The sexual revolution of the 1960s, that favorite target of the cultural right wing, was well under way before Dwight Eisenhower passed the torch to the new generation’s representative, John F. Kennedy. After two decades of depression and war, America in the 1950s was ripe for an explosion of hedonism. As the United States moved from a war to a peacetime economy (though not abandoning the Cold War alliance of government and defense industries), the celebration of consumerism became a central theme of American culture. In the words of market researcher Ernest Dichter, it was necessary to persuade the average American that “the hedonistic approach to his life is a moral, not an immoral one.”
The Kinsey reports on male (1948) and female (1953) sexuality might be seen as the curtain-raisers for a radically transformed public perspective on private behavior. The new gospel of consumerism found one its most effective prophets in Playboy, the magazine begun in December 1953 by Hugh Hefner. Playboy was an immediate success, promoting a lifestyle of sexual indulgence—for men—that was opposed to marriage, family, monogamy.1 Women, whose sexual independence—and availability—was increased by the arrival of the birth control pill, began to demand speaking roles in the morality tale unfolding on the public stage. By the mid-1960s Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan offered a tamer counterpart to Playboy and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had sparked the prairie fire of women’s liberation.
As the 1960s progressed there seemed to be fewer limits on what could be talked about, whether in the relative privacy of women’s consciousness-raising groups or on the public stages of rock concerts and political demonstrations. Thus, it was probably inevitable that the new openness would pierce the veil of gentility that cloaked the relatively new medium of television.
One of the earliest programming genres on television was the talk show, a relatively inexpensive way to fill much of the available screen time by scheduling guests with agendas to push and axes to grind. In the mid-1960s such high-minded, politically oriented talk show hosts as David Susskind (who famously, and controversially, hosted Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev) were joined by the edgier and more aggressive likes of Alan Burke and Joe Pyne, who would attack and insult their guests. At the other extreme were the polite, celebrity-oriented show hosts such as Mike Douglas, who would entertain daytime studio and home audiences of women. In 1967 a Columbus, Ohio, daytime host named Phil Donahue revolutionized the talk show, almost by accident, when he took the microphone out into the studio and brought the audience into the act. The response was immediate and irreversible—the audience was now part of the show—and Donahue, who relocated first to Chicago and then to New York, became the king of daytime television. Donahue rode the crest of the second wave of the sexual revolution, offering women a place at the media table, discussing topics previously reserved for men, or simply off-limits for public discussion. As Heaton and Wilson put it, The Phil Donahue Show afforded women “the opportunity to voice their opinions about everything from politics to sex, and even the politics of sex.”
Donahue’s arrival on the national media scene coincided with the emergence of the lesbian and gay liberation movement, and it wasn’t long before he opened his stage to people who had few if any opportunities to speak for themselves. Queer guests generally had to contend with hostile audiences, especially in the earlier years—by the mid-1980s Donahue had taken to asking, almost plaintively, why his audiences seemed so accepting of sexual nonconformity—and they generally found themselves being “explained” by experts. For a long time it seemed necessary to producers to “balance” gay guests with homophobes, often clergy or conservative medical professionals.2 But even in such circumstances, Donahue offered an unprecedented opportunity for sexual minorities to represent their own lives. In between the mantra of “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” repeated endlessly by fundamentalist audience members, and the sympathetic incomprehension of many middle-Americans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people took the stage to talk about coming out in high school, or as a married man, or as a grandmother; about being a gay parent or the child of a gay parent, or the parent of a gay child; about being a woman trapped in a man’s body or about the experience of transitioning from one bodily status to another. When the AIDS epidemic exploded in the early 1980s, Donahue, along with its more sensation-oriented rival Geraldo, offered one of the earliest national platforms for discussion and information on a topic the news media were inexcusably slow to address.
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s Donahue and his imitators continued to provide a steady stream of queer themes for increasingly sophisticated audiences. Donahue often said that if he was truly successful he would be replaced by a black woman and, of course, he was. Oprah Winfrey arrived on the talk show scene in 1986, and her more emotional, empathetic style quickly catapulted her to the top of the daytime ratings. For the next decade Oprah and Phil, joined by numerous others, injected multiple daily doses of public celebrity and private emotion into the nation’s bloodstream. In the mid-1990s the heated competition among nearly thirty syndicated talk shows, and the growing interest in attracting a younger demographic audience slice, was capped by the runaway success of Ricki Lake. Lake, who started in showbiz in John Waters’s sleaze-celebrating movies, opened the doors to a new style of daytime TV, abandoning the expert-oriented high-toned seriousness of Phil and Oprah, or even its more tabloid versions in Geraldo and Sally Jesse Raphael, in favor of rowdy audience engagement more reminiscent of professional wrestling. The final step toward what many critics decried as freak-show television came with the success of The Jerry Springer Show. Springer, a former Cincinnati politician and TV newsman, was a standard-issue Donahue imitator when his producers saw the writing on the studio wall and turned toward outrageousness, moving the show from “issues to relationships. We younged it up. We made it contemporary. And we raised the rating about 30 to 35 percent.”
The newer style of talk show quickly dominated the ratings, driving Donahue into retirement in 1996 and leaving Oprah as the undisputed queen of the high road. On the crowded low road, programmers recruited guests with on-air 800-numbers, filling their schedule with squabbling family members and current or former lovers. These programs typically scheduled many more guests than was standard on Phil or Oprah—producers were always worried, and often rightly so, that guests would back out, so they overbooked—and frequently they added lesbian, gay, and bisexual guests into the mix, without identifying the program as gay-themed. This form of mainstreaming—gay teens could also squabble with their parents, siblings, and former lovers, just like anyone else—reflected and perhaps encouraged a kind of tacit acceptance of queerness on the part of studio and home audiences.
In the late 1990s it became clear that audiences were more hostile to bisexuals than to gay or lesbian guests, because bisexuals seem either confused or unfaithful. Studio audiences apparently have learned the lessons taught so long by Phil and Oprah, and accept gay people as a fact of life—the liberal talk show hosts are quite stubbornly devoted to the position that “gays are born, not made”—but bisexuals are infuriatingly indecisive. Bisexuals are also seen as promiscuous, by definition, and condemned for this in a way that gays and lesbians are not. But if bisexuals strain audiences’ newly acquired sophistication, transgendered people arouse endless fascination and evoke mixed emotional responses. TV talk shows have been obsessed with topics concerning transsexualism since the early 1980s, when cross-dressing was considered a fairly daring topic—Phil Donahue never tired of congratulating himself for wearing a skirt on a 1988 program—and there is probably no topic more alluring to programmers. As Joshua Gamson has noted, these programs, for all their sensationalism and insult-tossing on stage and from the audience, “turn out to be gound-level versions of high-academic theories of gender ‘performativity’ and gender construction.” For activists the talk shows offer an opportunity to reach people who might never otherwise encounter a gay or transgendered person speaking about their lives, and they are, therefore, often willing to put up with hostile audiences and sanctimonious hosts. Trans-activist Angela Gardner described her experience on the Mort Downey Jr. Show as “a root canal without the anasthetic.” But, she added, “we got more membership response from that show than anything we ever did. … From all over the country we were getting phone calls for information.”
One format favored by the new crop of talk shows invites guests to meet someone who harbors a “secret crush” on them. After the person with the crush tells the host and audience about their fantasy—while we see the object of desire sitting backstage—the “star” is brought out and we see his or her face as they see who it is who has the crush on them. This is a format used by Ricki Lake, Jerry Springer, and Jenny Jones, among others, and they mixed gay and straight crushers and crushees. On one Jenny Jones “secret crush” program from 1994, a straight-identified man reveals a crush on his straight best friend, who responds with interest, saying that he’s “try-sexual—I’ll try anything once.” The two men’s mutual sexual interest is then seen, and raised, by the crush-holder’s girlfriend, who reveals her desire for a “three-way” with both men: after all, men always fantasize about having two women at once, so why shouldn’t she have two men? A woman in the audience jumps up and cheers, “You go, girl!”
In 1995 a Jenny Jones “secret crush” program confronted Jonathan Schmitz with acquaintance Scott Amedure’s secret lust, and he was clearly not interested in reciprocating. A few days later, back home in Michigan, Schmitz bought a shotgun and killed Amedure—the episode was never aired. The murder led to an outpouring of public condemnation of the Jenny Jones program and “trash TV” in general, but the truth was more complicated. It did appear that Schmitz had been misled by the producers into thinking his secret admirer was a woman, and he clearly felt humiliated by the public revelation that he was desired by another man. Yet these are hardly grounds for murder—despite the longtime appeal to judges and juries of the now generally discredited “homosexual panic” defense—and Schmitz was convicted of second-degree murder (his “public humiliation” defense apparently saved him from a first-degree conviction). The family of the victim, Scott Amedure, sued Warner Brothers, owner of the Jenny Jones show, claiming that they were negligent in not realizing that Schmitz was mentally unstable and that publicly confronting him with a homosexual admirer risked a violent outcome. Despite programmers’ claims that they had not misled Schmitz, and Jones’s testimony that she knew practically nothing whatever about how her own show was put together, the jury sided with the plaintiff’s argument that “the Jenny Jones show and what it does to people is unsafe at any speed,” and awarded the family more than $25 million in damages. As the judgment against Warner Brothers wound its way through the lengthy appeals process, pundits piled more criticism on “trash TV,” and talk show excesses were briefly reined in. But as the memory of the murder and the law suit faded, the ratings once more took precedence over moralism. The race for the bottom resumed.
The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) was mandated by Congress to fulfill a mission first stated by a 1967 Carnegie Commission report, to “help us see America whole, in all its diversity” and “provide a voice for groups in the community that might otherwise be unheard.” In adopting (some of) the recommendations of the Carnegie Commission and establishing PBS, Congress failed to specify the term “public” beyond its being “noncommercial,” thus leaving open the question of “what is public about public television.”
In 1988 the U.S. Congress created the Independent Television Service (ITVS), mandated to “develop, produce and package independent work that addresses the needs of underserved communities,” and in the same year PBS launched the series P.O.V. (for Point of View) in order to “provide visibility and support for compelling personal visions of nonfiction film and video producers.” P.O.V. stood out within the framework of American broadcasting, even PBS, by virtue of the intention—built into its name—to show documentaries that openly reflected the views of their makers, avoiding the familiar trappings of “objectivity” and proclaimed neutrality. In the words of the series’“Call for Entries,” it sought “films made because the filmmaker had something to say—to a large audience—in his or her own way.” The series was an immediate success, showing films such as Gates of Heaven by Errol Morris, about a pet cemetery, and Twinsburg, OH: Some Kind of Weird Twin Thing by Sue Marcoux, about an annual twins convention. Things heated up quite a bit when the series scheduled Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied to air on July 16, 1991.
Marlon Riggs had not expected Tongues Untied to air on PBS, despite his 1987 Emmy Award–winning film Ethnic Notions, because he didn’t think “TV would have the courage to show” a film that openly explored the experiences of black gay men. Still, P.O. V. decided to schedule the film, which had won awards at fourteen international film festivals and had already been shown on the BBC and on public broadcasting stations in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. But how would it play in Peoria? As it turned out, P.O.V. was stepping into the middle of a cultural war that was already raging in the United States—a war that was being fought over control of the public sphere.
As the 1980s drew to a close, the right wing had shifted the focus of the political counterrevolution they were mounting against the gains of minorities and women to encompass the domain of elite culture. Although the political struggles of the 1980s had often been fought on the field of culture, it was the lowlands of mass and even marginal media—commercial television, rock and roll, pornography—that drew the attention of moral enforcers. Signaling the opening of a new front, right-wing columnist and frequent presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan called for “a cultural revolution in the ’90s as sweeping as the political revolution in the ’80s.” In terms that feminist writer Carole Vance analogized to Nazi cultural metaphors, Buchanan warned that, “Just as a poisoned land will yield up poisonous fruits, so a polluted culture, left to fester and stink, can destroy a nation’s soul.” In the ensuing skirmishes the forces of counterrevolution laid siege to art and public broadcasting agencies that dared to exhibit the work of uppity gays and blacks.
Most notorious was the series of attacks in 1989 on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for funding arts programs that included Andres Serrano’s photograph, “Piss Christ,” and Robert Mapplethorpe’s explicitly sexual photographs of gay men. Capitalizing on the momentum built up by the attacks on “Piss Christ” and by the Corcoran Gallery’s (Washington, D.C.) craven cancellation of the Mapplethorpe show scheduled for July 1989, Jesse Helms successfully passed an amendment to severely curtail the funding options of the NEA. The Helms amendment was eventually “compromised” in House-Senate conference, and opponents had to pretend that they achieved a victory by whittling down Helms’s wording to a ban of NEA funding for anything that would be considered obscene under current Supreme Court rulings. The larger impact extended beyond the precise wording of the legislation, as it achieved its intended effect by confusing and intimidating cultural institutions.
Although Tongues Untied had received no direct funding from the NEA, and of its entire $175,000 budget, only $5,000 could be seen as indirectly derived from the NEA (through the Rocky Mountain Film Center), its appearance on the P.O.V. schedule drew the series into the fray. Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association (AFA) attacked the film, P.O.V., and the NEA. Wildmon issued a release claiming that PBS stations “are showing an inordinately high number of programs dealing with homosexuality,” and recommended that viewers first protest the screening to their local PBS stations and then be sure to watch it “to see for themselves how their tax dollars are being spent.” The AFA was joined in the attack by Pat Robertson and his Christian Coalition. On July 3, Robertson’s TV show, the 700 Club, ran a report on Riggs that began, “He’s black, he’s homosexual, he’s got AIDS, and he could be this summer’s version of the Mapplethorpe controversy.” P.O.V. later estimated that nearly two-thirds of the 284 stations that normally carry the series declined to air Tongues Untied, an unusually high number of cancellations that included many of the nation’s largest markets. But the story didn’t end there.
Shortly after the Tongues Untied screening, P.O.V. canceled its planned broadcast of Stop the Church, a film about ACT UP’s 1989 demonstration at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City protesting Cardinal O’Connor and the Catholic Church’s positions on AIDS. The schedule for the broadcast had been set months before, but suddenly PBS executives discovered that the film “crossed the line of being responsible programming into being ridicule.” P.O.V. president David Davis felt that, after the recent problems with the Riggs film, it would be “irresponsible, with as little notice, to expect stations to handle the level of press interest and viewer response Stop the Church is likely to generate.” As journalism historian James Ledbetter commented, this may have been the first time in television history that a program was canceled because viewers might have been too interested in it.
In the winter of 1992, as Patrick Buchanan challenged President Bush for the Republican presidential nomination, he ran a television commercial that featured scenes from Tongues Untied with the following text narrated and superimposed on images of leather-clad white gay men: “In the last three years the Bush administration has invested our tax dollars in pornographic and blasphemous art too shocking to show. This so called art has glorified homosexuality, exploited children, and perverted the image of Jesus Christ. Even after good people protested, Bush continued to fund this kind of art.”
Shortly after Buchanan began airing the ads, NEA chair John Frohnmayer was told to resign, and the reverberations continued to feed the right wing’s criticisms of the NEA and PBS. The pattern was repeated on several later occasions when public television broadcast programming that addressed lesbian and gay concerns. When a public TV station in New York scheduled a new lesbian/gay TV series, In the Life, then-senator (and later presidential candidate) Bob Dole took to the Senate floor to denounce the program, which he had never seen—it had yet to be aired—falsely asserting that it had been produced with taxpayers’ money (the funds were raised privately)—as if lesbian and gay citizens did not pay taxes. Dole sarcastically described PBS “apologists [who] are hiding behind Big Bird, Mister Rogers, and Muster-piece Theatre, laying down their quality smokescreen while they shovel out funding for gay and lesbian shows, all those doom and gloom reports about what is wrong with America, and all the liberal cheerleading we see on public television” (Congressional Record, 6/12/92).
In the fall of 1992 the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Media issued a study of public television that countered right-wing claims of liberal bias and “pro-homosexual” bias. After examining the types of people who appear as sources in a wide range of public TV programs (1,644 sources, appearing in 423 segments in 114 programs, such as the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour), the researchers could not find a single representative of a gay or lesbian organization.
In 1997 P.O. V. and PBS struck again, refusing to air Out at Work, a documentary illustrating workplace discrimination through the stories of three lesbian and gay workers.3 PBS claimed that 23 percent of the film’s $65,000 financing was problematic because it was derived from labor unions and the lesbian Astrea Foundation. PBS executive Sandra Heberer explained, somewhat contradictorily, that “PBS guidelines prohibit funding that might lead to an assumption that individual underwriters might have exercised editorial control over program content—even if, as it is clear in this case, those underwriters did not.” What she did not explain, however, was why PBS was not similarly disturbed when the New York Times funded a documentary on its history, or when PBS’s money series are underwritten by insurance and financial corporations, and the flagship News Hour program is underwritten by such corporate giants as Archer Daniels Midland and Citicorp.
When PBS scheduled a BBC production of gay author David Leavitt’s The Lost Language of Cranes as part of the Great Performances series in June 1992, the gay themes set off a predictable outcry from the right, and the Texaco Oil Company withdrew its corporate sponsorship from the PBS series. In January 1994, PBS’s American Playhouse series scored its biggest ratings success with the six-hour miniseries Tales of the City, coproduced by Channel Four. The story, based on gay author Armistead Maupin’s popular serial-novel about San Francisco, impressed most viewers by faithfully capturing the flavor of the original. It also included two man-to-man kisses, one fairly romantic and viewed from the side without one man’s head blocking our view.4 Reverend Wildmon was also attracted to the series, and in March he sent every member of Congress a “12-minutes bootleg videotape darkly highlighting the series’ four-letter words, fleeting nudity, pot-smoking and one prolonged gay kiss.” The American Family Association’s March “Action! Page” mailing was headlined “Your Tax Dollars Used to Air Pornographic, Profane, Homosexual TV Series.” While listing several programs that “presented homosexuality in a very favorable light,” it mostly focused on Tales of the City: “Those are your tax dollars PBS used to air this pro-homosexual propaganda. And it’s our Judeo-Christian values PBS continues to attack and defame. … PBS can rightly be called the Homosexual Pride Taxpayer-Funded TV Network.” The Georgia State Senate passed a resolution directing the local public TV station to cease airing Tales of the City and never air it again. Within a few weeks PBS announced that it was abandoning plans to coproduce a sequel for which the scripts had already been completed, and the budget for American Playhouse was cut by two thirds.
More Tales of the City did make it to U.S. television screens in June 1998 but not to public television. The cable channel Showtime replaced PBS as producer of the series, and Maupin happily noted that “cable allows you the opportunity to tell grown-up stories without restrictions.” Reviewing the sequel in the New York Times, gay novelist Stephen McCauley was relieved: “Fortunately, Showtime has increased the casual drug use and made the nudity less fleeting, and the same-sex relationships happier and more passionate.”
The growing willingness of cable channels to tackle projects considered too controversial for pubic television has raised serious questions about the need for public television now that movie channels, Art & Entertainment, Discovery, the Learning Channel, Bravo, etc., have taken over much of the territory previously monopolized by PBS. As most Americans enter the promised 500-channel cable environment, it will become more difficult to defend the need for a PBS that, in critic James Ledbetter’s words, “is engaged in duplicating, in content and in form, benign programming that most American television viewers already watch elsewhere.” If public television is to live up to the vision of its creators by providing a voice for groups in the community that might otherwise be unheard, it will have to find the courage to withstand criticism, and even to court rather than avoid controversy.
In 1995 the Independent Television Service (ITVS) presented a four-part series, The Question of Equality, in keeping with ITVS’s congressional mandate “to develop, produce and package independent work that addresses the needs of underserved communities.” The series, timed to air on public television stations during October’s National Lesbian and Gay History Month, included programs on Stonewall and its immediate aftermath; the political culture wars of the early 1990s and the fight over Oregon’s antigay Ballot Measure 9 (the measure lost); anti-lesbian and gay discrimination in the military and the flaws in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy; and the experiences of openly lesbian and gay teenagers. The series was well received—the Los Angeles Times referred to it as an “epochal … television breakthrough”—and it demonstrated the continuing potential of public television to serve as a venue hospitable to minority perspectives. Beginning with Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives and later with Before Stonewall, Silent Pioneers, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, Coming Out Under Fire, License to Kill, and After Stonewall, public television has provided the only (relatively) nationwide exposure for documentaries in which lesbian and gay people tell their own stories and trace their own history.
The public square represented by public television, however eroded by cable-carried competition and however challenged by right-wing campaigns, remains an important sector of the cultural landscape. Lesbian and gay people continue to make claims on this public resource, and the struggle for access to the public airwaves remains an important site of struggle for equality.
In the spring of 1999 the issue was joined again when San Francisco’s KQED stepped in after PBS declined to distribute It’s Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School by Oscar-winning documentarian Debra Chasnoff. The film focuses on ways of introducing children to issues of diversity and acceptance of lesbian and gay people, showing what Chasnoff termed “age appropriate” lessons taking place in first-through eighth-grade classrooms across the country.
The film opens with Sen. Robert Smith (R-NH) protesting gay and lesbian “filth” in the schools, waving documents and warning about such “trash” as a symptom of moral decay, thundering, “You wonder what’s wrong with America?” The film cuts to a third-grade classroom, where the children are discussing the same topic, and one small boy asks, “Who, like, really cares if you’re gay? It’s like barely nobody knows in the world. It’s, like, what’s the big whoop?” Of course, for Senator Smith and his allies, the big whoop is precisely the lack of hysteria that characterizes the classroom discussions shown in the film. It’s Elementary shows these students neither revulsed nor signing up to march in Gay Pride parades—but curious and matter-of-fact. In perhaps the first film ever to explore children’s reactions so thoroughly, the contrast between venomous adults and tolerant children is startling.
The armies of counterrevolution were quick to mobilize against the broadcasting of It’s Elementary. Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association rushed out a fund-raising letter, decrying the “pro-homosexuality bombshell fired into our children’s elementary schools,” and Beverly LaHaye of Concerned Women for America, in her fund-raising letter, called the film a “major new effort to recruit innocent children into the tragically destructive homosexual lifestyle.” A more recent arrival on the cultural battlefield, conservative radio counselor Dr. Laura Schlessinger, made the film a major target, calling it an “agenda piece” that teaches kids that gay is okay. “I think pedophilia is next,” she warned her listeners.
The film was ultimately broadcast by approximately 100 out of 347 public television stations nationwide. Some stations responded to protests by following the broadcast with a counter-video, Suffer the Children, produced by Wildmon’s American Family Association. As program director Brad Fay of KIXE in Chico-Redding, California, explained to the San Francisco Examiner: “It’s terrible. It’s a rebuttal nonetheless. I feel if there’s this much controversy, the more you can educate people the better—even if it is a right-wing reactionary view.” In contrast, Leta Powell Drake, program director for Nebraska Education Television, said, “Part of our mission is to educate our viewers, and even sometimes challenge them. You wonder about this deep-rooted hatred for people who are different—where does that come from?”
Lesbian archivist Joan Nestle cites the recollections of a lesbian musician about the Moody Garden Gang, a butch-femme working-class lesbian community centered around a bar in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1950s:
It was our Mecca, we were family, and we had found a home. … So many of the kids ask what’s so special about Moody Gardens. To us it was our world, a small world, yes, but if you were starving you didn’t refuse a slice of bread, and we were starving just for the feeling of having others around us. We were kings of the hill. We were the Moody Gardens. … If there hadn’t been little Moody Gardens all over the world, we wouldn’t even be allowed to get together as we do today and feel, in a small way, we are being accepted and we are not alone.
The gay community in the decades before Stonewall came together in the restricted and vulnerable spaces of the bars and baths in order, in Nestle’s words, “to breathe the life we could not anywhere else.” The bars were also the crucibles of resistance that eventually exploded into riots, first in Los Angeles and then, famously, at the Stonewall. Gathered in the smoke-filled dimly lit bars, gay lives fantasized to the soundtrack provided by jukebox selections. Gay men famously idolized Judy Garland, identifying with her survivor’s grit and determination, and a long-lived myth attributes the Stonewall riots to the emotional fervor created by Judy Garland’s funeral earlier that day.5
In the euphoria of the post-Stonewall period the Gay Activists Alliance’s first gathering spot was a former firehouse in SoHo, where Saturday night dances drew enormous crowds, offering the movement’s young recruits a revolution they could dance to. These were heady times, as men danced with men and women danced with women in large, loud spaces that were neither owned by the Mafia nor raided by the police.
The decade of the 1970s witnessed the birth and diffusion of a visible, unmistakably eroticized gay male culture, and its heart beat with a disco pulse. Even before Stonewall, gay disk jockeys and impresarios were creating the late-night dance venues that gave birth to disco, and by the early 1970s disco clubs were springing up everywhere, Dionysiac pleasure palaces for the newly liberated urban gay male. Very likely as an unconscious tribute to the power of gay male sexual energy represented by disco, the early 1970s witnessed the odd phenomenon of pseudo-gay Glam Rock in Britain, where David Bowie “came out” as gay—or bisexual—in a perversely successful attention-grabbing career move. Bowie’s ambiguous forays into sexual perversity raised his public profile and made him a hero to many gays—the Gay News of London saw him as a “potent spokesman” for gay rock. Even his critics, such as John Gill, acknowledge that Bowie’s “clever (if ultimately meaningless) packaging of sexual outrage created a safe space where many of us, gay, bi or straight, could play out games and experiment with difference,” much as The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s late-night screenings functioned for many young people around the same time.6
If David Bowie and fellow faux-queer Glam rockers Marc Bolan, Brian Eno, and Lou Reed were hitching a ride on the notoriety of gay sexuality, others were engaged in hijacking the energy of disco for resale to straight audiences. The hit movie Saturday Night Fever (1977) translated disco to a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood where John Travolta’s Tony Manero ruled the dance floor and gay men were hassled on the basketball court. Studio 54 became the most glamorous dance club in the country, attracting straight and closeted gay glitterati, along with hordes of wannabes crowding the ropes and hoping the doorman would smile on them. Impresario Jacques Morali recruited a band-full of gay stereotypes to become the Village People, whose barely disguised gay anthems managed to fly under America’s radar screens.
But even voguish and disguised, disco was clearly not territory in which straight white males felt at home. Disco has been described as “an extended conversation between black female divas and gay men” (and even, in the case of Sylvester, a black male diva), and thus straight white men rightly felt that they were being decentered. By the late 1970s the backlash against disco had become unmistakable, as “Disco Sucks!” became the war cry of the angry white male, and disk jockeys organized disco demolition rallies. By the dawn of the 1980s, Reagan was in the White House, rumors of a “gay cancer” were beginning to surface, and disco was all but dead.
If disco was the soundtrack for gay male culture of the 1970s, it wasn’t the only flowering of queer music in those heady days. Lesbian musicians were creating their own musical world, inspired by the twin passions of feminism and lesbian liberation. Alix Dobkin was a folk singer who grew up in the world of leftist causes, and when she came out as a lesbian feminist she began writing songs that reflected her new identity: “I was bowled over that whatever I wrote about being a lesbian was going to be utterly original and unique.” It wasn’t only her songs that were original; she also pioneered self-production and distribution, pressing copies of her first album, Lavender Jane Loves Women, and selling them through classified ads in feminist publications, at concerts, and at the important and influential Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival that, since the mid-seventies, has brought together thousands of women each summer. Dobkin’s example was soon followed by Holly Near and her Redwood Records, and Olivia Records, whose album The Changer and the Changed, by Meg Williamson, eventually sold over a quarter of a million copies.7 The Michigan festival became a platform for launching other lesbian and bisexual musicians, as such varied performers as Janis Ian (in her new, lesbian persona), Tracy Chapman, Michelle Shocked, Two Nice Girls, the Indigo Girls, Ferron, and Melissa Etheridge benefited from the exposure it provided.
The popular music scene in the United States was transformed in the early 1980s with the arrival of MTV, which quickly took on a role hitherto only approached by American Bandstand as a national forum for launching trends and careers. MTV’s visual energy and production values greatly amplified the reach and power of newly emerging talents, and turned media-savvy performers such as Michael Jackson (who “broke” MTV’s color barrier) and Madonna into true superstars. MTV was shrewdly in touch with the youthful audiences whose tastes it was molding as well as reflecting, first promoting a new crop of British bands and later providing the bridge that hip-hop traveled from the urban ghettos to the white suburbs.
MTV was a vehicle for sexually ambiguous singers making their (often tortuous) way out of the closet: Elton John, the only one among the original Glam Rock bisexuals who finally landed on gay; Boy George, who never really fooled anyone, but dithered for a while; the Pet Shop Boys and R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, who stayed coy longer than was really necessary; and George Michael, who waited until he was entrapped in a Beverly Hills rest-room to tell us what we already knew. And then there were the polymorphously perverse, such as Madonna and Prince, who kept the sexual lines blurred without ever quite crossing over into queer (Madonna told a concert audience in 1994 that she was a gay man trapped inside a woman’s body). MTV has also hosted gay-inclusive nonmusical content, such as the Real World series and the more recent college dorm serial-soap, Undressed, which includes both lesbian and gay characters among its perpetually sexually active cast. Yet, lest anyone mistake MTV for entirely gay-friendly territory, it also provided a platform for the homophobic and misogynist posturings of angry-white-male heavy metal and angry-black-male gangsta rap.8 In 2000 race was transcended by the success of white rapper Eminem, but unfortunately, misogyny and homophobia remained intact: “My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge / That’ll stab you in the head / Whether you’re a fag or a lez / Or the homosex, hermaph or a trans-a-vest / Pants or dress / Hate Fags? The answer’s yes.”9
The reign of heavy metal’s homophobia was ended or at least diluted by the unexpected advent of grunge, surging out of the Northwest with the success of Seattle’s Nirvana. The group’s lead singer, Kurt Cobain, wrote in the liner notes of their CD, Insecticide: “If any of you [fans] in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records!” Grunge helped ease the way for “homocore” bands like Pansy Division that pushed beyond a critical barrier by writing openly queer lyrics—Pansy Division paid tribute to Nirvana with their song “Smells like Queer Spirit.”
The increasing openness of some performers—although notably, the most flamboyant queers, such as Culture Club’s Boy George, Bronski Beat’s Jimmy Somerville, Erasure’s Andy Bell, were all British—began to simultaneously raise the audience’s expectations and strain its patience. Performers who scrupulously stuck to gender-vague lyrics, refused to talk about their personal lives, and dithered about avoiding labels and identities, began to feel the pressure from their fans. As lesbian critic Lily Braindrop put it in 1991, responding to performers who ask, “Who cares about that stuff anyway?”: “Millions of queers in this country who are aching to see a mainstream performer stand up and say, ‘Yes, I am!’”
The first mainstream star to take up the challenge, although only after a protracted period of teasing, was k. d. lang, the Canadian singer who combines country and cabaret or, to quote an album title, torch and twang.10 Lang, a multiple Grammy-winner who has been variously compared to Patsy Cline and Judy Garland, came out in a July 1992 Advocate cover story which helped set off a flurry of “lesbian chic” in the publishing world. In addition to appearing on the cover of New York magazine, lang posed for Vanity Fair sitting in a barber’s chair and being “shaved” by supermodel Cindy Crawford. Coming out certainly didn’t harm lang’s career—she won a best female pop vocal Grammy the following year—and may have been the stimulus for her friend, rocker Melissa Etheridge, who came out onstage at a Clinton Inaugural Ball in January 1993. Etheridge also followed lang by winning a Grammy for her aptly titled Yes I Am and went on to greater visibility when her then-lover, director Julie Cypher, bore two children (in January 2000 the identity of the father was revealed: veteran rocker David Crosby).
In the summer of 2000 another female pop star made a move out of the closet, in this case someone who had not been widely rumored to be gay. The cover of the June issue of the national lesbian magazine Curve announced “Sinéad Comes Out” next to a picture of the Irish singer who had first exploded onto the pop scene in the late 1980s with a bald head and controversial lyrics about racism, war, and child abuse. Sinéad O’Connor’s notoriety hit its peak when she tore up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live, but since then she has been ordained as a priest in the tiny splinter Latin Tridentine Church. Speaking to Curve, O’Connor said, “I’m a lesbian … although I haven’t been very open about that and throughout most of my life I’ve gone out with blokes because I haven’t necessarily been terribly comfortable about being a lesbian. But I actually am a lesbian. … I don’t think I necessarily paved the way for anyone, but other people paved the way for me.”11
Melissa Etheridge and k. d. lang came out, taking on the responsibilities that come with the territory, and their careers moved to new heights. But once again, as with other branches of show business, their male counterparts were still hesitating behind their closet doors. True, there are openly gay British pop stars, complementing the openly gay British actors—there are even matching gay knights: Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Elton John. In the United States, heavy metal rocker Rob Halford, former lead singer of Judas Priest, came out in an Advocate cover story, but little notice was taken. Rufus Wainwright may have been out from the beginning of his career, but he’s still at the start of that career, and still working the alternative music niche (and, he says, he keeps falling in love with straight men). RuPaul may have had a cable talk show and a hit song, but even 6-foot-plus African American drag queens don’t break the showbiz mold. But when Puerto Rican ex-Menudo singer Ricky Martin exploded into superstardom at the 1999 Grammy Awards, the massive press coverage—ranging from the covers of Time and TV Guide to the supermarket tabloids—seemed fixated on the rumors about the star’s sexuality. Billboard’s talent editor, Larry Flick, commented, “We’ve gotten to the point where people aren’t so shocked by the gay thing, and the media is feeling those questions aren’t as taboo.” For his part, however, Ricky Martin remains elusive. Speaking to his friend Gloria Estefan for Interview magazine, he limited himself to, “What I say about sexuality is, I leave it for my room and lock the door. I go back to my culture. It’s something you don’t talk about.”
In 1975, after David Kopay read an article in the Washington Star by sports-writer Lynn Rosellini about gay professional athletes, he called Rosellini and offered to become the first major league athlete to come out publicly. Kopay, a recently retired NFL running back, was the only gay athlete featured by name in Rosellini’s series and in 1977 he published The David Kopay Story. In the quarter century since Kopay came out, only a handful of athletes have joined what remains a very exclusive club. The membership rolls in the club reveal some striking patterns: male athletes tend to come out after they have retired from active play; lesbians are more likely to be out while still competing; team players are less likely than individual competitors to come out.
Athletic competition plays a central role in most human societies, often as training for military combat or as a substitute for it. Americans place sports near the top of the hierarchy of skills to be cultivated and admired, and a cult of athletics often seems to permeate the institutions of secondary education. And like the military—another institution focused on physicality and cohesiveness—institutionalized sports, from high school locker rooms to big-league dugouts, is hostile to any signs of homosexuality. In a culture where coaches routinely berate poor performance by accusing boys of being sissies, and where famed Penn State women’s basketball coach Rene Portland boasted that no lesbians could play for her, it should surprise no one that most athletes stay closeted. Even sociologist Harry Edwards, who became famous as an advocate for racial equality in professional sports, condemned athletes who discuss their sexual orientation openly: “Whoever makes it a public or political issue is wrong. There is nothing professional sports teams can do with it. It’s not something I would ever raise with a team. I take issue with anyone who tries to make it an issue on either side.” In other words, don’t ask, don’t tell.
Sports in American society is more than a high school and college obsession; it’s a very big business. Sports coverage is a central component of journalism—many local news audiences tune in for sports reports and many newspaper readers turn to the sports section first—and sports programming comprises a major portion of broadcast revenues. For athletes, as for other show business stars, coming out, however psychologically liberating, involves financial and professional costs. After David Kopay came out, even as a retired NFL player, he was unable to obtain a coaching job. Other openly gay athletes, such as tennis great Martina Navratilova, and even some only rumored to be gay, such as multi-Olympic gold medal–winning track star Carl Lewis, have been denied many of the big-money endorsements their straight colleagues have received.
Kopay was all alone in the gay athlete’s club for quite a while, and when he was joined it wasn’t entirely a voluntary act. In 1981 women’s professional tennis star, and former Wimbledon champion, Billie Jean King was outed when a former secretary filed a “galimony” suit, claiming that they had been lovers and that King had promised to support her. King, who was then married, at first denied the charge, then admitted the affair, which she labeled a mistake. Ultimately, King divorced and came out as a lesbian. The media furor over King’s sexuality was amplified by her high profile as a fighter for gender equity in sports. Her 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” victory over Bobby Riggs before a TV audience of 50 million made her a symbol of women’s athletics, but she went beyond symbolism by organizing a walkout of women from a national tournament because their prize money was a tenth of the men’s. Shortly afterwards, she initiated the Women’s Tennis Federation, which led a separate women’s tennis circuit. The scandal didn’t last very long, and the WTF survived the episode with some loss of sponsors. Billie Jean King was variously defended by some who were willing to overlook “her confessed period of lesbianism away from the courts,” and attacked by those, like Philadelphia sportswriter Rosemarie Ross, who seemed to have been waiting for an opportunity to gloat, “King’s career is pretty much over.”
Shortly after the Billie Jean King lawsuit story broke, Martina Navratilova made history by coming out while still at the height of her career. After denying the rumors swirling around her relationship with lesbian author Rita Mae Brown, the Czech émigré star came out in a newspaper interview.12 In the years since coming out Navratilova continued to blaze a trail, as she went on to amass an unsurpassed record of tournament victories, becoming the most visible openly lesbian athlete in the world. Asked in the early 1990s if she was setting an example that encouraged other gay athletes to come out, Navratilova turned around and said, “I don’t see any line forming behind me.” But in 1993 Gigi Fernandez came out when she appeared with Navratilova on stage at the March on Washington. By 1999, when openly lesbian French junior world champion Amélie Mauresmo was criticized by opponents Martina Hingis and Lindsay Davenport in unmistakably homophobic fashion—Lindsay complained after losing to Mauresmo, “I thought I was playing a guy,” and Hingis called her “half a man”—it was Hingis and Davenport who were caught up in a media storm, forced to backtrack and defend themselves.
On the men’s side of the aisle, the highest profile gay athlete is probably diver Greg Louganis, whose back-to-back Olympic double gold medals defined him as the world’s greatest diver. Louganis electrified audiences when he hit his head on the diving board during the 1988 Olympic preliminaries, then went on to win the gold.13 Despite his medals Louganis was offered few endorsements—a Wheaties box picture was considered but dropped—and by the early 1990s he retired from diving and tried a career in acting. Taking the role of a gay chorus boy in Paul Rudnick’s play Jeffrey was understandably taken as a coming out gesture, and New York Times sports columnist Robert Lipsyte took him up on it, asking, “So, does this mean you’re out?” While Louganis preferred to say that he was “working on things,” by the following summer he opened the Gay Games in New York, saying, “It’s great to be out and proud.”14
In 1995 figure skater Rudy Galindo, whose career was seemingly in decline after the death of two of his coaches, and a brother, from AIDS-related causes, attracted little attention when he came out in an interview with sportswriter Christine Brennan. This all changed in 1996 when the 28-year-old Galindo surprised everyone by winning the U.S. Figure Skating title, thus becoming one of the very first openly gay stars in a sport widely considered to be rife with gay men. Galindo rapidly became a willing role model for gay athletes, speaking at gay events and AIDS fund-raisers, and writing the obligatory autobiography with Eric Marcus.
Louganis and Galindo were both stars in individual competition, as were Olympic swimming medalist Bruce Hayes, divers David Pilcher and Patrick Jeffrey, and skater Doug Mattis. Gay team sports players have not been counted among the out crowd.15 Advocate editor Judy Weider has acknowledged that “there are several prominent athletes in team sports who, to the best of our knowledge, are gay,” and that she and her staff check in with “selected gay male athletes in the big U.S. team sports, to see if they are ready to come out.” So far, none has, and big-time sports agent Leigh Steinberg says, “Frankly, it would be easier for someone convicted of bank robbery to get a job in the NFL than an overtly gay player.”16
The ranks of openly gay team-sports stars are limited to those few, like David Kopay and former New York Giants tackle Ron Simmons, who came out after their careers ended. Baseball player Glenn Burke, released from the Oakland A’s in 1979, later recounted how his career was destroyed by homophobic managers, although he only came out publicly in 1993, the year before he died of AIDS. More recently, center fielder Billy Bean, who played for three major league teams during his nine-year career, came out in 1999 after leaving baseball. During his playing days, he revealed, he had hidden his relationship with his first lover, who would hide in his car if Bean’s teammates dropped by. After his lover died suddenly, of a ruptured pancreas, he had to play the next day and could not attend the funeral.
Even an umpire known to be gay could not be tolerated in major league baseball, as Dave Pallone learned when he was fired in 1988. When Pallone wrote Behind The Mask: My Double Life in Baseball, he claimed that an all-star team of gay baseball players could be assembled and, whether he was entirely serious or not, the tremors he set off must have been a satisfying bit of revenge. San Francisco Giants manager Dusty Baker recalled, “That started kind of like a witch hunt. Even some of the wives were asking their husbands, ‘Are you one of them?’ That was a heavy time.”
Just as most people assume, rightly or not, that male figure skaters are likely to be gay—and certainly many of their male fans are—so it has been widely assumed that women’s golf and basketball include many lesbians in the ranks of both players and fans. The prime exhibit here would be the annual Dinah Shore women’s golf tournament in Palm Springs each March. The large number of lesbians who congregate in the desert resort every spring has led to estimates that dwarf the attendance at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and even Provincetown’s ultra-gay Women’s Week. As a San Jose Mercury News sportswriter noted, “Dinah Shore Week is a chance for many to get away from hometowns where their sexual orientation may be secret. Palm Springs becomes a place to enjoy the rare feeling of being open and in a majority.”
However openly lesbian many in the audience might be, the Ladies Professional Golf Association is, as its name suggests, both conservative and reticent about matters of sexuality. That there was a backlash against the increasing openness of lesbian golfers, and their fans, was revealed in the comments attributed to CBS golf commentator Ben Wright in May 1995. As reported by a Wilmington, Delaware, reporter, Wright said that women golfers are handicapped by their breasts, which get in the way of their swing, and that “lesbians in the sport hurt women’s golf. … Lesbianism on the tour is not reticent. It’s paraded. There’s a defiance in them in the last decade.” There was an immediate uproar, as LPGA commissioner Charles Mechem rushed to defend the sport from “an unfair attack—a cheap shot—on a group of talented professional women … a way of demeaning or trivializing their performance and their accomplishments.” Mechem insisted that lesbianism does not exist on the LPGA tour, and that “lifestyle issues are private matters.” At the same time, women athletes condemned Wright’s homophobia, and Martina Navratilova asked how Wright could putt “with that big stomach?” CBS briefly suspended Wright and then reinstated him after he denied having made the statements attributed to him.
Ben Wright’s putative comments aside, the ranks of women—or lady—golfers does not include legions of open lesbians. In 1996 pro golfer Muffin Spencer-Devlin was profiled in Sports Illustrated and discussed her marriage ceremony with musician Lynda Roth, at their Laguna Beach home. Spencer-Devlin was not followed out of the LPGA closet by any other golfers, and other lesbian golfers have mostly kept their distance from her (in March 1998, however, Patty Sheehan came out in a Golf World magazine column). On the other hand, sponsors didn’t flee from the LPGA or from Spencer-Devlin, and the organization did agree to replace the “Spousal Badge”—an access pass previously given to players’ husbands—with a “buddy clip” that can be given to a significant other.
Women’s basketball is experiencing rapid expansion and success, fueled by the U.S. team’s Olympic achievement in 1996 and the support of a generation of post-Title IX women. And it’s not called Lady’s Basketball. The fans at the Dinah Shore are an older and generally more restrained group than the growing legions of lesbian fans of the WNBA. Former pro basketball player Mariah Burton Nelson, a Washington Mystics season-ticket holder, told the Washington Post that “there’s a lot of anger on the part of lesbians for being left out of society in general and having to deal with homophobia in sports.” Resentment at efforts to heterosexualize the sport and gloss over the large lesbian fan base led the Lesbian Avengers protest group to stage a “visibility action” at an August 1998 Mystics game: buying a block of sixty seats and wearing the group’s T-shirts. The following summer a group of “Lesbians for Liberty” staged a “Lesbian Visibility Action” at the Liberty basketball game in New York’s Madison Square Garden. In the spring of 2001 the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks deviated from its family-oriented marketing program by holding a pep rally at the lesbian Girl Bar in West Hollywood. The team’s general manager noted, “This isn’t about marketing to sexual lifestyles, it’s about marketing to a group of people we think will buy tickets.” Philadelphia Daily News lesbian columnist Debbie Woodell bemoaned the fact that there are no openly lesbian WNBA players, noting, “Most of us who are out know how hard it was to take those first steps. And we’ll be there when the first big name in basketball takes that huge first step. (Hint to anyone who’s reading: It feels like making a game-winning shot.)”
As the 1990s drew to a close, the playing fields of American professional sports remained a major battleground in the ongoing cultural wars. The popularity of the U.S. women’s soccer team in the 1999 World Cup competition was due to their spectacular success in winning games, but their media images were also heavily focused on their heterosexual credentials as wives and mothers. The crowds that cheered when Brandi Chastain ripped off her jersey top (and promoted her Nike sports bra) were comfortable in the knowledge that she’s straight. When Green Bay Packers star Reggie White—an ordained minister—was invited to address the Wisconsin state legislature in March 1998 and mixed ethnic stereotypes (“Hispanics are gifted in family structure. … Asians can turn a television into a watch”) with homophobic ranting about sinners who are “like liars, cheaters, backstabbers and malicious people,” there was an outcry, but his career was secure. White was condemned by gay groups, and by many journalists and public figures, but not by the NFL.
Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker didn’t get off quite as easily after he gave an interview to Sports Illustrated in December 1999. Rocker, who was known for mouthing off, told the reporter that he wouldn’t play for a New York team: “Imagine having to take the (No.) 7 train to [Shea Stadium] looking like you’re in Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing. The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners.” Rocker managed to offend enough groups that he was quickly forced to apologize. As New Orleans sportswriter Mark Purdy wrote, “Major League Baseball is, at heart, a service entertainment industry. And when you have a high profile player from a World Series team who goes off and insults immigrants, gay people and minorities … well, that doesn’t help sell many tickets to immigrants, gay people and minorities. As well as to their friends, relatives, lovers and anyone else who doesn’t appreciate irrational hate.” Baseball commissioner Bud Selig sentenced him to “sensitivity training” sessions and levied a $20,000 fine and a 30-day suspension. Within a few days an arbitrator reduced the fine to $500 and cut the suspension in half; Rocker returned to training camp and resumed playing.