Achieving LGBTQ inclusion is a struggle for pop culture, too – People’s World

June 29, 2024

In the three-decade period from the mid-1980s to 2015, public opinion in the United States and the political, social and legal status of the LGBTQ community have changed dramatically. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people were previously politically and legally despised, persecuted, criminalized, pathologized and marginalized groups; today they are equal citizens under the U.S. Constitution and government policy.

These changes were part of a much larger social upheaval that overturned the hierarchical, patriarchal, and racist postwar worldview shaped by Jim Crow racism, the anti-communism of the Red Scare, and the anti-gay hysteria of the Lavender Scare, and resulted in sweeping advances in civil rights, women’s rights, immigrant rights, the disabled, and environmental rights.

Achieving comprehensive legislative and legal successes required sweeping changes in general attitudes, mores, and public opinion, not just regarding LGBTQ rights. How did this change come about? How could public attitudes and opinions change so quickly that historic political and legal advances for the LGBTQ community became possible?

Susan Burgess, a distinguished professor emerita at Ohio University, author, political scientist, and LGBTQ activist, explores this question in her thoughtful and insightful book. Inclusion of LGBT in American lifeIt shows how these complex and dynamic changes have emerged over time through the active, “mutually dependent” interface of ideas, politics and popular culture.

For example, “changing attitudes toward sexual privacy and sexual mores opened the door to the acceptance of homosexual love.”

Class and democratic struggles, including LGBTQ rights, are played out in the realms of economics, politics, and ideology, with pop culture being a big part of it. Pop culture reflects these struggles and changes broadly, including the conflict between traditional mainstream and radical new ideas.

The dynamic culture conflict, in turn, influenced large parts of American public opinion and attitudes. “The relationship between mainstream and radical politics, mainstream publics and LGBT counterpublics, has produced such changes,” she writes.

Burgess examines political and cultural changes that led to legal victories in the three pillars that make up the “new political subject with rights—the LGBT citizen”: the right to sexual privacy, open service in the U.S. military, and marriage equality and family. Burgess devotes separate chapters to each of these areas and shows how mainstream American politics incorporated LGBTQ ideas.

After years of struggle, these rights were codified in landmark rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, including Lawrence vs. Texas in 2003, which recognized that consensual same-sex intimacy between adults is protected by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, and Obergefell vs Hodges in 2015, which guaranteed marriage for all. Lower court rulings, laws and presidential orders codified other rights, including Obama’s executive order allowing transgender people to serve in the military.

On June 26, President Joe Biden pardoned 2,000 veterans who were discharged from the military between 1951 and 2012 for violating the ban on homosexual intercourse. The pardons were another step toward righting a historic injustice. Congress repealed the law in 2014 under the Obama administration.

Burgess uses what political scientists call the “classical civil rights paradigm” to illustrate the three phases of comprehensive radical change. In the first phase, traditional ideas dominate and the excluded group is marginalized. Courts, institutions, and civil society generally deny them their rights.

During the transition period, radical new ideas emerged as marginalized communities sought equality through activism and the building of a counterculture to the prevailing norms and mores. These new ideas contradict traditional beliefs and legal restrictions and cause social and cultural tensions.

In the third phase, the majority accepts radical new ideas and the excluded group gains recognition from the state and society as citizens with rights.

Inclusion of LGBT in American life uniquely examines this process through a popular culture lens. In addition to the emergence of a national LGBTQ movement in the 1970s following the Stonewall Uprising, gays and lesbians came out to family, friends, and coworkers in the 1980s at the height of the HIV-AIDS crisis.

In addition to grassroots activism, the creation of countercultural patterns within excluded communities and their humanization in the eyes of the masses are important components of changing general and traditional attitudes. “Popular culture has expanded public understanding of privacy, gender and sexual norms, and family forms, and promoted public acceptance of a new LGBT political subject with equal rights and freedoms,” she writes.

Burgess explains how queer theory takes on the role of popular culture in political change and challenging traditional ideas from critical race theory.

She writes: “Pop culture has expanded public understanding of privacy, gender and sex norms, and family forms, and promoted public acceptance of a new LGBT political subject with equal rights and freedoms.”

Pop culture in music, cinema, television and sport reflects and influences people’s thinking and expanded imaginations. For example, people’s ideas about family have radically changed to include families headed by same-sex couples. Gender identification is also radically changing to include non-binary identification.

The book examines how broader social changes that led to legal victories were expressed through film and television and influenced each other in shaping public opinion. For example, changing attitudes toward the family and marriage equality are addressed in popular television shows. such as “You have to be an adult” (1957–1963), Mid-thirties (1987-1991) and The American (2013–2018).

Leave it to Beaver promoted the traditional concepts of the patriarchal nuclear family. Mid-thirties reflected new attitudes towards relationships, extended family and community and The American questioned the basis of socially constructed family units for property and status purposes.

Films like Casablanca, A policeman and a gentlemanAnd brothers Examine changes in popular culture related to changing attitudes toward privacy rights, sexual mores, and masculinity.

Burgess examines the entire James Bond film genre to illustrate the changing attitudes towards sex and gender norms, sexuality and masculinity that led to gay and lesbian open military service.

The victory of full LGBTQ equality is part of a much more significant historic political realignment. The United States has experienced six major political realignments throughout its history and may be experiencing one today. These periods are characterized by the emergence of new political ideas, expanded political imagination, and instability.

Some of the instability comes when the new ideas and rights become the subject of fierce political and social backlash. Today, MAGA aims to roll back democratic rights, including LGBTQ rights. Christian fascists and other far-right elements dominate the GOP and oppose the development of a multiracial, multigender democracy. They want to impose a white, Christian nationalist, patriarchal, racist, and anti-LGBTQ social structure.

State governments dominated by the MAGA party and the GOP have passed over 100 anti-LGBTQ laws in the last five years, and the U.S. Supreme Court dominated by the Federalist Society is striking down reproductive rights, voting rights, workers’ rights and environmental rights.

The reversal of Roe v. Wade should be a warning that no law is safe. In fact, after the Dobbs In his ruling, Clarence Thomas said the Supreme Court had “misjudged” the issues of contraception, same-sex relationships and marriage equality and should reconsider those decisions.

To reverse democratic progress and change public opinion, mores, attitudes and culture, MAGA must establish an authoritarian, patriarchal, racist, Christian fascist regime backed by a massive campaign to divide people on the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation. Such a move would and will be met with massive resistance.

But historic gains on rights can be defended by first soundly defeating MAGA in November and electing a pro-LGBTQ president, Congress and elected officials at lower levels. The Biden administration could be the most diverse in U.S. history, including with LGBTQ officials in high positions in government and the judiciary. A second Biden term and expanded Democratic majorities could lead to major legislative and legal advances, including codifying Roe v. Wadewhile simultaneously changing the corrupt and MAGA-dominated US Supreme Court and the authoritarian MAGA rule in the red states.

Burgess closes the book on a hopeful note by juxtaposing two recently celebrated cultural works, Hamilton And Meaning8. Pop culture, says Burgess, can help us “visualize unknown futures that go beyond what we think we know and expect about current politics” and “expand our imaginations to see, accept and create more just, inclusive and democratic futures,” even when much of our current reality is shrouded in darkness.

LGBT Inclusion in American Life: Pop Culture, Political Imagination, and Civil Rights

By Susan Burgess

New York University Press, 2023

220 pages.

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