Queer creatives driving change in Australia’s TV industry

There is an emerging expectation amongst viewers to see queer TV professionals behind the creation of gender and sexually diverse stories in Australian TV. A new RMIT study unpacks the motivations, barriers and labour behind the queer stories that appear on Australian screens.

Damien O’Meara, Lecturer in Public Relations

Key points:

Queer labour, the work undertaken by LGBTIQ+ people to advance rights, visibility and access, has been crucial to the successful development of queer stories for Australian TV.
Research shows that there are two main motivations for queer TV professionals to create queer stories; one reason was “to tell engaging, dramatically truthful stories” for commercial success, and the other was to see themselves and their communities represented onscreen.
A major challenge to telling queer stories on Australian TV is the long-held industry perception that these stories lack broad audience appeal, but there has been a significant increase in the inclusion of these stories, from appearing in just 17 TV series in the 2000s to 46 in the 2010s.
Queer creatives and executives are instrumental in getting queer stories onscreen both in growing the number of these stories and in driving more complex and dramatically truthful queer narratives.
Established queer creatives and executives are taking on the task of getting emerging queer creatives into the industry by bringing in new and underrepresented voices to their productions.
As audiences grow to expect authentic representation onscreen and in writers’ rooms, will we see distinctly Australian queer stories be prioritised in the age of streaming giants?

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Queer creatives driving change in Australia’s TV industry