For LGBTQ+ folks, representation in TV & films had been steadily growing over the past decades, but the numbers are still not comparable to stories with straight characters. GLAAD's 2023 Studio Responsibility Index reported that of the 350 films release theatrically by major distributors (including Netflix, Apple TV+, A24, and The Walt Disney Company) only 28.5% of films included LGBTQ Characters.
Hosts of Yahoo Finance's new show Living Not So Fabulously, David & John Auten-Schneider, chatted with Jane Sasseen on the newest episode of the vodcast. As co-chair of NewFest, NYC's largest presenter of LGBTQ+ film & media, Sasseen values the importance of storytelling, so much so that it's what "[her] life has been all about."
On this episode, Sasseen and your hosts take the topic of representation in storytelling one step further as they consider the equal importance of the types of stories depicting the community, not just the quantity. Often LGBTQ+ stories feel either tragic or fabulous, David shared, to which Sasseen agreed saying they want tales on 'regular people.'
Stories are incredibly important. Storytelling telling stories well is basically what my life has been about. And so that's what, you know, that's how I got involved in New Fest and, you know, we do, you know, it's mostly fictional films, but we do documentaries as well, but I just think it's incredibly important to, you know, to be seen for these stories and just the mass diversity of these stories to be told that, you know, at the end of the day, we have all the same problems, all the same joys, all the same, you know, we're screwed up in all the same ways, you know, as straight people and you know, we want to see our stories and the way we resolve those issues and go through our lives played out.
I appreciate you, you, you bring up this point of it sometimes it's the everyday stories. Although, you know, an everyday story sometimes isn't the most exciting, but sometimes those are the ones that we learn from, right? We getting getting to see ourselves, John and I have talked about this before about how oftentimes the stories that we hear are either the tragic ones or the the excessive ones where we are living amazingly fabulous lives and I just think about Halston, we just recently watched that on Netflix, we talk about these kinds of stories, but sometimes we can't necessarily relate to those. I'm not going through that kind of tragedy in my life, and I'm not that kind of at that kind of level in my life. Sometimes we want to hear the stories of people who are just regular people.
Just regular people.
For full episodes of Living Not So Fabulously, watch on our website or listen on your favorite podcast platform.
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