Up from Invisibility - (Between Men-Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies) by Larry Gross (Paperback)

About the Book

Gross traces the relation of lesbians and gays to the media and astutely points to the latter's lingering inability to embrace the complex reality of gay identity.

Book Synopsis

A half century ago gay men and lesbians were all but invisible in the media and, in turn, popular culture. With the lesbian and gay liberation movement came a profoundly new sense of homosexual community and empowerment and the emergence of gay people onto the media's stage. And yet even as the mass media have been shifting the terms of our public conversation toward a greater acknowledgment of diversity, does the emerging "visibility" of gay men and women do justice to the complexity and variety of their experience? Or is gay identity manipulated and contrived by media that are unwilling--and perhaps unable--to fully comprehend and honor it?

While positive representations of gays and lesbians are a cautious step in the right direction, media expert Larry Gross argues that the entertainment and news media betray a lingering inability to break free from proscribed limitations in order to embrace the complex reality of gay identity. While noting major advances, like the opening of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore--the first gay bookstore in the country--or the rise of The Advocate from small newsletter to influential national paper, Gross takes the measure of somewhat more ambiguous milestones, like the first lesbian kiss on television or the first gay character in a newspaper comic strip.

Review Quotes

A readable account of the gradual emergence of a gay-lesbian presence in news, entertainment, and advertising over the last fifty years.--James Boylan "Columbia Journalism Review"

Not only adds to our understanding of the culture but also encompasses material from an impressive number of venues that should be, but often are not, included in a book about the media.--Roger Streitmatter, American University "Journal of Mass Communication Quarterly"

This scholarly study is engaging and readable.-- "Library Journal"

About the Author

Larry Gross is Sol Worth Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Contested Closets: The Politics and Ethics of Outing, editor of Image Ethics: The Moral Rights of Subjects in Photographs, Film, and Television and On the Margins of Art Worlds, and coeditor (with the late James Woods) of The Columbia Reader on Lesbians and Gay Men in Media, Society, and Politics.