Wedding Bell Blues

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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.