Last Friday, Greater Boston (available streamed, click on “Beat the Press”) has a great survey of the week’s news coverage of the gay marriage debate. Their findings? While news and television showed gay protesters of all sorts, the photos and footage of couples kissing were almost invariably lesbian.
No surprise, really, though it is surprising how such a thing can go by unnoticed by most people, viewers and commentators alike. The GB panelists did latch onto the main culprit - the relative comfort straight male editors and producers have with lesbian sexuality opposed to gay male. Then there’s the fact, as John Carroll noted, that pro-marriage activist groups put lesbian couples front and center. But to the extent that there’s cynical calculation going on (I suspect there is), it’s of a different sort than Carroll suspects. As much as thinking about discomfort of gay male sexuality, they’re playing to their own notions, stereotypes even, of lesbians as exemplars of the settled life. (Thus goes the old joke: “Q: Where do lesbians go on a second date? A: U-Haul”). Activists, male and female, undoubtedly feel that the lesbian couple with child represents the best face of their cause, the sort of relationship most in need of recognition.
In any case, half of the Goodridge couples are male. Why haven’t we seen them snogging on the Globe’s front page?
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