GLAAD Annual Report Is Out: More GLBT on TV This Season

GLAAD has just released their Where We Are on TV report for fall, and it shows good news for GLBT representation on broadcast television for the 2010-2011 season, especially if you’re a white gay male. But things are improving across the spectrum as well.

This year's report counts 587 characters on broadcast primetime scripted television, and then compares that to the number of GLBT characters that are lead or supporting, which is 23 or 3.9%. That’s up from 18 GLBT characters or 3.0% last year.

It's worth noting that eleven of those characters are on ABC, which casts an impressive 7.2% of their characters as GLBT.

CBS was touted for improvement in this report, but simply because the character Kalinda on The Good Wife will finally be revealed as bisexual. Improvement in this case counts as getting to 0.8% GLBT representation.

A steady upward crawl. 

Only NBC saw a drop in the percentage of characters on primetime, down to just 2%, but that can be attributed as much to the decimation of last year’s series at least as much as to corporate culture.

Gains on The CW are perhaps the most impressive. The network produces only ten hours of television each week, but has managed to bring us gay characters this year on the established 90210 with Teddy, and an upcoming lesbian character on their hit Hellcats.

If there’s a downside to broadcast television, it’s that representation tends to be very white, and very male. There are only six GLBT characters of color on broadcast television, three are Latino, three are Asian-Pacific Islander, and none are black.

There are only two lesbian characters on primetime broadcast, and six bisexual women who are arguably designed to appeal to straight men.

If one were to quibble with any piece of data in the broadcast report, it might be the counting of the animated characters on Fox. Why American Dad gets credit for omnisexual Roger the Alien and Terry and Greg, while The Simpsons counts Patty and Smithers as recurring is unclear.

[Editor's Note: We heard from GLAAD's Richard Ferraro who explained that they count animated characters regardless of the quality of the depiction because they are still scripted characters. However, at the end of the television season, GLAAD rates the networks on these characters/storylines in the Network Responsibility Index.]