NYU to Preserve Gay Cable News Footage

Thousands of hours of video news and features on the LGBT and AIDS movements produced by Lou Maletta for his Gay Cable Network (GCN) over 19 years have been acquired by New York University’s Fales Library for cataloguing and preservation. Maletta, 72, launched the network in 1982 with “Men in Films,” which explored male erotica, and soon went on to develop news programming that gave virtually the only television attention to the nascent AIDS crisis and the ongoing fight for LGBT rights …

Maletta shut down operations in 2001, but has been paying for storage of the 6,100 hours of videotape in the hopes of selling the archive. While NYU is paying him a small fee for the donation, Marvin Taylor, the Fales director, called it “a major preservation challenge,” saying it could cost as much as $4 million to complete the digitization process — a task that will take many years and for which he is seeking funding.

“NYU has one of the most important gender studies programs in the country,” Taylor said, and the GCN material was a natural fit for the library, complementing its Downtown New York collection that documents the arts scenes from the 1970s through the ’90s, “a world decimated by the AIDS epidemic,” the library’s release said. “This is the age of YouTube,” Taylor said. “These days preserving history through moving images is what we need to be doing. And scholars really want it.”…

Read more at: Hunter of Justice!

Important New Book on Gay Marriage

Lee Badgett’s new book When Gay People Get Married is out soon from NYU Press; you can order it now. Here’s the description:

In order to find out the impact of same-sex marriage, M. V. Lee Badgett traveled to a land where it has been legal for same-sex couples to marry since 2001: the Netherlands. Badgett interviews gay couples to find out how this step has affected their lives. We learn about the often surprising changes to their relationships, the reactions of their families, and work colleagues. Moreover, Badgett is interested in the ways that the institution itself has been altered for the larger society. How has the concept of marriage changed? When Gay People Get Married gives readers a primer on the current state of the same-sex marriage debate, and a new way of framing the issue that provides valuable new insights into the political, social, and personal stakes involved.

Read more at Hunter of Justice – A blog about sexuality, gender, law and culture.