If you’re looking to find gay characters and representations on television, where do you turn? Logo, the all-gay cable channel owned by Viacom? MTV, long a supporter of gay rights? Showtime, once the home of The L Word and Queer as Folk?
No, it turns out the answer is Fox. Yes, as in Fox News. According to the annual Network Responsibility Index compiled by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Fox was the only broadcast network to receive an “excellent” rating, with 45% of their primetime programming featuring gay representation. The only channel to score higher was cable network ABC Family, with 74% inclusion in primetime programming.
But as far as the networks were concerned, they all received at least “adequate” ratings from GLAAD, with stodgy CBS trailing behind with 27%. They may be the most-watched network, but they’re always a little behind the times. However a quarter of all their programming included a gay man or lesbian (or bisexual – don’t forget the bisexuals) in some way. That sure is a marked improvement from the days when the only LGBT character you might run into was lisping Uncle Arthur on Bewitched or maybe Charles Nelson Reilly doubling his entendres on The Match Game.
In an age when Fox, of all places, is the gayest of all the networks, do we still need to worry about how often, and in what way, gay people are portrayed? Yes and no. It seems that representations of gay, lesbian, bisexual and especially transgender individuals (truly the final frontier) are here to stay and they’re even diversifying, as shown by the African American and Latino gays on Empire and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, two of the shows that drove Fox to their positive rating.
However the interesting thing is that gay characters on TV – in either scripted or reality shows – usually turn up in ones or twos. There is usually a sole LGBT character on a show who may have a significant other and that’s it. Naturally it’s nice to be included and it’s helpful to show gay Americans fitting in with the rest of the population in their families (Empire), workplaces (Brooklyn Nine-Nine) and schools (Glee). That is what true acceptance looks like.
What almost all of the networks in the study are lacking, however, is a “gay show”. The only show in the study with a preponderance of gay characters was HBO’s Looking, which focused on the lives of a group of young gay men in San Francisco. In previous years of this study, shows like The L Word or Will & Grace would prop up the statistics for their networks. These were beehives of gay activity with characters of all sorts of sexual orientations flying about and making the airwaves a little bit more diverse. Those shows – set in actual gay communities – are a thing of the past.
While that is a bit of progress – portrayals of gay life are no longer relegated to a programming ghetto – it’s also a bit sad in that we only get to see how gay and lesbian characters behave in a straight milieu. Now that Looking has been cancelled (RIP) there is no show to examine the questions and problems of modern gay life in the same way that some of those big homosexual shows of the past could. It’s rare that we get to see gay people interacting with each other outside a romantic context, and those interactions happen quite often, as anyone who has ever been to a RuPaul’s Drag Race party will certainly tell you.
Of course Fox deserves congratulations on its efforts for inclusion. I’m sure Rupert Murdoch thinks it’s a nice feather in his cap as he’s signing Bill O’Reilly’s paycheck. But now that gay people are as much of a staple of the TV landscape as game shows or procedurals with acronyms in their title, maybe it’s time to focus on the quality and diversity of those portrayals as well as the volume.
