An intriguing post has crossed my dash that says “don’t just recommend media to people solely because it has queer representation: make sure to give some kind of summary or context.” The idea is to flag if the movie/series/game has content that could be uncomfortable or trauma-related. For e.g., I won’t watch a movie with queer characters, no matter how good it is, if one of those characters commits suicide. That’s just one of my own rules for comfortable viewing. (I have heard a similar pattern of argumentation from black Americans: not all of them enjoy watching a movie with a majority black cast if the movie is about the visceral horrors of slavery, so I assume this discussion of tailored recommendation also has some intersectional potency as well.)

I do very much vibe with these requests, but there’s something else about it that I’ve been tossing around in my head for a while. When people mention to me that a piece of media has a) queer representation and b) no suicides (my one plot restriction), that doesn’t tend to be a persuasive recommendation to me. I also want to know If the Movie is Good.

There are lots of ways a movie can be Good, or at least The Kind of Good that Currie Likes. The Handmaiden is good in the traditional sense of quality cinema — extraordinary acting, lovely cinematography, extravagant sets, meticulously romantic plot, and it’s one of my favourite movies of all time ever. Rocky Horror Picture Show is none of those things (and can be uncomfortably transphobic in modern contexts, so it doesn’t really score high on the “representation” card any more) but to me it’s Good because it’s Gothic, campy, catchy, and deeply embedded in queer culture.

The reason I care about this is because I think evaluating movies purely on whether they have good representation will have a few inevitable pitfalls. The first is one discussed in the post I referenced earlier, which points out that “good queer fiction” tends to focus on coming-out narratives and leave genre films by the wayside. Furthermore, if we fall into this trap of assuming that “good” queer representation means good movies, we’re going to inevitably give bad (in the aesthetic sense) works of fiction a pass — of course, “bad” is very subjective, and queer has a long history of embracing camp and so-bad-it’s-good filmmaking. I have heard good things about the representation in Sense8, Black Sails, and Gentleman Jack, but I’ve never actually committed to watching any of them because all people talked about when recommending them to me was representation. The “is it good” question is doubly important for genre narratives, at least for me. Like, Black Sails is a pirate adventure, so while the queer storylines are great, I would also like to know if there are some cool cannon battles. The reason why The Handmaiden is one of my favourite movies ever is because it’s an amazing con movie that just so happens to have adorable lesbians as its centrepiece.

But I think the real problem here is more that if queer representation is “enough” for acclaim, we’re going to get a lot of rainbow-stickered corporate schlock pumped out to attract queer viewers (what I would call a subtler kind of queer baiting). Asking for queer representation and nothing else reduces the queer consumer to a market demographic: to people who will inevitably support massive studios so long as their boxes are checked. We aren’t demanding quality, imagination, surprise, or even appeal in our artistic products; we’re demanding a checklist of tokens. This is especially disappointing to me because queerness is often the inspiration for a lot of very imaginative and revolutionary art, and not all of it is exclusively about love or gender performance. We should be asking for more than representation — we should be asking for good shit!