ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION ORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION NORMALIZATION
THE QUEERS LEFT BEHIND THE SUITS VS. THE SLUTS FIGHTING FOR DIFFERENCE
Colin Walmsley Benjamin H. Shepard Jess Merritt
THE AGE OF QUEER MEDIA
Tyler Scruggs
THE EFFECT OF POSITIVE MEDIA REPRESENTATION
German Lopez
WHY MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF LGBTQ+ CHARACTERS MATTERS
Skyler Murry
While the gay rights movement in the United States has achieved a remarkable string of successes over the past several years, including the invalidation of the Defense of Marriage Act and the legalization of gay marriage, not everyone within the LGBT community is equally positioned to take advantage of these successes. After all, although marriage is a declaration of love, in many ways it is also an expression of economic security and social respectability, attributes that many marginalized LGBT people do not have. So while love may have won for middle and upper class gays, many transgender
dismantled the hypersexual, flamboyant gay stereotype and replaced it with a more wholesome image that mainstream America found more palatable. It was also an assertion that the gay rights movement had reached an important milestone, transcending basic issues of health, safety, economic security and social stability. But the problem is, it hadn’t. Over 20 percent of all LGBT youth are homeless, and 40 percent of all homeless youth are LGBT. 58 percent of queer homeless youth have been sexually assaulted. 64 percent of transgender people make less than $25,000 per year. 41 percent of transgender people and 62 percent of queer homeless
people, queer people of color and queer homeless youths instead find themselves left behind by a community that has become increasingly defined by the interests of its white, cisgender, middle and upper class members.Over a decade ago, this powerful subsection of the LGBT community decided that the fight for marriage equality would be the modern cornerstone of the gay rights movement, and for good reason. Marriage is an institution of respectability. The fight for gay marriage suggested that the gay community had grown up, left its radical past behind and was ready to join mainstream society as a reputable partner. It
youth have attempted suicide. And 10 transgender women have been murdered in the U.S. so far this year. And yet, as middle and upper class gays poured time and money into the fight for gay marriage, these and other less marketable LGBT issues were largely forgotten. The number of queer youths on the streets rose. Violence against transgender people increased. And the gap between the ‘mainstream’ queer community and its fringes grew. As one gay, black and homeless youth on Pier 45 told me, ‘It’s like once they had marriage equality it’s like, ‘Nah, we don’t feel your pain any more, sorry.’’ Unfortunately, this dystopia has
already started to become reality. As ‘mainstream’ white gay culture has become not only socially accepted, but also widely marketed and commercialized, middle and upper class gay interests have become inseparably intertwined with the gentrification of historically gay spaces and the criminalization of poor, non-white, transgender and homeless individuals within these spaces. For example, Greenwich Village: long a refuge for queer youths fleeing rejection and persecution has become a shining showcase for the gay community’s newfound prosperity, complete with organic juice bars, small dog boutiques and seemingly hundreds of overpriced coffee shops. And as the gay elite have become increasingly integrated into the power structure of society, many have used their newfound influence not to alleviate the inequalities within the queer community, but instead to cement their position at the pinnacle of an expanding LGBT hierarchy. Instead of collaborating with queer homeless youth to recreate the old Village’s culture of diversity and acceptance, many residents of this new Greenwich Village — many of them gay and lesbian — have sought to ‘clean’ their streets of the ‘Bloods and Crips’, ‘gangs of unruly youths’ and ‘gay youth of African-American and Hispanic origin’ - all seemingly references to queer homeless youth of color. Instead of proudly embracing the Christopher Street Piers’ rich history as a haven for disowned queer homeless youths, some residents have tried to eject the youths from the piers altogether, arguing that times have changed and queer youth no longer need safe spaces. Instead of protecting queer
homeless youths from harassment, the Christopher Street Patrol has increasingly hounded them for petty quality of life infractions, a strategy eerily similar to that of the anti-gay vigilantes the patrol was in part founded to combat. But the worst part about this trend is that because the discrimination is perpetrated at least in part by our own community, it is given a sense of legitimacy. After all, it can’t be homophobic if it’s queers versus queers, right? With the stunning advances in gay rights and growing prosperity of America’s LGB community over the past decade, it’s easy to forget that the very groups we are now marginalizing are the ones who launched the queer rights movement at a time when being gay was still a crime. If queer homeless youths, black drag queens, transgender women and gay hustlers had not risen up against oppression at Compton’s Cafeteria and Stonewall over 45 years ago, we would not have gay marriage today. Our movement was built on the back of our community’s margins. So as long as LGBT youths sleep on the street, transgender people fear for their lives, and queer people of color live in poverty, my new right to marry will be diminished. The LGBT movement still has a long way to go; I just hope the next big battle for queer rights isn’t against the queer community itself.
HIV-positive Andrew Sullivan recently boasted in The New York Times Magazine, ‘I’ll say it loud; I’ll say it proud: I love drug companies.’ As one of the most visible gay journalists in the nation, the statement spoke to a core dilemma within a gay and lesbian movement split between gay assimilationists, such as Sullivan, and social justice minded queers. The question was, how had this free market loving Tory Thatcherite become a spokesman for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) movement? Sullivan’s cavalier boast neglected the point that ACT UP, the proqueer AIDS direct action group, had not only spent almost fifteen years fighting to
vision of sexuality as cultural transformation. Both movements questioned basic tenets of family structure and patriarchal authority in America. In the following years, the gay liberation movement become more and more institutionalized. The struggle shifted from grass roots community groups to legal battles in the hands of lawyers. In 1973, The Advocate, a gay newspaper, editorialized that the gay liberation movement should be run by ‘responsible, talented, experts with a widespread financial backing from all strata of the gay community.’ The problem was that a politics of respectability required a basic trust in just that
get expedited approval for life saving medications, but had put their bodies on the line to get drug companies to lower prices so people could actually afford them. For the homophiles (the predecessors to today’s assimilationists), gay sexuality was something to keep quiet about or apologize for. For the liberationists, gay sex was something to revel within and create global solidarity around; ‘Perverts of the world unite!’ was a central GLF anthem. Gay liberationists recognized that while many homosexuals claimed they were just like everyone else, the dominant culture did not see them that way. As such, gay liberation, in alliance with women’s liberation, created a
capitalist social structure that only a couple of years earlier GLF had described as sexist, racist, and homophobic. Many had become queer not to fit in. Countless gays, lesbians and queers, particularly gender/fetish, SM, leather, or transgender communities had very little interest in fitting into the status quo. A conflict between the suits and the sluts would characterize much of the history of the GLBT movement and its inherent divides.
Kids know. They really do. Long before the adults do. The stares, the pointing, the laughing, starts from your first class. It is something taught, something ingrained from their earliest days. Carefully inculcated notions of identity and gender, of the the prescriptive binarism that drives societal structures and beliefs. Black and white, night and day, sun and moon, male and female. Diversity is anathema to binarist thinking. For many, the marriage equality movement remains traumatising. But now, with ‘marriage equality’ upon us, we have come full circle. I came from a background where the slightest
sniff of nonconformity was punished swiftly and severely. I was bashed at 19 in front of the Beat nightclub, my skull fractured, for the crime of being publicly queer in Queensland. Funny to spend the better part of 20 years as part of a community only for them to toss you out when you breach their own select standards of normative behaviours. This is what Chris Heywood calls the ‘new homonormativity’, where queer people are expected to live according to some fabricated notion of authenticity that is palatable to the hetero masses. We are being held hostage by white cis middle class gay men who have
the means and desire to engage with the capitalist mainstream as peers, through increased access to income, jobs and services that are beyond most queer people. White cis middle-class gay men often claim to be ‘LGBT’ activists but don’t give a shit beyond the G. The queers whose backs they climbed on, the ones they were happy to fuck in the 90s, they don’t want to be associated with now. They don’t want to know about Sylvia Rivera, or Marsha P. Johnson, because they don’t fit the image they want. They run ads on television with white heterosexual men and women, ‘real’ men and women, not these dirty queers or trannies.
I have spent a lifetime being told I am a pervert, I am dirty, I am weird, disgusting, and to think after that lifetime we have arrived at a point where I need to hear it again defies words. We live in a world where I am supposed to be happy we finally achieved ‘equality’ which means a few gays and lesbians can wed, but the majority of queer and trans people still struggle in economically deprived environments lacking access to jobs, healthcare, accommodation, social services and the support of family or friends, part of the same group that keeps my narratives of heteronormativity and homonormativity are but tiny, terrified little rabbits.
The Advocate (1994)
James Webber (1949)
Turn on your TV, look at any channel or streaming service, and you’ll notice just how powerful LGBTQ voices in entertainment are. In 2018 alone, the queer community saw marked growth and improvements in not only in LGBTQ representation but the quality of that representation. It’s easier now more than ever to find yourself reflected in the stories told on television. That being said, there’s still a ways to go before the world we see in media more closely reflects the world we live in. GLAAD’s 2018 annual report, ‘Where We Are On TV,’ was released in October; it revealed some staggering statistics based on their research. Thanks to Netflix and FX’s trans-led series ‘Pose,’ 8.8 percent of broadcast series regular characters on television are LGBTQ identifying, inching closer to the globally estimated 10% of queer-identifying people in the real world. Ryan Murphy, one of the co-creators of the barrier breaking series, is now setting the bar for trans representation in media. Of the 433 total regular and recurring LGBTQ characters on scripted broadcast, cable, and streaming programs, only 26 are transgender. This year, nine characters were added to the ranks; five are characters on FX’s ‘Pose.’ In her introduction to the report, GLAAD President & CEO Sarah Kate Ellis wrote, ‘…the percentage of LGBTQ series regulars on broadcast primetime scripted programming is up to an all-time high of 8.8 percent. That same group of characters is also at gender parity with equal percentages of LGBTQ men and women on broadcast, and for the first time, more LGBTQ characters are people
of color than white LGBTQ characters on television. Across all platforms GLAAD tracks – broadcast, cable, and streaming – the number of bisexual characters, transgender characters, and characters with HIV and AIDS are up this year.’ According to the report, ‘GLAAD’ found 75 regular LGBTQ characters on original scripted series on streaming services, an increase of 24 from last year’s count. There were an additional 37 recurring characters, up 18 from the previous year’s report. It brings the total to 112 characters, 42 more than the last year.’ What’s interesting about 2018 in queer media is not just the quantity of gay characters, but the uptick in the quality of stories those characters tell. Films with gay undertones have been around for decades and helped construct the stereotypes we experience today, but often they’re under-budgeted and under-produced; frequently relegated to bargain bins and streaming service ‘LGBT Films’ sections. Too often, viewers take a chance on what ends up being low-budget and disappointingly lowbrow entertainment. Andrew Scahill, an assistant professor of film studies at the University of Colorado Denver, praised the progress media has made in telling new and unique stories. ‘I’d say the biggest change is seeing more minority voices speaking to a diversity of experiences within the gay community,’ said Scahill. Films like ‘Moonlight,’ ‘Pariah,’ or ‘Tangerine’ are a reminder that the queer experience is not a universal template.’ While 2018 saw many queer coming out stories from ‘Love, Simon’ to films like ‘Boy Erased’ and ‘The Miseducation of Cameron Post,’
queer media may want to set its sights higher. ‘At the same time, gay representation seems to be looking for stories beyond experiencing homophobia or coming out,’ Scahill said. ‘The last horizon will be genre cinema, we have yet to see a lesbian James Bond or a gay Superman.’ In December, Bravo announced plans to reboot ShowTime’s ‘Queer as Folk’ for modern audiences. While it indeed isn’t lesbian James Bond or even season 3 of HBO’s ‘Looking,’ the show has been a longstanding example of homonormative storytelling; where sexuality is so abundant and commonplace that characters require depth and attributes beyond their bedroom preferences. Rest assured, as we enter the new year and beyond, the deficit of gay storytelling in media is going to continue to shrink. Will it help younger generations in the search for their own sexual and gender identities? That’s the goal for producers and directors of prominent LGBTQfocused media. It’s now the responsibility of the audience to continue to support and equally criticize that representation so it doesn’t go away. It won’t be a perfect, smooth ride, and we’ll still see more shoestring budget ventures. However, in this new age of media, seeing representations of your life on the big screen is what we all want in the end, and it’s coming.
With shows like Ellen, Will and Grace, Queer as Folk, and Six Feet Under, there were more and more media examples of gay folks just being human that helped show the rest of America that this isn’t a group of people you have to fear or treat unfairly in social situations or through the law. LGBTQ groups argue this is one reason they were able to build support for same-sex marriage so quickly over the past few years (from 27 percent in 1996 to 60 percent in 2015), as individuals coming out and better media representations showed Americans that LGBTQ people are normal people trying to live their lives just like anyone else. As a gay man, I went through something similar. I always knew that my parents were accepting of gay rights, and that they would love me no matter what. But knowing that is frequently not enoughthe mind is very good, especially in your teen years, at getting you to doubt yourself and your place in the world at every turn. So when I saw my parents watching Will and Grace for the first time and laughing with the characters, it gave my sense of my parents’ acceptance a concrete example. I wouldn’t come out for a few years. But when I did, I can genuinely thank a show like Will and Grace for making it easier. It became less about waiting until my parents were ready and more about waiting until I was ready. And I had the privilege of knowing my parents accepted me all along. In other cases, when a person has no one around her accepting who she is.
Media connects us to one another and allows us to express the things we see happening around us in the world, our feelings about them, and inform our identities. Media play vital roles in how current events, problems, and occasional successes affect us. So when we watch our favorite television shows and movies and we see gay, lesbian. Bisexual, trans, and/or queer characters, those characters inform viewers of what it’s like to be LGBTQ+. Now why does this representation matter? Because the things we see in day-to-day media create the norm. What we see in the media helps shape or shift public opinion. A study from 2015, written by Bradley J. Bond and Benjamin L. Compton, found that a positive relationship existed between exposure to on-screen gay characters and gay equality endorsement. It is especially important now to have so much representation (and even more) with the current political climate. More, now than ever, does our media need to focus on the representation of marginalized groups. Representation makes people feel seen and understood and not alone and not strange. Queer characters as one-dimensional sidekicks without happy endings aren’t the move; it just won’t fly anymore. Perception shouldn’t be as much as it is, but the lack of visibility unfortunately harms LGBTQ folks. Ultimately, it is these voices that matter.People of marginalized identities should be calling the shots on how they are portrayed and how we come into the mainstream. Representation matters. Point blank. Simple as that.