Turn on any new show right now and play a little game. Count how many episodes before a character comes out, has a same-sex relationship dropped into the plot, or gets a pride flag in their apartment for no reason the story ever addresses again.
It won’t take long.
Somewhere along the way, Hollywood decided that including a gay character — any gay character, written any kind of way — was the same thing as representation. So now we get the coworker who mentions her girlfriend once and disappears. The best friend who’s gay in his bio but straight in every scene. The side character whose entire personality is that he’s queer, with nothing else underneath.
It’s not representation. It’s a checkbox. And the Black LGBTQ community is catching the worst of it from both sides.
The Token Problem Nobody Wants to Name
Let’s be honest about what’s happening. A lot of these characters aren’t written — they’re placed. There’s a difference.
A written character has a point of view, contradictions, a reason to be in the room beyond their identity. A placed character exists so a writers’ room can say they did something. They show up, they signal, and then the story moves on without them.
This is what people are actually responding to when they complain about an “agenda.” Not gay people existing on TV — gay people have always existed in real life, which means they’ve always had a place in honest storytelling. What feels off is the artificiality of it. The character who’s gay the same way a prop is a lamp. Present. Purposeless. Decorative.
The irony is that this lazy inclusion ends up feeding the exact backlash that makes real representation harder to get greenlit. Networks perform diversity, audiences feel manipulated, and then when a show comes along with a genuinely developed Black queer character at the center, someone in a boardroom gets nervous about “taking a risk.”
But Here’s What Gets Erased in That Conversation
Gay people are real. Black gay people are real. Black lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people are real — and by the numbers, they represent one of the largest LGBTQ demographics in the country. Nearly 1 in 5 Black adults under 35 identifies as LGBTQ.
That’s not a niche. That’s a community. And that community has a culture, a history, a language, a set of experiences that mainstream television has barely touched.
The ballroom scene. The church and the closet. Navigating racism inside LGBTQ spaces and navigating homophobia inside Black spaces at the same time. The particular way Black queer joy looks — unapologetic, layered, rooted. The love stories. The friendships. The families built by choice when biological ones turned away.
None of that requires a token. None of that can be handled by dropping a pride flag in the background and calling it a day.
And yet that’s mostly what we get — when we get anything at all.
The Shows That Got It Right (And How Few There Are)
Pose centered Black and Latino transgender women in the ballroom community and gave them full humanity — love, loss, ambition, joy, conflict. It was one of the most important shows on television. It ran three seasons and ended in 2021.
P-Valley explores Black sexuality with a complexity network television still won’t touch. Insecure included queer Black characters without making their queerness a crisis or a costume. Abbott Elementary lets LGBTQ characters just exist as full people.
These are the exceptions. Not the rule. Not a movement. Exceptions.
Meanwhile, how many shows this year added a gay character who felt like they were written by someone Googling “how do gay people act”? How many Black gay men got a real romantic storyline that didn’t end in tragedy, disappearance, or being outshined by a white counterpart’s love story? How many Black lesbian couples got the same screen time and tenderness that gets handed to their white counterparts without a second thought?
Two Problems, One Community Left Out
The conversation about LGBTQ representation on TV usually splits into two camps fighting each other:
One side says there’s too much — it feels forced, performative, agenda-driven.
The other side says there’s still not enough — the numbers don’t reflect reality, the stories aren’t deep enough, the visibility isn’t real.
Both of them are right. And neither of them is usually talking about Black queer people when they make their argument.
The token gay character problem is real. Hollow inclusion designed to check a box does nobody any favors — not the audience, not the community being “represented,” and not the art.
But the solution to bad representation isn’t no representation. It’s better representation. Stories written from the inside out, by people who actually live these lives, with Black queer characters who get to be the full, complicated, contradictory, loving, ambitious, funny, flawed human beings they are in real life.
What We’re Actually Asking For
Not a gay character in every show. A real one when you put one in.
Not a tragic coming-out arc as the price of admission. A story that starts somewhere beyond survival.
Not a best friend whose entire role is to support the straight protagonist’s journey. A lead. A center. A person the camera follows home.
Black queer people have been in every room, every era, every movement that shaped this culture. They were in Harlem during the Renaissance. They were on the front lines of civil rights. They built the language and the sound and the style that the whole world borrows from without credit.
They deserve more than a checkbox.
They deserve a story.
Drop a comment — what show do you think actually got Black LGBTQ representation right? And what show do you think was just checking
