The liberal gay activist group GLAAD’s yearly “Where are We on TV” report for the 2015-2016 TV season was released this past Tuesday, and although the report finds that LGBT characters are up, it also lamented a lack of representation among those living with HIV, and a need for greater racial diversity within the LGBT community.
Ironically, ABC Family was one of the most LGBT-inclusive networks on cable, as well as Showtime; the only three recurring transgender characters on were on these cable channels. Traditional TV outlets had no representation of the LGBT community, although streaming services such as Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon saw four transgender characters, with two being leads on Transparent and Sense8.
Up five percent from last year, 33 percent of characters on broadcast TV were lesbian, while bisexual characters went up from last year’s 20 percent, the report found that bisexual stereotypes still reinforced damaging representations.
Some more numbers – the number of LGBT characters went from 64 in 2014 to 84 this year, with 58 of those being recurring characters. Even though there was an increase in black characters, 70 percent were still white. There were 145 regular black characters on TV, with only 59 being women. Overall, women make up 43 percent of the characters – up three percent since last year.
Sarah Kate Ellis, CEO & president of GLAAD, wants TV to see the “full diversity of the LGBT community,” and says it’s “not enough to just include LGBT characters; those characters need to be portrayed with thought and care to accurately represent an often tokenized community.”
Ellis told Entertainment Weekly, “Each of us lives at the intersection of many identities and it’s important that television characters reflect the full diversity of the LGBT community…” and cites Empire, Transparent, and Orange Is the New Black as successful shows that “can serve as an example to network executives that audiences are looking for stories they haven’t seen before; indeed, there are still plenty of stories about our community yet to be told.”
But isn’t it “tokenizing” to demand Hollywood scriptwriters and casting directors obey leftist “diversity” requirements to all the better churn out “plenty of stories about” the LGBT community? How, exactly, does this form of affirmative action lead to higher-quality writing, acting, and directing which producers quality TV?
