First and foremost, let me indicate that this journal entry is going to be mostly relating to something that is entirely old news – AKA, it happened Wednesday. However, being hard at work in my new job, I did not get a chance to enjoy the newest episode of Glee until early Saturday morning (consider this your sole warning – if you don’t want to hear anything about the show for whatever reason, back out now). I’ve taken most of the weekend processing how I feel about the show.

I could comment on the great music, the really awesome original songs (which were a first for the show), but as you might imagine, being gay, the biggest thing for me was “the kiss.” This is something that has been in the works for the past six months, something that the greater majority of the show’s fans have wanted for a long time. However, unlike most shows, the writers didn’t bow to pressure – they made us wait and wait and wait, and I don’t think there could have been a better time to do it.

Now, for those of you who are straight, the impact of the kiss may be lost. You see straight kisses on television, even on teen shows, all the time. What’s the big deal, right? Well, as someone who spent the greater majority of his late teens and early twenties trying to play it straight because he wasn’t quite sure whether “being gay was okay,” let me tell you – had I seen something like this on primetime network television when I was 15, I would be a vastly different person today.

And, to be fair, this isn’t the first gay kiss between two guys on primetime television. However, it is the first instance, at least that I can think of, which didn’t involve one of the following:
1. Playing up the kiss for laughs;
2. Making it far too sexually charged;
3. Making it a “comfortable” kiss for straight people by abbreviating its length or panning away the camera; or
4. One or both of the characters being laden with stereotypes so much so that they’re not actually a character, but more of a symbolic archetype of what the ‘mainstream’ thinks being gay is all about. Either that, or being completely insane.

This goes way beyond simply ‘gay is okay,’ in my opinion. It attacks the stereotypes that all gay men (and lesbians as well) are out to get laid as much as possible, and as long as they have something to bury their dick in, they are happy (which is especially prevalent in the fandom). It shows two boys who met, became friends, and over the course of the time they’ve gotten to know each other, have fallen in love. This is easily the most sane relationship on Glee (in the same episode you can see how fucked up some of the straight relationships are in this show).

This particular show has affected me in ways that I’m still trying to process. I’ve been driving my roommate nuts all weekend listening to, watching, re-listening to and re-watching the episode and the songs from it, and I’m sure she’s about to kill me. Maybe this means that I’m just a stereotypical queen who’s getting overly emotional about something insignificant. Or maybe, just maybe, for the first time in my life, I feel like being different – whether being gay or falling in love as a gay man – is more accepted than I thought it was.

And no…I don’t really have to care about what the mainstream thinks, nor should I. I’ve got amazing friends and a strong group of people who love and support me no matter how much I fuck up. But…doesn’t mean that being accepted on a larger scale is a bad thing, either. And, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with who I am, or who I’ve become after the things that have gone on in my life. But, looking back over it, I do have to say it would have been nice to get here a few years sooner. 