Yet, intimate minorities tend to be ignored by the main-stream media and addressed as though they don’t exist. This exclusion happens to be posited to play a role in maintaining sexual minorities hidden and without energy, an activity which Gross relates to as “symbolic annihilation” (Gross, 1991; Gerbner & Gross, 1976).
Portrayals of homosexual folks of all ages have already been uncommon and frequently negative (Gross, 1991, 1996; Moritz, 1994), and portrayals of young nonheterosexuals are also less common (Kielwasser & Wolf, 1992). Programs for adolescent audiences often portray an environment that is exclusively heterosexual with just occasional brief appearances by adolescent figures that are confused about their sex (Kielwasser & Wolf, 1992). This is really important because homosexual adolescents usually cannot get information highly relevant to their orientation that is sexual from and family members and can even make use of tv being a supply of information about homosexual problems (Paroski, 1987).