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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.

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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. 

Happiest Season - Is Queer Representation Finally Mainstream?

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 at one point during the film I looked around and the majority of people in attendance had giant grins across their faces as they watched for the first time ever their own Hallmark experience unfold on the screen. It was sweet, innocent fun and I couldn’t help but think: why did this take so long to come into existence? 

Karen - Thank you for tuning into this recap/review, please be sure to follow us on twitter at whatabout_dat, follow Karen @lezdish

Closing music 








SEASON OF LOVE  ❤️ PLUS NYC PREMIERE Q&A

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? 

Karen - As I mentioned before, AfterEllen was an absolutely pivotal part of my identity formation as a teenager, and I realized that the site would continue to exist whether all the writers stayed or left. It would continue to be a global platform with the ability to create positive impact for young women coming to terms with their sexual orientation. Girls in Bangladesh, Kenya, South Korea, Argentina, and even in the US wouldn’t know about the backstory with Trish. Two or five or however many years later, they would log onto the site and I wanted them to have something to read that would help them. I think we often become very myopic and Anglo-centric when we think about the world just because we write in English, but there is SO much of the world that is also impacted by what we write.

Jen - What was your turning point? What made you finally leave? 

Karen - After Trish, Evolve Media hired Memoree Joelle as the new editor. Memoree came to the site with some baggage in the sense that she had expressed what were perceived to be anti-transgender comments in the past. We writers knew about those sentiments, but for the first several years, she kept the sentiments behind those comments private and off the site. In late December 2018, however, when it became clear that Evolve Media was looking to sell AfterEllen and would no longer be monitoring whether she was publishing anti-trans rhetoric, she began to publish that rhetoric through the AfterEllen Twitter handle. That’s actually a bit of an over simplification in the sense that Memoree would argue that she’s not “anti-trans” per se but rather that she feels that as the LGBT community has focused on trans issues, it has come at the cost of lesbian issues and therefore she seeks a more equitable balance of resources and energy. However, the delivery of that message came across as extremely anti-trans. 

By December 2018, I could no longer remain with AfterEllen. As someone who doesn’t share Memoree’s ideology, it was impossible to continue to be associated with it. As much as I believed in the spirit of AfterEllen’s mission, to have stayed any longer would have been to condone that sort of bigotry, which I don’t. 

Jen - What are some of your takeaways from working at AfterEllen? 

Karen - I would say the biggest takeaway is that Hollywood is changing. Often we get impatient at the pace of change, but in 2002 we might see three queer female characters in movies a year and in 2019 we’re talking about whether Valkyrie and Captain Marvel will date in massive, billion dollar grossing Marvel movies. The amount and quality of representation today is unbelievable compared to two decades ago and earlier. I’d like to believe that some of that is a result of the great work done by people at AfterEllen, Autostraddle, and other sites. 

The other takeaway is that yes, queer media is dying. That’s for a variety of reasons, but one thing that I would flag is stovepiping in our community. For a decade, readers would come to sites like AfterEllen or Autostraddle and they would read about all the queer content on TV. There was a unified base of knowledge that was shared among the community. Everyone knew, for example, the ten shows that had queer characters. Now people seem to be falling into a few fandoms and not paying attention to what’s happening outside those few. Readership for sites like AfterEllen is dying in part because rather than going to AfterEllen, viewers are going to show-specific sites. But if we lose these universal or aggregative sites, then we lose a really good repository of knowledge.

Book Trailer - 1min +

Jen- “Conspiracy of the Dark” - Is really different from the deeply analytical articles you’ve put out into the world. Where did the inspiration for the project come from? How did you find your story?

Karen - I’ve always loved Young Adult fantasy. Ever since I was a kid, that’s always been my favorite genre. But there really haven’t been a ton of queer protagonists in mainstream books. When I was a teenager, there were three: Malinda Lo’s “Ash” and “Huntress,” and then Tamora Pierce’s “The Will of the Empress.” So with “Conspiracy of the Dark,” the inspiration was just to write a good and interesting story, but also to create more content for young queer women. We need stories of our own, and if mainstream publishers aren’t particularly interested in giving it to us, then we have to write it and disseminate it any way we can. 

Jen - Being that you write high-fantasy, what kind of research do you do, and how long do you spend researching before beginning a book?

One of the luxuries of high fantasy is that no research is necessary! I love it. You just open up your computer and go.

Jen - What does literary success look like to you? If you could have it all, what would it look like with journalism and writing, what does success look like for you? 

Karen - I would say that literary success for queer content looks very different from straight content. Here’s what I mean: JK Rowling has made a billion dollars off the Harry Potter series and merchandising. If you’re going to write straight content, that’s success. Success is fame and fortune. But queer content will never sell like that. No one will be getting rich off queer content, and in fact I only know of one queer female writer who makes enough to do it full-time. To me, success in our genre is impact. If someone reads my book and says, “Wow, this is fantastic. I’ve never before seen myself portrayed as a knight or a mage,” then that’s success. All I want to do is put out the content that didn’t exist when I was a teenager. Let’s fill figurative libraries with the content that the mainstream has denied us for centuries.

 

It’s largely the same with journalism: success is about creating impact. It’s almost impossible to know if the articles that I write have caused anyone in Hollywood to re-evaluate how they do representation, but I hope they have. Ultimately, fame is fleeting and subjective. Here today, gone tomorrow. But if an article plants the seed where Hollywood says, “Hey, maybe Captain Marvel CAN be gay,” then that’s impact forever.

Jen - What’s the most difficult thing about writing queer characters? 

Karen - There’s nothing difficult about writing queer characters…if you’re already queer yourself. I think where we see more difficulty is when straight people are writing queer characters. 

Jen - How does your background in queer pop-culture effect the way you write characters?

Karen - Not exactly. I will say, however, that there was a queer couple on TV whose dynamic I really liked so I used their dynamic as the basis of the romantic pairing in my book.  

Jen - What was your hardest scene to write? Why?

Karen - The opening few pages of my book. In the initial draft, I wanted the description of my character’s world to be very detailed so that readers would feel immersed in it. I immediately realized, however, that it was too much and no one would get past those pages. They would stop reading. So I had to go back and cut.  

Jen - What was the pitch process like trying to sell your concept to literary agents?

Karen - The way publishing works is that for mainstream publishers, normally you get a literary agent and the agent then tries to market your book to publishers like Harper Collins. So in essence you have two barriers to get over: finding a literary agent and then finding a publisher. Literary agents post online what they’re looking for: cook books, fantasy, sci-fi, etc. I ended up querying 17 literary agents, all of whom specifically said they wanted LGBT content and fantasy content. Every single one of them turned the book down. Then I tried Bella Books, for which you don’t use a literary agent, and also was turned down. The truth is that mainstream publishing really doesn’t want queer female YA content right now, and the two or so books a year that come out with it feel like a miracle.

For me, I was also hurt by the fact that to date, queer women haven’t shown an interest in YA fantasy as a genre. The most popular genre is contemporary romance. So for any publisher taking on the book, it’s a risk. It could turn out that neither gays nor straights want to read it. 

 Jen - How did you connect with Ylva publishing? 

Karen - I sent my manuscript to them using the website instructions. To be honest, it was my last effort. If Ylva hadn’t taken it, I would have given up. Ylva has been wonderful to work with, and I really, really am glad they believed in the book and decided to take a chance on it.

Jen -  Moving forward what do you think will happen to queer digital publications? Do you think you will ever return to journalizing or has that ship passed?   

Karen - I think we’re seeing an atomization of queer digital publications. The revenue structure that supported blogs and websites in the mid to late 2000s is gone. There’s just not the money in it, and that hurts websites. When they can’t stay monetized, they fold, and that trend impacts not just the queer sites, but everyone. For queer content, what pops up are small, personal websites run by one or two people. The problem with sites like that is it’s hard to direct traffic to them. With so many, how do readers know to go to them? It’s not that they’re bad, but rather it’s hard for them to promote themselves.

For myself, I love writing about queer topics, particularly in the entertainment field, but frankly, my ability to return to that field isn’t contingent on me. With this atomizing, people feel like they want to run their sites themselves without outside content. What that’s meant is that I can’t get anyone to take my free articles. So while I have lots of ideas for articles, I have no place to publish them.  


Jen - This has been an interview with Karen Frost, thank you so much for being here today. Your presence elevates the podcast. Please come back soon. Be sure to follow us on twitter @whatabout_dat. 

Music Outro
 

 

The Sordid Tale of AfterEllen with former content contributor Karen Frost... And Books...

 

Do you love YA Novels? But wish for more queer-centric representation? Well, then look no further, Daughter of Fire -- Conspiracy of the Dark is the Lesbian Harry Potter you've been carving. It's a four part series which follows the story of a young woman who can conjure fire with her hands. Available at Ylva Publishing this book trailer was produced compliments of What About Dat? TV Recap and Review, be sure to look for our next podcast with author Karen Frost. 

 https://www.ylva-publishing.com/product/daughter-of-fire-conspiracy-of-the-dark-by-karen-frost/

 I am the daughter of winter. My people are strong and unbending as ice. I was born with the frozen winds sweeping through my hair, with snow dusted across my skin. I am. I am. I am…

For Aeryn, a girl born to the remote, wintry Ice Crown region of Ilirya, the outside world is a fantasy: a series of wonderful stories told by occasional passing travellers. She never imagines anything for her life beyond following in her parents’ footsteps.

But the discovery that she has the rare gift of magic shatters her isolated world. Aeryn can create and tame fire. It’s an intoxicating, raw, and thrilling power, but it also sets her apart. And her gift attracts attention.

She is whisked from her home in the wilds to train at Windhall University and master her magic. There, Aeryn slowly learns the truth about the real world, with its strange mix of people and powers, and so many intertwining threads of shadows and light. She’s drawn to unattainable Lyse, a beautiful healer in training who makes Aeryn’s heart soar. But she also senses a creeping darkness all around that could threaten the future of the kingdom itself.

A compelling, original, evocative fantasy novel for young and old. Part one of the Destiny and Darkness series.

Daughter of Fire - Conspiracy of the Dark

Join the @whatabout_dat Team as they bring you Jes Macmillan live and uncut from the #Clexacon2016 press room. Get Jes's thoughts on the future of #avalance. Love the podcast? Want to help us grow? Be sure to follow us on twitter: @whatabout_dat 

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