Dana Dies

In the latest episode of The L Word, one of the most lovable characters died, the tennis player Dana Fairbanks, portrayed by Erin Daniels. True, I had never really felt strongly for Dana for that matter, although I must admit that it was an interesting character. The love story with Alice is a reflection of many parallel stories in lesbian life, sad that it ended so dramatically and without much else to hope for. Death, the great leveller, intervened early in Dana and Alice's lives, taking one away and leaving the other to grieve the loss of a lover/friend. Much has been argued against having had Dana lose her battle to breast cancer, and I understand that the show producer, Ilene Chaiken, hesitated herself, finally choosing to kill Dana as a way of raising awareness over the issue. To that I might as well say, what about those lesbians who regularly go to their gynecologists and have cancer anyway? By not giving Dana more than 5 episodes of "life", IC proved that the lethal variant can just blow you away in no time if you are young. Unless some counterpart to this is given in the show at some point of its fourth season, the precedent has been set that cancer kills. Thanks for the news! Together with lesbos going back to men (Tina), irreversibly unfaithful dykes (Shane), and lezzies on the hunt for men to get those precious drops of sperm, the show has been as stereotyped as lesbian portrayal in prime time TV series for the average guy. Now, instead of keeping suspension of disbelief as valid as when Shakespeare the troubadour wrote his most memorable works, the show has chosen to give homosexual women a lecture on how serious life is, so much so that it can kill your lovable people. My only question to this is: Didn't we know this already from life itself? Isn't life hard enough to need more TV reality crap being fed into our system when we should be simply enjoying ourselves as viewers a little more? Guys, I'm not asking for promiscuous lifestyles or anything like that, but I think that lesbian cancer is another of a long list of typical issues in lesbian life. Calling people's attention by killing off Dana was perhaps a little bit too much, whereas giving hope, or at least keeping her alive long enough to make her own farewell process, would have been a much more reasonable storyline. There is nothing to do, bad writing is bad writing, regardless of your sexual preference.