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Visibility Matters: Entertaining the Future

Visibility Matters is a monthly-ish column by AfterEllen.com Founder Sarah Warn about larger trends affecting lesbian/bi women in entertainment and the media.

Visibility Matters: Entertaining the Future

Lesbian/bi visibility in entertainment today is a mass of contradictions. It’s both better and worse than it was when I started writing about it more than seven years ago.

There are more lesbian talk show hosts than ever before on network TV, but still very few fictional lesbian characters on broadcast or cable TV.

We now have well-developed, prominent lesbian characters and superheroes in comics – from Willow to Batwoman – but even the most minor lesbian characters are missing from, or “straightened out” in, most studio theatrical releases. Sometimes an entire lesbian subculture is de-gayed, as demonstrated in Whip It.

Female musicians are coming out left and right as gay or bisexual, as we saw when Brandi Carlile finally confirmed last week that she’s a lesbian, but there are many women – especially those signed to major labels – who remain closeted, at least to their fans.

More books by openly queer authors are getting published, but books with LGBT characters and themes are still getting banned at libraries and schools, and some major booksellers are still skittish about including them, as Scholastic demonstrated last week when it pulled Lauren Myracle‘s new elementary school book from its school book fairs because one of the four girls has two moms.

What’s the common factor determining whether and where queer women and characters are represented or included? Financial risk. In businesses, a sure thing is always better than an unknown entity when money is on the line.

That means whenever there’s significant money at stake, the queer woman (real or fictional) who are cast in roles, written in as characters, signed by a major label, or included in bookstores are almost always limited to those who are already a proven success.

Which is why Ellen DeGeneres was only offered her own talk show after Finding Nemo resurrected her popularity following the controversy surrounding her former sitcom.

Lesbian and bisexual women are most likely to be left out whenever a small group of people (studios, bookstores, record labels) are trying to guess how a large group of people will react, because we’re still considered likely to be controversial just by virtue of being gay or bisexual.

And in some ways and in some areas of the country and the world, queer people and content are still controversial.

But that’s increasingly less true.

The Road to Success

In the early days of AfterEllen.com, I couldn’t find any established actors willing to talk about being gay, even when everyone knew they were.

Out musicians were also hard to come by. Although Melissa Etheridge and k.d. lang had bravely come out a decade earlier, when they were relatively well-known singers, few musicians – high-profile or not – had followed their example.

In 2003, I published a profile on AfterEllen.com of an openly gay up-and-coming musician written by someone who wrote for me occasionally, only to wake up the next morning with voicemail from the musician’s publicist threatening to sue us if we didn’t pull the the article down, because it was sending hundreds of lesbians over to the musician’s message board, where they were posting comments thanking the musician for being out.

Apparently, she wasn’t that out, after all.

Although I don’t think the musician and her publicist handled that particular situation very well, I understood where the fear was coming from: true stories abound of talented female musicians being told by their labels not to come out or they’d drop them.

In 2004, I had a conversation with a very well-known publicist in the industry who represented more than one high-profile gay actress. She turned down my (very polite) request for an interview with one of her clients by telling me flat out, “I advise my clients never to talk about their sexuality.”

The publicist herself is a lesbian, and she was just doing her job. Actors, comedians, musicians, and (to lesser degree) novelists have historically had a much better chance of becoming a proven success by staying closeted.

In fact, until recently, staying closeted was arguably the only way to achieve career success as it’s traditionally defined.

Ellen DeGeneres was already fairly well-known by the time she came out in 1997, and she still paid a heavy price for it, because she was one of the first high-profile women on TV to come out.

Comedian Wanda Sykes and TV journalist Jane Valez-Mitchell both worked their way up their respective career ladders before coming out publicly, as did Suze Orman and Cat Cora, although they all handled it in different ways.

But signs have emerged in the last few years that this model is no longer the only path to success in entertainment and the media.

Rachel Maddow was offered the MSNBC hosting job despite being openly gay for years. Actress Clementine Ford came out in the last year, and was subsequently offered a role on the CBS daytime drama The Young and the Restless. Out actresses Portia de Rossi, Sarah Paulson, Cherry Jones and Jane Lynch have all been offered prominent roles on television in recent years, and relatively unknown actor Jasika Nicole was out in her first interview with The New York Times when Fox’s hit show Fringe became a hit.

One of the most high-profile young actors, Lindsay Lohan, continued to land acting roles after she publicly confirmed her on-and-off relationship with Samantha Ronson in 2008 (although her career has suffered due to other personal issues). During one of their off-periods, she even filmed a satirical online dating ad that referenced her bisexuality.

While fictional TV shows and movies with prominent lesbian characters are still few and far between, there’s been some progress in the last few months.

FlashForward (ABC) recently revealed that one of its main characters is a lesbian, and it appears that one of lead female characters on The Good Wife (CBS) has a girlfriend. Although Ming-Na‘s lesbian character on Stargate Universe (Syfy) has received minimal screen time so far, she is expected to play a bigger role in the series in the future.

Coming soon on the big screen is The Runaways (formerly called Cherry Bomb), a bio-pic starring the popular actress Kristen Stewart as queer rocker Joan Jett; Precious, the Oprah and Tyler Perry-backed indie film that includes an out lesbian among the characters; and The Kids are All Right, a comedy starring Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as a couple whose son wants to meet his biological father.

There’s been an increase in books with queer characters, too: there were only 200 young adult novels with LGBT content published between 1969 and 2004, for example, which is an average of around 5 books a year. Since 2005, the average has been 20 per year.

Many musicians are now coming out earlier in their careers, both individual performers like Lady Gaga, Missy Higgins, MeShell Ndegeocello,and Sia, and women in bands like Tegan and Sara, Girl in a Coma, Dance Yourself to Death, Otep, and The Gossip. And their careers don’t appear to suffer much.

To be clear: As a general rule, it’s still easier to achieve large-scale success as an actor or musician if you’re closeted, and for authors, filmmakers, and TV creators to sell their work if they don’t prominently include lesbian/bi themes and characters.

But it’s now finally at least possible to be out, or include LGBT themes and characters, and achieve success in entertainment.

(It’s also more difficult to stay closeted these days, given the rise of cell phone cameras and de-centralized reporting on internet, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Building an Audience

Some of this change has to do with evolving social mores brought on by time, more LGBT people coming out to their friends and neighbors, and more high-profile queer women being included in entertainment, media and news.

But much of it is due to the internet.

The internet is the ultimate testing ground, a massive focus group – or more accurately, thousands of smaller focus groups – that aren’t hand-selected by marketing groups to fit a specific demographic.

On the internet, queer people get a vote, and they use it. The result is a much more accurate picture of what and who has the potential to attract an audience.

This takes much of the guessing out of the equation for the business people, making it easier for them to justify putting money behind potentially controversial (read: gay) content or people.

The internet also allows actors, comedians, musicians, filmmakers and writers to develop a national (and international) following through the strategic use of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and online video.

Writer, producer, and director Angela Robinson‘s movie version of Girltrash is being made in part because the web series proved there’s an audience for it.

Comedian Liz Feldman, who already had a successful writing career in television, was able to use the internet to hone her on-camera skills with her popular show This Just Out with Liz Feldman, which probably helped her land her current gig on The Jay Leno Show (NBC). The success of comedian Bridget McManus‘s show Brunch with Bridget on AfterEllen.com is one of the reasons Logo decided to air it on television.

Campy lesbian detective web series B.J. Fletcher, Private Eye is being developed for television because of its success online, and the internet talk show Cherry Bomb was picked up to run on Canada’s OutTV because of it’s large online following.

The online following that AfterEllen.com’s former Managing Editor Malinda Lo developed over the years undoubtedly helped sales of her debut novel Ash.

Out British filmmaker Shamim Sarif‘s two lesbian feature films I Can’t Think Straight and A World Unseen developed large international support even before they were available for viewing outside film festivals, thanks to online editorial and viral promotion.

(Then there’s Tila Tequila, whose popularity on MySpace and professed bisexuality landed her her own reality show – but that arguably falls more into the category of setback than progress.)

It works the other way, too: Straight actress Crystal Chappell is developing the lesbian web series Venice in large part because of the positive online feedback she received from fans of her queer character on the CBS daytime drama Guiding Light.

There are many good web series that were successful online, but aren’t of broad enough interest to be picked up for television or film, (because they’re considered too niche to attract advertiser support or appeal to a wide audience).

There are many musicians, comedians, and novelists whose online following hasn’t translated to offline success, at least not financially.

But there are also musicians like Amanda Palmer, who says she’s made more money through promoting herself online via her blog and Twitter than from sales through traditional retail outlets.

Stories like these are only going to become more common as bandwidth speeds improve, consumer entertainment products all become internet-accessible, and we increasingly turn to the web for entertainment.

While the internet has helped queer women in many ways – providing a safe place to be out, helping us feel less isolated, and even helping some women find girlfriends – the influence the internet has and will continue to have on the visibility of lesbian and bisexual women in entertainment and the media may be one of its most important legacies, because of how entertainment shapes, and is shaped by, the larger world we live in.

Back to the Future

Given how far we’ve come in the last seven years, what can we expect seven years from now?

I’m not sure we’ll see ourselves adequately represented in big-budget films or TV shows anytime soon; that’s still an old-media business model with too much money at stake to be anything but conservative.

But I’m also not sure big-budget films and TV shows will carry as much weight seven years from now, either.

When streaming and downloading movies, music, and books becomes the norm, it’s a much more level playing field. The people and content which get the most promotion still wins, but unlike in traditional outlets, promotion on the internet doesn’t require as much money.

It often requires no money at all, as the 128 million streams of the Evolution of Dance video proves. And no amount of money will make up for a bad product, as last year’s large online media buy to promote the disastrous movie Australia proves.

The talent and quality of the product or performer is more important than money when you can click a single button and share something with a hundred or thousand of your friends for free.

And the internet is making it even easier to find and support queer performers and queer-inclusive entertainment.

Seven years ago, there were almost no lesbian sites to turn to. Today, in addition to AfterEllen.com, there are dozens of lesbian and bisexual websites, as well as personal blogs, that highlight queer and queer-friendly content; popular online video sites include plenty of videos made by and for queer women; and sites like heretv.com, logoonline.com, and tellofilms.com are focused exclusively on providing LGBT films, music videos, online talk shows and web series.

The internet also opens up a whole new world of international content, actresses, musicians and writers. Just as many women living outside the U.S. keep on the latest Grey’s Anatomy developments by watching video clips online, or reading recaps, many American women are getting hooked on international web series and TV shows like Plan V, Chica Busca Chica, Verbotene Liebe and Los Hombres de Paco the same way.

The internet has also helped fuel the international success of the Millenium series by Swedish author Stieg Larsson, which revolves around a bisexual woman and a straight male journalist.

Similarly, international “celezbians” like Australia’s Ruby Rose or Norway’s Gro Hammerseng have developed significant American followings, thanks to the international visibility provided by the internet.

The Power of the Many

One of the most enjoyable aspects of writing for AfterEllen.com is being able to shine a light on talented actors, musicians, authors, and filmmakers who aren’t yet covered by mainstream entertainment outlets like People, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, E! Online or TVGuide.com.

We help you discover these women, films, and shows, and you then help them become more successful by following them online, and watching or purchasing their products – which in turn helps them secure funding for more projects, land roles or book gigs, sell their book, etc.

Multiply that times all the other sites and blogs doing the same thing, and suddenly the future of women in entertainment is largely in the hands of queer women, rather than studio execs.

As Angela Robinson wrote in her excellent column on this topic in 2006, “The gatekeepers are dying, slowly but surely, and now is the time for the artist to talk directly to the audience, without the middleman.”

While the visibility of queer women in entertainment won’t improve drastically overnight (technology and business models still need time to catch up), we are slowly but surely creating a world in which there are more entertainment options for us, more ways to see ourselves represented, and more ways to succeed in entertainment and still be ourselves – one show, movie, book, author, musician, comedian, and actor at a time.

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