By Karen Frost

Resulta que el secreto del éxito es ... lesbianas. Y los españoles lo tienen claro. Vamos a ver cómo. 

Several years ago, I made the following argument: TV shows can drastically increase the size of their viewership by adding a well-written and well-acted lesbian storyline. This is because well-publicized, popular queer female couples accessible internationally through YouTube or other streaming can rally domestic queer audiences while simultaneously drawing in hundreds of thousands of global viewers in a way that the show’s heterosexual pairings—except in extremely rare circumstances—don’t. To support my argument, I used four case studies: an American daytime soap opera, a primetime sci-fi drama on an American broadcast network, a Brazilian telenovela, and a supernatural Western horror on an American cable network.

Since the mid-2010s, while hundreds of TV shows throughout the Western world have introduced lesbian storylines, Spanish TV has done something extraordinary: it has become such a leader in lesbian storylines that it hasturned into a case study on the impact of LGBT inclusivity on viewership. More than that, Spanish TV has become a global gold standard for LGBT representation and queer fan engagement. How did this happen? Admittedly, probably the biggest factor is that Spanish TV leverages the global Spanish-speaking community, which at 400 million native speakers is actually larger than the English-speaking community, but that’s only part of the story. After all, the same could be said of TV programming coming out of Argentina or Mexico. So what sets the Spaniards apart? 

Camino and Maite on “38 Acacias”

The working theory of this article is that queer representation on Spanish TV has been so successful since the early 2010s because it has to a large degree avoided falling into toxic tropes, has treated its many queer female couples with dignity and equality, and has taken measures to highlight its lesbian pairings on social media so that they will attract international viewership. (It’s worth noting here that fans have created English subtitling on almost all queer Spanish storylines, making them accessible to the 1.5 billion English speakers in the world who may or may not speak Spanish.) Put another way, Spanish TV has supported and championed its lesbian couples more than is done in many other countries, and this has attracted millions of fans-domestically and internationally. In a world in which content transcends borders, languages and cultures, here is proof—in the form of quantitative metrics, at least—that Spanish TV has seen the potential of the global queer female fandom and is tapping into it by giving viewers with what they want: more lesbian content.

Below is an examination of how queer female content has drastically affected viewership patterns for the internationally accessible social media of two of Spain’s biggest corporations and how the corporations have both responded to and encouraged these patterns.  

La 1: Where Lesbian Content Rules

Corporación de Radio y Televisión Española, S.A. (RTVE, Spanish Radio and Television Corporation) is a state-owned, public corporation that happens to be the largest audiovisual group in Spain broadcasting in Spanish. Like the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), its offerings range from news to sports to reality TV to series. In the last decade, RTVE has added a bunch of queer female characters to its series on its La 1 channel and highlighted their storylines on their social media. The results speak for themselves:

• Nine of the RTVE Series YouTube channel’s top 10 most viewed videos feature queer female pairings (spanning three different shows). These nine videos beat out 4,710 other videos from at least seven other RTVE series going back two years. When it comes to La 1’s YouTube audience, the primary viewers are clearly being drawn in by lesbian content.

• The top six of the 1,643 “Servir y Proteger” videos on RTVE’s Series YouTube channel are of Nacha with female love interests. The most viewed video for the show, “Servir y Proteger: Nacha y Aitana pasan la noche juntas #Capítulo550” (“Serve and Protect: Nacha and Aitana spend the night together”), has over 8.2 million views. This is significant given the show only averages about 1.1 million viewers per episode. Meanwhile, the top video without lesbian content received only 564k views, or 1/15th the number of views.

• The lesbian storyline on “Amar in Tiempo Revueltos,”which ended for La 1 in 2012, was so popular and groundbreaking that even today, RTVE has dedicated a section of the video library on the show’s website to clips of Ana and Teresa…but no other couple.  

It’s possible to speculate that La 1 may have been inspired to proactively champion “Acacias 38” in particular—including through enthusiastic hashtagging and retweeting things associated with #Maitino, compiling “best of” Maitino scenes, sharing Maitino “behind the scenes,” and teasing future scenes—based on the overwhelmingly positive fan response first to Ana and Teresa and then to the pairing of Celia and Aurora on “Seis Hermanas” (2015-2017). The most viewed video of Celia and Aurora on YouTube (which was not uploaded by RTVE) received 14 million views. With massive view counts like that, it’s no wonder LezWatchTV counts six RTVE shows with queer female characters in the last three years. Queer content=viewers, and RTVE is more than happy to encourage international viewership by opening up its videos to anyone who wants to watch.

Antena 3: The Unmatched Global Juggernaut for Lesbian Storylines 

What has 45 million views and is the third most popular video out of 13,634 videos on the Atresmedia Youtubechannel? Sara kissing Luisita on “Amar es Para Siempre”(“Sara aprovecha la debilidad de Luisita parabesarla”—“Sara takes advantage of Luisita’s weakness to kiss her”). The fourth most popular video is Alba and Sophie kissing, also from “Amar es Para Siempre,” with 35 million views. It’s hard to contextualize view counts that high in a way that’s graspable. For Americans, 45 million views is almost five times as many views as Jennifer Lopez’s video “How I mastered the Pole Dance | Hustlers BTS Part 1” got and almost three times more views than the trailer for Beyonce’s “Lemonade.” A more graspable comparison for everyone, however, may be this: the population of Spain is 47 million people. View count and individual viewers aren’t the same thing (one viewer can watch a YouTube video up to 30 times before the views are no longer counted), but if every man, woman and teenager in Spain watched the clip of Sara and Luisita, that would be approximately how many times the clip was viewed.Utterly incredible!

Luisita and Amelia on “Amar es Para Siempre”

The tens of millions of views that Antena 3’s lesbian content has received is, to the best of my knowledge, unmatched by any other lesbian pairing anywhere in the world, in any language, at any time. It’s like the difference between Usain Bolt running the 100m at the Olympics and a high school student running it at a local track meet. Every other couple is simply left behind. Regardless of country of origin, the most popular queer female couples almost always max out at 7-14 million YouTube views (suggesting the approximate limitation of the global queer female fandom), but Antena 3 more than tripled this maximum twice in just under two years. Nor was it the first time a lesbian Antena 3 couple became stratospherically popular.The most viewed video of Pepa and Silvia from “Los Hombres de Paco” reached 30 million views even though it aired 10 years ago.

Antena 3 is continuing to lean into its queer content by doubling down on Luimelia, the pairing of Luisita and Amelia on “Amar es Para Siempre.” Beginning on Valentine’s Day, Antena 3 will be airing “#Luimelia,” a six chapter alternate-universe-style, spin-off miniseries set in 2020 on its premium streaming service ATRESplayerPremium. This may, in fact, be the first ever instance of a lesbian TV spin-off (even if in abbreviated form), given the failures of petitions to do the same for couples like Barcedes (Chile’s Perdona Nuestros Pecados) and Juliantina (Mexico’s Amar a Muerte). Leave it to Spain to trailblaze that, too.

Nacha and Rocío from “Servir y Proteger”

Spain’s Place in the Queer TV World Deserves More Recognition 

Unfortunately, three of the four shows mentioned at the start of this article, the ones I originally used to prove the size and potential impact of the global queer fandom, were ambivalent about their lesbian pairings. “General Hospital,” which never wanted to commit to its lesbian storyline and did so grudgingly, eliminated its queer female romance before it even had a chance to grow, and the show has never allowed lesbian content again (even though the storyline won one of the actresses an Emmy). “The 100” achieved infamy in the LGBT community by killing off its highly popular lesbian character after actively rallying queer viewers to the show, and in consequence, it lost approximately 1/3 of its viewers. On “Em Familia,” the lesbian couple was only allowed three kisses and no real physical intimacy. Only “Wynonna Earp” actively cultivated and rewarded its queer fan base, and for its trouble, its fans fought tooth and nail to get it a fourth season, filming now.

Unlike the three flawed original case studies, Spanish TV leans into its lesbian storylines, providing a better, less mixed case study for how lesbian storylines positively impact shows. And because its content is so accessible, it’s easy for viewers around the world to watch. Although not all Spanish lesbian TV pairings have been fantastically successful (La 1’s pairing of Ainhoa and Diana on “Centro Médico” never garnered a huge following, for example), nor have all had happy endings (Ana and Teresa when they were moved to “Amar es Para Siempre”, “Tierra de Lobos,” “Los Hombres de Paco”), nevertheless on the balance Spain has produced a lot of quality lesbian content.In the Anglo-centric English language press, Spain’s contributions to queer female pop culture are most often overlooked, but these contributions are significant and have spanned decades. It’s just just Spain’s quantity of lesbian storylines, but their quality. Starting with the extremely influential storyline of Maca and Esther on “Hospital Central” in the mid-2000s, Spanish representation has entertained and uplifted literally millions of queer women around the world. Based on view count alone, Spanish storylines are likely some of the most watched lesbian videos in the world.

And Spain’s not stopping. Based on the consistency of queer content now being added to Spanish shows across multiple networks (Movistar+’s “SKAM España”, “Hockey Girls” on TV3/Netflix, etc.), there’s every reason to believe that Spanish TV will continue to produce quality content in the future. ¡Viva España!

Silvia and Pepa from “Los Hombres de Paco”

By: Karen Frost

By now, everyone knows the story. The wedding planning website Zola.com submitted to the Hallmark Channel six wedding ads, four of which featured a wedding between a same-sex female couple. After one of the ads ran in December, the conservative Christian organization One Million Moms—a subsidiary of the American Family Association, one of the nation’s leading anti-LGBTQ groups—gathered a petition with 35,009 signatures and complained directly to Bill Abbott, CEO of Crown Media Family Networks, Hallmark's parent company, about both the ads and Abbott’s publicly expressed “openness” to Hallmark airing LGBT content. Crown Media responded by pulling the four lesbian ads but not the two straight ads.

The outcry was immediate in the LGBT community and throughout the more liberal parts of the Internet, the counterprotest dwarfing the size of the original protest. Every major news outlet ran with the story while #BoycottHallmarkChannel trended on Twitter. Sensing the direction of the public opinion winds, Crown Media backpedaled. The next day, Hallmark tweeted that it would not only air the ads, but that it would work "with GLAAD to better represent the LGBTQ community across our portfolio of brands."

Zola, a wedding website service features a couple kissing. Credit: Zola

In less than a day, the kerfluffle turned into a triumphant victory for the LGBT community (and Zola, which couldn’t have bought better publicity). Hallmark’s reversal demonstrated that at least some corporations can be influenced to reverse a publicly anti-LGBT stance by negative press and pushback on social media. The conflict brought the conversation about queer representation in TV ads and on the Hallmark Channel to the attention of the general heterosexual public, shining a spotlight on the discrimination the queer community still faces in 2019. And finally, it put the ball in Hallmark’s court for (one day) airing a much hyped/protested LGBT movie that gives a nod to tolerance and inclusivity without irretrievably angering the over 85 million viewers who watched Hallmark Christmas programming in 2018, a tall order.

Missing from most of the discussion about this flashpoint, however, is a way to convey to readers the sheer magnitude of the LGBT representation problem in holiday oriented films produced by the mainstream. It’s not about an ad or about a network, it’s about a much, much bigger problem. Everyone knows that “Hallmark style” movies are all but exclusively heterosexual, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant stories about upper middle class protagonists (incredibly, Hallmark didn’t have a movie featuring people of color until 2018). That’s not news. But let’s look at what the numbers tell us about queer female representation across all holiday films:

As of December 2019, the Hallmark Channel has aired 232 Countdown to Christmas movies and Lifetime has aired 88 Christmas movies. The queer female community is 0 for 320 on that count. But those movies are just one part of a larger group of movies with a Christmas theme. This year, the Washington Post used an algorithm to search IMDb for “Christmas” movies and determined that 31,034 movies dating back to 1913 include Christmas themes. How many of those movies had queer female protagonists? I count five full-length movies: “Rent” (2005), “Carol” (2015), “Ghosting: The Spirit of Christmas,” “Let it Snow,” and “Season of Love,” the latter three airing in 2019. A tiny lesbian subplot was cut from “Love Actually” (2003) for time or it would have made six. (Some have argued that “Anna and the Apocalypse” counts, too, but although the character of Steph reads as queer, she’s never overtly identified as such in the movie.) Mathematically, that’s 0.016% of all Christmas-themed movies. Hallmark actresses Danica McKellar and Holly Robinson Peete have each been in that many Hallmark Christmas movies alone.

What these statistics effectively tell us is that when it comes to movie demographics, queer women don’t exist. If we assume that queer women make up around 6% of the global population, the current rate of representation is about 1/400th of what it should be. This isn’t just erasure. It’s intentional obliteration. It’s what happens when sexism meets homophobia. An entire segment of the population disappears on screen.

It’s no secret that for years Hallmark and Lifetime, avowedly conservative networks with no desire to “rock the boat” with their viewer base, wouldn’t allow queer female characters in their movies (or non-white people, or non-Christians, or disabled people, etc.). But to blame just those two networks for homophobia is to miss the forest for two trees. It’s not just them. It’s every major studio. A quick search of “LGBT Christmas movies” immediately reveals an outline of the problem: in the extremely rare instance mainstream Hollywood has added a queer presence to a Christmas movie, it’s been a gay brother/son—“The Family Stone” (2005), “Holiday in Handcuffs” (2007), “Twinkle All the Way” (2019)—or sassy gay friend—“A Christmas Prince” (2017), “A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding” (2018), “Christmas in Evergreen: Letters to Santa (2018),” and other gay coded Hallmark characters.

It’s not just Christmas. Lesbians have been excluded by major studios for other major holidays, too. “Home for the Holidays” (1995) has the prodigal gay son returning home for Thanksgiving. In the American “Love Actually” knock-off “Valentine’s Day” (2010), one of the storylines is about a gay football player struggling to come out. Freeform’s upcoming “The Thing About Harry” (2020) puts queer, teenage boys at the forefront of the network’s first Valentine’s Day rom-com. But queer women have only been represented in Thanksgiving movies by way of indie film: “What’s Cooking?” (2000) and “Lez Bomb” (2018). They haven’t been in any Valentine’s Day movies at all. (Queer women dominate Halloween movies, but that’s a separate conversation about the sexploitation of women and fetishization.)

Lez Bomb the Movie. Written & Produced by: Jenna Laurenzo

Make no mistake: the problem is not one of queer men vs. queer women. After all, the men aren’t doing much better, statistically. The problem is there’s only been one mainstream Thanksgiving movie made with LGBT characters and it was 24 years and four Presidents ago. All members of the LGBT community are being disadvantaged.

With the few one-offs noted above, there’s not a single major studio in Hollywood, Hallmark or otherwise, that has cast queer female characters in movies centering around holidays. It’s not a Hallmark problem, it’s an everyone problem. When it comes to Hallmark and Lifetime, the issue of LGBT representation is tied to the broader culture war. These networks have chosen a very narrow white, straight, Christian focus so as not to upset what they view as their core conservative Christian viewership (unsurprisingly, Hallmark as of 2018 was reported to have a policy against showing interracial couples even in the background, proof that 2019 is the new 1950). But the policy restrictions that apply to those networks don’t apply to the same degree to other studios. The creators of “Bad Santa,” for example, aren’t afraid to ruffle feathers. So what’s everyone else’s excuse for not having decking the halls with lesbians?

When tello Films created “Season of Love” to fill the queer female representation gap, it was a gift to the queer female community, but it also represented a failure of the mainstream. After years of organizations like GLAAD pushing for increases in representation across all genres and by all studios, movies with a holiday theme have remained steadfastly exclusionary. Put plainly, the queer female community had to crowdsource its own holiday film because of blatant, overt discrimination on the part of the entire film industry that went unchallenged for decades.

You can rent/purchase the movie here: https://www.tellofilms.com/products/season-of-love it's out now. From Tello Films and DASH Productions- Season of Love is a lighthearted rom-com featuring a large ensemble cast of diverse women and their connected love lives during the hectic holiday period just before Christmas through the New Year who discover love truly is the best gift of all.

The road to LGBT representation on the Hallmark Channel or on Lifetime is uphill. Hallmark aired 98 new movies in 2019 (not all holiday, of course) and has even more planned for 2020…none of which have queer characters. To match its content to global demographics, Hallmark would have to produce about 6 queer movies in 2021, something the network won’t do.

But there is hope. By coincidence, a huge number of actresses who have been in Hallmark channel movies have also been in high profile queer roles. These include: Ali Liebert, Jennifer Beals, Sarah Paulson, Katie McGrath, Kim Delaney, Teri Polo, Mia Kirshner, Alexis Bledel, Katrina Law, Chyler Leigh, Amy Acker, Heather Morris, Bridget Regan, Emmanuelle Vaugier, Rachel Skarsten, Jes Macallan, Kat Barrell, and Elise Bauman. As a result of the #BoycottHallmarkChannel movement, several of them spoke up in support of more queer content on Hallmark. Liebert offered to be Hallmark’s first lesbian bride. Regan requested to be in a “heartfelt lesbian Christmas comedy.” Barrell tweeted her disappointment and Bauman issued an open letter. Hallmark’s own stable of actresses is pushing for change.

What this means overall is that the talent for a queer female holiday movie produced by the mainstream is there. The willingness to act in that movie is there. The writers are there. So when the time comes, all Hallmark (or whomever) has to do is greenlight it.

Archive

In his wonderful book “Blink,” writer Malcolm Gladwell provides an anecdote about the field of classical music. In brief, before the 1980s, orchestras were dominated by men (largely due to the assumption that women have weaker lungs and/or are too timid and delicate to perform boisterous pieces at an elite level). However, when an audition system was put in place to prevent selection committees from knowing the gender of the auditioning musician, suddenly women began to win the majority of auditions for top orchestras. In the US, for example, the number of women playing in the top orchestras increased fivefold after a screen system became common. What happened? Social prejudices about women, as a group, had been interfering with the auditioners’ ability to objectively evaluate women. Put another way, a system to prohibit conscious and unconscious bias from interfering in the selection process allowed for a truly objective selection process. And in the process, it highlighted the pervasive and toxic effect of sexism in the field of classical music. 

What does this story have to do with minority representation on TV and movies in America? Well, a lot actually, because this article is about bias, homophobia, and its pernicious effects in Hollywood. 

Consider the following: According to Autostraddle’s internal accounting, in 2018 there were 128 scripted American shows with regular and/or recurring queer female characters. That was up 12% from the 116 shows in 2017, which was up 36% from 80 shows in 2016. There were 230 characters in 2018, compared to just 85 in 2017. If that’s not astounding enough, just eight years ago, in 2010, there were only 18 regular or recurring queer female characters on TV. In 2007, GLAAD counted a mere three. Now in 2019, both “Batwoman” and “Abby’s” feature a queer titular character played by an openly queer actress, and queer characters are 8.8% of regular characters on primetime scripted broadcasting (a demographic roughly proportional to the percentage of the general American population that is queer). By every conceivable measure, TV representation is progressing. More than progressing. It has exploded in a rainbow of support from networks and showrunners. 

Now consider this: According to the University of California Annenberg’s annual assessment of the top 100 grossing US films, in the last five years, lesbian characters have represented only 0.09-0.38% of speaking characters. In 2018, only 11 of the top 100 films had a lesbian character, for a total of 17 lesbians out of over 4,000 speaking characters. Including males, only 1.3% of all speaking/named characters were LGBT (this is roughly consistent with GLAAD’s findings for the year as well). The Annenberg study poignantly notes that since the start of the study over a decade ago, “the number of LGB characters on screen has changed but not the percentage.” Thus while in 2018 the number of LGBT characters in movies were more than double the number in 2014, the overall numbers remain so tiny that this change is much less than a percentage point, which is statistically insignificant. Representation in movies, in short, is not progressing an inch. 

“Blink” is in part an exploration of how manipulating variables can lead us to identify bias, and the above data clearly shows the presence of conscious bias. While the television side of Hollywood has identified a need for greater diversity and has taken steps to rectify decades of exclusion, the film side of Hollywood has continued to cling to…homophobia. For the last two decades, when called out for their lack of inclusivity, movie studios have responded that they can’t have queer content because viewers will reject it. “We can’t afford to show queer content” has been an oft repeated mantra (director Paul Feig alluded to the lack of queer content as official Sony Pictures policy when explaining why out lesbian Kate McKinnon’s character in “Ghostbusters” couldn’t be openly queer in 2017). Studios stress that same-sex content will be particularly rejected in China, India, and Russia—the lionshare of overseas sales—where homosexuality is largely outlawed. The problem is, there’s no data to support the contention that queer content will lead to lowered ticket sales. In fact, there’s significant data to support the argument that queer content has no impact at all. Here are just a few examples:

• “Deadpool 2” (2018) made $785 million (a sevenfold return on its $110 million budget) despite the fact that Teenage Negasonic Warhead is shown in a same-sex relationship with fellow student Yukio. According to the Times of India, seven scenes were cut for the Indian version. None of them involved references to their relationship. And when “Once Upon a Deadpool” was released as the China-safe PG-13 version, the relationship stayed. So much for the argument that foreign audiences will refuse to watch and foreign censors will refuse the content.

• “XXX: The Return of Xander Cage” (2017) brought in more than half of its $346.1 million revenue from China alone even though out queer actress Ruby Rose’s character Adele Wolff was openly lesbian (her character doesn’t appear to have been censored in any international version). In total, 87% of the movie’s revenue came from overseas.

• “Atomic Blonde” (2017), featuring a bisexual protagonist and a female love interest, tripled its $30 million budget for a global box office of $95.7 million. 46% of its revenue came from foreign sales, including almost $3.5 million from Russia and Central Asia, $1.8 million from Brazil, and more than half a million dollars each from Ukraine, Romania, Poland, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey. Although India and the Arab countries censored out the movie’s sex scene, it clearly didn’t hurt the overall marketability of the film, suggesting that censorship doesn’t have to be a disqualifier for LGBT content.

At the same time that studios claim a sort of feigned helplessness to show queer content in their major releases, they display a painfully cynical hypocrisy when it comes to queer female content in their art house releases. Although it’s considered too “financially risky” to put LGBT content in mainstream movies, queer material has simultaneously become a shoe-in for Oscar nominations. Since 2002, 12 of the characters that spawned Best Actress nominations were queer (four wins), and five of the characters that led to Best Supporting Actress nominations were queer (one win).  This means that 17 out of 170 (10%) Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress nominations were for playing a queer character. Given that queer female characters are only around 0.25% of the characters in the top 100 grossing films each year as noted above, this isn’t just statistically anomalous, it’s intentional.

Studios are specifically using queer stories as Oscar bait. But in fact, the numbers are even more significant: in the last 17 years, 23.5% of Best Actress winners played a queer character, and approximately 30% of actresses who were Oscar nominated for playing a queer character won. Overall, since 2002, A List actresses in a queer role have approximately a 50-50 chance or better at an Oscar nomination. What does this all tell us? In Gladwell’s example, orchestral auditioners couldn’t “hear” the quality of women musicians because societal norms told them that women weren’t as good musicians as men. When they made a conscious effort to curb their bias, they found that women were just as good or better than their male peers.

In Hollywood, producers hear just fine the quality of queer stories when it comes to Oscar bait. Almost every year, it’s LGBT stories that are nominated for (and win) Oscars:

2002: “The Hours” and “Frida”

2004: “Monster”

2005: “Transamerica”

2006: “Notes on a Scandal,” “Brokeback Mountain” and “Capote”

2008: “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”

2009: “Milk”

2010: “The Kids are All Right” and “A Single Man” (“Black Swan” also had a lesbian sex scene)

2011: “Albert Nobbs” (and “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”)

2014: “Dallas Buyers Club”

2015: “Carol” and “The Imitation Game”

2016: “The Danish Girl”

2017: “Moonlight” and “Disobedience”

2018: “Call Me by Your Name”

2019: “The Favourite,” “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” and “Bohemian Rhapsody”

The argument that diversity doesn’t sell is a lie. Given there has now been almost a decade of data indicating that the argument against diversity isn’t rooted in financial returns, social norms, or any other indicators of success or failure, the continued claim that diversity will hurt the bottom lie is a fig leaf for bigotry and homophobia. When we look at why TV is succeeding at becoming more diverse, it’s because TV studios are bringing on more diversity everywhere. More diverse writers, more diverse showrunners, more diverse casts. Diversity breeds more diversity. Hollywood’s movie sector, however, remains perpetually stagnant. In ten years, the percentage of women on screen hasn’t increased above 33%, the presence of women behind the screen has remained static, and huge populations of minority women remain invisible. 

Every year, the Annenberg study authors recommend that gender parity could be achieved by adding just five more female speaking characters per film. Every year, this suggestion is ignored. There is so much Hollywood could do to combat bias in movies, if it chose to. Scripts could be submitted namelessly. Character genders in scripts could be masked until casting time. Scripts would be chosen based on quality, not gender and race of characters. But so long as the film industry actively chooses to be homophobic, none of these measures will matter, and the queer community will have to continue to create its own independent content as a way of supplementing the few crumbs Hollywood produces each year. Sadly, this is what has happened to the African American community for decades, resulting in a largely separate and unequal second film industry. Rather than integrating all our diversity, we’re creating sub-industries. How do we solve this problem? By following TV’s example. And hiring diversity.