Study: Screen Gays are Stereotypes
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PinkNews reports that the results of a study by the UK Film Council show that people believe the gay characters we see in movies are often too stereotypical.
Seventy-per cent of the 1,705 people surveyed by Harris Interactive said that films tend to focus on gay people having problems rather than being everyday people.
And 63 per cent said that gay characters are too often defined by their sexual orientation.
PinkNews.co.uk
I have a bit of a beef with accusations of stereotyping. As I see it, you can have a Camp Man in a film provided that’s not all that he is. And you can have an Angry Lesbian in a film too, but there has to be more to her than that. I feel like every time there’s an effeminate gay man in a film or on television, people immediately shout, “stereotype” regardless of how good the character is.
Overall, in the study, LGB respondents were more likely to be unhappy with the representation of gays in film, which makes sense, because we’re the ones most likely to care.
To be perfectly honest, the characters I though were least stereotypical (the lesbians from The Kids are Alright) angered me the most. They were bad people. Mean to each other. Ridiculously clueless parents. And while A Single Man didn’t include any actually camp characters, George is pretty much defined by his problems (which are made worse because he is gay), but I think that film comes across as genius.
Do you agree with the findings of this study? Which characters in film made a good or bad impression on you?
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I’ve always really liked Callie and Arizona from Grey’s anatomy, more often than not they’re just too doctors, with a large over dose of problems (due to the nature of the program), who happen to be gay and together. Their relationship is never over played and usually done in quite a subtle light focusing on the types of problems people have in every type of coupling today
I think my problem is that my favourite characters are usually the ones being accused of being stereotypes… maybe I just like stereotypes?
To be honest, I think the key to avoiding the accusations of stereotypes is simply to have the number of LGB (and especially T) characters. The more there are and the better written they are, the more realistic and proportional the portrayals will be.
Like so many things, it just comes down to numbers.
I think you’re right CanuckJ, it’s about what else they are. One of my favourite characters was Jack in Will & Grace. The man was a “sissy” but there was so much more to him.
I think gay and lesbian characters are starting to become more than “the gay” on tv now. Bi and Trans are still just there to be Bi and Trans.
We need more.
I loved Jack. I have a special place in my heart for camp men, having grown up in musical circles. When people talk about effeminate or camp men, I’m thinking of the men who taught me to really feel what I was playing or singing, the ones who introduced me to Berlioz and Rachmaninoff, the ones who taught me how to make my face say what the lines don’t. They were my heroes.
So I’m totally unduly biased in all these discussions.