Not all people have encountered gay people in their life so when this is how they are shown it gives a false image and could make people intimidated by gay people. Also in most movies when they portray lesbians they are usually "hot" girls and usually kissing wearing uniforms or skimpy outfits for the viewers pleasure. This is also a misleading image of lesbians. Not all of them are all "girly" or act like this.
A few days ago we watched a movie in class, But, I'm Not a Cheerleader, and in the movie the main character is sent away to a rehab camp for gays and lesbians by her parents. This is to try to make her "normal" again. On a side note I thought it was interesting because to me she didn't come off like a lesbian, the signals they gave off in the movie like the picture in the locker and her boyfriend trying to forcefully kiss her didn't really make it seem like she was actually lesbian. It seemed to me that by sending her to the camp kind of put the idea into her head and in a way brainwashed her to think she was lesbian, but maybe that is just how it came off to me in the movie.
The media as well as society looks at LGBT people as "not right and not normal" and if you are then you can be cured or fixed for example rehab or step programs. In the rehab program in the movie their way of "fixing" the people was step by step and by assigning them different gender related roles. Such as the lesbians and gays were split into two different groups and in one stimulation the lesbians were supposed to do things like scrub floors, put on makeup, wear a wedding dress, things that our society views as feminine roles, and this was supposed to help "cure her." For the guys it was pretty much the same thing but they were assigned masculine roles such as playing football, chopping wood, grabbing on their nuts when praising or excited about something. This ties into a reading that we were assigned to read in class, Naming all the Parts by Kate Bronstein. In this paper it is discussed how society labels and assigns people gender roles. If you are a guy you are expected to act one way and if you are a girl you expected to act another. Roles are assigned to us based on our gender. If someone decides to like someone of the same gender this is out of the norm and viewed as something that is not ok because of how culture perceives gender roles to us. From birth we are taught different gender roles in society: girls are supposed to wear pink, play with dolls, clean ect, boys are supposed to be tough, play with GI Joes and like darker colors, all the time our society try's to assign these roles in different ways.
