This post, Studios Forsake LGBTQ Representation at Their Own Peril, first appeared on Pressing Issues.
Does art imitate life or does life imitate art? As someone working on media representation and justice, the answer is clear to me: It’s both.
Art and life are always in a complicated dance – at times mirroring each other’s moves, other times soloing in their own directions, and sometimes, teaching each other difficult steps. This interplay is part of why the battle over representation – who gets to make movies, decide the name of various bodies of water, even coin the terms of debates (think “forced-birth” versus “pro-life”) – matters so much.
And it’s visible in all sorts of social-justice movements, from racial equality to LGBTQ rights. The stories we tell, who tells them and on what platforms matter profoundly, shaping our shared understanding of the world around us. Culture precedes policy, as they say, so getting the laws we want might just start with getting the movies we want made.
Take, for example, groundbreaking, if imperfect, shows like Will & Grace, The L Word, and Queer as Folk – they helped lay the groundwork for marriage equality.
Now, more than 20 years later, we’re seeing our government curtail the power of art. President Trump is working to turn the media into a propaganda machine, and too many of the major conglomerates are happy to play along. Unfortunately, representations of trans people offer a clear example. Trump’s cowardly efforts to scapegoat them resulted in literally zero trans representation in all the films from the top-10 studios last year.
That’s just one of the revealing findings of GLAAD’s Where We Are in Film report. To find out more, I spoke with Raina Deerwater, the report’s lead researcher and author. With the LGBTQ advocacy and cultural-change organization since 2016, she serves as associate director of entertainment research and analysis. Her award-winning work measures LGBTQ representation, inclusivity, and diversity in television and film.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
CRISTINA ESCOBAR: What is your goal with the Where We Are in Film report?
RAINA DEERWATER: Where I grew up, in a super-small town, there was one movie theater that had four screens. There should be a film playing in those theaters that is inclusive of our community. Our community exists, it’s in the world, we’re around. We should be in movies as well. So that’s the goal – to talk about LGBTQ representation in mainstream film and point out ways it’s great and ways it’s not so great.
The report also exists as a benchmark and source of truth because a lot of times, you’ll hear anecdotally, “every time I go see a movie, there’s a gay person in it” or whatever. It’s good to have specific evidence: Here’s every film that the 10-biggest distributors in the U.S. have put out, and this is how many have LGBTQ representation in them.
CRISTINA ESCOBAR: The LGBTQ community is a favorite target of this administration. Can you share how its continued efforts to demonize your community show up in film and particularly in the numbers you are tracking?
RAINA DEERWATER: One of the numbers that wasn’t shocking, but was really disheartening, is that there were zero trans characters in any of the films. GLAAD looked at 225 films, and none of them had trans people in them – and that is the community that is most under attack right now.
There are other numbers that someone else at GLAAD is tracking – the number of local anti-trans legislative bills that have been introduced, for example. And there’s the federal push for a lot of terrible anti-trans stuff. There is this misconception that the masses agree with these policies.
Unfortunately, right now, a vocal minority has a lot of power in the government. And instead of talking about things like health care and grocery prices, they’re talking about the two trans women who, God forbid, tried to play a sport this year.
This targeted attack on the trans community has bled into film and television, especially at major studio films, which are owned by really big conglomerates that want to get their mergers approved by the government.
The major studios have fallen into this trap of not producing things that represent this government’s targets. For the last three years, there’s been a decline in LGBTQ characters of color, which maps politically onto what’s happening right now. It’s this unfortunate thing where there’s an overall decline, but the more marginalized groups are declining at an even larger rate.
CRISTINA ESCOBAR: Can you tell me how the lack of LGBTQ representation in media affects your community?
RAINA DEERWATER: As Roger Ebert said, film is an empathy machine. And for that to work, the film doesn’t need to be about a certain experience. We may get a film about someone coming out or someone transitioning, and the conflict is someone’s identity.
What we really want to see is a rom-com or a superhero movie, and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, I love Spider-Man or When Harry Met Sally. You love the characters for who they are, their actions, their quirks. What happens if one of those beloved characters also happens to be gay, also happens to be trans? Then, I’m rooting for this character, even if I don’t know a trans person. That’s humanizing. It makes people more than just a talking point on Fox News. Fiction can make something more real, and that’s such a powerful thing for movies in theaters that reach a broad audience.
CRISTINA ESCOBAR: Free Press submitted comments condemning the FCC’s idea of putting warning labels on children’s programming with trans or nonbinary characters. How does your report push back on that particular attack?
RAINA DEERWATER: It’s not an exact one-to-one because the report’s about film, and the FCC was proposing to regulate TV. The connection is with kids and family programming. In this report, we found zero inclusion in animated and family films. That’s not a coincidence.
The government is selling an untruth that Hollywood is indoctrinating our kids through media. But a queer kid is queer no matter what. And if they seek media with queer people, they can maybe see a future and a community for themselves. And for people who aren’t in the LGBTQ community, it can help them better relate to their queer son or niece or whatever.
Specifically for media aimed at younger people, there’s this incorrect notion that being LGBTQ is an adult thing. So many people have queer parents, queer classmates, queer teachers. We are not adult content. We just exist in the world, and it’s wild to paint the portrayal of people that exist as “adult” when we’re just around.
CRISTINA ESCOBAR: I hear you describing this downward loop where politics and media are feeding off each other to curtail people’s rights. How do we flip it so we get into a positive loop?
RAINA DEERWATER: That’s a big question. Going back to film specifically, independent filmmakers are seeing great success outside of the studio system because they don’t have to go through all those roadblocks. Artists are doing a lot creatively in terms of inclusion but also in terms of storytelling – telling stories we maybe haven’t heard before, including voices we maybe haven’t heard before.
Those films are killing it on the festival circuit. Those stories are what people want to see.
If you look at what happened at the Cannes Film Festival this past year, two of the biggest titles that came out were Club Kid and La Bola Negra, both of which are queer stories. One was bought by A24, one was bought by Netflix, and these are two studios we track in this study, which is exciting for me. These companies are buying these films centering LGBTQ representation because people love them.
It’s coming to a point – are we going to listen to what audiences want or the fear-mongering from the government? I have a lot of hope because Netflix not only bought La Bola Negra, but they’re also doing a one-month theatrical window, which they’ve never done before for any film. And obviously, a lot of that is to get award acclaim, but also it’s really exciting to see an epic queer love story get a big theatrical release from the biggest streamer out there.
The number of Gen Z who are actively going to the movies right now and are investing in physical media are the ones who are driving this. And they’re a generation that’s more queer than every other generation combined. So, according to Gallup – which you know, take with a grain of salt – people want to see these stories, and they are going to see these stories no matter what, whether it’s through the film system or not.
Studios can either take note and listen to their consumers or slowly become irrelevant.
