It
is often the small, everyday actions that define the cutting
edge of political movements and the burgeoning movement to
get newspapers to print the marriage or civil-union announcements
of gay and lesbian couples is an example of a seemingly simple
request for fairness inspiring political action and social
change.
Gay-marriage proponents, as well as the National Lesbian and
Gay Journalist Association, have been lobbying newspapers
across the nation to print announcements of gay nuptials.
Many smaller papers, including the Sun Journal of Lewiston,
Maine, the Sunday Citizen of New Hampshire, the Fayetteville
Observer of North Carolina, and local Massachusetts community
weeklies, such as the Melrose Free Press, the
Somerville Journal, and the Cambridge Chronicle,
have recently begun carrying such announcements. As of now,
however, no big-market papers print gay or lesbian wedding
announcements, although several are in the process of re-evaluating
their current policies.
There’s no question that printing gay wedding and commitment
announcements is a break from tradition, but the reluctance
of papers such as the Boston Globe and the New York
Times to do so now is baffling. These papers have no trouble
printing editorials promoting legislation that counters discrimination
against gay men. The Times has editorialized in the
past in favor of anti-gay-discrimination legislation on both
the city and the state level and has argued for coverage of
transgendered people under the state’s anti-discrimination
bill. The Boston Globe has editorialized in favor of
domestic-partner benefits, as well as endorsing Massachusetts’s
Safe School initiative, which supports the rights and safety
of gay kids and students. Both papers published editorials
attacking the culture of queer-hating that led to Matthew
Shepard’s death.
On some level, the refusal to print these notices seems petty,
even as the fight to get them printed comes across as frivolous.
Let’s face it, the decision to print gay-nuptial notices
is a battle of society-page protocol that hardly seems germane
to the everyday lives of lesbians and gay men. It doesn’t,
for instance, address the hatreds and inequalities that gay
people face daily. What it does do is question the most profound
organizational principles of a functional society: manners,
etiquette, social protocol, and civility. Perhaps the real
revolution won’t happen in the courts or in the streets,
but in the society pages, the columns of Dear Abby and Miss
Manners, and the newest edition of Emily Post’s etiquette.
A look at the history of wedding announcements explains why
the question of whether to print gay-nuptial notices so vexes
newspaper editors and publishers. To begin with, marriage
announcements are a public manifestation of a private relationship
that is regarded as a central pillar of what we like to call
the civilized world. Their earliest form took place as banns,
the Christian ecclesiastical mandate that upcoming weddings
be announced three times in advance of the ceremony to make
sure that no one has any objections to the union. In the mid-19th
century, the practice morphed into the secular tradition of
first announcing an engagement and then the wedding on the
“society page” of British and American newspapers.
Wedding announcements’ transition from the church to
the newspaper was ascribable to the always-aspiring-upward
middle class. The rich thought it vulgar to announce engagements
and weddings in the popular press (after all, anyone who actually
mattered would find out the happy news from their servants)
and the poor didn’t have the social standing, or the
economic clout, to make their personal lives matter to the
newspaper-buying middle class. From the 19th century onward,
U.S. media supplied readers with narratives of current events
and set the terms of socially acceptable behavior, proper
language, child-rearing, gender norms, and—through the
“women’s pages”—fashions. Along with this,
they reinforced the limits of social aspirations and fears:
they told you who was invited to tea at the homes of the upper-middle
class, and where the “bad part of town” was located;
they continually demonstrated (through news stories and features)
the gentility of white people and the physical, social, and
moral impropriety of African-Americans and poor white people.
To an extraordinarily large degree, they were the most potent
gatekeepers and reinforcers of social norms, prejudicial thinking,
and discriminatory behavior. At their best with, say, the
muckrakers like Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair, who exposed
political and business scandals, they fought the system. But
for the most part, they capitulated to enormous social, political,
and economic pressures, often refusing to confront, or expose,
the myriad ills of society. After all, newspapers are driven
by advertising and business interests. To a large extent,
this hasn’t changed.
In a July 29 column, Boston Globe ombudsperson Christine
Chinlund wrote about the Globe’s intent to review
its gay-wedding-announcement policy “with an eye toward
possible change. Underline possible.” While Chinlund
supports such a change. “In my view, the issue of gay
partnership is indeed a civil-rights matter; by extension,
so is its cultural treatment—newspaper notices included.”
She also acknowledges how difficult such a change will be
to make. While she may have her own opinion, Globe
editor Martin Baron has quite another: “Some may see
this as an easy issue, but I see it as a difficult issue.”
He goes on to say, “Community standards are something
we can’t ignore, but what a community standard is is
hard to say.” Baron’s fancy footwork obscures the
issue at hand. Of course you can’t ignore “community
standards”—i.e., pretend they don’t exist—but
you can certainly decide to cross or change them. But more
problematic is the idea that “community standards”
exist in any uncontested, authentic, sense. Mainstream newspapers
in this country function under the myth that they speak for
the majority or plurality. And maybe papers are or should
be, voices of their communities. The problem is, of course,
whose community do they speak for, and who decides?
Newspapers’ acceptance of “community standards”
has been at times horrific and appalling. In the 1920s, for
example, it was not unusual for some Southern papers to print
notices of an impending lynching of an African-American in
legal custody. A way of getting a good crowd, it was most
certainly in line with the prevailing notion of “community
standards.” In 1965, Alice Crimmins of New York, who
worked as a cocktail waitress and was accused (with almost
no convincing evidence) of murdering her two small children,
was essentially convicted during her trial by every paper
in Manhattan (including the New York Times) because
she refused to shed tears in public, a clear violation of
community standards about how women should behave. In 1991,
Paul Reubens (aka Pee-wee Herman) was arrested for masturbating
in a adult-movie theater. Newspapers (and other media) vilified
him and essentially destroyed his career: community standards
dictated that children’s-television stars shouldn’t
have sexual lives. In January 2002, the Providence Journal
printed the names and addresses of men who had been picked
up on misdemeanor charges of engaging in consensual sex in
an adult-movie theater, even though this was antithetical
to accepted journalistic practice of at least two decades’
standing. One of the men committed suicide.
These examples, of course, represent the extreme. Far more
common are the instances of newspapers reinforcing the social
status quo. Up until a few decades ago, Southern newspapers
had long followed a practice of referring to African Americans
by only their given and last names, rather than by the titles
of miss, missus, or mister with their surnames. It had long
been a “community standard” in the South, after
all, to refer to “Negroes” by their first names
alone. (This “community standard” practice gave
rise to some African-American parents’ naming their infant
boys “Mister” to ensure that they were given respect,
however unintentionally.)
The
battle over language—which is, of course, a battle over
etiquette and appropriate behavior—is profoundly political.
In the 1950s and 1960s, civil rights activists fought long
and hard with newspapers to get them to stop referring to
African-Americans as “colored.” During the same
period, fledgling homosexual rights groups didn’t have
the social or political clout to effectively lobby newspapers
to stop using words like “perverts” and “queers”
when referring to gay men and lesbians. By the 1970s, however,
gay activists were fighting to get newspapers to stop using
the more old-fashioned and clinical term “homosexual”
in favor of “gay.” The New York Times put
up an often-acrimonious, eight-year battle against using “gay,”
finally relenting in 1982. Of course, the fight for “Ms.”
(instead of Miss or Mrs.) went on for years in almost every
newspaper across the country before it became accepted usage.
Newspapers reinforce societal standards all the time. A look
at social coverage in American newspapers over the past 50
years chronicles how overtly wrong and insulting many of these
papers’ policies have been. Until the late 1960s, for
example, the New York Times printed notices
of Jewish weddings on Mondays, while those of Christian weddings
were published on Sundays. As recently as 30 years ago, most
major dailies devoted considerable space on their society
pages to debutante coming-out parties and activities. Only
white debutantes and their parties were given any notice,
even though middle- and upper-middle-class African-Americans
were engaging in almost identical activities. In New York
City, for example, the Times was the place to have
one’s “coming-out” proclaimed. Yet the parties
of African-American debutantes were written up in the Amsterdam
News, a large and influential paper published in Harlem,
even though these affairs were as formal, expensive, and hierarchically
structured as those of the white debs.
Ten years ago, only the bride’s (very formal) photo appeared
in wedding announcements; now, it is perfectly acceptable,
even mandated, to have a photo, usually informal, of the smiling
bride and groom. It is not unheard of, although still not
very common, to see photos of non-white or even interracial
couples in major newspapers—something that wasn’t
done 20 years ago. It is also now common for gossip columns
to mention, in passing, the homosexuality of such openly queer
celebrities as Sir Ian McKellen, Ellen DeGeneres, or Sir Elton
John, along with their date du jour—unacceptable just
15 years ago. Ten years ago, it was unacceptable in obituaries,
whether paid announcements or news stories, to use the word
“lover” or “partner” for the deceased’s
unmarried (gay or straight) survivor. The more liberal papers
might have been willing to say “is survived by…”
without a specific relationship designation, but most would
not even allow that.
Community standards change. That much is obvious. What’s
less obvious, however, is that these changes are not just
the reflection of societal evolution, but the very enactment
of such change. To a very large degree, we aren’t just
who we say we are, we are who the society pages say we are.
The reason newspapers like the Globe are unwilling
to print notices of gay and lesbian weddings—or at least
are wrestling with the decision—is because they understand
full well that such a change in policy is not just cosmetic.
It’s meaningful on a societal level. The political point
here is not that publishing gay-wedding notices and announcements
constitutes capitulation to a noisy, demanding minority, but
that such a move would be another important step in granting
homosexuals access to a public space that is open to everyone
else.
In this, newspapers have a clear choice: they can follow or
they can lead. The argument that community standards are at
issue here, as put forth by the Globe’s Baron,
is a not only false, it’s also pernicious. Most of what
passes for community standards in America today—casual
acceptance of a pathetic minimum wage, the social tormenting
of kids who don’t conform to “appropriate”
gender roles, the continued harassment faced by many women
in the job force, the ongoing scapegoating of African-American
youth by police—prevents people from leading healthy,
productive, and happy lives. If those who run our country’s
biggest newspapers followed their best instincts and traditions,
they would spend most of their energy combating community
standards, not pandering to them. 
