Mainstreaming Gays

Critical Convergences of Queer Media, Fan Cultures, and Commercial Television

By Eve Ng

Rutgers University Press

Mainstreaming Gays discusses a key transitional period linking the eras of legacy and streaming, analyzing how queer production and interaction that had earlier occurred outside the mainstream was transformed by multiple converging trends: the emergence of digital media, the rising influence of fan cultures, and increasing interest in LGBTQ content within commercial media. The U.S. networks Bravo and Logo broke new ground in the early 2000s and 2010s with their channel programming, as well as bringing in a new cohort of LGBTQ digital content creators, providing unprecedented opportunities for independent queer producers, and hosting distinctive spaces for queer interaction online centered on pop culture and politics rather than dating. These developments constituted the ground from which recent developments for LGBTQ content and queer sociality online have emerged. Mainstreaming Gays is critical reading for those interested in media production, fandom, subcultures, and LGBTQ digital media.

How did legacy TV morph into streaming and take queerness with it? Eve Ng brings intellectual force and clarity to a key change in queer media, redefining what 'mainstream' means and showing us how power, capital, and reinvention have long sparred—and danced—on the fields of queer culture.'
Lisa Henderson, Dean, Faculty of Media and Information Studies, Western University

Mainstreaming Gays investigates the role that LGBTQ media professionals, television, and online content played at a pivotal moment in media convergence and the consolidation of multiplatform content delivery. Impeccably researched and accessibly written, Eve Ng’s book offers a nuanced analysis of the central role LGBTQ media and marketing played during a vital period in media history.'
Katherine Sender, professor and director of Graduate Studies, Department of Communication, Cornell University

Chronicled in these pages are a host of culturally significant portals for LGBTQ news and entertainment which, Ng convincingly argues, contributed to the mainstreaming of historically marginalized communities. With her rigorous investigation into the people who created and benefited from these sites, Ng shows how the distance between the margins and the center, fans and producers, amateurs and professionals, is much narrower than scholars typically assume. This is an essential book for scholars of queer media.’

Aymar Jean Christian, author of Open TV: Innovation Beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television

EVE NG is an associate professor in the School of Media Arts and Studies at Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio. She is the author of Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis and an associate editor of Communication, Culture & Critique.

Introduction – Between Legacy and Streaming
Chapter 1 – New Convergences in LGBTQ Media Production: Digital Pathways Into Commercial Media
Chapter 2 – The New Queer Digital Spaces
Chapter 3 – Gaystreaming, Dualcasting, and Changing Queer Alignments
Chapter 4 – Beyond Queer Niche: Remaking the Mainstream
Conclusion – Legacies and Futures for Mainstreaming Gays
Appendix – List of Research Interviews and Events
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index

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