Last year, I built an internal database of every lesbian, bisexual and queer female character to appear on English-language television, which I’ll continue maintaining indefinitely. However, “maintaining the database” and, respectively, keeping our Fall TV Preview current, has turned out to be a bigger job than I anticipated. Sometimes it feels like the opposite of 2016, when updating the list of Dead Lesbian and Bisexual TV Characters eventually became part of my daily routine. We’ve amassed some bodies this year, sure, but we’ve gained a lot of new characters too. After an unprecedented summer for queer characters of color, the fall season has bestowed upon us surprise new lesbian and bi characters on Manifest, The Man in the High Castle, God Friended Me, Law and Order SVU, American Vandal, The First, The Deuce, Shameless, Atypical, The Purge, The Haunting of Hill House and Wanderlust. Those are just the shows that we weren’t aware would feature queer women — there are over a dozen more we knew about ahead of time.
Which is just to say that I wasn’t surprised that for the first time in all the years we’ve been reporting on the GLAAD Where We Are On TV Report, the news is mostly positive. “Where We Are on TV” accounts for and forecasts the presence of LGBTQ characters for the 2018-2019 TV Season (June 1, 2018 – May 31, 2019). This is the 23rd year GLAAD has done this quantifiable tracking.
Here are the major things GLAAD found about representation on broadcast television:
- Record high percentage of LGBTQ series regulars (8.8%, up from last year’s 6.4%)
- We have finally reached gender parity amongst LGBTQ characters: men and women are coming in at 49.6% each (last year: 55% men, 44% women)
- For the first time ever, LGBTQ characters of color (50%) outpace white (49%) characters! Just barely but still!
- Record-high numbers of Black (22%, vs. 18% last year), Latinx (8%, tied with last year) and API series regulars (8% vs. 7% last year)
- Lesbians are up slightly from last year (28% vs 25%), but we have yet to re-ascend to the 33% we had in 2015-2016, many of whom proceeded to die in 2016.
- Bisexual+ characters are up (29%), with 25 bi+ women and eight bi+ men.
The CW takes broadcast honors for the most inclusive network, and came up top in analyses of gender diversity, too, which backs up something we’ve noticed in Autostraddle Teevee HQ: The CW, often guided by Greg Berlanti, is really angling for the queer female audience. As Kayla noted in her piece about Cheryl Blossom’s confirmed bisexuality, “[The CW] should probably at least change their slogan from “dare to defy” to “dare to BE BI.” By our own count, 13 of The CW’s 17 current scripted offerings include LGBTQ women characters. Supergirl now has the first trans superhero on TV and we’re getting closer and closer to the debut of lesbian Batwoman.
GLAAD notes that many of these shows have only one LGBTQ character amongst a group of straight cisgender characters, which should change. As I’m sure many of you know and have experienced firsthand, being the only queer person in an entire town of straight cisgender people can often be a living breathing nightmare that nobody should have to endure in real life and perhaps not so frequently on our television screens either.
Findings from Cable:
- Lesbians (53 characters, 26% of the total) are up in number but down in percentage and bisexual women are down three percentage points (19% characters, representing 40 characters). The number of bi+ men on cable has increased for the first time in three years.
- The number of LGBTQ regulars on scripted primetime cable is up to 120, from 103 in the previous year. Recurring characters are up to 88 from 70, for a total of 208 characters.
- Gay men are still the majority of LGBTQ regular and recurring characters, at 43%.
- 3.9% of these characters are transgender: seven trans women, one non-binary person.
GLAAD notes that FX, with its hearty roster of Ryan Murphy programming, has overtaken Freeform as the most inclusive cable network. However, it’s worth noting that FX’s inclusive programming, while often featuring queer women, seems to always feature queer men; and Freeform was essentially the reverse — often featuring queer men, always featuring queer women.
Pose alone is responsible for more than half the trans representation on all of cable. GLAAD writes, “There has never been a scripted show with several ongoing trans characters who interact as chosen family in the same ways that lesbians and gay men were able to see and relate to on The L Word and Queer as Folk respectively.”
The fine print: 31 characters included in this year’s cable report won’t be returning for next year, and 27% of all LGBTQ representation on cable is on eight series that have six or more queer characters each. If any of those series were cancelled, there’d be a notable decrease in inclusion across cable generally — but this has also always been the case with these reports. See, for example, the few years lesbian numbers spiked but almost all of those characters were on The L Word.
Findings from Streaming:
- Streaming networks boast 112 regular & recurring LGBTQ characters, 42 more than last year
- 48% are people of color, up from last year’s 23%.
- Streaming is the only place where Latinx characters are significantly represented, at 24% (Cable has 9%, Broadcast has 12%, and Latinx people are 17% of the U.S. population.) Fifteen of those 27 characters are from foreign Netflix series. (I’m assuming this is Elite, House of Flowers & Cable Girls.)
- Gay men are at 35%, Lesbians at 33%, Bisexual women at 17%, and Bisexual men at 8%
- Streaming has the highest number and percentage of trans characters.
Netflix was awarded ‘most inclusive network’ honors, but they also have the largest number of shows, period, so it’s not really a fair fight. They also found 14 of Hulu’s 16 LGBT characters are women — Harlots and The Handmaid’s Tale both got even queerer this year, Desiree Akhavan’s The Bisexual premieres next month, and Marvel’s Runaways is returning in December. Hulu’s queer women abundance might be related to the fact that 62% of Hulu’s subscribers are women.
The “highest number and percentage of trans characters” is a little tricky too, as they include next year’s 2-hour musical finale of Transparent (I’m serious, that’s the plan) and Orange is the New Black, which’s also airing its final season next year. I’m not sure if Sense8‘s finale movie was part of that count, either, but that’s over too.
Cross-platform findings:
- Significant increases in LGBTQ characters of color
- Trans characters are up with 26 across all platforms — 17 trans women, five trans men and four non-binary characters.
There’s still plenty of room for improvement, which is a topic we touch on just about every day. We need more trans characters across all shows, and a lot more trans men, and more QPOC characters and more characters with disabilities and women and men should be even and wow there’s just a lot still to be done!
Last year, armed with our new database, I did an enormous piece on the year in queer TV, and I’ll be doing that again this year, too, so I don’t want to get too much into what we’ve observed on the topics GLAAD’s report covers or our theories about why it’s happening aside from the obvious — showrunners are listening to GLAAD, they’re listening to fans, and they’re increasingly aware of how specifically passionate queer women are about our stories. But I do wonder if maybe just maybe in general, the people of this devolving country are more open than ever to stories about women generally, and stories about women who date women instead of men specifically. Just saying.