Media Reception, Sexual Identity, and Public Space
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Copyright by Bryan Ray Fruth 2007 The Dissertation Committee for Bryan Ray Fruth Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: MEDIA RECEPTION, SEXUAL IDENTITY, AND PUBLIC SPACE Committee: Janet Staiger, Supervisor Mary Kearney Lisa Moore Thomas Schatz Karin Wilkins MEDIA RECEPTION, SEXUAL IDENTITY, AND PUBLIC SPACE by Bryan Ray Fruth, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2007 Acknowledgements I wish to thank Janet Staiger for her incredible patience and support during this process. I want to also thank my other committee members—Mary Kearney, Lisa Moore, Tom Schatz, and Karin Wilkins—for sharing their insights and generous comments and for helping me end this experience on what felt like a high note. I also wish to thank my family and friends—Brad in particular—for pushing me to complete this chapter of my life. Finally, thanks to the kind folks at the GLBT Historical Society of Northern California for digging up and dusting off the “Stop the Movie Cruising File” for me and for assisting me while I researched their incredibly rich archives. iv Media Reception, Sexuality Identity, and Public Space Publication No._____________ Bryan Ray Fruth, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2007 Supervisor: Janet Staiger In an attempt to trace the ongoing process of forming and negotiating gay identities in response to historical events and media texts, this dissertation explores the intersections between gay men, media reception, and public space in relation to a number of historically and socially significant film and television texts: Cruising (1980), Parting Glances (1986), Longtime Companion (1990), Philadelphia (1993), and Any Mother’s Son (1997). This dissertation examines these texts within the framework of historical materialist analysis, while incorporating the insights of cultural geography. These analyses demonstrate the importance of studying historical audiences while understanding audience members as not only media consumers, but social subjects located within social space who reflect upon, respond to, and adapt to the ways in which social space enables and constrains their politics, desires, memories, and affective experiences. v Table of Contents Chapter One: Gay Male Film and Television Reception........................................1 Media and Counterpublic Spheres..................................................................8 The “Problem” of Placelessness ...................................................................17 Gay Audiences and Media Theory ...............................................................23 Interpretive Counterpublics ..........................................................................42 Historical Materialist Analysis .....................................................................51 Outline of the Dissertation............................................................................54 Conclusion ....................................................................................................67 Chapter Two: Stop (The Movie) Cruising: The Demonstrations and The Politicized Audience .......................................................................................................69 The Politicized Audience and the Third Space of Reception .......................72 The Political Context ....................................................................................76 Greenwich Village ........................................................................................81 San Francisco................................................................................................97 Chapter Three: “The Whole Queer Scene”: Cruising, Geography, and Urban Sexuality .....................................................................................................110 Appropriating Space ...................................................................................110 The Sexual “Fringe” and Codes of Hypermasculinity................................115 “Double-Edginess” in the City and the Reception of Cruising ..................133 Conclusion ..................................................................................................149 Chapter Four: AIDS Films, Cultural Memory, Public Space .............................152 AIDS as Gay Identity Crisis .......................................................................163 Mourning and AIDS ...................................................................................171 “Bearing Witness” as Tactic for Survival...................................................174 Critical Approaches to Watching AIDS Films ...........................................180 Chapter Five: Bearing Witness and Utopian Longing: Interpreting AIDS Films207 Rethinking Gay Identity in Parting Glances ..............................................207 Parting Glances as Elegy............................................................................215 vi Fire Island as Frontier .................................................................................230 Radical Poetics and Longtime Companion .................................................236 Bearing Witness and Affect........................................................................241 The Philadelphia Stories.............................................................................245 Conclusion: Nostalgia and/as Utopian Longing ........................................254 Chapter Six: “Together With These Nice Viewers at Lifetime”: Made-For- Television Movies and Virtual Third Places ..............................................259 Critical Approaches to TV Movies.............................................................264 Cable TV, New Media, and Public Space...................................................291 Online Publics and the TV Movie ..............................................................312 Conclusion ..................................................................................................337 Chapter Seven: Conclusion.................................................................................340 Bibliography ........................................................................................................348 Vita…...................................................................................................................372 vii Chapter One: Gay Male Film and Television Reception I am concerned with media reception practices and their relationship to cultural, social, and political identities and struggles, and public spaces. I focus on how film, television, and the Internet simultaneously shape public space and foster gay male collective identities in the U.S. Rodger Streitmatter addresses similar concerns in relation to print media in his history of the lesbian and gay press. For example, he writes that Vice Versa, the first lesbian newspaper initially published in the U.S. in 1947, “launched a whole new medium of communication that has ultimately helped unify alienated readers while combating their oppression.”1 As prototype for the lesbian and gay press, the newspaper established several characteristics which are still reflected in the lesbian and gay press of today: it employed a “positive tone to counteract the way gay people saw themselves covered in American newspapers”; it published political views in the form of poetry and fiction which sought to “empower” lesbian readers; it opened its pages to other authors so that it became a forum for the issues facing lesbians and gay men; and it was “a venue for public discussions of topics the mainstream media ignored.”2 According to Streitmatter, this type of lesbian newspaper opened up several new opportunities for publicity or for generating public discourses about collective lesbian interests. For the first time, lesbian and gay readers could openly debate issues that had never been publicly discussed. It allowed writers whose ideas might not have made it into print in other papers the possibility to air their views. It provided a forum to 1 Rodger Streitmatter, Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995), 2. 2 Streitmatter, 7-10. 1 educate the heterosexual population about the “realities” of lesbian experience. Finally, the newspaper cataloged and published resources available to lesbians “who were unsure of their sexual identity [and] had access to very little information about homosexuality.”3 Streitmatter's research illustrates the potential the early lesbian press had in shaping collective identities in the U.S. after World War II. The gay and lesbian press has been critical to the development and on-going negotiation of queer collective identities and the creation of a “counterpublic sphere.” I define “counterpublics,” following Nancy Fraser, as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”4 Each of the following chapters situate media texts and gay male audiences within specific historically and materially constituted discursive and spatial fields in order to tease out the ways in which gay men forge a collective sense of self in relation to media texts. The print media, film, television, and the Internet produce not