The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media (4 page)

of unprecedented visibility for gays and lesbians in the news and popular culture, what cultural studies scholars have dubbed “the era of the visible”

(Becker, 2006; Gross, 2001; Walters, 2001a). From countless television hits like
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,
Modern Family,
and
The L Word,
to snl

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cable channels that promise “all gay, all the time” (LOGO), to popular “out”

celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres, who graced the cover of
People
magazine with her bride, Portia DeRossi, America appears to be in the midst of a “gay moment” (Becker, 2006).

However, the rise in entertainment appeal and the recognition of gays

and lesbians as a budding consumer market has not necessarily challenged homophobia or worked to combat heterosexual privilege. As a line of critical cultural work has argued (Alwood, 1996; Barnhurst, 2003; Becker, 2006; Gross, 2001; Sender, 2004; Walters, 2001a), gay and lesbian visibility in the media is paradoxical, simultaneously symbolizing “the sign of social decay and the chic flavor of the month” (Walters, 2001a, p. 14). Despite the great critical and commercial success of gay-themed programming like
Ellen
and
Wil & Grace
in the 1990s, and
Queer as Folk
and
The L Word
in the 2000s, social and civil rights struggles for gay and lesbian citizens have continued.

Anti-gay legislative measures, like the passage of the federal Defense of Marriage Act and the dozens of state bans on gay marriage, have proliferated.

Hate crimes against the gay community continue to rise despite the explosion of gay images in entertainment media.

Building on this growing body of work (Aarons, 2003; Alwood, 1996;

Becker, 2006; Bennet, 2000; Gross, 2001; Keller & Stratyner, 2006; Sender, 2004; Walters, 2001a, 2001b), my look at the gay marriage debate in the news is first and foremost dedicated to studying the politics of representation, which is concerned not only with
who gets seen
in the media and popular culture but also “what it
means
to be seen after all” (Ciasullo, 2001, p. 605).

Work from feminist and queer theorists has shown us how the mass media

and popular culture have historically served as powerful and instrumental sites for regulating the boundaries of gendered and sexual identities, what it means to be “male” or “female,” “straight” or “gay.” Since media representations are always a part of larger hegemonic power structures, marginal groups must conform to the rules of dominant culture to gain
visibility,
often mistaken as
acceptance.
Constructions of gendered, raced, classed, and sexual identities in the news and popular culture operate within an overall set of power relations that privilege reproduction and heterosexuality (Rubin, 1989).

“To be sure, representation promises visibility, but visibility means not only that one is present but that one is being watched”; inevitably, “certain images get singled out as watchable” (Ciasullo, 2001).

As this line of work reveals, images of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in the media, consistent with other marginalized s

groups, were virtually nonexistent a mere half century ago. Gay issues, now n

routinely front-page news, were considered “unfit to print” 60 years ago by l

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America’s widely read newspapers and magazines. When representations

did begin to emerge, they perpetuated a host of anti-gay stereotypes. In
Straight News
Edward Alwood (1996) shows how, much like early film and television, gays and lesbians emerged in the news as objects of derision and scorn: sexual perverts on par with child molesters and rapists, mentally de-ranged criminals, immoral sinners, and as a threat to the social order. Gays have also been routinely constructed as victims of abuse and disease—first as sufferers of mental illness in the 1950s and eventually as victims of the human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/

AIDS) in the 1980s—trapped against their will in a dangerous and corrupt lifestyle. From underreporting the numbers at gay rights marches by relying on “official” police estimates rather than those of organizers, to trivializing the 1969 Stonewall riots, scholars have suggested that mainstream news organizations have historically participated in disparaging and marginalizing gay activist efforts (Alwood, 1996; Gross & Woods, 1999). Reporting on gay and lesbian issues has inevitably been colored by what Alwood (1996) calls a “heterosexual assumption,” since newsrooms have historically been run by white, middle-class, heterosexual men.

Beginning in the 1940s, when homosexuality emerged as a topic of media

reports, gay identity was characterized as a threat to national security and as a mental disorder. News stories centered on army regulations to forbid gay recruits from serving during World War II (Bennet, 2000). In another widely cited example, in the 1950s “homosexuality became synonymous with communism” during McCarthy-era concerns over communists and “perverts”

infiltrating top government agencies (Gross & Woods, 1999, citing a report in the
New York Times,
April 19, 1950). One of the first television appearances by gay men was the 1967 hour-long documentary “The Homosexual” hosted

by CBS’s Mike Wallace. Famously, while the program excluded lesbians altogether, the gay men who did appear were hidden behind strategically placed potted plants, their voices disguised as they confessed their “sickness” to television audiences (Gross & Woods, 1999, p. 350). In 1969 the riots protesting the police raid of the Stonewall Inn were hard to ignore, as many attribute these events to igniting the gay liberation movement. Yet the
New York Times
buried coverage of the riots in a brief article on page 33, while the
New York
Post
sensationalized the protests with the headline “Homo Nest Raided!

Queen Bees Stinging Mad” (Alwood, 1996).

This sort of underreporting and misrepresentation was tied largely to the fact that LGBT journalists remained closeted in the newsroom, fearful of the repercussions of coming out in a discriminatory workplace environ-s

ment (Alwood, 1996; Leibler et al., 2009). The widespread devastation of nl

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the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, however, forced many LGBT reporters out

of the closet. The AIDS crisis was initially ignored by the mainstream press when the disease was thought to be contained to marginalized subcultures.

Eventually coverage routinely characterized the gay population as “walk-

ing time bombs,” an at-risk group that threatened to spread their plague to the rest of society’s “innocent victims” (Edward Albert, as cited in Gross & Woods, 1999, p. 397).

Over the past two decades, gay and lesbian citizens and spokespersons

have appeared openly on the news with regularity. However, some activists argue that contemporary journalistic filming of the community, which shoots subjects from the back, hiding their faces from view, imbues homosexuality with an element of shame (see discussion in chapter 2). Even in the 1990s, when news stories began to focus more on public policy and civil rights

issues like serving in the military, job discrimination, and hate crimes legislation, tired stereotypical images and exoticized representations lingered in the media. “For too many years when gay men and lesbians appeared on

the nightly news, their lives were illustrated by woefully archaic film clips of seedy gay bars or seminaked parade revelers. Even through the late 1990s it used to amaze me that journalists could yammer about employment legislation or ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ while showing film clips of drag queens in hot pink beehive hairdos and spiked heels” (Jacobs, 2004, p. 72).

Increased media attention on gay civil rights struggles has been a prominent component of this contemporary era of visibility. In the past decade, several book-length volumes have interrogated the cultural, political, and economic impulses of the 1990s and 2000s that produced this rise in gay-themed programming (Becker, 2006; Gross, 2001; Walters, 2001a). As Su-

zanna Walters argues in
Al the Rage
(2001a), gay and lesbian identity has moved from invisibility to that of public spectacle. Although shows like
Ellen
and
Wil & Grace
offered more varied representations than in the past, these depictions were constructed to make homosexuality more palatable

to a straight audience rather than questioning the values of a heteronormative society (Battles & Hilton-Murrow, 2002; Dow, 2001). As with other marginalized groups, these programs situated gayness within the “safe and familiar popular culture conventions” of the situation comedy (Battles & Hilton-Murrow, 2002, p. 87). In other words, gay and lesbian identity has been written into a straight world, with representations largely crafted to appeal to a heterosexual culture (Clark, 1995; Kates, 1999).

Moreover, consumerist media representations have perpetuated an image

s

of the LGBT community within a narrow range of discourses about gender,

n

race, class, and sexuality. As Larry Gross (2001) argues, “Gay people did l

not . . . ascend from the pariah status of criminal, sinner, and pervert to the LC

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respectable categories of voting bloc and market niche without playing the familiar American game of assimilation” (p. xvi). To be gay in the media has meant you are young, white, and wealthy, oftentimes male, severed from the larger LGBT community, and removed from queer politics.

For example, in the late 1990s the popular ABC sitcom
Ellen
(1994–1998) featured the first leading lesbian character on mainstream television. Critics celebrated Ellen DeGeneres’s coming out, both as herself and as Ellen Morgan, her character on the show, as a watershed moment for gay and lesbian representation. As Dow (2001) argues, however, DeGeneres’s coming out was anchored to heteronormative power relationships that demanded imposed

conformity to her straight viewing audience. The character Ellen Morgan’s coming out had to abide by certain rules of gay and lesbian representation, rules that make homosexuality less threatening to dominant culture: she

was largely desexualized, as physical contact with another woman was rarely shown, and she was apolitical, as her coming out was personal and divorced from any sort of LGBT political movement. Ellen Morgan comes out in a

straight world, isolated from a larger LGBT community. Her gay “confession”

was presented as a “problem” for straight culture, her family, and friends.

Much like
The Cosby Show
was written for the comfort of white audiences,
Ellen
was crafted to appeal to straight audiences (Dow 2001). Nevertheless, ABC pulled the show from the air in 1998, citing declining ratings and increased pressure from conservative groups about the program’s gay content.

Likewise,

Will & Grace
(1998–2006), NBC’s popular sitcom about the relationship between a gay male lawyer and his best friend, a hetero female interior designer, was lauded as boundary-breaking. The series contained not one, but two gay male leads, who performed markedly different gay personas—Will was presented as more masculine, serious, and “straight,” while Jack was presented as stereotypically feminine, flighty, and catty. However, as Kathleen Battles and Wendy Hilton-Murrow (2002) point out, this “gay” show operated within heteronormative power structures. The relationships were organized along heterosocial pairings; the male/female couplings of Will and Grace, and of Jack and Karen, were key to the show’s logics. Like
Ellen,
the show foregrounded interpersonal relationships over larger political aims. Wil ’s coming out was presented almost exclusively as a problem for Grace, devoid of a critique of the larger systemic homophobia at work.

This scholarship points to the potentially dangerous downside of in-

creased media attention: that visibility comes at a price, and that it is often sorely mistaken for cultural acceptance and inclusive citizenship (Clark, 1995; Dow, 2001; Fejes, 2000; Gross, 2001; Walters, 2001a, 2001b). Media s

narratives celebrate a post–gay rights era, assuming that civil rights struggles n

have been won and equality has been achieved. What results is a culture

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eager to consume “the
images
of gay life but all too reluctant to embrace the
realities
of gay identities” (Walters, 2001a, p. 10; emphasis in original).

In the 2000s we have seen the development of what one volume dubbed

“the new queer aesthetic on television” (Keller & Stratyner, 2006), the television and marketing industries’ embrace of sexually provocative, hip, and

“edgy” programming designed to appeal to younger, cosmopolitan audiences.

Shows like
Queer as Folk
and
The L Word
play by different rules than those of the more “sanitized” world of network television, produced for premium cable audiences with more adventurous and sexual y explicit themes. Market-ers are using the allure of gay culture to appeal to trendy, neoliberal straight audiences just as “companies like Nike and Sprite have used elements of hip-hop culture to entice white audiences” (Robert Benjamin Bateman, in Keller and Stratyner, 2006, p. 14; see also Clark, 1995; Kates, 1999). As Ron Becker (2010) writes, “Television’s seemingly ubiquitous openly gay men and the gay friendly straight people who surround them reconfirm a liberal notion that the closet is gone and the homophobia that constructed it is increasingly irrelevant” (p. 13).