“When I'm trying to explain the wonder that is Leslie Knope to nonbelievers, I often find myself at a loss for words. But not anymore. Henceforth and forevermore, Leslie Knope is a woman so flawless that she made Batman cry. ”

“Probably the four biggest complaints I heard about Glee last night were: 1) This is a comedy; how dare they do something so dramatic? 2) It's way too soon after Newtown to show something like this on TV. 3) I can't believe how emotionally manipulative that was. 4) It was pointless. Look, I'm no champion of Glee. I've written way more harsh stuff about the show than I have nice stuff about the show, but all of those arguments are a little confusing to me. I didn't see a single gay person complaining about Glee doing drama when Kurt and Santana were grappling with their sexuality and trying to summon the courage to come out. Or when Karofsky's self-loathing homophobia nearly killed him. Or when Unique was trying to embrace her gender identity. Pretty much all of us applauded that drama, right? We said it was important. That's why we get so angry at this show so much. Because when it tells important stories well, it tells them better than anybody. And it's always going to be too soon after a school shooting if we don't do something to stop school shootings. Sandy Hook wasn't the first. And it won't be the last. If you wait three months to tell this story, or six months, or a year, who's to say how many more school shootings will happen between now and then? No, the time to open a dialogue about a horrific thing is when there's momentum to change the horrific thing. That time is right now. As for emotional manipulation, I think one of the greatest things a story can strive to do is make you feel a thing you've never felt before, and would never feel otherwise. Again, we applaud this show when it does that for gay folks. We count on this show to do that for gay folks. We want it to show the world what it's like to be gay, to be in a same-sex relationship. Is it emotionally manipulative to make straight people feel that? To feel what it's like to be gay, to be a friend to someone who's gay, to root for someone who's gay? No, man. That's just the power of story. And this episode put us right in the middle of a school shooting. The directing, the acting, the whole thing, it made us feel like we were trapped in that choir room with New Directions, or trapped in that bathroom stall with Brittany, or crying on the floor of the school kitchen like Marley's mother. It was scary as hell, it was traumatic, and it was gut-stompingly sad. We were there with them, not breathing with them, crying with them. We were transported inside of a story and made to feel things we'd never felt before. That's what story does. And yeah, in the moment when Sue confesses to being the one with the gun, it does feel pointless. But that's not the end of the story, is it? It was Becky who had the gun, Becky who was just trying to take Brittany's advice and prepare herself for the outside world. The point is that anyone can get his or her hands on a gun and most teenagers can just walk right into their high schools with guns in their backpacks. No, not everyone who has a gun wants to kill someone, but every gun has the potential to kill someone. Guns are everywhere in America and if someone wanted to walk into a school today in suburban Ohio and murder a whole classroom full of kindergarteners, they could do it. Gun violence in this country is out of fucking control. That's the point. "Shooting Star" put us right in the middle of that point: "You feel how fucking terrible this is? Yeah, it's a real thing. A real thing we need to address. Like now." And, frankly, the fact that it came right in the middle of an otherwise ludicrous episode of Glee, that's also kind of the point. No one's ever sitting around waiting for their school to get shot up. They're planning what they're going to wear to prom and strategizing about their basketball games in the afternoon and worrying about their term papers and living and laughing and loving and singing, and then their innocence is shattered with a single shot. ”

“Here’s what we know about queer representation on TV: It changes everything. It changes things for straight people who have never met a gay person in their lives. It humanizes us. It opens the door for us into the living rooms of “mainstream” America and we sit down with these people who don’t know us and we have dinner with these people who don’t know us and we make them laugh and we make them cry and they come away knowing that there’s one kind of folks. And it changes everything for gay people too. We are, all of us, born with an ancient need to stretch ourselves across the fictional universes of other people’s stories. If they can be heroes, we can be heroes. If they can find love, we can find love. If they can crash and bleed and break and claw their way back to redemption, well, then, so can we. If a young gay boy can get thrown into a dumpster and crawl out and come out and sing his way into the most prestigious fine arts school in the country where he can banish his bullies with a song in his heart and a smile on his face, we can really believe that it gets better. And if a young gay girl can break through walls she spent a lifetime building, stare down her deepest, darkest fears, and find the courage to crack open her own heart, we can be brave enough to love out loud too. When I call Glee out on its misogyny, on its double standard of gay/straight physical affection, on its unwillingness to commit to its character development and tell us their real truths, it’s not because I’m jaded and cynical and like the sound of my own angry voice. It’s because when Glee does it right, it does it better than anyone. It heals us on a soul-balm level. I’ve written before about how constellations are nothing more than stories, the joining-up of unrelated points of light by people who wanted to make sense of the universe. When we look at the night sky, it’s not a jumble of glowing chaos. It’s Orion. It’s the Big Dipper. It’s Leo the Nemean Lion. And when we look at our own lives in the context of the stories we’ve been told, we’re not lost and alone and abandoned in a turbulent world without hope. We’re Blaine. We’re Brittany. We’re Santana. We’re Unique. And when people who don’t know us — not really, not physically, not yet — try to work out whether or not we’re like them, the same thing is true: We are Kurt Hummel. We hurt and we love and we hope. Oh, we hope. And sometimes we do it looking fierce in one-sleeved woolen ponchos. So, yes: I am a woman on a mission. And when Santana Lopez says “AfterEllen” out loud on Fox, five years after there were exactly zero lesbians on any major network, it only strengthens my resolve. It also makes me feel like the first time I went out on a date with another girl and she flicked her eyes up at me coyly over her beer and I was like, “Oh Jesus, she’s going to kiss me. Another girl is going to kiss me.” And she did kiss me, all gentle and firm and delicious and hops and jalapenos, and my heart ricocheted around in my chest like a pinball and my lungs forgot to do their job and all of my blood rushed to the surface of my skin, and I think what happened next was that I blacked out. It’s like, Naya Rivera is saying “AfterEllen.” I see her lips going, “AfterEllen.” But it sounds to me very much like, “I love you.” ”

- from Heather Hogan’s (afterelton.com) fantastic review of Glee ep 4.13, Diva.

ETA: Where I come from, ANY interaction between queer couples that shows signs of potential affection, or demonstrates that they are actually in a relationship is censored (hey, a silver-lining to the Klaine breakup? On TV here…it never happened. Because I suppose we weren’t suppose to think they had anything to break up in the first place……!). I therefore have a very, very deep appreciation for all the little things that push the boundaries of what the Powers That Be let us see through their glasses of discrimination, prejudice, homophobia and heteronormativity.

I know we want MORE queer visibility, more equality between the characters, and yes, we should absolutely demand more. But I’d also like to state how much it means to me, a queer kid in a country that throws us in prison for being gay, that I can see Blaine in all his glorious fabulousity as a Diva,  or his blessed-incurable case of hearteyes that the Powers haven’t figured out how to censor yet [I can absolutely imagine them pixelating out his eyes every time he looks at Kurt! ssshh..no one tell them], or watch a character like Kurt Hummel -an incredible embodiment of someone who is so amazingly strong, powerfully different and represents so much of what they want to hide from us- come alive on my TV, or hear Santana uttering the words ‘afterellen’.

As we keep fighting for more, I take comfort in the little things that they try so hard to keep from us [and it makes me a little happier that there are others w/o access to online sites to watch uncensored versions of glee who can see these small gems, and hopefully to them, it’s enough light that they don’t feel so alone in the dark tunnel we’re stumbling along in].

“And when we look at our own lives in the context of the stories we’ve been told, we’re not lost and alone and abandoned in a turbulent world without hope”. Indeed.