New GLAAD video highlights homophobia in Hollywood (VIDEO)
The charity have released an online video campaign to highlight the unfair treatment of LGBT characters in major Hollywood films.
Titled ‘Hollywood Must Do Better,’ the two and a half minute video features clips from several popular mainstream films released in the last five years.
GLAAD says each of these clips are an example of how Hollywood regularly depicts the LGBT community in a negative or dangerous light.
“People around the world love going to the movies,” a disclaimer at the beginning the video reads. “But for LGBT people, entertainment often comes at their expense.”
The video then features snippets of popular recent films – including Ted, Project X and The Wolf of Wall Street – that the organisation says contains homophobic and insensitive jokes.
“We’re still the butt of the joke. We’re still infrequently seen and when we are seen, it’s in a negative light,” GLAAD CEO and president Sarah Kate Ellis told Variety in announcing the campaign.
“We want to show people and to build awareness of how bad mainstream films are,” Ellis added. “Our greatest outcome would be for studios to take notice and understand that we are watching, we are paying attention and we are putting a concerted effort into changing things.”
According to the organisation, just 20 of more than 100 major studio releases in 2014 featured LGBT characters, and those that were included received little screen time.
GLAAD’s third annual Studio Responsibility Index (SRI) found that of the 20 films deemed inclusive of LGBT characters, ten of those contained less than five minutes of screen time for their LGBT characters – with several being less than 30 seconds.
GLAAD President Sarah Kate Ellis warned that the film industry was in danger of being left behind – by failing to mirror the progress made by ground-breaking TV shows such as Transparent and Orange is the New Black.
She said: “As television and streaming services continue to produce a remarkable breadth of diverse LGBT representations, we still struggle to find depictions anywhere near as authentic or meaningful in mainstream Hollywood film.”
The media charity recently announced it will no longer publish an annual report monitoring the quantity, quality, and diversity of LGBT representation on TV.
The charity published its ninth annual Network Responsibility Index earlier this month, which identifies TV networks who have excelled at representing LGBT people, storylines and characters – as well as those who have failed to do so.
However, as the report enters its ninth year, nearly all US TV networks are ranked ‘adequate’ or above – with the FOX network becoming the first major broadcaster to be ranked ‘excellent’.
Watch the full video below.
