When Star Wars: The Last Jedi underperformed in China, some fans called this an unexpected boon for LGBTQ representation. If China was less important to the Star Wars universe’s collective gross, the theory went, then Chinese censors wouldn’t hold as much sway over studio decisions. And without China holding Star Wars back, we would finally get the LGBTQ representation we’ve been clamoring for. But there are several problems with this logic, starting with xenophobia and ending with Hollywood’s own history of bigotry and bias.
The idea goes like this: Because Chinese movie-goers are buying more tickets than ever before, they have increasing sway over the global success or failure of American blockbuster films. Being able to screen your film in China requires passing the eyes of Chinese censors, who consider several factors in how they rate domestic and imported cultural products: cultural protection, historical “accuracy,” political appropriateness, and finally, moral grounds.
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Films that portray the Chinese military as either weak or oppressive commonly face censorship, and depictions of the country as poor or unsophisticated likewise don’t pass muster. Some of the top foreign targets for censorship are children’s books, cartoons and games, and the reason for that is obvious: Children’s media is a huge part of how people everywhere shape the views and lives of their children. And in China, the central government doesn’t want that left to foreign media or even “reactionary” domestic creators.
Hollywood blockbusters, including sci-fi-fantasy epics, action spectacles, and superhero films, have also been targets of Chinese censorship. The 2012 remake of Crimson Dawn was going to feature Chinese soldiers invading a US town, until a meeting with Chinese officials made it clear that the film would never make it to the Chinese market unless that was changed. The script was adjusted so that it was instead DPRK soldiers landing on US soil.
The cost of one blockbuster not making it to Chinese theaters wouldn’t be fatal for any Hollywood studio, but the cost of souring their long term relationship with officials and hurting future releases is certainly daunting. That’s why more and more studios are making changes to their films with Chinese censors in mind.
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The movie market and censors are often mentioned in the same breath, but to assume that what Chinese audiences are interested in is always the same as what Chinese censors think they should be interested in would be misguided. Few Hollywood studios understand the Chinese market as just that: A complex network of people of all demographics, with varying interests and buying power.
“Playing to the Chinese market” means embarrassments like Iron Man 3 or Transformers 4, movies that shoehorned in nonsensical scenes with Chinese actors and blatant product placement, neither of which even tested well with Chinese focus groups. In Iron Man 3, filmmakers inserted a scene into the Chinese-only version of the film, where Chinese stars including Wang Xueqi and Fan Bingbing played Tony Stark’s doctors debating treatment options for the removal of the hero’s embedded arc reactor and the repair of his chest.
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In Transformers 4, Chinese consumer goods -- including some that aren’t widely available in Europe or North America -- are prominently featured in scenes all over the world. Spotting these products and laughing about them became a game for Chinese audiences.
In reality, Chinese censors are often less concerned with portrayals of “immorality” in foreign cultures than they are about negative portrayals of China itself. But earlier this year, Mango TV censored a Eurovision performance which included LGBTQ artists and themes. The European Broadcasting Union, who owns and organizes the annual contest, hit back by removing the channel’s rights to broadcast the finale.
Only a month earlier Chinese LGBTQ activists fought social media network Weibo’s ban on queer content. The company announced in April it would be removing all queer content as part of its efforts to “clean up” the site. Activists flooded Weibo with thousands of posts using the thashtags #IamGay, #IamGayNotaPervert, and #Iambreakingthelaw. Thanks to that public outcry - and to the company’s precipitously dropping share price - Weibo reversed the ban.
What’s often left out of US coverage of anti-LGBTQ censorship in China is that amid a rising tide of government censorship of LGBTQ content, Chinese activists are fighting back every step of the way, and sometimes, they’re actually winning. Any argument equating Chinese censors with Chinese culture and people as a whole is an unforgivable flattening of a real and complex place.
It’s also a convenient dodge for American pop culture fans to place the blame for the lack of LGBTQ representation in Hollywood anywhere but where it belongs: Squarely on the shoulders of Hollywood execs. While it’s true that Chinese audiences represent a larger than ever slice of the movie pie, and that Chinese censors are the gatekeepers for that audience, it’s not true that Chinese censors are holding back Hollywood studios from giving Elsa a girlfriend or Cap a boyfriend.
They’re not even keeping Disney or Fox from portraying gay-in-the-comics characters, as gay-on-the-screen; the studios are making, and have always made these decisions all by themselves. If Chinese censors were holding back Hollywood mega studios, we would have noticed a dip in LGBTQ representation, corresponding with the rise in significance of the Chinese market, but there was never much representation to begin with. While we are starting to see more and diverse representations of LGBTQ people on television, decades of straight and cis representation with the odd gay best friend, dead lesbian, or tragic trans character is not exactly a great record.
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This year’s GLAAD survey of diversity in Hollywood “found that of the 109 releases from major studios in 2017, only 14 (12.8%) of them included characters that are LGBTQ. This represents a significant decrease from the previous year’s report (18.4%, 23 out of 125), and the lowest percentage of LGBTQ-inclusive major studio releases since GLAAD began tracking in 2012. Not one of the 109 releases included a transgender character, a drop from the one transgender character portrayed in 2016, who only served as a punchline.
While 18% to 12% is a significant drop, that we have yet to crack even 25% is even more alarming to me. Not even a quarter of Hollywood releases feature even a minor LGBTQ character. Not even a quarter of these releases did the bare minimum of allowing LGBTQ people to exist in their worlds. Hollywood simply isn’t demonstrably committed to portraying diversity on screen, and blockbusters are some of the worst offenders. It's so bad, GLAAD made a special call out to Disney, Fox and Warner Brothers for failing to include LGBTQ characters in superhero films and straight-washing what few queer characters do make it to the screen.
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Both Wonder Woman and Thor: Ragnarok edged away from portraying their bisexual heroines as bi on screen: in Wonder Woman, by putting Diana in a relationship with a man and never raising the possibility of same-sex attraction; and in Ragnarok, by portraying Valkyrie’s significant relationship with a fellow female warrior as ambiguous, maybe a friendship, maybe a romance. Even Deadpool 2, which features Negasonic Teenage Warhead and Yukio as the big screen’s first superhero girlfriends, shied away from confirming Deadpool’s pansexuality on screen.
Consider too, the live action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, which reinterpreted the villainous LeFou as gay, and tragically in love with Gaston. While it’s encouraging that Disney has, for the first time, featured a gay character in one of its films, Lefou is exactly the same kind of male character the company has been coding as effeminate (and therefore deviant and devious) all along. Rather than work against its history of queer-coding villains, this film confirms it. It’s almost like director Bill Condon was able to make Lefou gay only because it didn’t shake up any stereotypes about queer men!
Last year, LGBTQ YouTubers discovered that their videos were being hiddenin Restricted Mode, regardless of their content. The most safe for work, innocuous content was being hidden by the content filter meant to hide “inappropriate content.” YouTube changed its policies after creator and public outcry had “YouTubeIsOverParty trending on Twitter, but weeks later, LGBTQ videos were still being flagged as inappropriate content. YouTube is not engaging in the same kind of censorship as the Chinese government - for one, it’s not a government - but whether by intent or accident, its policies resulted in the silencing of LGBTQ voices on one of the world’s largest forums.
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YouTube isn’t alone in flagging LGBTQ content as NSFW or inappropriate. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr all have a history of hiding, filtering or suppressing LGBTQ content. None of these platforms have squads of moderators rifling through our posts in search of posts to take down, of course. What they have instead are algorithms, designed by real human engineers, that define our very existence as troublesome. In short, simply being an LGBTQ person is a contentious social issue in America. Profit-seeking American corporations don’t need any outside pressure to cut us out - they are reflecting the bigotry that already exists here.
LGBTQ people everywhere are struggling to live and to see themselves in media. Good international allyship means recognizing and not co-opting each others efforts, and not weighing them up for your own personal gain. Blaming homegrown bigotry on convenient outsiders does nothing to help expand LGBTQ representation here in the West, and instead reveals an all too comfortable xenophobia: a sense that we just do things better here. Is China isn’t to blame for American blockbusters not being more gay? No. It’s time to face facts: America is to blame for American movies.