It'll be one of the boys, according to Patrick Ness ....

http://www.denofgeek.com/uk/tv/class...representation

Yay!!

Great news!

It's Peter Capaldi gawn mad, I tell ya!

What you did there.

I see it.

Bloody tickbox token characters. I don't see the Alpha Centaurian community being pandered to.

Fady Elsayed has been retweeting Ness's tweets about the LGBT character, so maybe it's him playing the role?

In the light of what's happened in Orlando, a gay character would be warmly received.

Praying for the 49 killed and 53 injured by a senseless homophobic attack, and pray for the freedom of many other LGBTs across the world.

Great that gay people are being represented, but why does it have to be made this big thing?

Would have been much better for the show to come on, the gay character to be there, and no-one to make a big deal about it. After all openly gay people are pretty common in our society these days.

Making a big thing about it seems to suggest that a character being gay is somehow an rare state of affairs, when of course it isn't in reality.

Don't remember a fuss about captain jack being bisexual. He was just an interesting character who happened to have those sexual preferences.

Patrick Ness agrees with you, DBB. (Just had a look at his tweeter thingy; Am daaan wiv de kidz, me. Not on tweeter myself though. Barely grasped the worldy wide web until relatively recently, tbh.) He writes (or twitters) that he's surprised it's even news and mentions the Radio Times and The Daily Housepric....sorry, Express reporting it.

As for Captain Jack, it was clearly part of RTD's 'GAY AGENDA' (TM) that cropped up rather a lot back in the day and it was commented upon at the time. The only people who made a fuss were the sort you'd expect to, really...(thinking of the media there; the sort of 'Gay actor Barrowman kisses Doctor Who shock!' lot.)

eta It's still about as the kiss in Russell's AMSND showed....and I remember one of the first things he was asked after the announcement that he was doing Who was "Are you going to make the Doctor gay?" His two word response included the word "off".

Is the character going to be L, G, B and T? Presumably we can discount the L if it's going to be one of the boys.

Sorry, I just despise that term, particularly when it's lazily misused as a synonym for "gay", or increasingly "transgender", when these words do not mean the same thing, sexual orientation and gender identity being totally different things. I personally believe the misuse of this acronym (and its various, increasingly absurd permutations), while no doubt well-intentioned, actually does more harm than good as it serves to reinforce old prejudices about what it means to be homosexual or transgender. I repeat: they are not the same. Should all non-Christian faiths in Britain be lumped together so a Muslim character in a programme is referred to as an "MSHBJ character" (meaning, naturally, that s/he's a member of the Muslim Sikh Hindu Buddhist Jewish community)?

Not getting at the OP, as the term is used in the original tweet from Patrick Ness but, really, what on earth is the term "an LGBT character" supposed to mean? It's meaningless.

By the way, I happen to be a gay man, should anyone think my sexuality is somehow relevant to my opinion here

I don't mind LGBT. I think its relevant and groups people who have a similar life experience in terms of legal recognition and prejudice. There is a similar phrase capturing race (BME) which effectively groups together people who are not white. Again, different groups of people but a shared experience of living in a predominantly white country.

You could also argue the same of the phrase 'disabled' which captures an even broader group of citizens but, again, a shared experience.

Or we could just call them 'people' without using labels...

One day, one day . . **sighs wistfully**

Totally agree. This stinks of knee jerk reaction to the Orlando tragedy or was this character originally going to be gay ?

They've been filming for months and scripts would've been written and characters sketched out a lot earlier. Obviously. "...stinks of Knee jerk..." indeed. Dear me.

This is exactly the point. They weren't going to release this information - it was simply going to be something that was revealed as the story unfolded. Patrick released the information on Twitter in response to what happened in Orlando as follows:

Been asked if Class will have LGBT representation in it. Will a lead character with a boyfriend who he kisses & sleeps with & loves do?

We were keeping that secret, but today that secret doesn't seem very important. #lovewins

Gosh, what a lovely response! I just want to try and tell stories about characters I love. That's how I start anything.

Kind of astounded that having a gay lead on Class has been such big news (EW, Radio Times, Express...). One day it won't be, one day soon.

BECAUSE IT'S NOT A BIG DEAL. One way to change the world is to act as if it's already changed. That's how I roll, that's how Class rolls...

Or Doctor Who fans...

It's a sad commentary on society that it's still even "a thing". One day characters like this will be created without so much as a raised eyebrow.

I used to question why transgender was included in this acronym because it is an issue of gender identity rather than sexual identity - and the two are very distinct. But then again, homosexuality and bisexuality are very distinct and it never meant that bisexual people didn't have to put up with being referred to as gay all the time. As a bisexual person I've had first-hand experience with that - even from my open-minded friends who consider it fair game to refer to me as 'kind of gay'.

It does seem an issue of very trivial semantics, and personally it doesn't bother or offend me heavily. But the acronym doesn't imply a collective sense of identity, it's intended to imply a collective sense of struggle and community.
It derives from a time before sexual and gender identity were seen as so distinct, and so people who were lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender endured very similar struggles. They suffered the same stigmatisation, and indeed the same misuse of their identities which were considered synonymous with eachother.

Any confidently gay person knows that when you're stigmatised by society (and this shooting in Orlando proves that even in the liberal western world of today there is still an aspect of 'us and them' in the public attitude amongst enough dangerous people to make this still relevant) for this one aspect of your identity then you own the hell out of it. You don't have pride in being gay per se, you have pride in overcoming and enduring ongoing struggle by owning your identity with your head held high. The same is true for lesbians, bisexual people and transgender people. And whilst it's an issue of semantics, they too have every right to embrace and have pride in their identity. The LGBT acronym puts them on the map. It may be outdated in some respects, sexuality is something I consider personally to be fluid (as even Doctor Who liberally suggests will be something we all come to realise - hopefully sooner than the 51st Century) and more suited to a spectrum than a bunch of labels.

Admittedly I don't think labels are inherently bad. It can feel satisfying to belong to a sense of community. As a bisexual person I have no shame in identifying as 'LGBT' because any one of those things is fine by me, and I know that the people who identify as any of those things has endured the same kind of marginalisation, or stigma. It's that struggle that binds the four, and creates a sense of community. And without it, bisexual people just get lumped in with the 'gay' description, and transgender people face more erasure still. In its own way, whilst it panders to the idea of labels and puts an emphasis on them, it also helps to break down the rigid 'gay or straight' ideology. It takes us a step closer to realising that 'sexuality is a spectrum'. More recently it's being understood and accepted that 'gender identity is a spectrum' too in its own respect.

Some people have tried repeatedly to expand upon LGBT...there's LGBTQ, there's LGBTQI, LGBTQIA and several more than try to add yet further labels. They never take off and personally I think that's actually progress. Because it hits a point where you realise there's too many different labels and boxes, and too much pigeonholing and suddenly this concept of categorisation just doesn't work anymore. The reason these extensions don't take off isn't because people refuse to accept there's more than the current options, it's because they realise it's a spectrum rather than something to be an endless list of options to choose from.
We want to work towards people just being able to be themselves, love who they want and be who they want, without having to tick boxes but also being entitled to a word that befits their identity? Then LGBT is the decent starting point - covering bases of sexuality and gender identity without going overboard. Showcasing that there's more than just gay or straight options, and insisting that it's not such a black and white picture. It's enabled minorities other than gay and lesbian people to recognise their own identity and that's personally something I am very grateful for - even if once again it is only an issue of trivial semantics.

I think the thing is that sexuality and gender, while not quite the same, are intrinsically linked in the sense of sexual identity.

And they equally face oppression from those that think that biological gender and sexual identity should be one thing - born as man, identify as man, mate with woman. L, G, B and T all deal with variations in that template to some degree.

Depends really. If the character is well written and well rounded, changing their sexuality to gay won't make a difference. If they're a stereotype written in for box ticking, they suck anyway.

Changing their sexuality? Who said that being straight was the default?

Characters are well written and well rounded and gay.

It will be great to have an LGBT character but I fear that may become the only defining thing that makes up that character like the way so many LGBT Characters are written these days. I want there to be actual personality and development. On a lot of shows these days they feel the need to shove into the audiences faces that "Oh hes gay" over and over again with no substance.

Calm down Tumblr. If a character wasn't specifically designed to be gay, chances are they are straight.

What I meant was if a character was written as "gay" before the rest of their personality was defined, it will probably be their only defining aspect, as Brandon_Smith said.