Co-Constructing a Print Media Narrative: Interviews With LGBTQ Activists From the 1960s and 1970s in New Zealand

Abstract

This article examines how New Zealand activists in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community of the 1960s and 1970s worked to co-create their own media representation and production. Through the memories of 29 activists who were involved in the LGBT political movement of the time, this article explores how LGBT communities used potentially harmful media stereotypes to their own advantage and how they worked to purposefully manage their representation as well as media production. Activists depended on diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framing to amplify, extend, bridge, and transform what it meant to be LGBTQ in New Zealand. At the time, the media represented a very mainstream, and conservative, vision of the LGBT community. The media frames and media representations used at the time were systematic processes to reaffirm intended realities of social, economic and political power. The early work of these activists managed to change their intended reality through dogged determination.