the gay hockey show was hbo max's biggest acquired hit ever. tv responded by cutting 120 queer characters. read the room.

Photo: Heated Rivalry star Hudson Williams at TIFF 2026. TKA201, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via GLAAD and Out

Here is the year television had. Two closeted hockey players fell in love on Heated Rivalry, and it became, by GLAAD's count, HBO Max's most-watched acquired scripted series ever. Apple TV's Pluribus won six Emmys. The Hunting Wives topped the Netflix charts. And over the same twelve months, the people who make TV quietly deleted a quarter of all the queer characters on it.

That is the headline finding of Where We Are on TV, GLAAD's 21st annual count, released Thursday. Looking at scripted broadcast, cable and streaming series with seasons that premiered between June 1, 2025 and May 31, 2026, GLAAD found 369 LGBTQ characters. The year before, it was 489. That is 120 fewer, a drop of 25%.

the trans number

Seven. Out of 369, there were seven transgender characters, six women and one man, which is 2% of the total. Last year there were 33. In the 2021-22 report there were 42, a record. And of the seven, GLAAD says, none will return next year.

"Now we see no transgender characters on television," said Nick Adams, vice president of the GLAAD Media Institute, noting the drop comes while "trans people are under attack from local, state, and federal politicians."

what else fell off

• Characters of color make up 161 of the 369, or 44%, down from 51% and the lowest share in eight years.
• The number of characters living with HIV is zero.
• 141 of the 369, or 38%, will not be back anyway, because their shows were canceled or ended, were limited series, or the character died or left.

That last number is the one to sit with. Even the representation that survived this year is mostly on its way out.

the business case, again

GLAAD's president, Sarah Kate Ellis, made the business case again: "Hollywood is slashing LGBTQ stories and characters even while demand is increasing. It's a bad business decision." She is not wrong that the hits keep proving her point. We have written about Heated Rivalry turning a fictional charity into a real one and about a pop star naming her son after Ilya. The culture is clearly not the part that lost interest.

One last detail, which we include without comment: the research was supported by Skittles. Taste the rainbow, while supplies last.