Rainbows and Butterflies?: Media and the LGBT Community

A cursory reading of various news stories in the mainstream media about the NYC Pride parade which took place on Sunday June 26 prompted me recently to a number of curious observations about gender roles and media representation of men, women and gayness. While coverage of the LGBT community over the past few decades has been extensive and well-documented, it has by no means been homogenous across all groups that are comprised of it, NYC Pride being no exception. If I were to rank them, I would probably say that gay men received most of the media attention on Sunday, followed by transgender people and then lesbians. It’s interesting, but not altogether surprising, that the representation in the media seems to be focused on the flamboyant gay male more than any other group within the LGBT community. Is it the fact that they are men, or that they are men emulating the behavior of women, that gets them more attention than lesbians receive? And if it is the latter, then why aren’t women getting equal amounts of attention when they act like men? What’s also interesting is that at the heart of the stereotypical media portrayal of a gay male is, above all else, effeminacy. The average lesbian in turn experiences a de-feminization in the mainstream media, which portrays lesbians as embodying behaviors that run counter to conventional ideas of what it means to be feminine. While these are merely stereotypes that are perpetuated if not entirely created by the media they are a small percentage of what gay men and women are actually like. Yet, they have somehow become all we think of when we consider homosexuality i.e., the queer becoming truly queer, in the sense that they seem to outwardly reject the manner in which their gender is translated into a practice or a behavior by emulating the opposite sex instead. One can only wonder how much of this is reality, and how much of it is a perception fostered by media portrayal. All lesbian women are hardly tomboys, and all gay men are hardly queens. Also, let’s not forget, lesbians are important PYPs too! (Big thanks to my colleague Emilie Spiegel for her thoughts while writing this!)