Prism ERG, HMI, Verizon Media & BUILD Series NYC Present: LGBTQ Representation in Media

HMI’s Speaker Series is a quarterly panel series that brings together celebrities, activists, thought leaders, and notable individuals to lead an innovative and thought-provoking conversation on topics pertaining to the LGBTQIA+ community. For this panel, Huff Post' Cole Delbyck chatted with Clare Kenny, Director of Youth Engagement, GLAAD; Diana Tourjee, Journalist, Vice Media; and Phil Jimenez, comics artist.

Video Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

COLE DELBYCK: Thank you all so much for being here. I want to sort of start out by acknowledging that LGBTQ representation has dramatically increased over the past couple years. We have shows like "Pose" and "Queer Eye" and figures like Laverne Cox and Adam Rippon. But I want to sort of throw it back to a time when these queer stories were more in short supply. You really had to seek them out.

So to get sort of a window into each of your own experiences, I want to know, what was sort of your earliest memory of seeing a positive representation of LGBT people, and how that sort of impacted your perception at the time?

CLARE KENNY: Well, I think the first time I remember seeing a queer character that I identified with was in "But I'm a Cheerleader." And this was before I knew I was queer. And so I saw Natasha Lyonne's character. And I really identify with that.

She didn't think she was queer. She's getting sent to a conversion therapy camp, but it's a campy camp. And so there's humor in it. And there's a lot of humanity.

And it's fun now to realize I really did identify with that "But I'm a Cheerleader" idea. And at the time, I just thought I was really curious. And I really connected, except for the gay part.

And now it's very clear. No, I connected with all of it. And it's very ironic, actually.

COLE DELBYCK: That's great. A classic, I love that film. How about you, Diana?

DIANA TOURJEE: Are we talking positive representation or representation period?

COLE DELBYCK: I'd like to first start out if there's a positive one that jumps to mind, though I those are maybe are few and far between.

DIANA TOURJEE: Yeah, the first positive-- I mean, I consider it positive-- representation that I experienced as a child was when I was 12 years old. It must have been the late '90s, early 2000s. And I saw "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" on MTV.

And content like that can be critiqued a lot today in retrospect. But at that time, it was my first window into anything that was not straight, cis, hetero-normative, not that I knew it what the latter of those words meant at that time. And I think in retrospect, what it provided to me at that time was just the hint that there might be other people in the world like myself, which is somewhat difficult to say, because I don't think I really knew who I was at that time. But I think I recognized something within the characters in that film that made me feel less invisible and alone.

Quickly after that, the first intentionally and specifically positive representation that I saw was "Queer Eye For the Straight Guy," because that was a huge show. I mean, "Will & Grace" at the same time. It's hard to really identify which of these was more influential.

But that's the one that I remember referencing as a child. And it was a positive representation of the men who were on that show. But I also think it was quite damaging in many ways for me, because I was completely detached from who I could possibly be in the world. And so this was the only cultural reference I had for what it might mean if you're not part of the normal society of cis straight people.

And so I was trying to frame myself within the context of the characters who were revealed on this show. And really, I'm nothing like them. I thought I should become more cleanly and at home, and it might make me feel like a real person. That didn't work.

But ultimately, I found representation and peace in Hedwig from "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," where I first actually felt like I saw myself. And Divine in "Pink Flamingos."

COLE DELBYCK: Yes, Divine, queen of camp. Phil, what about you?

PHIL JIMENEZ: I have a strange relationship with identity representation in media that I think has something to do with my age. I'm an '80s kid. And so for me-- which meant I was actually born in the '70s. Sorry about that.

But for me, queer representation was as much about aesthetic and sensibility as it was about specificity. Part of that is I'm really lucky. I present as a white male, so I was never longing for that kind of physical representation in entertainment.

But I found that what fed my soul were shows that had a decidedly queer bent. And that could range from the Lynda Carter "Wonder Woman" TV show in the 1970s to late night soap operas like "Dynasty," which were clearly written by a bunch of gay guys doing coke. You know, like have Alexis say this, right?

And so one of things I've been really fascinated by working with LGBTQ youth and just sort of activism in general is the push and pull of sort of metaphoric representation, how we can see ourselves in an aesthetic or an idea as opposed to I need to see myself as I am represented in comic books or film. And again, I'm really, really lucky. I never need to see another story about a white dude ever. And I will have had my stories.

But I do-- I'm actually quite grateful for this idea that a story can be decidedly queer but not necessarily gay.

COLE DELBYCK: I so resonate with that. And I think growing up, sometimes it's sort of like a scraps-of-the-table mentality. You gravitate to what you gravitate towards because there is an absence.

And so sort of on the other side of that coin, I'm curious sort of what types of damaging representations stick out to you. For me, this is not particularly explicitly queer, but I remember growing up watching Disney movies. And all the villains in those animated films are sort of coded as queer. And I was like, why am I relating to this eight-legged sea witch who's trying to take Ariel's voice? But I did.

And then I was like, what do I-- so does that spark anything for you, sort of any early things that kind of stung and impacted you like that?

CLARE KENNY: I think for me, it was more of the lack of representation. I really didn't know where to look, especially once I started realizing I was different. There was always "The L Word," which was special and is special to me still.

But yeah, being a young queer girl and thinking I was straight for so long, I didn't have a lot of images come and kind of disrupt that idea. And that's mostly what I feel like was missing and was most harmful, was the kind of lack of visibility for queer females. But I think Diana probably has the more important story to tell here.

DIANA TOURJEE: That's funny, because you reminded me of what my first answer should have been. When I was very young in the '90s, growing up and watching all the Disney films you were talking about, I always identified with those queer-coded villains and came to hate heroes of all kinds. So Jafar, that was me, just take away the beard. Ursula, duh.

And I think that even though I today can see the context in which male femininity has been culturally positioned to be negative and evil, and the damaging way-- the damaging sort of subconscious influence that must have had on me and other young people across the United States who don't conform to gender norms. I think that those characters, for me at that time, actually did probably represent something that I could identify with. Interestingly, I think that this is such a nuanced and complicated subject in the sense that some of the same characters that I first saw myself in in a positive way I think also limited the extent to which I could identify with them and damaged me at the same time.

So Hedwig de-transitions at the end of that movie. I used to just stop watching before it ended because-- and I didn't know that I was trans at that age. I didn't have the language for it, rather. I knew who I was in a certain sense, but only within the parameters of my society. So it didn't seem possible that I could be anything but a boy.

And when I was called derogatory slurs at school that I didn't know what they meant and my brother told me it meant that I was gay, I measured that against my growing sexual identity. And I couldn't deny the fact that I was attracted to men. And so all I had for reference was these two things. One, the body that I have is decidedly and unforgivably male-- society told me-- and the sexuality that I was beginning to experience, which was attracted to men.

And so I had sort of no choice but to associate myself as a gay boy at that time, because it didn't seem possible to be anything else. I wasn't one of those trans kids who was banging against the walls that I was really a girl, even though I would talk about myself that way, and like that if I could choose, I would be, and things like that, and to know you could.

Divine is an icon of history who never did anything wrong in her life. But in retrospect-- and Frank, I think that Tim Curry as Frank-N-Furter was also really bold representation at that time and a really important cultural contribution. I've written about it in years since.

And thinking about it now in retrospect, it's like I had an alien, Frank-N-Furter. I had the tragedy of Hedwig, who ends up having to sort of in the end find peace in her body as a man instead of a woman. And I had Divine, who ate dog shit.

So none of these characters were real. None of them-- they could all inspire something within me. They could all be a reference point for some hint of who I might be, some aspect of what I think you were talking about around the cultural-- around the ways that things can be queer without being explicitly gay or something like that. But none of them provided me any kind of real-world pinpoint for who I might be or how I might become the person that I am today.

And so at the end of it, even though I identified with those characters, the damage that was done-- which isn't to point blame, really, to them. But the damage that was done I think culturally, as a product of the absence of any other characters, is that the closest things I identify with are not real. None of these people and none of these characters could exist in the world I live in.

And if that's the closest thing that I can identify in my life, then I'm not real. And that was happening at the same time as my entire society-- I entered puberty and I entered middle school and all of a sudden sexuality was a thing. And I lost all of my friends. And I lost the ability to talk to and relate to men, who became nothing but-- I was very frightened of men and talk to men or befriend men for years.

And that was occurring all at the same time as these sort of cultural references were coming that I was trying to associate to and failing to, and that having drastic negative consequences for me, immediately developing mental health issues from the age of 11 or 12 that didn't go away-- haven't gone away, to be frank, but can be addressed over time. So I think it was the absence. And I think it was also the bent away from reality.

And then in later years, just learning how as I was going-- coming of age, how reviled I was because I was perceived to be a male and was blatantly feminine. I could never contain or hide that. I tried. I would have. I would have lived in the closet if I could have. But I was exposed for who I was before I even knew who I was by the nature of my being.

And so yeah, I was trapped in that. And I learned to hate myself from a very young age. And I think so that cultural representation you're seeing on screen in films was mirrored everywhere around me, every message I was receiving, whether it was from people who used to be my friends or people who hated me at school.

I was fortunate to have a supportive, loving family. But the faith that I was brought up in, also learned from a young age the lessons of I'm going to be tortured violently because of who I am. That's what hell is, you know? Hell is a violent concept.

So representation is everywhere. It's at school. It's in TV. It's in the Bible. It's at home. It's at your friend's house.

COLE DELBYCK: Thank you. That's a beautiful answer. And I think you're touching upon something really important, is that as powerful as representation can be, there's also this gap between what we see and sort of the lived reality of so many LGBTQ youth. Thank you for sharing that.

Phil, anything to add? What do you think of sort of maybe of a representation or a character or a story line that struck you sort of in the wrong way growing up?

PHIL JIMENEZ: So again, a slightly different take on that, because I don't have memories of seeking to see, again, decidedly homosexual men in fiction. That may or may not have been because I was in the closet or my interests. What I found that what I was interested in were representations of people with width and breadth of emotional life.

So I have often said that the characters I was most attracted to or ones that I responded to were at the time I would say protofeminist '70s characters, because unlike their male counterparts, they could be afraid. They could be sad. They could be loving. They were allowed to have an enormous range of emotions.

What's interesting to me about that is that I've had many debates with women, clearly, over this who did not respond positively to so many female characters, particularly in TV and in media, because of the emotional lives they lived. I found that I could not relate generally to alpha male characters, particularly straight cis male characters, because they were-- they had basically two emotional modes. And I don't. Like, I'm going to cry right now.

And so characters that had greater emotional lives were always more appealing to me. And my experience was that those were female characters. And the actresses that played them, many of whom I've met, brought that with them to the material. The material itself might not have been sourced or written that way, but that they brought that life to them.

And so I found that the most dangerous sort of imagery for me was more related, I guess, to what we would call toxic masculinity and the sort of-- the pyramid of power and where masculinity lie in that period-- that pyramid when I was growing up, and wanting to avoid that at all costs.

COLE DELBYCK: How beautiful, though, that you make these characters now for a whole new generation.

PHIL JIMENEZ: It is very, very interesting, particularly because I'm fascinated by saleability of characters, and also queerness and gayness in particularly mainstream superhero comics. Because one of things I find is that while we have dozens and dozens of queer characters in comics, they all still work within a very narrow scope of what I would argue is sort of conservative and patriarchal of what a hero can be and how they should behave. There's not a lot of pushback.

When I say gay characters, there's not a lot of queerness in those characters. They exist and are encouraged as long as they don't deviate too far from the Captain America norm.

COLE DELBYCK: It's interesting. As HMI is a youth-serving organization, we know that it's just so critically important for LGBTQ youths to see themselves authentically represented on screen. We also know that sort of today's kids are sort of identifying earlier and having a deeper understanding of what it may mean to be LGBTQ at a younger age.

So how do you think LGBTQ representation in the media can sort of better serve our young people on this journey? And what stories do you see that are consistently missing that are really key components to our community?

CLARE KENNY: Yeah, I really thought Diana's point of real stories, more realistic real stories are so critical, and probably the biggest thing that's missing from our media landscape right now. I think for young people, especially Generation Z, who's come up in an entirely different media landscape than even I have as a millennial, it's important for them to be able to be a part of the content creation and feel like they are involved in the stories.

So GLAAD actually started our digital platform amp to help LGBTQ youth tell their own stories. Whether they're talking about politics or the pop culture icons that they love or personal stories about their identity, it's really putting them in that position of power. And having GLAAD amplify that story to our network, which is a lot of young people, but also older people in our community and allies to our community who need to hear from young people, hear about their lives, the differences between what it's like to be a queer teen now versus a queer teen even five years ago or ten years ago.

And that storytelling that they're a part of is really creating this strong network of storytellers and young people who feel empowered to take hold of their identity, show people what it's like to be queer, but also here are the issues that affect my life. And how can we work together as this youth community, this online community to amplify these stories and create change and galvanize action? So I think having real examples of this young person is powerful and strong, but they're also sort of average.

They're a high schooler or they're a college student. And they're going to classes just like me. And they have this really strong opinion about how much they love Laverne Cox or Janet Mock, and connecting on that level, connecting on the level of we're young people. This is what we care about, but we also feel empowered now to take media into our own hands and connect with each other on these new platforms that we're building.

COLE DELBYCK: Yeah, what an important tool to empower young queer people to be the author of their own stories. And that's a great platform. Diana, what comes to mind for you?

DIANA TOURJEE: Would you mind phrasing the question?

COLE DELBYCK: Yeah, so what do you think--

DIANA TOURJEE: My brain's not that great.

COLE DELBYCK: At site like Vice and in your own writing, what do you-- or the media landscape in general, what do you think we can do better to sort of support LGBTQ youth and positive imagery in that way? And what stories do you think are missing that are really key to unlocking the potential and safety and acceptance for LGBT youth?

DIANA TOURJEE: Hmm. I think that people need to have the opportunity to see stories told about them in media, whether that's television or any other sort of narrative media, that don't place boundaries around identity. And I think that is a really broad statement that can only be hammered out in a fine-tuned way, because there are so many ways in which we reinforce ideas about what we're supposed to be, the way we're supposed to look, the feelings we're supposed to have. What's appropriate?

What can we say? What can't we say to other people? What part of ourselves is a secret and needs to be kept that way, and otherwise?

So in one way, I think what we need to do is the bare minimum of having actual representative media, where we're looking at the population that lives in this country and this world and making sure that there's not a disproportionate amount of one part of that population being represented on TV or anywhere else in media just because it's part of this mainstream. And I think that's obviously where we've been forever.

And the stories of white cisgender straight people have been told throughout this country's history in ways that don't even help them. Sometimes I think about being LGBT or queer, and it's like human identity is really vast. We can be so many things. If you're a kid growing up and you identify with the gender that you were assigned at birth and you're attracted to the sex that people say you should be, then it's pretty easy to just write that off, that there's nothing about you that makes you special or different or stands out, and that LGBT people are different and in this other category. And that's a problem of itself, and probably more important.

But my point is that for this other-- for the majority-- for this other mainstream audience that thinks it's serving itself, it's really just perpetuating the same notion of what it means to be a man or a woman in a way that limits straight cisgender people as well. It's not good for anyone to have to look on TV or wherever else you're looking and see something that's teaching you that this is who you are. What would our country look like if that population came of age in a truly diverse representative media world? Would we have fewer people who identify strongly as straight or cisgender?

I think we'd have more trans people. I think we'd have more people who are identifying outside of the gender binary. I think we'd have less people who are strictly straight, because I think there is so much in this world. I mean, I know so many people.

And you can look at the men who are attracted to trans women as a great example. Raised their whole life to think there's noth-- like they're straight, you know, these guys. And they fit into all these norms.

But many of them suffer extreme anxiety and depression because of a natural attraction to something that just doesn't fit in to this stereotype of what they're supposed to want. I profiled a man who was suicidal because of it, because of an attraction to trans women. And so people who live their lives as straight and cis may come to a point and have-- many do come to a point where those terms no longer even benefit them.

So getting back to the people who really matter-- queer people-- I do like to go on tangents about the straight people for some reason, mostly because I just think they're self-deluded and they're failing themselves. It's tragic. But the real victims, and the people who are truly victimized by it, are those who can't edit their identity or their behavior enough to fit within that very rigid, sharp box.

And referencing my own experience-- like I said, I would have stayed in the closet if I could. I could change the way I dressed, but I couldn't change the way I walked. And I couldn't change the way my voice sounded. And I couldn't change the fact that what puberty was doing to me was destroying my sense of identity and ruining my life.

That places people at risk of dying. And so not having proper representation puts you in a position to disenfranchise your own children. We're talking about kids. There is no more vulnerable population than children.

And we are raising children in a world, in a country that is so deeply embedded in beliefs that have material, violent results in the world. And whether that's through the failure for us to separate church and state-- because please, church and state is not separated in this country-- or whether it's through the things that we teach each other about the way we should behave or the way that we should love and the stories that we're seeing-- and all of that is told in characters and stories and media representations.

So what we need to do is we have to have media that does the bare minimum of representing what we actually look like. And so that includes gender representation. But, of course, it also represents the other things that make us human beings, which is racial diversity, ethnic diversity, the diversity of religious beliefs, diversity of all kinds, from sexuality to anything else. It's not possible in 21st century America to pursue representation for anyone LGBT without including every other aspect of what makes someone a person.

And the neglect to do so is the perpetuation of the white supremacist history of this nation, the founding failures of this nation to serve anyone other than the small-- I don't know if it's small or not, but it's mainstream majority of hegemonic states, cis white gen-- white gender? OK. It's a thing-- men, and the way in which women are contextualized against that.

And so meet that bare minimum. And then let's do a lot fucking better than that, because that's something that should have happened centuries ago. And beyond that, what we can start to do is ask people to tell their own stories, and to stop expecting that-- as a journalist, I'm in an industry that prioritizes this concept of objectivity. If you're a journalist, if journalism is real, then you're objective, objective truth.

Objectivity is a fallacy invented by cisgender white men to believe that somehow their experiences are completely abstract from subjective point of view on the sole basis of the fact that they don't have to confront the fucking problem. Sorry for swearing. They don't have to confront--

COLE DELBYCK: Oh, you can swear all you want.

DIANA TOURJEE: They don't have to confront their problems that people who don't fit into that do every single day. And so my point in that is as a journalist, I strive towards objectivity, because it enables me to look at something in a way that I know is going to be less informed by prejudgment. And this relates to storytelling, because when you're doing work as a trans journalist-- a lot of critics of my work and the kind of work that I do in the media, where I tell stories about transgender people. I cover trans rights, culture, and crime.

And there's ideas about bias, about someone like me telling a story like that. You could only think that someone like me would have bias in telling a story like that if you were a transphobic. I mean, that's pretty much it.

The questions you ask a subject are subjective. The sentences that you write in an article are subjective. The words, the framing, the editing, the whole process, the image you pair with it, the way you socialize it, who you share it with, who you neglected to reach out to as a source if you're talking about journalism are all subjective decisions made by the editorial team behind that piece.

So what you need to do is start telling stories that give voice to the subject. And acknowledge that no one else could tell their story. And the more diverse stories that are being told by those people, the more likely we are to reach something that actually starts to look like the human race.

Because at the moment right now, we're not representing the human race. We're representing one part of it, which has had advantage over other marginalized groups for far too long and to detrimental impact in those communities.

COLE DELBYCK: The answer really makes me think of sort of this platform amp that you're working with, and that's sort of the answer to these issues. You know, harnessing that power of representation and putting it in these people's hands I think is one of the answers, at least. Phil, what does this make you think of and sort of things that are missing, as a sort of content creator, as a person who is writing and creating stories for this generation?

PHIL JIMENEZ: It's, again, perhaps a slightly skewed answer. But one of the things I am fascinated by about fiction storytelling-- so I tell fictional stories about fantastical beings and fantastical worlds. And the reason I do is because those worlds were places where I could escape when I was a child. They were very, very important to me, because they didn't necessarily validate the world I was in. They suggested a sort of world I could live in.

And I think for me, that is also really vital. I am constantly sort of teetering back and forth between the function of storytelling and what it's supposed to do, and particularly when it comes to representation. Because one of the things I often joke about is that-- I've told this story many, many times-- but the reason that the X-Men appealed to me when I was young was because even though it was about a marginalized group, they still lived in New York.

They were fabulous. They lived in a mansion. They were like a family of choice. They went to outer space, and they did so in thigh highs.

It suggested to me that there were other ways to live. There were other ways to form family. And that if, quite frankly, if being marginalized meant that I could live in a mansion in upstate New York and have a big white wig and sort of fight aliens, like maybe being--

DIANA TOURJEE: Let's do it.

COLE DELBYCK: Oh, yeah.

PHIL JIMENEZ: I'm done. I'm in. But more to the-- more to the idea that I vacillate, again, between with representation, and it is how much fiction should reflect our world and how much it should provide possibilities for a new one.

I'm currently obsessed with providing possibilities for a new one, because I think it's the only way that you manifest reality is to start making it, even as fiction. And again, I'm not sure if that's the right path. But it's certainly the one I'm interested in. I'm interested in seeing us in new ways, in new lights.

Which is not that I am interested in stripping away stories or not telling them. As a matter of fact, my goal in life now is almost to get out of the way of young storytellers and let them tell their own stories. But I would also encourage them to think about the world they live in and using their stories to reshape it.

COLE DELBYCK: You speak to sort of the rich queer history that comic books have. But the progress has been more sort of slow going on the big screen. I think it took what, 20 Marvel movies for there even to be an explicit mention of a gay person in this universe, which is just pathetic in my eyes. Why do you think it has been so sort of delayed on this level, as someone sort of with that intimate knowledge of the genre?

PHIL JIMENEZ: My answer is hyper cynical. It's China. These movies are made for multinational audiences. They're not made for us in this room. They're made to play to a global audience.

An enormous market for these films is China. And China has very, very strict rules about LGBTQ representation in film. My sense is also general reticence to offend. We're talking about conglomerates making multi-billion dollar decisions and doing so slowly.

I also think there was some planning, at least with those Marvel movies, the roll-outs of "Black Panther" and "Captain Marvel," which part of their marketing was this is the black character. This is the woman character. They did so on this foundation of a bunch of white characters, right?

And so as cynical as that is, I-- as safe playing as that was, I think they wanted to establish a foundation that the people across the globe could invest in, and then slowly but surely introduce these other sorts of diversity. I'm not saying that's good. I'm not saying it's just. I'm not saying it's wise or fair.

But the answer to your question is clearly money. And they're not going to lose billions of dollars by putting an explicitly gay character in a film until they think it's ready, until they think that international markets can sustain that. Let alone-- I mean, we have a pretty vocal fandom as it is. And yes, my answer is simply money. It always comes down to money.

COLE DELBYCK: It also makes me think of-- there is this tension that I sort of come up against when we see queer representation, but it seems geared for sort of straight viewers or straight eyes for their approval, for their acceptance. And I think of a movie like "Love, Simon," which was the first rom-com with a gay teen lead to be produced by a major studio. And there were a lot of things about that film that I really enjoyed. But there were also sort of these retrograde politics at play, where he was just like every other normal teenage boy except for this one thing, that he's gay.

What do you make of that? Do you still feel like there's power in telling the story regardless? Or as sort of a queer consumer, are you more sort of critical of that type of messaging?

CLARE KENNY: I think "Love, Simon" was historic and revolutionary in many ways. Did I see myself in that movie? Not necessarily. But I think coming from-- coming from a place where, kind of what everyone's saying, there's such a lack of representation everywhere we go.

And at GLAAD, many of my friends and colleagues, we live in this bubble of 24/7 queer media. But we know that that's not true. And that's not even the experience of the students we work, with like our campus ambassadors.

When there was a critique of do teens need "Love, Simon" in 2019 or 2018, one of our students, or a few of our students came to me and they said can we write about this? We do need this movie. And I think that that spoke for itself, that these were queer teens. They're trying to be queer journalists. They have a critical eye of what representation needs to be, the nuances and the lack of diversity in queer media as it is.

And they still were like yeah, but we really like this. And we like the direction that media is going in. And having this film screened in hundreds of screens and thousands of screens across the world was really valuable to them as the young people that the audience-- or that the sort of film is for.

I also last week even met a high schooler on the Upper East Side. I spoke there with my intern. And she came up to us after and told us that her mom saw "Love, Simon," and she was a little nervous about what her reaction was. And she was like, OK, Mom, like what did you think?

And she said I really enjoyed it. It taught me so much about you. And she was like really? But she was like it taught me so much about you. And I feel like I understand a lot more about what you're going through.

And she even said-- and this sounds so corny, like I'm making this up, but this literally happened last week-- she said I want to help you come out to the rest of our family if that's what you want to do. And so this was a mother that previously, as far as I could tell, was not as understanding or accepting of their child. And that movie moved them.

And that's what we want. We want that movement. Even if it's just one peg forward to being an ally, I think it's so powerful in that way.

I want to see us creating more nuanced films and telling deeper, richer stories about queer people. But it is stories like that that I think are real. And they are-- films like this are affecting change.

COLE DELBYCK: That's incredible. That's so heartening to witness that through a tangible sort of interaction, the impact, yeah, that a big film can have. Diana, did this spark anything for you?

DIANA TOURJEE: Yeah, absolutely. I think that white, cis, straight America-- sometimes it feels like as a queer person, you're living in an alternate reality. But here's the thing-- white, straight, cisgender America is living in an alternate reality. And the rest of us are living in reality, and have to deal with the consequences of the failure of the mainstream people who are in power neglecting us every day.

And so you see the abysmal rates of poverty and mental health issues and homelessness and suicide that plague communities of LGBT youth living in the United States. And it's all at the expense of someone else's idea about the world they're living in. And that's what I mean when I say an alternate reality, because we're living in a world that it's almost impossible to break through.

It's like the matrix. It's almost impossible to break through the fact that you're not-- that what you're experiencing is not real, that the idea that this is how men and women behave, this is the way they're supposed to be is a fabrication. It's an invention.

And it's an invention of one sect of the nation. And it may or may not benefit that sect. But it certainly is destroying the lives of everyone else.

And so media that panders to that is natural, because that's the system of power. And any interest in diversification that is happening today-- and it's happening. And it's important. It's necessary and is meaningful.

And I think that you have expressed clearly the ways in which it's meaningful, as it's diversifying, transparent. That's the only one that comes to mind at the time. That content is revolutionary. We must always be able to critique the things that we can also acknowledge to be revolutionary. And otherwise, you're going to settle for the first step towards diversification, then you're done.

But the interest in doing so on the part of the mainstream is-- I've no faith that the mainstream is interested in diversifying for the sake of saving the lives of LGBT children in the United States. I think that what you stated about motivations of wealth is absolutely accurate across industry and politics, sadly enough. But what wealth is-- what is wealth? Why do people care about wealth?

Because it's power. What people want in this world is power. And when they have it, the wrong people have it-- which may be anybody. Do any of us need that kind of power? No.

It destroys. It destroys the pursuit that we should all be having as human beings and American citizens towards creating a collective society that actually sustains us and represents who we are. And so the media that's created today, that is positive in some ways.

But then also sort of telling LGBT stories for cisgender and straight audiences, it's complicated, like everything's complicated. It's good in the ways that it is good because we need that change. And it is the first step. And I would be surprised if we were able to take five steps the first time. I would be surprised if we were able to move beyond that.

But we always have to ask ourselves, too. We always have to try to do that. We have to do-- try and attempt to do more than we know is possible. Because if we try-- if we hold limits on ourself-- much with the Equality Act, which is being voted on tomorrow in Congress, which will seek to enshrine LGBT protections, finally, for all Americans, including transgender people.

That by another name earlier in this millennium was failed to be put forth or ever made into law because-- without excising transgender protections from it, because this movement of largely white, hetero-normative, cisgender gay rights in the early 2000s thought the only success we're going to have with the mainstream who are in power is if we don't freak them out too much by including the trans protections too. And don't worry, we'll come get you later.

Well, we're already dead. So unless you can do necromancy and bring us back, I think that you need to try and fix the problem now. And I think that that was a very hard, violent lesson, lethal lesson that we have learned, and I hope have learned. I think we're starting to learn. The Equality Act now includes transgender people.

None of it will fix any of these problems because they're all so deep. It will address issues and wounds that are the result of these deep issues. And as dark as all this sounds, it's-- we don't have to be negative about it. It's just the world we live in.

And if we refuse to acknowledge that, then we're not going to change it. If we try and just stay on the positive, bright side of what this change might mean, we're not going to be helping the people who are at the end of the day not benefiting from representation, like in "Love, Simon." We have to be considering ourselves at the same time as we're considering how we can help someone else.

And I think the only way you can help yourself the best is by finding a way to help someone who is less advantaged than yourself. It's certainly not something I practice every day or whatever. But I just think it's something that I believe in, and I think that as a country we need to start believing in.

So the stories that I see sometimes with trans people-- you know, to be frank, they're boring. I'm tired of it. You know, I don't care about it. I'm not interested in what a cis family is going to think about a trans person. I'm not interested in a trans person finding out their identity in a mirror and putting on lipstick and all those.

That's so boring. You know, we've all been-- because we're living in reality. And so it's only in this alternate reality that an audience could be encaptured by looking that on screen. Like ooh, wow, breast implants.

It's like, congratulations. We've been here for a long time. And we know what it's like.

So it's like we have two different worlds. And the reality that is being lived on the streets often is so different from the one that you see anywhere else. But we need to start merging them.

And I think by telling stories that-- by acknowledging that this is a step, but then also doing-- the kind of-- back to "Transparent," something that was really profound about that production is the way in which "Transparent" informed-- or included, rather-- transgender people in every department of its production. That was cultural change. It was humongous.

Whatever criticisms you have about "Transparent," whatever you have, that is undeniably revolutionary in ways that we can't even begin to know yet. "Pose," which is a phenomenal success, an excellent testament to the kind of art that we can be creating around transgender people's lives, LGBT people's lives in general, may be in relation to "Transparent" in some way like that. But think about all the ways in which we don't know what that production did to help inform other people in any industry around what it means to be inclusive or what it means to be representing trans people. And that could be taking place in industries completely apart from film.

So yeah, our story as been told for straight and cis audiences I think are typically not good enough. But it's not surprising or anything. I think it's just you find a way to get people to understand that stories are just more interesting when they're about real people.

And I think about the human race a lot as like-- I try and think about it as a single entity. Like, if we were as a collective human race one being, we're in a very young period of our existence. I mean, think about the history of the world and how long this planet's been around.

If you look on a map or whatever, it's like the planet's been around this long. And we've been around-- like I can't even put my fingers close enough together to represent how small human beings have been alive. I think we're having a massive identity crisis as a species that we don't accept who we are yet.

It's not like LGBT people are different from straight people. It's not that people of color are different from white people. It's that human beings are racially diverse and sexually diverse and diverse in gender expression as a collective group.

And so it's this collective group struggling to accept itself-- not all of it, part of it-- at the expense of other people. And we need to get over that in order to acknowledge who we are as a people, not just how to get rights to this other segmented part of the population, which would be LGBT people in this situation. That population has been disenfranchised and does not have access to the resources that go into creating the kinds of productions that we see today that do include better representation. And it ought to, for the benefit of everyone.

COLE DELBYCK: Snaps all around there. You know, Phil, as someone who's sort of working with some of these mainstream characters, superheroes are some of the most obvious examples of that. How do you wrestle with that tension between wanting to communicate a queer sensibility to reach young queer readers, but also realizing that these comic books are largely marketed towards straight people?

PHIL JIMENEZ: I mean, a simple and apparently flippant answer is I'm drawing them, right? So I think they're inherently queer, simply because my sensibilities are absolutely shaped and defined by my experience as a queer person. So everything from narrative storytelling choice to design is decidedly queer. It sounds sort of silly, but I think that's true. And I think it's why it's vital that whoever we are and whatever form we are live sort of as an expression of our true selves, because I think that that can only help change.

I also, as I said earlier, I'm-- at this point, what I'm looking forward to is wrapping up some projects and kind of getting out of the way, and letting young people, particular young queer people, take over and transform these characters so that they can speak to them personally and speak to other people. There's nothing I find more flummoxing in my business than the number of 40 and 50-year-old men who think they know what 15-year-olds want to read about.

And because I'm near that, I've decided that what I would-- I'm on this final project. And my hope is, again, to just get out of the way and let young people tell their own stories. And hopefully, an industry will see in them the value that I see in them.

COLE DELBYCK: Well, I want to sort of give the audience a bit of an opportunity to ask any questions that they have. Thank you all for answering my questions and sharing your own experiences. It was really sort of moving to hear. Any questions that we have from the audience? Hi.

- Is this on? Yeah. So I am a trans male in high school. And I run the GSA at my school. And me and a friend of mine are doing a faculty meeting next September for the teachers at my school. Because while I am Gen Z and I grew up in a time period that had more representation than previous generations, most, if not all, of the teachers at my school have not experienced that.

So what is one crucial piece of advice you would give to a teacher in how to recognize or how to protect a young LGBT person in school?

COLE DELBYCK: Yes, go for it.

DIANA TOURJEE: I do apologize for being a ham.

COLE DELBYCK: Ham it up.

DIANA TOURJEE: I do want to answer this question, because GSA was something that was sort of a home for me when I was a kid in the early 2000s. And I remember once we painted a sort of mural-- or not a mural, but a poster that was sort of advocating ourselves and representation, repetating-- blegh, ourselves. And we hung it up in the halls. And I remember, I was a-- I was, must have been 12 years old. I was 13.

And I drew a woman in a pink suit with blonde hair. And underneath I wrote the name Steve. And I think at that age, I didn't understand exactly what I was doing. But I think I was clearly trying to say I'm transgender. Hello.

And we hung it up on the wall at the school. And the next morning I came in and it was gone. And I asked my GSA leader why. And it's because the school administration saw my illustration on that poster and said it was inappropriate. That was a nasty cultural lesson for me to be learning at a young age. I'm not even appropriate enough to be in school.

I think that we have to force those conversations in the way that you're doing it, and that you have to recognize that what you're doing is so meaningful in ways that are going to be helpful to you immensely. But also to your friends, I'm sure. But also to people that you don't know at your school who may see you every day, may see the GSA every day, but not have the courage to join it, to other people.

So do acknowledge that for yourself. And be quite proud of your ability to know who you are at such a young age, because it's very difficult to do that and to be able to move forward with your life at this uncertain period of your life. You are the first generation to come of age at a time in the United States when there is representation of transgender people in society. In many ways, that makes you the most important generation that's ever existed.

I think that all the trans people that came before you were generation zero, and you're generation one. And I think that the way in which that you shape the future is going to be what we all need to listen to in terms of what it means to be a person, because I don't-- this is a profound experience that you are having, growing up in a world with representation that never existed before in the history of the world. It's a big deal.

And working with people from another generation who are in positions of power over you is very difficult. I advise you to trust yourself to know that your instincts are valid and real, to know that no matter how they respond, it doesn't change that fact. There will always be people in your way who are gatekeepers who are more held back than you are. And you need to be strategic in your life around when to push and when to hold and what's going to reap the maximum benefit for you and the people that you care about the most.

Be nicer to them than you should be, because-- but then be mean. That's what I like to do. I feel like I've gotten-- it took me a long ass time to learn this.

But let people know that you're not there to attack them, that you understand where they're coming from. And all that you want is for them to understand where you're coming from. And show them simply the material ways in which a change in their understanding of you and your experience would materially benefit you and the people that you are in school with.

Maybe that means it'd be easier for you to wake up in the morning and get to school, because you don't have to be worried about X, Y, or Z issue. Do your homework. Make sure you have that stuff done, the stuff that the people in your school are actually going to care about, you know I mean? That kind of stuff, so that they can think OK, maybe I need to care about this issue.

Even if to them, they're like non-binary? Transgender? They, them, what is all this stuff? Every time I hear an old person be like that's confusing, I just want to smack them in the head.

But the sad fact is that they'll die one day, and you will inherit the Earth. Actually, I said that was sad. It's not sad. It's good.

In the meantime, do everything in your power to protect yourself, to protect your mental health, to protect your state of mind, and to stand up for the people that you care about and the people who aren't as advantaged as you, as I'm sure we're all on different tiers of advantage and disadvantage in our lives. So just be honest with yourself. Be honest with them. And know when to push and when to pull and when to sort of stop.

COLE DELBYCK: Thank you. We have one more question, I think. Hello.

- Hi, how's it going? So I have a question for the full panel. And y'all kind of touched on this a bit. But with stories for children and alternate venues like webcomics or children's books or graphic novels coming out, I'm seeing a lot of dynamic stories for children and their support net when they know where to look for it. But still, for massive studios or networks, it seems to be things subjugated to a cameo or a blatant acknowledgment.

I'm curious what at a consumer and viewer level we can do to promote not just queer characters acknowledged, but represented? And queer stories, represented?

PHIL JIMENEZ: I have a thought about that, which may be rejected outright. But one of the things we have discovered in my neck of the woods, which is I would say fairly mainstream corporate superhero comics, is we have an enormous number of LGBTQ fans. We don't have an enormous number of LGBTQ consumers.

This is one of the interesting things about having so much product available on the internet, is we see numerous, almost uncountable fans of queer characters. We see them at conventions. We see them cosplaying. We see them talking about them online.

That doesn't reflect in sales. It is my experience that publishing companies, particularly now, are highly fearful, reactive businesses. They will put out what they think will sell. And they will instantly draw back what they don't think will sell. Bottom line is everything to them.

And I said it earlier, and I know it sounds horrific, but for the most part, even well-intended publishers and editors in my business will be like, well, nobody's buying "Apollo and Midnighter." We're going to cancel it, even though they're the most prominent gay characters in comics.

So the thing that I can say-- and it is very, very difficult, I think, for a lot of young people, particular LGBTQ people or marginalized people who can barely eat. But the way to sustain that presence in at least publishing and in mainstream media is to find a way to purchase it. And that sounds gross, because again, it all comes back down to money.

But that is my experience in these businesses. They're highly reactive. And if there's not sales to support a character or a world for that character, they're not going to publish it, no matter how well-intended.

CLARE KENNY: Yeah, and I think that coming from GLAAD, which has been working with-- first as the outsiders to media, and now kind of shifting that watchdog role into really pushing inside of media for inclusive stories. There's plenty of my colleagues on our entertainment teams who hear from studio heads and show runners when there's a mass voice online about an issue, about a character, about a story line. So these-- the way that these studio heads and everyone who's kind of inside deep in media, they are getting to see online kind of where discourse is going.

And the pushback that they receive from killing off a queer character has changed media. It has changed shows. It's kept queer characters and trans characters alive in some cases. It doesn't always work. But those kind of campaigns from fans can be really effective.

So I think I totally agree with Phil. Spend your money when you can and use that capital. But also use your social capital and social media as your voice and your platform, because they are listening. And they're starting to listen more and more to consumers on platforms where they can really start to galvanize a larger voice and a push for visibility.

PHIL JIMENEZ: Just if I can chime in-- and this is not to end on sort of a, you know, a spiritedly good moment. But I have worked in mainstream superhero comics for almost 30 years. And my experience has been largely positive, at least internally, not necessarily from a corporate level. But the folks that I work with-- editors, publishers, writers, producers, are in many cases-- I'm not going to say hell bent. That's too dramatic.

But are very, very interested in those stories, sometimes for the cynical reason they're just new to them, right? They're like OK. So I have rarely encountered overt homophobia or transphobia, probably more misogyny than anything, in these businesses.

Warner Brothers just purchased a show from me a couple of years ago. It's been in development. And the two leads are LGBTQ. And they love that. Like, they are so into it.

So my experience-- and again, this might be more positive than many people have-- but it is positive. So they are listening. There are people who work in these corporations who do care. The trick, I guess, is to find them and to garner their support in whatever way you can.

DIANA TOURJEE: Will you just say it again?

- I was just saying how there's a growing amount of, I guess, dynamic stories available for queer use in alternate venues, but it's still really not reflected in the larger place. And I'm curious at a consumer or viewer level what we can do to help encourage that, beyond just acknowledging gay people exist?

DIANA TOURJEE: Mm-hmm. I would say you need to become part of the industry and change it from the inside, unless you don't want to be in the industry. But I think we're talking broadly about other people other than just you, even though we care a lot about you.

I think it's very important that we start rejecting the norms that we're not comfortable with anymore. Stop tolerating them. Stop allowing other people to put labels on who we are. If a label suits you, you're entitled to it, right? But we spend so much time trying to find a way in which to fit ourselves into whatever box whether, it's trans, gay, straight, or something else, that we lose sight of how to expand beyond that.

And I think that with the big industries you're talking about, it's necessary to enforce the kind of beliefs that you have as an individual in the spaces that you're in. And so if that's amongst your friends or if it's in an audience or if you're in an industry like that, don't settle for less than your values. If you're in a space that seems like it's not diverse enough in a certain way, I think-- because what I'm getting is pretty granular.

You can't go write an email to Paramount Pictures and ask them to change anything and they'll-- and listen to you. You have to do something in the world that's going to affect change in whatever way it can. And in your life, wherever you do, wherever you live and the communities that you spend in, that's the place and the space that you can affect material change.

Speak up against sexism and misogyny. Speak up against racism. Speak up against transphobia. Educate yourself about the issues you may already know about or may not. And find the ways in which you can lend your voice to support other people.

And if we do that collectively, then it's going to start influencing every institution that we have in the United States. We have to shift what the hands of power are holding. We have to place power into new positions.

So changing the titan today is not going to happen. But working-- working and believing in yourself with a core set of values that you don't let go of or saying no to because of X, Y, or Z reason is going to place you in a position one day in your life where you'll probably have a lot more influence than you do today. I definitely agree with my fellow panelists about all the other things that you can do now as well.

But my suggestion is to live each day in your life in the spaces you go, whether you're going to school, whether you're going to work, whether you're starting an organization or club, having an online conversation, that the world that you want to live in is being actively created, that you hold yourself accountable to that, and that you hold other people accountable to it in a way that's not hostile and not about guilt or blame or any of that. Because that's a waste of time and it's distracting. It's not the point. The point is trying to create the world that you want to live in.

And then you and all of your friends are going to grow up. And you're going to be the people who are running the show. And when that's happening, you're going to have created a culture that is actually hospitable to human life on Earth. And I would appreciate that myself very much.

COLE DELBYCK: Well, that's a wonderful note to end on. Thank you for your question. I want to thank Clare, Diana, and Phil for your remarks and sharing your stories, and also to the Hetrick-Martin Institute and Verizon for partnering for today's event. Let's please give it up for our amazing panelists.

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Thank you so much.

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