Making Out in the Mainstream: GLAAD and the Politics of Respectability by Vincent Doyle (review)

Making Out in the Mainstream: GLAAD and the Politics of Respectability is an ethnographic study of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) between 2000 and 2001. Vincent Doyle undertook research at the offices of GLAAD in New York City and Los Angeles. Today, the study reads almost as a historical document as well as a still timely ethnography. Over the course of the book, Doyle explores and works to understand the controversies with which GLAAD contended. Today, a program like Queer as Folk is likely not to shock, but two decades ago, the program was controversial and provocative, especially in the times of Ellen, a program that quickly ended after its eponymous character came out as gay, and Will and Grace, a program that was campier than it was sexy.

Making Out in the Mainstream consists of an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. These chapters are, in a sense, case studies insofar as they speak to particular moments; for instance, the first chapter accounts for the history and ascendance of GLAAD to the mainstream, addressing the successes and the challenges of founding a national organization. The second chapter attends to the politics of inclusion and access, particularly with regard to who was included in GLAAD. Doyle provides readers with "an ethnographic account of front- and back-stage aspects of the Media Awards to provide a sense of their value for GLAAD." Of course, the challenge with the awards, as Doyle has noted, is who gets nominated and why. The third chapter speaks to the Dr. Laura Campaign, which is "the story of how a small but well-connected group of activists challenged GLAAD's dominant position in the media activist field. In so doing, they forced GLAAD to adopt more militant, confrontational tactics than its 1999 strategic plan envisioned." The fourth chapter explores sex, race, and representation, in which Doyle argues that "discourses of diversity in a neoliberal world selectively fail to represent those whose differences 'are not easily professionalized, funded, or used for other institutional or financial gains."'

Making out in the Mainstream is at its finest when it considers and explores the polemics of the "mainstream." Doyle concludes that "the queer critique of the politics of respectability bears repeating: the gains that mainstreaming makes possible … come at the cost of reinforcing exclusions of race, class, and gender." Such a perspective is important because it asks about who is being left behind in the process of "mainstreaming," what voices remain unheard and unrecognized? Making Out in the Mainstream is a welcome addition to scholarship on queer respectability, following in the lines of Jane Ward's Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in Activist Organizations. In contrast to mainstreaming, Doyle argues that "we might deploy a politics that builds upon the sense of heightened personal and political possibility that comes from occupying spaces that are simultaneously inside and out. We might refuse the implicit mandate to decide between exclusion and inclusion, sameness or difference, respectability or marginalization, by staking our claim to the mainstream and, at the same time, cultivating the ground that sustains queer alternatives." In this way, then, queerness becomes a both/and scenario, one that moves away from, yet holds on to, the binary, slipping between the cracks, and in so doing highlighting that slippage as productive.

Making Out in the Mainstream thus contributes to a growing body of institutional ethnographies, particularly in queer studies, while also providing an interesting and important critique of "mainstreaming" without throwing out the process altogether. Doyle's Making Out in the Mainstream will also be of interest to scholars in communication studies and popular culture studies. Braiding together ethnography, queer theory, and communication and cultural studies, Making Out in the Mainstream is a thought-provoking study.