Press freedom has been denied to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Americans for decades. LGBT Americans have been demonized by Christian-American theocrats, persecuted as criminals by federal, state and municipal governments, and declared mentally ill by the American Psychiatric Association. Mainstream American media demonizes, censors, ignores, and defames the LGBT community and individuals, fanning the flames of homophobic and heterosexist attitudes.

Homophobic and heterosexist attitudes justify denying lesbian and gay Americans unconditional constitutional parity. The origin of these attitudes begins with Christian-American theocratic preachers who want to replace the United States Constitution with the New American Bible. This bible is an incorrect translation of the King James Bible, which had already distorted the Hebrew Bible and the original Christian Bible (soulforce).

Christian-American theocrats pressure government officials to write laws denying lesbian and gay Americans the right to work, housing, privacy, due process, and the First Amendment rights of free speech, assembly, and press. Homophobes are people who are afraid they are gay or lesbian. Homophobia, a word coined around 1955, started after the 1948 Kinsey Report, "Sexual Behavior in a Human Male," was published, finding that 47 percent of white male adults had at least one adult homosexual orgasmic encounter.

Then people feared that anyone could become gay or lesbian, and there would be no way to know. The only reason this was a problem was because of heterosexist attitudes. Heterosexists are under the delusion that they are superior to gay men and lesbians. Heterosexists think that equal rights are only for those people they approve of, accept or tolerate. They believe that if they do not suppress gay and lesbian freedom, more people will become gay and lesbian.. They believe sexuality is not genetic but a choice.

Press freedom for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Americans is an ongoing battle, fought along with the struggle to win unconditional constitutional parity. Each decade brought new challenges, many unforeseen, and each set of challenges increased the numbers of people involved in the movement, and activists learned how to work the system, political, private, and the press.

The more they learned, the greater and deadlier the backlash. Today, LGBT American activists are a powerful political and economic force. While they have increased their clout, the heterosexists they battled 50 years ago are still around, sitting on megamedia empires, which still censor, demonizes and defame them. However, now they have the means and resources to fight back, because of the ground they covered over those 50 years.

1970-1979

After Stonewall, there was no turning back, and gay and lesbian organizations cropped up across America, quickly learning how to influence and infiltrate local party politics, and publishing newsletters, newspapers, and magazines. The enthusiastic leap out of the closet was met by heterosexist violence, starting with Charles Thorpe, San Francisco Gay Free Press editor, who was attacked, smacked in the head with a baseball bat and his face cut with a knife. Each June, across the world, Gay Pride celebrations commemorated the Stonewall Inn uprising.. Participation became larger each year.

The news coverage focused on the flamboyant drag queens and the dykes on bikes, rather than on the majority of gays and lesbians dressed in everyday street clothes. That kind of TV coverage has not changed much. Activists in New York continued pressuring the media to be more objective in their coverage. Using a direct action tactic called "zapping" and civil disobedience, activists crashed television shows, demanding to be heard, and often getting arrested. Next they zapped and lobbied the American Psychiatric Association, pressuring it to remove homosexuality as a mental illness diagnosis, which they finally did in 1974.

Throughout the 1970s, with each step forward to equality, heterosexual backlash became more vicious and sometimes deadly. Reverend Troy Perry started the gay Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) in 1968, and by 1973 it was the largest single membership national gay organization. Today there are 300 churches in 18 countries. Eighteen fires torched MCC meeting places over the church's first 25 years, killing 33 people. The New Orleans UpStairs bar and MCC meeting place was torched in 1973, and the death count was unknown as the bodies were fused together. The Times Picayune did not mention that this was a gay bar, and the wire services repeated only what the New Orleans paper reported. The New Orleans afternoon paper, the State-Item, quoted New Orleans Police Department's chief of detectives, "you know this was a queer bar."

As LGBT rights organizations gained political clout, with candidates seeking out the community for queer block vote support, gay rights ordinances were passing in many cities, including Miami Florida. Then, Florida Citrus Association shill, the entertainer Anita Bryant, led the backlash. Bankrolled by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, Bryant started Save Our Children from Homosexuals campaign, overturning the ordinance by referendum in 1977. She called gays "human garbage." The Miami Herald refused to run ads from the pro-gay side, publishing a headline, "There's no human right to corrupt our children."

Televangelist James Robison announced plans to put together a national TV multi-million dollar pulpit to condemn homosexuality on prime time. When gay activists demanded equal time, Robison's show was pulled off the air for a short time, so that the gay groups would not have any broadcast access. Bryant's campaign kicked off the antigay theocratic broadcast movement.

Don Wildmon started the American Family Association in 1977, obsessed with stopping media coverage of gay rights issues. Today AFA produces a radio show available on about 1200 stations nationally. It has a broadcast ministry with about 200 stations and 27 states, and sued the FCC for refusing to grant them some licenses.

James Dobson started Focus on the Family in 1977. Dobson is heard daily on over 3000 radio stations in North America and in 98 countries, with an audience of about 200 million listeners daily. FOF lobbies against "special rights" for gays.

Beverly LeHaye began Concerned Women for America in 1979. CWA actively opposes all gay and lesbian civil rights. Its daily radio show broadcasts on 75 stations reaching about one million listeners weekly. Those three organizations are the tip of the iceberg (for the rest of the iceberg.

1980-1989

AIDS brought the gay and lesbian community together as no outside human force could possibly do. While many of the gay activists who started the liberation movement, and put their lives online for equality, became ill from HIV infections, and died, the new generation of activists continued organizing, educating, and agitating in ways never seen before in the gay and lesbian liberation movement.

Christian fundamentalists replaced psychiatrists as experts on homosexuality. Any time there was news about gay rights or AIDS, mainstream media schlepped out some born-again reactionary to spiel anti-gay propaganda, because that's what the media called objectivity. AIDS opened up a new avenue for televangelists to scare the flock into sending money for them to battle the gay disease, which they blamed on the sins of the homosexual lifestyle. By firmly establishing themselves as players in the media market, the mainstream press turned to them routinely as experts on anything homosexual.

The Reagan administration refused to talk about AIDS, because as far as Reagan was concerned mostly gay men, people of color, and drug addicts were HIV-infected and dying, there was no need for the federal government to fund research. The fact that the majority of HIV infected people worldwide were heterosexual, and the disease was spreading through heterosexual prostitution in Africa, Asia, in Europe, was ignored by the American press.

Instead, because minorities in America tend to live in "ghettos" and it is easier for the Centers for Disease Control to track epidemics in clusters, the true majority of Americans HIV-infected is still not reported.. Men who are not monogamous, and have sexual relations with prostitutes (a flourishing industry in America) are as much at risk for becoming HIV-infected as any heterosexual man is anywhere on the planet. Since heterosexual men continue to believe they are not at risk, because of the media misinformation, they are not getting tested, and skew the numbers of HIV-positive people.

American mainstream media continues misinforming the public about HIV and AIDS. The result is increasing numbers of heterosexual men and women infected with HIV and living with or dying from AIDS.

The national media looked to the New York Times to lead the way in reporting about AIDS, but from 1980 to 1983 AIDS was a story not fit to print by the Times. The Times attitude in part came from the owners, the Sulzburger family, position about gay people. During the 1970s, the Times style book was changed requiring reporters to use the word "homosexual" exclusively when referring to gay men, and to only use the word "gay" when writing about an organization with "gay" in its title.

Executive editor, Abe Rosenthal, was considered by some to be antigay in his hiring and firing practices, and in reports that he called gay people "faggots" and "queers" in some editorial meetings. Rosenthal explained that he believed the word "gay" to be a politicized term, and did not recognize that this was the word gay people chose to call themselves.

Rosenthal also killed or buried articles about AIDS, including stories about heterosexuals affected by the disease. He especially did not publish stories that would bring information to gay men about scientific breakthroughs, or what was being learned about prevention. That information came from the gay press, like the New York Native.

It also came from newly organized gay groups, like the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) organization. GMHC was started by a handful of gay men in 1981 to raise money for education, and to care for the people who were dying, whatever their sexuality. Their efforts were ignored by the Times until 1983, when gay activists met with Rosenthal. They told him he was missing the news value of the AIDS story. Put it to him that way, he was hooked, and began ordering more stories done on the impact of AIDS on the lives of New Yorkers.

The Times trailed behind Newsday, the New York Post, and Newsweek in their coverage, but picked up steam for the rest of the decade. The Times had some catching up to do though, since it had published only seven articles in 18 months, while hundreds of people had died.

To counter the antigay mainstream media spin, the Gay and Lesbian AllianceAgainst Defamation(GLAAD) formed in 1985. By 1987, GLAAD persuaded The New York Times to change its editorial policy and use the word gay, and by 2001 the Times began including same-gender commitment ceremonies, which started national media precedence.

While LGBT activists raised money and awareness, Christian fundamentalists raised money and prejudice. As theocRats control their own media, and literally preach to their choirs, they inflamed people into violent backlash against gay men and lesbians, and heterosexuals living with AIDS, including children and their families. When two boys from Florida, who had hemophilia, became infected with HIV through blood transfusions, and were threatened by their neighbors, the mainstream press begin to pay attention and report that violence.

1990-1999

The 1990s was the decade of the cultural war declared by Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican Convention. Web pages on the newly emerging Internet is the battleground. Now, not only did the mainstream press have a market on 24/7 television and radio, and in daily and weekly papers and magazines, but it could zap information, true or not, along telephone lines and broadband to billions of homes, offices and internet cafes worldwide. The burgeoning billion dollar antigay theocratic industry had found its niche, popping up web pages filled with propaganda. Some web pages advocate violence, like Fred Phelps godhatesfags.com, but the Internet also makes it easy to find out who they are and where they live, lifting up the rock they live under -- People for he American Way Right Wing Watch.

Townhall set up an easy way for hundreds of these antigay organizations to reach out and into the pockets of their followers, with pop-up donation messages to make sending money easier. These organizations use listserves, directly communicating with the flocks, instructing them when to send a massive blitz of email, snail mail and telephone calls to their congressional and state representatives, the president, and governors, threatening not to vote for them if they don't support antigay legislation.

Emails swirl through the Internet, directly linking to corporate CEO's email addresses where, with a mouse click form letters are sent threatening to boycott companies who advertise on gay-positive television shows.. Conservative media watcher, Peter LaBarbera, monitored gay and lesbian listserves, reporting their content to reactionary theocrats. He moves around a lot, but his latest incarnation is an homo-obsessed attack on LGBT rights - at Americans for Truth [about homosexuality].. Here he tucks in his Lambda Report, so named to confuse people, as lambda is a symbol of the LGBT freedom movement.

The National Lesbian and Gay Journalist Association (NLGJA). founded in 1990, advocates positive gay and lesbian coverage in the news. LGBT organizations and publications publish web pages, getting out the gay side of the story without interference, reaching people with limited access to information.

Community forums, message boards and chat rooms bring people together to socialize and organize globally. Throughout the gay and lesbian freedom movement, there has been a long-held belief that if heterosexuals would just get to know gays and lesbians, they would be less frightened and more understanding. Heterosexuals and gays and lesbians can talk anonymously on the Internet.

Unfortunately, as with every decade, there is a backlash. In the 1990s, this backlash was deadly for a many people. Beginning in 1995, the FBI began including statistics including sexual orientation in its hate crime statistics. In 1995 1,347 people were reported as targets, 13 percent; in 1996 1,281,by 2003 anti-male homosexual bias was the most common sexual orientation motivation, with 783 incidents (10.5% of all hate crimes).

2000-2003

After the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack, Jerry Falwell told Pat Robertson on the 700 Club "...the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to mke that an alternative lifestyle... all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen'." However, the next day he told CNN, "I would never blame any human being except the terrorists, and if I left that impression with gays or lesbians, or anyone else, I apologize."

The power and influence of the gay and lesbian liberation movement has finally resulted in the mainstream media turning around, and not accepting antigay diatribes as the status quo for them to uphold. Yet there is still profit in prejudice.

MSNBC replaced Phil Donahue with reactionary radio shock jock Michael Savage, who makes his living defaming gays and lesbians: "the degenerates on the left who want to sell Americans on the idea that homosexuality, bisexuality, transexuality and even sex with animals is normal..Upon protest by GLAAD and its influence on advertisers, Savage said, "We're going to go after your funding sources. And we will do everything we can within the legal realm to cut off that funding." MSNBC said, "We ...strongly defend [Savage's] new show as a legitimate attempt to expand the marketplace of ideas."

Today, over 100 newspapers nationally print same-gender union announcements. The Miami Herald in 1978 would not even accept a pro-gay rights ordinance ad, and now publish same-gender union announcements. Protecting children from the homosexual lifestyle is still very much alive in America. Gay-positive book and web sites are banned in schools, some public libraries, and in software monitoring programs. GLAAD and NLGJA are criticized for continuing the struggle for fairness in the media. Reactionaries still argue that antigay bias is simply an exercise of free speech, and silencing gay and lesbian voices is the Christian thing to do. Or, in the case of Michael Savage and Laura Schlessinger, the Jewish thing to do.

CONCLUSION

Gay men and lesbians can still be arrested in some states for making love. Now when the mainstream media covers this issue, they do not use disparaging words like "faggot" but, for the most part report fairly. Currently 14 states still have sodomy laws on their books, and only four apply to same-gender partners.

Lambda Legal Defense Fund, founded in 1973, litigated a Texas case before the Supreme Court in 2004, where the court finally found that gay and lesbian Americans are indeed protected by the 14th Amendment. Senator Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) told an AP reporter that if gays have a right to privacy so will men who have sex with dogs. GLAAD put pressure on him to apologize, and on the Republicans to censure him.

The mainstream media reporting has not fanned the flames of prejudice. Instead Santorum ended up in a position where he had to explain himself, which he did on his web page, writing that he was talking about privacy and did not intend to offend anyone. He even met with Parents, Friends and Families of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) because of this pressure, although PFLAG parents left the meeting very upset, as reported in the mainstream press.

While unconditional constitutional parity is not even closely apparent yet, and school children are at risk of being bullied because of their perceived sexuality, the political clout of the LGBT liberation movement is certainly evident. After breaking free of constant harassment by police in June 1969, activists quickly organized, published hundreds of newspapers to communicate, and then started pressuring the media, governments, and the private sector into stopping their bigoted attitudes.

The media began to change in the middle 1990s. Governments have changed some policies, like sodomy laws and police raids, but still refuse to recognize same-gender marriage rights. Many more gay and lesbian journalists are out of the closet, but there are still those who must stay silent to keep their jobs. While there are still antigay theocrats who solicit donations through homophobic propaganda, those numbers are dwindling. Even the Christian Coalition, started by Pat Robertson in 1989, no longer features antigay rhetoric on their web page. The Internet greatly impacted changes in attitude, as uncensored information became more freely available.

The methods used by Anerican LGBT activists for unconditional constitutional parity have been followed worldwide, to differing degrees of success, depending on the repressive polices of other nations.