According to GLAAD, Social Media Companies Are Failing LGBTQ+ People

Feature image by Zackary Drucker for The Gender Spectrum Collection.

Today GLAAD released its 2022 Social Media Safety Index report, a comprehensive review of the LGBTQ user safety policies of the major social media networks. All major social media networks – Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube – earned below a 50% score out of a possible 100; they are literally failing the queer community.

Jenni Olson (she/her/TBD), Senior Director of Social Media Safety at GLAAD, led the report in partnership with Ranking Digital Rights and Goodwin Simon Strategic Research. An advisory committee of researchers and queer media leaders, including representatives from Stanford, Harvard Law School, Media Matters for America, Kairos, and Fight for the Future; plus Nobel Prize Laureate Maria Ressa, Kara Swisher, and author and activist ALOK contributed.

“GLAAD has worked on these issues in various ways for over a decade,” Olson explained in an interview. “But it became clear in 2020 that there was a need for a focused program dedicated to LGBTQ social media safety and platform accountability.”

The experience of online hate and harassment is common in our community. A June 2022 report from the Anti-Defamation League found that 66% of LGBTQ+ respondents experienced harassment, and 54% experienced severe harassment — defined as physical threats, sustained harassment, stalking, sexual harassment, doxing, or swatting. GLAAD’s own research in May revealed in the Social Media Safety Index, also found that 84% of LGBTQ adults agree there are insufficient social media protections to prevent discrimination. 40% of all LGBTQ adults, and 49% of transgender and nonbinary people, do not feel welcome and safe on social media. Of course, these experiences and harms compound the more identities intersect, combing with racism, ableism, Islamaphobia, xenophobia, classism, and other forms of hate.

Algorithmic Bias, Free Speech, Surveillance, and Censorship

Essential to any discussion of social media platforms is a fundamental review of algorithms. Algorithms are essentially a series of instructions that tells the platform what steps to take to solve a particular problem or make a decision. It can, for example, decide what content to promote in more news feeds and timelines and what content to hide. It is usually a combination of human-created rules and code and artificial intelligence (AI) learning that helps the algorithm adapt over time. For example, human moderators could teach the algorithm to deprioritize phrases used by white supremacists.

When prompted to take additional steps to limit hate and harassment, social media companies often cite the need for free speech to justify their failure to act. In a 2019 speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg said, “I believe we have two responsibilities: to remove content when it could cause real danger as effectively as we can, and to fight to uphold as wide a definition of freedom of expression as possible — and not allow the definition of what is considered dangerous to expand beyond what is absolutely necessary.”

However, it’s hard to follow how this argument applies, because the platforms have proven to be biased, not the free beacons of speech Zuckerberg alleges. Multiple studies, experiments, and regular reports of the most popular posts on platforms show that across the board, the platforms prioritize right-wing content. The social media algorithms prioritize engagement in clicks, likes, views, saves, reactions, shares, et cetera, above all else. Engaging content keeps people on the platform longer; this attention is required to make money from advertising. Controversial and upsetting content tends to generate more engagement, and the racist dog whistles, sexist namecalling, and transphobic tropes used by right-wing media are undoubtedly good at angering their target audience and causing reactions and comments from opponents.

“When you come across some horrible, hateful YouTube video or Twitter account or TikTok post — rather than the platform’s AI algorithm design choosing to show you yet more toxic hate or disinformation, the company can make a responsible choice to surface higher quality content.” Olson, Senior Director of Social Media Safety at GLAAD, explained in an interview.

To quote one of GLAAD Social Media Safety Index advisory committee members, Kara Swisher, “enragement equals engagement.” The platforms, or more specifically, their algorithms, are trained to push out hate-based content because it leads to more engagement which leads to more profits.

Furthermore, like all forms of artificial intelligence, AI-based algorithms learn the same biases that humans teach, unless steps are actively taken to combat prejudice. For example, Microsoft bots trying to learn from Twitter quickly started tweeting hate and had to be shut down. Human and AI bias also result in the dispropriate removal and suppression of LGBTQ content and creators. Hence, LGBTQ content rarely stands a chance of reaching as far as hate-based content.

Since the algorithms recreate human biases and promote controversial content, failing to actively work against these biases and remove hateful content only serves not just to spew hate but actively promote, spread, and profit from hate. Though Facebook says this is no longer the case, a 2016 internal report at Facebook found that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools.”

Social media companies’ ads also rely on gathering and selling user data, often known as surveillance advertising. The companies let advertisers choose precise criteria for targeting ads from political beliefs, relationship status, education and income level, particular pages you like, things you’ve purchased, and everything in between.

“This is also an area where we will have to see regulatory oversight reign in the companies,” said Olson. “Thankfully, we are beginning to see some impact from the EU as they just passed the Digital Services Act (DSA), which won’t go into effect until next year, but the platforms already need to adapt. These companies need to be required to implement real data privacy and to refrain from targeting users with surveillance advertising.”

Online Hate Leads to Offline Violence and Hate-Based Policy

In the tech age, especially after January 6, the world has become more acquainted with disinformation – intentionally false or misleading information often used to target systemically marginalized people. The falsified New York Post article about Kamala Harris is an excellent example of deliberately false information used, in this case, to undermine the leadership of a powerful woman of color. The article falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris’s children’s book was being given to children at the U.S. border as part of government-funded “welcome kits,” but the New York Post knew this was false at the time of publication. The story came to light when the reporter who wrote it publicly admitted to being forced to falsify information and resigned from her position.

LGBTQ people have long been the targets of disinformation. All of the lies that the right spreads claiming that queer people, and especially trans people, are a danger to children or try to convert people are disinformation. What’s clear to anyone targeted by this disinformation is that it isn’t simply a lie. It’s a form of hate.

The Social Media Safety Index reports, “What social media companies define as “hate” is insufficient. An enormous amount of the anti-LGBTQ disinformation circulating amidst our current culture wars is indeed, quite simply, hate. Much of this material should rightly be evaluated against current existing policies for hate and harassment and dehumanizing speech, with corresponding enforcement. In the same way that these companies prohibit lies about COVID, the posting of inaccurate voting information, denial of the Holocaust — the intentional posting of patently false disinformation intended as a targeted attack on LGBTQ people (and other historically marginalized groups) must be mitigated.”

Further, the hate on social media never stays online. It fuels offline violence and policy changes.

“Today’s political and cultural landscapes demonstrate the real-life harmful effects of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and misinformation online,” said GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis. “The hate and harassment, as well as misinformation and flat-out lies about LGBTQ people, that go viral on social media are creating real-world dangers, from legislation that harms our community to the recent threats of violence at Pride gatherings. Social media platforms are active participants in the rise of anti-LGBTQ cultural climate, and their only response can be to create safer products and policies urgently, and then enforce those policies.”

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The Scores and Platform Takeaways

GLAAD’s Social Media Safety Index puts forth a set of overall recommendations for all social media platforms and more specific recommendations that focus on the areas where particular companies fail. The broader proposals seek to:

• Address algorithmic bias;
• Train moderators to understand LGBTQ needs;
• Increase transparency;
• Strengthen protections for LGBTQ people;
• Increase privacy and stop surveillance advertising.

Instagram Score 48 out of 100%, and Facebook Score 46 out of 100%

Meta owns both Facebook and Instagram, and in many cases, the policies are not differentiated between the two sites. Instagram scored slightly higher for allowing pronouns on some users’ profiles.

• Instagram and Facebook have no policy protecting users from targeted deadnaming and misgendering despite allowing some users on Instagram to add pronouns to their user profiles. This potentially dangerous combination could open users up to hate without adequate policies to support them.
• Meta prohibits targeted advertising based on sensitive topics, including topics related to sexual orientation. However, no similar disclosure was found that indicates the company does not permit detailed targeting based on users’ gender identity, creating concerns about advertising being able to use sensitive information to target ads.

In response, a Meta spokesperson said, “We prohibit violent or dehumanizing content directed against people who identify as LGBTQ+ and remove claims about someone’s gender identity upon their request. We also work closely with our partners in the civil rights community to identify additional measures we can implement through our products and policies.”

YouTube Score 45 out of 100%

• The company provides limited transparency on users’ options to control the company’s processing of information related to their sexual orientation and gender identity. The company discloses that it prohibits targeted advertising based on sensitive categories, including sexual orientation and gender identity. It’s good that they don’t allow ad targeting, but this doesn’t go far enough to protect user privacy, especially considering that the same company owns YouTube and Google.
• The company also prohibits advertising content that could be harmful or discriminatory to LGBTQ individuals. However, it doesn’t go far enough with a ban on promoting conversion therapy. This is especially dangerous on a platform that auto-plays related videos, helping lead users down a hate-filled rabbit hole.

YouTube did not respond to Autostraddle’s request for comment.

Twitter Score 45 out of 100%

• Twitter is one of only two platforms, the other is TikTok, which bans deadnaming and misgendering, providing recourse for users who are targeted in this way, including, recently, Elliott Page.
• Twitter prohibits targeted advertising based on sensitive categories, including sexual orientation and gender identity but does not disclose options for users to control the company’s collection of information, and recommendation of content based on users’ disclosed or inferred sexual orientation or gender identity is not off by default. Turning it off is helpful, but users do not have complete control over their privacy related to their sexual orientation and gender identity.
• Twitter also prohibits advertising that could be harmful or discriminatory to LGBTQ individuals, including conversion therapy.

In response, a spokesperson for Twitter said “At Twitter, we know the public conversation only reaches its full potential when every community feels safe and comfortable participating. We welcome GLAAD’s feedback and the opportunity to better understand the experiences and needs of the LGBTQ+ communities on our service. GLAAD has been an active member of the Twitter Trust & Safety Council since 2016 and a key partner in this space. We’ve engaged with GLAAD to better understand their recommendations and are committed to open dialogue to better inform our work to support LGBTQ safety.”

Twitter’s spokesperson also shared additional details including that their “hateful conduct policy prohibits inciting behavior that targets individuals or groups of people belonging to protected categories. This policy prohibits targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”

One especially interesting part of Twitter’s response includes noting that “We recognize that if people experience abuse on Twitter, it can jeopardize their ability to express themselves. Research has shown that some groups of people are disproportionately targeted with abuse online. This includes; women, people of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual individuals, marginalized and historically underrepresented communities. For those who identify with multiple underrepresented groups, abuse may be more common, more severe in nature and more harmful.” This presents an important acknowledgment of the role of intersectionality in targeted hate and harassment and the fact that hate and harassment discourage people from participating and can be harmful to free speech and expression.

TikTok Score: 43 out of 100%

• In 2022 TikTok added bans on pro-conversion therapy content, deadnaming, and misgendering. GLAAD found TikTok was the only company to provide comprehensive information on how it detects violations of this policy. Paired with the fact that TikTok allows users to specify pronouns, this is an important policy that means if you are misgendered or deadnamed, you should be able to get help and support from the platforms.
• The company currently does not disclose options for users to control the company’s collection of information related to their sexual orientation and gender identity. The company also provides only limited options for users to control the recommended content they see based on their orientation. This is a crucial privacy concern that means advertisers may use your personal information to target. However, a TikTok spokesperson did not that in the United States and Canada, housing, employment, and credit ads cannot target audiences using age, gender, zip code, marital or parental status, or any other protected characteristic.
• TikTok was the only company that did not disclose any information on steps it takes to diversify its workforce, an important step given that technology repeats human bias.

A TikTok spokesperson responded, “TikTok is committed to supporting and uplifting LGBTQ+ voices, and we work hard to create an inclusive environment for LGBTQ+ people to thrive.”

TikTok also provided additional information on their policies including that their “hateful behavior policies prohibit hate speech and hateful ideologies. We’ve long prohibited such content and behavior, and to make that abundantly clear, earlier this year we updated our policies to specify that deadnaming, misgendering, and content that supports or promotes conversion therapy programs is not allowed and will be removed from our platform when found. This was embraced by organizations including GLAAD, UltraViolet, and Lesbians Who Tech.”

TikTok also noted that they have prompts that encourage people to reconsider posting potentially unkind comments. Data was not readily available to confirm if this is improving the experience of TikTok users, but It’s worth noting that Twitter has this feature too and that Twitter’s own reporting found that these prompts resulted in “34 percent of the people revis[ing] their initial reply or decid[ing to not send their reply at all.” This demonstrates the power of harnessing the AI learning technology these platforms have to be used in creative ways to create a more welcoming environment.

One interesting find in GLAAD’s report is that there can be a big difference in the stated policies versus the reality. Facebook, for example, scored high for having expressed commitment to protecting LGBTQ people but then scored poorly for having no protections against deadnaming. Often if a form of hate speech isn’t explicitly named as prohibited, companies fail to enforce it even if it should be covered under general hate speech policies. For example, the intentionally false New York Post article about Kamala Harris, mentioned earlier, was not considered hate speech even though it relied on sexist and racist tropes to spread false information.

Conversely, expanding policies makes it possible to hold people accountable for hate, as was recently when Elliott Page was targeted with intentional misgendering and deadnaming on Twitter.

“In the 2021 report, we urged all platforms to follow the lead of Twitter and Pinterest to add a prohibition against targeted misgendering and deadnaming to their hateful conduct policies,” explained Jenni Olson ), Senior Director of Social Media Safety at GLAAD. “Earlier this year, we were really glad to partner with the folks at UltraViolet [full disclosure, I work for UltraViolet and led this work in collaboration with Jenni at GLAAD], and through our combined, coordinated advocacy work, we were able to convince TikTok to make this change. They also added language against misogynist hate speech simultaneously, thanks to UltraViolet. GLAAD also urged them to add the prohibition on conversion therapy content. To illustrate the difference this can make for individual LGBTQ users — the existence of these policies gives users a very specific lever to report this kind of violative content.”

“In the first week of July, a well-known right-wing figure intentionally and maliciously posted a tweet misgendering and deadnaming Elliot Page. So while we are continually pressing the companies to improve policies and improve enforcement, it does make a huge difference that the policies do exist.”

“We should all be enraged at these companies and urge our legislators to work towards thoughtfully crafted regulatory solutions…These companies have an inherent conflict of interest in their decision-making process around content moderation. To some degree, they don’t mitigate hate because they are making money from it, and we as a society are paying the price.”

Protecting Yourself

Olson also shared some advice and, in the report, resources for protecting yourself if you become the target of online hate, harassment, and disinformation. “The most valuable piece of guidance I’ve gotten from folks who do training on this topic… is that you should really take care of yourself and your mental health and seek support from friends or professionals if and when you experience online abuse.”
“Lastly, these are difficult times, and this is difficult work we’re all doing. This line from the report reflects something very important for us all to remember: ‘As we stand together to fight against hate, we stand also united in love — as a community: LGBTQ together.”

Resources if you are the target of online hate, harassment, or disinformation:

PEN America Online Harassment Field Manual

LGBTQ+ Digital Safety and Online Abuse Defense

What to Do if You’re the Target of Online Harassment

Before today’s release, GLAAD held briefings with each platform named in the Social Media Safety Index to review the recommendations described in the report. GLAAD will maintain an ongoing dialogue about LGBTQ safety amongst tech industry leaders throughout 2022 and beyond.

Read the full report on GLAAD’s site.

Lesbian and Non-Binary TV Characters Are All The Rage, Relatively

After years of roaming the earth listlessly in search of a televised field in which to triumph, lesbians have achieved a remarkable pinnacle in the field of media representation: for the first time in GLAAD’s storied history of reporting on this topic in their annual Where We Are on TV Report, lesbians represent the majority of LGBTQ characters on broadcast television, outnumbering the previous consistent winner of “Gay Men.” For the first time since the 06-07 season, lesbians also represent the majority of characters on cable. However, as in ’06-07, GLAAD attributes this to the prevalence of lesbian characters on a show from ye olde The L Word franchise.

Just a Few Shows Are Doing All The Work: The L Word‘s impact isn’t unusual. handful of shows comprising the majority of any given year’s gains or losses is a pretty typical feature of a Where We Are on TV Report, and there’d be value in looking at the overall percentage of shows with LGBTQ characters, period. The 2010 report noted massive losses for queer female representation, but anybody who hadn’t been watching The L Word wouldn’t have noticed a seismic shift. In the cable analysis section, GLAAD notes that the majority of Freeform’s LGBTQ characters appear on Good Trouble and Single Drunk Female and that FX’s are concentrated on Better Things and What We Do in the Shadows. Furthermore….

Trans Representation Getting Better: There is an increase in the number of trans characters, as well as a “welcome increase in trans characters who appear in a comedy series.” After decades of being used as the butt of the joke, it’s encouraging to see more trans characters making jokes, and sometimes even being lead characters, as in Euphoria, Saved by the Bell and Sort Of.

In recent years, growth in trans representation was carried by Transparent and/or Pose, usually alone, and it’s actually incredibly promising that despite Pose‘s cancellation, the number of transgender characters on cable has only decreased slightly. And that’s actually only if you look at the numbers in a very specific way, which brings us to….

More Non-Binary Characters Than Ever: GLAAD reports 42 transgender characters, including eight non-binary characters, on television overall, but they then note the existence of 17 “additional characters who are non-binary and not transgender.” Detailed later in the report, they explain “If the character is non-binary, but the word transgender is never mentioned, the character explicitly says they are not transgender, or creators confirm the character is not transgender – the character will be counted as non-binary but not counted as transgender.” According to GLAAD, characters falling under this category of “non-binary but not transgender” include characters on Grey’s Anatomy, Feel Good, And Just Like That and The Sex Lives of College Girls. 

Hands-down the most difficult part of analyzing LGBTQ+ data of any kind is deciding how to define any of the terms in that acronym — terms that are always evolving and mean different things to different people. Based on GLAAD’s own definition of transgender as “a person’s gender not matching what they were assigned at birth,” it does seem that if we are counting “women who date women” as lesbians regardless of them explicitly saying they are lesbians, we should count “people who don’t identify with the gender they were assigned at birth” as transgender regardless of if they say the word? Relying on characters with notoriously limited screen time and cis writers/creators to label their characters feels… tricky.

But again, this isn’t easy stuff to sort through!! In the Autostraddle community lexicon, we do include non-binary people in the definition of “trans,” so I will be conflating GLAAD’s numbers when I say things like this: there were 25 non-binary characters this year and that’s an impressive leap! As someone who has been maintaining an orderly and updated database of TV characters who are LGTBQ women and/or trans since 2017, this tracks — it’s been a very noticeable rise. Streaming networks seem to be performing best in this regard with14 trans women, 17 non-binary characters and six trans men.

Trans Characters Played by Trans Actors: Of the 42 characters it counted, GLAAD noted 41 were played by trans actors. (This is another tricky thing to count, especially when it comes to young actors!)

Other notable tidbits:

• GLAAD “challenged” platforms to have at least 50% of its LGBTQ+ characters be characters of color, and network television and cable continue to meet that goal, but overall racial diversity of LGBTQ characters on broadcast and streaming increased, while cable saw a decrease.
• Only TWO (2) ASEXUAL CHARACTERS emerged from the ether this year, and one was on the now-cancelled program genera+ion.  GLAAD has promised a second asexual character on a streaming series whose details “are under embargo at time of publication.” That’s exciting!
• Bisexual+ characters comprise 29% of all LGBTQ characters on broadcast, cable and streaming, an increase of one percent from last year. Bisexual men remain elusive, with 50 bi+ men out there. There are also nine bi+ non-binary characters, although I’m not sure what that means.

In conclusion, it’s a great thing that our exact demographic continues to see increases in representation! We do hope that as viewing options multiply, that more networks see the value in investing their marketing dollars in various ecosystems long taken for granted, such as websites that enable them to reach the exact audience they require to support the LGBTQ-inclusive content they’re creating. It’s one thing to create the shows, but one must also invest in their success, and it’s sad to see so many of the best shows for queer representation, like genera+ion and Gentefied, get cancelled before their advertising departments have exhausted even their most obvious option. Just saying!

GLAAD: You Watched TV Like a Full-Time Job in 2020, Even With Fewer LGBTQ+ Characters

GLAAD released my all-time favorite annual collection of stats today: the Where We Are on TV report for 2020. GLAAD has been putting this thing together since 2005. It started with counting the number of LGBT characters on TV and has evolved into a deeply researched and detailed analysis of LGBTQ+ characters and the quality of their screen time, breaking the numbers down by things like gender, race, disability, age, and all-ages and Spanish-language programming. GLAAD then uses the report — and its past reports to highlight trends — as part of their advocacy and education initiatives throughout the year. Numbers matter. For example, activism around the Bury Your Gays became a lot more effective when fans were able to point the massive list Riese assembled of all the dead queer women on TV over the years. I used to be an accountant! I love numbers!

ANYWAY.

This year’s Where We Are on TV report is really interesting because, first of all, GLAAD quotes Nielsen and notes that, with the pandemic raging, Americans were at home watching TV enough for it to basically be a full-time job in 2020 (37 hours per week, on average). And second of all, there was a downtrend in several areas that had seen pretty consistent progress over the last many years because so much TV and film production was on hold in 2020. This is especially true because there are still so few LGBTQ+ characters overall that missing even a few shows makes a significant impact, as is the case in 2020 where we lost shows with multiple characters like The L Word: Generation Q (which didn’t film due to the pandemic), How to Get Away With Murder (which ended its run in 2020), and cancelled faves like GLOW. You’ll also note that’s a lot of POC characters.

One of the most interesting things about this year’s report was the fact that “one in every five LGBTQ characters appears on a series that is tied to one of just four creatives” — Greg Berlanti, Lena Waithe, Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes. Meaning that 5% of shows account for 17% of total LGBTQ+ characters.

The total series regulars on broadcast TV were down down to 9.1% from last year’s 10.2%. Cable dropped to 118 characters total, down from last year’s 215. And streaming services — Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, etc. — dropped to 141 characters, down from last year’s 153. On a more positive note, there was a slight increase in characters with disabilities; there are 38 regular and recurring trans characters, up from 26 last year; racial diversity increased on broadcast and cable shows; and we’re getting a new asexual character in 2021 (whose identity is under embargo).

I was also really pleased to see GLAAD talk about the uprising for Black lives that has been shaping our cultural conversation since last summer, and name the concrete steps some networks have taken to ensure they are addressing systemic racism in their programming. “New calls were made for change in the entertainment industry which would prioritize hiring, promoting, and investing in Black creators and stories on all levels,” GLAAD writes. “Since June, several networks and studios have either launched or expanded their staff and efforts in the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity space. Several companies made donations to the Black Lives Matter movement, and CBS signed a multiyear agreement with the NAACP which will include a dedicated team of executives working with the group to acquire, develop, and produce new programming across ViacomCBS properties.”

It is so necessary for us to begin seeing those changes immediately — in the next season — on TV. (Check out Color of Change’s recent Normalizing Injustice report for more data on the impact of negative representation for POC characters.)

Netflix leads the way with LGBTQ+ characters on streaming platforms, and the CW on cable. (Let’s go, Batwoman!)

You can check out GLAAD’s full 2020 Where We Are on TV Report right here!

GLAAD 2020 Film Report: Mainstream Movies Continue to Ignore Lesbian, Bisexual, Queer and Trans Women

It says a lot about the state of lesbian and bisexual women in film, in general, that I remembered 2019 as a pretty decent year because I saw one (1) entire gay woman in a movie where she was: a) such a main character that she had half the dialogue and was even on the movie poster, b) so gay that no one could leave the theater without knowing she was gay, and c) the theater was stadium-style in the suburbs and full of people, not an arthouse cinema in Greenwich Village with two other lesbians and one retired straight couple with a season pass to IFC.

But of course Booksmart is only one movie and — according to GLAAD’s annual Studio Responsibility Index, which dropped this morning — major studios released 118 movies in 2019. Get ready for some even more dismal numbers: Of those 118 movies, 15 included gay men, eight included lesbians, three included bisexual characters, and zero included trans characters. Also only 34% of those characters were people of color (a downtrend from 2018’s downtrend). But wait, it gets worse! There were 50 total LGB characters in major studio films, and 28 of those 50 characters received less than three minutes of speaking time and 21 of them were on-screen for less than a minute. GLAAD’s description of the two animated family films that included gay characters is almost too sad to look at: “Two dads dropping their child off to camp in Paramount’s Wonder Park, and two moms escorting their child to school in Disney’s Toy Story 4.” Blink (or be straight) and you miss it!

The write-up for Charlie’s Angels was also particularly depressing: “Charlie’s Angels features out actress Kristen Stewart as Sabina, one of the spies and a lesbian. In a mid-film scene, Sabina is distracted from her case when she stops to check out an attractive woman at the gym. Though the moment is technically enough to confirm Sabina’s interest in women.”

GLAAD’s SRI focused on the eight studios that had the highest theatrical grosses in 2019, and ranked them on a scale of “failing” to “insufficient” to “poor.” The next step up is “good,” but no studio received that rating for 2019.

I was unsurprised looking at these numbers. GLAAD’s Studio Responsibility Index is always bleak, which is one of the reasons why it’s so essential. But I was surprised by how many of these movies I knew a lot about because they included gay characters, even if only briefly — which is something GLAAD goes to great lengths to note every year. Megan Townsend, GLAAD’s Director of Entertainment Research & Analysis, consistently hammers home: “Telling meaningful LGBTQ stories is not just the right thing to do, it’s also just smart business. LGBTQ people are a significant audience who are supporting LGBTQ-inclusive films with our dollars and digital attention. Nielsen found LGBTQ audiences are more likely to see a new theatrical release more than once compared to straight audiences, and continue to stay engaged consumers, with higher levels of purchasing a digital copy, subscription service, and spreading the word online.”

At Autostraddle we know that’s true because when we write about a movie with actual LGBTQ+ women, everyone reads and shares it on social media and then comes back to comment with their own opinions after they’ve watched it (usually more than once). We will subscribe to any platform to watch a queer movie, drive for hours to see it in theaters; heck, we will even buy physical DVDs, which Drew Gregory wrote about beautifully this week in her piece about Criterion releasing Portrait Of A Lady on Fire, which was huge deal, but also out of 1,051 titles in Criterion’s collection, only 18 feature queer women.

“This isn’t theoretical. This isn’t a customer complaint,” Drew wrote. “This is about who I am. This is about who we all are. This is about what we deserve. Those of us who have long been ignored deserve to be included — no, centered — in film culture. So let’s celebrate the release of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. And then let’s ask for more. And more and more and more.”

GLAAD agrees: “Hollywood must feel encouraged and empowered to leverage that interest and buying power by delivering movies that include substantial LGBTQ characters and by unambiguously marketing and promoting these movies.”

You can read GLAAD’s full Studio Responsibility Index here. 

LGBTQ TV Characters Are at an All Time High, According to GLAAD’s “Where We Are on TV” Report

The energy in the room was cautious excitement.

GLAAD was about to announce the 2019-2020 “Where We Are on TV” numbers and they were better than ever. For the first time, over 10% of series regulars on broadcast shows are LGBTQ. Over half of the LGBTQ characters on broadcast shows are people of color. There are twelve more transgender characters across platforms than last year.

But this was a room filled with people who understand the stakes. “Our community finds itself in 2019 facing unprecedented attacks on our progress,” GLAAD president Sarah Kate Ellis began. “The role of television in changing hearts and minds has never been more important.”

Ellis was quick to remind us that while the 10% landmark is worthy of celebration, 20% of Americans ages 18-34 are LGBTQ. She announced that GLAAD is now calling for the industry to reach this 20% goal by 2025. “That’s six years so we have time,” she added, underlining how practical and reasonable they’re truly being.

As a trans lesbian who was sitting next to an asexual person, both of us lamenting how rarely we see ourselves on screen, I appreciated the complex framing. It’s not that there isn’t cause for celebration, but when the stakes not only include gaining political acceptance, but personal acceptance, better only means so much. As Ellis said, “Television must evolve.”

This mix of optimism and awareness continued on the panel moderated by Dino-Ray Ramos featuring Ellis, Gloria Calderón Kellett (showrunner One Day at a Time), Jacob Fenton (UTA), Nicole Maines (Supergirl), Brian Michael Smith (The L Word: Generation Q), and Sabrina Jalees (Carol’s Second Act).

Ramos began by bringing up the 20% goal and asking if the panelists currently saw themselves on TV. Jalees quipped, “I’m not going to be happy until 100% are specifically Pakistani-Swiss lesbians. What’s it gonna take?”

Calderón Kellett spoke about the importance of behind the scenes representation, specifically as a straight showrunner: “I think it’s really about empowering queer voices. I know that the storylines on our show are made excellent because we have a largely queer staff. And I think that is lifting up those voices and making sure they’re learning the process of showrunning… And the hope is they’ll become showrunners themselves. Because to answer your question I had to create a show to see myself on screen.”

“It’s also that shift of understanding the real value of queer voices versus checking off a box,” Jalees added. “I’ve been in rooms where I felt like I’m here because I’m the diversity hire and I’ve also been in rooms where I feel like I’m here because I’ve got a story.”

And on the subject of token queers, Maines discussed a frustration many of us share, when shows only have one LGBTQ character. “We tend to flock!” she exclaimed. “I know when I was in college I had a whole suite full of gay people. I wouldn’t see a straight person for days.”

This is the first year where LGBTQ women characters outnumber LGBTQ men, a welcome change of pace. As Jalees noted: “We all know within the queer community that lesbians get the one night at the gay bar. We get to rent it out for the night and then we’re out of there!”

“Stack the chairs before you leave!” Maines added.

But Maines also pointed out that this gender breakdown isn’t so simplistic when discussing trans stories. “There’s an overwhelming majority of trans women to the point where there aren’t nearly as many stories of trans men being told,” she said. “I don’t think men should outnumber women. I don’t think women should outnumber men. I think it’s important that all queer people’s stories are being equally represented.”

There is one queer woman show that is going to have not one, but two trans male characters.

“I mean, it’s The L Word so it’s gonna be a lot of joy, a lot of sex, a lot of bodies, a lot of discussion of issues. There’s gonna be lesbians! It’s gonna be great,” Smith said, the crowd growing rowdy, and Maines piping in: “Stop there. I want that.” (Sorry Supergirl fans, Maines did also say at one point she is not gay.)

Smith went on to say that he was a fan of the original series until Max’s storyline. But he was much more positive about Generation Q‘s trans representation.

“Instead of trying to shoehorn everything in the transmasculine experience that there could possibly be into one character it was very clear they recognized there’s diversity in the transmasculine experience,” he explained.

Smith also discussed being the first black trans man to be a series regular with his upcoming role on 9-1-1: Lone Star. And Maines discussed being the first trans person to play a superhero on TV. Turns out transphobic Twitter comments aren’t Maines’ only challenge.

“It’s an uncomfortable suit. I’m not used to having good posture. The vest pulls everything back. I’m like, this is awful!” she confessed. “Can I be the first slouching superhero? That I think is the representation we need to see.”

A reoccurring theme among all the panelists was how important representation was to them growing up and how much they wished there was more. “To picture myself seeing that kind of representation it would’ve changed my narrative of my identity for the better,” Jalees shared. “It feels really good that there are young people watching us, watching our stories, and feeling better about who they are. This myth that we’re supposed to be some version of normal can go away and we can all just be ourselves.”

I am very excited to say that in the upcoming season there are going to be three trans lesbians on TV. But the number of asexual characters has gone from two to one and that one show is ending. As Smith said, “It’s not inevitable. You have to really work to keep the truth and authenticity out there.”

We’re getting to a place where we can expect and demand nuance, and we need to keep pushing to ensure all our stories are told. Every identity. Every intersection of identities.

There is plenty to celebrate. And there is plenty of work to be done.

GLAAD: Movies Are Getting Better For Lesbian and Gay Characters, Staying Terrible for Trans and LGBTQ Kids’ Characters

The weirdest thing happened in December 2018: For the first time ever, we were able to make a year-end list of best lesbian and bisexual movies. And not low-budget indie films that only made their way around LGBTQ festival circuits. We’re talking major studio films here. We’re talking Kristen Stewart in Lizzie, Gina Rodriguez in Annihilation, Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick in A Simple Favor, Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams in Disobedience, Melissa McCarthy in Can You Ever Forgive Me, Keira Knightly in Colette, Kiersey Clemons and Sasha Lane in Hearts Beat Loud, Chloë Grace Moretz and Sasha Lane in The Miseducation of Cameron Post. We’re talking Oscar winners Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone in The Favourite. Also, of course, the Academy Award Winner of Riese Bernard’s Heart: Blockers.

It felt good to be able to put 15 movies on a list! And today, in their annual Studio Responsibility Index, GLAAD confirmed that good feeling with numbers — while also emphasizing that a win for lesbian and gay characters in movies isn’t a win for the entire LGBTQ community. Racial diversity among LGBTQ characters is down (there was a 15 percentage point decrease in POC characters between 2017 and 2018). There wasn’t one single trans character in a major studio release. And LGBTQ rep for kids remains dismal (none of the animated/family films released by major studios had LGBTQ characters, and GLAAD is even willing to count, like, one minor comic relief sidekick quickly mentioning he’s not married to a woman in How to Train Your Dragon 2 as a win.)

Some other key findings: 

+ 20 LGBTQ-inclusive films were released in 2018.

+ Ten films featured more than ten minutes of screen-time for lesbian and gay characters.

+ 45 LGBTQ characters made it into mainstream movies in 2018.

+ 26 of those characters had less than three minutes of screen time; 16 had less than one minute.

+ Zero LGBTQ characters for kids were counted in 2018.

+ Zero trans characters were counted in 2018.

+ POC LGBTQ characters only made up 42% of LGBTQ characters.

What’s puzzling about the movie industry’s unwillingness to catch up with the LGBTQ revolution on TV, GLAAD points out, is that queer people pay money to watch basically anything that has even the tiniest bit of representation in it and then talk about it, at length, on every single social media platform. That’s not anecdotal based on my own personal Twitter timeline; GLAAD cites numbers: “Nielsen found that queer audiences are 22 percent more likely to see a new theatrical release more than once compared to straight audiences. Additionally, LGBTQ audiences are nine percent more likely to purchase a physical or digital copy than straight audiences.”

Bottom line: There’s lots to celebrate but we’ve still got a very long way to go, especially when it comes to characters who aren’t white and cis.

“GLAAD urges Hollywood to quickly move forward in telling stories of LGBTQ characters at the intersection of multiple identities,” the report reads. “This also includes more queer characters with a disability, those of different religions, body types, more trans characters, more queer women, and others”

You can read the full 2019 Studio Responsibility Index here.

LGBTQ Characters Are Thriving on TV While the World Burns, GLAAD Report Finds

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.

GLAAD Survey Finds Straight People Fine with “Equal Rights” in 2018, Not So Much Actual LGBT People

Four years ago, GLAAD added one more metric to the toolbox we have at our disposal for measuring the cultural standing of LGBTQ people in the US when they asked the Harris Poll to launch an index that explicitly asks respondents about their level of acceptance of LGBTQ people. The survey asks about the respondents’ level of comfort with interacting with LGBTQ people in everyday social situations like the doctor’s office or place of worship, whether LGBTQ respondents report experiencing discrimination, and the degree to which respondents support “equal rights” for LGBTQ people. As one would expect, the numbers have generally trended more and more towards acceptance as time and progress march on, with numbers either improving or staying the same since the beginning of the index. That is, until last year — when, as GLAAD CEO Sarah Kate Ellis puts it, “the acceptance pendulum abruptly stopped and swung in the opposite direction.”

Compiled in the Accelerating Acceptance report, the index found that after a dip in the reported discomfort in 2016, in 2017 levels of social discomfort with LGBTQ people rose across the board. More non-LGBTQ respondents than last year said they were either “somewhat” or “very” uncomfortable in every imagined hypothetical scenario, ranging from having an LGBTQ doctor to their child learning about LGBTQ history in school to finding out that their own family member is a member of the LGBTQ community. In the case of “learning [my] child was placed in a class with an LGBT teacher,” respondents were actually more uncomfortable than they were in 2014, the beginning of the survey.

Unsurprisingly, at the same time as the non-LGBTQ respondents are reporting their rising discomfort with us, the LGBTQ respondents are reporting higher levels of discrimination. (In 2017, 12% of the respondents self-identified as LGBTQ and 88% did not; in 2016, 17% of the respondents were LGBTQ.) Increased numbers of people reported discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity — the percentage jumped 11% since 2016 — as well as on the basis of disability, religion, age, and “other areas.” In fact, the only area in which LGBTQ respondents didn’t report increased discrimination was on the basis of race and ethnicity, which saw a 4% drop in reported discrimination.

Why such a sharp shift across the board? GLAAD suggests we look at the “heightened rhetoric toward marginalized
communities” that ramped up in a particular way during the election cycle in 2016 and stayed up after the inauguration in 2017, as well as the ways in which LGBTQ issues have appeared constantly in the headlines as a matter of debate and the fact that “LGBTQ visibility slipped in news and entertainment media.” (In our own analysis earlier this year, we noted that “in 2016, GLAAD’s annual report revealed that lesbian representation had gone down for the first time since 2004, and ‘while bisexual women are getting a small boost in visibility, it’s often coming at the cost of damaging cliché.’ Our Senior Editor Heather Hogan called 2016 ‘the most frustrating year ever for queer women who love television,’ even compared to years when we had ‘hardly any TV representation at all.'”)

It’s true that when far-right and ultraconservative candidates or issues are dominating the national conversation, especially when they become law, we see increased negative sentiment and violence against marginalized groups — racially and religiously motivated hate crimes rose by a shocking 41% in England and Wales after Brexit. The data for the 2017 survey was gathered from November 16-20 of 2017, in the heady weeks following the results of the US election and at a particular peak of intensely charged rhetoric.

Given that context, it’s interesting to note the one measured criteria of the Accelerating Acceptance report that didn’t change from 2016 to 2017 — the response to the statement “I support equal rights for the LGBT community.” In both 2016 and 2017, 79% of respondents said they either “somewhat” or “strongly” agreed. It’s interesting, given the results of the rest of the survey and the specific wording of the statement, what “equal rights” might mean to the non-LGBTQ respondents. Does it mean the right to safety from harm, to accessible and competent medical treatment, to form families and parent children, to be visibly LGBTQ in public without fear? If straight and cis people are growing more uncomfortable with us as part of their daily life and communities, if they report not wanting us to treat their illnesses or teach their children — what rights to a fully lived and safe public life do they really support for us, and to what extent would they prefer to back an abstract and undemanding sense that “love wins?” Unfortunately, there are some answers the survey can’t give us.

It’s a somewhat grim but ultimately unsurprising reveal, given the direction national discourse and policy have taken in the past year and a half for marginalized people in the US in general and including LGBTQ people. The parallel of the President choosing Mike Pence as his running mate, attempting to ban trans people from the US military, firing the entire HIV/AIDS advisory council, allowing his administration to ban the words “diversity” and “transgender” at the Department of Health and Human Services, opening the doors for rampant life-threatening discrimination against LGBT people in healthcare, specifically revoking Obama-era protections for trans employees and so many other things — and also literally waving a rainbow flag is a bit on the nose, but unfortunately apt. In an era defined for many marginalized people by a deep cognitive schism between the protections and support we’re told we’re afforded and the reality we experience, this shift in support is disappointing but not surprising.

2018 GLAAD Media Award Nominees Include Autostraddle, Gabby Rivera’s “America,” “One Day at a Time” and More of Your Faves

GLAAD announced their 29th Media Awards nominees today and guess what? Yes! You’re right! Autostraddle dot com has been nominated for “Outstanding Blog” for the fourth time. We were nominated in 2013, 2014, we won in 2015, and now we’re nominated in 2018! Also, Riese Bernard, Autostraddle co-founder/CEO/EIC, was nominated last year for Outstanding Digital Journalism Article for her comprehensive work about trans women on TV.

We’re really proud to share this nomination with some other rad independently published websites:

Gays With Kids

My Fabulous Disease

Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents

Transgriot

It took our senior editors several hours after we received the nominations yesterday for us to realize we’re on the list because we were busy doing the million things we do every day to make this indie publication we live and love flourish in a world where we’re constantly competing with LGBT websites that have major venture capital behind them, and LGBT verticals on mainstream websites that — you guessed it — have major venture capital behind them. Which is why this nomination is your victory too! We don’t have venture capital. We have A+ members who stand behind us and believe in us and lift us up, and we have readers who buy our Gender Traitor hoodies and Lavender Menace tees and Read a F*cking Book enamel pins, and we have A-Campers who sleep on bunk beds in cabins in dance their hearts out in the forest surrounded by other queer humans. We have you. And it’s a good thing we’ve got going here.

You’ll notice some other familiar names on this year’s list of GLAAD nominees, including former Autostraddle writer Gaby Rivera who got a very well-deserved nod for her comic book writing debut on America. (Congratulations, Gabby!) Plus a lot of your favs:

Outstanding Film – Wide Release

Battle of the Sexes

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

Outstanding Comedy Series

The Bold Type

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Survivor’s Remorse

Transparent

One Day at a Time

Outstanding Drama Series

Doubt

The Handmaid’s Tale

Sense8

Wynonna Earp

Outstanding Kids & Family Programming

“Chosen Family” Danger & Eggs

Steven Universe

The Loud House

And of course a Best Episode nod for Master of None‘s “Thanksgiving” episode.

We’re honored to receive this nomination for the fourth time (we think that’s the most anyone’s ever been nominated for Outstanding Blog, actually!). We’re really, really proud of the work we did last year. And we’re so excited to keep building this community and making the world better with you.

GLAAD and ASOS Have a New Charitable Collaboration and It’s Kind of Great

ASOS launched a capsule collaboration today with GLAAD! Proceeds from the thoroughly modern, skatewear-inspired collection go directly to the charity’s work on their Together campaign, which highlights the importance of solidarity between marginalized (and, at times, overlapping) communities.

Image via ASOS

ASOS’ designers have applied ampersands (a symbol associated with the Together campaign) and the word “unity” liberally to the line of tees, sweatshirts, jewelry, and bags, which are categorized by descriptors like “relaxed” and “oversized” rather than by gender.

Image via ASOS

The line consists of rainbow embroidery details, tropical prints, and comic book-esque touches, many on extreme scales. (GLAAD also has its own line of Together-themed merchandise, which also employs ampersands, though in a slightly more conservative fashion.)

Image via ASOS

The collection ranges from $13-$48, with certain items in sizes XS-XL and others in XXS-XXXL. Check the rest of the line out below.

Image via ASOS

Image via ASOS

Image via ASOS

Image via ASOS

Image via ASOS

Will you (or have you already) picked up a piece/pieces from the collection? I’m partial to that embroidered black sweatshirt for the chilly months ahead, but that’s just me.

Mainstream Film Said “Mmmm Nope” to Representing Queer Women in 2016, GLAAD Studio Responsibility Index Reveals

We experienced a major triumph this year when Moonlight nabbed the 2016 Oscar for Best Picture, becoming the first film led by an LGBTQ character to win that particular award, and one of only a few Oscar-winning films focused on Black characters in which those characters were not slaves or servants. Unfortunately, Moonlight‘s critical success is not reflective of overall industry trends, as GLAAD’s highly depressing 2016 Studio index reveals.

The Studio Responsibility Index analyzes releases from the seven film studios that had the highest theatrical grosses from films released in 2016: 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate, Paramount, Sony, Universal, Walt Disney and Warner Brothers. Collectively these studios released 125 films in 2016, which were analyzed by GLAAD for quality and quantity of representation.

Films released by “art house” divisions of aforementioned studios were not included in the data or tallies, but GLAAD did provide some written analysis of those films within their report.

18.4% of analyzed films, or 23 films total, included LGBTQ characters, of which 82.6% were gay men. One huge but easy-to-miss caveat, though: “It is important to note that 14 of [the 70 tallied LGBTQ characters] were part of a single musical number in Universal Pictures’ PopStar: Never Stop Never Stopping, which misleadingly inflated the numbers.” The musical number in question is pretty meta, as it essentially mocks the mainstream’s faux-accepting no-homo mainstream attempts at “inclusivity” that we see throughout the other analyzed films. GLAAD also found that nearly half of the 23 films marked as inclusive gave their LGBTQ characters less than one minute of screen time and that only 20% of LGBTQ characters were people of color. In her introductory letter to the report, GLAAD President Sarah Kate Ellis notes that, looking back on five years of the SRI, “we continue to see many of the same problems repeatedly.”

The basic numbers are bleak, sure, but bleaker still are GLAAD’s summaries of the films. Looking at queer female characters specifically, I found approximately zero who were inoffensive and prominently featured and one who was prominently featured but also was a taco who has sex with a hot dog bun who believes she is having sex with her boyfriend. The taco, voiced by Selma Hayek in the un-beloved film Sausage Party, is referred to by GLAAD as “an oversexualized lesbian,” although many of our readers felt strongly that the taco was bisexual. It’s possible we may never know the truth of this particular matter.

In Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, an older lesbian makes a multi-second appearance in order to hit on Tina Fey’s character Kim Baker. In Bridget Jones’s Baby, we have a lesbian couple “used to prop up a joke about the possible fathers being mistaken for a gay couple.” In Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, a lesbian woman and “a man who shows up dressed as a woman” are two candidates who respond to the titular characters’ cragislist ad soliciting dates to a Hawaiian wedding. The man-dressed-as-a-woman apparently eventually “takes off the wig” and “offers the men sexual favors after they turn him down.” This is one of a few films that relied on trans panic tropes for humor, a feat which can be accomplished even without having transgender characters. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates also included one of only a few bisexual female characters mentioned in the report, a bisexual cousin named Terry who apparently bribes a woman into having sex with her and solicits two men for a threesome. Although not included in the tallies, the report also gives a shout-out to Keeping Up With the Joneses for “an extended kiss between the two female leads” used as a technique to distract men while transporting weapons. It’s the kind of joke that would be funny if it wasn’t basically the only extended kiss between two women to show up in a major studio film last year. Everybody Wants Some! also gets a not-tallied mention for “a scene in which star player Roper kisses a girl, and then encourages her to kiss the girl next to her” in order to delight fellow partygoers. World War II drama Allied, while gingerly applauded for barely including the relationship between Pilot Officer Bridget and her girlfriend, stops clapping altogether to grimly acknowledge that “in a later scene the film trivializes their relationship when Bridget and Louise oblige a bunch of male soldiers who ask the women to kiss in front of them.”

Although it’s not a lesbian character, I’d like to mention that GLAAD mentions that in Dirty Grandpa we have a male character subject to a “running gag” that he is a butch lesbian.

Two of less than ten lesbian characters mentioned in the report are animated birds who hold hands in the background of one short scene in The Angry Birds Movie and at least one lesbian couple from an ending montage in the animated film Storks. These inclusions, although brief, are still noteworthy for their subtle presence in the notoriously homo-averse genre of children’s movies.

Consider this: the year’s most iconic queer female character in a major studio film, Kate McKinnon’s Jillian Holtzmann in Ghostbusters, was never acknowledged as queer in the film itself although it was basically confirmed off-screen by the film’s creators. Her situation would be clear queerbaiting and therefore drive me bananas were it not for the fact that none of the reboot’s team of female Ghostbusters really had a romantic storyline, gay or straight, which was refreshing in its own way. Suicide Squad’s Harley Quinn was excluded from GLAAD’s tally because her bisexuality, as established in the DC Comics Series, was missing altogether from the film.

Both Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie and Zoolander 2 are given a firm rebuke for their absurdly irresponsible portrayals of transgender people, the latter of which was so fucked up that the trailer, which dwelled obsessively on whether or not Benedict Cumberbatch’s seemingly non-binary character All had “a hot dog or a bun” in their pants, inspired a protest petition. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie was not a wide studio release, so was not part of the tally, but it sounds like it managed to be transphobic and racist at the same time, because the world is a magical place filled with terrible people who are bad at jokes. Take a gander at this line from GLAAD’s summary: “In the same scene, Bo is wearing a large wig styled as an afro, and says that she is now a “black person,” making a ridiculous parallel between her spouse’s transition and her own assertion that she’s changed her racial identity.”

Other independent studios not included in the tally but discussed in the report include A24, founded in 2012, which produced Moonlight. Gravitas Ventures’s 2016 film All We Had told the story of a mother and daughter who settle in a small town and befriend Pam, a transgender waitress played by a transgender actress. Magnolia Pictures brought us the highly acclaimed Korean lesbian thriller The Handmaiden. Open Road’s Mother’s Day had a subplot with Cameron Esposito and Sarah Chalke playing a lesbian couple with a baby. I watched it on an airplane and honestly didn’t hate it, so there’s that. Strand Releasing, which generally focuses on LGBTQ-inclusive and foreign films, included Summertime, a 1970s-set period romance drama about two women falling in love amid the feminist movement that looks real good. Wolfe Video, which has been entirely dedicated to LGBTQ films from the jump, broke intersectional ground with Margarita with a Straw, the story of a bisexual Indian woman with cerebral palsy.

Also excluded from the tally but discussed in the report were two movies from Sony’s arthouse wing, Sony Pictures Classics. The independent Wall Street drama Equity features a lesbian lawyer who “does have some dubious moments” but “is also the closest the film has to a moral center.” The Meddler has a lesbian couple looking to get married who are “not a major part of the overall story” but “are included as a regular part of the world.”

Ultimately, the last 15 or so years have born witness to a gradual shift in big studio movies from “trying to appeal to lots of different types of people” to “aggressively mainstream.” It’s not just LGBTQ people who aren’t seeing their stories told, it’s also women, people of color, Muggles and others who lack superpowers, automatic weapons and/or spaceships. The 20 films with the highest domestic grosses of 2016 are mostly animated (Zootopia, Finding Dory) or action/sci-fi/fantasy franchises (Captain America: Civil War, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice). These are big-budget films with guaranteed audiences, international appeal, and easy merchandising tie-ins. We’ve somehow gotten to the point where when Bridesmaids came out and did well, the entire world freaked out as if female-fronted films had just been invented that very same year when in fact they used to be quite prevalent and profitable. There have been a few recent successes that have hopefully reminded studios that CGI-free movies fronted by women and/or people of color can still make it to the Top 30 domestic grossers, like Hidden Figures, Bad Moms and Get Out.

On the upside, we now have access to more independent lesbian and queer films than ever before, if you know where to look and can manage to avoid the really bad ones. (There are a lot of really bad ones.) Many of these films never obtain a wide theatrical release, but are eventually available on Netflix, Wolfe or other VOD platforms. Our revised list of the 100 Best Lesbian Movies Of All Time includes 16 movies released in 2015 or 2016, including Suicide Kale, Carol, Grandma and The First Girl I Loved. It’s not just that we need “lesbian films,” though, we also need to see ourselves exist within the universes created by mainstream film, too.

Although GLAAD is determined to continue pushing major studios for diversity and inclusion and promises to up the stakes for 2018, I fear that abundant positive representation could remain out of reach for a long time. But surely, I mean SURELY we could at least hope for studio films to stop actively defaming and misrepresenting the few LGBTQ characters it does introduce? Perhaps butch lesbians, femme gay men and trans women could stop being punchlines!!!! Maybe the few movies about LGBTQ people that do get wide releases could not be about AIDS, murder or suicide! A girl can dream, or else, I guess, watch Ghostbusters blooper reels on YouTube. FOREVER.

Our Lives By the Numbers: How Data Is Used to Track LGBT Social Progress

Header by Rory Midhani
Feature image via shutterstock

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In my very first industrial engineering class during undergrad, we were given an overview on “problem solving 101.” We used manufacturing-specific case studies, but the broader takeaway was this: you cannot make improvements to a system without knowing its current state. If you fail to establish a baseline, any other actions you take will essentially be wasted effort — because when all is said and done, how will you know whether you’ve made things better or worse? The first step to problem solving is to gain a clear understanding of the issue, and to lay it out in such a way that progress, improvements and setbacks can be tracked. Obviously this isn’t possible (or practical) to follow in every situation, but I do think this approach provides a solid framework for system improvements in a variety of contexts — including social justice and LGBT-relevant causes.

One example that comes to mind is the GLAAD’s Network Responsibility Index, an annual review of LGBT representation on TV. Reports were shared both with the general public and in direct conversation with the networks, pushing them year over year to increase the numbers of LGBT characters and stories on screen. Following a decade of tremendous progress, GLAAD issued its final NRI in 2015, determining that the report’s primary quality metric (“are LGBT people being pictured on TV”) was being met. GLAAD continues to track diversity and quality of depictions in its Where We Are on TV report.

In contrast, we have GLAAD’s annual review of LGBT representation in major Hollywood films, the GLAAD Studio Responsibility Index. When I covered the inaugural report in 2013, there were only a handful of movies with queer female characters. Results were similarly dismal in 2014, 2015, and 2016, and even a cursory glance at the data makes one thing very clear: the top seven major motion picture studios are neither providing sufficient LGBT representation, nor are they trending in the right direction. This doesn’t mean that the report is a failure! On the contrary, it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: shining a light on the problem. GLAAD’s report is an immensely valuable tool, and continued tracking will help advocates hold the studios accountable.

On a more sober note, LGBT activists are also doing research and using data to track real life discrimination and violence against members of our community. In the past week, two standout reports have been released: Unerased by Mic, and the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality.

Unerased: Counting Transgender Lives is a comprehensive database of transgender Americans who have been murdered since 2010. Using data collected by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs as a starting point, Mic assigned a team of five reporters to review news reports over the past seven years and conduct additional reporting to find out more about each victim and identify patterns that could help combat the problem. Reports Meredith Talusan,

From 2010 to 2016, at least 111 transgender and gender-nonconforming Americans were murdered because of their gender identity, 75% of them black trans women and gender-nonconforming femmes, who identify as neither male nor female but present as feminine. No group under the LGBTQ umbrella faces more violence than transgender people, who accounted for 67% of the hate-related homicides against queer people in 2015, according to the NCAVP.

But it’s difficult to know the full scale of the problem. When a transgender person is killed, each step in the process of accounting for their death risks erasing that person’s gender identity. … [Although there has been better data in recent years], what’s less clear is if the number of violent incidents is actually increasing along with the rate of reports about them. Without a log of historical data, it’ s hard to know how today’s anti-trans violence compares to even a decade ago.

While that particular challenge makes it difficult to rely on this data for baseline incident rate (ex: “more trans people were killed this year versus a previous year”), it is a fully appropriate source for assessing other patterns in anti-trans violence. This dataset overwhelmingly confirms an intersectional effect due to race, for example. Awful as it is to watch this database of tragedies grow, the fact is, anti-trans violence will continue to be carried out whether we are watching or not. Collecting data on the extent and nature of the problem is one way to fight back.

On the same day Unerased was announced by Mic, the National Center for Transgender Equality also released their report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey. With 27,715 respondents, it is the largest survey ever conducted among trans people in the United States. The survey was offered online in 2015 in both English and Spanish, and captured data from adults (18+) in all 50 states, Washington D.C., American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and U.S. military bases overseas. During the creation of the survey, many questions were adapted from pre-existing federal surveys, meaning that even beyond the benefit provided by the study’s huge sample size, the data is uniquely valuable for making direct comparisons between survey respondents and the general U.S. population.

The report is a few hundred pages long and includes thousands of data points, but some of the findings highlighted during the release event were:

• 46% of survey respondents had been verbally harassed in the past year because they were transgender, and 9% had been physically attacked. Among undocumented trans immigrants, the number experiencing physical attack rose to 24%.
• In the past year, 23% of respondents faced housing discrimination or instability, with 12% actually experiencing homelessness. Almost a third of all respondents had experienced homelessness in their lifetime. Among undocumented trans immigrants, almost half had experienced homelessness.
• Respondents had unemployment rates three times as high as the general U.S. population, and were twice as likely to be living in poverty. Among trans POC, the poverty rate was three times higher than the general U.S. population, and among disabled trans people, almost half were living in poverty.
• 40% of respondents had attempted suicide in their lifetime — a rate nine times higher than that of the general U.S. population. In the month preceding the survey, 39% of respondents reported experiencing serious psychological distress, based on the Kessler 6 Psychological Distress Scale.
• 1.4% of survey respondents were living with HIV (a rate five times higher than the U.S. population), but among Black trans women, the rate was 19%.

Said NCTE Executive Director Mara Keisling, “The survey’s a good reminder that there’s still a lot of work to be done. While there are so many good things to look at, so much progress being made, there are still tragedies and challenges happening every single day for trans people around the country. The policy stakes couldn’t be higher. We’ve always tried to be an extremely assertive policy advocacy organization, and there’s data in here that shows us some of the things we need to get into deeper and faster and better. We don’t have all the information yet about what the policy frontier looks like in the coming months, but we do know we have a tool now that shows lots of things that we need to be working on. This will help with that advocacy.”

What useful data sets have you come across in your activism?

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Notes From A Queer Engineer is a recurring column with an expected periodicity of 14 days. The subject matter may not be explicitly queer, but the industrial engineer writing it sure is. This is a peek at the notes she’s been doodling in the margins.

GLAAD Report: 2016 Was A Year Of Representation But Also, Mostly, Murder For Lesbians On TV

GLAAD’s announcement that 2015’s Network Responsibility Index would be its last was surprising and surprisingly encouraging. As Riese noted when she reported it on it last September, LGBTQ representation on TV had evolved to the point that quality was becoming more important than quantity. “We are there,” Riese said. “We are in the picture.” And of course she was right. Riese and I both keep spreadsheets in our head (and a literal one on Google Drive) detailing every single lesbian, bisexual, and trans woman in TVs history; we could see that what GLAAD president Sarah Ellis was telling us was true: “LGBT representation has increased to the point that we can be found in the programming of nearly every major network.” Behind the scenes, we even decided that it was okay to stop trying to cover everything and to focus only on what was good.

Then Lexa happened. But not just Lexa. Zora from The Shannara Chronicles. Carla from Code Black. Julie Mao from The Expanse. Ash from Janet King. Kira from The Magicians. Denise from The Walking Dead. Nora and Mary Louise from The Vampire Diaries. Mimi and Camilla from Empire. Cara Thomas from Marcella. Pamela Clayborne from Saints & Sinners. Felicity, Bridey, Mayfair, Root, Poussey, Bea, Sara Harvey, Julia, Helen. 25 lesbian and bisexual characters have died on TV since GLAAD retired its Network Responsibility Index a year ago, bringing the grand total of queer women’s deaths on TV to 166. (For now. Our list gets an update almost every other week.)

Today, GLAAD released its other annual TV report, the Where We Are on TV report, and while there are some encouraging things to talk about, statistically, GLAAD is also feeling the frustration.

While much improvement has been made and TV remains incredibly far ahead of film in terms of LGBTQ representation, it must be made clear that television – and broadcast series more specifically – failed queer women this year as character after character was killed. This is especially disappointing as this very report just last year called on broadcast content creators to do better by lesbian and bisexual women after superfluous deaths on Chicago Fire and Supernatural. This continues a decades-long trend of killing LGBTQ characters – often solely to further a straight, cisgender character’s plotline – which sends a dangerous message to audiences. It is important that creators do not reinvigorate harmful tropes, which exploit an already marginalized community.

The year between this year’s Where We Are On TV report and last year’s has been, without question, the most frustrating year ever for queer women who love television. Yes, there have been years where we had hardly any TV representation at all, but the trend since 2006 had been consistently encouraging. Every year for the last ten years, we have seen more queer women on TV and we have seen better portrayals of queer women on TV. I think one of the reasons Lexa’s death caused so much outrage is that she seemed like the ultimate symbol of queer women having arrived. She hadn’t come onto The 100 as a Queer Character; her relationship with Clarke evolved naturally, the way it would between any straight characters. She was complicated and layered and beloved. Her death, and the landslide of lesbian/bi deaths that came after it, were crushing because they shook the hope out of us.

And it was more than just a feeling. One of the bleakest things about this year’s Where We Are On TV report is the acknowledgement that lesbian representation on broadcast TV dropped 16% since last year and lesbians on cable are down 2%. On cable! This is the first year since The L Word began that lesbian representation has gone down on cable TV. While bisexual women are getting a small boost in visibility, it’s often coming at the cost of damaging cliches. (Looking straight at you,Gotham!) And women, in general, are still trailing behind men on TV. We only make up 44% of regular characters, but we make up 51% of the population.

But GLAAD’s Where We Are on TV report is a shot of optimism in two ways.

1) The statistics as a whole are promising.

+ 43 of 853 series regulars on broadcast TV are LGBTQ, the highest percentage (4.8%) ever. Plus 28 recurring characters. When you juxtapose this stat with the one about lesbian representation, you can see that this increase of LGBTQ characters is because of gay men.

+ There are 142 LGBTQ characters on primetime cable TV.

+ Streaming platforms boast 65 LGBTQ characters (the highest percentage compared to straight characters of any way to watch TV).

+ There are 12 trans women on TV, and 16 trans people total, which is double the number of trans characters from last year. (Though, of course, the most prominent and critically acclaimed trans woman — Maura from Transparent — is played by a cis man.

+ The number of bisexual women on TV is up on broadcast and streaming TV.

+ Black series regulars are at an all-time high (but Black women only make up 38% of those characters).

+ Racial diversity, in general, is on the rise. 36% of broadcast TV characters are people of color.

2) This is the first time GLAAD has ever specifically mentioned the Bury Your Gays trope in their Where We Are On TV report, and they gave it both a prominent place and used strong language to call on TV creators to cut it out. That GLAAD took this step is a direct result of the activism that sprang out of Lexa’s death of The 100. Not only did fans raise a significant amount of money for The Trevor Project and start their own convention, they forced mainstream media to pay attention to Bury Your Gays for the first time in history. Riese and I gave at least a dozen interviews to big, well-respected mainstream magazines and newspapers about Lexa’s death and where it fits into queer TV history. Variety wrote about, Entertainment Weekly wrote about it, The Hollywood Reporter wrote about it. Y’all, The Washington Post and The New York Times wrote about it. That matters.

It also matters that GLAAD called it out specifically and prominently in this year’s Where We Are on TV. GLAAD has been releasing this study for 11 years and by providing cold, hard stats they’ve forced networks and showrunners to pay attention and to change things for the better. It has not been a good year for queer women on TV, and GLAAD knows it, and now so does everyone else.

GLAAD’s 2015 Network Responsibility Index Is Its Last, ‘Cause Counting The Gays Isn’t The Point Anymore

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
– William Bruce Cameron, Sociologist, 1963

This year’s “Network Responsibility Index,” released yesterday, will be GLAAD’s last, says GLAAD President Sarah Kate Ellis in a Variety column. The organization will instead be focusing more on their annual “Where We are On TV” report, which should come out this month and will provide statistics on overall diversity and describe what LGBTQs can expect in the 2015-2016 TV season. There’s a few reasons why the NRI feels less useful these days: the plethora of programs to evaluate, changing methods of consuming television and an overall shift in the cultural climate. So, basically, GLAAD is changing its focus from evaluating the past to preparing us for the future.

I mean, the only channel GLAAD evaluated this year that was entirely lacking in LGBTQ impressions was The History Channel. So.

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As a data nerd with a spreadsheet imprinted on my brain listing every LGBT female character to ever appear on an American TV show, I’ll obviously mourn the death of this report. But Ellis is right that the focus has shifted from quantity of representation to quality. This year is definitely the first where every network (except The History Channel) at least did something, although it’s been swinging that way for a while. We are there. We are in the picture. But it’s often a very white, very male, very middle-class picture. It’s also pretty deplorable that although the trope of “Bury Your Gays” has managed to fade overall, lesbian and bisexual female characters of color remain particularly prone to sudden death, serving to desensitize viewers to imagery that we really should be more sensitive to these days. I’ve long felt that what the Network Index missed was a penalty for each gay person you kill off.

The method of evaluating network-by-network has been useful for holding networks accountable, but it’s becoming somewhat meaningless for viewers who only watch one channel: Hulu. The networks GLAAD evaluates in depth — broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, The CW) and the largest cable networks (ABC Family, FX, MTV, TNT, ABC, TBS, USA, TLC, A&E, HBO, Showtime) — barely provide a comprehensive picture of what’s out there, with so much LGBTQ content showing up on channels like PBS, Starz, BBC America, E! and SyFy; as well as streaming services like Hulu, Amazon Prime and Netflix. I honestly forget every week that Scandal is on ABC, and I’m a person who started subscribing to the USA Today at the age of eight so I could keep up with the Nielsen Ratings. (They came out every Wednesday in the “Life” section, which I always thought was a weird name, because it wasn’t ever about life. It was about fiction. But fiction has a life.)

We’re getting to a certain quantity of representation where the quality standards can be higher — but the challenge that kind of analysis presents is an interesting one. At what point are there enough LGBTQ characters that no single instance of misrepresentation is significant enough to be condemned? I’d say when it comes to white cisgender gay men, we’re there, we’re at that point, we can afford a Cyrus Beane. But for other sub-groups of the LGBTQ umbrella, it’s hard to say. Within the LGB female community, the battle rages on regarding whether it’s lesbians or bisexuals who are the most poorly represented in the media. Even the most qualitatively poorly represented group in the media — transgender women — already have at least a few viewers who are done critiquing the quality of representation, as evidenced by a lengthy email we received from a transgender reader following our Pretty Little Liars finale recap (which gave a balanced analysis of the reveal, in my opinion), in which the reader insisted “trans people can be literally anything in society that people who aren’t trans can be. This includes the bad things. This includes being villains… you can’t tell me that A shouldn’t do evil things just because she’s trans.” The emailer suggested we abandon “the groupthink BS that so many of us actual trans people are against,” even though our recap, which many actual trans people agreed with, was created in consultation with our Trans Editor, Mey.

Why do we care so much about the quality of our representation? Why are so many outraged by what went down on Pretty Little Liars? Why are we so pissed about the ending of Orphan Black? Why are so many viewers scared that Amy’s gonna fall for a guy this season on Faking It? Why is representation so crucial for LGBTQ people specifically? Well, unlike many other minority groups, most queers are unlikely to have another family member with the same affiliation, which means media can stand in for real-life community. In the 2000 book Alternate Channels: The Uncensored Story of Gay and Lesbian Images on Radio and Television, Steven Capsuto writes that “in America, broadcasting wields a power once reserved for religion: the power to tell people what is real.”

I truly believe in story, I think the stories we see and the ones we choose to engage with are one of life’s most vital elements, it’s right up there with food and shelter. This has always been true. And even sports, in a way, are a kind of story for people who invest in that particular narrative. You are always following something, some story, all of us, every day. So yes these stories matter. “The contributions of the mass media are likely to be especially powerful in cultivating images of groups and phenomena about which there is little first-hand opportunity for learning,” writes Larry Gross in the 1991 paper Out of the Mainstream: Sexual Minorities and the Mass Media. Gross summons the term “symbolic annihilation,” first used by George Gerbner in 1972 “to describe the absences of representation, or underrepresentation, of some group of people in the media (often based on their race, sex, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, etc.) understood in the social sciences to be a means of maintaining social inequality.”

Now the focus has shifted to misrepresentation and underrepresentation. Outside of ABC Family, we rarely see a lesbian or bisexual female character at the forefront of any particular cast (which is part of why Faking It is so precious to us), especially not on broadcast television. We don’t have our Jamal on Empire, Mitchell and Cameron on Modern Family or our Cyrus on Scandal. Also, when it comes to lesbian representation: why must so many lesbian characters sleep with men? Will we ever see a diversity of gender presentation amongst female queer TV characters, or just a bunch of thin femmes? WHY SO MANY WHITE PEOPLE?

But mostly these days it’s not the simple existence of queer characters that we’re fighting for, it’s for screen time for those characters and their romances. It’s so tiring, this back-and-forth we play with the people who tell the loudest stories. This is what we want to look like! Stop making us look like [other thing]! Straight white men save so much time not worrying about that shit.

So, which fictions did we tell this year, and who told them? I’m not gonna go through the whole report with you, I’ll just pick out the most interesting parts.

Like: a thing to know is that a lot of these numerical ratings can be totally thrown because of one or two shows. Showtime dominated in the mid ’00s with Queer as Folk and The L Word, then retreated, surged back again for The Real L Word, and is now, like many networks, spreading their queer eggs in multiple baskets to get back on top. Networks with gay judges on reality shows or queer hosts of news specials, like Anderson Cooper and Robin Roberts, get huge boosts that may or may not represent any qualitative measure of representation. In the capacity of judge or host, sexual orientation is often muted or aggressively desexualized, existing outside the context of romantic or sexual narratives or relationships.

Like: this year, Empire alone enabled Fox to boast “the second most racially diverse representations on broadcast.” (PLUS HAVE YOU HEARD THAT TIANA IS GONNA BE A SERIES REGULAR THIS SEASON?!!! WE ARE SO EXCITED FOR THIS.) Over at ABC, Shonda Rhimes is responsible for most racial diversity amongst the network’s LGBTQ characters. “Collectively, there is probably no single person who oversaw more LGBT-inclusive hours of television than creator Shonda Rhimes,” wrote GLAAD. The CW scored best for racial diversity amongst broadcast networks with 38% of its representations being people of color.

But, another weakness in the GLAAD methodology is revealed in the case of The CW, who got an artificial boost in overall representation from The Flash, who had a gay police captain, David Singh, appear in almost every episode — but rarely played more than a background role in the action. The CW also killed a queer woman in Arrow, a gay vampire in The Originals and a gay warlock on The Vampire Diaries, but they’ve also got a queer Latina character on Jane The Virgin and a bisexual lead on The 100. 

Fox scored the first-ever “Excellent” rating for a broadcast network, mostly ’cause of Empire, So You Think You Can Dance and Glee, the latter of which dealt with its exceptional low ratings going into the final season by becoming the gayest fucking thing any of us have ever seen. I’m sure that GLAAD is relieved to be done writing the same paragraph about Bones every year, some variation of “forensic artist Angela is bisexual, but nobody talks about it.”

NBC got a shout-out for the most trans-inclusive programming, “thanks to shows like American Odyssey,” which I have never heard of.  NBC cancelled two lesbian-inclusive shows: Marry Me, which featured a black lesbian, and One Big Happy, the great lesbian hope that turned out to be kinda lousy. Ultimately, NBC scored well ’cause it has so many telethons and award shows, which are often hosted by or feature performance by gays.

Meanwhile, ABC Family is KILLING IT. 74% of their original programming hours include LGBT characters, but they excel beyond even that impressive figure: 79% of those impressions were lesbian characters, 49% were people of color, and they’ve even got a transgender male character played by a transgender actor. How has ABC Family accomplished this? Well, in general, when one seeks LGBTQ representation on a show, one inserts a gay man. It’s just the default. But at ABC Family, the default is, instead, a gay woman. Somebody at that network decided to tell a different story and they went all in. Dude, a few years ago Molly Ringwald played somebody’s lesbian Mom on vaguely anti-abortion cheesefest The Secret Life of the American Teenager! They somehow got a bisexual girl and a lesbian into Chasing Life. There’s a deaf lesbian, Natalie, on Switched at Birth. And Pretty Little Liars has given us lesbians, bisexuals and queer women in droves. (Perhaps this is what happens when you have a lesbian showrunner!) PLL alone has given us more queer female characters than appeared on television for the entire decade of the ’80s: Emily, Maya, Paige, Samara, Alison, Sara Harvey, Jenna, Shanna, Sydney, Talia and, of course, Caleb.

[But why do Hanna, Spencer and Aria get multi-season arcs for their romantic partnerships but not Emily? You could combine every moment of screen time garnered by Paige, Maya, Samara, Talia and Sara Harvey and it’d still be only half of what Caleb or Toby or Ezra have racked up individually.]

The ABC Family summary seems to contain GLAAD’s first statement about Pretty Little Liars‘ “Big A Reveal,” noting that although most of ABC Family’s inclusive hours are from PLL, PLL made a major misstep this year that would’ve affected its grade if it had occurred within the report’s research period. “The show made some attempt to separate [Charlotte’s] transgender identity from her mental illness,” GLAAD writes, “but ultimately she was the latest in a long series of transgender women portrayed as psychotic killers in mainstream media.” GLAAD hopes that “when the series returns next year, it makes an effort to further humanize Charlotte beyond being yet another psychotic trans stereotype.”

HBO did well as always but also said goodbye to two of its queer-inclusive shows, True Blood and Looking. Really it’s about time HBO started featuring more female lesbian and bisexual characters (I miss Kima on The Wire, y’all), as most of its most legendary accomplishments in LGBTQ representation come from exquisitely crafted male characters in critically beloved shows like Six Feet Under, Girls, True Blood, Game of Thrones, Big Love, Entourage, Oz and The Sopranos. (Many of which honored gay male characters while pushing lady-queers to the fringe.) MTV got a round of applause for Faking It, noting that “perhaps the most unique storyline… was that of Amy’s stepsister Lauren, who audiences learned was born intersex.” Showtime does “good” too, ’cause of Shameless and Penny Dreadful, as well as The Real L Word: Mississippi and Masters of Sex.

The “Where We Are On TV” report, which I await with baited breath, will contain more revelatory numbers about diversity respective to gender, race and ability status. It’ll also give us specific numbers on how many gay men, lesbians, bisexual men, bisexual women, transgender men, transgender women and otherwise-identified humans are on TV. The takeaway from this report is, really, that this methodology no longer tells the comprehensive picture about LGBT representation that we need in this bold new era, although it’s definitely served its awesome purpose. Everybody has gotten a lot better: ABC from 15% inclusive hours in 2006 to 32%, CBS from 9% to 27%, The CW from 12% to 45%, Fox from 6% to 45% and NBC from 7% to 28%. We’re also seeing so many more queer characters on cable and streaming networks that GLAAD’s report doesn’t analyze in depth, or at all, like shows on TV Land, Starz and Comedy Central.

Everybody involved in reporting on LGBT representation in the media has witnessed a dramatic change we’re still figuring out how best to cover. But GLAAD has done a great deal to encourage networks to question their representation, and they will continue to do so, even without what I imagine is an incredibly time-consuming report to compile. That spreadsheet in my head is getting harder and harder to keep track of, too… and that’s a good thing.

“I Take Bullets:” Lesbian Badass Mary Kristene Chapa’s Vibrant Life After 2012 Shooting

A few months ago, Mary Kristene Chapa could only grip and release a ball 35 times. Today, she’s up to 60. These are the victories that give her hope as she continues her recovery after a June 2012 shooting that killed her girlfriend Mollie Olgin and left Kristene with paralysis.

Kristene’s recovery from the shooting has been grueling and expensive for her family. She suffers from PTSD and still struggles to do basic tasks like tying her shoes with her one fully-functioning hand. But when she speaks, her voice conveys a passion for life and hope for the future.

“Every day is a constant struggle with many obstacles, but there’s always a different path to follow,” Kristene said. “There’s always a way to go around the challenge.”

Kristene just turned 21, and the event that occurred when she was 18 shapes her daily life. Because of the permanent damage to her left arm and near total loss of peripheral vision, she’s unable to drive or participate in the sports she used to love. She also has remaining bullet fragments in her brain. She still travels multiple times a week with her mom, Grace Chapa, to different physical therapies. The Saebo brace has been effective in improving her arm strength and coordination, but Texas’s limited Medicaid program didn’t pay for the therapy. The family continues to struggle with doctors and Medicaid to get Kristene’s physical and neurological therapies covered, and they’ve paid for procedures and equipment out of pocket.

The Chapa family has set up an ongoing page on GoFundMe to encourage friends, family and supporters to donate to help offset the costs of Kristene’s medical bills. They include extensive travel since she can’t get the care she needs in Corpus Christi, the city nearest to her home in Sinton, Texas. The family just learned that Medicaid won’t cover Kristene’s therapy with the Saebo brace. In over a year, the page has raised about $16,000 of the estimated $40,000 the family needs to ensure Kristene’s full recovery.

“[This process] has taken me away from the rest of our family, but we’re doing what we have to do,” said Grace Chapa, Kristene’s mother. “I tell her, ‘you have to do it, and you have to go on.’ There are better things for her in the future.”

Kristene actively pursues those better things. At the time of the attack, she was a brand new high school graduate preparing to start college. Three years later, she is once again registering for classes at a local college so she can begin getting her basic coursework out of the way this fall. Her longterm goal is to become a counselor or occupational therapist assistant, so she can help others who are facing challenges like hers.

“I take bullets,” reads her Skype status.

“It’s sort of a motto for me,” she explains. She has already survived the worst, and she’s fully prepared to make the best out of life.

She’s working with a co-writer, Chivas Sandage, to write a book about her life before and after the shooting titled Salt Wind Redemption: Love & Murder In South Texas. Kristene and Chivas first came into contact after the shooting, when Chivas wrote a blog post about the tragedy. In November 2013, Kristene approached Chivas and asked for help with a book. They are seeking an agent to find the book a publishing home, Chivas says. The narrative weaves together Kristene’s own memories and ideas to form the beating pulse of the text.

“Her right thumb is writing for her, is writing for the book,” Chivas said. “She texts these long passages because that’s the way she’s most comfortable writing — with a cell phone. That tells you a little bit about how tedious writing is for her, how it is impossible to use two hands on a keyboard.”

Though a violent tragedy is the crux of the narrative, Chivas and Kristene agree there is much more to the story.

“At the heart of this book is a romantic comedy, that’s Kristene and Mollie and their incredibly vital relationship,” Chivas said. “They were madly in love, and they were hilarious, they were constantly cracking jokes. They are just two playful, fun loving young women. Even just now, I spoke about them in present tense.”

Mollie remains a presence in Kristene’s life. Throughout the year — on Mollie’s birthday, the anniversary of when they got together, and the anniversary of Mollie’s death — Kristene goes to place flowers at the park where the shooting took place. They were only together a few months, but they saw a long future ahead of them in a relationship full of love and big plans. Today, Kristene is focusing on her recovery, the book, and regaining as much of her life as she can. She’s dated since the shooting, but “I haven’t found a keeper,” she explains.

“It’s very hard because I have high expectations, I know what I deserve, and I won’t settle for less,” she said. “And they also have to understand that I’m not an average girl, I’m a responsibility. It’s hard because I’m different.”

Kristene hadn’t come out to her family or told them about Mollie before the shooting — which was hard for Mollie, who was out to her family. Grace said it was an adjustment for their family to know they had a lesbian daughter, but the family and the community has nothing but love for Kristene.

“It’s a first for us, but of course we accept it,” Grace said. “It can be hard, but I don’t see anybody staring at us saying that ‘you have a gay daughter,’ not here in town or anywhere. A lot of people come up to her and hug her and tell her she’s an inspiration, and everyone’s praying for her. We need all the prayers.”

Police arrested David Strickland on June 20^th, 2014, almost exactly two years after the murder took place. He faces a capital murder charge, carrying a sentence of either life in prison without parole or the death penalty. Kristene and her family believe the attack, which took place at Violet Andrews Park in Portland, Texas, was a hate crime motivated by the fact that she and Mollie were a same-sex couple. The assailant robbed and sexually assaulted both women before shooting them, according to the arrest affidavit.

Texas hate crimes statutes do include sexual orientation, but as of now the case is not being charged as a hate crime. Assistant District Attorney Sam Smith couldn’t say whether they would present evidence at trial framing the murder as a hate-motivated crime and stated that it wouldn’t necessarily serve the case to do so.

“Any time you can tell the jury why something happened, it’s beneficial, but in Texas I do not have to prove why someone committed a crime. I just have to prove that they intended to and did in fact commit a crime,” Smith said. “We charged it as a capital murder because we feel we have the evidence to secure a conviction under that statute. A capital murder sentence carries the most serious possible punishment.”

Kristene said she believes a life sentence without parole would be a step toward providing justice for her and Mollie. Today, Kristene’s main feeling toward David Strickland is pity.

“It makes me feel very sad for him that he would want to kill both of us just because we were a couple,” she said. “I feel very sorry for him. To want to kill someone you have to hate them so much. It’s pathetic.”

The alleged shooter and his family maintain his innocence. Before a November hearing when about 20 supporters of Kristene gathered in front of the courthouse urging a speedy trial, David’s father Larry Strickland said the public and media had decided his son’s guilt without giving him the benefit of due process.

“He’s been convicted in the news media without evidence,” Larry Strickland told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. “The truth will come out.”

According to the Caller-Times report, bullet casings found at the crime scene matched a pistol in Strickland’s possession. His lawyers say Kristene did not identify the defendant in a photo lineup.

The LGBT community has rallied around Kristene, supporting her locally through supportive events like the one in November and nationally by supporting her fundraising effort and helping share her story. On May 10, she attended the GLAAD awards with Grace and Chivas and and received a standing ovation after sharing her story and giving heartfelt thanks in a speech.

“I know it’s a tragedy, but it also brings a lot of people together and shows all the great people out there that are willing to help and that have good hearts,” she said on stage. “This tragedy terrifies the LGBT community, people in my community. It’s hard to be gay in South Texas, but I believe that God loves everybody, no matter if you’re gay or straight.”

You can see the whole speech here:

Kristene’s goal, she says, is to get a message of hope into the world. The GLAAD speech, the book and her daily effort to thrive despite her injuries are all ways to get her fierce optimism out there. She was featured on MSNBC in December. Kristene also hopes to connect with other trauma and shooting victims. She hopes to go on a book tour once the work is complete to have a chance to speak with as many people as possible.

“I want to help people that are having hard times and let them know that they’re not the only one, they can share the bond with me and know that giving up isn’t an option,” she said. “I know it’s hard. I am a strong person, but I have my breaking points too. You have to think about all the positive times and keep working to achieve your goals.”

We Went to the GLAAD Awards and Talked to Laverne Cox, Andreja Pejić, Janet Mock, Dascha Polanco, Lynda Carter & More!

The GLAAD Media Awards happened on Saturday night at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City, New York, and because I live in the Big Apple, I attended the event with Autostraddle fashion/style writer Aja, who was a champion for many reasons, not the least of which was: she told me how to get the vodka stains out of my suede shoes after the red carpet interviews were over and the complimentary Ketel One White Cosmopolitans began to flow freely. (I couldn’t get any of the bartenders to tell me the secret recipe for a Ketel One White Cosmopolitan, but my taste buds revealed that it was just vodka and lime juice and maybe triple sec.)

As I’m sure you know, Autostraddle won GLAAD’s Outstanding Blog Award this year, at the awards ceremony in Los Angeles. I didn’t expect any special treatment, though, and especially not after I arrived and came face-to-face with journalists from every mainstream pop culture website and magazine on the planet and the big names in commercial gay websites too. When the GLAAD bosses led us upstairs to the red carpet, Aja and I walked-walked-walked past The Hollywood Reporter and Variety and Entertainment Tonight and Deadline and Out magazine and Logo with their big fancy video cameras and microphones and sound check guys, and found our spot near the end of the line (with our phones and camera and back-up AAA battery-powered tape recorder).

The way red carpets work is you stand patiently and wait for celebrities to make their way down the line, and then you say where you’re from and either the celebrity or their handler decides if they want to talk to you. Usually, the further down the line you are, the more exhausted everyone is from answering the same questions over and over under the crazy hot lights that make their skin look so good for Getty in their too-tall, toe-crunching shoes. And so I thought, before we got started, that maybe we’d get two or three good quotes and some pictures of blurry famous people as they whipped past us.

Well, I was in for a surprise! Not only did the GLAAD folks who were working the red carpet go out of their way to bring us the celebrities they knew our readers would want to hear from, but every person I said “Autostraddle” to stopped in their tracks to come over and talk to us. Lots of media folks sought us out all by themselves. They hugged me, high fived me, shook my hand, and told me repeatedly how happy they are that this website exists and continues to do what it does. More people than I can count told me to say thank you to Riese, over and over, all night long.

I’m telling you this part of the story for two reasons:

1) Our senior editorial team spends a lot of time talking about Autostraddle’s place in the world as more and more giant mainstream sites and magazines with millions of dollars at their disposal jump on the bandwagon of writing about LGBTQ people. It’s something Riese talked about recently in her Business of Art Fix. I’ve been a professional lesbian writer for seven years, and I have been around the whole entire block when it comes to creating queer content, and I can say with the certainty of experience that there is no place on the internet like Autostraddle, and it was so affirming to see famous queer folks knowing our name and thanking our writers and editors for their commitment to creating a safe, ethical space with a larger purpose.

2) I was as keenly aware on the red carpet as I am right now that the reason Autostraddle continues to exist and the reason I get to fulfil my soul’s purpose by working here is because of you. You, you, you, you. Your financial and emotional support continue to make this possible. At the after party — which Aja and I never really knew if we were invited to, but went to anyway because everyone was under the spell of Ketel One White Cosmopolitans at that point — I danced between Michael Sam and Dascha Polanco (who plays Daya on Orange Is the New Black), and you were dancing with me.

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The Red Carpet

The red carpet was actually blue, just FYI. And these are the people I talked to.

GLAAD President Sarah Kate Ellis

GLAAD Board of Directors co-chair Jennifer Finney Boylan: Autostraddle! Let me give you a sound bite no one has gotten all night long! A year and a half ago, the GLAAD Board decided to hire this woman right here, Sarah Kate Ellis, and we have seen a complete transformation in our movement. She is a tornado! And she’s so nice, too.

Sarah Kate Ellis: Aww, thank you, Jenn.

Autostraddle: That’s my question, actually. It seems like the last year and a half has seen an astronomical rise of representation for queer people, on television and in mainstream news media, especially. Do you feel it from where you’re sitting?

Sarah Kate Ellis: Oh, I definitely feel it, but, you know, I’m always looking forward. Yes, this last year and a half has been amazing, but now we’re here and where are the gaps forming? Where is the visibility just starting up? Where is the visibility building? And how are we, as a community, supporting those efforts?

Autostraddle: Where do you see the gaps right now?

Sarah Kate Ellis: We have got to stay on top of the challenges facing the trans community right now. Yes, we’re seeing a rise in representation, but the trans community is struggling with unemployment, struggling with the violence against them, with high suicide rates. We want to find that balance of celebrating our progress and being realistic about the challenges we face.

Aja: If you were going to give one piece of advice to companies that are trying to be as diverse as possible with the people they hire, what would it be?

Sarah Kate Ellis: I always say, go where diversity is. We always choose from the same pot, but there are unlimited resources out there. Go to historically black colleges and recruit. I always hear people saying they can’t find people of color, and I’m like, “Um, there are colleges specifically for people of color. Come on. Call them. Ask them. Get a relationship going.” Instead of expecting people to come to you, go find them where they are.

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Laverne Cox

Autostraddle: You just won an Emmy!

Laverne Cox: We did, we won an Emmy for Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word, and my Emmy is coming in the mail.

Autostraddle: Emmys come in the mail?

Laverne Cox: That’s what they tell me!

Autostraddle: It’s been a huge year for you. The Emmy, the Screen Actors Guild Award, Time magazine cover, Variety magazine cover.

Laverne Cox: I feel so blessed. I am just trusting in God’s plan. I am so proud of the seven young people who were brave enough to let us tell their stories on TV, and some of them are here tonight, so I’m excited to reconnect with them. I feel very grateful to work with our entire cast at Orange Is the New Black. There’s so much talent there. Our bench, as Jenji Kohan says, is so deep. It’s a really exciting time.

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Transgender model Andreja Pejić

Autostraddle: Congratulations on being the first openly transgender model to be profiled by Vogue in this year’s May issue.

Andreja Pejić: Thank you!

Autostraddle: How is the world of modeling changing for trans people?

Andreja Pejić: I think we’re moving away from the shock value and this sort of gimmicky casting that prevailed when I first started modeling. And that’s important. Why should transgender women — why should any women — be typecast? This is an industry based on your look, not your gender or your sexuality, and it’s good to see the shift toward that truth.

Autostraddle: How do you feel like we’re doing with trans visibility on TV?

Andreja Pejić: We’ve made a few strides. Over the past year, we have had Transparent and Laverne’s character on Orange Is the New Black. But like in modeling, we need to move away from these stereotypes and start seeing trans stories that aren’t necessarily focused on being trans.

Autostraddle: What’s next for you?

Andreja Pejić: I want to keep modeling for as long as I can. I have some projects on the way that I’m really excited about. And I’m just open to all the possibilities that will be coming my way.

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Janet Mock

Janet Mock didn’t do the red carpet, but Aja chatted with her for a few minutes and we just want you to know how gorgeous she looked.

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Andro supermodel, actor, humanitarian Rain Dove

Autostraddle: Things are changing so fast, Rain Dove, and you are a huge part of that. How have you seen the world of modeling shift since you became involved in it?

Rain Dove: Thank you very much. I don’t know if it’s 15 seconds of fame, or if it’s going to last a lifetime, but I think what we’re seeing now is people wanting to just live their lives and not make gender and sexuality a socio-political issue. We have water issues. We have education issues. I don’t want to be a part of a selfie nation, I want to be a part of a selfless nation, and it has been so rewarding to have an entire community come together behind me and say, “Let’s fucking do this together.”

Autostraddle: Your career is about social change as much as it is about modeling. What impact are you striving for?

Rain Dove: I want to show kids and their parents that you can have food, water, shelter and validation, and still be exactly who you are. I want to be that success story. 70 percent of my time right now is spent doing advocacy and humanitarian work. I just want to encourage people to get back out in their communities and get their hands dirty. If people can afford to buy the clothes I’m wearing when I’m modeling, they can afford to make a difference.

Autostraddle: When we’re talking about advocacy and resources, the LGBT community has been focusing very heavily on marriage equality these last few years, but there’s a different kind of advocacy on the way. What does that look like?

Rain Dove: I think it’s time to start tackling the fact that so many LGBTQ people don’t even have their basic needs met, don’t have food or shelter. Homelessness, unemployment, access to GMO-free food, not allowing corporations to privatize water. I think that’s where we’re heading. I’m excited to see money and resources moving in that direction.

Autostraddle: What’s next for your career?

Rain Dove: I have a new modeling campaign coming out, and I am so excited about it. I can’t talk about it yet, but it’s going to be great. Hey, can I hug you and it’s like I’m hugging Autostraddle.

Autostraddle: Yes, of course! 

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ESPN writer/editor, trans advocate, and GLAAD Board of Directors member Christina Kahrl

Autostraddle: What’s the next step to making equality a reality in the sports world?

Christina Kahrl: We need to see someone come out and play on a major sports team. I think it’s ludicrous that Michael Sam didn’t make a team last year. I’m a Raiders fan. They’re terrible. If you’re telling me they couldn’t use Michael Sam, I don’t believe you.

The NFL has talked the talk, but they haven’t walked the walk. Major League Baseball hired Billy Beane as their Ambassador for Inclusion, and that’s a great first step. I’m looking forward to the point in time when we’re going to see a Major League player come out. The NHL, however, provides a great corporate example. They were one of the first major sports to step out and say, we are going to be entirely supportive of any player who comes out, yet no players have come out. So we need to start having a healthier conversation about what it means to come out as a gay person who is also a prolific athlete.

Autostraddle: Why do you think it’s so hard in major team sports for people to come out?

Christina Kahrl: I think, for one thing, players really don’t want to be a distraction. They want to fit in with the culture of the team, which is a value that has been instilled in them since little league or youth soccer. But when we talk to players who are gay, who didn’t come out during their careers, we find out how destructive it was for them, personally, to choose that team acceptance over personal truth. And I think a lot of that message is going to have to come from the media.

Autostraddle: I thought both ESPN and NFL Network’s coverage of Michael Sam was exceptional. Rich Eisen was about to come out of his skin when Sam hadn’t been drafted near the final round. But what’s the next step?

Christina Kahrl: I agree. I think ESPN and NFL Network did a pretty excellent job of setting the expectation, of saying, “This is how these stories deserve to be covered.” On a national level, that’s great. Think about, though, even a really progressive place like New York, if a Giants or Jets player comes out, how do you think the New York Post or New York Daily News will cover that? Even if you assume the best intentions, one of the problems with allyship is that people don’t always know how to do it right.

Autostraddle: That’s a really interesting conversation, too, when we start talking about trans athletes.

Christina Kahrl: Exactly. I talk to a lot of journalists who work for places that aren’t really national media, and they’ll call me up when they are covering trans athletes and ask for help. They want to be allies, they really do, but they need some guidance. They’re not even sure about pronouns sometimes.

Autostraddle: Do you think Bruce Jenner is going to change the way we talk about trans athletes? Will we be able to discuss things more intelligently and openly now?

Christina Kahrl: That’s the challenge. Jenner’s coming out opens up a huge conversation, and the expectation now is that the media is going to do this right. There’s no excuse now. Even if you came out of journalism school ten years ago and never took an ethics class or a class about covering LGBT people, it’s your responsibility to get back on top of that. You have to catch up.

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Daytime TV and web series star Louise Sorel

Autostraddle: Oh my gosh, I didn’t know you would be here. Forgive me, Louise, I’m starstruck. I have been a fan of yours since I was four years old. I grew up on Days of Our Lives. I remember when you played Rayna Kapec on Star Trek! It is an honor to meet you!

Louise Sorel: Oh goodness, thank you! Don’t say that about being four, though; it makes me sound like I’m 100 years old.

Autostraddle: No, not at all. You look amazing. You got your start in film in the mid ’60s and transitioned to TV in the early ’80s. How have you seen the landscape change for lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people in your career?

Louise Sorel: Oh, it’s amazing what’s been going on. I come from the old school, when television was very limited, but you look at web series like what Crystal Chappell is doing now, and how those promote internet platforms like Netflix with Orange Is the New Black or Amazon with Transparent. It’s wonderful. If the bloody Conservatives would get their heads on straight — oh, I guess I shouldn’t talk politics.

Autostraddle: No, you should!

Louise Sorel: Well, it’s just that people should be allowed to be who they are, and they should be allowed to love each other, and marry each other, and express themselves fully, exactly as they are. I’ve had many arguments with homophbic people who seem to think gay people are a recent development, and I’m always like, “Excuse me, have you heard of the Greeks? The Romans? Let’s talk about Michaelangelo. Let’s talk about the great artists of our time.”

Autostraddle: That’s amazing. Do you think daytime television started pushing the boundaries first, in terms of representation for gay people?

Louise Sorel: I do. I also think it produced some great allies that have gone on to do wonderful things for the community. Crystal Chappell, for example. We worked together on Days and then sort of lost touch when I moved to New York, but then I saw her doing all of these gay and lesbian web series, and I’ve been so impressed.

Autostraddle: Is there going to be another season of Beacon Hill? You were great in that!

Louise Sorel: Thank you! I hope there will be. Ask Crystal. She’s coming down the red carpet right behind me.

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Actor/writer/editor/ web series mastermind Crystal Chappell

Autostraddle: I just talked to Louise Sorel. She wants me to ask you about another season of Beacon Hill.

Crystal Chappell: Haha! I’m going to work on it!

Autostraddle: You’re working on Venice now, right? Season five?

Crystal Chappell: I am writing season five right now, actually! I’m working on a film and after that, I’m diving into Venice, and then I have to rewrite The Grove, and then we’ll talk about another season of Beacon Hill.

Autostraddle: Crystal Chappell, do you even sleep?

Crystal Chappell: I did last night, but that’s rare! I just really enjoy challenging myself.

Autostraddle: I’m thinking about your story on Guiding Light, with Natalia and Olivia, and it coming right in the wake of Prop. 8 back in 2008. To me, that story signified an enormous shift in media portrayals of lesbians on television.

Crystal Chappell: Things have opened up, they really have. I was with the fans wanting more, more, more from the Otalia storyline. Until I did The Guiding Light, I don’t think I really understood this desperate need lesbian viewers had to be represented on screen. I have always had gay friends, I’ve been surrounded by gay people my entire life, and then I began to interact with these fans whose only connection to other lesbians was on television. Walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, I guess, is what The Guiding Light gave me. It really opened my eyes. It’s been interesting to see this slow, steady progress of cable and broadcast TV since then. It’s happening, and we can see it, but I do still think there’s always the worry from networks about how people are going to receive these stories.

Autostraddle: Right, so, it does feel like the real progress, the real way forward, is through online platforms.

Crystal Chappell: I absolutely think so. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, those have been so important in opening these doors. And obviously I have a soft spot for web series.

Autostraddle: What has been the most rewarding thing for you about doing all of these queer-themed web series?

Crystal Chappell: When the Otalia storyline made me aware of the need for these kinds of stories, I wanted to start a dialogue with the LGBT community, and this community welcomed me with beautiful open arms. This community has surrounded me with really good people. I could have never imagined how warmly and openly we would be received.

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Fusion Network news host Alicia Menendez

Autostraddle: Tell me a little bit about why you’re here tonight.

Alicia Menendez: I’m here representing Fusion for an interview we did with the amazing trans activist Geena Rocero and her work with Gender Proud and gender marker legislation. It’s a really powerful story, and I think there’s no better messenger than Geena to talk about how the world has to begin its transition toward trans equality. Gender marker legislation is one way we can start taking down institutionalized discrimination.

Autostraddle: You guys at Fusion have been ahead of the curve in terms of going after trans stories to tell.

Alicia Menendez: The main reason we’re able to tell trans stories well is because my good friend Janet Mock served me my ass, right? She gave me a real lesson on what it’s like to be asked the kinds of questions the trans community gets asked all the time. We need to be honest about how invasive these questions are, and so I think I’ve been lucky to have these personal relationships and to work at a network that pushes us to tell the stories of our generation.

Autostraddle: How do you think social media has changed the way the news media talks about things like sexuality and gender and race?

Alicia Menendez: Right, social media has changed everything. There’s an army of people ready to call you out for racism and homophobia and transmisogyny. And I think when you’re working as a journalist, when someone calls you out — which has happened to me many times — you have to accept that with a spirit of generosity, and take it as an opportunity to learn.

Autostraddle: Do you see the other side of that as well, on social media, when you really get something right?

Alicia Menendez: The interview that Janet Mock and I did is now being used in colleges and universities to teach about intersectionality and identity, and I think that shows the power of the internet to really educate and inform.

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Orange Is the New Black actress Dascha Polanco

Autostraddle: We’re so psyched about the new season! What’s in store for Daya?

Dascha Polanco: Oh, you know, still super pregnant! It’s the longest pregnancy in the world, so let’s see what happens near the end!

Autostraddle: Are you still loving being on the show?

Dascha Polanco: Of course. It is the same organic foundation that Jenji and the writers have had since the beginning. It’s as diverse as it could be. New characters are coming in and stirring things up, which is exciting. Stories are being revisited. I really am proud of this season. I think people are going to enjoy this season even more than the first and the second.

Autostraddle: How do you feel like we’re doing, generally, with women of color on television? Orange Is the New Black, to me, still feels like the exception when it comes it diversity.

Dascha Polanco: I think we’re making progress, but women of color only make up maybe eight percent of people on TV, and America is a rainbow. It’s not 92 percent straight white people. And I want to see TV embrace and represent that, across the board. Orange Is the New Black is a model for how we can do it right.

Autostraddle: Thank you for taking the time to stop and talk to me down here at the end of the line at the end of the night.

Dascha Polanco: Of course, my love.

Autostraddle: I have some good news for you. I believe you can enjoy a Ketel One White Cosmopolitan at this bar just around this corner. 

Dascha Polanco: Oh, you know I’m going there.

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Wonder Woman, Lynda Carter

Autostraddle: I wrote down a hundred questions for you and now you’re standing here and I can’t remember them. Wonder Woman is the reason I’m alive, I think. Your show made me strong enough to make it until I could be myself when I was a little girl, getting bullied for being so different.

Lynda Carter: Wow. Thank you for telling me that.

Autostraddle: Honestly, the only thing I’m thinking right now is this pitch I have for you. A Wonder Woman/Xena crossover film starring you and Lucy Lawless.

Lynda Carter: [laughs and squeezes my arm and winks at me]

Autostraddle: What advice would you give queer kids getting bullied today?

Lynda Carter: You know who you are, and who you are is good and right. Don’t let anyone tell you what you cannot do. Don’t let anyone else shape who you’re going to be. You are going to make it!

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These are some people Aja and I peeped on the red carpet, but didn’t have time to talk to.

 

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The GLAAD Awards

Like Riese said when she recapped this year’s Los Angeles GLAAD Awards, the whole thing had an air of celebration and triumph, and I was especially impressed with the trans representation. We did not have dinner tickets, so after the red carpet, Aja and I made do with two Ketel One White Cosmopolitans and a Starburst. And then we laughed and cried and clapped through the awards.

 

Laverne Cox introduced Sarah Kate Ellis, whose speech had everyone cheering.

 

Kristene Chapa, the south Texan teenager who was shot along with her girlfriend three years ago, gave a moving speech that had the audience in tears, and received a standing ovation.

Out country music star Ty Herndon covered Miley Cyrus’ The Climb and made everyone cry.

And Kelly Rippa made everyone go nuts when she accepted the GLAAD Award for Excellence in Media.

Afterward, everyone hit up the after party and I chatted with a whole bunch of celebrities (off the record, because famous people want to just dance sometimes too, I guess) and the common consensus is that the world is changing and everyone is excited and Autostraddle is a huge part of that change and none of what we do would be possible without you. You are the GLAAD Award Winners of our Hearts.

GLAAD Studio Responsibility Index Reveals Queer Women Basically Don’t Exist In Movies

With the number of queer female TV characters increasing at an astronomical rate these days, it’s easy to forget how terrible things are on the big screen. Yesterday GLAAD released its third annual Studio Responsibility Index, which tracks LGBT representation in films made by Hollywood’s major studios, and whooo boy, it is bleak. Let’s discuss what GLAAD’s report reveals, look at some pretty charts I made, and talk about why movies still matter.

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The Numbers

If you’re into it, you should really read GLAAD’s full report. These things are always comprehensive, statistical masterworks. I read the whole thing three times, though, and I’m going to shake it down to the bottom line so you can see how grim it is. Here we go:

+ Major Hollywood studios released 114 films in 2014.

+ Of those 114 films, 20 included queer characters.

+ Of the 20 films that included queer characters, only seven included women.

+ Of the 20 that films included queer characters, ZERO included transgender characters.

That looks like this:

Actually, though, it gets worse. Of the 20 movies that included queer characters, only seven included queer characters who were on-screen longer than it takes to get a cup of coffee at Starbucks — and the majority of those meager seven films tripped over tired cliches and damaging stereotypes.

Inspired by the Bechdel Test, GLAAD created The Vito Russo Test (named after the lauded film critic/GLAAD co-founder). To pass the Vito Russo Test, the following criteria must be true:

+ The film contains a character that is identifiably lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender.

+ That character must not be solely or predominantly defined by their sexual orientation or gender identity. I.E. they are made up of the same sort of unique character traits commonly used to differentiate straight characters from one another.

+ The LGBT character must be tied into the plot in such a way that their removal would have a significant effect. Meaning they are not there to simply provide colorful commentary, paint urban authenticity, or (perhaps most commonly) set up a punchline. The character should “matter.”

Here’s how 2014’s 20 LGBT movies fared in the quality arena.

Yep, that’s right. Out of 314 major Hollywood film releases, one single film — Melissa McCarthy’s Tammy — passed the Vito Russo test with queer female characters.

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How Tumblr Does It

The 2015 Studio Responsibility Index numbers are depressing, for sure, but so is the depth GLAAD had to dig to even find some of the gay characters in the report.

+ In Mas Negro Que La Noche, the character called Pilar is probably a lesbian “based on several longing looks” she gives another woman and because someone remarks on her “very ‘lesbian’ tattoo.”

+ In The Lego Movie, the one-second appearance of Dumbledore counts as gay, right? Because Dumbledore is gay. Right?

+ A minor character in How to Train Your Dragon 2 says, “This is why I never married. That, and one other reason.” So we should infer that “the other reason” is that he’s gay.

+ In Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel, some of Gustave’s prison friends call him a “real straight fellow,” to which he responds: “Well I’ve never been accused of that before, but I appreciate the sentiment.”

+ In Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, “Twice, Octavius is also shown to be quite taken with the appearance of the knight Sir Lancelot, remarking about how handsome he is and his ‘huge sword and hypnotic blue eyes.'”

I’m not clowning on GLAAD. This report is important stuff. It’s just that there were so few legitimately queer characters on the big screen for any length of time in 2014, GLAAD was forced to sift right to the bottom of the barrel to squeeze any sign of gayness out of some the characters they evaluated. It’s like if you tilt your head just right and stare long enough at a Tumblr GIF set, you can come away thinking nearly anyone is gay.

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Why It Matters

GLAAD opens its Studio Responsibility Index by reminding everyone that what happens on the Hollywood big screen still matters quite a lot. Sure, queer women can save a buck and watch hundreds of queer characters on their TVs from the comfort of their homes. And honestly, that’s what many of us do. Our representation on TV is incomparably better than what’s at the theater. No contest. However, Americans still spend billions of dollars every year consuming major blockbusters, and what they see on the big screen effects their perception of gay people. GLAAD has proven that fact over and over. Plus, Hollywood blockbusters are one of the United States’ main exports, and the way that most other cultures are exposed to our own. Damaging tropes and stereotypes reverberate around the globe when they are unleashed in movies produced by major studios.

Sadly, Hollywood continues to drag its feet and trail decades behind the pace of the rest of American entertainment. In February, Variety reported that even though female-fronted films like The Hunger Games, Maleficent, Divergent and Tammy had huge box office success last year, women “comprised a paltry 12% of protagonists in the top-grossing films of 2014. Over the past decade, the situation has gotten worse, not better. The latest figures represent a drop of three percentage points from 2013 and a fall of four percentage points from 2002.”

NPR’s Linda Holmes did some fascinating number crunching two summers ago about the movie theaters within ten miles of her home and concluded that on any given Friday:

Of those 617 showings, 561 of them — 90 percent — are stories about men or groups of men, where women play supporting roles or fill out ensembles primarily focused on men … Of the seven movies about women or balanced groups, only one — the Israeli film Fill The Void — is directed by a woman, Rama Burshtein. That’s also the only one that isn’t about a well-off white American … If I were limited to multiplexes, as people are in many parts of the country, the numbers would be worse. In many places, the number [of movies with female leads] would be zero.

If Hollywood still isn’t willing to put up the money to produce movies with female protagonists — despite the repeated, billion dollar successes of those films, and the fact that women comprise 50 percent of the population — how much less willing are they going to be to champion films with significant queer characters?

For now, Hollywood blockbusters are a straight white man’s game, and there’s no end to that paradigm in sight.

We Won A Thing: Autostraddle Triumphs At GLAAD Awards, As Does Kerry Washington

feature image by Charley Gallay/Getty Images for GLAAD

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The 26th Annual GLAAD Media Awards in Los Angeles were triumphant on multiple levels.

Ellen and Portia actually walked by us on the red/blue carpet and for the first and hopefully last time in my life, I slipped into a terrifying moment of Paparazzi Mode. I have no regrets.

I had nice chats with the star and the showrunner of Faking It about what to expect next season…

We got the scoop on New Girls On The Block, a new reality series about a group of trans women friends…

Host Tig Notaro made me laugh my ass off. 

I’ve seen Tig now at BlogHer and at GLAAD, and at times she was too dry for both audiences (obviously much moreso at BlogHer), but always exactly as dry as I like my comedy. Like parched. It’s marvelous.

The winners for Outstanding Comedy Series (Transparent) and Outstanding Drama Series (How To Get Away With Murder) were both shows created by females, which’s a minor miracle in an industry that remains so extremely male-dominated.

My A-Camper (and Autostraddle contributor) Cleo gave a speech about Glee and then Alex Newell sang a song and it was amazing.

I even managed to forget that I am dying a slow death from fevercoldmonster for a solid half-hour…

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… AND AUTOSTRADDLE FINALLY WON THE GLAAD AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING BLOG! That’s why the women in this pictures are so happy, it’s because they just found out that Autostraddle won Outstanding Blog:

Our award wasn’t actually announced out loud — along with most smaller awards, like Best Comic Book, the winners of Outstanding Blog were flashed on one of many large television screens for us to see but nothing happened onstage. However, if it had been announced out loud, I bet this girl and this guy from Girls would’ve wanted to give it to us:

Portia’s like, “my favorite thing about Autostraddle? How can I pick just one?”

Look at these winners:

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Almost as exciting as us winning an award was Kerry Washington’s speech when she accepted the Vanguard Award, presented to an ally in the entertainment community who has made a significant difference in promoting equal rights for LGBT people. Here’s Ellen introducing her…

…and here’s Kerry Washington BLOWING YOUR MIND:

It was a very star-studded evening! Actual homogay ladies in attendance included Samira Wiley, Hannah Hart, Antigone Rising, Jessica Clark and Nats Getty.

I have to say — and I realize that as a WINNER, my account of the evening may be biased, but it felt very triumphant, the whole thing, like a fancy parade. It also felt slightly less male-dominated than usual, and the trans female representation was outstanding — guests included Laura Jane Grace, the entire cast of New Girls on the Block as well as Transparent folks including Alexandra Billings and Our Lady J.

I smiled so hard when Cleo was onstage that my face nearly froze that way. I clapped so loud when Kerry Washington talked about the importance of not just LGBTQ stories but diverse LGBTQ stories that I nearly slapped my hand off my own arm. My girlfriend got to talk to Daniel Franzese, the actor who portrayed the first queer character she really fell for. It was an evening infused with joy; one which acknowledged how far we’ve got to go and how far we’ve come in equal measure. The aggressive fundraising that happens at these events is often pretty easy to scoff at, but I also recognize how real the need to raise funds is, so it doesn’t bother me. They’ve got a lot of people to pay and programs to run — and hiring really good people requires providing them salaries competitive with the for-profit sector work they’re leaving behind!

Like I said, the winners of smaller awards like ours don’t get up and give speeches. But if I had given a speech, I would’ve thanked my team first and foremost, and also all of you. I would’ve thanked all of you who’ve given money, bought merchandise, joined A+, come to camp, shopped through our affiliate links, donated a campership, left a comment, hosted a meet-up, attended a meet-up, shared a post of ours on social media, sent us a delightful e-mail, told your friends about us, wrote about us in your publications or on your blogs, given us an interview, ran into us at Whole Foods, taken a reader survey or ever tried to explain what “Autostraddle” means to anyone, ever. I would’ve thanked my incredible team: firstly, my Executive Editor and Best Friend Laneia and my Co-Founder, Tiny Dancer Alex Vega. My Managing Editor Intern Rachel, sister wife for life. My Senior Editors Yvonne Marquez and Heather Hogan. My founding team: Tess, Crystal (whose praise I sing from the highest hills), Stef, Carly, Robin and Natalie. Gabby and The QPOC Speakeasy. Every single Autostraddle Subject Editor, Contributing Editor, writer, developer, designer, tech person, photographer, camp staffer, intern, illustrator, merch girl, comic artist and all the other humans who make this place run. These humans work so hard, and so many of them have worked or do work so hard for so long for free, too. All the souls who make A-Camp so fantastic, and the guests like Deanne Smith, Hannah Hart and Julie Goldman, who have leant A-Camp their starpower and used their powers for good. I would’ve thanked my dearest mother and my little brother. My girlfriend, Abby, for making me happier than I ever knew possible, and Quickbooks, for basically the same reason. Also my Dad, even though he’s dead so I’ll have to tell him about it later. Also Tinkerbell. The most important thing to take away from all of this is that it’s basically all because of Tinkerbell.

It’s going to be an exciting and transformative year. I can feel it!

And here is the complete list of winners from Saturday night’s award ceremony:

Vanguard Award: Kerry Washington

Stephen F. Kolzak Award: Roland Emmerich

Outstanding Film – Wide Release: The Imitation Game (The Weinstein Company)

Outstanding Drama Series: How to Get Away with Murder (ABC)

Outstanding Comedy Series: Transparent (Amazon Instant Video)

Outstanding Individual Episode (in a series without a regular LGBT character): “Identity Crisis” Drop Dead Diva (Lifetime)

Outstanding TV Movie or Mini-Series: The Normal Heart (HBO)

Outstanding Music Artist: Against Me!, Transgender Dysphoria Blues (Xtra Mile Recordings)

Outstanding Daily Drama: Days of Our Lives (NBC)

Outstanding Comic Book : Rat Queens, written by Kurtis J. Wiebe (Image Comics)

Outstanding Digital Journalism Article: “31 Days of PrEP” [series] (Advocate.com)

Outstanding Blog: Autostraddle (autostraddle.com)

Autostraddle is Nominated for GLAAD’s Outstanding Blog of the Year — Again!

Feature image via Shutterstock

Readers, friends, A-campers, lend us your ears! We have done it again! Thanks to your continued financial and emotional support — and the endless energy, enthusiasm and wits of our writers and editors — Autostraddle dot com has been nominated for GLAAD’s Outstanding Blog of the Year for the third year in a row! The third year in a row, you say? Yes, kittens, the third year in a row! We were nominated in 2013 and 2014, too!

In the wise words of our Lady of Feminist Motivation Leslie Knope, “Do it! Fierce! Power!”

We’re so psyched and super honored to be nominated along with some other really rad queer blogs:

+ The Art of Transliness

+ Box Turtle Bulletin

+ Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters

+ My Fabulous Disease

Y’all are the ones who keep making this happen for us, you know? You guys! YOU!

And guess what other amazing news? Lumberjanes was nominated for Best Comic Book! You go, Noelle Stevenson and Grace Ellis! Four for you, Noelle Stevenson and Grace Ellis! Champagne to the max!

Below is a full list of GLAAD Award nominees, and here’s a cool thing: Nine of the ten shows nominated for Outstanding Drama feature queer women! That’s an all-time high!

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OUTSTANDING FILM – WIDE RELEASE
The Imitation Game
Love is Strange
Pride
The Skeleton Twins
Tammy

OUTSTANDING FILM – LIMITED RELEASE
Dear White People
Life Partners
Lilting
The Way He Looks
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow

OUTSTANDING DRAMA SERIES
Degrassi
The Fosters
Game of Thrones
Grey’s Anatomy
How to Get Away with Murder
Last Tango in Halifax
Masters of Sex
Orphan Black
Pretty Little Liars
Shameless

OUTSTANDING COMEDY SERIES
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Faking It
Glee
Looking
Modern Family
Orange Is the New Black
Please Like Me
Sirens
Transparent
Vicious

OUTSTANDING INDIVIDUAL EPISODE (in a series without a regular LGBT character)
“Deep Breath” Doctor Who
“Down a Tree” Good Luck Charlie
“Identity Crisis” Drop Dead Diva
“Let’s Have a Baby” Playing House
“No Lack of Void” Elementary

OUTSTANDING TV MOVIE OR MINI-SERIES
The Normal Heart

OUTSTANDING DOCUMENTARY
The Case Against 8
L Word Mississippi: Hate the Sin
Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word
To Russia with Love
True Trans with Laura Jane Grace

OUTSTANDING REALITY PROGRAM
Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce
B.O.R.N. to Style
Make or Break: The Linda Perry Project
R&B Divas: Atlanta
Survivor: San Juan del Sur

OUTSTANDING DAILY DRAMA
Days of Our Lives
General Hospital

OUTSTANDING MUSIC ARTIST
Against Me!, Transgender Dysphoria Blues
Angel Haze, Dirty Gold
Mary Gauthier, Trouble & Love
Mary Lambert, Heart on My Sleeve
Sam Smith, In the Lonely Hour

OUTSTANDING COMIC BOOK
Hawkeye, written by Matt Fraction
Lumberjanes, written by Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis
Memetic, written by James Tynion IV
Rat Queens, written by Kurtis J. Wiebe
Saga, written by Brian K. Vaughan

OUTSTANDING TALK SHOW EPISODE
“Issues Facing the Transgender Community” Katie
“Laverne Cox discusses ‘The T Word'” The View
“Michael Sam” Oprah Prime
“Pepe Julian Onziema” Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
“Robin Roberts” The Ellen DeGeneres Show

OUTSTANDING TV JOURNALISM – NEWSMAGAZINE
“Coming Out” Nick News With Linda Ellerbee (Nickelodeon)
“Gay and Muslim in America” America Tonight (Al Jazeera America)
“Gay Rodeo” This is Life with Lisa Ling (CNN)
“Infield & Out: Baseball for All” Morning Joe (MSNBC)
“Transgender Society” Ronan Farrow Daily (MSNBC)

OUTSTANDING TV JOURNALISM SEGMENT
“Change is Coming to the South” Melissa Harris-Perry (MSNBC)
“Fired for Being Gay?” MSNBC Live (MSNBC)
“License to Discriminate?” Anderson Cooper 360 (CNN)
“A Model with a Mission” Alicia Menendez Tonight (Fusion)
“Transgender Tipping Point?” This Week (ABC)

OUTSTANDING NEWSPAPER ARTICLE
“A Christian Family, a Gay Son and a Wichita Father’s Change of Heart” by Roy Wenzl (The Wichita Eagle)
“For Transgender Service Members, Honesty Can End Career” by Ernesto Londoño (The Washington Post)
“An Identity to Call Their Own” [series] by Michael A. Fuoco & Mackenzie Carpenter (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
“Longtime Utah LGBT Advocates Recount Brutal History” by Erin Alberty (Salt Lake City Tribune)
“When They Stopped Waiting” by Shaun McKinnon (The Arizona Republic)

OUTSTANDING MAGAZINE ARTICLE
“Do Ask, Do Tell” by S.L. Price (Sports Illustrated)
“The Forsaken” by Alex Morris (Rolling Stone)
“Inside the Iron Closet: What It’s Like to Be Gay in Putin’s Russia” by Jeff Sharlet (GQ)
“Sex Without Fear” by Tim Murphy (New York)
“The Transgender Tipping Point” by Katy Steinmetz (Time)

OUTSTANDING MAGAZINE OVERALL COVERAGE
Essence
Glamour
Out
Sports Illustrated
Time

OUTSTANDING DIGITAL JOURNALISM ARTICLE
“31 Days of PrEP” [series] (Advocate.com)
“Black Parents, Gay Sons and Redefining Masculinity” by Edward Wyckoff Williams (TheRoot.com)
“Conner Mertens came out to his college football team. Now he comes out publicly.” by Cyd Zeigler (Outsports.com)
“A Nun’s Secret Ministry Brings Hope to the Transgender Community” by Nathan Schneider (America.Aljazeera.com)
“A Year Later, ‘Nothing’ Has Changed Since Transgender Woman Islan Nettles was Killed” by Tony Merevick (Buzzfeed.com)

OUTSTANDING DIGITAL JOURNALISM – MULTIMEDIA
“Left Behind: LGBT Homeless Youth Struggle to Survive on the Streets” by Miranda Leitsinger (NBCNews.com)
“Why did the U.S. Lock Up These Women with Men?” by Cristina Costantini, Jorge Rivas, Kristofer Ríos (Fusion.net)
“With Technology I Didn’t Have to Sell My Body” by Kerri Pang (MSNBC.com)
“Young and Gay: Jamaica’s Gully Queens” by Adri Murguia, Christo Geoghegan (News.Vice.com)
“Young and Gay in Putin’s Russia” by Milene Larsson (News.Vice.com)

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Thank you, every one of you, for continuing to allow us to do what we love by supporting us with A+ memberships, sharing our stuff on social media, and encouraging us and sharpening us with your heartpower and brainpower every day. We love you back, to infinity!

Where The (Queer) Girls Are Gonna Be On Your TV This Year

GLAAD’s annual “Where We Are on TV” and “Network Responsibility Index” reports intend to serve as a barometer for progress in LGBTQ representation on American television, and this year’s reports, as usual, reflect incremental progress in some areas, regression in other areas, and an overall lack of queer women on our teevee screen. The Network Responsibility Index gives ratings to 15 major networks based on the 2013-2014 season, and Where We Are On TV analyzes diversity — gender, sexual orientation, race and ability status — across all scripted television shows, and looks at LGBTQ characters planned for the 2014-2015 season.

I’ve been reading and analyzing these reports for five years now — there’s usually quite a bit to talk about because the reports are so very quantitative and representation is so very qualitative. When last year’s report came out, we talked about how a lack of representation onscreen was likely related to a lack of representation behind the scenes, compared the U.S population of various races, sexual orientations and gender identity to their representation on screen and looked at the quality of that year’s LGBT female characters because quantity didn’t tell the whole (sad) story.

In 2012, Kate wrote about the lack of masculine LGBT women on TV in Why Do Queer Women On Television All Look The Same?. In 2011, the first year any network received an “Excellent Rating” — MTV and ABC Family both snagged one — we talked about the lack of queer people of color. In 2009, we did some supplemental math ourselves to note that only 28 LGBT female characters — some only one-episode guest stars — were cited by GLAAD, as opposed to 86 men.

This year, June Thomas at Slate.com argued that these particular GLAAD Reports are “pointless and outdated” and that “GLAAD’s conclusions are essentially meaningless in the current TV landscape,” citing online streaming and YouTube as major change agents, making it so “it’s just as easy, if not easier, for many viewers to watch shows that are no longer on the air.” She also requests her fellow LGBTs “commit to valuing quality over quantity—“counting the queers” is no way to achieve social justice.”

These are fair points — the numbers never tell a complete story. The system is inherently flawed, too. For example, The L Word was singlehandedly responsible for a surge in lesbian representation for five years, making overall numbers seem progressively high when the majority of Americans weren’t actually being exposed to any more queer women on TV than usual. Last year there was more parity with respect to the gender of queer characters than there is this year, but this year feels a whole lot better than last year for queer women and queer women of color.

Mainstays like Santana on Glee and Callie and Arizona on Grey’s Anatomy existed last year (and still do), but new shows weren’t exactly chomping at the bit to write lesbian storylines. This year we’re seeing a lot more LGBT women front and center. Broadcast networks will feature 32 regular LGBT characters this season, up from last year’s 26, and 33 recurring LGBT characters. Of those 65 characters, 18 are lesbians and 10 are bisexual females. On cable, 105 regular and recurring scripted characters are LGBT, which includes 26 lesbians and 21 bisexual females.

Do the math: that’s 44 lesbian characters and 31 bisexual females compared to 82 gay men and 12 bisexual men. Wild, right? The striking discrepancy between men and women for the ratio of lesbian/gay characters to bisexual characters could be its own GLAAD report, honestly, and it’s something I’ll talk about a little bit in my recap for tomorrow’s episode of Faking It.

Among 813 series regulars on 115 primetime scripted television series on five broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, The CW, Fox and NBC), 32 are LGBT, or 3.9% of the whole. Of these, only 43% were female and 57% were male, and 74% are white. Latino/a characters and black characters each represent 11% of the remainder and 5% are Asian/Pacific Islander. The forecast is slightly brighter on cable, where 64 regular LGBT characters will appear this season, up from 42 last year. Of these, 56% are cis females, 44% are cis males, and 1% is a transgender male. 66% are white, 11% are Latino/a, 10% are black, 8% are multi-racial and 5% are Asian/Pacific Islander.  Streaming networks, where we’re seeing some of the best representation of all time, were mentioned but not analyzed.

The hidden delight of the Where We Are On TV report is, however, that the networks have given GLAAD a shit-ton of information about upcoming characters and storylines! So for this year’s Report on the Report, we’re gonna give you a qualitative look at where you’ll find lady-loving-ladies on television this year.

Disclaimer — No human can possibly be intimately knowledgable about all these shows, but I’ve spent several days researching them the best I could and getting info from other team members about the shows they watch. It’s likely you know more than we do about some of these shows, so feel free to alert me in the comments about anything inaccurate and we’ll make the change!

READY? I DON’T THINK YOU’RE READY.

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Returning Regular Lesbian, Queer & Bisexual Female Characters

We didn’t lose too many LGBTQ female characters between last year and this year to shows ending or getting cancelled. True Blood was even included in the 2014-2015 analysis although it ended this past summer, so no points got docked for losing Pam and (the ghost of) Tara!

The major queer characters from last year are pretty much still around:

• Santana and Brittany on Glee (who might have a wedding proposal next season!)
• Emily and Paige on Pretty Little Liars
• Callie and Arizona on Grey’s Anatomy
• Delphine and Cosima on Orphan Black
• Bo and Lauren on Lost Girl
• Stef and Lela on The Fosters
• Gail and Holly on Rookie Blue
• Jack and Imogen on Degrassi: The Next Generation
• Caroline and Kate on Last Tango in Halifax 

The somewhat second-tier w/r/t the size of the role and/or pertinence of their queer identity remain as well: Doc Yewll and Lev on Defiance, Kalinda on The Good Wife, Diana on White Collar, Betty on Masters of Sex, Lena on Ray Donovan, Elaria Sand on Game of Thrones, Jenny on Two and a Half Men (groan), Ariana on The Bridge, Carolyn on Under the Dome and Tara on The Walking Dead. Reportedly, Nyssa on Arrow will have a big storyline this season.

Some newly-out queers and smaller roles round out the bunch: Haddie on Parenthood, Nenna and Rose on Crossbones, Margot on Hannibal, Patsy on Getting On, Lydia on Switched at Birth, Crickett on Heart of Dixie, Joanna and Alex on Witches of East End, and Dominion‘s Arika and Uriel. Lesbian recurring character Gina Mendez on The Following survived a stabbing at the end of Season Two, and there are rumors she’ll be a major character in Season Three… but there are also rumors that she may not return at all.

Then there are the ones whose interest in women hasn’t been mentioned in years but still technically count, like Josslyn on Mistresses, Angela on Bones, Pam on Archer and Patty on The Simpsons.  Oh right, and Connie on the animated series Brickleberry, voiced by Roger Black and described as “a lesbian female ranger who has a large body, immense strength, and a deep voice that is often mistaken for male.”  Her vagina makes growling noises when she’s excited and she’s obsessed with a straight female park ranger. Yay for representation!

Unfortunately, forget lesbian bed death, the real plague haunting queer women on television is plain ‘ol LESBIAN DEATH. Lots of queer female characters died this year. Shana, a queer women of color, was killed off on Pretty Little Liars. Leslie Shay was killed in the season premiere of Chicago Fire. Recurring character Reyna Flores was killed off on Matador last week. And although she appeared throughout the season in hallucinations, Tara died the true death in the True Blood premiere.

The Almighty Johnsons, which apparently featured a bisexual character named Michele, was canceled.

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Very Recently Debuted Shows With LGBTQ Female Characters

Faking It has a teenage high school girl who likes girls at the heart of its story. It’s been under fire for falling into the lesbian-sleeps-with-a-man trope after the Season One finale, and it seems like the writers want to keep her options open, but presently it seems that regardless of her identity, her dating-related storylines will be exclusively girl-on-girl. Faking It is the first show since South of Nowhere to have a teenage lesbian as one of two main characters.

Chasing Life, a charming and cheesy little drama that premiered this summer on ABC Family, introduced a subdued but resonant queer storyline for teenagers Brenna and Greer, which included a “label-free” teenage girl choosing a girlfriend (the openly lesbian Greer) over a boyfriend.

Also on ABC Family, Switched at Birth has really been stepping it up with its queer representation. In addition to casting lesbian and bisexual actresses like Sandra Bernhard and Meredith Baxter, the show currently features a deaf Latina teenage lesbian, Natalie, who has a girlfriend, Hillary. There’s also a lesbian book editor named Lydia Kaiser who played a small role in Season Three.

The Strain, on FX, just brought back FRANKIE aka Ruta Gedmintas as computer hacker Dutch Velders. GLAAD says that “FX will have ten lesbian, gay or bisexual characters, including Michael on Partners, Dutch on The Strain, and Abdul and Sammy on Tyrant.” So I guess that means that Dutch is a HOMO.

TNT’s The Last Sail has a lesbian lieutenant of color who told AfterEllen she appreciates that for her character, “being a lesbian and having a female partner at home was dealt with in such an un-sensationalized way.” Season Two starts in 2015.

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New or Returning Shows With New LGBTQ Female Characters

Backstrom (FOX) – Nicole Gravely (gay) – 2015
GLAAD says that “The Portland Police Bureau’s Special Crimes Unit on Backstrom will feature both a gay and a bisexual character, Nicole and Gregory,” and that’s good news because Nicole (Genevieve Angelson) is one of two lead characters. She plays second-in-command to the titular self-destructive and “irascible” Everett Backstrom (Rainn Wilson), a detective “tasked with not only keeping the unit together in the face of Backstrom’s behavior but ensuring that his unorthodox investigatory methods hold up in court.”

Last year, when the role was still being played by Mamie Gummer, Vulture described Nicole’s role as “…an openly gay police detective who is saddened over her breakup with her longtime partner.” But in January, AfterEllen reported that the show was being “re-tooled” from the Swedish novel series it was adapted from and that Nicole would no longer be a lesbian, but that she also wouldn’t be heterosexual, because who isn’t dying for ANOTHER “label-free” lady on television AM I RIGHT LADIES? However, GLAAD’s inclusion of Backstrom and description of Nicole as gay could suggest yet another re-tooling has taken place.

Survivor’s Remorse (Starz) – M-Chuck (lesbian) – October 2014
GLAAD lists Survivor’s Remorse’s M-Chuck as one of the “new out women… to be introduced in the upcoming season.” M-Chuck, who is African-American (like most of the show’s cast), is third from the top on the show’s webpage, and she is described as Cam’s “older sister, staunch defender and biggest fan.” The show “follows Cam Calloway, a basketball phenom in his early 20’s who is suddenly thrust into the limelight after signing a multi-million dollar contract with a professional basketball team in America.” M-Chuck is played by Erica Ash, who you might remember as the only straight female actress on Logo’s Big Gay Sketch Show! The sitcom, executive-produced by Lebron James, is only slated for six episodes thus far but is getting positive reviews. The San Francisco Gate remarks that Mary Charles / M-Chuck is “a woman on constant prowl for the ladies and isn’t afraid to show a little PDA with a girlfriend during church.” YESSSSSS.

Gotham (FOX) – Renee Montoya (lesbian) & Barbara Kean (bisexual) – Now Airing
As discussed, Renee Montoya is a Latina Lesbian detective on Gotham, and her bisexual ex Barbara Kean will appear later in the season. So far Renee’s screen time has been minimal.

Faking It (MTV) – Reagan (lesbian) – Now Airing
Faking It will be adding a love interest for Amy this season, and GLAAD reports she is a lesbian of color.

Jane the Virgin (The CW) – Luisa (lesbian) and Rose (bisexual) – October 2014
Jane the Virgin, a show that actually looks really good and funny despite everything the premise would lead you to believe, has two queer female characters: Rose, who is bisexual and in every episode this season, and Luisa, who is a lesbian and the doctor who accidentally gets Jane pregnant.

Scream (MTV) – Audra Jensen (bisexual) – 2015
The Scream films are being adapted for the small screen, and Jamie Travis of Faking It will be directing the pilot. Bex Taylor-Klaus will be playing a lead role as Audra Jensen, the “daughter of a Lutheran pastor” who is “described as an artsy loner who aspires to be a filmmaker.” You may remember Bex Taylor-Klaus from her role as a homeless masculine-of-center kid Bullet on The Killing. 

One Big Happy (NBC) – Lizzy (lesbian) – 2015
We’ve got a lesbian in the lead of this new NBC Comedy. “Gay and a bit type-A” Lizzy (Elisha Cuthbert) and her best friend “straight and more laid back” Luke decide to have a baby together — platonically — and then Luke meets a girl named Prudence and they get married and ta-da a non-traditional family is born! Our dearest Liz Feldman is writing the show, and Ellen DeGeneres is the Executive Producer. Fingers crossed this will be better than The New Normal, although seriously must we always stick babies in our lesbians?

Black Sails (Starz) – ??? – 2015
Black Sails will be introducing two new LGBT characters, but there’s no indication from GLAAD on if these characters will be men or women or neither. The show already has two queer characters, Max and Eleanor. Many fans hope Anne Bonny might turn out to be one of those “new” LGBT characters.

Red Band Society – Sarah Souders and Andrea Souders (lesbian)
Sarah and Andrea will play small roles as the moms of “mean girl” cheerleader Kara.

The Mindy Project – Dr. Jean Fishman (lesbian)
Niecy Nash will be playing a recurring role as “a take-no-prisoners type” who “also happens to be a lesbian” and will be Mindy’s “antagonist” at the office. I really love The Mindy Project so I am very excited about this.

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Where Are The Transgender Women?

Unique, who was holding it down for trans women of color on Glee, isn’t returning next year — which is actually fine, because the show did a terrible job with her character and storyline and I was sick of hearing them get praised for including her at all. GLAAD found zero transgender women on the shows it analyzed this year (and just one transgender boy — Cole, who plays a minor role on The Fosters).

After several consecutive years of minimal progress in transgender representation on broadcast networks, GLAAD decided that starting next year, “networks must feature significant transgender content in their original programming in order to receive a grade of “Excellent” in the NRI.”

However, Faking It just introduced an intersex character, which is obviously different from having a transgender character, but is within the trans* umbrella. There is a lot more going on for transgender characters on streaming television, however…

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Streaming Content With LGBTQ Female Characters

Orange is The New Black (Netflix)
Orange is the New Black remains an embarrassment of riches. We’ve got Piper Chapman, our bisexual lead, a queer transgender woman of color, Sophia Burset, and then a whole truckload of additional lesbian, bisexual or at-least-kinda-queer ladies like Alex Vause, Suzanne, Poussey, Big Boo, Nicky, Soso and Leanne.

Transparent (Amazon Prime)
This show is SO FUCKING GAAAAYYYYYYYYYYY y’all. We’ve got Maura, a lesbian transgender parent, at the epicenter. Then there’s Maura’s bisexual daughter, Sarah, Sarah’s lesbian activity partner, Tammy, and Tammy’s wife, Barb. Maura’s daughter, Ali, is possibly genderqueer (this hasn’t been articulated yet but seems to be the direction we’re going in), and her best friend, Sid, is bisexual. The show also has 25 transgender cast and crew members, including one prominent trans female character, Davina (Alexandra Billings), as well as three recurring characters, Kaya, Eleanor and Shay.

House of Cards (Netflix)
House of Cards is secretly kinda queer — the main dude is bisexual, but there’s also some girl-on-girl culture happening between two recurring characters, Rachel Posner and Lisa Williams, though it’s unclear how that will play out next year.

Alpha House (Amazon Prime)
I have no idea what this show is but apparently it features two female legislative assistants who are dating!

East Los High (Hulu Plus)
I’m actually really not sure how we didn’t know that this show existed until last week?? There’s a teenage Latina couple! YOU GUYS.