LGBTQ characters under- represented in television and film

Perhaps the best question to ask on the topic of LGBTQ people in the media is, "Where are they?"

LGBTQ people make up a very small percentage of the characters on our TV sets. On primetime TV this season, a mere 18 out of 600 characters are gay or bisexual. Mainstream cable has even lower numbers, and the trend is continuing downwards: only 25 characters are gay or bisexual this year, compared to 32 in 2008 and 40 in 2007.

Statistics are even grimmer for lesbian characters and grimmer still for transgender characters. While 66 percent of LGBTQ characters are male, only 32 percent are female, and only one character is transgender.

Any    increase    in    LGBTQ representation from years past is nonetheless a welcome change, but is this enough? Incorporating more gay, bisexual, and transgender people into the media makes TV and film "more reflective of current issues affecting our lives," said Jarrett Barrios, president of The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). For better or for worse, the fantasy world of the media is often mistaken for reality, so doesn't any increase in LGBTQ characters show a positive trend towards a more accurate representation of the modern world?

The cliché of "quality, not quantity" can be applied here. The issue is not simply the number of gay or transgender people represented in the media, but how they are represented. The number of LGBTQ characters in TV and film may be increasing (slightly) overall, but what kind of attention are they getting?

Film, perhaps more so than television, has historically been brutal in its treatment of LGBTQ individuals. Cinema contained virtually no gay characters before the 1960s, though any characters too "effeminate" or "different" were often seen as laughable and subject to ridicule. Limitations imposed on film from the 1930s to 1950s were so strict that overt homosexuality was completely forbidden in movies, and could only be subtly suggested through an actor's performance. As Hitchcock film scholar Robin Wood asserted, a film from the 1940s cannot not tell us that the two main male characters sleep together, but "it also cannot tell us clearly that they don't, since that would imply that they might." Even the possibility of homosexuality was considered unthinkable.

Times have since changed—or have they? There exists an entire body of cinema out there devoted to LGBTQ characters, true, but who outside of the LBGTQ community has actually seen these films? How will America's rampant homophobia ever end unless the general public is used to seeing homosexual, bisexual or transgender characters? If they never see these people, they will never relate to them, and if they never relate to them, they will always be the "other," frightening and obscene.

often do we even hear about a transgender person on TV or in the theaters? Then the most loaded question of all: how many of these LGBTQ characters portrayed in the media are anything other than Caucasian? Sure, the goofy gay guy friend occasionally makes an appearance on cable, but who has ever heard of a black or Asian gay friend?

With the increase in LGBTQ characters in film after the 1980s and 90s, media coverage of LGBTQ characters improved— though perhaps only because treatment of LGBTQ characters before the 1980s was so heinous. How often are gay men still portrayed as ridiculous or air- headed? How often are lesbians given time in the limelight? How

LGBTQ people continue, despite the improving statistics, to be invisible in modern film and television. Worse still, they are taboo and forbidden—the monsters under the bed. American society has come a long way since the 1950s. Shouldn't our TV shows and movies reflect that?