Netflix’s July 2013 release of Jenji Kohan’s Orange Is the New Black is representative of the innovations in content made possible by independent distribution. There is little public information about why Showtime, home to Kohan’s Weeds, passed on Orange, but Kohan has discussed enthusiasm for the freedom working with Netflix gave her:

“the greatest thing about going to Netflix was that I pitched it in the room, and they ordered 13 episodes without a pilot. … That is every showrunner’s dream, to just ‘go to series’ and have that faith put in your work. … They were new, they were streamlined, they were lovely, they were enthusiastic about it. And I love being on the new frontier.”

One of the freedoms Kohan has enjoyed is writing a complex story about women for a diverse female ensemble cast. The complexity of Orange’s three-dimensional characters has been both praised for “exhibit[ing] the sort of real talk about race, gender, and identity usually limited to college seminars” and critiqued for repeating familiar stereotypes of race and class. Although many critics agree that the series is “a showcase for a large group of black and Latino actresses who for the most part have not had regular roles in series before this,” it is Orange’s representations of gender and sexuality diversity that have brought it nearly unanimous praise. The New Yorker, for instance, proclaimed, “There are more lesbians here—butch and femme and of every ethnicity—than in any other series on television.” The show also blurs the lines between lesbian and straight with characters like Piper Chapman, who finds herself caught between her former lover (a woman) and her fiancé (a man), and Lorna Morello, a “temporary lesbian” who has sex with Nicky Nichols until she feels it is a violation of her commitment to her male fiancé. But by far, the most interesting, compelling, and groundbreaking character on Orange is the prison’s hairdresser, Sophia Burset, who, in addition to being an inmate, is African American and transgender.

Laverne Cox, also a transgender woman, plays Sophia, and her presence in Orange marks the first time in history that an African American trans woman has held a substantive role on television. And unlike the two-dimensional and stereotypical transgender characters who came before Sophia—like Dirty Sexy Money’s Carmelita Rainer, a mistress whose life ends tragically, and Nip/Tuck’s Ava Moore, a sexual predator who transitioned to woo a love interest—Sophia’s character is a thoughtful portrayal of transition and transgender identity. Laverne Cox told Time, “There’s a lot of the same trans stories being repeated over and over again. Orange breaks that in a lot of wonderful ways.”

Though she does not have an abundance of screen time in each episode, we learn a lot about Sophia’s life in season one, much of it in an episode-long showcase on her history, her transition (Cox’s real-life twin brother plays Sophia pre-transition), and the credit card fraud that landed her in prison. We also meet her wife and son, which allows the show to explore the complexities of transitioning in midlife. But Sophia’s most compelling storyline involves her struggle to receive her hormone pills in prison after a budget cut takes them away (they are eventually restored). Through it all, Orange portrays Sophia as a transgender woman who made some bad choices, but who refuses to be a victim or a stereotype—she is a loving spouse, parent, friend, confidant, and hairdresser extraordinaire.

With its multifaceted portrayals of women, gender, and sexuality, it is easy to see why Orange is being hailed as Netflix’s best program—even better than Emmy-nominated House of Cards. And when you look at the new fall offerings from the broadcast and cable networks, Orange looks downright avant-garde. In many ways it is disappointing that Orange seems so extraordinary in 2013, but as Bitch Flicks argues, “It is still revolutionary and fresh merely for there to be a show mostly about women, much less one like OitNB that does its best to reflect womanhood as anything but monolithic and directly addresses race, class and sexuality.” While it is not possible to know the number of viewers who have viewed Orange, the buzz the show has generated says something about our culture’s readiness for complex, sexually diverse female characters. Hopefully its success will convince television producers and networks to be ready, too.

Tina Belcher, holding up the self-authored tome Erotic Friend Fiction: Buttloose

Bob’s Burgers begins its third season in September. While its viewership is competitive with the other programs on FOX’s Animation Domination Sunday night line-up, Bob’s Burgers has the trappings of a cult hit. The program was created by Loren Bouchard of Home Movies. He developed the project with Jim Dauterive, who made a name for himself as a writer and executive producer on King of the Hill. Both shows’ investment in character detail, deadpan comedy, and flights of surrealism is evident in Bob’s Burgers. It also features the formidable talent of contemporary improv and alt-comedians. The main cast includes H. Jon Benjamin, Eugene Mirman, and Kristen Schaal. Sarah Silverman, Megan Mullally, and Mr. Show alum Jay Johnston voice recurring characters. Amy Sedaris, Paul F. Tompkins, Aziz Ansari, and Patton Oswalt made guest appearances. Yet Bob Belcher’s thirteen-year-old daughter Tina is arguably the program’s breakout character and has the potential to be one of American broadcast television’s most subversive girl characters.

At first, Tina seems like yet another socially inept teenage nerd, a late bloomer in the mold of Freaks and Geeks‘ Bill Haverchuck and King‘s Bobby Hill. Yet what I find refreshing about those two characters is what they share with Tina, who holds her weirdness with dignified self-possession. Nowhere is this more evident than in her sexuality. For many pubescent girl characters on American television–King‘s Connie Souphanousinphone, The Cosby Show‘s Rudy Huxtable–menstruation defines female sexuality. Tina met this milestone with little comment before the series began. Some characters explore their sexuality in other ways. For example, Mad Men‘s Sally Draper masturbated at a slumber party (her friend Glen Bishop has articulated his desire in other ways). Older girls test the choppy waters of romance and sex, usually with their male counterparts. Often, these journeys of self-discovery are the focus of an episode or a character arc. But Tina’s active, idiosyncratic fantasy life–filled with zombies, mating insects, her dentist, Garfield and 60 Minutes fan-fic, most of her class, and especially the son of her father’s business rival–is a running joke on Bob’s Burgers. Refreshingly, her family doesn’t panic or ignore her desires. They acknowledge them and sometimes voice their discomfort, but never make her feel ashamed. Thus, the joke comes from the novelty of Tina’s matter-of-fact delivery, not her family’s response. Unfortunately, a girl who confidently articulates her desires is still novel for American television.

It’s worth considering if the show gets away with giving voice to Tina’s hormonal impulses by using Daniel Mintz’s monotone to articulate them. In the original pilot, Tina’s character was a boy with the same name as the actor portraying him. Apart from sex and gender differences, they were basically the same awkward, withdrawn, frank character. Such voice casting is more common for women playing pubescent male characters whose voices haven’t dropped, a conceit whose queer potential King exploited to the hilt by having Pamela Adlon breathe life into Bobby, a kid whose flamboyant, effeminate tendencies bemuse and terrify his good ol’ boy father.

Tina’s ability to challenge normative girlhood cannot be championed without an interrogation of white privilege. Although Tina seems to be an equal-opportunity fetishist, her fixation on a Brazilian capoeira instructor, a Cuban minor league baseball player, and the family’s Asian American dentist suggests a potentially problematic longing for the Other. Furthermore, Tina’s dialogue could be considered in conversation with Lena Dunham’s Girls, an HBO dramedy heralded for its artless depictions of human sexuality that fails to consider the desires and needs of women of color. Who gets to be candid?

While Tina is a fan, she is also the product of fan-fic culture. A quick Google search opens up a hellmouth of Tina-inspired pornography. In my research (which I won’t share here), I noticed particular focus on her bare, post-training-bra chest. She is also rendered in a number of graphic scenarios and positions that makes any reminder of her age and lack of evident consent all the more troubling. Tamer examples demonstrate fans’ quickness to sexualize Tina by making her older and more stylish by shaping her bob, shortening her skirts, and lengthening her knee-high socks. This mirrors similar fan and Hollywood makeovers for nerdy girls like Ghost World‘s Enid Coleslaw and Scooby Doo‘s Velma Dinkley and potentially minimizes the actors’ radical potential.

I don’t want to suggest that Tina is subversive because she’s not conventionally pretty. However, having Tina fit into an animated storyworld where no one is particularly attractive takes emphasis away from her appearance is important. Tina is thirteen, an age when most girls are accustomed to critique and objectification and diminish themselves in the process. That the Belcher family loves Tina without fretting too much about her looks or proclivities is a decent attempt at raising a healthy, self-actualized human being. The Simpsons couldn’t accomplish this without entering Lisa in beauty pageants and getting Marge in Playboy. The ways in which Family Guy confirms Meg Griffin’s dowdiness for an easy laugh is cruel and dispiriting. Through Tina, Bob’s Burgers demonstrates animation’s ability to destabilize and redefine girl characters’ relationship to their bodies and desires. However, animation is also vulnerable to fanboy exploitation, initiating a process of negotiation that must always keep girl characters from being more than the whim of someone else’s fantasies.

Darren Criss, America's Boyfriend

This is the last of a 3-part series of articles on these male voices in Glee.

“Your eyes are like stars right now…Mind if I move in closer?” sings dreamy crooner Blaine Anderson (Darren Criss) to our countertenor hero, Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer), as they perform the classic Hollywood duet, “Baby, it’s Cold Outside.” This is only one of the many charming and provocative romantic overtures Blaine makes, in song, to Kurt as well as to other young men during the course of Glee’s second season, and it is only one of the many performances by Blaine, both with Kurt and with his a cappella group The Warblers, that queers the performance of a traditionally gendered song.

With Blaine’s character, Glee both honors and re-imagines the crooner for the new millineum. As I discussed in Part 1, the crooner has long been a liminal figure in American culture, operating both in the commercial mainstream and on the fringes of gender normativity, and has been culturally stigmatized for both reasons. But Dalton Academy is Glee’s version of Oz, where normative American gender expectations and roles have been suspended and gender hierarchies largely reversed. The allure of the prep/college boy culture has always been, in part, about prolonging male adolescence by delaying the assumption of normative male roles. Indeed, the first crooning idols originally emerged from college culture in the 1920s, and it is a world in which the crooner thrives.

Glee celebrates the crooner for the very qualities that masculinist America does not: his alignment with the cultural feminine through his preference for romantic songs and commercial pop, his status as an erotic object for male and female audiences, his beauty and sensitivity, his emotional openness and transparency. And Glee’s producers have cast an actor as Blaine, Darren Criss, whose star persona emphasizes and extends these same qualities to a remarkable degree. Like Kurt/Colfer, Blaine/Criss offers a new model of American male performer, one that goes beyond being gay-and-girl “friendly” to truly embracing a gender-queer performance style and persona. Blaine/Criss retains the sincerity of the crooner even as he performs beyond the boundaries of a fixed or normative gender identity.

As an all-male a cappella group, the Warblers sing de facto love songs to each other, a violation of gender norms that has generally made such groups accessible only to the cultural elite (they are dubbed by Tuft University’s Beelzebubs). But Glee takes its transgressions much further. Because Blaine is the lead singer, an out gay character, and seen primarily through Kurt’s desiring eyes, all of his performances have a homoerotic charge. Moreover, Blaine specializes in songs by female singers without changing the lyrics, thus often positioning himself in the feminine role, whether that be as the erotic object (the one who will “let you put your hands on me in my skin tight jeans”) of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream,” or the annoyed girlfriend of Destiny’s Child’s “Bills, Bills, Bills.” When Blaine does play the seducer (he’s versatile), he serenades other boys as girls, for instance, when he continually addresses a male Gap store attendant as “baby girl” while wooing him with the Robin Thicke song “When I Get You Alone.”

It is Blaine’s musical performances with Kurt, however, that give emotional and narrative weight to the Warblers’ gender-play. When Kurt transfers back to McKinley, Blaine and the Warblers come to sing “Somewhere Only We Know” to him, evoking the “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” period of Kurt’s stay at Dalton, but assuring audiences that, unlike Dorothy, Kurt will retain both the maturity Dalton gave him and a dreamy prince:

This particular performance sparked euphoria among fans as soon as the single and the scene were released on Youtube, which happened a few days prior to the episode’s premiere. The verbal and physical reactions to crooning haven’t changed that much in 80 years; fans repeatedly cry when listening to the song, compliment Darren Criss on the beauty of his voice, claim to be falling in love as well as erotically aroused by him (“Can this song make me pregnant?”), and indicate “repeated abuse” of the replay button to prolong their ecstatic state. What is less common here is the context for such intense emotion: the fact that Blaine is singing this song to Kurt makes the song more rather than less meaningful for fans, who largely identify with Kurt and love Blaine as the boyfriend Kurt “deserves.” Cross-gender identification is common practice for television fans, who often create “slashed” homoerotic fiction surrounding a relationship that is not homoerotic in the text. In this case, however, the intensity of fan euphoria is tied to the text slashing itself, further naturalizing gay relationships by revising the rules of the musical genre. As the warm, pure-hearted crooner, Blaine becomes the perfect counterpart and love object for the more ambitious, complex Kurt and for fans.

Part of the reason Blaine is so beloved is because of the young man who plays him. Darren Criss himself occupies queer cultural space in that he identifies as straight but plays gay, champions the mass culture associated most with women and children (like Disney songs), and is more than happy to be an erotic object for both sexes (see, for example, his spread in Out magazine). Perhaps most unusual of all, Criss writes and performs songs from a female point of view even outside of the Blaine character. Criss composed the song “The Coolest Girl,” for the character of Hermione in a musical adaptation of Harry Potter. In concert, he often performs the song, asking the largely female audience to join in, since “I am not a girl, although I try to be sometimes”:

Just as Colfer provides a model for queer kids who have not yet been represented, so Criss provides an equally significant alternative model for queer straightness. Both performers, through Glee and beyond it, give voice to radically fluid adolescent masculinities that do indeed offer their audiences new ways to dream.

This is the first in a series of articles on these male voices in Glee.

Part 1: The Trouble with Male Pop Singing

What immediately struck me about this still of Glee’s Chris Colfer (as Kurt Hummel) and Darren Criss (as Blaine Anderson) from Entertainment Weekly’s January 28, 2011 cover story is that this image might easily have been taken in the mid-to-late 1920s,  but it would have been unlikely to appear in the mainstream press since that time. Attractive young men in collegiate attire, sporting ukuleles or megaphones, singing to each other and to their adoring publics in high-pitched voices was a mainstay of 1920s American popular culture, then vanished during the Depression. Even the easy homoeroticism of a boy positioned between another boy’s legs dates back to popular images of the 1920s. In the early 1930s, a combination of greater media nationalization and censorship, increasing homophobia, and panic regarding the emasculating effects of male unemployment formed the context for the first national public attack on male popular singers as effeminate and as cultural degenerates. As a result, new, restrictive gender conventions became entrenched regarding male vocalizing, and the feminine stigma has remained. Until now, that is. The popularity of Glee, and, in particular, these two singers, has made me think that American culture may finally be starting to break with the gender norms of male singing performance that have persisted for the last 80 years. Since much of my research has focused on the establishment of these gendered conventions, I would like to offer some historical context and share some of the reasons why I find Glee’s representation of male popular singing so potentially groundbreaking.

Male singing has not always been so inextricably tangled up with assumptions about the gender/sexuality of the performer. Before the reactionary gender policing of popular singing, men who sang in falsetto or “double” voice were greatly prized. Song styles such as blues, torch, and crooning were sung by both sexes and all races; lyrics were generally not changed to conform to the sex of the singer or to reinforce heterosexual norms, so that men often sang to men and women to women. Crooners became huge stars for their emotional intensity, intimate microphone delivery, and devotion to romantic love. While they sang primarily to women, they had legions of male fans as well, and both sexes wept listening to their songs.

When a range of cultural authorities condemned crooners, the media industries developed new standards of male vocal performance to quell the controversy. Any gender ambiguity in vocalizing was erased; the popular male countertenor/falsetto voice virtually disappeared, song styles were gender-coded (crooning coded male), female altos were hired to replace the many popular tenors, and all song lyrics were appropriately gendered in performance, so that men sang to and about women, and vice-versa. Bing Crosby epitomized the new standard for males: lower-pitched singing, a lack of emotional vulnerability, and a patriarchal star image. Since then, although young male singers have always remained popular and profitable, their cultural clout has been consistently undermined by masculinist evaluative standards in which the singers themselves have been regularly ridiculed as immature and inauthentic, and their fans dismissed as moronic young females.

From its beginnings, however, Glee has actively worked to challenge this conception. The show’s recognition and critique of dominant cultural constructions of performance and identity has always been one of the its great strengths. Glee has continually acknowledged the emasculating stigma of male singing (the jocks regularly assert that “singing is gay”) while providing a compelling counter-narrative that promotes pop singing as liberating and empowering for both men and society at large. Glee‘s audience has in many ways been understood to be reflective of the socially marginalized types represented on the show, and one of the recurring narrative struggles is determining who gets to speak or, rather, sing. Singing on Glee is thus frequently linked to acts of self-determination in the face of social oppression, a connection that has been most explicitly and forcefully made through gay teen Kurt’s storyline this past season, which has challenged societal homophobia both narratively and musically. In the narrative, Kurt transfers to Dalton Academy to escape bullying and joins the Warblers, an all-male a cappella group fronted by gay crooner Blaine. Musically, Glee also takes a big leap, shifting from exposing the homophobic, misogynist stigma surrounding male singing to actively shattering it and singing on its grave.

From the very first moment Kurt is introduced to Blaine and the Warblers, as they perform a cover of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” to a group of equally enthusiastic young men, we know we’re not in Kansas anymore. The song choice is appropriate in that it posits future-boyfriend Blaine as both a romantic and erotic dream object for Kurt, and it presents Dalton as a fantasy space in which the feminine associations of male singing are both desired and regularly celebrated. “Teenage Dream” was the first Glee single to debut at #1 on iTunes, immediately making Criss a star and indicating that a good portion of the American public was eager to embrace the change in vocal politics.

And “Teenage Dream” was only the beginning. This fantasy moment has become a recurring, naturalized fixture of the series. Just as Kurt turned his fantasy of boyfriend Blaine into a reality, so did Glee effectively realize its own redesign of male singing through a multitude of scenes that I never thought I would see on American network television: young men un-ironically singing pop songs to other young men, both gay and straight; teen boys falling in love with other boys as they sing to them; males singing popular songs without changing the lyrics from “him” to “her” to accommodate gender norms; and the restoration and celebration of the countertenor (male alto) sound and singer in American popular culture (I will address Chris Colfer’s celebrated countertenor voice in the next installment of this series). And instead of becoming subjects of cultural ridicule, Colfer’s rapturous countertenor and Criss’s velvety crooner have become Glee’s most popular couple, its stars largely celebrated as role models of a new order of male performer. It’s about time.

When The Good Wife was announced last fall my first reaction was interest, as Julianna Margulies and Christine Baranski are both awesome, but that reaction quickly turned to apprehension. Infidelity is the one topic I really avoid in entertainment if I can help it, and I had no interest in seeing this play out. However, the power of word-of-mouth swayed me when a number of my friends–friends who tend to not have much of a fannish love intersection–raved about the show. I gave it a try, and I got hooked. Watching a season in the course of just a few days is always a heady experience, and one that differs from following a series as it airs, week by week. The compressed viewing can highlight weaknesses, but it can also allow longer story lines to gain impact for the viewer, benefitting from the accelerated narration.

Yet neither the larger story lines, such as the myth-arc of corrupt politicians and unjustly imprisoned husbands, nor the smaller, episodic court case narratives were what kept me watching. Rather, I found that the depth of the characters and their interactions had me riveted and wanting to see more. Bechdel test aside, it is nice to see three main female characters interact about everything other than their relationships to or with men. It is even nicer to see these women struggle and yet remain sympathetic and strong. I’m looking at Alicia Florrick and I feel myself identifying more than I have with many other characters who more closely resemble me and my life. It is the program’s demonstrated ability to show depth without needless melodrama and stereotyped caricature that I’ve fallen in love with.

By genre classification, The Good Wife is, disputably, a procedural. And what’s more, it isn’t even innovative as such. The audience is usually presented with one case per episode, and the good side tends to win: defendants are innocent and are vindicated in the nick of time. I’m not sure we have a more precise category for such procedurals cum drama (which seem to cluster in medical and legal settings), but it is the characterization in these shows as well as those in more traditional prime time soaps that I measure Alicia’s portrayal against. I don’t identify (or even much like) most of the characters on Grey’s Anatomy or Parenthood to use two shows I still watch as examples. The drama tends to be extreme, not in the actual issues–because clearly the imprisoned husband and large political scheming are dramatic indeed–but in the responses to those issues. The appeal for me is that the show succeeds in presenting mature adults with adult capabilities beyond their profession, and yet the women are not dominated by any single issue in their lives–neither motherhood nor work nor their sexuality.

The balance of work drama and home issues presents Alicia in different roles that do not defer to one another (mother, lover, wife, professional) but rather mutually influence and affect. This feels like my life: constant negotiation, juggling of different roles and responsibilities, the small concessions and compromises that are part and parcel of most adult lives. In my favorite line of the show, former boss Stern tells Alicia “I always thought the CIA could take lessons from the suburban housewife,” calling out the similar emotional demands of Alicia’s different roles. The show doesn’t shy away from the challenges Alicia faces in negotiating her adult life; this is more than I tend to expect to see on television, where story lines often trade in emotionally false dichotomies. “Issues got more complex. And I grew up,” Alicia explains to her brother; this is the moment where I feel that I am seeing a real person on the TV screen. People may up and run to Africa and break up relationships in airports (example), but most of us go to work and pick kids up from school and have fights and make up and continue on with our lives.

In Alicia, we are presented a woman who’s recovering from an immense emotional trauma and upheaval in her life, but whose response isn’t extreme. She isn’t divorcing her cheating jail-bound husband, but she refuses his demands in a way that make it clear he’s not used to refusal. In the subtle details we see her change and grow, rather than in big melodramatic gestures, and this is why I love the show. At one point, her husband and potential lover discuss a court case while Alicia prepares coffee for everyone in the kitchen. When she moves to present some cakes along with the coffee, she suddenly throws them back in the box, clearly redefining her role. Emotions may not be writ large in this drama, but the message comes through loud and clear nevertheless: this Good Wife is not simply a suburban mom who was publicly shamed by her husband’s infidelities. She is a host of other things at the same time, as are we all. Adult issues are complex indeed!

In GLAAD’s recent report they mention that the total number of LGBT characters on television actually decreased this year. In part this was a result of the cancellation of the L-Word, the majority of whose character’s were LGBT. However, I believe that this year we actually saw an increase in the visibility of LGBT characters on TV. Because, some new shows have LGBT characters and other have recently added them,  a relatively large number of prime-time network television programs, both dramas and comedies, have gay and lesbian characters. Nearly every network has at least one clearly gay or lesbian central character on one of their shows. On Sunday you can see LGBT characters on Desperate Housweives and Brothers and Sisters on ABC, Monday there is House on Fox, Tuesday has Modern Family on ABC, Wednesday there is Glee on Fox, Thursday Grey’s Anatomy on ABC. Friday ABC has Ugly Betty, and Saturday there is Mercy on NBC. (This is not an exhaustive list) CBS alone seems to have ignored the trend. These representations are not all perfect, far from it, but looking back only a short decade ago when Will and Grace was considered unusual, being able to find an LGBT character on network TV every night is a pretty amazing thing.

Network prime-time has not until recently been the location of most LGBT visibility on television. In the past networks confined  LGBT characters to daytime soaps. HBO and Showtime have longed featured LGBT characters on their shows and have provided many of the characters that made up the numbers that  were counted in  drama and comedies on television. LOGO on cable has certainly also punched up these numbers. But these shows weren’t on network prime-time televison. I was a fan of Showtime’s LGBT heavy shows, Queer As Folk and The L-Word, but if you were uninterested or even hostile to LGBT issues you would be unlikely to tune in. In contrast, you may not be interested in LGBT issues but if you are a long term fan of Grey’s Anatomy  you would likely continue watching the show now that a lesbian relationship is among the major story lines. Many of the shows with LGBT characters and themes in the late 90s and early 2000s took place in primarily LGBT worlds and contexts, interaction with the “straight” world often took the form of narratives of conflict. Integrated shows, like those we now have on network prime-time television, play a different role. They may show conflict, but they also show cooperation. LGBT characters are part of workplace communities, families, and friendship groups with both LGBT and straight members. This integration lets these show tell different stories and let them tell more familiar stories differently. Callie can be horrified and hurt at her father’s hostility to her homosexuality and Arizona can advocate patience on Grey’s Anatomy in part because they are addressing a more integrated (and possibly ambivalent) audience and because they have a more integrated cast of characters; filled with many heterosexual characters who are supportive of their relationship. I certainly don’t suggest that these kinds of shows should replace programs that represent LGBT communities and worlds more extensively, as the programming on LOGO and the Showtime do. But I think the long-term goal for LGBT representation on television should include both kinds of show. Representations are still too problematic and too few, they are not, and most likely never will, be perfect. But as Kath Weston has observed in her work a group cannot fully be accepted until they are seen as “fully social persons” who are part of families and communities. Integrated shows may be a step towards this. Paired with increased visibility I would like to hope that this season does not represent a loss at all but a different kind of gain. Am I just a wide eyed optimist? What do others think?