The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media (21 page)

to straight audiences (Arlene, Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Caucus).

News personnel relied on civil rights framing to focus on issues of discrimination, fair and equal treatment of all citizens, and the rights and protections that marriage equality affords gay and lesbian couples. News organizations made deliberate attempts—through the language reporters used, the social actors they cited, and the imagery they created and selected—to link gay marriage with the civil rights movement of African Americans, specifical y to articulate with the battle to legalize interracial marriage in the 1960s. Some stories compared the court decisions that legalized gay marriage with other “milestone”

cases like
Brown v. Board of Education,
which ended racial segregation in public schools. The May 18, 2004, edition of the
New York Times
ran a front-page story the day after Massachusetts became the first state to al ow same-sex marriage, writing, “Gay rights activists hailed this day, which fell on the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision
Brown v. Board of Education
, as an occasion that evoked the triumphs—and the social vindication—of the civil rights era”

(Bel uck, 2004a, p. A1). Stories employing the civil rights frame equated discrimination against gays and lesbians with discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities. In a rare instance of citing a person of color speaking on behalf of gay rights, one television news story included a sound bite from an African American congresswoman saying she knew the pain of discrimination and therefore could not vote to ban same-sex marriages.

Social and political supporters of same-sex marriage cited in the media

drew connections between the fight for marriage equality and previous civil rights struggles, such as women’s suffrage and interracial marriage. One recently married lesbian interviewed on
60 Minutes
said, “For me it feels like the option to get on the front of the bus as a lesbian . . . as opposed to the back of the bus” (Hewitt, 2004, March 10). Equal rights framing was a predominant strategy used by marriage proponents, especially by straight allies. Consider what San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom told
Nightline’
s Ted Koppel to explain why he defied California law to issue same-sex marriage licenses: “In 1958, there was polls showing as high as 96 percent of whites in this country were opposed to interracial marriages. It took ’til 1967, in
Louving v. Virginia
, to end that practice in 16 states, to allow blacks to marry whites, whites to marry Asians and the like. If we wait for the right time, we’ll never advance s

the cause for any discrimination in this country” (Sievers, 2004, July 13).

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These civil rights discourses referred to gays and lesbians as minorities without equal rights. For example, one article from
USA Today
reported how the same-sex-marriage debate was moving into the workplace as gay

couples demanded the same health insurance and other benefits that were

offered to married couples. As one recently married lesbian told
USA Today,

“I’m going to continue to speak with them [my employers] about why they

don’t offer us the same rights. Now that I’m married, I’m more aware of all the rights we’ve been missing out on” (Armour, 2004).

Beyond the use of language and sourcing, news producers selected specific imagery to associate marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples with the struggle to legalize interracial marriages. The very presence of mixed-race couples used in photographs and television news stories alluded to the similarity between the movements. Indeed, it is telling that the only time we saw gay and lesbian people of color represented on the marriage issue was as part of a mixed-race couple. Often their statements and story framing made no linguistic references to interracial marriage, but the very use of their images served as visual reminders of the historic (and, for some, present-day) social taboos surrounding interracial marriage.

As I argued earlier in this chapter, the issue of same-sex marriage was

largely framed within the standard journalistic frame of “conflict.” Other framing devices used to tell the story confined the issue within “official” institutions of power that have historically criminalized and marginalized the gay community—politics (political), the courts and the police (legal), and the church (religious). Still, gay rights activists appeared to have met their stated objectives in promoting the issue as a civil rights issue or, alternately, as a love story. While the activist-preferred frames of civil rights and romantic love did not dominate in news stories about gay marriage, they were employed in more than half and more than a quarter of news stories, respectively. Again, the presence of these frames does not indicate that they were dominant, but almost always used in conjunction with several other frames. Nevertheless, the prevalence of both civil rights and romantic love framing indicates at the very least that activists were able to influence the story structures and encoded meanings of news narratives.

Conclusion: Gay Marriage Packaged

for Prime-Time Audiences

By drawing our attention to the routine practices journalists used to produce s

the issue of same-sex marriage, this chapter revealed how media attention n

condensed the debate to a two-sided conflict that silenced moderate and

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Gay Marriage Goes Prime-Time

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secular perspectives. Media coverage also reduced the broader gay rights agenda to a single-issue movement. This media analysis indicates that while gays and lesbians—almost always shown as couples—were visually resonant

in news stories, they were rarely given the opportunity to offer their own perspectives on this critical community issue.

In reporting on the gay marriage debate, the news media sustained the

long-standing pattern of imbalance in the power, prestige, and prominence of the sources they cited (Alwood, 1996; Bennet, 2000). Reporters’ reliance on unbalanced sourcing not only privileged but also rendered credible and innocuous insidious anti-gay imagery and historic homophobic discourses.

Analysis of the sources cited indicated how the debate was restricted to conventional y “straight” perspectives, continuing to grant power and prominence to authoritative (and often oppositional) sources from legal, religious, and political communities. While gay and lesbian couples and gay rights activists were consistently cited in news reports, political figures, conservative activists, religious figures, and the president himself dominated the debate and were al owed more time to speak than were gay and lesbian citizens. Those couples, the ones who had the most at stake, were given the least amount of time to tell their story. Gay and lesbian citizens were given a shorter sound bite, speaking less often and granted less time, than other sources speaking on their behalf, such as straight allies and gay rights activists.

As these findings reveal, gay and lesbian people in the news continued to appear more as “image bite” than “sound bite” (Bucy & Grabe, 2007; Grabe

& Bucy, 2009). For the most part, the couples who served as the dominant visual focus of news stories contributed little to the linguistic content of the stories. In these television narratives, gay and lesbian couples seem to be granted the status of visual ornamentation. They are largely seen and not heard, and audiences are told very little about them. In the vast majority of these news reports, 82 percent of the time, the couples remained unidentified.

Considering the power of these visual narratives, this analysis was intensely concerned with who was represented, how they appeared, and what they

were shown doing. On this issue the community was no longer “othered”

or “exoticized” in stereotypical ways (such as gay bar life or pride parades), but instead was shown visually conforming to dominant, normative definitions of marriage and family. This suggests that in the battle over images, gay rights activists seemed to have met their stated goals of presenting the new face of gay and lesbian people in America: couples getting married, raising their children, or simply walking their dogs in what appeared to be a quiet, middle-class suburban neighborhood. Gay and lesbian people in the news

s

almost exclusively appeared as couples. Their visual representations, once nl

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centered on urban street life; dark, seedy bars; and leather festivals, were arguably transformed in news stories about marriage, and gay and lesbian life became domesticated in typically heteronormative ways.

Therefore, the strategic communications and public relations arm of the

gay rights movement, still in its relative infancy, appeared to have met its stated objectives in at least two ways. First, although proving a causal relationship is beyond the scope of this work, activists seemed to be successful in framing the debate principally as a civil rights issue and secondarily as a story of love. These findings suggest that activists who sought to control how the gay marriage issue was defined in the news media were able to assert their preferred framing devices.

Second, by promoting certain visuals over others, and producing their

own imagery to accompany news stories, activists were able to provide new,

“reformed” representations of gay and lesbian life. But activists also spoke of the continued struggle to visual y represent the diversity of their community in news reports. According to some, it was difficult to line up racially diverse voices in the gay marriage conversation, as many people of color in their community remained closeted. Interestingly, media analysis indicated that while couples of color (where both partners were from a racial minority group) did not speak at all in television news reports, interracial couples spoke nearly twice as long in sound bites as did their Caucasian counterparts. This finding suggests that news producers privileged the perspectives of biracial couples, potential y al uding to previous civil rights struggles for interracial marriage.

As activists recognized, doing battle over marriage in the mainstream

media meant conforming to the rules of news making. Conflict-driven, sensationalistic coverage forced activists to package their message into condensed sound bites for increasingly fractured news audiences. As chapter 5 details, these framing strategies and sourcing patterns from 2003 to 2004 set the stage for future reporting in 2008–2010, ultimately leading to internal debates and external conflicts in the wake of losing Proposition 8.

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5. Speaking Out

Representing Gay Perspectives in News Discourse

On November 6, 2008, as CNN’s Anderson Cooper described, “anger spil ed

into the streets” as demonstrators protested the passage of California’s Proposition 8 (Doss, 2008, November 6). By a slim margin, 52 percent of the state’s voters approved the controversial ballot measure that reversed the earlier state supreme court decision, once again making same-sex marriages in

California illegal. The Prop 8 measure represented the most expensive campaign outside of the presidential contest and set a new record for spending on a social policy initiative. The “Yes on 8” campaign, seeking to ban gay marriages in the state, raised $39.9 million; Prop 8 opponent groups (the “No on 8” campaign) raised $43.3 million.

Alongside the victory of former Illinois state senator Barack Obama, U.S.

news media fixed their attention on the passage of Proposition 8, what my activist informants described as a monumental loss for the gay rights movement. Mainstream news outlets led the evening broadcasts with protester

footage of angry crowds shouting in unison, “Equal Rights,” “No more H8!”

and “Don’t ask for equality. Demand it.” That evening, CNN opened its newscast with an amateur video of police officers dragging a protester across a concrete sidewalk and pummeling the activist with sticks in the middle of the street. CNN’s Cooper solemnly described the scene: “People are taking to the streets angry tonight over having their chance to marry be taken away.”

With reportedly half of the “Yes on 8” funds raised by a campaign orga-

nized by the Mormon Church, many protests targeted the Church of Jesus

Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In Los Angeles activists blocked off part of Santa Monica Boulevard, chanting, “Shame on you! Shame on you!” outside the

s

Mormon headquarters there. Video and still photographs featured protester nl

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signage such as “Mormon Hate Leave Our State,” “Church of Latter Day Hate,”

and “Take your magic undies off my civil rights.”

The Prop 8 passage, of course, coincided with the victory of the country’s first African American presidential candidate, and pundits and journalists alike immediately began to make connections between the two events, ban-dying about the “70 percent” statistic. With a high percentage of African American voters turning out to support Obama, and a reported 70 percent

of them voting for the ban on same-sex marriage rights, reporters as well as political analysts were quick to attribute the gay movement’s loss to the Obama victory.

For those activists working inside the movement, losing the California

ballot initiative was not only “shocking” but also, as my informant Patrick put it, “a lost opportunity of historical proportions, and it’ll be a lot harder to win again in the future.” For some, the defeat was a wake-up call for the movement, as “a lot of gay people repented of their complacency and their failure to get engaged [in the movement].” As Evan explained it, “There are many people, particularly young people—gay as well as non-gay—who had