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Making Out in the Mainstream, by Vincent Doyle, was recently reviewed by the Bay Area Reporter, the oldest and highest circulation LGBT news weekly serving San Francisco’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities. The review coincides nicely with this week’s announcement of the 27th Annual GLAAD Media awards.
The following is an excerpt from Brian Bromberger’s piece entitled “Swimming in the mainstream”:
It may have been the climax of GLAAD’s (formerly Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) prestige. GLAAD presented its 2000 Vanguard Award, given to a member of the entertainment or media community who has significantly promoted equal rights for LGBT people, to actress Elizabeth Taylor. In her acceptance remarks, after declaring “any home where there is love constitutes a family, and all families should have the same legal rights,” she added, “What it comes down to is love. How can anything bad come out of love? The bad stuff comes out of mistrust, misunderstanding, and from hate and ignorance. Thank God GLAAD works to fight this!” But as Vincent Doyle, a Canadian assistant professor of media and cultural studies at IE University in Spain, contends in his new book Making Out in the Mainstream, this moment may have been the tipping point between GLAAD’s old activist political strategy and its new market-oriented public relations approach.
Based on 18 months of field research including participant observation, in-depth interviews, and archival analysis carried out at GLAAD’s New York and Los Angeles offices from 2000-01, Doyle’s work is as much a history of GLAAD as a study of its LGBT media activism, including a profile of its awards ceremony and organizational responses to controversial public figures such as Dr. Laura Schlessinger and Eminem. GLAAD was formed in New York City in 1985 to respond to negative AIDS reporting and incendiary attacks on gay men written by the New York Post. Beginning as a militant grassroots organization with direct-action demonstrations against homophobia, within two years GLAAD was shifting its approach to insider strategies to gain access to media companies so it could be transformed into a national media-advocacy lobbying group, complete with a corporate-trained executive board and director. Doyle features extensive interviews with lesbian Joan Garry, who was executive director during the pivotal years of 1997-2005, when this shift in principles occurred, as well as a vast budget expansion reflecting its popular success. Read the full review on The Bay Area Reporter’s site>
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