At Monday’s Emmy Awards, LGBTQ issues commanded greater attention than did TV shows. The awards show featured a demand that TV spotlight more transgender characters, a defense of drag queen story hour, and a 10-second-long kiss between two men.
“The world urgently needs culture-changing stories about transgender people,” insisted Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD, upon her acceptance of the Governors Award. According to the Television Academy, the award “honors an individual, company or organization that has made a profound, transformational and long-lasting contribution to the arts and/or science of TV.”
GLAAD is certainly a worthy recipient of the award. The organization, which aggressively lobbies for LGBTQ representation in the media, has spearheaded a campaign for all movies and TV shows to feature characters who identify as gay, lesbian, nonbinary, or transgender. GLAAD has found incredible success in reaching its goal. According to the organization’s “Where We Are on TV” report, 596 LGBTQ individuals were featured on TV platforms in the 2022–2023 television season. In introducing Ellis during the Emmy Awards, actor Colman Domingo asserted that GLAAD has consulted “on nearly every TV series and TV movie with an LGBTQ character” over the past four decades to “mak[e] sure the realities we face offscreen are reflected onscreen.”
Evidently, however, 596 LGBTQ characters in one year is not enough for GLAAD, as Ellis is upset that just 32 of those 596 LBGTQ characters identify as transgender. In an interview with Variety, Ellis explained her decision to beg the Television Academy to include more transgender characters:
We have seen those watershed moments (for lesbian, gay and bisexual representation), whether it was Ellen DeGeneres coming out or Will & Grace.… What we don’t have yet is a watershed moment for the trans community. I see this opportunity as a chance to speak to the academy and all the creators in the room to say that we need that moment. We need you to create and write about trans people because there were over 500 anti-LGBTQ bills proposed this past year and most are against trans people and our trans youth.
In her speech at the Emmy Awards, Ellis claimed that transgender “visibility” on TV is “lifesaving.” That claim seemed to echo the common (false) assertion that kids with gender dysphoria will commit suicide unless they immediately receive the full slate of “affirmative” transgender medical treatments and social affirmation of their “gender identity.” When Ellis made the claim that transgender visibility is “lifesaving,” the cameras flashed to the actress Bella Ramsey, who uses “they” pronouns and identifies as non-binary. Ramsey recently played a 14-year-old in the TV show The Last of Us. Ellis concluded her remarks by claiming that LGBTQ people “are still being villainized with cruel and harmful lies.”
In introducing Ellis, Domingo likewise asserted that LGBTQ characters can play a role in debates on LGBTQ issues. Such characters, he said, “are an incredibly important piece of showing the humanity of who we actually are, dispelling tropes and offering a rich, vibrant rainbow of the human experience.”
On the politicized night, RuPaul Charles, whose show RuPaul’s Drag Race won an award, used his acceptance speech to push back against efforts to prevent drag performances for children. “If a drag queen wants to read you a story at a library, listen to her because knowledge is power, and if someone tries to restrict your access to power, they are trying to scare you,” he said. He then declared, “So listen to a drag queen!”
The night also featured a 10-second-long makeout session between two heterosexual men, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Matty Matheson, that was likely to please Sarah Kate Ellis. Some concerns were prompted, however, over whether the kiss was consensual. “Ok… but like… that was assault. Ask for consent,” someone commented on X.
The centering of LGBT issues did not pay off in terms of viewership. The Emmys reached 4.3 million views, an all-time low and a 25 percent decrease over the previous all-time low, which the awards show recorded in 2022. The show’s awards were essentially irrelevant given that the big winners of the night, including Succession and The Bear, won awards just last week at both the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards. The Emmy Awards were thus just another round of forgettable Hollywood backscratching.
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For the next Emmy Awards, we can expect even more than 596 LGBTQ characters.
Sarah Kate Ellis told Variety that quite a few people question her on whether there will ever be enough LGBTQ representation for her to be happy. The “activist” inside her, she said, wants to respond “Never!” But, she explained, she will actually be “happy” when “we are in every story because we are in every family, we are in every workplace.”
“I don’t mean that we need to be the center of every story,” said Ellis, “but I don’t know a family in America, or a workplace or a restaurant, or really anywhere in America, where there aren’t LGBTQ people.”
What can also be expected for the next Emmy Awards is even less viewers.
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