This is an open letter in response to the proposed SCREEN Act and many other efforts to ban LGBTQIA+ content and explicit content as pornographic:

I am a reader, writer, and watcher of a vast variety of entertainment, from classic children’s movies to extreme horror. Please excuse the essay below, but I feel like really important things are happening and going to happen, and we all need to be prepared to protect ourselves now rather than simply waiting for the worst.

It’s so easy to look at market forces in the short term and allow book burners and book banners to decide what content everyone is going to be able to read, write, and watch. There’s small but loud pressure to consider queer content ‘pornographic’ (regardless of actual sexual content, because they are the ones who sexualize queer existence), to declare all sexual content pornographic, and to then declare the distributors of pornographic content sex offenders.

What these people tried to do to LBG people, they’re using the same playbook for trans people, and because they’re such a small subset of the population, they’re a lot easier to target. Compromises are made out of fear rather than principle. They’re winning against trans people, and they’re applying the playbook once more to LBG people. People have already proven willing to throw one subculture under the bus, so why not another?

Amazon made its bones on the backs of indie writers and both small and large publishing companies. It doesn’t necessarily make a profit from us, but it’s still the place for published written content. Whether some people like it or not, the Internet was built on the back of erotic and sometimes queer content. Romance, erotic romance, erotica, romantasy, etc. dominate the top spots. Fifty Shades was a cultural phenomenon, paving the way for Sarah Maas and Colleen Hoover. All of this, and Amazon is making every effort to produce its own prestige content, which often includes queer and/or sexual content.

HBO (WB-Discovery) made its bones on both prestige and trashy sexual content, often with queer content, none so popular as Game of Thrones.

Netflix made its bones on queer and sexual content, coming into its own with Orange is the New Black, eventually hosting everything from the Fear Street trilogy to Stranger Things, Ryan Murphy vehicles, Bridgerton, and other juggernaut feel-good shows like Queer Eye and Great British Baking Show.

Even The Blacklist, which is NBC product but one of the most popular shows on the platform, is a decidedly queer story, to say nothing of the Star Trek series through CBS.

Disney has long capitulated to these loud but small voices, in part to continue to send their movies to highly censored but lucrative markets like China and Russia. Any queerness has been suggested rather than overt, not to mention villainized. Only recently has it been more overtly depicted, but sparingly. However, Disney also has control over content intended for teens and adults through such channels as ABC (Freeform), FX, and Fox Film and Television, hosted on Hulu (and now on Disney+ directly).

When these small but loud forces come for all queer and sexual content, all of your content will be at risk. It is simple enough to proceed with ‘acceptable’ and ‘clean’ content per regulations going forward, maybe, and eliminate all cultural gains made in favor of placid obedience. It will be more difficult to censor back decades of valuable and pervasive queer representation and on-screen sex intended for teen and primetime (adult) audiences.

Just off the top of my head, powerhouse mainstream and legacy shows like Glee, NCIS, American Horror Story, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, SWAT, anything Shondaland (Grey’s Anatomy, How to Get Away with Murder, Scandal), anything FX, anything HBO, ER, 9-1-1, Wheel of Time, Star Trek, Matlock (new), Ghosts, The Irrational, Will Trent, Brooklyn Nine-Nine… On the chopping block. That’s not even getting into movies or the decades of novels through publishing arms of these entertainment industries.

As someone who has had very little queer community in real life, queerness in television has been so important to me and to others and has been instrumental in getting mainstream America to see how our existence isn’t a threat to them. But book burners/banners are. They don’t want people to be able to read/write/watch what they want or for people to be responsible for their own content and avoid what they don’t like. They want people to only read/write/watch the things that book burners/banners watch, and they want to criminalize what they don’t like.

We could lose whole swaths of prestige shows and even just plain enjoyable dreck by calling them pornographic. John Waters said pornographers are important to all of us, canaries in the entertainment coal mine, because what they are allowed to do allows the rest of us to do what we want. (See also Evelyn Beatrice Hall summarizing Voltaire: ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’)

American media has been censored and controlled in the past (and now) to certain degrees (see: the Hays Code, the present swath of book bans in schools). However, entertainment is not the same beast it was in the fifties. It has ballooned in size, power, influence, and ubiquity.

Streaming made so much more available to so many more people. I believe that attempts to censor or remove IPs with queer and/or sexual content will remove too much conscientiously created over the last 30 years with deliberate effort to depict queer people as they really are, rather than the terrifying predators that the far right believes us to be.

Religion is no longer the opiate of the masses. Entertainment is. I think if governments seek to control queer and sexual content by forcing censoring/removal of it beyond the merely annoying and oft ridiculed level of ‘edited for television,’ there will be more of a pushback than they are expecting from the general population. A disturbing number of people who enjoy modern romance and romantasy novels, sometimes with queer content, voted red.

I think that if these disappeared, there might be enough of a backlash, but in a theocracy, it’s difficult to say whether that can be depended upon to turn legislative/litigious tides. Netflix, Amazon, Disney, HBO, etc. all have a stake in what book burners/banners are trying to eliminate in books, movies, and television. And they have tremendous economic power. I beg you to refuse to budge. What they’re doing to books matters to you. You’re on the chopping block with us. These policies will affect you, but you have the economic power to resist and effect change. Please do not bow down the easy path now by self-censoring trans experiences. Censors learn what they can do by what you’ve already proven yourself willing to do.

Most big businesses lean conservative in hope of conserving a buck, but I believe supporting creators and your customers will lead to greater gains in the long run and that it’s most cost effective to take the risk of pushing back against book bans/burns as well as efforts to eliminate queerness and sexual elements from more visual media. I understand that these are businesses, but what most businesses forget is that they are also services. You can choose to accept civic duty or ignore it, but your choices have larger cultural consequences than profit, and it’s short-sighted to pretend otherwise.

Freedom of speech and expression is on the docket in this administration and beyond, because Project 2025 was never just about 2025 and has been in motion for decades with concerted and staggeringly successful efforts at banning vitally important books in schools. The book battle is your battle. They will eventually do it to you.

I am begging you, with your tremendous economic influence, to stop waiting to see where the wind will blow so you know which direction to go and instead step into this fight, hand in hand with book publishers and other entertainment companies, to protect speech, expression, cultural memory, the right of information, the right of parents to allow their kids to read, write, and watch according to their own principles rather than someone else’s, and the right for kids to see themselves in the media they consume and for teens to prepare for adulthood in the eminently safe spaces of entertainment. Too much information is less dangerous than too little, and diversity shouldn’t be a reluctant compromise. It literally makes everything better.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for your time.

(Edited to add: I didn’t just post this here. I sent a version of this letter to the four big entertainment corporations listed above in November.)