don't you think these numbers run pretty close to passing the gut check

no, not if you take a narrow scope of how you define what characters you code as straight because my gut tells me about 90% of all film roles involving speaking don't involve any hints of personal sexuality and my personal gut checks don't go lower than "few" which can't distinguish between 2% and .2%, my personal gut isn't so refined (setting aside the problems of getting a full grasp of the top 100 grossing films of the year when i've probably seen 15 of them...i'm betting i'm systematically missing some of them)

I mean, I kinda doubt your interest in the issue of representation at a more basic level, given the use of the phrase "representation games",

so you're assuming bad faith? well that's a sign we shouldn't continue. Also where did i actually dispute this "but I think it's pretty hard to argue that minority groups aren't marginalized in film." that's sort of feels strawmanny. My argument was this gap isn't nearly as big a deal as OP seems to suggest (due to the nature of the post), please confine yourself to that criticism instead of casting aspersions. No one is claiming the study mandates quotas so cut that crud out.

but I think an order of magnitude is a big enough difference to offset the difference in scale

i think it's fine to disagree with me on if this is a "horrible lack of coverage" but that doesn't make your initial example any less terrible, the "9% straight people" comparison just fails on its face.

and it's hard to find a good reason other than discrimination.

perhaps but the author of this piece seems to me to suggest another reason inadvertently (which i address in other comments) which suggests that the way to fix this is to include tertiary characters making dialogue identifying themselves as specifically gay (since sexuality can't be judged based on external appearance). What you need to set out is what the "expected number of gay speaking characters" should be absent that to get the "true disparity" which is going to be somewhat less. FYI that was what i was calling "representation games."

Your blindness analogy doesn't work because the argument isn't that "every statistically measurable variable in the population should be proportionally represented in film." It's that LGBT voices

so you're arguing the disabled don't face persistent discrimination? that may sound snarky but it's not the intent (well .01% of the intent), it's showing that you're personally rejecting what lots of people consider a legitimate case of minority grievance regarding cultural/social exclusion (It's almost like these categories are debatable...though you really shouldn't doubt disability as a protected minority status).

I don't think executive assistants or Methodists

But more importantly, it's what the people who finance films want to finance. And it's which writers and filmmakers are let inside the circle of people who get funding to make films.

I'm making multiple unrelated argument along side each other and one of them is "there is no reason to expect hollywood to mimic social reality" or if you want "if you think hollywood has a social responsibility in general the problem isn't simply about gay voices" I think we often don't go nearly far enough with this discourse with "hollywood" and representation and how the airbrushed version of America presented in theaters and on the silver screen is problematic on a million levels. We could get into this but given your comments i'm guessing that would potentially invite invectives i'm not interested in hearing. I would just point out that the type of argument you make naturally follows a sliding scale and "socio-political" goals is a term with a broad reach. One aspect of this question is "does culture matter, do "culture war" group and idea representations matter? Why limit your counterclaim to terms with no cultural baggage?

ex assistants

this comes up in another way, the nature of professions involved in films. are different from normal distribution of professions and if we want simply a representative sample of gay characters do we look at say % of people in those occupations who identify as LGBTQ or do we look simply at the general population numbers (or is there no difference? I must admit i've not dived deeply into this data). This seems a relevant question yet it's not one often asked.

think the number of LGBT characters in our filmic fiction is pretty close to the number of LGBT people out there in our lives?

shouldn't you refer to the gallup poll i cited? i don't want to beat the drum on our guts having systematic biases/being unreliable but national polling suggests the reference to guts is greatly unreliable.