Affective production value on queer community television: a case study of the Gay Cable Network and Gay USA

This article assesses the significance of the Gay Cable Network (GCN), a production company that aired a dozen shows on public access cable television made by and for LGBTQ New Yorkers. Drawing upon archival research and interviews with producers, hosts, and assistants at GCN, I argue that LGBTQ producers experience both transformational opportunities for political engagement as well as precarity, frustration, and loss through public access cable television production. I evaluate the social experience of television production to analyze what I am calling affective production value: a metric that establishes how community media production generates a range of powerful emotional experiences for its producers. I examine the daily experience of queer television production through GCN founder Lou Maletta’s tireless efforts to produce and distribute LGBTQ programming for more than twenty years as well as the continuing efforts of his contemporaries on Gay USA, an LGBTQ news program that still airs weekly. Examining cable access shows in terms of affective production value allows scholars to decenter normative standards of production quality in order to understand how local production generates meaning for its producers, offering us the opportunity to explore the personal and cultural impact of community television production.