SAN FRANCISCO   - Black tuxedos, elegant dresses, hair coiffed. For over two weeks now, people around the world have seen images of hundreds of attractive gay and lesbian couples marry in San Francisco.

Nearly 3,400 same-sex couples, often accompanied by their children and parents, have married at San Francisco's city hall -- creating images that stand in big contrast to the typical "leather daddies" and "biker-dykes" images seen two decades ago.

Analysts who study gay and lesbian issues say the recent images are emblematic of the "mainstreaming" of gays and lesbians in society in the past decade due to changes in the gay and lesbian community and changes in how the media reports gay and lesbian issues.

"In the old dark days, one had to dress queer in order to mark their differences from heterosexuals. That is no longer the case today," said Jonathan Katz, executive coordinator of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University in Connecticut.

"Now, those old stereotype presentations are often brought out for pure fun, at drag parties, for example," Katz said.

The mainstreaming of the gay and lesbian community, popularized in television shows like NBC's successful comedy "Will and Grace" featuring openly gay characters, has also been fed by the rising number of diverse openly gay men and women.

"Gay and lesbians are a diverse community. They're your uncles and aunts. They're white, black, Latino," said Joshua Gamson, a sociology professor at the University of San Francisco.

"Earlier images tended to emphasize the community's sexual wildness. The images we've seen recently help mainstream gays because they help straight people see things about the gay community and what it's become," said Gamson.

Many media outlets on Thursday carried comments by comedian Rosie O'Donnell after her San Francisco wedding that she and her wife Kelli Carpenter would rush back to New York to attend parents' day at their children's school rather than honeymoon.

Such images might not have been widely reported by the media years ago, said Edward Alwood, author of "Straight News," an account of how gays and lesbians have been portrayed in the media.

"Whether it was television or print, newsrooms were often guided by running the stereotypical images in order to meet the public's perceptions of what being gay meant," said Alwood, a former CNN correspondent in the mid-1980s and now a journalism professor at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.

"It was almost like if editors didn't show the stereotypes, like gays wearing mini-shorts, they weren't being objective," Alwood said.

Alwood said coverage of gays and lesbians has changed dramatically since the first documentary on gays appeared in 1967 on CBS.

"In that documentary, they did an interview with a gay man whose face was mostly obscured by a plant because they didn't want to show his face. It's almost comical to think about it now," said Alwood.

Still, while public images of gays and lesbians have changed over the years, that has not translated into widespread support for same-sex marriages.

Several polls in recent weeks have shown a majority of Americans -- and Californians -- do not support the right of gays and lesbians to marry.

Copyright © 2004 Reuters Limited

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