Representing the Rainbow

Would you ever hire a white actor to play Martin Luther King? What about an atheist to play the part of a priest? Or a Frenchman to play a Russian? While the answer seems clear cut for the first question, it may not be for the others. Now, to the question I really want to ask: would you hire a straight actor to play the part of a queer character?

Let’s get our hands on some data

I decided to turn to a source that may (or may not) be considered reliable: Wikipedia. What can I say, I trust in the wisdom of crowds (and on my thorough screening of said wisdom). Using Wiki as a starting point, I compiled two lists: one of the actors and actresses who have publicly come out as LGBTQ (being it as gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans,…) and a list of all queer characters in both TV and Radio and Movies.

I then started the (quite time consuming) task of cleaning the data and gathering information on each actor sexual orientation. Refer to the end of the article for details on how I went about it.

What does *insert LGBT term here* even mean?

Here’s a handy glossary with some of the terms I’ve used. Liberally copied from Stonewall. I like to be PC on this 😉 Feel free to skip and refer back to this in case you find any term you are unfamiliar with.

• Bisexual (or Bi): refers to an emotional and/or sexual orientation towards more than one gender
• FtM: an abbreviation for female-to-male, a term used to describe someone who is assigned female at birth but identifies and lives as a man. Also transgender man or simply trans man.
• Gay: refers to a man who has an emotional, romantic and/or sexual orientation towards men. Also a generic term for lesbian and gay sexuality – some women define themselves as gay rather than lesbian
• Gender expression: how a person chooses to outwardly express their gender. A person who does not confirm to societal expectations of gender may not identify as trans.
• Gender identity: a person’s innate sense of their own gender, whether male, female or something else, which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth
• Lesbian: refers to a woman who has an emotional, romantic and/or sexual orientation towards women
• LGBTQ: the acronym for lesbian, gay, bi, trans and queer.
• MtF: an abbreviation for male-to-female, a term used to describe someone who is assigned male at birth but identifies and lives as a woman. Also transgender woman or simple trans woman.
• Non – Binary: an umbrella term for a person who does not identify as only male or only female, or who may identify as both
• Queer: in the past a derogatory term for LGBT individuals. The term has now been reclaimed by LGBT young people in particular who don’t identify with traditional categories around gender identity and sexual orientation
• Sexual orientation: a person’s emotional, romantic and/or sexual attraction to another person
• Straight: refers to a person who has an emotional, romantic and/or sexual orientation towards people of the opposite gender
• Trans or transgender: an umbrella term to describe people whose gender is not the same as, or does not sit comfortably with, the sex they were assigned at birth.

Now that you know what the terms mean, let’s dive in, shall we?

Who’s out, out there?

Not that many people, unsurprisingly. And mostly gay man (unsurprisingly?). There are many more LGBTQ actors than actresses out publicly. It is also interesting to note that there are more bisexual women than bisexual man, which chimes with the idea that women’s sexuality is more fluid compared to men’s. There are also more trans women compared to trans men actors, more than 11x.

A rainbow of characters

I run this analysis on the full list (1500+ characters). If we look at what “flavour” of queer characters is more popular, the gays win: more than 60% of all LGBTQ roles are for gay men and lesbians. Bisexuals come in second. Trans folk only account for 6% of total LGBTQ roles. If we consider than almost half of the pie is taken up by one color of the rainbow, I guess it is fair to talk about lack of representation…

If we consider the split by gender, we see that there are more bi roles for women than for man. Almost 40% of roles for women are in fact bisexual. Unfortunately, I do not have data on the endgame… maybe this should be something I should look into next (¬‿¬)

Playing gay

More than 80% of queer characters are played by straight actors, and results are similar for both genders.

Let’s zoom in a bit: about 1/5^th of all roles are played by LGBTQ actors. However, when we look at actors who are playing a character with their same sexual orientation (for example, a lesbian playing a lesbian character), the proportion falls quite significantly. For example, although there are 81 LGBTQ roles played by non-straight women (17%), only 52 of those roles are played by actresses identifying with the same sexuality as the character they are portraying (11%). This is mostly driven by there being quite a few actresses identifying as bisexual who are playing lesbian characters.

Here’s a complete table showing which characters are played by which actors. I find it quite weird that there are 2 straight guys playing lesbians…

Typecasting and shows full of unicorns

Actors have a fear that, if they accept to play a gay character, they will be typecasted in the future. This does not seem to come to pass: only 91 out of 994 actors who have played queer roles have portrayed more than one LGBTQ character. The only two actors who have played 4 LGBT characters have played all those roles in the same show. And they are both straight (Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black fame and Griffin Mcelroy, podcast and Tv show host, in case you were wondering who they were). However it is true that it is more likely for a member of the LGBTQ community to play a queer character more than once: 33% of actors who have played gay actually identify as such. Whether that’s typecasting or just gays wanting to be themselves on screen, who can tell…

Are shows more likely to have one lone gay character or do they go full out, with a full rainbow cast? Looks like the gays are destined to be lonely. Out of 725 unique shows, there is only one LGBTQ role in roughly 60% of them. And in almost half of these shows, the lone LGBT character is a gay guy. GBF anyone?

Here’s the list of shows which feature more than 10 LGBTQ characters. Excluding Hollyoaks and Eastenders (each of which counts more than 4000 episodes and a huge  cast), I can’t say I’m surprised by who took the top spot!

So what?

It looks like the answer to the question I asked at the beginning is a resounding yes. Whether that is a good or a bad thing, I’ll leave that for you to decide. On the one hand, an actor’s job is to be acting, so playing a gay character is just like playing any other character. On the other hand, I think that it may be quite hard for a straight person to capture the nuances of being part of the queer community (or maybe I’m just being conceited). If a character is not properly understood, they end up just being a stereotype, e.g. the hot lesbian or the flamboyant gay friend, and I would venture to say, this happens quite often.

I do now know whether the characters listed are main, secondary or just appear for a short time as a guest star in one lone episode (unless they are in a series or movie I’ve seen) (and I have seen a lot of these…). I think representation of queer people is still lacking in TV and movies, and let’s not even get into the “bury your gays” trope… LGBTQ fans deserve better. I’m not advocating for every show to have a LGBTQ character (although that would be awesome), I would however want to see shows where queer characters are not just there to be a stereotype, or to fill a quota, but because gay people exist “IRL” and thus deserve to be included.

Making good movies and television is an incredibly hard task. I could argue that a director’s or writer’s grasp of a character is more important than an actor’s. It does not matter how smart your waiter looks or how well they serve you, if the chef does not know how to cook, your meal is going to be terrible. At the same rate, if you start with a poorly designed character, even the best actor cannot turn the movie around. We should not forget the importance of directors, producers and writers to invent, develop and show compelling stories and rounded characters.

As the whole world is hailing the golden age of television, I cannot help but be hopeful that queer representation in pop culture, both in terms of roles and of LGBTQ staff involved in production, will improve in the future. And, who knows, maybe one day we will have more movies written by and starring LGBTQ folks.

In the meantime, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on the couch watching Carol for the 138th time.

Note on data

To find each actor’s disclosed sexual orientation I did the following:

• If the actor / actress was featured in the list of those that had publicly come out, I labelled them accordingly
• If they were not, I searched online. If they had publicly disclosed their sexuality, I labelled them according to their disclosure
• If no disclosure had been publicly made, I looked if they were marked as married / partnered on Wikipedia
• If no information on marriage or dating was available on Wikipedia, I searched online. If I found more than one source citing them dating, I assumed their sexual orientation to be consistent
• If no information was available online, I excluded them from the sample.

There were a lot more exclusion with TV and radio programs, mostly because of the higher proportion of secondary characters. Here’s what I ended up with: