Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity

by Joshua Gamson

Using extensive interviews, hundreds of transcripts, focus-group discussions with viewers, and his own experiences as an audience member, Joshua Gamson argues that talk shows give much-needed, high-impact public visibility to sexual nonconformists while also exacerbating all sorts of political tensions among those becoming visible. With wit and passion, Freaks Talk Back illuminates the joys, dilemmas, and practicalities of media visibility.

"This entertaining, accessible, sobering discussion should make every viewer sit up and ponder the effects and possibilities of America's daily talk-fest with newly sharpened eyes."— Publishers Weekly

"Bold, witty. . . . There's a lot of empirical work behind this deceptively easy read, then, and it allows for the most sophisticated and complex analysis of talk shows yet."—Elayne Rapping, Women's Review of Books

"Funny, well-researched, fully theorized. . . . Engaged and humane scholarship. . . . A pretty inspiring example of what talking back to the mass media can be."—Jesse Berrett, Village Voice

"An extraordinarily well-researched volume, one of the most comprehensive studies of popular media to appear in this decade."—James Ledbetter, Newsday

Genres: Queer, Nonfiction, Sexuality, Ebooks, Gender and Sexuality, Gender

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Joshua Gamson is an American scholar and author. A graduate of Swarthmore College and the University of California, Berkeley, he served on the faculty of Yale University before becoming a professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco.

Reviews

[Kathleen O'Neal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book as part of the research process for a paper I wrote for Dr. Roger Lancaster's Social Institutions class in the fall of 2023. My paper dealt with the phenomenon of reality television as a social institution and is entitled "Reality Television as a Social Institution: The Moral Pageant." In working on this paper, I locate the origins of contemporary reality television in part in the daytime television talk shows that were popular during the 1990s and early 2000s, while I was growing up. (In fact, one of my favorite childhood memories is of my friends and I in sixth grade playing Jerry Springer together during P.E. time.) Shows like those of Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake, Sally Jessy Raphael, Montel Williams, Oprah Winfrey, Jenny Jones, Maury Povich, and the rest often featured sexual and gender minorities and their relationship problems as prominent parts of their programs. In "Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity", Joshua Gamson attempts to deconstruct this phenomenon and analyze what it means for both sexual and gender minority people as well as for the larger culture. This book was incisive, funny, interesting, illuminating, and very well-written.

Reading this book alongside rewatching many of these old shows brought back a lot of fun memories and it also made me thankful for the many positive ways that things have changed for sexual and gender minority people in our society since these programs originally aired. Particularly interesting to me was Gamson's analysis of bisexual and transgender issues and individuals and their treatment in the daytime television talk shows of this era. It's refreshing to watch a contemporary reality television show such as Catfish (which frequently features people of diverse genders, sexes, sexualities, disabilities, races, sizes, classes, etc.) and typically does an admirable job of portraying everyone involved as simply just folks alongside 1990s talk shows in which transgender ladies of color are verbally abused in racialized, sexualized, classed, and gendered ways by the audience while Jerry Springer eggs it on and think to oneself, "At least in some senses, society truly has made some progress since I was a child."

Gamson argues in his book that in some ways, the talk shows of the 1990s made homosexuality, bisexuality, and transsexuality more visible and in some ways more acceptable to middle American audiences. Nonetheless, because these programs simultaneously scandalized and normalized sexual and gender diversity, the stage was set for explosive incidents such as the murder of one guest on the Jenny Jones Show by another guest in an incident charged with violent heterosexism. Gamson's analysis of this incident in particular is even-handed, thoughtful, and illuminating.

In addition to being a lot of fun, Gamson's work is an essential look at an important media institution in the popular American culture of the 1990s and early 2000s and provides a fascinating snapshot of an era that is not so far behind us but in many ways seems so far away. Highly recommended.

[Elisa Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely love this book! A must for non-fiction lovers interested in gender studies, media studies, or any other related field.

[Juno · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was recommended this book by my thesis advisor, and I ended up reading the entire thing and quoting it heavily in the published text. I think this piece remains very relevant, politically, socially, and academically, especially in conversations of moral and sexual subjecthood in digital spaces!

A quote, although I did not use it in my thesis, that stood out to me was:
"I watched a woman tell a panel of femme lesbians on Sally, "not Jane and Eve." But, the meaning is the same: you are not right, you are not loved, you were not created, you do not even really exist." (p.117)

[Alexa Doran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent, thought-provoking points were delivered with eloquence and humor but holy repetitive!!!! Not a wise use of real estate.

[Jo Besser · Rating 2 out of 5]

More like 2.5 stars. It was informative but it was dense. I wish the chapters weren't as long.

[dejah_thoris · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I'm sure most of you know, I love talk shows and Reality TV, so this book was definitely an interesting read. But for those of you who hate that same media, there's much to examine in Gamson's analysis. So much, in fact, that I think he should write an updated edition now that there's Dr. Phil and other talk show formats. (Or he could examine LGBTQ presentation on Reality TV.) Much of this book shouldn't be a surprise. Yes, guests are often scripted, and sometimes even actors are used to fill slots. Yes, most talk shows focus on the loud and visual in hopes of securing that key youth demographic, which is to the detriment of activists trying to explain that we're not all obnoxious in-your-face queers. (I think this probably has changed, however, with the rise in popularity of Dr. Phil, the Doctors, the View, Ellen, etc. style shows that focus on respectability.) But as Gamson describes, talk shows are a two-headed beast where making the private public can serve to educate by normalizing behavior (any kind of person can be gay) and alienate by demonstrating that queer people are nothing like the average Midwesterner (e.g. loud and proud messy drag queens). I especially enjoyed the analysis surrounding truth-telling and how bisexuals are still denigrated on talk shows because they are seen as promiscuous no matter how often that myth is refuted. Similar issues surround transsexuals as audiences demand rigid gender adhesion to the point where many would rather have a guest come out as gay than as the opposite gender. Lots of great talking points in this book with content interesting enough to hold most non-fiction readers, assuming they're curious about LGBTQ portrayals in mass media.

[Caitlyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for thesis. Very interesting. Makes me want to watch the shows they mention to get a better understanding, but I will save myself the headache (and heartache?)