All business is predicated on a simple idea: demand and supply. If there is a demand for a product, the creation of a supply to meet that demand will result in monetary gain for the producer. The magnitude of that gain will depend on the size of the demand and the producer’s ability to effectively fill it. Everyone needs shoes. No one needed the 2001 model Adidas Kobe Two, which look like what Star Wars Storm Troopers would wear when lounging around in their off hours and was such a disaster Kobe ended up buying out his contract with Adidas and moving to Nike.

Producers tailor their production and marketing to key market segments: groups of people who share one or more common characteristic and to whom the product should be at best mandatory, at worst appealing. Consumers should need or want to buy the product, thus generating demand. Normally, the common characteristics of a market segment are things like interests, lifestyles, geographic locations, and demographic profiles. Ideally, these market segments should be measurable, large enough to be profitable, durable, and accessible. In summary, producers want a large and consistent demand that will last for years.

The global lesbian population is approximately 78 million people (1% of the global population of 7.8 billion, a little smaller than the population of Germany), while the total number of queer women statistically should be around 456 million (6%, a number greater than the total populations of the US and the UK combined). As a result of globalism, the individuals in this goliath market segment very likely have a similar psychographic profile and discrete, identifiable needs that producers could fill. Theoretically, they create a demand for particular, marketable products. This means that at least on paper, we’re an ideal customer base. And yet in practice, marketing exclusively to lesbians feels like it has a high rate of failure. Time and again, lesbian-oriented businesses fail. Why? Are lesbians really such terrible customers? Or is there another factor at play?

The “Pink Dollar” is a Huge, Lucrative Marketing Target…

As a market segment, the overall LGBT community punches above its weight. The purchasing power of the American LGBT community was estimated at $965 billion in 2018, making the queer community’s “pink dollar” the strongest of any minority group in the US.

Globally, the LGBT purchasing power was $5 trillion in 2018. This is largely because gay and lesbian couples tend to be DINKS: dual-income, no kid households, meaning they have more disposable income than their heterosexual counterparts. In addition, lesbians experience what’s called the “lesbian premium”: according to a 2015 meta-analysis done by Marieka Klawitter, a professor of public policy and governance at the University of Washington, on average, lesbians earn 9% more than heterosexual women (note that lesbians seem to have a huge pay disparity: they either make tons more than straight women or much less, which is why the average is 9%). Overall, this means gays and lesbians theoretically have more money to spend than straight couples with kids.

LGBT American Airlines Marketing

Photo by: Subaru LGBT Marketing

Indeed, two famous case studies prove there can be big money to be made when companies pitch sales to the LGBT community to capture those pink dollars. American Airlines saw its earnings from LGBT customers rise from $20 million in 1994 to $193.5 million in 1999 after it formed a team devoted to LGBT marketing. (In 2018, LGBT travelers spent over $218 billion a year, one reason the travel industry has laid a particular focus on wooing queer travelers.) Meanwhile, Subaru began marketing to lesbians specifically in the 1990s after it discovered that lesbians were its fifth largest purchaser group, and that lesbian niche market contributed to making Subaru the #2 car seller globally throughout the 2010s. With billions of pink dollars at stake, it’s no wonder that in recent years major corporations from credit cards companies to food companies to alcohol distillers have targeted ads to the LGBT community.

…So Why do Lesbian-Oriented Businesses Seem to Fail so Often?

Olivia Records Logo

Photo credit: Olivia Cruise

Olivia, better known as Olivia Travel, is the world’s largest lesbian-focused company. But 30 years ago, it was a company on the brink of folding. Olivia started in 1973 as Olivia Records, a women’s record label founded by radical lesbian feminists and dedicated to empowering women in the recording business. It made 40 albums and sold over one million records. In 1988, it hosted two sold-out 15th anniversary shows at Carnegie Hall, then the venue’s largest single-grossing event of all time. And yet despite this success, the company was sinking financially. Its founders were idealistic and inexperienced in business, and by the late 1980s, the lesbian separatist movement that had been the engine of Olivia’s success was starting to lose its momentum and be overtaken by a broader feminist movement. By 1990, Olivia was no longer financially viable.

Then it made what turned out to be a massively successful decision. In 1989, a concert attendee suggested a concert on the water. Olivia founder Judy Dlugacz seized on the idea and in 1990 chartered a cruise ship to the Bahamas. 600 women signed up and Olivia’s Travel empire was born. Today, Olivia averages revenues of around $20-$30 million a year. It’s a case study in identifying a market gap and building a product to fill that gap.

Olivia Records’ story mirrors the experiences of many lesbian businesses: despite identifying a market segment, putting out quality product, and trailblazing new successes, they ultimately are unable to proceed financially. Here are just a few examples of high-profile businesses catering to lesbians that have gone out of business in the last decade:

• Bars: Even the heterosexual press has noticed the death of the lesbian bar in America. The last lesbian bar in New Orleans, Rubyfruit Jungle, closed in 2012. Philadelphia's Sisters closed in 2013, and San Francisco lost the Lexington in 2015. The oldest continually operating lesbian bar in the United States, Phase 1, closed in 2016. Only a handful of lesbian bars now remain in the US, including Henrietta Hudson, Cubbyhole, and Ginger’s in New York City, A League of Her Own in the basement of Pitchers in Washington, DC, My Sister’s Room in Atlanta, the Lipstick Lounge in East Nashville and the Gossip Grill in San Diego.

The big 3 NYC Lesbian bars. All still open. Photo Credit Henrietta Hudson NYC

Photo credit: Ginger’s Bar Brooklyn

Photo credit: Cubby Hole NYC

• Magazines: Like the dodo bird, most American lesbian magazines went extinct before the 2010s. Girlfriends went out of business in 2006, and in an editorial in the 2010 September issue of Curve magazine, then-owner Frances Stevens wrote that without reader assistance in the form of a subscription, gift or donation, the magazine would likely not make it through the year. (Months later, Curve was sold to Silke Bader, who also owns Australia’s LOTL, which was how the magazine survived.)

• Websites: Small, independent lesbian blogs run as labors of love by their owners will always exist, but the larger, transnational lesbian websites have really struggled to stay afloat in the mid-2010s. SheWired.com was absorbed by Pride.com in 2016 after it failed as a stand-alone lesbian-centric venture for Here Media, the owner of The Advocate, Out Magazine, and Gay.com. In its perpetually tenuous efforts to stay solvent, Autostraddle implemented a business model with multiple revenue streams including A-Camp, the A+ Membership Program, merchandise sales, advertising, and affiliate commissions. AfterEllen also resorted to reaching out for contributions after it was sold by Evolve Media in March 2019 for failing to bring in sufficient ad revenue.

• Bookstores: LGBTQ bookstores peaked in the 1990s, with over 40 operating in the United States. Now fewer than half that number remain, and many have broadened their sales focus to stay in business.

• Clothing Lines: Many efforts to create gender neutral or transmasculine clothing lines have failed, although others have continued. At least nine of the clothing companies listed on Autostraddle’s list of 73 lesbian-owned businesses from mid-2018 have closed, including Grayscale Goods, I AM NO LABEL, Kipper Clothiers, Kreuzbach10, Saint Harridan, Ambiance Couture, Apule Town, Equal Period, and FYI by Dani Read.

Anecdotally, many people trying to establish small businesses catering exclusively or mostly to the queer female community have found the market to be less robust than the numbers would seem to suggest at face value. An effort to use indiegogo to fund a new LGBT bar in Philadelphia, for example, ended with only 15% of the funding met. Content creators for webseries and short films have also noted the absence of funding for queer projects. (The webseries “Different for Girls” only generated $1,754 from 16 backers in its Indiegogo campaign for season two, which was 9% funded.)

Success is a Numbers Game, Even for Lesbians

While some lesbian-centric ventures fail, others do spectacularly. Club Skirts Dinah Shore Weekend, popularly known as “The Dinah,” is the largest lesbian event in the world and it’s been happening since 1991. In 2018, over 15,000 women attended. ClexaCon, the world’s largest fan convention for LGBT content creators, allies, and fans, is now entering its fourth year and has been so popular and successful it’s inspired similar conventions in Barcelona (Love Fan Fest) and Tampa (QFX East). When it comes to major annual social events like these, queer women seem to be willing to turn out in droves.

Photo credit: Dinah Shore

Photo credit: ClexaCon 2018

Photo credit: QFX Events 2020

So what’s the secret to the success of lesbian-centric businesses like these? Perhaps the secret is that there is no secret. The queer female business market is, at heart, unpredictable…just as it is for heterosexual businesses. Some androgynous clothing lines fail while others succeed. Some Indiegogo campaigns for lesbian short films blast through their goals while others fall way short. Most queer bookstores are failing because in 2020 people just don’t go to brick and mortar bookstores anymore. And many lesbian business owners, like the founders of Olivia Records, have a good idea but lack the business experience to see that idea translated to financial success. According to the Small Business Association, 30% of businesses fail in their first year, 50% in the first five, and 66% in the first ten. 69-89% of crowdfunding projects (for example on Kickstarter or Indiegogo) don’t meet their funding goals. The truth is, business ain’t easy, no matter the industry or market segment.

Lesbian-Centric Businesses Probably Fail at the Same Rate as Everyone Else

So why does it sometimes seem like queer women aren’t doing enough to help the businesses created for them? Why aren’t they pouring money into failing bars, teetering websites, and cash strapped media projects to support queer causes? The demand seems to exist, so why is there discontinuity between the demand and the supply? A few reasons:

• First, there’s a relativity problem here. Most people don’t realize how often businesses fail and therefore they’re surprised when they see such high failure rates. Without data for comparison, however, it’s impossible to say whether lesbian-oriented businesses fail at a higher or lower rate than businesses that don’t primarily cater to the queer female community. Maybe we’re actually doing better than a 30% fail rate in the first year. Until someone does a study, we’re all going off of “gut feelings,” which are notoriously wrong.

• Second, as a result of a slew of articles in the last few years proclaiming the death of queer spaces, etc., at least some of us have an anchoring/confirmation bias: once we start to believe that lesbian businesses are being edged out by society, we begin to absorb any new datapoints about failures as proof of this belief while at the same time discarding success stories. If you know one lesbian store/website went out of business, every time you hear about more going out of business it will reinforce that belief. But as noted above, we don’t actually know whether we’re doing better, worse, or the same in terms of success and failure rates.

• Third, there is an expectation of altruism/support in our community that isn’t always met. Literature on philanthropy in the LGBT community suggests our community values building and supporting the community. If only 22% of Americans give to Kickstarter crowdfunding campaigns, we might expect our community to give more than that to LGBT projects in an effort to counteract historical marginalization. We might expect our community to prefer queer-run coffee shops or bike stores, for example, and donate to crowdsourcing projects because it gives back to the community. When we see these businesses fail, it may seem to be a reflection of the failure of that community altruism.

Good News, Bad News on Crowd-Sourcing

In the past, I’ve used crowdsourcing for the Brazilian webseries “RED” as an example of how the queer community could do more to support queer projects. Between Indiegogo and Catarse, a mere 156 backers financed season six, 163 backed season five, and 233 backed season four. The point I’ve made in the past is that the first episode of “Red” had approximately 369,000 views. If everyone had paid $1 per view, that $369,000 would have financed around 35 seasons of the show and everyone could have watched for free ever after. It would have been a spectacularly effective and easy funding mechanism.

It turns out, “Red”’s crowdsourcing data teaches us something else about lesbian-centric content, which is this: everything about “Red”’s experience is the norm for crowdsourcing. Nothing changed because it was a lesbian-centric project targeting lesbian consumers. According to 2020 crowdfunding statistics, fully funded crowdfunding projects have an average of 300 backers with an average pledge of $96. The $6,180 raised through Indiegogo for season 4 of “Red” came from 54 backers, which means an average of $114.44 per backer. If “Red” hadn’t had any queer content, it might have received the same amount of financial backing. This trend is borne out by other lesbian crowdsourcing projects, too. Tello films’ “Riley Parra” season 2 Indiegogo campaign raised $21,280 from 192 backers, or an average of $110.83 per backer, while tello’s campaign for “Season of Love” raised $61,157 from 586 backers for an average of $104. In short, lesbian-oriented projects do no worse than anyone else.

Photo Credit: Red the webseries

Photo credit: Tello Films

On the one hand, that’s good news. It shows that fears about lesbian ventures being underfunded may be overblown. But there’s bad news, too, and the bad news is we’re doing no better than anyone else. The queer female community talks a big game about supporting each other and forming an uplifting community, but the data suggests that at the end of the day…we’re as charitable, philanthropic, and consumer minded as our heterosexual peers. No less, but certainly no more. The solidarity within the queer female community does not translate to significantly higher contributions. (By the way, 87% of contributors to crowdfunding campaigns have only given to five campaigns or fewer, showing how hard it is to mobilize crowdsourcing.)

It’s Up to Us as Individuals to Make a Difference

The above indicates that as a market segment, queer women don’t behave in a distinctly different way from any other group. (For the most part. Clearly we love Subarus and Olivia cruises.) Absent further data, there’s no evidence they necessarily fight harder to keep something (“Wynonna Earp” is its own case study) or donate more money or buy more products. That means that while we can’t pull the community as a whole to spend more money at LGBT-run stores or on LGBT-centric projects, as individuals we can make the decision to support these things. Because demand drives supply, if you believe in something, put money toward it. Create demand. If you want to see more ladies kissing on screen, donate to Indiegogo campaigns. Want more androgynous clothing lines? Find the ones that exist and buy form them and promote them on social media. The real lesson here is that we might not be able to move mountains all the time as a community, but as individuals, we can do our best to lift each other up.

Want to make a difference? Here are some exciting web series to support with viewership or fiscally.

BIFL - https://www.bifltheseries.com

AVOCADO TOAST - https://www.avocadotoastseries.com

TWENTY - https://twentythewebseries.com

DELTA AND DAISY - https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/delta-daisy-season-1#/

New York Girls TV - https://www.newyorkgirlstv.com

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.