Abstract
In The Gay Marriage Generation: How the LGBTQ Movement Transformed American Culture, Peter Hart-Brinson provides a sophisticated explanation for a significant puzzle: why did opposition to same-sex marriage collapse so dramatically in the decade or so before the Supreme Court legalized it in 2015? The answer is a stepwise journey through a history of LGBT activism and public opinion surveys about homosexuality, all in service of discussions of generation theory, attribution theory, conceptual metaphor theory, and explanations of how culture wars work. The Gay Marriage Generation provides a unique mixed-methods research design of survey regressions and qualitative interviews to understand how public opinion changes; it will interest researchers far beyond the specific question tackled here.
Hart-Brinson’s evidence and argument are nested within discussions of generational change, expanding on Karl Mannheim. He argues that researchers should focus on finding generational triggers (p. 218), the events that cause subsections of age cohorts to change their ideas or behavior. We can thus retain the concept of generational change if we define generations not as age-defined demographic “pulses,” but as subgroups of an age cohort who have responded to key events in significant ways and which subsequently become dominant through cohort replacement. “Social” generations are thus only one portion of what marketers name.
The Gay Marriage Generation identifies three periods of gay-rights activism that caused cohort differences in opinions about homosexuality: the Homophile Period (1945 to 1968); the Resistance Period (1974 to 1986); and the Gay Rights Period (1993 to 2015). These corresponded to dominant frames for homosexuality in the public sphere: illness, lifestyle, and identity, three schemata that are supported by Hart-Brinson’s regression analyses. Tables of the author’s six original regressions in the appendix are not always referenced directly in the text, which is a shame because they contain sophisticated analyses of public opinion change.
Statistically, Hart-Brinson finds that “cohort and period effects in public opinion cannot be explained by changing moral judgements about homosexuality or by other [demographic] factors” and that the other significant predictors are political/religious ideologies (pp. 86–87). Hierarchical age-period-cohort analysis validates Hart-Brinson’s supposition that “the Identity Cohort has truly unique views of gay marriage, compared to their elders” (p. 87). Hart-Brinson also stresses two popular misconceptions: that close contact with LGBT people increases opposition to same-sex marriage, not support, and that the cultural schemata of homosexuality (identity versus behavior) varied independently of people’s moral judgements (good, bad) about it (pp. 92, 221).
Hart-Brinson concludes that opposition to same-sex marriage collapsed for two reasons. One-third of the effect came from cohort replacement, as younger Americans of the “identity cohort” were much more likely to support same-sex marriage than their elders (p. 83). The more interesting two-thirds of the effect is an interaction between cohort and the interrelated independent variables of political and religious ideology.
It is this interaction that forms the backdrop to the project’s qualitative research design. Hart-Brinson recruited 97 interviews in 2008 and 2009 with matched parent-student pairs from a midwestern regional public college and a community college, allowing him to explore cohort differences while controlling for parental socialization. Hart-Brinson’s presentation of qualitative data is gold standard and includes all the tables and calculated percentages a reader could want, as well as detailed discussions of recruitment and coding procedures.
With his interview data, Hart-Brinson makes substantial analytic hay out of the ostensible bystanders in the culture war about same-sex marriage. It was not surprising that he found primarily young liberals in opposition to old conservatives—the “intersection of cohort with ideology” (p. 127). For these partisans, gay marriage was part of a culture war in which they eagerly framed their interview arguments against their absent antagonists.
Crucial were the two coherent “middle-ground” discourses articulated by one-third of his interviewees: a “libertarian pragmatism” that argued that homosexuality may be distasteful but that same-sex marriage could be fine, and an “immoral inclusivity” in which homosexuality is a sin no different from, say, lying, and thus same-sex marriage wasn’t necessarily objectionable. While 54 percent of the young interviewees unambiguously supported gay marriage and only 9 percent were unambiguously opposed, 37 percent expressed middle-ground views that included libertarian pragmatism (6 percent) and immoral inclusivity (11 percent). For parents, only 38 percent expressed unambiguous support for gay marriage while 34 percent were opposed, but 13 percent expressed libertarian pragmatism and 16 percent some other middle ground.
Hart-Brinson’s finding that attitudes about homosexuality are independent from those about gay marriage run counter to attribution theory—that our attitudes about phenomena are linked to what we believe causes them. Rather, most interviewees expressed complex, multi-causal arguments about homosexuality that refuted a false dichotomy of “born this way” versus “perverted behavior,” while others dismissed the question as beyond their knowledge. The argument here takes a detour through cognitive metaphor theory that will interest cultural sociologists and qualitative data-coders; the metaphor codes, masterfully summarized in a table, support the earlier claims of a distinct identity cohort.
Hart-Brinson also parses metaphors to show that there is a surprising consensus lurking under the pyrotechnics of the culture war: Americans of all cohorts and ideologies are impressively united about the meaning of marriage and the legitimacy of the struggle itself. Hart-Brinson found intriguing parallels between conservatives who supported civil unions because they reserved marriage for traditional couples and atheists who preferred civil unions because they wanted secular marriage for everyone (p. 164). That there is so much cross-cohort and cross-ideology support for marriage itself, Hart-Brinson claims, suggests that marriage is being reinstitutionalized after a rough patch (p. 187).
Helpfully, Hart-Brinson spends an entire chapter on the exceptional cases: old supporters of same-sex marriage and young opponents. He finds that these cases are exceptions that prove the rules of generational theory, as he defines it: resistant subcultures within ostensible generations shield today’s sub-cohort of vanquished gay marriage opponents, just as they insulated iconoclastic liberals in days past—insofar as we define a generation as only that portion of an age cohort who themselves changed, and not all of those born into the time period during which the change occurred.
What I was left wondering about these discursive alternatives to straightforward opposition to gay marriage, and what all available data cannot answer, is whether the alternatives were newly available, or suddenly strengthened. Either explanation would help make sense of the “accelerating pace of change” that the book tantalizes us with, but abandons (p. 94).
The Gay Marriage Generation is painstakingly written, but the beginnings of chapters are engaging about the research process or Hart-Brinson’s “eureka” moments. Readers benefit from next-chapter summaries that are more succinct than the previous chapter’s conclusion. The book’s deep involvement in so many literatures makes it difficult to imagine teaching it to undergraduates; but for graduate-level methods or cultural sociology classes, the book offers a great deal, as it does to scholars of public opinion and academics interested in generational theory.