Gay Media: Adapting to cultural change
The change from a fortnightly to a weekly schedule in 1995 brought with it a changed dynamic and an increasing emphasis on seeking out community news. An expanded staff and a vital group of contributors also contributed to this. Under the strong leadership of trained journalists, the SSO more than at any time in its prior history adopted the conventions of traditional journalism. As community organizations like the Mardi Gras and the AIDS Council turned into multimillion dollar enterprises the SSO paid even more attention to its important role of fourth estate watch-dog.
The final period, under my own editorship, has been a time of stability for the newspaper with both myself as editor and a number of key staff remaining in their positions for lengthy periods of four or more years. In the history of the Star this has been very unusual and indicates a more professionalised environment for working journalists. Changes in gay community and mainstream culture have led to changes in both the style and content of the SSO’s coverage. I will note only two of those changes.
The role and power of community organizations has declined significantly over those years, culminating in the financial collapse of Mardi Gras in 2002. This has meant that the paper’s bread and butter news has shifted away from the coverage of those expressions of community. Simultaneously the movement for gay and lesbian rights has taken on an increasingly national and international flavour with campaigns for same-sex marriage in places as diverse as Taiwan, France and the United States framing calls for similar relationship reform in Australia.
Coverage of cultural and media representations of gay men and lesbians have always been important for SSO but over the last two to three years the explosion of gay and lesbian images on television has pointed towards popular culture as an important frontier for contemporary gay politics.
This move towards the cultural and the global in both gay and lesbian politics and in SSO coverage is perhaps the biggest shift away from the original vision of the Star as a community noticeboard. But just as Michael Glynn argued that he knew there was a gay community because he saw it when he went out on Saturday night, many contemporary gay men and lesbians know there is a gay community because they have seen it on Will and Grace or The L Word.
In looking back at the “various Stars” of the paper’s first fifteen years Craig Johnston talks about a change in emphasis from “advocate (Michael Glynn’s Star) to chronicler (Larry Galbraith’s Star Observer) to critic (Campion Decent’s Sydney Star Observer)” (SSO 15 July 1994). Johnston’s types have a certain validity as characterisations of the Star under the three editors he names. However I think what is even more evident is that throughout its history the Star has moved backwards and forwards along the spectrum marked by those three words: advocate, chronicler, critic.
The success or otherwise of the various Stars can be measured in various ways but I would contend that it has made significant contributions in four separate areas: a) the development of the gay and lesbian community; b) the development of gay and lesbian journalism; c) assisting individuals in negotiating gay or lesbian identity and d) the definition and maintenance of a gay market.
The Star has, as the various debates surveyed here show, made an important contribution to the self-understanding and development of the Sydney gay and lesbian community and that community’s key institutions. This has occurred through both its role in community development and community critique.
Secondly the Star has been critical to the development of gay and lesbian journalists and gay and lesbian journalism. Many writers who received their first journalistic training at the Star have gone on to work in the mainstream press. To pick two very different examples, Ruth Pollard a staff journalist with the Star in the mid 90s, who specialised in reporting the HIV/AIDS epidemic, is now a health reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald and her colleague from that era Ben Widdicombe, an arts reporter, is now the gossip columnist for the New York Daily News. That the Star could help launch two such diverse careers is a tribute to both its diversity and professionalism.
Bernie Sheehan, the editor who oversaw the Star’s move to weekly publication in 1995, was poached to head the start-up of one of the first Australian city-based internet portals, Ninemsn’s Sydney Sidewalk. Although Sheehan was a journalist of considerable talent it was her helming of a diverse publication such as the Star with its mix of niche community news and serious arts and entertainment coverage that caught the eye of the portal developers. She took with her a number of the Star’s key contributors. Sheehan’s recruitment started a trend with the editor of a Melbourne gay and lesbian weekly becoming Sheehan’s counterpart in the start-up of Melbourne Sidewalk and her rival at Sydney’s other gay and lesbian weekly Capital Q leaving to become her internet competitor at Sydney City Search.
Apart from these individual success stories the Star has had an ongoing role as a source for mainstream coverage of gay and lesbian issues. Throughout its first decade the Star was a strident critic of the mainstream press, regularly running pieces deconstructing the mainstream media’s inaccurate or homophobic reportage. However in the 90s, with the mainstream press beginning to cover gay and lesbian issues more extensively, it becomes a key source. During her term Bernie Sheehan was a regular guest on ABC National’s afternoon drive-time program, summing-up what was in the Star that week.
The Star has managed to hold its own in the reporting of gay and lesbian issues, even in big stories that receive blanket coverage by the mainstream media. During the 2002 allegations against openly gay high court judge Justice Michael Kirby, which was front-page news nationally, elements of the Star’s coverage were quoted by both ABC and the Sydney Morning Herald.
The Star’s influence on individual lives is harder to document, but in a sense this follows logically from the other areas of influence I have just outlined. As I noted early in this article, gay identity, unlike other minority identities is not usually a product of family socialisation in the same way as say, ethnic identity. In fact gay identity most often emerges counter to family socialisation. Therefore points of entry, particularly media, which can provide a private space for initial contact and exploration, are uniquely important for gay men and lesbians who are ‘coming out’. The Star as a widely available access point to the various social and political institutions of the Sydney gay and lesbian community has undoubtedly been a critical prop in this coming out process for many Australian gays and lesbians.
Finally, although the Star did not single-handedly create a viable gay market it has always been a key player, from its GPC days to the current time, in the promotion of a gay and lesbian advertising market and commercial culture. Ironically, it is only because it was left out of the biggest commercial adventure in Australian gay publishing that it survives today.
In 1999 the Satellite Group, the world’s first ‘pink’ publicly listed company, took over all the weekly gay and lesbian publications apart from the SSO. Following the group’s spectacular crash in 2000 the Star remained the only weekly paper left standing. Even though it has chosen to define itself as a community owned not-for-individual-profit company, through its survival over 25 years it has become one of the commercial success stories of community publishing.
This commercial success should not be seen as separate to its other areas of achievement. As I have noted earlier in this article, there is a well-worn debate in the queer studies literature about the effects of commodification and consumerism on gay and lesbian culture generally and its print media specifically. Alan McKee (2002) has argued that it is unhelpful to frame this as a binary citizen/consumer conflict. He argues for a notion of “queer citizenship” or “queer nation” that is not just about individual/state relations, nor is it just a linguistically innocent replacement for “queer community”.
I would agree with McKee that rejection of gay ‘commodification’ is often more a question of aesthetics than economics or politics: “It is not commercialism per se that offend most of these writers: it is the fact that people choose the wrong kind of commodified culture” (2002:19). McKee writes:
It is important to lay claim to the term ‘citizenship’ for members of a Queer nation, rather than accepting that we are ‘only’ involved in identity politics or merely a community. According to the strict definition of citizenship we exist only as a lack. We are ‘not citizens’ – or perhaps more accurately and with an even more derogatory thrust, we are ‘not good citizens’. Our lack of engagement with the state appears as an absence, apathy, laziness, a failing. But what if we are still engaged with public spheres, with governance, with rules, with customs in other spheres – can this not be recognised as citizenship? (McKee 2002:20)
Similarly, Alexander Chasin recognises that “print capitalism generates equations between readers, consumers, and citizens” (2001:92). He sets the importance of the gay press in a context that recognises the gay market, alongside both gay movement and gay community as political and relational frameworks that produce what Anderson (1991) would call an imagined nationhood.
The national…gay community came into being through the imagined comradeship of gay men and lesbians reading an increasingly commercial gay press. In that press, gay men and lesbians read for news of the growth of the movement, they read for news of consumption opportunities that reinforced their belonging in the community, and they read vernacular language that helped delineate the boundaries of the community. (Chasin 2001:92)
The debates about community, inclusion, locality, journalism, and commerce that have played themselves out in the pages of the various Stars, and within their equally various boards of management, are examples of the vitality and complexity of the possibilities of such queer citizenship.
From: O’Donnell, M., 2004, “Star Wars: Patterns of change in community journalism at the Sydney Star Observer,” Australian Studies in Journalism, Issue 13 (DOWNLOAD PDF)
