Waiting in line at Vons, 7-11 or Big Lots!, it’s hard not to look at the National Enquirer, Star and Weekly World News staring back at you from over the candy bars, chewing gum and batteries. And the chances are pretty good that at least one of the stories you’ll see on the cover involves gays, lesbians, transgenders or crossdressers — in stories ranging from the sexual escapades of Princess Di’s gay butler at Buckingham palace to the various incarnations of Anne Heche’s sexual orientation. There was also the gay angle of the Beltway snipers — were they lovers or weren’t they? — the long list of possibly closeted and rumored-to-be-gay celebrities, including reports of what bars “American Idol’s” Ryan Seacrest and Simon Cowell frequent and which drag queens at these bars they kiss (or don’t). However underrepresented gays and lesbians may be in mainstream media and in entertainment in general there’s no question that gays and lesbians are of great interest to the tabloid media. And we are equally well represented on the television equivalent of the tabloids, the daytime talk show. For example, in a typical week on the “Jerry Springer Show,” gays or lesbians make an appearance in at least three out of five episodes. And gays and lesbians aren’t absent from Jerry’s competitors either.

Of course the very nature of the tabloid press and daytime talk shows is to be sensationalistic and exploitative. And most people looking at the Weekly World News’ most recent report on the location of Batboy, their oft-reported terrorist-fighting part-bat/part-human aren’t going to take any of the stories appearing in its pages very seriously. Just the same, I recently made a joke about a particularly ridiculous alien-related tabloid cover story only to have the cashier engage in a sincere conversation about the contents of that very story. So it would seem there are at least some people who take the tabloids as a reputable source of information — if not the most reputable source of news. At the same time, people watching “Springer” or “Ricki Lake” or “Jenny Jones” or any of the other myriad of talk shows are unlikely to take the people appearing on them to be reflective of the way that the world really is — if they take the participants seriously at all. But for all that there are certain to be some people who take the stories they read in the tabloids or see on television seriously. After all, the Enquirer has a weekly circulation of 2.76 million, while the Weekly World News has a circulation that hovers between 200,000 and 300,000 per week. “The Jerry Springer Show” is shown on nearly 200 television stations in the United States, and televised in 13 other countries. With so many people reading and tuning in to these shows there are certain to be at least a few people who take the topics and persons involved in the stories at face value.

If the stock in trade of tabloid media is scandal and exploitation, are gays and lesbians really singled out for particularly bad coverage? A typical cover of the National Enquirer features stories about celebrities caught on tape shoplifting, frolicking naked on a secluded beach, collapsing backstage at a performance or with newly discovered “evidence” in a high-profile crime. So when there’s also a story implying that a celebrity or near-celebrity is involved in a same-sex relationship, or a story that explores the gay angle to a crime, such as the sniper shootings or Andrew Cunanan’s killing spree, have gays and lesbians really been singled out or maligned? Of course, in all fairness the tabloids weren’t the only ones to jump on this bandwagon — Cunanan dominated the covers of more respectable national newsmagazines and the gay angle of the sniper case was fodder for print and televised magazines across the country. In fact, the Richmond, Virginia, Times-Dispatch carried a story both speculating on the sexual orientation of the snipers and accusing the majority of media outlets of avoiding “the seeming homosexuality” of the suspected snipers. This article prompted an action alert from gay and lesbian media watchdog, GLAAD. While there are plenty of cases of this sort of sensationalism in the mainstream media, tabloids make fewer apologies for making these pieces splashy and sensationalistic. Gays and lesbians are just being put on the same footing with other sensational stories, they reason. And when gays and lesbians are featured more than once on a talk show that also focuses on a woman who has cheated with her husband’s father or dabbled in hillbilly love triangles, the public perceives the gay content as just part of the freak show. Gay men and lesbians are simply being treated like the other participants and panelists in these programs. As Glennda Testone, GLAAD’s Southeast Region Media Director said when asked about whether gays and lesbians are singled out in these media, “I can’t say if gays are more [exploited] than other groups” but they are “one of the groups that is picked on. We’re not the only targets, but we are a target of tabloid sensationalism.”

So the real question is whether the way in which the tabloid media covers and sensationalizes sex and sexuality harms the GLBT community. Take the edition of the National Enquirer on newsstands in mid-May as an example. Its cover advertised five stories in total. One featured reportedly exclusive photos of a celebrity wedding, one was a report on Paula Abdul’s “secret romance,” and the main story centered on “new evidence” and a “secret witness” in the Laci Peterson murder case. The last two stories had a gay angle. One was the posthumous outing of Humphrey Bogart and the other reported the “true story” of Rosie O’Donnell’s relationship. For the cover of a tabloid, this one was fairly innocuous. If it says anything negative about gays and lesbians, it says that we ought to be surprised or shocked to discover that someone like Humphrey Bogart was gay and that there must be something secret and hidden about the relationships of even an out lesbian figure like Rosie O’Donnell. Both stories imply that there is something shameful and hidden about the lives of gays and lesbians, even when it is ostensibly lived in the open. This impression is strengthened by coupling the articles with secret evidence, secret romances and exclusive photos. Since the entire atmosphere of a tabloid newspaper is one of secrets and scandals exposed — not unlike Hollywood scandal sheets of an earlier day — almost any coverage of gays and lesbians seems to taint them with the air of scandal.

Some tabloids have made efforts to change the public’s perception of them being homophobic. For instance, the Rupert Murdoch-owned British Sun pledged in 1997 to tone down its homophobic stance, after it garnered criticism for outing several members of Tony Blair’s government from a public that didn’t much seem to care. Even so, this hasn’t stopped the Sun from reporting on the supposed offing of a mafia boss for being gay, opining about gay adoptions or filling it’s “Dear Deirdre” column with the sort of gay sex tales that usually fill talk shows on this side of the Atlantic — and all within the past month. Similarly, the National Enquirer garnered praise in 1997, including some from GLAAD, for its sensitive treatment of the coming out of Danny Pintauro of “Who’s the Boss?” Yet within the last two weeks the same publication has published numerous outings, speculations about sexual orientation and other stories that treat gays and lesbians as not quite within the norm of society.

When gays and lesbians are panelists or participants on daytime talk shows they are placed in an equally bad light. To take one example, in the last full week of April this year, gays or lesbians were featured on “Jerry Springer” three out of five days — about average for “Springer.” (This was a week without specifically “gay-themed” shows like “My Son is a Woman,” which aired May 16.) Though gays and lesbians were featured on shows covering “Feuding Family Hour,” “Strange Secret Affairs,” and “Relentless Ex-Lovers,” there weren’t any gay or lesbian panelists on “Lied-To-Lovers” or “Hillbilly Love Triangles” — the shows that rounded out the week. With talk shows the issues are a little different than with tabloid newspapers and magazines. In the tabloids there’s often an implied or outright judgment on the stories being reported and the people mentioned in them.

When the Weekly World News reported in February 2002 that a Southern minister found his son’s Playgirl magazines and posters of Justin Timberlake, claiming that “flouncy pop performers” like NSync were making “once-virile” young men “gayer than Liberace” by singing that set “off a chain reaction … leading them down the path of homosexuality,” there wasn’t much doubt that it was good in the editors’ opinion for young men to be virile and bad for them to be “flouncy.” The same can be said for their report in October 2002, of the discovery of a spray that “wards off gays like bugs” — even though they reported that a gay rights group (for whose existence there is no evidence) hailed this discovery as a preventative for gay-bashing. In tabloid stories there’s often a clear moral or at least visceral judgment and it tends to be homophobic.

In contrast to this, there’s little overt homophobia (at least from the host) in the way gays and lesbians are presented in a television talk show, and there’s almost no moral judgment of gays and lesbians for their sexual orientation. The talk show host is almost always morally neutral or celebratory of being gay, even when her or his audience isn’t. And, while the audience is likely to hoot and holler with more than usual vigor if a secret crush is shown to be a gay crush or a long-time boyfriend turns out really to be a woman, they are just as likely to liven up if the secret love is overweight, particularly unattractive or much older or younger than the featured guest. When audiences boo and hoot, they aren’t making moral judgments, but reflecting their tastes, shock or an aesthetic judgment.

If there’s any harm in television talk shows, it’s, of course, the gratuitous freak-show aspect. The participants in the show are the freaks — not unlike the audience members in many ways — featured for those aspects of their lives that make them different from the norm. They’re featured for their freakishness, dysfunction, complexity or number of relationships. There are many shows in which the reveal focuses on a relationship with a grossly obese person or a little person, straight out of a 1920s circus geek act. Even the ubiquitous makeover episodes, now a mainstay of “Montel,” “Maury,” “Ricki” and “Jenny Jones” focus on just how horrible, overly sexual or freakish the participants are until they are helped by the shows’ celebrity stylists.

When gays and lesbians appear on the panels of these shows they’re inmates of the freak show. This is the double-edge of the talk show that Joshua Gamson addresses in his book Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Noncomformity. On one hand, television talk shows have given much more space and time to discussion of gays and lesbians than any other electronic media. When there were almost no gays or lesbians on television anywhere, in the long dry spells between one-off gay characters on sitcoms and prime-time dramas, gays and lesbians were featured players on the television talk show circuit. As Gamson writes, “We (GLBT people) are taking, and being given, much more public media space now, but because talk shows forged a path in there.” In other words, talk shows have made gays and lesbians very visible on television; the fact that there are sitcoms focusing on gays and lesbians today has something to do with our presence for so many years on talk shows. But at the same time, in Gamson’s estimation, talk shows are “the place most enthusiastically afforded us … a measure of our cultural value.” The very fact that gays and lesbians are so welcome on television talk shows says something about our place together with the other dysfunctional and freakish inhabitants of those stages.

Indeed, gays and lesbians receive representation on television talk shows to a much greater degree than on the news or on primetime television or even other daytime outlets. But the representation that we get on these shows, like the representation that little people, the overweight and others receive is as objects of shock and fun. When a secret crush is revealed on “Ricki Lake” or “Jenny Jones,” and the crush is that of a gay man towards a straight man, the audience will undoubtedly laugh and catcall. The television audience is expected to participate in this as well. Being on the stage is being an object of fun and, perhaps, humiliation.

The most striking example of humiliation and its effects on gays and lesbians is the “Jenny Jones” murder case. In March of 1996, the “Jenny Jones Show” taped an episode on secret crushes. One of the secret crushes was Scott Amedure’s crush on his friend Jonathan Schmitz. Although the episode never aired, Schmitz shot Amedure to death three days later, claiming that he had been so humiliated by the show that he went into a “gay-panic.” While the courts rejected this defense, there’s little doubt that the “Jenny Jones Show” did harm to Scott Amedure. As his brother, Frank J. Amedure, Jr., argues on his memorial website scottamedure.org, “These shows cause irreparable emotional harm to people, the destruction of relationships and families, etc. Exploitation of people with sensitive human issues … can easily cause humiliation … pain, hate and violence.”

That’s one example of clear and serious harm being done to one gay man. But even if, as Schmitz and Amedure’s family claim, both men were misled about the nature of the segment, they chose to go on the show. For her part, Jones and her producers maintain that Schmitz was made aware of all possible outcomes of his secret crush. And participants on talk shows do choose to be there. If they are humiliated, they’ve chosen to open themselves up to that.

Since most of us don’t choose to go on television talk shows (and most of us aren’t famous enough to be of interest to the tabloids), what harm do they really do to us? After all, “Springer” maintains that his show is entertainment and that he realizes it’s trashy. If everyone’s in on the game, where’s the harm?

Talk shows, like the tabloid papers they resemble, place gays and lesbians in a questionable context. Tabloids surround stories about gays and lesbians with exposés of secret relationships and shocking crimes, implying that gays and lesbians are habitués of the world of secrecy and crime. Television talk shows surround their gay and lesbian participants with cheaters, stalkers, incestuous relationships, love triangles and other slightly unsavory situations. By placing gays and lesbians in this context, television talk shows situate gays and lesbians as, if not outsiders, at least people on the fringe of society and hardly respectable. In particular, by putting gays, lesbians, bisexuals, drag queens and other members of our community together with adulterers and polygamists, talk shows help to feed the very worldview of gays and lesbians that Senator Rick Santorum recently voiced.

Of course it might seem that tabloid journalism and television talk shows can only do this kind of harm to gays and lesbians if people really take them seriously. And, after all, who can take these publications seriously when even “Springer” and “Ed Anger,” who writes rants and editorials in the Weekly World News calling for the Beltway snipers to be used as an execution team in Iraq, claim that all they really are is entertainment? It is precisely because of the sensationalistic and fringe nature of these publications and programs that GLAAD doesn’t monitor them, according to GLAAD’s Testone. It’s for this reason that there is no talk show category in GLAAD’s annual media awards. Testone said, “Tabloid readers get that more than half of what is in their pages is lies.” What is of more concern to GLAAD is the way that stories can sometimes make the jump from the tabloid to the mainstream press, as occurred in the Richmond Times-Dispatch case. However, celebrities featured and exposed in other tabloids take them seriously enough to sue over tabloid allegations involving alcoholism (Shirley Jones and the National Enquirer), threatening neighbors (Elizabeth Taylor and the Enquirer again) and homosexuality (Tom Cruise and the overseas tabloids Actustar and Tv y Novelas). At times, too, representatives of tabloids claim that they are really legitimate media outlets, as when Barry Dutter from Weekly World News claimed that they “verify every quote” and “don’t make people up,” while commenting on the New York Times/Jayson Blair scandal on NPR’s comedy news-quiz show, “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”, on May 17 (Former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was recently found to have published hundreds of stories with falsified or plagiarized facts and quotes).

And the sheer volume of readership for the most popular tabloids at least begs us to assume that some people are taking what is reported in their pages seriously. The fact that there are 14 daily talk shows on television stations throughout the country and that, even as their ratings drop off, they remain immensely popular, implies that at least some people take the discussions and encounters and people on them as realistic and representative of the groups to which they belong. Getting hard numbers on whether viewers take these shows to be credible isn’t easy. We know that the people on the shows sometimes do, as in the Scott Amedure murder, a similar murder case resulting from a “Springer” episode called “Secret Mistresses” in May 2000. But how much viewers take cues about the way the world is from these shows is hard to say.