While the entertainment industry has made progress in including LGBTQ+ characters and story lines on screen, much of it caters to audience expectations and feels lacking in authenticity.
A recent example is “Heated Rivalry,” a show on HBO Max, which focuses on the struggles of a gay couple in a toxic, hyper-masculine sport. The series was widely accepted, becoming extremely popular among audiences of mostly straight women, accounting for well over two-thirds of viewership.
This hints at a larger trend in the entertainment industry. Mainstream stories of LGBTQ+ experiences are overwhelmingly written by straight authors for audiences mostly outside the community.
When a “Bridgerton” cast photo for season four was released shortly after, however, and two female cast members were pictured holding hands, support vanished. Audiences were quick to complain that having a lesbian or bisexual character would contradict the character’s struggles with infertility and make her hard to relate to. As many have pointed out after the press release, her struggles are not exclusive to straight couples – many queer people also struggle with similar problems.
Resistance from the audience and shareholder opinions often scares companies away from queer storylines due to perceived financial risks. Despite recent advancements in LGBTQ+ representation in media, progress is not linear and major production houses are still hesitant to include representation.
A GLAAD report found that queer characters on cable are down 53% from the 2022-2023 season. Among those who remain, 53% are leaving within the next season, 39% of whom are leaving because the show itself was canceled.
Disney has been the most public example of this issue, as popular shows with strong representation like “The Owl House” and “Willow” are being silently removed from its online streaming platform Disney+. Even in theatrical releases, Disney and its offshoot company Pixar continue to downplay LGBTQ+ storylines in favor of mass market appeal.
In one of Pixar’s latest movies, “Elio,” the namesake character was originally written as an exploration of identity and self. These scenes were cut after the gay director Adrian Molina left. Executives later admitted the decision to cut Elio’s storyline was due to poor audience reception.
When given the opportunity, major studios tend to choose the safe option, as exemplified by Disney. They do not want to risk offending audience members, so they choose the most middle-of-the-road stance.
When LGBTQ+ representation does appear on screen, it is not always in a positive or well-handled manner. The phenomenon of stereotyping on-screen queer characters began in the 1920s with the coding of villains as queer, setting the standard that being gay was inherently evil.
By playing into the audience sentiment of the time, directors took much fewer risks. When the Hays Code was introduced in 1930, even this representation was censored and would remain so for decades after.
Following political pressures over the morality of modern films, the entertainment industry set up a strict code of self-censorship. The rules, commonly referred to as the Hays Code, laid out a list of things banned in motion pictures, including profanity and drugs, and it prohibited any explicit mention of homosexuality.
With the repeal of the Hays Code in 1968, LGBTQ+ characters and storylines were allowed back in films. “The Boys in the Band,” released in 1970, is widely considered one of the first American films to center queer people. Demand for representation in Hollywood only continued from there and developed into the movies of today.
While representation has made leaps in progress, negative stereotyping continues to affect the film industry, the most famous example being the “bury your gays” trope. Production houses want to bring in LGBTQ+ characters for diversity points, but many do not care to keep them around. Thus, the phenomenon was born in which the death of queer side characters is used as a plot device and character growth for the straight protagonist.
The experiences of queer characters are almost never explored with the nuance or authenticity demanded. In fact, according to a study by Autostaddle, among 1,779 scripted U.S. television series from 1976 to 2016, only 16% of LGBTQ+ characters experienced positive endings. The audience is simply not interested in seeing these characters reach satisfying endings, in part because they aren’t given a reason to care. Major studios set queer characters up to fail as strictly disposable side characters, not giving audiences the time to grow attached to them before they are written off.
There is no easy solution to the issue of LGBTQ+ representation in mass media, and major production houses will continue to tell mass-marketable narratives of queer experiences as long as it remains profitable. But if audiences continue to show vocal support for LGBTQ+ focused stories, we can show the major companies that strong representation is profitable and that telling authentic stories is worth their time.