Media Garden's 1 year anniversary !

This media garden is celebrating first anniversary!

During this past year, I’ve posted 150 entries, about books, shows, and movies, as well as some of their medias : dvd and bluray editions about which I could find details, or had in my hand to discuss their details.

For this 151^st entry, I had planned on telling you which are my favorites, but before I do that I’ll take a small detour.

In view of recent events, I decided expand it and tell you about LGBT and gender-bender episodes, movies and books I liked.

As far as I know, many movies & shows are too graphic for me to watch, so don’t be surprised if I don’t list some quintessential ones you know about: chances are, I won’t be able to watch them.

Gene Roddenberry had promised to include some LGBT characters in his various Star Trek shows, but due to censorship, this hadn’t been fully fulfilled. Instead, there are some episodes which deal with the topics of gender assignments and sexual orientation, and all tended to be very mild in their approach – give or take a scene, or a dialogue.

• In TOS Turnabout intruder, the bottom of this lis : a woman transfers her consciousness into captain Kirk’s body. This was daring for its time, but made an unfortunate message association: the captain’s diminished while being a woman, and the woman who swapped places with him in sick and crazy.
• Prequel Enterprise’s episode Stigma discusses very broadly about sexuality-based discrimination, as well as HIV, through a metaphor and some dialogues.
• Still in Enterprise, Cogenitor proposes a tri-gendered race and makes social commentaries on another issue aside for gender and sexuality.
• As a side plot in TNG’s the offspring, A character creates a gender neutral child and lets ‘’it’’ choose gender. The dialogues here aren’t LGBT per se, but are on topic of gender assignment.
• DS9’s Rejoined dared to push the boundaries further, with the first lesbian kiss- though the characters involved had been previously in a heterosexual relationship.
• DS9 again, someone has to change sex in Profit & Lace, after an unexpected social evolution adding female rights in a misogynist culture… this touches both of feminism and sex-change, even though it doesn’t deal with sexuality itself. The episode would have been more poignant if, at a certain point, it had been silent or with a small dramatic music, instead of the silly one used at that moment... 
• The most powerful comment and dialogue was through TNG’s the outcast where an androgynous alien race despises the expression of genders as well as sexuality altogether – which they view as a perversion they must correct through treatment- much like forced medication was given to homosexuals in our own recent past. 

Outside of Star Trek : 

•  I only recently watched Philadelphia, carrying both comments about discrimination towards homosexuals and HIV. I reviewed it here.
• A few years ago, I had enjoyed a French novel called En souvenir de demain, which I also reviewed and which has a lesbian protagonist.
• Lesbianism is briefly discussed in Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay A room of one’s own, in regards to a 1928 novel the well of loneliness and the subsequent trial of its author…
• I haven’t reviewed yet, but I also watched Harvey Milk, who was a gay activist and was moved by it quite a bit.

In spite of my homophobic upbringing, even before I grew to accept and slowly become this budding LGBT activist, I have loved what is often referred to as gay or LGBT music. This is the case of Erasure and Pet Shop Boys, which a friend had introduced me into  back in the late 1980’s and whose music has been an integral part of my life ever since – and also are factors in my personal change towards full acceptance some years later.

I also enjoy tremendously an Israeli singer who came out a few years ago and who had been singing about LGBT in very eloquent yet poetically subtle lyrics: Yehuda Poliker.

I started making entries for all 3 on my music garden blog, which shall be expanded over the next few weeks.

There are other bands and singers that I like and happen to be gay, lesbian or any other part of the LGBT spectrum, but I need to stop my entry here.

Suffice to say, I think about them all first as people, who may be anywhere in this spectrum or cicgender, it doesn’t totally matter, except in regards to raising awareness to this very fact that they are people who are artists, or characters in books, shows and movies.

All LGBT issues have been far too often decried and it’s time for acceptance, awareness and compassion, and just be a normalcy that no one will ever notice anymore the differences between one person or another.