image : Harvey Milk, a gay rights activist (http://latinolikeme.wordpress.com/2008/11/, retrieved 12.1.2011)
Analysts said that even if the representation of gays has made considerable progress on television and film, the
lives of gays and lesbians is still systematically obscured or distorted in the mledia.
In the press:
In 1998, Lisa Bennett published the results of a study that lists 50 years of coverage of issues relating to
homosexuality in The Times and Newsweek. The results concluded that in the news media reinforce prejudice
and discrimination against gays and lesbians and often combine them without evidence of criminal or deviant
behavior. The media also often repeated offensive or homophobic comments. She said also that in general, the
media strengthened the idea that gays and lesbians were, by definition, inferior.
Before the beginning of the homosexuals protest movements in the 1970s, they appeared rarely in the headlines
of the news. In the 1980s, when the emergence of AIDS had become a public health issue, the coverage had
become more important and more negative: gay men were often presented as serious dangers to society.
Today: An article published in July 2001 in “A rayons ouverts” (the newspaper of the National
Library of Canada) reveals that there still is a great improvement in the coverage of the gay theme.
Today, the media publishes annually more than 400 articles dealing with issues and themes related
to gays, then we published in a fortnight a year, all newspapers combined, in the eighties.
Moreover, the tone of these articles has greatly changed over the years, becoming more objective
or friendly.
