The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media (28 page)

getting married, raising children, or simply walking their dogs in a quiet suburban neighborhood. These narratives persisted across the time span

of this study, whether they were the stories of celebrity couples like Rosie and Kelly O’Donnell or the tales of lesser-known private citizens and their families like Carol and Kay, who became part of the media spectacle only because of the cultural fascination with gay marriage.

Additionally, this book has also documented how these marriage battles

pushed the movement to grow and expand in new directions. The marriage

issue elevated the LGBT community to front-page status, increasing the

need for public relations personnel and communications departments. The

press attention surrounding gay marriage created a new professional cadre of people who were highly sophisticated in packaging positive media messages and content for the mainstream press. In fifty relatively short years, the gay movement has gone from largely unmentionable in the mainstream press

to having a group of highly educated, sophisticated professionals, hired by powerful lobbying organizations, whose sole job it is to manage the presentation of gay issues in the news.

A mere ten years ago my activist informants said they had to fight to get
any
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coverage of gay issues. Now organizations compete to have their perspectives n

dominate in news discourses. Most recently these organizations have added l

faith and religion directors and outreach programming to more effectively LC

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respond to the religious opposition to gay marriage. Paradoxically, conservative efforts to use gay marriage to advance their own political agenda in the end participated in solidifying and professionalizing the public relations efforts of the gay rights movement.

Nevertheless, this book has also demonstrated how doing battle in the media also constrained representations of gay and lesbian identity. The marriage debate caused trouble for activists who struggled to (re)direct the conversation, to

“sel ” gay marriage to straight America, and craft positive narratives and images about gay and lesbian life. My activist informants, as with most social reformers, found their goals and strategies to be at odds with those of a commercial media industry. In fol owing the standards of journalistic neutrality, the news media cited dichotomous viewpoints on either side of the debate, unwittingly providing a platform for extreme anti-gay opponent groups. Problematic framing devices of “God vs. gays” and “blacks vs. gays,” along with standard sourcing patterns in the name of reportorial “balance,” limited the debate and created a sounding board for historic homophobic discourses. As Cheryl explained, “If there is a reporter out there who is writing a story about a racial issue, they’re not going to go to the Ku Klux Klan to get the opposing view. And yet stil , with this [gay marriage] issue, it’s okay to go to James Dobson, who thinks that gay people are immoral and evil and intrinsical y bad, to get the reaction.”

Gay marriage opponents who were selected by reporters and editors to

voice an opinion in the news—including most politicians, conservative activists, religious leaders, and black community leaders—equated gay marriage with the demise of the institution, social disorder, pedophilia, and polygamy.

Following an unwritten professional code, journalists covering the gay marriage issue continued to grant power and prominence to authoritative sources from the legal, medical, religious, and political communities. By 2008 it was less common to see representatives from the conservative far right as sources, but when they did appear, their use of vitriolic and homophobic language, labels, and stereotypes persisted.

Another challenge for activists working with the news media was in their attempts, often unsuccessful, to bring more secular, nuanced, and ideologically diverse perspectives to the debate. Activists struggled to shift the conversation to one in which religious values were a
part
of the gay voice, not set in opposition to it. My informants often found it difficult to recruit and foreground supportive religious leaders, civil rights leaders, political allies, and gays and lesbians of color as media spokespeople. The same consumerist representations that permeated popular culture also worked to exclude many gay and lesbian citizens of color from the marriage conversation.

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Even when groups were able to enlist supportive ministers and clergy as

n

sources, and to organize media events around ceremonies of African American l

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same-sex couples (like in Washington, D.C.), stock journalistic frames of “God vs. gays” and “blacks vs. gays” made these stories more difficult to tel . Activists fought, but found it difficult, to disrupt dominant discourses, disseminated in part by media representations, that insert gayness into a white, wealthy, and cosmopolitan lifestyle.

This book has ultimately been concerned with the politics of media representation and the cultural production of news. As recent scholarly work has demonstrated, over the last several decades gay visibility in the media and coverage of gay issues in the press have progressed at a level unprecedented by other social movements and minority groups. But in reporting on the gay marriage debate, as with all gay issues, these stories were filtered through standard journalistic values, written and produced from a heteronormative vantage point. Furthermore, while the marriage issue afforded visibility to some (largely white, middle-class) gay and lesbian couples, it was closed to many others. Ironically, while more visible, gays and lesbians who appeared in the news were mostly seen but not heard.

Trouble for LGBTQ

In his critique of black popular culture, Stuart Hall (1992) wrote, “what replaces invisibility is a kind of carefully regulated, segregated visibility” (p.

24). As this book has demonstrated, activists on the marriage front produced and employed discourses that softened and normalized gay identity for a

heterosexual audience. My informants were ever aware of the gay and lesbian

“freak show” that had dominated previous news stories and images, and they sought to separate themselves from the extra legal, circus-like mass weddings that appeared as media spectacle.

As Michael Warner and other social critics have cautioned, the marriage

issue might mean trouble for those gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer citizens who don’t “fit the mold” as defined by the politics of visibility.

The trouble with marriage, and the fight for gay marriage in particular, is that it is anchored to a set of power relations that embraces the “politics of shame.” Marriage inevitably values heterosexual hierarchies and lifelong monogamous commitment over other forms of loving and nurturing.

The notion of marriage as being the “ticket in” to the exclusive club of social acceptance is illustrated time and again in informant interviews and in media reports. Many of my informants referred to marriage as the “stamp of approval.” As Marissa explained, for a gay kid growing up in Iowa today, s

in a state that recognizes same-sex marriages, it’s a fundamentally “different n

world.” Marriage “tends to normalize everything else,” she said, making it l

harder to legislate against gay, lesbian, and even transgender citizens. Win-LC

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ning marriage, in other words, makes it easier to pass an anti-bullying law in Iowa, sign the domestic partner benefits bill in New Jersey, and lobby for transgender protections in New York.

This sentiment is echoed in news discourses as well. Dave Wilson, as a

recently married gay man, told
Nightline
audiences in 2004, “Everyone we say we’re married to, they look at us and get it right away. We don’t have to explain our relationship. We don’t have to explain who we are or what we are to each other. They get it” (Sievers, 2004, July 13). This notion of recognition and acceptance that Dave and his partner express is inspiring, and the notion of marriage equality as a stand-in issue for a whole range of civil rights is alluring. But we should question whether gay and lesbian people will be welcomed as full citizens
only
if
they adhere to these regulated, segregated forms of visibility—monogamous, middle-class, child-rearing, and, of course, married.

For the most part these representations fit the picture that Michael Warner (1999) painted years ago: “Marriage, in short, would make for good gays—the kind who would not challenge the norms of straight culture, who would not flaunt sexuality, and who would not insist on living differently from ordinary folk” (p. 113). The movement’s predominant emphasis on civil rights strategies—and on marriage as
the
civil rights issue—could result in an overall depoliticizing and dilution of gay and lesbian identity. In his article “What’s Left of Gay and Lesbian Liberation?” Alan Sears (2005) argues that although many gays and lesbians are on the verge of winning full citizenship rights in Canada, Western Europe, and possibly even the United States, the focus on civil rights in capitalistic democracies “leaves many queers out in the cold.

The consolidation of lesbian and gay rights has tended to benefit some more than others. Those who have gained the most are people living in committed couple relationships with good incomes and good jobs, most often white and especially men” (p. 93).

In selling one particular version of gay and lesbian life, the movement

risks unintentionally casting other forms of gay identity (
not
being part of a monogamous, married, child-rearing couple) to the margins. In this new era of the visible, these particular narratives and images of newly gay marrieds in the news constrained modes of citizenship. News discourses surrounding gay marriage ended up reinforcing the insider/outsider binary that has historical y plagued LGBTQ representations, narrowly positioning particular gay and lesbian “poster couples” and families inside the circle of acceptability and legitimacy, while casting other gay forms of loving and family partnership outside of the circle.

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As the battle over marriage rights continues, progress is certainly hard to n

deny. As a civil rights issue, marriage equality for gay and lesbian citizens is l

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a no-brainer. Marriage in the United States continues to be not only a central legal gateway to equality and protections but also a major organizing tool of social and economic life. Despite the inherent problems in that system, it is unlikely to change anytime soon. To deny gay and lesbian citizens access to that institution, despite its problematic formulations, is fundamentally wrong. For many movement leaders, the debate goes beyond securing marriage rights for a few, but rather becomes, as Evan explained, an “engine for eradicating discrimination and prejudice” on a larger scale.

Marriage has always been a battleground on which larger questions of what kind of country this is going to be have been contested . . . Whether you want to get married or not, you have a stake in these issues. You have a stake in the right boundary between the individual and the government. You have a stake in the separation of church and state. You have a stake in the equality of the races or the equality of men and women. And gay people are now on this battleground, and it’s fit and proper that they are. Because this is where we have, time and time again, contested these large questions.

This emancipatory potential can be fulfil ed only if the conversation about marriage, ironically, remains focused on the unmarrieds as well. If not, discourses surrounding same-sex-marriage rights risks inadvertently limiting those gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and queer people deemed “worthy” of full equality.

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Appendix

Studying Gay Marriage in the Media

This project was fundamental y concerned not only with news coverage of the same-sex-marriage issue but also with how social actors involved in electoral and cultural politics attempt to shape stories about their lives and issues. In particular I was interested in the process whereby historically marginalized communities harness the power of mainstream commercial media to reform

their images and influence public opinion. Critical to shedding light on this process and its challenges, I conducted 30 in-depth, face-to-face interviews with 24 activists who had become media spokespersons for the gay marriage issue. Because my focus for this project was how the gay marriage debate became largely a mediated issue in public discourse, I also investigated hundreds of print and broadcast news stories across an eight-year time period to uncover the dominant narratives and images that were used to communicate stories about same-sex marriage to news audiences.

I adopted a multi-method research design in order to (1) determine the

broad boundaries of media content, (2) interrogate the specific meanings of media representation, and (3) examine the behind-the-scenes activities that shape the cultural production of media content. In a move toward method-ological diversity and pluralism—a direction that many scholars have called for (Lindloff & Taylor, 2002; McCeod & Blumler, 1987; Miles & Huberman, 1994; Trumbo, 2004)—I employed multiple methodologies to illuminate

different versions of the “reality” under study. Because any single mode of inquiry reveals only “certain dimensions of the symbolic reality,” my approach was designed “to avoid the personal bias and superficiality that stem from one narrow probe” (Fortner & Christians, 2003, p. 354). In the following s