Token Lesbian

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


There's one woman (or girl) in the cast of characters who isn't like the others - she isn't interested in boys at all, but she isn't asexual, either. Since there's only one such character in the cast, she's the Token Lesbian.

This trope doesn't make any assumptions about the character's personality - she can be a Lipstick Lesbian, a Butch Lesbian, a Schoolgirl Lesbian, a Lesbian Jock, in a Transparent Closet, or she could be so well-developed as a character that it's impossible to pigeonhole her. The important part of the trope here is that she's a Token Minority, and the minority is "homosexual people".

If a show has a Fundamentally Female Cast, it's reasonable to assume one of the characters is a Token Lesbian.

Contrast with Everyone Is Gay and Hide Your Gays. Note that Token Yuri Girls is not a subtrope of this trope, because that trope discusses works with more than one lesbian character.

For the trope that used to be here about two lesbians being a couple in a work that's otherwise about gay males, see Token Lesbian Couple (which is also not a subtrope of this trope).

No real life examples, please; in addition to there being plenty of lesbian communities, tokenism is a fraught discussion at the best of times, and tends to carry offensive implications whether true or not.

Examples of Token Lesbian include:

Anime and Manga

Fan Works

Film

Literature

Live-Action TV

  • Played with on Law & Order, when Serena Southerlyn was revealed to be lesbian immediately before being Put on a Bus. The Other Wiki says that "[t]he decision to announce Southerlyn's homosexuality only as the character left the show was widely denounced both by fans and critics."
  • Newscaster Bronwyn Jones on the 1995 series Muscle outed herself as a lesbian on-air in order to avoid blackmail. This being a mid-'90s comedy series, her sexual orientation was exploited by her employers.