LGBTQ+ People and Media Industries

The media is a contested field for people of nonnormative gender and sexual identities regarding production, representation, and audience engagement. Awareness of representational politics and academic studies about the representation of LGBTQ+ people in the Global North grew alongside social movements, most notably the Stonewall Riots in New York (1969), the feminist movement, scholarship, and the emergence of gender studies and queer studies. Textual analysis, studies of media representations, and academic research of audiences of media texts fall outside of the scope of this bibliography. Instead, this list of citations focuses on the involvement of LGBTQ+ people in media production, highlighting how they contribute to the greater presence of the community, better articulation of diverse voices from these groups, and the production of media that caters to audiences of nonnormative gender identities and sexual orientations. The majority white, “Western” male, cisgender, and straight media producers may account for the historical lack of acknowledgement of the contributions of LGBTQ+ media producers. Similarly, the relative invisibility of these groups in the media may be based on an assumption of the “needs and gratifications” of most media consumers. LGBTQ+ media producers have been present ever since the advent of popular cinema and later television, even though many might have kept their nonnormative gender identities and sexual orientations secret at the time due to social pressures. This often resulted in the lack of representation or discriminatory and harmful stereotypes and tropes about LGBTQ+ people in the media. This bibliography seeks to foreground emerging research in queer media production studies that acknowledges the roles and contributions of LGBTQ+ people in media production. These people include above-the-line talents (showrunners/producers, directors, writers, and actors) and other media workers. The references also acknowledge queer people who are involved in the production and distribution of media, which can be independent from the mainstream, recognizing that the media is often used by activists and those in resistance to heteronormative and homonormative discourses. It aims to include a range of media, from traditional formats, such as feature films, television, and radio, to aligned fields, including pop music and new media that utilizes mobile and Internet technology (digital platforms and social media). In addition, this article foregrounds the work of LGBTQ+ people in media production outside of the Euro-American centers and references research publications on their contributions, simultaneously noting how the subject area continues to be dominated by literature on media production practices in the Anglophone Global North.