Does it seem like lesbian characters are getting scarce lately?
Well… the good news is that you’re not imagining things.
GLAAD’s Where We Are report, which tallies LGBT characters in US broadcast TV, reported a sharp drop in lesbian regular characters last year, down a third from roughly 30 to 20, but it’s just the latest edge of an ongoing year-on-year trend. If you’re wondering if maybe our missing lesbians have simply translated over to trendier identities, I’m afraid even that cold consolation is lacking – the same report showed a decrease of 44% in LGBT characters overall. Similar movements are reported in movies.
The trend is across the board.
Part of it – not all – can be attributed to the fact there’s just… less stuff being made now, generally. Post-Covid, scripted TV and movie production everywhere has seriously contracted, but streaming TV seasons were already getting shorter and further apart, and have started making aggressive moves into other entertainment arenas, like reality TV and live sports.
This is and will be a compounding problem for lesbian media particularly – we’re not going to retain even our current proportion of this ever-shrinking pie.
We can’t ignore the changing political winds in the air, but they are, frankly, far too depressing to talk about in detail here. Suffice it to say that as the pipeline narrows, more and more of it will be reserved for “safe” output, both small- and big- C conservative stuff, seen as wiser investments by decision makers.
Now, realistically, few of us were naive enough to think IP farming corporations were going to be our forever friends, through thick and thin. But now is the time to acknowledge we’re heading into that “thin” phase. We are back in the media wilderness, to be there for the foreseeable future, and we will find ourselves, if we haven’t already, to be on our own.
But we’ve been here before. In the long view, the last few decades of art and media – for better, and by God, for worse – have been anomalous, for just how much lesbian-relevant output has been coming from mainstream platforms and, indeed, just how high profile that material was. How positive, how valuable or how well executed it was, well, that’s another matter, but the point remains.
I think – and I must be a little uncharitable here for a moment – that this has made us a little lazy. I think a good number of lesbians have learned to satisfy our appetite for art and storytelling with mainstream output, and then burn off our own creative energy in turn by engaging with it, squabbling over it, reblogging it, rewriting it, re-editing it and reacting to it.
If we have or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re going to have to reorient ourselves now. We must shake off the kind of passive, one way art and media consumer role to which many of us have grown accustomed. We have to reconnect with the DIY sensibilities once a hallmark of underground lesbian communities, and just start making as much of our own shit for each other as possible. Because if we don’t, there simply won’t be anything else.
This will require a lot of recalibration. We cannot compete with Netflix or Amazon, or their production values. Love them or don’t, we’re not going to see another League of Their Own or San Junipero for a very long time to come. We are going to have to make all this stuff for each other with the resources we can muster among ourselves.
That isn’t necessarily all bad.
The flipside of a low budget is that there’s a low threshold for it to pay its way; no big money means no corporate oversight, no secondary stakeholders or interest groups to consider beyond our own vision. Limitations have often proved to be the mother of invention.
We are not going to create a lesbian MCU with spin off mobile games, cartoons or tie in merch, sure, but we don’t have to. There are any number of alternative and unconventional media formats at our disposal now that weren’t before – there have never been more tools available to make and distribute our own art, stories and work.
There is effectively no entry cost to writing a novel, beyond the commitment to do the work; it has never been easier to create something to a palatable standard, and distribute it either digitally or via Print-On-Demand channels. The entry point to graphic art is almost as accessible; it’s the refining of it that’s a lifetime process, but isn’t that the joy and pain of it anyway?
With a little creative flair, cult video games have been made for under a hundred pounds, on the stuff you already own. Yours probably won’t beat GTA out graphically or commercially, but it will claim its little corner of the world and reach some of the people looking for it, won’t it?
Are those projects likely to be sublimely perfect first try, no, probably not, but they’ll exist, and they’ll be ours. We can make stuff that is entirely our own, in our own voice.
That presents, too, a responsibility, to be more thoughtful, active, positive consumers – even collaborators – to our own creatives. It means being a little more forgiving of lesbian work with rough edges, made in good faith, yes, but also actively spreading the word for stuff on the basis of the potential it suggests of its creator.
I am perhaps largely preaching to the choir on this, speaking as I am from the pages of an independently published lesbian magazine, but I hope many more of us make fresh, conscious efforts to speak for ourselves, and speak to each other.
The main barrier to these projects happening is simply that we’re not doing it; that it doesn’t necessarily occur to us that we can. But anyone with a Blue Yeti mic can start a podcast, and lots of dudes who shouldn’t, do.
Why not you too?
Leslie Chancer is a writer, specialising in media analaysis and culture through a lesbian lens.
Leslie is currently working on a lesbian romance novel.
Find more work from Leslie here
Restless Violets 
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