The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media (13 page)

in New York; Lauren and Noel are engaged and planning a commitment

ceremony later in the spring. But their presence on the
Newsweek
covers exemplifies a pattern in terms of how gay and lesbian couples appeared in the news: as visual ornaments. At closer look their selection reveals a larger systematic effort that projected the face of gay marriage in predictable ways: one that was overwhelmingly white, middle to upper class, and anchored to dominant notions of masculinity and femininity.

This chapter is centered on representations of gay and lesbian couples,

their ceremonies, and their families in news narratives. Analyzing prominent national news coverage from a range of print and broadcast media from 2003

through 2005,1 I examine the extent to which activists were able to assert their preferred images and narratives in news discourse. This time period s

is significant not only because of the
intense
media saturation of the issue nl

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chapter three

but also because this was the timeframe in which journalists
first
began to describe, assess, symbolize and frame the issue. In chapters 5 and 6 I show how visual representations and framing of the issue evolved from this initial time period to the later coverage in 2008 through 2010.

This chapter highlights how gay life was no longer “othered” in stereotypical ways, but, as my activist informants desired, was shown conforming to normative and disciplined definitions of marriage and family. These “poster couples” selected by news producers and gay rights activists were frequently legitimated in news narratives, but often unwittingly at the expense of the broader community of unmarried gays, who were relegated to the margins.

To begin I examine the linguistic and visual devices that news entities relied upon to represent gay and lesbian couples as “deserving” of marriage. What were the characteristics of the gay and lesbian couples who were selected to represent the marriage movement? What kinds of images of gay and lesbian life did the news media foreground? What were the predominant narratives that gay and lesbian couples who were given a voice in the news used to talk about and define their marriage? Building on the work of critical-cultural and queer theorists, my analysis in this chapter focuses on how markers of gender, class, race, lifestyle, and sexuality were deployed to construct the human face of gay marriage.

In the second part of the chapter, I move from the couples to their wedding ceremonies, specifical y the ways in which same-sex weddings were ritualized and symbolized in news narratives. How were standard ceremonial symbols

(rings, cakes, flowers) and dress (wedding gowns and tuxedos) used to represent same-sex ceremonies in the news? In what ways were these symbols

used to reinforce heterosexual binaries (e.g., man/woman, bride/groom)?

Finally, I conclude this chapter by considering how these stories and images work together to produce new forms of gay desire.

The Importance of Being Seen:

Visual Discourses in News Narratives

Visuals serve as important editorial content that are able to frame issues in powerful ways that words cannot (Messaris & Abraham, 2001). My focus on representations, in both the visual and verbal form, is a critical component in understanding how news narratives were used to tell the story of gay

marriage. Moreover, recent scholarship suggests that visual discourses are often excluded in news analysis. For example, while the combined audience s

share for television news is great, some mass communication scholars have nl

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argued that TV news is under-studied (Bucy & Grabe, 2007; Grabe, 2007; Grabe & Bucy, 2009). When television news is the subject of analysis, the visual content of news narration is often excluded at the expense of privileging verbal content (e.g., a focus on transcripts rather than video). While visuals are very much produced and constructed—as much as the written or spoken word—“images are readily accepted as closely resembling what they represent in the physical world. Therefore viewers are less likely to question their constructedness” (Grabe, 2007, p. 7). Despite the importance of visual and verbal narratives in news discourse, most critical work has had a heavy
textual
emphasis that rarely includes an analysis of images and how they work together to produce narratives of gay and lesbian life (Landau, 2009).

Despite the lack of scholarship on visual news narratives, the
perceived
visual impact of gay marriage imagery was touted early on by conservative activists and political analysts as having a “rallying” effect that stirred the conservative base into action. As conservative activist Randy Thomasson

expressed in a
60 Minutes
(March 10, 2004) interview:

Bob Simon (journalist): What went through your mind when you first saw

those television pictures of gays lined up at city hall waiting to get married?

Randy Thomasson (executive director of the Campaign for Cali-

fornia Families): I think I was as shocked as most people were, because

this was now out of the closet and
all over the TV screen
. And then night after night, day after day, it was in your face. And this was not just shocking, this angered and actually disgusted a lot of parents and grandparents who didn’t want that being pushed into their living room every day [emphasis added].

Likewise, the political director of ABC News compared the visual potency of gay and lesbian wedding ceremonies to the images that exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: “We saw in those prison abuse photos out of Iraq,

. . . the country’s attention can really be focused by photographs, by moving images. People on both sides of this [gay marriage] issue are going to watch to see how much the activists get engaged by the photos, by the pictures”

(Kennedy, 2004).

Through my analysis of media content, then, I was interested in the process by which a group that has historical y symbolized the “antithesis” of wholesome family values and the opposite of monogamous partnering comes to

represent lifelong commitment and enduring family life. This move, of course, is a tenuous one, predicated on the adherence of these select “poster couples”

to conventional heteronormative logics. As I highlight in chapter 1, being seen is not the same thing as being known (Walters, 2001a). A growing line of s

critical-cultural scholarship has shown how gay and lesbian representation has nl

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operated within specific heterosexist power structures that demand imposed conformity to a perceived heterosexual audience, leaving dominant ideologies firmly intact (see chapter 1 for a discussion, as well as Dow, 2001; Fejes, 2000; Gross, 2001; Walters, 2001a, 2001b).

Likewise, I argue in this chapter that the couples who appeared in na-

tional news stories about gay marriage were selected to appeal to a presumed typical news audience—heterosexual, middle to upper class, and educated.

Through the language and imagery used, news audiences and readers were

continuously reassured that these couples and their unions were “traditional,”

“normal,” “ordinary,” not “scary,” and not any more “interesting” than a typical heterosexual couple. Moreover, these married couples and their lifestyles, presented as suburban, wholesome, and average, were oftentimes marked as different from and more acceptable than the rest of the LGBT community,

cast as urban, alternative, and deviant.

In order to critical y analyze the “discursive politics” embedded in emerging news narratives during this time period, I employed both in-depth, qualitative textual analysis and systematic quantitative content analysis. I began by exploring those news “packages” that were intended to give readers and viewers more “complete,” “in-depth” coverage of the issue: prominent and lengthy feature articles and cover stories. I searched the Lexis-Nexis database to locate front-page features in national newspapers, cover stories in leading national newsmagazines, and leading prime-time newscasts in which the entire episode was exclusively focused on the gay marriage issue (see the appendix for selection criteria and a list of news stories). Approximately 25 stories were selected, including feature or cover stories from national newsmagazines
Time,
Newsweek,
and
U.S. News & World Report
; prominent front-page stories from leading national newspapers like the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
; and episodes of prime-time television news programs
60 Minutes,
20/20,
and
Nightline.
These programs and publications were selected because of their prominence and their appeal to large, mainstream news audiences. I had a particular interest in televised “newsmagazines” like
60 Minutes
and
Nightline
because of their “self-contained narrative segments [that] al ow for elaborate storytelling” and rich visual narration (Grabe, 2000, p. 40).

The results from the textual analysis were then used to systematical y “test”

for patterns across a wider range of television network news stories. Through critical analysis of these patterns, content analysis provides a powerful tool for researchers to investigate the “big ideas” that shape cultural meanings,

“the contours of the ideological environment” (S. Thomas, 1994, p. 689).

s

I used content analysis to investigate 93 television news stories that were n

centrally concerned about the gay marriage issue that aired on
NBC,
CBS,
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and
ABC
evening newscasts between June 2003 and January 2005. Content analysis was used to systematical y capture the ways in which broadcast news entities framed the issue of same-sex marriage, privileged particular sources over others, and depicted gay and lesbian couples and their ceremonies. This chapter reports on the findings of the qualitative content analysis and how these patterns emerged through quantitative content analysis.

Seen But Not Heard: Nameless, Voiceless Couples

Symbolize the Movement

As chapter 2 highlights, activists fully realized that the unprecedented amount of reporting on the issue of same-sex marriage presented an opportunity for gays and lesbians to appear in ways they hadn’t been able to before: not as criminals, victims, or radicals, but as newlyweds and families.

They were also acutely aware of the power of visual framing—that the visuals carried into the living rooms of Americans by mainstream news outlets, and in particular full-motion video of same-sex couples kissing, exchanging rings, and cheering in celebration, would shape public perceptions of the community and the marriage issue.

Media analysis during this time period revealed an interesting pattern: in most stories, gays and lesbians were presented as unidentified couples who were either standing in line waiting for a marriage license or celebrating during their ceremony. We as viewers and readers do not meet them; we

do not know their names, where they are from, how they met, or why they

want to get married. These couples are not given a voice; they do not speak and are not quoted. In print they largely appear in photographs but are not cited in the article or named in the caption. In fact, content analysis of television news reports during this same time period showed that when gay and

lesbian couples were visually featured in a story, their names were revealed only 18.4 percent of the time, either through the reporter’s narration or as text appearing across the screen.

This figure is shockingly low considering that attribution of sources is a standard journalistic practice. Attributing names to the sources used in news reports not only increases the credibility and power of the source interviewed but also helps viewers identify with the speaker. Historically, however, the question of anonymity has been a contentious issue in reporting on gay and lesbian communities. For decades, news organizations “protected” the anonymity of their gay sources by assigning them pseudonyms and hiding or blurring s

their images. This standard practice of masking the identity of gay and lesbian n

sources was often necessary, since gays and lesbians feared losing their jobs or l

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA: News stories regularly featured long lines of gay and lesbian couples wrapped around city blocks, as in this photograph taken outside of San Francisco City Hall on February 19, 2004. On August 12, 2004, the California Supreme Court voided the marriages of about 4,000 gay couples performed by the city of San Francisco, ruling that the mayor had overstepped his authority. (Photo by Hector Mata/AFP/Getty Images)