Shortly after the war in Afghanistan began, The Associated Press sent a photograph of a U.S. bomb bearing the inscription, “Hijack this, fags,” to news agencies around the world.

Although AP removed the picture from the wire service and issued an apology, negative gay stereotypes will endure if journalists do not continue to learn about gays’ struggle for acceptance, the founder of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association told 50 students Monday in Fisk Hall.

The founder, Roy Aarons, and Michael Wilke, the executive director of the Commercial Closet Association, discussed how media representations of gays have been changed by society’s increased acceptance. The discussion was part of the Medill School of Journalism’s Crain Lecture Series.

“Oscar Wilde’s love that cannot speak its name has become the love that cannot stop shouting,” Aarons said.

Aarons founded the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association after many years of hiding his sexual orientation in the workplace. In his lifetime, he has seen a range of gay repression, activism, stereotyping and finally acceptance in the media, he said.

Until the social revolutions of the 1960s, society repressed and isolated gays, Aarons said. The media attention they received, if any at all, depicted them as pedophiles and degenerates. This negative image repressed gays and isolated them from society, he said.

Portrayals of gay people in the 1990s are wrought with celebrity, sensationalism, politics and violence, Aarons said. Ellen Degeneres’ and Rosie O’Donnell’s decisions to come out, the violent death of Matthew Shepard and the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about gays have brought about a change in the media’s portrayal of gays. These events have made the lifestyle more mainstream and accepted in the media, he said.

Acceptance of gays and lesbians has accompanied the number of stereotypes portrayed in the media, Wilke said.

“It seems that we have gone from being invisible to being inescapable,” he said.

But commercials and advertisements that depict gay people often show them as pedophiles, hustlers or overly effeminate, he said.

Although the last stereotype accurately reflects a portion of gay society and increasingly is accepted by the gay community, Wilke said, advertising disproportionately presents this particular depiction of gay people. Wilke showed an IKEA commercial where two gay men were fighting in their home and destroying each other’s possessions, which included furniture and high heels.

“The only thing funny about this commercial is how gay they are,” he said, adding that advertising should not aim for social change.

Wilke said he is trying to encourage advertisers to take representation of gays to the next level. Instead of allowing audiences to laugh at effeminate personalities, advertisers should use gay characters like they would use straight ones – have them say something funny unrelated to their sexuality, he said.

This way, the audience could laugh with them and not at them, Wilke said.

Bisexual, Gay and Lesbian Alliance President Laura Blacksher said coverage of gays and lesbians in the media is moving in a positive direction.

“Definitely over the last couple of years there has been much better coverage of gays and lesbians in the media,” said Blacksher, Speech sophomore.