Lou Maletta, who founded the Gay Cable Network in 1982, when the gay rights movement was not receiving broad media attention, died on Nov. 2 in Kingston, N.Y. He was 74. The cause was liver cancer, said Luke Valenti, his companion of 37 years.
The network had its roots as a weekly program called “Men & Film” on Channel 35 on Manhattan Cable Television. Mr. Maletta showed gay pornographic movies that he had edited to make less explicit, and the programming grew to become a forum for the full range of issues facing gay people.
There had been gay-oriented television shows before the Gay Cable Network was started. But Mr. Maletta’s enterprise was considered the first to produce weekly news, entertainment, political commentary, cultural and health-related programs, and it distributed them to public-access channels in 20 cities (at first on videotapes he mailed).
“It was critical to the L.G.B.T. rights movement,” said Kenneth Sherrill, a political science professor at Hunter College who has written extensively on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. “Mainstream television wasn’t rushing to cover the movement, and public access cable provided entree for social and political groups that were traditionally excluded. Lou Maletta’s programming allowed voices of the gay community to speak for themselves.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/business/media/lou-maletta-founder-of-gay-cable-network-dies-at-74.html?src=recg
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