Straight News

Edward Alwood's history of how journalism has treated gays and gay issues shows a remarkable progress from the time when a gay man appeared on television with a hood over his head to protect his identity. The crucial turning point was that watershed in the history of gay rights, the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, when drag queens found themselves taken seriously at last after a night spent fighting the police. Alwood relates how the descheduling of homosexuality as an illness by the American Psychiatric Association forced a reassessment upon a reluctant media establishment, and how the onset of the AIDS epidemic sparked genuine empathy, and the emergence of gay liberation within the newsrooms.