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This critical introduction to gay and lesbian identity within the media explores the concept of ´new storytelling´. The case studies look at film, television and online media, focusing on the narrative potential of individual storytellers who, as producers, writers and performers, challenge identity concerns and offer new expressions of liberty.

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List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Placing the Self Within the Frame New Storytelling: Transitions from the Past Gay Identity and Self-Reflexivity Community, History and Transformation Factual Media Space: Intimacy, Participation and Therapy Commodity and Family Teenage Identity and Ritual Other Storytelling and the New Frontier Conclusion: Cohesion, Fragmentation and ´Becoming´ Notes Filmography Works Cited Index

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´[Pullen´s] numerous references to and discussion of popular culture will be accessible to a wider audience interested in media studies, gay and lesbian culture, and the social sciences.´ CHOICE

´Gay Identity is a valuable entry point for those looking to see how queer theory responds to an age of mainstreaming, hyperpersonalization, diffuse celebrity, and digital distribution.´

- Communication Culture Critique

´Gay Identity is a challenging read However, it´s a thorough and well-researched overview of how myths and archetypes have been transformed and re-created over time: in personal lives, in performance art, and in our own Internet community.´

- The Daily Sheet, DaveCullen.com

´Contemporary media may not yet have transformed the world, though it is making a good effort at doing so. But it has certainly provided golden opportunities for changing personal lives. This book provides vivid examples of the multiple ways that this is happening for countless numbers of young LGBT people across the globe. It is within the heterogeneous space of online new media, and contemporary documentary and fictional forms that new meanings, identities, relationships and communities are being carved out, and new forms of loving and living are being actively rehearsed. This book provides an invaluable guide to a future already being made in the present.´

- Jeffrey Weeks, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, London South Bank University, UK, author of The Languages of Sexuality

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CHRISTOPHER PULLEN Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Bournemouth University, UK. He is the author of Documenting Gay Men: Identity and Performance in Reality Television and Documentary Film (2007). His research interests relate to the representation and performance of minority identity within contemporary media, and contexts of gender and sexuality.

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