Has ANY high-profile movie had a gay protagonist?

[Hiro Protagonest]

In a game made by Asian people for Asian people? Huh.

Well, these were the previous "final trainers" in the games I'd played.






I never actually fought Steven though, I got stuck with this fruit (never found him in Meteor Falls either)

[SaintRidley]

You know, referring to Wallace as 'this fruit' in a thread about lgbt protagonists could be very easily read as homophobic. Might want to read the room a bit.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Wait, what? You're claiming that Star Trek is "one of the worst" for diversity???

This is the show that cast a black actress in a starring role in the 1960s, and a Russian actor during the Cold War, and is credited with portraying the first ever interracial kiss on television. This is a show that, throughout every incarnation of its existence, dedicated more than a few episodes to relevant social commentary.

Even if all you want to do is look at the Captains, their record is pretty good. Picard, while still being a white male, diverged from the macho manliness of his predecessor by being a history and literature nerd and getting into very few fist fights in his onscreen career. The next Captain was a black man, and the one after that was a woman.

Yeah, you can pan Enterprise for going back to the white male Captain, but that show was denigrated for so many other reasons and I think most people don't even remember it exists.

Darth Ultron and I had this same conversation in another thread. Or rather, he made the same assertion and I made the same counter-argument, although I restricted mine to TOS (and don't forget the Japanese actor playing a Japanese character twenty years after spending his childhood in an internment camp because of his ethnicity). I would be very interested in seeing his response .

Oh, back on topic, Zorro the Gay Blade is a parody that plays to camp stereotypes, but it was pretty daring for its time.

[Hiro Protagonest]

You know, referring to Wallace as 'this fruit' in a thread about lgbt protagonists could be very easily read as homophobic. Might want to read the room a bit.

Wallace might've been in a relationship with Steven... maybe.

Okay, you're right and I apologize. He just goes kind of overboard on the fashion side.

[LaZodiac]

Darth Ultron and I had this same conversation in another thread. Or rather, he made the same assertion and I made the same counter-argument, although I restricted mine to TOS (and don't forget the Japanese actor playing a Japanese character twenty years after spending his childhood in an internment camp because of his ethnicity). I would be very interested in seeing his response .

Oh, back on topic, Zorro the Gay Blade is a parody that plays to camp stereotypes, but it was pretty daring for its time.

Don't forget that it's okay to be Takei. Star Trek's really inclusive it's just sometimes has bad episodes, as you'd expect from a long running show.

[russdm]

Yeah, that definitely doesn't happen now. And there definitely isn't any bias in how screenwriters and directors are chosen/supported/promoted, it's only actors that have this problem. Definitely.

This is way you need to create studios or start crowd-funded projects. To screw Hollywood over with the profits that they would lose until they start doing things better. Hollywood cares more about what sells and if it discovered/determined by Hollywood that there is a large profitable area to fill that is being filled by Independent filmmakers, then Hollywood may start trying to get involved.

Really on Hollywood to just get with the program at some point in some fashion is going to involve waiting for a while, and still receiving movies that are objective to you. Hollywood is driven by money, and the people inside Hollywood. Remember, that Mad Max Fury Road caused an uproar, which I personally didn't get. Why is Fury Road being Feminist or having Feminist ideas that terrible? (Don't need answers to that question, because I have read the stuff about it and still don't get the complaining)

I am solely saying that other sources than Hollywood should be used. Because Hollywood is terrible.

As for the gays in star wars comments, there was a gay couple in of Travis's books, then another (lesbian Moff) in Lords of the Sith, with another gay guy in Aftermath (Where the author reacted badly to fans responses; I also didn't know anything about Scalzi and none of the reviews on amazon that I have seen mention anything about him)

So I don't understand the outrage about this. Wasn't C3P0 a gay robot, as suggested by Simon Pegg once on Top Gear, and in a relationship with R2? I mean, it can be read that way easily enough, and it takes nothing away from the story to do so.

I loved Lando, and like Finn just as much. I also loved Sisko. Han shut the shield down, but it was Lando, a black guy not a white guy, who blew up the second death star. And it was admiral ackbar, a fish guy that lead the rebellion attack. There were even a black rebel pilot fighting at endor, including an Asian pilot. Plus you have Samuel L Jackson in Clone wars show (well the character)!

I have to admit that I preferred Jake Sisko to Wesley Crusher. Seemed more of a real character, and without the mary sue-ness of Wesley. Plus Jake has such a better relationship with Sisko depicted compared to Doctor crusher and Wesley. (I blame Roddenberry or the other writers for not developing the Doc and Wesley, As Jake and Ben and Ben's dad had a real strong family relationship that felt real and tear jerking at times)

[jere7my]

Does it have to be a movie because Star Wars The Clone Wars tv show had a good amount of female Jedi. So Rey in the newest Star Wars shouldn't be a surprise except for people who weren't follow Star Wars too closely (casual fans).

A lot of people were excited about Ahsoka, but Clone Wars had a fraction of the audience of the movies, and Ahsoka (like the other female Jedi) was never the main protagonist. Most of the female Jedi in the prequels didn't even get lines.

This runs into a Chekov's gun problem. A film either has a love interest or it does not, and mainstream films want to appeal to as large a demographic as possible. 90% of the audience will relate more easily to a heterosexual love interest (because about 90% of people are heterosexual), so that is what we get. If there is no love interest, the sexuality of the protagonist is irrelevant, and Chekov's gun implies it should not be mentioned. It would be like Morgan Freeman mentioning that he was black in March of the Penguins.

Even if we assume a best case scenario, and gay erotic scenes could be shown with nobody raising an eyebrow (I would love to say we lived in this world, but realistically I don't think we do), heterosexuals (not bisexuals) would still lose interest. This is an unavoidable problem if you are trying to keep a mainstream audience interested, and is not a question of tolerance.

We just had someone saying that gay viewers should be able to relate just as well to straight protagonists; now you're saying that straight viewers shouldn't be asked to relate to gay protagonists? And you're claiming it has nothing to do with tolerance, despite the thousands of outraged internet posts that followed Abrams' announcement that Star Wars might have a gay character?

Regardless, I think you're wrong. 52% of the American viewing audience is female, but 52% of the protagonists are not. They're not just playing the numbers; there are entrenched structures working against non-SWM protagonists.

And "irrelevant" sexuality gets mentioned all the time, Chekhov or no Chekhov; see below.

More seriously, though, there are also plenty of "hollywood movies" in which the protagonist isn't specifically heterosexual. Now, I understand that is not what the OP is looking for, but honestly, in a lot of these typical movies, the only reason for a protagonist to be heterosexual is so there can be a hot woman or hot man on-screen. Most of these protagonist do not actually have a personality - the hot romance really is only view bait.

Then, there is the huge amount of movies in which there is no romance whatsoever. Just like in real life: I have no idea how many people I know that are gay, simply because for the majority of people I know, I have no knowledge or interest in their love lifes at all.

This means that there's three types of movies:
- The ones without any romance plot. We won't ever know if the protagonist is gay.
- The ones were the romance is only there to show off whatever hunk or chick is featured this time. These probably won't have many (male) gay characters, because showing two men snogging probably is the opposite of viewbait (female gay characters are different, I think, which is why those seem to be featured more often).
- The ones were the romance is the actual plot. This means, however, that if the protagonist is gay, the gayness will be an important part of the plot - which by consensus in this thread doesn't actually count.

So that leaves us to either
- Guess if a character that has no romance might be gay. Which is cool, but won't help the "representation" problem.
- Find those few characters that feature in a view bait movie but somehow aren't view bait, which, understandably, aren't that many.

You're ignoring the large category of films in which a protagonist's sexuality is incidental but still established. I just watched Unforgiven last night; Clint Eastwood's wife died off-screen before the movie began, so there is no romance plot, the wife is not there for eye candy, yet we still know Munny's sexuality. We only know Ray from Ghostbusters is straight because of his sexy-ghost dream. Alien's Ripley has a husband back home we never see. Even Mark Watney from The Martian takes the time to draw ASCII boobs. I could go on. The theaters are full of movies without romantic subplots that nevertheless mark the protagonists' sexuality, and in most cases it would be just as easy to mark them as gay. (The existence of children might complicate this, but not insurmountably.)

[Aedilred]

Actually, I think that we need more movies where there isn't a love interest. There's nothing wrong with a romantic angle or subplot (or even romance being the main plot of the story) but there are way too many movies with a irrelevant romantic subplot just tacked on for the sake of having it. That's one of the things I liked about the movie The Cell with Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn--their characters don't get romantically involved, because there's no reason within the film that they should be involved. But in probably 90% of movies with that basic set-up (law enforcement officer works with someone outside of law enforcement) they do get involved, for no reason other than that people expect it (and maybe to pad the running time a bit). Indeed, I was actually expecting the two of them to hook up at some point, and I was happy that the movie subverted my expectations in that way (I'm not endorsing the movie overall; though I do think it's better than its reputation, it's not exactly good).

I was going to give Kingsman some credit for not doing the obvious and pairing up its male and female protagonists but instead establishing a strong non-romantic bond between them. Then it lost all that credit at the end, for different reasons. I gather the DVD and some international releases cut the most offensive elements of that ending, which is good, because it was just the worst.

TV, not film, but I think Brooklyn Nine-Nine deserves some mention. Holt is openly gay but while his sexuality forms a part of his character, it is by no means his defining feature. While his sexuality occasionally comes up as a plot point or is played for laughs it's never the butt of the joke. When it's first mentioned (in the pilot) it's to demonstrate the collective failure on the part of the 9-9 to notice that a man who has the rainbow flag on his desk and a framed newspaper cover describing him as the first openly gay police captain in the NYPD is actually gay: the joke's on them. Whenever it's come up subsequently it's generally been Holt indicating the struggles he used to undergo being both black and gay as a setup for the rest of an episode otherwise unrelated to it (as with the weekend away, or the organisation he founded that he's being challenged for leadership of).

And this is a minority of episodes where it comes up in the foreground at all. His sexuality is never hidden but nor is it frequently emphasised. Gay stereotypes are nowhere to be seen. His marriage is treated like any other relationship on the show and other characters are accepting and supportive of it. I've certainly seen things handled a lot worse.

(Indeed - and while I'm looking at this through the lens of a white male so might be misjudging things terribly, I think it scores well on most points of diversity. Both the main authority figures are black, and one is gay. The principal protagonist is Jewish, and the two leading female characters are Latina. The only (non-Jewish) straight white males in the main cast are also the most pitiful characters on the show, and collectively the butt of more jokes than anyone else. And all of this is relatively understated and the show (almost?) never actually makes a big deal out of this, or even draws attention to it.)

[DavidSh]

On a tangent that has appeared in this thread:
Final Fantasy characters are quite possibly meant to be pseudo-European, because the traditional JRPG is set in a fairy tale pseudo-Europe, with kings, queens, princesses, knights, and European-style castles.
Shoguns, daimyo, samurai, and ninjas are the exception.

[LokeyITP]

This is way you need to create studios or start crowd-funded projects. To screw Hollywood over with the profits that they would lose until they start doing things better. Hollywood cares more about what sells and if it discovered/determined by Hollywood that there is a large profitable area to fill that is being filled by Independent filmmakers, then Hollywood may start trying to get involved.

Sure, do a thing that Spike Lee couldn't make work, sounds so easy (granted I don't think even someone as good as Spike Lee could make that premise watchable). Also Kickstarter and similar get a big cut and it's not strictly investment so you lose another big cut to taxes.

Independent films already have diversity or at least don't have to have a meaningless bit of dialog to establish the lead isn't gay (besides being better than studio films in many other ways). They don't have big budgets but often get name stars at scale (the ones that actually try to act, not talking about the current crop of film leads for the most part). The reason they can't be high profile is they don't get wide release or advertising, only occasionally does something break out, or get an angel like Tarantino to get the film into wider release.

It'd probably be easier to go up against Microsoft, Apple and Google, at least they'll fight kinda fair.

[Serpentine]

As alluded to, TV is doing relatively well. There's Sense8, obviously. Josh Thomas' Please Like Me has gay characters front and centre. There's a show with a mostly Aboriginal cast called Black Comedy that has a couple of recurring gay characters. Modern Family, Brooklyn 99... I'd be really surprised (and very disappointed) if shows like Neighbours and Home and Away didn't have any, but I haven't watched either in years to find out. Supernatural has a bunch of queerbaiting, but aside from a few specific episode side characters nothing is confirmed...

[Ashen Lilies]

TV is doing much better, yes, in part because of platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime being more willing to experiment and release **** we haven't seen a billion times already.

Orphan Black has a few gay/bi clones as well as one Trans clone

The 100 was doing pretty well until ClexaGate happened.

From what I've heard of the upcoming Xena reboot, we can expect an openly bisexual Xena as well.

Frank Underwood in House of Cards is bisexual.

Transparent and Orange is the New Black are both shows that exist and I'm not hallucinating them.

Bearing in mind that giant franchises such as Law and Order tend to still be pretty terrible at this.

[Misery Esquire]

The 100 was doing pretty well until ClexaGate happened.

Please stop suffixing -gate onto things.

[ThinkMinty]

Mitch Downe from ParaNorman, off the top of my head.

[LaZodiac]

Rewatching it and, the protagonist from the movie Snowpiercer is at least bi. It's only sort of hinted at in the movie I think, but in the graphic novel it's based on he explicitly is. And it's Chris Evans so that's a big damn name.

[Ravian]

It's worth noting that a lot of different cultures where the majority population has less than a certain level of melanin tend to use the same range of light colours to depict the skin tones of that population - as that is what the population will parse those as representing. For example, I'd imagine most white people probably don't think of most Iranians as being caucasian, and yet if you look at historical Persian art the skin colours you see aren't going to look terribly different to the ones you see in European art. This is not much different in historical Japanese art either, where the skin colour in depictions of Japanese people is frequently left white, including in art which is in colour.



So yeah, the fact that a fair amount of modern Japanese art styles result in characters that western audiences parse as white, while being typically parsed as Japanese to Japanese audiences is incidental, rather than deliberate.

It should also be noted that the majority of reason that a lot of people see anime characters as white is because they have large eyes and a wide variety of hair colors aside from just black.

The reason for this is because of both an artistic focus on expressive eyes that's common in Japan, as well as the use of color in hair for symbolism.

Thus a red haired character is most likely red haired not because they're meant to be naturally ginger, but because it's supposed to tell you that the character is hot-headed. (this also tells you why so many characters have clearly unnatural hair colors. Blue, for example, is supposed to look intellectual and introverted.)

Granted, plenty of anime just uses the excuse that their characters aren't japanese, so they can go a little further to justify their color symbolism. (No one questions why Edward Elric is Blonde because Amestris is clearly supposed to be a Germany analogue. But it also helps show that he's young, stubborn and a little naive, traits that are also common with other anime blondes like Naruto and Vash the Stampede.

Of course, that sort of symbolism tends to fade the more serious the show goes. So where everyone might broadcast their personality via hair color in your shonens and shojos, things will start to look more uniformly black and brown. (brown hair's actually fairly common in Japan, though it tends to still be fairly dark.) in shows like Paranoia Agent that strive for a more grotesquely realistic style.

[Prime32]

Thus a red haired character is most likely red haired not because they're meant to be naturally ginger, but because it's supposed to tell you that the character is hot-headed. (this also tells you why so many characters have clearly unnatural hair colors. Blue, for example, is supposed to look intellectual and introverted.)

On this topic: When these characters are actually described by others (or by the narration, in the case of novels with illustrations), they'll still generally be referred to as having natural hair colors. There are anime out there where a blonde foreign exchange student will show up and everyone will comment on how unusual and pretty their hair is, even if half the class's hair seems to be green or purple.

There are ways in which a character can be drawn to look more "Western" (the stereotypical American man has a blocky face with a big nose, small blue eyes and blonde hair), but they're only used to distinguish a character from the norm - if a story is in a setting where most characters are Caucasian, then they won't be used as often (and never for protagonists).

[Ashen Lilies]

Rewatching it and, the protagonist from the movie Snowpiercer is at least bi. It's only sort of hinted at in the movie I think, but in the graphic novel it's based on he explicitly is. And it's Chris Evans so that's a big damn name.

Given the way Chris Evans plays Steve Rogers in the Captain America movies, I'm 99% sure that Chris just plays all of his characters as bisexual and takes it from there.

[ThinkMinty]

Like... so I'm Asian right? So why every Asian action hero gotta be about that kung-fu bull****? Why the villains always gotta be either ninjas, Yakuza, or Yakuza-ninjas? Why can't I just get some lawyer with a Korean name from New York, who likes bubble tea, doesn't know jack about any mystical dragon techniques, and then puts on a mask and beats up criminals with boxing skills she learned from her dad (a born-again Christian)? And then she takes on this corrupt American oil company with the help of her 'exotic' Texan boyfriend, only to find out it's a secret front for an ancient clan of cowboys, who then come after her with their mystical ancient cowboy lasso techniques.

One, I want to see that movie.

Two, what kind of Texan? There's a lot of people there, I dunno what Texan by itself is a shorthand for.

Top Gun.

Oh yeah, Top Gun, and it's unofficial sequel, 300.

One of the more persistent quirks of the anime aesthetic is that (white) people from majority white cultures tend to instinctively read characters in drawn the style as being white. Many will also go on to comment how weird it is that the Japanese "draw themselves as white", while never finding it at all odd that they personally read the yellow-skinned characters from The Simpsons and the similarly yellow lego mini-figures as representing white people

Mukokuseki is a thing. If you don't want to read the TVTropes thing, basically sometimes in Japanese animation and sequential art they draw people without race being that specific, and then the audience projects whatever onto them. .

Or in a more esoteric/very specific reference kinda way, the show Moonbeam City made everyone literally porcelain-white regardless of race because they were aping the aesthetic of Patrick Nagel.

[Nerd-o-rama]

One, I want to see that movie.

Two, what kind of Texan? There's a lot of people there, I dunno what Texan by itself is a shorthand for.

Cowboys with ten gallon hats, paired six-shooters, and jingling silver spurs*, the same way everyone of Japanese ancestry in Daredevil is a ninja who dresses in black pajamas and fights with swords and shuriken.

*Also, huge belt buckles, but that's actually completely accurate.

[Starwulf]

From what I've heard of the upcoming Xena reboot, we can expect an openly bisexual Xena as well.

While it's great they are doing so, I'm not really sure where people get the idea that Xena wasn't clearly at LEAST bisexual in the original run of the show. Honestly I figured out she was at least interested in Gabriel(that was the name of her sidekick, right? been a while) sexually by about halfway through the first season, and I'm pretty certain they shared a kiss at least once or twice throughout the seasons, and lots of other occasions where it was heavily implied something naughty was going to happen before the screen went to black and then commercial. And I'm an idiot, lol, so if I could see it, I don't see how others couldn't. It was(to me at least) about as open as a character could be without actually saying the words "I like other women".

Like, I have always believed that her being at the very least bisexual was entirely canon for the show, so when I first heard about the reboot and how they are stressing "she's bisexual" I didn't understand why they were making such a big deal about it because I thought it was incredibly obvious and actual canon.

[BlueHerring]

Cowboys with ten gallon hats, paired six-shooters, and jingling silver spurs*, the same way everyone of Japanese ancestry in Daredevil is a ninja who dresses in black pajamas and fights with swords and shuriken.

*Also, huge belt buckles, but that's actually completely accurate.

Interestingly, that only applied to the Hand and its affiliates. When you get talking about the Chinese in Daredevil, only one used martial arts. The rest were all generic bodyguards with guns.

[Ashen Lilies]

It was(to me at least) about as open as a character could be without actually saying the words "I like other women".

Like, I have always believed that her being at the very least bisexual was entirely canon for the show, so when I first heard about the reboot and how they are stressing "she's bisexual" I didn't understand why they were making such a big deal about it because I thought it was incredibly obvious and actual canon.

As valuable as subtext is (especially when dodging censors), there comes a time when we get bored of it and appreciate when a show actually says what it means. Especially since that can then lead to a deeper exploration of various themes that can't be done if the show has to hide behind a veil of plausible deniability.

This is also in response to numerous commentators upthread who have made various comments about the possibility of reading certain characters as LGB - again, true, but we're bored of subtext. We've had years of sly winks and nudges. Frank and open representation is better.

Cowboys with ten gallon hats, paired six-shooters, and jingling silver spurs*, the same way everyone of Japanese ancestry in Daredevil is a ninja who dresses in black pajamas and fights with swords and shuriken.

*Also, huge belt buckles, but that's actually completely accurate.

This one knows me.

[Ruslan]

I can recall offhand quite a lot of movies with gay protagonists, but you know what? In each and every one of these cases, the movie is actively about the protagonist(s) being gay. Philadelphia, In & Out, Brokeback Mountain, The Imitation Game, the plot simply doesn't work without the character(s) being gay.

This is not necessarily true for films with heterosexual protagonists. Often, heterosexuality will be mentioned in passing only, but will not have any effect on the film (eg. "he has a girlfriend back home", when it has no real effect on the plot, and could have been replaced with "he has a boyfriend back home" with same effect).

In summary, protagonists are always heterosexual, unless the story specifically requires them to be otherwise. That's where Hollywood is at right now.

[Thanqol]

Please stop suffixing -gate onto things.

I dunno, in the case of the 100 there was literally a gate involved at the centre of the betrayal.

[ThinkMinty]

This is also in response to numerous commentators upthread who have made various comments about the possibility of reading certain characters as LGB - again, true, but we're bored of subtext. We've had years of sly winks and nudges. Frank and open representation is better.

Wouldn't it be super weird, say, if all the Mexican characters could only be Mexican in subtext, and if they were overtly Mexican, everyone complained that the show was making things too political by having Mexicans, who actually exist, openly being Mexican in that show's reality?

That's what the argument against inclusion sounds like.

[Ninja_Prawn]

From what I've heard of the upcoming Xena reboot, we can expect an openly bisexual Xena as well.

I'm looking forward to this one! The original Xena passed me by (I guess I was too young) but I just started watching it a few weeks ago and wow, do the choreography and effects look dated. The romantic subplot is just about the only thing that still works, to modern eyes.

It's kind of sad that bringing their relationship into the open is going to be such a big deal, though. It makes you wonder where we'll be twenty years from now...

[Bohandas]

Any movie with an android character that clearly identifies as male or female is sort of LGBT. Lacking a biological sex it is impossible for a robot's gender identification to match it's sex

[Bohandas]

Wouldn't it be super weird, say, if all the Mexican characters could only be Mexican in subtext, and if they were overtly Mexican, everyone complained that the show was making things too political by having Mexicans, who actually exist, openly being Mexican in that show's reality?

That's what the argument against inclusion sounds like.

IIRC that's totally a thing (that's what I've heard at any rate; although I can no longer remember my source for this so I don't know for sure how accurate it is). IIRC a lot of folks who produce tv shows, unless they're specifically looking to be edgy, are afraid make a minority character who isn't otherwise super generic for fear of being accused of stereotyping. The one exception to the genericness is that they're afraid to give minority characters any notable vices, even if the other characters are super flawed, for fear of being labeled racist. Obviously there are lots of exceptions to this, but It's my understanding that this is part of the reason for the lack of diversity in a lot of tv and movies.

On this topic: When these characters are actually described by others (or by the narration, in the case of novels with illustrations), they'll still generally be referred to as having natural hair colors. There are anime out there where a blonde foreign exchange student will show up and everyone will comment on how unusual and pretty their hair is, even if half the class's hair seems to be green or purple.

If everyone else's hair is green or purple then blonde hair is unusual.

[ThinkMinty]

IIRC that's totally a thing (that's what I've heard at any rate; although I can no longer remember my source for this so I don't know for sure how accurate it is). IIRC a lot of folks who produce tv shows, unless they're specifically looking to be edgy, are afraid make a minority character who isn't otherwise super generic for fear of being accused of stereotyping. The one exception to the genericness is that they're afraid to give minority characters any notable vices, even if the other characters are super flawed, for fear of being labeled racist. Obviously there are lots of exceptions to this, but It's my understanding that this is part of the reason for the lack of diversity in a lot of tv and movies.

That's also a problem, and it's some form of positive discrimination. They don't want to look racist, so they swing "too far" the other way and try to avoid the character getting any possible criticism. The easiest way to handle that is to provide enough representation so that "the girl" or "the black guy" doesn't have to stand in, alone, for an entire group of people. Then you can get organic representation.

Pretty much the answer is write the characters like they're characters first, and let the chips fall where they may.