The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media (10 page)

about what
might
happen if gays could marry. Americans were turning on nightly news programs and witnessing for themselves gays and lesbians getting married in San Francisco, New York, Oregon, and Massachusetts. Those already working in communications departments had to turn their attention almost entirely to crafting appropriate narratives about marriage equality.

Activists sensed that marriage was their ticket in; it was what would al ow them to talk about their issues with prominent news entities and reach national news audiences. But the focus on marriage limited the conversation as wel .

One activist who appeared as a spokesperson on a wide variety of network and cable news programs pointedly explained, “
NBC Nightly News
doesn’t cal you to talk about the employment nondiscrimination act. You’re lucky if you can get a word in edgewise that they don’t edit out. Marriage, they want to talk about marriage. Why? Because it’s the hot issue.” Other causes important to the movement that were “not-so-hot” took a backseat to marriage, or at least had to be framed within the larger context of relationship recognition.

But from the perspective of most activists, this shift in attention to marriage s

in no way replaced or competed with other issues such as violence against n

gays and lesbians and access to HIV treatment, but it gave them a “larger l

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microphone” to talk about equality for LGBT citizens more broadly. Deflecting complaints waged by others in the movement that marriage unfairly

dominates the agenda and overshadows other important causes, the former

head of HRC explained, “People would say to me, ‘How did marriage become priority number one? What about job discrimination?’ And I would say, it’s al intertwined. It’s all inter-tangled. It’s all part of the same equality vocabulary.

But marriage is the buzzword, because that’s what the press and the politicians are all talking about. They’re not talking about job discrimination for gay people; they’re just buzzing about gay marriage.” As Evan explained it, marriage does not limit the conversation, but rather opens the door to talking about a whole host of issues by affording a kind of legitimacy and social status previously unknown to the gay and lesbian community.

Marriage is a vocabulary in which . . . people talk about who you are and define who you are. And therefore claiming that vocabulary and helping people see our lives in this vocabulary of love of caring and dedication and commitment and so on would transform the position of gay people in a way that would then benefit us on a variety of other battles that we would also be fighting. In other words, winning marriage is not the only thing that matters. But talking about our lives in the vocabulary of marriage would help us win better protection against bullying for kids in schools, better treatments with regards to AIDS, access to health care and so on.

But despite the best intentions of activists to use marriage to discuss other issues that are critical to the gay rights movement, including access to health care, employment nondiscrimination, the diversity of their community, and AIDS funding, media analysis shows the news agenda centered universally

on the gay marriage issue, discussing other issues only within the context of relationship recognition (see discussion in chapters 3 and 4).

Appearing in the news media under the umbrella of marriage gave the

community opportunities to present themselves as “normal”—as couples

in loving, monogamous relationships, as nurturing parents, as individuals yearning to build a family life. These images are boundary-breaking considering the historic representation of LGBT people as predatory villains, promiscuous perverts, laughable buffoons, and queer radicals—essentially, the culturally constructed “antithesis” of wholesome family values.

As comments from informants indicated, although many may have been

initially hesitant to do battle on the marriage front in the mass media, in the end they welcomed the marriage conversation as a way to reform the images they had seen of themselves in the press and popular culture. Consistent with s

other marginalized groups, researchers have traced coverage of the LGBT

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chapter two

community, once virtually nonexistent, as moving from invisibility to one that perpetuated anti-gay stereotypes (Alwood, 1996; Bennet, 2000; Gross, 2001; Gross & Woods, 1999). Gay rights activists in this study were keenly aware of these patterns of representation, as well as how such depictions would undermine the position of gay people by offending the sensibilities of a heterosexist culture. Informants feared what these exoticized images might signify, captured in comments like this one from Cheryl:

Twenty or some years ago, gay people were portrayed as deviants, perverts, sexually obsessed. Public’s image of a gay person was what they saw at a gay pride [parade], some woman walking down the street naked, some guy . . . half naked or dressed half like a woman. And you’d be like, “Oh, shit, like a freak show.” “I don’t want my kids to see this, this is scary.” “I don’t want them living next to me.” I mean, it was just terrible for everyone, including people like me.

That’s not who I am, and I’m gay.

Informants struggled to separate themselves from what they perceived to be the more “radical” paraders who had appeared on the nightly news for so many years by practicing performative media strategies. These assimilatory media strategies were part of an overall policy to build programs that were directed toward what my activist informants referred to as their “straight allies.” An integral part of the organizational strategy was to build an alliance of gay and non-gay organizations and to construct same-sex marriage as “not just a gay issue,” but one tied to universal concerns of economic justice and workplace nondiscrimination. These organizations worked to build alliances with labor unions like the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), civil rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and human rights groups

like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Employing a common civil rights discourse, one activist explained the need for non-gay alliances in this way: “There is no movement against oppression by any minority that has been able to be achieved without the support of the majority. If you only had black abolitionists, we’d still be living in slavery right now.”

Activists strategically crafted narratives about gay marriage and about gay life that would highlight alliances with non-gay partners and resonate with mainstream audiences—messages that would “play in Peoria,” as the saying goes, or connect with Middle America. As one informant who works for

the national Republican gay and lesbian organization told me point-blank, same-sex marriage is not a radical anti-family movement as defined by his s

own party. It is a “conservative fight,” part of the struggle to win the “battle n

to be boring.” Employing discourses that are popular among gay conserva-

l

tives asserting that marriage would “tame the wild beast” of homosexual

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love (Walters, 2001b), he argued that the gay movement and society more

generally should embrace same-sex marriage because it encourages gays to enter long-term, monogamous relationships.

As comments from these informants indicate, activists on the marriage

front used two symbiotic discursive strategies to, on the one hand, construct gay and lesbian life as normal, banal, and ordinary, and, on the other, to differentiate themselves from the “freak show” imagery of drag queens and proud paraders that had been the predominant visual imagery of LGBT

communities in the news. Critical to this strategy was to separate themselves from a gay movement that is seen as radical, separatist, and defiant. These informants sought to depoliticize gay identity in an effort to normalize gay marriage. In the following comment from Cheryl, the historic battle cry of the gay identity movement appears almost obsolete and powerless in helping with the daily concerns of average middle-class gay Americans: “This isn’t about trying to get your parish priests to sanction our relationship, because we need that, you know, ‘We’re here, we’re queer, we want it in your face.’ This is about me worrying about Jen [my partner] and the kids if I get killed, and will she end up losing the house? And my kids won’t go to college because she can’t figure out how to support our kids?”

Concerned that the news media was constructing gay marriages as “radi-

cal” and threatening to mainstream values, my activist informants were critical of the kinds of images news crews shot of gay and lesbian life. Activists who worked intimately with the news media were acutely aware of the power of images and how these pictures of their community might contribute to

public perceptions. Early in the debate, organizations began to track how gays and lesbians were being depicted in the news, paying careful attention to what is referred to as the “b-rol ,” the standard use of images and full-motion video that accompany the journalistic narration in television news stories.

As one communications director for the HRC explained, “When news sto-

ries are produced about our community, it’s the b-roll of images, what goes under the voice-over, that paints a picture of who you’re talking about.” They discovered a predictable pattern of images that accompanied nearly every news story about gay people that ran on television—even same-sex marriage stories—of showing anonymous and general y faceless individuals in gay bars.

He discussed in detail how this visual framing worked to create a storyline of who gay people are:

So you have this view: gay people apparently like to drink a lot or are in these dark, seedy places often shown the backs of their heads, not showing their s

faces. Because there was this interest in protecting people’s anonymity. But at n

the same time, if all you’re seeing is the backs of people’s heads it leads you to l

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chapter two

believe that they’re ashamed to show their faces. So there is that shame element to it. Or people walking down the street always from the back, sometimes the most gratuitous displays of public affection they could get on camera. So while most gay people aren’t walking down the street making out, that makes for “good television.”

He argued with news media personnel that it was inaccurate and irresponsible to, for example, cover the
Goodridge
case with these stock b-roll images:“This is about two women and their daughter and them seeking protections; why

would you show video of some guys in a bar to represent their life?”

Frustrated with the stock of video images used by local and national television outlets to tell the story of gay marriage, this gay rights organization shot and disseminated video clips for news outlets to use as b-rol , a practice common in public relations. These images were used to strategical y construct their own original visual narratives of gay life as a corrective to the staple diet of bar life imagery. To visual y support coverage of the
Goodridge
case in Massachusetts, for example, they shot b-roll of the plaintiff couples, crafting a narrative of normalcy and everyday banality. Images included couples walking their dog, cooking dinner, coming home from work, and playing Monopoly

with their kids, “all of those things that are what families do but are so entirely different than those images that you had been seeing” (Michael, Human Rights Campaign). They provided the video images to local and national media outlets and were pleased to see that the b-roll was picked up and used.

Activists in the marriage movement contrasted these everyday images of

coupledom with what they described as the more common and less desir-

able footage of “mass” gay ceremonies. As chapter 3 details, news entities frequently shot footage showing hordes of anonymous same-sex couples

standing in long lines that wrapped around city blocks, waiting outside city hall in places like San Francisco. Other activists complained of dated stock footage of mass weddings that included same-sex couples in a field dressed in traditional wedding garb to protest their exclusion from marriage. These images of mass weddings troubled informants, because they did not look like

“the real thing” or fully represent the more “traditional” ceremonies many same-sex couples opt for. Activists wanted to avoid circus-like ceremonial imagery that looked more like a performative public display rather than an intimate and meaningful ritual. One informant discussed the problematic

images that were replayed from a protest event on the mall in Washington, D.C., in the early 1990s: “And you see this over and over, two women in

dresses kissing or two men in tuxedos or two women in tuxedos. And it has s

this sort of circus-like atmosphere to it that also, I think, does a disservice n

to couples who have very sort of traditional ceremonies. But then people l

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associate . . . gay marriage . . . wedding . . . this wedding is this 10,000 people thing with crazy outfits. What is that? It doesn’t feel like marriage to them”

(Michael, Human Rights Campaign).

Paradoxically, some informants even seemed reluctant to celebrate cover-

age of a milestone moment for marriage equality: the controversial gesture by San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples in February 2004. There was concern that video images panning long lines of couples waiting to marry were a spectacle that “could turn some people off,” making gay wedding ceremonies look more like “people waiting in line to get tickets to a rock concert.” As one communications director put it bluntly, “This is not Mardi Gras.”