J.J. Abrams: "I'd Welcome Gay Characters In STAR WARS"

[Torillian]

Jon-Erich said:

Torillian said:

Movie makers don't have any obligations to represent realistic diversity, but the post I was replying to seemed to state that minorities were being overrepresented in media which I wanted to look at from a math point of view since I was curious.  Any given single movie does not require a gay character but overall the trend seems to be that LGBT community if underrepresented and not overrepresented in movies.  

I understand that they feel underrepresented but that's also a problem. See, when future generations will look at movies that came out around the time the original Star Wars came out, they'll a classic timeless movie that appeals to everybody. When they a movie from 2016, they won't get it. They aren't going to see something timeless. They're going to see something from 2016. They're going to ask themselves why gay people are being thrown onto the screen like that. Because the problem with Hoolywood and writers is that they haven't yet learned to write stories and scripts for gay people yet. I'll use black people as an example. When you see a black person in a tv show or a movie, do you think to yourself "oh, that's a black guy"? No. You just see him the same way you would see any other character. This is because unless the character is supposed to be a stereotype of some kind, the character wasn't written to "represent" anyone. Until they learn to write gays and other minorities into shows and movies in the same way, the gay person in a movie will continue to be nothing more than the token gay person.

That's why I feel that if a writer can't write gays, then they shouldn't and if the LGBT community has a problem, then the writer should just say that.

I am not a cinema historian by any means, but I would assume that when black characters were first being written into shows that they had similar problems of being poorly written in.  It's only with time and many years of black characters becoming more normal that they began to be better written.  The writing community in general needs experience with these things in order to make them work.  If we say "well you shouldn't write in gay characters until you write them well" then I don't know how we will ever get to that point.