Though the report found comedies to be the most inclusive genre, it also singled out two films from that genre, Get Hard and The Wedding Ringer, for having what it called “more blatant and incessant gay panic humor than we have seen in a Hollywood film in years. Narrated by Lily Tomlin, this exuberant, eye-opening movie serves up a dazzling hundred-year history of gay men and women on the silver screen. The one transgender character counted in the study, who appeared in the comedy Hot Pursuit, “existed purely to give the audience something to laugh at when her identity is revealed.” And as for the Vito Russo Test, only 36 percent of films passed, down from more than half of the films studied the previous year and the lowest percentage since the study began four years ago. Nearly three quarters of LGBT characters had minor roles with less than 10 minutes of screen time and LGBT representation continues to skew heavily toward gay males (77 percent), with only one transgender character represented.Īnd just because LGBT characters are present, of course, does not mean they are presented in a positive light. Though the number of LGBT characters in mainstream releases, at 47, was up from 28 counted last year, the study found that racial diversity among those characters had decreased by 7 percentage points. Tough Love: Film scholar Vito Russo made his mark at UCSC in his brief tenure teaching The Celluloid Closet, a course on gays images in film based on his. As with recent studies about women and minorities in film, the results of GLAAD’s study do not offer much to celebrate. From Eric Marcus: The late author and activist Vito Russo is best known for his 1981 landmark book, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, and for co-founding both GLAAD (originally known as the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), and ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power).

The Celluloid Closet by Vito Russo