VisualGPS Creative Trends Culture Beyond Pride: Everyday LGBTQIA+ Narratives

Morning coffee. A shared laugh with friends. Getting ready for school, soothing a crying baby, the daily commute. These simple, universal moments form the fabric of life—familiar to nearly everyone, regardless of background. Yet, for many in the LGBTQIA+ community, seeing these everyday experiences authentically reflected remains rare. Despite making up more than 9% of the US population, a figure that has tripled since 2012,¹   they appear in less than 1% of popular visuals according to Getty Images' VisualGPS research.

Pride Month is a time to celebrate LGBTQIA+ identity and community, as well as a rare moment of heightened prominence as a campaignable focal point for many brands. But perhaps paradoxically, this lens risks flattening a vibrant spectrum of experiences into a single narrative.  Despite some progress,  portrayals in the marketplace still tend to default to limited views: Roughly 30% of LGBTQIA+ visuals focus on rainbow flags, protests, parades, or parties, while narrow stereotypes persist around gender presentation and age.² Too often, images show only couples in romantic contexts, rarely extending to families, friends, or the broader tapestry of daily life. This reductive approach fails to capture the diversity within the LGBTQIA+ community, which spans every age, background, faith, occupation, geography, personality, and personal style.

As part of the solution to this schism, over the past five years Getty Images has partnered with GLAAD to create an Inclusive LGBTQIA+ Visual Storytelling Collection and corresponding guidebook to provide brands, agencies, and media organizations worldwide with an expansive reservoir of visual content reflecting the true diversity and intersectionality of the LGBTQIA+ community.  This initiative aims to build visibility across all aspects of real, everyday lives, not just during Pride Month but year‑round.

Our research confirms that this authenticity resonates. When given the opportunity of choosing content from our LGBTQIA+ Collection, brands overwhelmingly focus on genuine human storytelling: 87% of visuals highlight individuals and personal vignettes rather than broader political or cultural issues.  It's clear that when provided the choice, brands are especially drawn to specific slice of life stories, with video narratives in particular offering a potent opportunity to reach consumers.  As an immersive, sensory‑driven  medium, video has the unique ability to bring viewers past the surface directly into tangible moments of lived experience, sparking genuine emotional connections. What we need is more of those visualizations out in the visual media ecosystem to help people see themselves represented as more than just tokens, and to foster empathy by exposing all viewers to lives different from their own.

In the current, charged cultural moment, conventional wisdom suggests a polarized, intolerant society where ‘inclusion’ of one identity is being argued to inherently ‘exclude’ someone else. Yet in a country as vast and diverse as the US, cultural contradictions are to be expected and in practice this diversity does not inevitably lead to conflict. In fact, our VisualGPS research reveals this nuanced reality of people's openness and curiosity to one another: In our most recent consumer survey, 54% of respondents say they’ve been inspired by social media’s ability to expose them to new or different points of view, while 42% feel inspired by ‘following others’ in their journeys or stories and seeing how they navigate life. 

Community does not have to mean ‘sameness.’ Indeed, thriving communities make space for opposition and difference; they are strengthened by individual variety and a fundamental belief in the possibility of mutual respect and coexistence. Imagery has the power to reinforce this potential as a rare window into ordinary human stories, carrying us as curious voyeurs beneath the thin veneer of stereotypes to reveal points of connection we might not ever have imagined.  Recognizing the shared humanity in ourselves and what we share with others in these simple, everyday moments then becomes, in fact, extraordinary.

Sources
[1] GALLUP
[2] LGBTQIA+ Inclusive Visual Storytelling Guidebook