The Path to Gay Rights

How Activism and Coming Out Changed Public Opinion

Jeremiah J. Garretson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479881925
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An innovative, data-driven explanation of how public opinion shifted on LGBTQ rights The Path to Gay Rights is the first social science analysis of how and why the LGBTQ movement achieved its most unexpected victory---transforming gay people from a despised group of social deviants into a minority worthy of rights and protections in the eyes of most Americans. The book weaves together a narrative of LGBTQ history with new findings from the field of political psychology to provide an understanding of how social movements affect mass attitudes in the United States and globally. Using data going back to the 1970s, the book argues that the current understanding of how social movements change mass opinion—through sympathetic media coverage and endorsements from political leaders—cannot provide an adequate explanation for the phenomenal success of the LGBTQ movement at changing the public’s views. In The Path to Gay Rights, Jeremiah Garretson argues that the LGBTQ community’s response to the AIDS crisis was a turning point for public support of gay rights. ACT-UP and related AIDS organizations strategically targeted political and media leaders, normalizing news coverage of LGBTQ issues and AIDS and signaled to LGBTQ people across the United States that their lives were valued. The net result was an increase in the number of LGBTQ people who came out and lived their lives openly, and with increased contact with gay people, public attitudes began to warm and change. Garretson goes beyond the story of LGBTQ rights to develop an evidence-based argument for how social movements can alter mass opinion on any contentious topic.

PART I

Introduction

1

A Transformed Society

LGBT Rights in the United States

It is apparent that condemnation of homosexuality is today almost universal.… Occasionally one encounters an attitude not so much of tolerance but of actual acceptance, but this is rare.… The basic problem is the hostile spirit pervading even the more permissive of modern peoples.

—Donald Webster Cory, The Homosexual in America, 1951 (emphasis added)

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a dramatic wave began to form in the waters of public opinion: American attitudes involving homosexuality began to change. The key to understanding why is simple. As the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) decimated the gay community in the late 1980s, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)1 activists demanded that the media begin to cover AIDS and other issues of importance to them, Then, as the public’s fear of AIDS waned and a national dialogue on gay rights emerged in the early 1990s, lesbians and gays across the country began to feel more comfortable living openly. So many people learned of gay family members, friends, and acquaintances that the basic negative reactions that most people had toward lesbians and gays began to evaporate. As this visceral negativity towards homosexuality dissipated in the wake of increased familiarity with lesbians and gays, a marked transformation of the American public’s views on gay rights started that has continued to this day.2

The transformation of America’s response to homosexuality has been—and continues to be—one of the most rapid and sustained shifts in mass attitudes since the start of public polling. As late as 1987, the General Social Survey (GSS)3 found that 78 percent of the American public thought that same-sex relations were “Always Wrong.” A mere twenty-five years later, the same survey found that only 45 percent believed homosexuality was “Always Wrong,” with an equal percentage saying same-sex relations were “Not Wrong at All.”4 Put another way, over a third of the American public has changed its view on just this one question. Since the 1990s, change among younger Americans has been so drastic that many pundits and academics have concluded that opposition to gay rights will soon go the way of support for segregated schools and opposition to interracial marriage. Only strong conservatives and the very religious have remained immune to this trend.5

How has this change in public opinion occurred? What are its primary causes? Why do we not see attitude change of similar magnitudes on other issues? What makes gay rights different?

The change in Americans’ basic reaction to lesbians and gays is much broader than surveys have captured. In the 1960s and 1970s, journalists routinely dismissed gay issues as improper or unseemly for public consumption.6 Elected officials either ignored lesbians or gays or openly denigrated them.7 When presented with well-reasoned constitutional arguments for gay rights, federal judges concluded without a second thought that discrimination against lesbians and gays was perfectly legal.

Times have changed. Lesbian and gay issues are now regularly discussed in the national news. Many political figures tend to endorse laws supporting gay rights.8 Federal judges across the country and a majority of the US Supreme Court now appear persuaded that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment renders many anti-gay laws unconstitutional. Lesbian and gay characters are now regularly depicted on American entertainment television,9 including shows geared toward teenage audiences like Teen Wolf and Glee. And, most important, a vast majority of the public now reports personally knowing out lesbian and gay relatives, friends, or coworkers.10

All of these facets of the nation’s growing acceptance of lesbians and gays are interrelated with change in public support for gay rights. In democracies such as the United States, politicians generally respond to public opinion. Judges and television executives do not wish to appear too out-of-step with the public.11 LGBT people themselves feel more comfortable coming out to those perceived to be more supportive of gay rights.12

Although public opinion may encourage these changes, it is often driven by them. The changing stances of politicians, television, and personal experiences with respect to LGBT people have all been shown to cause more liberal attitudes toward lesbians, gays, and their rights.13 This interrelationship makes understanding the root cause of attitude change difficult. But understanding why and how opinions have changed is central to comprehending why many aspects of American society—entertainment, politics, corporations—appear to be, at least rhetorically, more tolerant of the existence of lesbians and gays. Recognizing the central role that mass attitude change has had in these broader social changes is key to understanding the social revolution regarding sexuality in both the United States and across the globe. This, in turn, leads us to consider the extent to which this process of attitude change may be pertinent to other issue areas.

* * *

The core argument of this book is simple: It is that the most important factor that has allowed for a rapid, significant, and durable transformation in public opinion about lesbians and gays has been the tireless work of LGBT activists, especially during the AIDS crisis. LGBT and anti-AIDS activists reoriented the national dialogue by changing the way the news media approached gay rights issues. As the national media began to discuss gay rights, the lesbian and gay community no longer felt as isolated from society at large. This led to a massive increase in “coming out” and the transformation of American society.

This book is about how the explosion of tolerance for gay rights that Americans are rapidly expressing on surveys has its origins in the ways in which lesbians and gays have fought back against the stigma they have felt from the larger society. As the LGBT movement assaulted this stigma, it unleashed a series of contextual changes in American society that cascaded into further change. The goal of this book is to disentangle these various contextual shifts in media, politics, and society and to explain how LGBT activism eventually caused the metamorphosis of public perceptions of lesbians and gays.

Although LGBT activists started the process of change by pressuring political elites and the national media to pay attention to the AIDS crisis and other gay issues, the eventual responsiveness of these institutions to activist pressure provided another crucial link in causing social change. The notion that institutional change can bring about shifts in public opinion is hardly a new theory.14 However, the actual process through which institutions have brought about change in public perceptions of lesbians and gays has been misunderstood. The central problem with preexisting theories of change in mass opinion on gay rights—framing and elite-signaling (explained below and in chapter 2)—is that they tend to operate directly through news media. In the media, framing involves the use of phrases and words that cause readers or viewers to apply certain values, like beliefs in equality and fairness, to gay rights, while elite-signaling involves individuals adopting the positions of political leaders on an issue when those positions are communicated through news media.

Such media-led theories are ill-suited as an explanation for the distinctive features of change in support for gay rights. For instance, not only has the public become more liberal in its attitudes toward gay rights in time periods of intense news attention to gay rights, but it has also grown more tolerant in time periods when news attention to gay issues has been close to zero. Furthermore, attitudinal change on gay rights has occurred both among those who follow the news regularly and among those who report complete inattention to the news. If attitude change comes directly from news coverage of gay rights, then why is it not most concentrated among those that watch the news?

This book argues that institutional changes in the American media and political system, specifically the start of a prominent national dialogue on lesbian and gay rights, did not act directly on the American public as is usually the case when the media causes attitude change on other issues. Instead, rather than causing the distinctive changes that we have seen on gay rights, what these institutional changes did—in reality—was to encourage lesbians and gays to “come out” en masse. Thus, institutional change brought about a “ ‘boom’ ” in public exposure to lesbians and gays—both through media and interpersonally. It was this “ ‘boom’ ” in exposure to lesbians and gays that resulted in all of the distinctive features of change in gay rights and ultimately led tolerance to triumph. Figure 1.1 summarizes this causal sequence of attitude change.

I term this theory—that exposure to lesbians and gays was the defining factor that has caused distinctive change on gay rights attitudes as compared to other issues—the theory of affective liberalization. Evidence in this book demonstrates that exposure to lesbians and gays increased support for gay rights by significantly warming the automatic emotional reactions—positive or negative—that spring to mind when people think about lesbians and gays. While other factors also affect support for gay rights, it is this increased exposure—in the form of interpersonal and mediated contact with lesbians and gays—that has largely defined the most prominent features of opinion change on gay issues: its broadness, its durability, its rapidity, and its concentration among the millennial generation.

Figure 1.1. The Causal Sequence of Attitude Change. The causal sequence that resulted in durable attitude change on gay and lesbian issues as described in this study is represented in this diagram by the black arrows. Anti-AIDS activism resulted in pro-gay shifts in both national media coverage and among Democratic elected officials in the early 1990s. These were followed by increases in coming out, which led to durable mass attitude change via affective liberalization. Preexisting theories of the origin of attitude change, including value-framing and issue evolution, are depicted by the dotted arrow.

The next section outlines change in American attitudes on gay rights over the last forty years. After illustrating these trends, I outline my theory of affective liberalization. One other major feature of this work is also previewed in this chapter: a strong emphasis on the role of the LGBT movement in providing a catalyzing force for change through years of sustained activism. Other academic accounts miss that centrality. A brief outline of the book follows.

A Survey of Changing Views on Lesbian and Gay Rights, 1972–2014

When we survey attitude change on gay rights, we are first struck by the rapidity and scale of the change. However, an equally impressive feature of this change is that it has occurred across nearly every question asked by pollsters regarding lesbians, gays, or homosexuality regularly. From public acceptability of homosexuality to support for allowing gay teachers, we have seen a sustained shift in public support.15

Civil Liberties

Without legal support for the rights of minorities to communicate with the public—in the form of speeches, books, rallies, and parades—the public will likely never encounter the viewpoints of minorities.

The first national survey to ask about support for the civil liberties of lesbians and gays was the General Social Survey (GSS) in 1972.16 Approximately every two years, this survey asks a different representative sample of the American public an expansive battery of questions during interviews that last well over an hour. Four frequently asked questions involve gay rights. Three questions ask about support for the free speech rights of gays. Of these three, two questions directly involve civil liberties for lesbians and gays: one asks respondents if they believe that homosexuals should be allowed to make a speech in their community; the other asks if it would be proper to have a book favoring homosexuality and written by an “admitted homosexual” removed from a library in a respondent’s community.

Figure 1.2. Trends in Support for Gay Civil Liberties.

These trends involve the percentage of the public who would allow a library book or a public speech on homosexuality in their community by an “ad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part I. Introduction
• Part II. A Prelude to Change: LGBT Movement Development and Political Integration
• Part III. Public Response and the Nature of Social Change
• Part IV. Looking toward the Future
• Appendix 1. Additional Information on Statistical Methods
• Appendix 2. Additional Information on Data and Variable Coding
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author