Light spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker ahead.
In what's become an annoyingly familiar pattern over the past several years, a blockbuster franchise has touted "LGBTQ representation" in an upcoming installment, only to deliver the barest minimum imaginable.
This time, the film in question is Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and the exclusively gay moment is a kiss between two female Resistance fighters.
One of the characters is a speaking role — Commander D'Acy, played in TROS and The Last Jedi by Amanda Lawrence. The other is just some lady; if we've ever seen her before, I don't remember it. Their embrace plays out in the background and is over so quickly, you might have missed it if you reached for your popcorn at the wrong moment.
It's bullshit that this is the best Star Wars can do in 2019.
The timidity of this scene did not stop J.J. Abrams from talking it up to Variety(opens in a new tab) weeks before TROS' release. In the same interview where he confirmed Finn and Poe would not be boyfriends, Abrams hinted at the possibility of other queer characters coming to Star Wars and stressed that he wanted the world of his film to reflect the real-world population.
“In the case of the LGBTQ community, it was important to me that people who go to see this movie feel that they’re being represented in the film,” he said at the time.
The tiny smooch in TROS echoes the unnamed gay support group attendee in Avengers: Endgame(opens in a new tab), the two men making eye contact in Beauty and the Beast, the two dudes standing next to each other in Star Trek Beyond, the girlfriends who never even touch hands in Deadpool 2, the husbands with blink-and-you'll-miss-it wedding rings in Alien: Covenant, and the superheroine who didn't go out of her way to deny her "girlfriend troubles" in Power Rangers.
In each case, the amount of self-congratulation on display seemed wildly out of proportion with the content of the supposed LGBTQ representation itself. (And that's not even getting into characters whose sexualities were mentioned by their performers and writers offscreen but never acknowledged at all onscreen, like Valkyrie in Thor: Ragnarok and Lando in Solo: A Star Wars Story.)
It's worth acknowledging that, yes, the lesbian couple in TROS is indeed a first for Star Wars. Yes, it's a step forward. Yes, it's better than nothing. Yes, it surely means something to someone. That does matter.
And yes, I'll even grant that it's an improvement on other examples of this trend — like Beauty and the Beast, which never actually confirms that Lefou is gay, just halfheartedly implies it.
But after a while, those yeses feel less like markers of progress than of the lack of it.
LGBTQ characters shouldn't have to be relegated to the sidelines of our culture's biggest, most beloved stories.
The relative insignificance of these particular characters is a reminder that more prominent characters like Poe and Finn can't be canonically gay because, as Oscar Isaac put it, "it's a time when people are too afraid." The briefness of the women's embrace reflects the studio's desire to keep even this meager bit of LGBTQ representation contained within a tiny box that they can throw out of the plane if the going gets too rough. Indeed, The Hollywood Reporter(opens in a new tab) writes that that's exactly what Disney has done in Dubai, where the kiss was edited out altogether.
And the fact that it still "counts" as an historic first speaks poorly of this franchise and others like it. Even as explicitly queer films from Call Me By Your Name to Love, Simon have wowed critics and cleaned up at the box office, the decision-makers behind Hollywood's biggest blockbusters remain too timid to offer up more than a tiny peck between minor characters.
It may not be the end of the world that Star Wars won't make StormPilot canon, or Disney won't give Elsa a girlfriend, or Fantastic Beasts won't explore Dumbledore's sexuality, or what have you. There's no shortage of queer characters and queer stories to be found outside these gazillion-dollar properties in 2019; even major movie studios have proven willing to get on board with LGBTQ characters as long as they're not part of a $400 million action-adventure sequel.
But LGBTQ characters shouldn't have to be relegated to the sidelines of our culture's biggest, most beloved stories. It's bullshit that this is the best Star Wars can do in 2019, and even more bullshit that this is the second version of this story I've written this year, following Endgame. Make it so I don't find myself rehashing this story yet again in 2020 or 2021 or 2022, Hollywood, and then we'll talk.
