"Smackdown" Smacked. Some e-mailers have written to say they found the "we"re not gay, it was just a put on" conclusion to World Wrestling Entertainment's "Smackdown" gay wedding to have been quite gay-negative, and ditto the crowd's reactions. What can I say, I based my item on the Washington Post's coverage. Does this mean you can't believe everything you read in the papers"?
Prime-Time Quotas? The Gay & Lesbian
Alliance Against Defamation reports
that:
The number of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender characters appearing this fall on primetime network television has declined by almost two-thirds compared to the 2001-02 television season". The Fall 2002 season includes only seven lesbian and gay characters in primetime -- all of whom are white. There are no bisexual or transgender characters. Last year, 20 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) characters regularly appeared on network television.
Proclaims GLAAD's Scott Seomin:
"The diversity of the gay community cannot be conveyed through seven characters, especially when all of those characters are white. This is not merely about the decreasing number of gay and lesbian characters on TV. It is about the total lack of people of color, bisexual and transgender portrayals on network television."
Now, I"m all for more gay characters on the tube. But there's something about GLAAD's rhetoric that's unsettling. For one thing, there's no recognition on GLAAD's part that TV programming decisions are driven by ratings, not by a central planning committee made up of homophobic whte male racists. In the wake of the success of "Will & Grace," there was a big jump in the number of gays on TV. It was TV's typical copycat phenomenon. But many of the new shows bombed in the ratings -- not because they had gay characters, but because they weren't very good.
Should GLAAD be encouraging more gay stories on prime-time
television? Absolutely. But failing to understand what caused the
gay surge and subsequent decline, playing the race card at a time
when there are more black characters than ever, and righteously
declaring the need for transgenders of color all comes off as just
more stale activist rhetoric.
--Stephen H. Miller