The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media (12 page)

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debate throughout the 1990s. “Gay and lesbian organizations attempted to place military men and women before the cameras . . . by showing their

ordinariness and, in some cases, their extraordinary service duly rewarded with medals and honor—but to no avail. They found themselves unable to

disrupt the symbolic value that homosexuality-as-transgression holds in

dominant masculinist and nationalist discourses and unable to place on the public agenda the mundane experiences of lesbian and gay people who have served in the military” (p. 267).

As Adam asserts, activist organizations’ media strategies for reaching mainstream audiences are not always or often successful. In the fol owing chapters, I explore these tensions by analyzing prominent print and broadcast news stories, along with activist critiques, in order to investigate how the marriage issue was characterized and symbolized by mainstream news outlets. This

analysis uncovers how professional journalistic norms limited the debate to a two-sided conflict, revealing the hurdles that social movement actors face when attempting to shape a controversial issue on the national media stage.

Conclusion: Wedded to the Marriage Issue,

for Better and for Worse

As the dust settled after the 2004 presidential election, the gay rights movement began repairing the damage from what the national media referred to as a series of “bruising losses” (Broder, 2004, p. 1). President George W. Bush was reelected, running a successful campaign that won the “values vote,” including a proposed constitutional ban on gay marriage. By large majorities, citizens of 11 states voted to pass state constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriages. Making matters worse, several gay ally groups on the political left blamed the gay marriage issue for President Bush’s reelection.

At first it appeared that the battle over same-sex-marriage rights, rather than winning gay and lesbian citizens the legitimacy they had been fighting for, may have cost them quite a bit. As many in the movement had initially feared, the marriage issue had produced a vehement backlash, the kind social movements struggle to recover from. In those “dark days,” one pessimistic editorial opined, the best strategy was for gay and lesbian advocates to “hun-ker down,” as if hibernating like a bear for a long winter. “Over the next four years, the GLBT community isn’t going to have much to cheer about: no

federal civil rights legislation, no federal hate crimes laws, paltry increases in AIDS funding, and, of course, a continual verbal onslaught against us by s

our elected officials. It’s going to be a hard, cold freeze.”

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Perhaps the question of gay marriage, cloaked in an overall concern for

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Fighting the “Battle to Be Boring”

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for the vast majority of the American public. As the communications specialist for the Human Rights Campaign put it, “On Election Day the American

people were given the final exam on the first day of class.” The marriage conversation, as we saw unfold over the next several years, was only in the beginning stages of what would be a very long discussion.

These considerable losses in the aftermath of the 2004 election left the gay rights movement struggling to put the pieces back together again. News coverage reported that the larger national organizations like the HRC were pursuing “less aggressive” strategies, appointing non-gay leaders, and bolster-ing their memberships of straight allies. Several groups backed away from the marriage issue in lieu of pursuing less controversial equality measures, such as social security survivor benefits, hospital visitation, and tax breaks for same-sex families.

As this chapter has shown, for most of my informants, gay marriage may

not have the platform of choice to lobby for increased equality and antidiscrimination measures. The onslaught of media attention forced marriage to become the central issue of the movement, pushing gay rights activists into a bitter and increasingly public battle against many of society’s most powerful political forces. But the debate did pave the way for several simultaneous transformations. It increased the visibility of a number of LGBT concerns, provided a space for new, “reformed” images of the community, and boosted mobilization efforts of the gay rights movement.

For all of the groups I spoke with, the marriage debate carried out in the press provided a rallying point, elevating the status of their community and their issues. In some cases the issue even contributed to the growth of their organization either in terms of donations, members, litigation efforts, or political interest. In others the press attention over marriage forced a different conversation altogether. For example, leaders of the small, state-based group Indiana Equality, immersed in a conservative political environment, feared that the national press attention surrounding marriage might hamper their attempts to pass moderate measures at the state level. At the time, Indiana Equality was working on amending the state’s civil rights code to include gender orientation and sexual identity orientation as part of its an-tidiscrimination policies. But when same-sex nuptials began in other parts of the country in 2004, leaders of the organization knew gay marriage would become a battle at the state level, and a losing one at that. Leaders had to shift organizational resources to fight a state amendment banning same-sex marriages. Not surprisingly, gay rights advocates lost. Nevertheless, the battle itself provided a point of mobilization, an opportunity to gain new members s

and motivate constituents at the grassroots level. As their PR director told n

me, in losing the marriage battle at the state level, “at the same time we’ve l

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also used [the marriage debate] as an organizing tool to get more people here engaged [in activism] across the state.”

At the same time, the marriage issue also pushed activists to produce and employ discourses that soften and normalize gay identity for straight audiences rather than embarking on a more radical and systematic critique of embedded cultural homophobia. These activist informants, ever aware of the power of media images and understandably cautious of offending mainstream sensibilities, strove to tap into universalizing stories and pictures to represent their cause and their community. Other groups in the movement—the voices from within the gay community who argue that marriage may not be worth

the fight—were shut out of this debate. With an overall concern for making gay and lesbian life palatable for a mainstream audience, the marriage equality movement arguably “narrow[ed] its political horizons and temper[ed] its actions to avoid hostilities with heterosexist (and intermittently homophobic) mass media” (Carroll & Ratner, 1999, p. 20).

The diversity that has been so central to the gay movement has kept com-

peting political logics—those oppositional and assimilationist discourses discussed at the beginning of this chapter—in equilibrium. Gay movement

scholars have argued that, historically, “The peculiar brilliance of the gay identity movement has been due to the way identity, interest group and

commercialism have been held in balance . . . The movement grew in many

directions at the same time, but without having a center. It was not forced to homogenize around a narrow vision of goals, identities and strategy”

(Armstrong, 2002, p. 189).

This is certainly not to argue that the more progressive arms of the movement representing queer politics have disappeared altogether. Nor does it discount the opportunities that the marriage conversation affords the larger LGBT community, a subject I return to in the concluding chapter. Nevertheless, as marriage equality comes to dominate the movement’s agenda and

become the stand-in issue for inclusive citizenship, gay and lesbian identity risks becoming homogenized and diluted. As Armstrong (2002) warns, while

“the decentralized and expressive nature of the movement allowed space for diverse ways of being gay,” in the move toward “ideological homogenization, these spaces may disappear” (p. 189). For a movement that has thrived on its diversity, exclusive emphasis on marriage could force gay and lesbian identity into a rigid box from which it cannot easily escape.

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3. “The Marrying Kind”

The Face of Gay Marriage in the News

The July 7, 2003, edition of
Newsweek
magazine featured two “poster couples”—

one gay and one lesbian—to symbolize the controversial, captivating, and soon-to-be pervasive issue of gay marriage.
Newsweek’
s cover director, Bruce Ramsay, decided to do a “split run” for that week, producing alternate covers of the same magazine issue (White, 2003). One
Newsweek
cover photo featured a medium shot of two young Caucasian women, smiling warmly,

both facing the camera. One woman stands behind the other and cradles

her in an embrace, their hands clasped at their hips. The couple, who could easily be mistaken for sisters and possibly even twins, is dressed nearly identically: both wear dark, fitted denim jeans and crisp white shirts. Their faces, which touch lightly at their foreheads, feature similar makeup—modern

and professional, fresh and light. They appear to be in their early 30s and do not violate the traditional cover girl standards of beauty, thinness, or youth. Their styling, posture, obvious makeup and jewelry, and manicured nails mark the women as appropriately feminine. Nothing about the cover, even the somewhat intimate posture they hold, is especially threatening, except for the headline inscribed in large bold type across their torsos: “Is gay marriage next?”

The alternate
Newsweek
cover for that same week features a gay male couple: two conventionally fit and attractive Caucasian men who appear to be in their 30s or early 40s. They are arranged similarly, one man with his arms draped around the other, their hands clasped at the waist. The pose is comparable in its banality to that of the lesbian couple, though the representation of
male
intimacy offers a potentially more threatening image for s

Newsweek’
s largely heterosexual audience.

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In a split-run cover story, the July 7, 2003, edition of
Newsweek
magazine featured two “poster couples”—one gay male and one lesbian couple—to symbolize the controversial issue of same-sex marriage. The cover story was not centrally about gay marriage, but about the impact of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case,
Lawrence v. Texas.
(From
Newsweek
, July 2 © 2003 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the s

Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or n

retransmission of the material without express written permission is prohibited.) l

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“The Marrying Kind”

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These prominent magazine covers during the summer of 2003—months

before the historic
Goodridge
case, months before the mayor of San Francisco began handing out marriage licenses to same-sex couples—mark the

beginning of the contemporary debate over same-sex-marriage rights in the mainstream press. Nevertheless, despite what the headline implies,
Newsweek’
s cover story that week was not about gay marriage per se, but about the historic U.S. Supreme Court case handed down on the final day of the Court’s 2002–2003 term,
Lawrence v. Texas.
In a 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court overturned the Texas anti-sodomy law, citing that gays and lesbians

“are entitled to respect for their private lives” (E. Thomas, 2003, p. 40). The decision was hailed as one of the most important opinions of the last century, on par with
Roe v. Wade
and
Brown v. Board of Education
. The
Lawrence
case also led the mainstream media, along with politicians, legal scholars, social conservatives, and gay rights activists, to focus public attention on same-sex-marriage rights. Although the majority opinion was careful in arguing that the case was not about gay marriage, conservative justice Antonin Scalia quipped, “Do not believe it” (E. Thomas, 2003, p. 42).

This cover story on “gay marriage” was not really about gay marriage,

and it was also not especially clear why these two couples were selected by
Newsweek
to represent the movement. The couples were not linked to either the
Lawrence
or the
Goodridge
cases nor any other sort of legislative effort to legalize gay marriage. They were not identified as activists in the movement for marriage equality. Though
visually
very prominent, the cover couples selected are noticeably absent from the newsmagazine’s textual content. Their stories and images do not appear in the inside pages of the spread. Reading the brief inside note from the editor, all that readers are told is that Dominic and Andrew had a civil union ceremony in Vermont and are raising twins