LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland by Páraic Kerrigan

Author:Páraic Kerrigan [Kerrigan, Páraic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, LGBTQ+ Studies, Gay Studies, Gender Studies, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781000333169
Google: lRkOEAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

Hegemonic news media and media institutions

The news media in Ireland, much like the US and UK, was one of the first sites where AIDS was made intelligible. As broadcasters and newspapers across the US and the UK began to report on the virus, it became apparent that AIDS was becoming associated almost exclusively with gay men. As Rodger Streitmatter notes, the American news media was central in constructing the narrative of AIDS as a gay disease, with ‘gay plague’ becoming a recurring journalistic phrase.6 The assumption that AIDS was a gay disease can be seen in its preliminary designation as GRID (gay-related immunodeficiency) in the US. Colin Clews observes that the UK press were using ‘gay plague’ in numerous headlines, particularly in the early to mid-1980s.7 Within the Irish context, AIDS was also linked with homosexual men. During the 1980s, much of the media in Ireland, particularly current-affairs programming and the press, popularised the narrative of AIDS as being confined to ‘risk groups’, which included gay men, intravenous drug users and sex workers. Accordingly, this rhetoric worked towards creating the dichotomy of ‘general population’ versus ‘risk groups’, which served to marginalise the groups in the latter and bring them under greater scrutiny by the media.8

The media construction not only of this dichotomy but of AIDS as a gay disease is apparent from various newspaper headlines in the Irish press during this period: ‘AIDS contact fears from the kiss of life’, ‘AIDS warning to organ donors’, ‘New alert as AIDS victims increase’, ‘Terror hits town after AIDS death’, ‘Victim of AIDS is cremated in secret’ and ‘AIDS fear ban in pub’.9 An editorial in the Nationalist and Leinster Times on 26 June 1985 suggested that it was not AIDS but homosexuality that was the killer disease.10 This news story indicated how, as Simon Watney argues, ‘the reporting of AIDS was inexorably caught up in the larger discourse of retribution against gay men’.11 The dominant media in Ireland reported false information and sensational stories, with these constructed presentations of AIDS as a gay disease disrupting the mainstreaming, commodified visibility of gay men previously established.

Irish television’s framing of AIDS as a gay disease is apparent from a series of Today Tonight programmes in the 1980s. Today Tonight was RTÉ’s flagship current-affairs programme, which initially broadcast three nights a week. The programme’s success in terms of its high-quality journalistic output and successful TAM ratings increased this number to five programmes per week by 1983. The success of the show, according to John Horgan, could be attributed to the personality of producer Joe Mulholland. Horgan explains that RTÉ used any available finances to produce home-based programmes, with current affairs taking up most of this funding. In its format, the show offered a magazine of current affairs, including panel analysis, provision of information from specialists on topics and opportunities for government representatives to discuss Dáil decisions. Horgan expresses the importance of Today Tonight when he argues that it ‘came to overshadow the news in a sense, it virtually was the news’.

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