The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media (15 page)

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beside the point, and a harder pill for perceived straight audiences to swal ow (as, the logic goes, straights do not like to envision or acknowledge same-sex love). Those who wanted to talk about marriage as love felt that it was a more universal approach (not too many hetero couples say they want to marry for the tax benefits, for example) and that majorities are often turned off by talk of minority rights—what they often see as “special rights.”

The first couple featured, Dave Wilson and Rob Compton, appeared in

several news texts to narrate their story of how they met and to describe what their life together is like. In this
Nightline
episode, Wilson and Compton, a mixed-race couple, shared with news audiences images and video from their ceremony.2 Like most couples in the news, they said their original motivation was to acquire the same rights and benefits afforded to heterosexual couples.

During the interview, Dave and Rob speak mostly of their marriage in terms of the legal rights and benefits, using terms like “rights,” “security,” “safety,”

and “next of kin.” They explain that their desire to marry came about when Rob was in the hospital a few years back with kidney stones, and Dave was appalled that he had no say in any of Rob’s medical decisions.

BOSTON, MA: David Wilson (top right) and Robert Compton (top left) speak to the media after being married by a Unitarian minister at the Arlington Street s

Church in Boston on May 17, 2004. Wilson and Compton, one of the first couples in Massachusetts to be legally wed, regularly appeared in news features about the n

gay marriage issue. (Photo by Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images)

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But beyond discourses of legal rights and benefits, Dave tells the story of their wedding, and talks emotionally about the weightiness of the moment in their ceremony when the officiate married them, saying, “and with the power vested in me.” The power of that moment overwhelmed them, and,

as Dave told
Nightline,
“we just became mush.” Invoking the universality of marriage, Dave discussed the “intangible benefits” of being married, how they are now part of an institution that has uniform meaning: “We don’t have to explain who we are or what we are to each other.” Dave’s rhetoric invokes a mainstreaming of same-sex romance as “love,” a universal humanizing

language that needs no explanation.

Likewise, the Goodridges, who were interviewed in the same
Nightline
segment, talk about their marriage as an amazing and historic event; while they knew of the legal benefits, they did not anticipate how much it would solidify their relationship and lend credibility to their family. They talked about their marriage through the eyes of their eight-year-old daughter, Annie. She was the catalyst for the historic case that bears their name legalizing same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. In a story they retold across news media, including
Nightline
and
Newsweek,
it was three years ago when Annie told her parents that they can’t possibly love each other, because they were not married like the parents of other kids at her school. They discuss what their marriage meant to Annie in terms of a heteronormative sameness to

her peers. “For her, it means that her family is like the other kids’ families

. . . The level of both relief and, I think, comfort and security she feels has really been visible since May 17.”

Seemingly curious about the emotional weight the couple placed on their

marriage, the reporter pushes them by saying, “When you went into this, the legal rights, at least when I spoke to you before, seemed to be paramount.”

They both confirm, that, yes, that was originally all they were looking for.

“But what we got in addition to that is a recognition and a sense of profound respect and love by the community that we weren’t counting on before.”

These couples cited in the news welcome a new era when gays and les-

bians—at least the married ones—do not have to explain their relationship to their family, peers, schools, or community. Marriage, for them, ensures full integration and inclusive citizenship. But as critics like Suzanna Walters (2001b) and Michael Warner (1999) argue, “The-battle-has-been-won” discourse can be dangerous. Marriage is presented as the end-all, be-all goal for the gay and lesbian community, symbolizing full recognition by society, a sentiment shared by many of the activists I interviewed.

s

The notion that marriage equality is symbolic of full equality is echoed not n

only by gay and lesbian spokespeople cited in the news but also by report-l

ers themselves. In news coverage the larger LGBT movement is reduced to a LC

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BOSTON, MA: Hillary Goodridge (second from left); Julie Goodridge (right); their daughter, Annie (second from right); and lawyer Mary Bonauto (far left) of the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) celebrate as they leave city hall in Boston. On May 17, 2004, the Goodridges became the first same-sex couple in the city to be allowed to apply for a marriage license. Bonauto was the lead lawyer in the case that legalized gay marriage in Massachusetts, and the Goodridges were the lead couple of a total of 14 plaintiffs in the case. (Photo by Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images)

single-issue movement (marriage), with little to no recognition of the inter-community conflicts over the marriage issue. As Ted Koppel tel s audiences,

“Make no mistake about it, gay marriage is an American revolution in the making” (Sievers, 2004, February 24). The
New York Times
coverage of the Massachusetts weddings reports that the newly marrieds “are acutely aware of their role as representatives of a new era for gays and lesbians” (Bel uck, 2004b, p. A1). This type of journalistic narration presumes that gaining marriage rights (in what was, at the time, one state) erases the prejudice and inequality gays and lesbians have historical y endured—and continue to endure—when it comes

to accessing health-care, housing, employment, and hate crimes protections.

Just as the selection of gay and lesbian couples is anchored to heteronormative notions of marriage, so too are the ways in which same-sex ceremonies are portrayed. Now that I have analyzed the selection of couples granted a s

presence and given a voice, I turn to how same-sex ceremonies have been

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ritualized and symbolized in news narratives.

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BOSTON, MA: Hillary (left) and Julie Goodridge (right) display their rings after their marriage ceremony at the Unitarian Universalist Association on May 17, 2004, in Boston. As the lead plaintiff couple in the court case that legalized gay marriage in Massachusetts, the couple and their family were regularly featured in news stories. (Photo by Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images)

With This Ring: Symbolizing

and Ritualizing Same-Sex Ceremonies

While same-sex marriage ceremonies presented in the news and popular

culture offer the opportunity to show unique, alternative versions that might be more applicable to gay and lesbian couples—a possible “queering” of traditional marriage—the result is often to “depict gay weddings as cheerfully hetero we-are-the-world assimilation” (Walters, 2001b, p. 341).

The gay and lesbian ceremonies featured in news stories, through imagery and descriptive text, do more to mimic dominant media representations of the heterosexist institution than to question or chal enge it. These sentimental representations of the wedding ceremony—either heterosexual or homos

sexual—ultimately serve the commercial interests of a number of institutions n

tied closely to the wedding industry, including the diamond, fashion, floral, l

and culinary industries, to name a few. Ultimately these consumerist repre-LC

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sentations have come to define the modern wedding ceremony for same-sex

couples as well, undoubtedly in an attempt to tap into the perceived budding market of the gay consumer.

Oftentimes these news productions of same-sex ceremonies constrained

representations of gay weddings and forced couples into heterosexual bi-

naries, simply inserting into traditional wedding symbols and imagery two women or two men. News organizations created and selected graphics that

strongly mimicked heterosexual pairings to represent the issue of gay marriage. One of the most common and consistent graphics used was a reconfiguration of the iconic miniature bride-and-groom figurine often featured as a cake topper on towering white wedding cakes. For example, the predominant graphic that
Nightline
used to open its February 24, 2004, newscast was of a spinning wedding cake topped with alternating figurines—one cake with

a mixed-sex couple figurine, one cake with two bride figurines, and one

cake with two groom figurines. These alternating images flashed between

contrasting images of a lesbian couple kissing during their ceremony and a sound bite from President Bush calling for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

Likewise, the May 8, 2005, Sunday Styles section of the
New York Times
featured a front-page article on gay weddings, with almost the entire space above the fold featuring three dozen or so ceramic wedding figurines—women

in wedding gowns, men in tuxedos—organized along same-sex pairings

(Bellafante, 2005). The iconic figurine is even used in one
New York Times
article describing a couple’s preparation for their big day: “On the windowsil above the sink, there was a figurine of two brides, and on their calendar was scrawled, simply, ‘Get Married’” (Belluck, 2004b, p. A19). Indeed, the same-sex figurine was such a pervasive symbol that it was selected to represent the controversial
Newsweek
cover nearly five years later that covered the Prop 8 case in California. Two ceramic brides, gleaming white, stand out against a Pepto-Bismol-pink background with the divisive headline reading, “The

conservative case for gay marriage.”

In addition to cake toppers, other graphics produced by news organizations strongly reflect traditional opposite-sex wedding dress and rituals, now applied to same-sex pairings. For example, the
60 Minutes
episode titled “Marry Me!” (Hewitt, 2004, March 10) features a magazine-like close-up shot of two identical men, mirror images of each other, one angled forward facing the camera and the other one angled facing right. The two identical faces overlap each other in an intimate posture, appearing as if they are about to kiss. Below them, on the horizon, are a dozen or so photographically illustrated couples, s

brides in white gowns joined arm in arm with other brides, and grooms in n

tuxedos joined arm in arm with other grooms. The figures are dressed in

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traditional attire, the only difference from conventional wedding imagery being the same-sex pairings.

Interestingly, the graphical ways news organizations chose to represent the issue were rarely reflected in the actual footage and photographs of same-sex couples during their ceremonies. While it was fairly common to see two men dressed in tuxedos during their ceremony, it was rare to see two women pictured in traditional white wedding gowns. In the cases of real-life ceremonies that were predominantly featured, such as the wedding of Julie and Hillary Goodridge or the celebrity ceremony of Rosie and Kelly O’Donnell, the women were not wearing dresses at all, but light-colored pantsuits.

The symbol of the ring, perhaps the most iconic symbol of marriage and