Monitoring the Media : Activist Alliance Exercises Clout in Fighting Anti-Gay Images

The 30-second public service announcement featured Bob Hope, but its subject was no laughing matter.

“I was amazed to learn that many people die each year in anti-gay attacks, and thousands more are left scarred emotionally and physically,” the comedian intoned. “Prejudice hurts . . . kills. Don’t be a part of it.”

For Hope, the making of the spot represented an apology. He taped it last year for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) after the group telephoned his production company to complain about his use of a derogatory term for homosexuals on “The Tonight Show.”

“It was a substantive victory, and it put us on the map,” said Craig Davidson, executive director of GLAAD/New York, the organization’s oldest and largest chapter.

A year later, GLAAD is back in the spotlight, this time as a result of the Andy Rooney affair. GLAAD officials met twice with executives of CBS News--on Jan. 26 and Feb. 6--to register complaints about Rooney’s slurs against gays in his syndicated columns and a Dec. 20 network special.

Pressed by GLAAD to apologize, Rooney compounded the insult in an open letter to the Advocate, a gay newsmagazine. “I’m sorry I offended so many homosexual people,” the letter began, although it only served to inflame matters and offend CBS brass with a graphic description of anal sex.

“Do I find the practice . . . repugnant? I do,” wrote Rooney. “Is it ethically or morally wrong or abnormal behavior? It seems so to me.” Knowledgeable sources at CBS News said it was Rooney’s letter--and not his alleged remark that blacks “have watered down their genes”--that resulted in the commentator’s three-month suspension from the network on Feb. 8. Rooney denied having made the remark about blacks, which was included in an article in the Advocate.

Whatever CBS’s true motivation for disciplining Rooney, the episode highlights the role of GLAAD--and of minority advocacy groups in general--in attempting to shape values and public opinion through the news and entertainment media. Although some observers praise GLAAD’s role as a watchdog, others accuse the organization of promoting censorship.

GLAAD is “defending a group (gays) that it’s still respectable to attack,” said Larry Gross, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communications, who does similar work with the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force. “It is enormously useful to have GLAAD chapters in New York and Los Angeles, because that’s where the national media are headquartered.”

Still, added Kathryn C. Montgomery, who teaches film and television at UCLA and is the author of “Target: Prime Time,” a book on advocacy groups and their struggle over entertainment television: “There is a very fine line between correcting a damaging image and restricting someone’s freedom of expression.”

The 4-year-old GLAAD tries to straddle that line, filling the dual role of informational resource on the gay community and pressure group. With a mailing list of more than 10,000, GLAAD can generate hundreds of letters and phone calls to media outlets.

“I call it mailbox activism,” said Davidson. The grass-roots campaigns provide leverage for meetings between GLAAD and editors, network executives and station managers.

The meetings are designed to “sensitize” media executives to gay concerns, and in the aftermath of the Rooney affair, CBS has allowed GLAAD to distribute its materials and meet with its senior producers of news shows.

But GLAAD insists that it is not playing the role of censor. Rather, the group is asking for the same degree of self-restraint that responsible media outlets have strived to demonstrate for years in reporting on and portraying racial, religious and ethnic minorities.

“The fact is that self-censorship is a reality in the media today,” said Rich Jennings, a lawyer who founded and serves as co-president of GLAAD’s Los Angeles chapter. “We see and hear jokes and epithets about gays in the media that would never be allowed if directed at another group.”

“A lot of these remarks are made out of ignorance and are not malicious,” added Jehan Agrama, a former television production executive who is co-president of GLAAD/LA. “Ninety percent of the time, people are simply repeating what they’ve heard from childhood, without thinking about the effects of their words. With these people, it is simply a matter of saying: ‘These words hurt.’

“With the other 10% who are bigots, it’s a matter of discrediting them, turning attention on them, showing them in their true light as bigots,” she continued.

Consider the case of radio host Rush Limbaugh, who attacks gays almost daily on his nationally syndicated two-hour show broadcast locally by KFI. On Dec. 11, commenting on AIDS and abortion activists who disrupted services at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, after reeling off a string of anti-gay epithets, Limbaugh said:

“I know that I speak for the decent and normal citizens of this country when I say to those of you of the leftist, militant, homosexual crowd: Take it somewhere else. Get out of our schools. Get out of our churches. Take your deadly, sickly behavior and keep it to yourselves.”

GLAAD/LA, which believes that such remarks promote violence against gays, is organizing a national letter-writing campaign to get Limbaugh to tone down his rhetoric--or at the very least to balance it with other voices.

Last week, in another broadcast tirade against gays, Limbaugh took note of the campaign and vowed that he would not be “Andy Rooney-ized,” although KFI station manager Howard Neal said in an interview that he has met with GLAAD and “is working on their concerns.”

Founded in New York by a group of gay and lesbian writers in the fall of 1985, GLAAD seeks to foster understanding and tolerance of gays and lesbians by working for fair coverage of gay issues in the news media and accurate depictions of gays in films and television programs.

The group came together in response to the New York Post’s sensational AIDS coverage, which was widely viewed as fanning hysteria about the epidemic. The new organization’s first action in December, 1985, was a demonstration outside the tabloid’s headquarters.

“Maybe we should give (Post former publisher) Rupert Murdoch an award for helping to found the organization,” Davidson said.

With the formation of ACT UP--the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power--in 1987, many of GLAAD’s street activists took up the mantle of AIDS activism, and the scene of GLAAD’s struggle shifted from the sidewalks to the newsroom.

Since 1988, GLAAD has grown to encompass nine independent chapters. The biggest and most active are in New York and Los Angeles, with others in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Washington San Francisco and South Florida. The chapters are banding together to form a nationwide body called GLAAD/USA.

GLAAD takes as its model the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith, founded in 1913 when public accommodations displayed such signs as “no dogs or Jews allowed” and Jews were sometimes lynched.

Established by Chicago-area lawyer Sigmund Livingston, the ADL’s goals, according to its charter, are to “stop, by appeals to reason and conscience . . . the defamation of the Jewish people” and to “put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against, and ridicule, of, any sect or body of citizens.”

“GLAAD is a good organization doing good work,” said Andrew Cushnir, assistant director of the Pacific Southwest Regional Office of the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith. “The world needs more civil rights organizations,” he added.

Despite the kind words, there have been tensions between the two groups. In 1985, the ADL threatened to sue GLAAD for trademark infringement when the group called itself “the Gay & Lesbian Anti-Defamation League.”

“We concluded the ADL was not being discriminatory--that they enforced their trademark against everyone,” said Davidson.

A more serious and continuing conflict involves the ADL’s refusal to include material on prejudice and violence against gays in its “A World of Difference” prejudice-reduction campaign.

Said the ADL’s Cushnir: “The program is sticking to its original focus: prejudice based on race, religion and ethnicity.”

Still, the two groups have started to work together on such issues as civil rights and hate crimes. “ADL’s efforts to initiate and create hate-crimes legislation around the country always includes hate crimes based on sexual orientation,” Cushnir said.

And GLAAD officers met Tuesday with ADL staffers in Los Angeles to further the dialogue. “It is so clear to us that we have the same enemies,” said Carol Anderson, a Los Angeles attorney who serves as GLAAD’s outreach chairwoman.

“The people who chalk swastikas on synagogues are the same people who will beat up a man walking down the street in West Hollywood,” she added. “There is no difference.”

Anderson said she has no illusions about “changing the mind of the raving homophobes.

“It became clear to me last fall when we lost the Irvine gay-rights vote by 2%--2%, in conservative Orange County!--that all we need to do is convince a small percentage of undecided people that our right to live and to love is the same as theirs,” she said.

Part of the campaign to convince the undecided is GLAAD’s drive for greater gay and lesbian visibility. A recent example took place last week on Valentine’s Day, when GLAAD members flooded radio stations with requests for love songs dedicated to partners of the same sex.

“The idea was to make Angelenos stop and think, and to show radio jocks that lesbians and gays are a vital part of their audience,” said Jennings. “It was a great success: at least four stations broadcast our dedications.”

Another example of the campaign for greater visibility was GLAAD’s yearlong effort to persuade Daily Variety to list the names of unmarried partners in its obituary columns.

“Surviving partners were being treated as nonexistent entities--no matter how many years they’d been together or how much they loved each other,” said Anderson.

“They spurred us to giving the question more focused thought,” said Variety publisher Michael Silverman, who changed the policy last November.

“It was nothing earthshaking,” said Anderson. “The world is not going to stop. But there is now one more place where people can pick up a newspaper and find validation for who they are--that their lives have meaning, too.”

GLAAD has even gotten the attention of Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), a persistent critic of gays’ drive for equal rights, who contacted the group last March and offered to make a public service announcement condemning “violence against all innocent people.”

But GLAAD felt that Dannemeyer’s proposed, nonnegotiable script would have led to an increase of violence against against gays by affirming the congressman’s belief in the “heterosexual ethic.”

Despite GLAAD’s progress, some station managers and editors--including those who sympathize with GLAAD’s call for tolerance--take exception to some of the group’s tactics.

“They sometimes shoot from the hip, or take offense where none is intended,” said a high-level editor of a newspaper in a city with an active GLAAD chapter. Others refuse to accept GLAAD’s equation of homophobia with religious and racial bigotry.

“It is inherently a tricky situation to have someone from the outside trying to tell you how to do your work,” commented UCLA’s Montgomery. “It is especially difficult in this country, where sexuality is such a troublesome and difficult issue.”

The magnitude of GLAAD’s challenge became clear in the aftermath of the Andy Rooney affair, when Walter Cronkite leapt to the commentator’s defense. “He is an independent thinker and a courageous social critic,” said a statement issued by Cronkite.

“Courageous?” said the Annenberg School’s Gross. “What is so courageous about garden-variety bigotry?”

GLAAD IN ITS OWN WORDS

The following are excerpts from the “Guide for Media Professionals” published by the Los Angeles chapter of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

ON EQUAL TREATMENT: “If bigoted or defamatory terms about other minorities are edited out of columns, news reports and advertisements, we expect similar consideration. If extremist opinions about other minorities are not considered necessary to provide ‘balance,’ we resent the notion that they are necessary in stories or interviews about us.”

ON GAYS IN THE NEWSROOM: Media outlets should “make an affirmative effort to hire openly gay and lesbian reporters and encourage those already employed to become resources for story ideas and coverage.”

ON STEREOTYPES: “Do not show or describe only the most unconventional members of our community. . . . It is unfair to reinforce perceptions that all lesbians and gay men are into, say, leather or drag.”

ON THE GAY “LIFE STYLE”: “Do not refer to the gay ‘life style.’ There is no single gay life style. Lesbians and gay men lead diverse lives and work in all occupations in every region of the country. Gay people are single and in couples; intellectuals and jocks; rich, middle-class and poor; urban, suburban and rural.”