The Bechdel Test, coined by celebrated lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel, measures whether or not a film has two female characters who talk with each other about something other than a man.Its lesser known LGBT analogue, the Vito Russo Test, gauges whether or not a film has a single, significant, fully fleshed-out LGBT character. That might seem like an even easier hurdle to clear but, according to a new report from the media advocacy group GLAAD, a lower percentage of 2015 Hollywood releases passed the Vito Russo Test than ever before in 2015.
Out of 126 releases from the top seven major film studios, only 22 had an LGBT character. And of those 22 films, just 36 percent passed the Vito Russo Test.
“Hollywood’s films lag far behind any other form of media when it comes to portrayals of LGBT characters,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, GLAAD president and CEO, in a press release accompanying the 2016 Studio Responsibility Index. “Too often, the few LGBT characters that make it to the big screen are the target of a punchline or token characters. The film industry must embrace new and inclusive stories if it wants to remain competitive and relevant.”The new GLAAD report reveals a big-budget film industry that is still mired in the past, even as independent cinema and television continue to make advances in LGBT representation.
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In the same year that The Danish Girl was nominated for four Academy Awards, the only transgender character to come out of a major film studio functioned only as a momentary punchline in the poorly-reviewed Reese Witherspoon/Sofia Vergara buddy comedy Hot Pursuit. In an early scene—as AfterEllen describes it—a woman is revealed to be transgender after she talks in a deep voice, prompting Witherspoon’s character to “make a face.”
LGBT characters of color did not fare much better on the big screen in 2015. While Laverne Cox continued her historic role as a transgender inmate on Orange is the New Black and Lena Waithe landed a breakout role on Aziz Ansari’s Master of None, Hollywood stalled in its representation of non-white LGBT characters. Out of the 47 LGBT characters who appeared in mainstream releases in 2015, all but 13 were Caucasian—a notable decrease from the previous year. Turns out that the Oscars weren’t the only thing that were #SoWhite last year.
The GLAAD report also highlighted a “noticeable resurgence” of gay panic jokes in 2015’s major releases. Hot Tub Time Machine 2, for example, featured a scene in which Adam Scott’s character is forced, screaming, to have virtual reality sex with another man on a game show. And in the comedy Get Hard, Kevin Hart’s character tried to prepare a white-collar criminal (Will Ferrell) for prison rape by taking him to a popular gay restaurant to learn how to perform oral sex.This gay panic comeback was so unexpected that, as The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee reported, Ferrell and Hart themselves were frequently asked to account for the seemingly archaic jokes during their press tour.
Even apart from these exceptionally bad examples, none of the major studios featured in the GLAAD report—Fox, Lionsgate, Sony, Universal, Disney, Warner Brothers, and Paramount—received a rating of “Good” for LGBT representation. The final three in that list received a “Failing” grade. For comparison, GLAAD gave six television networks a “Good” rating and two an “Excellent” rating in 2015.
Hollywood also paid far more attention to one letter in the LGBT acronym than it did to the others. Gay male characters were featured in 77 percent of big studio films with LGBT characters, as compared to 23 percent for lesbians and only 9 percent for bisexuals. In reality, bisexuals are a majority of the U.S. LGBT population.
Very few of these LGBT characters are essential to the plot or defined by anything other than their sexual orientation or gender identity—the only qualifications necessary to pass the Vito Russo Test.
As Ellis wrote in the report, “It is not enough for LGBT characters to simply be present; rather, these characters must be crafted thoughtfully and better reflect the full diversity of the LGBT community.”
The one silver lining in the 2016 Studio Responsibility Index is the relative success of smaller arthouse imprints like Focus Features, Fox Searchlight, Sony Pictures Classics, and Roadside Attractions. Twenty-two percent of films from these studios had LGBT characters in 2015, up almost 12 percent from 2014.These smaller films included Grandma, in which a lesbian author (Lily Tomlin) helps her granddaughter raise money for an abortion, and Roland Emmerich’s controversial and reductionist take on the 1969 Stonewall riots.
But in 2016, GLAAD is not satisfied with minor progress among films that already have a “limited reach,” as they note at the end of the report, especially while other forms of entertainment media are doing laps around the big studios. On network television right now, audiences can enjoy shows that feature a male bisexual attorney, a gay police captain, a bisexual female lawyer, a gay R&B singer, and many other diverse LGBT characters. Another year of tokens and punchlines from Hollywood isn’t going to cut it.
“GLAAD will continue to hold film studios accountable for the stories these companies choose to tell on our screens,” the report concluded. “Lucky for them, we still have plenty of stories to be told.”
One of those untold stories, someone at GLAAD seems to hope, is a love story between the often-shipped Finn and Poe in the sequel to Star Wars: The Force Awakens. In the report’s section on Disney, which received a “Failing” grade for having zero LGBT characters across 11 films, GLAAD writes that “the most obvious place where Disney could include LGBT characters is in the upcoming eighth Star Wars film.”
J.J. Abrams has already promised new gay characters in future Star Wars films but GLAAD is going all in for those of us who have spent too much time watching John Boyega / Oscar Isaac GIFs on loop.
“GLAAD will continue to hold film studios accountable for the stories these companies choose to tell on our screens,” the report concluded. “Lucky for them, we still have plenty of stories to be told.”
