Homosexuality in the media part two

In which Hanna devotes an ENTIRE BLOG POST to the worship of Joss Whedon.  (I can't help myself.  Anyway, why the heck not?)

So I just kind of wanted to get some different opinions on this because, due to the fact that I worship Joss Whedon, I feel my point of view might be... biased.  If you don't know who Joss Whedon is, he's the guy who made Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel (a spin-off of Buffy), Firefly, Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog, and most recently Dollhouse.  The reason I'm blogging about him is that in every single one of those shows (except Dr. Horrible, because it was a 3 episode webseries about 45 minutes long total) there is at least one episode with GLBT themes or a homosexual character.  To be specific, it's generally lesbians.

This didn't really emerge fully until season 4 of Buffy.  When the boyfriend of one of the main characters (Willow) leaves Sunnydale, a few episodes later, she meets her new love interest, Tara.  As the name might imply, Tara's a girl.  It takes them about a year to kiss onscreen, but they have a clearly loving, compassionate relationship, and in the musical episode, Tara sings a love song to Willow that is absolutely loaded with sexual subtext.  Their relationship is treated just as seriously as any of the heterosexual relationships on the show, and Willow's prominence as a character does not decrease at all as a result of her getting a girlfriend.  That would be all well and good, except that Tara dies tragically at the end of the sixth season (at the hands of a misogynist serial killer.  Make of that what you will.)  Which would still all be pretty well and good (Buffy characters love interests have been dying and/or leaving them since season one) if it weren't for Kennedy.  Introduced as a potential slayer in season 7, Kennedy is a brash, bossy, often obnoxious lesbian who makes a point of showing off just how lesbian she is (sometimes to humorous effect... e.g, another potential slayer, holding a stake, says that she loves the feeling of wood in her hand, to which Kennedy responds "Lost me there.")  About halfway through the season, Kennedy and Willow start dating.  Willow is sweet, shy, bookish, and not entirely over Tara's death yet.  Kennedy does not seem in the least like her type.  So why?  It sort of seems like she just jumped on the first lesbian that came around.  (Also interesting when talking about Willow is her relationship with her boyfriend Oz, the one who leaves.  Though they're made out to be quite in love with each other previous to his departure, once she starts dating Tara, she pretty much becomes and out-and-out lesbian... no chance that she'd date a boy in the future.  Does this paint homosexuality as a choice?)

Excluding Angel (I remember there being an episode with GLBT themes but I can't remember which so I'm just gonna skip it) we have the lesbian encounters in Firefly and Dollhouse, both of which follow a similar theme, because from a certain viewpoint, both cases are a form of glorified prostitution.  In Firefly, this takes place between the Companion Inara, a main character on the show, and a female client.  Companions in Firefly are sort of a cross between prostitutes and geishas, very high-class, very expensive courtesans whose services extend beyond sex, who choose their clients very carefully, and who give careful attention to the emotional and spiritual components of sex as well as the actual sexual component.  Though only female Companions are seen in-show, it's likely that there are male ones as well according to many fans, and apparently, the gender of the clients doesn't matter either, judging by the episode War Stories in which the 'councilor' Inara is meeting with turns out to be a woman.  Note that Inara herself is implied to be completely straight, up to and including being the love interest of the show's main character Captain Malcom Reynolds.  In Dollhouse, the situation has a similar tenor.  The entire premise of the show is of an underground business in Los Angeles that rents out "Actives," people whose real personalities and memories have been wiped out and replaced with literally whatever the client wants.  Echo, the show's main character and an Active, is hired out at various times to be a spy, a break-in artist, a bodyguard/singer, a negotiator, an investigator, a hit man, a therapist, a mother, and most often, a romantic partner, in any form the client desires (ranging from dominatrix to schoolgirl.)  And like Companions, there's more to the interaction than just sex, because Actives can be "imprinted" to be anything and anyone you want, and when there is romance involved, they will truly feel they're in love.  It is implied frequently in Dollhouse that it is far from unusual to have a female client hire a female active for a romantic engagement, or have a male client hire a male active for a romantic engagement (Echo even married a female client on an engagement once, according to the episode "A Love Supreme").  Still, however, when the Actives have their real personalities restored to them, all three of the central character Actives are straight.  Dollhouse also has one minor character, Mag, who is not and never has been an Active and is implied to be lesbian, but she only appears in the two season finales.

The reason I find all of this interesting is that the GLBT themes in Joss Whedon's work are all filled with "Yes, but"s.  GLBT encounters in Dollhouse and Firefly are forms of prostitution in which at least one participant is straight, and in Buffy, though one of the three most central characters is a lesbian, she only becomes one halfway through the series, and in seventh season doesn't seem to care what her partner is like so long as she's a girl.  Personally, I'm inclined to think that Whedon's work sends an overall positive message about GLBT issues, but I am forced to admit there's a mixed quality to it.  What do you think?  Are these messages a good thing overall, a bad thing overall, or somewhere in between?