Guardian Article

BBC research into lesbian, gay and bisexual portrayal offers hopePeter Tatchell welcomes the BBC's belated initiative to examine coverage on TV radio and websites

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Comments (27) The BBC decision to commission research into its portrayal of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people is a welcome, if somewhat belated, initiative. It comes in response to two decades of sustained – and often ignored – criticism of the BBC by LGB licence payers, journalists, campaigners and media analysts.

The research will examine both the quantity and quality of LGB coverage in comedy, news, documentaries, entertainment and dramas on BBC TV, radio and websites. The decision that the study will cover 28 different audience sectors, including ethnic and religious groups, with some respondents expected to express homophobic views, has, however, raised a few eyebrows. If this research was looking at depictions of the Jewish community, I wonder whether the BBC would feel obliged to take into account the opinions of anti-semites and neo-Nazis?

Never mind. Hats off to the BBC for agreeing this research and indeed for its ground-breaking gay Muslim storyline in EastEnders, which has helped highlight some of the dilemmas faced by an often hidden section of the gay and Muslim communities.

Despite these positive moves, many LGB people still feel the BBC is guilty of an alarming degree of low-level homophobia and an often perplexing unwillingness to remedy it. In the 1990s, Radio 1 was allowed to broadcast music advocating the murder of gay people, which prompted the queer human rights group OutRage! to rename the Beeb as the "British Bigotry Corporation". Even now, although the BBC won't give air-time to "kill gays" hit tunes, it still occasionally interviews and promotes "murder music" singers like Buju Banton.

In 2006, the BBC was stung when the gay lobby group Stonewall published a damning report, Tuned Out, by Leeds University researchers. They examined 168 hours of prime-time BBC1 and BBC2 television programmes; finding that positive gay references totalled a mere six minutes, compared to 32 minutes of negative, disparaging coverage. In other words, gay people were five times more likely to be portrayed in negative terms than in positive ones. Over half of all gay references were jokes, which mostly played on stereotypes of sexually predatory or effeminate gay men. Lesbian and gay issues were rarely mentioned in BBC factual output.

At the time, Stonewall's chief executive, Ben Summerskill, noted that gay people contribute an estimated £190m a year to the BBC in TV licence fees. "Gay licence-payers receive astonishingly poor value from the BBC," he said. "It's difficult to argue that 1.5 million gay households should be expected to continue making such a substantial contribution to channels on which their real lives are hardly reflected, and which are often punctuated with derisive and demeaning depictions of them."

Sadly, there is little evidence that BBC coverage has improved since then. Last December, it reported on legislation before the Ugandan parliament that seeks to impose the death penalty for repeated same-sex acts. In response, the corporation's Have Your Say Africa site hosted an online debate: "Should homosexuals face execution?" The BBC later apologised for the headline. It would not, I suspect, hold online debates such as: Should black people be lynched? Moreover, the BBC's commentary announcing the debate put a very weak case against the execution of LGB Ugandans. It read like an open invitation for respondents to endorse the state-sponsored killing of LGBs.

This faux pas followed the furore over the Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles using the word "gay" as an insult and getting away with it. Indeed, the BBC governors ruled that the word "gay" was an acceptable on-air synonym for "rubbish".

At a time when the BBC national news was almost daily reporting murders of young men and racist attacks, in 2008 it failed to report the homophobic murder of 18-year-old Michael Causer in Liverpool, other than on the Merseyside section of the BBC website. In contrast, the racist murder of a black Liverpudlian, Anthony Walker, received national BBC news coverage for weeks. Why the double standards? Perhaps the BBC's LGB research project will shed some light and offer solutions.