August 11, 2012
I doubt this post will win me many friends in the glee fandom… lol, not like I have many anyway.
So. Before I get into this, I wanna say that I love burt as a character on glee. I enjoy the way he has been written and I enjoy even more what he represents in terms of representation for queer kids on tv. I think he is one of the first, if not only, tv dads to be totally and utterly cool with having a gay kid. This is really a meaningful and valuable contribution from the media, especially as a counter-example to the usual story the media likes to paint of queer as a misery inducing cautionary tale sort of thing. This is good.
What I don’t like is burt in fandom and how he is revered in fandom. You see it in much of the fanfic written that includes him. He is like the mary sue of dads or some shit. He is treated like a damn hero or whatever the fuck just for being a minimally decent human being and father.
In many ways, it is a sad commentary for how queer kid to parent relationships are both normally portrayed and how they occur in real life that he seems so damn remarkable and worthy of worship.
Except…
He really is just a minimally decent human being and dad. The way he responds and relates to kurt is exactly how parents should be: supportive and loving. Like… we all get that, right? We all get that someone being minimally decent shouldn’t be understood as this massively heroic thing.
Like…
It should be minimally expected that my parents are not abusive, do support me, and love me. Now, I (unfortunately) didn’t get minimally decent parents. Instead I had shitty, abusive and neglectful parents who never really loved me (something that is mostly unrelated to the fact that I’m bakla).
It is sad and depressing that so many people think that burt is this super awesome hero dad just because he loves his kid and supports him. This is sad and incredibly telling for just how low our standards for what an exceptional parent is have become. A standard so low that a parent behaving as he should gets all this love and adulation for being decent.
(In many ways… I’m reminded of the whole wemma debacle where so much of abuse culture has filtred into our understanding of how romantic relationships work that all the red flags aren’t noticed or really much discussed. Just like so much of abuse culture has warped our understanding of the parent/child relationship that we see a decent parent and think he is the second coming of jesus.)
All this leads to a situation where this dude can write some absurd letter to a hypothetical child and expect to be praised up and down^[1]. That somehow this is news. That we should read this and go, “what a wonderful man for behaving in the ways that he should!!!”
No. You don’t get praise for being a minimally decent human being. And we should raise our standards for what counts as an exceptional parent and/or human being. We all deserve better and more.

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