Homosexuality seen as accepted by media

A month after the Supreme Court decision legalizing sodomy and Canada’s recognition of same-sex “marriage,” analysts say an almost casual acceptance of homosexuality pervades the media.

Last night, “Boy Meets Boy,” a dating game for homosexual men where some straight men are thrown into the mix, aired on NBC’s Bravo cable channel.

This came on the heels of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” another new Bravo show that last week got bumped up to prime time Thursday, the same night that NBC airs its homosexual-themed sitcom “Will & Grace.”

“Queer Eye” features a group of homosexual men giving a fashion makeover to a heterosexual man.

“It was horrible,” Matthew Felling, media analyst for the Center for Media and Public Affairs, said of the new Bravo show. “It showed a gay guy running through a straight guy’s closet pulling out hockey jerseys. It was almost an ‘Amos and Andy’ angle towards homosexuality.”

But David Smith of the Human Rights Campaign, a homosexual advocacy group, said the public wants entertainment with an edge.

“It’s not like NBC and Bravo are doing public service announcements for the gay community,” he said. “If there’s not a market for these programs, they’d not be on the air. And ‘Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?’ was more a threat to heterosexual marriage than any gay program.”

According to the Nexis database, 350 stories about homosexuality appeared in major papers from May 26 to June 25. That rose to 537 stories from June 26 to July 25.

Topics included the Canadian and U.S. court decisions, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s decision early this month to extend its nondiscrimination policy to cover homosexuals, and the June 7 election of the nation’s first homosexual Episcopal bishop in New Hampshire.

On Monday, the New York Post announced the establishment of the nation’s first high school for homosexual students in New York.

“What happened last month [with the court decisions] ratified an attitude change that had already happened,” said Andrew Tyndall, founder of www.tyndallreport.com, which analyzes network TV coverage. “The culture had already changed. The last thing to change was the law.”

Homosexuality ranked fifth in topics covered on the three major network prime-time weeknight news shows June 23 to 27, he said, rating 13 minutes total.

Critics don’t argue that homosexuality should be criminalized or considered abnormal, he added, “but whether gay behavior should be considered no different than heterosexual behavior, that is definitely not resolved.”

But there has been a backlash against homosexuality, according to a poll released yesterday by USA Today. Whereas 60 percent of adults polled in early May thought homosexual relations between consenting adults should be legal, 48 percent think so now. The survey also found that opposition to same-sex “marriages” had risen to 57 percent, the most opposition since the question was first posed in 2000.

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