Who are the highest earning LGBTQ+ players on stream TV?

By creammagazine, January 27, 2021

Stream television has provided avenues for a wide variety of characters to be portrayed by many members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Netflix and Stan, in particular, have become TV fixes during Covid times, and are both very big on inclusivity and diverse representation.

But which LGBTQ+ actors are on track to gaining the most stream-play and earning the big bucks?

In time to coincide with LGBTQ+ History Month, OnBuy.com studied the last year of Netflix’s streaming to ascertain the 20  highest earning LGBTQ+ actors on the channel.

Coming out on top is the star of Twilight and Charlie’s Angels, Kristen Stewart, with a whopping 70 million dollar net worth.

She is followed closely by RuPaul – who appears on Netflix overseas but on Stan in Australia – earning 60 million dollars for his hard, glitter-laden labour.

Ex-X-Files star Gillian Anderson comes in third with a net worth of 40 million dollars.

Last on the Top 20 list is MJ Rodriguez from Netflix’s 2020 hit show Pose, who has a reported net worth of 1 million dollars currently, however we predict even bigger things from Rodriguez in the future.

 

Which members of the community are the most successful?

Onbuy.com can reveal that three out of the top five earners are bisexual women, making them the top earners in 2020 with a combined net worth of 152 million dollars. This is compared to gay men whose combined net worth comes to 111 million dollars. See? The pink dollar is just as unstable as the normal dollar, folks.

Lesbians came in third place with a combined net worth of 55.5 million dollars, followed by the transgender community at 16.5 million dollars, and finally a motley crew dubbed ‘queer’ at 3 million dollars.

 

Where are they most successful?

LGBTQ+ actors earnt a combined 139 million dollars in films compared with a whopping 198.5 million dollars from TV shows, making the TV industry a more successful one so far for the LGBTQ+ community.

 

Which Netflix show is most inclusive?

The show on Netflix with the highest concentration of LGBTQ+ actors is Pose, with 140 trans actors and crew members and 35 non-trans LGBTQ+ characters. Indeed this is the highest number of any TV show in history.

Orange is the New Black comes in second with 17 LGBTQ+ actors and crew.

In third place is Ratched, with 11 LGBTQ+ actors and crew.

In order to work out if LGBTQ+ actors earn more in TV or Film, OnBuy took the top 20 earners (based on net worth) and researched the earnings for their most watched (in terms of viewing figures) projects. It then added up all the top earning films and top earning TV shows and found that the top earning LQBTQ+ actors on our list earned more from TV shows than they have from films.

Antonino Tati