The Battle Over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism Through the Media by Leigh Moscowitz Read Free Book Online

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
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    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
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    Gay Marriage in an Era of Media Visibility
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    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