The Last Gay Word

A reader wrote in asking if I could post Brent's latest The Last Gay Word column (concerning what needs to happen for gay entertainment to break into the mainstream)  here so folks could discuss. Since your wish is my command, here it is. To read the whole thing you'll have to go below the fold, and then you can comment away. Just don't praise Brent too much. I have to live with him, after all, and this house is only big enough for one over-inflated ego! Enjoy!

Gay men in entertainment have made incredible strides in recent years, scoring at the Oscars, the Emmys, on Broadway and the bestseller lists. It's enough to make a person think that we've arrived. That we've entered some golden age, where all will be perfect, or nearly so, from here on out.

Not so fast. For one thing, despite a few high-profile projects, we're still not represented in books and movies and TV shows in numbers anywhere near our actual percentage of the population.

And as I've written before, we're especially under-represented in stories that aren't specifically about Being Gay, or in genre projects like fantasy, mystery, or science fiction.

Basically, we've conquered the urban areas, the blue states, and most of the European Union; we're finally starting to become well-represented in our strongholds, in our little specialized media niches: online, or in art house theaters, on cable television, and in Broadway theaters or big city bookstores and libraries.

But there are still vast swaths of the world where gay content is almost unheard of, or where the gay content that does exist is watered down or "balanced" so as to not "offend" conservative Christian sensibilities. Last year, the Oklahoma state house went so far as to pass a bill requiring that all public libraries put gay-themed books, even picture books, in a special "adults-only" section. But I'll hazard a guess that public libraries in Oklahoma aren't buying a lot of gay-themed books to begin with.

In other words, for all our recent success, gay content is still controversial; we still haven't quite gone mainstream. Brokeback Mountain, for all its acclaim and publicity, made "only" $83 million in domestic release, slightly more than half of what the last Tom Cruise movie Mission Impossible 3 made, which, incidentally, was considered a disappointment. Another Gay Movie, which has been seen by literally every gay person I know, has made less than a million dollars in domestic release.

So how do we break out of our entertainment ghetto? After all, gay people live everywhere. And people everywhere need to know how we live. No one would ever suggest it's acceptable for stories with African American content to be censored from much of the country, right?

But moving ahead won't be easy. In fact, the obstacles we face may be some of the scariest and most infuriating that we've faced yet.

That's because the obstacles we face now are institutional ones.

A few weeks ago, I had an interesting conversation with an author friend who was considering writing a teen science fiction book with a main character who is gay. Her editor loved the idea, but warned her that, despite her solid track-record, her book probably wouldn't be picked up by chains like Walmart and Target—outlets that now represent 40 percent or more of the book market. For a teen book like the ones this author and I both write, gay content also effectively rules out placement in a book club or school book fair—placements that can literally mean sales of hundreds of thousands of books.

Sure, for high-profile, bestselling authors like E. Lynn Harris, gay content isn't enough to get a book rejected. But for the rest of us? Gay content creates serious institutional obstacles—obstacles that result in a direct hit to our personal bottom lines, threatening the viability of not just the project in question, but our whole future careers.

In other words, the odds against my friend's gay science fiction novel are incredibly high before she has even written a single word. I certainly won't blame her if it never does get written.

This is why I get frustrated by activists who blithely insist that all closeted gay actors immediately come out, or that we should cavalierly out them online.

It's easy for them to say. After all, it's not their future careers that are on the line. As an author, I definitely understand how incredibly precarious any career in the arts really is, and I get why certain actors may legitimately worry that he or she might not get cast in other projects if his or her sexual orientation becomes widely known.

The point is, established institutions--movie studios, television networks, corporate retail outlets, public schools, regional theaters--don't like controversy. And yet it's exactly these folks that we have to do battle with if we want gay-themed entertainment to move to the next level of accessibility.

Take the world of theater. With all the gay playwrights, gay male storylines are probably over-represented in that medium, right?

Well, maybe in a few cities. But for all their success on New York and Los Angeles stages, all the gay playwrights I know tell me how challenging it has been to get their works produced on regional or amateur stages—which, incidentally, is where playwrights happen to make most of their money: the money they need to make to be able to write more plays.

Why won't regional theaters produce their plays? It's not that artistic directors are homophobic per se (some of their best friends are gay!). They just worry about offending their subscribers, or their corporate sponsors who, after all, aren't giving a theater a quarter of a million dollars to be targeted by outraged members of the local chapter of the Concerned Women for America.

In other words, institutional obstacles.

See how it works? See how scary it is?

Overcoming these obstacles will not be easy. It will take more gay writers and producers willing to force the issue. It will take our standing up to entrenched forces every inch of the way. And it will take audiences stepping up and staring down the bigots, demanding that these entertainment options be available from the nation's television networks, chain stores, and movie theaters.

It will happen eventually. But only if we make it so.

And that is the last gay word.

Brent Hartinger is the author of the gay teen novel, Geography Club, which is currently being adapted for the movies. The latest sequel, Split Screen, is out later this month. Explore "Brent's Brain," his website, at www.brenthartinger.com.