GLAAD condemns Hollywood’s depiction of LGBT crowd

One of the nation’s largest gay rights groups has stepped up its criticism of Hollywood, saying the movie-making crowd isn’t giving due nods to those of lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender persuasion.

GLAAD said in a report released Tuesday that only 17 or 102 films released by Hollywood’s biggest seven studios included gay characters. And of those, the gay characters were given the most minimal of screen time minutes, the group accused, the New York Daily News reported.

“What’s disheartening for me and to all of us in GLAAD is when it comes to major studio films, LGBT people are basically invisible,” GLAAD national spokesman Will Cruz told the New York Daily News. “And when we do show up, it’s largely a part of comedies as caricatures to service a joke at the expense of the character.”

Some of the examples cited by GLAAD as worst offenders: Katee Sackhoff’s character in “Riddick” is subjected to several rape threats after it’s suggested she’s gay while Ken Jeong’s Leslie Chow character in the Warner Brother’s “Hangover” movies makes numerous “homophobic humor” comments, the New York Daily News reported. GLAAD also decried “The Wolf of Wall Street” and its perceived stereotypical treatment of the gay butler character.

The GLAAD report follows another from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that just found only 2.3 percent of U.S. adults now describe themselves as gay or bisexual. Other surveys — including one from Gallup in 2012 — indicated that between 3 percent and 4 percent of America’s population self-identifies as gay.