Or drank a bottle of wine. That’s what I did at my father-in-law’s house.
Fortunately, my relationship with my father-in-law got better. When I talked to him about marrying his daughter, he even said, “If we’d met differently, I’ll bet we could have been friends.” (I knew what he meant.)
For a long time, however, the social relationship between LGBT people and the rest of society did not seem to get much better. When I was a teenager in the ‘80s, students still whispered in the hallways about the P.E. teacher being a lesbian. For some it was horrifying. For people like me it was interesting, and a precursor to wondering when she’d be fired.
I have to imagine she drank a lot of wine.
I can laugh now when I think of those days if only because they have changed so much. I attribute a lot of this to TV, which has allowed Americans to see LGBT people as they are: just like them.
“Activists and academics say that depictions of gay characters on television play a big role in making viewers more comfortable with their gay, lesbian and transgender neighbors,” says the New York Times. “In five separate studies (researchers) have found that the presence of gay characters on television programs decreases prejudices among viewers of the programs.”(1)
Naturally, not everyone is happy with this. Brent Bozell, a prominent anti-LGBT equality blogger, asks: “TV Has to be At Least 42 Percent Gay?”(2) Even I’ll admit that is a lot of gay people. Maybe too many.
Huh?
If Bozell is correct, and 42 percent of TV characters are gay, that seems disproportionate to reality. Although it’s a best guess, most studies seem to indicate about 4 percent of the country identifies as LGBT.(3) That’s one tenth of what Bozell says are currently on TV, and if that’s true, that’s a problem.
No, not because LGBT people are a problem.
Rather it’s because if television really does “reflect the ideas that have been accepted by society,” as an article on PopWatch.com argues, don’t we want that reflection to be as accurate as possible?(4) Imagine if 42 percent of the characters on TV were over-the-top, conservative, right-wing lunatics? Wouldn’t LGBT activists be outraged? What if Sarah Palin were on TV 42 percent of the time? (No, she’s not. It just seemed that way in 2010.)
Maybe it’s not politically correct to say it, but if LGBT’s are dominating 10 times their share of the characters on TV, might Bozell not have a point?
He would -- if he wasn’t wrong.
According to The Hollywood reporter, only “only 3.3 percent of the characters featured in the 2013-14 TV (seasons) were lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.”(5) What’s more, this number is down from 4.4 percent the year before. What is Bozell talking about?
As it turns out, Bozell’s number reflects one network, and the amount of time LGBT characters are seen on the screen. Being charitable, we’ll even assume his data is correct. But when Bozell writes, “Fox (has) these characters in 42 percent of their programming hours,” and uses that to say TV is “42 percent gay” he’s truly comparing apples and oranges.(2)
Yes, it’s true that with 5.4 percent LGBT characters, Fox has chosen go beyond other networks and the LGBT population at large.(5) What is not the Fox network’s decision, however, is what people watch.
That 42 percent of programming hours on FOX are taken up by LGBT characters merely demonstrates that lot of people are choosing to watch those shows. I seriously doubt Bozell is saying people shouldn’t get to decide what they watch.
More, he can’t argue that people don’t have a choice. In the last two years two heavily promoted network sitcoms built around the premise of gay families -- “The New Normal” and “Sean Saves the World” -- have both been cancelled after one season because no one was watching them. (I didn’t -- and apparently most of you didn’t, either.)
One final note for Bozell -- and the rest of us. If he really is as incensed about disproportionate demographic representation on TV as he claims, why isn’t he up in arms about ethnic minority representation?
According to Think Progress, just 5.7 percent of the characters on TV are Latino, while 8.8 percent are African-American.(6) This in contrast to Hispanics making up 16.4 percent of the country and African-Americans making up 12.6 percentage of the U.S. population.(7)
Perhaps it is time Bozell took up their cause. Perhaps we all should.
References:
1) New York Times: Gay on TV: It’s All in the Family
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/business/media/gay-on-tv-its-all-in-the-family.html?_r=0
2) TownHall.com: TV Has to be At Least 42 Percent Gay?
http://townhall.com/columnists/brentbozell/2013/10/25/tv-has-to-be-at-least-42-percent-gay-n1731850/page/full
3) About.com: Gay Population Statistics: How Many Gay People Are There?
http://gaylife.about.com/od/comingout/a/population.htm
4) Pop Matters: How TV can reflect society's tolerance
http://www.popmatters.com/article/how-tv-can-reflect-societys-tolerance/
5) The Hollywood Reporter: LGBT TV Characters Down From 2012 Record, GLAAD Study Finds
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/lgbt-tv-characters-down-2012-647281
6) Think Progress: What The U.S. Would Look Like If It Mirrored The Main Characters On Prime-Time Network Television
http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2013/10/28/2840441/world-looked-like-prime-time-network-television/
7) Wikipedia: Demographics of the United States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States