The 2016 Where We Are on TV report by American media advocacy group GLAAD, released earlier this month, found that LGBTQI representation on US television is at its highest in 21 years. This is significant for audiences worldwide, in light of the US's cultural imperialism, for good or for bad, when it comes to the small screen.
It also draws attention by contrast to the state of queer representation on Australian television. In August, Screen Australia published Seeing Ourselves: Reflections on Diversity in TV Drama, a landmark study of diversity in local TV series.
Surveying the 199 Australian dramas aired from 2011 to 2015, it determined (among other things) that only 5 per cent of characters could be identified as LGBTQI; this figure is less than half of the proportion of real-world queer individuals (11 per cent) in the Australian population.
Indeed, local television is moving at a very slow pace in this arena. Despite the 1970s Australian series Number 96 being one of the first shows in the world to include a gay recurring character, it was only in 2010 that Neighbours introduced a gay series regular.
While titles such as Outland and Carlotta have queerness as a thematic focal point, the majority of fiction series — Janet King, House Husbands, Winners & Losers — only incidentally portray non-heterosexuality. Moreover, while The Block's 2004 debut marked the first Australian reality series to feature a same-sex couple, it's just this year that it included a lesbian couple in its roster. And it was only in March that a local dating show, First Dates, paired two gay men.
The most prominent LGBTQI-aligned Australian television series of late is, of course, Please Like Me. Notwithstanding its controversial demotion from ABC1 to the more 'niche' ABC2 when it premiered in 2013 — allegedly for being 'too gay' — it has enjoyed global critical acclaim, including a 2014 Emmy nomination, and is currently in its fourth season.
The queer depictions in Please Like Me may, as Tim McGuire has identified, be couched among 'universal touch-points' such as mental health and family dynamics — an approach that makes them more 'palatable', and calls to mind Laurence Barber's razor-sharp criticisms against characters that insidiously '"just so happen" to be gay'.
But the show's foregrounding of an openly queer, effete protagonist (Josh Thomas, pictured) is nevertheless noteworthy — particularly as it challenges the sometimes-problematic Australian ideals of blokey mateship and masculinity.
"Television lies at the intersection between culture and commerce: even if those behind the scenes wish to push for more and better queer depictions, they may not necessarily be willing to take financial risks to do so."
The significance of positive representation cannot be overstated: media products are inherently normative, legitimising identities and lived realities through the mere fact of visibility. Media texts influence our attitudes to political issues — and, in the case of LGBTQI rights, this is ever more important, given the continuing debates surrounding marriage equality and the pervasiveness of homophobia (the recent suicide of 13-year-old Tyrone Unsworth, who was bullied at school for his sexuality, is an especially chilling example of the latter).
But media products are also born of society's existing values and ideologies; media and culture shape and reflect one another. In our case, the relative recency of LGBTQI rights becoming enshrined in state and federal law, the persistence of the 'gay panic' defence in court, and the fact that one in five Australians deem homosexuality 'immoral', impact both the production and consumption of artforms.
Television lies at the precarious intersection between culture and commerce: even if those behind the scenes wish to push for more and better queer depictions, they may not necessarily be willing or able to take financial risks to do so. The prevailing industry belief that 'gay doesn't rate' continues to hold sway; as the four interviewees in this article on LGBTQI underrepresentation reveal, television creatives are often censured for writing queer-themed storylines, or sometimes altogether precluded from doing so. When they are afforded that liberty, they are smacked with prohibitive 'unwritten rules' so as to not 'push it too far'.
Risk is certainly greater when marketing to a smaller population like Australia's; unlike the US, we don't have the viewership numbers to facilitate the 'niching' of audiences. But this shouldn't be a disincentive to seek ways forward. Focusing again on just numbers, we could at least start by aiming for parity in terms of the proportion of queer characters compared to those in the real-world population.
In terms of revenue, a 2015 UCLA report determined that Hollywood films with diverse casts generate more money at the global box office. While these findings relate to audience responses to race representation in cinema, it wouldn't be a stretch to extrapolate — bearing in mind that minorities account for a not-insubstantial segment of viewers — that the underlying motivation is a desire to see one's own experiences on screen.
The Screen Australia report acknowledges that there is 'an almost universal preference for authentic representations', and that 'diversity in the writer's room itself was a priority'. As the federal funding body has already taken steps to address the underrepresentation of women in the screen industries via its Gender Matters initiative, it's only reasonable to advocate that it extend this venture to facilitate more LGBTQI representation — on and off screen — as well.
Authenticity is possible only through lived experience, however. And so, as Shaad D'Souza has argued, it's vital that production companies and television networks take risks on queer and other minority creatives, and give them opportunities to write, produce and portray their own stories. If the immense success of Please Like Me is anything to go by, it's time the Australian small screen make the big leap and let viewers enjoy — and be enriched by — more queer TV depictions.
Adolfo Aranjuez is the editor of Metro, Australia's oldest film and media periodical. He is also the subeditor of Screen Education, a columnist for Right Now, and a freelance writer and speaker.