'Glee' Season 6 News: Ryan Murphy Talks Show's Impact On LGBT Visibility, 'More Work To Be Done' [VIDEO]
Glee creator Ryan Murphy recently spoke about the growing acceptance of the LGBT community nowadays compared to when the show first started.
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Murphy gave a heartfelt speech at the Family Equality Council recently, where he received an award. With the finale of Glee just a few weeks away, the producer spoke on the evolution of LGBT acceptance.
"If I look back to seven years ago, Glee was going to be about a lot of things - song, dance, Jane Lynch's character being waterboarded - but for me, I wanted to do something personal on the show," Murphy explained, per Vulture. "I grew up in Indiana behind a cornfield and a church, and for me the only single person I knew who was gay was Paul Lynde. So with Glee I wanted to write about something personal, something about gay characters, something about creating your own kind of family no matter who you are or where you live."
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Glee has featured gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender characters over the course of its six seasons, most recently featuring a prominent storyline involving Beiste (Dot-Marie Jones) transitioning to being a man.
Other shows like ABC's Modern Family, Netflix's Orange Is the New Black and Amazon's Transparent have also featured LGBT issues very prominently over the past few years. Murphy said that acceptance of these groups is growing.
He noted that only 18 percent of people back before Glee or Modern Family premiered believed that there should be equal rights to gay or nontraditional families. This number has skyrocketed to 52 percent nowadays.
But Murphy added that there is "more work to be done" on this front. He listed industry executives who took chances on allowing such characters on television, including Dana Walden and Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane and Michael Lombardo.
"These captains of industry fought the good fight 100 percent of the time, even when they were starting out, and with their power and ability to make and approve content, said one simple thing to change history and create a new national conversation, which was, 'Do it, write it, don't change it, be bold, that's the only way things are going to change.'"
Glee airs Fridays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Fox.
Watch the promo for the next episode of Glee here:
