Gay TV and Straight America

Notes

235 Notes Introduction: The Importance of Gay-Themed TV 1. The project’s methodology is grounded in a critical cultural studies approach to media analysis. Cultural studies practitioners like Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson have encouraged media scholars to situate television’s representations and industry practices within wider structures of domination and social relations and to acknowledge and theorize the relative autonomy of reception. Recent studies have applied such theoretical perspectives in an integrated approach which asserts that to understand television as a cultural practice more fully we need to examine the mutually determining relationships among specific programs, the industry that produces them, the audiences that view them, and the social contexts within which these activities take place.This integrated approach helps me to foreground the political implications of commercial television’s Janus-faced nature as, in Eileen Meehan’s terms, both a “culture industry” and “industrial culture”(563-572). At a time when both gay and lesbian politics and commercialized televised representations of homosexuality were so socially central, exploring the relationship between them becomes vitally important. Eileen R. Meehan,“Conceptualizing Culture as Commodity:The Problem of Television,” in Television:The Critical View, 5th edition, ed. Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 563–572; Julie D’Acci, Defining Woman:Television and the Case of Cagney & Lacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language , ed. S. Hall, D. Hobson, and A. Lowe (London: Hutchinson, 1980). 2. Eloise Salholz,“The Future of Gay America,” Newsweek, 12 March 1990, 20–25. 3. Andrew Kopkind,“The Gay Moment,” Nation, 3 May 1993. 4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (London:Verso, 1991); Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices:American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 5. Larry Gross, “Out of the Mainstream: Sexual Minorities and the Mass Media,” in Remote Control:Television,Audiences, and Cultural Power, ed. Ellen Seiter (New York: Routledge, 1989), 130–149. Alexander Doty argues that the absence of openly or explicitly gay and lesbian characters on television doesn’t mean that there weren’t gay, lesbian, or queer narratives or pleasures available to viewers. Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Athough the amount of gay content on 1990s TV was unprecedented, it is important not to simplify the history of gay and lesbian televisibility. As Stephen Tropiano and others have discussed, the 1970s saw a striking increase of gay-themed programming. In other words, this project does not trace the initial rise of gay and lesbian material on television, but rather the emergence of a historically specific gaythemed programming phenomenon driven by various social and industry factors which have their roots in the 1970s and crystallized in the 1990s. Furthermore, the Becker_Notes_Pgs-235-270.qxd 11/1/2005 9:23 AM Page 235 1990s programming trend I focus on doesn’t neatly coincide with the start or end of the decade. During the late 1980s, for example, programs like NBC’s quality dramas Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, Cagney & Lacey, LA Law, thirtysomething, adultoriented sitcoms like Doctor, Doctor, Designing Women, and Golden Girls, and Fox’s sketch comedies The Tracey Ullman Show and In Living Color included gay material and recurring gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters that serve as precursors of what was to become a full-blown programming phenomenon a few years later. 6. Suzanna DanutaWalters, All the Rage:The Story of GayVisibility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 10 (italics in original). 7. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 14. 8. Given such theoretical presumptions, the terms I use in this project to refer to my object of analysis are important and problematic, since they don’t simply refer to a self-evident signified. I use the terms “gay and lesbian” and “gay” to refer to the kind of material and characters that appeared on prime-time television and the discourses that circulated in the trade press because those are the categories and terms that were operative in those locations. 9. Van Gosse,“Postmodern America:A New Democratic Order in the Second Gilded Age,” in The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America, ed.Van Gosse and Richard Moser (Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 2003), 1–36. 10. As John Fiske aptly puts it, a structure of feeling “refers to a what it feels like to be a...