New Movie Study Prompts Big Response
GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis framed the findings as part of a broader cultural and political shift. She pointed to what she described as growing censorship efforts, including a recent Federal Communications Commission inquiry into whether television ratings should alert viewers to programming that includes LGBTQ families or transgender and nonbinary characters. “It […]
GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis framed the findings as part of a broader cultural and political shift. She pointed to what she described as growing censorship efforts, including a recent Federal Communications Commission inquiry into whether television ratings should alert viewers to programming that includes LGBTQ families or transgender and nonbinary characters.
“It is clear that our advocacy must evolve to meet the gravity of this moment,” Ellis wrote.
GLAAD expressed the same concern more bluntly in an Instagram post published Sunday: “Our stories are disappearing.”
The organization’s report, titled Where We Are in Film, examines the number, quality, and diversity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer characters appearing in films released by 10 major motion picture studios during the 2025 calendar year.
In total, GLAAD reviewed 225 films. Of those, 46 included LGBTQ characters, representing 20.4% of the films studied. That marked a decline from 2024, when 59 of 250 films, or 23.6%, included such characters.
The total number of LGBTQ characters also fell sharply. GLAAD counted 112 characters across the 46 qualifying films in 2025, down from 181 characters the year before. The share of LGBTQ characters of color also declined by six percentage points.
For Ellis, the most significant issue is that the decrease appears to be part of a longer pattern rather than a one-year fluctuation. The percentage of films featuring LGBTQ characters has fallen from a record 28.5% in GLAAD’s 2023 study to 20.4% in the latest report. That amounts to a 28% decline over three years.
In its observations and recommendations, GLAAD criticized the overall drop in representation, especially the reduced presence of LGBTQ characters of color. The report reserved its strongest criticism, however, for the complete absence of transgender characters.
According to GLAAD, none of the films released by the 10 studios it monitored in 2025 included a transgender character. The group also acknowledged that transgender characters appearing in earlier editions of the study were often portrayed offensively or played by actors who were not transgender.