How Heteronormative Media Hurts LGBTQ+ Survivors
LGBTQ+ survivors of domestic violence face unique barriers when it comes to leaving abusive relationships. Research shows many reasons for this, including: distrust/inaccess to professional services, relationship overlaps within queer communities, and biases within current DV infrastructure. One of the most alarming issues is that LGBTQ+ survivors often struggle to even name what they experience as abuse. Many dominant narratives about abuse frame it as a heterosexual experience, with highly gendered roles that do not reflect queer relationship dynamics. As such, LGBTQ+ people may struggle to identify themselves within these narratives.
According to “cultivation theory,” media has a profound influence on developing our world views. Particularly in the case of television, we are hand-fed images of what certain people and experiences look like. On one hand, this is a powerful way for humans to develop empathy by getting to "experience" situations they might not otherwise have experienced. This also allows viewers to see what the human toll of said experiences can look like. On the other hand, media can repeat certain images in unrealistic or nonrepresentative proportions.
In the case of domestic violence, one repeated media image is an exaggeratedly terrible male character using his strength to hit a meek woman. While this situation certainly does occur in real life, it is far from the only way domestic violence is enacted. The more that one specific view of DV is portrayed, the more they contribute to the larger culture’s idea of what abuse looks like. When LGBTQ+ people do not have examples of (un)healthy queer relationships in the media, they are at a disadvantage for understanding potential violence in their own relationships.
Common representations of heterosexual abuse often fail to include the wide-ranging types of abusive situations, particularly ones which specifically hinder the ability of queer folks to name their abuse. These areas include heterosexist conceptions about violence, concepts of victimhood, and sexual desire.
Heterosexist Violence & LGBTQ+ Survivors
Heterosexism presumes that heterosexuality is the default, seeing other sexualities and identities as breaking from that norm. Heterosexual narratives of abuse often center physical violence as “the” way that abuse occurs. Depictions of psychological abuse or other forms of coercive control typically come from a male partner who is also physically violent. The physical violence is then framed as the main abuse, whereas the psychological tactics are simply offshoots of that man’s violent personality. While multiple forms of abuse do often coincide in an abusive relationship, media tends to center relationships which include physical violence, making many feel as if physical violence is a requisite for a relationship to be abusive.
LGBTQ+ folks—like many marginalized groups—experience forms of abuse that are unique to their identities. Many of these forms of abuse stretch beyond the tactic of physical violence, making it crucial for them to be able to identify abuse which does not get physical. In particular, LGBTQ+ survivors often face high rates of financial and identity-based abuse. These abusive tactics can be more challenging to spot because they often coincide with financial and social burdens queer communities are already faced with.
Additionally, gender roles function differently in queer relationships than in heterosexual ones. This means that the violence they experience may look and feel different. For example, due to gendered stereotypes about women and femininity, lesbian relationships can be regarded as “softer,” “easier,” or more caring than heterosexual relationships. There can be an assumption that violence primarily comes from men, and therefore, there is less of a risk for violence in lesbian relationships. These stereotypes—again supported by lack of diverse media depictions—can make it deeply challenging to identify when abuse is being experienced.
The Perfect “Victim”
Both gendered and personality-based stereotypes about what a victim/survivor looks like have the potential to make abuse hard to name. Media narratives most often frame victims/survivors as damsels in distress—a term which assumes one is both feminine and passive. Scholarship often supports the connection of femininity, weakness, and victimhood. A 2025 study on LGBTQ+ survivors of domestic violence featured the story of one cisgender, gay man who did not label himself as “abused” because he had always thought of himself as capable and felt that “there was no reason he couldn’t handle” his partner’s financial and elder abuse “properly.” However, after hearing about the concept of emotional abuse, he came to realize that he was in fact vulnerable. Pervasive images of “weak” survivors, with some sort of supposed culpability in their abuse, had convinced him that he was not a victim, both because of his gender identity and strong self-perception.
Survivors do not look only one way, act one way, or have something inherently exploitable about them. This is a misconception fostered by popular media that consequently shifts blame to the individual survivor or individual relationship. Shifting this blame ignores the more complicated sociological issues at hand: What patriarchal structures position violence as an appropriate form of control? How does class impact people’s ability to escape abuse? How does one’s identity and their abuser’s identity impact their ability to be believed?
As outlined by our Survivor Anthology Project, there is no one way to experience abuse, and no single image of who a survivor can be. A survivor (or victim) can be anyone; it only requires a body that can be hurt or needs that can be exploited. Particularly for queer people, there are unique factors that increase their potential vulnerability to exploitative partners, such as losing the support of family and friends upon coming out. The more that media depictions can display nuanced experiences of abuse, the more opportunities LGBTQ+ individuals can have to understand their own relationships.
How Heteronormative Models of Consent Hurt LGBTQ+ Survivors
In a previous blog post about sexual coercion, we talked about media studies which found that women are consistently portrayed as having to resist sexual advances or play a long game of “hard to get.” In turn, men are consistently framed as the ones pursuing sex. Similarly, there is an entire brand of relationship/marriage jokes that center around women not wanting to have sex with their male partners, or otherwise reluctantly “giving in” to bad sex. One such example from broadcaster Andy Roony states, “A wife is a sex object. Every time you ask for sex, she objects.” In all these ways, media typically depicts sexual desire as something that is felt by men and as something that is acted upon by men, while women are the occasionally-willing participants.
Norms of consent and desire have formed around this heterosexist principle. Even in consensual sex, it is assumed that a man must obtain the verbal consent of his female partner, while the woman must only give consent—not necessarily obtain it. While this narrative is problematic in itself, it also provides unique obstacles for queer individuals who do not have this model of consent and desire to follow.
These incomplete narratives may be part of the reason why sexual coercion and sexual abuse were found to be the most reported kinds of coercive control amongst the LGBTQ+ community. Because queer pleasure, desire, and dynamics are not often included in general media or sex education, LGBTQ+ folks have less of a clear path to see what obtaining consent—or freely giving it—should look like. While queer individuals have a long history of creating alternate paths of education and resilience, they should not have to rely on self-led efforts alone.
Uplifting the Voices of LGBTQ+ Survivors
In recent years, there have been some efforts to show queer relationships to mass audiences. Popular TV shows like Heated Rivalry and Heartstopper include conversations about clear verbal consent, which are especially important for their young or inexperienced queer characters.
However, there has been less focus on LGBTQ+ abuse—possibly because of “stereotype threat,” which refers to the fear that one might confirm negative stereotypes about their marginalized group. Producers and writers looking to destigmatize sexual identities may not want to portray queer abuse due to fear of adding to offensive notions about queerness being unnatural or indicative of mental illness. This is also noted as a reason that individual LGBTQ+ survivors do not come forward about their own abuse—because they want to protect their community from unfair profiling.
It is important to have media which represents harm in a responsible way—not exaggerates it for entertainment but also not glosses over it. This is critical to informed, nuanced discussions of abuse in queer communities.
Here are our recommendations from our Survival & Beyond anthologies that touch on LGBTQ+ identities within abusive dynamics, all while still celebrating and uplifting queer voices:
Hold On
Marianne Winters discusses generational trauma through accounts of three female ancestors’ struggles. One of the grandmothers featured reveals to Marianne that she is also queer, providing a moment of connection for the two and emphasizing the fact that queerness has and always will exist.
a series of erasures
alec chaya transforms old sonnets written for, and pictures with, an abusive ex into pieces that are about, “rededicating time, space, and art for myself.” In a very visceral way, they “erase” the regrets about past relationships and reframe them as pieces which always contained hints of their self-love and self-acceptance.
Thinking/Wanting
Andrea Hampel addresses the ways in which they were misled by normative social narratives to live a life and accept kinds of love which they did not want. This includes them thinking they want to repair a relationship with an abusive partner, have a monogamous relationship, and many other misconceptions about what is truly right for them.
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