Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-11469381-20150831022901/@comment-995426-20151014225453

Well, to be honest, I never actually saw that 1987 series episode with Mona Lisa (so have zero opinion about the episode or characters themselves), and I never memetically associated Raph as necessarily having a girlfriend. Having girlfriends (especially when they're different girlfriends in each incarnation) is not necessarily a meme&mdash;it's just common. Also, I never said sassy big sister Raph was unmanly, which is why I also referred to him as a "tomboy". He is very masculine, but also had character development in the first two seasons that strongly reminded me and my friends of being a character who thinks more like a woman than like a man.

Note that this really has nothing to do with gender identity (though it can overlap especially a person has a transgender identity). It's just that most men have different emotional and intuitive thought processes from most women, which can be very subtle or quite noticeable. It says nothing about a person's strength or capability, but just about how their brain approaches various stuff. And while there certainly are gay men who have a "man's brain" and don't easily register on gaydar, a disproportionate number of gay men (far more than straight men) have a "woman's brain". (Similarly, a disproportionate number of lesbian women have a "man's brain", which is even more common with "chapstick lesbians" than with "lipstick lesbians".) See  for more information. Anyway, that's the scientific angle. But when people have a developed gaydar based on their own life experiences and cumulative trial-and-error wisdom, it's an intuitive angle that cold-reads a person and comes to the impressions it does. The impressions people already had were part of what motivated the corresponding scientific research in the first place.

But it's not just that Raph and Slash "seem gay" to certain audience members. It's more that they're doing and saying many things we can actually relate to on a personal level in ways we can't as easily relate to most straight characters&mdash;they become like audience surrogates for us. With Raph, we liked that he was very much like so many other Raphaels, and was still quite aggressive and manly and competent, but also liked the easter eggs of very strong gaydar signals that reminded us more of our world of ourselves, our gay friends, etc. It was a fresh new spin on a classic character, and also a positive, strong, unwimpy representation of a gay man. But part of that also meant that it would have become offensive to suddenly rewrite him as a straight man, unless the show were to explain believably how he could be bisexual so as to respect the character we had already come to know and love. This show being what it was (a TV-Y7 show where gay hints are never more than hints), we know they probably weren't going to address such things in a frank, specific manner, but we hoped they could at least continue to tread gracefully and respectfully with what they had already given us.

And where Bebop and Rocksteady are concerned, it was good that they tripped our gaydar in this version too, at least sometimes (though it was mostly Bebop who did), because it felt like a nod to the same thing in the past that made us feel more visible back then just as it made us feel more visible now. Because, let's face it&mdash;people notice gay people, but they tend not to notice straight people because straight people are so much more common and every day is "straight pride day".

You see, marginalized minorities also tend to care about greater positive minority representation in media. That's part of why organizations like the NAACP and GLAAD exist. When we feel less invisible in mainstream media, we feel a bit more like we're part of mainstream society while still having the freedom to be ourselves. Contrastly, when we feel our presence being erased from mainstream media, we feel more marginalized and vulnerable again. Lots of characters are Caucasian, or straight, or have girlfriends, and it's easy to ignore and forget when most people on TV are Causasian, or straight, or have girlfriends. But when we feel noticed&mdash;and especially when we feel noticed and then unceremoniously ignored&mdash;we tend to remember it. We don't like feeling invisible, forgotten or swept under the carpet.

And yes, "straightsplaining" is a thing, just like "mansplaining" and "whitesplaining". It's entirely possible to explain oneself, but these are terms that imply an attempt to discuss the issues in a way that's ungracefully tainted by an offensive level of ignorance or justification of majority privilege. It's possible to have a positive, constructive discussion without these kinds of "splaining", but that just doesn't happen enough. Note that's entirely possible to "splain" "innocently", especially where one's own benign ignorance is involved and a person just didn't know they were coming across as offensive.

By the way, I don't know James Carter or Inspector Li.