LGBTQ Breaking News Service

Before the album was released, Brandt mounted a heavy promotional campaign, including full-page advertisements in Rolling Stone and Vogue, posters on the sides of buses and a gigantic billboard in Times Square depicting Jobriath as a nude statue. Coinciding with the album’s release, Jobriath had planned to make his live performance debut with three shows at the Paris Opera House, where he would emerge in a King Kong costume climbing a mini replica of the Empire State Building. The production cost was estimated at an exorbitant $200,000.

The ad campaign is one reason Jobriath is considered to this day to have been among the music industry’s most overhyped acts.

With the gay liberation movement growing in the early 1970s, Brandt assumed that Jobriath would be readily embraced. “The kids will emulate Jobriath,” he told Rolling Stone in 1973, “because he cares about his body, his mind, his responsibility to the public as a leader, as a force, as a manipulator of beauty and art.”

The album earned some positive reviews, including one from Rolling Stone, which said it “exhibits honest, personal magnetism and talent to burn.” Other publications were more mixed. In his review for The New York Times, Henry Edwards made the inevitable comparison to Bowie. “Jobriath, too, writes about ‘space clowns,’ ‘earthlings’ and ‘morning starships,’” he wrote. “The results can only be described as dismal.”

Sales of the album were poor, and the Paris Opera House shows were scrapped.

“When it started out,” said Cross, Jobriath’s guitarist, “it was all about the music. After Jerry Brandt got involved, it was all about the career. Then after that started to take hold, it was all about Jobriath’s sexuality. America was not ready for that.”

Jobriath put out a second album, “Creatures of the Street,” in 1974 and embarked on a national tour, only to encounter homophobic slurs during a performance at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. By the next year, even after his appearance on “The Midnight Special,” Elektra had dropped Jobriath from its roster, and he and Brandt had parted ways.

“He didn’t sell any records,” Brandt said in “Jobriath A.D.,” the documentary film. “What gets a record company going is the smell of money. And there was no money. He didn’t generate 50 cents.”

The WGA West’s LGBTQ+ Writers Committee sent an open letter to Hollywood on Friday urging the film and television industry to employ more LGBTQ+ writers, combat ongoing discrimination, and to more accurately reflect the lives and history of the gay community.

The letter, which was released in advance of L.A.’s Pride Celebration this weekend, says the industry’s history is “steeped in decades of codified bigotry against the LGBTQ+/queer community,” but notes that this discrimination “is not a problem of the past.” Indeed, the letter notes that in the past five years, 22% of the 158-member committee “report having been the target of overt discrimination and/or harassment in an industry setting based on their identity. That number jumps to 57% when looking at micro-aggressions.”

It also notes that 22% of the committee’s members surveyed “report being turned down within the past five years for a staff job, a meeting to get on a show, and/or having a script read for staffing because the writer’s room ‘already has an LGBTQ+ writer,’ ” and that 25% reported that they were they were “always” or “often” the only LGBTQ+ writer in the room. “The continuing, systemic forces of heteronormativity and bigotry are preventing us from rising in the ranks, and from being hired in the first place.”

“Hollywood can do better, and so Hollywood must do better,” the letter states, and provides “some good places to start,” including:

• Read us. Get to know us. Hire us. Hire more than one of us in your TV writer’s room. Buy projects from us. Pay us. Pay us what we are worth. Find us in the WGA Directory by specifying Writer’s Background, or by contacting our committee.

• 30% of our members report being asked to consult on a project because of their LGBTQ+ identity. If you are looking to tell a story about a specific queer POV – rather than hire a cishet (a person who identifies as the sex they were born as) writer, only to later bring us in to achieve a degree of authenticity – hire a queer writer at the outset.

• Listen when we tell you an LGBTQ+ storyline, scene, character, or line of dialogue is problematic or inauthentic. When we speak up, it is not a personal attack. It is an opportunity to dig deeper and do better.

• If your program, fellowship, or competition exists to uplift underrepresented and marginalized voices, LGBTQ+ people must be included.

• Do the work to educate yourself on the identities and terms that comprise our community. Respect our names, pronouns, and boundaries. Do not stop trying when you stumble, or because you are afraid to ‘get it wrong.’

• In 2021 alone, over 100 bills targeting the transgender community have been proposed, and dozens enacted into law. Many of our productions are in these states. Hollywood must stand up and vociferously speak out against the wave of anti-trans legislation, not simply with words, but with actions. The industry has spoken out against anti-abortion and anti-voting laws in the past. We must do the same now.

Here is the full text of the letter:

Dear Hollywood,

We see you. Do you see us?

Our industry is in a period of long overdue reckoning. For decades, gatekeepers have been rewarded for locking the most marginalized voices out of the room – whether that be the boardroom or the writer’s room. The system is broken.
As leadership of the WGAW’s LGBTQ+ Writers Committee, we are here to tell you that the fight for inclusion and visibility has hardly begun.

We are halfway through Pride Month, when LGBTQ+ people and our allies come together to celebrate who we are, individually and collectively. While it is also a time to acknowledge how far we’ve come, it is undeniable that there are – to quote a great writer – “miles to go before we sleep.”

The industry’s storied history is also one steeped in decades of codified bigotry against the LGBTQ+/queer community. Some of America’s most treasured cultural and artistic achievements were released under the “moral guidelines” of the Motion Picture Production Code (aka the Hays Code). These guidelines meant that openly LGBTQ+ characters were entirely absent from major studio projects, except to be ridiculed, pitied, or pilloried. Far more often, they existed solely in subtext, trapped in a celluloid closet.

The portrayals of Hollywood’s past — and present — are responsible for exacerbating harmful stereotypes and stigmas that have persisted through generations. Perception bleeds into and then becomes reality. We have been taught to see ourselves as ‘The Other,’ just as the heteronormative majority has been taught to see us. Even in a post-Hays Code landscape, the prevailing narrative has not allowed LGBTQ+ characters the full scope of our humanity. Too often, we are reduced to our collective traumas – coming out, victimization, the AIDS crisis, being murdered for our identities.

GLAAD’s 2021 “Where We Are in TV” report has shown progress, but in film, LGBTQ+ representation is lagging. Of the 118 films released by the major studios in 2019, a mere 22 – only 18.6% – included a single LGBTQ+ character. Of those, only nine featured an LGBTQ+ character for more than ten minutes of screen time. And, of course, the statistics are far more dire when looking at representation for queer BIPOC and queer disabled characters.

But on-screen visibility – or lack thereof – is not the entire story of how Hollywood continues to fail the LGBTQ+ community, and LGBTQ+ storytellers.

Last month, in a survey of 158 members of the WGAW’s LGBTQ+ Committee, a staggering 46% of writers reported that they have hidden their identity – or felt compelled to do so – in an industry environment. Even when narrowing focus to the past five years, that number remains at 25%. When asked why, the top three most cited reasons were: fear of discrimination; fear of not getting or losing a job; and not wanting to be stereotyped. One committee member explained: “When you grow up not fitting in, feeling endangered, and trying not to draw attention to yourself, it’s hard to let that go. I suppose I didn’t want to be reduced to one facet of my being.”

We must challenge any environment where queer writers feel the need to hide their identity. And we must ask how many artists aren’t out at all, or have quit the industry altogether – especially within the more underrepresented and intersectional parts of our community: transgender, non-binary, intersex, BIPOC, disabled, over 55, etc.

In the past five years, 22% of LGBTQ+ Committee members report having been the target of overt discrimination and/or harassment in an industry setting based on their identity. That number jumps to 57% when looking at micro-aggressions.
LGBTQ+ discrimination is not a problem of the past. Hollywood can no longer hide behind good intentions, progressive values, or marriage equality.

Queer people continue to live in fear of being who we are, in a country that continues to marginalize us, invalidate us, erase us, and deny us our basic access to housing, employment, and healthcare. Our industry’s current health plans provide transgender writers with incredibly limited access to gender-affirming care. By comparison, transgender part-time employees of Starbucks receive the highest standard of care, as recommended by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. But as of the publishing of this letter, we have trans folks at every level who must consider alternative employment in order to have more inclusive coverage. It is time for the industry to do better by our transgender community.

Although LGBTQ+ people share a culture, a psychology, and a history of political and religious oppression – we are, with rare exception, not considered an underrepresented or marginalized group among Hollywood circles. We are left out of diversity reports and fellowship opportunities. Our scripts are often not submitted in response to requests for “diverse voices” because our representatives are told that being LGBTQ+ “does not count.” All the while, there are still shows with queer characters on screen, but no queer writers in the room – let alone a writer who matches and can speak to the specific identity of the character. Frequently, studio executives blame the very laws meant to protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination, claiming they cannot legally inquire about our sexualities or gender identities. The fact is, we are telling you how we self-identify. Now, we demand you value us and include us.

If you believe the industry already does, think again. Twenty-two percent of surveyed LGBTQ+ Committee members report being turned down within the past five years for a staff job, a meeting to get on a show, and/or having a script read for staffing because the writer’s room “already has an LGBTQ+ writer.” The LGBTQ+ community is not a monolith. We are not interchangeable. Yet our identities continue to be tokenized and our voices minimized by this “there can only be one” mentality – 25% reported they were “always” or “often” the only LGBTQ+ writer in the room. This burdens the singular queer writer with the weight of representation for the entire acronym, which is particularly challenging to navigate at the lower levels.

Unfortunately, this is the same type of box-checking other underrepresented groups face, and it must stop across the board. We refuse to feel fortunate to simply be allowed a seat at the table, only for our presence to be used as a “rainbow shield” while our perspectives are ignored.

In the same way the success of Shonda Rhimes does not mean Hollywood has fixed its racist history of suppressing Black voices, the existence of Greg Berlanti or Ryan Murphy does not mean LGBTQ+ writers as a whole have “made it.” In fact, an overwhelming 72% of TV writers on the Rainbow Pages – an independent database of queer WGA members – are low-level, have written freelance episodes, or have not yet staffed at all. The continuing, systemic forces of heteronormativity and bigotry are preventing us from rising in the ranks, and from being hired in the first place.

Writers are not alone in this. We stand in solidarity with our queer siblings in other industry unions who are suffering the same marginalization, and we must also acknowledge the unique challenges they endure as directors, actors, and crew members.
Hollywood can do better, and so Hollywood must do better. Although this list is not exhaustive or all-encompassing, here are some good places to start:

• Read us. Get to know us. Hire us. Hire more than one of us in your TV writer’s room. Buy projects from us. Pay us. Pay us what we are worth. Find us in the WGA Directory by specifying Writer’s Background, or by contacting our committee.
• Thirty percent of our members report being asked to consult on a project because of their LGBTQ+ identity. If you are looking to tell a story about a specific queer POV – rather than hire a cishet writer, only to later bring us in to achieve a degree of authenticity – hire a queer writer at the outset.
• Listen when we tell you an LGBTQ+ storyline, scene, character, or line of dialogue is problematic or inauthentic. When we speak up, it is not a personal attack. It is an opportunity to dig deeper and do better.
• If your program, fellowship, or competition exists to uplift underrepresented and marginalized voices, LGBTQ+ people must be included.
• Do the work to educate yourself on the identities and terms that comprise our community. Respect our names, pronouns, and boundaries. Do not stop trying when you stumble, or because you are afraid to “get it wrong.”
• In 2021 alone, over 100 bills targeting the transgender community have been proposed, and dozens enacted into law. Many of our productions are in these states. Hollywood must stand up and vociferously speak out against the wave of anti-trans legislation, not simply with words, but with actions. The industry has spoken out against anti-abortion and anti-voting laws in the past. We must do the same now.

There is a tremendous cost to Hollywood’s pervasive, systemic bigotry. This cost cannot only be tallied in dollars – though we would note a UCLA study published in October 2020 that estimated studios lose up to $130 million per film due to a lack of authentic diversity. Every June, multinational corporations engage in Rainbow Capitalism, chasing Pink Money. We must ask: just how much revenue does Hollywood lose each year because it rejects LGBTQ+ stories and storytellers?
The stories we tell, the stories you greenlight, determine the future that LGBTQ+ youth envision for themselves. What we see on-screen and how we are represented informs what we believe is possible.

It is present-day Hollywood’s responsibility to make right all the harm caused by Hollywood’s past. The notion that even a single queer character will be deemed too much of a risk in our increasingly global market is unacceptable. Reject this idea, or knowingly choose to reject us. Either way, we see you.

9 hours wey don pass

Wia dis foto come from, Getty Images

Prez Akufo-Addo on LGBTQ

SPOILER WARNING: Do not read if you have not watched Season 2 of “Love, Victor,” streaming now on Hulu.

The second season of “Love, Victor” — the spinoff series of the groundbreaking 2018 coming out feature “Love, Simon” — picks up right where the first left off, with Atlanta teenager Victor Salazar (Michael Cimino) telling his parents that he’s gay. After waiting a year, audiences finally get to see how Armando (James Martinez) and Isabel (Ana Ortiz) react to their son’s announcement.

It’s not terrible — there are no tears or screaming, no condemnations or rejections. But at first, neither parent embraces who Victor is either. Armando at least engages, if awkwardly, asking about his girlfriend (i.e. Victor’s attempt to convince himself he could be with a woman) and wondering aloud when he decided he was gay.

Isabel, however, remains silent. When Victor finally asks her to say something, she blanches.

“I think, um, that we should get some rest,” she says, barely getting the words out. “And we can talk about it tomorrow.”

When the episode cuts to 10 weeks later, Victor and Isabel still haven’t talked about it. As the season unfolds, while Armando does the work to understand his son by attending meetings of the local chapter of an LGBTQIA+ ally support group, led by Simon’s father Jack (Josh Duhamel), Isabel really struggles to accept that Victor is gay.

“It would be dishonest for him to come out and for everything to be just fine in his household,” says co-showrunner Brian Tanen. “In 2021, you really just want to see parents hug their kids and tell them everything’s going to be OK. But part of our job on this show was to tell a different coming out story than, say, Simon had in the film” — in which Simon’s parents pretty much immediately understand and accept him.

“Love, Victor” charts a different, more nuanced course; as Victor charges ahead into his first same-sex relationship with his boyfriend Benji (George Sear), Isabel flounders, avoiding spending time with Benji — let alone acknowledging he’s dating her son.

“This is going to sound slightly odd, but I was actually kind of excited when they told me,” says Ortiz about Isabel’s arc in Season 2. “It was really exciting to play — it was really different.”

Usually in coming out stories, the mother is the one who is understanding and devoted to her LGBTQIA+ child. Ortiz even played that role to perfection on ABC’s beloved telenovela “Ugly Betty” as Hilda Suarez, who fiercely protected her young gay son Justin (Mark Indelicato). So she relished the reversal.

“I thought about it constantly,” says Ortiz of the differences between Hilda and Isabel. “They are two sides of a coin, aren’t they? Hilda really would would fight anyone to the death if they looked at Justin cross-eyed. Whereas, I think Isabel is so hung up on what people think of her and her family and of her as a mother. Like, ‘How could you raise a gay son? If it was me, I wouldn’t let them be gay.’ I’ve heard that quite a bit from people in my community: ‘Well, just, no — tell him he can’t be gay. Tell her she can’t do that.’”

Ortiz saw this dynamic at work from within her own family. She relays how her late cousin Freddy was devoted to her paternal grandmother Ramona, despite the fact that for a long time Ramona could not accept that Freddy was gay. That dynamic helped inform Ortiz’s understanding of why Isabel would take so long to support Victor.

“She’s not a monster,” Ortiz says. “She loves her son, she loves her family. The way in for me really was just thinking about Freddy and Ramona and how much we all loved her, despite those flaws — how human she was. She was still there for Freddy, and yet, there was always that little thing — until there wasn’t. Until that light switched.”

The “Love, Victor” writers also mined their own personal experiences with coming out to their parents when crafting Isabel’s journey this season. Take Isabel’s initial reaction to keep postponing the hard conversation with Victor to another day.

“For those whose parents didn’t immediately embrace the idea of coming out, this idea of a non-answer was something we heard about over and over again,” says Tanen. “This idea of a parent just holding back and not really wanting to say one way or the other because they’re, A, in a little bit of shock, and, B, don’t want to say negative things, but aren’t there on their journey.”

One of the biggest sticking points between Victor and Isabel is her refusal to allow Victor to tell his little brother Adrian (Mateo Fernandez) that he’s gay, a development that grew out of the small controversy when “Love, Victor” moved from its initial home on Disney Plus to Hulu before Season 1.

Tanen says that while the move only ended up benefitting the show — allowing for an uncommonly frank depiction of Victor and Benji’s sex life in Season 2 — the decision that “Love, Victor” couldn’t be on the more “family friendly” Disney Plus “did spur an interesting conversation in our writers’ room about whether LGBT issues are inherently more adult.”

“They are in some ways a discussion of sexuality, and sexuality is a little bit more of an adult topic,” he continues. “We wanted Isabel to grapple with whether it’s OK to have these conversations with kids. Because of course it is. These are just conversations about who people are.”

Once Adrian does learn that Victor is gay, he accepts it without a second thought, which spurs Isabel to confront the biggest impediment between her and Victor: her lifelong devotion to the Catholic Church. Early on in Season 2, Isabel even consults her priest about Victor; he counsels her to try to help her son find his way back to Jesus — in other words, to stop being gay.

“When he’s agreeing with her reluctance about Victor’s coming out, she doesn’t want to hear it,” says Tanen. “You can see on her face she wants the priest to turn her around on this. Her heart and mind are in different places.”

Later, when Adrian tells Isabel that their priest insinuated that Victor’s soul was in danger, she has the same light switch moment that Ortiz’s grandmother had with Ortiz’s cousin Freddy, and she marches into the priest’s chambers to tell him off.

“I have been raised to believe a lot of ugly things, Father,” she says. “Things that it’s probably going to take the rest of my life to unlearn, but I will unlearn them.”

Ortiz loved the scene, but she says the director had to keep reminding her to dial back her reaction. “My instinct is to be like, ‘Let me loose!’” she says with a laugh. “But that’s just not Isabel. She still is so much more subdued about it.” (Still, Tanen remembers that during the table read for the episode, “people clapped for her” after that scene.)

Tanen — who’s been writing scenes for Ortiz since “Ugly Betty” — wrote the penultimate episode of the season, in which Isabel finally tells Victor what he’s been so desperate to hear: “I accept you, Victor. I love every single part of you.”

That kind of happy ending isn’t reflective of every parent’s reaction to their child’s sexuality, but Tanen says it is in keeping with the larger mandate for “Love, Victor” to eschew dwelling on the trauma of coming out.

“We want the show to feel, at its core, inspirational and uplifting,” he says. “It can become emotional in our writers’ room as as people recount the journeys that they’ve been on, but it can also be incredibly cathartic. And an opportunity to have a little bit of wish fulfillment, as well — to rewrite history in a way, even when it isn’t perfect, to show LGBT audiences, ‘This is a way that this can go.’”

Telling queer stories from a place empathy can also lead to some unexpected places.

“It’s a little bit easier for me now to dialogue with someone in my family who has those [homophobic] views,” she says. “Before I would just get into a screaming argument over dinner. Now, maybe I can have a conversation with them and try to look at it a little bit more from their side.”

“I think having those conversations is really important,” she continues. “Right now, everybody’s so pissed, and rightly so. I mean, the world is upside down. But when it’s your family, when it’s people you love… I’m much more able to have these conversations calmly. And maybe even just watch the show with them and be like, ‘Now we can talk about it.’”

It’s customary for the City of Utica to raise the Bosnian, Polish and Irish flags, complete with a ceremony, each year to honor those communities’ pride in their heritage.

On Friday, the city added another flag to its annual rotation: the LGBTQ Pride flag. The flag, flown in recognition of Pride Month, was raised before a collection of community members and local dignitaries including Oneida County Sheriff Robert Maciol, Utica Mayor Robert Palmieri Councilperson Celeste Friend and former Congressman Anthony Brindisi. 

Deputy City Clerk David Butler was the primary speaker at the ceremony, which was held at the Hanna Stage in front of City Hall. The first-time flying of the Pride flag was meaningful to Butler. 

“It makes me, as a queer person and lifelong resident of Utica, feel seen and welcome in my own city,” Butler said. “Something I couldn’t always say when I was growing up here.”

The city plans to work with organizers for a Pride Event in Utica next June, according to a statement from Palmieri. There also will be a team from city hall at next year’s ACR Health AIDS Walk. 

For now, the flag-raising serves as a reminder that symbols matter, Butler said. 

“The raising of this flag here, at our city hall, right beside the red, white and blue, is a powerful and declarative symbol unto itself — one of communal and institutional visibility,” Butler said. “It’s an acknowledgement that you see me as I am, a queer person and a caring neighbor and a fellow patriot.” 

Subscribers exclusive:We need to celebrate LGBTQ joy this Pride Month. Lives depend on it.

Palmieri said the city raises flags for other groups, and it’s important residents take pride in the city, love each other and be who they are. 

“We are all one,” he said. “We are a great community and at the end of the day, all I’m looking for is to make our city better.” 

The event featured free coffee provided by Character Coffee and cupcakes from Wisk Baking Company.

Steve Howe is the city reporter for the Observer-Dispatch. For unlimited access to his stories, please subscribe or activate your digital account today. Email Steve Howe at showe@gannett.com.