Gay TV and Straight America PDF Download

Author: Ron Becker
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813536898
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Drawing on political and cultural indicators to explain the sudden upsurge of gay material on prime-time network television in the 1990s, this book brings together analysis of relevant Supreme Court rulings, media coverage of gay rights battles, debates about multiculturalism, concerns over political correctness, and more.

Author: Samantha Allen
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316516015
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST A transgender reporter's "powerful, profoundly moving" narrative tour through the surprisingly vibrant queer communities sprouting up in red states (New York Times Book Review), offering a vision of a stronger, more humane America. Ten years ago, Samantha Allen was a suit-and-tie-wearing Mormon missionary. Now she's a GLAAD Award-winning journalist happily married to another woman. A lot in her life has changed, but what hasn't changed is her deep love of Red State America, and of queer people who stay in so-called "flyover country" rather than moving to the liberal coasts. In Real Queer America, Allen takes us on a cross-country road-trip stretching all the way from Provo, Utah to the Rio Grande Valley to the Bible Belt to the Deep South. Her motto for the trip: "Something gay every day." Making pit stops at drag shows, political rallies, and hubs of queer life across the heartland, she introduces us to scores of extraordinary LGBT people working for change, from the first openly transgender mayor in Texas history to the manager of the only queer night club in Bloomington, Indiana, and many more. Capturing profound cultural shifts underway in unexpected places and revealing a national network of chosen family fighting for a better world, Real Queer America is a treasure trove of uplifting stories and a much-needed source of hope and inspiration in these divided times.

Author: Marshall Kirk
Publisher: Plume Books
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
A compelling and compassionate work that never fails to stimulate. After the Ball is required reading for straights interested in understanding a minority that comprises 10% of the population and for gays who ar learning that the revolution is far from over.

Author: Linas Alsenas
Publisher: Amulet Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Milestones of gay and lesbian life in the United States are brought together in the first-ever nonfiction book on the topic published specifically for teens. Profusely illustrated with period photographs, first-person accounts offer insight as each chapter identifies an important era. From the Gay '20s to the Kinsey study, from the McCarthy witch hunts to the Beat generation, from Stonewall to disco, and from AIDS to gay marriage and families, this overview gives a balanced look at how queer men and women have lived, worked, played--and fought to overcome prejudice and discrimination--for the past 125 years.--From publisher description.

Author: Julia Himberg
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477313621
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Television conveys powerful messages about sexual identities, and popular shows such as Will & Grace, Ellen, Glee, Modern Family, and The Fosters are often credited with building support for gay rights, including marriage equality. At the same time, however, many dismiss TV’s portrayal of LGBT characters and issues as “gay for pay”—that is, apolitical and exploitative programming created simply for profit. In The New Gay for Pay, Julia Himberg moves beyond both of these positions to investigate the complex and multifaceted ways that television production participates in constructing sexuality, sexual identities and communities, and sexual politics. Himberg examines the production stories behind explicitly LGBT narratives and characters, studying how industry workers themselves negotiate processes of TV development, production, marketing, and distribution. She interviews workers whose views are rarely heard, including market researchers, public relations experts, media advocacy workers, political campaigners designing strategies for TV messaging, and corporate social responsibility department officers, as well as network executives and producers. Thoroughly analyzing their comments in the light of four key issues—visibility, advocacy, diversity, and equality—Himberg reveals how the practices and belief systems of industry workers generate the conceptions of LGBT sexuality and political change that are portrayed on television. This original approach complicates and broadens our notions about who makes media; how those practitioners operate within media conglomerates; and, perhaps most important, how they contribute to commonsense ideas about sexuality.

Author: Tison Pugh
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813591759
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom examines the evasive depictions of sexuality in domestic and family-friendly sitcoms. Tison Pugh charts the history of increasing sexual depiction in this genre while also unpacking how sitcoms use sexuality as a source of power, as a kind of camouflage, and as a foundation for family building. The book examines how queerness, at first latent, became a vibrant yet continually conflicted part of the family-sitcom tradition. Taking into account elements such as the casting of child actors, the use of and experimentation with plot traditions, the contradictory interpretive valences of comedy, and the subtle subversions of moral standards by writers and directors, Pugh points out how innocence and sexuality conflict on television. As older sitcoms often sit on a pedestal of nostalgia as representative of the Golden Age of the American Family, television history reveals a deeper, queerer vision of family bonds.

Author: Victoria E. Johnson
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814742920
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Winner of the 2009 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award The Midwest of popular imagination is a "Heartland" characterized by traditional cultural values and mass market dispositions. Whether cast positively —; as authentic, pastoral, populist, hardworking, and all-American—or negatively—as backward, narrow–minded, unsophisticated, conservative, and out-of-touch—the myth of the Heartland endures. Heartland TV examines the centrality of this myth to television's promotion and development, programming and marketing appeals, and public debates over the medium's and its audience's cultural worth. Victoria E. Johnson investigates how the "square" image of the heartland has been ritually recuperated on prime time television, from The Lawrence Welk Show in the 1950s, to documentary specials in the 1960s, to The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the 1970s, to Ellen in the 1990s. She also examines news specials on the Oklahoma City bombing to reveal how that city has been inscribed as the epitome of a timeless, pastoral heartland, and concludes with an analysis of network branding practices and appeals to an imagined "red state" audience. Johnson argues that non-white, queer, and urban culture is consistently erased from depictions of the Midwest in order to reinforce its "reassuring" image as white and straight. Through analyses of policy, industry discourse, and case studies of specific shows, Heartland TV exposes the cultural function of the Midwest as a site of national transference and disavowal with regard to race, sexuality, and citizenship ideals.

Author: Michael S. Sherry
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807885894
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Today it is widely recognized that gay men played a prominent role in defining the culture of mid-twentieth-century America, with such icons as Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Montgomery Clift, and Rock Hudson defining much of what seemed distinctly "American" on the stage and screen. Even though few gay artists were "out," their sexuality caused significant anxiety during a time of rampant antihomosexual attitudes. Michael Sherry offers a sophisticated analysis of the tension between the nation's simultaneous dependence on and fear of the cultural influence of gay artists. Sherry places conspiracy theories about the "homintern" (homosexual international) taking control and debasing American culture within the paranoia of the time that included anticommunism, anti-Semitism, and racism. Gay artists, he argues, helped shape a lyrical, often nationalist version of American modernism that served the nation's ambitions to create a cultural empire and win the Cold War. Their success made them valuable to the country's cultural empire but also exposed them to rising antigay sentiment voiced even at the highest levels of power (for example, by President Richard Nixon). Only late in the twentieth century, Sherry concludes, did suspicion slowly give way to an uneasy accommodation of gay artists' place in American life.

Author: Jonathan Ned Katz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022630762X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
“Heterosexuality,” assumed to denote a universal sexual and cultural norm, has been largely exempt from critical scrutiny. In this boldly original work, Jonathan Ned Katz challenges the common notion that the distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality has been a timeless one. Building on the history of medical terminology, he reveals that as late as 1923, the term “heterosexuality” referred to a "morbid sexual passion," and that its current usage emerged to legitimate men and women having sex for pleasure. Drawing on the works of Sigmund Freud, James Baldwin, Betty Friedan, and Michel Foucault, The Invention of Heterosexuality considers the effects of heterosexuality’s recently forged primacy on both scientific literature and popular culture. “Lively and provocative.”—Carol Tavris, New York Times Book Review “A valuable primer . . . misses no significant twists in sexual politics.”—Gary Indiana, Village Voice Literary Supplement “One of the most important—if not outright subversive—works to emerge from gay and lesbian studies in years.”—Mark Thompson, The Advocate

Author: Aniko Bodroghkozy
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118646053
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
Presented in a single volume, this engaging review reflects on the scholarship and the historical development of American broadcasting A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting comprehensively evaluates the vibrant history of American radio and television and reveals broadcasting’s influence on American history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With contributions from leading scholars on the topic, this wide-ranging anthology explores the impact of broadcasting on American culture, politics, and society from an historical perspective as well as the effect on our economic and social structures. The text’s original and accessibly-written essays offer explorations on a wealth of topics including the production of broadcast media, the evolution of various television and radio genres, the development of the broadcast ratings system, the rise of Spanish language broadcasting in the United States, broadcast activism, African Americans and broadcasting, 1950’s television, and much more. This essential resource: Presents a scholarly overview of the history of radio and television broadcasting and its influence on contemporary American history Contains original essays from leading academics in the field Examines the role of radio in the television era Discusses the evolution of regulations in radio and television Offers insight into the cultural influence of radio and television Analyzes canonical texts that helped shape the field Written for students and scholars of media studies and twentieth-century history, A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting is an essential and field-defining guide to the history and historiography of American broadcasting and its many cultural, societal, and political impacts.