|
Media Matters
I propose these two unlikely foot soldiers because of the findings of a relatively small-scale study that I recently conducted with my students at American University. The impetus for my project was my belief that teen-oriented magazines and TV shows have huge impact on their readers and viewers, even though most people pooh-pooh them as irrelevant. One part of my study involved magazines. I gave copies of four articles about gay teenagers to 200 of the 18-year-olds in my classes and asked them to read the stories and look at the accompanying photos. I then had the students complete an anonymous survey about their reactions to the seven gay teenagers profiled in the stories. When I asked my students which of the seven subjects in the articles they found the least physically attractive, their overwhelming choice was a girl named Krystal Bennett. That didn't surprise me, as photos showed Krystal to be a large girl who wore her hair in a crew cut and dressed in men's-style suits and neckties-not exactly the Britney Spears look. I was surprised, though, when I asked my students which of the seven subjects they had the "most positive feelings" about and Krystal was again their top choice. The article about Krystal, which had appeared in Seventeen, described how she had been harassed during her early teens because she didn't look feminine. At first, she denied her sexuality and claimed to have a boyfriend in another state. But after awhile, she started acknowledging that she was, indeed, a lesbian. "Some people were going to hate me," she said in the story, "but I was going to be true to myself."
I never did. More than 90 percent of my students were fully comfortable with the clips showing people talking openly about homosexuality, showing two lesbians holding hands and hugging, and showing two gay guys kissing on a public beach. The response that surprised me the most was that well over half of my students-58 percent, to be exact-were even comfortable with a clip showing two guys kissing and cuddling while lying shirtless in bed together. When I asked my students why they weren't shocked by the images, the vast majority of them mentioned The Real World, the program on MTV that brings seven young strangers together to live and have their every move videotaped and later televised. "The first time I saw two guys on Real World kissing, I freaked," one of my male students told me. "But after a couple seasons, you get used to it. Now it's no big deal." One of my female students immediately talked about the program as well. "I can't see myself kissing and cuddling with another girl," she told me. "But I've seen it so much on Real World that it definitely doesn't shock me anymore." While I am certainly not opposed to government-sponsored programs designed to reduce the alarming level of harassment that American gay teens currently have to endure, my study makes me question if education and social service programs are the only answer. In short, I'm convinced that the best way to reduce homophobia-as well as the harassment that it often leads to-is to increase gay visibility. Once straight people get to know us, it's much harder for them to hate us. My study shows that magazines such as Seventeen and TV programs such as The Real World are already doing their part. And getting results. A full report on the study, which was supported by a grant from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, is at www.glaad.org/programs/csms/initiatives.php? 
Rodger Streitmatter, Ph.D. is a member of the School of Communication faculty at American University in Washington, D.C. His latest book, Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America has recently been published by Columbia University Press. He is also the author of Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay & Lesbian Press in America (Faber & Faber, 1995) and Raising Her Voice: African American Women Journalists Who Changed History (The University Press of Kentucky, 1994)
|
|
The male cast of The Real World: Las Vegas
A recent issue of Seventeen included an article about a girl's struggle with her classmates about her sexuality