The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media (9 page)

a whole. As Evan explained, some activists were concerned “that the fight for l

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the freedom to marry was either premature or potentially dangerous. That it would trigger a crackdown, a greater reaction, an opposition.”

This fear of engendering a stronger response from opponents led to internal frictions about whether to move forward with the
Goodridge
legal case. Many feared the case was premature and that a victory would be the “longest of shots.” The co-chair of the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus, a lobbying group that works in the state legislature, called her organization

“one of the last holdouts” on the marriage front. She pleaded with the GLAD

legal team to delay the
Goodridge
lawsuit because “we knew that people weren’t ready for it. We knew that if they filed the lawsuit there would be an immediate backlash.”

Leaders at GLAD were acutely aware of the risks of catapulting marriage

into legal, political, and cultural debate. As Carisa, communications director for GLAD, explained, the team eventually took the case despite resistance from others in the movement. “It’s part of the agenda because there was a demand for it, not because there was necessarily a leadership that decided that it was a top agenda item.” Mary, a civil rights attorney at GLAD, tells the story of when she started as a lawyer 15 years ago, one of the first phone calls she received was from a couple who wanted to get married. According to Carisa, Mary had told her that “for a good 11 years, she [Mary] received phone calls like that from people who wanted help getting married. And she told people, ‘No, now is not the time.’ That there are these other sorts of legal, political, and social building blocks that need to be in place first.”

For most activists, then, the “m word” was not only dangerous but also utterly inconceivable. The community was acutely aware of the explosive potential of pushing the marriage agenda. One informant explained why, with the exception of a couple of pioneering individuals like Evan, the activist community was slow to embrace marriage. “For most activists, it was so unattainable. They didn’t dare to dream about marriage. It wasn’t that they didn’t want it, it wasn’t that they wouldn’t have articulated it as a goal. They never believed they could get there . . . the prejudice and the hate were so strong and the demonization of gay people was so strong that you would never expect normal social acceptance in a cultural arena like the right to marry.”

The divide within the movement over whether to pursue equal marriage

ultimately gave birth to new organizations and new sorts of activists who were disappointed with “the gay establishment’s” fear of the issue. Some splintered off to start their own activist work or began building independent single-issue organizations dedicated solely to marriage equality. For example, s

two of my informants for this study left larger gay rights organizations, the n

Human Rights Campaign and Lambda Legal, because they wanted to work

l

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the agenda not because activists dreamed it up, nor because the opposition pushed the controversy, but because marriage rights were something gay

people had been wanting for a long time. While working pro bono at Lambda for couples who wanted help getting married, Evan argued that it was the desire of gay couples, not necessarily activists, that drove legal organizations to bring forth cases even “without the blessing of . . . the gay establishment.”

At least one of these informants joined the fight and started her own

organization, Marriage Equality USA, because of her personal desire to

marry her partner. Davina, whose story is featured in the introduction of this book, described how her desire to marry her partner, Molly, overcame the resistance she felt from those in her own community. “In the early years, in ’98, when we were doing stuff around marriage, a lot of people within the LGBT community were like, ‘Why are you focused on this? That’s really not our issue.’ Or, ‘That’s so far away, you’re not being realistic.’ But we

[Molly and I] still really wanted to get married.” The act of participating in a ritualized ceremony transformed Davina and her partner from merely a

couple who wanted to marry to activists entrenched in the movement for

marriage equality. The ceremony they had with friends and family in 1998

convinced them “that this was something we wanted to work towards as a

couple because it was the right thing to do. Because we loved each other.

We saw, just having the ceremony, we did tons of education. Going to order a cake. Getting the rings. Or renting a place.”

She went on to describe what characterizes the people involved in Marriage Equality USA as different from the other national gay and lesbian organizations. Their members, activists, and board members are entirely made up of people just like her, who want to get married themselves and are not necessarily tied to the larger gay and lesbian movement. They are employed outside the movement and do their activist work on the side. At times, she explained, these activists felt disconnected from the larger political aims of gay and lesbian movement. Her comment about the generational divide highlights

the competing political logics of the gay liberation movement, centered on the critical view of social institutions like marriage, and the assimilationist logic of the contemporary gay rights movement. As Davina explained:

Our main activities are not in working with the LGBT community. So we come at it at a much more grassroots level. We haven’t been privy to the politics, the years of politics. I grew up in a different generation. The generation above me was pretty anti-marriage to begin with. It was sort of more of the feminist, sexual liberation movement that was more interested in tearing down the patriarchy, s

tearing down institutions, and being able to experience sexual liberation . . .

I didn’t have that same thing when I was growing up. It’s like, we feel like we n

want to be able to be a part of the fabric of society, not the fringe.

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Even among people who actively sought marriage rights on the behalf

of couples, they understood the risks of going mainstream with an issue as explosive as gay marriage. But their attempts to avoid the issue were thwarted by a political opposition hungry to do battle over marriage and a commercial media system eager to air that debate over a hot-button issue. As Evan explained, even if a gay rights debate revolved around other measures entirely, marriage would inevitably come up. “Try as hard as we might, those of us in the legal organizations, activists, and so on, to find ways of challenging discrimination without tackling the exclusion to marriage, time and time again, we would run up against the exclusion to marriage being offered as a justification for discrimination.” He tells the story of his own entry into the media landscape as a gay rights spokesperson, illustrating the centrality of the media as constitutive of the marriage debate:

My very first national television appearance as a gay activist was on
Crossfire
, and I was on because then Mayor Koch of New York City had issued an executive order allowing for bereavement leave for city employees. You know, this is at the height of the AIDS epidemic. And it was a minimal humane measure to allow gay couples, gay survivors, to grieve their partners.

So I go on the show, and [my opponent] immediately starts attacking me,

saying what he wants is gay marriage. And I would have to say, “Yes, actually I do think gay people should have the freedom to marry, but that’s not what this is about. This is about a very modest, very minimal, very merely humane and decent measure allowing people to grieve their loss.” And I thought to myself, if we’re going to have this fight over marriage anyway, even when we’re thinking something so minimal, why shouldn’t we fight for everything we deserve?

As Evan’s narrative of his induction as a national media spokesperson reveals, the mainstream news media was critical in pushing the marriage issue front and center in cultural politics. The intense media frenzy that continued over same-sex-marriage rights created an increased need for institutional strategic communications within these activist organizations. When the

marriage debate began to dominate media coverage of gay and lesbian life, leaders in the movement began to see the issue as an opportunity to reform representations of their community.

Producing Gay Marriage for the Mainstream

The cultural fascination with same-sex marriages turned the media eye on gay and lesbian issues in unprecedented ways. Carisa, who had worked for s

decades on a host of gay rights issues from military inclusion to AIDS ad-n

vocacy to employment nondiscrimination, put it this way: “Marriage has

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become this juggernaut. It’s taken on this life in popular culture. I would predict there would never be another issue like it, that’s gay related, that’s had sort of the saturation coverage that marriage has had.” As the communications director for the Task Force pointed out, her job was no longer about visibility, but about controlling the messaging. “Ten years ago, when I was working on the New York State issues, we had to battle to get gay issues into the press. Today we have to compete to get your message and the way you

want it framed into the press. Because pick up on any given day the top ten newspapers in the country, and there will probably be eight stories related to something that is about the gay community.”

This shift from merely being recognized by the mainstream media to con-

trolling the framing of issues led to organizational restructuring, so most of the large national activist organizations required a communications director or similar position to manage media inquiries and strategies. In fact, several of these public relations and communications professionals I spoke with were new to their positions in 2004 and 2005, hired in response to

the increased media attention surrounding the marriage issue. As several informants explained, they had been hired because the organization had to

“beef up” its communications capacity and public education efforts due to press inquiries about gay marriage. The coverage surrounding the San Francisco mayor’s issuance of marriage licenses alone was astounding, even for activists who had worked on messaging for decades. One activist, who had been a national media spokesperson for the gay rights movement for over

20 years, explained, “When Newsom issued marriage licenses, the coverage of that was just beyond anything I’d ever seen before on any gay issue before.

I mean, you had 60 satellite trucks in front of city hall and you had outlets from Bogota, Colombia, to South Korea news, to obviously everything in

between and all the national mainstream media. It was a fabulous human

interest story. This whole city was electrified.”

Events like these placed an increased burden on organizations to develop and fund a communications department that could build a strategic communications plan, hire and train professionals to answer media inquiries, create a bank of sources, conduct research about media coverage, and develop credible spokespeople to represent the organization.

The media attention changed the nature of even litigation groups like

GLAD, whose purpose was once to keep controversial cases below the radar of the press, doing battle in the courtroom rather than in the court of public opinion. But the increased visibility of gay and lesbian issues, and the weight of the marriage issue specifically, forced GLAD to expand in such a way that s

a case like
Goodridge
became not just about the legal court maneuvering but nl

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about public communications tactics as well. According to the communica-

tions director of GLAD, the case was packaged within a carefully crafted communications strategy that undeniably influenced the selection of the

seven plaintiff couples who were chosen by the organization to represent gay marriage. As the litigation was being planned, “there was a communication strategy around it. I think certainly, who the plaintiffs were, and how they presented publicly, and their sort of likeableness and attractiveness and articulateness and all of that stuff, made a big difference.”

The anticipated media circus weighed heavily on the minds of those plan-

ning the historic and controversial case that ultimately legalized gay marriage in Massachusetts. The plaintiff couples were carefully selected by this litigation group to appeal to a mainstream audience to appear pleasant, sympa-

thetic, and palatable. Being media savvy was a prerequisite for selection. In order to be represented by the group and in front of television news cameras, these couples had to already be “out” in all aspects of their lives (for example, out at work and with other family members) and have the sort of flexible oc-cupations that al owed them to attend media trainings, press conferences, and hearings. As discussed in chapter 4, in 2004 these conditions inadvertently limited the racial, ethnic, and class diversity of the couples selected.

News exposure of the
Goodridge
case and the San Francisco weddings transported visual images of gays and lesbians getting married into the living rooms of Middle America. The debate was no longer talking heads musing