Do the Faces on TV Represent How America Feels About and Treats LGBT People?

An analysis of the changing faces (LGBT media and US leaders) in the context of LGBT-related hate crimes in the United States.

About Me & Why This Topic

I have heard a lot of coming-out stories. I’ve heard them from close friends, new acquaintances at parties, professionals at LGBT-focused business events, one-night stands, significant others, online chats, my own sisters, and even people I have never met. In my experience, these stories have been quick to come up in conversation, partly because it is a large part of who we are and partly because it’s a way to cope with the shame we felt before.

I’m currently a senior at the University of Pennsylvania. When I came out, I was one of the few queer people at my high school, but I was widely accepted. Gay marriage had already been legalized, I lived in a liberal area outside of Philadelphia, and I had parents who vowed to always love me. I assumed it would be even easier to come out now: it’s strangely cool to be gay on social media (i.e. TikTok). I mean, RuPaul is now mainstream. However, every time I hear these coming-out stories, I am reminded that the shame hasn’t gone away.

I remember having a boyfriend when the news broke that LGBT people could marry. I didn’t know it then, but I was a lesbian —my greatest fear at the time. I also think about my friends from the Midwest who tried so hard to play into the stereotypical straight person, whether consciously or not, or the one who was sent to conversion therapy by his religious parents, and the times that one of my male friends had been called slurs on Penn’s campus for walking around short-shorts.

It’s a lot easier to find queer media these days. Watching the far-and-few lesbian options on TV (none of them good) helped me cope when I first realized I was gay. Now, it’s all accessible. Doesn’t that mean that society is more accepting, that it’s not as taboo to be gay? Brooklyn 99, Modern Family, How I Met Your Mother, Always Sunny, even Adventure Time all have main characters who are queer, but do the faces we see on our TV represent how our nation feels?

The Face of Our Nation: Does Presidential Political Party Affect the Number of Hate Crimes Against LGBT People?

In short: the results are unclear. However, I believe that is the most important part of my analysis.

First, the correlation between party and the number of hate crimes in a certain year is not significant — a correlation of 0.008258 with a p-value of 0.1955. Looking at the graph below, it is also hard to pick out a trend. This makes sense. Views around LGBT people have drastically changed in the last two decades, so a democratic presidential candidate likely would not have been an outwardly eager advocate for LGBT rights.

Still, you can see a drop-off in these hate crimes right around when gay marriage was legalized in 2014. Furthermore, as Donald Trump took presidency in 2017, the number of these hate crimes began to rise.

During his time in office, President Trump had enacted a number of anti-LGBT policies, including rolling back non-discrimination protections, especially for trans people. However, this does not mean that there were more hate crimes during President Trump’s administration than during Bill Clinton’s. It is likely that these kinds of crimes were documented less frequently and with as much care as they are today.

For this analysis, I used crime data from the Federal Bureau of Investigations. This data spans from 1991–2019. When I mapped the number of hate crimes by state for each of the presidential administrations during that time period, I noticed that there were a lot of regions that had reported no LGBT-related hate crimes during those earlier presidencies.

The gray states in the above chart represent all the states that had no reported hate crimes against gay, lesbian, or transgendered people. These maps all represent the proportion of LGBT-related hate crimes to the total number of reported hate crimes during that time period to account for potentially better record keeping now. Still, nearly half the states during Bush’s administration reported no hate crimes against queer people, which is highly unlikely.

I should also note that no map shows that safety for LGBT people is noticeably better or worse during any presidency. The more dangerous regions may change, but I was surprised to see that our elected leader has little impact on the overall outlook for the LGBT community. In the context of the most recent presidential election, it makes sense: the United States is a divided country in terms of social and political beliefs.

I also wanted to look at these types of maps just for hate crimes against trans people, since they are typically more at-risk than gays or lesbians.

Even less data was available for hate crimes against trans people, including in the more recent periods. This lack of data may be due to the fact that the trans population is relatively small in the US, but the ever-growing murder rate among trans individuals makes me question how much of this violence is being reported and recorded.

Seeing potential discrepancies in this type of data reminds me of the harmful implications of Trump removing social-issues-related pages from the White House Website, including the one dedicated to LGBT rights. Information and data are necessary in order to understand the underlying problems within our nation.

Does Increased Representation in the Media Mean Progress?

When I embarked on this project, I anticipated that there would be a significant decrease in these hate crimes because of my perception of LGBT acceptance. Part of that perception stems from the increased presence of queer people in movies and T.V. shows. My original idea for this project was to show that the increased media portrayal of LGBT people was related to a decrease hate crimes. This was not the case.

This graph plots the number of movies and TV shows released against the number of LGBT hate crimes from 1991–2019. Strangely, there was a significant positive correlation between media released and LGBT hate crimes — a correlation of 0.7109 with a p-value of 0.03689.

While I don’t think that more gay movies cause more gay hate crimes, it is strange that with increased representation there is increase violence.

I dug more into the data, parsing the movies and the victims by sexuality — gay, lesbian, transgender.

These graphs plot both hate crimes and released media over time for each of the three listed identities. They also have the colors of the two presidential parties as a backdrop for the corresponding years.

The media data for transgendered individuals seems to be the most volatile and reactive to major events. It makes sense there was a large dip in trans movies around 9/11, as producers most likely prioritized those stories over trans people’s. On the flip side, as gay marriage was legalized, there was a major uptick in trans films. Still, the hate crime data does not react in the same way, remaining relatively flat. Similarly, the gay and lesbian graphs do not tell much of a story.

Conclusion

Qualitatively, I know that representation is important. Seeing people like me on television be appreciated, and even revered, has catapulted my self-confidence and helped me start loving who I am.

Quantitatively, I did not get the decisive results that I wanted. Maybe there are other data sets that better capture the relationship between representation and acceptance. However, those data sets are not easy to come by. Organizations like police departments and government agencies must prioritize collecting data on marginalized groups. In my own bubble, I had thought the problem had gone away. We need this kind of data to know where to focus our efforts in order to make our society habitable for everyone.

Sources

Federal Bureau of Investigations: https://heinonline-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/HOL/Index?index=usfed%2Funifor&collection=agopinions

IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/?ref_=nv_home

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States