Lehigh University Lehigh Preserve Theses and Dissertations 2012 The Advocate and The akM ing of a Gay Model Minority Christianne Anastasia Gadd Lehigh University Follow this and additional works at: http://preserve.lehigh.edu/etd Recommended Citation Gadd, Christianne Anastasia, "The Advocate and The akM ing of a Gay Model Minority" (2012). Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1340. This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Lehigh Preserve. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Lehigh Preserve. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Advocate and the Making of a Gay Model Minority 1967-2007 by Christianne Anastasia Gadd A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate and Research Committee of Lehigh University in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History Lehigh University 9/1/2012 © 2012 Copyright Christianne Anastasia Gadd ii Approved and recommended for acceptance as a dissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History Christianne A. Gadd “The Advocate and the Making of a Gay Model Minority, 1967-2007” Defense Date John Pettegrew Dissertation Director Approved Date Committee Members: John Pettegrew Gail Cooper Dawn Keetley Edward P. Morgan iii Acknowledgements As a child, I remember reading the words of poet Charles Lamb emblazoned on a knick-knack in my parents’ home: “The good things in life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture.” The quotation is a good metaphor for the last ten years during which time this project took shape and came to fruition. I am deeply indebted to a number of people whose support, assistance, and guidance have made this mixture mostly sweet. I am exceedingly grateful for the support of Lehigh University throughout my graduate career. The resources provided by the History Department have been immeasurably helpful to the creation of this study. In awarding me the Joan and Michael Hoben Teaching Fellowship, the department allowed me to develop a class based on the research which foregrounds this dissertation, and the support provided by the department’s Kritzer Family Dissertation Research Grant enabled me to travel to LGBT archives and libraries across the nation. I also am grateful to Lehigh’s Humanities Center for awarding me its Graduate Summer Research Grant, and for the support of Kathleen Hutnik and the Graduate Student Life Office at Lehigh. Lehigh University’s Fairchild-Martindale Library. Thanks also go to Janet Walters, the indefatigable coordinator of the History department for her ready assistance and friendship. I have spent more time holed up in libraries and archives during this project than any person probably should, and I am grateful to their staff members for their guidance and expertise. Pat Ward and the late Maria Merle of Lehigh University’s Fairchild-Martindale Library were instrumental in helping me obtain many hard-to- iv find resources. Thanks also go to the coordinators of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of San Francisco, the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University’s Carl A. Kroch Library, the Special Collections of the John Hay Library at Brown University, the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library, and the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archive and Library at the William Way LGBT Community Center in Philadelphia. I am also grateful to former Advocate staff members Chris Bull and Michael Shively for patiently answering my questions about their experiences at the publication. Many thanks are due to my advisor, John Pettegrew, who has been a dependable and invaluable source of support throughout my entire graduate career. I am also appreciative of the sage guidance and support of Gail Cooper and Dawn Keetley, with whom I have had the pleasure of working for nearly ten years in the fields of History and Women’s Studies. Thanks are also due to Ted Morgan, for offering a fantastic Political Science course which galvanized my desire to study the American mass media. Reaching back to my undergraduate career, I appreciate the good fortune that led me to study with Julie Abraham, Mary Porter, and Persis Charles at Sarah Lawrence College; their classes in LGBT and Women’s Studies enabled me to discover my true passions as a scholar. I hope this project is a credit to all of them. To my esteemed colleague and dear friend Holly Marietta Kent I owe a debt of gratitude for her encouragement, wit, and for generally keeping me sane in the oftentimes insane world of academia. I will always be thankful for the confluence of circumstances that brought our orbits into alignment. I am also grateful for the support v and love of my friends and family members, including Gretchen Keer, Elda Collier, Tabitha Beasley, Sharon and Larry Grim, Stephanie and Mark Sienkiewicz, Ida Watts, Jeanne and Rick Fox, Dianne Linden, Betty Giddio and Lynn Johnson. And although they did not live to see the completion of this project, I know that my grandparents, Robert and Elizabeth Linden and Charles and Helen Gadd, would be thrilled to finally have a “doctor” in the family. Finally, I would like to dedicate this project to three people. I could not have asked for more supportive, enthusiastic, or loving parents than William and Sarabeth Gadd, and appreciate all the efforts they made to help me achieve this goal (ranging from scheduling “mental health breaks” at the Shore to keeping my cupboards stocked with funny cake and Diet Coke to fuel the writing process). And without the unwavering love and support of my partner, Lorrie Giddio, this project would not have been possible. Words cannot express how grateful I am for her presence in my life. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures Page viii Abstract 1 Prologue 3 Introduction 25 Chapter 1: Society, Sexology, and LGBT Identity in the Twentieth Century United States 52 Chapter 2: "The Ugly American:" Race, Xenophobia, and The Advocate 99 Chapter 3: Pushed to the Margins: The Advocate , Women, and Sexism in the Gay Press 171 Chapter 4: Outside the Margins: Bisexuality in The Advocate 282 Chapter 5: Strange Bedfellows: Transgender Issues in The Advocate 332 Epilogue and Conclusion 390 Vita 400 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: The Advocate ’s design changed over time Page 24 Figure 2: Larry Gross, “Majorities, Minorities, and the Media” Page 37 Figure 3: Cartoon, 1970 Page 169 Figure 4: Cartoon, 1972 Page 170 Figure 5: Cartoon, 1983 Page 170 Figure 6: Cartoon, 1981 Page 282 Figure 7: “Gay For the Thrill of It?” Page 330 Figure 8: “Are Lesbians Really Gay?” Page 331 Figure 9: Sandra Bernhard, “Acting Lesbian” Page 331 Figure 10: “Heartland Homicide” Page 389 Figure 11: Greg Louganis and Alexandra Billings Page 389 viii ABSTRACT This dissertation places The Advocate , a leading newsmagazine for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community published in the late twentieth-century United States, in context with contemporary political and social events and explores the relationship between the magazine's content and the ascendancy of an organized American LGBT political movement. My work argues that the magazine deliberately attempted to produce a largely normative LGBT minority in the interests of achieving mainstream acceptance of homosexuals and as a means of broadening public support for their struggles for civil rights. This goal, I charge, necessitated the magazine’s effacement of issues related to race and gender, generally, and of women and people of color, specifically. This project complicates still-dominant depictions of LGBT Americans as a monolithic entity by exploring the ways in which issues of gender, race, class and sexuality created fissures within this broadly-conceived community. My study illustrates how these differences were minimized by The Advocate , which consistently endeavored to consolidate—and to homogenize—LGBT Americans. This tendency, I argue, was driven by the fear that a failure to do so would sap the potential power of the LGBT political bloc that emerged in the United States in the 1970s—a sentiment expressed implicitly and explicitly in the magazine’s pages. I explore The Advocate ’s treatment of those who lay outside its tacitly-established borders and argue that their exclusion illustrates the limitations of identity politics. I also engage in a detailed analysis of The Advocate ’s coverage of second wave feminism, and evaluate its coverage of topics related to transgendered identities and bisexuality. Examining these issues reveals how 1 The Advocate struggled to maintain an essentialist and binary view of gender and sexuality, even at the cost of disenfranchising part of its audience. This practice, I conclude, both effected and reflected tensions with which the mainstream LGBT community and political movement continue to contend even today. 2 Prologue: A Brief History of The Advocate Though subcultures of same-sex-attracted individuals existed in the United States throughout its history, the 1950s were the decade in which nascent homophile organizations—most notably the lesbian group Daughters of Bilitis and the gay male- focused Mattachine Society—made a mission of combating institutional and social discrimination against gay and lesbian Americans. Their efforts made some headway, particularly in the last years of the decade, but homophobia still pervaded American culture well into the 1960s. By the late 1960s, however, the cultural moment was considerably different than the period in which the homophile groups had coalesced; struggles for civil rights for African-Americans, demands for gender equality from feminists, and fervent protests against the Vietnam war by both liberal and radical organizations contributed to an atmosphere infused with militancy, unease, and great hope.