A half century ago gay men and lesbians were all but invisible
in the media and, in turn, popular culture. With the lesbian and
gay liberation movement came a profoundly new sense of homosexual
community and empowerment and the emergence of gay people onto the
media's stage. And yet even as the mass media have been shifting
the terms of our public conversation toward a greater
acknowledgment of diversity, does the emerging "visibility" of gay
men and women do justice to the complexity and variety of their
experience? Or is gay identity manipulated and contrived by media
that are unwilling -- and perhaps unable -- to fully comprehend and
honor it?
While positive representations of gays and lesbians are a
cautious step in the right direction, media expert Larry Gross
argues that the entertainment and news media betray a lingering
inability to break free from proscribed limitations in order to
embrace the complex reality of gay identity. While noting major
advances, like the opening of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore --
the first gay bookstore in the country -- or the rise of The
Advocate from small newsletter to influential national paper, Gross
takes the measure of somewhat more ambiguous milestones, like the
first lesbian kiss on television or the first gay character in a
newspaper comic strip.
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