The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s comprehensive recent report on the film and television industry offers unsettling statistics for how this form of violence has been allowed to happen. The gender breakdown for industry creators is between 75 and 78 percent male. Even bleaker, white directors make up about 90 percent of the power behind the camera. For films like “Stonewall” and “Tangerine,” where the stories belong to the queer, those of color and the female, the reins of the production continue to be handed to the vision of a majority that doesn’t identify.

There are two camps to the debate around narrative ownership. One argues that creators should only tell stories they can identify with, to avoid the possibility of irresponsible representation. The other contends that creators should be allowed to tell any story they see fit in the name of creative and artistic freedom. I fall into the second camp, with a caveat. I will never call creators to stop, but there is an urgent need to ask them to pause — to think and be critical of their sense of entitlement over experiences not their own. To fail in this regard is a form of violence against the people they claim to support.

Still, television and film creators continue to be given the resources to produce narratives they haven’t the means to comprehend. Last year, $17 million was given to a cisgender white gay director to tell the story of queer trans people of color at the Stonewall riots. When casting “Stonewall,” the director, Roland Emmerich, was adamant about the need for a “straight-acting” lead as an “easy in” for audiences. The result was not just an embarrassing, tone-deaf loss of profit for the studio, where uproar about whitewashing and trans-erasure on social media added insult to the injury of a meager opening weekend. But importantly, the production also reinforced the idea that those who are already invisible do not have the voice to tell their story or the agency to be their own subject.

Soon after the attack in Orlando, I went to the Stonewall Inn. Not to a vigil, just a moment in the day. I wanted to grieve, and I didn’t want to be alone. There were others there who had gathered to reflect on the occasion.

I arrived to find a small crowd, made up of what I soon gathered to be mostly straight observers, snapping photographs, whispering and occasionally shaking their heads, as if they were underscoring how tragic they knew these deaths to be. I wanted to tell them to leave.

But how could I blame them, when we’ve all been taught by popular films and successful television shows and 24-hour news that our tragedy is exciting fodder for consumption? I was tired with the fear of knowing that I cannot physically protect myself or the people I care for when we are targeted because of who we are. I was tired of knowing how vulnerable we are even in the midst of our joy. But I refuse to be lost to despair.