Gay Atlanta at the Dawn of the Millennium: The OutTV Atlanta Video Archive

INTRODUCTION

OutTV Atlanta was a public access television program that aired in Atlanta, Georgia (and briefly in Savannah, Georgia), between 1999 and 2001. Created by Atlanta entrepreneur Mike Maloney, the show featured mostly volunteer reporters who covered fund-raising events, artistic performances, nightlife venues, political events, gay rodeos, and more in an attempt to provide a comprehensive and realistic picture of gay and lesbian life in Atlanta around the turn of the millennium. In 2018, Maloney worked with the LGBTQ Institute at the Center for Civil and Human Rights to donate the tapes containing production footage from the show to the Archives for Research on Gender and Sexuality, part of the Special Collections and Archives department at Georgia State University (GSU) Library. (The collection's official title is the LGBTQ Institute's Mike Maloney Collection of OutTV Atlanta Video Recordings but is referred to hereinafter as the OutTV Collection.) The tapes have been digitized and made accessible through the library's digital collections website.¹ The following is an exploration of (1) the history, content, and significance of the collection and (2) the process involved in digitizing and providing access to this idiosyncratic video collection.

HISTORY OF OUTTV

Public access television first came to Atlanta in the 1970s, largely thanks to the efforts of James Bond, an Atlanta City Council member.² The best-known cultural artifact born on Atlanta public access television is the long-running variety program The American Music Show (TAMS), which Bond coproduced and which is probably most famous for featuring a young RuPaul in some of its early episodes. The American Music Show is now frequently discussed as an underground queer phenomenon; although the show's creators and cast weren't all gay and the show didn't set out to showcase queer performance specifically, its absurdist sensibility and irreverence toward gender presentation made it attractive to gay artists and musicians. Duffy Odum, an Atlanta actor and long-running cast member on the show (who also appeared on OutTV), says that the show's cast and crew were all unconcerned with the sexuality of their collaborators but that they were quite concerned with social justice and civil rights. "We didn't start out as a gay television show," says Odum (who is straight). "But . . . I and others were advocates of civil rights, women's rights—who needed the help now were gay rights. And we were eager, eager to jump on that. We were eager to join in that community. I loved these people, and we didn't like what we were hearing, that some of our friends were going to other cities and getting bashed and some of them killed. We hated, hated, hated it."³

Odum's characterization of The American Music Show as a socially progressive, inclusive oasis for oddballs of all stripes mirrors the long-standing reputation of Atlanta as a bastion of queerness and creativity in the conservative South. The city has long been home to a large and vibrant LGBTQ community, and when Mike Maloney decided to start OutTV in 1999, it was with the goal to document the lives of members of that community. He felt that many people outside of the community lacked an understanding of their LGBTQ neighbors' lives, and he wanted to show that "LGBT people weren't just bar people . . . that [bars] was where we would go to feel safe and to be around people that were like us. I wanted to show that LGBT people were just everyday people. People that you would meet at the bank, your teller, your doctor, or the nurse or the police officer. We're just everyday regular people. There was nothing to be scared of."⁴ Maloney sold his car and solicited donations from family and friends to fund production of the show, and he bought a weekly public access spot and began airing the half-hour episodes in 1999.

Maloney had grand ambitions for OutTV, but from the beginning, it was very much a homegrown operation run on a shoestring budget. Maloney did much of the camerawork...