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“Gays in Your Living Room”: LGBTQ+ television, homophobia, and the birth of Channel 4 in 1980s Britain

journal contribution
posted on 2024-10-07, 15:13 authored by Marcus CollinsMarcus Collins

This article examines the conflicting attitudes towards homosexuality and public-service broadcasting among British program-makers, pressure groups, newspapers, politicians, and viewers in the 1980s through the prism of Channel 4’s One in Five (1983), billed as “the first programme ever to begin to show what it means to be positively gay.” It pairs a close reading of the broadcast with wide-ranging research in the archives of broadcasters, LGBTQ+ organizations, Parliament, and the press to show why minority programming formed a major arena of contestation over the representation and rights of lesbian and gay people in late twentieth-century Britain. Straight opposition to One in Five captured the strength and characteristics of homophobia in the 1980s, while the program’s divisive effect on queer audiences illuminated divisions within the LGBTQ+ community at the cusp of the HIV/AIDS crisis. The program was dogged by difficulties in creating a cohesive queer identity capable of accommodating differences in gender and ethnicity, region and nation, lifestyle, class, sexual practices, and political orientation. The inception, production, and reception of One in Five simultaneously highlight the particularities of sexual politics in Thatcherite Britain and ongoing dilemmas about the processes and merits of achieving inclusion, diversity, and equality for marginalized groups.

Funding

Journalism History

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

  • International Relations, Politics and History

Published in

Journalism History

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journalism History on [date of publication], available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2024.2408525.

Acceptance date

2024-09-21

ISSN

0094-7679

eISSN

2641-2071

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Marcus Collins. Deposit date: 2 October 2024

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