On April 15, 2021, Professor Alfred Martin, Jr. was interviewed by Charity Nebbe on Iowa Public Radio's Talk of Iowa podcast to discuss his latest book, The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom.

In the entertainment world some people called the 1990s the Gay 90’s because of the explosion of LGBTQ representation in pop culture. But that representation was largely missing from sitcoms with predominantly Black casts.

 

Alfred Martin, Jr. has studied this absence. He’s a pop culture expert, an assistant professor of Communications at the University of Iowa and the author of “The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black Cast Sitcom.”