Glee is something of a TV guilty pleasure (increasingly guilty as it goes on), and isn't known for story coherence much of the time. But it is known for being very vocally supportive of gay rights. It features more gay regular and recurring characters than any other show on network TV (indeed, more on its own than some networks do). Last night, though, it fell down on the job, catastrophically. It presented a teen lesbian getting outed, and then turned the person who did it into a hero only out to help her.
Closeted lesbian student Santana was outed by Finn in the previous episode, whether accidentally or not, in the middle of a crowded hallway. The recap for the following episode tells us that Santana only “thought” this was the case, and that it was the political candidate who turned it into a campaign ad that was really responsible (and the candidate did do it too, on a much bigger scale, but this does not negate the incipient act. Glee apparently thinks it does, because not only was Finn never called on this, he was made into a hero for organizing what essentially amounted to a giant pressure-party to get her to come out, whether she wanted to or not.
This handling of Santana’s outing goes far beyond bad writing. Glee has always had a lot of that; this is legitimately dangerous, as the show has whitewashed Finn’s actions and taken what could almost be classified as a “pro-outing” position. It can be ‘for their own good’, apparently.
Quite apart from the show undermining at every turn Santana’s fears and suggesting that, yes, apparently she was just being silly being in the closet, which is a bad enough message to send to gay kids, the far more frightening implication: Glee is telling the well-intentioned straight kids of North America that this is how they should try to help their closeted gay classmates. It’s for their own good, kids, and they’ll probably thank you for it later!
There are a number of other cogent analyses of this situation, prepared by people much more qualified to talk about the subject than I am:
http://www.drshebloggo.com/...
http://dorothysurrenders.blogspot.com/...
http://www.afterellen.com/...
So I decided that the only thing to do was to report this to GLAAD:
http://www.glaad.org/...
GLAAD has championed Glee in the past against many bigoted accusations from the usual suspects of the homophobic “family values” crowd, but if it is to have any meaning, it must also police the actions of the shows that claim to speak for the gay community. And make no mistake, most of the general media and audience take Glee at their word when they talk about gay issues; with all those gay actors, the gay writers, and all that pro-gay messaging, they must know what they’re talking about, right?