1962 police arrest two gay men

A cameraman hid in a closet and watched the clandestine activities through a two-way mirror. Mansfield, also described as the 'fun centre of Ohio' saw an outrageous incident of police hidden filming in public toilets. MANSFIELD (video, black and white, silent, 9 minutes, ) In the summer ofthe Mansfield, Ohio, Police Department photographed men having sex in a public restroom under the main square of the city.

Based upon his study of reader response to letters to the editor early in the 20th century, Nord argued readers are active players as well, constructing their own meanings as they read, all the while guided by cultural and political elites. Those that do evolve or lose their salience tend to do so as a result of fluctuations in tastes, preferences, and beliefs revealed in popular culture.

Meaning is found, not in texts alone, but in the interaction between texts and audiences Kosicki, Entman touted framing as the overarching concept that could become a general theory of how communication texts work. First, the frame must be shared, which is to say not imposed by an individual or group Reese, Framing activates conventions and tacit rules concerning interpretation and text construction shared by participants.

Abstract In August ofpolice in Mansfield, Ohio, a small industrial city in the Midwest heartland, arrested 18 men on sodomy charges following an undercover public restroom surveillance operation in a public park. They are powerful symbolically because of widespread identification within the culture and because of the affective reactions they engender.

This is particularly significant to understanding media treatment of LGBT people in the era before the Stonewall uprising inbecause seldom were LGBT people used as sources about themselves and those who were used as sources, including mental health professionals and public officials, frequently based their statements on dubious scientific findings at best and myth and stereotype at worst.

Resultant police measures gave way to media spectacle—one documented by the found footage and media accounts presented by artist and filmmaker William E. Jones. While politicians and the media have prominent voices in deliberative discourse about social issues, it is not their province alone.

A more contemporary synopsis of the restroom surveillance and subsequent arrests and prosecutions has since been written for the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. Finally, frames exist at multiple levels of abstraction.

Making Art from Evidence

Second, the more useful frames tend to exhibit some degree of persistence though, as Reese notes, some may evolve and others are eventually replaced. In general, framing refers to the way issues and events are organized and made sense of, particularly by the media, media professionals, and their audiences Reese, Years of research applying the framing approach suggest three characteristics important to the usefulness of frames.

While many journalists claim that news is naturalistic and free from institutional and ideological influence Reese,there appears to be general agreement among those who have studied the news media and framing that the media either are a cultural elite active in framing or at least are complicit with political and cultural elites in the process.

Highly abstract frames comprise a wide range of content and may be referred to as cultural frames. The role of the audience, and especially its level of activity in the construction of meaning, is less certain. In a two-week sting procedure, the Mansfield police department deployed its men to film (in 16mm) the underground public bathroom from a two-way mirror.

The Famous Underground Restroom

The film now enjoys cult status as queer camp, had a brief tour of major modern art museums, once was available for downloading from a website dedicated to LGBT-focused films, and now is available in an altered form on the social media site YouTube youtube.

Some 15 years after the arrests, the local city council considered a proposal to reopen the park restrooms, which had been ordered closed after the police concluded their investigation. The sting would lead to not just the last sodomy prosecutions in the state before the laws were changed, but also to distribution of a narrated version of the surveillance film the police department produced as a how-to guide for other agencies.

In those men who we call Gay today were known in the headlines as “deviants.” Stage 3) The scandalous news broke on August 22, and that was the day it became very dangerous in Mansfield to be Gay. The Police had set up a secret camera in the underground restroom to film the carnal intimacies of Gay men’s covert rendezvous.

The day after most of the arrests had been made, the headline, “Hidden Movie Camera Used By Police To Trap Sexual Deviates At Park Hangout,” splashed across the front page. In August ofpolice in Mansfield, Ohio, a small industrial city in the Midwest heartland, arrested 18 men on sodomy charges following an undercover public restroom surveillance operation in a public park.

As evidence of the connection, Reese notes that framing relies upon media discourse, individuals, and social and cultural practices as sources for its insights. The most readily available evidence of framing exists in media texts. Join as we go back to to find out why this outrageous act occurre – Listen to Case The Mansfield Ohio Gay Sex Sting of by The Gay Files instantly on your tablet, phone or browser - no downloads needed.

While agreeing with Baylor that the transaction depends on there being culturally-available frames shared by both the media and the public, Wiggins seems to see a more detached role for the media, arguing that they merely provide the raw materials, conceptual frames, and vocabulary for the discussion, but that the public constructs the terms on which the discourse takes place.

At the same time, social groups also may be framed, so that discourse with the community tends to construct the very social structure and political alignment that supports it. The discourse of framing is replete with examples of devices used in the construction of frames, including myths, metaphors, narratives, catchphrases, exemplars, depictions, and aural and visual imagery.

The local newspaper covered that story as well.