BBC’s hit Sherlock provides a fascinating model of unconventional relationships that stands out from almost everything else on the air right now, and Alyssa’s interview with Steven Moffat last week in which the relationship between Sherlock and Holmes came up was a fascinating glimpse into Moffat’s mind as a creator. I have my own issues with Moffat (oh, do I), but one thing I have to admit he’s done brilliantly with Sherlock is expose audiences to the idea of complex emotional connections between human beings that are not necessarily based on romance or sexuality. And I’m glad to know that this is a deliberately and carefully thought-out choice on his part.

A lot of asexual Sherlock fans read Sherlock as asexual, and there’s certainly ample reason to think that; he talks about being married to his work, and in the original canon as well as Moffat’s work we don’t necessarily see evidence of sexual relationships or sexual attraction. The tension that ran between him and Irene in “A Scandal in Belgravia” was not quite sexual in nature, although it was sexualised; it was an expression of emotionality between a man and a woman who are baffled and excited by each other in a way that didn’t look like sexual attraction so much as it did intellectual and emotional stimulation.
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The Family Research Council, an organization plagued by the fear that someone, sometime might be getting away with something fun, has gone after Star Wars: The Old Republic, because the game allows players to choose to have their characters be in same-sex relationships. As Tony Perkins said in his radio broadcast:

In a new Star Wars game, the biggest threat to the empire may be homosexual activists! Hello, I’m Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. In a galaxy not so far far away, Star Wars gamers have already gone to the dark side. The new video game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, has added a special feature: gay relationships. Bioware, the company that developed the game, said it’s launching a same-sex romance component to satisfy some complaints. That surprised a lot of gamers, since Bioware had made it clear in 2009 that “gay” and “lesbian” don’t exist in the Star Wars universe. Since the announcement, homosexuals have been celebrating the news, but parents sure aren’t. On the game’s website, there are more than 300 pages of comments–a lot of them expressing anger that their kids will be exposed to this Star Warped way of thinking. You can join them by logging on and speaking up. It’s time to show companies who the Force is really with!

First, to bring the geek and the sexual orientation history, saying that our same sexual orientation identity categories don’t exist a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away isn’t remotely the same thing as saying that males and females of any of the Star Wars universe species don’t form same-gender relationships. Sexual orientation is a relatively new concept, but dudes and dudes or ladies and ladies? Not so much.

But I really think things like this are useful because of the way they illustrate right-wing fears and the right wing agenda. Folks like the Family Research Council are invested in declaring that sexual orientation is a choice because then they can push back against the idea of legal protections for LGBT people. But they also would prefer for the possibility of same-sex relationships to be eradicated and made illegal on the off chance that someone actually chooses to be in one, that someone might decide that a relationship with someone of their own gender is more satisfying on every level than a heterosexual relationship. That’s the real terror here, that the vision right-wingers are offering of a mother, father, and however many kids you get if you don’t use birth control might not appeal to everyone. Trying to keep gay relationships illegal or unrecognized, in video games or in the real world, is a last-ditch effort you make when you’re afraid your own messaging isn’t working.

I’m a deeply committed Peter Dinklage fan, both because he’s a marvelous actor, and because I think his sex appeal and sense of humor and advocacy for folks of short stature offer a way forward for depictions of people in pop culture that go beyond the pathetic. So I was delighted to see The Surrogate, an affectionate sex comedy based on journalist Mark O’Brien’s article about his experience with the sex surrogate who helped him lose his virginity after a life largely spent confined to an iron lung after a childhood bout with polio. There’s a lot to like in the movie: John Hawkes, killing it in a lead role that will get him awards attention beyond his great performances in smaller projects like Deadwood; a lot of compassion and serious thinking about sex by able-bodied and disabled characters alike; William H. Macy as Mark’s friend and confessor Father Brendan. And when all of that comes in a movie that’s dedicated to seeing folks with disabilities as fully human, you’ve got a special and important movie, even if it’s one that hews to general romantic comedy conventions.

Part of what’s fresh about The Surrogate is the movie’s efforts to actually get us inside Mark’s head for the minor irritations as well as the traumas. “Scratch with your mind,” he tells himself during a long night in his iron lung. “Scratch with your mind.” When his iron lung is disabled during a blackout and he drops the stick he needs to call for help, his reaction is muted and practical, rather than panicked, even though he lands in the hospital. When he meets Susan (Deadwood coworker Robin Weigert), who is working as a volunteer in the hospital, she asks him, “Are you religious?” “Yes,” he tells her, with humor rather than bitterness. “I would find it absolutely intolerable not to be able to blame someone for all of this.” Mark’s disability has neither canonized him or crushed him.

When it comes to sex, the movie is quietly resolute on the question of whether people with disabilities can have fulfilling sexual lives or can be sexually desirable. Mark decides to see a sex therapist and then a sex surrogate when his reporting for another piece introduces him to Carmen, a woman in a wheelchair who tells him how good her sex life is (in somewhat hilarious detail). He gets a sign-off from Father Brendan, the new priest at his Catholic church, explaining “this isn’t exactly a confession. I haven’t done the deed. I’m hoping to get a quote in advance.” Once the process is underway, The Surrogate has respect for Mark’s stress, good intentions, and utter lack of experience—even in scenes where he’s experiencing premature ejaculation or behaving awkwardly with Cheryl (Helen Hunt), the surrogate he agrees to work with. Good sex, the movie argues, is a matter of practice for everyone, whether they’re able-bodied or not. When Mark’s caregiver Vera explains to the clerk at the hotel where Mark and Cheryl that the two are working on simultaneous orgasms, the clerk, who has full use of all of his limbs if somewhat attenuated social skills, has no idea what she’s talking about.

There’s no question that The Surrogate follows some predictable arcs. But it’s an illustration of the fact that those dramatic forms can still be powerful if they’re used to frame different kinds of stories about different kinds of people. And with its careful attention to what actually constitutes good lovemaking, The Surrogate is a rebuke to in-heat movie love scenes everywhere. Actually talking about sex is, it seems, still a radical act.

I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about Shame, a movie I think I admire more than I like. Other critics will and have said lots of things about Michael Fassbender’s performance, which is marvelously tormented (it struck me that one of the reasons he’s so powerful and unnerving in roles like this, or as Magneto in X-Men: First Class is that when he cries or gets angry or upset, his mouth tends to curve up in a rictus of a smile). For a man who spends much of his time pursuing an act that’s meant to be an expression of the life force, he looks frighteningly close to death. And there’s a debate to be had, I think, about whether Steve McQueen should have explored the roots of Brandon’s addiction, particularly the constantly-implied but never-specified “bad place” that Brandon and his sister Sissy come from. But I found myself struck more by things around the movie’s margins than at its center, by emotions other than the core of Brandon’s torment.

One thing I appreciated was the decision to have Brandon sleep with women of color as well as white women. There might have been something disturbing about depicting a very attractive white man using black and Asian women as disposable partners. But nobody ever exactly follows up with him — in some cases, because they’re pros, in some cases because he’s as disposable to them as they are to him. The most genuinely erotic sex scene in the movie happens between Brandon and his coworker, Marianne, an African-American woman he’s actually gone on a date with, and after an awkward beginning, seems to have made an emotional and intellectual connection with. Ultimately, he can’t bring himself to sleep with her. But I still appreciate that McQueen makes a non-white woman the most multi-dimensionally attractive person in the movie.

And while the Shame is about the fundamentally unsatisfying way Brandon sees the world, it’s also delicately about what it means to be the object of sexual desire. The opening sequence, in which he and a woman on a subway train trade increasingly intense glances, certainly communicates the ferocity of Brandon’s hunger. But it’s also a beautiful articulation of how it feels to be the object of that attention, in a way that respects ambiguity. In their initial encounter, the woman is first embarrassed, then reciprocates. His attention is both flattering and overwhelming, and there’s something honest in that lack of clarity. But when Brandon comes up behind her as she stands for her stop, chasing her through the commuter-clogged station, his behavior shifts from an implication of intimacy to frightening. There’s a difference between wanting to connect with someone and wanting to devour them.

Both Brandon’s failed relationship with Marianne and these subway encounters elevate the simple act of communication into an incomprehensible mystery. We can feel his fear. And even though Brandon is more sexually successful than his boss, a brutal caricature of a wannabe pick-up artist with a family at home, even all the practice he’s had doesn’t give him a fail-proof approach, or universally good instincts in selecting his partners. I don’t think a sequence where Brandon has a sexual encounter in a gay bar is actually as intense a symbol of his degradation as McQueen suggests it is. But it’s certainly testament to the persistent spur of his addiction, coming after he’s been beaten up by one of the boyfriends of a woman he’s trying to pick up, and before a night-ending threesome. Brandon may be more familiar with the varieties of human sexuality than a non-addict, but it remains a mysterious and unpredictable force for him.

And perhaps for us. I may have mixed feelings about the decision to leave the reason Brandon and Sissy’s boundaries are so disastrously degraded obscure. But I appreciate the decision not to pose a solution for Brandon’s addiction, or a model of functional sexual relationships. Is it a bad thing for the attractive blonde from the bar to have sex with Brandon under a bridge under any circumstances, or only unfortunate that it’s so easy for him to get his fixes? Shame doesn’t pretend to know, and doesn’t demand that we know either. Engagement is the only thing it asks for, whether of Brandon or of us.