LavenderMagazine.com – by Liz Highleyman
Television is a major influence on American popular culture, and the evolving presence of GLBT people on the small screen has both reflected and fostered acceptance of gays in mainstream society.
In the 1950s and 1960s?a time when homosexuality was regarded as a crime or a mental illness?a few brave queers began appearing on local television talk shows.
In April 1954, Los Angeles station KTTV ran a program called Confidential File featuring a policeman, a psychiatrist, and a gay man, Dale Olson. Asked whether he would change his sexual orientation if he could, Olson replied that he would not. The next day, he was fired from his job. Four years later, New York?s WABD ran a similar program featuring sympathetic psychologist Albert Ellis and Gonzolo Segura, a gay chemist who wore a hood to hide his identity.