As we look ahead to Pride month, I’ll be writing a series of articles like last year (Baseball is Gay, Homophobia is Gay, Live Laugh Late Life Lesbians) I write for Splice twice a week (Tuesday/Friday) so you’ll have twice as many glittery unicorn Gay Pride content to consume, which will make the conservative white men trolls here at Splice Today extra uncomfortable. Let’s kick off this year’s series early by updating a post from last year on how zombies are gay.
In that article I discussed queer representation in Season One of The Last of Us. I covered the poignant episode 3 and the fantastic love story between zompoc survivors Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett), and how Bella Ramsey’s main character Ellie becomes more than besties with Riley during a mall love scene. I especially loved the symbolism of how they started off wearing Halloween masks and then removed them to show their true selves to each other.
The Last of Us season two is on now, and, in the absence of Riley (damn mushroom zombies), Ellie moves on to a new bestie Dina who at first is allegedly straight, but as we learned back in The L Word, all girls are straight until they’re not. Dina ends up pregnant by her ex and in love with Ellie, who’s singing and playing acoustic guitar to A-ha’s Take On Me in a well-lit vintage record store overgrown by nature, which everyone knows is how straight girls become lesbians. The show is accurate to the video game in which Ellie and Dina are lesbian lovers. In both seasons of The Last of Us, the queer scenes are handled with tenderness and artfulness, but that doesn’t stop the homophobic Christian Nationalist right wingers from trolling movie sites to review-bomb the show with idiot “woke agenda” one-star reviews.
Another show that’s taken chances this season with a woke agenda is Black Mirror. I was an early adopter of this show from the start; I mention watching it for the first time 10 years ago after learning about it in a Splice review from my colleague Ray Cummings. There are now 33 episodes in seven seasons that began on Netflix a decade ago. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a dystopian futuristic series where each episode can be watched as a standalone; almost like watching a bunch of sci-fi Stephen King short stories. Technology and social media are often themes, many storylines are gripping, and in M. Night Shyamalan directorial style there’s often a twist ending.
In this year’s release of episodes, Black Mirror is seeing its authentic self in the mirror as we experience an homage to the classic season three 2016 romantic lesbian-themed time-travel San Junipero episode in several episodes. In “Hotel Reverie,” two women who fall in love in a simulated reality, this time as part of of a Hollywood film, perhaps writing parts of their own script. And in “Striking Vipers,” sexual identity and gender are explored as two men playing a video game have very different sexual experiences through the game than they do with each other in real life.
At a time when the Supreme Court has allowed the President to enforce a ban on transgender people in the military, the queer landscape in the country is changing every day. In a few weeks, Trump will attend a performance of Les Miserables at the Kennedy Center that ten performers are boycotting due to his purging of the board and installation of himself as chairman. It’ll be interesting to see how the arts and entertainment community continues to be impacted by the political environment in the coming days.