In February, Moonlight received Best Picture at the Academy Awards, winning over the big budget musical La La Land. Moonlight, a coming-of-age tale, addressed issues related to homophobia, racism and patriarchal norms. With its widespread success at the Awards, as well as at the box office, many people felt that the movie was a victory for the LGBTQ community.
However, a report has found that representation of LGBTQ characters in Hollywood is not improving, making Moonlight’s success an anomaly.
According to the 2017 Studio Responsibility Index from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), a non-governmental media monitoring organization, only 18.4 percent of 125 major movies released in 2016 included characters that identified as LGBTQ. Despite the highly anticipated queer moments in Beauty and the Beast, as well as in Star Trek Beyond, LGBTQ representation had only increased by less than 1 percent from 2015 to 2016.
Even more upsetting, according to GLAAD officials, is the fact that most the queer characters in Hollywood are based on “outdated stereotypes” played for “cheap laughs.”
To determine these statistics, GLAAD viewed films released in 2016 by the seven major studios: Disney, Fox, Lionsgate, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Brothers.
According to the organization’s president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis, GLAAD evaluated each film for the inclusion of queer characters, the presence of general LGBTQ content and anti-LGBTQ language or “humor” in order to “map the quantity, quality, and diversity of LGBTQ characters.”
GLADD’s 2017 Studio Responsibility Index introduced a five-point scale to rate films released throughout 2016. This new rating system held “Hollywood studios to a higher standard reflective of the LGBTQ inclusion that is thriving in other forms of media,” said Ellis.
Using the five-point system, GLAAD gave Disney, Sony and Lionsgate “failing” grades. Fox, Paramount and Warner Brothers received “poor” grades, while Universal earned a slightly better “insufficient” grade. With this, none of the studios received a “good” or “excellent” grade.
For the 23 films of 2016 that were LGBTQ inclusive, only 9 of them passed GLADD’s Vito Russo Test, which measures LGBTQ characters within a film’s context much like the Bechdel Test measures female characters.
To pass the Vito Russo test, the film “must contain a character that identifies as [LGBT], and that character must not be solely defined by their sexual orientation or gender identity, [meaning] they are comprised of the same sort of unique character traits commonly used the differentiate straight/non-transgender characters from one another,” according to the GLAAD website.
“The LGBT character must [also] be tied into the plot in such a way that their removal would have a significant effect, meaning they are not there to simply provide colorful commentary, paint urban authenticity, or set up a punchline.”
In short, “the character must matter.”
The 9 films of 2016 that passed the Vito Russo test proved to be a slight improvement in comparison to last year’s GLAAD report. In 2015, of the 22 films that were LGBTQ inclusive, only eight passed the test, the lowest percentage since the study began in 2012.
While American film has much improvement to do in terms of queer characters, TV programming has greatly increased its LGBTQ representation in recent years. The success of shows like Transparent and Orange is the New Black makes it dire for Hollywood “to set up and show the full diversity of the world that movie audiences are living in today,” said Ellis.
“Films like ‘Moonlight’ prove there is a huge opportunity to not only tell LGBTQ stories worthy of Oscar gold,” Ellis continued, “but to open the hearts and minds of audiences here and around the world in places where these stories can be a lifeline to the people who need it most.”
