The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media (16 page)

commitment, was a recurring image used in news stories. The lead photo—

appearing in full color above the fold—on the front page of the
New York
Times
the day after same-sex weddings began in Massachusetts, shows a gay male couple leaving the courthouse, one man prominently thrusting his ring finger in the air as if to show onlookers his wedding ring (Belluck, 2004a, p.

A1). Both men smile widely as the city clerk who performed their ceremony gives the couple a thumbs-up. A close-up shot of the wedding ring or rings was also commonly used by television news crews to symbolically represent the issue. The February 24, 2004
Nightline
episode that took us through the ceremonies and into the homes of two couples focused close-up shots on the ring-bearing hands of both Rob Compton and Dave Wilson and Julie and

Hillary Goodridge. Additionally, photographs in newsmagazines were often positioned or angled to show rings on the hands of same-sex couples. For example, the July 7, 2003,
Newsweek
featured a medium-length shot of the hands of two men dressed in dark suits, one sliding a ring on his partner’s hand (E. Thomas, 2003, p. 42).

The sameness to “traditional” wedding ceremonies and rituals was also

emphasized in the series of articles leading up to “the big day” in Massachusetts when same-sex couples could legally marry. These articles emphasized the similarity of largely commercial wedding customs such as picking out wedding attire, shopping for rings, organizing reception details such as food and beverages, selecting flowers, and even going through the mental rituals of bridal jitters and cold feet.

The May 16, 2004,
New York Times
front page article with the headline

“Hearts beat fast to opening strains of the gay-wedding march” chronicled how several couples and the city of Boston were preparing for the onslaught of gay nuptials (Bel uck & Zezima, 2004). The article’s most prominent photo is s

of a middle-age lesbian couple peering at each other over a glistening jewelry n

case, “shopping for their wedding rings,” aided by a salesperson. Sprinkled l

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PROVINCETOWN, MA: Kristi Habedanck (left) and partner Suzanne Rotondo

(right) of New York kiss as Rotondo holds the couple’s daughter, Phoebe, after receiving their marriage license on May 17, 2004, in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

(Photo by William B. Plowman/Getty Images)

among the reporting on how various opponents in the state have attempted to reverse the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s decision on the legality of gay marriage, the article describes the “giddy anticipation,” “anxious disbelief,”

and “exhilaration” of couples. The article goes on to report how “Linda Lundin and Kathy Bertrand, partners for 26 years, are planning their wedding attire: white linen pants and a pastel top for Ms. Lundin, a drapey peach-and-green pants outfit for Ms. Bertrand.” When the Goodridges are interviewed in the same article, Julie narrates what is going through her mind: “I’m thinking about whether or not the shoes are going to look good with the suit I picked out . . . Is the tailor going to be done and have we ordered enough flowers and are we going to have fried calamari at the reception and how much is enough?” Explains one lesbian about to be married to her partner of 19 years,

“I feel as emotionally invested as any bride. I have the bridal jitters.”

Reports of the ceremonies performed that day contained the level of

frivolous details that have been common in traditional newspaper report-

s

ing of heterosexual weddings. For example, one gay couple was described

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as marrying “on their 8 1/2 acre Christmas tree farm in a stand of fading daffodils under an arch they had made from the ribs of a whale. The men

wore lily-of-the-valley boutonnieres and stood behind a lilac bouquet as Mr. Bourn, a town selectman, read ‘Oh Tell Me The Truth About Love’ by

W. H. Auden” (Belluck, 2004a, p. A21). Throughout these mundane report-

ing details, the similarity of a gay groom or a lesbian bride to any other heterosexual groom or bride is continuously emphasized.

When television news audiences were invited to witness in some detail a

gay or lesbian couple’s wedding ceremony, the propulsion to mimic customary heteronormative practices was even more pronounced. For example,

when the July 13, 2004,
Nightline
episode opened on the wedding ceremony of Rob Compton and Dave Wilson, the setting was of a large, formal church with elaborate arches and architectural details, packed with hundreds of guests filling even the upper balcony of the church. The two men marched slowly down the aisle to traditional wedding music, played on the harp, both of them wearing black tuxedos. The ceremonial dress, setting, and music

signified formality and tradition, with the exception of the rainbow flag hanging from the upper balcony of the church. In an emotional moment,

the female officiate, clearly choking back tears, raised her hand to the couples and began reciting the ritualistic ceremonial words beginning “by the power vested in me,” at which point the entire church erupted in applause and gave the couple a standing ovation.

Later on in the program, producers showed video clips of Julie and Hill-

ary Goodridge’s ceremony, which took place later that same afternoon. Both women wore white pantsuits and marched down the aisle of the church as

guests sang a chorus of “Here Comes the Bride.” While the full verse is inau-dible in the
Nightline
episode, the
New York Times
reported that guests sang a revised version of the traditional wedding tune: “Here comes the brides, so gay with pride, isn’t it a wonder that they somehow survived” (Bel uck, 2004a, p. A21). Iconic wedding images reinforce the validity of their ceremony: the role of the flower girl is played by their eight-year-old daughter, Annie; cameras focus in on a close-up of their rings; and a traditional wedding kiss seals their union. In the representations of both of these ceremonies, audiences are assured that this is a wedding just like any other. Except for the fact that there are two brides or two grooms, these ceremonies do not offend the culturally constructed, taken-for-granted notions of what a wedding is or what one should look like. In the case of at least two of these selected media couples—the Goodridges and the O’Donnells—one partner took the last

s

name of the other, ironically participating in a heterosexist and patriarchal n

practice historically rooted in property ownership.

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Short of the Goodridges’ revised lyrics to the wedding march, these fea-

tured ceremonies did not contain anything that resisted, questioned, or

reimagined the institution of marriage, a deliberate strategy on the part of activists to select and highlight couples and ceremonies that did not challenge conventional notions of matrimony. (Recall Samiya’s insistence that gay people are not “challenging” or “redefining” the institution of marriage.) In fact, the only aspect that marked these ceremonies as different from a traditional wedding was the prevalence of news cameras, both video and stil , and the preponderance of reporters present. It was clear that these ceremonies served not merely as intimate pronunciations of love in front of friends and family but as organized media events as well. As I detail in the following chapter, these visual representations that constructed gay marriage as
symbolical y
similar
to
heterosexual marriage contradicted news anchors’ oral scripts of gay marriage being radically
different from
traditional marriage.

It is this confrontation between sameness and difference that I return to in the book’s concluding chapter.

Conclusion: Producing Marriage as Gay Desire

By deconstructing the visual and linguistic narratives used to tell the story of gay marriage in 2003 and 2004, this chapter has probed the central question, in this “era of the visible,” in which depictions of gay and lesbian life appear with increased regularity, who and what is actually seen? This analysis has shown that, initially, only a select few were allowed entry into the conversation about marriage equality. News stories constructed these gay and lesbian

“poster couples” as “normal”: suburban, middle to upper class, Caucasian, nonthreatening in demeanor and appearance, anchored to appropriate depictions of femininity and masculinity, and already a part of a long-lasting, monogamous, child-rearing partnership. By scrutinizing the visual productions of same-sex wedding ceremonies, I highlighted how those who were selected by the media were careful not to question traditional cultural meanings of marriage or interrupt the symbolic imagery of wedding rituals.

Certainly, given the historic representations of the gay and lesbian community as promiscuous perverts and dangerous pedophiles, incapable of

committed love and unfit for family life,
any
depiction that acknowledges same-sex ceremonies and features gay families represents progress, light-years ahead of the limited portrayals of gay life that propagated even a decade ago. Returning to Carol and Kay’s call for “more exposure” to faces like theirs understandably reflects a powerful sentiment implying that in-s

creased visibility leads to greater societal acceptance. But in constructing the nl

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“ordinariness” of those gay and lesbian couples who are deemed worthy of marriage equality, news producers, through written narrative and selected imagery, also created dichotomies between those gays and lesbians who

lead “normal” lives, similar to the perceived heterosexual news audience, and those more outlandish, sexually promiscuous homosexuals who live

“alternative lifestyles” on the margins of society. In doing so, producers invoked a common discourse in the marriage debate, popular among gay

conservatives as well, that marriage is the panacea that will “tame the wild beast” of gay culture and homosexual desire. As
60 Minutes
reporter Bob Simon told audiences, “Go to the Castro today, and the conversation has

changed” (Hewitt, 2004, March 10). The video shots of banners and flags

from the gay pride parade, icons of the gay liberation movement, faded to a final image of a lone rainbow flag blowing silently in the wind. The rainbow flag represents the historic residue of a bygone era rather than a symbol of modern activism.

We must therefore consider the ways in which these legitimating discourses also regulate gay identity (Landau, 2009, p. 88). In her analysis of same-sex parenting in mainstream U.S. newspapers and newsmagazines during this

same time period, Landau concluded that these portrayals of gay family

life only worked to reinforce heterosexist notions of partnering and parenting. Moreover, news texts focused almost exclusively on the
child
of a gay or lesbian couple—who was “compulsively” reinforced as heterosexual—as

the “synecdoche and social test for gay familial life” (p. 82). Gay couples, in other words, were acceptable only if they reared straight, and appropriately masculine and feminine, children.

Likewise, the gay and lesbian couples in my news sample were positioned

as discursive defenses against dominant ideologies of homosexuality as

inherently inferior and deviant. Meanwhile, the “symbolic annihilation”

of queer and unmarried gay identities continued (Gross, 2001), and chal-

lenges to heterosexism were scant (Barnhurst, 2003; Liebler et al., 2009). Gay marriage constructed as a suburban, middle- to upper-class, whites-only

institution does little to interrupt heteronormative and classist definitions of “family values.”

The “American game of assimilation,” as Gross (2001) points out, can be

a dangerous one, winnable only if marginalized groups play by the rules

of dominant culture. Representations of gay marriages in the news—the

couples, their talk of marriage, and their ceremonies—were constructed

to appeal to a mainstream heteronormative audience. In doing so, news

s

producers tapped into heterosexist ideologies by positioning these poster n

couples deserving of marriage vis-à-vis the wider community of unmarried l

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gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals, who were implicitly cast as deviant, transgressive, and ultimately undeserving of full equality. As Walters (2001b) cautioned, public discourse surrounding the gay marriage debate “might grant visibility and acceptance to gay marrieds, but it will not necessarily challenge homophobia (or the nuclear family) itself; indeed, it might simply demonize nonmarried gays as the ‘bad gays’ (uncivilized, promiscuous, irresponsible) while it reluctantly embraces the ‘good gays’