New Study Reveals Less Than 1% Of Characters From 2015’s Top-Grossing Films Were LGBT

Every Oscar season there’s a film or two about LGBT themes that’s rolled out with much fanfare about the possibility of awards. However, that obscures the fact that of the major films the studios expect to make money at the box office, they’re still largely ignoring lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender characters.

A new study by USC reveals that of the top 100 grossing films in the US of 2015, only 32 characters out of 4,370 were identified as LGBT. While that’s an increase of 19 on the previous year, not one of the 32 was a lead character (most were completely inconsequential) and only one was transgender. There were also 19 gay men, 7 lesbians, and 5 bisexuals (3 males, 2 females). As 82% of the movies in the sample did not depict one LGBT speaking or named character, that means of the 18 that did, 17 only had a single LGBT character, while another had two.

The study found that since they started sampling in 2007, the position for ethnic minorities, women and LGBT people has changed little in terms of representation. It’s still the case that more than two-thirds of roles in the top 100 movies are men, women are still far more likely to be sexualised, and men still direct 92% of major films. The terms of racial representation, there’s been no increase in the number of ethnic minority character between 2007 and 2015, less than 15% had a non-white lead, 17% did not feature one Black or African American person in a speaking role, while half didn’t have a speaking Asian American character. Disabled people meanwhile represented only 2.4% of characters, with the position behind-the-camera little better.

It suggests that despite a lot of talk on Hollywood about increased representation, on the ground little is changing, and that film is still largely male, white and straight.