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LGBT Representation In Popular Media

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In popular media there is very little representation for people who don’t fit the mold of existence outside of being used as a prop or sexualized. The “mold” for this existence is being a straight, white, cisgender, abled, christian, heterosexual man. Now many people may say that there are plenty of characters outside of this mold, but many of them are objectified. Now when people are underrepresented they are erased from society. This is a sadly common thing when it comes to LGBT people. LGBT representation, especially in genre fiction, is uncommon leading to young people in the community’s marginalization becoming worse or more evident to them.

In popular media there is very little representation for people who don’t fit the mold of existence outside of being used as a prop or sexualized. The “mold” for this existence is being a straight, white, cisgender, abled, christian, heterosexual man. …show more content…
Speculative fiction, better known as fanfiction or fics, is where people who are fans of a work of fiction can gather and write fiction based off their favorite characters. This has allowed for LGBT fans to gather and create more representation for themselves. Real representation is hard to come by for the LGBT community often relying on subtext for representation, this is harmful because it sends the message to LGBT young people that they will never be able to live openly, that they will only ever be subtext.

As representation goes media as a whole is rather lacking in LGBT representation. In 2012 GLAAD studied 76% of major theatrical releases and only 17 of 104 featured an LGBT character. Now these may seem like good statistics, but only 4 of them included an LGBT character in a major roll and a fair amount of them relied on LGBT people for a cheap joke. Most good representation is not in the mainstream, but rather in indie

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