I would suggest Funeral Parade of Roses.
I’d be up for this. We’d need to bring in books, too. A lot of the interesting work has been in the literature space rather than filmed–cheaper to produce and let’s your imagination run away with you! 
I’d be interested in seeing Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite on the list as well as Torchwood, both of which I’ve been meaning to dig into for ages.
To be honest, I’m not sure I’d want an arc on queer sci-fi. I would, however, definitely participate in a longer conversation on the forum. With frak parties and book selections. It’s just a really tall order for the Crew–if there’s one subject that the Friendliest People in Sci-Fi might have trouble with, it’s this one. And because we’re the Friendliest People, we’d need to not just allow but encourage discussion and respectful disagreement, which would be hurtful and unpleasant for many of us. Also, it would be a big ask of the mods, who would need to do more than the usual amount of work to boot any trolls or truly hateful people.
I’m glad to see this arc request because it gives me another chance to say that GWC is the awesomest forum I’ve ever found in terms of being welcoming not just to girl geeks but to feminist geeks and queer geeks. Seeing as I’m all 3 of those things, I really, really love this place. Aaaaand, though I am a queer lady geek, I love that there’s not just one little corner of the web where I can rock out and do my thing with the 10 other folks like me. Here, I have all of you! Cheesey though it is, variety is the spice of life.
I would disagree that was what I was doing. I was thinking that it is a subject that doesn’t follow what the show is about.
gwc link
“In doing so, the hosts and community both discovered that we all share one idea that’s more dear to us than our love of the podcast-founding show: we love introducing friends to (and being ourselves introduced to) new sci-fi, fantasy, comic, and gaming material. Where individually we were lucky to have a few local friends who filled that role, as members of the GWC community we now have thousands of friends lining up to turn each of us on to the latest (or oldest) cool new stuff.”
I would say for new lessoners, it could be a turn off.
I would say this doesn’t follow the format that this podcast follows. I did say this could be sensitive material and even in this discussion it is starting to get heated. If anything, I believe it falls outside the criteria of this podcast. It isnt being a bigot for not wanting to hear this type of material, it can just be personal choice.
Just playing Devil’s Advocate here, since I’ve already shared my thoughts on this arc suggestion, but…
I like that the Crew occasionally delivers a non-sci-fi/fantasy/comics arc, like the High School Movies arc and the Heist Movies arc. I think it’s entirely appropriate to include those arcs in the regular downloads–even if the Crew goes with something that not everyone here is interested in. It’s part of sharing the stuff we think is cool and fun with our friends.
Sometimes, if I am absolutely 100% certain that I have no interest in a particular thing the Crew is covering, I consider skipping the cast… but I usually go back and listen to it later for all the other great chatter. This was the case with the recent Garfield Halloween Special cast (but they were camping so I had to listen!) and the first Transformers movie cast (I listened to that too after I eventually watched the movie).
I agree that not wanting to listen to an arc about queer movies does not make a person a bigot. But I have to be honest that it does make me a little sad that someone would so object to the idea that you’d rather the Crew not make those casts easily available through iTunes.
In the event that the Crew did decide to do an LGBTQ arc, I sincerely hope that listeners whose feelings on queer folks and their depictions in movies are so strongly negative that they don’t want to even listen to the casts would go with the flow and opt out as a “personal choice”–not make try to make that choice the default for everyone.
All that said, my bottom-line feelings about doing this arc are still best reflected by my prior post in this thread.
If anyone wants to take a lead in coordinating some side action watching some good gay flicks and reading some queer sci-fi and fantasy (zomg the Elemental Logic series by Laurie Marks!) PM me or set up a thread. I’m all in! Sadly, I don’t have time to coordinate, but I sure can participate and bring some life to the party!
Holy Crom, I can’t believe I missed this thread until now.
I hate to start making work for people (ie The Crue or their Mods) but this is a hell of an idea for an arc. If not an arc, at least a segment or segments. Would it be crazy to suggest some telephone interviews/stories from our gay Alpacas? As in what they have felt were milestones in sci-fi books, movies, TV? This could be an awesome presentation, and to hell with those who won’t listen to it. That’s not what we do here. We listen.
I’ll state right here and now that GWC has opened my eyes to a lot of things, expanded my horizons, made me rethink a lot of the stupidity and ignorance that surrounded me. In that spirit I would love to see something happen regarding this subject.
Such an arc (and that’s what it should be, imo, not “separate but equal”) sounds really interesting, regardless of the particular way that it’s approached.
The way I see it, it could either be handled as a totally out-of-standard-format arc a la the high school arc (as Starbuccaneer mentioned below) or dovetailed into more general genre/geek subjects by finding specific SF&F examples, but I think both of those approaches are totally valid and could work equally.
On the one hand, I understand the sentiments from earlier in the thread that an arc that approached the subject straight up without really having anything to do with traditional GWC fare could potentially draw the ire of some current listeners (but hopefully no more so than the high school or heist arcs) and confuse new listeners. The latter can be easily addressed with a heads-up at the beginning saying that people might want to go back and listen to earlier eps first, though.
Using specific genre examples (e.g. Torchwood, Buffy, etc.) would certainly make the introduction of the subject to the 'cast more seamless, and I don’t think the arc would lose anything for not using mainstream LGBT movies. I personally think it would be the more interesting tact, but that’s just because SF&F is such an interesting mechanism of social commentary to look at.
And sexuality in BSG has been discussed at length in the past podcasts, with characters like Cain, Gaeta, etc who are gay/lesbian. And it was all discussed in a amicable polite manner, or so I remember. (yay! on everyone)
I think politics is a huge no-no topic and generally leads to irrational discussions, but sexuality, whichever the case maybe, has been discussed at length in the past anyway in tv shows, movies, games even - maybe not in a specific arc, but definitely scattered throughout many podcasts in many interesting discussions. Relationships and love and sex are a huge part of many stories anyway.
Like, one of my favorite movies is Happy Together -
Happy Together with Tony Leung and the late Leslie Cheung
- which incidentally is a ‘LGBT’ movie, but it’s also just a very good movie with an interesting story like any other good movie that’s been showcased in a previous podcast/arc. So if there is an array of movies/tv show episodes/etc that have a good story which happens to have gay/lesbian characters and people want to talk about (and the crue wants to talk about) in an arc, then I don’t really see what the objection is. It’s no different than discussing something like Clueless. (So yes, I think a LGBT arc would pretty much be like the heist and high school arcs, but then again Chuck, Sean and Audra were already fans of those particular movies in the first place, so in the case of a possible LGBT arc, maybe it’s kind of more of a “they haven’t seen any of the movies, and it’ll take way too long for them to watch all of them, then decide whether they found it interesting enough to discuss, then talk about it, etc” issue. In which case, using only LGBT plots in SF shows might be a more do-able arc, since we’re mostly familiar with them already, and interest is already there.)
Oh, and Queer as Folk was a pretty interesting show too. The UK one I think is better, but the US one has its moments in the early seasons too before it turned into a huge soap opera (and RTDavies of DW and Torchwood also made the UK one, so it might be interesting to compare amongst his series and his different portrayals of gay and lesbians in different genre and time to tie it back to the SF realm of things).
ETA: Incidentally, I found this movie, also named Happy together, featuring the same songwhile looking for the movie trailer above, and it cracked me up: