Smooth as Silk

You should know by now that the mass media have been mainstreaming homosexuality. Rod Dreher, who works for a mainstream daily newspaper, has an article in Touchstone (Sept. 2005) titled “Pink Campaign: How the Media Made Homosexuality Mainstream.” He says: “Every media product — every newspaper or television report, every movie, every TV show, and so forth — is shaped by choices made by the creators, producers, and editors. Those choices will inevitably reflect the judgment of those creators, not only about what’s right and what’s wrong, but more fundamentally, about what constitutes the range of acceptable opinion.”

Dreher says that for the mass media, “Sexual repression is responsible for human misery, and must be fought at every turn if we are to be free and happy. The people who went on to make the movies, the television shows, the music, and the news products…agree with this view…and business people, who may or may not be personally conservative, have not hesitated to co-opt the message of sexual liberation to sell their products.”

As for mainstreaming homosexuality, Dreher says: “You might have thought that the advent of AIDS in the 1980s would have sobered up our culture about promiscuity in general, and specifically about its key role in male homosexual identity. But a funny thing happened: In the media, AIDS carriers became identified solely as victims — victims of cruel fate and a repressive society…. The message went out through the media that promiscuous gays who contracted AIDS were not to blame for their predicament — which is no more true than to say that a two-pack-a-day smoker is not responsible for his emphysema. We have no problem blaming the smoker…. But with AIDS, it was different.”

Dreher quotes a 2003 story from the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Michael Wilke, who advises corporations about how to advertise in the gay community, lauds…[‘gay’-friendly TV] programming (including Queer as Folk, Will and Grace, and Boy Meets Boy). He said, ‘It gives straight viewers a chance to make friends with gays in their living room. It’s like sensitivity training.’ Robert Thompson…said, ‘This is the genius of television. Gay characters are a hot genre, the shows have a cumulative power, and they end up moving the center of public opinion.'”