ABSTRACT

Sexual minorities differ in important ways from the “traditional” racial and ethnic minorities; they are, in an interesting sense, akin to political minorities. The average American adult spends several hours each day in this television world, children spend even more of their lives immersed in its “fictional reality.” The fatal flaw in the credo of centrism and moderation is that how one defines the “responsible” extremes will determine where the center will fall. In the United States the mass media-legitimated spectrum runs a lot further right than it does left, which puts the “objectively balanced” mainstream clearly to the right of center. There have always been minority media in the United States; various immigrant groups supported newspapers, books, theater and occasionally movies in their native languages. Since the 1970s a lesbian and gay alternative culture has offered a range of media sources and products- press, music, theater, pornography, which are unmistakably the product of gay people's sensibility.