Steven Capsuto
@stevencapsuto
Author of ALTERNATE CHANNELS: QUEER IMAGES ON 20TH-CENTURY TV. Lead historical consultant for VISIBLE: OUT ON TELEVISION (Apple TV+, 2020). This feed is mainly for my "Today in Queer TV History" video posts. Previous posts are on my YouTube channel.
I’m traveling in California. Here's the obligatory pic in front of the "Brady Bunch house" in Studio City. 😃
Today, I'm at the Yiddish Book Center in Massachusetts for the annual Yidstock music festival. This is their Yiddish typewriter collection, on display in the book room, where the public can peruse or buy many of the thousands of vintage volumes in Yiddish that the center has rescued. #Yiddish
This week, I'm digitizing audio interviews I did in the 90s with people who'd been involved in gay rights activism in the 1950s to mid-1970s, and with TV producers and writers behind early US TV depictions of queer people. I plan to post some of them online (for tapes where I have permission). 😊
Saludos desde el Campamento La Brújula... @torraleschema.bsky.social
After watching these old silent movies, I'm starting to suspect that people being tied up in sawmills was a widespread social problem in the 1910s...
In search of escapist entertainment as far removed as possible from today's news, I dug out some early DVDs of silent-movie shorts. The transfer tech back then was pretty bad, so I've cleaned up some of them before putting them on my media hard drive... It keeps me out of trouble. 😀
A new executive order says that everyone is whatever sex they were "at conception." Congratulations! Everyone in the world is female. No sneaking into the men's room now... #gender
Just signed up as a volunteer translator with the New York Civil Liberties Union, and the knots in my stomach immediately unclenched slightly. Authoritarians want you to feel helpless, so do something to mitigate the hell that these assholes have unleashed...
These are six fine contemporary stage plays from Spain that I was hired to translate into English. I'm spending the next few weeks submitting the English scripts to professional theaters—a fascinating process that I'm still figuring out. 😀🎭 #theater #theatre #SpanishTheater #CatalanTheater #Catalan
21 years ago today, I was in Madrid giving my "Queers on American TV" lecture in my best approximation of European Spanish, using a mix of dubbed and subtitled clips that I'd brought on a VHS tape. Technologically, such a different era! (Hat tip to @javiermarin.bsky.social for this video clip.)
TODAY IN QUEER TV HISTORY SALLY JESSY RAPHAEL - 11/14/1988, syndicated Today in 1988, this talk show devoted an hour to trans men—or, as the transcript catalogs described it at the time, "Women who've become men (transsexual)." I'd love to find video of this one! #trans #LGBTQ #TV #TalkShows
Multitasking! The underslept translator renders 19th-century science stuff into English while his other computer digitizes videos of LGBTQ-themed TV shows. 😀
TODAY IN QUEER TV HISTORY On the Korean series SQUID GAME, released today in 2021, we learn that the murderous games exist to entertain amoral zillionaires, embodied in a sexually predatory old white American gay man who says things like "If you can satisfy me in 5 min., I'll change your life."
TODAY IN QUEER TV HISTORY The brilliant, cynical Fox sitcom ACTION, about a ruthless Hollywood producer, debuted on this date in 1999. Viewers could tell Hollywood was a wild, edgy place because the regular characters included some gay men and a woman who was a sex worker. It was another time...
TODAY IN QUEER TV HISTORY THE GOLDEN GIRLS - Premiere - 9/14/1985, NBC This pilot episode differs a bit from the series: Sophia doesn't live with them and the Girls have a gay male housekeeper named Coco (Charles Levin), but the core elements are there. #gay #queer #LGBTQ #GoldenGirls #sitcoms
TODAY IN QUEER TV HISTORY NOT FOR WOMEN ONLY - 9/9/1975, Syndicated This talk show presented day 2 of its week-long series on bisexuality on this date in 1975, back when bi people were seldom discussed on TV. Guests included Barbara Trilling. #bisexual #bi #LGBTQ #queer #TalkShows
Now that I've digitized hundreds of queer-themed TV shows from my old VHS tapes (and Hi-8 and video-8, among other old formats), I needed a way to organize the files and my notes about the shows. For now, my solution is a locally running media server, and frequent backups to local physical media. 😀
Currently on the VHS digitizer: "Dumping Your Husband for Another Woman," a 1991 episode of THE OPRAH WINFREY SHOW about women who had left heterosexual marriages after coming out as gay. A surprising enough phenomenon in 1991 to warrant an hour-long TV discussion. #lesbian #gay #LGBTQ #TalkShows
Forget about "Name a store that dates you." What dates me is that when anyone mentions "The Avengers," this is what I picture first...
I don't remember the novel describing Sam's clothes. But in the 1931 film (from the same studio), Sam's a sharp dresser. Very much a three-piece suit guy.