This Pride month, I was thinking about what kinds of LGBTQIA+ characters films portray. I found a list on Wikipedia that identified LGBT characters in film, so I narrowed that list to only films in the United States, and limited the years to 1990 to 2020. After that, I was left with 331 characters (some within the same film). This list also identified characters as Black, Latinx, Asian/Pacific Islander or White — there were no other races/ethnicities acknowledged.
I never fully trust Wikipedia, so let’s consider the 331 a sample, as I am sure there are film characters missing. Of the 331 total characters in our sample, 85% are White, 8% are Black, 5% are Latinx, and a whopping 2% are Asian/Pacific Islander. See the chart above for a visual representation of this information, with the glaring majority of White characters.
Not dissimilar to the rest of Hollywood films, White people dominate the market. For a breakdown of this disparity, see my previous article on the overall representation of race and gender in film. LGBT characters are not spared from underrepresentation in film. Actually, it’s even worse.
Let me put these 331 characters into context. Again, since there are probably many which were overlooked on the list, so let’s round it up to 400. According to Box Office Mojo, 17,892 films were made from 1990 to 2020. For the sake of argument (statisticians, please look away), let’s pretend it is 400 individual films and not characters. Our 400 films out of the 17,892 total mean only 2% of films made over 30 years have LGBT characters. One more time — two percent of films had characters who identified as LGBT. And, as we just learned, most of those characters were White.
So of these characters, I wanted to see what kind of characters made up the 15% BIPOC. I narrowed my analysis to the last 10 years (2010–2020) and marked each as a leading or supporting character. The chart below shows the results for the Black, Latinx and Asian/Pacific Islander LGBT characters.
