Larry Gross – författare

A half century ago gay men and lesbians were all but invisible in the media and, in turn, popular culture. With the lesbian and gay liberation movement came a profoundly new sense of homosexual community and empowerment and the emergence of gay people onto the media''s stage. And yet even as the mass media have been shifting the terms of our public conversation toward a greater acknowledgment of diversity, does the emerging "visibility" of gay men and women do justice to the complexity and variety of their experience? Or is gay identity manipulated and contrived by media that are unwilling—and perhaps unable—to fully comprehend and honor it?

While positive representations of gays and lesbians are a cautious step in the right direction, media expert Larry Gross argues that the entertainment and news media betray a lingering inability to break free from proscribed limitations in order to embrace the complex reality of gay identity. While noting major advances, like the opening of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore—the first gay bookstore in the country—or the rise of The Advocate from small newsletter to influential national paper, Gross takes the measure of somewhat more ambiguous milestones, like the first lesbian kiss on television or the first gay character in a newspaper comic strip.

"Worth had courage and originality enough not to take pictures for granted, but thought and struggled with some of the most difficult problems that cinematographers (and researchers in visual media) are faced with."—Edward T. HallOne of the central figures in the development of the study of visual communication, Sol Worth (1922-1977) was a filmmaker and painter before he turned to academic pursuits. He began with the question of how film could be understood and studied as a medium of communication and from there he moved on to the larger and more profound questions about the nature of visual media in general and the role that visual images play in shaping and constructing reality. Worth''s pioneering work with Navajo filmmakers broadened our understanding of visual perception and communication even as it presented anthropologists with a means to achieve one of their most cherished goals: somehow to see the world through the eyes of their informants.The papers in this volume trace the development of Worth''s thinking and research as he outlined the problems and issues that must be faced in the study of visual communication. He went further than anyone else in setting the intellectual agenda for the field, drawing upon such diverse disciplines as anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, and semiotics. His broader interests are reflected in several papers that apply to problems and concerns of a more practical nature. Among them is Worth''s innovative paper on the use of film in education.Worth''s contributions to the serious task of understanding the role and potential of visual media and visual communication extend far beyond the intellectual realms of theory and speculation. Indeed, they speak clearly to issues facing all of us in a world that is so much shaped by visual communication.