Kirjahaku

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.

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.

During the late 1980s, the near-worship of artistic genius produced auction sales of works by Vmcent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso for tens of millions of dollars, over $15 million for a painting by Jasper Johns, and record prices for works by many other deceased and even living masters. At the same time, it was no longer controversial in academic and intellectual circles to maintain that art works are the products of what Howard Becker has termed collective activity carried out within loosely defined art worlds: Works of art, from this point of view, are not the products of individual makers, "artists" who possess a rare and special gift. They are, rather, joint products of all the people who cooperate via an art world's characteristic conventions to bring works like that into existence. Artists are some sub-group of the world's participants who, by common agreement, possess a specialgift, therefore make a unique and indispensable contribution to the work, and thereby make it art. (1982: 35) The concept of the art world-with its central focus on the collective, social, and conventional nature of artistic production, distribution, and appreciation--confronts and potentially undermines the romantic ideology of art and artists still dominant in Western societies.

The concept of the art world confronts and undermines the romantic ideology of art and artists that is still dominant in Western societies. By treating the production of art as work and artists as workers and examining the conditions under which these activities take place, this sociological perspective illuminates much that remains obscured by rom

Despite the notoriety that followed the recent exposure of Malcolm Forbes and Pentagon spokesperson Pete Williams, the issue of outing originally arose at the dawn of modern gay consciousness in the late 19th century. In "Contested Closets", Larry Gross historicizes, describes and analyzes the concept and practice of outing, placing it within the framework of the lesbian and gay movement over the past century, as well as showing how outing illuminates many ethical and conceptual issues at the heart of contemporary identity politics and journalistic practices. "Contested Closets" reveals how the advent of outing represents a sea change both in the consciousness of the lesbian and gay movement and in its relationships with mainstream and political institutions. The book includes an extensive collection of important press articles that provide original and hard-to-locate source material on this controversial topic. ""Contested Closets" is about secrets and the telling of secrets, about lies and the telling of lies. It is about the codes that bind some people to keep others' secrets, and the conventions that require some people to tell lies about others. And it is about the breaking of these codes and the violation of these conventions. It is about the deliberate revelation by lesbian and gay people of the hidden homosexuality of prominent people. It is also about the conflicting loyalties of journalists - mainstream and alternative, straight and gay - caught between the obligation to tell the truth as they know it (even if not the whole truth), and the rules of the game that protect the sexual secrets of celebrities and public officials. It is about the shifting boundaries between the public and private realms, and the dangers of building a political strategy on the narrow platform of the right to privacy. It is a book about outing. Gross is the editor of "Studying Visual Communication", co-editor of "Image Ethics", associate editor of "The international Encyclopedia of Communication", and co-editor of the "Between Men/Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies" book series. He is also co-chair of the Task Force on Lesbian and Gay Concerns of the International Communication Association.

50-year-old Tommy James is a writer for an alternative newspaper in Cincinnati, Ohio. He's preparing for a return trip to Seattle, Washington. This will be his first trip back since his twin brother died there nearly five years ago. Tommy's feeling nothingness. With an ex-wife, an ex-girlfriend, another soon to be ex-girlfriend and with most of his other relationships, Tommy's struggling to find meaning in the choices he's making. He feels like he's going through the motions in his life but not experiencing any kind of real happiness. Jessica Burns is a pretty young woman in her early 20's. It's been eight years since she ran away from her parents' home in Portland, Maine after they forced her to have an abortion. She hasn't seen them since. Living on the streets in Portland, Oregon, a vicious sexual assault makes her run again, this time to Seattle, Washington where she finds a bartending and waitressing job at The Hurricane Caf . Now, circumstances there are leading her to believe she may have to yet again find another city to run to. On Tommy's first night in Seattle, he has a chance encounter with Jessica at the bar located inside The Hurricane Caf -an encounter that sheds light on the nothingness in his life and one that will enable Jessica to start facing her demons and to finally stop running.