Entertainment Companies Ditch LGBTQ+ Content, Shove Characters in a Closet

I think it’d be an understatement to say the most recent US election has been devastating for us here at the Geekiary.  Many of us are part of one or more vulnerable groups that will suffer under the upcoming policy changes.  At least we have our media, we thought.  But now even that is showing signs of falling out from under us. 

The biggest example of media failing us that’s making the rounds right now is about Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur.  A trans-inclusive episode involving the character Brooklyn was cut from the lineup and will not be airing.  The episode would have involved issues regarding trans girls playing sports, which would have been an incredibly poignant piece of media if it had been released.  However, the corporate powers-at-be were too afraid of the content, and now we may never see it.

This decision was supposedly made a long time prior to the election results and apparently had nothing to do with them, but that doesn’t exactly make it any better.  All that means is they’ve been eager to abandon us for a while and are now ready to capitulate to the incoming administration openly and without shame. When the decision was made to withhold it makes little difference in that regard.

For what it’s worth, I believe them when they say it was a decision made before the election results.  Back in September, news broke that queer themes in Inside Out 2 had been toned down. This wasn’t a sudden shift in strategy. It’s something that has been slowly evolving for the past couple of years. 

I’ve been critical of Disney’s LGBTQ+ representation for decades.  But progress has been made, especially in the last five years.  We got several canonically queer characters in the MCU, including Loki, which I praised even in the face of many peers telling me it wasn’t enough.  Well, of course it’s not enough, but it was a huge step and I wanted to encourage them to continue.  It seems like my encouragement was for naught, however, and we’re about to backslide after all this progress we’d made. We won’t even have ‘not enough.’  We’re about to have nothing. 

Disney isn’t the only one abandoning LGBTQ+ representation. According to Denzel Washington, a same-sex kiss was cut from Gladiator II. There’s a possibility it was cut for other reasons – flow, time, whatever – but the timing doesn’t feel great.  Then you have the long downfall of HBO over the past several years, where popular queer content like Our Flag Means Death are cancelled, or gets shoved away in a vault never to see the light of day, like Batgirl.  Netflix similarly axed Dead Boy Detectives.

Add all these incidents together and a pattern starts to emerge.  The entertainment industry is shifting rightward, abandoning the progress it’s made towards representing LGBTQ+ identities on screen, and shoving us in a closet (or a vault, sometimes). The entertainment companies that make these decisions don’t see supporting us as good business anymore.

So what do we do?

At the very least, we continue to do the same thing we did before they decided to backslide.  We’ve been working on getting better representation in film and television for decades.  I’ve personally been invested in this topic since the late 90’s and, while I’ve enjoyed the progress we made, I’ve never really felt my work here was done.  It just felt like I was working with content that was finally going in the direction I hoped it would go. I went from “please give us something” to “please give us more.”

It’s still going to be an uphill battle.  We’re the little guy at the moment, being drowned out by a cacophony of bigotry and hatred in the wake of the election.  Corporations see the writing on the wall and are adapting to a cultural shift in a conservative direction.  But even if it’s hard and seems like it won’t matter much, we need to make our continued support for progress loud and clear.

It’s true that we have very little power on a political level at the moment, and will have even less when Trump takes office. But we do have the power to sway pop culture, and make our thoughts on their shift rightward known. We’ve done it before. And we’ll do it again.  Corporations want to make money, and if a huge portion of their customers start getting loud about something, they’ll listen.  And, as I said, the bigotry is incredibly loud right now.  They’re acting accordingly.

Be loud. Be firm.

Send strongly worded, but polite letters that get the point across. Preferably send them through snail mail to show we mean business with our extra effort to get off the Internet and do something meaningful in the real world. Make fan campaigns. Be a little irritating to the networks if you need to (within reason, of course).  Do what you’ve always done, lovely fandoms of the world! Just turn it up to 11, maybe. 

Will it make a difference? Maybe.  It certainly did at the end of the 2010s and early 2020s, when LGBTQ+ content was starting to go mainstream.  We never got to that full equality status – the ratios of LGBTQ+ characters in our shows and movies did not match the ratios in real life, but it was certainly a lot closer than it was a decade prior to that.  So we might as well try it again. 

I know it may seem silly to devote time to this when very real world policies are going to hinder us.  This is, after all, fiction.  I’m not suggesting that this should be your main focus at all.  We are going to have a lot of legislation and executive orders that will impact our health, families, and abilities to exist peacefully in this country.  So go march for those causes, and make contact with your senators, congressmen, and even local legislative officials about issues that will impact you and those that you love.  But when you get home and want to wind down and find that all the new shows are comprised of almost entirely cisgender heterosexual characters, maybe slam out a letter to a media public relations department, too.

Author: Angel Wilson

Angel is the admin of The Geekiary and a geek culture commentator. They earned a BA in Film & Digital Media from UC Santa Cruz. They have contributed to various podcasts and webcasts including An Englishman in San Diego, Free to Be Radio, and Genre TV for All. They identify as queer.

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