The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media (5 page)

Scholars who have turned to more recent coverage of gay issues have

found that media tend to present LGBT communities and issues in ways

that “don’t challenge hegemonic notions of gender and sexuality, and by

employing frames that privilege heterosexuality” (Leibler et al., 2009, p. 256; see also Barnhurst, 2003; Schwartz, 2011). For example, Barnhurst’s (2003) study of National Public Radio reporting on LGBT issues across three election cycles found that the sheer number of stories and the length of stories increased from 1992 to 2000. However, this coverage was a “mixed blessing”: the professionalization of LGBT sources normalized gay perspectives but also made resistance to dominant heterosexist institutions unlikely. The polarization of gay issues in news reports also resulted in the ratcheting up of hateful and homophobic rhetoric by anti-gay sources. Likewise, Liebler and his colleagues’ (2009) analysis of the same-sex-marriage debate in 2004

found that daily newspapers and wire stories tended to depoliticize the issue. News stories employed assimilationist and normalizing narratives that insisted that LGBT citizens are “just like everybody else.” Nonconfrontational sources privileged “hegemonic ways of seeing,” failing to mount a critique of the exclusive and heteronormative nature of marriage (p. 670).

Considering the history of media representations and the coverage of gay issues in the press, the debate over marriage offers the opportunity to once again become front-page news and to advance the conversation over gay

s

rights in public discourse. As one young gay activist wrote in an editorial for n

Newsweek
during the 2004 election, “That’s why many are happy about the gay l

marriage debate: it’s a good way for the gay community to ral y for its cause and LC

Moscowitz_BattleoverMarriage_text.indd 16

7/29/13 9:38 AM

Gay Marriage in an Era of Media Visibility

17

raise its public profile. Previously beneath the radar screen, the prominence attached to gay issues in the [2004] presidential campaign is putting . . . the community at the center of the political debate” (Mosvick, 2004).

As history suggests, and as that activist argues, media representations and news coverage in particular are critical components in becoming a player in the cultural scene. The unprecedented amount of reporting on the issue of same-sex marriage creates a space in political culture for gays and lesbians to make headlines in ways they never have before: not as “criminals” perverting children, not as “victims” of a deadly disease, not as exoticized drag queens parading proudly, but potentially as fully human couples engaged in loving relationships and raising families.

However, fol owing the work of critical cultural scholars, I investigate how the marriage conversation has not only provided new opportunities but has also constrained discourses surrounding gay and lesbian identity. As the gay rights movement has moved away from a separatist stance critical of dominant culture, organizations have more recently focused on moderate political strategies that highlight similarities to the straight majority (see discussion in chapter 2, as well as Armstrong, 2002; Bernstein, 1997). Media strategies within the movement now center on mainstreaming and normalizing gay and lesbian identity, forging alliances with non-gay organizations, and educating the public about issues that are important to the LGBT community. By exploring the

aims, strategies, and stories of gay rights activists, I join a larger conversation about the consequences of social movements’ reliance on the commercial news media to enter the political debate and shape public discourse.

Media Frames and Social Movements

This book is also informed by a theoretical interest in media framing, or the process of organizing and assigning meaning to issues and events (see, for example, Entman, 1992; Entman & Rojecki, 1993; W. Gamson, 1998; Goffman, 1974; Graber, 1997; Iyengar, 1991; Snow & Benford, 1988; Tuchman, 1976; Weaver, 2007). Communication scholars have long recognized that

newsmakers do more than
report
events. News functions as a narrative, lit-erary form that provides symbolic definitions of social realities. Like other cultural storytellers, journalists rely on standard, familiar stories and symbolic representations that media audiences use to make sense of events and issues. Newsmakers are governed by news values that dictate that the most extraordinary, dramatic, and tragic elements of stories will be emphasized.

For these unusual and otherwise meaningless occurrences to make sense,

s

they must be given order and meaning; otherwise, they remain random,

n

isolated events.

l

LC

Moscowitz_BattleoverMarriage_text.indd 17

7/29/13 9:38 AM

18

chapter one

Those who study the media and social movements have paid special at-

tention to how journalists frame social issues, movement goals, and activist participants (see, for example, Bronstein, 2005; W. Gamson, 1998; Mansbridge 1986; McLeod, 1995; Snow & Benford, 1988; Sobieraj, 2011). Researchers have found that the framing of social issues by newsmakers “shapes public understanding of the roots of contemporary problems and the merits of alternative solutions” (Nelson & Kinder, 1996, p. 1055). Coverage of a movement or issue can have an impact on public support for the cause, influence policy makers to act, and affect the group’s ability to attract and retain members. For example, writing about the American women’s movement, Carolyn Bronstein (2005)

shows how news frames radicalized movement members, cast protesters as

social deviants, and ultimately weakened public support for feminism. As she points out, framing does not remain static, but rather evolves as “journalists often restructure frames to match changing social and political conditions”

(p. 785), especial y for ongoing social issues. Most recently, Sarah Sobieraj’s
Soundbitten: The Perils of Media-Centered Political Activism
(2011) tracked fifty activist organizations across two campaign cycles, critiquing groups’

aggressive and often ineffective pursuit of media publicity.

Extending this body of work on media framing and social movements, this

project is concerned with how the gay marriage debate has been organized and given meaning by media storytellers. In the 2000s the marriage equality movement, and the broader gay rights movement as well, experienced “its

definitional moment” in the mainstream press, “during which journalists

explain and appraise it” (Bronstein, 2005, p. 785). Based on in-depth interviews with the leading gay rights activists who were on the “front lines” of the marriage debate, this study documents the inner workings of the marriage equality movement to reveal the internal debates that social movements

inevitably face when they find themselves in the glare of mainstream media: What stories do we tell about our lives? What images best represent our

community? Who should speak for us? This study thus offers a significant contribution to the study of media and social activism. I show how activist frames, messages, and tactics evolve over time in response to the gay marriage controversy and its onslaught of media attention.

Marriage in the Mainstream

Marriage is an institution that has historically served as a civil rights battle-field. As conservative columnist and gay rights spokesperson Andrew Sulli-s

van (2004) points out, African Americans were able to gain access to marriage n

only after the desegregation of other core public institutions like the military l

LC

Moscowitz_BattleoverMarriage_text.indd 18

7/29/13 9:38 AM

Gay Marriage in an Era of Media Visibility

19

and the education system. “The fact that the constitutionality of interracial marriage was
the last
of these cultural milestones to be established is therefore far from remarkable. The symbolic power of marriage, it turns out, is even deeper than that of citizenship, even starker than that of military glory, even clearer than that of public space. It is the institution where public citizenship most dramatically intersects with private self-definition. It is where people have historically drawn the line” (p. xxv).

The battle over gay marriage therefore sheds light on national discourses concerning the institution of marriage itself at a time when traditional heterosexual hierarchies are being simultaneously bolstered and disputed. As Barry Adam (2003) writes, “Marriage has long been implicated in a politics of exclusion. Nation-building rhetoric employing analogies of the nation to the family (and thus marriage) inevitably manufactures a series of ‘others’

thrown out of the national family and uses marriage laws as a tool to mark that exclusion” (p. 274).

As historians and sociologists remind us (Coontz, 2005; Weiss, 2000),

marriage has always signified much more than apolitical love and intimacy; it has historically served as the central mechanism in the organization of social and economic life. Gay nuptials are only the latest in a long litany of complaints bemoaning the “besieged” institution of marriage. For many

social conservatives, gay marriage represents the final “nail in the coffin” of marriage and the family, joining other discourses of social crises such as high divorce rates, premarital sexual relations, children born out of wedlock, and working mothers.

This conversation about gay marriage thus invariably reflects our culture’s growing ambivalence about the institution of marriage itself and its place in our modern society. At a time when any marriage in the United States is statistical y more likely to fail than succeed, the number of unmarried people is greater than the number of married people, and celebrities popularize rush-to-the-altar weekend weddings that end in divorce by midweek, the

debate over same-sex nuptials in the 2000s is intertwined with, not separate from, this overall cultural hand-wringing over marriage.

As Ron Becker (2006) aptly points out, “gay TV” (the recent rise of gay-

themed television programming) reveals as much about straight America as it does about the gay and lesbian characters featured in it. These civil rights battles—over gays and lesbians in the military, over equal employment, over marriage rights—reflect and contribute to America’s “straight panic,” what Becker defines as the growing anxieties felt by a heterosexual culture that is

“confronting this shifting social landscape where categories of sexual identity s

were repeatedly scrutinized and traditional moral hierarchies regulating nl

LC

Moscowitz_BattleoverMarriage_text.indd 19

7/29/13 9:38 AM

20

chapter one

sexuality were challenged” (p. 4). As I revisit in the concluding chapter, our culture’s gay marriage debates that are carried out in the media both reflect and contribute to an overall uneasiness about the institution of marriage itself losing the “exceptional” status it has long enjoyed.

It is within the context of these larger bodies of work—the rise of LGBT

visibility in the media, the shifting goals and strategies of the gay rights movement, the role of marriage as a political and social institution, and the media framing of issues and movements—that this book investigates media

coverage of the gay marriage issue and activist discourses surrounding it. I examine these news narratives as a gateway into contemporary understandings of gay and lesbian identity—namely, who is allowed in and who is cast out of our “national family.”

Research Approach

Inspired in part by Todd Gitlin’s (1980) canonical work on the complex relations between the news media and social movements, this book is interested in how the major news media covered the controversial issue of same-sex

marriage and how activist message-producers struggled to promote their

preferred meanings, definitions, and images in news discourse. My work is not designed to determine a cause-and-effect relationship between the news media and the gay rights movement. Rather, I approach these entities, as Gitlin says, not as “determined objects ‘having impacts’ on each other, as if movements and media were billiard balls, but [as] an active movement and active media pressing on each other, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not, in a process rich with contradiction and self-contradiction” (p. 14).

In order to explore how marginalized groups work with media to shape

news coverage of their cause and their community, I started by conducting in-depth, face-to-face interviews with gay rights activists who had become media spokespersons for the marriage equality issue. As I detail in chapter 2, I spoke with those activists who had been granted a voice in the mainstream news debate, those whom prominent news entities had hand-selected to

represent “the gay voice” in what was constructed as a two-sided conflict.

These were the groups and the spokespersons who were “on the Rolodex,”

so to speak, of major national news organizations. I wanted to interview the

“elite” of the gay establishment—those individuals who were in a position to sell their issue, their story, and their version of gay and lesbian identity to the American public. I spoke with the presidents, communications direc-s

tors, press secretaries, national news directors, religion and faith directors, nl

LC

Moscowitz_BattleoverMarriage_text.indd 20

7/29/13 9:38 AM

Gay Marriage in an Era of Media Visibility

21

media relations directors, and board members of the nation’s leading LGBT

organizations.

I traveled to New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco

in 2005 to interview these activists, shortly after the events of 2004 that pushed the issue into the mainstream media. Based upon the shifting legal and cultural climate in 2008 and 2009, I returned to interview those same informants in 2010 to examine how the aims and challenges of gay rights

activists had shifted during this time frame—their goals, the stories they attempted to communicate about gay and lesbian life, and their analysis of media coverage of LGBT issues and communities. I also added to my list of informants several new voices that had emerged in this debate over those five years. In total, I conducted 30 interviews with representatives from organizations like Lambda Legal; Freedom to Marry; the Gay and Lesbian Alliance