sexual orientation

Originally posted Feb. 11, 2009.  Reposted in honor of the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.

I found a collection of images relating to gay and lesbian studies put together at Columbia University, including this scan of a NYT article on what came to be known as the Stonewall Riots, when crowds reacted violently when police attempted to raid a club on June 28, 1969 (skirmishes continued for several days):

Graffiti from the Stonewall Riots (published in the Village Voice):

There are also some other good photos unrelated to Stonewall such as this one, from 1962, of entertainers at a drag club being hauled off by police after a raid:

The database might be useful if you’re interested in what is generally seen as the start of the gay rights movement.

Katrin sent along a link to a Los Angeles Times article reporting on how family composition in the LA area has changed in the past decade.  The short story is that families are less “traditional” than they were ten years ago.  Only 23% of households are now made up of a married couple with kids (down 10% since 2000). Meanwhile, single-parent families, non-married partners (with and without kids), and same-sex couples (with and without kids) have all increased by 20-25%.  Married couples without kids are up too (by 4%), they’re now 26% of all households.

The maps below show the percent of households in each census tract that include an unmarried couple living together.  Darker orange means a greater percentage.  You can see that this convention-breaking isn’t evenly distributed.  I think the big orange blob underneath Burbank is Silver Lake/Echo Park, a notoriously hip part of the city where you find lots of “hipsters,” and Hollywood, where the population of same-sex couples is likely higher.

Los Angelenos, do you see anything else interesting?

See also the amusing: What Does a Traditional Family Look Like?

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

What makes top news today: a Southwest pilot’s homophobic, sexist, and vulgar commentary; it was kept quiet for some three months.  This happened on March 25th, 2011, broadcast accidentally over the air route traffic control frequency during the flight.  It’s now almost July.  The FAA, the pilot community and Southwest Airlines kept this under wraps for eighty-nine days.  Amazing.

Here’s the transcript of exactly what was said (trigger warning):

Southwest Pilot: “Well, I had Tucson to Indy all four weeks and, uh, Chicago crews…11 out of 12 …there’s 12 flight attendants, individual, never the same flight attendant twice.

“Eleven fucking over the top fucking, ass-fucking homosexuals and a granny.” (silence)

“Eleven. I mean, think of the odds of that. I thought I was in Chicago, which was party-land.”

“After that, it was just a continuous stream of gays and grannies and grandes…”

“Well I don’t give a fuck. I hate 100 percent of their asses.”

“So, six months, I went to the bar three times. In six months, three times.”

“Once with the granny and the fag, and I wish I hadn’t gone.”

“At the very end with two girls, one of them that was part do-able, but we ended up going to the bar and then to the crew at St. Louis, and all these two women wanted to do was, one wanted to berate her sister and the other wanted to bitch about her husband.”

“Literally, for three hours, me and the F.O. (First officer). When that was done, got back to my room, I’m like why the fuck did I stay up?”

ATC: “OK, whoever is, uh, transmitting, better watch what you’re saying.”

Southwest Pilot continues: “They’re still both (inaudible), you know what I mean? I still wouldn’t want anyone to know if I had banged them.”

“So, I mean it was a complete disaster for six months.”

“Now I’m back in Houston, which is easily where the ugliest bases. I mean it’s all these fucking old dudes and grannies and there’s like maybe a handful of cute chicks.”

In interview with Tom Costello on the NBC Today Show this morning, Aviation Analyst, John Cox defended the airline industry, saying the pilot’s comments are a throw-back to a different age in the cockpit: “It was more common in the past, but in today’s environment you see a lot more focus on the professionalism and you don’t hear these kinds of things very often anymore.”

Really?  Mr. Cox, you don’t hear these kinds of things often, anymore?  Spend one moment to Google “Southwest stuck mic”; you will find pilot aviation forums yucking it up already in defense of the pilot saying, “Well, at least he was honest!”

Is it any wonder only six percent of all commercial pilots are women?  The cockpit is not a place of equal opportunity.  Never was.  Isn’t today.  What’s more, there’s a cover-up.  Outside of what airlines now call a “flight deck”, the pilot fraternity defends itself saying, “yeah it used to be like that, we’re more professional now.”

Try to find the pilot’s name.  You can’t.  Southwest will not identify the pilot.  He was initially suspended without pay, but is now back in the cockpit under the good-‘ol-boy protection program and after involuntary “diversity” training.

Aviation market studies indicate women make up 26% of the prospective pilot population.  Only 7% of all pilots are female.  Unless serious action is taken, I doubt anything will change soon.

Audio:

More on the subject here: Sexism in Aviation, Then and Now.

Stephen Wilson is an aircraft salesperson, flight instructor, and former air safety investigator who takes interest in his profession from a sociological viewpoint.  He posts aviation and personal commentary on his blog, from where we borrowed this post.

Yesterday I posted some videos from a story Anderson Cooper did about so-called “sissy boy” therapy, meant to train boys not to act in gender non-conformist ways and, thus, to keep them from being gay (I have now updated the original post with the final segment from the series). The videos provide a horrifying look into the damage that can be done when children are brutally punished and criticized for any signs that adults interpret as evidence of homosexuality.

This type of therapy is still available, and some of the researchers Cooper discusses continue to have lucrative careers assuring parents they have the key to preventing, or eliminating, gayness in their kids. But that said, it’s also clear the cultural attitudes about gays and lesbians have shifted greatly, both within the psychiatric community (the APA no longer defines homosexuality as a mental disorder and does not advocate therapies meant to “cure” gays and lesbians) and among the general public.

For instance, Peter N. sent in a link to a set of graphs by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life illustrating the major changes in attitudes toward gay marriage. Overall support for same-sex marriage has gone up significantly over the last few decades (with polls increasingly showing more people favoring it than opposing it and a few even showing a slim majority of respondents supporting same-sex marriage rights). Attitudes toward same-sex marriage vary widely by age; among those born since 1981, support is quite high:

Not surprisingly, support also varies by religious affiliation:

The Pew Forum also has graphs of differences by political affiliation, etc.

We can also see this change in some instances of corporate marketing that include gays and lesbians or discuss gay rights — something that would have been unthinkable for mainstream corporations to do openly until fairly recently for fear of public backlash. David F. sent in Google Chrome’s contribution to the “It Gets Better” series of videos:

Similarly, Megan B. was struck by this Sealy mattress ad, which, though not unambiguous, she thought would be interpreted by many viewers as implying support for same-sex couples:

Finally, Jacob G.sent in a segment from the ABC News “What Would You Do?” series, in which a waitress openly harasses a lesbian couple to see how other customers will react, and found that about half of onlookers actively intervened:

Katrin and Danny sent in a heart-breaking video that highlights the damage that has sometimes been inflicted on children, with the guidance of researchers, because of adult concerns about behavior that deviates from socially-accepted gender norms. In this segment with Anderson Cooper, two siblings and their mother discuss the treatment their brother suffered, with the approval and encouragement of UCLA researchers, as a form of “anti-sissy” therapy:

It would be nice to be able to write this off as completely debunked practices of an earlier time, based on premises that would never recur today. But as the video makes clear, the publications that resulted from this study continued to be cited by those who argue that through therapy, gays and lesbians can be “cured.”

Here’s the second part of the story:

There will be a third installment tonight; I’ll update the post once the final segment is available online.

UPDATE: Here’s the third segment, about a boy who underwent anti-gay therapy in the ’90s:

UPDATE 2: Also, Danny was wonderful enough to type up transcripts of the first two videos! They’re after the jump.

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Leigh S. sent in a link to a story at The Week about a new Budweiser ad depicting a soldier returning home from deployment. It has gotten attention because some viewers interpret it as at least potentially presenting a gay soldier. See for yourself:

So…what do you make of it? I certainly don’t think it’s unambiguously a gay couple — it could be a friend or brother just as well. But it does show him calling that guy instead of, say, his parents (or the woman he hugs when he gets home), and that guy being the first to greet him.

For that matter, is the fact that a beer company would make an ad where they didn’t go to great lengths to make it 100% clear that he’s not gay itself a step forward?

Nate Silver, at Five Thirty Eight, has a new post up about the increasing support for same-sex marriage in the U.S. In the past few months, four polls Silver deems credible have found, for the first time, more than half of Americans supporting legalizing same-sex marriage. Here’s a graph Silver created showing the results of polls on the topic over time (an update of his earlier graph):

Of course, as Silver points out, results of public opinion polls don’t necessarily translate into immediate changes in politicians’ positions. Support for same-sex marriage is surely unevenly distributed, meaning some politicians will still find opposition to it to be a winning electoral strategy in their districts. Or they may count on the fact that many voters may support same-sex marriage but not view a candidate’s position on this issue as a deal-breaker. And, of course, sometimes politicians take a position and stick to it regardless of opinion polls.

That said, as with public opinion about gays and lesbians serving in the military, the trend line is clear, and it seems likely that fewer politicians will see opposition to same-sex marriage as a sure-fire winning strategy, as many have in the past.

Last week we received ten requests* to discuss the furor over a J. Crew ad featuring a 5-year-old boy in pink toenails, with his mom, Jenna Lyons, the President and Creative Director of J. Crew.

Fox News, Media Research Network Center (MRNC), and One Million Moms criticized the ad for supporting a liberal agenda aimed at mainstreaming gender-bending behavior and causing this particular child to be confused about his gender or sexual orientation.  Their criticism was picked up by mainstream news outlets, including ABCNews, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the Los Angeles Times, who mostly just posed the question as to whether they were correct, while balancing opposing views in support of the idea that painting a son’s toenails pink was consequence-less.

Frankly, I’m not sure what to make of this “furor” (as I called it).  On the one hand, the criticism of the ad is a cautionary tale to all companies and a lesson to us all.  Here at SocImages, we frequently criticize companies that portray and assert rigid gender roles, especially for boys.  But look what happens when a company dares to do something different?  Outrage!  Accusations! Perhaps we’re short-sighted to imagine that companies can just tell whatever cultural story they want to tell.

On the other hand, perhaps this isn’t a story about advertising, perhaps it’s a story about media more generally.  It’s true that there were objections to the ad.  But I didn’t find many of them; just a few high-profile examples.  Perhaps what really happened was what is sometimes colloquially referred to as a “slow news day.”  Only the choir would have been preached to if the criticisms weren’t picked up and highlighted by many more media outlets.  And those outlets, as I did above, beg audiences to pay attention to the “furor.”  A furor that might have been largely of their own making.  Say “hello” to ratings.

These are my thoughts. Yours?

*  Many thanks to Katrin, Zoe S., Jeff H., Prof. Mary Reiter, Sara P., Andrew Slater, p.j., Brian K., Ben Y., and Dmitriy T.M. for the submissions!

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.