The Gay Marriage Generation

How the LGBTQ Movement Transformed American Culture

Peter Hart-Brinson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479868094
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The generational and social thinking changes that caused an unprecedented shift toward support for gay marriage How did gay marriage—something unimaginable two decades ago—come to feel inevitable to even its staunchest opponents? Drawing on over 95 interviews with two generations of Americans, as well as historical analysis and public opinion data, Peter Hart-Brinson argues that a fundamental shift in our understanding of homosexuality sparked the generational change that fueled gay marriage’s unprecedented rise. Hart-Brinson shows that the LGBTQ movement’s evolution and tactical responses to oppression caused Americans to reimagine what it means to be gay and what gay marriage would mean to society at large. While older generations grew up imagining gays and lesbians in terms of their behavior, younger generations came to understand them in terms of their identity. Over time, as the older generation and their ideas slowly passed away, they were replaced by a new generational culture that brought gay marriage to all fifty states. Through revealing interviews, Hart-Brinson explores how different age groups embrace, resist, and create society’s changing ideas about gay marriage. Religion, race, contact with gay people, and the power of love are all topics that weave in and out of these fascinating accounts, sometimes influencing opinions in surprising ways. The book captures a wide range of voices from diverse social backgrounds at a critical moment in the culture wars, right before the turn of the tide. The story of gay marriage’s rapid ascent offers profound insights about how the continuous remaking of the population through birth and death, mixed with our personal, biographical experiences of our shared history and culture, produces a society that is continually in flux and constantly reinventing itself anew. An intimate portrait of social change with national implications, The Gay Marriage Generation is a significant contribution to our understanding of what causes generational change and how gay marriage became the reality in the United States.

1

Imagining Generations and Social Change

Like many academic studies, mine has a story behind it. In 2006, when I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, voters in the state confronted a referendum on gay marriage in the midterm elections. The question before voters was whether or not to amend the state constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman—and thus prevent the courts from overturning the existing statutory ban as unconstitutional (what happened in Massachusetts in 2003, making it the first state to legalize gay marriage).

I was a teaching assistant for a class called “Contemporary American Society,” and the week before the election, I decided it was my civic duty to have my students talk about voting and the issues that would be on the ballot. Predictably, at a liberal campus like Madison’s, the students in my discussion section who supported gay marriage dominated the discussion and were quite vocal about voting “no” on the referendum. As an educator, I felt my role was to try to create space for the other side, so I asked the students, “Why do you think people oppose gay marriage? What reasons do you think they would give to explain why they would vote to define marriage as between one man and one woman?”

Silence. Even in my normally contentious discussion section, my question was met with awkward glances. Tentatively, one student raised his hand and said the opponents were religious and thought that homosexuality was a sin. Then, another student said that they were bigoted and intolerant. That was it. My students were extremely fluent in the language of support for gay marriage, but they had trouble explaining why people opposed it.

I found myself explaining to them the profound sociological significance of de-gendering marriage. Although there is no one “traditional” marriage, and although procreation has not been viewed as essential to marriage for decades, it is true that the opposite-sex couple had been a taken-for-granted part of the institution of marriage in modern Western societies. I explained that the very idea of gay marriage had been unthinkable to most Americans until very recently and that it would be reasonable for someone to be upset that the conventional wisdom was being challenged.

This kind of classroom one-sidedness happens all the time, so normally it would not have made an impression—except for the fact that the editors of the conservative student newspaper at UW–Madison also took a pro–gay marriage stance on the referendum. The Mendota Beacon was an activist newspaper funded by the conservative Leadership Institute, and its motto, “Shining Light on What’s Right,” truthfully advertised the right-wing viewpoint that could be found in its pages.1 Normally, the newspaper followed the Republican Party line on most issues, and when it didn’t, it advocated more conservative principles. But with gay marriage, the editors bucked the party line and advocated that students vote “no” on the constitutional amendment.

Together, these events made me wonder: Could this be a generational issue? Could young people be that much more supportive of gay marriage that even the conservative activists approved? And if so, why? When I began studying public opinion data on the issue, it certainly seemed to be a clear-cut case of generational change. Both tolerance for homosexuality and attitudes about gender equality had liberalized in this manner: not only were young egalitarians replacing older traditionalists in the population, but there was evidence that older Americans were adapting to the changing times by changing their attitudes.2

But when I began reading the research on generations, I was disappointed. In both scientific studies and popular books, I noticed a serious disconnect between what the authors were saying and what the classical theorists of generational change had written. In the popular literature, all I saw were crude stereotypes about Generation X, Millennials, and other broadly defined cohorts. By contrast, the scientific research on generations I found seemed totally unrelated to the popular understanding. There was a vast literature on relations of kinship descent across the life course (e.g., among grandparents, parents, and children) and an equally large literature on cohorts (focused on quantitative measurements of their similarities and differences), but very little research on cohorts’ cultural distinctions. It was as if social scientists found the pop culture stereotypes of generations to be so appalling that they wanted nothing to do with them.

In this chapter, I explain why this puzzling gap in the literature about generations exists and how we can bridge it. First, I trace the source of the divergent meanings of the generation concept back to its classical foundations. Although philosophers throughout history have understood the importance of generational change, I discuss the work of Karl Mannheim, whose theory of generational change has been the most influential.3 Second, I outline five key problems that Mannheim’s theory poses to researchers who want to document and explain generational change. Third, I discuss recent innovations in generational theory and explain the importance of the social imagination; I argue that the concept is well suited to generational theory because it links society-wide changes in history and culture with the psychological processes by which individuals form and articulate their worldviews.

This lays the foundation for the study of gay marriage that follows in subsequent chapters. Generational theory requires us to combine three types of social research: a thorough description of historical events, a precise quantitative analysis of how the population changes over time, and a cultural and cognitive explanation of how young people develop distinctive worldviews, based on their biographical encounter with history while coming of age. When the insights from each of these types of research are combined, we can understand exactly how and why generational change occurs.

Generational Theory

Most people have a decent, intuitive understanding of generational theory. Social scientists have formalized and extended this basic view in important ways, and their efforts have produced some valuable insights. They also have debunked some important myths and can help us avoid common traps in our conventional thinking. But our everyday version of generational theory is a good place to start.

In general, we think of generations as groups of people who share a common location in historical time and who develop distinctive worldviews and patterns of behavior because of the experiences they had while coming of age. Typically, the experiences we have during adolescence and early adulthood create a set of stable, enduring values and orientations that serve as foundations for future thought and behavior. Because different age groups go through this developmental phase during different historical periods, each cohort will be different from the ones before and after it. Sometimes the differences are so dramatic that young people have trouble understanding older people, and vice versa: old people complain about “kids these days,” while young people tell their elders to “get with the times.”

We use this commonsense view to talk about generations in two contrasting ways. First, when we think about groups like the Sixties Generation or Digital Natives, we think of significant historical events or societal trends and how growing up during that time produced a unique group of people. The Sixties Generation came of age during the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and Woodstock, and they fundamentally reshaped American politics and culture with their protests, music, and sexual mores. Similarly, today’s Digital Natives can’t be separated from their smartphones, are in constant contact with their peers, and share everything about their lives online. In this view, generations emerge in response to some notable change to society; only some people belong to those generations, while others do not.

In the other view, everyone belongs to a generation that has some kind of unique worldview, based on the year they were born. The idea that the Millennial Generation follows Generation X, which follows the Baby Boomers, and so on, illustrates this latter view. The temporal boundaries between the generations aren’t always clear, but this succession of generations is thought to follow a fixed interval of time that can be indexed to the life course. The labels capture the idea that people who grow up during different periods in history develop different psychological and behavioral traits that define them as a group.

Although this latter view of generations has some major flaws, which I explain below, both views illustrate generational theory’s basic presumption that the process of coming of age during a particular historical era creates distinctive worldviews and acts as a potent force of change. However, the fuzziness of the character traits that we associate with different generations points to a big problem: generational research often produces one-sided stereotypes of whole age groups. Not everyone who came of age during the 1960s was a liberal hippie. Not all Millennials are constantly checking their smartphones. Stereotypes drive sociologists crazy, and no self-respecting social scientist can accept this basic view of generations, despite its intuitive appeal.

Karl Mannheim, the most influential generational theorist in the social sciences, confronted this challenge in the 1920s, and his discussion of what he called “The Problem of Generations” is Exhibit A for why generational theory is, on one hand, so evocative and important while, on the other hand, so stereotype-prone and resistant to scientific study.4 Mannheim’s theory of generations is worth discussing in detail because it provides the framework for a more comprehensive and nuanced analysis of generational change.5

Mannheim’s thinking on the subject was inspired by the Marxists’ problem of class consciousness. Like most social scientists of his time, Mannheim was familiar with Karl Marx’s theory of communist revolutions and the debates about why workers did not rise up to overthrow capitalism, as Marx predicted. Why did workers fail to develop the working-class consciousness that one might expect of those exploited, paid meager wages for dangerous work, and subjected to terrible living conditions? Mannheim reasoned that developing a working-class consciousness depended upon much more than simply being part of the working class. Workers also had to experience the deprivation that Marx predicted (not all workers did); then they had to be connected to a Communist Party organizer (not all workers were); and then they had to actualize this working-class consciousness by acting on their identity as workers and suppressing other status group identities (like occupation, religion, and ethnicity) that might inhibit mobilization. Only if all four of those conditions were met would the workers rise up against the capitalists.

Mannheim argued that the same logic held for generations. Simply being part of a cohort—being the same age as someone else—wasn’t enough to make you part of a generation. You also had to share a common experience with others in that cohort, develop meaningful personal relationships with others who also shared those experiences, and then develop a common identity, worldview, or set of behaviors to bring your distinctive generation into being.

Mannheim therefore distinguished among four separate generation concepts, the interrelations of which define the problem of generations and serve as the foundation for subsequent generational research. The generation location is what we, today, call a cohort; it refers simply to a group of people defined by a shared location in historical time and space.6 Members of a cohort have nothing in common, other than the fact that they were born during the same historical period into the same society. There is potential for a generation to emerge from a generation location, but something else is required. Put differently, being in the same cohort is a necessary but not sufficient condition to being part of a generation.

Mannheim defines the “generation as an actuality,” or actual generation, as those members of a cohort who “participate in the characteristic social and intellectual currents of their society and period.”7 What Mannheim means is that to become a generation, members of a cohort must share a common and distinctive experience with history that is made possible by their unique position in historical time and in social space. Not only must you be in the same age group in the same society, but you also must occupy similar social positions in that society, such that you experience history in the same way.

An example may clarify this distinction. In a classic study, sociologist Glen Elder Jr. studied the effects that growing up during the Great Depression of the 1930s had on that cohort as they moved through the life course. Generational theory predicts that this would have a variety of long-lasting effects on the cohort’s behaviors and worldviews: we might expect them to be more frugal and to value steady employment more than older and younger cohorts. But this was not true for the whole cohort. Elder found that only people who experienced deprivation firsthand were affected in lasting ways; those who lived through it but weren’t adversely affected by it were no different from other cohorts. Thus, the actual Depression Generation comprised only a certain subgroup of the cohort—those who experienced the historical event directly.8

Before moving on, it is worth pausing to draw out one important implication that this example illustrates regarding the distinction between cohort and generation. In reality, only certain members of a cohort become a part of the actual generation, so our tendency to identify whole cohorts as generations should be presumed wrong until proven otherwise. What separates the actual generation from the cohort are the cultural and social psychological processes that emerge when people experience the unique conditions of history in a particular way. These “social generational” processes translate the experience of history while coming of age into the enduring worldviews and behaviors that we observe in some members of the cohort.9

The third generation concept described by Mannheim is what he called a ge...