In a year where Hollywood seemed to be earning its reputation as one of the most progressive and gay-friendly industries on earth, GLAAD’s latest Studio Responsibility Index makes a case that 2014 didn’t exactly solve homophobia in Hollywood…. GLAAD report says that only 17.5% of the major studio releases included identified lesbian, gay, or bisexual characters… that’s an improvement over last year, there’s still a way to go. Even worse than a film with no LGBT characters are films with what GLAAD calls…
“outright defamatory representations.”
Their Observations & Recommendations section singles out these 5 films as the worst offenders:
Exodus, Gods and Kings: GLAAD says that the film features “one of the year’s worst depictions of a gay character.” Ben Mendelsohn’s Viceroy Hegep is the vicious overseer when caught embezzling, offers Moses sexual favors in exchange for his silence. GLAAD calls his character…
“overtly effeminate, vain, greedy, inhumane, and duplicitous” and concludes that “this ugly, spiteful caricature harkens back to a time when Hollywood routinely depicted L.G.B.T. people as abhorrent villains the audience would naturally root against. For anyone who thinks those days are behind us, Hegep and his pronounced lisp prove that isn’t the case.”
Top Five: Chris Rock and Rosario Dawson’s characters discover that Dawson’s boyfriend is secretly gay or bisexual. In a series of flashbacks, Dawson’s Chelsea recalls her boyfriends fondness for anal pleasure and how she once vindictively took revenge on him for it. That sequence was called out by both GLAAD and film critics for implying that anal sex is wrong and deserving of punishment. GLAAD goes on to point out that elsewhere in Top Five, Rock, who wrote and directed the film, speaks pointedly about the power of racial depiction on film:
“More than one film critic pointed out how disappointing and hypocritical the scene was in a film that asked the audience to think critically about the movies they watch.”
Horrible Bosses 2: Jennifer Aniston extends her harassment from Charlie Day’s character to his wife. GLAAD points out that …
“many of Julia’s most loathsome personality traits fall in line with some of the worst stereotypes about bisexual people. . . . The film also contains a number of jokes about the three men pretending to be gay or simulating sex acts with each other, which, despite the insertion of character lines asserting their acceptance of gay people, widely miss the mark.”
Transformers: Age of Extinction: GLAAD’s report takes director Michael Bay’s entire career into consideration when examining the most recent Transformers. Singling out a character with a “limp-wristed handshake” who Mark Wahlberg’s character proceeds to “inexplicably intimidate and bully, calling him ‘snakeballs.’” In the context of Bay’s body of work, the report concludes:
“The best that can be said is that at least in this film Bay doesn’t have anyone physically beat the gay-coded character the way he did in 2013’s Pain and Gain. When it’s an improvement for a director’s film to not feature an anti-gay assault, that’s a tragically low bar.”
The Other Woman: Hollywood is still lagging behind when it comes to representation of transgender characters. The report is particularly punishing when it comes to a scene in The Other Woman involving a bearded, hairy-chested man in women’s clothing. The report explains:
“If Dana is meant to be the filmmakers’ sophomoric approximation of a transgender woman, it’s far and away one of the most offensive representations we’ve seen in years. If instead, Dana is a man who agreed to dress in drag and harass the cheating man as part of the revenge plot, then it’s meant to be a gross-out moment steeped in gay-panic and trans-panic. Because of how cartoonish Dana appears, we’re inclined to assume it’s the latter, but it’s a defamatory scene either way.”
(via Vanity Fair)
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