Grey's Anatomy: Representation Of The LGBTQ Community

Today’s media outlets are slowly broadening their views of society to integrate representation of people from the LGBTQ community. While I applaud and respect their efforts, I believe mainstream television has only begun to scratch the surface of the challenges the LGBTQ community face on a daily basis. The LGBTQ storylines I’ve seen, as I will describe in this paper, feel almost like an afterthought. As if a character or issue were added to complicate the main plot or possibly placate what the broadcast station may consider a fringe group of viewers, not to accurately portray the true multi-faceted and challenging life queer people face on a daily basis. I believe most shows not only misrepresent LGBTQ characters, but tend to float over the

I soon became addicted and watched the show from the beginning via Netflix. Overall, I feel Grey’s Anatomy does a decent job of representing the LGBTQ community. That said, this was not the case in the first few seasons, where the only hint of lifestyles outside the mainstream came in the form of a gay bartender. What I enjoyed about this storyline was the way it wasn’t portrayed completely ‘Gay Inc.’. I also appreciated the way the character’s storyline was not centered on his gayness, but encompassed deeper issues like having a baby with his partner and the complications with their

As a cult favorite, Grey’s Anatomy’s has unlimited potential to expand on this narrative because of its die-hard fans, and I would love to see them use that platform to demonstrate more LGBTQ people in prestigious careers, something that would be valuable and empowering for trans youth to see as opposed to this population being portrayed in a negative light, such as in Orange is the New Black (OITNB).

In OITNB, the transgender character, Sophia Burset, played by Laverne Cox, is represented as a felon. The character is given some depth in the source of her crime—identity theft to pay for her sexual reassignment surgery—it still shows her going about obtaining the ends by unjust means, leaving an overall negative connotation on both the character and the