Sexual preference and media

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Sexual preference and media
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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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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."

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• 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."

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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).

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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

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• 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).

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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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

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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

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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

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1986
1985
1993
1993
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Major Issues

• Identity
• Coming Out
• Potential Backlash