Well, for example, Thelma and Louise is in heavy rotation on Logo. No self-identified lesbian characters, but of tremendous interest to lesbians and gay men. Even in films with gay main characters, there’s generally a sizable supporting cast which is non-gay. As the channel begins to offer more original programming, the percentage of gay characters will undoubtedly go up.
These are the shows that made the top 20 for weeks in December.
“60 Minutes”
“A Charlie Brown Christmas,”
“Biggest Loser 2,”
“CBS Sunday Movie”
“Cold Case”
“Criminal Minds”
“CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”
“CSI: Miami”
“CSI: NY”
“Desperate Housewives”
“ER”
“Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”
“Fox NFL Post Game”
“Ghost Whisperer”
“Grey’s Anatomy”
“House”
“Las Vegas”
“Law & Order: SVU”
“Lost”
“Medium”
“Monday Night Football”
“My Name Is Earl”
“NCIS”
“NFL Monday Night Football”
“NFL Monday Showcase”
“Numb3rs”
“Out Of Practice”
“Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”
“The Amazing Race 8”
“The Apprentice 4”
“Two And a Half Men”
“Without a Trace”
Does anyone want to do a regular/recurring character count on these shows?
This is gonna skew the results…
I can remember seeing the first black people on television ads…quite a big deal back then, and then finally there was Diahann Carroll starring in the show Julia, considered a breakthrough back then.
I mention this because luckily, it seems that casting has pretty much gone color blind and it is no big deal to see a black judge, black lawyer, black doctor, etc etc whereas only a decade or so ago, it was a big, big deal. For that matter, it hasn’t been all that long ago that you would never have seen a female judge, female lawyer or female doctor on a television show.
My hope is that someday Gay characters will no longer have to be the punch line in stories and they can incorporate a Gay judge, Gay lawyer, Gay doctor into a cast and nobody will blink an eye.
To be honest, I think a lot of these shows have helped…for example, this week, on General Hospital, for the first time they have a main character coming out, and soaps have traditionally sidestepped male homosexuality as too controversial for the traditional audience of housewives…the fact that Mary Smith in Salt Lake City, and Jane Smith in rural America no longer seem to be shocked by this fact and are not frantically phoning in complaints to advertisers - well, that speaks volumes for how far Gay characters are being accepted into the mainstream. This can only bode well when Mary and Jane’s kids/siblings/or neighbors decide to come out.
Are Gay characters over-represented? Hardly. The fact is, you are only noticing because they are still so rarely represented that you sit up and take notice when they are portrayed.
Not to mention Monday Night Football.
Not only are gay characters under-represented, those that are shown seriously lack diversity.
I think we can all agree that there generally are a lot of roles for white males in the Hollywood/TV system, and a dearth of good leading roles for, well, damn near every color.
If you buy these U.S. Census demographics from Wikipedia, representing the demographics of the United States…
Then with 16 LGBT characters on American TV you’d expect the breakdown to go…
11 “white” (assuming the 69% number)
2 Hispanic
2 Black or African American
1 Asian
0 American Indian
0 Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander
0 Two or more races
I’m not suggesting that there are plenty o’ them gays on the teevee, but compared to the demographics of the U.S. at large, the distribution isn’t that far off the mark for the few that are there.
Perhaps from the perspective of a gay man (or woman), who knows many other gay men (or women), the demographics aren’t representative of any given gay person’s daily experience, and I’m not sure how you’d go about fixing that.
I’d say that’s more a problem with the viewer and their assumptions than the programming. If a character has only one scene, say, doing her work as a forensic scientist alongside the main character, why would there be any cues of such if she were a lesbian? I think that making sure all gay characters are somehow tagged is contradictory with the notion of making gay characters about more than just their queerness.
The point is that it’s a natural assumption, though. You’re only given selected information in a TV show, and viewers would be perfectly justified in thinking that a character is straight unless they’re told otherwise. Isn’t that how we behave the rest of the time?
I can buy that people will make assumptions about Things We Cannot Know about certain characters; people do that. To then blame their assumptions on somebody else… well, that sounds kinda weird to me.
That would sound a lot like bad-mouthing the cook for a meal you never tasted because you assumed it wasn’t going to be good.
True. But I don’t think it makes sense to assume that some proportion of unidentified characters are gay just so the gay population on TV matches the population in the real world.
Which is also a pretty vague number, actually — but I agree that they [unknown characters] shouldn’t be counted as one thing or another just to pad the numbers for either side.