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What About Dat - Queer Media

What About Dat - Queer Media

Written by: Podcast Queens Productions
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 What About Dat? Queer Media. A podcast & website. Our mission is to promote greater representation in the media for women, LGBT+ community, & allies.Copyright 2019 All rights reserved. Art Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Happiest Season - Is Queer Representation Finally Mainstream?

    Happiest Season - Is Queer Representation Finally Mainstream?
    Dec 23 2020

    Welcome back to another episode of What About Dat? My name is Jen and today on the cast I'm joined by the full What About Dat Team to discuss Happiest Season. Specially, the way it transcends into the mainstream media. 
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    27 mins
  • SEASON OF LOVE ❤️ PLUS NYC PREMIERE Q&A

    SEASON OF LOVE ❤️ PLUS NYC PREMIERE Q&A
    Dec 10 2019
    Welcome back to another episode of What About Dat TV recap and review my name is Jen and today on the podcast I’m joined by TV PUNDIT, QUEER JOURNALIST, and author of the Destiny and Darkeness Series (which I’m currently reading)...  The lovely Karen Frost  Karen … SAYS HI TO EVERYONE   Jen - Today we are discussing tello Films’ first movie, which just dropped December 1st. Season of Love is a lighthearted rom-com featuring an ensemble cast of diverse women and their connected love lives during the hectic holiday Christmas through New Years, who discover love truly is the best gift of all. Follow IRIS , MARDOU, LOU, KENNA, JANEY, and SUE    CONT”D Karen frost… The film stars in order by couples    Mardou - Laur Allen    Iris - Emily Gross  Lou - Emily Clark    Kenna - Sandra Mae Frank  Janey -  Janelle Marie    Sue - Dominque Provost Chalkley  Karen - Just to warn you all, beyond this point we will make a conscious effort to not spoil the film.  That said, spoilers may happen toward the the latter half of the cast. And also, come on guys, it’s a Hallmark-style movie. You know how this ends. Karen - Look, Hallmark is an interesting genre. Traditionally, Hallmark movies have carried some subliminal cultural messaging. Busy city woman goes to a small town and rediscovers the magic of simple living when she falls in love with the local farmer. Modern career woman meets time traveling prince and discovers that it’s okay to revert to traditional female roles. For years, this genre has been VERY white, Anglo-saxon Protestant and it’s reinforced what are essentially conservative Christian values. Within the last few years there’s been a bit of a shift away from that as the genre tries to draw in non-white viewers, but ultimately viewers--who include my seventy year old father, by the way--really enjoy the predictable, by the numbers aspect of the genre. They’re not looking to be surprised by twists and turns.    Obviously, tello’s film wasn’t going to be about reinforcing heteronormativity, but I had a suspicion that it would keep the other major trapping of the genre, which is, plainly put, a pretty non-confrontational, vanilla story about people falling in love. Two strangers or mostly strangers meet, fall in love. Boom. Did you have favorite couple?      Karen -  I watched with my girlfriend and we both liked Mardou and Iris best.   What did you like about this couple?  Kenna and Lou - Lots of fun, felt like more balanced side characters  Mardou and Iris both were incredibly strong. They could’ve been their own movie going experience.  Janey and Sue - Felt like they had issues…   Was there a moment that took you by surprise?  Jen - Mardou and Iris’s first kiss. Mardou under the mistletoe was one of the best moments in theater.    Karen - The 80s themes for Kenna when Lou was looking at her. I was like, “Is this a thing that happens in Hallmark movies? Why is this happening?” I still don’t have the answer.   If you could pitch a sequel what would that look like?    Karen - I think it would have to be all new characters, no? These characters found love. End of story for them. But I would love the sequel to go back to that traditional Hallmark style where it’s a single character finding love during the holiday season. So I’m thinking something like New York lawyer gets sentenced to probation in a soup kitchen after accidentally hitting a fire hydrant while texting and driving, learns it’s better to give than receive while falling in love with a woman who volunteers in the kitchen over the holidays.     Do you think tello achieved what they set out to do?  Karen - Yes, but that’s not actually any surprise. Look at the romance novel industry. For both straight people and queer women, it’s the single most lucrative and largest genre. People LOVE romance. Tello saw the market gap and went for it. So if the goal was to produce a Hallmark style movie that offered three different romances in one movie, then of course it succeeded.   Jen - Yes, I think this film is big for tello... Karen - In total, this movie had 586 backers on Indiegogo, raising a total of $61,157. That comes to just over $100 per backer, on average. To the queer community, I say this: content costs money. If there’s no money, it won’t get made. So I encourage listeners to think about if they’ve got even $5 to donate to causes that matter to them. Content matters to me so I prioritize it. I hope other people will do the same.    Jen - (Over Music) -  Christmas is a fantasical time of year in which the lifetime channel screens a month’s worth of heteronormative fluff to distracts us as we wrap presents, bake cookies, and decorate our homes. For one brief evening, I didn’t watch Rachel Maddow with a sinking feeling in my gut. Instead, I found myself in a room of allies and potential friends, sipping a delicious beer with a soggy hotdog and ...
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    36 mins
  • The Sordid Tale of AfterEllen with former content contributor Karen Frost... And Books...

    The Sordid Tale of AfterEllen with former content contributor Karen Frost... And Books...
    Oct 20 2019
    A Sordid Tale of AfterEllen with Former Content Contributor Karen Frost  First of all, for people who might not know… What is AfterEllen? For the Generation-ZERS  AfterEllen was founded in 2002. Prior to its founding, there hadn’t really been a queer women-specific site that focused on queer female representation in the entertainment industry. AfterEllen flagged for readers when there was a queer female character on TV, offered movie reviews, and conducted interviews with women in queer roles. Over time, the site went through several sort of cosmetic variations, to include video logs and sock puppet re-enactments of “The L Word,” but for 17 years it’s stayed true to its original ideology of identifying and promoting queer female visibility on TV and in movies. Show Notes:                                         Before the Intro - 15 secs  What About Dat? Is a Podcast Queens Production,  Sponsored by Archetype Footwear.  Archetype Footwear OVER MUSIC INTRO - 30 - seconds Jen - Welcome Back to another episode of What About Dat? A podcast where I talk about socially relevant television and speak with thought leaders who want greater visibility and representation in film, television, and digital publication for women, lgbtqia, and their allies.  Today on the podcast we are joined by arm-chair TV-Pundit, former content contributor for AfterEllen, Lez Watch TV, and Tello Film Productions. The Queer Queen of analytics and data and Young adult novelist of the upcoming, “Daughter of Fire Series,” Book 1. Conspiracy of the Dark.   The lovely Karen Frost. Jen - Thank you so much for joining me today, I’ve been a huge fan since you decided to eat your sandwich next to me at Clexa Con.  Karen - Thank you for having me.    Jen - What did you do before writing for AfterEllen? What compelled you to reach out and become involved in the publication?  Karen - I’d read the site since probably a few months after its founding. Every day, I would go on and see if there was a new article. Frankly, back in the early 2000s there was so little representation that there were only new articles a few times a month. The site was absolutely pivotal to my formation of a queer identity as a teenager, and I’d always dreamed of contributing, so when a call went out for writers in 2015, I hoped I’d be picked. Jen - Of your 182 articles what is the piece you are most proud of?  Karen - Let me preface my answer with a bit of a story. In 2016, there was a MASSIVE uproar in the queer female community after the character of Lexa on the CW show “The 100” was killed. Without getting into fandom-specifics, one of the things to come out of it was the feeling, “Why are our characters always being killed off?” For the first time, someone put together the data on it, and we discovered that 25-30% of all queer female characters have been killed off on TV shows. That’s a rate orders of magnitude larger than straight characters. Put another way, there was a statistically significant tendency of shows to kill off our characters. But had no one done the math, that knowledge would have remained in the realm of “feelings” rather than “data.” Because of work to highlight this problem, the next two years saw a plummeting in the number of queer female characters who were killed. Now, to get back to your question of what article I’m most proud of, I would say that the articles that I’m most proud of are the ones that used data to make a point about representation, for example showing that an actresses’ best chance of getting an Oscar nomination and winning since 2002 has been to play a queer character. I believe that it’s hard to convince Hollywood to have more representation using just “feelings,” but if you use data to show the profitability, then it’s hard for Hollywood to say no.   Jen - At ClexaCon, you briefly mentioned a mass exodus from AfterEllen? What happened? Why did so many writers cease their involvement with the publication?  Karen - The mass exodus happened in September 2016 when then-editor Trish Bendix was fired after six years at her position. Evolve Media, who owned AfterEllen at the time, announced it could no longer keep a full-time editor given that AfterEllen wasn’t meeting revenue goals and that it would be reducing the amount of content produced. The relationship between Trish and Evolve immediately soured, and all the writers but me chose to leave in solidarity with Trish. Anyone interested in those dynamics should read an article Trish posted about the dying queer media and the struggle to monetize it. She had a first row seat for years in seeing how the entire media landscape was affected, not just AfterEllen.  Jen - You wrote an article entitled “Why I stayed,” which was a compelling counter-argument for why you were going to continue to contribute articles to AfterEllen during a time when other people were leaving. Why did you stay?...
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    57 mins
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