The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media (11 page)

The communications director for GLAD talked about their organization’s

specific strategies to separate themselves from the spectacle of the San Francisco weddings, which she defined as “extra legal.” It was an important aspect of their communications strategy to define the Massachusetts weddings as legal “real marriages” that could not be rescinded rather than merely “symbolic” media events. In preparing for the
Goodridge
case, then, she said,

“There was a lot of planning around presenting these marriages as main-

stream. So on the day it became possible for people to marry, May 17, there was a great deal of planning around the weddings of the seven couples. And giving media people access to them. And showing people being embraced by their families, and their communities, and their religions, getting married.

It wasn’t pictures of people on the steps on city hall in San Francisco, where it was more of a carnival atmosphere.”

Implicit in this struggle to “sell” marriage to the mainstream was a fundamental disagreement among those in the movement about how to frame

marriage in the early stages of public debate—employing either discourses of love or discourses of equal rights. In this next section, I show how the movement split over these competing definitional strategies—whether to

define marriage as a package of rights and responsibilities or as the ultimate expression of love and commitment.

For Love or Money:

Competing Definitional Discourses

In 2005, when I asked my informants why they believed gay and lesbian

people should fight for marriage equality, they began reciting a common

script—one I heard repeated time and again with amazing consistency—

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recounting a long list of rights, benefits, and protections that are afforded n

exclusively through the institution of marriage. Informants spoke of the 1,138

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federal protections, such as family medical leave, hospital visitation rights, inheritance, social security benefits, pensions, and federal tax policy, in addition to the state and local policies that reward marriage participants.

Describing these rights, informants framed the institution within economic concerns of financial security and stability, the “bread-and-butter kitchen table issues” that families deal with day to day. Economic concerns were used to differentiate marriage from other less desirable forms of relationship recognition like domestic partnerships and civil unions. Using these rights discourses, informants immediately began talking about marriage as a set of
financial
benefits—tied closely to notions of stability, security, and emotional peace of mind—for gay and lesbian families and communities. Some activists spoke of their own relationships in this way, feeling personal y burdened by financial worries because of their exclusion from marriage. As Cheryl explained, “As a family, I live in fear . . . I mean, I try to financial y plan for it. I’m more pre-cautious about savings. Because I know if I die in a plane trip Thursday going home, I leave [my partner] Jen with a big mortgage, two children. I don’t know how she works and does child care, and no support through my social security program because they won’t recognize her.”

Not surprisingly, the equal rights frame directed the overall media strategy that most organizations relied upon to tell their stories about marriage, revolving around the legal and financial repercussions of being excluded from marriage. These communications and public relations professionals told

“heartbreaking stories” that would reach various cohorts and appeal to gay and non-gay constituencies. Informants sought to capitalize on the limited resources and deadline pressures journalists face and condensed their marriage stories into neat, press-friendly packages. Activists categorized specific media stories they would cycle through—for example, “the kids story” and

“the seniors story”—to provide the news media with “fresh meat” that would keep reporters interested in new angles.

For example, informants packaged “the kids story” as focusing on the child of a gay or lesbian couple who becomes sick and is unable to receive treatment because she is not covered under her biological mom’s health insurance plan.

Likewise, activists told the story of Annie (and others like her), the child of Hil ary and Julie Goodridge, who lacked the emotional and financial security of knowing her parents were married and desperately wanted to be just like any other family. Whatever the specific details, the underlying message of the kids narrative is, as one activist bluntly put it, “Even if you hate us, don’t screw [over] our children.”

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Another successful narrative that ended up being a “gold mine,” according n

to one activist, was the story of the elderly gay or lesbian couple. The “seniors l

story” was successful as a strategy for lobbying legislators and was appealing LC

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to journalists, since most people already sympathize with the elderly population. A familiar seniors narrative would be about a couple who had built a life together for decades (30 to 50 years). When one partner dies, the other is left essential y homeless because, unprotected from federal tax policy, she cannot afford the taxes on the house. The seniors story was popular among reporters and news audiences alike because it was coded with symbolic meanings about what gay and lesbian life looked like. Like children, seniors are “cute and cuddly,” in the words of Arlene, desexualized and therefore nonthreatening. Additionally, these stories involved “super-stable” gay or lesbian couples whose relationships had lasted longer than most heterosexual marriages.

These stories—kids and seniors—were the successful ones, the ones that

journalists and editors “ate up,” the ones that appealed to a wide audience.

They were stories about treating people equally and providing society’s most vulnerable populations with security and basic human rights. There were

other stories activists tried to tell, however—stories about the economic and racial diversity of their community, stories about religious tolerance, stories about the consequences of marriage exclusion for international couples—

that were more challenging to tell and ultimately failed to garner or sustain media interest. Even when stories were successful, activists faced yet another problem when reporters began to tire of these same framing strategies. “It got to a point, the press would say to me, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, the senior story, Arlene. We’ve already covered it already. Yeah, yeah, yeah, kids. I know kids.

You’ve done kids. What else do you have there?’”

As coverage became more intense, communications strategists in the

movement felt the demand to create new ways to tell stories about marriage and family. This ultimately gave way to competing definitional strategies, a core divide in the movement over how best to characterize and symbolize the meaning of marriage—as a package of rights or as the ultimate expression of romantic love. As represented in the comments below, although many activists saw these two tactics at odds with one other, both had the same goal: to appeal to the “moveable middle.”

While many in the movement thought framing marriage as a package of

legal and financial rights would resonate most successfully with mass audiences, the head of the Marriage Project for the Human Rights Campaign

began to have his doubts. In his estimation this strategy was failing. Research from polling and focus groups conducted by the organization demonstrated that the straight audiences they were supposedly reaching didn’t think of marriage in those terms. He explained:

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If you ask a typical non-gay couple, “Why did you get married?” they don’t n

immediately go to, “Well, so I can get tax breaks and make sure that I can see l

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my partner in the hospital” . . . I think we need now to take those legalistic arguments and create more empathy . . . We need the average voter and average American to think of our relationships the same way they think of their own: you get married because you love the person you want to get married to.

That’s why you get married.

These informants defined marriage not as a set of “unemotional” rights,

obligations, and responsibilities, but as universal and humanizing “romantic love.” Activists invoked love as the common language for understanding

marriage, and marriage as the common language to define relationships in society. The communications director for GLAD described “love and commitment” as a competing discourse to the predominant “rights” language that had defined marriage for many in the movement. Her statement demonstrates the attempt to appeal to straight allies by characterizing romantic love as the universal social language:

I think the main theme [surrounding the
Goodridge
case] was about love and commitment rather than being about rights. That these are people who love each other. These are people who have built a life together and are committed to each other, and that marriage is the ultimate adult expression of that kind of commitment . . . Straight people say, “Oh, my God, they deserve it. They’ve been together for 30 years. If you can still stand each other, you definitely deserve to get married.” It’s a common language. It’s a shared language.

Another activist who managed the public education efforts at Freedom

to Marry demonstrated how talking about marriage solely as a package of

rights erases the emotional “true meaning” of marriage: “You don’t propose to someone, you know, ‘Would you like to share my health insurance? Would you like to have equal rights to own a home with me?’ It’s about love. It’s about commitment. It’s about heart.”

Other activists pointed out how the terms surrounding marriage, terms

like “wedding,” “husband,” “wife,” and “spouse,” come with a certain degree of social weightiness, credibility, and cultural acceptance. They are terms that are relational, unconditional, and require no explanation, as opposed to the more legal terms associated with gay marriage, like “domestic partner.”

As one activist commented, a domestic partner sounds like someone who

cleans your house rather than someone with whom you build a life.

These activists who sought to talk about marriage within discourses of

love argued that rights language was not only unappealing to mainstream

audiences but also potentially problematic. From their research, they found s

that public opinion polls indicated that Americans respond negatively to n

rights and “entitlement” language, especial y when it concerns gay people and l

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other minority groups. As Carisa of GLAD explained, Americans see rights as competitive and oppositional, so if one particular marginalized group is awarded rights, then their own group’s rights are inherently taken away. In this way granting same-sex couples equal marriage is seen as handing down

“special rights,” a framing strategy disseminated by social conservatives asserting that these equal rights represent something “extra” extended to an already privileged group.

But for activists who highlighted a rights discourse, talking about marriage as romantic love was far more hazardous. It not only sexualized gay and lesbian relationships; it also asked heterosexuals to recognize and accept them as equals. These activists struggled to keep the messaging of marriage “on track”

by talking only about rights. One activist who lobbied for gay rights in the Massachusetts legislature complained about other groups in the movement

attempting to assert a love discourse, undoing any progress they were making to gain rights on a variety of issues. “If you’re going to talk about marriage at all—and please don’t—the last thing you should do is talk about recognition.

The law is not created as a form of therapy to make us feel better about our relationships. They will resent it, and it will never sell. Who gives a damn whether they recognize us or not? We want rights, we want benefits, we want to be treated equal y, regardless of what they think of us.”

Among those who wanted to define marriage solely as rights was a fear that packaging marriage as romantic love would only contribute further to the

“ick factor,” the term commonly used to refer to straight culture’s repulsion to homosexual sex acts. Since romantic discourses and wedding imagery

might sexualize gay and lesbian relationships, leaders of the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus coached couples to leave their wedding

albums at home when meeting with legislators and the press. “[Other gay

rights groups] used to walk around the building and they would tell people,

‘Bring in your wedding photos.’ And we would tell people, ‘Don’t bring in your wedding photos, whatever you do!’ . . . They [members of the public]

can deal with us having long-term committed relationships. They can deal with us needing benefits and protections. But the two wedding dresses, its ick. Two guys in tuxedos, ick.”

Underlying these activist framing strategies—packaging marriage either as rights and security or as love and commitment—was a need for activists to tel their stories in ways that would serve the imperatives of a commercial news media system and appeal to mainstream audiences. Certainly the strategy on the part of gay rights activists to present homosexuality as normal and banal is not unique to the marriage debate. As Barry Adam (2003) has pointed out, s

these same universalizing discourses ran throughout the gays-in-the-military nl

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