“I am telling the veracity of my life. No one can question that, no one can take those things from me.”
David discusses queer media that had an impact in his life, and the importance of realistic representation.
Chapter 1 |5 min read | October 5, 2021
My name is David Demchuk, I am 59 years old. I was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. And I currently live in Toronto. I am a cis-gay man, I have been out, really since I was about 17 years old. And I am a writer. I've written for theater. I've written for film and television for digital media. And currently, I am a novelist.
Of the media that I that I take in, [does it portray realistic LBGTQ experiences?], yes and no. A lot of what I watch tends to be, for example, genre material, horror, fantasy, science fiction, things like that. So I'm not actually looking for what I would describe as an authentic experience. That said, there are queer people, trans people creeping in along the edges, even even in those media.
“For us, these are like, major milestones. And they shouldn't be. But it makes a huge difference.”
David D
And, and I am, I am pleased to see that some of the portrayals are, are fairly realistic within these bounds. I mean, I suppose the things that one should be saying are things like Queer as Folk and Pose, within sort of a broad latitude, because some of these are very television, they're good examples. For me, it was important when we started seeing films in the 80s and 90s, that started portraying queer people relatively realistically. I'm thinking of films like Passing Glances and My Beautiful Laundrette, things that were sort of core works of that period, and then we sort of saw more subsequently, but we also see things that are completely escapist, completely ridiculous. The representation in those I think, is really important as well, we just had three, this would have been unimaginable.
In my youth, we just had three interconnected full-length horror movies on Netflix, the fear street movies, adaptations of a major franchise, the fear street books, and they had queer young people as protagonists. Where are they realistic? No, they weren't required to be realistic. But they had human beings with human emotions and human interactions. And if I was a 17 year old, and I had watched those it would have blown my mind. It would be inconceivable that such a thing could happen.
The most you could hope for is that you might have a side character who got killed off in the first 20 minutes, and you might have felt something for them. And that would have been like a major achievement.
You're starting to see queer people, trans people being normalized, and having agency and owning their narratives and, and carrying through to the end and having the potential for happy endings. And that all sounds, I mean, particularly if you're not queer, that all sounds weird and trivial like you take these things for granted in mainstream media. But for us, these are like, major milestones. And, and, and they shouldn't be. But it makes a huge difference.
And for me, it makes a huge difference for younger audiences, who I think really struggled to find any representations of themselves in any of the media they consume. Now we're seeing so much more with YA fiction we're seeing so much more really also with adult fiction, we're seeing a lot in the mainstream media, in film, and television in ways that I would never have expected.
One of the films that I think was really important to me was The Times of Harvey Milk, which is a fantastic documentary about an exceptional man, but an exceptional man who was living, an ordinary, recognizable queer life, and had a great personality, and was doing things with it and was engaged and so on. His life was presented within the context of a thriving queer life and queer community within San Francisco, one that was embattled to a certain extent, or he wouldn't have pursued a political career, but one where he was engaging, charismatic, and living life fully in a way that we did not often see queer people in that period.
And that's probably the kind of story I'm talking about. If I'm going to write for myself, if I'm going to write queer characters, and I have, I wanted to pick them realistically, I wanted to pick their lives, their experiences, their conflicts realistically, but I don't necessarily want to be you know, sort of neorealist and in the way that I portray them or their experiences so that's probably the difference that I would say between ruthless realistic portrayals and portrayals that are very similar to the way that we see other people being portrayed in the media.
See More from David
Chapter 2: Queer Storytelling
I think if you're going to come into my world, then you can do a rudimentary amount of research. You can Google something you couldn't do in 1984. You can find out what are poppers. What is Grindr? What is polyamory, you know, you can find that shit out.
Chapter 3: Finding Your Voice
Nothing is instantaneous. Everything takes some time, and it's important to be patient with yourself. I think, experimenting within yourself, asking those questions within yourself sort of creates a self discourse in order to explore stuff.