The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media (29 page)

sections I explain how and why I approached this project as I did. The first nl

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section describes in detail the interview process, justifies the use of the in-depth interview as a mode of inquiry, discusses the selection of informants, and provides the questions that guided the interviews. The second section details the selection of the news media under study, highlights the criteria that shaped my analysis, and justifies the qualitative and quantitative approaches used in this investigation of news content.

Interviewing Gay Activists

My informants for this project represented the “gay voice” in what was constructed as a two-sided conflict: gay rights organizations in favor of same-sex marriage positioned against conservative activists who opposed it. These were the groups and the media spokespersons who were hand-selected to

serve as credible sources by major national news organizations. The informants selected for this project, then, had achieved a sense of cultural capital; their presence and visibility in news stories signified that their opinions and perspectives mattered. These were media and public relations professionals who were in a position to promote their issues, stories, and versions of gay and lesbian identity to the American public.

These interviews with leading gay and lesbian rights activists were characterized by researchers as informant interviews (Lindloff & Taylor, 2002), professionals with extensive experience in their organization or movement who have risen through the ranks and can speak knowledgeably about the

organization’s goals and strategies. They are “savvy social actors” who often provide the researcher entry into the cultural scene. These gay rights activists were generally middle- to upper-class, highly educated, located in urban centers of political and cultural power, and oftentimes had access to state-based bureaucratic institutions. In addition to being activists, they were attorneys, former senators, media executives, and psychiatrists. While a few of these respondents had other jobs outside of their activist work, most were employed full time at gay rights organizations.

The organizations represented in this study had many important similari-

ties—namely, all were entrenched in the marriage debate (whether or not they chose to be); all had a voice in national mainstream media; and all (except for the local Indianapolis activist) were located in large, urban, “progressive”

coastal cities. But these organizations also differed in important ways that distinguished their perspectives, goals, resources, outreach efforts, and strategies. For example, these groups differed based on how they defined their pris

mary role in the gay movement. Some groups were largely legal in focus, such n

as GLAD or Lambda Legal, whose primary responsibilities were in bringing l

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forth litigation and representing plaintiffs. Some were political interest groups and lobbyists, such as Log Cabin Republicans, the gay political interest group affiliated with the Republican Party, and the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Caucus, a group responsible for lobbying legislators and advocating for gay rights bills. Others were defined more by their public education efforts and media messaging, such as Freedom to Marry. Of course, categorizing groups in this way is somewhat artificial, as many of these organizations perform all of these roles; for example, the Human Rights Campaign monitors legislative efforts, crafts media and advertising campaigns, and lobbies Capitol Hill.

Organizations also varied widely in terms of size, organizational structure, financial support, funding, membership, and political access. Some groups, such as Marriage Equality USA, described themselves as more “organic” or

“grassroots,” single-issue organizations made up mostly of private citizens who desired to marry, with only a handful of professional staff and board members. Others were larger, more bureaucratical y structured, formal organizations with a large professional staff (like the Human Rights Campaign).

Other groups had formed because marriage movement leaders had left the

larger multi-issue organizations to start smaller, more single-focus groups dedicated solely to marriage equality (such as Freedom to Marry). As such, these organizations had varying goals for the LGBT community, different

ideas about marriage equality and whether or not the issue should be foregrounded, different strategies for their entry into the public conversation, different personal motivations for working in the movement, and different notions about how best to “sell” gay marriage—in other words, how to make gay marriage palatable for a national news audience. These varying perspectives in turn provided a rich platform for my analysis.

As I indicated earlier, I conducted interviews across two different time periods of intense legal and political activity surrounding same-sex marriage: in 2005 and again in 2010. For the first round of interviews, in 2005, my initial content analysis of television news stories in 2003–2004 revealed a total of 17 activists representing 13 national gay rights organizations. After recording a list of sources from gay rights organizations who were cited in national news stories, and securing approval from my institution’s human subject review board, I sent potential informants an email inviting them to participate in the study, outlining its purpose and their role in project.

I then followed up by phone, sometimes making several calls, in order

to answer any questions they had and set up a specific meeting time that would work with their schedule. The informed consent paperwork was

then sent by mail or email to each informant so he or she would have the s

opportunity to review the paperwork prior to the interview. At the time of nl

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the face-to-face interview, the informant was invited to read the document again, ask questions, and sign in the appropriate space indicating whether or not they wished to remain anonymous.

While the majority of the informants I contacted agreed to be interviewed, others did not return my phone calls or respond to my emails. Still others declined. Some indicated they were not available, and others said they were wary of being included in the research project. Those working for legal organizations were the most hesitant to be interviewed, as they were concerned about confidentiality and the risk of offering information that could be used misleadingly. Still others were undoubtedly unlikely to trust an unknown researcher with privileged information about the organization or its efforts.

The fact that several refused to be interviewed or did not reply to my repeated requests is not surprising considering that media and public relations professionals tend to have busy work lives and at times inflexible schedules.

A few were called away last minute from a scheduled interview with me to attend a press conference or meeting. Considering I had no prior access to or relationship with the activist community—I was a PhD student at the time of the initial interviews, and an associate professor during the second round of interviews—I was overwhelmingly pleased with the level of participation.

Of the 17 activist sources cited in the initial round of news stories I analyzed, I was able to interview 11 of them (see list of informants below).

Not surprisingly, it was easier to garner access during the second round of interviews, in 2010, as I already had established a relationship with many of my informants. By this time, as I outlined in the introduction to this book, the terrain had shifted rather significantly. Five additional states and the nation’s capital had legalized same-sex marriage since the initial time period of my study, and the tone of news coverage and the shift in public opinion showed increased support for marriage equality. I wanted to return to those same informants I had interviewed in 2005 in order to understand how they made sense of these events and how they would characterize the seemingly growing public and political support. I wanted to understand how their goals and strategies had changed, what their persistent and emergent challenges were, what the stories were that they “pitched” now, and how they evaluated and assessed media coverage to date.

I was able to revisit most of the activist informants from my previous study.

In a few cases the original informant was no longer with the organization, but I was able to speak to the individual who replaced that informant and thus had a similar role in the organization. There was only one organization s

I was unable to follow up with, the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political nl

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Caucus based in Boston, because my informant was out of town at the time of my visit and we were unable to find a convenient time to reschedule.

Additionally, through an analysis of national news coverage from 2008

to 2010, I was able to identify several new voices that had emerged. Not surprisingly, new organizations had formed over that time period and had become major players in the national media scene, organizations like Equality California that formed to defeat Proposition 8. In addition, other legacy organizations like PFLAG that had once been largely inactive on the marriage issue had taken a more forceful stance and became a highly visible national media source. Between May 2010 and January 2011, I again traveled to New York City, Washington, D.C., Boston, and San Francisco to interview these informants. I conducted 19 interviews during this time frame: 8 of these with informants I had interviewed previously (or that informant’s “replacement,”

who filled that same role) and 11 with additional informants who were either new to the debate or who had emerged as visible spokespersons for marriage equality over that five-year period.

As Marianne Paget (1983) writes, “What distinguishes the in-depth inter-

view is that the answers given continuously inform the evolving conversation

. . . It collects stories, asides, hesitation, expressions of feeling and spontane-ous associations” (as cited in Lindloff & Taylor, 2002, p. 172). Since my aim was to allow social movement actors to characterize a complex relationship with media coverage and reporters, I devised an interview schedule (included in this appendix) to keep the protocol flexible enough to allow for spontaneous discussion and follow-up questions but still ensure that consistent questions were asked of everyone.

Interviews with respondents took place in coffee shops, office buildings, college campuses, and gay bars. Most were one-on-one, individual, face-to-face interviews, with the exception of three that were conducted over the phone. In these instances informants were critical figures who were travel-ing at the time of my visit, or who were called away for a last-minute press conference, so we had to schedule and talk via phone. All but three of my informants agreed to be taped and identified, although at times some informants specified that certain threads of conversation were “off the record.” In addition to recording and transcribing interviews, I took extensive field notes during our conversations. When I wasn’t able to audio-record the interview, I took extensive field notes. Interviews ranged in time from 45 minutes to 3

hours, with most interviews lasting between 1 to 1 1/2 hours.

I began by asking informants how they came to be personally involved

as activists in their organizations (see interview schedule in this appendix).

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I asked how their organization had come to define marriage equality as a goal and why they thought the issue of gay marriage had become such a hot topic in the media and in our public culture. I also asked them about media strategies—what were the ways they tried to advocate for gay marriage and educate the public about their cause? I wanted to learn more about the specific stories activists used to communicate about the issue and then to evaluate those strategies—which ones were successful and which ones failed?

I also invited activists to evaluate their relationship with the news media and to critique news coverage of their community more generally and the

gay marriage issue specifical y. I viewed activists as participants “in a cultural conversation in which the media are ongoing participants as well” (Press & Cole, 1999, p. 3). Depending on the conversational flow, I often used media examples of same-sex-marriage coverage to spark dialogue and invite critique. I asked respondents to look at stories and images from news magazines and newspaper articles, because I was interested in activists’ responses to media discourses about gay marriage. Finally, I asked them if (and how)

their organization had changed in response to the marriage debate. In the second round of interviews, depending on whether or not I had previously interviewed the informant, my focus was on how the issue had evolved over the last several years, how their goals and strategies had changed, what new stories had emerged, and what reporters covering the marriage equality issue had gotten right and what they had gotten wrong.

I personally transcribed the first round of audio-recorded interviews; the second round of interviews was transcribed by a private transcriptionist.

All told, the interviews generated a vast amount of data, over 300 pages to analyze. I listened to the interviews and read through the transcriptions several times, at first as independent interviews and eventually in relation to each other. During the interview process, and again upon listening to the recordings and rereading the transcripts, I identified several themes that began to emerge. For example, what first struck me was how most activists discussed marriage equality as an issue they were reluctant to pursue in the news media, which I was not expecting. I also noticed key differences in how activists talked about marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples—some