Why No One's Watching Gay TV
December 2002
To hear the thick-headed major-domos at PrideVision tell it, I’m a horrible lesbian unless I send them my cold hard cash. The latest plea from Canada’s 24-hour gay and lesbian TV channel is such a turn-off I’ve resolved to never send them my money. Good-bye and good riddance.
"What would you say if you heard that discrimination was pulling the plug on PrideVision TV?" the press release the company sent out in November reads. "What would you say if you learned that it isn’t discrimination pulling the plug, but our own community who isn’t plugged in? With only 20,000 subscribers we are impotent! Help PrideVision TV GET IT UP!"
It's not just that this manipulative gurgle is only directed at boys -- I could overlook that by making a joke about how my version of such "help" lives in the drawer next to my bed.
What truly galls is the combination of hubris and the hoped-for expropriation of my money for export to the United States.
I truly believe this to be their plan: We should pay PrideVision for a lousy bunch of reruns, and they then will use our money to finance the launch of their American channel, which will include (and they’ve said this themselves) at least 10 original US shows.
PrideVision is giving us fewer and fewer "services" -- less and less Canadian TV product. Staff is down from 54 to 10, and finding first-run Canadian programming is a heck of a challenge for the bamboozled viewer. But Canadiana’s gotta go because it won't sell in the US, which is where PrideVision really wants to be. We're just a jumping off point for the real market, the gigantic American money making treadmill.
Even PrideVision people pretty much admit it: "We're still very much on target to launch in the U.S.," vice-president Anna McCusker recently told an inquiring reporter. "We're... honestly asking our present subscribers to bring a friend to the network so the numbers are increased, but we’re confident the community will support PrideVision TV."
These expansion plans must now be collapsing, since Showtime and MTV (both owned by Viacom) are about to jointly launch their own 24 hour gay channel in the US, come spring. It’ll be called Outlet. [SINCE THEN, Here! has been launched in the U.S., and Viacom's network, now called LOGO, is scheduled for summer 2005.]
PrideVision is now faced with reality: The Canadian version must survive on its own, because there really is no where else to go. Of course, they have never had a decent business plan that focused on Canada and on giving a great gay channel to its Canadian customers. So they may go under.
This leads to Plan Two. The latest push for subscribers -- they’ve given themselves a month, ending in mid-December, to pull in 50,000 new watchers -- is based on a combination of guilt and pushing the idea that the community owes them.
A healthy community cannot be built on guilt. And it also cannot be built on the belief that noblesse oblige.
PrideVision, McCusker just told the Globe and Mail, "is the envy of the world. And the community that it is here for should understand there are possibilities that the voice may not be there if they do not come on board and support it."
They truly believe we owe them our money just because they're broadcasting gay stuff. Its existence is more important than its quality or its community involvement.
PrideVision is about to get a nasty reality check. You provide a service, folks. If we don't like your service, we aren’t going to pay for it. We will not be pathetically grateful just because you exist. Only a straight company would come up with such a screwed up marketing plan.
I don't know who's gay and who isn't over there at Headline Media Group, which owns PrideVision, but the company doesn't have an understanding of community, nor of gay culture itself. Their first big break in the world of cable was a sports channel, The Score. I love the irony of a bunch of self-important sports he-men -- in my imagination, kibitzing with homophobic football players about how fags can never be allowed into locker rooms -- working next to a bunch of homo screamers.
But obviously, PrideVision staff were able to make it work. Now they need to put that experience to work, and connect with the redneck... viewers.
PrideVision needs to market itself differently, to an audience that’s guaranteed to obsessively watch it, no matter what kind of programming it has: rightwing Christians.
They, after all, have been PrideVision’s most loyal viewers. Campaign Life Coalition and its web partner, Lifesite.net, are completely bug-eyed about PrideVision, sending out news reports with astounding regularity.
Like this one: "The station, which was given approval in Canada in 2000, has been an area of concern for Canadian families. It has ignored even the extremely minimal decency standards of Canadian television showing full frontal nudity during day-time television hours."
I love that religious nuts must be paying PrideVision eight bucks a month in order to have someone monitor the channel, 24/7. They are more loyal than we are. And no one deserves to watch a good daily dose of homo sex more than they do!
The lack of subscribers must confuse the relgious nuts all to bits, too. They love the low numbers, but it hurts their cause. They spend much of their time panicking that homos recruit and that giving gays more rights is only going to turn nice, proper heterosexuals off to the wrong side of the tracks. But reality keeps intruding. PrideVision doesn't have enough subscribers to survive, and the census showed a tiny number of common-law gay and lesbian couples. It's hard to build a decent moral panic about evil homosexuals talking over the world when there seem to be so few of them.
Those gay men and lesbians who really do need PrideVision live in the rural areas, where there may be little in the way of a good gay support network. Yet people who are in the closet can't get it -- they'd have to special order it by coming out to their neighbourhood cable customer service representative -- a not very likely scenario.
Or they're kids, struggling to come out -- and mom and pop would see it on the monthly bill.
By contrast, a gay newspaper is easy to pick up while hurriedly passing by (while assuring no one's looking); an Internet site can be accessed in the privacy of one's own home. And both these media outlets are free.
We have become accustomed to our culture being free -- freely offered, freely received.
You can't buy community. PrideVision may discover this too late.
ADDENDUM: Soon after, Bill Craig bought in to PrideVision, and has spent the last couple of years trying to rebuild and relaunch. I still don't watch it.