The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media (6 page)

Against Defamation (GLAAD); Marriage Equality New York; the Task Force;

Human Rights Campaign; Victory Fund; Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance

(GLAA); Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG); and

the Log Cabin Republicans (see the appendix for a list of organizations and informants interviewed). Through in-depth interviews, I investigated questions such as:

• How did gay and lesbian rights activists decide to foreground one goal in the media—same-sex marriage—over other goals of the movement (e.g.,

employment nondiscrimination, HIV/AIDS research funding, equal hous-

ing, and the like)?

• What were the predominant stories activists tried to tell about gay and lesbian life? In doing so, what challenges did they face from reporters, from their political opponents, and from critics within their own community?

• How did activists select the couples and the images that came to represent the marriage equality movement? How did they try to symbolize same-sex

ceremonies in the news?

• In the views of activists, what strategies and stories were successful in garnering media attention and appealing to a mainstream audience, and

which ones ultimately failed?

• How did activists characterize coverage of the debate? What aspects of media coverage were they happy with, and what disappointed them?

Next, to investigate news content, I relied primarily on textual analysis to critique the symbolic meanings of narratives and images that were used to tell the story of same-sex marriage in news features. As I detail in chapters 3, 4, and 5, I examined hundreds of stories from national newsmagazines like
Time,
Newsweek,
and
U.S. News & World Report
; front-page stories from snl

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chapter one

leading national newspapers like the
New York Times,
Washington Post,
and

USA Today
; episodes of prime-time television news programs like
60 Minutes
and
Nightline
; and segments of national network television news. I selected programs and publications that were prominent, had high impact, and appealed to a large national news audience. I analyzed news texts from two different time periods across the decade (2003–2004 and again in 2008–2010) to capture the major legal and political developments in the United States that made the same-sex-marriage issue a front-page story. Specifically, I investigated the following:

• Who were the prominent figures and groups allowed to participate in the national media debate? Whose voices were privileged in news discourses

about gay marriage?

• What were the dominant framing devices used to structure the debate for news audiences?

• How were labels, images, and descriptive language used in news stories to portray the LGBT community?

• What were the physical and demographic characteristics of the gay and lesbian couples selected to represent the marriage movement?

• What kinds of visual images of gay and lesbian life did the news media foreground?

• How were standard visual symbols (rings, cakes, flowers) and dress

(wedding gowns and tuxedos) used to represent same-sex ceremonies in

the news?

Like all research projects, this project has its limitations. My approach is in some ways too narrow and in other ways overly broad. Focusing my

interviews on prominent gay rights activists who already had a voice in the mainstream media clearly excluded many other kinds of groups and activists. For example, I did not interview gay marriage opponent groups like Focus on the Family and the National Organization for Marriage. I also did not interview those lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) organizations largely silenced in the mainstream debate over marriage, those groups whose members were either opposed to state-sanctioned marriage

or believe the movement should focus on other priorities. Also omitted are the journalists, editors, reporters, news photographers, and videographers who covered the gay marriage issue. Each of these groups has the potential to offer important perspectives on representations of gay marriage in the media and provide a promising program for future research.

In addition, my approach to studying the issue of gay marriage in the

s

news
is but one way to examine the larger public debate about the issue.

n

News narratives are only one important aspect of the overall ideological l

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Gay Marriage in an Era of Media Visibility

23

landscape. Other narratives surrounding gay marriage emerged in popular

culture during this time, including those in entertainment television, feature film, documentary film, on websites, and in discourses over legal court cases (see, for example, Bennett, 2006; and Walters, 2001a, 2001b).

Also, by focusing on
mainstream
news discourses—those programs and publications that reach the largest news audiences—I eliminated coverage of the gay marriage issue in smaller, more progressive news outlets that may have included diverse perspectives and a larger universe of frames. I did not focus on how the issue was covered by alternative media written for and targeted to the LGBTQ community, publications such as
Out
or the
Advocate.

Just as no analysis can claim to be representative of “the media” (all media coverage of an issue, for example), no study of media
content
can capture the various ways audiences construct meanings of those messages, images, and stories. My approach strove to unpack the dominant meanings about

the gay marriage issue that were embedded in mainstream news narratives

during this volatile time period. My analysis here, then, represents only one piece, but a significant piece, in the puzzle of how social movement actors define a controversial issue in cultural politics and attempt to shape public discourse through the mainstream news media.

Plan of the Book

This book about media coverage of the gay marriage issue begins with the story of how activists came to define marriage equality as a central goal of the movement in the first place. Chapter 2 reveals how most activists were initially reluctant to “do battle” over marriage in what they termed the “oppositional environment” of the mainstream press, an issue forced into the media spotlight by opponent groups and sensationalistic media outlets. However, activists eventually saw the marriage issue as a potential corrective to the salacious images of gay and lesbian life they had seen perpetuated in the press and popular culture. Attempts to craft “positive” narratives and images about couples and families brought about intra-community struggles over

how to best define gay relationships, how to talk about marriage, and which stories would resonate with mainstream news audiences.

How successful activists were in framing the debate and producing their

preferred images for the news media are the subjects of chapters 3 and 4. In chapter 3 I examine the face of gay marriage that emerged in news texts, how gay and lesbian couples, families, and communities were visual y represented in news stories. In particular I examine how markers of gender, class, race, s

lifestyle, and sexuality were deployed to present particular gay and lesbian nl

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chapter one

couples as “deserving” of marriage. While these “poster couples” selected by news producers and gay rights activists were oftentimes legitimated in news narratives, they were also cast as “different” from the more “radical” community of non-married gays, relegating particular LGBT and queer identities to the margins.

Despite these attempts to “mainstream” gay marriage, chapter 4 shows how activists fell prey to the common pitfal s that have historical y plagued reporting of social movements. Media analysis shows how standard journalistic

frames highlighted a simplistic, two-sided conflict that silenced alternative perspectives; provided a platform for recycled homophobic rhetoric; and

framed the issue within “official” institutions of power that have historically criminalized and marginalized the gay community. Journalistic definitions of authority, expertise, and “balance” created an uneven playing field, pitting gay and lesbian spokespersons against unequal sources of influence from

legal, medical, religious, and political authorities.

As activists recognized, doing battle over marriage in the mainstream

media meant conforming to the rules of news making. This ultimately led to tensions over representations and media strategies, especially in the wake of losing Proposition 8 in California in 2008 and Question 1 in Maine the fol owing year. In chapter 5 I return in 2010 to interview those activist informants, as well as talk with new activist voices that emerged in this debate, in order to reveal how media narratives and activist strategies evolved over time. While the issue no longer had the same kind of novel, sensationalistic “freak show”

coverage that prevailed early on in the debate, problematic framing devices of

“God vs. gays” and “blacks vs. gays” dominated coverage. Movement leaders faced internal conflicts over how best to represent pro-gay perspectives in media discourse and gain support from the “moveable middle.”

Over a decade ago, social critic Michael Warner (1999) argued in
The
Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life
that gay marriage would ultimately work to create hierarchies between the “good gays,”

who settle down, get married, and rear children, and the “bad gays,” who continue to live out their “alternative” lifestyles on the margins of society. In chapter 6 I conclude the book by questioning the limits of commercial media as a route to social change, and by critiquing the institution of marriage as a route to inclusive citizenship. I argue that these images and narratives employed in both activist strategies and news discourses may unwittingly work to stigmatize those (unmarried) lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer citizens who do not fit the normative mold in this new era of visibility.

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2. Fighting the “Battle to Be Boring”

Marriage as a Portal into the Mainstream

The scariest thing is when you start reading in the paper how

normal you are, and you start to believe it.

—Arlene, Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus

In the office suite of the gay and lesbian rights organization Freedom to Marry, I waited patiently for my first interview to begin. Across the table from me sat Samiya, the organization’s young communications director, who was rifling through the paperwork I had sent her before the interview. Her brow furrowed, she picked up her pen and began to circle and cross out several words. She made some notations in the margins, then signed her name on

the line to indicate that she agreed to participate in the study. As she handed the papers back to me, I noticed she had circled words like “challenge” (as in challenge a dominant institution) and “redefine” (as in redefine marriage) in the project description and had drawn frowny faces in the margins to

mark her disapproval of my semantic inaccuracies. She pointedly explained,

“We’re not defining or redefining the institution of marriage . . . marriage is a living, breathing institution, and it’s been changing ever since it started up through now . . . And I think it’s absolutely kind of a right-wing point of our opposition to act like we’re redefining marriage when we don’t have that power . . . I think World War II changed marriage more than we ever will. Women’s equality movement changed marriage at least as much, if not more than, we ever will.”

In this chapter I explore how leading gay and lesbian social movement

leaders staged the issue of gay marriage—how they crafted narratives about same-sex marriage, and about gay and lesbian life, for mainstream media

s

audiences. This chapter also communicates a story of struggle—not only

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chapter two

the battles that activists waged with their political opponents over marriage rights; not only the challenges they faced in trying to tell their stories in a heterosexist commercial media system; but also about the internal debates, the kind that are hidden from the glare of media coverage, about how to

define, construct, and symbolize same-sex marriages. Because of the centrality of the news media in producing and propelling the same-sex-marriage

debate into the public consciousness, I examine news content not only as the major source of this investigation but also as “a constitutive medium of the debate itself and of the imaginary within which it took form” (Strassler, 2004, p. 691).

As I detail later in this chapter, the LGBT movement, like other minority and civil rights movements, has depended in part upon recognition in the media to become players in democratic politics and public culture. When

groups do emerge from the shadows of invisibility, “the manner of their

representation will reflect the biases and interests of those powerful people who define the public agenda,” mostly white, middle-age, heterosexual males who hold middle- to upper-class positions in society (Gross, 2001, p. 4). How social activists navigate this uneven terrain is a central concern of this book.

In this chapter I analyze in-depth interviews that took place with social movement actors in 2005. My respondents were involved in shaping the

same-sex-marriage debate in national news stories at a crucial time when the issue first exploded in media discourse and political debate, in 2003 and 2004. Later in the book, in chapter 5, I report the findings from interviews with these same activists and with several new voices that emerged in 2009