Lou Maletta, who founded the Gay Cable Network in 1982, when the gay rights movement was not receiving broad media attention, died on Nov. 2 in Kingston, N.Y. He was 74.
The cause was liver cancer, said Luke Valenti, his companion of 37 years.
The network had its roots as a weekly program called “Men & Film” on Channel 35 on Manhattan Cable Television. Mr. Maletta showed gay pornographic movies that he had edited to make less explicit, and the programming grew to become a forum for the range of issues facing gay people.
There had been gay-oriented television shows before the Gay Cable Network was started. But Mr. Maletta’s enterprise was considered the first to produce weekly news, entertainment, political commentary, cultural and health-related programs, and it distributed them to public-access channels in 20 cities (at first on videotapes he mailed).
“It was critical to the L.G.B.T. rights movement,” said Kenneth Sherrill, a political science professor at Hunter College who has written extensively on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. “Mainstream television wasn’t rushing to cover the movement, and public access cable provided entree for social and political groups that were traditionally excluded. Lou Maletta’s programming allowed voices of the gay community to speak for themselves.”
Among those voices was Andy Humm, who is now the co-host, with Ann Northrop, of “Gay U.S.A.,” a weekly one-hour cable news program produced by Manhattan Neighborhood Network and distributed nationally. The show originated on the Gay Cable Network, which Mr. Maletta closed when he retired in 2001.
“Lou had this grand vision of a 24-hour gay cable network,” Mr. Humm said. “That didn’t happen for him.” Still, the continuation of “Gay U.S.A.” and the introduction in 2005 of Logo, a primarily gay-oriented 24-hour cable channel that is part of MTV Networks, have in part fulfilled his dream.
“Lou laid the groundwork,” Mr. Humm said. “He developed news programming, entertainment, sports. He had a guy come on every week and talk about the gay bowling league.”
Mr. Maletta’s network began in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, and he enlisted officials from New York City’s health department and Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a nonprofit AIDS advocacy group, to provide segments. From 1984 to 2000, he provided coverage of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, interviewing political leaders from the floor and gay rights demonstrators in the streets. Those were among the dozens of local and national protests the network covered.
In 1988, Mr. Maletta traveled with a team of volunteer correspondents to the Republican convention in New Orleans, by way of Mississippi.
“He was this tremendous character, generally wearing spandex, a black leather jacket, the Gay Network T-shirt and a cowboy hat,” Mr. Humm recalled. “Not unusual in New York, but try going to a Hardee’s in Mississippi on the way to a convention. I didn’t think we were going to get out alive.”
People just stared, Mr. Humm said.
Louis Phillip Maletta Jr. was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 14, 1936, the only child of Louis and Mary Maletta. After serving in the Army, he became a freelance photographer and a travel agent, booking gay cruises. He was outside the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in summer 1969 when a police raid helped ignite the gay liberation movement, said Mr. Valenti, his companion.
In addition to Mr. Valenti, Mr. Maletta is survived by a daughter from a marriage that ended in divorce.
What motivated him to take his programming beyond its sexually explicit origins, Mr. Maletta told Gay City News in 2009, was watching a 30-year-old friend “turning into someone who looked 90 six months after being diagnosed” with what at one time was called gay-related immune deficiency.