The year may only be a few months old, but GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis already has a lot to celebrate.
Ellis, who will be presented with the 2024 Woman of Influence award as part of the Multichannel News Wonder Women of New York celebration on March 21, recently marked her 10th anniversary as the head of the nonprofit LGBTQ advocacy group. Her efforts in leading the organization’s charge to create initiatives, campaigns and programs pushing for the fair and accurate media coverage of the LGBTQ community earned GLAAD the TV Academy’s 2023 Governors Award during the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards on January 15.
Yet the former Condé Nast and Time Inc. executive and married mother of two teenage children has no plans to sit on her laurels. Ellis and GLAAD were set to honor Oprah Winfrey and Niecy Nash-Betts during the organization’s 35th annual GLAAD Media Awards in Los Angeles on March 14, the first of two awards ceremonies for the
nonprofit. The second will take place in New York on May 11.
Ellis will also continue to guide GLAAD’s mandate for greater inclusion in media through the GLAAD Media Institute, which was established in 2018 to foster the organization’s research into LGBTQ representation and acceptance.
GLAAD will also look to expand LGBTQ advocacy efforts more aggressively into the social media and gaming platforms, in an effort to make sure that all media offer a true and accurate representation of the LGBTQ and transgender communties, Ellis said.
Ahead of the Wonder Women of New York awards luncheon March 21 at the Ziegfeld Ballroom in Manhattan, Ellis talked about her goals for GLAAD, her accomplishments and disappointments through her decade-long tenure, and why her family life means that she takes her work personally. Here’s an edited transcript of that conversation.
MCN: Over the past decade, how far has the entertainment industry come in terms of its acceptance and inclusion of the LGBTQ community?
Sarah Kate Ellis: I think our role with media — whether it be TV shows or streaming or journalism — has gone from a watchdog to more of a partnership as the culture has changed. We’ve moved into more of a partnership with the media. I’ll also say that as new forms of media, like social media, have grown and evolved, we’ve taken on more watchdog roles. So with traditional media, including streaming, I would say that our relationship has grown in a positive direction. With other, newer platforms, we’ve had to take more of a watchdog advisory role in those spaces.
MCN: With that, has GLAAD changed its focus on the audience it wants to reach?
SKE: What never changes is our audience, and our audience has consistently been what is “the movable middle,” those folks who understand the humanity of our community but might not have the education or information about our community. How we reach them has changed dramatically. We’ve also shifted our focus more toward the transgender community. About 90% of Americans say they know somebody who’s lesbian or gay or bisexual, but only 30% of Americans say they know somebody who is transgender. So our focus has shifted in a way around transgender and nonconforming folks, and helping to educate people about who they are as their visibility has grown through TV, theater and on video games and other various media platforms.
MCN: Last month, GLAAD was honored with the Television Academy’s Governor’s Award at the Emmys. What did that recognition mean to you personally and to the organization?
SKE: We’re going to be 40 years old next year, so that was a true recognition for what our founders set out to do, which was to increase the visibility of the LGBTQ community through television. And so to be recognized by the Television Academy with their Governor’s Award was a full-circle moment for the organization. And personally, having spent the last 10 years at the organization and making it a bigger partner with Hollywood by increasing storytelling, it was, for me, a moment of real validation.
MCN: During your acceptance speech, you said that GLAAD’s advocacy efforts are personal to you and your family. How does your work at GLAAD influence and gratify you on a personal level?
SKE: For me, I came to GLAAD when my kids were 4. Being married to a woman and bringing kids into this world, I thought it was my duty to create a better tomorrow and protect my family. In my opinion, there is no better place to do that than GLAAD and all of the work that the organization does. So for me, it’s been personal since day one of accepting the job, and it’s why I accepted the job. One of our rally cries at GLAAD is, ‘it’s personal,’ and for everyone at the organization, it means the world to us to be able to do the work that we’re doing to protect our community and advance acceptance for our community.
MCN: What has been your biggest accomplishment during your 10 years at GLAAD?
SKE: I would say creating the GLAAD Media Institute, because that has enabled us to scale our work in an unprecedented way and has increased our impact tremendously. The institute works as an adviser for Fortune 500 companies, all the major gaming companies and the major studios. We’re embedded in over a dozen Hollywood projects at any given time. Through the institute, we do a TV report and recently released our gaming report. So it’s a consultancy, a think tank and an advocacy arm on the ground, both local and globally, where we work with LGBTQ activists.
MCN: How about your biggest disappointment?
SKE: I think the backlash we’ve seen recently has been the biggest disappointment. When I started at GLAAD we didn’t have marriage equality yet, and pretty quickly after we were able to achieve that. To think that all of the accomplishments we had made in becoming a more equal, just and accepting society are now so fragile. How quickly they are being rolled back is my biggest disappointment.
(Editor’s note: Ellis later said she was referring to recent state legislation and local and federal court rulings she said were harmful to LGBTQ people and other diverse communities, including the overturning of Roe v. Wade, rulings on voting rights and more than 500 state-level anti-LGBTQ bills introduced last year, as well as to the group’s effort to mobilize to pass the federal Respect for Marriage Act after conservative Supreme Court justices signaled a potential rollback of rulings affirming the legality of same-sex marriage.)
MCN: What goals have you set for yourself and GLAAD in 2024?
SKE: We have some strategic initiatives set for next year. One of them has been really focusing on the gaming industry. No. 2 is our work on the election. We want to work through the media to make sure that it is accountable and to make sure that the candidates are being asked LGBTQ questions, and that any kind of LGBTQ conversations that come up are accurate and real and not misinformative. We also want to ensure that every LGBTQ person that’s eligible is registered to vote and has a plan to go to vote. We’ve been doing that work since 2018 and it’s been incredibly successful.
I would say third is making sure that trans stories are being told across the board. We’re on the ground now in Oklahoma where there was the beating death of a young, gender-nonconforming person named Nex. [Nex Benedict, a nonbinary 16-year-old student, died February 8 after they were beaten up in a women’s room at their high school in Owasso, Oklahoma, according to published reports.]
The negative forces against our community have grown and been emboldened, especially over the past six to seven years. The use of media platforms to distribute misinformation and disinformation about our community and targeting our community has led to an onslaught of anti-LGBTQ legislation that we’ve never seen the likes of. We want to make sure that Nex’s story is being told, and that the world sees the culture that’s being created by anti-LGBTQ activists and what it’s doing to our youth.
