Happy pride !!

Pride( perfectly smooth segue btw), as we all know, is a month to promote inclusiveness and celebrate the innumerable identities that fall in the umbrella of queer. Just its ( much necessary) existence, however, points to considerable proof that being a part of the LGBTQIA+ community can more often than not be an isolating experience. This is especially true for young adults and teens still in the process of discovering their identities, and healthy representation in mainstream media is perhaps one of the only ways to cope with the alienation that embeds itself in their lives due to a lack of relatability to their peers.

So, we’ve established the importance of that media and further opened the market for corporates to freely capitalise off of it without so much as putting an iota of effort into casting characters that can accurately portray a certain identity, or even writing them for the people that are supposed to find solace in them; instead, merely making use of them to add humour to the plot without being given any depth or expanding it.

Obviously, there are notable, more fulfilling exceptions- especially in recent media but this, too, is evidently also only true for the more common identities, as such. Although that is truly a feat in itself, we cannot forget or dismiss how several other sexual orientations and gender idenitities are addressed, to put simpy, through extremely harmful prejudices that a cis-het person in the writing room holds.