The Danger Of A Single Storyline
Writing queer characters in South African film and television
Hattie V. Williams in an article titled “Black women’s kin networks and the sisters in the house” defines fictive kinship as “ the relationship developed between non-related members of a given group that develops out of common ancestry, history, social experience or predicament while kinship connotates blood or marital ties.”
One can make the argument that all black people share common ancestry however, much of what binds black people together is not genetics but the closeness we feel due to our shared experiences. Because society treats queerness as an identifying factor and queerness is a site of oppression, there is a sharing of experiences among queer folk.
Paying close attention to queer stories — excluding those in fiction — reveals that many a queer identifying and identified people share the same stories or upbringing, childhood, coming into ones gender identity and sexuality, acceptance, coming out and navigating the world as a queer body. These stories are never identical but are always horrifyingly similar.
It is these shared experiences that have culminated in queer people forming pockets among themselves. Transwomen will generally socialize with other transwomen. Lesbian women will have friends who share the same identity. Intersex folks will seek each other out and form community. Because the rest of the world has made it a mandate to otherize queerness, queer people have had to find belonging among each other.
If we existed in a world where it was inconsequential that a person is bisexual, asexual, or intersex, queer folk would have no need to find kinship from other queer people because there would be no void.
Coming to the danger of a single storyline. From the advent of South African film and television endeavoring to tell queer storylines, these have existed in three main boxes; coming out, physical violence and adultery. One would struggle greatly to find a queer story told in South African film and television that did not at some point center one or more of these.
Even telenovelas who have consistent queer characters all fall into the trap of writing storylines that very neatly fall into this category. Probably the most famous example is the character of Schumacher on Mzansi Magic’s The Queen. Schumacher (played by Vuyolwethu Ngcukana) is a bisexual man and every single year he has had a storyline about coming out and adultery. Whenever there is a Schumacher story arch, you best believe he is either coming out to someone as bisexual or he is cheating on his partner with someone of a different gender compared to his partner at the time.
The writers of The Queen may not be aware of this but by continuously writing this character as a sex-crazed bisexual who can never be satisfied with just one partner but always wants to have a man and a woman at the same time, they are perpetuating the stereotype that bisexual people are greedy and can never be satisfied with one partner.
The Queen does nothing to combat biphobia or destigmatize bisexuality but play into the harmful stereotypes that have been developed by people who are not bisexual about bisexual people.
In the beginning, there was a genuine need for telling coming out stories. Society needed to be made aware of this section of people who do not fit perfectly into the boxes or hetero-cis-normativity. We still do not live in a society where it is completely safe for queer people to come out. However, when you continuously write stories of queer people coming out, you create in the imaginations of people who are not queer that queer people have to ‘come out’ or that they have to make an event of their ‘coming out’.
Perhaps if a story was written of someone who was just queer without making an event of their coming out, there would be less pressure on queer people — one, to come out and two, to make an event of their coming out.
The constant repetition of coming out stories told on television and in cinema creates an anxiety among queer people who are hyper-aware of the fact that they need to make an event around their coming out. Not only does the media tell you that you have to make this big event around your coming out but those around you also expect there to be a big announcement of the fact because of the same media that they consume.
These stories, unfortunately, are not doing what they are supposed to do.
One would be at pains to find a queer storyline in South African film and cinema, where the queer person did not have to come out and where there was no ‘big event’ around their coming out. Telling a single storyline defeats the purpose of writing queer people in all their texture and nuance.
Part of the reason why writers only imagine queer people within the bounds of coming out, physical violence and adultery, is because of an incorrect or unfair reading of the fictive kinship of queer people.
Because queer people have a fictive kinship based on the shared experiences of coming out and physical violence does not mean these are the only stories about queer people that can be told.
There is a conception among people who are not queer that queer people live scandalous, sex-driven, adulterous lives. When writers include an adultery storyline in all queer characters on television, they construct an image of queer people as sexual deviants who’s lives revolve around sex and sexuality.
It is interesting that although we do not have a lot of queer characters across tv and cinema, one would find that almost every single one of those characters has cheated on someone or has had a promiscuous sex life. What this also does is center sex as the biggest part of having a queer identity.
Just because queer people have created communities around the shared experiences of coming out and suffering physical violence because of their identity, does not mean these are the only stories you can write about them. Just because you think all queer people do is cheat on each other does not mean you must factor that into every queer storyline.
I just need writers of South African tv and cinema to do better where queer characters are concerned.
