The Invisible Queer: Hidden Life in Children's Media

“Won’t somebody please think of the children?!” Helen Lovejoy exclaims in “The Simpsons” episode from 1996, “Much Apu About Nothing.” Despite the line’s satire, American children’s media took the lesson quite literally. Many parents still behave like Helen Lovejoy, believing they must protect the minds of children from any force considered mature, immoral and corrupting. One such force is queerness.

During my childhood, I never observed LGBTQ+ representation on either the big or small screen. I only witnessed cisgender and heterosexual characters and romances, conditioning me to think in heteronormative ways. As a bisexual woman who was aware of my identity early on, this did not produce healthy, self-assured feelings in me as a child. I have no memory of my parents, relatives and other adults actively speaking against the LGBTQ+ community around me, but I still felt that something must be wrong with me because I possessed no language about queerness. Shame and self-loathing welled up inside me because I believed I was the only “abnormal” person in my limited worldview.

Such feelings are not uncommon among LGBTQ+ children, which can lead to tragedy when those emotions are heightened enough to impact mental health. According to The Trevor Project’s “Facts About Suicide,” “LGB youth seriously contemplate suicide at almost three times the rate of heterosexual youth…[and] are almost five times as likely to have attempted suicide compared to heterosexual youth,” while “40% of transgender adults reported having made a suicide attempt. 92% of these individuals reported having attempted suicide before the age of 25.” The sharp difference in rates of suicidal ideation between LGBTQ+ and cisgender, heterosexual children demonstrates the absolute necessity of validating LGBTQ+ children’s identities from an early age and showing them that their lives are just as valuable as those who are cisgender and heterosexual.

One way to combat early heteronormative conditioning is to positively and actively represent LGBTQ+ characters in movies and television. While this may appear as a superficial method to some, major links have been established between marginalized children’s consumption of media and self-perceptions. In Ebony M. Roberts’ 2004 article “Through the Eyes of a Child: Representations of Blackness in Children’s Television Programming,” Roberts argues that “television is a child’s early ‘window’ to the world” and that “starting around age 4, children take what they see on the television screen as trustworthy information.” This is vital for showing how children accept what they see as truth and can thus be easily influenced into accepting certain views about others or themselves.

In relating her specific argument to Black children’s experiences watching television, Roberts concludes that “Black people and culture were better represented” in the children’s show “Sesame Street,” which could “create feelings of pride and personal identification” in Black children. On the other hand, when studying “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers,” the White Ranger, a white male himself, was valued over the other Rangers, who were women and people of color. Roberts saw this as communicating “the message that ‘white is right,’ or in this case, more powerful,” leaving a neg- ative moral for Black children. The influence of television and other children’s media significantly impacts the socialization of children who do not fit into the favored categories of white, cisgender, or heterosexual. Creating more LGBTQ+ characters in children’s movies and television is a potential progressive step for this self-image issue.

However, similar to what Roberts’ study indicates for Black characters, it is not the lack of LGBTQ+ characters that is the problem, but rather the already existing portrayals of queerness. My early conception of never seeing LGBTQ+ representation was simply not true. Two anime television shows I watched were 1992’s “Sailor Moon” and 1998’s “Cardcaptor Sakura.” Both of these programs depicted queer characters and relationships, with Sailors Uranus and Neptune in the former and Tomoyo, Syaoran, Touya and Yukito in the latter. But in the late 1990s to early 2000s, LGBTQ+ youth in the U.S. like myself were never given a chance to witness so much queerness on television because censorship and English dubbing transformed these characters into cousins or close friends. Because of the American viewpoint and political stance that we must “think of the children,” optimistic and affirming LGBTQ+ representation was eradicated in the 1990s in a practice that persists to this day with world powers like the United Kingdom censoring “Steven Universe,” as Teresa Jusino of The Mary Sue reported in 2016.

However, queerness is not only erased and hidden in translations. This erasure occurs in films and television shows that boast of LGBTQ+ representation without following through. LGBTQ+ characters are increasingly announced through “Word of Gay,” a trope defined by the online wiki TV Tropes: “When Word of God [the writer or other creative figure] explains that a character was actually LGBTQ outside of the series, choosing to keep them Ambiguously Gay (at most) in the actual story.” The most famous example of this is when author J.K. Rowling of the “Harry Potter” series told fans that Albus Dumbledore had really been a gay man all along. Other movies and television shows that perpetuate this trope include “How to Train Your Dragon 2” with Gobber, “Zootopia” with Judy Hopps’ neighbors, “The Legend of Korra” with Korra and Asami and “Voltron: Legendary Defender” with Shiro and Adam.

While these productions are arguably well-intentioned attempts at representation in children’s media, hiding the characters’ queerness in canon and only introducing these identities through outside comments conveys a feeling of shame and parallels to being “in the closet.” This secrecy also does nothing to benefit LGBTQ+ children since they probably don’t know that these characters are queer without being told so or doing their own research. With the Word of Gay trope, creators try to have their cake and eat it too by giving brief hints at LGBTQ+ representation without offending parents who must “protect” their children from queerness.Two of these instances, Dumbledore and Adam, embody the “Bury Your Gays” trope as well, which states that LGBTQ+ characters cannot be happy and must die in fiction to satisfy those who find queerness “distasteful.” These combined tropes both fail to endorse queer life over queer death.

Queerness has not always faced total erasure and censorship in U.S. children’s media. “ParaNorman,” “In a Heartbeat,” “Adventure Time,” and “Steven Universe” all offer very clear and unhidden queer representation. Efforts need to be made to introduce more transgender and genderqueer characters into children’s movies and television shows, but all the previous examples indicate that children’s media can portray queer life to a young audience without always worrying about losing money from conservative households.

LGBTQ+ children receiving support from their parents and other caregivers is clearly a vital factor that cannot be ignored in this self-image discussion. According to the 2017 National School Climate Survey by the GLSEN, “LGBTQ students whose parents engaged in advocacy with their school, overall, had better well-being, including higher levels of self-esteem and lower levels of depression.” Parental acceptance fosters healthier attitudes in LGBTQ+ children. Abandoning the notion that children must be “protected” from the dangers of queerness also contributes to this betterment. If LGBTQ+ children feel acceptance from both their caregivers and entertainment, their mental health could drastically improve.

Helen Lovejoy’s “Won’t somebody please think of the children?” line gives the false impression that, when society thinks of children, they imagine them all as exactly the same. But children with marginalized identities do not fit into the accepted cisgender, white, able-bodied, neurotypical and heterosexual paradigm that is implied here, especially when they belong to a group that children are said to need protection from. By explicitly representing queerness in children’s media, perhaps LGBTQ+ children can finally imagine themselves not as villains threatening the innocence of childhood but rather as young people looking forward to bright futures of queer life and not death.

WRITTEN BY SARAH GARCIA

ART BY MONICA JUAREZ