Sexual preference and media

1. Sexual preference and media

2. The dominant mode of sexual preference is heterosexualiy • Most people self-identify as hetero • Seen as ‘normal’ • Enforced through religious doctrine • Enforced through law • Enforced through violence or negative stereotyping • Media follow/influence normative beliefs about society and social groups

3. Voter exit polls in the United States found that between 4 and 5 percent of voters in the last five U.S. national elections identified as gay or lesbian. While voters may constitute a large sample of the U.S. population, they are still not representative of the population at large.

4. The NHSLS found that 1.4 percent of women and 2.8 percent of men thought of themselves as homosexual or bisexual, while more than 4 percent of women and more than 6 percent of men report a sexual attraction to people of the same sex. Another analysis that combines data from the NHSLS and several waves of the GSS finds that 3.6 percent of women and nearly 5 percent of men report having had sexual contact with a partner of the same sex since they were age 18. A national survey in Canada (2003) found that 1.9 percent of men and 1.6 percent of women reported being gay, lesbian, or bisexual.

5. The American Psychological Association states that, "sexual orientation emerges for most people in early adolescence without any prior sexual experience. And some people report trying very hard over many years to change their sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual with no success. For these reasons, psychologists do not consider sexual orientation for most people to be a conscious choice that can be voluntarily changed."

6. The APA adds that, "Homosexuality was thought to be a mental illness in the past because mental health professionals and society had biased information about homosexuality since most studies only involved lesbians and gay men in therapy. When researchers examined data about gay people who were not in therapy, the idea that homosexuality was a mental illness was found to be untrue."

7. The identical twin problem: • Essentially all conservative Christian authors who have written about homosexuality maintain that sexual orientation is not determined by one's genes. Most treat it as an abnormal, unnatural, chosen, and changeable habit or addiction. Religious conservatives often point to studies of identical twins who were separated at birth and raised independently. If one is gay, then the other twin is found to be gay only about 55% of the time. They reason that: since identical twins have the same genetic structure, then if homosexual orientation were determined by genes, 100% of the other twins would be gay. Thus they conclude that homosexual orientation is not caused by one's genes. • Many gays and lesbians believe that their orientation is caused by their genes; it is normal, natural, unchosen and unchangeable. With the exception of one small religious association of therapists, the vast majority of human sexuality researchers and mental health therapists accept that the root cause of homosexual orientation is genetic. • The data seems to show that a small minority of individuals -- perhaps 10% -- have a "gay gene" or "gay genes." However, the gene is only expressed in perhaps 55% of those individuals, as a result of some unknown factor in the environment. In the remainder, it remains dormant and the person matures as a heterosexual. • Source: religioustolerance.org

8. Gaybashing attacks represent a significant percentage of all hate crime incidents in the United States. For example, according to the Human Rights Campaign, FBI statistics for 2001 show that sexual orientation-based hate crimes constituted 13.9% of all reported bias incidents, making it the third highest ranked category, after crimes due to racial and religious prejudice. • Source: www.glbtq.com

9. A 1984 report by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force suggested that almost every glbtq-identified person surveyed has experienced some form of verbal, physical, or property-related abuse as a direct consequence of their sexual or gender identification.

10. Although statistics are not available on the actual numbers of AIDS-related attacks, it is significant that gaybashing incidents that included verbal references to AIDS, as well as attacks against people with AIDS, became more noticeable in the late 1980s.

11. Gaybashing in the Media • It is rare that gaybashing incidents generate major media coverage. Until the 1990s, gaybashing was not considered a crime that warranted more than local attention. In the 1980s, however, gay people became visible in the media due to the spread of AIDS in the United States. The epidemic, and its connection to the gay community, led to increased levels of anti-gay fear and hatred, which, in turn, fueled increases in gaybashing.

12. Two murders, motivated by homophobia and transphobia, that occurred during the 1990s garnered significant national media attention. Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay University of Wyoming student, was targeted by his assailants because of his sexual orientation. On October 7, 1998, in Laramie, Wyoming, Shepard was lured from a campus bar by two men who gave him a ride. The men drove him to a remote location, savagely beat him, tied him to a fence, and left him to die.

13. On Christmas Day, 1993, Brandon Teena was beaten and raped by two men who had learned that Brandon, whom they had previously befriended and had believed was male, had actually been born female. Following the attack, Teena reported the rape to the local police, who failed to take any action against the assailants. Almost a week later, the two men tracked Teena down and murdered him.

14. In particular, Matthew Shepard was viewed with a great deal of compassion in the media. As a young, white, attractive, "normal-looking" college student who was tortured and killed with sensational brutality, Shepard was viewed as the acceptable face of homosexuality to whom sympathy could be given.

15. The Brandon Teena Story (1998); Kimberly Peirce's feature film Boys Don't Cry (1999); • Moises Kaufman and the Techtonic Theater Project's play The Laramie Project (2000, made into an HBO motion picture in 2002); and NBC's The Matthew Shepard Story (2002).

16. there are clear changes in the media of the past ten years or so, which bring certain ideas much more into the mainstream than they ever were before -- the visibility of gays and lesbians, for example (even though it's still limited) • Source: David Gauntlett • http://theoryhead.com/gender/interview1.htm

17. KP: Umm, I'm not sure. For the sake of polemic, I'm going to say not necessarily. In the 1970s, Soap had a gay character and high ratings, and disco allowed for more sexual expression. Going all the way back to the 1920s, there were two lesbian plays and one gay play on Broadway! Again, I think that at certain times the culture is more willing to support alternative sexualities. Maybe because I fancy myself a historian of a certain stripe I'm going to insist on a cyclical pattern; eruptions at different points rather than a progression. On the other hand, I'm not going to insist blindly that there hasn't been a transformation of some kind in the way we think and live sexuality; certainly at this moment there does seem to be a more liberal and less sexist attitude to sex.

18. Change at every level • The prominence of these questions of identity in modern society is both a consequence and a cause of changes at the institutional level. Typically, Giddens sees connections between the most 'micro' aspects of society - individuals' internal sense of self and identity - and the big 'macro' picture of the state, multinational capitalist corporations, and globalisation. These different levels, which have traditionally been treated quite separately by sociology, have influence upon each other, and cannot really be understood in isolation. • Take, for example, the changes in intimate relationships which we have seen in the last sixty years - the much greater levels of divorce and separation as people move from one relationship to another, the substantially increased openness about sexuality, and much more conspicuous sexual diversity. These changes cannot be understood by assuming they were led by social institutions and the state, not least of all because traditional thinking on both left and right has been that both capitalism and the 'moral authorities' of the state would prefer the population to have stable monogamous family lives. • Source: Gauntlett ( ) www.theory.org.uk

19. Anthony Giddens: The reflexive project of the self • Making a narrative • If the self is 'made', rather than inherited or just passively static, what form is it in? What is the thing that we make? Giddens says that in the post-traditional order, self-identity becomes a reflexive project - an endeavour that we continuously work and reflect on. We create, maintain and revise a set of biographical narratives - the story of who we are, and how we came to be where we are now. • Self-identity, then, is not a set of traits or observable characteristics. It is a person's own reflexive understanding of their biography. Self-identity has continuity - that is, it cannot easily be completely changed at will - but that continuity is only a product of the person's reflexive beliefs about their own biography (Giddens 1991: 53).

20. Anthony Giddens: Lifestyle • Choose your future • In the post-traditional era, since social roles are no longer handed to us by society, we have to choose a 'lifestyle' - although the options are not, of course, unlimited. 'Lifestyle choices' may sound like a luxury of the more affluent classes, but Giddens asserts that everyone in modern society has to select a lifestyle, although different groups will have different possibilities (and wealth would certainly seem to increase the range of options). 'Lifestyle' is not only about fancy jobs and conspicuous consumption, though; the term applies to wider choices, behaviours, and (to greater or lesser degrees) attitudes and beliefs. • Lifestyles could be said to be like ready-made templates for a narrative of self. But the choice of one lifestyle does not predict any particular type of life story. So a lifestyle is more like a genre: whilst movie directors can choose to make a romance, or a western, or a horror story, we - as 'directors' of our own life narratives - can choose a metropolitan or a rural lifestyle, a lifestyle focused on success in work, or one centred on clubbing, sport, romance, or sexual conquests.

21. Beyond tradition • [...] The choices which we make in modern society may be affected by the weight of tradition on the one hand, and a sense of relative freedom on the other. Everyday choices about what to eat, what to wear, who to socialise with, are all decisions which position ourselves as one kind of person and not another. And as Giddens says, 'The more post-traditional the settings in which an individual moves, the more lifestyle concerns the very core of self-identity, its making and remaking' (1991: 81). • [...] The importance of the media in propagating many modern lifestyles should be obvious. [...] The range of lifestyles - or lifestyle ideals - offered by the media may be limited, but at the same time it is usually broader than those we would expect to just 'bump into' in everyday life. So the media in modernity offers possibilities and celebrates diversity, but also offers narrow interpretations of certain roles or lifestyles - depending where you look.

23. KP: In a related question, gay rights, or even freedom of sexual orientation are certainly more visible in popular culture than they were five or certainly ten years ago. At the same time, does this increased visibility really lead to increased acceptance? Or, are the media gains made to stand in for real, political gains.

24. DG: Well of course we should never confuse changes in the media with changes in real life. However I do think that popular media can take a leading role in this kind of social change. On its own, the media can't transform people's attitudes, but I think it can help to chip away at people's prejudices. To take up an example you mentioned, intolerance towards lesbians and gays is slowly decreasing (I've got statistics about this in the book). By no means has it gone away, but it's in decline. I think that one part of the reason for that is that TV has allowed people to 'get to know' some pleasant gay characters. That doesn't always work of course -- some people are so intolerant that they just get even more angry when they see people from groups they hate on screen. But I think that over time, popular media is bound to be able to slowly affect attitudes.

25. AIDS and the representation of gay men • At first, silence in the news media • Gay media focus • Gay activism • ACT UP! • “Silence = Death” • Ryan White and Rock Hudson • Ryan White, a hemophiliac treated as someone who did not ‘deserve’ the disease • A ‘media frenzy’ ensues

32. Political action • AIDS Activism • Attacked government as unresponsive, drug testing too slow, etc. • Gay Rights Activism • Political acknowledgement as an oppressed minority • Attack upon legal and governmental restrictions on GLBT people • Sodomy laws • Gay marriage

33. Cultural action • Sympathetic portrayals of gay men dealing with AIDS • An Early Frost • Philadelphia • Efforts to include gay characters in mainstream media portrayals • Soap • Spin City • Ellen • Reality TV • Will and Grace • Development of gay media • Cable • Queer as Folk • The L Word • Queer theory (postmodern activism in sexuality) • David Bowie • Queercore (Queer punk music) • Judith Butler

34. 1986 1985 1993 1993

35. Major Issues • Identity • Coming Out • Potential Backlash