Speaking of Hamilton, it’s super fucked up the reputation it gets because of some of its more immature fans. Like, yeah, okay, there are people out there that are treating the founding fathers like “uwu cinnamon roll characters” instead of the actual real life people they were but that’s….not the show’s fault? The show does a better job of showing them as flawed human beings than MOST historical media, which tend to glorify them and completely ignore all flaws and shortcomings.
But more than that, it’s fucked up that the show is starting to get a bad reputation or be regarded as “cringey”. This is a show that shattered records and set milestones in theatre, and it is a show that is like 99% non-white. It’s a show that was written BY a man of colour specifically to CREATE more roles for performers of colour in an industry where he always felt there was little to no room for them. Can we not discredit that or its importance just because some teens on tumblr don’t know how to be normal about a musical they like?
I know this is a fun tweet and all that but it absolutely is an instance of striaght privilege. Heterosexual people have up to seven years to explore their sexual and romantic attraction in an environment that is designed for them while many queer youth deligate their time in maneuvering their identity in response to themselves and their environment. It’s one of the reasons why dating as a queer adult is so hard: so many of us are romantically undersocialized when compared to our heterosexual peers, who are not only given social liscence to explore themselves, but who have the additional benefit of being able to see themselves in media.
There will always be exceptions to this, of course, but it’s so sad to see how the effects of childhood homophobia haunt us well into our adult years, to the point where it limits our opportunity to connect with other people around us.
