I feel that homosexuals are way under-represented on tv and movies.
That’s it, I love you.
I don’t think many people agree with that number anymore. :rolleyes:
Cite, I realize that it’s Wiki and therefore suspect but even pro-gay groups don’t use that number. Many surveys have shown that exclusively gay men only account for between 1-3% of the population at most. Those higher estimates of 10% include some very loose definitions typically asking if you’ve ever had same-sex contact. Which, for the purposes of this thread, don’t represent the proportion on TV that the OP is asking about.
Based on the presumption that somewhere less than 5% of people are self-classified as gay then I’d say they are overrepresented. If you want to include bi-curious into the mix and raise the percentages you’ll have to include all the gratuitous lesbian enounters in B movies and you’re definately overrepresented still.
Now there’s a group that’s overrepresented. Are there any shows featuring a family of WASPs?
Where do you think suburban Italian Catholic homosexuals come from? People do tend to hang out with their family members. And showing homosexuals as members of families and not unconnected urban flotsem would make sense in the real world 
My dad’s cousin, btw. Suburban Italian Catholic lesbian. However, for the purposes of sitcom, its very important to recognize that the family has never acknowledged her to have any sexuality whatsoever. i.e. in a sitcom she is the “never married aunt who doesn’t date but who’s mother still tries to fix her up with nice boys.”
Really? One out of every twenty characters on television is gay? How have I been missing all these shows overflowing with the gays?
“Gratuitous lesbian encounters in B movies” are not in any way representational of anything to do with actual human sexuality. And even if they were, again, unless more than one out of every twenty movie characters is gay, then gays are not over-represented.
There’s The Book of Daniel on NBC, about an Episcopal priest and his family in CT. Of course he has a gay son and a lesbian sister-in-law…
The Kinsey Study (which is where the 10% figure comes from) is a textbook example of how not to conduct an accurate and meaningful survey. Most surveys come up with a figure in the low single digits for the number of people who self-identify as gay.
Over-presented, under-represented.
Still, if one accepts that 3-5% of the population is gay, some smaller proportion of those 3-5% isn’t yet out, and some take great pains to fit in. It’s not as if a character on TV can be secretly Chinese.
This makes no sense.
Well, there’s the adopted son on The Book of Daniel…
Wasn’t it Dorothy Parker who said “Scratch any Hollywood actor deep enough and you’ll find an actress”? As well as “Heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common”?
I believe the 3-5% percent are people who are out & gay. It may depend on the context, though. For example, my cousin came out to my parents (his died several years ago) in 2002. They laughed at him— he’d had the same “roommate” for 15 years, and the two of them owned a cottage in the Catskills. But of course before he came out to them, he limited his exposure to my mother and her siblings. He was out to most of his cousins, his co-workers and his friends, though. So depending on the point of view, there could, I suppose be gay characters in a series who are not presented as gay at first.
Well, I would say there are an awful lot of characters on TV whose sexuality isn’t known at all.
And the cultural assumption, absent evidence to the contrary, is that those characters are straight.
It’s what everybody else has been saying: the few gays that do appear on TV are so flamboyantly over-the-top caricatures that they represent nobody real.
I doubt that gays are overrepresented on TV. (We could try making a list if anybody’s up for it, and project what percentage of the TV population it might be.) The group that’s overrepresented, I think, is the strongly implied homosexual. That’s the effeminate lisping hairdresser type, usually a bit player whose sexuality isn’t actually discussed. You’re just supposed to know he’s gay because he’s FABULOUS!. There are people like that, but TV and movies have been known to overrely on them for cheap jokes.
See, this is the crux of it. When I said that if 5% of the population is gay then I think they are overrepresented it was of the proportion of characters who’s sexualty is portrayed one way or another.
To make the argument that eveyone on TV who isn’t explicitly portrayed as gay is de facto straight is another topic altogether.
This is just bizarre. You people who think gays are over represented can honestly tell us that it’s your impression that more than 1 out of ten characters on TV or film is gay?
I doubt if one of ten characters would be gay on the proposed gay network (did that every come to fruition?)
That’s just ludicrous. Do a survey. Watch TV for a few hours. Make a little tickmark on the left side of the page for every person who comes onscreen who’s gay, and a tickmark on the right side for every person who comes onscreen who’s not gay. I’ll eat YOUR hat if it’s not closer to 1:100 than 1:10.
If you want to see mud logging represented, shoot off an email to Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs.
Thank goodness! I caught an episode of Queer Eye recently, and Carson was wearing ugly old-man loud plaid golf pants. Please tell me that’s not fashionable! Actually, they were all looking fairly un-fabulous in that episode.
There are three in the US: Logo (cable); here! (pay per view); and Q (no idea). Don’t know anything about Q’s programming but I’d hazard a guess that the percentage of gay characters on the other two equals 5%.
Do you mean at least 5%. Otherwise I’m confused. I’ve never seen either channel, but if I were to turn one on, I’d expect some gay characters. If I paid for a gay channel, I’d be rather upset to see a show about a bunch of straight people with one gay character. Maybe it’s just me. I’d probably like my Gay TV gay.