Guggenheim to support Gross’ ‘Up From Invisibility’

“No one looking at the young woman who walked into a lesbian bar in Los Angeles in the summer of 1947 would have suspected that they were witnessing a milestone in American social history. A twenty-six year old secretary who called herself Lisa Ben (an anagram of lesbian) was distributing copies of a new publication she had created called Vice Versa — ‘because in those days our kind of life was considered a vice.’ The magazine consisted of only 15 type-written pages, but it signaled the first stirrings of the modern gay rights movement in the United States.”

So wrote Larry Gross, Sol Worth professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, in the opening of his application for a Guggenheim fellowship. Gross’ proposal was funded by the Guggenheim Foundation, and as a result he will be spending the 1998-99 academic year completing work on a book titled, Up From Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men and the Media in America.

Gross was trained as a social psychologist (B.A., Brandeis; Ph.D., Columbia) but found that “the then narrow disciplinary confines of social psychology stifled my interests in art, culture and history,” as he put it in his application. The study of communication, especially media, “offered me the opportunity to bridge disciplinary approaches and methods, thinking about the arts in social and historical perspective, as carriers and articulators of basic beliefs about the nature of things and about the moral order.”

Gross will seek to develop parallel narratives in Up From Invisibility. He’ll not only be looking at the emergence of the lesbian and gay community in the United States since World War II, but he’ll also be examining how media developed as well. The two interact, he believes, because having media gives a community an identity; media not only bring a community together but shape it as well. That’s why portrayals of lesbians and gays in mainstream media are so important, Gross contends. Many lesbian and gay individuals are either isolated or uncertain about their sexuality, and media portrayals present information about who these individuals think they are “supposed” to be (or not supposed to be).

While others have published histories of the lesbian and gay press, and mainstream news media, as well as analyses of portrayals of lesbians and gay men in film, Gross wants to include television and newer technologies such as the Internet. He believes that lesbian and gay characters have never really been “invisible,” that they’ve always been present in television. Until more recently, however, their sexualities have not been explicitly acknowledged. Like ethnic minorities before them who were denied a sexuality in media programming, lesbians and gay men have often assumed the role of “sexless sidekick.” Yet, lesbian and gay audiences were very aware of potentially gay characters; for example, lesbian bars were sponsoring “Ellen”-watching parties long before the show’s writers had ostensibly decided that their leading character was a lesbian. Gross contends that minority audiences generally, and lesbian and gay audiences particularly, become more sophisticated in “reading” media messages relating to their portrayals; in essence they become “bilingual.” “Camp is nobody’s mother tongue,” Gross said, but media present gay audiences with opportunities for “double readings” of hidden as well as surface meanings [with current images of how “camp” is being done, thus allowing those audiences to recognize those patterns again during later viewing].

Gross has been collecting data for this project for a long time, and he indicated that his biggest challenge will be which examples to include and which to leave out. Even so, he will most likely travel to Cornell University, the New York and San Francisco Public Libraries, and the National Lesbian and Gay Archive in Los Angeles as part of his work. In the process, he hopes to co-mingle historical analysis with media analysis from the perspective of communication theory to create a unique and significant work.