The Advocate and The Making of a Gay Model Minority

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Lehigh University
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Theses and Dissertations
2012
The Advocate and The Making of a Gay Model
Minority
Christianne Anastasia Gadd
Lehigh University
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Gadd, Christianne Anastasia, "The Advocate and The Making of a Gay Model Minority" (2012).Theses and Dissertations.Paper 1340.
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The Advocate and the Making of a Gay Model Minority
1967-2007

by

Christianne Anastasia Gadd

A Dissertation

Presented to the Graduate and Research Committee

of Lehigh University

in Candidacy for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in

History

Lehigh University

9/1/2012
© 2012 Copyright
Christianne Anastasia Gadd

ii
Approved and recommended for acceptance as a dissertation in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History

Christianne A. Gadd
“The Advocate and the Making of a Gay Model Minority, 1967-2007”

Defense Date

John Pettegrew
Dissertation Director

Approved Date

Committee Members:

John Pettegrew

Gail Cooper

Dawn Keetley

Edward P. Morgan

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Acknowledgements

As a child, I remember reading the words of poet Charles Lamb emblazoned
on a knick-knack in my parents’ home: “The good things in life are not to be had
singly, but come to us with a mixture.” The quotation is a good metaphor for the last
ten years during which time this project took shape and came to fruition. I am deeply
indebted to a number of people whose support, assistance, and guidance have made
this mixture mostly sweet.
I am exceedingly grateful for the support of Lehigh University throughout my
graduate career. The resources provided by the History Department have been
immeasurably helpful to the creation of this study. In awarding me the Joan and
Michael Hoben Teaching Fellowship, the department allowed me to develop a class
based on the research which foregrounds this dissertation, and the support provided by
the department’s Kritzer Family Dissertation Research Grant enabled me to travel to
LGBT archives and libraries across the nation. I also am grateful to Lehigh’s
Humanities Center for awarding me its Graduate Summer Research Grant, and for the
support of Kathleen Hutnik and the Graduate Student Life Office at Lehigh. Lehigh
University’s Fairchild-Martindale Library. Thanks also go to Janet Walters, the
indefatigable coordinator of the History department for her ready assistance and
friendship.
I have spent more time holed up in libraries and archives during this project
than any person probably should, and I am grateful to their staff members for their
guidance and expertise. Pat Ward and the late Maria Merle of Lehigh University’s
Fairchild-Martindale Library were instrumental in helping me obtain many hard-to-
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find resources. Thanks also go to the coordinators of the ONE National Gay and
Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of San
Francisco, the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University’s Carl A. Kroch
Library, the Special Collections of the John Hay Library at Brown University, the
James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library, and the
John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archive and Library at the William Way LGBT Community Center
in Philadelphia. I am also grateful to former Advocate staff members Chris Bull and
Michael Shively for patiently answering my questions about their experiences at the
publication.
Many thanks are due to my advisor, John Pettegrew, who has been a
dependable and invaluable source of support throughout my entire graduate career. I
am also appreciative of the sage guidance and support of Gail Cooper and Dawn
Keetley, with whom I have had the pleasure of working for nearly ten years in the
fields of History and Women’s Studies. Thanks are also due to Ted Morgan, for
offering a fantastic Political Science course which galvanized my desire to study the
American mass media. Reaching back to my undergraduate career, I appreciate the
good fortune that led me to study with Julie Abraham, Mary Porter, and Persis Charles
at Sarah Lawrence College; their classes in LGBT and Women’s Studies enabled me
to discover my true passions as a scholar. I hope this project is a credit to all of them.
To my esteemed colleague and dear friend Holly Marietta Kent I owe a debt of
gratitude for her encouragement, wit, and for generally keeping me sane in the
oftentimes insane world of academia. I will always be thankful for the confluence of
circumstances that brought our orbits into alignment. I am also grateful for the support
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and love of my friends and family members, including Gretchen Keer, Elda Collier,
Tabitha Beasley, Sharon and Larry Grim, Stephanie and Mark Sienkiewicz, Ida Watts,
Jeanne and Rick Fox, Dianne Linden, Betty Giddio and Lynn Johnson. And although
they did not live to see the completion of this project, I know that my grandparents,
Robert and Elizabeth Linden and Charles and Helen Gadd, would be thrilled to finally
have a “doctor” in the family.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this project to three people. I could not have
asked for more supportive, enthusiastic, or loving parents than William and Sarabeth
Gadd, and appreciate all the efforts they made to help me achieve this goal (ranging
from scheduling “mental health breaks” at the Shore to keeping my cupboards stocked
with funny cake and Diet Coke to fuel the writing process). And without the
unwavering love and support of my partner, Lorrie Giddio, this project would not have
been possible. Words cannot express how grateful I am for her presence in my life.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures Page viii

Abstract 1

Prologue 3

Introduction 25

Chapter 1:
Society, Sexology, and LGBT Identity in the Twentieth Century United States 52

Chapter 2:
"The Ugly American:" Race, Xenophobia, and The Advocate 99

Chapter 3:
Pushed to the Margins: The Advocate, Women, and Sexism in the Gay Press 171

Chapter 4:
Outside the Margins: Bisexuality in The Advocate 282

Chapter 5:
Strange Bedfellows: Transgender Issues in The Advocate 332

Epilogue and Conclusion 390

Vita 400

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: The Advocate’s design changed over time Page 24

Figure 2: Larry Gross, “Majorities, Minorities, and the Media” Page 37

Figure 3: Cartoon, 1970 Page 169

Figure 4: Cartoon, 1972 Page 170

Figure 5: Cartoon, 1983 Page 170

Figure 6: Cartoon, 1981 Page 282

Figure 7: “Gay For the Thrill of It?” Page 330

Figure 8: “Are Lesbians Really Gay?” Page 331

Figure 9: Sandra Bernhard, “Acting Lesbian” Page 331

Figure 10: “Heartland Homicide” Page 389

Figure 11: Greg Louganis and Alexandra Billings Page 389

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ABSTRACT

This dissertation places The Advocate, a leading newsmagazine for the lesbian,
gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community published in the late twentieth-century
United States, in context with contemporary political and social events and explores the
relationship between the magazine's content and the ascendancy of an organized
American LGBT political movement. My work argues that the magazine deliberately
attempted to produce a largely normative LGBT minority in the interests of achieving
mainstream acceptance of homosexuals and as a means of broadening public support for
their struggles for civil rights. This goal, I charge, necessitated the magazine’s effacement
of issues related to race and gender, generally, and of women and people of color,
specifically.
This project complicates still-dominant depictions of LGBT Americans as a
monolithic entity by exploring the ways in which issues of gender, race, class and
sexuality created fissures within this broadly-conceived community. My study illustrates
how these differences were minimized by The Advocate, which consistently endeavored
to consolidate—and to homogenize—LGBT Americans. This tendency, I argue, was
driven by the fear that a failure to do so would sap the potential power of the LGBT
political bloc that emerged in the United States in the 1970s—a sentiment expressed
implicitly and explicitly in the magazine’s pages. I explore The Advocate’s treatment of
those who lay outside its tacitly-established borders and argue that their exclusion
illustrates the limitations of identity politics. I also engage in a detailed analysis of The
Advocate’s coverage of second wave feminism, and evaluate its coverage of topics
related to transgendered identities and bisexuality. Examining these issues reveals how
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