The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media (27 page)

that of Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, who warned television audiences: s

“The wildfire will begin . . . same-sex marriage is likely to spread to all 50

n

states in the coming years.”

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In the eight years since that story aired, Senator Frist’s predication did not come to fruition—not by a long shot. However, the movement toward

marriage equality seemed to be shifting, some might argue “inevitably,” as Iowa and several states in the Northeast made moves to legalize same-sex marriages. National public opinion polls have continued to show growing

support for same-sex-marriage rights. On June 24, 2011, New York became

the sixth, the largest, and the most visible state to grant legal status to same-sex nuptials. With a 33 to 29 vote, four members of the Republican majority voted with Senate Democrats to sign the marriage bill into law. Senator Mark Grisanti of Buffalo, who had previously campaigned on an anti–gay marriage platform, told his constituents he had “agonized” over the decision before ultimately supporting the bill: “I apologize for those who feel offended. I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife”

(Confessore & Barbaro, 2011). One month later nearly 1,000 gay and lesbian couples rushed to be among the first married in New York State.

At the time of this writing, on the heels of the 2012 presidential election, the issue continues to draw controversy, heated political debate, and media headlines. Same-sex-marriage rights were up for public vote in four states in 2012, and in a historic first, voters approved measures that would legalize gay marriage. Three states—Maine, Maryland, and Washington—endorsed

same-sex marriage rights, and not through legislation or court rulings as in the past, but this time at the ballot box. As this chapter’s opening epigraph recounts, President Obama pressed for equal marriage rights in his 2013

inaugural address. In referencing the 1969 Stonewall riots, he equated the contemporary gay rights movement to the women’s movement and the civil

rights movement of the 1960s.

Two months later, the U.S. Supreme Court dove into the debate for the first time in ten years, beginning hearings on two significant gay marriage cases.

The decisions, released in June of 2013, ruled the federal Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional (
United States v. Windsor
) and reinstated legal same-sex marriages in California (
Hollingsworth v. Perry
). In covering the historic decisions, news organizations around the globe routinely featured same-sex couples celebrating, oftentimes in a teary embrace, flanked by cheering supporters and pictured with their infants and young children in tow. Nevertheless, while the Supreme Court’s DOMA decision extended federal benefits to those same-sex couples already legal y married, it left 29 state-wide bans intact. The Supreme s

Court stopped short of declaring same-sex marriage a constitutional right, and n

failed to propose any sort of federal solution to the legal patchwork of marriage l

benefits and exclusions that exist for gay and lesbian families across the U.S.

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Over a decade ago social critic Michael Warner (1999) argued in
The Trouble with Normal
that despite (and perhaps because of) our cultural fascination with gay life, the politics of sex, shame, and identity remain very much alive and well. By embracing the normalization of gay and lesbian identity as its ultimate goal, he argues that the modern gay rights movement has

become “a project for divorcing homosexuality first from sex and then from politics” (p. 96). Borrowing Warner’s axiom, I will frame the insights from this book project around “the trouble with marriage” in three distinct ways: first, how gay marriage represents a troubling confrontation with straight culture; second, how the marriage conversation was troubling for gay rights activists who sought to influence news frames and images; and finally, how media productions of gay marriage are potentially troubling for those gay and lesbian citizens—in particular those bisexual, transgender, and queer citizens—who don’t fit the “normative” mold in this new era of visibility.

Trouble for Straight America

In the 2000s same-sex marriage, first and foremost, meant trouble for

“straight America.” As the opening quotations of this chapter illustrate, as well as countless others cited in news coverage throughout this debate, gay marriage spoke to the growing anxieties felt by a heterosexual culture struggling to hold on to its traditional hierarchies. The marriage conversation in the 2000s emerged from the conditions of the unprecedented gay and lesbian visibility in the 1990s, a time period when, more generally speaking, being mainstream was boring and “safe,” and being different was cool and “edgy.”

Having a gay friend, like having a black friend, became a symbol for neoliberal tolerance. In the media, “being on the margins held a certain cultural al ure” (Becker, 2006, p. 10). But what surfaced from the rise of this cool, edgy, gay-themed media environment in the 1990s was a nation “more nervous

about the future of Straight America” (p. 5). As Becker argues, “Members of a naïve mainstream (which had long had the empowering luxury of ignor-ing what it meant to be white, male, straight, etc.) found it harder to assert the universality of their experience. They struggled to make sense of their newly exposed social positions and tried to navigate a culture where racial and gender as well as sexual identities mattered” (2006, p. 4).

Within this shifting social landscape, for many, marriage became the cultural fault line. As chapter 1 details, when it comes to bids for inclusive citizenship and social equality, marriage has been where people have historical y drawn the line. This perhaps explains the paradox in public attitudes toward gay rights s

and gay marriage. The vast majority of Americans now support a wide range of n

equal protections for gay and lesbian citizens, including domestic partnership l

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benefits, inclusion in military service, equal access to housing, employment nondiscrimination, and even adoption rights. But still only a slight majority favor same-sex-marriage rights. After al , securing marriage as an exclusively
heterosexual
institution ensures that “no matter how social y integrated gays and lesbians become, straight life and love are fundamental y different from and better than gay life and love” (Becker, 2006, p. 217).

The images that came to represent the gay marriage issue in the media—of same-sex couples donned in traditional wedding attire, exchanging rings

and vows, kissing passionately, and cheering in celebration—were a central investigative focus of this book. These visuals came to symbolize the paradox of sameness and difference, alluding to traditional norms and at the same time problematizing them. According to Davina, whose story begins this

book, her decade-long practice of “running around in wedding garb” with

her partner has been met with mixed reactions from onlookers. “People always sort of smile when they see a bride or a happy couple dressed up,” she explained. “They get it. It’s sort of transformative. So we’ve always gotten a lot of ‘Congratulations!’ when people see us. Sometimes people will give you a free meal. People are excited, they’re happy, it’s a strange thing . . . [But]

are we scaring straight people by doing this? And would we get our message across better if we ‘beiged’ it down a little bit and tried to be less threatening?”

As Davina suggests, these images of gay people all dressed up like straight marrieds represent a troubling confrontation with straight culture, because, for many, gays and lesbians threaten to “dismantle” the institution simply by claiming access to it. Pervasive media images of elated gay and lesbian couples, newly married, lay bare this confrontation. As Becker (2006) argues, “[News] photos of gay men in tuxedos and lesbians in white dresses cited the ubiquitous imagery of heteronormative wedding photographs while simultaneously queering them, producing an unsettling mix of similarity

and difference. Unsettling because, like the logic behind and coverage of gay rights issues in general, such photographs worked to simultaneously blur and sharpen the distinctions between gay people and straight people” (p. 218).

In news texts, visual representations that constructed gay marriage as

symbolically
similar
to
heterosexual marriage contradicted news anchors’ oral scripts that pronounced its radical
difference from
traditional marriage. For example, as my analysis of the July 13, 2004, episode of
Nightline
illustrates (Sievers, 2004, July 13), news producers highlighted this sameness and difference by juxtaposing the celebratory ceremonies of straight couples with those of gays and lesbians. All the while, Ted Koppel’s voice-over reminded viewers, s

“That was then, this is now.” As Suzanna Walters (2001b) and Ron Becker

n

(2006) have suggested, the media’s propensity to represent gay ceremonies l

as imitations of heterosexual marriages is not unique to news narratives. The LC

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various gay and lesbian wedding ceremonies that emerged on entertainment television in the 1990s and 2000s on shows like
Friends
,
Northern Exposure
, and
Roseanne
also mirrored and reproduced heterosexual norms.

These discourses surrounding gay marriage were troubling for straight

America not only because they stirred a debate about gays’ and lesbians’ bid for inclusive citizenship but also because they subjected marriage itself to a microscopic gaze. At a time when marriage in the United States is far more likely to fail than succeed, and men and women are delaying marriage until later into their adult lives or opting out altogether, the institution seems outmoded at best, and at worst growing obsolete. As the late Andy Rooney editorialized on
60 Minutes
(Hewitt, 2004, March 21), politicians’ hand-wringing over same-sex marriages seems misplaced. “Most Americans disapprove of gay marriage, but if Congress gets into the marriage business, it better look into all marriages, not just gay ones, because marriage is in big trouble. More than half of all marriages in the United States are ending in divorce these days. There’s so many divorces they make the wedding business look ridiculous . . . So forget making gay weddings il egal, Mr. President [George W. Bush]. If you want to make marriage more stable, make divorce il egal.”

Our culture’s debates about gay marriage carried out in the media therefore reflect and contribute to larger anxieties over an institution that appears to be fragile and falling out of favor. The conversation about marriage rights offers the
possibility
to reconceptualize our narrow heteronormative foundations of marriage and family, one that has been rooted in retrograde ideas about reproduction and hegemonic gender roles. But those gay rights activists

fighting for marriage equality in the mainstream media were forced to tread lightly, careful not to (re)define the institution in ways that would challenge traditional notions of what marriage means.

The Trouble for Activists

The marriage debate was also troubling for gay rights activists, those who initially feared battling over marriage rights in an oppositional arena like the commercial news media. Insisting that marriage was not a battle of their choosing, many of my informants argued that it was the mainstream news

media and conservative activists who propelled the issue onto the national political agenda. As chapter 2 details, for them, the “m word” was not only dangerous (potentially inciting a conservative backlash) but utterly inconceivable. Ultimately, political and journalistic pressures made talking about marriage unavoidable, and activists pursued the marriage agenda to combat s

the images and narratives of gay and lesbian life that had marked the com-n

munity as unambiguously “anti-family.”

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Debating marriage equality in the mainstream media certainly created new opportunities for activists to “reform” images of gay life and shape public discourse around an important civil rights issue. Marriage gave gay activists

“a larger microphone” in which to talk about a wide array of LGBT issues, albeit under the umbrella of relationship recognition. The issue also opened up commercialized spaces in the media and popular culture to new, and

in many ways, oppositional representations of gay and lesbian life: lesbian couples donned in white gowns exchanging rings under a flowered canopy,

or two fathers burping their newborn son.

For the most part, the “poster couples” who appeared in news stories, the ones handpicked by the activist organizations to represent the issue, were selected to appeal to mainstream news audiences. Visual representations

of the community, once centered on urban street life; dark, seedy bars; and leather festivals, were transformed in reports on the marriage issue as gay and lesbian life became domesticated in typically heteronormative ways.

Interviews with activists revealed that this was not accidental, but part of an overall media project to win the “battle to be boring,” to normalize (or, as critics might argue, “sanitize”) gay and lesbian identity for the mainstream.

In the battle over images, gay rights activists seem to have met their stated goals of presenting the new face of gay and lesbian citizenship—couples