Welcome to Most Popular, the podcast that explores the impact pop culture has had on society. I'm Dr. Adrienne Trier Benick, a professor of sociology, and I will be your host. Today's guest is Dr. Bruce Druschel. Bruce is a professor and chair of the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Miami University.

His teaching and research interests are in the area of media policy and economics, audiences, media history, and LGBTQ representation in media and film. He is founding co editor of the journal Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and he has edited or co edited five books, including LGBTQ Culture, The Changing Landscape, and a book called Star Trek Fan Phenomenon, which we talk about a little bit.

Bruce and I met when I thought Many moons ago, that [00:01:00] I would do an edited book on the ways podcasting has helped people with marginalized voices have a space to express themselves. Bruce submitted a chapter that was easily one of the best things I have ever read, and that's saying a lot considering the rock stars I've worked with.

The book fell through, and after I sent the email saying the contract had been cancelled, Bruce emailed back and said that I should use the opportunity to put together a collection for a journal instead. Good. Now. At this moment, I was a deep into my sadness PJ's hot chocolate in hand, Sarah McLaughlin playing in the background, you know, the scene in the first sex in the city movie where Carrie gets into them gets to the Mexican hotel and she's like, close the shades all of them.

That's how sorry I was feeling for myself when I got his message. He helped turn that project around and I am so grateful in our conversation. We talk. A little bit about the history of queer voices and radio. We talk about how podcasts have become a space for people in the LGBTQ community to share their experiences.

And we also talk about some [00:02:00] of our favorite old Hollywood stars. I loved this discussion and I hope you enjoy it too. Here's my conversation with Dr. Bruce Drusciel.

I'm Bruce Drusciel and my, the thing that currently. Consumes most of my time is I'm a chair and professor in media journalism and film at Miami University, which is in Ohio, about halfway between Dayton and Cincinnati, and as part of that, I have interests in certainly LGBTQ representation in various media.

That has been kind of a, a late specialty of mine. When I was hired here some 37 years ago, I taught broadcast journalism because that's my professional background, or I'm a journalist, and I also taught media management and economics and media policy. Over time, I've also added to that portfolio, things like, like media history.

Lately, I've [00:03:00] also become interested in, in film generally, film history generally. And so I teach an introductory film, film class here, and I'm working right now on a, on a science fiction film course. Before I got into academia, I was a journalist. I worked in radio. And so, in part, that's a lot of my interest in, in radio.

I, I grew up listening to, to radio back when I think radio was really, really good. Commercial radio was really, really good. Now, these days, I tend to listen mostly, I think, to public radio, but I, I, I still kind of, kind of, I guess, am fixated on the radio, on the way radio used to be, and on the role that it used to play in people's lives.

People tend to forget that, these days, that in a lot of cases, one's tastes were formed. To a large degree by what they listen to. And they began to, you know, as, as most people do in adolescence, you kind of [00:04:00] break away from your parents in terms of the way you like to spend your time, what you like to do.

And, and radio was a big part of that. And, and especially. Starting in the 1950s, when people could, could begin listening to a degree to, to things that were, that they felt really spoke to them, and not to their entire families, I think radio began to, to play a special role in, in that process of becoming a, a unique person and becoming an adult.

It's funny that in the same kind of thought process you made the leap from AI back to radio because I think, I've had this discussion with a few folks, I think that what we're experiencing now with AI and kind of the high alert that people started to get on. Is very similar to when it transitioned from radio to television and everyone, Oh my God, what are we going to do?

We're not going to have radio anymore. And kind of the same with like penmanship to typewriters or, you know, spell check on the [00:05:00] computer from typewriter to word or whatever you use. It's just so funny that that it's cyclical, right? Like that, that, that kind of. I don't want to say moral panic because that's not the word but kind of this alert that society tends to go on when these things change is a very similar reaction, even, you know, depending on what we're talking about.

Well, maybe we can coin a term, something like tech panic or, or something like that. Because I, I agree with you, you know, people, people have been ready to, you know, consign playing of music, you know, on musical instruments to, you know, to the graveyard once radio came along and radio also was going to spell the end of the, of the, of the film industry and television was going to, was going to kill both of them supposedly.

And then. When the internet came along that was going to kill television and in reality, you know, all of these media are still around. [00:06:00] It's just that they have become, in some cases, maybe a little bit more niche. Yeah. They certainly have become more specialized. They certainly are not the, the one size fits all medium that they used to be.

Yeah. You think about when you think about what radio used to to do, you know, it used to be a, for one thing, a, an all family entertainer. And one of its big pitches was that once you had made the rather substantial investment in the hardware, and once you were able to actually get a, get a signal out of the thing, you know, it was pretty much free entertainment, you know, just like television was originally, you know, you, you get the, you get the set, you put up the rabbit ears and then you have.

You know, endless entertainment, or at least three channels worth or three and a half channels worth. And, and that helps certainly to, to sell the medium. And, and I think that, you know, successive media, including things like, you know, [00:07:00] videotape recorders and, and so on have had, and, and, you know, MP3 players have had kind of the same allure, you know, that once you buy this, you've got this potentially endless source of entertainment for not much more investment.

And, and of course, the even more important, we've been able to, to really customize it to the individual's tastes as time has gone on. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about how, how LGBTQ folks have been represented in, in radio? The, well, you know, it's an interesting thing. We tend to think of progress as being linear and is always being improvement.

And, and in reality, the story of. The representation of LGBTQ people in media, period, and especially in radio, is, is not at all linear, nor not at all, you know, a positive progression. [00:08:00] There is a, and this is not just something that people imagine, I mean, there really were queer characters, identifiably queer characters, in radio, in its fairly early days.

If we go back, To the days when radio did things like, like dramas and comedy and variety programs, for instance, there was a series called Mert and Marge, which was which also had a couple films connected to it. It was about basically. What was something kind of unusual to working women, you know, working in, in the entertainment industry and in this case, the, the theater industry and one of the, the, the supporting characters was named Clarence Tiffing Tuffer, which you can conjure without a while, but he, it was played by Ray Hodge and he was Identifiably, I guess a [00:09:00] gay man simply because of his gender performance, which was rather, rather effeminate.

And, you know, he, and, and also a little bit about the things that interested him. He was very interested. He was the, the, the kind of the wardrobe and, and props person for this theater troupe. And, and, you know, they were always accusing him of, you know, or, or, or telling him warding him off, you know, trying to wear some of the, some of the women's.

And, Costumes and that type of thing, but you had him, you had and then in terms of women, you had to Lula Bankhead, who was a kind of a today we would refer to her as as a multi platform personality, you know, she was, she was certainly on radio, she was on film, she made personal period appearances, and For one thing, she had this wonderful, wonderful voice, which was probably conditioned by, by [00:10:00] way, way too much bourbon or, or something, but it was kind of, it was sort of.

You know, husky and therefore sort of masculine, but it was also rather theatrical and, and it wasn't just the way she sounded but the things she said, and she was, she was the, the daughter of a very Influential and important southern family and and so maybe because of that, of course, that can kind of cut both ways that can either make somebody very guarded about their reputation about the family reputation, or it can be very freeing.

And in Toledo's case, it certainly was very freeing. And one of the things that she was very free about discussing were her. You know, were her romances, how she spent her time. She, you know, for, for a woman in the, in the 30s and 40s, she certainly led a very free lifestyle. And, you know, there were stories [00:11:00] about her and her romances with women and with men, but largely with women.

And it became actually the stuff of of, of jokes on, on radio. People would, she would appear on variety shows, you know, with the likes of Bob Hope and, and, and so on. And they would refer to her with masculine pronouns for instance. And, and that of course was meant as kind of a joke. Right. Which is in sharp contrast to the reason that we do that today.

But, But it was meant as, as kind of a, kind of a dig or an insinuation about both her gender performance and her, and her sexuality. And I don't think that we, you know, it, it, it certainly, we went a number of years before we had anything like that on radio again. A lot of this owes, I would argue, to the immediate post war period and, and McCarthyism and that sort of thing, where [00:12:00] to be different in any way was not a good thing.

And certainly to be perceived as gay was, In many respects, just as bad as being perceived or being connected with socialism or communism. And because you were, because of your sexuality, you were subject to, and the way society looked at it, you were subject to blackmail. And, and, if you were subject to blackmail, then your loyalties could always be tested.

And, and, even though there was very little evidence that came out of the, the McCarthy hearings in the Senate, or the HUAC hearings in the House during the 1950s, that demonstrated that lesbian or gay people were any more likely. To be turned by, by, you know, Russia or, or, you know, any foreign power. This was something that [00:13:00] I think, because it was again, a symbol of difference was something that people were willing to believe and radio at that time, of course, was almost exclusively commercially supported.

And, and most programs were owned by the sponsors, and the sponsors, of course, being in business to sell consumer products, and therefore to try to maintain some sort of popular image among the audience, didn't like to do risky things. And so, somebody like a Tallulah Bankhead. you know, was not going to work during that, during that time.

And certainly somebody like a Clarence Tiffing Tuffer was not going to work during that time. And so this was actually an extremely straight time in, in radio. And really we, that persists. well into the 1970s. And it's really only when we get into the 1980s that you, that via some, some fairly popular and, and some [00:14:00] fairly daring and, and certainly envelope pushing acts, musical acts, popular music acts, that we start getting, getting anything that appears queer on the radio at all.

Part of her act was that she was always trying to live up to her name. By the way, just to, if I can add just a little, a little, you know, people, people talk about the queerness of, of Batman and Robin. And if you look at the, at the, the very campy. 1960s television series rendition of, of the Batman and Robin story.

And there are so many, many, many queer things about that. And of course, we know that camp is a, is a, is a form that is associated with LGBTQ people. But if, you know, over time, there were a number of guest stars on that show who were, who were queer. I mean, they were closeted. For the most part. But, you know, Cesar [00:15:00] Romero was the, as the Joker.

Of course, he had, you know, was, was famous for kind of playing the Latin lover and that type of thing. But he was queer. Tallulah Bankhead actually you know, played one of the supervillains on, on that show. It was toward the end of her career. And, and sadly, you know, her career and You know, her health were, were collapsing during that, that time.

But, you know, like a lot of people, she was turned to television. She had a very memorable appearance on the Lucy and Desi Comedy Hour in 1960. And then she also was in the Batman series. And I think she was Black Widow was the name of her Was her character. Oh, I love that. But, but she was, but she was completely in terms of, of course, you know, this is a show that's supposed to be all family, maybe, you know, airs in the evening.

But, you know, there was. And, and so her, certainly her, her script, her lines were very, were very sanitized, but, you know, but there was, there was [00:16:00] still the unmistakable Tallulah delivery that was, that was there. And, and, you know, if you wanted to do, if you wanted to do a queer reading of, of Black Widow, you certainly could.

I'm fascinated by these voices in history that have had such an impact on our society in ways that we couldn't even grasped at that time. And now we're starting to see them kind of poke their way through in different ways. I mean, you've got whether whatever you feel about the film Green Book that that comes out and you've got a documentary on Rock Hudson that just came out talking about his life and his existence and.

You know, some people, I'm seeing more and more folks talk about like Hedy Lamarr and her stuff with Wi Fi and the things that she kind of didn't get attention for and maybe should have gotten a little attention for. And it's fascinating to me how these people, and I'm sure it's happened throughout history, but it's how these people's heads start to poke out of the sand a little bit of, you know, look, this is, this is someone who was doing this before.

Everyone else and we should be paying attention [00:17:00] to that. So talking about Tallulah Bankhead to me is interesting because that's one that should be in that lineup of folks. You're really right. There are In fact, the New York Times, as a kind of a recurring feature in their obituary section, has started quite literally disinterring some of these people.

Oh my gosh, yes. Yes, I was interviewed by the woman who does this. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Go ahead. I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, for those who are not familiar with it, it's a, they go back and they look at people who either weren't recognized at all.

During their lives and who, and whose obits never, never ran in any major, in any major publication or who had this kind of secret side to their life that, that didn't get widely reported. And I think Hedy Lamarr is certainly an outstanding example of that. You know, this is a woman who by all accounts was brilliant.

And yet we, we know her primarily for her film [00:18:00] roles where frankly, you know, she wasn't so much. And. You know, I would go back and in terms of, in terms of actors alone, if you look at people or, or, you know, people who were celebrities, you know, people like Barbara Stanwyck, I think are a very good example.

This is a woman who was, I don't know if people realized at the time how groundbreaking she was. You know, there was this, this Western on ABC in the 1960s called the Big Valley, which was. In sharp contrast to every other Western that was on, was dominated by women. You know, you had Linda Evans and Barbara Stanwyck was the matriarch of this family.

And she was the, you know, you may have had, yeah, she may have had, you know, some other strong male characters on there, but she was the boss. You know, and, and she was the moral center of that family. And if she didn't want something to happen, it did not happen. And, and, you know, Barbara [00:19:00] Stanwyck was, from what we understand off camera, every bit as big a presence.

I'm thinking about Johnny Mathis, for example, now here was somebody who was, you know, kind of a crooner and that type of thing, but somebody who really had to, his, his managers or, and or him, you know, they had to really. Massage his image to make him acceptable to an audience. So, you know, if you look at his album covers and you look at publicity photos, and if you look at how he appeared on stage when he performed, he was always very preppy.

You know, and he, as it happened, as an African American man, he also happened to be kind of light skinned, and, but the, but the idea was to make him as non threatening to white audiences, particularly to white parent audiences, as, as possible. And, you know, if you look at, if you look at people like, [00:20:00] like little Richard.

You know, he, of course, you know, he had his own queerness about him, which he, you know, had a complicated relationship with. But, you know, one of the reasons that his persona was the way it was, was it made him less threatening. You know, he was not seen as this, as this, you know, threat to, to straight white women, young women.

Because he was, you know, he would do these outrageous things and he, you know, had an elaborate hairstyle and a little mustache and the makeup and the whole, the whole bit jumping ahead, just a little bit, just contemporary times. Why do you think podcasting, and this is so meta, I wrote that in my notes too, but why do you think podcasting is such an attractive medium for queer audiences or LGBTQ folks?

I think it's an attractive medium really for audiences broadly and I'll address that first and then talk specifically about LGBTQ audiences. I think one of the [00:21:00] reasons that it is as attractive as it is, it is A fairly easy medium to be a creator in, and just as, you know, desktop editing software has made everybody, you know, a filmmaker and, and, you know, television producer, and just as, you know, software enabled people to, you know, to edit music, to, to, to video, and so to create their own, you know, their own works that way, I think that, With just a, really a few hundred dollars, you can get a very credible setup for, for podcasting.

And, and you know, the big thing of course is, is promoting it and getting it distributed and that sort of thing. And that's where maybe some, you know, there's a little bit of differentiation in terms of the investment, but you can do a podcast fairly inexpensively. Also, it's very individualized. [00:22:00] And, and, and so people can, in much the same way that the people who were experimenting with.

Super 8 cameras at the end of World War Two and formed the basis of kind of the independent film movements in, you know, starting in the late 1940s because these were affordable because they they could capture and tell stories that they wanted to see captured and told, I think that promotes their popularity now for LGBTQ audiences.

I think that's really important. You know, that's really exaggerated because queer audiences have always suffered from the fact that they have been shut out of mainstream media. So, you know, starting with the, with the motion picture code in the 1930s, that for. You know, 35 years pretty much meant that if you had [00:23:00] a queer presence on screen, it had to be so heavily coded that the average viewer couldn't, couldn't pick it out.

And you really had to be, you had to be attuned to it, and that oftentimes meant you had to be LGBTQ yourself and you had to be looking for it and you probably were going to be looking for it because you were just simply so starved. And I think the same is true of, of other media as well. People would do, this is, you know, the source of queer readings in media is that, you know, people just wanted to see that.

And I think when it came to, to podcasting, particularly since anything queer was, you know, had disappeared from audio media starting in the 1950s, I think there is, you know, there has been a real appetite for. Something that speaks to queer people, and, and the fact that you can do that fairly readily, you [00:24:00] don't have to be hired by a large media organization like iHeartMedia or Entercom or something like that.

That you can, this is something you can do yourself and you can be responsible for yourself, and you set the rules, they aren't set for you, is, is a very, very important thing. You know. Audio media are important because they're very portable. They're very individualized, you know, who hasn't had the experience?

Well, okay. Who growing up during a particular period in time, hasn't had the experience of having a little transistor radio with a little, with the little earphone and being, you know, alone in your room at night. And some people talk about you know, pulling the covers up over their head and listening to things that.

That they found spoke to them, but that they knew their parents would disapprove of and, and boy, if you're, if you're, you know, a lesbian, a young lesbian, or if you're a young gay guy, or, you [00:25:00] know, you're questioning your sexuality and you're not hearing this. Over the air, then how, how nice to be able to listen to people talk about it because you know, as I said at the outset, radio has such an important role in forming our tastes and helping us make the transition from, from adolescence or from teens into, into adulthood.

And if you think about it, there's a whole generation of young men, particularly who. Learned about how to be a young man by listening to, you know, disc jockeys on the, on the radio. And women, I think learned about their roles from listening to, you know, the pattern and listening to female singers and that sort of thing.

But inevitably it was, it was straight. And if you were, if you weren't straight, or if you were questioning your straightness, you have to do a real, [00:26:00] real. Interesting reading of, of those things that you're listening to in order for it to be at all valuable for you. So podcasts are great because you can have queer people.

Talking about queer history, talking about the coming out process, talking about, you know, how you deal with families, how you deal with the workplace, how you deal with your friends and, and it, it speaks to you as a, as a listener. Have you ever seen the show ghosts? There's one on the BBC and then there's one on CBS.

So, so it's based off a BBC show, but the president, yes, this is the one where the people who have died at this all throughout history. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're the American version. They're making a, the, one of the storylines is they're making a podcast based off of one of the ghosts murder and that goes throughout history.

Keep saying what's a podcast. What's a podcast. And the older [00:27:00] ghosts say it's just the radio. It's just radio. And that's like a running gag of like, what's a pod? It's just, it's radio. Just accept it as radio. That's what I was thinking about as you were giving this wonderful thing about history. I was like, oh yeah, like ghosts.

So I, I really want to, I like the, the transition that's happening here because a lot of your career has been to talk about queer identity, LGBTQ radio, all of that. I often get the question. Why does studying all of this stuff matter? Like, how do, why do we care about how pop culture affects a society?

And I'm very interested in your reaction to that, because I think you've already outlined it through what you've already said, that these things have impacts on people. But I'm curious how you answer that question. I think the best way of, of talking about that is to, is to use the metaphor or the allegory of the iceberg, where pop culture [00:28:00] is, is for most people, the part of the iceberg that they see, the part that is above the ocean surface, but there is much more to it that is below the surface.

And, and that which is below. Is oftentimes, first, the most interesting, and I would argue, also, the part that has the most potential to, to have an impact on, on society. You know, it's no accident that when African American characters first began to kind of populate TV screens and especially characters who were, I'm going to use the word authentic or, you know, real, or at least connected to the, the biographies of the, of the people of African American creators that they were on comedies, situation comedies largely, or in [00:29:00] comedy variety, or I'm thinking they're, you know, Flip Wilson or musical variety programs.

Because those are the ones that people that get under people's radar, you know, if you have kind of a hard hitting drama that, you know, has a message that that people might perceive as beating them over the head as being very pedantic. I think there is a defense mechanism that people put up and and part of that defense mechanism is in the is in the is the embodiment is the handheld remote and they just simply, you know, change channels or or cut off that that stream.

I think the comedy, the value of comedies and, and lighter forms of entertainment is that they can convey messages in a much more surreptitious way. You know, Susan Sontag [00:30:00] talking about camp said that camp neutralizes moral indignation. And, and I think in the same way, Yeah, anything that is comedic in nature or light entertainment in nature can neutralize moral indignation simply by entertaining us and planting its seeds, laying its eggs where we don't see them.

And, and they, and these ideas just grow in us or, you know, or, or the changes very slow in, in taking place in our, in our, the way we think about things, the priorities we put on things and, and so on. And the same, by the way, is true of science fiction, since we've already kind of talked about that. You know, one of the.

I think one of the, the wonderful things about science fiction is that you can, you can communicate ideas about the way you would [00:31:00] like the world to be, and you can get away with it in science fiction, because it's not real, you know, because this is something that's taking place, you know, in a different time, it's taking place in the future, or it's taking place on a different planet or, or, or something like that.

And yet it's a real reflection of the way you would The author would like to see the world be, or, you know, what the idealized version of that might be. Yeah. It's funny, as you were saying that, I was thinking of, I'm not a huge Star Trek person, my husband is a massive Star Trek person, but I do like the movie, I forget which one it is, but it's the one where they come to Earth and there's the whales that they need to, and they go to the hospital and a woman is suffering, and the guy, the doctor, the science Star Trek doctor hands her a pill and says, here, take this, and it instantly cures her problem immediately, and he just says, oh, modern medicine is so barbaric.

yeah. And it's just, it's such a good example of, we could fix these problems, you know, yes, a pill for to fix all of your [00:32:00] medical issues is stretching it, but we could do that. And here's a, here's a movie that's saying, look, why are we not thinking about a better way? To be, to handle medical situations that we've just taken for granted as they're going to be an issue.

There's nothing to do about it. Like, I think one grew back someone's ear immediately. Like it was, it was just a whole thing of he just handed them something and immediately they were fixed. And, and I think that's what you're getting at is that pop culture has that ability to plant that in someone's brain of why aren't we doing this in another way?

Why is this not something we're challenging? Well, and, and not just things that are of a, you know, kind of a medical nature or a very personal nature that way, but things that have so social and cultural implications and, and since you used the example of Star Trek for the voyage home, by the way. Thank you.

Yeah, you can go back to the original series, and at a time when, you know, it was impossible for, [00:33:00] Characters of different races to interact intimately on on camera because the, because the sponsor, well, the network's always said, well, the sponsors won't have it. One of the big complaints about Star Trek over the years.

including from me on the printed page in a few, a few cases was, you know, okay. So for all of its progressivism, for all of its utopianism with regard to, to race and, and, and gender and that type of thing, it, it's still, you know, it really never had LGBTQ characters. It never depicted Honestly, an LGBTQ character.

You always had to read in to the storyline, and this, you know, persisted well into the 1990s, and so you have Star Trek Discovery, one of the more recent series, and I swear to you, most of the characters on that, including the In my view, all of the interesting characters are either non binary or gay [00:34:00] or, or lesbian, you know, they, they made what I think was a, was an incredibly intelligent decision in casting the comedian Tignataro.

Oh yeah, she's great. Yeah. Yeah. And, and she just. She just has the, for one thing, they give her the best lines, and, and, and she just eats up the screen. One of the reasons that popular culture, I think, is a, is a fit subject for study, and this kind of gets to, to, you know, the latter part of our, our conversation here, is that it does make a difference.

We tend to think of it as being kind of a light, fluffy, inconsequential topic, and it's not at all. You know, you know, it's, it's really the only thing in a lot of cases that has ever really changed the way people live. You know, you do it first through popular media and, and the things that people enjoy doing.

Yes, [00:35:00] you can legislate. Yes, you can command things to happen and, and that type of thing. But the real change occurs when people want it to and they will want it to when it's something that they, that means something to them. And it's, it's, it's those cultural artifacts. and cultural practices that are the things that are most meaningful to people.

Thank you for listening. You can find more episodes of Most Popular on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts. Please take the time to follow, rate, and review, and more information, including additional resources for educators, can be found on my website, adriennetrier-bieniek.com

com. The website is linked in episode notes and I am on Instagram at at dr.adriennetb. Thanks to my students for the encouragement to keep making these episodes and I will see you next time.

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