Is LGBT television necessary?

Lately I’ve been traveling a lot. I have had the pleasure to stay in a few hotel rooms, and I’ve also had the honor of staying with friends. One of my favorite things about this is that I get to discover new or previously unheard of television shows.

I don’t have the opportunity to watch a lot of television – so I rely on my people. People have guilty TV pleasures that come out when you spend time with them at home. And one of the best things ever is lying in a hotel room with moments of unplanned time and a remote. One of my newest guilty pleasures is VH1’s Hollywood Exes.

LOGO, “our channel,” has been in the news lately due to Direct TV dropping the station. It’s not a great loss to my day-to-day life. I hardly ever watch LOGO anymore. The other day, I watched one of the gayest shows on television, no not Glee, but Tori Spelling’s Craft Wars. This is the land of glitter and rainbows, building and hot gluing, big red lips and Coco the chicken. Is this on the gay channel? No, it’s on TLC.

In fact, I’ve seen lesbians choosing wedding gowns, talking about how they feel about getting married – legal or not – and sharing a great big celebratory kiss at the end of the ceremony, all frequently on TLC.

How is the channel with programming about the ordinary side of straight life – babies, weddings, shopping; how are they getting it so right for the LGBT community? And the channel that is supposed to be for us getting it so wrong?

On TLC, HGTV, Food Network, even ABC I see stories or characters about LGBT people participating in regular everyday-life kinds of things; renovating their house, running a business, eating a meal and being a family. On LOGO the other night they had one program that sounded gaily provocative, 4 hours of Ru Paul’s Drag Race and that scary movie that Katherine Zeta Jones plays a lesbian. Really!? It feels as though it ought to be called PRIDE TV: all of your gay stereotypes, but no one who actually looks like your neighbor.

You know I love all of the sparkly sides of my LGBT family. But one of the biggest laments I hear from people, particularly women, is that our life isn’t a Pride parade. It is important to have our lives portrayed more truthfully and honestly. We may be fabulous, but often we’re quietly fabulous in our homes, crafting, just like everyone else.

It started to make me wonder: Is it better to assimilate and be portrayed honestly in mainstream media? Is it still important to have a dedicated station for our community? Yes! It is vitally important. It is important for us to keep telling our stories.

I think that programming decisions are the issue. I don’t think you can run a queer television company the same way you do a mainstream media station. Each segment of our community needs to be represented by someone of that community. So, I ask you, how is a gay, white, middle-aged, privileged gay man living in New York City going to be able to decide programming for a young, Black, regular working lesbian in Denver or a 30 year old, Latino, trans man in Indiana? You need someone that actually knows your story from the inside.

We need a station for us, by us. If we have so much disposable income, why aren’t we trying to make sure the money stays in our community? Our station ought to be amazing. Filled with compelling programming with our lives at the center, programming that represents the parts of our lives our straight allies would never know about.

I want a show like “Craft Wars” but instead of Tori Spelling we would have a Martha Stewart-wannabe-twink and his ultra-femme lesbian sidekick (I think Amy Lynn O’Connell is perfect for this job) and we’d call it Fabulous Fun with Friends. And they would have the same kind of challenges – make a bird house out of the stuff from your junk drawer, but the outcomes would be way more fun. Wait for it, just think about your mother’s junk drawer, then think about what’s in yours. Yeah, exactly, it’s the perfect show for Queer TV. Or, Linda Cox, Rent A Butch, with a show like that Holmes guy on HGTV. She knows a lot of stuff, she knows how to explain it and she’s way better looking than him. I want to see her help a lesbian couple build a yoga studio in their garage. I think TLC might like this show, but I’d rather see it on Queer TV.

I want a show to teach me how to reinforce my ceiling to install a … well, let’s just say “projects” for our families.