Quill & Quire Book Review: Making out in the Mainstream

Quill & Quire recently reviewed our newly released book Making out in the Mainstream, GLAAD and the Politics of Respectability by Vincent Doyle.

The following is an excerpt from the review:

There are few groups so prominent in the LGBT mainstream as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. In this historical and ethnographic study of the organization, Vincent Doyle, a Canadian living in Spain, explains how that came to be, and examines the effects of a shift in queer activism toward a PR approach and away from something more outré and confrontational.

Doyle identifies GLAAD as a key actor in changing the stakes of American gay and lesbian organizing from “the dismantling of the closet” to deriving “maximum … advantage from the legitimation of homosexuality within mainstream institutions.” In short, the media-lobbyist organization has become a champion of assimilationist rather than liberationist goals, and has proven adept at negotiating a division that has been playing out inside the LGBT community just about forever.

Employing 18 months of field research conducted in 2000 and 2001, Doyle illustrates how the instalment of corporate-trained executives in the late 1990s transformed GLAAD from a confrontational activist group that even included a militant direct-action committee called Terrible Retribution into a mostly play-nice lobby group, fighting to fit into the existing institutions of American neoliberal capitalism and live up to its informal motto, We Want In.

At the centre of the book is Joan Garry, the executive director who more than tripled GLAAD’s budget during her tenure from 1997 to 2005. A self-declared minivan driving, white-picket-fence lesbian mom, Garry comes across as a complex and likeable figure. The book presents a few key case studies: the glitzy social politics of the GLAAD Media Awards; the somewhat flailing attempts to counter the homophobia of radio and TV host Dr. Laura Schlessinger; and the mixed messages around race and representation that marked GLAAD’s responses to controversial white rapper Eminem and the groundbreaking TV series Queer as Folk.

Read the full review on Quill & Quire

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