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Contesting Homosexuality’s Imagination, 1945–2015
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
—Seinfeld, “The Outing” (Season 4, Episode 17)
If I had to choose one utterance that epitomizes the status of gay rights in the 1990s—poised as it was on the brink of a revolution—I would choose this one. Simultaneously forward- and backward-looking (in historical terms at least), “not that there’s anything wrong with that” was a stroke of rhetorical genius. The phrase was used not once but six times—and by four different characters—on the February 11, 1993, episode of the NBC sitcom Seinfeld.1 Repetition is powerful as a source of both humor and learning: the sitcom made the problem of homophobia accessible through humor, and the learning came through Jerry’s character, who packaged the catchphrase with a ready-made repertoire of retorts—a script for viewers to use in their own lives to acknowledge but delegitimate homophobia:
“I mean, that’s fine if that’s who you are.…”
“I have many gay friends.…”
“People’s personal sexual preferences are nobody’s business but their own!”
The repetition and humor, augmented with supporting tropes, turned a simple catchphrase into a moral lesson: even though we might dislike or even feel repulsed by homosexuality, we should not judge others. The episode was seen by twenty-eight million viewers originally—over 10 percent of the US population—and by tens of millions more during reruns.2 “Not that there’s anything wrong with that” became part of the essential inner monologue for social liberals who wanted to be more tolerant of lesbians and gays, but who had to get over society’s disapproval of homosexuality. Those seven words helped shift the discourse about homosexuality in the United States from one of unambiguous moral condemnation and disgust to one of tolerance and acceptance.3
The Seinfeld episode is emblematic of representations of homosexuality in mass media during the early 1990s. As communication scholar Ron Becker observes in his analysis of lesbians and gays in prime-time television during the decade, it is a classic mistaken-identity narrative (in this case, Jerry and George are labeled as gay) that allowed viewers to work out their anxiety about homosexuality by watching fictional characters do so.4 The laughter was a nervous, self-conscious kind. But more to the point, “not that there’s anything wrong with that” was powerful because it resonated with the prevailing cultural Zeitgeist even as it pushed beyond it.5 It appeared at a historical moment in which a shift in the social imagination of homosexuality had begun, but had not fully coalesced: the dominant cultural schema of homosexuality as behavior was being challenged by a new cultural schema of homosexuality as identity.
This chapter examines the historical trends in media representations of homosexuality and the evolving political battleground over gay rights in order to document the changing social imagination of homosexuality in the United States. In the lifetimes of contemporary Americans, what it means to be “homosexual” in society has changed significantly—not just in the sense that it is easier to be openly gay today than it was in 1945, but also in the sense that the very meanings of the terms have changed. People growing up in the United States at different points in time encountered very different constellations of meaning surrounding homosexuality, and the understandings of it that they developed while coming of age shaped the beliefs, attitudes, and values that they articulated in the political arena.
This chapter is organized chronologically to show how the social imagination of homosexuality changed between 1945 and 2015. In each historical period, the narrative weaves together two domains in which the symbolic contests over the social imagination are particularly important: politics and media. The ongoing political battles between the lesbian and gay (later, the LGBTQ) movement and the conservative countermovement were extremely important in shaping the social imagination of homosexuality because each side strategically framed the debate for ordinary Americans in distinct ways. Not only were these political battles covered in the news media, but entertainment media also shaped the social imagination with their fictional portrayals of lesbians and gays.
By tracing the evolution of these two realms of culture, this chapter shows how the social imagination of homosexuality in American society shifted over time. The changes happened slowly and unevenly, and there are few dramatic moments that constitute distinct markers of change. But if you adopt a long-term perspective and know where to look, the change is unmistakable. Looking at representations in the mass media, and especially the actions of media gatekeepers and other privileged communicators in the public sphere, we can identify turning points in which contrasts between older and newer ways of imagining homosexuality are brought into stark relief.6 Change never happened overnight, but change did come. We are living with the evidence all around us today.
The Social Imagination in the Public Sphere
In the previous chapter, I defined the social imagination as the process by which collectives jointly create and modify the cultural schemas that individuals encounter and internalize through social experience and that provide the cognitive foundation for future action. Although it is really a continuous process, it is easiest to think of the social imagination as a static entity: the social imaginary. If one could take a snapshot of the social imagination at a single point in time, the resulting picture would show the social imaginary—the collection of culturally dominant meanings that exist in a given society at that time. As an individual, each of us usually confronts the social imaginary as a force that shapes and constrains the things we can say and do. I cannot change the meanings associated with particular words at will; I must adapt my own speech and behavior to the social imaginary.
However, that stability is only illusory. The social imaginary is constantly contested, multiple, and changing; and even though we typically have to accept the dominant social imaginary as it exists in order to have our speech and actions be comprehensible to others, change is possible. As a society, we invent new words and forget old ones; we try to influence people’s attitudes and values, and we resist changing our own; society comes to accept things that it used to reject, and vice versa. Thus, the process of social imagination is ongoing: every communicative and behavioral action both builds upon and contributes to the evolving social imagination somehow.
Although in principle every action, no matter how small, contributes to the social imagination, the size of the impact varies. Every time people come out to their family and friends as gay, and every time they confirm or undermine a stereotype, they affect the social imagination—if only for those who know them. But because we are interested in public opinion about gay marriage, we have to think about changes in the social imagination that affect the whole society. In other words, it is one thing if my neighbor comes out as gay; it is another thing if a famous celebrity does so; and it is still another if one million people do so as part of a coordinated social movement.
In this chapter, therefore, we will analyze changes in the social imagination of homosexuality in the public sphere, not in everyday life. It is not that ordinary people are unimportant; it is that if we want to see evidence of how the social imagination changes over time, we must look where we are most likely to detect it. We will examine how representations of homosexuality in the mass media changed over time because, by definition, the mass media transmit cultural meanings across boundaries of time and space to an audience of theoretically limitless size.
Within the public sphere, we will focus on four categories of people who are privileged communicators within it. Three of them—recognized political actors (elected representatives, parties, interest groups, and social movements), celebrities, and experts from epistemic communities—are privileged because their claims to power, status, and authority grant them standing to speak in the mass media.7 The fourth type—journalists and producers in the culture industries—are privileged both because of their gatekeeper roles and because they create the discursive terrain of the public sphere itself.
The public sphere is a concept first advanced by philosopher Jürgen Habermas to explain the significance of communication and media in democratic societies. Habermas initially defined the public sphere, akin to the “marketplace of ideas,” as “the sphere of private people come together as a public”—a place in which ordinary people could come together to talk about matters of common concern. Habermas held that this public sphere initially emerged in seventeenth-century Europe, as people began assembling in salons, coffeehouses, and other public places to discuss literature, news, and economic issues. After the democratic revolutions in the United States and France, the ideal of free speech in the public sphere was codified in law, and in practice the news media became “the public sphere’s preeminent institution” in large-scale democracies.8
Habermas was critical of the ways in which the rise of the mass media in the twentieth century effectively transformed the public sphere from a realm of deliberation and debate into a realm of publicity and consumption—in which citizens were reduced to consuming audiences, not full participants, in public communication. Moreover, Habermas saw that access to the means of message production was stratified by wealth and power in the mass-mediated public sphere, which meant that both wealthy capitalists who controlled the mass media and political figures who controlled the government had disproportionate influence. Critics will recognize the threat to democracy represented by this stratification of influence over political discourse; nevertheless, this did not change the essential function of the mass-mediated public sphere as the venue in which people could hear information and opinions about matters of common concern.
The idea of the public sphere is important for our discussion of the social imagination for two reasons. First, the reality (if not the ideal) of the public sphere directs our attention to those organizations and individuals who will be most influential: journalists, mass media organizations, celebrities, epistemic communities, political parties, and organized social movements shape the public conversation more than ordinary people. Thus, if we want to document how the social imagination of homosexuality has changed in American society over time, we would be most likely to find the evidence there. Second, what we call public opinion emerges out of the public sphere, so the causes and effects of change in public opinion should also be evident there.
The results of the following analysis show that the dominant social imaginary changed twice in the lifetimes of contemporary Americans, and that each change followed a similar pattern. At each of the turning points, a precipitating event (Stonewall in the first instance, Bowers v. Hardwick in the second) caused the lesbian and gay movement to adopt new tactics and discourses—innovations that were especially influential in campaigns targeting particular epistemic communities (mental health professionals in the first instance, journalists and media producers in the second). Changes in the practices and discourses of those epistemic communities were then transmitted to the public via mass media, and both public opinion and the dominant cultural schema for homosexuality changed afterward. Although this is not the only way in which the social imagination can change, this model twice proved effective for the burgeoning LGBTQ movement.
Homophile Period (1945–1968): Homosexuality as Mental Illness
Neither Sigmund Freud nor Alfred Kinsey—arguably the two most influential writers on homosexuality in the early twentieth century—viewed it as a mental illness; nor did they think negative moral judgments about homosexual behavior were appropriate. However, their writings nonetheless cemented its status as both undesirable and a treatable medical condition in the broader social imagination. Freud’s psychoanalysis of homosexuality gave authority over its diagnosis and treatment to psychiatrists—represented by the American Psychiatric Association—while Kinsey’s behavioral studies created a sensation among readers by showing that homosexual behavior was more widespread than previously imagined.9 While Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) provided support for the homophile view that homosexuality is normal and natural, it also stoked Americans’ fears that homosexuality posed a threat to heteronormative society.
Homosexuality first became a national political issue in the United States after World War II. Approximately nine thousand soldiers were discharged from the US military during the war because of allegations of homosexuality, and the general public first became aware of gays in the military in a June 9, 1947, article in Newsweek, titled “Homosexuals in Uniform.”10 The fundamental cultural assumptions that Americans shared—that homosexuality is bad but changeable—are evident in the text:
To screen out this undesirable soldier-material, psychiatrists in induction-station interviews tried to detect them (1) by their effeminate looks or behavior and (2) by repeating certain words from the homosexual vocabulary and watching for signs of recognition.… Once this abnormality was detected, the man was usually evacuated by the unit doctors to a general hospital where he received psychiatric treatment while a military board decided whether or not he was reclaimable.11
This language of deviance and illness both reflected and perpetuated the imagination of homosexuality as a mental illness that was dominant in American culture during this period.
The repression of lesbians and gays continued throughout the 1950s. Lesbians and gays were drawn into the anticommunist hysteria of 1950 to 1953, during which time thousands of federal government employees were fired because of allegations of homosexuality. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association published the first edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), in which it classified homosexuality as a type of “sexual deviation” that can be diagnosed and treated as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.”12 Also during this decade, police departments in urban areas intensified their use of raids, entrapments, and other tactics designed to arrest and prosecute lesbians and gays.13
Despite the climate of fear and persecution, lesbian and gay networks and identities slowly strengthened during the postwar years. The two most well-known homophile movement organizations—the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis—were founded in 1951 and 1955, respectively. Initially, the organizations served primarily as safe spaces for lesbians and gays to meet and discuss their shared experiences, and they were structured to be protective of members’ identities. Far from attracting public attention or subverting social norms, these early homophile organizations were primarily accommodationist in nature: the groups sought to educate society about homosexuality, not through mass mobilization but by developing relationships with experts in science, law, and education.14
In popular culture, lesbians and gays were almost entirely invisible to the American public during the forties and fifties. Even the mocking representations that were legacies of Vaudeville—the “sissy” character, cross-dressing, and “swish routines”—were censored. In Hollywood, the 1930 Motion Picture Production Code was established to keep offensive content out of movies; beginning in 1934, the Production Code Administration reviewed movie scripts and final products to ensure that films were in compliance with the code.15 This system infamously caused Hollywood writers and directors to eliminate or mask representations of lesbian and gay sexualities in films through the end of the 1950s, before it finally unraveled.16
In radio and television, not only were stations subject to the Federal Communications Commission’s mandate that networks serve “the public interest,” but networks also maintained their own internal censorship departments. For example, NBC’s Continuity Acceptance Department reviewed scripts for programming and advertisements and filtered out most depictions of lesbians and gays.17 In 1952, the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters approved a self-regulatory code designed to keep offensive content off the air—a code to which all the networks and 80 percent of broadcast stations subscribed.18
The homophile movement’s very perseverance through the 1950s may have been its greatest accomplishment. None of the homophile magazines and newsletters had large circulations, and by the dawn of the 1960s the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis counted fewer than 350 members nationwide between them.19 Nevertheless, the establishment and survival of an organized movement provided the foundation for the political uprisings that would follow in the tumultuous sixties.
The sixties, as the conventional wisdom goes, changed everything. But the decade did not change the social imagination of homosexuality. Most Americans would continue to imagine homosexuality as a mental illness or deviant lifestyle throughout the decade, despite the gradual emergence of a movement that began to contest its oppression openly. As late as 1970, fully 62 percent of Americans said that, for most lesbians and gays, homosexuality is a “sickness that can be cured.” The stigma of homosexuality remained so strong that 81 percent of Americans agreed that “I won’t associate with these people if I can help it.”20
If anything, what changed in the 1960s was the nature of the social and symbolic annihilation of lesbians and gays: their trivialization and absence in 1950s mass media were replaced by their emphatic condemnation in news, television, and film.21 In October 1961, the prohibition against depicting homosexuality in Hollywood film was eliminated from the Motion Picture Production Code and replaced with a statement: “Restraint and care shall be exercised in presentations dealing with sex aberrations.”22 Hypothetically, this would allow writers and directors to create positive representations of lesbians and gays, but that would have been unpopular. Instead, lesbian and gay characters were clearly denoted by signs of pathology: they were mentally tortured, socially outcast, and suffered frequent on-screen deaths. Hollywood’s message to mass audiences in the 1960s thus reinforced Americans’ negative views about homosexuality.
The national news media changed their reporting on homosexuality in the 1960s as well, framing it as a full-blown social problem. Several high-profile exposés of lesbian and gay life were printed in newspapers and magazines in the early 1960s, and television news followed suit later in the decade. On December 17, 1963, the New York Times published a front-page story titled “Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern.” The social problem framing is evident in both the title and the lead sentence: “The problem of homosexuality in New York became the focus yesterday of increased attention by the State Liquor Authority and the Police Department.” The article is peppered with warnings that “sexual inverts have colonized three areas of the city” and that some “homosexual bars” are operated by “the organized crime syndicate,” providing safe havens for “the dregs of the invert world.” The status of homosexuality as a mental illness is not disputed in the article; the homophile movement is merely reported as favoring the view that “homosexuality is an incurable, congenital disorder,” rather than a curable, developmental one.23
Seven months later, Life magazine produced an in-depth exposé of the “sad and often sordid world” of “practicing homosexuals.” The warnings for the American public are explicitly stated in the opening paragraphs: “This social disorder, which society tries to suppress, has forced itself into the public eye because it does present a problem—and parents are especially concerned. The myth and misconception with which homosexuality has so long been clothed must be cleared away, not to condone it but to cope with it.” The understanding that homosexuality is an unwanted “affliction” dominates the essay. A lengthy story on the attribution of homosexuality presents a range of opinions from medical and psychiatric experts, but it devotes only one paragraph to the research of Evelyn Hooker, which showed that there was no difference between gay and straight men in psychological tests.24
On television, the first national exposé of homosexuality appeared on CBS Reports on March 7, 1967. In “The Homosexuals,” reporter Mike Wallace discusses homosexuality from the personal, social, legal, religious, and medical points of view. The show begins with a three-minute interview with Warren Atkins, a twenty-eight-year-old articulate Mattachine Society activist who describes “sexual orientation” as an important part of one’s identity, no different from eye color or skin color. In doing so, CBS allowed the homophile movement to contest the mainstream imagination of homosexuality. Nevertheless, that interview was immediately followed by an interview with an anonymous gay man who confirmed the dominant view: “I know that inside, now, I’m sick. I’m not sick just sexually, I’m sick in a lot of ways: immature, childlike. And the sex part of it is a symptom, like a stomachache is a symptom of who-knows-what.” Overall, the program devotes over 20 percent—about nine of forty-three minutes—of its content to explaining the psychiatric view that homosexuality is a mental illness.25
Thus, mass media representations of the 1960s elevated the political and social significance of homosexuality: what was once a private, isolated behavior became a public epidemic and a cultural malaise. The media encouraged audiences to see homosexuals everywhere: they might be your neighbors, your grocery store clerks, and your children’s teachers. Despite the advances made by lesbian and gay activists during the 1960s, the social imagination of homosexuality remained unambiguously negative.26
Turning Point 1 (1969–1973): Demedicalization
The year 1969 is justifiably remembered for the June 27–28 Stonewall Rebellion—when patrons of a gay bar in New York City, the Stonewall Inn, fought back against a routine police raid. But Stonewall was neither the first such uprising nor qualitatively different from others; what makes Stonewall significant is what happened afterward.27 By 1969, the lesbian and gay movement had become emboldened by the tumultuous sixties, had grown in number and organization, and had become national news. Thus, both mainstream and alternative news sources covered the Stonewall uprising more than others, and activists responded by deploying new tactics of protest publicly.
For the social imagination, 1969 is also noteworthy for the release of the final report from the National Institute of Mental Health Task Force on Homosexuality. One could hardly expect the NIMH to steadfastly deny that homosexuality has anything to do with their expertise, so the final report does not exactly read like a revolutionary statement. However, the recommendations of the task force codified a significant divide within the epistemic community over the status of homosexuality, and it marked the beginning of its demedicalization.
In general, the report makes clear that it is straight society who must change—not lesbians and gays. It recommends that virtually everyone become better educated about homosexuality, naming specifically those professional groups—from law enforcement personnel and lawyers to teachers and ministers—whose emotional reactions to homosexuality “interfere with an objective understanding of the problem.”28 Moreover, the task force argued that government policy should change:
Most professionals working in this area—on the basis of their collective research and clinical experience and the present overall knowledge of the subject—are strongly convinced that the extreme opprobrium that our society has attached to homosexual behavior, by way of criminal statutes and restrictive employment practices, has done more social harm than good and goes beyond what is necessary for the maintenance of public order and human decency.29
Thus, the task force argued that private homosexual contact between consenting adults should be decriminalized and employment policies revised in order to reduce the anxieties that lesbians and gays experience.
The publication of the NIMH report codified the disagreement among psychiatrists and mental health professionals about whether or not homosexuality was a mental illness that could be cured. Proponents of the illness model, such as Irving Bieber and Charles Socarides, continued to make the case that homosexuality was a medical issue. In a 1970 article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Socarides pleads with his fellow physicians to swim against the tide of popular culture:
Together with the mainstream heterosexual revolt has come the announcement that a homosexual revolution is also in progress and that homosexuality should be granted total acceptance as a valid form of sexual functioning, different from but equal to heterosexuality. Such acceptance of homosexuality, as being a simple variation of normality, is naïve, not to say grounded in ignorance.… That we, as physicians, could be persuaded to overlook such tendencies among our young people is a harmful fantasy.30
By contrast, dissenters like Evelyn Hooker and Thomas Szasz maintained that millions of people engaged in homosexual behavior without exhibiting any signs of mental illness and that efforts to treat homosexuality as such were a form of social control.
It was this divide in the epistemic community into which lesbian and gay activists drove a tactical wedge, creating an opening for changing the whole society’s imagination of homosexuality. How did they do it? After Stonewall, lesbians and gays turned away from established homophile associations and began founding hundreds of new organizations, which transformed the issue of homosexuality’s repression into a multifaceted and contentious movement for sexual liberation.31 These groups pioneered new tactics of protest—especially “coming out,” public marches, and “zapping”—and deployed them in a triumphant four-year campaign to demedicalize homosexuality.32
Activists especially targeted the American Psychiatric Association and demanded the removal of homosexuality from the DSM. In 1970, gay liberationists in San Francisco organized a protest of the APA’s annual convention, causing such a disruption that some panels discussing research on homosexuality and aversion therapy could not be finished. The incident prompted the APA Program Committee to convene a panel at the 1971 convention for lesbians and gays to present their views formally, but that accommodation failed to avert further disruption.33
At the 1972 convention in Dallas, lesbian and gay activists were again invited to present, but this time the result was more conciliatory. Attendees learned for the first time that lesbians and gays were their peers: a masked gay psychiatrist, Dr. H. Anonymous, spoke at the panel for himself and the other two-hundred-plus gay psychiatrists he knew were in attendance and who had to conceal their true identities. In the exhibition hall activists Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings presented a poster called “Gay, Proud, and Healthy: The Homosexual Community Speaks,” which invited conference attendees to help make psychiatry an “ally.” Overall, the message to conference attendees was that the APA had a choice to make: would it continue to stigmatize lesbians and gays with diagnoses of mental illness, or would it repudiate its past?34
The opportunity to make that choice soon emerged. At the May 1973 convention, over a thousand psychiatrists gathered to hear a debate organized by Robert Spitzer, a member of the APA’s Committee on Nomenclature, regarding the removal of homosexuality from the DSM. Also at the convention a New York GAA activist, Ronald Gold, brought Spitzer with him to a social function of the “Gay-PA”—the clandestine group of gay psychiatrists who met every year at APA conventions. Years later, Gold recalled an incident at that gathering in which a man broke down in tears in his arms—an event that spurred Spitzer to action:
He was a psychiatrist, an army psychiatrist, based in Hawaii, who was so moved by my speech, he told me, that he decided that he had to go to a gay bar for the first time in his life.… It was a very moving event. I mean, this man was awash in tears. I believe that that was what decided Spitzer right then and there. “Let’s go.” Because it was right after that that he said, “Let’s go write the resolution.” And so we went back to Spitzer’s hotel room and wrote the resolution.35
By the middle of December, Spitzer had successfully steered a resolution through the Committee on Nomenclature and the Board of Trustees that declassified homosexuality as a mental illness and replaced it with “Sexual Orientation Disturbance”—which allowed someone who was “disturbed by, in conflict with, or wish to change their sexual orientation” to seek treatment.36
The impact of the APA’s decision was immediate. As Barbara Gittings recalled, “When the vote came in, we had a wonderful headline in one of the Philadelphia papers, ‘Twenty Million Homosexuals Gain Instant Cure.…’ It was a front-page story. I was thrilled. We were cured overnight by the stroke of the pen.”37 The New York Times also ran a front-page story, emphasizing the historic proportions of the declaration in the lead paragraph: “The American Psychiatric Association, altering a position it has held for nearly a century, decided today that homosexuality is not a mental disorder.”38 For decades, lesbians, gays, and heterosexuals alike had been convinced that they were sick; now, those psychiatrists—whose claims to expertise over the true nature of homosexuality had been hegemonic—declared that they had been wrong.
This authoritative shift in the social imagination of homosexuality did not, however, end the discrimination against lesbians and gays. Although expert authorities no longer claimed homosexuality to be a mental illness, ordinary Americans would nonetheless continue to imagine it as abnormal, criminal, immoral, and repulsive. In Gittings’s words:
Now that people don’t have the sickness label, they’re coming out with more reasons for being against us: “I don’t like you.” “I don’t like the way you live.” “I think you’re immoral.” “I think you’re rotten.” All of that is more honest than this “you’re sick” nonsense.39
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, this was exactly the cultural climate faced by lesbians and gays. They were no longer stigmatized by the sickness label, but the American public remained as intolerant of homosexuality as ever.
Resistance Period (1974–1986): Homosexuality as Deviant Lifestyle
Today, it is strange to think of homosexuality as a crime, but by 1974 only eight states had repealed their sodomy laws. In most parts of the United States, people could be arrested and prosecuted if they were caught engaging in homosexual sex—even privately in their own home. Despite demedicalization and gay liberation, most Americans would continue to imagine homosexuality as a deviant or criminal behavior through the late 1980s. In its 1986 ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick, the US Supreme Court lent its institutional weight and authority to this understanding of homosexuality by upholding sodomy laws as constitutional.40
If the fifties and sixties represent the story of the lesbian and gay movement’s emergence, then the seventies and eighties mark the story of conservative opposition. Although efforts by lesbians and gays to gain equal rights and political power strengthened during these decades, their gains were surpassed by the countermobilization of religious and conservative groups who were alarmed by the revolution occurring in their midst. In the early 1970s, the lesbian and gay movement was coalescing at the same time as second-wave feminism, and the perceived threat of these two movements to orthodox worldviews should not be understated. It was compounded by the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed all women access to abortion, and the campaign to add the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution.41
This unholy trinity—gender equality, gay liberation, and abortion rights—induced religious conservatives to build a resistance movement, the result of which was that by the end of the 1980s, the public’s acceptance of lesbians and gays was no greater than it had been in 1973. Between 1973 and 1987, the percentage of Americans who said that “sexual relations between two adults of the same sex” is “always wrong” actually increased from 70 to 75 percent.42 In effect, this period of resistance bolstered the social imagination of homosexuality as a deviant, immoral behavior for most Americans.
The year that conservative opponents gained the upper hand against the lesbian and gay movement was 1977. That year, the “homosexual agenda” became thoroughly integrated into the national New Right movement, via Miami, Florida. A mere six months after the Dade County Commission voted to add sexual preference to its nondiscrimination law, the voters overturned it by a vote of 69 to 31 percent, thanks to a campaign spearheaded by celebrity Anita Bryant. According to communication scholar Fred Fejes’s authoritative history of this episode, Bryant’s campaign, called Save Our Children, used local churches and synagogues as the initial sites for organizing before going public. Their discourse was firmly rooted in religious opposition to homosexuality, but it also included secular appeals, such as allegations that gays were targeting children for conversion to homosexuality. Bryant’s campaign attracted national media attention and inspired conservative activists in Wichita, Kansas, Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Eugene, Oregon, to launch similar campaigns in the next twelve months.43
This episode was tactically and discursively important. Tactically, it provided New Right activists with a tool—the ballot initiative—that they would use to successfully combat the lesbian and gay movement over the next several decades. Discursively, it introduced a coherent counterframe into the public sphere, three aspects of which seem especially potent: it defined homosexuality as a moral issue, rather than a matter of civil rights; it stoked fears that heterosexuals—especially children—could be influenced to adopt the homosexual lifestyle; and it portrayed gay rights as “special treatment” that was not available to others.44
The discourse resonated with individuals at the time because, regardless of demedicalization, Americans still imagined homosexuality as a learned behavior, not as an inherent, unchanging identity. In fact, the oppositional discourse of New Right activists magnified and crystallized one of the main frames that the media used to talk about homosexuality after demedicalization: the lifestyle frame. Fejes traces the origins of this frame to marketing researchers of the mid-1960s who used the term to categorize consumer groups by their activities, interests, and opinions, not just demographics.45 Lesbian and gay activists had adopted the term as an alternative to the sickness label during the demedicalization campaign, and by the mid-1970s, lesbian and gay media had embraced it. According to Fejes: “In 1974 the Advocate, the major national gay magazine, in revamping itself with an eye toward making itself more mainstream both in advertising and politics, adopted as its cover slogan, ‘touching your lifestyle,’ thus giving its imprimatur to the term.”46
Although characterizing homosexuality as a “lifestyle” was certainly preferable to “illness,” the adoption of the term by many in the lesbian and gay movement was problematic, to say the least. Even if there were such a thing as a gay lifestyle, the ways that lesbians and gays might have imagined it—as happy, healthy, normal, and functional—were opposite to how most Americans imagined it—as sad, unhealthy, deviant, and dysfunctional. In the 1970s, the opposition’s judgment resonated with the public, and the imagination of homosexuality as deviant lifestyle became dominant.
The onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic both reinforced this understanding and intensified the stigma: there could be no greater symbol to reinforce the public view that homosexuality is unhealthy than a lethal “gay cancer” with no cure. The impact of HIV/AIDS on the gay community and the movement cannot be understated and has been written about extensively; but many in the general public felt their condemnation of homosexuality was validated by HIV/AIDS.47 Religious conservatives interpreted HIV/AIDS as divine punishment for sin; ordinary Americans blamed people with AIDS (PWAs) for their condition because they thought of homosexuality as a freely chosen behavior; and fears that HIV/AIDS could be spread by insignificant contact—for example, merely touching objects that a PWA had touched—exacerbated homosexuality’s stigma.
The case of popular movie star Rock Hudson illustrates the cultural dynamics surrounding HIV/AIDS. According to communication scholar Larry Gross, the mass media paid little attention to HIV/AIDS until it became clear that heterosexual Americans might be threatened by it; the June 25, 1985, revelation that Hudson had AIDS was the turning point.48 The absence of early media attention was in part due to the public’s presumed lack of concern about gay men, but also to journalists’ own prejudices and fears that they would be suspected of being gay themselves if they covered HIV/AIDS: “It was only after Rock Hudson had raised the status of AIDS to that of a front-page story that reporters could safely be associated with the topic.”49
A celebrity icon since the 1950s, Hudson was the epitome of what art historian Richard Meyer calls “relaxed masculinity”: he was physically imposing (six-four, two hundred pounds) but cultivated a nonthreatening image that appealed to both men and women.50 The revelation that he had AIDS provided every American with a face that they could associate with the disease, but also outed Hudson as gay, and in doing so overturned Americans’ assumptions about homosexuality. Meyer observes that the social commentary on Hudson’s outing at the time carried a “tone of betrayal” because of how the on-screen heterosexual romances his audiences admired were really those of a gay man.51 There is bitter irony in the fact that a man who would die from AIDS three months later was accused of deceiving the American public because of the closeted life he was forced to lead.
Summing up the significance of HIV/AIDS on the American imagination, Gross observes a paradox:
By the late 1980s, the AIDS epidemic had accomplished something that the lesbian and gay movement had not been able to achieve—the end of gay invisibility in the mass media. Even so, nearly all the attention to gay men was in the context of AIDS-related stories, and because this coverage seems to have exhausted the media’s limited interest in gay people, lesbians became even less visible. AIDS also reinvigorated the two major mass media “roles” for gay people: victim and villain. The public image of gay men was becoming inescapably linked with the specter of plague.52
In short, HIV/AIDS—via Rock Hudson and the threat it posed to straight society—brought homosexuality into the center of the American collective consciousness, but the mental image that it produced was one of a deadly malady unleashed upon society by the deviant lifestyle chosen by an irresponsible minority.
The status of homosexuality as a deviant behavior was institutionally affirmed by the 1986 Supreme Court ruling Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld the constitutionality of sodomy laws. Although Georgia’s sodomy law applied equally to both heterosexual and homosexual acts, the Court transformed the case into a question of homosexual sodomy specifically. In a five to four decision, the majority ruled that the right to privacy, which covered matters of marriage and reproductive behavior, did not extend to homosexual behavior and that state legislatures were free to criminalize homosexual behavior on the basis of moral disapproval. The Court viewed homosexuality as being antithetical to the institutions of marriage and family and that the state was therefore justified in declaring it illegal.
The journalists Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney note that the ruling was handed down on June 30, the day after many cities’ annual gay pride celebrations, and that the unambiguously anti-gay ruling sparked both despair and anger from lesbians and gays around the country.53 The despair is easy to understand: taken together, the opposition of the New Right, the emergence of HIV/AIDS, and the affirmation of societal intolerance for homosexuality constituted a dramatic setback, if not reversal, of the progress made by the lesbian and gay movement. The anger has been best explained by sociologist Deborah Gould, who argues that the court ruling was so sudden and severe that it forced the diffuse frustration that had long been simmering among lesbians and gays to bubble over:
Hardwick laid bare dominant society’s hatred for lesbians and gay men, and made clear the hopelessness of a strategy for gay rights based on being “good” lesbians and gays. In doing so, Hardwick reconfigured lesbians’ and gay men’s feelings about state and society, and simultaneously rearranged their self-feelings, paradoxically, perhaps, easing gay shame and fear of further social rejection. At the point of complete social annihilation, there was no further to be feared.54
In essence, Bowers v. Hardwick radicalized lesbians and gays because they had nothing left to lose.
Thus, the emotions that Bowers v. Hardwick elicited proved to be the beginning of yet another turning point; enraged and motivated activists began planting the seeds for a new phase of contention. Within hours of the ruling, three thousand people blocked traffic in Greenwich Village; two days later, six hundred people were arrested for civil disobedience at the US Supreme Court; and another five thousand activists attempted to disrupt the Independence Day celebration in Lower Manhattan.55 But most importantly, activists began channeling their anger into organization building: by building radical direct action movement organizations, like the Silence = Death Project, and making plans for a second March on Washington.
Turning Point 2 (1987–1992): Legitimation
The year 1987 was pivotal for two reasons: the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights and the founding of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). The events surrounding the March on Washington expressed the whole range of emotions—from outrage and sadness to pride and love—felt by the lesbian and gay community. On Tuesday, between 650 and 850 protestors were arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience at the US Supreme Court. On Saturday, a wedding demonstration (more on this below) was held to celebrate love and demand equal rights for same-sex couples. On Sunday, the seventy-thousand-square-foot AIDS Memorial Quilt was tearfully unveiled on the National Mall to pay tribute to those who had died. At the end, over two hundred thousand people—including allies like Jesse Jackson, César Chávez, and Whoopi Goldberg—marched to combat HIV/AIDS and end discrimination against lesbians and gays. The march’s most significant and enduring victory is that it is commemorated every October 11 as National Coming Out Day, and thus represents the fulfillment of one of the main slogans and promises of the march: “For Love and for Life, We’re Not Going Back.”
The founding of ACT UP in 1987 was also important because the organization had a disproportionately large influence in forcing the government, scientific and medical authorities, and the American public to take the HIV/AIDS crisis more seriously. Originally founded in New York, ACT UP was a network of over 110 national and international groups united by shared goals and similar tactics of direct action protest. Before the movement’s decline in the 1990s, ACT UP groups around the United States committed scores of creative, spectacular, and disruptive actions that both drew attention to the AIDS epidemic and forced authorities like the FDA and CDC to prioritize treatment and education.56
Taken together, the radicalism of ACT UP and the more reformist tone of the 1987 March on Washington changed the national discussion of homosexuality. It became increasingly difficult for the news media to portray lesbians and gays as one-dimensional stereotypes; HIV/AIDS had become such a multifaceted issue that the news media began to humanize them more fully. At the same time, the practice of coming out—institutionalized in National Coming Out Day—began to appear in mass media and therefore gave American audiences an opportunity to witness lesbians and gays at their most vulnerable moment—of confessing to a stigmatized, secret aspect of their identity.57
Nowhere was this humanizing effect on clearer display than on the Oprah Winfrey Show, October 11, 1988—one year after the March on Washington. The producers decided to devote an entire episode to the first annual National Coming Out Day. It included activists, experts, and other notable figures as panelists to talk about the coming out experience; the studio audience was even composed of movement sympathizers. Audiences at home witnessed Winfrey moderating an open, frank discussion about the necessity and the emotional difficulties of coming out to their loved ones. One guest, Greg Brock, the assistant managing editor at the San Francisco Examiner, used his appearance on the show as an opportunity to come out to his parents privately the night before the taping. His mother spoke on the show via telephone about her feelings, and Brock recalled her concluding, “But the bottom line is that he’s my flesh and blood and my only son and I love him.”58
The significance of such a mass-mediated coming out is twofold. First, straight audiences at home were suddenly able to imagine how they might react if they were in Greg’s mother’s shoes; she both role-modeled how the bonds of family and friendship conquer stigma and provided audience members with a script to follow in case someone they knew ever came out to them. Second, lesbian and gay audiences who had not yet come out were given Greg’s role and script, and thus furnished with the materials necessary to imagine their own coming out. This, then, was the primary impact of the March on Washington and National Coming Out Day: the more people came out and the more people witnessed it, the more fully lesbians and gays became integrated into Americans’ everyday lives.
Just as importantly, the effects of these changes were felt inside the newsrooms—the places where media gatekeepers were daily concocting the authoritative account of the day’s events for Americans at home. Prior to 1987, few employees in a typical newsroom had come out as gay, and few knew enough about lesbian and gay issues to cover them adequately. In 1982, the Columbia Journalism Review reported that “nearly 200 interviews at news organizations in ten cities indicate that, with rare exceptions, gay reporters and editors believe they must stay in the closet to keep their jobs, and that their fear of being perceived as gay inhibits them from making suggestions about covering stories about gays.”59 The article cites a half dozen stories that were flawed as a result: for example, the New York Times’ coverage of a mass shooting that killed two and wounded six at a gay bar in Greenwich Village failed to include any statement from the city’s gay community.60
Communications scholars Fred Fejes and Kevin Petrich argue that the AIDS epidemic and AIDS activism “force[d] the media to regard the gay and lesbian community more seriously and in a different light” because of the ways in which the requirements of news reporting led journalists into new territory:
Reporters and their readers were exposed to a view of gay and lesbian life very different from the 1970s hedonistic stereotypes of gay life. Accounts of the fundraising, the patient care efforts, the political lobbying efforts for more AIDS funding, and AIDS education campaigns began to characterize the gay community far more than the “exotica” of gay and lesbian life.… Moreover, the political activism of groups such as ACT UP served to further educate media reporters how homophobia was woven into the government’s and media’s response to the AIDS crisis.61
Thus, a combination of the AIDS crisis and movement activism forced journalists to confront the multidimensional lives of lesbians and gays and correct the stereotypic representations that had previously dominated the news.
Occasionally, this process unfolded dramatically on the newsroom floor itself. On December 21, 1990, a deputy national editor at the New York Times, Jeff Schmalz, stood up from his desk in the middle of the newsroom, had a seizure, and fell to the ground as coworkers watched helplessly. At the hospital, he tested HIV-positive, and the episode contributed to a dramatic shift at the New York Times—both in its organizational culture and in its outward depictions of lesbians and gays. Between 1990 and 1991, the number of stories about the gay community in the New York Times increased 65 percent, causing observers to marvel at the “Lavender Enlightenment” at the newspaper. In reality, the improvement in coverage had its origins in 1986, when longtime executive editor Abe Rosenthal was replaced by Max Frankel, who began to allow journalists to use the word gay in their stories. Nevertheless, as more and more journalists came out of the closet, experiences like those of Schmalz made HIV/AIDS and homophobia personal for many straight journalists. They weren’t abstract issues anymore; they were affecting people they cared about.62
The New York Times was not the only news organization that changed its tone. In 1990, the American Society of Newspaper Editors released the results of a survey of two hundred lesbian and gay journalists about their experiences in the newsroom and their perceptions of the quality of reporting on lesbian and gay issues, indicating significant room for improvement on both fronts. Accompanying the survey results was a series of short essays giving practical tips on improving reporting, notes on preferred terminology, and recommendations on issues that should receive more coverage. The release of this report is significant because it brought the issue of media representations and workplace climate to the attention of newspaper editors across the country and set clear professional expectations that newspapers should improve their reporting and treatment of lesbians and gays.63 Additionally, the leader of the survey, Leroy Aarons, personally came out at the ASNE meeting in which the survey results were reported, went on to establish the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, and worked with the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation to create a similar survey and report for broadcasters.64
Thus, as the 1990s dawned, the tenor of news discourse about homosexuality had undergone a significant shift since Bowers v. Hardwick. It was around this time—1988 or 1990—that public opinion surveys began to detect an increase in tolerance for homosexuality, which would continue as a long, steady trend over the next twenty-five years. To be sure, the vast majority of Americans still disapproved of homosexuality, and representations in popular culture were still tepid and trivializing, at best. Entertainment media depictions still relied heavily on stereotypes and never portrayed same-sex intimacy; fictional characters were rarely central to any plot or developed in much depth; and mass media producers still felt the need to conform to the tastes of the mass audience.
Now, however, media producers were beginning to face pressure from groups like the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. GLAAD was formed in 1985 in order to counter the negative representations in the New York City press and quickly became an effective national media watchdog. For example, a 1988 episode of the NBC series Midnight Caller, the 1991 Hollywood film Silence of the Lambs, and the 1992 film Basic Instinct all depicted lesbian, gay, or bisexual characters as depraved killers and were fiercely protested. The pressure from GLAAD and others pushed the entertainment industry to change their tone and begin planning more positive representations for 1993 and beyond.65
The emergence of GLAAD as a media advocate and the shift in the organizational cultures and practices of mainstream newsrooms meant that the terms in which the social imagination of homosexuality was created and distributed would be changed forever. Journalists and Hollywood storytellers, more than anyone, have the power to construct our imagination of the world. Journalists, through the news, aspire to tell us what is true in the world; writers and entertainers in the culture industries, through their stories, teach us how to feel in the world. Because of this, the production of more positive representations of lesbians and gays was a significant development in the evolving social imagination of homosexuality: beginning around 1990, the news and entertainment media would increasingly portray homosexuality as part of one’s identity—who one is, not what one does.
In 1991, this shift toward representing homosexuality as identity crystallized around new scientific research that homosexuality was, at least in part, biological. A neurologist, Simon LeVay, published an article in Science that documented a difference in the anterior hypothalamus (one part of the brain that regulates sexual behavior) between straight men on one hand and both straight women and gay men on the other hand—a finding that purported to show a biological basis for homosexual attraction among men.66 The study received over two minutes of coverage on both the CBS and NBC evening news on August 29, was part of a twenty-nine-minute show regarding the causes of homosexuality on Nightline on August 30, was front-page news in the August 30 New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and was covered in both Time and Newsweek the following week.
Although LeVay and other scientists urged caution in interpreting the findings, many journalists immediately framed the study as being much bigger than it was by raising the question that audiences most urgently wanted answered. Curt Suplee of the Washington Post led his story with it: “Are homosexuals born gay and heterosexuals born straight?”67 The headline in the Los Angeles Times read, “San Diego researcher’s findings offer first evidence of a biological cause for homosexuality.”68 After reflecting on the uproar caused by the study’s release, Newsweek’s Sharon Begley intoned, “Despite the questions, the study fit the emerging theory that sexual orientation is determined more by nature than nurture.”69 In short, although journalists did not say so explicitly, the coverage clearly implied that homosexuality is probably an innate part of your identity, not something freely chosen. By 1993, when the first scientific evidence that homosexuality may be genetic was released, the news narrative that homosexuality might be due more to nature than nurture had been firmly established.70
The final crucial development in the legitimation of lesbian and gay identities is the movement’s full inclusion in the 1992 presidential campaign of Bill Clinton. Although gay rights had been part of the Democratic Party platform since 1980, never before had the movement been so fully embraced by a candidate in the country’s most important election. Clinton not only actively sought the support of the gay community but also included them as part of his message of unity in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention:
We must say to every American: Look beyond the stereotypes that blind us. We need each other—all of us—we need each other. We don’t have a person to waste, and yet for too long politicians have told the most of us that are doing all right that what’s really wrong with America is the rest of us—them. Them, the minorities. Them, the liberals. Them, the poor. Them, the homeless. Them, the people with disabilities. Them, the gays. We’ve gotten to where we’ve nearly them’ed ourselves to death. Them, and them, and them. But this is America. There is no them. There is only us.71
The fact that Clinton actually won the election while outwardly supporting gay rights meant that lesbians and gays had real national political standing and that they would be a political force to be reckoned with in the decades to come.
Gay Rights Period (1993–2015): Homosexuality as Identity
By the end of President Clinton’s first hundred days in office in 1993, a new gay identity discourse was ascendant in American culture, and “not that there’s anything wrong with that” signaled its contrast with the prevailing attitudes. The discourse was not yet dominant over the immoral lifestyle discourse, but its propagation by the Democratic Party and mainstream media provided the LGBTQ movement with strong institutional counterweights to the immoral lifestyle discourse put forth by the Republican Party and New Right. Progress in winning equal rights would be painfully slow, but the rise of the identity discourse in news and popular culture was so fast, and so dramatically different from the cultural climate of the 1980s, that Entertainment Weekly dubbed the decade the “Gay 90s” when it was only half finished.72
In politics, April 25, 1993, was the date of the Third March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, which attracted almost one million participants. As sociologist Amin Ghaziani notes, the inclusion of “Equal Rights” in the title of the march indicates the consolidation of a discourse of equal rights that emerged in response to state-level political battles with conservative opponents in Oregon, Colorado, and elsewhere.73 Also at this time, President Clinton attempted to fulfill his campaign pledge to allow gays to serve in the military. In the face of widespread opposition, he was forced to issue a compromise decree in December 1993, known popularly as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which effectively left the existing ban in place but instructed members of the military to neither inquire about nor reveal one’s sexual orientation.
Although political success would remain frustratingly elusive in the 1990s, popular culture evolved steadily between 1993 and 2000, especially in television and film. Looking only at prime-time network television series, the number of openly gay characters increased from five in the 1992–1993 season to thirty-three in the 1996–1997 season, and the number of gay-themed episodes in those series increased from eleven in 1992–1993 to thirty-two in 1997–1998. The reason for the increase, according to Ron Becker, is a shift in the marketing strategies of the broadcast networks. Competition with cable channels had eroded the networks’ traditional advertising advantage, so they began to target the narrow demographic groups that advertisers most coveted in their programming decisions. Led by the Fox’s “edgy” programming that appealed to young, educated, liberal, urban, and affluent audiences (The Simpsons, In Living Color, Beverly Hills, 90210, etc.), broadcast networks began to incorporate gay content into their episodes in order to attract these desirable viewers. As Becker puts it, “By 1993 homosexuality was actually becoming chic in certain circles,” and the controversy surrounding it gave programming that edgy appeal that advertisers wanted.74
By the 1995–1996 season, all the broadcast networks had increased the amount of lesbian and gay content on television, but none of the characters were protagonists and the representations were sanitized so as to avoid controversy. That changed with the April 30, 1997, coming out of Ellen DeGeneres as both the actress and the character on Ellen. The month-long controversy that preceded the actual airing of the episode merely increased its profile. As Becker notes, only one of ABC’s 225 affiliates refused to air the episode, and a threatened boycott of advertisers by conservative groups appeared to have little effect; by contrast, GLAAD held coming out parties to coincide with the airdate, and the episode’s forty-two million viewers got yet another opportunity to develop an emotional identification with a lesbian who was struggling to overcome stigma and admit who she is to the world.75
Even though Ellen was canceled the following year, in the fall of 1998 NBC introduced the series Will & Grace, which ran 189 episodes over eight seasons and featured two leading gay male characters.76 Many have criticized the show for its avoidance of same-sex intimacy and for the heteronormative pairing of an openly gay man with a straight woman as the show’s title characters; but it is probably because of those features, rather than despite them, that Will & Grace helped shift public opinion. Back then, majorities of Americans still disapproved of homosexuality, even as they became increasingly supportive of gay rights; and there is some evidence to suggest that regular viewers of the show became more tolerant of homosexuality by virtue of their identification with the gay characters.77
The representations of lesbians and gays in Hollywood films followed a different trajectory, though the ultimate outcome was largely the same. Whereas the “culture of homosexual pollution” determined how homosexuality was depicted in the 1980s, lesbian and gay characters in the 1990s increasingly took on the form of the “normal gay.”78 The film that most clearly marks the rise of the “normal gay” is Philadelphia (1993), the story of a successful lawyer who is fired after the partners at his law firm learn that he has HIV. Tom Hanks won an Academy Award for his portrayal of the suffering gay lawyer, Andrew Beckett, but the film is also noteworthy for Denzel Washington’s homophobic character, Joe Miller, whose anti-gay prejudice ultimately does not prevent him from helping Beckett win justice. The film invites straight audiences to identify with both characters: they sympathize with Beckett because his character suffers while exhibiting no stereotypically gay character traits, and they sympathize with Miller because audiences at the time shared his moral disapproval of homosexuality. By watching Washington’s character work through his homophobia, audiences learned how they could stand up against discrimination while at the same time acknowledging their discomfort with homosexuality.
Through the rest of the decade, lesbian and gay characters appeared in an increasing variety of roles and contexts that collectively attest to the diffusion of the “normal gay” throughout society. In The Bird Cage (1996), Robin Williams plays a gay drag club owner with a straight son and who humorously adopts a straight persona when meeting the daughter-in-law’s conservative parents. In As Good as It Gets (1997), Greg Kinnear earned an Oscar nomination for playing the gay neighbor and witness to an antisocial Jack Nicholson’s romantic pursuit of Helen Hunt. Also in 1997, cult classic film director Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy depicts Ben Affleck’s pursuit of Joey Lauren Adams, whose sexual orientation is far from clear.
Thus, in Hollywood’s gay nineties, lesbian and gay characters appear as parents, neighbors, friends, potential romantic partners, professionals, business owners—all defined by attributes other than sexual orientation. Sexual orientation in the 1990s thus became only one part of a person that stood alongside all others. To be sure, sociologist Steven Seidman’s conclusion that these films “at best promote a fairly narrow type of social tolerance, not equality” is accurate: films of the 1990s rarely featured lesbian or gay leads or depicted homosexuality as equal to heterosexuality.79 However, Hollywood at least relegated homophobia to the negative half of the semiotic ledger.
Critic Suzanna Danuta Walters observes that homosexuality’s “new visibility” in the 1990s was deeply embedded in paradox: for just as American popular culture seemed to embrace lesbians and gays more than ever, acceptance in real life lagged far behind.80 According to the 1996 General Social Survey, there was still a 30-point gap between the percentage of Americans who said that homosexuality was “always wrong” versus “not wrong at all” (56 to 26 percent). In politics, this period has been characterized as one in which the state refused to see lesbians and gays in law and policy: both “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) illustrate how policy makers tried to render same-sex sexuality invisible.81 And in everyday life, lesbians and gays faced persistent homophobia and anti-gay violence, as the gruesome 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard illustrates. Thus, just as it became easy and cool to consume gay culture, Americans remained resistant to real equality.
Americans’ acceptance of lesbians and gays in politics and real life would lag behind mass media representations for most of the 2000s as well, but as the new millennium dawned, the social imagination of homosexuality as deviant behavior was no longer dominant. The religious and conservative opposition to homosexuality remained quite strong—and appeared to strengthen after George W. Bush, an evangelical conservative, assumed the office of president after the 2000 election. However, the news media, culture industries, and the Democratic Party provided a secular, youthful alternative. Throughout the 2000s, moral disapproval of homosexuality steadily declined, support for gay rights steadily increased, media representations continued to push the boundaries of acceptability, and the social imagination of homosexuality as identity became increasingly powerful. Tolerance and equality for lesbians and gays never progressed quickly or dramatically, but the tastemakers in the media continued to tell an ever-widening story about normal gay identities, while the demographic metabolism of society slowly and inexorably churned out a new generation who saw the world in a new light.
The Battle for Gay Marriage
Looking back on the history, it seems to be no coincidence that the first significant push for gay marriage by the LGBTQ movement occurred in 1987 at the Second National March on Washington as part of a momentous turning point. True, the first legal requests for same-sex marriage licenses appeared in the 1970s; but back then, when homosexuality was broadly understood to be either a mental illness or a deviant behavior, such a proposition was nonsense.82 Gay marriage would make sense only in the context of a full-throated demand for the recognition of lesbian and gay identities.
Gay marriage was a significant component of the 1987 March on Washington in two respects. First, although the word marriage did not appear, the first of the seven major demands made in the activists’ platform was “The Legal Recognition of Lesbian and Gay Relationships.” The platform further alluded to gay marriage—albeit in a variety of euphemistic phrases—by demanding access to the rights and benefits given to heterosexual couples:
Lesbian and gay male domestic partners are entitled to the same rights as married heterosexual couples.… Changes must be made in the courts and the legislatures to provide homosexual couples the same privileges and benefits as heterosexuals who commit themselves to similar relationships.83
Although the platform did not demand gay marriage per se, the call for rights, benefits, and legal status equivalent to marriage was effectively the same.
Second, as mentioned above, organizers held a mass wedding ceremony on Saturday, October 10. Ghaziani reports that the decision to hold a wedding was highly contentious, garnering opposition from several constituencies within the movement.84 Nevertheless, about two thousand same-sex couples, along with their supporters, gathered in front of the IRS building in Washington to enact their vision of marriage equality.85 One participant in the event recalled:
The wedding ceremony was conducted by a woman. She said, “Now, for those of you who aren’t getting married, move to the outside and join hands.” The people who were going to marry moved in. All of us who had joined hands were told to raise our hands and hold them in the air while she said some kind of prayer. The emotion and the sincerity were very unexpected. Tears were streaming down everybody’s faces. It was like this circle of love. I think people might have expected more of a show, and it turned into something very real.86
Gay marriages would become very real indeed. In a tension that would characterize the battle over gay marriage from beginning to end, this public, political demonstration that, legally, was about rights and benefits provided by government to married couples was also an intensely emotional, personal affair that invoked transcendent values of love, acceptance, and recognition.
During the 1990s, gay marriage became a nationwide issue. Activists at the 1993 March on Washington demanded its legalization explicitly in their platform, and a mere ten days later, the Hawaii Supreme Court issued the first (albeit temporary) legal victory for gay marriage proponents. In Baehr v. Lewin, the court ruled that the government must demonstrate that “compelling state interests” are served by denying someone a marriage license on the basis of sex. The ensuing legal battle lasted for much of the remainder of the decade, and it prompted both federal and state-level legislation to define marriage as between one man and one woman only. In 1996, President Clinton signed DOMA, which both defined marriage thusly and explicitly allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages that were granted in other states. Two years later, voters in Hawaii and Alaska amended their state constitutions to define marriage as an opposite-sex union, thereby preempting any court ruling that would permit gay marriage there.
In 2004, Massachusetts became the first state to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the Supreme Judicial Court ruled, in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (2003), that it was a violation of the state constitution to deny the rights and benefits that come from marriage to someone on the basis of the sex of the individual’s partner. Legislators were given six months to correct the problem, but the court rejected a proposal for same-sex civil unions (similar to what Vermont legislators created in 2000) because it would relegate same-sex couples to “second-class status.” On May 17, the first marriage licenses to same-sex couples were issued, and over 8,100 couples received them during the next two years.87
Although this was a significant milestone, the most dramatic effect of gay marriage’s legalization in Massachusetts was the nationwide moral panic that ensued: opponents sounded the alarm that liberal courts would redefine marriage to include same-sex couples if they did not take drastic measures.88 President Bush endorsed a proposed amendment to the US Constitution banning gay marriage and rode a tidal wave of anti–gay marriage ballot initiatives to his 2004 reelection. Prior to 2003 only four states had banned gay marriage in their state constitutions, but in 2004 citizens in thirteen voted to do so. Between 2005 and 2008, thirteen more states passed such constitutional amendments. In all but two of these twenty-six referenda, gay marriage opponents won with more than 56 percent of the vote.89 It is perhaps shocking to recall that the day after President Obama’s election in 2008, gay marriage was legal only in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and no state that had proposed banning gay marriage via constitutional amendment had ever failed to do so. At the time, only 39 or 40 percent of Americans supported gay marriage, according to Gallup and the Pew Research Center.
