Opengender

Lesbian voluntary organisations and sites of cultural production in the 1970s (and into the 1980s) were marked by resistance to capitalist work practices such as the hierarchical division of labour. These 'inefficient' counter-capitalist organisations have largely given way, in commercial as well as voluntary sector production, to the dominant accent on 'productivity'. This prioritisation has been enforced by a range of capitalist-institutional pressures on queer commerce, and by funding bodies in the voluntary sector. These economic forms of productive control of lesbian discourse have been, in many ways, far more effective in disciplining lesbian discourse than regulatory censorship or institutional exclusions had been. As with the globalising tendency of new media technologies, as the circulation of lesbian identities expands, its articulation tends towards univocality and institutionalisation to the (hyper)capitalist mode of production.

Changes in British lesbian media production and reception thus need to be placed in the wider context of more general transformations in the matrix of marginal cultural production. My account of these changes (where not referenced specifically to academic sources) is based on conversations with Linda Gibson (former Editor, Shebang), Frances Williams (former Editor, Diva), Gillian Rodgerson (formerly News Editor, Gay Times; Editor, Capital Gay; and currently Editor, Diva) and on all of their contributions to a course on Lesbian Culture and Politics which I taught at London University's Centre for Extra Mural Studies between 1992 and 1995; as well as interviews which I conducted whilst researching an article for Diva on lesbian independent cinema (Graham, 1994) with Helen de Witt (former programmer, Scala Cinema; Acquisitions Officer, Cinenova; currently programmer, Lux Cinema); Laura Hudson (former programmer, London Filmmakers' Co-op Cinema; director, Super-8 Festival; currently Publicity and Marketing Officer, Cinenova); Jacqui Lawrence (Commissioning Editor, C4); and Cherry Smyth (Programmer, Lesbian and Gay Film Festival).

As noted in a previous chapter, lesbian feminism (both in the US and in Britain) had produced an explosion of marginal lesbian publishing ranging from mimeographed newsletters to academic journals. In Britain, there was considerable participation by black lesbians. In the early 1980s, Outwrite, an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, radical feminist newspaper was set up by a group of mainly black women (Mason-John, 1995), who also made a major contribution to Spare Rib. Publication under marginal conditions was always difficult, but under free market conditions the going got considerably tougher. Commercialisation of the club scene meant that funds became hard to raise through 'benefit' events. People are reluctant or unable to donate labour to low-profile, oppositional, projects. Many of the alternative distribution networks set up in the 1970s collapsed in the 1980s, along with the smaller (and more accessible) commercial distributors. Consolidation left distribution almost entirely to big businesses which demanded not only a reliability and quantity difficult to furnish on a shoe-string, but also control of politically sensitive or 'obscene' content. Those 'alternative' bookshops which survived the 1980s did so by commercial adaptation which also tended to exclude unreliable, impractical, and un-glam 'grey' publication.

At the same time, lesbians themselves also began to demand higher production values. Capitalisation thus became increasingly necessary to launch commercially reliable and attractive lesbian publications. Lesbians had not characteristically built up capital reserves, having been minimally interested in commerce. In any case, lesbians had always been disadvantaged in the male-dominated gay commercial sector as well as by more conventional sources of capital being generally seen as skint, unreliable, and unruly.

Gay Times had already incorporated Gay News, gradually transforming from organ of the Gay Liberation Movement to a glossy, lifestyle magazine financially secured by advertising and the proceeds of gay pornography which its parent company, Millivres, also distributes. The 1980s saw the rise of giveaway newspapers such as Capital Gay and The Pink Paper capitalised by gay businesses and resourced by advertising. As a lifestyle magazine, Gay Times, developed glossy, professionalised journalistic news and production values and a content dominated by celebrity interviews, 'lifestyle' items, and presentation of 'issues' carefully moderated to avoid conflict or negativity. The Pink Paper maintained more of a campaigning tone (although frequently criticised for its white-middle-class-male news values), whilst 'disco-bunny' giveaways led by Boyz look more like a sexually explicit version of mainstream girl-teen-mags.

By the 1990s, lesbian visibility had also increased and lesbianism was admitted to the ranks of the 'issues' being glossed over in the more pro-feminist mainstream women's glossies. In 1993, "the [US] national press discovered lesbians" (Lebow, 1993: 19). Lesbian cultural production shifted towards alignment with 'pink pound' free market ideology and 'lifestyle' consumerism. In this context, lesbian periodicals were effectively drawn into a vacuum of expectation, producing a run of lesbian 'lifestyle' magazines. Shebang, a more politicised lesbian giveaway appeared as sister to the Pink Paper in 1992 in competition with the one remaining radical-feminist independent, Lesbian London. In the context of an expansion of gay publications with relatively high production values (with the launches of Phase, and Attitude), Diva was capitalised in 1994 by Millivres as a 'lifestyle' glossy targeting a white, professional, thirty-something, lesbian consumer group posited by analogy to Gay Times' male target group. By the mid 1990s, the independent giveaway Lesbian London collapsed, and the remaining commercial lesbian magazines, Diva and Shebang, were capitalised by gay-male organisations with executive editorial control.

The surviving marginal independents, Quim and Bad Attitude, showed a radically different style and content. Mason-John (1995) noted a black lesbian contribution to more marginal lesbian journals of the 1980s which was largely absent from the glossies which tended to tokenise black women. Whilst the independent, Quim, had solicited little black lesbian involvement editorially after the initial involvement of a black lesbian, it did regularly feature the work of black artists (15). There have been constant complaints, however, concerning editorial exclusion of material produced by-and-for black lesbians within the commercial sector (reported by Mason-John, speaking at a meeting called at Unison Headquarters in London, March 1995, to respond to Radclyffe, 1995). When Shebang, which was popular but failing to attract adequate revenue, was relaunched, a putative female 'disco-bunny' was targeted as a largely imaginary counterpart to the already saturated male category. This was felt to have limited lesbian verisimilitude, and was greeted sardonically by its young, clubby, lesbian target group. Quim, Bad Attitude, and Shebang collapsed by the end of the 1990s, leaving British lesbian publication dominated by Diva (although lesbian publications with minimal production values still are still sporadically produced and circulated, particularly in provincial cities).

In common with their 'lifestyle' antecedent, the women's magazine, gaynlesbian 'lifestyle' publications must attract as much revenue as possible. Their style and content must thus appeal to the maximum number of potential readers whilst alienating as few as possible. The result tends to be a disproportionate focus on sex and commodity consumption, and a MOR approach to 'issues'. This process of commodification was further aided by a convergence between the agenda of women's magazines and that of gay/queer discourse itself — sex and consumption. The well-capitalised glossy proved popular beyond its target demographic of well-heeled thirty-somethings.

Images of lesbians on TV, as lesbians are wearily aware, had been controlled by heterosexuals ever since the 1960s 'social problem' documentaries dared speak its name at all. By the 1970s, lesbianism was tokenised in dramas and sitcoms, or served up as exotica. The standards of 'balance and objectivity' fancifully adhered to by middle-class, white, male, heterosexuals who control British TV ensures that showing lesbianism generally results in little more than a public opportunity for its opponents to vent "acrimonious anti-lesbianism" (Collis, 1994: 122). Early BBC efforts at gay programming were white-male-biased and heterosexually addressed. In 1982, C4 launched with a chartered commitment to 'minority' programming (a sort of indie BBC2), including bits and pieces for gays. By 1989, Out was provoking mixed reactions amongst lesbian and gay audiences, but nevertheless seemed to epitomise a celebratory sense of having arrived in the mainstream.

One of the major concerns at Channel 4 was the likely impact of the programme on advertisers [...] What actually happened was that the rating figures for the programme regularly exceeded the one million mark, a figure not much lower than Channel 4's average rating figures for much of the mainstream programming. (Hamer and Ashbrook, 1994: 167)

C4's Dyke TV (1996) was the first specifically lesbian-focused TV, coming perhaps just after a peak of lesbian-and-gay optimism in an unprecedented level of mainstream exposure. Dyke TV was clearly committed to "multiplicity," covering a wide range of issues and identities. C4's commissioning of "minority" media production by competing, small, independent, companies, might, nevertheless, be argued to have produced a homogenising conformity with the aesthetic standards and production practices of upmarket commercial TV.

US TV barely utilises the documentary form and would not, in any case, have been prepared to 'risk' discussion of homosexuality prior to Gay Liberation for commercial reasons. The first successful gay character appeared in a US soap (the satirical series Soap) in the 1970s. Through the 1980s gay and lesbian characters became popular in TV soaps and sitcoms both in the US and the UK. By 1996, there were 22 gay and lesbian characters on American Network TV and such characterisations became associated with the most commercially successful mainstream shows (Tickled Pink, Tx: C4, 1997). This popularity gave unprecedented clout to media pressure groups such as GLAAD in the US. The approach towards representation most often assumed by urban, high-visibility, queer activism has been a combined strategy of a post-modern attitude towards mainstream culture, a quasi-separatist base for cultural production, and engagement in the 'style-wars' of identity proceeding from this sub-culturally productive base.

New forms of 'alternative capitalism' produced effects in excess of the appropriation and recirculation of marginal codings through mainstream channels of communication, however. One of the most revealing assumptions underlying commentary on the commodification of lesbianism during the 1990s has been the idea that lesbianism is 'catching up' with gay male commercial success. The voiced-over commentary to the historical documentary It's Not Unusual (Tx: BBC2, 1997) described a rapid expansion of the lesbian club-scene during the 1990s and argued that it had been "delayed" in following the gay male disco phenomenon by a lesbian "political focus" in the 1970s and 1980s. Groocock similarly argued that "[f]or lesbians the process of self-affirmation and empowerment has been slower [than for gay men]" (Groocock, 1994: 117). The idea is also often put forward in queer discourse that the alliance between lesbianism and feminism was some kind of heterosexual feminist 'hijack' (see Rubin, 1984: 298-299; Weeks, 1985: 217; Groocock, 1994: 104). Whilst many might argue that a heterosexual agenda had achieved re-ascendancy within feminism by the latter part of the 1980s, lesbians would, on the contrary, appear rather to have 'hijacked' feminism in the 1970s (Love and Abbot, 1972: 107-134; Faderman, 1991: 206-209). The resignification of the commodification of lesbian identity as 'delayed' by feminist politics teleologically positions queer capitalism at the apex of lesbian endeavour and resignifies lesbianism as its inadequate mimicry. Thus, lesbianism is doubly subordinated first as 'poor relation' to male homosexuality and then through an occlusion or re-attribution to heterosexual women of the fundamental re-articulation of feminism and sexual politics actually achieved by lesbians.

Another noticeable effect of the institutionalisation and commercialisation of the productive matrix of queer theory and media has been the creation of a queer 'chattering class'. That is, within academia and the media there has developed a professionalised network engaged in the production and disciplining of the representational regime of queer. This productive group is small, and somewhat isolated from its constituency in a way similar to that described by Showalter's (1989) analysis of the effects of the assimilation of feminist and African-American discourses into the academy. As in the case of the mere 200 or so individuals who control almost the whole of US network TV production (The Tube is Reality, Tx: C4, 1991), professionalised queer media producers are not, of course, motivated by a will to misrepresent. Rather, they reproduce the specificities of their own discursive order, effectively re-ordering all lesbian or queer contestations within the terms of the (white, heterosexual, male dominated) capitalist productive matrix and that of the institutions which employ this chattering class. Besides its homogenising effects, this process further forecloses a publicised critique of capitalist praxis.