TODAY IN QUEER TV HISTORY
ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK - 6/6/2014, Netflix
Season 2 of the long-running prison drama series was released on this date in 2014. It was great to see a well-made, well-written series with lots of lesbian or bi women portrayed, a major regular character who is trans and has her own nuanced story lines, and queer characters of color, especially given TV's long history of focusing LGBTQ portrayals disproportionately on white gay men.
If it had debuted a few decades earlier, activists probably would have pilloried it for perpetuating the trope of violent queer women, but by the 2010s there were enough different types of queer characters onscreen that ORANGE did not attract the kind of objections that, for instance, the 1970s-80s women's-prison TV serial PRISONER (aka PRISONER: CELL BLOCK H) had attracted from some lesbian activists at the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcqcCSFT3uU
#OITNB #television #MediaStudies #series #lesbian #gay #bisexual #trans #LGBTQ #queer #Netflix