If Publishing's Efforts to Diversify Haven't Done Anything, Why Did You Fight for Them? Why Do You Defend Them Now?

"this isn't happening, also it's happening and it's good," part a billion

I spend a lot of time arguing that the American left is too concerned with symbolic and artistic victories and insufficiently devoted to basic material needs. It’s not like I don’t value those symbolic and artistic victories at all; it’s just a matter of proportion and strategy. One reason that left-leaning people tend to be fixated on industries like Hollywood, academia, media, the nonprofit sector, and similar is that those are the areas where they exert an unusual level of control. And this can produce some situations that inspire cognitive dissonance.

Complaints that television has not been friendly to LGBTQ characters go back a long way, and for good reason. Television networks have spent most of their history failing to establish such characters often enough or with sufficient sympathy and depth. That was all bound up in broader societal antipathy to those people, of course, and it can be hard to know what’s the cart and what’s the horse when it comes to social change and our narrative arts. Whatever the case, it’s certainly true that for a long time gay characters were rare and tended to be portrayed as broad stereotypes when they did appear. TV shows were more likely to include gay panic storylines, such as in Three’s Company, than actual meaningful gay representation. Other, smaller sexual and gender minorities were barely considered, outside of an occasional “guy in a dress” laugh line in a sitcom. And you can argue (I would argue) that, as time passed and gay people saw a number of heartening victories in the courtroom and the legislatures, depictions of such people in Hollywood lagged far behind. At best were movies like the AIDS epidemic era legal drama Philadelphia, which did the typical Hollywood thing of presenting a minority character as so noble and sympathetic that they were dehumanized. At worst….

But things change. This is important to remember if you are a left-of-center person, because the core of all left belief is precisely that things can change and change for the better. And here the status of the left in the entertainment business is important. Because while this is still capitalism and cash still rules, Hollywood is very close to a liberal monoculture, and this means that liberals have a great deal of influence over which stories get told. So, LGBTQ characters on television. Have things changed, for the better? It’s very difficult to say that they haven’t.

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation The prominent LGBTQ rights organization GLAAD regularly compiles databases of depictions of characters from sexual and gender minorities in the entertainment industry. These censuses of LGBTQ people onscreen are imperfect, but fundamentally the numbers aren’t particularly difficult to investigate. And in the last half-decade they certainly show a media world that’s far more interested in portraying characters who come from sexual and gender minorities than in the past. The statistics bounce around, as you’d expect, but in 2022 we saw a high-water mark with 12% of characters on television explicitly identified as part of the LGBTQ spectrum. Given that the highest estimates of their portion of the population writ large range from around 7.5% to 9.5%, this means that LGBTQ characters on television are actually over-represented. I don’t mean that normatively, to be clear, but just in terms of matching proportions, as the purpose of art is not to perfectly reflect society but to do what is artistically best. Of course, that cuts both ways. Diversity in the arts is important, but progress in that area can only come when it derives from organic artistic need. Luckily, the more we diversify Hollywood, the more it will.

Now with the rise of LGBTQ characters attenuating somewhat, with GLAAD reporting that representation has fallen by a few percentage points, there’s a lot of gnashing of teeth. I would argue that trying to adhere to strict proportional representation would be a mistake on basic creative grounds, and that what matters is that our entertainment spaces are clearly more accepting of such characters and storylines than they once were. I find it very hard to deny that, in 2025, LGBTQ people receive a great deal of representation in American popular culture, or that our entertainment media celebrates that representation loudly. That’s all to the good. Because art is improved when we have a greater choice of what and who is depicted within it and the arts become more just when all types of people have a chance to tell their stories.

As I’m sure you’re aware, though, many liberal people really do not want to take that W. Look around in liberal circles on social media and you’ll find many who insist that nothing has changed. It’s in fact very straightforward, if laborious, to count the total number of characters on TV or in the movies, count how many of them are LGBTQ, and come up with a percentage; there will be some quibbling about either number but the trend will be obvious. And it’s clearly been heading in one direction over the past quarter-century. Of course this representation is as shallow and commercially-motivated as anything else in our creative industries, truly radical queer perspectives are as unwelcome on television as they are anywhere else, the tendency is always to prize “normalcy” among such characters in a way that neuters them and affirms conventional social norms…. All true. It’s also true that most LGBTQ people still face various forms of discrimination, often including threats to their lives, which representation can’t possibly fix. (Which… well, never mind.) But if you’ve set your sights on numerical representation of LGBTQ people in the arts, I think few honest people would question the intuitive observation that it’s getting better.

And yet to point this out enrages a lot of people, a lot of the self-same people who have loudly demanded better representation. They don’t want to take a W. The typical rejoinder is that if you celebrate too soon you’ll stop pushing for progress. I would respond by saying that it’s actually incredibly important that social movements recognize and celebrate progress, as the alternative is convincing the public that your project is hopeless. Regardless, it’s just extremely difficult for me to understand how an honest and rational adult could fail to see that the movement for better LGBTQ representation in the arts and media has made great progress, and yet many of the very people who made that progress possible not only refuse to acknowledge it but get actively angry at those who do. You called for representation, Hollywood said it was going to give you more, they did an admittedly slow and half-assed job but things genuinely did get better, you’re winning. Take the W! But, no. People get steaming mad whenever you suggest that representation anywhere has gotten better. Brother, I don’t get it! I don’t get it.

There’s a very similar situation in publishing, where there’s a particularly annoying debate going on about the rise of non-white-male authors publishing novels and a concomitant decline in white man novels. There’s been an awful lot of exhausting discourse in this regard. As with LGBTQ representation in entertainment, you have a scenario where the quantitative gains seem undeniable; certainly the publishing industry has talked endlessly about diversifying itself, and most analyses suggest that they’ve succeeded, with (for example) fiction by writers of color in particular seeing a doubling in the span of a half-decade. This all aligns with the eye test, for me, as a guy who loves books and reads a lot of them and about them. There’s also the issue of the ideological bent of book media, what’s left of it, with the space absolutely dominated by left-leaning people. That has inevitable consequences for what and how books get discussed. I’m not expecting a lot of positive coverage from LitHub, no matter how good my novel might be, you know what I’m saying? (Preorder now!) And of course there’s always talk of reversals and backlashes; in particular, a lot of women and people of color got hired in publishing in the heady 2015-2022 period, some of them have been fired, and people read the tea leaves of what this means in a very small world. Certainly, progress can stall. But to go to your local bookstore and conclude that publishing has not worked hard to diversify…. I don’t know what to tell you, or what you’d accept as progress.

Overall, I can’t disagree with this synopsis from Michael Mohr, whose analysis is worth reading in full:

If we extract from the data, the trend is clear. Publishing is dominated by young progressive white women who have a tendency to seek more books for, by, and about women like them. Since more women than men read books, and particularly novels, this makes sense economically. So to some extent this is just “capitalism” — aka the free market doing its thing.

The free market is doing its thing, though of course why the people in the market are in the market and want what they want is always filtered through culture. But though deeper questions can always be probed, I think this succinctly reflects the empirical reality, and the argument that publishing is simply serving its real-world customer base is probably the strongest defense. What I can’t shake, again, is how many of the people who pressed for this very change in fortunes simply refuse to accept that they’ve accomplished something. I know, there’s a lot more to do and fragile gains to defend. But you had a vision and you made real progress towards it. Most activists can never say as much. Take it from me. Why the refusal to accept victory, even if it’s only partial?

Liberals said they wanted more books from authors from marginalized groups. Prominent voices, particularly among writers and in publishing, used their cultural and political influence to pressure publishing companies to put out more work from those marginalized authors. They worked social media, they complained on podcasts, they wrote essays for the handful of publications that still care about books, they pressed publishing companies. The part that was usually unspoken (but sometimes loudly shouted, such as on Twitter) was that the point was equally to reduce the number of straight white men getting book deals. The evidence suggests that this change has begun at scale, however haphazardly and incompletely; more importantly, the bureaucracy of publishing is now dominated by people other than straight white men, which means that the infrastructure should be in place to maintain or even deepen this condition. Writers from marginalized groups have gotten more book deals, and commensurately fewer have gone to straight white men because there’s only so many books that get published by major houses. Positive reviews and awards have matched or exceeded the proportional progress in this regard. You’re free to say that it’s not sufficient, but that stuff has occurred.

So to the people who both championed this change and now insist that it doesn’t matter, I can only ask - then why did you fight for it in the first place? Is it simply that the percentages need to swing further? That would, I think, start to lend credence to those who suggest that this is retributive rather than constructive. And do you really believe that social justice politics have insufficient sway… in publishing? What would enough influence look like, then? Just how monocultural do you guys want publishing, media, Hollywood, and academia to be? American liberalism has a profound inability to wrestle with its own influence, and this does not help with the common perception that liberals are losers.

This podcast episode from The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang, The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper, and the novelist Andrew Boryga is fine. It largely references one fairly notorious piece by Jacob Savage complaining about the difficulty white men have in getting their novels published and celebrated. The podcasters’ disdain for Savage, while obviously theatrical - this is all theatrical - is pitched at an appropriate level. They also appear at least somewhat willing to concede the simple quantitative reality that a deliberate effort by publishing companies to publish fewer white men (which the publishing industry spent years explicitly pledging to do) may have resulted in… making it harder for white men to get published. By way of analogy, Harper is an academic and straightforwardly says that it’s hard for white men to get professor jobs now, which is something everyone in academia knows and almost everyone is incentivized to pretend not to know. This willingness to at least entertain the idea that an industry that openly and relentlessly pledged to favor the submissions of writers of color and women writers actually has done so cannot be found, for example, in this deeply disingenuous piece by Alex Skopic, which plays the social justice classic “This Isn’t Happening, But Also It’s Good That It’s Happening.”

There’s two points of criticism I have to make about the podcast, which both betray a failure to be self-critical in the exact way they ask white male novelists to be self-critical. At one point they mock the idea that writers like Savage are upset about their declining opportunity to publish in fancy newspapers and magazines. (This is another thing that absolutely has happened, thanks to the people who now insist it could never happen, but never mind.) Kang says, “You know you just want to be in The New Yorker, right? Like, stop being such a fucking baby!” There are a lot of people who could credibly say these particular words. Me, for example. But the absolute last person who should be saying it is a staff writer for the New Yorker. It is never, ever a good idea to dismiss the importance of a privilege when you are yourself the recipient of that privilege. I know they’re not exactly doing outreach here, but if they cared to actually change the mind of a resentful white dude who want to be writers, this is the very worst way to do it.

Yes, people still want to write for fancy places, and yes there are considerable advantages to doing so. Considering that we’re talking about publishing, for example, a lot of people struggle to find literary agents who will represent them. Staff writers for The New Yorker will never be in that position; you can get an agent by dint of that fact and nothing else. And, you know, having that job makes your mom happy, and it’s a good opener if you’re trying to get laid at the Verso loft, and you get an employee discount on tote bags…. Kang and The Atlantic’s Harper dismissing those benefits is going to look very petty to a lot of writers, and certainly not just white men. And I don’t blame them.

Here’s the bigger thing. At one point cancel culture comes up, and they recite the usual progressive catechism about it - canceling doesn’t matter, people aren’t really canceled, canceling doesn’t hurt anyone. This is of course not true, and I don’t think the people who say it really believe that it’s true. (If you’d like to argue about it, let’s meet in the lobby of the movie theater the next time a movie starring Armie Hammer is released.) The trouble with saying that canceling doesn’t work is that it immediately prompts this question: then why did you take part in it? Why did you defend it? It’s been whiplash-inducing to live through the cancel culture era. Liberals lustily participated in canceling campaigns, throwing fuel on every Twitter fire, insisting that the social media pile-on was a vital tool for achieving justice…. Those of us who expressed reservations were called the enemies of progress or worse. BUT ALSO, now, we’re constantly told that cancel culture isn’t a thing, that nobody really ever gets canceled, that people often actually benefit from cancelation! etc etc etc. These are, of course, totally incompatible claims. And yet not only do people move from one to the other, many somehow manage to believe both at the same time.

And that’s what’s really at play here too, the same question: if publishing’s effort to publish more minority writers and fewer white men has not actually worked, why is it worth defending? Alternatively, if white men’s primacy in the book world really has been meaningfully reduced, in what way are the white men pointing that out in error? You can either tell me that efforts to de-white-man-ify publishing are worth doing, a meaningful effort to improve the world, or you can tell me that no white men ever lose opportunity because of that effort and it’s thus harmless. You can’t do both. Liberals doing the “it’s not happening”/“it’s happening and it’s good” thing is insufferable and increasingly inescapable.

I believe in diversifying publishing and the arts and a lot more. I also understand that this effort can foreclose on possibility for people who are not “diverse” according to corporate standards, and this is never fair. It’s complicated. Just like I support race-based affirmative action in college admissions while recognizing that it amounts to insurmountable discrimination for many Asian applicants, which is fucked. It’s complicated. What I find quite aggravating is that many in media and pieces like Skopic’s or this shit-eating entry from Vox insist that it’s not complicated when it certainly is. And I find it profoundly annoying that Kang and Harper and Boryga can’t come out and push back against the people who insist that there has been literally no change in publishing demographics over the years even though they know better - because they’re afraid to get in trouble.