Gay men in media
Portrayals of lesbian women and gay men have continued to increase over the two decades since they were featured in popular shows like Will and Grace and Modern Family ; and these portrayals have and recently spread to shows for teenage audiences such as Glee and Teen Wolf. Beyond entertainment, the news media has also increasingly covered gay rights as such issues have become politicized. Media portrayals of new issues and previously marginalized people are an understudied dimension of the ways ideas, values, and principles are spread — transnationally as well as within countries.
In an increasingly interconnected world, we hypothesize that effects from virtual contacts through media exposure to portrayals of lesbian women and gay men should hold cross-nationally, depending on the national media outlets willingness to transmit portrayals.
We expect media effects to vary by age cohort since younger audiences in their impressionable years are more likely to have shifted their views in line with new information transmitted since the s.
Media portrayal of LGBT people
These audiences are less likely to have formed firm opinions about gay and lesbian people. In a cross-national, multi-level analysis of individual attitudes, our work demonstrates that both media pervasiveness and press freedom are related to more liberal attitudes among young people. However imperfect media portrayals of gay people may be — and however poor a substitute for personal contacts — the media does introduce new debates and new frames of reference about homosexuality across multiple domestic contexts.
They suggest that the effects of contacts with an outgroup involve more than just face-to-face interactions. Researchers, advocates, and policymakers, and producers should take into account how cultural contact through media can shape opinions and values, even across national borders. Television, film, radio and the Internet remain powerful socializing mechanisms through which younger generations come into contact with previously invisible minorities. In making our case, we do not wish to minimize the contributions of direct, interpersonal contacts to processes of attitude change.
Indeed, our data may show joint effects from media contacts and personal contacts. Another route for change may have occurred as new media portrayals increased the interpersonal visibility of gay and lesbian people and the likelihood that they would come out and openly reveal their identities to friends, neighbors, and co-workers. Importantly, we are not arguing that enhanced visibility generated by the media always improves the lived experiences of gay and lesbian people.
It depends on the context and exact media content. Media portrayals may arrive in contexts already somewhat open to gay and lesbian people, or in contexts where discrimination and hostility hold sway. In addition, given media portrayal can highlight more or less sensational or controversial aspects of gay life, and indeed often neglects the broad array of issues experienced by members of this diverse community.
The takeaway of our research is that as the liberalization of attitudes towards gays and lesbians has occurred in many countries across the globe since the s, change has been encouraged in part by communications climates — within and across nations — that allow for the free transmission of minority viewpoints.
Yet gaps in tolerance and freedom of expression remain between free countries and those that restrict the sharing of controversial content or minority viewpoints. How gay men and lesbians are represented in the media has been one of the most prolific areas of research and analysis within gay and lesbian studies as well as queer theory since the s. Although a relatively recent area of scholarship, this work is considered vital for a better understanding of how a modern gay and lesbian identity was shaped, reflected, and at times ignored by mainstream media.
For gay men and lesbians who comprise a type of invisible minority group that is rarely born into gay or lesbian families, communities, or support networks, the importance of mainstream media representations is considered paramount. Whereas early studies focused on the complete erasure of gay and lesbian identity and the simple caricatures and stereotypes that populated Hollywood films and to a lesser extent television and other media, more recently research has expanded.
New work considers how gay and lesbian audiences are able to reappropriate media images and how new genres and digital technologies are changing the relationships among producers, media texts, and audiences while creating more varied, if not necessarily more positive, representations of sexual minorities.
- best gay dating app in russia!
- Queer Representation in Film and Television | MediaSmarts.
- What is homophobia?!
- jack’d - gay chat & dating for pc!
Academic work on gays and lesbians in the media is inherently interdisciplinary, with studies coming from film historians, media theorists, communication scholars, sociologists, psychologists, and a host of other disciplinary and methodological traditions. This broad array of academic work is supplemented by a range of activist and popular accounts of the place of gay men and lesbians in the mainstream media.
Main navigation
Not surprisingly, much of the work in this area is critical of the mainstream media and argues that what few representations of sexual minorities do exist in the mainstream media are problematic and should be rectified. Several books and articles are considered canonical to better understanding how gay men and lesbians are represented in the media. These core texts take into account some of the earliest and most influential contributions to this area of study.
Some of the earliest work began with historical understandings of how images of gay men and lesbians were both formally and informally systematically excluded from media images. Work by pioneers in this field, including Larry Gross Gross and Woods , Gross , Richard Dyer Dyer , Dyer , and Vito Russo Russo , was considered groundbreaking and even taboo when first published. Whereas a precedent existed in media studies, with other minorities, including women and racial and ethnic minorities, beginning to examine critically the politics of representation, investigations into sexual minorities and media images were slower to emerge.
Part of this has to do with the lack of images available to critique not to mention the general hesitation to do research on a topic like homosexuality, which was still considered very controversial into the s. Some of the earliest work in the field, including Chesebro , came out of discussions in the Caucus on Gay and Lesbian Concerns now the Caucus on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Concerns , which officially formed within the National Communication Association in as a means of lobbying for the visibility of gay and lesbian studies and its practitioners within the communication discipline.
Since then some of the work in this field has been captured in wonderful edited volumes, such as Barnhurst and Duberman Barnhurst, Kevin G. Media q: New York: Peter Lang. This edited volume is a strong collection of essays from some of the most important thinkers in the area of gay men and lesbians in the media. The book covers a lot of terrain and serves as a strong overview of the topic. Chesebro, James W. Gay male and lesbian communication.
One of the earliest texts to move beyond a focus on homosexual behavior or scientific studies of homosexuality, this edited volume focuses on manifestations of homosexual identity and community. A section of the book is devoted to public images of the gay and lesbian community. Duberman, Martin, ed. Queer representations: Reading lives, reading cultures. New York Univ. Whereas most work on queer representations focuses on film, video, and television, this edited volume delves into some of the lesser-explored areas of representation of homosexuality, including literature and photography and the other visual arts.
Dyer, Richard, ed. Gays and film. New York Zoetrope. Originally published in Dyer, a British film theorist, is responsible for some of the earliest and best work on representations of gay men and lesbians in film.
The impact of "media contact" on attitudes toward gay men.
This volume is critical, as it argues for a special relationship between gays and the cinema that extends beyond simple representations. Dyer, Richard. Now you see it: Studies on lesbian and gay film.
- mike grey gay escort!
- gay men singles!
- Global information and education on HIV and AIDS.
- You are here!
- gay male top!
- best international dating apps!
As the title implies, this work examines some often-forgotten examples of lesbians and gays in film.