When will there be enough gay people in movies? According to GLAAD, the answer is: Probably never. Last week the LGBT activist group released its scorecard for major Hollywood studios, grading them on their support for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) storytelling.”
For the past 10 years, GLAAD has been releasing this list ostensibly to ensure that gay people are represented on screen just as they exist in real life. And this is reasonable goal, except that it’s not actually what GLAAD wants.
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No one was good enough for GLAAD this year, with Warner Bros. receiving a grade of “poor” despite 12% of its films being “LGBT inclusive” and Sony, United Artists, Universal, and Disney all receiving “insufficient” ratings because their inclusion ranged 13% to 44%.
Yet, Deadline reports, “Despite their grades of ‘insufficient,’ Disney, Universal Pictures and United Artists Releasing far exceeded a goal set four years ago by GLAAD when it challenged the studios to include identifiably LGBTQ characters in at least 20% of their films.”
How come this massive overrepresentation of gay, lesbian, and transgender characters still wasn’t enough? Disney had a 44% rating, releasing 5 LGBT inclusive films out of its 12 films, an enormous proportion when you consider that just 7% of adults identify under the LGBT umbrella. Disney even went so far as to market transgenderism to children in one of its films.
But that wasn’t sufficiently radical. The problem was not that the studios didn’t have enough LGBT characters — although when GLAAD inevitably doubles its benchmark, they’ll be in trouble — but that they weren’t activists.
Deadline reports that GLAAD’s metrics depend on “the quality of and diversity of a film’s LGBTQ characters, their story arcs and, for the first time, on the ‘corporate actions’ of the studios and their parent companies.” The New York Times notes that this activism portion is “balancing support of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees and advocates with donations to anti-L.G.B.T.Q. politicians.”
And it’s not just political activism; GLAAD wants studios to sever ties with anyone who questions radical gender ideology.
“Warner Bros. received a grade of ‘poor,’ in part because of the studio’s ‘dangerous and irresponsible’ support of J.K. Rowling, the ‘Harry Potter’ author,” the New York Times reports. Yes, the “dangerous” author who has been criticized for saying aloud what most of the rest of the world believes: that men cannot be women, and vice versa.
To those not inclined to pay attention to the capricious demands of progressives, it may seem silly to worry about what GLAAD thinks. But this influential organization is pressuring movie studios into increasing overt gender ideology in films for children and beefing up their own progressive advocacy off screen.
You can expect to see more companies, especially Disney, vying for GLAAD’s approval. And this fight isn’t about “representation.” It’s about pressuring major film companies to distribute increasingly radical propaganda.
