Disclosure : I received a free netgalley ARC of this book in exchange for my review.

Fascinating account of how TV shows hinted at and sometimes shared more directly queer viewpoints to a TV audience. I'd only seen a few of the shows Matt refers to, sometimes on re-runs or via YouTube as NZ television didn't get everything USA audiences did. Even so I could follow the history and understand the debt of knowledge LGBTQ+ people have to TV for providing some context to other viewers. This is in my view even more crucial now with young queer people pointing to TV examples to help family and friends understand they're not alone and they're OK.

I'd never heard of Matt Baume before this book and I don't watch talks on YouTube but I'd be interested in reading more books by him, especially on more recent films and TV shows with queer content.

This book was fun and silly. It's not the best non-fiction book I've read this year, but I enjoy pop culture books very much. This was a nice and well written trip down memory lane if you're a fan of groundbreaking sitcoms like "All in the Family" and "The Golden Girls". The author did a good job outlining how important gay characters were in the pop culture landscape. Interesting read just wanted more depth.

This brief history of queer people as told through the lens of television was everything I could’ve hoped for and more. Such a great listen!! Got emotional a few times. So happy to see all the progress we’ve made and so sad about how far we have to go. Happy Pride month, everybody! Let’s go watch Modern Family.

Loved this exploration of LGBTQ characters in television from the 1960s to the present. Had no idea Bewitched had intentional queer metaphors.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for granting me free access to the advanced digital copy of this book.

This was a great read and highlighted a few shows that I really love. In particular, Baume's look into the TV show Soap was really engaging. I really appreciated how the author looked at the cultural and political climate of the time when the shows were airing. Definitely recommend!

Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of this book.
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What a good stories, like this tells us various situation on famous world, including TV and music.
low-key i would have finished whether i had the possibility to listen as audiobook due to AI tools.

4.0

Great book. This was a pretty interesting concept, similar to Tre'vell Johnson's "We See Each Other" which examines Black trans representation in media.

I’ve been watching Matt Baume’s YouTube videos for a few years. He is engaging to watch and this book really captured the energy of his videos. The book goes in depth with a handful of shows, but also makes mention of episodes of other sitcoms and how they fit into history of Queer representation on TV. I don't have much to say besides I loved it and I hope this is only the first of many books from Matt Baume.

Hi Honey I’m Homo is an incredible look at the power that the stories we tell as a society have to change the world we live in. Tracing the history of queer movements through sitcoms is never something I would have thought of doing but has now changed the way I look at the world. I will never look at All in the Family the same way again.
More than that, this book made me question anew how I consume media, made me even more passionate about having conversations with others about whose stories they are reading, watching and listening to, and made me louder about how important it is to fight back against this anti LBGT+ pushback in media that is currently occurring.
It reaffirmed all of my existing beliefs and filled me with a zeal that made me want to give this book to everyone I know. An excellent book all around!

Interesting concept, but failed to totally hook me so I wasn’t able to finish it. I think this material would work better in visual format with clips from the shows because I had a really hard time with chapters about shows I hadn’t seen. I’ll still keep this one in mind as a recommendation for people who want to learn more about this topic!
Thanks to netgalley for the arc!

A phenomenal book on how television from the 1960s-2000s matched the gay rights movement. I'd previously watched some of the episodes on YouTube (if you haven't seen them, you're missing out.) It was fantastic to see these television shows in order so that you could follow the changes over time. A must read for anyone interested in the rights movement.

Hi Honey, I’m Homo is a humorous and informative exploration of the expanding LGBTQ+ presence in sitcom television, how writers had to fight for script concessions and the hurdles they had to deal with.

This was a super interesting read and look at what went on behind the scenes of these different sitcoms. The author’s writing style is witty and light giving lots of detail without it getting bogged down in those details.

Each chapter explores a different sitcom and how the writers had to fight for queer representation, and while that representation was not always great, it did have an impact on the people watching and gave viewers a different perspective to consider. Shows like Bewitched while it may not have outright directly tackled topics like coming out and gay marriage like some of its contemporaries, instead explored them in really clever and more subversive ways using witches as allegory. Barney Miller took a different approach and it’s inspiring how the producer of the show, Danny Arnold, filming at times out of pocket and even to the extent of mortgaging his home to film, refused to bow to the pressure of the networks and the “Family Viewing Hou.r” But each chapter and the sitcom it explores as well as the time period explored, the challenges faced as well as the effects on the audience is really fascinating.

One point I wish the author had explored was the impact of streaming. It would be interesting to hear his thoughts on that and the impact having of there being more diverse content but it being content that might not reach the broad audience the sitcoms he covers did. I also wish there had been a little more diversity in the shows chosen as examples rather than only shows with predominantly white casts.

I think if you are interested in queer and pop culture history this is definitely a must read. The anecdotes and personal stories behind the scenes are super interesting. At times humorous and at times poignant, it’s a great read.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Whatever one’s take on sitcoms, whether one loves them or despises them, no one can say they don’t play an important role. They are part of what makes televised entertainment what it is, and in their US American version, not only have they become a lucrative export product, but as such also a mirror of US American society, for everyone to see and study. Better than any political speech, more accurately than any documentary, they show the whole world what makes the USA really tick, or more precisely: what makes the country’s citizens laugh.

The prime idea behind Matt Baume’s book, if I understood it correctly, was to compile the findings the author presented in his podcasts, that is, the correlation of popular US sitcoms and the queer community, its lives, problems, and growing acceptance by the larger public. I’m very glad he undertook this task (for the record, I’m not a great consumer of podcasts), and gladder still I was sent an ARC by the editor via NetGalley. To be honest, I didn’t know the first shows the author talked about (I hadn’t even heard about them if you take All In the Family or Soap as examples), but that didn’t disturb my reading pleasure. Sitcoms aren’t very different one from another—they got that label precisely because their format must make them instantly recognizable as such. Plus, the research, the details, the insights quickly compensated for my lack of knowledge and brought them closer to my understanding.

In fact, the author’s swipe is broad (he tackles shows from different television eras, from Bewitched to Modern Family, from Ellen to one of my alltime favorites, which will never cease to make me laugh because its writing is so funny: Golden Girls; not to mention Will & Grace or Friends). What made those parts even more interesting was what I’d call the recognition effect; there were direct quotes from some of those more recent shows that I still use as quibs in my day-to-day life to get a chuckle out of my interlocutors. I found Matt Baume’s book about how queer life shaped sitcoms and how sitcoms shaped the US American public’s view on queers highly entertaining and very insightful. The author’s research seems to be extensive, thorough, careful, with lots of behind-the-scenes information—how the evolution of this or that queer character could lead to a sometimes prolonged fight between network executives and directors or script writers.

The book is written in an easily accessible style, the main narrative never being drowned in too many details, and the overall arch painted an interesting mirror of US mores and beliefs, from the queer person as a “sicko,” “pervert,” despisable “outcast,” to the first kiss between women in Ellen, to Mitchell’s and Cam’s wedding in Modern Family. It also reflects how the TV community, despite many rather gruesome caricatural treatments of queer characters, has been trying for quite a while to cast queers in a more sympathetic light than any poll of what the public thought would have warranted.

All in all, this is an enlightening as well as an entertaining read, which I wholly recommend.

I loved this book. To me, it was the epitome of a good pop culture text in that it really fully engaged with the social context of the time. My favorite chapter was the one on Soap because I remember being a kid in the 90s watching soap in syndication. I thought it was hysterical, but not particularly trashy or vulgar (although I was a child of Melrose place and 90210). Reading about the boycotts was shocking to me because it seems so tame! It really put the struggle and evolution into context in a practical way.

A lot of the Queer books available on NetGalley are pretty self-help focused - so I was very glad to find one with a more sociological approach. Unfortunately, I wish I would have liked it a little more than I did.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with this book. I think that is evidenced by the fact that I am rounding up to 4 stars instead of a more accurate 3.5. It just fell the tiniest bit flat for me personally.

At first, with older shows (Bewitched, All in the Family, Alice, Barney Miller, and Soap), I thought that perhaps an older reader would appreciate this book more. Perhaps they would find some nostalgia - or at least have a better frame of reference for the episodes being mentioned. For me (a millennial), these chapters were interesting from a historical standpoint and not much more.

But once we got into more recent sitcoms (Cheers, Golden Girls, Dinosaurs, Friends, Ellen, Will & Grace, and Modern Family), I found that my knowledge of these shows didn’t particularly make the chapters more enjoyable. In fact, I even felt like the inclusion of some chapters was a bit of a stretch; only focusing on one or two episodes or plot points.

The book's historical context remained the most fascinating aspect throughout. “How were American viewers and television stations reacting to these shows?” rather than “How were these shows portraying Queer lives?” (Because let’s be real, they were largely doing a terrible job.) Glimpsing the challenges that were occurring behind the scenes was nice because it was not something that I had been previously aware of.

But simply being interested in Queer studies (and not caring much about popular culture), meant that reading this book was only an okay experience; certainly not a favorite of mine that challenged the way I see the world. And I think that’s going to be the most influential factor in how I’d recommend this book to others. Its prime audience being those individuals who are both interested in Queer studies AND television/sitcoms as a historical medium.

As someone who has watched Matt Baume's YouTube series, I wasn't sure how in-depth or additional this book would be to that. I was wrong! There is so much history packed into this book that I highlighted many passages to return to later with my own writing. There were even events and facts I hadn't heard about before! This is less of an encyclopedia of all the queer American stories and more of the history of gay rights parallel to what was on TV at the time (and only sitcoms), which was interesting. Also, it is focused primarily on the gay and lesbian--definitely not much about trans people. I would have liked a little more about that.

It's entertaining, and in the early part of the book, interesting to see what was going on behind the scenes. But it got kind of floppy at the end. Dinosaurs? Really? Good enough.

A book made for an Audiobook. I came into this a little biased, as I've been a long time fan of Baume's culture cruise videos, and found them fascinating as they went through the developing portrayal of queer people in media. He did a wonderful job translating the fascination his YouTube videos inspire into this book, but I couldn't help but wish I was listening to it. The little notes were such a good touch and always made me laugh but going back to the annotation took me out of it a little, I wish they'd been formated in the footer of the page they existed in. All in all this book lived up to my expectations of a book from Baume and I'm very excited to see it's reception.

A really humorous and fun look at the queering of sitcom television -- Matt Baume writes a really enjoyable piece of nonfiction. I learned a lot, laughed a lot, and cried a smidge in reflecting on the progress we've made -- and the progress we've yet to achieve.