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That thinness of representation is not simply statistical it’s palpable.
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Only one studio film ( Hot Pursuit, of all things!) was trans-inclusive, and remarkably, Buena Vista and Paramount both managed to exclude LGBT characters from their entire release slates. These are movies that would not have been made in 1996, featuring characters whose existence would barely have been acknowledged then.īut in larger-scale Hollywood movies, where are we? Stalled, according to a Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) study released this year of 114 studio films, only 20 included LGBT characters, and more than three-quarters of them were gay men. The smart, determined, conflicted lesbian characters in Todd Haynes’s Carol, the gender-fluid and/or gay kids in Jean-Marc Vallée’s Demolition and Chris Kelly’s moving dramedy Other People, the trans women of Sean Baker’s Tangerine, the cheerfully homewrecking lesbian in Clea DuVall’s The Intervention, the closeted Korean-American boy in Andrew Ahn’s Sundance award-winner Spa Night, and the young African-American protagonist of Barry Jenkins’s much-praised Moonlight are all, in their ways, genuinely new. And on the American indie front, representation has both broadened and deepened. Movies from abroad, from Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color to Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, continue to push (or incinerate) the envelope in terms of explicit depictions of sexuality. Yes, the number of out performers and filmmakers has increased exponentially.
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Two decades later, we are not living in the movie-culture utopia that gay Americans hoped those films might presage. Instead, the brink turned out to be the breakthrough. The assumption was that more diverse and varied characters would emerge eventually, and the optimism felt warranted: LGBT representation seemed to be on the brink of a breakthrough. Yes, they were almost exclusively white, male, and upscale, but today’s arguments about and understanding of representational politics shouldn’t be wielded as a cudgel to beat up movies for failing to live up to standards that weren’t defined and discussed until years after they were made.
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After decades of invisibility, gay characters were finally being granted a small patch of turf the studios brought forth dramas ( Philadelphia), coming-out comedies ( In and Out), and gay sidekicks or supporting characters in movies like My Best Friend’s Wedding who weren’t neutered or pathetic, as they had been 10 and 20 years earlier. Twenty years ago, emboldened by political and social progress, and galvanized by the early years of the AIDS crisis, Hollywood felt on the precipice of meaningful change. The status quo is that of a promise unfulfilled. But the blink-and-miss-it swiftness of the moment-we’re going to give you something a tiny bit gay without even breaking stride-only underscores the shocking absence of LGBT representation in current Hollywood product.
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Few would have expected Star Trek Beyond to build out an entire subplot about Sulu’s home life after all, over the decades, the series has barely said two words about who he is (quick, what’s his first name?). In 2016, a gay Sulu is about as on point, in a Star Trek way, as an Asian Sulu was in 1966-which is to say, newish but hardly groundbreaking.Īnd yet, for all the laudable motivation behind it, those few Star Trek moments feel more like a nod toward the symbolic importance of LGBT inclusion in mainstream entertainment than the manifestation of an actual desire for it. But to me, it was right in line with the whole history of Star Trek’s gestural progressivism. Rowling revealed that Dumbledore preferred the company of other Dumbledores.) The decision displeased original Sulu George Takei, who is gay but doesn’t think Sulu is (it’s complicated). I don’t intend to dismiss it entirely there is political content, impact, and value in retconning an element of a beloved long-running series to say, “Oh, by the way, this guy in this thing you’ve loved for 50 years? He’s gay.” (If you doubt that can have impact, recall the furor in 2007 when J.K. In 2016, that pair of glimpses-let’s be generous and call it 15 seconds of a 122-minute movie-is what passes for gay content in a mainstream Hollywood release.