Gay Media: Readers, Consumers, Citizens

In his study of the history of the first gay newspaper, The Advocate, Rodger Streitmatter suggests that it became the standard bearer for future gay and lesbian publications. He delineates three characteristics that made it particularly significant:

1. It gave the gay and lesbian community a “powerful voice…it did not limp apologetically onto the journalistic stage…it raised a defiant editorial voice that was strong and relentless.” (1993:456)
2. It helped articulate gay and lesbian values and norms. “By speaking in the lexicon of gay America and by publishing homoerotic images the Advocate served to legitimate and affirm gay values” (1993:457)
3. It helped the emerging gay movement by “serving as a cohesive force for a diverse readership….[it] served to galvanise individuals who previously had felt isolated in a society that was inhospitable to them” (1993:457).

He suggest that true to its name, The Advocate, practiced advocacy journalism and fulfilled a similar social role to newspapers and magazines established by African Americans and the women’s movement.  He argues that the influence of these presses extended far beyond their primary goals.

Scholars have suggested, for example, that the black newspapers created African-American role models and developed a sense of black fraternity; that the suffrage press served the movement by identifying leaders and allowing its ideology to be communicated to a much more diverse audience of women; and that the women’s liberation press of the 1960s in initiated an open forum for feminist ideas. (1993:451)

Although these similarities are often evoked in discussions of gay and lesbian media, as Rob Cover points out, there is at least one significant difference, which would suggest that gay and lesbian media are particularly important to gay and lesbian subjectivity formation. Ethnic or racial identities are generally – although not always – produced through family socialisation and affirmative identity formation often occurs from a very early age. Whereas “lesbian/gay media are frequently one of the first sites of discourse accessible which affirms any non-heteronormative articulations of desire” (Cover 2002:112).

However the social influence of gay and lesbian press has not always been read sympathetically. Much of the recent debate on the role of the gay press has centred around its commodification of gay and lesbian lives. This view is expressed at its most provocative in Mark Simpson’s (1996) collection of essays Anti-Gay, in which a number of British gay writers suggest that the early liberation slogan “gay is good” has been transformed into a market driven slogan “gay is goods”. The historic task of the gay community and gay publications to name, to make gay life visible has, they argue, deteriorated into a mere making of lists.

The listing impulse has nicely evolved into the material function of the gay press which is to advertise gay goods, services and performers. Complaints about poor quality of these goods are redundant – the act of discrimination and approval is in the naming of them as gay in the first place. Critical faculties must be suspended once the naming moment is over (except in terms of ‘how gay’ – i.e. how useful to the self justificatory project of gay). The reverse discourse has gone from political project to marketing strategy. The Great Gay (Shopping) List is the ‘gay community’. (Simpson 1996: xiv)

While Simpson suggests that commercial imperatives are prioritised by today’s gay/lesbian media, it is interesting to note that even in the early days of The Advocate, its clearly idealistic founder Dick Michaels was criticised for following both commercial and movement objectives (Streitmatter 1993:452).

In a theoretically more sophisticated argument Cover echoes some of Simpson’s concerns. He argues that because of their “‘first encounter’ dominance” as a resource for the performance of non-heteronormative subjectivities, the gay and lesbian press exercises a hegemonic effect. “Younger persons are compelled to identify with…the dominant ‘widely available’ discourses of non-heteronormative sexualities – that is, lesbian/gay culture as opposed to more marginalised sexual knowledges” (Cover 2002:110) such as bisexual/transgender/queer.

While Streitmatter’s analysis of the emergence of the gay and lesbian press, as indicated in his study of The Advocate, is both insightful and almost unwaveringly positive, he is less sympathetic or astute in his analysis of the emergence of commercially successful gay publications like Out, which launched in the early 1990s as a self-styled gay Vanity Fair.

Streitmatter concludes his book length study of gay and lesbian media with an opinionated critique of Out and similar publications. He writes:

Until a cure for AIDS is found, lesbians and gay men are allowed to serve in the military, federal law prevents employers from firing gay people because of their sexual orientation, and gay bashing is no longer running rampant across the country, it is difficult to applaud gay and lesbian journalism that concentrates on documenting the joys of owning a red damask love seat….By becoming mainstream in their editorial content, design and advertising, the gay glossies slipped away from the most fundamental purpose of a movement press: securing equal rights for their readers. (Streitmatter 1995:337)

There are several flaws in this argument. In judging Out against earlier news-oriented, movement publications he is comparing apples with oranges. This is like dismissing Vanity Fair or Details because it is not the New York Times. Secondly Streitmatter is unduly dismissive to imply that Out is only interested in red damask love seats. Thirdly he fails to take into account the diversity of gay and lesbian media currently being produced, no single publication has to bear the burden of pushing forward the fight for gay and lesbian equality. But most significantly he fails to take into account the changing nature of gay and lesbian cultures and politics and the increasingly complex ways that contemporary readers interact with both alternative and mainstream media in constructing identity.

In judging the global state of gay and lesbian journalism Out must be put alongside rigorously news oriented publications like gay and lesbian weeklies such as the Washington Blade. In judging ‘movement’ objectives one has to sift through the plethora of gay and lesbian political positions from national political lobbyists such as the Washington based Human Rights Fund through to the LA based media/entertainment industry oriented Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation through to the gay Republican group Log Cabin Republicans. To talk simply, as Streitmatter does, of a singular “movement press” belies the complexity of the contemporary lesbian and gay movement.

Others have seen the emergence of strongly commercial gay press in quite a different light. Larry Gross (2001) argues that the emergence of a strong gay and lesbian advertising niche is the “ultimate accolade.” Following media theorist Michael Schudson, Gross writes:

Advertising does not claim to depict life as it is but as it should be – life and lives worth emulating. Thus to be ignored by advertising is a powerful form of symbolic annihilation, but to be represented in the commercial universe is an important milestone on the road to full citizenship in the republic of consumerism. (Gross 2001:232)

Hamilton and Atton (2001) warn against a decontexualised “mediacentric” view of alternative media that relies on essentialist and/or vanguardist narratives. They argue for a more complex relational view that replaces:

an essentialist conception of social movements with one anchored in a materialist perspective, which reconceptualizes culture as not a simple expression of a social movement, but as the public, discursive activity by which it comes into being. (Hamilton and Atton 2001:124)

Simpson and Streitmatter exemplify such a “mediacentric” tendency, common to much that has been written about the gay press. On the one hand they reify the gay press as almost single-handledly producing the gay movement and then on the other hand critique its evolution without any concurrent engagement with the simultaneous changes in the gay movement and in mainstream society and media.

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)