ABSTRACT
During the twentieth century, the American news media’s coverage of gay men and lesbians was overwhelmingly negative. In 1950, newspapers routinely referred to gay people as “perverts,” with headlines such as “Perverts Called Government Menace” in the New York Times and “Sex Perverts Called Risks to Security” in the San Francisco Chronicle. Journalism’s penchant for making disparaging comments about gay people remained intact through the final decade of the century. In 1993, for example, the Chicago Tribune told its readers that pedophilia was rampant in the gay community, saying, “Homosexual men are much more likely than heterosexual men to incorporate boys into their sexual practices”—even though experts insisted that this wasn’t true. 1
