Looking through the 8 films we produced this year, I realized that we had 8 LGBT characters. In Justine in Barry there were 4…Barry, Fred, Tom and Hunter. In Harley there were 2, Lucas who is gay, and Harley who is bisexual. In Treats there were also two LGBT characters, Rick who is gay and Tristan who we would learn in part two is bisexual. The 8 characters gives us a percentage of 28.6% representation of LGBT roles in our films.

Why even count the characters or bring attention to this? If you do a little research, you will find that only 3.3% of characters on television this last year were LGBT, 4.4% the year before that and 2.9% the previous year which makes the average in three years only 3.5% (GLAAD Research). The demographics of the LGBT community varies depending on where you look, usually between 5-10%. According to Kinsey, 8.6% of men reported having attraction to the same sex and 15.5% of women reported the same. This is just the percentage of the people who admitted to having these feelings. How many more are in the closet or just plain curious but don’t talk about it?

When you think in terms of math, the LGBT percentages in the population speak loud and clear. It just makes good sense for the characters on television to represent the statistic in the real world, which means that even though the 3.3% statistic from this year is an improvement on the 2.9% from two years before, it is still a drop from last year at 4.4% and is low compared to the percentage of the population that either identifies as LGBT or reports having same sex attraction.

Representing the LGBT community is important to me in my films. I see it as an issue of human rights, equality, and freedom. The LGBT community is beautiful and deserves to be celebrated, especially after all of the hardships they’ve endure over generations because of bigotry, injustice and inequality in America.

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