Hollywood Doesn’t Need Another Warning Label for LGBTQ Stories — Opinion

Christopher Racster is an award-winning producer of LGBTQ+ film and television with more than 25 years of internationally distributed work. He leads Outfest and serves on the board of the Iris Prize LGBTQ+ Film Festival in Wales, and speaks frequently on LGBTQ+ media and its role in advocacy and public understanding. Ahead of OutfestNEXT this weekend in Los Angeles, Racster looks at an FCC proposal that could harm how queer stories are told.

On April 22, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opened an inquiry asking whether the television ratings system should create a new rating or warning for programs with transgender or gender non-binary content. Supporters of the inquiry framed the idea as a way to protect parental authority. After the inquiry opened, more than 40 organizations, including GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, and PFLAG, filed comments against it before the window closed. Supporters’ arguments ran along two lines: that parents and guardians, not federal regulators, should be the ones deciding what their children watch, and that a label singling out LGBTQ+ characters wrongly files our stories alongside graphic violence and explicit sex, as if the presence of a gay or trans person were itself a mature theme.

I have spent more than 25 years producing LGBTQ+ film and television, and I have sat across enough tables from financiers, acquisition executives, and marketers to tell you exactly what this proposal does. It obstructs. A rating has never been a neutral fact printed on a box. It is a scarlet letter, and every decision-maker quietly takes it at face value. Advertisers and distributors pay attention to it. The people deciding which projects get money pay attention to it. I have watched a room go quiet over the fear of a single letter grade before anyone had seen a frame of the actual work. By attaching a warning to a story simply because a queer character walks into it, you have not given parents anything real to decide on. The label says nothing about whether a show is violent, frightening, or sexually explicit. It flags only that a queer character exists, which tells a parent nothing about whether the program is right for their child. What it does tell every studio is that these stories come with a tax. You have made them harder to sell and harder to greenlight, and therefore easier to remove from the public eye entirely.

We have seen this machinery before, and we should say so clearly. For years, the film ratings board applied a double standard that anyone paying attention could clearly see. LGBTQ+ films drew harsher ratings than their straight equivalents. “Henry & June” became the first film to receive an NC-17 rating in 1990. “Boys Don’t Cry” and “But I’m a Cheerleader” were both forced into cuts to escape the same fate. The 2006 documentary “This Film Is Not Yet Rated” put the pattern on the record, and a peer-reviewed study in 2018 confirmed that films recommended for LGBTQ+ teenagers were routinely rated in ways that put them out of reach.

‘Passages’Courtesy Everett Collection

These are films that could have been a vital lifeline for those young people. And this is not a thing of the past. In 2023, the drama “Passages” drew an NC-17 for gay sex scenes that were not remotely explicit, while “Blue Valentine,” a straight drama built around a comparable scene of oral sex, had its own NC-17 reduced to an R on appeal a decade earlier without cutting a single frame. Same act, different rating, and the clearest variable was who was in the bed. The mechanism was never an outright ban, and it did not need to be. A rating that limits who can watch a film also limits who will fund it, and that is a quieter and more durable form of control than any ban.

For a while, I let myself believe that era was behind us. Through the 2010s and into this decade, LGBTQ+ stories moved from the margins to the center of the culture. They won Oscars and Emmys. They traveled the world and made real money. Audiences did not just tolerate them; they went looking for them. I watched a film that I helped bring to the screen play to a full house in a country where I had been assured, confidently, by people who should have known better, that no one there wanted to see it. They were wrong. The appetite was always there. What had been missing was the permission.

That progress is now being reversed, and reversed purposefully. GLAAD’s most recent studio report found that LGBTQ+ inclusion in major film releases was at a three-year low, the third straight year of decline, with not a single transgender character among the 225 films it studied from the 10 largest distributors. This did not happen because the stories stopped working or stopped needing to be told. It happened because the climate around them changed. The FCC inquiry does not stand alone. It sits alongside Florida’s 2022 “Don’t Say Gay” law, the wave of school library book removals, and a broader campaign that treats the ordinary visibility of LGBTQ+ people as something to be flagged, restricted, and eventually erased. A warning label is the entertainment industry’s version of that same instinct. It borrows the language of child safety to put our lives back in the category of things adults must be cautioned about.

‘But I’m a Cheerleader’Mark Lipson/Kushner-Locke/Ignite

The argument against this is not only moral. It is also commercial, and the industry should not be shy about saying so. Gallup finds that nearly a quarter of adults under 30 identify as LGBTQ+. The Williams Institute counts roughly five million American children being raised by LGBTQ+ parents. Surveys show large majorities of Americans believe everyone deserves to see themselves on screen. Studios that let a government inquiry frighten them into caution are not managing risk. They are walking away from one of the few audiences that still shows up reliably, and handing it to platforms that will never accept a warning label in the first place.

I also want to name something that rarely makes it into these debates, because it is the part of my life I know best. LGBTQ+ film festivals are not a nice addition to this ecosystem. We are load-bearing. Festivals like Outfest and the Iris Prize in Wales, where I serve on the board, do work that no algorithm and no studio slate will do on its own. They are where accurate representation is initially developed and defended before the stories make it to the wider market. They are where a first-time filmmaker finds an audience that a distributor has not yet imagined. And they are the most reliable answer we have when someone in power decides our stories need a warning. When a festival programs a film and fills a theater, it makes an argument that no ratings board can overrule. It says these stories are already being watched, already being loved, and already part of the culture. In a period when institutions are quietly deciding what is safe to show, festivals remain a platform that cannot be pressured into silence, because they belong to the community that built them.

The choice before the industry is not complicated. A warning label on LGBTQ+ content is a request to return to a time when our stories were treated as a liability to be managed rather than ones with an audience to be served. We have lived through that version of the business. It was not safer for children. It was only smaller, poorer, and less honest. The people who make and distribute this work should refuse the premise outright, and they should say why publicly. The rest of us should keep doing what has always worked. Keep making the stories. Keep filling the theaters. Keep proving, one sold-out screening at a time, that nothing here needs a warning.

OutfestNEXT runs July 23 to 26 in Los Angeles.