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

Header by Rory Midhani
Feature image via shutterstock

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.

So many queer ladies on TV last year!

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.

Via Mic.

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.”

Data on the impact of family support. Full report at www.transequality.org.

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

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

GLAAD’s “Where We Are On TV” Shows Best Place To Be On TV Is Behind The Camera

When compiling our Fall 2013 TV Guide, I was disappointed by the lack of LGBT females we can anticipate blowing up our screenspace this season, especially following an unforgettable summer chock-full of scissoring Sapphics, bisexual bombshells and butch bomb girls. GLAAD‘s recently released Where We Are On TV report, which looks at the diversity of shows announced for the 2013-2014 season, did little to abate this concern. It also raised a lot of questions for me about how representation is measured and the reason why progress has come more quickly for some groups than others.

See, “Where We Are On TV” devotes its in-depth research to LGBT representation, but it also briefly tallies racial and gender diversity, offering multiple avenues from which to analyze representation’s quantification. If gay men and gay women are equally represented on network television, why doesn’t it feel that way? Has scripted television done its job if the percentage of women or people of color matches said group’s share of the U.S. population? If many of the LGB characters on television rarely or never address their sexual orientation, are they still worthy of our celebration? Why has LGB representation improved so much while PoC and female representation has stagnated? Let’s discuss.

TV Representation vs. Population Statistics

Measuring inclusivity and evaluating representation isn’t easy or straightforward, and one popular technique is comparing the percentages of certain groups on TV to U.S population statistics. Let’s look at how some of these comparisons stack up:

+ 43% of series regulars on scripted primetime television are female, but 51% of the country is female.

+ 77% of broadcast series regular characters are white, but 72% of the U.S. population is white.

+ 5% of broadcast series regular characters are Hispanic or Latino, but 16.3% of Americans are of Hispanic or Latino origin.

+ 11% of broadcast series regular characters are black, compared to 12.6% of the population.

+ 1.8% of the national population is bisexual, comprising 51% of those who identify as LGB. However, only 10% of LGBT network characters and 21% of LGBT cable characters are bisexual.

+ .001% of the 796 broadcast series regulars are transgender, but .03% of the national population is transgender.

+ The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2011 Community Survey found 12% of U.S. citizens report living with an apparent disability, but GLAAD found that even when including all characters who would be covered by the American Disabilities Act, which includes people not accounted for in the Census numbers (like HIV-positive people), only 1% of primetime broadcast series regulars have a disability.

So how do we judge how much representation is “enough” representation? Obviously the numbers for Latino/a Americans are beyond unacceptable, but what about the others? It seems ridiculous to argue that there are plenty of Asian-American and Pacific Islander characters on television, but the percentage represented on television (6%) actually exceeds the percentage of the national population identifying in those groups (5%). Asian Pacific American Media Coalition co-chair Daniel Mayeda told GLAAD that despite those numbers, “we continue to advocate for television series in which we are the main star.” Fox got an “F” from the APAMC this year for its API inclusion efforts because it “failed to provide the data the APAMC has consistently requested and which the other networks have delivered for over a decade.” Fox didn’t even care enough to participate in the APAMC’s television report card. It’s about quality, not quantity.

Nor does it feel as if African-American representation is anywhere near an acceptable level, despite being in the general neighborhood of its relative population, likely because as ColorofChange Executive Director Rashad Robinson told GLAAD, despite those numbers, “the quality of those representations remain a serious cause for concern.” They cite Scandal and Suits‘ “complex, multi-dimensional Black characters” as real progress, but lament that “too often viewers are exposed to portrayals of Black people that are dehumanizing and inaccurate.” Quality. Not quantity.

Similarly, in 2012 Gallup found that 3.4% of the U.S. population identified as LGBT, which isn’t that far off from our visibility on television (although the 3.4% number represents only those who are out — I personally suspect that number will creep gradually towards 10% over the next few decades). For the 2013-2014 TV season, GLAAD found 26 LGBT-identified series regulars on broadcast networks out of 796 total series regulars — 3.3%, down from 4.4% in 2012. Cable networks boast a more impressive 42 LGBT characters out of an unidentified total. But none of us queers here would argue that we’re anywhere near annihilating our symbolic annihilation.

Ultimately, it’s unlikely television producers are considering population ratios when planning TV schedules, which makes the usefulness of that evaluation metric shaky. Besides, if they were working from numbers like that, we’d probably see more programming reflecting the fact that women watch more TV than men and black people watch more TV than other racial groups. If TV was aiming to adequately represent the population it depicts in fictional programming, we’d see far more diverse casts, considering most television shows are set in the most diverse areas of the country, especially cities like New York City (56% nonwhite and 4.5% LGBT as of 2006) and Los Angeles (70.6% nonwhite and 5.6% gay as of 2006). Furthermore, despite the fact that women and nonwhite individuals are more likely to identify as LGBT, regular/recurring LGBT characters on broadcast and cable networks are are 72% and 71% white, respectively, and overwhelmingly male. It seems likely that onscreen representation reflects the demographics of television creators, not of the television audience.

“Writers pose with their award for outstanding writing for a drama series for “Homeland,” backstage at the 64th Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, September 23, 2012. (Photo : Reuters)”

This is unfortunate, because television is our most powerful medium for destructing the ignorance fostered by our segregated country and affirming and empowering the identities of members of minority groups. The latter cause is being tended to reasonably well — thanks to one billion cable channels, it’s possible for women, queer people and people of color to find people like them on TV if they look hard enough. But when we’re talking about changing American hearts and minds, we have to look at how many characters from those groups are showing up on popular network shows with mainstream audiences, and the size and quality of those roles.

Our vice president credited Will & Grace with softening American attitudes towards LGB people and enabling same-sex marriage legislation, and many of us here credit various inclusive television shows with softening our attitudes towards ourselves as LGB people. On the flipside — when Gallup found that people of color, young people, women and people with lower levels of education and income were more likely to ID as LGBT, they noted that these results “run counter to some media stereotypes that portray the LGBT community as predominantly white, highly educated, and very wealthy.” This “positive” stereotype has actually proven legitimately damaging at times — in the Prop 8 trial, it was noted that many Americans don’t think gay people need marriage equality, hate crime protections or non-discrimination laws because according to Mitch and Cam, we’re all doing just fine! Wheee!

this is not actually at all the way that we live

Media stereotypes remain: 56% of the LGBT characters GLAAD found were men. But a full 50% of the broadcast networks’ 46 regular and recurring LGBT characters are female, marking the first time in GLAAD history that females and males have been represented evenly. Quantitatively, this is a huge deal, but looking at the data qualitatively is a bit more complicated.

LGBT Female Characters on TV: The Quality Report 

FYI ten years ago this graphic would’ve been much smaller and twenty years ago it would’ve had one person in it

Queer women have a storied history of settling for less, or settling for subtext, when it comes to seeing ourselves represented on television. We make do with lesbian couples offering tentative pecks while hetero pairs suck face down the hallway and witness even our most celebrated and well-written queer characters see their relationship storylines sidelined while straight romances sit firmly at center stage (I’m lookin’ at you, Pretty Little Liars). Transgender women are rarely, if ever, portrayed on television, and you can count the positive portrayals of trans* women on television on one hand. (Also, they are rarely portrayed by trans* actors.)

Likewise, many of the women counted in this report aren’t necessarily candidates for Grand Marshall of the Northampton Pride Parade. For example, GLAAD promises that “new show Super Fun Night will feature a character named Marika who seems to have a strong attraction for the series lead; her female roommate.” Yup, a show which weekly begs the question “how many fat chick jokes can be squeezed into 22 minutes” will feature a sporty nerdy single lady who “can’t get a man” (that’s the premise of the show, that these three girls can’t get boyfriends) lusting after her straight best friend! How groundbreaking!

Many other characters who count quantitatively fail qualitatively: in Bones, GLAAD notes that “now that [Angela is] happily married to a man, her bisexuality is no longer addressed on the show.” On Mistresses, the relationship between label-free Josslyn and lesbian Alex was obnoxiously sidelined while hetero pairings took center stage — we’ve spent more time watching Josslyn cheat on Alex with a male colleague than seeing the two ladies get together! And while Unique’s inclusion on Glee is commendable as the only transgender woman on primetime television — and a transgender woman of color, at that — the show has dealt her a rotten hand all around (Catfishing, anyone?) and can’t seem to make it through an episode without using at least one unchecked transphobic slur.

Chicago Fire has been acclaimed for its main queer character Leslie Shay, but as a commenter shared in all-caps on our Fall 2013 Television preview, it recently featured a “crazy ex-girlfriend takes revenge through false rape accusation plotline,” which we all know is “the worst plotline in the history of humanity.”  Nor will I be tuning in to misogynistic crap like Two and a Half Men plan to “feature a new regular LGBT character this season when the long-lost bisexual daughter of the former lead will move into her deceased father’s house.” I can sit through a lot of things in order to reach the lesbian parts, but not that. We were promised a new love interest for Kalinda on The Good Wife, but it was announced shortly after the GLAAD report debuted that this new love interest wouldn’t be showing up after all. Excited about that interracial lesbian couple on Under the Dome? Well, one half of that couple, Alice (played by Samantha Mathis), just died of a heart attack.

There’s some good stuff coming up though, too, like Santana’s new love interest on Glee (although her series debut came with an onslaught of biphoba), Callie and Arizona on Grey’s Anatomy (Arizona is now also the only series regular with a disability on ABC) and a promising thing brewing between Detective Gail Peck and Holly on Rookie Blue. Furthermore, Mulan was recently revealed to be bisexual on Once Upon a Time.

infographic via GLAAD

And although cable represents a smaller percentage of female characters compared to male, it’s got most of the good ones, like the lesbian Moms Lena and Stef of The Fosters, two bisexual scientists on Orphan Black, Emily and Paige on Pretty Little Liars, deaf lesbian character Natalie on Switched at Birth, Lost Girl‘s Bo and Lauren and Degrassi’s Fiona and Imogen. It’s also worth mentioning, however, that all the shows I just mentioned are either on ABC Family or imports from Canada or The UK. The best option for LGBT representation remains Orange is the New Black, a Netflix original not included in the GLAAD report.

Racial diversity amongst LGBT characters has been improving gradually, and it’s great to see so many interracial lesbian couples on television — but it would also be nice to see more same-sex female couples where both characters are of color, which happens approximately once in a blue moon (Emily & Maya on Pretty Little Liars, Santana & Dani on Glee, Kima & Sharon on The Wire… who am I missing?).

Alas, gay men still have it better. On network television they’ve got a much-lauded teenage romance and upcoming wedding for Kurt and Blaine on Glee and two huge spotlights for gay dads in Sean Saves the World and the Emmy-favorite Modern Family. Although queer women rock cable w/r/t character quality, queer men far outnumber queer women on cable and cable doesn’t provide the visibility network shows do: The Fosters miraculously pulled in a network high of 2.07 million viewers for its finale, but Modern Family regularly attracts over 12 million viewers a week and is the fourth most popular show on television. Yay for two wealthy white gay men constantly bickering, tricking and passive-aggressively undermining each other every week! (I love the show, but I hate their relationship!) It’s been a long time since we’ve had an entire show to ourselves, but HBO’s Looking, about three gay men in San Francisco, is currently filming for its 2014 debut.

Even though LGB representation isn’t at the levels we want it to be, it remains true that visibility for LGBs, and gay men in particular, has far outpaced that of women, trans* people, people of color and people with disabilities. This is especially remarkable when you consider how few LGB people exist compared to people of color. Regular/recurring LGBT characters on broadcast television has skyrocketed from 1.3% in 2006 to 3.3% in 2013, whereas for many people of color and women, progress has stagnated entirely. Check it out:

I didn’t make a graph about female representation because it has been at 43% for all of the above time periods, which would make a really boring graph. The number of transgender characters per year was too low to show up on the chart (there’s one now, there was one in 2009-2010 and zero in 2006-2007).

When will it get better for everyone?

omg netflix is gonna be airing 567 sexy episodes of “orange is the new black” starting tomorrow! and poussey is gonna come out as gay and then everything is gonna become a unicorn and/or a rainbow!

There are many explanations for this discrepancy in progress, like America is Really Fucking Racist and The Patriarchy, but I suspect a great deal of this can be accounted for by the composition of teams behind-the-scenes: only 26 percent of primetime network TV creators, executive producers, producers, writers, directors, editors and cinematographers are women, only 6.5 percent of TV writers are African-American, and people of color account for a mere 15.6 percent of behind-the-scenes TV employment. Nearly one-third of TV shows have no minority writers on staff and ten percent of TV shows have no women writers on staff. In terms of TV executive producers, women are underrepresented by a factor of more than 2 to 1, people of color at a factor of 5 to 1. The Emmys repeatedly fail to nominate or award people of color in any of its categories.

Hollywood has always been a homosexual haven, so it’s not a huge surprise that many gay characters have managed to evolve past Jodie Dallas while misogynist and racist material goes unchecked every day. Forget about it when it comes to transphobia and transmisogyny — transgender folks have been granted excruciatingly awful television representation throughout all of human history and even shows which aspire to political responsibility (like Glee and The L Word) fuck trans* stuff up. Although there are no numbers on it, I suspect this problem is enabled by a lack of trans* representation behind-the scenes (although Lana Wachowski (who recently produced the totally racist film Cloud Atlas) is working on a 2014 Netflix series called Sense8).

While it’s absolutely true that straight men have brought many gay characters to the screen on shows like Skins and Modern Family, most LGB characters on TV are the work of gay men and/or women (straight and gay). Gay men in particular are well-represented behind-the-scenes of shows that prominently feature gay, lesbian and bisexual characters, like Six Feet Under and True Blood‘s Alan Ball, The Fosters’ Peter Paige, Sex and the City‘s Michael Patrick King and Will & Grace‘s Max Mutchnick. Gay television producer Darren Star created Melrose Place, which featured one of the first gay television kisses ever, as well as gay-inclusive shows Sex and the City, 90210 and GCB. Gay Cuban-American writer Silvio Horta was the head writer, developer and producer for Ugly Betty. Gay showrunner Ryan Murphy is responsible for homo-heavy programs like Nip/Tuck, The New Normal, Glee and American Horror Story. Gay television writer and producer Russell T Davies made the first-ever American show entirely focused on gay men, Queer as Folk, as well as gay-friendly fare like Doctor Who and Casanova.

“Onscreen gay ubiquity has been greatly aided by the growing number of ‘out’ gay people in high places in the industry,” write Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons in the epilogue to Gay L.A. They also note that “lesbians have not yet had the same degree of prominence and success as have gay men in behind-the -camera Hollywood.” But they mention pockets of hope, like former HBO president Caroline Strauss. We’ve got lots more behind-the-screen advocates, though: it was Ellen Degeneres who brought us the groundbreaking Ellen and Ilene Chaiken who created The L Word. Comedian Carol Leifer created Rules of Engagement, which included a lesbian character played by Sarah Rue and Marlene King is responsible for the super-gay Pretty Little Liars.

If it’s not an LGB female writer/creator bringing a queer female to the screen, it’s likely to be Ryan Murphy, Alan Ball, Joss Whedon or a straight female writer/creator, such as Grey’s Anatomy‘s Shonda Rhimes and Orange is the New Black‘s Jenji Kohan. Furthermore, despite female underrepresentation behind-the-scenes of other shows, historically most shows with LGB characters of any gender have had a woman heading or co-heading its writing and/or creation, including South of Nowhere, Degrassi, Lost Girl, Bomb Girls, Lip Service, Roseanne, Weeds, The Good Wife, 30 Rock, The Carrie Diaries, Nashville, Girls, Emily Owens M.D., Smash, The Killing, Friends, Nurse Jackie, Mad Men, Awkward, Veronica’s Closet, Ray Donovan and The Masters of Sex.

Which brings me back to why progress seems quicker in some areas than others: White gay men occupy more “influencing” behind-the-scenes television positions than gay women, and thus gay men are more positively and frequently represented on TV than gay women.

Whereas highly stereotyped depictions of gay people have waned in recent years and numbers of gay people appearing in popular shows has increased, progress has stagnated and often reversed for people of color, despite the fact that research has shown that shows with diverse writing staffs and casts fare better in the ratings. In a 2013 study of writing staff diversity for the 2011-2012 TV Season, the only analyzed shows with significant PoC representation (over 35% of the writing team and/or  4+ PoC writers) on staff were BET shows (The Game, Let’s Stay Together, Reed Between The Lines), The Cleveland Show, Single Ladies, Key & Peele, Alphas, Criminal Minds, Family Guy, Grey’s Anatomy, Raising Hope, Nikita and Austin & Ally. That’s 13 shows out of 191. This is how shows like Outsourced even make it to air.

The instant the taboo around gay characters began crumbling, there were plenty of white gay men well-positioned in Hollywood to start telling their own stories; men like Ryan Murphy, Alan Ball, Scott Rudin, David Geffen and Darren Star. This was not the case for gay women, women or people of color when their various rights were allegedly won. Many are still fighting our way in, and it’s difficult when you consider that most showrunners, producers and writers do their time lower on the Hollywood totem pole for many years before being handed the reins themselves — which means our next lesbian television vanguard is probably already working in the industry. Maybe it’ll be Angela Robinson, Rose Troche, Katie Ford, Cherien Dabis or Ali Adler. Maybe it will be one of the ladies already making great television online, like Words With Girls‘ Brittani Nichols, Little Horribles‘ Amy York-Rubin, Unicorn Plan-It‘s Ashley Reed or Roomies‘ Julie Goldman and Brandy Howard. It might be you! Just please G-d, let it not be Ilene Chaiken.

GLAAD 2012 Network Responsibility Index: Why Do Queer Women On Television All Look The Same?

GLAAD has released its 2012 Network Responsibility Index, which is a fancier way of saying that GLAAD posted its Gay TV Report Card. Every summer, GLAAD rates cable and broadcast networks based on the amount of hours they feature LGBT-inclusive programming, as well as the network’s gender and racial diversity.

The results are revealing and not particularly positive. Representations of gay men far outnumber those of gay women, and queer people of color are eclipsed by am overwhelming amount of white characters. Not a single network was graded as “Excellent” and too many received “Failing” as their final rating. Networks that carried strong LGBTQ programming were also host to shows that featured homophobia or offensive humor. For every narrative that the queer community embraced, ten storylines ignored, negated or flat out insulted us.

Me too, Whit. Me too.

Showtime took the top slot with a “Good” rating due to 46% of its original programming featuring positive LGBT representations. Credit goes to Ilene Chaiken’s stumbling into her agent’s office on bath salts with “I swear this is a good idea hear me out” venture into reality television, The Real L Word. ABC Family was the only network where lesbian representation was higher than gay males: a whopping 45 to 7 hours. Special thanks to Emily and all the ladies who have locked lips with Emily (but mostly Paige for being the very best of the lady lip lockers). Extra points to Emily for being a queer lady of color.

CBS received a “Failing” despite the fact that Kalinda can get it, and get it hard. So did the History Channel and TBS. TLC, the same network that made the Palin family reality stars and has been accused of leaning in a conservative direction, received an “Adequate.” They can address their thank you cards to Glitzy, Honey Boo Boo’s “pageant gay pig”.

It’s important to note that GLAAD’s ratings reflect representation in the barest terms. Glee is a diversity gold mine as far as the ratings system is concerned, but the fact that it’s also riddled with tokenism and problematic portrayals does not have an effect on the final score. Even on shows where queerness makes an appearance, those portrayals need to be questioned. It’s not enough to have  a gay character, to show a clip of two women kissing, or to have storylines that feature homosexuality. Yes, it’s a big deal that I can watch a teen drama where my favorite couple is the same sexuality as me (teen dramas are typically the most welcome genres to introducing LGBTQ characters and narratives). But it’s not enough, and it’s not something I have to settle for. There are crucial questions to be asked, and asked relentlessly: where are the queer people of color? Where are all the queers who are not gay men?

When we see queer women in media, what are we seeing? The lesbian couples that arguably receive the most attention on current network television are Brittany and Santana, Callie and Arizona, and Paige and Emily. Besides their sweet lady kisses, where are the indicators of queerness? Why is it that they’re all undeniably femme, conventionally attractive and able-bodied? This is the question that I come back to again and again: why do queer women on television all look the same?

Femme representation in the media is incredibly important — and strangely ironic given the issues surrounding femme invisibility within the queer community. By no means am I arguing against the necessity of femmes or femme presentation in the media. But I’m concerned by the fact that a female-bodied person presenting in a masculine or atypical way is absent from the queer media presence. Seriously, where the hell are all the butches?

The media has its own reasons for staying away from butch representation, and maybe they’re legitimate ones. Maybe they’re afraid to tap into representations that could be construed as stereotypes. Maybe they’re afraid that showing a female-bodied person who is not conventionally attractive, whose body and expression is not still desirable to a heterosexual male and thus the mainstream audience, is too risky for ratings. Maybe a legacy of lesbians only appearing in stereotypical roles makes networks want to showcase queer women as being “normal,” and that definition of normal means making them look like traditionally feminine women. Maybe we are in a “post-queer society” where it doesn’t matter what queers look like, and we don’t need to show butch lesbians to represent queerness. Too bad that’s bullshit.

Being a masculine-presenting female body — or any kind of body that isn’t within the norm — that isn’t conventionally attractive or widely represented means you’ve already struggling to love yourself.  I own the fact that I’ve had to fight for my appearance to be accepted by my family and my surroundings. I know a lot of butches who do the same thing, and we’re lucky that there are beautiful people in this world who love our bodies and love the parts of us that society deems undesirable. Excuse me while I shed some precious butch tears.

I wish that I didn’t have to look at society around me to love myself, but damn it all if it doesn’t help. I think about the queers out there in places where there isn’t a strong queer community. I think about the queer kids who skip school so they won’t get their nose broken for wearing boys’ clothes. Society already tells us we are ugly, we are undesirable, we are freaks. Maybe it would help, even a little, if there were butches on those shows. If these butches were normal people, maybe even cool people. If they became more than just stereotypes or things to be feared — real characters with real narratives that viewers empathized with. If Paige’s gradual descent into soft butchdom continues on the righteous path.

A butch can dream.

The Gays Are Taking Over TV, Except Where We’re Not: The 2011 GLAAD Network Responsibility Index

The GLAAD Network Responsibility Index says this about itself:

“The GLAAD Network Responsibility Index (NRI) is an evaluation of the quantity and quality of images of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people on television. It is intended to serve as a road map toward increasing fair, accurate and inclusive LGBT media representation.”

The report looks at broadcast networks and cable networks, and the things that people usually say about it include:

There aren’t enough queer people on TV!
There aren’t enough queer ladies on TV!
There aren’t enough evangelical religious figures on TV! (if you are the SBC)

And so far, all of these statements — except the last one — are still true.

According to GLAAD-commissioned Pulse of Equality Survey, which looks at public perception and gay people, 19% of respondents reported more positive feelings towards gays over the previous five years, and 34% of those said it was partly because of seeing lesbian or gay characters on television. Basically: television, unsurprisingly, has the power to change minds. And things like The Real L Word are on it. Think about that for a minute.

Last year, the majority of LGBT representation happened in network programming aimed towards younger viewers, which is not surprising, considering that support for gay marriage is significantly higher among younger people. But while last year MTV became the first network ever to score an “excellent” rating for having over 42% of its original programming count as LGBT-inclusive, this year it didn’t even make the list: the GLAAD report cites a combination of significantly fewer LGBT-inclusive hours and problematic episodes of Jersey Shore and True Life, though it still applauds MTV for anti-bullying initiatives and queer characters on Skins, If You Really Knew Me, and The Real World. Instead, ABC Family topped the cable networks category, with 55% and the report’s second “excellent” ever. The ABC Family lineup includes Pretty Little Liars, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, Greek, and Make It or Break It.

via ABC FAMILY/ANDREW ECCLES

The broadcast networks’ ratings fall in the same order as in 2009-10, with The CW in the lead with 33% of LGBT-inclusive hours of original programming, followed by Fox, ABC, NBC, and CBS, with 10%. In the cable networks, ABC Family has a significant lead with 55%, followed by Showtime, TNT, HBO, AMC, Syfy, FX, USA, and A&E and TBS, which both had a shameful 5%.

Except in super problematic situations such as on Jersey Shore, the quality of the representation does not seem to have been a factor. The report looked at whether or not an LGBT depiction happened; whether it was major or minor; whether any significant discussion of LGBT issues happened; “quality” is listed under the grading considerations, but how it was determined isn’t specified. For instance, Showtime was reported as having 37% of LGBT-inclusive hours, which the report attributes to The Real L Word and Shameless. Can we talk for a minute about just what percentage of The Real L Word is aimed towards an accurate portrayal of lesbians instead of towards an accurate portrayal of what an audience of straight men might like to watch? As a lady-loving-lady, I certainly want to see young, presumably intelligent queer women reduced to a pile of power-of-the-clam-loaded drama, on-screen sex, and trying to make silicone copies of some dude’s penis because the producers won’t acknowledge that maybe lesbians can make babies without phallic objects provided by their straight dude friends. I don’t want quality instead of quality. I want both.

But there’s an even bigger problem: the huge lack of trans* representations and racial and ethnic diversity. Even in the most inclusive networks, the rates for these types of representation are abysmal. Only 2% of the 310.5 LGBT-inclusive hours across ten cable networks included trans* representation, consisting of Carmen on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and an episode of Terriers that dealt with the murder of a trans sex worker. There wasn’t a single regular or recurring trans* character anywhere on American TV (Degrassi‘s Adam is on a show imported from Canada). To say this isn’t great would be a massive understatement. According to the report,

“Despite the obvious dearth in representations of lesbians and bisexuals, the most glaringly underrepresented LGBT population on network TV (and TV in general) are transgender people, who were included in 1% of the LGBT-inclusive hours tracked this year, which works out to just 0.002% of the total hours of broadcast primetime programming. While there were several primetime broadcast series that featured transgender storylines in single episodes, each one contained at least some degree of problematic content. This is certainly an area where the broadcast networks should strive to improve.”

Race and ethnicity are problematic points as well. In the broadcast networks, NBC led with only 38% of the LGBT impressions from white characters. ABC, however, had the least racial diversity with 85% of impressions from white characters, and with most of the diversity points coming from Callie on Grey’s Anatomy and Alejo Salazar on The Whole Truth. Fox, CBS, and The CW also featured mostly white representations.

Let’s take a look:

ABC

(broadcasting network)

via wholetrughtv.com & greysanatomy.wikia.com

ABC received a “good” on the report and has a significant amount of commitment to lesbian, gay, and bi storylines with Ugly Betty, Brothers & Sisters, Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Modern Family, and Dirty, Sexy Money. Also I think some chick named Ellen once came out on an ABC sitcom or something.

However, while ABC wins at overall LGBT-inclusive programming hours, 85% of its 479 impressions were white characters. Most of the 15% consisted of Dr. Callie Torres on Grey’s Anatomy (who, excitingly, got married) — while The Whole Truth‘s gay Latino attorney Alejo Salazar added a little diversity, the show was cancelled, and none of the other non-white characters had recurring roles.

NBC

(broadcasting network)

via v2.ten.com.au and queersvu.wordpress.com

NBC scored an overall “adequate” with only 15% of their hours being LGBT-inclusive. However, it features the greatest racial diversity of its LGBT impressions:

“While a total of 65% of the 1584 total LGBT impressions on the broadcast networks were white characters, only 38% of the 227 impressions on NBC were white. Conversely, 36% of NBC’s impressions were from Latino characters thanks largely to Oscar Nunez on The Office, and 23% were Asian-Pacific Islander (API) because of Dr. George Huang on Law & Order: SVU. However, only 3% of impressions on NBC were black/African American.”

Additionally, even though Dr. Huang became a regular character, he still didn’t appear in every episode, and the actor who play him will not be returning to the show in the upcoming season.

ABC Family

(cable network)

ABC Family got the second “excellent” rating in the GLAAD report’s history this year, and is incredibly racially diverse. It really just deserves cupcakes:

“In addition to posting the highest percentage of LGBT-inclusive hours (55%) since the NRI began, ABC Family was also the most racially diverse this year, with 35% white impressions, 25% black, 13% Latino/a, and 28% multiracial. No API LGBT impressions were counted on the network, due to the fact that GLAAD counts Pretty Little Liars’ Emily Fields as multiracial. However, she is also of Asian-Pacific Islander ancestry.”

via abcfamily.go.com

Compare that to AMC, which didn’t have a single racially or ethnically diverse character, and it’s even more of a step in the right direction. Hopefully AMC, not to mention FX (98% white), A&E (93% white) and TBS (83% white), will catch up.

Finally, what would a report on diversity and inclusion be without the Southern Baptist Convention slamming both of those things? Not good enough, that’s what. The SBC is predictably irate over the continued positive growth of LGBT representation, and has suggested that gay lobbyists are bribing the entertainment industry to “use their media to recast the homosexual lifestyle as normative.” The SCB representative also lamented the lack of evangelical Christians on TV, which is the only lack of representation worth celebrating.