Gay USA is a weekly one-hour news program

News program

A news program, news programme, news show, or newscast is a regularly scheduled radio or television program that reports current events. News is typically reported in a series of individual stories that are presented by one or more anchors...

 "...devoted to in-depth coverage of gay

Gay

Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....

, lesbian

Lesbian

Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...

, bisexual, and transgender

Transgender

Transgender is a general term applied to a variety of individuals, behaviors, and groups involving tendencies to vary from culturally conventional gender roles....

 issues" on a local, state, national, and international level. It is filmed in the studios of, and aired by, Manhattan Neighborhood Network

Manhattan Neighborhood Network

Manhattan Neighborhood Network is a non-profit organization that broadcasts programming on four public-access television cable TV stations in Manhattan, New York and provides a community media center that enables individuals and groups to produce shows for its network.-History:It has operated...

 in Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

, New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

. It airs on Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

 Public-access television

Public-access television

Public-access television is a form of non-commercial mass media where ordinary people can create content television programming which is cablecast through cable TV specialty channels...

 cable TV and Free Speech TV

Free Speech TV

-External links:...

, and is currently available via the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 as Podcast

Podcast

A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...

s.

Current format

Typically, Gay USA begins with a quick introduction by hosts Andy Humm

Andy Humm

Andy Humm is a journalist, activist and currently co-host of TV news program Gay USA.-Career:As a gay news reporter, Humm has covered virtually every major gay and AIDS news story since the 1980s...

 and Ann Northrop

Ann Northrop

Ann Northrop is a journalist and activist, and the current co-host of TV news program Gay USA.-Early life:Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Northrop is a native of her mother's hometown, Windsor...

 then moves into news segments as viewed from the gay perspective. Regular segments include gay news, AIDS news, and entertainment news. The anchors refer to notes kept in front of them on the table during this portion of the show. Hosts Humm and Northrop often interject their news delivery with accounts of personal experiences and "...light, snappy repartee and good-natured verbal sparring and banter." Following the news topics of the week, guests are interviewed and/or videos clips are presented for the second half of the show. Bill Bahlman, Associate Producer of Gay USA posts a weekly Podcast edition of the show which is available on iTunes and from the show's official website GayUSATV.org

History

Gay USA was preceded by Pride and Progress which first aired in 1985 on the Gay Cable Network (GCN). Independently produced and supported by GCN owner Lou Maletta

Lou Maletta

Louis Phillip "Lou" Maletta Jr. was an American media executive and LGBT rights activist. Maletta founded the Gay Cable Network in 1982.-Life and career:...

, Pride and Progress was hosted by journalist/activist Andy Humm

Andy Humm

Andy Humm is a journalist, activist and currently co-host of TV news program Gay USA.-Career:As a gay news reporter, Humm has covered virtually every major gay and AIDS news story since the 1980s...

. The program covered LGBT

LGBT

LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...

 topics, including the Democratic

Democratic National Convention

The Democratic National Convention is a series of presidential nominating conventions held every four years since 1832 by the United States Democratic Party. They have been administered by the Democratic National Committee since the 1852 national convention...

 and Republican National Convention

Republican National Convention

The Republican National Convention is the presidential nominating convention of the Republican Party of the United States. Convened by the Republican National Committee, the stated purpose of the convocation is to nominate an official candidate in an upcoming U.S...

s from a gay perspective.

In 1996, journalist/activist Ann Northrop

Ann Northrop

Ann Northrop is a journalist and activist, and the current co-host of TV news program Gay USA.-Early life:Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Northrop is a native of her mother's hometown, Windsor...

 began co-hosting Gay USA with Humm.

Bill Bahlman, Associate Producer of Gay USA has a long history as an LGBT Activist. Organizations he served with or helped found include The Gay Activist Alliance, GLAAD, CLGR, The Lavender Hill Mob, & ACTUP New York.

Since September 2001, the show has aired on Manhattan Neighborhood Network

Manhattan Neighborhood Network

Manhattan Neighborhood Network is a non-profit organization that broadcasts programming on four public-access television cable TV stations in Manhattan, New York and provides a community media center that enables individuals and groups to produce shows for its network.-History:It has operated...

. In 2003, Gay USA became nationally available through Free Speech TV

Free Speech TV

-External links:...

. Podcasts of the show became available in 2006.

Interviews and guests

Gay USA includes interviews of individuals regarding relevant projects, organizations or entertainment. Guests have ranged from an out-gay, and thus unemployed, priest to a gay male couple with adopted children to political figures and entertainers. Some of the program's notable guests have included:

• Edward Albee
  Edward Albee
  Edward Franklin Albee III is an American playwright who is best known for The Zoo Story , The Sandbox , Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , and a rewrite of the screenplay for the unsuccessful musical version of Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's . His works are considered well-crafted, often...
  
  , three time Pulitzer Prize winning playwright
• Alison Bechdel
  Alison Bechdel
  Alison Bechdel is an American cartoonist. Originally best known for the long-running comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, in 2006 she became a best-selling and critically acclaimed author with her graphic memoir Fun Home.-Early life:...
  
  , comic strip and graphic author, notably of Fun Home
  Fun Home
  Fun Home is a 2006 graphic memoir by American writer Alison Bechdel, author of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. It chronicles the author's childhood and youth in rural Pennsylvania, USA, focusing on her complex relationship with her father...
  
  
• Wayne Besen
  Wayne Besen
  Wayne Besen is an American gay rights advocate. He is a former spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign and the founder of Truth Wins Out.Besen says he has interviewed hundreds of former and current "ex-gays," and is an outspoken critic of organisations such as Homosexuals Anonymous.- Photos of...
  
  , gay rights advocate
• Matthew Bourne
  Matthew Bourne
  Matthew Bourne OBE is a British classical and contemporary ballet and dance choreographer.-Biography:Matthew Bourne was born in Hackney, London in 1960. He went to William Fitt and Sir George Monoux School in Walthamstow, London...
  
  , British choreographer
• Rev. Pat Bumgardner, Pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church
  Metropolitan Community Church
  The Metropolitan Community Church or The Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches is an international Protestant Christian denomination...
  
  
• Justice Edwin Cameron
  Edwin Cameron
  Edwin Cameron is a South African Rhodes scholar and current Constitutional Court justice. Cameron served as a Supreme Court of Appeal judge from 2000 to 2008. He was the first senior South African official to state publicly that he was living with HIV/AIDS...
  
  , senior South African official
• Thomas Duane
  Thomas Duane
  Thomas K. Duane is an American politician from New York, currently serving in the New York State Senate. He was the nation's first openly HIV-positive person elected to office....
  
  , New York State Senator
• Martin Duberman
  Martin Duberman
  Martin Bauml Duberman is an American historian, playwright, and gay-rights activist. He is Professor of History Emeritus at Lehman College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York and was the founder of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate School...
  
  , historian
• Marga Gomez
  Marga Gomez
  Marga Gomez is a Puerto Rican/Cuban-American comedian, playwright, and humorist. She is openly lesbian....
  
  , award winning comedian
• Lesley Gore
  Lesley Gore
  Lesley Gore is an American singer. She is perhaps best known for her 1963 pop hit "It's My Party", which she recorded at the age of 16. Following the hit, she became one of the most recognized teen pop singers of the 1960s.- Biography :Gore was born in New York City, New York. She was raised in...
  
  , singer and songwriter
• Alan Hollinghurst
  Alan Hollinghurst
  Alan Hollinghurst is a British novelist, and winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty.-Biography:Hollinghurst was born on 26 May 1954 in Stroud, Gloucestershire, the only child of James Hollinghurst, a bank manager, and his wife, Elizabeth...
  
  , author of award winning The Line of Beauty
  The Line of Beauty
  The Line of Beauty is a 2004 Booker Prize-winning novel by Alan Hollinghurst.-Plot introduction:Set in Britain in the early to mid-1980s, the story surrounds the post-Oxford life of the young gay protagonist, Nick Guest....
  
  
• Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum
  Sharon Kleinbaum
  Sharon Kleinbaum is a leading social justice activist and an openly lesbian rabbi who has been Senior Rabbi of New York City’s Congregation Beit Simchat Torah since 1992 . She is a prominent advocate for human rights . She graduated from Barnard College and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical...
  
  , LGBT Synagogue
• Scott Long
  Scott Long (human rights activist)
  Scott Long is an American activist in the human rights movement working for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. He is now a Visiting Fellow in the Human Rights Program of Harvard Law School...
  
  , Executive Director of LGBT Rights Project, Human Rights Watch
  Human Rights Watch
  Human Rights Watch is an international non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. Its headquarters are in New York City and it has offices in Berlin, Beirut, Brussels, Chicago, Geneva, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Moscow, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo,...
  
  
• Joseph Lovett, film maker, notably of Gay Sex in the 70s
  Gay Sex in the 70s
  Gay Sex in the 70s is a 2005 American documentary film about gay sexual culture in New York City in the 1970s. It illustrates the twelve years of sexual freedom bookmarked by the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the recognition of AIDS in 1981...
  
  
• Michael Musto
  Michael Musto
  Michael Musto is an American columnist for the The Village Voice, where he writes La Dolce Musto. Musto was born in Brooklyn to an Italian American family. He attended Columbia University graduating in 1976. During his studies, he was a theater critic for the Columbia Spectator...
  
  , columnist
• Christine Quinn
  Christine C. Quinn
  Christine Callaghan Quinn is a Democratic politician and the current Speaker of the New York City Council. The third person to hold this office, Quinn is the first female and first openly gay speaker....
  
  , Speaker of the New York City Council
• Tully Satre
  Tully Satre
  Tully Satre is an American gay rights activist and gay writer. In June 2005, Tully Satre founded Equality Fauquier-Culpeper in the rural suburbs of Virginia. Equality Fauquier-Culpeper was noted that summer in The Washington Post, The Washington Blade, and other news outlets such as The Advocate...
  
  , youth activist
• Sir Antony Sher
  Antony Sher
  Sir Antony Sher, KBE is a double Olivier Award winning South African-born British actor, writer, theatre director and painter.- Early years :...
  
  , actor, novelist and artist
• Lily Tomlin
  Lily Tomlin
  Mary Jean "Lily" Tomlin is an American actress, comedienne, writer, and producer. Tomlin has been a major force in American comedy since the late 1960's when she began a career as a stand up comedian and became a featured performer on television's Laugh-in...
  
  , comedian who publicly came out on the show in 2000
• Tree, Stonewall Inn
  Stonewall Inn
  The Stonewall Inn, often shortened to Stonewall is an American bar in New York City and the site of the Stonewall riots of 1969, which are widely considered to be the single most important event leading to the gay liberation movement and the modern fight for gay and lesbian rights in the United...
  
   Bartender
• Paula Vogel
  Paula Vogel
  Paula Vogel is an American playwright and university professor. She received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, How I Learned to Drive.-Early years:...
  
  , Pulitzer Prize winning playwright
• Kenji Yoshino
  Kenji Yoshino
  Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar and the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law. Formerly, he was the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His work involves Constitutional law, anti-discrimination law, civil and human rights,...
  
  , author as well as professor of intellectual life at Yale Law School

Organizations involved in LGBT

LGBT

LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...

 rights and information dissemination have also been represented on the show by various guests. These include:

• ACLU Lesbian & Gay Rights Project
  American Civil Liberties Union
  The American Civil Liberties Union is a U.S. non-profit organization whose stated mission is "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States." It works through litigation, legislation, and...
  
  : Litigation Director James Esseks; Matt Coles
• Equality Ride
  Equality Ride
  The Equality Ride is a periodic LGBT rights bus journey across the United States led by young adults and sponsored by Soulforce, a national LGBT nonprofit organization. Its primary goal is to foster dialogue on issues of faith, sexuality, and gender, and discrimination against lesbian, gay,...
  
  : Activists Haven Herrin & Jake Reitan
  Jacob Reitan
  Jacob Reitan is a LGBT activist from Mankato, Minnesota who founded the Soulforce Equality Ride, featured in the film Equality U.. He is currently attending the University of Minnesota Law School. He received his masters from Harvard Divinity School...
  
  
• Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network
  Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network
  The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network is an organization in the United States that seeks to end discrimination, harassment, and bullying based on sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression in K-12 schools. GLSEN is headquartered in New York City and the District of Columbia...
  
  : Kevin Jennings
  Kevin Jennings
  Kevin Brett Jennings is an American educator, author, and administrator. He was the Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools at the U.S. Department of Education from 2009-11...
  
  
• Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund: Attorney Alphonso David
• National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
  National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
  The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force builds the political power of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community from the ground up. The Task Force is the country’s premier social justice organization fighting to improve the lives of LGBT people, and working to create positive, lasting...
  
  : Executive Director Matt Forman
• Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States
  Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States
  The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States is a lobbying organization and advocacy group dedicated to sex and sexuality education, sexual health, and sexual rights...
  
  : Monica Rodriguez

Gay USA Team

Frequently, the folks who work on and/or for Gay USA refer to themselves as the "Gay USA Team." In alphabetical order, the team currently consists of:

• Bill Bahlman - Associate Producer
• Sam Feder - Technical Director (employed by MNN
  Manhattan Neighborhood Network
  Manhattan Neighborhood Network is a non-profit organization that broadcasts programming on four public-access television cable TV stations in Manhattan, New York and provides a community media center that enables individuals and groups to produce shows for its network.-History:It has operated...
  
  )
• Andy Humm
  Andy Humm
  Andy Humm is a journalist, activist and currently co-host of TV news program Gay USA.-Career:As a gay news reporter, Humm has covered virtually every major gay and AIDS news story since the 1980s...
  
   - Host, journalist/activist
• Ann Northrop
  Ann Northrop
  Ann Northrop is a journalist and activist, and the current co-host of TV news program Gay USA.-Early life:Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Northrop is a native of her mother's hometown, Windsor...
  
   - Host, journalist/activist
• Rich Speziale - Studio Director (employed by MNN
  Manhattan Neighborhood Network
  Manhattan Neighborhood Network is a non-profit organization that broadcasts programming on four public-access television cable TV stations in Manhattan, New York and provides a community media center that enables individuals and groups to produce shows for its network.-History:It has operated...
  
  )

See also

• Media of New York City
  Media of New York City
  The media of New York City are internationally influential, and include some of the most important newspapers, largest publishing houses, most prolific television studios, and biggest record companies in the world...
  
  
• Culture of New York City
  Culture of New York City
  The culture of New York City is reflected by the city's size and variety. Many American cultural movements first emerged in the city. The Harlem Renaissance established the African-American renaissance in the United States, while American modern dance developed in New York in the early 20th century...
  
  
• Sexuality and gender identity-based cultures
  Sexuality and gender identity-based cultures
  Sexuality and gender identity-based cultures are subcultures and communities composed of persons who have shared experiences, background, or interests due to a common sexual or gender identity. Among the first to argue that members of sexual minorities can constitute cultural minorities as well as...
  
  

External links

• Gay USA (note that this page can be slow to load)
• Gay USA - The Weekly GLBT News Show
• Gay USA on Free Speech TV
  Free Speech TV
  -External links:...
  
  - select videos available.
• Gay USA's MNN listing