LGBTQ Television Programming

LGBTQ content on television has experienced significant growth since the first recurring gay character, Peter Panama in The Corner Bar, appeared on U.S. television in 1972. With the expansion and diversification of the media landscape, there is now programming marketed directly to the LGBTQ community. Increasingly, media scholars worldwide are becoming more aware of LGBTQ media content and its history, as these characters and narratives have gone from being marginalized to marketable. This entry provides an overview of that transformation, with particular attention to its dynamics and to the agents of change that have helped to bring it about.

LGBTQ television programming is an example of narrowcasting, in that the content is disseminated to a particular audience and not to a broader mass public. Narrowcasting can ...