LGBT People on TV: Will The Real L Word Show Us Reality?

Many of us of the dykely persuasion have been watching with anticipation — or at least a certain morbid curiosity — as the first trailers for The Real L Word hit our screens. The new Showtime reality series, by The L Word producer Ilene Chaiken, promises to give us a look at the lives of “real” lesbians in L.A.

I’m ambivalent — and the show poster headline "Love them — or love to hate them" implies that others may be, too. Maybe it’s that I found the last season of The L Word to be thin on plot and its cliffhanger ending to be a cop-out. Maybe it’s just that I want my TV shows to be escapist. If I want to see “real” lesbian lives, I’ll turn off the TV and look around my house. That's more real to me than the glamorous lives of a handful of women in West Hollywood.

Still, I will no doubt watch the show, for lesbians on television are few and far between. Media representation is, however, as important a matter as any political legislation. In fact, positive representation can help change hearts and minds in ways that can bolster support for political initiatives.

Representation of LGBT people on television is still very limited, however. The lesbians are almost always professional and white, are most often trying to get pregnant, or are Ellen DeGeneres. The getting pregnant storyline leads to the inevitable comic episode wherein they search for a sperm donor — witness Showtime's The L Word and Queer as Folk, Logo’s Exes and Ohs and Rick and Steve, HBO's If These Wall Could Talk II, and ABC's Cashmere Mafia.

Gay men on TV are also almost always white and artistic. The gay dads on ABC's Modern Family are a slight change from the norm, being dads, but they are still white and middle class. Transgender people are even rarer, with few regular roles — mostly guest spots where they are often victims of harassment or violence. Bisexual women seem to get more air time, but their same-sex relationships seem to be mainly during sweeps weeks, and they quickly go back to opposite-sex relationships thereafter. (Not that they aren’t still bisexual, but we’d never know it.) There are exceptions to all of these stereotypes, of course, but no more than a handful.

Will The Real L Word show us anything beyond the clichés? The women are all on the high end of the socioeconomic scale. The only woman of color is Rose, who is Hispanic. That’s a disappointment, but perhaps it’s better than having the cast look like a forced rainbow, a la the people staged behind Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell in his response to the President’s State of the Union address — a white woman, an Asian man, an African American woman, and a white male soldier.

When there are so few lesbians on TV, however, it is hard for any one show to singlehandedly balance out the representation. Still, I'd love to see a show that included more LGBT people of color and more working class families. Studies from the Williams Institute of UCLA, for example, indicate that almost half of all same-sex parents are Black or Latino, and that poverty is more widespread in the LGB community than among heterosexuals. The Real L Word does little to show those realities.

There will be drama in The Real L Word, of course, because it is reality TV, and LGBT or not, that’s expected in the genre. Still, if a bunch of lesbians can show that their dramatic ups and downs are not so different from those of any other group of reality TV stars, then maybe that is progress of a sort.

Now if we can only get through the season without any of them going through a wacky series of sperm donor candidates.

Photo credit: Showtime