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This essay charts the development of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender studies—sometimes called queer studies—in communication since the early 1980s. It considers the intellectual and political stakes in a project closely connected to movements for sexual liberation and also describes the shifting significance of such terms as gay and queer and the people and practices they signify. The analysis combines theories of subjectivity with questions about sexual representation in public and private, opening (and closing) with commentary on the social meanings and hierarchies of sexual difference.

This essay considers how cultural material is connected to political and cultural dialogue in public. It is based on a field study of the making of Storyline, a call‐in radio program for readers of women's literature jointly launched by WHYY‐FM (Philadelphia's NPR affiliate) and state humanities agencies in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. The essay is particularly interested in articulating the multicultural middlebrow as a structure of feeling and in tracking the development of progressive politics in so institutionally bound a project. In the encounter between the genteel tradition of radio book talk, the humanities academy, the depoliticized discourse of media professionalism, and the explicitly multicultural sensibility to which Storyline's developers and producers appealed, how are feminist politics and progressive discourses of socio‐cultural difference articulated?