Generations of activists have done the work to open up a diverse and multifaceted space for LGBTQ social change. Since the national marriage win, mainstream LGBTQ civil rights organizations have been stepping up efforts at other forms of legal and policy change, like nondiscrimination efforts in employment, housing, and facilities (see, e.g., the 2015 HRC report discussed in chapter 4). Other LGBTQ activists have committed to intersectional work, through movements like Black Lives Matter (see, e.g., Garza, 2014; Moore, 2014). Still others are turning, like activists have done for decades before them, to other institutions that have a potentially large public reach and constituency. This chapter focuses on two of those institutions through the lens of youth: schools and media.
Teenagers and young adults are already central actors in the stories in this book. They were the soldiers during World War II who found each other and built vibrant lesbian and gay communities. They were catalysts at Stonewall, standing up to police brutality with strength, camp, and courage. They were on the front lines of ACT UP and Queer Nation, pushing the mainstream AIDS and gay and lesbian movements in more radical directions.
This chapter moves the clock forward a bit to focus specifically on young LGBTQ people since the 1990s. It turns to two examples that highlight the theme of this chapter, a theme that has been central to the book: that social movements are often oriented toward culture and changing hearts and minds rather than only changing law and policy. These movements focus primarily on changing culture and cultural institutions and on building new communities. In other places in the book, I have talked about the ways in which LGBTQ activists have turned to the law to make change and the ways in which there are limits to what legal and policy shifts can do. I also have highlighted the connection between legal and cultural change, when, for instance, movement activists believe that visibility and pop cultural representation help to pave the way for policy change, as in the case of marriage equality politics. I have also provided examples in which cultural action has been explicitly taken – a play performed, a television show written – in order to build mainstream visibility and empathy and, ultimately, policy change, as was the case with AIDS activism. Finally, we have encountered examples of times when activists have felt so alienated from their country and its mainstream institutions that they have carved out their own cultural spaces and communities, with no immediate hope or desire to impact mainstream change, as was the case with radical lesbian feminists in the 1970s. These relationships between legal/policy and cultural change have always been dynamic and complicated.
This chapter allows us to examine this relationship even further. I focus here on youth-focused and youth-driven social change efforts that have educational and cultural institutions as their starting place and their target of change and that I believe are at the forefront of current LGBTQ social change. The institutions that I focus on here are schools and media. I illustrate some of the ways that education and culture can be the site and focus of social change. There are so many examples of ways in which young people have organized for social change around gender and sexuality. I have chosen two that are national in scope and that allow me to illustrate in more detail how – in the current educational, technological, and pop cultural moment – LGBTQ social change occurs in and through culture, sometimes with the backing of law and policy, sometimes outside of it.
First, the example of Gay–Straight Alliances (GSAs) shows the connection between the state (in the form of public schooling and the laws that govern public schooling) and culture and community. Here we have an example of the ways in which LGBTQ young people and their allies are more active than ever before not just in their demands for safe spaces, broad tolerance, and equal treatment behind school doors, but also in asserting visibility in school and in youth communities. My second example is the It Gets Better Project, which allows for a discussion of media as a site of increased visibility for LGBTQ young people and young adults and an examination of a kind of community-building that happens outside formal institutions and that relies on modern technology to build visibility and community.
Before we get to social organizing, we need some context. In August 2016, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released the first nationally representative study to ask high school students about their sexual orientation, practice, and identity. This most recent version of the Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that approximately 8 percent – or about 1.3 million – of high school teens identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, and that others reported that they have had same-sex sexual contact but do not identify as L, G, or B (CDC, 2016a; Hoffman, 2016). A recent study estimates that 150,000 – or 0.7 percent of – young people aged 13 to 17 identify as transgender (Williams Institute, 2017). For young adults, the numbers are even larger. A study conducted just before the November 2016 presidential election found that while 12 percent of the total population identifies as LGBTQ, 20 percent of young adults aged 18–34 do so. The study found that 12 percent of young adults also identify as transgender or gender nonconforming (GLAAD, 2017).
For these young people, what is it like to be young and LGBTQ – in and out of school – these days? After more than half a century of activism designed to improve the experience of being a sexual or gender minority in the US, to what extent have young LGBTQ people reaped the benefits of these efforts?
Some social scientists tell an optimistic story. Among the most prominent is psychologist Ritch C. Savin-Williams. In 2005 he published a controversial and much-discussed book called The New Gay Teenager, in which he focuses on what he calls “same-sex-attracted” young people.1 His argument, grounded in a strong methodological critique of past research on gay-identified young people, is that there has been a generational shift in the way that young LGB people view themselves and are viewed and treated by others. He celebrates the fact that young people today are “not embarrassed by gayness, don’t consider it deviant, and see it all around them – on television, in movies, in songs, in cultural icons, among their friends” (2005, p. ix). These young people tend not to identify with the “gay” label:
The new gay teenager is in many respects the non-gay teenager. Perhaps she considers herself to be “postgay,” or he says that he’s “gayish.” … They have same-sex desires and attractions but, unlike earlier generations, new gay teens have much less interest in naming these feelings or behaviors as gay. (2005, p. 1; emphasis in original)
It is not that these young people deny or are ashamed of their attractions, Savin-Williams argues. They are, rather, “more resilient than suicidal…. They’re adapting quite well, thank you” (2005, p. 3). Ultimately, he predicts that gay identity will become obsolete, and that the sheer “ordinariness” of same-sex-attracted young people will prevail (2005, p. 216; emphasis in original).
Additional research on the identity of young people finds a kind of flexibility to youth identity and porous gender and sexual boundaries. Psychologist Lisa M. Diamond finds that for young women (teens and young adults), in particular, the development of sexual attraction and orientation are characterized by “dynamic variability,” “fluidity,” and a nonlinear approach to adopting labels and identities over the course of a young lifetime (2007, pp. 152, 153). In his sociological investigation of current “post-gay” politics and identity, Ghaziani finds that LGBTQ college students may privilege a kind of “building bridges” to straight classmates and a downplaying of their gender and sexual identity, “a strategy of deemphasis that mutes distinctions between gay and straight” (2011, pp. 117, 114). Recent research also points to the creative complexity of the sexual and gender identity of young people. One study finds that young adults aged 18–34 “appear more likely to identify in terminology that falls outside those previously traditional binaries” of both sexuality and gender (GLAAD, 2017, p. 4).
Some researchers have also argued that schools themselves are changing for the better. A provocative study that has received attention in the US was conducted by English sociologist Mark McCormack. It finds that straight-identified boys and schools in the UK, in particular, have moved beyond the kind of homophobia that may characterize their counterparts in the US. Through a study of three English high schools, McCormack tells a “goodnews story” (2012, p. xxv). He finds that the straight-identified boys in his study were affectionate and emotionally demonstrative with each other, that they eschewed blatant homophobia and rarely used homophobic language, and that they generally did not fear being perceived as gay.2 This behavior in young straight men, McCormack argues, signals the “redefining [of] heterosexuality and masculinity for their generation.” Not only are they not homophobic, but these young men are actively “gay friendly – espousing pro-gay attitudes, being inclusive of gay students, condemning homophobia, and having close friendships with gay students,” which, in turn, helps to create “gay friendly high schools” (2012, p. 123; emphasis omitted). Like Savin-Williams, McCormack credits pop culture and social media with at least part of this shift.
Others who have examined the experiences of young LGB people have similarly found that things are changing for the better – even if not across the board or all at once. Writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis (2009), for instance, profiled a number of middle school students all over the US who identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual and were out to friends, family, teachers, and classmates. He notes that these young teens came from all over the country – Oklahoma, Texas, Michigan – not just the more liberal coastal cities. While these young people faced homophobic bullying and ignorance, they also found supportive parents: moms who chaperoned a weekly dance for gay kids in Tulsa or a Midwestern dad who accompanied his son to his first Pride parade.
From the US popular press, we also now hear good news stories of young LGBTQ people who have the support to come out and to thrive in their schools and communities. There is the moving story of the trans guy whose fraternity raised money for his surgery when his insurance would not cover it (D. Collins, 2017). There is the happy story of Brad Taylor and Dylan Meehan, boyfriends from Carmel, New York, whose “cutest couple” yearbook superlatives photo went viral when their friend posted it to her Tumblr (Garcia, 2013). There is the brave story of Mitch Anderson, from smalltown Texas, who took the opportunity of his graduation speech to come out publicly to his classmates and their families (Belonsky, 2013). There are the heartwarming stories of young trans women in Massachusetts, California, and Missouri who became prom or homecoming queens of their high schools (LGBTQ Nation, 2013; Steinmetz, 2014; Garner, 2015). There is, too, the inspiring story of a Girl Scout troop in Colorado that admitted a 7-year-old transgender girl, according to the organization’s policy of inclusiveness, despite the threat of a Girl Scout cookie boycott from some anti-LGBTQ activists (Hetter, 2012) and the Boy Scouts’ change in membership policy in 2017 to become trans-inclusive (Grinberg, 2017). There is the story that seemed to be everywhere of straight-gay male friendships, embodied in the “promposal” story in the spring of 2015 about a straight-identified boy who asked his gay best friend to prom (and earned them both a spot on Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show, where they were each presented with a check for $10,000). The straight boy made the invitation by posting a sign in his school hallway that read: “You’re hella gay, I’m hella str8, but you’re like my brother, so be my d8?” (Ermac, 2015).
Despite these promisingly uplifting stories, many still find that schools can be incredibly tough places for LGBTQ young people. Sociologist C.J. Pascoe (2007) found that teachers still fail to correct their students’ homophobia and even participate in homophobic joking, banter, and culture-building. Teachers also tend to maintain a heterocentric and heteronormative culture in their classrooms and their school, upholding views of mixed-sex couples as normal and natural and same-sex couples as either deviant or nonexistent (also see Biegel, 2010). For example, a school administrator in the Northern California school that Pascoe studied forced a self-identified lesbian student to cover up a “Nobody Knows I’m a Lesbian” t-shirt because, as the student understood it, the administrator worried that it promoted same-sex sex.3 At the same time, the school’s rituals celebrated and showcased presumably heterosexual sex and sexuality in many ways. Tellingly, no one intervened when a senior boy walked around school in a shirt that read “One of us is thinking about sex. It must be me” (2007, p. 68). Some of the self-identified straight boys Pascoe studied said they would never go to a prom that they thought would be attended by an out gay and gender nonconforming male classmate. Even a well-meaning teacher created a kind of “shrine to heterosexuality” through a prominent classroom photo display of exclusively male/female couples dressed for the school’s proms and other formal celebrations (2007, p. 31).
Other academic studies support Pascoe’s portrait of schooling (see, e.g., Macgillivray, 2004). In addition, we now have very good national data on the health and school experiences of young people who identify as LGB and T, which reveal that there is still much work to be done. The Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) conducts regular studies of the climate of elementary and secondary schools for LGBTQ youth. GLSEN’s most recent survey of elementary school students and teachers found that almost half of elementary school students (46 percent) and teachers (49 percent) reported that they heard phrases like “that’s so gay” or “you’re so gay” used as epithets at least sometimes in their schools.4 These young students report that name-calling and bullying that target gender performance and perceived sexual orientation are common in their schools. This bullying has an impact on both the happiness of elementary students at school and also their educational performance.
GLSEN’s report of secondary schools is even more grim.5 The organization’s 2015 survey of more than 10,000 LGBTQidentified young people concluded that, while school climate seems to be slowly improving, “[s]chools nationwide are hostile environments for a distressing number of LGBTQ students, the overwhelming majority of whom routinely hear anti-LGBT language and experience victimization and discrimination at school” (Kosciw et al., 2016, p. xvi). GLSEN found that 57.6 percent of students reported feeling unsafe at school due to their sexual orientation, while 43.3 percent felt unsafe due to their gender expression. Homophobic and transphobic remarks from both teachers and students were common in schools. Of those surveyed, 58.8 percent regularly heard homophobic remarks and 40.5 percent regularly heard transphobic comments. More than half of the students reported that their teachers or other staff at their schools made homophobic remarks (56.2 percent) or transphobic remarks or negative comments about gender expression (63.5 percent). A CDC study confirms the disproportionate levels of bullying for LGB students when compared with their non-LGB peers: 34 percent of LGB students reported that they were bullied at school and 28 percent reported that they were bullied online, compared to 19 percent and 14 percent, respectively, of their straight peers (CDC, 2016a).
The negative school climate created by both young people and adults in schools seriously harms students both academically and emotionally. Students who reported that they were targets in their schools missed more school, had lower grades, and more frequently reported that they did not plan to continue their education beyond high school (Grant et al., 2011; Robinson & Espelage, 2011; Kosciw et al., 2016). The CDC (2016a) reported that more than 10 percent of LGB students had recently (within the previous 30 days) missed school because they feared for their safety.
Breaking down the L, G, B, and T a bit, we see that bisexual students face specific challenges. A 2012 Human Rights Campaign survey of more than 10,000 LGBT-identified young people looked at the 3,808 respondents who explicitly identified as bisexual and at their experiences in and out of school (Andre et al., 2014). While the report is not broadly comparative, it does indicate that bi-identified young people are comparatively less happy and less likely to indicate that they have a caring or supportive adult in their lives than their gay and lesbian peers. They also tended to be out in smaller proportions to family, peers, and teachers.
For young people who identify as gender nonconforming, genderqueer, and transgender, schools can be especially tough places. These students tend to feel comparatively quite unsafe and more targeted for harassment (Grant et al., 2011; Kosciw et al., 2016). Anti-trans harassment and violence in schools is also more pervasive for trans students of color (Grant et al., 2011). Even when schools do have policies and programs in place to protect and support LGBTQ students, these often focus primarily on sexual orientation and tend not to be geared specifically to trans and gender nonconforming students (McGuire et al., 2010). Anti-trans perpetrators in schools include teachers as well as students. Jenifer K. McGuire and colleagues found that “harassment of transgender youth was pervasive in schools” (2010, p. 1185) and that teachers are just as likely to make problematic comments as they are to intervene when students make these comments. In a national study of transgender Americans, 31 percent of respondents reported that they were harassed by teachers or staff in their schools (Grant et al., 2011).
It is important to understand how other forms of marginality impact the experience of LGBTQ young people in schools. For instance, studies have found that there are some racial/ethnic differences in the way that LGBTQ students experience school. This is an area where more scholarship is needed. Savin-Williams (2005) indicates that young gay people of color may feel more positively toward school than their white gay peers and may not feel any more negatively toward school than their straight peers of color. GLSEN has called for further research on the intersection of racial and sexuality/gender but has found, overall, that, students who identify as Asian/South Asian/Pacific Islander and as Black or African American report feeling relatively safe and feeling victimized less with respect to sexual orientation than students of other racial/ethnic groups (Kosciw et al., 2016). A 2014 study by GSA Network and Crossroads Collaborative, however, found that the intersection of racism and anti-LGBTQ bias means that young LGBTQ people of color face substantial challenges in school and that they perceive that they are targets of disproportionate disciplinary action in school (Burdge et al., 2014; Klein, 2014). Media attention tends to focus overwhelmingly on the harassment, abuse, and suicides of white LBGTQ youth, ignoring the ways in which young people of color are victimized in their schools and how this impacts their engagement with and success in school (Moodie-Mills, 2011). We are also just beginning to focus on how other forms of victimization and marginality, like high rates of homelessness, impact LGBTQ youth (Choi et al., 2015).6
No current discussion of the experiences of being young and LGBTQ should ignore the tragic fact that there have been too many suicides to list. The Trevor Project reports that young people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual are four times more likely than straight youth to attempt suicide and these attempts are four to six times more likely to require medical treatment than the suicide attempts of straight peers.7 The 2016 CDC report found that more than 40 percent of LGB-identified students had “seriously considered” suicide and 29 percent had attempted it in the year prior (CDC, 2016a). This scholarly work supports the public narrative that LGBTQ-identified young people are more likely to consider, and even attempt, suicide than their straight and nontransgender (cisgender) peers.8 One recent study of 96 transgender young people aged 12 to 22 found that 30 percent had attempted suicide at least once (Peterson et al., 2016; also see Grossman & D’Augelli, 2007).9 Another comparative study of more than 13,000 middle and high school students in Wisconsin found that bisexual-identified young people, in particular and relative to gay- and lesbian-identified youth, are at high risk of suicide. This study found, for example, that “although less than half of 1% of straight-identified students reported thinking seriously about killing themselves ‘almost all of the time,’ 5.6% of bisexual-identified students reported doing so” (Robinson & Espelage, 2011, p. 320).
When it comes to legal protections for young LGBTQ people, progress has been slow, but there have been important gains in this aspect of the LGBTQ civil rights movement. The 1996 federal appellate court ruling in Nabozny v. Podlesny was a legal turning point. In this case, Wisconsin student Jamie Nabozny sued his school district for failing to protect him against years of anti-gay abuse by his classmates and his teachers. For the first time ever, at that late date in the mid-1990s, a court ruled that districts and their administrators were responsible for upholding gay students’ Fourteenth Amendment rights of equal protection and could be held liable for allowing anti-gay harassment and discrimination (Griffin & Ouellett, 2003; Macgillivray, 2004; Biegel, 2010). Since then, activists have successfully pushed a number of states to pass laws that specifically protect students from bullying, harassment, and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and/or gender identity. According to GLSEN’s most recent state data, 18 states plus the District of Columbia have anti-bullying and -harassment laws that protect LGBTQ students; 14 states plus DC have anti-discrimination laws that specifically protect LGBTQ students by making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity – of these, only Wisconsin does not include gender identity in its nondiscrimination law (GLSEN, n.d.(a); Percelay, 2015).
At the federal level, at the time of writing, a pair of proposed laws – the Student Non-Discrimination Act (SNDA) and the Safe Schools Improvement Act (SSIA) – would protect LGBTQ students. These laws were endorsed by President Obama and a number of advocacy groups but have not yet made much progress in Congress. In April 2014, the US Department of Education clarified that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the law that makes sex discrimination illegal in education programs that receive federal funding, also applies to gender identity (Percelay, 2015). A letter was issued in May 2016 offering “significant guidance” on policies and best practices for protecting the rights of trans students (US Department of Justice, 2016). The Obama administration also began enforcing Title IX to protect the civil rights of transgender students and transgender student athletes. As we will see in chapters 6 and 7, these protections are severely endangered by Donald Trump’s presidency.
States run the gamut in their approach to LGBTQ students and issues in school. Some states maintain and continue to endorse “no promo homo” laws, a general term for laws that prohibit teachers from introducing and discussing LGBTQ issues in public schools in any way that might be construed as positive. Currently, eight states have these laws on the books (GLSEN, n.d.(a)). Other states have taken expansive action to support and protect LGBTQ young people. California, for instance, enacted the FAIR Education Act (also known as Senate Bill 48) in January 2012 to extend the state education code so as to ensure that the social and historical contributions of LGBTQ people are included, alongside those of many other groups, in California’s curricula (California Department of Education, n.d.; Equality California, n.d.). In addition, ten states so far – California, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Illinois, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Nevada – plus the District of Columbia, have taken further steps to protect LGBTQ young people by banning harmful “conversion therapy” (a practice developed by the Religious Right in the 1990s to “cure” same sex-desires) for youth (Avery, 2017). Under President Obama’s leadership, there had been momentum to ban this treatment at the federal level by defining such “therapy” as consumer fraud (Ames, 2015). But the future of this federal action may be up in the air, given that the 2016 Republican Party platform has been read as supporting – in a thinly veiled way – such therapy (Stack, 2016b).
Gay–Straight Alliances (GSAs) provide one example of the ways in which young people, with the support of school staff, have organized for LGBTQ social change. They also provide an example of the ways in which schools themselves, as organizations, have been shaped by youth leadership and have developed to support the changes that are necessary to become responsive to and inclusive of LGBTQ young people. GSAs are a youth-led response to institutional problems. As we will see, they have yielded some important – albeit sometimes limited – positive results for their members and their schools. Despite their limitations, GSAs are an important and increasingly common example of young people taking the initiative to change the culture of an institution that is so central to their lives. It is also important to situate this form of organizing historically. It is difficult to imagine the existence of an LGBTQ youth movement for changing the culture and institution of schooling without the fights of the previous generations, the movements that began in secret because leaders who acted on behalf of the state depicted gay people as dangerous and sick and passed laws to serve this diagnosis. Anita Bryant worked to “save our children” from, in her view, predatory homosexuals who needed to recruit in order to grow their ranks. Now, young people organize for themselves in schools.
GSAs were not the first form of support for LGBTQ young people or in schools. Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) was started in New York City in 1973 by a small group of parents to support their gay and lesbian kids (Chauncey, 2005). Pat Griffin and Mathew Ouellett identify a few “historically groundbreaking” programs in schools that were founded in the 1980s, before there was much programmatic or policy focus at all on LGBTQ young people (2003, p. 109). New York City’s Harvey Milk School, which opened in the mid-1980s as a project of the Hetrick-Martin Institute, was a public school designed specifically to serve gay and lesbian students who chose to attend (also see Marcus, 2002). On the other side of the country, in 1985, Project 10 began in one school in Los Angeles and then grew to serve the entire school district. Project 10 provided counseling and support in schools for gay and lesbian students. The program, founded by teacher and counselor Virginia Uribe, was likely the first in-school support program in the traditional public schools for LGBTQ students (Miceli, 2005).
As Griffin and Ouellett (2003) recount, the end of the 1980s saw an increase in educators’ attention to the experience and the needs of gay and lesbian young people. This was prompted in part by the 1989 publication of a US Department of Health and Human Services study of teen suicide. The study did not focus specifically on gay and lesbian youth, but it did indicate that gay- and lesbianidentified young people were two to three times more likely than straight youth to attempt suicide. Advocates used this statistic to urge policymakers and educators to focus directly on supporting gay and lesbian students. In the early 1990s, as educators and academics increasingly turned to the needs of gay and lesbian young people in and out of schools, advocacy took the form of a focus on safety, inclusion, and civil rights.
One of the first groups in the country to call itself a Gay–Straight Alliance was started in Massachusetts in 1988 at Concord Academy, an elite private school with an unsupportive – even hostile – leader, according to the GSA’s co-founder (Jennings, 2006). At the time, GLSEN’s eventual founder, Kevin Jennings, was a young gay teacher at Concord. A straight student with a lesbian mom approached Jennings about starting a club to combat homophobia at the school, which she called the “Gay–Straight Alliance.” At the same time, Phillips Academy Andover, another elite Massachusetts boarding school, had founded its own GSA under the leadership of teacher Kathy Henderson. Soon Jennings was taking calls from other private schools that were interested in the work he and students were doing at Concord. Within a couple of years, Jennings’s partner had founded the first public school GSA, at Newton South High School in the Boston suburbs.
The early GSAs in Massachusetts spread – primarily through teacher exchanges – throughout the state, and they helped to shine a spotlight on the experiences of lesbian and gay students. The work of Jennings and others garnered the attention of policymakers in Massachusetts in the early 1990s and led to hearings, in the fall of 1992, in which students from around the state testified about their experience of being lesbian and gay in their schools and homes. This work also led to the development of a report offering a series of recommendations on how to ensure that these young people would be safe in their schools. In early 1993, the state board of education and the governor of Massachusetts created the first public program of its kind in the country, Safe Schools for Gay and Lesbian Students (Jennings, 2006; Sadowski, 2016). The work of Jennings and his colleagues also resulted in the founding and growth of the national organization that would ultimately become GLSEN (Miceli, 2005). In 1998, GLSEN began registering and connecting GSAs throughout the country. At around the same time, youth worker Carolyn Laub founded the Gay–Straight Alliance Network of California, first in San Francisco in 1998 and then statewide by 2001. The organization now has a national reach (see “Change the Nation,” n.d.). Like Project 10 and the early GSAs in Massachusetts, GSA Network grew out of the actions and awareness of students themselves (GSA Network, n.d.; Miceli, 2005).
As GSAs began to spread throughout the country, a number of districts attempted to block their formation. Some even argued – before the national decriminalization of sodomy with the 2003 Supreme Court Lawrence v. Texas decision – that GSAs promoted an illegal activity (sodomy), and therefore did not have a right to exist. After many legal fights, often helmed by the ACLU and Lambda Legal, students won the right to start these clubs in their public schools, with the same benefits and resources as other student clubs (Miceli, 2005; Biegel, 2010). Their legal argument was that banning some non- or extracurricular student-initiated clubs and not others, for whatever reason, is a violation of the Equal Access Act. This act, a federal law since 1984, had been championed by conservative Christians who wanted to ensure that students’ religious clubs could meet on public school campuses. The law requires that any secondary school that receives federal funds must allow all or no noncurricular student clubs on campus and provide equal access to school resources.
Ultimately, a case brought in Salt Lake City, Utah, on behalf of students who had attempted to start a GSA, resolved the legal issue in 2000. It established that the Equal Access Act clearly mandated that GSAs could not be banned in public schools as long as the school or district supported any other noncurricular clubs. The ruling ensures that any such group be student-initiated and studentled. As Jennings explained: “What’s very important to understand is that gay–straight alliances have a legal right to exist only if they are formed and led by students. So, you know, if they are organized by an outside group they lose the legal protections granted to them under the Equal Access of 1984” (Miceli, 2005, p. 110).
Sociologist Melinda Miceli (2005) writes that the youth-led GSAs are more directly political than Project 10 or other counseling models had been before them. Their focus has been on youth agency, building community within a school, safety, visibility, and changing school culture. She argues that the word gay in the group’s title is an explicitly political move to increase the visibility of gay students within schools. The explicit inclusion of straight students has helped to legitimize and grow the movement by bringing in those who “might otherwise feel that the problems of LGBT students are of no concern to them” (2005, p. 193). Best estimates are that there are now more than 4,000 GSAs across the country (Toomey et al., 2011; Sadowski, 2016). To be more inclusive, some groups now include transgender in their name, and some use queer rather than gay as their umbrella term (GLSEN, n.d.(b)).
Researchers and advocates have found positive, if somewhat limited, impacts of GSAs on young people in schools. These studies tend to find that it is the presence of a GSA rather than individual membership in the club that impacts student experience. One study found that the presence of a GSA in the school “may increase the subjective experience of safeness” for students, broadly speaking, but may not actually impact the “prevalence of victimization.” Students also reported that they had “better grades and were less likely to skip school because of fear” due to GSAs. Specific membership in the GSA, however, did not seem to impact feelings of safety or students’ “likelihood of skipping school” (Walls et al., 2010, pp. 325, 326). Another study, which looked at the longer-term impact of GSAs on LGBT young adults, confirmed this positive impact of GSA presence on “young adult psychosocial well-being and educational attainment,” including college attainment (Toomey et al., 2011, p. 180). GLSEN confirms a range of positive benefits to the presence of a GSA. In general, students in schools with GSAs heard fewer homophobic and transphobic remarks, felt safer and less victimized, felt that school staff and students intervened more when they heard anti-LGBTQ comments, and overall felt a stronger sense of belonging in their schools (Kosciw et al., 2016).
GSAs have also been valuable to young people’s political and leadership development, serving as spaces where members can develop a sense of “politicized consciousness” and “activist identity” (Mayberry, 2006, p. 27). Miceli argues that this is an unequivocal achievement of GSAs: “One of the GSA movement’s most significant achievements is that it produced a new generation of political activists to fight for the civil liberties of LGBT citizens” (2005, p. 229). For instance, straight participants learn how anti-LGBTQ discrimination impacts their peers and they gain a sense of their own straight privilege through their involvement. And GSA participants also report that the activism that had been nurtured through their GSA involvement would continue beyond high school.
GSAs also have limitations. A study of 22 Massachusetts high schools with GSAs, for instance, found that the alliances typically operate to promote student “safety” and “tolerance” of student gender and sexual diversity but do not explicitly confront issues of privilege or encourage a “more comprehensive examination of heterosexism and gender oppression and their effects on all members of the school community” (Griffin et al., 2004, p. 21). Miceli’s (2005) interview study with GSA student participants and faculty advisors found that GSAs had a limited impact on curbing institutionalized homophobia and heterosexism and that they often failed to attract large numbers of LGBTQ students, who might have feared being labeled with a stigmatized identity by joining their school’s club.
Access to GSAs is also a challenge for many students. In the mid-1990s, Salt Lake City employed the tactic of banning all extracurricular student clubs rather than allowing GSAs in the district’s schools (Jennings, 2006; Mayberry, 2006; Eckholm, 2011). More recently, other districts have considered this strategy, as well, and 14.1 percent of LGBTQ students surveyed by GLSEN report that they could not freely promote or form a GSA in their schools. GLSEN also found that just over half of the students surveyed had GSA-like clubs at their schools. Access varied greatly by age, with just 14.5 percent of middle schoolers reporting that their schools had GSAs versus 61.2 percent of high schoolers (Sieczkowski, 2013; Kosciw et al., 2016).
GSAs are not equally accessible to all students and do not impact all LGBTQ-identified students in the same way. The GLSEN survey found that students in small towns and rural areas have significantly less access to GSAs, with 31.4 percent of these students (versus 62.6 percent of urban and 63.0 percent of suburban students) reporting the presence of a GSA in their school (Kosciw et al., 2016). Miceli (2005) found that working-class students and students of color do not have as much access to, and do not participate at the same rates in, GSAs as their middle-class and white peers. Participation may be especially low among students of color who attend schools in which they are in a racial majority, while one study of 13 GSAs in Massachusetts found that students of color who are GSA members indicated lower levels of perceived support from their GSA when compared with their white peers (Miceli, 2005; Moodie-Mills, 2011; Poteat et al., 2015). Access to GSAs may also be lower for immigrant students (Toomey et al., 2011). A study of the school experiences of transgender students found that it was particularly important for trans youth that their GSAs work specifically to be trans-friendly and inclusive (McGuire et al., 2010; also see Sadowski, 2016).
It may also be the case that GSAs are heavy on the “S” students and may not, therefore, be reaching the “G” students and other sexual and gender minorities. Miceli quotes Jennings in 2003 as saying about the GSA space: “I think they’ve become the kind of place where if you’re young and you’re different, you go. It’s kind of a way of solidarity. I think the majority of young people involved in GSAs are straight-identified” (2005, p. 118; also see Poteat et al., 2015).
These limitations vary by chapter and by organization, and there is still a lot we do not know about the differences between GSAs. Miceli (2005), for example, argues that the GSA Network has provided an explicit focus on youth leadership development and activism, on the inclusion of bisexual and transgender students, and on race/class diversity in GSAs. GSAs are changing with the politics of the time and with student interests. This is clear from the organization’s new name and tagline, which it changed in April 2016. The new name became Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network with the new tagline “trans and queer youth uniting for racial and gender justice” (GSA Network, 2016). GLSEN, too, has responded to concerns about access and inclusion. Its online support for GSAs includes resources for trans-inclusivity and awareness about gender nonconformity and gender diversity and resources for the recognition of Black History Month and Native American Heritage Month.10 Miceli also notes that, dating back more than a decade, GLSEN has responded to concerns about lack of focus on racial diversity and intersectionality by sponsoring programming and providing resources about race and for students of color.
In the story of LGBTQ social change, art, media, and pop culture have been central and complicated actors. Art has been mobilized for community-building, identity development, and for speaking truth to power, as we have seen in everything from the homophile magazine in the 1950s to the poetry of Audre Lorde in the decades that followed, to Rent in the 1990s. Art and popular culture also have been employed to marginalize and pathologize LGBTQ people. As Russo wrote in his groundbreaking book on the subject, looking back at a time when LGBTQ and gender nonconforming characters were either hidden or tragic or truly terrible caricatures: “The history of the portrayal of lesbians and gay men in mainstream cinema is politically indefensible and aesthetically revolting” (1987, p. 325). Lesbians, gay men, and gender nonconforming characters appear in American film through its history as suicidal, homicidal, or as utterly laughable. “[H]omosexuals,” Russo observed, “are essentially buffoons who soothe an audience’s sense of superiority by portraying gays as weak, powerless sissies” (1987, p. 219). These portrayals have been a way to, as Gamson argues, continually achieve a “redrawing of the lines between the normal and the abnormal” (1998, p. 5; also see Seidman, 2002).
As a result of the social movements of the past few decades and significant changes in general attitudes about gender and sexuality, the mainstream media representation of LGBTQ people has changed substantially (see, e.g., Streitmatter, 2009). Over the past few decades, those in my generation – children of the 1980s and early 1990s – experienced the first real critical mass of positive gay and lesbian characters, storylines, and artists. About TV, in particular, scholar Ron Becker notes that there was a “startling increase of gay-themed programming on prime-time network television in the 1990s” (2006, p. 3).
For me, personally, consuming mainstream and basic-cable pop culture during the 1980s and 1990s meant that I took full advantage of this new lesbian, gay, and gender nonconforming visibility. Prince, in all his purple genderbendiness, provided my soundtrack as I started high school. I adored Rickie Vasquez on My So-Called Life in 1994, “primetime’s first gay teenager,” according to Entertainment Weekly.11 That same year, I mourned the passing of the incredible young AIDS activist, Pedro Zamora, from MTV’s The Real World: San Francisco. A few years later, I rooted for Jack McPhee on Dawson’s Creek to get kissed by his handsome prom date. As I was becoming a young adult, Will Truman and his best friend Grace Adler were the hip Manhattan professionals whose work lives, friendships, and romances filled my first apartment with laughter. Moving just slightly out of the mainstream, I found other iconic shows, artists, and characters. I crammed for my Women’s Studies finals to the music of the Indigo Girls, Tracy Chapman, Melissa Etheridge, and Ani DiFranco. I became intimately connected to the young queer characters who were moving into adulthood in their various communities and navigating jobs, love and sex, health, their families, and their tight-knit groups of friends. Rent debuted on Broadway in 1996 and became my rallying cry. Queer as Folk then The L Word on Showtime brought the lives of more gay and lesbian young adults into my life through paid premium cable.
These were among the best-known young queer and LGB pop cultural figures of my generation. There were not many of them, their portrayal could be read critically as problematic in a number of ways (see, e.g., Schulman, 1998; Gross, 2001; Seidman, 2002; Becker, 2006), and they did not nearly represent the full diversity of LGBTQ communities. Becker, for instance, argues about TV in the 1990s: “most gay-themed programming was used to appeal to an audience of socially liberal, upscale, white heterosexuals who prided themselves on being gay-friendly” (2006, p. 212). And, as sociologist Suzanna Danuta Walters reminds us in her book about the complexity of LGBTQ visibility, “cultural visibility” is not the same as “inclusive citizenship” and all the civil equality that implies (2001, p. 10). But, these artists were adding their voices, their experiences, and their political points of view to the mainstream. These characters were three-dimensional, loved, and out. In this way, they were speaking back to their tragic, tortured, and pathologized counterparts that Russo (1987) wrote so eloquently about a generation before.
Moving ahead by a few years, the television show Glee, in my view, is especially noteworthy for its popularity and its reach. I spend a bit of time on it here as an example of the kind of mainstream pop cultural representation of LGBTQ young people – and the critical acclaim it has received – that we encounter these days.
This show, with storylines that revolved around gender and sexual diversity and its universal theme of finding community in shared outsiderness, struck a chord for many and became wildly popular. In its six-year run, Glee and its actors were nominated for more than 150 awards, including 17 Primetime Emmys (four of which they won), 10 Golden Globes, 4 Screen Actors Guild Awards, and 6 GLAAD Media Awards (for LGBTQ representation).12 Glee won Golden Globe awards for best comedy twice. Cast members performed for the President of the United States, and Glee has been credited with the growth of school arts programs worldwide (Goldberg, 2015). One of the show’s central couples, Kurt Hummel and Blaine Anderson, landed the cover of Entertainment Weekly in January 2011 for a story called “Gay Teens on TV” (see “This week’s cover,” 2011). Chris Colfer, the actor who played Kurt, was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2011 (Agron, 2011). That same year, the series spawned a Glee movie, which was part concert footage and part testimonials from young people who have felt empowered by the show. The most popular actors from the show – like Darren Criss who played Blaine – have a huge number of fervently devoted social media followers.
Glee gave us the broad story arc of a relatively racially diverse group of suburban, Midwestern misfits who banded together via their school’s glee club to take control of their high school experience, to gain self-acceptance, and to triumph over the bullies of the world. The show, which ran from 2009 to 2015, featured a number of LGBTQ characters and storylines. Kurt was tormented by McKinley High’s football team, struggled to come out as gay in school, and was being raised by a sweet, supportive, widowed dad. We saw him fall in love over duets and lattes with Blaine, the out gay crooner from the rival glee club who liked sports and who was incredibly self-assured and not at all tortured by his sexual orientation. Kurt and Blaine were physically affectionate. They lost their virginity on the show. They ultimately got married. Glee also gave us two gay football players: Dave Karofsky, bully turned bear cub, and Spencer Porter, who described himself as “postmodern gay” and was kind of a jerk until he realized his inner musician. Glee also gave us one of the only prominent young bisexual characters on TV, Brittany S. Pierce: cheerleader, dancer extraordinaire, girlfriend to many over the years, and wife, eventually, to lesbian cheerleader Santana Lopez. Over the run of the show, Glee also introduced two transgender characters and storylines: Unique Adams, who landed at McKinley after a stint in a rival singing group, and the football team’s Coach Beiste, whose story of transition from Shannon to Sheldon became a substantial focus of the show’s last season.
Glee portrayed and confronted homophobia and transphobia in a number of ways. The show portrayed it as individual and blatant, by depicting multiple incidents of bullying and name-calling; as subtle, for instance, in multiple storylines about self-doubt and self-hate; and as institutional, by exposing the way that schools like McKinley failed to protect bullied students or neglected to include information about sex and relationships among same-sex couples in their sex education curricula. The show became a vehicle for queer visibility, through a “born this way” message around natural variation and diversity in sexuality and gender; an advocate of marriage equality through its storylines; and a support for young people struggling with suicidality (see, e.g., Kinser, 2012).
There are now many other groundbreaking mainstream characters, shows, artists, and pop cultural moments for and about young LGBTQ people. In fact, there is no way to write about these without being almost instantly outdated. They include hip-hop and R&B singer Frank Ocean acknowledging that his first love was a man; Lady Gaga, the international phenomenon with (at latest count) more than 69 million Twitter followers, identifying as bisexual and a strong LGBTQ advocate, and penning perhaps the pride anthem of recent years: “Born This Way”; young Justin Suarez, on Ugly Betty sharing a first kiss with a male friend turned love interest; the straight boy-gay boy and straight girl-lesbian girl best friendships on MTV’s Faking It; gay R&B singer/songwriter Jamal Lyon from FOX’s hit show Empire; and one of the only out HIV positive young characters on TV in recent days, Eddie, from HBO’s Looking. Deserving of special mention is The Fosters, a television show that centers around a multiracial family headed by two women. The show has featured two out trans characters (played by trans actors Tom Phelan and Elliot Fletcher) and a wildly popular romance between two 13-year-old boys who had possibly the “youngest same-sex kiss” on television in the spring of 2015 (Mandell, 2015; Ross, 2015).
This representation is by no means perfect. The LGBTQ movement has paid attention to pop cultural representation by doing a regular accounting of the diversity – broadly defined – of TV and film characters over time, under the assumption that more diverse visibility is good for the broad LGBTQ community. When Queer Nation activists engaged in a high-profile and sustained protest of the blockbuster movie Basic Instinct in 1991 and 1992, they were objecting to the portrayal of the homicidal lesbian and bisexual characters (Beale, 1992; Cunningham, 1992; Signorile, 2003). These murderous women who loved women were a trope – the kind of narrow LGB characterization that had become standard by that time. With simply more LGBTQ characters and with broader diversity – in terms of sexuality, gender, gender identity, race, class, location, age, and ability status – there is simply greater scope to tell more varied LGBTQ stories and to raise the visibility of a broader range of LGBTQ-identified people. This allows for wider identification with characters and in storylines, none of which individually bears the weight of representing an entire LGBTQ identity. The one homicidal lesbian character does not have to stand in for all lesbians; she can be just one of a wide range of diverse lesbian characters out there in popular culture. While sheer numbers of any one kind of character do not tell the whole story of representation, they do help to reveal the possibility of more varied and complex kinds of characters and storylines.
With this assumption about diversity undergirding its work, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation has been working since 1985 to serve as a media watchdog for the portrayal of LGBTQ people (Faderman, 2015). The organization publishes an annual accounting of LGBTQ characters in TV and film. For the 2016–17 television season, GLAAD’s (2016b) latest TV study found that 4.8 percent of series regulars – 43 characters – on scripted primetime network TV were LGBTQ, and 92 series regulars on scripted primetime cable were LGBTQ. An additional 28 and 50 LGBTQ characters were in recurring roles on broadcast and cable, respectively. LGBTQ representation of regular and recurring characters is weighted toward men: 56 percent and 54 percent of these characters are men on scripted primetime broadcast network and cable respectively. Among these LGBTQ regular and recurring characters, 42 percent are people of color on networks and 25 percent are people of color on cable. In the three forms of television that GLAAD examined – scripted programming in broadcast, cable, and streaming TV – 30 percent of the 278 total LGBTQ regular and recurring characters were bisexual and 6 percent – 16 total characters – were transgender.
While GLAAD indicates that television is making progress with respect to LGBTQ representation, its latest study of films released from major Hollywood studios in 2015 observes that: “Hollywood films lag far behind other media when it comes to portraying LGBT characters, cementing the industry’s reputation as [comparatively] outdated” (2016a, p. 4).13 GLAAD found that there were 126 film releases by the major studios in 2015, and that only 17.5 percent of them included LGBT characters and only one was identified as “trans-inclusive.” Of the 47 identifiable LGBT characters in these films, the significant majority was male (77 percent) and white (72.3 percent).14 GLAAD found, as well, that “[t]he majority of LGBT characters in mainstream films remain minor characters” (2016a, p. 9).
Pop cultural representation provides visibility for LGBTQ young people. It also provides the opportunity for young people to build identity and community (Driver, 2008; Gray, 2009; Ito, et al., 2010). We see the ways in which young people interact with these old forms of media – television, music, and film – in innovative ways through new media that allow them to actively make and maintain connections via shared passions and identities. It just takes a quick check of Twitter, Tumblr, and any number of old or new media platforms in recent years to realize how connected young people have become to these stories, characters, and pop cultural figures and how readily young fans have built online communities to share their reactions to their favorite characters and storylines. This is particularly true now, in this age of social media, when fans have relatively easy access to building virtual communities around their shared fandom. This “participatory approach toward new media” both “provide[s] a site for kids to exercise agency and authority” and “provide[s] kids with a space to negotiate issue of identity and belonging within peer cultures” (Ito et al., 2010, pp. 10, 9).
The It Gets Better Project is an important example from recent years of the mobilization of pop culture and media for LGBTQ social change. In the fall of 2010, in response to a number of high-profile suicides of both teens who self-identified as gay and teens who had been bullied because they were perceived to be gay, author and activist Dan Savage created the It Gets Better Project. Savage noticed that, while he was an invited speaker to many college campuses, he was never invited to middle and high schools. “[S]chools,” he wrote, “would never invite gay adults to talk to kids; we would never get permission.” He realized, though, that he did not need the approval of school gatekeepers because he could reach young people directly through social media: “[I]n a world with YouTube and Twitter and Facebook – I could speak directly to LGBT kids right now…. I could look into a camera, share my story, and let LGBT kids know that it got better for me and it would get better for them too. I could give ’em hope” (2011, p. 4).
Savage enlisted his husband, Terry Miller, in making an eightminute video for the project, with the simple message that life gets better after high school and that suicide is too permanent a solution to the temporary problems of youth. The video tells Savage’s and Miller’s own stories: how they were both mercilessly picked on and bullied at school, but how they later grew into productive and happy adults, husbands, and fathers. They talked about their happy moments as dads – snowboarding with their son, being with him as the sun came up over Paris on a family vacation – and they urged young people to survive high school so that they could get to joy and fulfillment in adulthood. Savage urged: “However bad it is now, it gets better…. Your life can be amazing. But you have to tough this period of it out, and you have to live your life, so that you’re around for it to get amazing. And it can and it will.” Miller counseled: “If you can live through high school … you’re going to have a great life…. So just stick it out. It’s painful now, but it’s going to get so much better.” They did not claim to have a universal story, but they believed that telling their individual stories might have an impact on young people who could not see beyond their current pain.15
Savage writes that the traffic generated by responses to his video crashed his computer within hours of its posting. That video has now been viewed on YouTube more than two million times. A second video followed within a day and, within a week, one thousand It Gets Better videos had been posted, following Savage’s model. Within a month, Savage’s computer crashed again after then-President Obama posted his own It Gets Better contribution. Savage wrote optimistically of the project’s impact: “The It Gets Better Project didn’t just crash my computer. It brought the old order crashing down” (2011, p. 5):
[T]he old order … fell apart when the It Gets Better Project went viral. Suddenly, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender adults all over the country – all over the world – were speaking to LGBT youth…. Soon straight people – politicians and celebrities – were talking to LGBT youth, too, delivering the same message: It gets better, there’s nothing wrong with you, and we’re working to make it better. (2011, p. 6; emphasis in original)
The campaign gave some evidence to young people, who might be feeling isolated in their own lives, that they were not alone.
The It Gets Better movement has become a mainstay in the LGBTQ movement for youth. Users have created more than 50,000 videos, which have been viewed more than 50 million times.16 A wide range of videos have been posted by LGBTQ and ally politicians and political leaders, performing artists, activists, staffs of major brands and companies, sports teams (including baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays and the athletic department of New York University17), everyday people, and a huge number of celebrities – including those associated with many of the LGBTQfriendly television shows of recent years. In 2011, Savage and Miller edited It Gets Better, a book that includes a collection of essays, a resource guide, and a series of testimonials designed to speak to and support young people.
Tragic moments in the It Gets Better Project’s history underscore that whatever pop culture can offer, it may have a limited ability to change the conditions of people’s individual lives. Some of the young people who created It Gets Better videos later took their own lives: bullied 19-year-old EricJames Borges, for example (Grindley, 2012) and bullied 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer (Hughes, 2011), who, quoting Lady Gaga, mentioned the support he had received on his video.18
There also has been criticism of the project. Walters writes that some see it as a glossy and “trendy” celebrity campaign that is simultaneously too pessimistic and too optimistic:
On the one hand, it posited gay youth as inherently in crisis, always on the brink of abuse or self-annihilation. So, in that sense, it painted an overly gloomy picture of what it is like to live as gay (or trans or bi) in the world as we know it. And on the other hand, it painted an overly rosy picture of adult queerness, fully embraced, successful, freed of the ugliness of anti-gay animosity. (2014, pp. 254–255; emphasis in original)
Walters further notes that the project does not fully confront the privilege inherent in Savage and Miller’s story and the message that “it gets better.” The many privileges of two white, urban, cisgender, American, professional men afforded them options that many others could not count on in their own lives. However, Walters’s overall assessment is that the project is “mercifully more expansive and complicated than its originator, Dan Savage” (2014, p. 255), in that the forum it provides allows the space for the telling and dissemination of many, varied stories, not only those of Savage and Miller.
In his work, Savage regularly argues that coming out is one of the most radical things that LGBTQ people can do, and that visibility changes both public opinion and creates connection with friends and family members who might otherwise hold a negative abstract view of LGBTQ people. As Signorile has said: “Everyone must come out of the closet, no matter how difficult, no matter how painful…. If they [the people in our lives] don’t know that we’re queer – if they think only the most horrible people are queer – they will vote against us” (2003, p. 364).
The It Gets Better Project is a form of organizing in this vein. It is a pop cultural, media-reliant response to social inequality – a form of organizing that depends on new media for coming out, community-building, visibility, and changing the way that LGBTQ people feel about themselves and experience their lives. In this form, celebrities work to leverage their platform to promote self-acceptance and to provide role models, and non-celebrities tell their stories for their own healing and celebration and to reach across the ether to make connections to others. Project organizers do their work in the hope that isolated young people will seek out and find others like them across the globe to assuage their sense that they are alone in their experience. They hope that communities will develop to steel themselves against despair and that an intergenerational conversation will allow young people to look beyond their immediate experience to imagine possible futures.
In this chapter, we have seen how young people engage in nonstate-focused forms of mobilization. We have seen how pop cultural representation for visibility and community has increased; and we have seen examples of self-determined forms of organizing, in GSA and in online communities built around fandom and around social media campaigns like It Gets Better.
LGBTQ movements have long focused on opening up the state, changing laws, and increasing protections for people who have been historically demonized as dangerous outsiders. These movements also have been about building alternative communities, outside the reach of the state. And, they have been about changing hearts and minds, where the stakes are both personal and political. Art and popular culture have been there in each of these endeavors. As Rupp and Taylor argue, forms of art and culture that can be understood to be intentionally political “are capable of winning a hearing for serious political purposes precisely because of their entertainment value” (2003, p. 3). Drag shows – in their case – and so many other forms of entertainment and pop culture attract an audience that might not participate in a political rally or visit a political site online and that certainly might not share a marginalized identity with those on stage or on screen. They buy a ticket or turn on the screen for entertainment, and they come to have an emotional connection and reaction to the entertainment they are consuming. In the process, by connecting with the cultural work, their identities and values around gender and sexuality are challenged and often changed.
January 8, 2017 was the last Broadway performance of the Tony Award-winning musical, The Color Purple. The show is based on Alice Walker’s 1982 novel by the same name. Celie is a young, poor, African American woman in rural Georgia at the beginning of the twentieth century who has been repeatedly sexually and otherwise physically abused by the men in her life, including her stepfather and her husband. The show is a story of her growing independence and ability to fight back. It is also a story of her love for Shug Avery, the glamorous singer who is Celie’s husband’s longtime girlfriend. Shug and Celie share an intimate friendship that is, at least for Celie, also a romantic and sexual connection. The musical includes many numbers that are triumphant and soaring celebrations of the strength, kinship, and beauty of the show’s Black women protagonists. One of Celie’s show-stoppers, sung by a performer so talented that words really cannot do her justice, Cynthia Erivo, is the song “I’m Here” in which she asserts her power, humanity, and perseverance. She belts the ending of the song, singing “I’m beautiful” and “I’m here,” and it brings audiences to their feet.
At the musical’s last performance, Hillary Rodham Clinton and her family were in the audience. As they walked to their seats in the theater, they were met with a spontaneous, sustained, joyous standing ovation and applause that delayed the show by a number of minutes. Audience members in the diverse crowd screamed “I love you, Hillary!” and “thank you, Hillary!” Her presence in the audience was, of course, a reminder of the recent presidential election. It also primed the audience to experience the show as a form of collective grieving for the election, a reaffirmation of strength in a time of fear and anger over the Trump presidency, and the building of community through art – even if just temporarily at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on 45th Street. The numerous standing ovations during the show (I was there, seeing the show for the third time), and the feeling of utter electricity in the theater could be attributed to the fact that it was the last performance of an incredible production. It could also be understood as a reflection of what Clinton’s presence meant to the audience, and what it meant to respond to Clinton’s loss with a show like The Color Purple. This healing and reassertion of power, too, for a community that feels besieged – this confirmation of being here and being beautiful – is also what art and popular culture can do.