Doing "Real Family Values": The Interpretive Practice of Families in the GLBT Movement

Abstract

This article considers how a social movement group in the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (GLBT) movement engages in discursive contention with the Religious Right over the meaning of traditional family values. By utilizing an understanding of framing as interpretive practice, we return to a more active conceptualization of framing and illustrate how the meaning making of PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), though bound by the dominant discourse of traditional family values, appropriates this discourse by doing "real family values." We close by considering how PFLAG's interpretive practice subverts and reproduces hegemonic meaning and by noting how our understandings of movement framing are extended by analyses of interpretive practice.In 1992 Dan Quayle, then vice president of the United States, made his now infamous statement against television's portrayal of single mom Murphy Brown, warning the United States about the crisis in traditional family values (Collins 2000,47). Since then, White House opinion about family in the United States has been continually and consistently revisited. Stacey (1996) notes how a neo-family values campaign arose during the Clinton administration and helped further claims of a crisis of core family values. In an interesting twist, recently, former vice president A1 Gore (with his wife Tipper Gore) published a book, Joined at the Heart (2002), detailing their view that American families have changed but that the real values to which all such families aspire (love, respect, honor, caring, nurturing, and providing for children) have not. The question, of course, is whether the Gores' work signals a shift in the dominant talk and politics Direct all correspondence to K. L. Broad,

Professional Allies: The Storying of Allies to LGBTQ Students on a College Campus

“…As the emerging literature on parents as heterosexual allies portrays, one way to narratively produce oneself as an ally is to come out as a heterosexual ally and to engage in LGBTQ advocacy by doing (pro-LGBTQ) heterosexual talk (Broad et al, 2004). In contrast, those contributing to this study did not talk of their own sexual identity.…”

“…Most general research on what it means to be an ally to the LGBTQ community has, thus far, focused a great deal on families, specifically work about parents with LGBTQ children (Broad, 2002;Broad, Crawley, & Foley, 2004;Fields, 2001). For example , Fields' (2001) research about parents with LGBTQ children and the work they do in a support group suggests that the way these parents seek to understand themselves is by resisting the stigma of homosexuality.…”

“…Fields argues that the way parents resist stigma often relies upon conventional understandings of gender, sexuality, and parenting. Broad (2002) provides another portrait of parents as allies by paying particular attention to how allies articulate their understandings of themselves in the context of advocacy (instead of support groups) through involvement in Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). She illustrates how parent-allies, in these circumstances, draw on the coming-out narrative of the LGBTQ movement to tell their own stories, but differentiate themselves by articulating their distinct relationship to the LGBTQ community.…”

“…For instance, while parents of LGBTQ children highlight their parental status and their heterosexuality, tell their stories of involvement in the context of personal relationships with LGBTQ people, and move through stages of awareness about LGBTQ issues (Broad, 2002), members of ALLIES told the story of their participation as stories of professional identity and work. We saw this most clearly reflected in the way Downloaded by [Monash University Library] at 23:51 04 February 2015 participants told stories of how they became involved in the group, which were often stories of following a professional trajectory, seeking professional training, and feeling a sense of professional duty.…”

“…In a sense, the way he tells his story identifies his professional identity as the more salient one here. Even though LGBTQ members of ALLIES have both the culturally available, formulaic story of LGBTQ coming out (Broad et al, 2004;Plummer, 1995) and the organizational materials outlining multiple coming out models for telling one's story (e.g., racial-and ethnic-specific Downloaded by [Monash University Library] at 23:51 04 February 2015 models), LGBTQ members did not invoke these stories to the degree one might expect. While they might have shied away from telling their personal stories of being LGBTQ because they recognized the awkwardness of doing so as members of a presumably heterosexual ally group, we also found it notable that even though they were talking with an interviewer they knew to be a member of the LGBTQ community, they did not talk to her as such.…”