The Problem With Invisible Queer Representation

We’ve reached the end of June. This month – Pride Month – is a time to be loud and proud with our queer identities. While we celebrate in parties and parades across the country, it’s also a time to take a hard look at how we’re represented in media.

The need for increased inclusion in the film industry has been a hot topic recently. For the most part, people want to see themselves reflected in media they consume. Members of the LGBTQIA+ community are no exception. Despite strides made with movies like Love Simon and Call Me By Your Name, a lot of work still remains to be done.

Just days before its release, Daniella Pineda revealed during an interview with Yahoo! Entertainment that a scene from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom confirming her character, Dr. Zia Rodriguez’s lesbian identity was removed due to time constraints. This is an all too familiar refrain. Queer representation is either left on the cutting room floor or revealed as a throwaway line in an interview. Our image rarely makes it to the final cut of the movie.

A scene that would reveal Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) to be bisexual was cut from last year’s Thor: Ragnarok because “it distracted from the scene’s vital exposition.”  An earlier cut of Black Panther included a scene with mutual flirting between Okoye (Danai Gurira) and Ayo (Florence Kasumba). Jonathan Kasdan, co-writer of Solo: A Star Wars Story revealed that Lando Calrissian is pansexual in an interview with Huffington Post. “There’s a fluidity to Donald and Billy Dee’s [portrayal of Lando’s] sexuality,” Kasdan told HuffPost. “I mean, I would have loved to have gotten a more explicitly LGBT character into this movie.” While he claims to have wanted to be more overt, when it came down to the final product he chose not to. Other than Lando’s relationship with his droid – which was played mostly for laughs – there was no evidence of his sexuality in the film. Author of the Harry Potter series J.K. Rowling announced that Albus Dumbledore was gay, yet his sexuality will not make an appearance in the upcoming Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.

These examples, along with plenty of other instances, continue the narrative of othering queerness. In these stories of dinosaurs gone rogue, magic, superheroes and gods, somehow a queer character is too peculiar to exist. Instead, worlds in which everyone is cisgender and heterosexual are peddled as the norm. They want to cue representation with their statements and deleted scenes after the fact, without taking any real responsibility for failing to provide authentic representation. 

Queer representation in film isn’t improving. In GLAAD’s survey of the 109 films released theatrically by the major studios in 2017, queer characters only appeared in 14 films. That’s only 12.8 percent of total releases. This marks a drop from 18.4 percent in 2016. Not only are we making it into less movies, our screen time has dramatically decreased. In those 14 films, half those characters had less than five minutes of screen time. The statistics for queer people of color are even worse. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther and Solo: A Star Wars Story could have provided Black, Afro-Latinx, and Latinx queer representation, giving a much-needed bump to those statistics. 

Jurassic Park, Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Harry Potter — these are all big franchises that bring in billions of dollars and are seen around the world. We saw first hand how a predominantly Black cast in Black Panther touched Black viewers. We witnessed the growing excitement of Asian audiences for the upcoming Crazy Rich Asians. As a queer person – especially as a queer Afro-Latina – I want to get my time in limelight, too. I want to see my experiences validated. I want to see someone like me get to be the hero, the love interest or at the very least part of the story. As we watch these microcosms of our world, queer people want to know that we can exist, too.

In a time where our government continues to threaten the rights of queer people, we need nuanced representation more than ever. Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, recently revealed in an interview with The Playlist that two queer characters will make their debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, one already established character and one new one. Here’s hoping that it’s a signal of more queer characters to come and not a singular occurrence.