Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender 2013 Abstracts
Sin and Spin: The Importance of Public Relations in the Early Gay Rights Movement, 1950-1974 • Edward Alwood, Quinnipiac University • This study examines public relations strategies in the gay and lesbian rights movement from the 1950s when most homosexuals remained deeply closeted through the gay liberation movement in the early 1970s when homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness. The findings demonstrate the effectiveness of message framing and focuses on activists who spearheaded these efforts and the strategies they used to gain recognition as a social minority. Public relations played a vital role in the early stages of the gay rights movement. The study concludes that gay and lesbian activists made a concerted effort to influence public opinion using fundamental public relations strategies more than a decade before the New York riots that marked the beginning of the modern Gay Liberation Movement.
Creating A Narrative Of (Im)Possibility: Outsports.com’s Declaration of a Gay-friendly Sports World • Robert Byrd, The University of Southern Mississippi • In this essay, I argue that Outsports.com writers constructed a narrative using a rhetoric of possibility of an open and accepting environment in American professional sport. By relying on straight athletes, as sources, Outsports’ narrative insinuates that an openly gay athlete would be able to successfully navigate the unknown terrain outside the closet and actually thrive as an openly gay athlete. In this essay, I argue, however, that the narrative of possibility relies on heteronormative constructions of masculinity and gayness.
“The fact is, I’m gay”: Coming Out as a Public Figure • Molly Kalan, Syracuse University; Azeta Hatef; Christopher Fers, Syracuse University • In the summer of 2012, three public figures (Anderson Cooper, Megan Rapinoe, and Frank Ocean) from different industries publicly disclosed that they identify as non-heterosexual. This study employs textual analysis in order to discern what themes appeared across articles covering this disclosure, and what media narratives about LGBTQ figures emerged. Common themes include how public figures act as role models and also provide increased visibility to the LGBTQ community within different industries.
Campaigning from the Closet: Contexts of Messaging During the Campaign to Defeat North Carolina’s Amendment One • Laura Meadows, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill • This article presents the results of a four-month ethnographic study of the Coalition to Protect All NC Families, the campaign to defeat North Carolina’s 2012 constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. We chart the campaign’s creation and conduct, focusing on the its decision to frame the amendment in terms of its harmful consequences for children and families, which marginalized the perspectives of those wanting to argue for marriage equality.
News Attention and Demographic factors Affecting attitudes towards Legalization of Same-sex Marriage in Singapore • Chitra Panchapakesan Kumari, Nanyang Technological University; Li Li, Nanyang Technological University; Shirley Ho • This paper focuses on the impact of the level of news attention to traditional, internet, social media and demographic factors influencing individual’s attitude towards the legalization of same-sex marriage in Singapore. The results indicated that news attention to internet media had positive association whereas news attentions to traditional media or social media had no effects on the individuals’ attitudes. Also individuals’ religion affiliation and religious guidance affected individuals’ attitude towards legalization of same-sex marriage.
Double-Edged Discourse: An Analysis of the LGBT Community’s • John Sewell, The University of West Georgia • This essay introduces the concept double-edged discourse (an oppositional discourse within another, larger oppositional discourse), relating it to the occurrence of queer discourse within LGBT discourse. Employing Laclau’s logic of equivalence, the essay analyzes how the discourse instigated by the Queer Nation manifesto, “Queers Read This,” spearheaded the appropriation of queer as an empty signifier. The essay examines the historical factors leading to the emergence of queer identity from within the greater LGBT discourse, considers the move from gay assimilationist strategies of the 1960s/70s toward queer’s transgressive oppositionality in the 1990s, examines the role of the manifesto, “Queers Read This” as a motivator for the appropriation of queer as an empty signifier, explains how the term queer has been something of a rhetorical burden for the LGBT community, imagines alternative discourses that might have occurred in an AIDS-free world to further clarify how the AIDS crisis may have led to the emergence of queer discourse, and explains how the equivalential linkages enabled by queer eventually dissipated. It is argued that queer functioned at cross-purposes with itself, operating in a way that at first produced constitutive unity and then became divisive as queer discourse ran its course.
Remembering Rustin: Brother Outsider and the Politics of Intersectional Queer Memory • Adam Sharples, University of Alabama • This essay examines the public memory of gay Civil Rights leader Bayard Rustin to question how African American and sexual identities are remembered through contemporary representations in film. By analyzing the documentary Brother Outsider through a critical framework of public memory, intersectionality, and queer theory this project questions how contemporary texts recuperate and circulate Rustin’s memory through mass media and what these revivalist memories signify for race and sexuality as a site of resistance.
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