At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we are fortunate to have a strong LGBT presence on our campus. We have an LGBT office in the Division of Student Affairs and a student organization — the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender & Straight Alliance — which publishes Lambda, a student-run quarterly magazine that was founded in 1976. The university has a Sexuality Studies program that began offering a minor in 2004. One of the courses offered through Sexuality Studies is “Sexuality and Visual Culture,” which includes discussion of LGBT images in film, video, television and photography. The summer reading selection for this year’s incoming freshman class is “Covering: The Hidden Assault On Our Civil Rights,” which is legal scholar Kenji Yoshino’s book about how sexual and ethnic minorities are often asked to downplay their differences.
In the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, we have an undergraduate course titled “Sexual Minorities and the Mass Media.” In that course, students examine how LGBT issues and individuals have been covered in the news and portrayed in entertainment media. One of the assignments in this course requires students to interview LGBT individuals who are over the age of 55 about their early memories of media images of LGBT people. This project helps students understand how media coverage has changed over time and how some negative stereotypes persist even in today’s media.
In our news writing course, which is required for all of our majors, we have a unit on avoiding bias in the news, and this includes discussion of inclusive reporting on both racial and sexual minorities. We recommend that students consult NLGJA’s Stylebook Supplement on LGBT Terminology to help them better understand and use appropriate language.
We also regularly include LGBT issues in our required media ethics course. We use case studies about the ethics of outing LGBT individuals, coverage of the same-sex marriage issue, and dealing with reader/viewer opposition to inclusion of LGBT sources in the news and the publication of same-sex wedding announcements, among other topics.
Other classes include discussions about LGBT-related issues on a more informal basis. For example, our “Current Issues in Mass Communication” course last semester featured a unit on LGBT characters in news and entertainment media and showed the newly released documentary “Further Off the Straight & Narrow: New Gay Visibility on Television, 1998-2006.”
A number of our graduate students do research on LGBT images in the media, and their work has won awards from organizations such as the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. One of our Ph.D. students, Peter Bobkowski, will present a paper this spring titled “Lambda on the Hill: History of the LGBT Newsletter at the University of North Carolina” to the International Communication Association in Montréal, Canada.
The Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s student-run newspaper, regularly covers LGBT issues, although there is not a specific reporter or editor dedicated solely to the topic. Last year, The Daily Tar Heel wrote a story about possible lagging administrative support for the Sexuality Studies program, which raised visibility of the issue on campus and resulted in key administrators publicly stating their support for the program. However, reception to The Daily Tar Heel’s coverage of LGBT issues has been mixed. There have been letters to the editor criticizing the student paper both for under-representation of LGBT issues/activities on campus and for excessive coverage of these same issues/activities.
