Abstract
This research contributes to social movement framing theory about frame variation, along with the social problems literature on child protectionism. I extend the theorizing on frames by arguing that frame variation can be a response to new agendas and goals of countermovements and opponents. Specifically, for opponents to rights activism, frame variation can be reaction to the assertion of rights for new protagonists, specifically their entry into new spaces. This study analyzes frame variation of the most deleterious child protectionist claims about stranger danger, assertions that the presence of racial, gender, and sexual others in public spaces will harm children. This paper is a content analysis of political flyers and messages developed by Religious Right campaigns at the state and municipal level between 1974 and 2013; these campaigns framed gay men and transgender woman as threats to children in classrooms and bathrooms. For both gay men and transgender women, these claims were most common at the start of rights advocacy. I argue that challengers make the most overt, deleterious arguments about harm to children when new groups initially advocate for legal rights and access to new spaces; as marginalized groups become more familiar and less “strange,” challengers make more covert claims about these groups, as stranger danger claims have waning cultural and political resonance.
“Save Our Children from Homosexuality” was the appeal by Anita Bryant in 1977 that linked homosexuality with harm to children in the public imagination, focusing on gay men as teachers. In 2013, protesters in San Antonio, Texas, carried signs that proclaimed “No Men in Girls' Bathrooms” as a protest against a transgender-inclusive municipal non-discrimination ordinance, asserting that transgender women would attack girls if allowed access to shared bathrooms. In the 2010s, these panics about transgender women in women’s bathrooms echoed across the country during debates on anti-trans “bathroom bills,” military policy, and school policies.
Frames, or meaning work to define a social problem (Benford and Snow 2000; Snow and Benford 1988), construct the potential consequences of social change, and child protectionist frames such as these assert the purported dangers to children. Often these child protectionist frames are stranger danger frames, which I define as the potential harm to children by sharing space with strangers, or non-family members, without parental supervision. Using historical data on anti-gay and anti-transgender initiatives, this study analyzes the timing of these stranger danger frames, which evoke children in public spaces threatened by racial, sexual, and gendered others, asserting the entry of these “others” into new spaces as a threat to the public body. These campaigns focused their concern on gay men and trans women sharing space with children outside of parental control.
This research contributes to social movement framing theory about frame variation, along with the social problems literature on child protectionism. First, I extend theories of frame variation by arguing that, in addition to factors such as resonance and countermovement framing, frame variation can be a response to new agendas and goals of countermovements. Specifically, for movements challenging civil rights activism, frame variation can be reaction to the assertion of rights for new protagonists, including their entry into new spaces. Second, I build on Holly McCammon’s (2012) work on frame variation to understand the shifting cultural and political resonance of these stranger danger frames, particularly the way the gay stranger became increasingly ineffective. There is a puzzling frame variation in the activism against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights: campaigns have consistently framed these rights as a danger to children in public spaces, but the protagonist or “Other” in these frames has changed from gay men to trans women. Frames about strangers emerged at the beginning of advocacy for gay men and trans women. As gay men became assimilated, anti-gay campaigns decreasingly used these claims. These claims become ineffective as “space invaders” grow into allowable occupants and become less plausible as sexual strangers. This research suggests that the capacity to construct others as strangers diminishes over time, as child protectionist frames have to become more covert and implicit to be resonant.
Since the late 1970s, the Religious Right movement has organized campaigns against LGBT rights that assert the danger of these rights to children (Herman 1997). This article focuses on stranger danger frames about gay or transgender strangers, the two groups within the LGBT community consistently used in Religious Right child protectionist frames. Initially, Religious Right campaigns portrayed the potential harm to children by gay strangers, often gay teachers. In the 1990s, frames about gay strangers declined precipitously, although the Religious Right still crafted covert child protectionist claims. In the 2000s, these campaigns began to include arguments about transgender strangers, specifically transgender women in bathrooms. Trans women were assigned male at birth but identify as a woman; however, anti-trans campaigns depicted them as perilous “men in dresses” invading sex-segregated spaces (see also Westbrook and Schilt 2014).
The Resonance of the Stranger
Social movements use frames to conduct meaning work to describe the social problem, its causes, and potential resolutions (Benford and Snow 2000; Snow and Benford 1988). Movements strategically develop frames to resonate with a particular audience, persuading voters, legislatures, citizens, or potential activists (Benford 1997; Bernstein 1997; Jasper and Poulsen 1995; Zald 1996). Scholars have long noted the importance of frame resonance, the “appeal and mobilizing potency” of frames (Snow and Benford 1988, 205). Highly resonant frames are “viewed as trustworthy, compelling, and espousing central beliefs, values and understanding” (McCammon 2009; Morrell 2015, 364; Zuo and Benford 1995). Professional expertise (Benford and Snow 2000; Leach and Fairhead 2007), experiential narratives (Epstein 1996; Morrell 2015), and emotion (Gould 2009; Jasper 1998) may make frames resonant. For child protectionist frames, frames may be resonant when they tap volatile public emotions (Irvine 2008). Jeffrey Victor (1998) argued that claims of ritual abuse symbolically resonated with a “demonology” in society about potential sources of harm; thus, “people who share a moral belief system are likely to selectively define certain purported moral threats, and not others, as ones to be taken seriously by society” (555). These moral threats may include delimiting who is outside the movement, “the Other against which the movement moves” (Eyerman 2006, 194).
The literature on the construction of social problems presumes that the imperiled child has a consistent cultural and political resonance. Scholars have described the appeal to protect children as the most “reliable” tactic for “stirring up erotic hysteria” (Rubin [1984] 2011, 141) and an “ideological Möbius strip” because no argument counters reproductive futurity or the perpetuation of society (Edelman 2004, 2). Allegations about harm to children are part of prejudice formation (Young-Bruehl 1998, 447). The imperiled child becomes “the apotheosis of the defenseless victim” (Silin 1995, 196) due to their innocence and vulnerability (Ariès 1962; Gilliam and Bales 2001), such that sex poses “an almost existential peril” (Levine 2002, xxvii). The construction of the imperiled child is relatively consistent—focusing on prepubescent children unsupervised by parents in places like classrooms and bathrooms (see Best 1990). Young, white girls are central to the imagery of the innocent, imperiled child (Bernstein 2011), although boys are occasionally featured.
US campaigns to oppose civil rights often invoke purported danger to supposed vulnerable subjects like children or women (Blee 1991; Godfrey 2003; McCreery 2008); this child protectionism “acted as ballasts to the civil rights claims of women, gays, and African Americans” (Frank 2013, 129). Child protectionist frames infer that civil rights invade children’s privacy and prevent white families from protecting their children (Blee 1991; Frank 2013); children protectionist frames have failed to protect black children (Bernstein 2011). These frames occur in such diverse campaigns as those against school busing (Frank 2013), school desegregation (Frank 2013; Godfrey 2003), the Equal Rights Amendment (Solomon 1979), and LGBT rights (McCreery 2008).
I argue that the most overt forms of child protectionist frames do not have enduring cultural and political resonance; this resonance relies upon who is framed as the potential perpetrator. Joel Best (1990, 6) suggests that the social construction of the “the child menaced by deviants” became the main typification of the child in the 1970s and 1980s, positioning racial, sexual, and gendered others as threatening “space invaders” (Puwar 2004), folk devils (Cohen 1972), or strangers (Bauman 1991; Beck 1996). Child protectionist claims rely heavily but not exclusively (see Cavanagh 2007) on male bodies as sexually dangerous. Since the 1930s, psychological theories about male sexual deviants have included concerns that men were either insufficiently masculine or hypermasculine (Freedman 1987, 89). Opposition to civil rights crafted dangerous strangers as black and male, threatening white women and girls (Blee 1991; Collins 2005). Contemporary challenges to transgender rights focus on the physical threat of bodies that are perceived as male. Laurel Westbrook and Kristen Schilt (2014) explain that within gender panics about “men in dresses” in women’s bathrooms, for example, is a “heteronormative logic” in which “all bodies with male anatomies, regardless of gender identity, desire female bodies, and many of them…are willing to use force to get access to those bodies” (48; see also Cavanagh 2010, 74). In these gender panics or “penis panics,” anti-trans opponents frame trans women as men due to the “presumed biological maleness” of a body that may have a penis, highlighting the centrality of the penis to constructions of maleness and stranger dangerousness (Westbrook and Schilt 2015, 383).
Stranger danger claims cannot be promiscuously evoked about any male subject. Research on child protectionist frames does not clarify who is framed as a deviant and when that framing succeeds. Construction of “the child menaced by deviants” relies on a construction of some bodies, typically male, as strangers. Zygmunt Bauman (1991) describes the stranger as neither friend nor enemy, neither us nor them, but an ambivalent figure within the community that undermines the social order. Strangers are simultaneously neighbors and different enough to evoke considerable social anxiety (Beck 1996) and desired social distance. The stranger explains anxieties about homosexuality in which “gay people are strangers who are not all that strange” (Stein 2001, 63). Shane Phelan (2001) argues that discourses about homosexual “recruitment” and “seduction” are “examples of a general ambivalence about the practices of strangers” (31). Classical theories about strangers provide an explanation for the process by which strangers become familiar and domesticated through assimilation (Bauman 1991). This project uses theories about strangers to understand the waning cultural and political resonance of gay men as strangers in Religious Right discourse and the concomitant framing of trans women as strangers.
Frame Variation and Shifting Countermovment Agendas
Many scholars have critiqued treating frames as static phenomena rather than as mutable and constantly changing (Benford 1997; Oliver and Johnston 2000; Snow et al. 2014). Fewer scholars have analyzed the process of frame variation, or the transformation of frames within one movement (McCammon 2012; Snow, Vliegenthart, and Corrigall-Brown 2007), particularly the role of opponents or countermovements on frame variation (Burke and Bernstein 2014). In her work on the women’s jury movements, Holly McCammon (2012) argues that organizational identities, cultural and political resonance, and countermovement framing influence frame variation, particularly the change from radical to moderate frames. Didi Herman (1997) attributes the use of moderate instead of radical frames about homosexuality in anti-gay activism to the declining resonance of radical frames.
Existing theories of frame variation ignore the role of countermovement activities beyond the creation of frames. I contend that the shifting agendas and goals of countermovements or opponents contribute to frame variation. Social movement framing may be more radical at the start of new countermovement initiatives, as countermovements put new issues on the public agenda and try to create new policies or laws. As countermovements achieve their goals, radical frames may be less culturally and politically resonant. For example, in opposition to the civil rights movement, blatantly racist opposition was replaced by moderate and coded framing. In school busing issues, covert language about “community control” and “parental involvement” replaced overtly racist language about fears of miscegenation in schools (Omi and Winant 1994, 127). This covert language is still insidious, as it may be challenging to identify the framing as racist (Bonilla-Silva 2006) or discriminatory.
In rights advocacy, I argue that timing shapes the deployment of frames about strangers. Nirmal Puwar (2004) suggests that “the moment when the historically excluded is included is incredibly revealing”; it dislodges the status quo with a “spatial and bodily collision of imaginations” (5, 143). Arguments about strangers are not universally deployed to combat rights but are linked to the initial entry of strangers to excluded spaces. These public spaces are an active medium in which identities are contested (Ruddick 1996, 135); often, socially disenfranchised people are framed as polluting or threatening outsiders in these spaces (Cavanagh 2010; Pile 1996; Sibley 1995). These claims reflect social distance, the desired or actual social or physical proximity from others (Bourdieu 1989), but also ideals about space such that “certain types of bodies that are tacitly designated as being the ‘natural’ occupants of specific positions” and “others are marked out as trespassers” who are “out of place. Not being the somatic norm, they are space invaders” (Puwar 2004, 8).
Methods
The Religious Right is a coalition of pro-family, conservative organizations asserting Christian morals and values in the public sphere (Fetner 2008; Herman 1997). This paper is part of a larger study of Religious Right referendum and initiative campaigns against LGBT state and municipal laws between 1974 and 2013 (Stone 2012). These rights laws include non-discrimination laws with protections for sexual orientation and/or gender identity, anti-gay initiatives to forbid future LGBT rights laws, and initiatives to ban same-sex marriage. Although campaigns are organized by local activists, these campaigns against municipal and state laws are part of the broader Religious Right agenda of obstructing LGBT rights and are often mentored by national Religious Right organizations (see Bull and Gallagher 1996a; Fetner 2008; Hardisty 2000; Herman 1997). All data were created by organized Religious Right campaigns, including political messages created by the main campaign or a recognized spokesperson operating to collect petitions to create or to oppose an existing ballot measure on LGBT rights.
These Religious Right campaigns against LGBT rights laws matter in the ways they shape and influence public opinion. Campaigns develop these frames within conservative ideologies (see Fetner 2008; Herman 1997) but attempt to persuade the general public to oppose LGBT rights. In the United States, the Religious Right has been at the forefront of using sex panics to mobilize constituents and increase political power (Irvine 2004, 2008; Rubin [1984] 2011). Campaign messages are representative of arguments made by the movement to the public on topics such as same-sex marriage and non-discrimination protections. The Religious Right develops frames in these ballot measure campaigns (Stone 2012) that are used in arguments to state and federal legislatures and judges, where the movement deploys moderate frames developed during campaigns (Mello 2015). Locally, campaign messages are widely disseminated within the targeted city or state; they are often played on the radio or television, distributed to voters through the mail, or included in newspaper ads. They become part of a public discourse during the months the campaign is taking place (see Bull and Gallagher 1996a; Fetner 2008; Hardisty 2000). The audience for these campaign materials is consistent, focused on the local voting public, allowing comparisons across campaigns.
I attempted to collect ads from all 170 campaigns and any attempted campaigns. Research on campaigns in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s came from archives, including the Cornell University Human Sexuality Collection and the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California. I searched for political ads and statements from campaign spokespeople in municipal newspapers through online newspaper databases, along with available microfiche of municipal newspapers. These data include a collection of political flyers, press releases, and handouts that I received directly from LGBT and Religious Right activists (see Stone 2012). Campaign videos and flyers from the 2000s and 2010s were accessible online. I added political ads that were reproduced in other scholars’ work. I collected 455 political ads, flyers, videos, and press releases from 89 discrete campaigns in 20 different states and 43 different municipalities during this time period. Although there were fewer ads in the earliest years, there are enough ads in each decade to represent major trends in campaign materials; almost half of the ads (45%) were collected from campaigns before 1999.
All data were organized and coded in NVivo. First, I coded every reference to or picture of children (256 cases).1 I did not include references to the “family”; children specifically needed to be invoked. I coded all references of children into main themes based on the purported threat to children, whether a stranger, family member, ideas/books, or an unspecified danger; each ad could contain multiple themes or codes. Common child protectionist themes were “ideas and books” (37 percent), “gay men (strangers)” (26 percent), “trans women(strangers)” (23 percent), and “same-sex parents” (13 percent). Themes about ideas and books focused on gay-positive literature or belief systems that homosexuality was acceptable. Arguments against same-sex marriage often used frames about “same-sex parents.” Most marriage frames were a “children need a mother and father” frame; this frame articulated the purported advantages of two-parent heteronormative households in terms of income, self-sufficiency, risk for child abuse, and educational attainment. Over half the ads about children evoked danger from strangers. Frames about “gay men (strangers)” or “trans women (strangers)” focused on these two types of individuals either in the same spaces as children (e.g., parks, bathrooms, classrooms) or in roles in which they interacted with children outside of parental control (e.g., teacher, Boy Scout leader, Big Brother).
These ads consistently construct gay men and trans women as sexually and morally threatening to children. Consistent with research by Didi Herman (1997), lesbians only occasionally appeared in political ads, often as a brief mention of lesbian gym teachers to supplement an extended narrative about the dangers of gay teachers. Apart from a few examples of transgender boys in narratives about transgender children (see Stone 2018), all Religious Right ads about transgender people focused on trans women or girls. These ads framed trans women as immutably male, denying the identity claims of trans people in favor of “body-based criteria” to determine gender (Westbrook and Schilt 2015).2 Over 90 percent of the claims about strangers and all 135 political ads with stranger danger claims focused on gay men and trans women.
This analysis focuses on the 135 political ads that included stranger danger frames; due to the small number of cases, the analysis for this project was necessarily qualitative. I used grounded theory to alternate between the close analysis of the construction of children, spaces, and bodies in the political ads and existing theories about imperiled children, contested spaces, and dangerousness with attention to differences in the data. Next, I compared the construction of children, spaces, and bodies between the political ads that focus on gay men and trans women, noting differences. Finally, I studied the emergence and decline of these frames over time, examining differences between the initial emergence of these claims and their decline for gay men. In the declining use of stranger danger claims for gay men, I examined carefully which organizations continued to deploy these frames.
Making Stranger Danger
Between 1977 and 2013, Religious Right campaigns deployed two waves of frames about gay men or trans women as dangerous strangers (figure 1). Each wave had a correspondence with new agendas and goals by the LGBT movement to pass rights laws. Below, I detail the emergence of these claims for gay men in the 1970s, the decline of stranger danger claims for gay men in the 1990s, and the rise of framing of trans women as strangers in the 2000s. Frames of stranger danger were evoked most strongly at the start of rights advocacy, and for gay men, these claims diminished over time, disappearing almost entirely in the late 1990s.
Frames about gay men and trans women as a proportion of all child protectionist claims, Religious Right campaigns, 1977–2013
The Gay Teacher, 1970s–1990s
Attempts to include sexual orientation protections in federal, state, and municipal non-discrimination laws began in 1972, and by 1993 eighteen states and 123 municipalities had sexual orientation protections (Button, Rienzo, and Wald 1997). This new agenda of passing non-discrimination legislation for sexual orientation contributed to new mobilizations and stranger danger frames by the burgeoning Religious Right. Beginning in the late 1970s, Religious Right campaigns constructed the gay man as a sexual predator, who could take the form of a Big Brother, mentor, foster parent, adoptive parent, or teacher (Fejes 2008; Sullivan 1987). These constructions often relied on moral panics about gay (Connell 2014) and Communist (Foster 1997) teachers as “foxes guarding the henhouse” (Connell 2014), influencing and recruiting youth outside the protective gaze of their parents. The gay teacher was depicted as a stranger, an extra-familial adult in one’s social network who has insidious motives. The classroom, ever a perilous space for innocent children, became reconstructed as a space of seduction and exploitation (Silin 1995).
Ads portrayed gay men as space invaders and gay sexuality as “masculinity out of control, as aggressive, powerful and unrestrained” (Herman 1997, 80) rather than effeminate, although a few ads focused on gender-transgressive gay men. Half of the sources about gay men explicitly mentioned either sexual abuse, desire for children, or pedophilia. Frames about gay strangers described the mental and moral confusion children might experience being exposed to gay role models; gay men in proximity or relation to children was constructed as a danger on its own, leaving the details up to the reader’s imagination.
These claims about dangerous gay teachers were central to the earliest campaigns in the late 1970s, including Save Our Children in Dade County, Florida, and the California Defend Our Children Initiative in California, also called the Briggs Initiative. The Briggs Initiative would have mandated the firing of teachers who were lesbian or gay or who advocated homosexuality (Hardisty 2000, 100). The Save Our Children campaign led by Anita Bryant used the language of disease and seduction to proclaim concerns about children (Herman 1997). These earliest campaigns focused on sex panics about whether gay men were infiltrating organizations like the Boy Scouts and Big Brothers to establish child pornography and prostitution rackets (Fejes 2008; Sullivan 1987, 193). Save Our Children ads juxtaposed warnings about seduction with glaring headlines from newspapers that read “Teacher accused of sex acts with boy students,” “Ex-teachers indicted for lewd acts with boys,” and “Former scoutmaster convicted of homosexual acts with boys.” Ads suggested that teachers were “proclaimed, flaunting homosexuals” with potential transgressive “sexual behaviors” like wearing dresses and soliciting children. A letter from the Briggs Initiative campaign declared the following missive about gay teachers after the passage of a pro-gay education law in California.
As a result, avowed homosexuals are teaching young children in the public schools of California. I don’t think I have to tell you how dangerous this is. We simply cannot expect our young people to receive proper moral guidance during their most impressionable years if we allow them to be placed in classrooms with homosexual teachers for six to eight hours every day.
This letter emphasizes the proximity and duration of young children’s exposure to gay teachers “during their most impressionable years.” The letter articulates the potential consequences as improper moral guidance, but the use of language about danger belies more complex concerns. In this letter, this threat was partially gay gender transgressiveness. A postscript to the letter prodded the reader to “take a good look at the man in the photo who is wearing an earring and fingernail polish. Ask yourself this question ‘Is this the kind of man I want teaching America’s children?’”
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, campaigns continued to frame the gay stranger as predatory, particularly in more radical campaigns. In a 1981 hearing about a non-discrimination ordinance in Lincoln, Nebraska, psychologist Paul Cameron manufactured claims about a young boy being sexually mutilated by gay men in a public bathroom (Bull and Gallagher 1996b, 26). Other ads and flyers in the 1980s stressed the dangers of public parks, restrooms, and malls; a commercial in 1980 in San Jose showed a young white girl crying in the park, surrounded by white gay men and a lesbian, racializing both the imperiled child and the perilous strangers as white. A commercial for a 1988 Oregon campaign shows a young white boy with a social worker who says, “Well, Ryan, shall we meet your new parents?” as the camera briefly shows two white men sitting on a bench together. The spot ends with the boy asking, “But where is my mommy?” The voiceover to the commercial stated that the governor’s executive order “means foster children like Ryan are now being placed with homosexuals.” In this ad, Ryan’s maleness, youth, and vulnerability are emphasized. The 1992 Oregon Citizens Alliance flyer “Homosexuality, the Classroom, and Your Children” combined fears of pro-gay curriculum with an illustrated narrative of two white boys named Chuckie and Billy who sexually experimented with each other after being encouraged by their gay health teacher, who was depicted as flamboyant, lenient, and unduly interested in the children (Douglass 1997, 29).
Although most claims about the physical danger to children focused on the classroom as a site of anxiety, children pictured in close proximity to gay adults accompanied claims of sexual peril. In a 1992 Oregon commercial, a curly-haired white preschooler of indeterminate gender perched naked on a white adult male’s shoulders. As the ad announcer read a statement from the National Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) member about desire for young children, the camera focused on the adult rubbing his hands gently over the child’s legs. These claims emphasized the physical peril to children of contact with gay adults but also racialized this peril as one impacting white children and enacted by white gay men.
Declining Stranger Danger and Alternative Child Protectionist Frames, 1990s and 2000s
In the mid-1990s, claims about gay strangers decreased precipitously and remaining claims became less explicit and more covert about sexual harm. These frames stated that openly gay adults would become schoolteachers or Boy Scout leaders, or more often, stated that non-discrimination laws would not allow organizations like the Boy Scouts to control who is a leader. In 1993 a Portland, Maine, campaign flyer proclaimed that “GAY ACTIVISTS want to be COUNSELORS for SCHOOL-AGE CHILDREN. PROTECT YOUR FAMILY!” After 1995 only fringe or radical Religious Right campaigns used these frames about gay strangers and sexual peril and often garnered negative public attention for them. In 2012, a campaign against same-sex marriage in Maine added claims about homosexuality as predatory to its website, which was rapidly removed when it gained national attention and scrutiny.
However, more covert child protectionist frames persisted or increased (see figure 2). The two most common claims of the 2000s and 2010s were the promotion and legitimation of homosexuality through books and ideas (see Stone 2012) and arguments that children fare better with a mother and a father. Frames about promotion and legitimation focused on the circulation of ideas, removed from the homosexual body and public spaces, with concerns that children would consider homosexuality a legitimate way of life. Ads focused on “promotion of homosexuality” or “sexual confusion” that would result from pro-gay children’s books like Daddy’s Roommate or Heather Has Two Mommies or school curricula like California’s Project 10. At times these frames were unspecific, suggesting that children would believe homosexuality was acceptable if the law was passed. These frames conjure images of vulnerable children being seduced into homosexuality through children’s books.
Frames about ideas/books or same-sex parents as a proportion of all child protectionist claims, Religious Right campaigns, 1977–2013
Arguments that children fare better with a mother and a father was an indirect and disembodied critique of same-sex parents. These frames argued that families with a mother and a father were a more stable environment for children and rarely mentioned gay and lesbian parents directly. Campaigns against same-sex marriage consistently stated that “children need a mother and a father” or “children do better with a mother and a father,” paired with heteronormative arguments about how mothers and fathers have distinct contributions to childrearing. In 2012, this frame was bolstered by the publication of faulty social science research by sociologist Mark Regnerus (2012) that stressed differences in poverty rates, educational attainment, voting habits, and cohabitation between children raised by same-sex and different-sex parents. Regnerus’s New Family Structures Study received widespread media coverage and was the source of an amicus brief and legal arguments for opponents of same-sex marriage at the Supreme Court. His research conclusions have since been refuted by scholars as a result of shoddy data collection, cleaning, measurement, and analysis (see Cheng and Powell 2015). In 2012 and 2013, Religious Right campaigns highlighted Regnerus’s findings, including purported higher rates of sexual and physical abuse for children raised in gay or lesbian households, but this attention to abuse was uncommon and vague about the perpetrator. In these covert child protectionist claims, Religious Right campaigns no longer made arguments about the danger of gay male strangers in public and semi-public spaces with children.
The Trans Woman in the Bathroom, 2000s–2010s
In 1990, it was uncommon to have transgender protections in non-discrimination laws. However, by the year 2000 there were 23 municipalities and one state with transgender protections in their non-discrimination legislation (Currah and Minter 2000), a reflection of the addition of transgender rights to the agenda of the LGBT movement (Stone 2009). In 1990, a Religious Right campaign in St. Paul, Minnesota, against a trans-inclusive law included claims about trans women in women’s bathrooms, framed as an issue of “men in dresses” invading women’s spaces (Currah and Minter 2000, 21). In earlier campaigns, the Religious Right had occasionally evoked “men in dresses” as unsuitable teachers, although it was unclear whether this was an invocation of gay effeminacy or gender deviance.
Almost all the anti-trans arguments focused on trans women sharing bathrooms with cisgender women and girls4. The bathroom is “a place where gender variance and homosexuality are linked to dirt, disease, and public danger” (Cavanagh 2010, 7). Similar to fears raised in the anti–Equal Rights Amendment campaigns and anti-school integration campaigns about sex-integrated bathrooms (Frank 2013), the bathroom became a sex-segregated site in which women were constructed as vulnerable and men as dangerous (Westbrook and Schilt 2014).
Since the mid-1990s, Religious Right campaigns have consistently framed trans women as “men in dresses” who are a danger to women and girls in the bathroom and locker room. Religious Right campaigns consistently describe trans women as a “man in a dress,” but also a “biological male that professes a female identity,” “gender-delusional men,” “emotionally-challenged men,” “cross-dressers,” “men who want to dress like ladies,” and “gender confused individuals.” These descriptions of trans women conflate maleness, gender variance, and mental illness. For example, a 2001 flyer in Ypsilanti, Michigan, warned of “dangerous language that gives emotionally-challenged men the ‘right’ to wear dresses and use public facilities for women and girls, even in our public schools.” This constructed immutable maleness was reinforced by ads that emphasized the masculine secondary sex characteristics of trans women in political flyers and ads. A cartoon political ad in a 2012 Anchorage, Alaska, campaign against a municipal law included a portrayal of a tall, big-boned trans woman dressed in high heels, a skimpy dress, and an ill-fitting wig. The ad emphasized the arm, leg, chest, and facial hair of this character, along with her strong jawline (figure 3).3 In the ad, the trans woman led a small preschooler away from her parents while they cried. These ads framed trans women as immutably male, heterosexual, and dangerous.
Screenshot from Anchorage, Alaska, campaign ad, 2012
Strange Bodies in New Spaces
Religious Right campaigns deployed arguments about gay men and trans women as the LGBT movement developed new agendas to advocate for non-discrimination laws based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Initial rights claims often target equal access to new institutions and spaces, and thus resistance to rights focuses on maintaining a desired social distance. This desired social distance constructs the others as sexual strangers, scapegoated as physically perilous to children. I contend that the timing of advocacy for rights is important for the construction of claims about stranger danger.
There were a few differences in how gay men and trans women were framed; for example, gay men were often depicted as organized in a community, whereas trans women were depicted as loners or isolated. Frames about trans women focused more on gender non-conformity than those of gay men. Frames about gay men and trans women constructed them as dangerous strangers in similar ways. The threatening aspect of these sexual strangers was their entry into contested spaces. Religious Right campaigns constructed the entry of gay men and trans women to public and semi-public spaces like classrooms, bathrooms, and locker rooms as inherently dangerous for children.
Although this purported harm could be mental or moral confusion, most claims about gay and trans strangers implicitly suggest sexual harm. Gay men and trans women were constructed as forcing their way into new spaces, and thus onto children’s bodies. Most commonly, campaigns conflated gay men and trans women with sex offenders through a series of rhetorical moves. First, campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s claimed that pedophilia is a type of sexual orientation and thus covered by new laws. In 1998 a St. Paul, Minnesota, campaign leader queried, “should a person who is ‘sexually oriented’ toward preschool children be allowed to work in a day care center?” Second, Religious Right campaigns in Oregon and Washington from 1988 to 1996 paralleled homosexuality with pedophiles, transvestites, sadomasochists, and rapists and attempted to take rights away from all these groups. This frame conflated all these categories together such that homosexuality symbolized pedophilia (Herman 1997). Third, anti-trans campaigns confused trans women with cisgender (or non-transgender) male sex offenders. Campaign ads portrayed masculine cisgender men ineptly cross-dressing and posing as trans women, claiming that cisgender male sex offenders will take advantage of the new transgender-inclusive laws. In 2013, campaign ads in both Miami Dade and San Antonio showed a picture of a white man with a thick beard and a poorly fitting blond wig ogling a frightened white blond tween. These claims rely on the predominance of the sex offender in the public imagination (Lancaster 2011) but also on a long history of media portrayal of trans women as deceptive or “tricky” (Bettcher 2007; Schilt and Westbrook 2009, 457).
Even without these explicit connections, the language used to describe the entry of gay men and trans women into new spaces implied sexual force. A majority of the ads used words like “forcefully,” “force,” “insist,” and “violate.” These frames suggested that gay teachers and trans women were forcing themselves into the classroom and bathroom but also ostensibly onto children. Early frames about gay teachers and homosexuality focused on privacy and force. A 1980 ad in Santa Clara, California, declared that “What gays do in private is their private business. Nobody wants to invade their privacy. But gays must not invade our privacy either. And their sexual lifestyle must not be flaunted about or forced upon us by them in every public fashion imaginable.” This ad juxtaposed this claim with suggesting that the new non-discrimination ordinance would force parents to hire homosexual babysitters and would lead to gay hiring quotas in schools. Framing around trans women and bathrooms often referred to the “privacy rights of women and girls.” This language about privacy implied issues about bodily undress and modesty but also relied on the historical conflation of elimination and sex (Kira 1966). The frequent use of the verb “violate” in phrases like “violate the privacy rights of girls” to describe the effect of trans women being legally allowed to use women’s bathrooms evoked sexual threat; the mere presence of trans women is confusing and violating to children, purportedly causing them to rush home to their parents in tears and fear the bathroom at school. Because trans women betrayed the somatic norms of women’s bathrooms, the Religious Right framed their insistence on access to bathrooms as a form of space invasion with scurrilous motives. These arguments about bathrooms prey “on the false notions that GLBT people are predatory creatures whose elimination and hygiene needs come second to their supposedly voyeuristic desires” (Currah and Minter 2000, 59). The “body-based criteria” for admittance to sex-segregated spaces both reinforced and was motivated by “fear of unwanted (hetero)sexuality” (Westbrook and Schilt 2014, 34) but also equated deception with force or rape (Bettcher 2007).
These frames construct new rights claimants as dangerous trespassers, threatening the security of existing exclusive spaces and the order of things (Puwar 2004). Anti-rights campaigns use imagery about force and proximity, picturing these others as forcefully invading previously exclusive spaces. For example, the Eagle Forum, an anti-ERA organization, depicted the ERA as a Trojan horse invading schools (Solomon 1979). New bodies in previously exclusive spaces such as classrooms and bathrooms implied not just forced proximity in space but force onto bodies. Boston anti-busing activists used terms like “forced busing,” which “carried a political message of helpless rage,” but also used “forcible” busing, which called to mind the ways “busing was…a symbolic rape of parent’s control,” creating a potential threat of sexual harm to children through miscegenation (Formisano 1991, 119). This conflation of physical proximity with forced space meant forced bodies and thus sexual harm to the idealized white children of the majority.
In anti-gay and anti-trans campaign ads, the threat to children was essentially a threat to the social body, embodied as a generalized child of the racial majority. A majority of ads portrayed prepubescent white children, pictured as between two and 10 years old, described as “little,” “small,” “young,” or “impressionable.” At times, teenagers were included in stories of sexually experimenting teens and hustlers. Almost all children pictured in these ads appear to be white, evoking appeals to protect children of the dominant race.5 Ads occasionally described these children as “your daughter” or used scenarios about one’s own children. However, 85 percent of frames address children more generally, often referring to “our children,” as in “protect our children.” For example, a 1994 Idaho campaign ad proclaimed: “They will demand…the right to adopt our children.” The children in question are not the reader’s children, who presumably are not up for adoption, but rather the community’s children. In this imaginary, “our children” are implicitly heterosexual, gender normative, and reared by heterosexual parents trying to protect them from exposure to LGBT life.
This generalized child represents not just the imperiled subject but also perhaps the most vulnerable part of the public body, a symbol of community vulnerability, the perpetuation of society, and maintenance of the social order. Queer theorist Lee Edelman (2004) refers to this concern as reproductive futurity, an investment in white heteronormativity and its future that is fixated on children. The threat to reproductive futurity was surprisingly white itself. All portrayals of gay men and trans women in the Religious Right literature appeared to be white. Racial ideologies have long conflated homosexuality with whiteness (Collins 2005; Connell 2014), which is echoed in Religious Right literature that constructs homosexuality as both intrinsically male and white (Herman 1997). The threat to the generalized white child from within the majority race may be the construction of the ultimate stranger, individuals subsumed within the public body who are marked only by their gender and sexual variance.
The Limits of the Sexual Stranger
Yet these claims about the dangerous stranger and imperiled public body do not work at all times. In the late 1990s, although the Religious Right still depicted homosexuality as threatening to children, campaigns rarely described gay men as a bodily, physical threat. The declining use of gay men in stranger danger arguments suggests that this construction of strangers invading exclusive spaces has time-limited cultural and political resonance. Scholars have argued that the Religious Right ceased using frames about seduction due to attempts to be more pragmatic and less extremist (Herman 1997). Members of the public found extreme arguments about predatory gay men alienating. This new pragmatic framing relied on claims about special rights, protected class statuses, and the unintended consequences of LGBT rights (Fetner 2008; Stone 2012), along with pseudoscientific data on the superiority of heterosexual parenting (see Regnerus 2012, for example).
What underlies this strategic shift in the Religious Right is the declining cultural and political resonance of these frames about gay strangers. In the 1990s, the public became increasingly supportive of gay and lesbian rights (Loftus 2001; Mucciaroni 2008), a shift that coincided with increased lesbian and gay visibility. Although there is still public ambivalence about gay teachers (see Connell 2014), American adults are increasingly supportive of equality in the workplace and access to public spaces (Mucciaroni 2008, 19). The American public finds gay and lesbian issues related to family life (e.g., adoption and marriage) more difficult to accept (Powell et al. 2010), which reveals continuing anxieties about children and homosexuality (Mucciaroni 2008, 23–24). This transition is only partial, as there are still occasional sex panics about gay bodies and children (Lancaster 2011). However, gay bodies are less reliably mobilized in constructions of sexual strangers.
This attitudinal shift is impacted by increasing normalization and routinization of homosexuality (Seidman 2002) in the United States, along with neoliberal assimilationist politics more generally (Phelan 2001; Walters 2014; Warner 2000) and homonormative politics advocating for same-sex marriage, military service, and domesticity (Brandzel 2005). Homonormativity lessens the differences between homosexuality and heterosexuality by emphasizing the domesticity and consumption of gay men and lesbians, along with their conformity in gender and sexual styles (Bryant 2008; Duggan 2004). This domestication of gay men is rejected by Religious Right campaigns in this study with assertions about the superiority of male-female parenting. This normalization predicated on homonormativity may exacerbate rather than reduce anti-trans frames produced by the Religious Right. American adults have different attitudes toward gay, lesbian, and transgender people (Worthen 2013), and homonormativity may increase animosity toward gender variance (Bryant 2008). Thus, the assimilation and normalization of gay men may inadvertently extend the intensity and trajectory of anti-trans frames developed by the Religious Right.
Stranger Danger Frames
As the LGBT movement developed new agendas, including proposing new constituents deserving of rights, the Religious Right initially developed radical frames that made overt claims about the purported danger of these new constituents for children. I contend that frame variation can be a reaction to new agendas and goals of countermovements or opponents. I argue that the most radical, overt frames may occur as an initial response to rights advocacy but become replaced later with more covert framing. This research raises questions about which countermovement agendas are most likely to result in radical frames, particularly if sudden changes in countermovement agendas alter movement framing. This finding is an important contribution to both theories on frames and on movement-countermovement dynamics (Meyer and Staggenborg 1996).
In rights disputes, these overt or radical frames are often linked to movement agendas about the entry of gender, racial, or sexual others into previously denied spaces. The initial “moment when the historically excluded is included” (Puwar 2004, 5) is rich with meaning and contestation. In Religious Right frames about gay men and trans women, this moment was fraught with anxiety about the stranger. These claims may be a response to racial, sexual, and gendered others’ bodies being “out of place,” defying the somatic norms of who has historically shared space with children. The contested spaces in the ads were those public and semi-public spaces that are sex-segregated (Westbrook and Schilt 2014) and/or spaces where children operate without parental supervision that are also the target of rights advocacy. These shared spaces, previously constructed as safe, become a space of threat and danger with the entry of new bodies. These frames were consistent with the depiction of the imperiled children of the majority in other moral panics (Best 1990; Silin 1995) and opposition to civil rights (Frank 2013; Godfrey 2003). This research also suggests that scholars should consider the role of space in analyzing frames developed to dispute rights.
Who gets framed as a perilous stranger in these claims also requires more investigation. Who needs protecting from whom? The construction of vulnerable subjects like children and women (Westbrook and Schilt 2014) remains relatively consistent. I build on Holly McCammon’s (2012) work on frame variation to understand the shifting cultural and political resonance of the perpetrators of stranger danger frames, particularly the way the gay stranger became increasingly ineffective. These stranger danger frames may depict the purported stranger as a Black young adult in Southern high schools during school integration (Godfrey 2003), a Communist in the classroom during the Cold War (Foster 1997), a gay man in the classroom (Connell 2014; Fejes 2008; Silin 1995), sex offenders in the neighborhood (Lancaster 2011; Leon 2011; Levine 2017), or a trans woman in the bathroom (Westbrook and Schilt 2014, 2015).
The resonance of these “strangers” with the general public audience varies significantly. Religious Right campaigns selected gay men and trans women as the “stranger.” Lesbians, bisexuals, and trans men were rarely (if ever) mentioned in Religious Right frames as a purported threat to children. Like other scholars (Freedman 1987; Westbrook and Schilt 2014, 2015), I affirm the targeting of perceived biological males as the “stranger” most likely to be culturally and politically resonant with the general public. However, gay men and trans women occupy different positions within the LGBT movement and public visibility. Gay men have historically been at the center of LGBT activism, benefiting the most from the neoliberal politics of the movement (Duggan 2004), along with receiving media visibility (Walters 2003). Religious Right framing focused on gay men throughout the 1970s and 1980s, rendering lesbians and bisexuals invisible (Herman 1997). However, as the LGBT movement has achieved goals of positive visibility, non-discrimination laws, and same-sex marriage, the gay man has become less culturally and politically resonant as a stranger. In many ways, trans women have taken the place of gay men as the scapegoated “stranger” in Religious Right discourse, framing that is projected onto trans girls as well (Stone 2018); this shift from gay men to trans women illustrates the complex ways that constructions of deviant “Others” change over time. Although trans women do not benefit from neoliberal LGBT politics in the same way as gay men, trans women may follow a similar process of normalization and routinization as gay men, supported by the increasing public discourse about transgender experiences and visibility of trans women in the media (Schilt 2010).
Footnotes
The ads that did not include child protectionist claims focused on themes such as “special rights” arguments, the sanctity of marriage, and religion.
I recognize here that most trans women do not identify themselves as male-bodied.
This is not to say that some trans women are not big-boned with strong jawlines. However, this depiction of trans women differs significantly from depictions of stealth or “deceptive” trans women pictured in movies like The Crying Game.
Cisgender refers to individuals whose gender expression and identity are congruent with the sex they were assigned at birth.
Opponents to same-sex marriage occasionally used pictures of children who appeared to be of Asian descent. One of the most aired commercials supporting California’s ban on same-sex marriage including a mother and daughter who appeared to be Latina; this commercial was dubbed in both English and Spanish. Black children appeared in only a few political ads used in areas with a high percentage of black voters and during the 2008 Arkansas ballot measure on foster parents.
About the Author
Amy L. Stone is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Trinity University and author of Gay Rights at the Ballot Box and Cornyation: San Antonio’s Outrageous Fiesta Tradition. She studies lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) politics, community, and urban life. She is currently deputy editor of Gender & Society and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Interdisciplinary Research Leader.
References
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Author notes
This research was completed with support from the Phil Zwickler Memorial Research Grant and Trinity University Academic Affairs. The author thanks Laurel Westbrook, Melanie Heath, Carla Pfeffer, Sarah Beth Kaufman, Kristen Schilt, and Sarah Sobieraj, along with participants in the Moral Panics in Sexuality conference, for invaluable feedback.
