Hollywood’s Liberal Elite Still Struggles to Give Queer Artists a Shot

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Steven Canals has been deep in preparation for his first time directing an episode of prime-time television. The Bronx, N.Y., native is working on the second season of Pose, a show he writes and co-created that has critics generally elated. The opportunity to now direct, he says, “is incredible.”

The FX Networks show has the largest number of trans actors in series regular roles in TV history. It’s an urban fantasia, a soap wherein larger-than-life glamazons fight battles on the dance floor, pantomiming to themes like “executive realness” and “royalty.” Fans took to social media during the Season 2 premiere to share GIFs of characters such as Angel Evangelista, a Puerto Rican sex worker played by trans actor Indya Moore, and quips from sharp-tongued emcee Pray Tell (Billy Porter). The stars have drawn attention everywhere—magazine covers, fashion campaigns, red carpets—and the show was just picked up for a third season.

The Golden Globe-nominated drama mixes ethereal costumes with the gritty reality of poverty and the AIDS epidemic in 1980s New York. Set against a backdrop of Trump-style wealth and leaning heavily for inspiration on the documentary Paris Is Burning, it captures the life of black and Latinx trans and other queer outcasts who built maternal “houses” that took in LGBTQ youth. In its second season, the story moves to 1990, when Madonna’s Vogue thrust the dance scene into the mainstream.

Canals, an openly gay Afro-Latinx screenwriter who wrote the pilot in 2014, spent years being told it was too niche and not commercial enough, before being discovered by Ryan Murphy, the co-creator of Glee and American Horror Story, in 2016.

“The reality is that we still aren’t seeing a lot of trans narratives being told,” Canals says. He notes there’s been progress in inclusion for LGBTQ people as a whole in Hollywood, and gay men and women in particular, but “we’re not doing great when it comes to representation of folks who are bisexual, and certainly I don’t think we’re doing great when it comes to trans representation either.”

The numbers back him up. A 2018 study by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found transgender people largely absent from Hollywood films and that only 1% of all characters in 1,100 popular films from 2007 to 2017 were from the LGBTQ community. There wasn’t one trans character across the top 100 movies of 2017. TV is more inclusive, with the percentage of LGBTQ series regulars on broadcast prime-time scripted programming reaching an all-time high of 8.8% in 2018, says GLAAD, the LGBTQ media advocacy group. The producers behind Transparent and Vida have sought out LGBTQ writers and actors.

“You have a show like Pose out in the world that is well received and has found an audience, and so suddenly everyone thinks, ‘Well, trans people are doing great.’ But that’s only one show,” Canals says. “Last year we had a little over 500 original pieces of scripted content. I think we could do better.”

Over the past year, Hollywood’s biggest studios have been championing the lives of gay rock icons Freddie Mercury and Elton John, though the former film, Bohemian Rhapsody, received criticism for downplaying Mercury’s sexuality. Rocketman, the John biopic from Paramount Pictures, featured the first gay sex scene in a movie by a major studio in recent years. (Scenes were cut for distribution in Russia, where homosexuality is illegal.)

Walt Disney’s Marvel Entertainment, one of the most powerful forces in modern Hollywood, is working on new and existing LGBTQ superhero characters; the first trans superhero has already made her debut on TV, in the CW’s Supergirl earlier this year. A gay-headlined major studio romantic comedy is in the works starring comedian Billy Eichner, produced by Judd Apatow for Universal Pictures. The subject is radical in its simplicity: It’s about two people who have commitment issues in their relationship, and the people are men.

Netflix is set to adapt the play The Boys in the Band, with Pose’s Murphy as one of the producers, reuniting the all-gay Broadway cast. Still, some of the most celebrated recent movies about LGBTQ people, like Call Me by Your Name and Love, Simon, starred straight lead actors.

“We’ve come a very long way from the days of old Hollywood, where every movie star was forced to be in the closet and there was no such thing as same sexuality for public consumption in narrative storytelling,” says Matt Tyrnauer, director of the documentary Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood. But “Hollywood is lagging in its full embrace of open same sexuality as something that is as mainstream as society itself.”

Actors like Ellen Page have been vocal about the pressure not to come out for fear of the impact on their careers.

“As more people feel comfortable coming out professionally, we will get more calls from people who believe that has negatively impacted their career,” says Adam Moore, national director of equal opportunity and diversity at SAG-AFTRA. The actors union tries to push the message “It’s not what you are, it’s what you can play as a performer,” but once LGBTQ people come out, some find their work limited to playing only those roles, Moore says.

One standout example of progress is the moment that actor Andrew Scott is having. The openly gay Irishman has become one of TV’s hottest sex symbols in the role of a straight priest in a love affair with the female lead in the show Fleabag. The onscreen chemistry is so sizzling, he has become known as “the hot priest” to legions of fans.

Chuck James, a founding partner at talent agency ICM Partners, says that in recent months he’s seen an increase in requests for actors to fill LGBTQ roles in mainstream dramas and for more actors who are LGBTQ themselves. For the stars of Pose, Canals wants recognition of their work as actors, without qualification. “These trans women are not playing trans, they are playing a woman who happens to be trans,” he says. “There is so much more that makes these characters who they are.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Chris Rovzar at crovzar@bloomberg.net, James Ellis

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