This is not to say, however, that Donahue shows were always queer friendly. Sometimes Donahue would resort to sensationalism in order to provoke controversy. An episode about cross-dressing in which Donahue appeared in a pink and black skirt unleashed a torrent of criticism, both from conservatives who charged that he was glorifying transvestism and from queers who accused Donahue of sensationalizing and demeaning cross-dressers.

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For the most part, however, Donahue demonstrated a genuine commitment to destroying stereotypes. Even though his show courted controversy, it never degenerated into the "freak shows" that would become the mainstay of talk shows in the 1980s and 1990s. According to Gamson, the show's producers sought guests from stigmatized groups who would present as normal and well-adjusted a face as possible.

Until the mid-1980s Phil Donahue was the sole practitioner of audience-centered, issues-oriented talk on television. With the debuts of Sally Jessy Raphael in 1985 and The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1986, television talk turned away from issues and focused more on titillation and personality. The approach of these shows leaned more towards public talk as personal confession and therapy, and the emphasis turned from contentious debate to rancorous, hostile confrontation. This format became increasingly popular well into the 1990s, and led to the creation of what many television viewers considered trash TV.

Talking Trash

While Donahue's audience was, as he frequently declared, atypically liberal, the studio participants for shows like Sally Jessy, Oprah Winfrey, and the 1987 series Geraldo, hosted by former 20/20 reporter Geraldo Rivera, were often quite hostile and much less tolerant than the shows' hosts.

The guest format, however, initially remained unchanged, as gay and lesbian guests continued being recruited through mainstream organizations. As the audiences became increasingly hostile and vocal, however, the shows' guests also became more outspoken and more outrageous.

In 1987 former radio talk show host Morton Downey, Jr.'s combative program entered the airwaves. Downey, a right-wing conservative, had little time or patience for liberals of any stripe, routinely dismissing them as "scumbuckets" or "pablum pukers."

Angela Gardner, a spokesperson for the cross-dressing group Renaissance Education Association, appeared on a 1989 episode and described the experience as akin to "a root canal without an anesthetic." She noted that Downey craved controversy, openly turned his audience against the guests, and often threw guests off the set.

Although Downey's television show lasted only two years, he deserves the dubious credit of being considered the father of trash talk. His loud, raucous format dealt a fatal blow to informative talk shows such as Donahue. In Downey's wake, many of the previously low-key shows such as Sally Jessy Raphael and Geraldo abruptly changed their approach and, in so doing, turned up the volume of their talk.

An early 1990s episode of Sally Jessy Raphael, for instance, showcased a panel on the topic "My husband left me because he's gay." The wronged party in this show, the wife, described to a sympathetic audience how she became physically ill when she saw her husband with another man. She described her ex-husband's lover as "a flaming faggot" and accused her husband of being "a faggot and a liar." When the ex-husband tried to defend himself, both the studio audience and the host vilified him--explicitly for his deceit and implicitly for his sexuality.

According to Gamson, however, the ex-husband's lies were partly scripted by the show itself. While the cameras were rolling, guests were told to tell the truth, while off camera guests and audiences alike were encouraged to perform narrow and sometimes flat-out dishonest versions of themselves in order to fit the show's script.

Oprah Winfrey, whose show featured a scenario similar to that on Sally Jessy Raphael, grew increasingly tired of talk show sensationalism and, in 1995, reverted to a format more in line with Donahue's more decorous discussions. Oprah's ratings, however, dropped in response to this format change.