No Elliot Page, There’s No Shortage of LGBT Movies

Are LGBT movies niche? Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page thinks they shouldn’t be. Speaking at a recent LGBT film festival in London, the Juno star said that queer movies deserve to be mainstream because “30 percent of young people identify as LGBTQ.”

There are two points to make in response to this. The first is that “30 percent of young people” is still a pretty small audience against the rest of the population. Granted, this is a huge generational uptick. As Bill Maher has noted, these days, there’s an obvious trendiness of identifying as something other than “cisgender” and “heteronormative,” which are not only nonsensical descriptors but practically slurs. Still, according to the Williams Institute, only 5.5 percent of U.S. adults identify as LGBT.

About the Author

Madeleine Kearns

Madeleine Kearns is a former staff writer at National Review.

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Are LGBT movies niche? Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page thinks they shouldn’t be. Speaking at a recent LGBT film festival in London, the Juno star said that queer movies deserve to be mainstream because “30 percent of young people identify as LGBTQ.”

There are two points to make in response to this. The first is that “30 percent of young people” is still a pretty small audience against the rest of the population. Granted, this is a huge generational uptick. As Bill Maher has noted, these days, there’s an obvious trendiness of identifying as something other than “cisgender” and “heteronormative,” which are not only nonsensical descriptors but practically slurs. Still, according to the Williams Institute, only 5.5 percent of U.S. adults identify as LGBT.