The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media (22 page)

grown up in an era of, ‘We’re winning.’ And, oh, my God, we didn’t win. And in California.”

The Prop 8 vote—and the myriad legislative twists and turns that fol-

lowed—served as a catalyst that propel ed the same-sex-marriage controversy into the media spotlight once again, this time within fluctuating political contexts and shifting public understandings of the issue. Moreover, these battles waged over Proposition 8 in California and Question 1 in Maine the following year ultimately led to tensions over media representations and campaign strategies. In the view of several of my informants, movement

leaders had shot themselves in the foot. Gay rights activists faced internal conflicts over the role of gay couples in news stories, the reliance on “straight allies” as spokespersons, and the use of images in campaign materials and media narratives.

In this chapter I report on the findings from activist interviews I conducted in 2010 and 2011, which included a return to many of the informants I spoke with in 2005. I interviewed a total of 20 individuals during this time period, including representatives from nine additional organizations that had become prominent voices in national news coverage since 2005: Lambda Legal; the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation; Marriage Equality New York; the Victory Fund; Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance; Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays; Equality California; National Center for s

Lesbian Rights; and the Family Equality Council. I conducted and analyzed n

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in 2008, in order to reveal how media narratives, movement strategies, and activist perspectives evolved over time.

For comparative purposes, I selected a similar sample of news stories for this time period, from 2008 through 2010, with an emphasis on prominent, large-circulation news magazines, television news transcripts, and leading television evening news programs. In total this analysis included 43 articles from the print edition of national news magazines
Time, Newsweek,
and
U.S.

News & World Report
(before it ceased its print edition); 20 television transcripts from the evening news broadcasts of NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN; and

an additional 28 video telecasts of network evening news programs from the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (for a total of 108 minutes of television news coverage). I employed textual analysis to examine the journalistic devices that produced dominant meanings of the controversial issue, including the prevalent frames, sourcing patterns, photographic and graphic images, moving images, voice-over narration, and visual representations of married couples and the LGBT community more broadly.

Since gay marriage had first captured the public imagination in 2003 and 2004, coverage of the issue had evolved considerably: gay marriage was no longer particularly novel, and it was no longer an abstraction. As chapter 1 recounts, this time period underwent a tremendous amount of political

and legislative transformations. At the start of this project in 2003, only one state—Massachusetts—had legalized gay marriages. By 2011 five additional states—Iowa, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Vermont, and New York, as

well as the nation’s capital, had legalized marriage for same-sex couples.

National public opinion polls continued to show growing support for gay

marriage. Most informants in 2010 discussed the maturation of the issue in the press as a “tremendous amount of progress” in a relatively short period of time. Moreover, these continuing battles, whether won or lost, had, as Evan put it, fueled the movement for marriage equality by pushing “the

conversation and the understanding and the center of gravity politically forward.” Citing the “numbers of non-gay people who have taken this on

as their cause,” Evan and several other activists indicated that they were energized by the momentum.

Nevertheless, the evolving journalistic lenses for communicating the story also presented new challenges for the movement. As this chapter highlights, despite an overall more favorable tone and nuanced coverage of the issue, activists faced problematic framing devices that unfairly pitted communities of color against the LGBT community. Media outlets continued to look to religious leaders as “obvious” oppositional sources on gay rights. Furthermore, s

as interviews with movement leaders indicated, internal disagreements over nl

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chapter five

how best to represent pro-gay perspectives in the media and gain support from the “moveable middle” divided the movement.

A Shift in Attitude:

A More “Favorable,” “Pro-Gay” Tone

From an activist perspective, journalistic attitudes shifted as the issue matured in public discourse. In the mid-1990s and into the early 2000s, coverage of the issue was seductively novel, and as chapter 4 argues, sensationalistic, following what Kate referred to as a “freak show mentality.” Gay marriage

“seemed like an anathema to many of the reporters covering it.” Gay marriage wasn’t just an abstraction; it was absurd. As Kate explained, “These weren’t seen as real relationships or enduring families. There wasn’t any sense that the reporter covering the stories saw themselves reflected in what they were covering. There was this sort of alien feature to it.”

As the issue evolved in news discourses and in the larger public sphere, however, these standard journalistic lenses of novelty and deviance were less applicable in coverage of the gay marriage issue than they had been five or ten years earlier. The movement’s project to mainstream and normalize marriage equality worked to some extent because those images and narratives of same-sex nuptials had become so ubiquitous. Evan explained it this way: “Five states have marriage. They haven’t been washed away. There have been no locusts. Their divorce rates are the lowest in the country. Families are thriving. Gays didn’t use up the marriage licenses. So people can now see with their own eyes that the scare tactics and the claims are just not true.”

In 2010 and 2011, my activist informants argued that the changes in the tone of the coverage came from issue maturation; the American public had had time to “get used” to the idea, eliminating the relative “absurdity” and “default opposition” in many people’s minds. By 2010 gay marriage was no longer a foreign construct. Michael explained, “There are a couple of things striking about it from a coverage perspective [in 2010]. One is it looked so normal. There were two people standing up in front of a crowd. There’s a minister. There’s some flowers. And, frankly, it’s something we’ve worked real y hard to achieve.”

One of the most significant shifts in coverage was in the declining role of oppositional sources. In much of the early coverage surrounding the passage of Proposition 8 in California, for example, it was gay marriage opponent groups who were marginalized. Commonly, spokespersons for conservative

groups were given short shrift: a four- to five-second sound bite in a two-s

minute-long story. In this time period, as opposed to previous coverage in n

2003–2004, reports nearly exclusively
began
with the “gay voice,” foreground-l

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ing gay and lesbian couples, gay rights activists, allies, and even supportive politicians (who were largely absent from the debate in 2004). Gay marriage opponent groups still maintained a presence in news stories, but their perspectives were often positioned at the end of the story, sometimes given the last word but often sidelined.

As one example, the May 15, 2008,
CBS Evening News
coverage highlights an overall celebratory tone in reporting on the California Supreme Court’s decision that, at least temporarily, reinstated legal marriage for same-sex couples (Kaplan, 2008, May 15). The story opened on a large crowd of gay and lesbian partners, including several plaintiff couples, cheering and happily proclaiming before news crews, “Now I can finally marry my partner of 15

years!” and “We can’t wait to get married.” The story focused empathetically on the plight of gay and lesbian couples who have been navigating the legal twists and turns of marriage over the past several years. Producers cut to a shot from 2004 of one hopeful couple standing in line when the county

clerk’s office was ordered to stop issuing marriage licenses. The lesbian couple’s disappointment was palpable; they cried out. At the end of the story, a leader from the oppositional Protect Marriage organization was asked by the reporter, “What’s wrong with legalizing gay marriages in California?” In a three-second sound bite, the leader responded by simply saying, “The court has overstepped its bounds.”

Most stories repeated this pattern, beginning with couples celebrating outside the courthouse en masse when the decision was announced, screaming, shouting, and jumping up and down amid a sea of supporters and television news cameras. Oppositional perspectives are acknowledged but appear more as journalistically obligated afterthoughts tacked on to the end of the story.

Similarly, in the round of coverage surrounding the passage of Prop 8 six months later, opponent groups were ostensibly overshadowed by pro-gay perspectives such as disappointed couples, shocked but determined LGBT activists, and even supportive politicians and legislators. This is not to imply that gay marriage opponent groups were silenced. On the contrary, as the next section highlights, oppositional rhetoric became increasingly heated as the news cycle continued. But in this round of coverage, these groups were granted less time to offer their opinions, and their perspectives were typical y placed deeper into the story, more in a defensive posture rather than an offensive one.

This shift in tone represents a potential reversal in sourcing patterns. As chapter 4 highlighted, in 2004 the debate was dominated by conventionally

“straight,” often anti-gay, perspectives such as conservative groups and opposing political leaders. By 2010 the movement leaders and spokespersons I s

interviewed, many of whom had been working on this issue for decades in

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WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA: Same-sex-marriage supporters listen to speeches

during a rally to celebrate the ruling to overturn Proposition 8 on August 4, 2010.

A federal judge overturned California’s controversial Proposition 8, a same-sex-marriage ban, finding it unconstitutional. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

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the press, referred to this overal “pro-gay” tone in coverage as a “sea change.”

Gay rights activists and media relations experts argued that over time their work to humanize the issue, employing the largely assimilatory strategies discussed in chapter 3, influenced journalistic attitudes and narratives. As Kate explained, “[Eventual y] the reporters covering the story are like, ‘Okay, remove the sexual orientation element and this is my next-door neighbor.

These are my cousins. This is my daughter and her husband.’ If you can get the media starting to identify, then they tell the story in a way that all of a sudden makes it not seem like a freak show but makes it seem like . . . ‘This family is like other families.’”

Additionally, professional gay rights organizations themselves took more of a backseat in news coverage. Their relative absence as sources reflects a shift in media coverage and movement strategy (Barnhurst, 2003). Overall my activist informants received fewer media requests to do talk-show-style debates, the kind of interviews that prevailed in the earlier round of coverage, and were less inclined to grant those requests. Several activists like Kate and Cheryl told me they now avoid doing debate-style interviews, especially on “conservative media” broadcasts like the Christian radio program
Focus
on the Family
, refusing to engage in disputes over whether gay people are

“sinners.” Activists strategically focused less on “talking heads” and more on the people directly affected by marriage laws, sending reporters to couples and families when media requests were received. As Marissa, a gay rights attorney, said, “If our [litigation] clients are quoted, it is a successful story.”

Despite an increasingly favorable tone, many informants pointed out how

mainstream news coverage stil often adopted the language of the far right and failed to investigate what they referred to as “bogus claims” from the other side. As I explain in this next section, while opponent groups were getting less time and space in the news, their claims and rhetoric were more heated, controversial, and vitriolic. As Evan explained, “The anti-gay forces, realizing they’re losing, have, in their—one hopes—last throes, really ratcheted up their game,” building a vast infrastructure to channel money into anti-gay causes and raising tens of millions of dollars in California and Maine to pass restrictive gay marriage measures. This strategy of targeting and circulating messages to narrower but more attuned viewers was made ever more possible by the increasing polarization of news audiences.