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  • Essay / LGBT diversity and the LGBT community - 1549

    The LGBT community actively involved in the media dates back to the 1970s (). At the time, a group of lesbian writers and activists started a gay liberation movement that represented both lesbians and gay men. However, other lesbian activists felt the movement needed to focus more on lesbians, as they felt gay men had their own agenda. The lesbian community therefore decided to create its own identity by imbuing itself with its own culture. This culture included good creative writing, art, and music (). They even created their own news periodical, called Lesbian Connection, which "in the early 1970s in East Lansing, Michigan, this periodical had a circulation of five to ten thousand copies bimonthly, making it the lesbian periodical with perhaps -be the largest number of readers of "it's time" (). Basically, because they were not fairly represented by the media themselves, they decided to create their own media “by lesbians, for lesbians” (). Financing their media projects was difficult, however; whether they ask for small or large sums of money, they always have difficulty raising them. If they asked for or made too much money, then they were seen as exploiters of the cause rather than supporters. Rather, when they asked for small amounts of money to fund their products, they "always saw this as linked to the rejection of a vision of creativity that emphasized skill and technical competence as well as on the mystique and exclusivity of the professional artist.” (). At the same time that lesbian activists were creating their own media movement, films representing them and the rest of the LGBT community were also being created. The first groundbreaking film, The Boys in the Band, middle of paper, however, admits in its article that more research needs to be done. Cartoons tend to misrepresent or underrepresent groups of people. people too. Mainly, the misrepresentation and underrepresentation of the LGBT community. According to research by (), "between 4% and 9% of all adults are gay or lesbian (McWhirter, Sanders, & Reinisch, 1990; Sell, Wells, & Wypij, 1995), and recent evidence suggests that the bisexual population is probably comparable in size to the homosexual population (Mosher, Chandra, & Jones, 2005); but in the cartoon universe, only 0.3% of the characters studied were anything other than heterosexual” (). This represents an extremely low percentage of representation compared to the LGBT population. Not only that, but in searches (), they found no lesbian or bisexual cartoon characters; and it was among more than 4,300 cartoon characters.