From Nylon to Netflix: LGBTQ+ storyteller Gabrielle Korn on Trump, TV and tokenism

It didn’t seem like the most auspicious start. Gabrielle Korn became the fashion, culture and lifestyle publisher Nylon’s youngest ever editor-in-chief aged 28 in the midst of Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency.

As the brand’s digital director during his candidacy, she had been aiming to steer the brand’s content in the direction of inclusivity and diversity, but she had a job persuading the powers-that-be that Nylon needed to meet the situation head on, publishing politically charged content to engage its increasingly politicised readers. Once his ascent to the White House was confirmed in 2016, Korn’s calls to be more radical were finally validated.

“What happened in American media immediately after he was elected was that everybody realised at once that they could no longer get away with being apolitical,” she tells me over Zoom from her Brooklyn apartment. “For somebody like me, who had been trying really hard to make the media political, it was like, great! Okay! Now I don’t have to convince my bosses that this is the right thing to do.”

We’re chatting to discuss Korn’s debut book, Everybody (Else) Is Perfect, a smart and prescient series of essays that dissect what it is to be a lesbian in women’s lifestyle media, particularly in the click-based attention economy, where publications want to diversify their content, but not always their workforces. She writes about joining the young women-focused media company Refinery29 aged 23 as an out lesbian and feeling “very tokenised … and really responsible for answering everybody’s questions because I felt like if I didn’t, the queer stories wouldn’t get told.”

The book covers everything from Korn’s belief that “magazines pretend lesbians don’t exist” and her nebulous queer aesthetic to Trump’s presidency and the rise of white supremacy in America. Woven into the book is the dichotomy of being a gay woman, and therefore a minority, and yet also “just another skinny white girl that lived in New York City.”

“Historically, I just don’t think women’s magazines considered lesbians [to be] women,” Korn admits. “When they said ‘we’re women’s media’ what they meant to say was ‘we’re straight women’s media.’ There’s so much sexism and misogyny that goes into what people think about lesbians.”

Having grown tired of the hypocrisy – and the media working model of being overworked yet underpaid – Korn hung her editor-in-chief hat up in August 2020, before announcing that she had joined Netflix as the editorial and publishing lead at The Most, which is the streaming service’s home for LGBTQ+ storytelling on social media.

“The impact that you can have with TV and movies just feels so much greater than the impact you can have with articles,” she says.

The genesis of The Most can be traced back to June 2019 when, in conjunction with Pride month, Netflix launched Prism, an LGBTQ+ focussed campaign, whose goal was to present a “spectrum of LGBTQ+ stories.” As part of the campaign, Netflix established designated Prism social media channels, which celebrated the work of some of the streaming behemoth’s queer talent including Black trans actress and star of Orange is the New Black, Laverne Cox, and the Queer Eye quintet. Prism’s channels have since been rebranded as The Most, which today have a collective following just shy of 200,000 across both Instagram and Twitter.

Korn is only the second person to hold the position at Netflix, and everybody in her team is a member of the LGBTQ+ community. “You can’t legislate feelings, so although gay people have rights, that doesn’t mean that people feel comfortable with us. It just means legally they have to put up with us,” she says, frankly. “That’s why positive representation on TV is crucial.”

Indeed, according to a study about the influence of media role models on gay, lesbian and bisexual identity, self-esteem can be directly tied to an individual’s viewing experiences with content that mirrors their own development and lives. While in 2020, the media monitoring service GLAAD found that queer representation on TV had decreased from 10.2 per cent to 9.1 per cent, Netflix outstripped its competitors by having the highest number of LGBTQ+ regular and recurring characters on its original shows.

She can’t say much about the service’s inner workings, but across television, “there is so much more LGBT content now than there ever used to be,” Korn says. “Brands have started either creating sub-brands for the LGBT audience or they have started actually hiring queer people on staff and integrating the content.”

Where Korn takes issue with the proliferation of queer content, however, is with the “corporatisation of queer identities, for example, the fact that most brands try to sell things to gay people during Pride month.”

“There has to be a shift in the understanding of why brands and companies take part. Pride campaigns aren’t about elevating singers or actors, they need to be about reaching the young queer kids in small towns who have never seen anyone who looks like them. It is to save the lives of people who would otherwise have felt completely isolated and alone.”

She is, though, enthusiastic about some representation. Next month, Netflix will premiere its original comedy thriller I Care a Lot, starring Rosamund Pike as a lesbian con woman, Marla Grayson. Grayson is a mendacious and deceitful legal guardian who profits from tricking the elderly out of their homes and assets; Eiza González stars as Fran, her girlfriend, and conspirator. “It’s so unhinged and amazing and such fun queer representation because every single character in the movie is a bad guy and I feel like we so rarely get to see nuanced queer villains. Usually, it’s such a caricature,” Korn says.

Sarah Kate Ellis, the president of GLAAD, told the New York Times earlier this month that “representation matters more than ever as people turn to entertainment storytelling for connection and escape,” and characters who “do not reinforce harmful stereotypes.”

Korn agrees. “Empathy is what’s missing with a lot of storytelling, so seeing queer characters portrayed as whole people who are as complex and nuanced as everybody else is how we’re going to get there.”

I’m interested to know then, how, as a gay woman, she felt about the record-breaking Hulu Christmas film, Happiest Season - the first mainstream queer Christmas romantic comedy, which starred Kristen Stewart as a woman travelling to meet her girlfriend’s family for the first time at Christmas, only to discover that they think the two women are just roommates and have no idea their daughter is gay. “It was a movie for straight people to understand and have empathy for queer people at Christmas,” Korn says firmly. “I feel about Happiest Season the way I feel about Biden: so happy it exists but really can’t wait to do better.”

As she celebrates the launch of her first book and sets about penning her second, Korn remains resolute. “Lesbians go in and out of style, I feel like we’re cool again now for whatever reason, but I want to see sustainable representation. I just want queer women included in the category of ‘woman’ and to have it stay like that.”

Everybody (Else) Is Perfect by Gabrielle Korn is out now