Price Points Be Damned: We Can’t Lose Queer Projects

Creators are constantly hearing that their films and TV shows are too ‘niche,’ while corporations and brands are beginning to assume a neutral stance

Joan Didion wrote in The White Album, “We tell ourselves stories to live.” Part of what she meant, I think, is that we come to rely on our stories as a kind of infrastructure; we build lives, friendships and marriages on top of them. They become foundational, tectonic in ways that are deeper than we understand. And like anything tectonic, it was alarming for me when the stories I’d always told myself about being a gay man started to move.

When I first heard the word “nonbinary,” I didn’t know what it meant aside from the fact that I was no longer in my 20s. At first I watched the beautiful rethinking of gender that Gen Z queer culture hath wrought as if it were happening on the other side of a generational glass wall. And then one time, I was telling my “coming out” stories to a friend’s college-age daughter, and when I said, “I felt like I was undercover as a boy,” I could see on their face a little shift of the eyes — they heard it differently than others had. It made me wonder where my understanding of myself as a gay man had come from. In Another Country, or Angels in America, or everything by Terrence McNally, I had found something that rhymed enough with my own experiences that I could feel I belonged to it. But looking back, I realize I never quite felt completely reflected in those stories; it was as if I’d been given half a mirror.

In the past few years, I’ve been part of retelling a set of stories that were part of my childhood, and finding a better mirror for myself within them. I grew up on Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own and loved it as an unpretentious, funny, outsider-y piece of Americana. But as Abbi Jacobson and I, along with our beautiful team of writers, started to research the stories behind the movie when working on the Prime Video series, it became clear that sitting underneath it was a history that was new to me. It was joyful, emotional, warm and, yes, Americana — and at the same time, it was deeply and authentically queer, and centered on women of color who were left out of the film. For me, feeling the courage behind the stories of gender-nonconforming people in the 1940s, and along with our amazing team reflecting them into the stories of Max ( Chanté Adams), Bertie ( Lea Robinson) and Jess ( Kelly McCormack), also made me understand that I wasn’t seeing myself wholly. It was transformative, and the response we got from the audience was just as transformative — people changing their pronouns, coming out, finding new ways of looking at themselves. That response let all of us know how deeply shows like this are needed.

In a museum recently, I was talking to an art historian, looking at some beautiful old pieces with strong queer undercurrents, when she said: “The truth is, for the last century, when times move forward, the museum has brought these paintings out. And when the country gets bad, we move them into storage in back.” We’re living in one of those times now. The Human Rights Campaign has for the first time declared that LGBTQIA+ people are living in “a state of emergency” in the U.S. Our lives and our identities are being politicized in a way that they haven’t been since the 1980s through the more than 500 LGBTQIA+ hate bills that have been introduced in state legislatures this year, and through the attacks on corporations that support queer rights, as well as prominent queer figures like Dylan Mulvaney.

These efforts are having their intended effects — corporations and brands are beginning to assume a neutral stance on our rights and existence rather than incur the wrath of these customers. GLAAD reports a decline in LGBTQIA+ representation in media this year, and I, along with most other queer writers, can tell you personally that the atmosphere has turned frigid in the past year and a half, and A League of Their Own has been one of the lucky ones. While states are passing “Don’t Say Gay” laws, we’ve seen a corresponding tidal wave of cancellations of shows with strong queer characters — especially female, trans and nonbinary characters. Creators now hear constantly about the need to find shows that are bigger, broader, that aren’t catering to a “niche” audience, without deep recognition of the fact that queer people are being attacked by some portion of that “broad” audience. And when we’re talking about “global TV,” there’s little recognition that LGBTQIA+ rights are still in their infancy in many of the countries that now represent the growth opportunities for platforms.

How does this affect the expectations of queer shows domestically or globally? What I hear now from my executive friends at multiple networks is that the new logic is that predominantly queer shows won’t work in this new age of political attacks on LGBTQIA+ people unless they are extremely cheap. If they have a price-tag equivalent to the average premium drama, they won’t work on the efficiency metrics that are now used by most networks to determine an approximate cost per view. Our stories — in particular stories that touch on gender identity — are increasingly seen as too “controversial” by too much of the audience, which is exactly what the forces mobilizing against us hope to accomplish.

This moment is a tipping point for queer representation. We have finally had the chance to make predominantly queer shows with authentic and diverse representation, and we’ve seen the effects: people finding a more full mirror to see themselves in, feeling more confident and more themselves, and finding a sense of connection to community and to their history. But as times become more conservative, if Joan Didion is right and we “tell ourselves stories in order to live,” then what happens when we lose those stories?

Graham