Sneaking Around the Censors

Perhaps the funniest part of As You Like It, to me, is the way it screws everything up so badly that Hymen, the literal god of marriage himself, has to swoop in just to make heteronormative sense of everything again.

It’s hard not to come away from As You Like It with the impression that Shakespeare was taking on the task of accessing homosexuality, or at least, homoeroticism of some sort. In the world of comedy, Shakespeare can slip in depictions of love between characters of the same gender, because it’s all a joke, right? All he has to do is make sure the higher-up governing officials of London – his era’s dreaded Network Censors – are pacified by the onslaught of heteronormative marriage at the end.

Shakespeare’s specific vehicle for accomplishing this mess is through crossdressing, and perhaps “cross-acting” in a sense as well. Ignoring the boy actor playing her for the moment, Rosalind’s triple nature makes her the perfect way to draw everyone in.

Dressing as Ganymede, Aliena’s companion on the road, Rosalind seems to act more as a lover than a brother to Celia in her new identity, even they're called ‘cousins.’ The way their relationship is described as “dearer than the natural bond of sisters” makes me think more of the Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune version of cousins, though. As Ganymede, Rosalind also finds that Phoebe falls in love with her, and towards the end of the play she says to Phoebe, “I would love you, if I could... I will marry you, if ever I marry woman,” showing some degree of requitedness in that relationship. Then, she begins to act as Orlando’s “Rosalind,” adding a third identity to the mess, and allowing Orlando to act like a man in love with a man, Ganymede... Because he’s acting in love with Rosalind.

And all of this homoeroticism going around is allowable because of Rosalind’s crossdressing. These romances can occur and Hymen can detangle them at the end, combing them out into four neat male-female couples just like that.

In the modern world, devices like crossdressing aren’t always necessary any longer. While queer representation on TV is still flawed, it exists – an impressive step forward.

However, children’s television has yet to catch up to the crowd. There have been a few recent strides forward, such as a kid on Disney with two moms, or the eventual romance between Korra and Asami, but for the most part the censors won’t allow even hints of queer relationships to slip through. Not even five seconds of a literal Love God doing his thing. Not even a couple of unnamed characters kissing briefly in the background. That’s a pair of recent examples out of many. Ouch.

So, like Shakespeare, some creators of children’s television have resorted to more covert means, hoping to get some queer representation out in the world. Recently, the show Steven Universe has done a pretty impressive job of it. Shakespeare imagined women dressing as boys to cause a stir. Steven Universe takes the idea of messing around with gender and identity to produce queer relationships a step further.

In the world of Steven Universe, there are alien characters called “gems.” Steven himself is half-human, half-gem, and has many of the abilities of other gems. One such ability is fusion: the ability to combine himself with another person to create a bigger, stronger person made of their combined identities. At first, Steven doesn’t know he possesses this particular ability, but when he tries in the episode “Alone Together”, he finds that he can fuse with his female friend, Connie.

The first time they meet, Steven accidentally uses his gem powers and they get trapped in a bubble.

The result is Stevonnie, an individual of unknown gender, seemingly in their teenage years, and absolutely gorgeous.

Stevonnie likes to dance.

In fact, Stevonnie is so gorgeous that when they go to get a donut at the local shop, both Sadie and Lars, a teen girl and a teen boy, are equally stunned and start blushing everywhere.

Maybe the humor of Lars and Sadie both finding Stevonnie attractive makes it okay, like the comedy in As You Like It?

And the censors are fine with this! After all, Sadie’s attracted to the boy part of Stevonnie, and Lars is attracted to the girl part of Stevonnie, right? Or at least, that’s the excuse you can give to any nosy execs who might think you’ve gone too far. Since the Stevonnie episode, the creators of Steven Universe have even used gem fusion as a smokescreen for queer content a second time, revealing in “Jailbreak” that the character of Garnet is the fusion of two gems who are pretty obviously in love, but still just sneaky enough to get past the censors.

But not that sneaky.

Shakespeare had his crossdressing, and here in the future, we have our… uh… strange alien power combination identity analogue. Hopefully at some point these kind of tricks for pulling off romances that aren’t straighter than a block of wood won’t be necessary, and queer kids can see themselves in their media without this kind of hassle. But, even so, it’s still entertaining to see how ways of sneaking queer content in have evolved over the past centuries, expanding into new genres with new smokescreens. Pushing the boundaries seems like an important part of writing that will never change.