ABSTRACT
After the media depictions of gay men had steadily increased between 1950 and the early 1990s, a handful of fleeting images of lesbians had surfaced when a few women were shown killing in Basic Instinct, kissing on Roseanne, and looking chic in the pages of several national magazines. Later in the 1990s, the hoopla surrounding Ellen had propelled another gay woman into the glare of public attention, although the role proved to be short-lived because the show was canceled soon after Ellen Morgan/ Ellen DeGeneres came out. Next, a pair of Sapphic women appeared in Queer as Folk, but they were overshadowed by all the boys. And so, as the gays-in-the-media phenomenon moved into the new millennium, lesbians were still hard to find.
