Until the late 1950s being publicly gay was unthinkable. Over the past half century society has evolved considerably and gay people share a newfound sense of community and empowerment in America. In the media especially, lesbians and gays are more visible than ever before, but does this"visibility" do justice to the complexity and variety of gay experience? Or is gay identity manipulated and contrived by media that are unwilling— and perhaps unable— to fully comprehend and honor it?Larry Gross traces the relation of lesbians and gays to the media from newspapers, magazines, and television to movies and the Internet. Gross shows how the emergence of the gay movement in the 1950s coincided with the growth of communications technologies and the ways in which such media intersect the political and social process. Gross notes the victories, like the opening of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore— the first gay bookstore in the country— or the transformation ofThe Advocate from a small newsletter to the first commercial gay paper, but also questions some dubious milestones, like the first lesbian kiss on network television (LA Law) orDoonesbury's Andy Lippincott, the first gay character in a newspaper comic strip. While positive representations of gays and lesbians are a cautious step in the right direction, Gross astutely points to the entertainment and news media's lingering inability to break free from proscribed limitations in order to embrace the complex reality of gay identity. Copyright (C) Muze Inc. 2005. For personal use only. All rights reserved.