Inclusion Matters: The 15 Most Groundbreaking LGBTQ+ Moments in Kids’ TV and Movies – POPSUGAR
To recall the first gay character in a kids’ movie or the first children’s cartoon to feature a queer wedding doesn’t require looking back very far. Unlike mainstream entertainment, children’s programming has historically been the hardest fought for diversity across all lines, LGBTQ+ representation especially.
This growing list of queer characters now serves as a reminder that inclusion matters — perhaps more for our youngest viewers than any other out there.
For decades, these potentially groundbreaking scenes never aired. They’d be conceptualized and carefully crafted by writers and producers, but then networks would invariably push back. They’d cite age-appropriateness as a reason to scrap whole storylines, character arcs, or even ancillary references to gay culture. Certainly, the TV Parental Guidelines rating system — which has long served as a way for broadcast networks to flag parents about the maturity of a show’s content — muddied progress, as have a few powerful conservative parent “watchdog” groups that would threaten boycotts and peddle petitions at even a hint of what they considered “amoral” subject matter.
So the fact that the last decade — namely, the past five years — has moved the needle on children’s programming with such magnitude is a clear sign of a cultural turning point not necessarily in film studios, but in the homes of families who now demand inclusion. Families come in many forms, and they all want to see themselves represented on screen. They want their children to see gay characters, bisexual characters, trans and nonbinary characters, just as much as they want to see strong female characters and racially diverse ones.
And what’s more, they want these characters to be normalized. One of the clear patterns throughout the milestone LGBTQ+ moments in recent history is that for every multiepisode coming-out story, and for every “very special episode,” there are more and more characters whose queerness doesn’t even need to be the storyline, to be tokenized. And this growing list of queer characters now serves as a subtle yet strong reminder that inclusion matters — perhaps more for our youngest viewers than any other out there.
Read on for 15 of the movie and TV moments that have helped shape LGBTQ+ storytelling for children’s audiences.