305 LGBTQ+ Hollywood Performers Across A Century Of Film

This is the biggest video on the channel - more than three hundred performers who have spoken publicly about their identities, across a century of film and television. At that scale it stops being a list and becomes a rough map of how the industry changed.

For Most Of Hollywood's Existence This Was A History Of Silence

For most of the industry's existence, the history of LGBTQ+ people in Hollywood is a history of silence. Careers were built on arrangements that everyone in the business knew about and no publication could report.

That silence broke slowly and unevenly, and it broke because individual people decided to speak about their own lives - usually at real professional cost, and usually earlier than was safe.

Three Hundred Names In Sequence Reveals A Curve, Not Just A List

Watching three hundred names in sequence produces a different effect from watching fifty. Individual stories recede and a shape emerges instead.

The shape is roughly this: almost nobody before 1970, a scattering through the eighties, a steady climb through the nineties and 2000s, and then a period in the last decade where it largely stopped being reported as news at all.

• Before 1970: essentially nothing on the public record, by design.
• 1980s-1990s: a small number of people speaking, at significant professional risk.
• 2000s onward: the risk falls as the number of people rises - each disclosure makes the next one easier.
• Last decade: increasingly a non-story, which is the clearest marker of change.

How the List is Bounded

Three hundred names is large enough that the boundary matters. The rule applied throughout is the same one used across this section: people who have spoken publicly about their own lives, and nobody else. That is what keeps a list this size from drifting into speculation.

Why The Boundary Of A List This Large Matters So Much

At more than sixteen minutes this is the longest entry here. The rest of the section is in Pride in Hollywood.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Bottom Line

Three hundred names, and a curve that says more about the industry than about any individual on it. Watch above, then browse the rest of the Pride in Hollywood section.