In pursuit of The Emerald City: cable-access television and the gay 1970s

Abstract

This article makes a case for considering The Emerald City—a little known yet pioneering gay-focused television series—as a significant media output of the gay 1970s, arguing that the show enables a rethinking of the relationship between the liberatory and liberal impulses structuring this decade’s sexual politics. To make this argument, I focus primarily on The Emerald City’s magazine format, drawing out the way that this particular mode of televisual address was used to make connections and coalitions between gay politics and a range of other Left political concerns. Ultimately, I propose that the show worked to communicate a capacious idea of what it meant to be gay in the late 1970s, complicating any one-dimensional accounts of this decade’s political priorities by establishing a queer agenda both multiplicitous and intersectional.

More information

Identifiers

Catalogue record

Export record