Of course Strand is gay. You can't have a competent, suave black male who is a lead character without him being gay because you just may have to pair him with a white chick or a Hispanic woman eventually. And the only heterosexual black characters on AMC shows that get to have interracial relationships are black chicks.
Not that I even thought AMC would kill Srand but now that he appears to be homosexual you can bet that that he will be bulletproof for quite a long while. And all of those fans and critics who were on the fence about him or indifferent will SUDDENLY become huge fans of his.
SO much of what you said I was thinking too when they revealed Strand was gay.
I don't really have a big problem with Strand being gay, he's still the same guy except he's homosexual.
THe problem I had is they presented Strand as soooo Alpha up to this point on FOTWD and the one character solely responsible for the survival of two families and driving the narrative arc, to do the 'gotcha' tonight seemed agenda driven.
Maybe it's my own latent homophobia but making Strand gay seemed to emasculate the importance of his character.
I still like the Strand character, but leaving him as a straight guy by the writers IMO was too threatening to them.
I've literally never seen a character like Strand on TV before, played by a Black male actor.
He was refined, sophisticated, financially successful and HARD.
You got the sense at some point he was going to start capping muthafuckers on HIS boat because they were fucking his shit up.
Every crisis the survivors have faced while on the water has been because they didn't follow his rules.
It's also part of the reason Strand's character was so threatening, because he seemed SMARTER than everyone else on his boat and was thinking 10 steps ahead of them.
I do agree if they'd let Strand be hetero, he would have been killed off.
Now that he's gay I'd expect him to survive the entire run of the show.
The fact is non-Black men have a hard time dramatizing these type of Black hereto characters because it plays into their insecurities and prejudices.
It would be like if Iron Man's Tony Stark was originally Black in the Marvel comic books.
Good bet we never would have seen him on the big screen.
I think it's good to have portrayals of gay men on TV that aren't stereotypical, I just feel like it was too convenient to diminish Strand's character by making him gay.
EDIT: I didn't know the actor who played Strand was actually gay.
But then again think about how many male actors in Hollywood who are gay and still are allowed to play hetero characters.
It was just a shock because here we are being presented one of the strongest characters in the Walking Dead franchise since Rick, but they decide to make the Black guy gay.
