What I Can’t Unsee
by Tal Lavin
There’s a common technique in films and storytelling I call the Obligatory Heterosexual Interlude. It involves introducing a female character into a story, often one about passionate man-on-man action—whether that means admiration, hatred, spycraft, conspiracy or camaraderie—and having her kiss one of the main guys and then more or less vanish. She’s never someone of particular interest or power, never a contender for main character status; her personality, if present at all, is wan. She is there to kiss and evaporate, thereby dispersing the mists of gay passion that might otherwise have gathered and precipitated into action. She is plausible deniability in human form, with all the magnetism that implies.
Feminist critics have long been in open scorn of this formula, which, at its worst, is known as “fridging,” a term for the fate of a female character introduced only to evoke heterosexuality, and then vengeance, by dying. The writer Gail Simone coined it in 1999, after an unfortunate Green Lantern comic in which the titular hero returns to find his girlfriend murdered and stuffed in a fridge by a villain named Major Force. The Women in Refrigerators website catalogued the similarly gruesome fates of scores of women in comics. In movies, sometimes the dead woman emerges from her fridge to produce a soft-focus domestic memory, inevitably juxtaposed against the grittiness of the hero’s current quest for vengeance. Otherwise, she remains silent in her little icebox.
Since I came out as trans, I started noticing all sorts of gay stuff about the media I watch and read. It’s not something I consciously do, just an extra sense I’ve developed, more keenly since I’ve started identifying as part of the gay community. Noticing gay stuff includes noticing homoerotic subtext, whether consciously placed there by the filmmakers or not. It also includes noticing efforts to mitigate even the subtlest breath of gayness.
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