In 1956 New York, Professor Richard D. Heffner aired one of the first television programs in the our nation's history about homosexuality on NBC. The airing marked the opening of a national conversation on homosexuality, and the response was electric. At a time when being gay was a felony, viewers queer and straight alike wrote in to sound off with their opinions - resulting in a colorful quilt of American voices regarding 1950s "sex deviance." Many of them are funny -- many more, heartbreaking. Their words reveal to us the strangeness of their time, but in so doing, reveal also the strangeness of ours, for the past is no clearer than the present and the present, no clearer than the past.
Taylor Cole Miller is a doctoral student of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Madison where he teaches media theory and production courses. His primary areas of interest include queer audiences, television studies, feminism, and media histories. He is currently researching the queer and feminist potentiality of syndication for his dissertation, exploring the implications for identities and bodies especially as more and more niche cable networks are turning to the "in with the old, out with the new" strategy of second-run syndication.
