It’s what made it possible for Moonlight-a film about a queer person of color-to win best picture at the Oscars. The indie realm has become our primary source for more diversity on screen. GLAAD’s fifth annual Hollywood report card confirms that the gay community is still dramatically underrepresented in mainstream movies: just 23 of the 125 films released by studios in 2016 featured LGBTQ characters, and 10 of the 23 gave them less than a minute of screen time. “I watched Alien: Covenant and there’s a gay couple in it, and I had no idea,” Spa Night director Andrew Ahn tells Vanity Fair, laughing. Unfortunately, their “coming out” scenes have mostly been lost in translation.
Recent films like Beauty and the Beast and Power Rangers have “broken ground” or “made history”-according to these headlines, anyway-as major Hollywood releases featuring openly queer characters. Hollywood is having an “exclusively gay moment”-a phrase inadvertently coined by director Bill Condon this winter and overblown by media attention.
