The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media (2 page)

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA: San Francisco sheriff’s deputies place handcuffs on same-sex couple Molly McKay (right) and Davina Kotulski (left), longtime activists in the marriage equality movement, after they staged a sit-in protest on February 14, 2011. Close to a dozen same-sex couples who were denied marriage licenses were arrested after the demonstration inside the office of San Francisco’s county clerk.

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

temporarily legal. By the end of the week, more than 3,900 gay and lesbian couples were married.

The matrimonial marathon that took place in San Francisco was one of the most visible moments in a series of legal and cultural events that catapulted the issue of gay marriage to the center stage of mainstream cultural debate.1

In the 2000s same-sex marriage emerged not only as an important election year issue but also as a central battle waged in the culture wars. Homosexuals’

bid for marriage rights quickly became a wedge issue, “one of the cultural fault lines dividing the two Americas” in what was already a contentious political climate (Rosenberg & Breslau, 2004, p. 23).

Moreover, the intense news coverage of the divisive issue in the U.S. media focused unprecedented attention on gay and lesbian life. Stories like those of Davina and Molly were featured in national newsmagazines and on morning news programs. The topic of gay marriage became a front-page story

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in leading national newspapers like the
Washington Post
and the
New York
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Times.
Local papers across the country, especially in conservative regions, l

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gave the issue “dramatic play” (Jurkowitz, 2004, p. 1). Images of same-sex couples waiting in line to obtain marriage licenses led the local and evening newscasts. Almost overnight, as
USA Today
reported, gay marriage replaced abortion as “the most volatile social issue” in the 2004 presidential election (Page, 2003). As lead anchor Tom Brokaw proclaimed to television news audiences on
NBC Nightly News,
“Never have the words ‘I do’ been so divisive”

(Reiss, 2004, May 16).

Today, of course, these stories and images of same-sex nuptials are almost passé. By 2013 thirteen states and the District of Columbia had legalized marriage for same-sex couples, and think tanks and media outlets alike showed a sea-change in growing public support. In 2008 a
Newsweek
poll declared a “gay marriage surge,” and surveys from the Pew Research Center showed

that by 2012 more American adults favored same-sex marriage (48 percent) than opposed it (43 percent) (Pew Forum, 2012). That figure represents a 17

percent increase from 2004, when only 31 percent supported gay marriage

and nearly twice as many Americans opposed it (Pew Research Center, 2012).

This shift in increasing public support for gay marriage is perhaps most visible in the arena of electoral politics. In 2004 the George W. Bush reelection campaign ran on, and many would argue won on, an anti–gay marriage platform. Eight years later, in a televised interview that attracted worldwide news attention, President Barack Obama told ABC’s Robin Roberts that same-sex marriage should be legal. A mere four years earlier, support for gay marriage on the national stage was the equivalent of campaign suicide—a political y volatile hot potato that no candidate wanted to touch. During the 2012 election season, however, gay marriage headlined at the Democratic National Convention, the first time ever that the issue of marriage equality was introduced in a major party platform. While pundits and strategists questioned the Obama camp’s motives during this election season, no one could ignore how the center of gravity on the issue had shifted. As Geoff Garin, a Democratic pol ster, told the
New York Times
, “The majority of voters are comfortable with the position Obama has taken on [same-sex marriage]. The issue is a defining one for younger voters, who see it as a litmus test of whether someone is in sync with modern times and their generation” (Baker, 2012).

But on the issue of same-sex-marriage rights, contradictions abound.

President Obama’s personal proclamation for marriage equality came the

day after voters in North Carolina—also the site of the Democratic National Convention—passed an initiative to ban same-sex marriages (even though

gay marriage was already illegal in the state). Consistently, gay marriage measures have been defeated at the ballot box, losing in total 32 statewide s

referenda that have gone up for public vote. It wasn’t until November 2012

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that voters approved gay marriage rights through the electoral process, making same-sex marriages legal in Maryland, Maine, and Washington State.

To date, battles continue over the legality of California’s Proposition 8

(“Prop 8”), which in 2008 outlawed same-sex marriages, a crushing defeat for the gay rights movement. After a dizzying number of legal twists and turns, in August 2010 U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker struck down the California voter initiative as unconstitutional, legalizing gay marriages in the state once again. Prop 8 proponents appealed the decision, and the case now awaits hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court.

This book is concerned with the media coverage that helped to define and shape one of the most contentious social issues of the last decade, the same-sex-marriage debate. Through an analysis of media reports and in-depth

interviews with leaders of the modern gay rights movement,
The Battle over
Marriage
offers a critical and longitudinal examination of how media frames and activist discourses evolved surrounding this definitive civil rights issue.

My focus is from 2003 to 2010, a period of intense media scrutiny, legal activity, shifting public opinion, and evolving political discourses.

This study interrogates the aims and chal enges of leading gay rights activists who sought to harness the power of mainstream news media to “change hearts and minds”—to advocate for their cause and reform images of their community. In doing so, I join an evolving academic and popular conversation about how news coverage frames contemporary social issues and move-

ments. This book also speaks to a growing body of work on the emergence

of gays and lesbians in the media and popular culture, using news narratives and representations as a critical but under-studied source of information about gay and lesbian life.

Who was granted a voice in mainstream media debates on this contro-

versial civil rights issue? How did gay and lesbian rights groups attempt to shape coverage of the debate? What images and narratives about gay and

lesbian life did activists foreground? What were the dominant journalistic devices—including frames, sources, and visual images—that media storytel -

ers relied upon to produce this story for news audiences? And in what ways did the media attention surrounding the marriage issue reshape the structure, organization, and goals of the contemporary gay rights movement? These

are the central questions I am concerned with in this book. To investigate these concerns, I conducted 30 in-depth interviews with the nation’s leading gay rights activists at two different time periods in this debate—in 2005 and again in 2010—in order to reveal the behind-the-scenes goals, strategies, s

and struggles of social movement actors who worked within the confines

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of commercial news media to “sell” gay marriage to a largely unreceptive l

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American public. I also conducted qualitative and quantitative analyses of a broad range of news media texts throughout this time period, including prominent, large-circulation newsmagazines; national newspapers in print and online; national network television news broadcasts; and prime-time

television news programs. Ultimately this project shows the complex ways that media coverage of the gay marriage debate both aided and undermined the cause, revealing both the progressive potential and the limitations of commercial media as a route to social change.

* * *

marriage in the news and why they matter, I want to return to the story of Molly and Davina. For them, a couple who had celebrated their union in a commitment ceremony with family and friends six years earlier, the experience of being “backed by the law” at San Francisco’s city hall in 2004 was transformative. Davina explained to me the cultural significance of marriage as society’s “shorthand for who gets what and who is related to whom.”

On that day in 2004, Mol y and Davina also became national media spokes-

persons. The traditional act of sealing the ceremony with a passionate kiss was captured by videographers, newspaper photojournalists, and magazine

photographers. Molly and Davina’s climactic kiss of conjugal bliss morphed into an iconic symbol for the gay marriage movement, appearing in regional newspapers like the
San Francisco Chronicle
; in national publications like
Newsweek,
Time,
and
USA Today
; in two documentary films; and on several television news programs.

This couple’s story points to the two central concerns of this book. First, I am interested in how activists like Molly and Davina talk of marriage, a historically exclusionary institution, as a route to inclusive citizenship and cultural acceptance. The media landscape has been an important site of struggle for chal enging and (re)defining marriage, an institution imbued with cultural meanings and social significance that are largely taken for granted. Defining marriage in particular ways legitimizes some individuals and relationships by prohibiting others. Because marriage is irrevocably tied to citizenship and nationhood, the gay marriage debate is not only about homosexuals’

bid for marriage rights but also about how we define ourselves as a culture and a nation. Narratives of gender, race, sexuality, nationhood, and family are intertwined
with news discourses about same-sex marriage.

Second, Molly and Davina’s story highlights how the gay marriage debate

became largely a
mediated
issue in public discourse—an issue we learn about s

and experience through newspapers, magazines, television news programs,

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and web stories. Coverage of same-sex marriage in mainstream news con-

nects with larger theoretical concerns about how social movements gain

access to the media and the politics of media representations.

To understand the significance of stories like Molly and Davina’s, and the process by which these stories become media spectacles, it is first necessary to position media coverage of the gay marriage controversy within several larger intellectual frameworks in the fields of media studies and queer studies. To begin this discussion, I briefly outline the major legal and political developments in the United States that catapulted gay marriage onto the front pages of prominent national newspapers and magazines. Next I highlight why this study is important by connecting my work to the major bodies of scholarship on the visibility of gay and lesbian people in the news and popular culture; the complicated interdependent relationship between social movements and media; and the role of marriage as a political and social institution. Finally, I briefly explain how I selected the news stories and activists for this study, and I outline the plan of the book.

Same-Sex Marriage: Legal and Political Contexts

The evolution of the gay marriage debate in the United States has many

different histories with multiple beginning points. In subsequent chapters I reflect more on the origins of the debate, especially from the perspectives of gay rights activists, some of whom have been fighting for marriage equality since the early 1980s. For my purposes here, I focus on the central events that piqued the public interest beginning in the mid-1990s and culminated in the explosion of media attention in the early to mid-2000s.

The fight for marriage equality in the United States has evolved on a state-by-state level, with early activity focused on Hawaii. A great deal of public attention centered on the 1996 Hawaii court case in which it was ruled that banning same-sex couples from participating in marriage was unconstitutional. The lower court sent the controversial case back to the state’s supreme court. Fearing that Hawaii would become the first state to legalize same-sex unions, Congress passed a federal act in 1996 dubbed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Signed into law by President Bill Clinton, this act defined for the first time on a federal level the term “marriage” as between one man and one woman and the term “spouse” as someone of the opposite sex. DOMA

also gave states the right to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.

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In 2000 the issue once again made headlines when Vermont became the

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civil union arrangements provide gay couples some, though not all, of the rights and protections that marriage affords heterosexual couples. Vermont’s then governor, Howard Dean, signed the civil union bill into law. These early steps in Hawaii and Vermont paved the way for the contemporary controversy over gay marriage in the 2000s, the time period that is the central concern of this study.