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Sci Fi Channel playing it very coy with potential gay storyline on "Battlestar Galactica".
WARNING: This post contains minor spoilers about upcoming Battlestar Galactica webisodes. Last week we reported on rumors that the upcoming Battlestar Galactica webisodes (which start streaming on December 12th) were finally going to add some gay male content to the show. The Sci Fi Channel is still refusing to say whether that is true or not, but the network's Sci Fi Wire blog did post the above screencap from one of the webisodes today. Read more after the jump. The post was titled "Battlestar Exclusive: Gaeta & Hoshi (Almost) Kiss!"and went on to say they had "obtained an exclusive screenshot showing the infamous Gaeta 'kiss' moment." Infamous? Seriously, Sci Fi? According to my dictionary, infamous means "having a reputation of the worst kind : notoriously evil; disgraceful." Sort of like Sci Fi's track record with gay characters up until now.
I'm just going to assume that the person who wrote that post didn't major in English and was going for something else entirely such as "groundbreaking" or "noteworthy". Otherwise, the network might be on the road to botching this character development. BTW, here is a better picture of Brad Dryborough, the actor who plays Hoshi.
Submitted by on Mon, 2008-12-01 19:20. |
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This is bothersome
At the core a gay
At the core a gay relationship is the same as any other.... doomed to meet one of two ends. you grow to hate each other or one of you dies leaving cold and alone!
the thing that seperates it is that the world still sees it as taboo.
BSG deals with a Taboo Relationship very well in the from athena's and heilo's
for a space faring society to be still hung up on two guys hitting it. would be dumb
they should have a gay couple completly intergrated not even make a big deal just have it be apart of the show...anywhere in the show it doesnt matter. foreground background it doesnt matter. if they make a big deal out it would feel like pandering to the croud (the gay episode) rather than realising that Gay folk are just the same as everyone!
if you really want to see it and you feel like tha show is doin you diservice then i guess they should have done a cylon dude and a human dude getting it on.....but still the taboo factor would have had to come from the fact that it was cylon and human not for one second should they have made any pause to say oooh look its to guys kissing cuz that would be pandering and that is one thing i feel Bsg has never done!!!!!!
Endings
Stop being so gloomy. You forget the possibility that you could both die at once in a horrible accident.
Is there an Emoticon for seething rage?
Well, we've always been disappointed by the Sci-Fi shows we like. It looks like we're going to be slapped in the face this time. Maybe the producers saw how ATWT is handling Luke and Noah and decided "That's perfect". We'll probably only get cut-away kissing "scenes".
SPOILER ALERT
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Gaeta had better be the Final Cylon like SyFyPortal is strongly implying.
If you have to consult a dictionary to
decide whether or not to be offended, then perhaps you're overthinking it a little. Dictionary aside, most people (myself included) take "infamous" to mean "much talked about and well known". Although the blogger was clearly sensationalistic, I can't imagine the rhetoric would've been any different if there were rumors of say, Starbuck and Tigh kissing, for example. Sex sells, period.
I think that BSG dropped the ball with the gay stuff in a potentially interesting way. Much like the abortion issue, it would stand to reason that a previously tolerant society might frown upon gay relationships as they would not produce desperately needed children. It would've been interesting to see if some citizens were upset about people like Gaeta and Hoshi "wasting" their...uh, procreative ablities. Could've been a great way to address homophobia. But there's not enough time for that now, obviously.
...considering 99% of the
...considering 99% of the sex we've seen has been within the context of a bunch of over-stressed people getting their rocks off (which could conceivably cover most of the Baltar stuff too), I honestly don't know *why* it hasn't included more threesomes and gay stuff. After all, it's lots of attractive young people in a pressurised situation on a near permananent adrenaline high, so there's a lot of sex going on whenever there's downtime. (also see the olympics) The only time kids have really been mentioned since Roslin made that comment about 'we need to start having babies' in the miniseries is the Cylon hybrid stuff and Cally and Chief's kid (which only happened when they'd settled down and became civilians on New Caprica).
So they could make the case that it was frowned upon in civilian society, but they've got no reason for not showing it in the military society (and there's no way they'd want their pilots becoming pregnant when there's so few of them) - the only time it was shown in a completely reasonable way was the Razor miniseries between Cain and Gina-six, where they made the entirely valid point of 'you need someone to care about and come home to in times of stress' - which became part of Cain's revenge thing due to betrayal.
To clarify
Dictionary
Spoil 'im
Producers or Network?
Bad way to describe scene
I agree infamous has always described villains and evil deeds, while famous is "well known and talked about." Nothing and no one who is good is ever described as infamous.
Also, when Sci Fi Channel buys their movies-of-the-week from independent producers they pay for only part of the cost of the production in exchange for domestic rights and they leave the international rights for the producers who then try selling those to make a profit on the film (average budget ~$2 million USD on the 2 hour creature-features, for example - giant spiders, killer bees, swamp monster, etc.) The producers do not have much incentive to include gay characters when they are trying to reap returns selling to the foreign markets.
Sci Fi regular series on the other hand are produced by Sci Fi Channel itself and pay for themselves through standard sale of commercial slots, syndication, and dvd sales, so no reason Sci-Fi couldn't include more gay characters.
that would be wrong
Reality
Your post reminds me of someone who is not handling reality too well.
a) the shows you are referencing are an extraordinarily tiny amount of product compared to what gets produced on a regular basis each year. So don't think because Afterelton covers a few shows produced overseas that this amounts to a significant amount of product in any given market. One, perhaps two shows per every-third-or-fourth-nation-or-so with one or two lead gay characters is not a significant amount compared to the number of shows on air. What you see on Afterelton - these shows brought together - is not what the audiences watching tv are seeing.
b) you are either purposely or inadvertently leaving out the fact that Brokeback Mountain had an extraordinary amount of free press coverage, and for many reasons, including its heterosexual stars, its nomination for awards, its director, its writers, etc. and even with all that massive free marketing coverage it still didn't break the $100 million domestic mark at the U.S. box office. So holding up that example as reflective of gay-storyline films, in general, is absurd at face value, especially given all the other gay-storyline films and their dismal box office receipts.
Lastly, it is economics that drives show business, like it or not. Ask yourself why don't the billionaires and millionaires in hollywood who are gay regularly produce gay-storyline films? You cannot claim homophobia about the subject matter for these folks and yet... no constant stream of gay-storyline films from them.
Reality?
Once again, reality check
a) The press coverage for Battlestar and Brokeback are not even close to comparable. A show on a cable station available to only part of the USA is not the same as an Academy-Award nominated film.
Your need to reference race in a discussion of gay story lines means you cannot stick to the topic at hand. For example, had you bothered to research box office numbers you would know that the actual numbers at the box office override your speculative idealism. You are acting as though something has not been tested that already has been for years, which means you aren't dealing with reality as this point.
b) you are saying that, not me. I am saying that selling in the international markets in which there are 80 countries where homosexuality carries a sentence of 2 years to life imprisonment/death penalty, producers have no incentive to include gay characters to boost sales - especially given that many of the countries have censorship boards. You appear to be someone who thinks the USA First Amendment applies to the rest of the planet. I am saying that trying to sell your product in 100% of countries to make money is better for a businessperson than trying to just sell it in 55% of countries that don't criminalize gay people, so the inclusion of a gay character automatically reduces the market potential based on existing laws. I'm not saying that's a good thing; I'm saying that is the way the laws around the world currently are.
c) hollywood is an industry that exploits every opportunity it gets. It has existed for a long time. Your wishing for such a market and there being one are two separate things entirely.
d) see item b above. I did not write the laws in those 80 countries, but industry is bound by them when functioning in those markets. Yuor arguments about race are irrelevant as there are not 80 countries that criminalize any element of being black. Once again, an occasional pet-project by someone who does not mind losing their money is not an industry; it's a hobby or a charity.
You keep saying reality check like you hold the only card
You keep saying reality check like you hold the card
Who cares?
Because a good storyline would make up for past mistakes
Not at all "right wing"
I honestly never thought for a second there was anything about this show even remotely "right wing". On the contrary, it perfectly embodies every left wing ideal. It's a show that is both color and gender blind, anti-war and anti-imperialism. Throughout the seasons, President Roslin has embodied some of the worst qualities of the Bush administration--the dictatorial conduct, the disregard for the rule of law, the torturting, the God complex, the refusal to see the enemy as anything close to human--and she has paid for it dearly; at nearly the cost of her soul. The episode where she learns of Baltar's complicitiy in the destruction of Caprica (metaphor for 9/11), tries to kill him, then sees the error of her ways and learns to forgive and find grace was the redemption of that character and the beginning of her salvation. It was also a repudiation of her prior bad acts (which of course uncoincidentally mirrored those of the Bush Administration). For crying out loud, the first part of the third season was a rebuke of the American occupation of Iraq! Remeber, the evil occupying Cylons referred to the humans as "insurgents". The wording was clearly not coincidental. This show is more left wing than Michael Moore, let's face it. Even though I'm a Democrat, sometimes I get a little angry at its message.
And as for lesbianism, you forgot to mention Gina Six and Admiral Cain, who were very much in love without the benefit of a threesome. Yes, Admiral Cain lashed out (to put it mildly) after learning the truth, but there's no reason take "gay=bad" from that very complicated and nuanced relationship. Plus, obviously neither Gaeta nor Hoshi are "bad", and there's literally no reason to believe that they suddenly will change personalities.
The Worlds of Science Fiction
Science Fiction has long been a very odd market. The demographic targets are highly mixed and this leads to some oddity in how things like relationships are handled in it.
The Star Wars consortium for example has always presented a lily white romantic environment so pure that Mad Magazine once joked in a bogus rating system: "Vague hints of sex that only the Reverend Jerry Falwell could find offensive". No indications of any pre-marital sex and even after marriage Padme still went to bed wearing enough inconvenient clothing and making to render sex impossible. Homosexuality is, of course, utterly absent except in the form of effeminate stereotypes.
Star Trek has been considerably more annoying, given all the boasting about a utopian future where people aren't divided by trivialities any longer. And such a total absence of homosexuality that some anti-gay fans actually speculate that it was "cured" in the Star Trek universe. Got a case of the Gays? Go see Doctor Crusher for a quick hypo-spray and she'll clear it right up!
One explanation that frequently comes out is that onscreen science fiction needs to be "family friendly" because a lot of the audience is young. A more common observation I've noted however is that sci-fi geeks have just as many homophobes amongst the ranks as sports fans andthey may be over-compensating for perceived geekiness the good old-fashioned way: by being homophobic.
Clearly there is a huge contrast here between onscreen sci-fi and written science fiction. Science fiction writers, especially the women, put a lot of gay characters onto the page, decades before this was even imaginable onscreen. Marion Zimmer-Bradley had LGBT characters in her Darkover series all the way back in the 70's. Anne McAffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series included a social structure of dragonriders wherein only gay males could bond with certain types of dragon. Lois McMaster Bujold actually slipped a novel into her Vorkosigan Saga series wherein the hero Ethan of Athos, comes from a colony world inhabited exclusively by men and even images of women are forbidden by the religion. Naturally same-sex partnerships are the norm there. Lesbian author Tanya Huff and her partner (possibly wife, they're from Canada) have had gay characters in their novels for years as well.
Yes, I have noticed that all this gayness is coming from female authors....
But it does make me wonder if there are two audiences out there. The literate audience that reads and the illiterate one that is more oriented to onscreen special effects? The illiterate audience may consist of a less imaginative (read: tolerant) audience than the literate one (which probably includes more women as well).
Obviously squeamish producers are an issue too. Russell T Davies in the UK managed to revamp Doctor Who and launch Torchwood with a major gay sensibility, and in Torchwood's case actual onscreen gay snogging. Of course Brits appear to have an easier time coping with gay and bi men onscreen than Americans do.You have a lot of the same audience watching Spike and SciFi and that crowd may be homophobic purely as a macho pose.
I thought that something was up when the re-vamped Battlestar Gallactica cast a woman as Starbuck, thus quashing any hints of bromance or slashiness in what was a slashable buddy relationship in the old 70's series. Now any sexual tension could be safely hetero.
It has actually hindered my viewership. These days I'd rather read sci-fi with a gay slant than watch movies or TV shows where it's consciously kept out.
That's a pretty cynical interpretation.
Sci-Fi cynicism
Being in marketing as a profession requires that one be either naively idealistic or intensely cynical. I think you can guess which I am...
I was under the impression that the gay male thing hasn't happened on BSG yet. So a true anaylsis will have to wait until it is done. However lesbianism does not count. Heterosexual males, especially geeks, find lesbians (attractive ones anyway) to be extremely entertaining. This is why every straight porno movie I have ever seen (and I saw far too many in five years as a volunteer firefighter) has at least one girl-on-girl scene.
But recasting a male character as a woman is hugely suspicious. It's not as if they broke new ground, as there were female fighter pilots in the original BSG as well. So it's not like they needed to establish that this was going to be a more women's equality friendly BSG. They accomplished that better with a female president.
This is why I found the Starbuck thing dubious, and the cynic in me immediately zeroed in on probable motivation, which would be to create two primary characters where there could be more overt sexual tension, and thus add to the appeal for straight male viewers. Also the motivation for hot fantasy Cylon chick as well (shades of Seven of Nine really).
Appeal to straight male viewers.
I'm not sure why that's problematic in your eyes. Of course the chicks are hot (although so are all almost the dudes for that matter) . Of course the show appeals primarily to straight guys as they make up the majority of the audience. I don't know why that's "dubious" or "suspicious". Appealing primarily to straight males does not automatically equal "homophobic" or not gay friendly.
And I disagree that the women's equality issue was accomplished with a female President. The fact that Starbuck and Boomer are tough and physically strong women says way more about this society than the fact that Laura Roslin is smart. In our society the idea of a female President is a lot easier to envision than the idea of a female heavyweight boxing champion or football quaterback. They've made it very clear that this is the reason they made Starbuck a woman. And yeah, of course it also helps dramatically that Apollo and Starbuck can be on again/off again lovers as well. Again, why is this a negative? Gay dudes like tough, hot chicks too.
And the lesbian relationship between Cain and Gina Six was about the furthest thing from titilation as you can get. As for Gaeta and Hoshi, no it hasn't happened yet, but if you've seen the show at all, you can have no doubt that it will be handled in a respectful way.