Cable Comes Out: LGBTQ Community Television on New York Public Access Stations

Herold, Lauren

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-pzh3-xa06

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Cable Comes Out: LGBTQ Community Television on New York Public Access Stations

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This dissertation explores the development of public access cable television programming made by and for LGBTQ people in New York City. Through archival research, interviews with the producers of these shows, and analysis of their content and textual features, I argue that LGBTQ public access programming reflected and amplified particular affects and experiences circulating in LGBTQ communities between the 1970s-2000s. My research traces the production and distribution of these programs to examine the possibilities afforded by and constraints inherent to creating local, low-budget television by teams of under-resourced producers. I suggest that cable access allowed LGBTQ people to experiment with and develop methods of queer television production before this opportunity was available on broadcast and commercial cable networks. A focus on affect and emotion throughout my analysis demonstrates how these programs function as what Ann Cvetkovich calls mediated “archives of feeling,” providing contemporary viewers with new windows into the study of LGBTQ culture and history in the U.S. My project thus illuminates the feel of queer television production, as a source for joy, empowerment, and community-building as well as precarity, conflict, tension, and loss for their producers. According to my research, LGBTQ producers created more than 150 cable access programs over the past 50 years. My scholarship adds this programming into the archive of television history, which still heavily emphasizes commercial networks. LGBTQ media studies scholarship similarly focuses on commercial programming, typically recounting the dearth of queer television representation from the 1950s-1980s. As I discuss, the history of public service programming designed for LGBTQ community use has not yet been addressed. My dissertation chapters explore the historical significance of particular LGBTQ cable access shows in New York City—the first city wired for cable, and therefore home to more than 60 LGBTQ cable access programs. I focus my analysis on New York’s cable market to explore the significance and impact of these shows on LGBTQ community culture within the city. LGBTQ people interested in creating media, but unable to or uninterested in working in the commercial industries, took advantage of public access as an available platform through which they could produce television. My research suggests that LGBTQ cable access programming is a historically significant yet under-researched antecedent to contemporary queer community media, offering scholars, producers, artists, and activists a historical record of LGBTQ culture, news, arts, entertainment, and activism as well as a model for producing sustainable and independent queer media.

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