Overview

Alternate Channels explores the fight for lesbian and gay visibility on 20th-century American television, as gay activists faced off with powerful, often vicious traditional values crusaders, with TV executives caught in the crossfire. It documents countless programs, characters, and political skirmishes, examining lesbian and gay portrayals and the few pioneering depictions of bisexual and trans people. The first edition was a semifinalist for what is now the Stonewall Book Award and has been widely used in universities. This revised edition, fact-checked from scratch, reinstates material that the original publisher cut and adds about 100 photos of TV shows from the early days to the year 2000. The author built this account of events from archival materials, a thousand broadcast recordings, and his interviews with showrunners, network and studio executives, and early activists.

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9780997825497

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Reviews

PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EDITION A groundbreaking, long-overdue exploration of pop culture's most popular medium and how it has reflected us . . . Alternate Channels has a breezy, engaging quality which makes the pages fly by. --Boston Bay Windows What makes the book terrific [is] his detailed accounts of little-known campaigns against queer defamation . . . Capsuto has done his homework. -- San Francisco Frontiers Capsuto is a dead-on analyst of trends and political patterns, championing the many people who have fought to bring gay lives and stories into our living rooms. -- Brill's Content

Author Information

Steven Capsuto began researching sexual-minority images on television in 1987 while volunteering with a lesbian and gay crisis hotline. Since 1990, he has given video-illustrated lectures in dozens of cities about televised LGBTQ portrayals. The first edition of his book Alternate Channels was a semifinalist for what is now the Stonewall Book Award. From the 1980s to 2000s, Steven oversaw the GLBT Library/Archives of Philadelphia (first the library and later the archives). He has served as a historical consultant or researcher on documentaries such as After Stonewall, TV Revolution, and The Question of Equality, and for the 2020 documentary series Visible: Out on Television.

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