Mainstream television, adolescent homosexuality, and significant silence

The treatment of adolescent subjects on network television is exceedingly heterosexist; continuing adolescent characters are always heterosexual and the adolescent audience is addressed as if it were composed exclusively of heterosexual viewers. This symbolic annihilation of gay and lesbian youth exhibited by network television in the extreme, and by most mass media in general, can contribute to a dysfunctional isolation that is supported by the mutually reinforcing invisibility of homosexual adolescents on the television screen and in the real world. Such isolation and invisibility can be examined as a spiral of silence phenomenon. Spiral of silence theory—in conjunction with the third‐person effect, the distinctiveness postulate, and the concept of symbolic annihilation—outlines the reciprocal communication‐based conditions through which the oppression of gay and lesbian youth may be achieved. The social‐psychological mechanism of the spiral of silence also partially accounts for the inefficacy of oppositional interpretive practices for disrupting pluralistic ignorance in this case; the relative ability of gay and lesbian adolescents to actually subvert dominant meanings, in an empowering way, is called into question.