0.8. Alternate Channels: Talking Queer TV with Steven Capsuto
History is Gay
Leigh Pfeffer
4.6 • 536 Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2020
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We're bringing you a bonus episode here on the History is Gay feed today, so get ready for a ride through the history of queers on TV! Leigh got a chance to sit down and talk with Steven Capsuto, author of Alternate Channels: Queer Images on 20th-Century TV, a deep dive into the history of queer representation on radio and the small screen from the 1930s to 2000! We chat about our favorite moments of representation from the era, the impact and role of gay activists in moving the needle forward for narrative depictions of queerness, and more!
Check out Steven and his work at www.alternatechannels.net and follow him on twitter @StevenCapsuto for daily "Today in Queer TV History" tidbits and more!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, and welcome to History is Gay, a podcast that examines the underappreciated and overlooked |
| 0:05.6 | queer ladies, gents, and gentle enbies that have always been there in the unexplored |
| 0:10.2 | corners of history, because history has never been as straight as you think. |
| 0:55.3 | Yeah. Hi, everybody. Welcome to History is gay. I'm Lee, as usual, and today we're bringing you a little mini episode that is an interview with a new friend named Stephen Capsudo, who is the author of Alternate Channels, Queer Images in 20th Century TV, which I've really enjoyed, and it has been out for many years, but there is a new edition, and it bright and it is pink and it is beautiful and a whole bunch of colors. And if you know me, you know that I |
| 1:01.3 | love talking about queer TV. So I'm very excited to chat with Stephen. Welcome, Stephen. Thanks for |
| 1:08.5 | coming on. Thanks for inviting me. This is exciting. |
| 1:11.7 | Yeah. Love the podcast. Thank you. Yeah. It's so funny. Like in starting this podcast, one of my first |
| 1:18.4 | things that I wanted to do before we even settled on doing like a queer history podcast is I wanted |
| 1:23.8 | to do a queer media analysis podcast. So it's nice to be able to get like these little |
| 1:27.7 | tidbits in every episode we talk about, you know, we do pop culture tie-ins. So it's nice to, |
| 1:33.5 | nice to have like a chat. But I wanted to kind of just start at the beginning. I'm sure that you've |
| 1:40.8 | been asked this in every single interview. But what kind of inspired you to start researching and writing this book? |
| 1:47.0 | Like, what was your own history growing up and seeing queer images on TV? |
| 1:53.0 | I was really lucky. |
| 1:55.0 | There had been in the early to mid-70s, the, as it was then, the gay liberation movement was lobbying the networks |
| 2:02.3 | to, you know, stop portraying all the lesbians as serial killers and, and stop portraying the gay men |
| 2:08.0 | as, like, terrorists and child molesters and whatnot. And so by the time I knew I was gay, |
| 2:13.4 | I was seeing some okay stuff, you know, I was seeing the daytime talk shows that had like gay activists on and |
| 2:19.5 | characters who, while problematic at least seem to have friends and family and jobs and lives, you know, and weren't killing anybody. |
| 2:27.8 | So that was good, but that was sort of like a little oasis. That was like the late 70s period. And by the time I was in grad |
| 2:37.2 | school in the late 80s, I was volunteering at an LGBT crisis hotline. And it was a different era. |
| 2:45.1 | Not a lot of people were out, which meant we were invisible to society, which was bad enough, |
... |
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