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It gets popular: LGBT video activism in the digital age

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Content Sarkissian i

IT GETS POPULAR:
LGBT VIDEO ACTIVISM IN THE DIGITAL AGE

by

Raffi Sarkissian

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

December 2018

Copyright 2018 Raffi Sarkissian
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Acknowledgments

In completing this dissertation, I owe a great deal of gratitude to Henry Jenkins, who has
served as my committee chair and inspiring role model throughout my graduate education. His
patience, careful guidance, encouragement, and generous feedback have shaped the strengths of
my contribution here. While I have much yet to learn, Henry has taught me some of the most
valuable lessons and values that I take with me as a scholar, teacher, and collaborator in both
academia and life.
I have been gifted with an extraordinary committee of scholars and supporters. From my
very first graduate course, Kara Keeling’s work and perceptive advice has consistently been a
key source of critical insight to my own ideas and scholarly development. While Larry Gross’s
work was part of the spark that led me to pursue studying LGBT media before USC, it was his
generous time and guidance on the field and discipline during my time here that has proved
invaluable. I also want to thank the additional members of my qualifying exams committee—
Sarah Banet-Weiser and Chris Smith—whose thoughtful and engaging feedback lent much
growth to my ideas and arguments.
While at USC, I also had the fortune of working with a constellation of kind and giving
faculty, mentors, and colleagues. I am deeply indebted to the large network of people that made
up Civic Paths, and Sangita Shresthova in particular, for their invested support, encouragement,
and community throughout my six years at Annenberg. Starting with my time in Critical Studies
and beyond my time as a student at USC, Bill Whittington has offered an immeasurable amount
of advice, support, and friendship for which I am very grateful. I also want to acknowledge here
Taj Frazier, Alison Trope, Ron Becker, and Aymar Jean Christian for their help and mentorship.
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Pursuing a doctorate is a challenging journey and very few people can understand and
help you through it the way your cohort and fellow graduate comrades can. I want to thank
everyone in the 2012 PhD cohort at Annenberg for the shared laughs, hardships, and
accomplishments. I want to extend a special thanks to Sam Close, Branden Buehler, Tisha
Dejmanee, and Katie Elder for the joys and friendships that were crucial to sustaining my spirits
through it all. Bonding through the ups and downs with Diana Lee in particular was integral to
making it through the program: thank you! I also want to acknowledge the many friends in the
cohorts immediately ahead and behind mine at USC Annenberg for including me in writing
groups, offering feedback on my work, and extending their time and friendship.
My family has been by my side throughout my long career as a student and I am
immensely grateful for their unwavering support. My parents, Ano and Jako, always put my
education first, taught me early about work ethic and responsibility, and their sacrifices will
always be recognized in all the fruits of my labor. The love and encouragement of my
grandparents, cousins, uncles, and aunts—in particular my morkoor—has meant the world to me.
I also want to thank my brother, Hovig, for indulging me in all the fun breaks from work—the
movies, the games, the banter, and competition—but also for listening, willing to endure my
ramblings, and sharing in our many existential reflections.
My family also extends to the many rich relationships that have shaped who I am. In
particular I want to thank Lilith Karageuzian for her lifelong friendship. I am also forever
indebted and inspired by the countless friends I have made through the Gay and Lesbian
Armenian Society. GALAS has always been and continues to be a vibrant source of pride that
both supplements and enriches my academic work.
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Most of all, though, three individuals have gone above and beyond to make me feel seen,
loved, and valued over the past eight years. Ritesh Mehta’s friendship, our long talks, and movie
outings have provided a reliable source of pleasure and reflection. His persistence and curiosity
in all things entertainment and academic have benefitted my own thinking across fields and I am
truly grateful for his companionship throughout the past many years. Nairey Keshishian has been
my lifelong cheerleader and words cannot express how much I cherish the love and deep bond
we share. Nairey’s strength, resilience, and boldness inspire me more than she knows and her
encouragement has been vital to my perseverance. Finally, I would not have survived graduate
school without Roxanne Samer. Roxanne has not only been my aca-partner in crime—from
taking classes and conferencing together to reading drafts, commiserating our lows and
celebrating our highs—she has been a true partner in life. Our friendship, which has taught me so
much about love and family, is the most valuable and meaningful triumph from my graduate
education. Thank you to all who helped me here.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ii

List of Tables vi

List of Figures vii

Abstract x

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

Chapter 2: A Participatory Proposition 23

Chapter 3: A Perfect Storm 88

Chapter 4: It Gets Complicated 155

Chapter 5: Conclusion 199

References 214

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List of Tables

Table 3.1 List of analyzed video parodies of “A Gathering Storm” 110

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List of Figures

Figure 2.1 “Vote No on Prop 8” banner with green checkmark. 33
Figure 2.2 “Vote No on Prop 8” banner with red “X.” 33
Figure 2.3: Amy Brenneman solo video in “Stop the Hate” campaign. 43

Figure 2.4: Dolores Huerta solo video in “Stop the Hate” campaign. 43
Figure 2.5: Frangela duo video in “Stop the Hate” campaign. 43
Figure 2.6: Jillian Armenante, Alice Dodd, and family video in “Stop the Hate”
campaign. 45
Figure 2.7: Kelly, William, and Elizabeth Walker-Ziegler family video in “Stop the Hate”

campaign. 45

Figure 2.8: Robin Tyler and Diane Olson couple video in “Stop the Hate” campaign. 45
Figure 2.9: Cynthia and Eva in “Stop8.org” campaign. 50
Figure 2.10: Scott and Victor in “Stop8.org” campaign. 50
Figure 2.11: Jacqui and Britta in “Stop8.org” campaign. 50
Figure 2.12: “Lies” video from “Stop.org” campaign. 59
Figure 2.13: “Mentiras” video from “Stop8.org” campaign. 59
Figure 2.14: “No vs Yes” video from Homotracker campaign. 66
Figure 2.15: “Constitution” video from Homotracker campaign. 66
Figure 2.16: “Family” video from Homotracker campaign. 66
Figure 2.17: Ending shot of “Constitution” video from Homotracker campaign,
illustrating the distancing of “No” from “Yes” using digital banner. 72
Figure 2.18: Ending shot of “No vs Yes” video from Homotracker campaign,
contrasting the distance displayed in “Constitution” video above. 72
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Figure 2.19: Ending shot of “Family” video from Homotracker campaign for comparison. 72
Figure 2.20: Mormons enter couple’s home in “Home Invasion” video from
Courage Campaign. 72
Figure 2.21: Freeze frame with voice-over in “Home Invasion” video from
Courage Campaign. 72
Figure 2.22: Mormon invaders tearing couple’s marriage license in “Home Invasion.” 75
Figure 3.1: Rosenberg in GS21, “Response to NOM’s Gathering Storm.” 89
Figure 3.2: Wood, center, delivering his line, “They’re going to turn my father gay”
in GS21, “Response to NOM’s Gathering Storm.” 89
Figure 3.3: Opening shot of original “A Gathering Storm” ad from NOM. 94
Figure 3.4: Lightning and background figures in original “A Gathering Storm” ad. 94
Figure 3.5: Closing shot of “A Gathering Storm” ad featuring Damon Owens. 94
Figure 3.5: Funny or Die’s “A Gaythering Storm” (GS26). 114
Figure 3.6: Funny or Die’s “A Gaythering Storm” (GS26). 114
Figure 3.7: Superimposed digital cutouts in GS18, “Gathering Storm Spoof.” 116
Figure 3.8: More digital cutouts from GS18, “Gathering Storm Spoof.” 116

Figure 3.9: DIY lightning bolt in GS10, “The Darkness is Coming.” 117
Figure 3.10: DIY background lightning and waving flag in GS10, “The Darkness

is Coming.” 117

Figure 3.11: Parodying background subjects: GS21, “Response to NOM’s

Gathering Storm.” 118

Figure 3.12: Parodying background formations: GS21, “Response to NOM’s

Gathering Storm.” 118

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Figure 3.13: Distracted background actors in GS30, “The best response to NOM’s ad.” 120

Figure 3.14: More distracted background actors in GS30, “The best response to NOM’s

ad.” 120

Figure 3.15: Parodying background poses in GS25, “The Crimson Tide is Coming.” 121

Figure 3.16: More parodying of background poses in GS25, “The Crimson Tide is

Coming.” 121

Figure 3.17: Parody of outtakes in GS8, “’Gathering Storm’ Audition 34.” 123

Figure 3.18: Scripted animation video GS11, “NOM: Before the Auditions.” 123

Figure 3.19: Opening shot of GS1, “The Gathering Storm (Fixed).” 127

Figure 3.20: Inserted “reaction shot” in GS1, “The Gathering Storm (Fixed).” 127

Figure 3.21: Doctored shot of background subjects in GS1, “The Gathering Storm

(Fixed).” 127

Figure 3.22: Mike Rose delivering central accented line in GS24, “A Gaythering Storm.” 135

Figure 3.23: Accentuating stereotypes in GS20, “The Best Parody of NOM’s Ad.” 135

Figure 3.24: Accentuating stereotypes in GS20, “The Best Parody of NOM’s Ad.” 135

Figure 3.25: Faux-outing markups in GS1, “The Gathering Storm (Fixed).” 146

Figure 3.26: Faux-outing markups in GS1, “The Gathering Storm (Fixed).” 146

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Abstract

It Gets Popular analyzes three cases of online LGBT video activism between 2008 and
2010 to analyze the queer and participatory politics of mainstreaming LGBTQ politics through
digital video publics. The first case details the No on Prop 8 Equality for All television ad
campaign—the dominant group leading the effort to vote against the ban for same-sex marriage
in California during the 2008 election—and juxtaposes it with the independently produced ad
campaigns distributed on YouTube. I argue these independent efforts, by both amateur and
professional content creators, not only directed audiences to vote no on Proposition 8, but also
critiqued the exclusionary politics of the dominant Equality for All campaign. The second case
analyzes a corpus of parody videos of “A Gathering Storm,” an anti-gay marriage ad put out by
the National Organization for Marriage. I posit that the parodies operate as a video meme and
shore up long-practiced traditions of camp and humor in LGBTQ activism of the past. The third
case analyzes the historical antecedents of the It Gets Better Project and contends with its
prominent critiques to demonstrate both the limits and affordances of networked platforms and
digital activism. Together, the three cases demonstrate a marked engagement with LGBTQ
politics through digital video production and distribution in the early days of digitally networked
activism. Practiced by and engaging both queer and ally participants, these videos laid the early
groundwork for a more popular investment in LGBTQ politics across social media, a turn I call
mainstreaming.

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Chapter 1: Introduction

On September 28, 2016, Randy Rainbow uploaded “BRAGGADOCIOUS!: Randy Rainbow
Moderates Debate #1!,” a parody video of the first presidential debate in which he edits himself
into the footage as the moderator and breaks into song after Donald Trump says
“braggadocious.” Rainbow parodies Marry Poppins’ “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” in a
political takedown of the Republican nominee, singing, “He’s super callous, fragile, egocentric,
braggadocious. Likes to throw big words around and hopes that we all notice. If he keeps
repeating them they might just make him POTUS. Super careless, fragile ego, extra
braggadocious” and on for another two minutes. Rainbow drew attention online—garnering over
30 million views for that video on Facebook—throughout the 2016 election for his series of
parodies, re-editing interviews with politicians and their staff to awkward and hilarious effect or
turning them into musical numbers with witty original lyrics. Many of the song parody choices
were from Broadway musicals or movies with strong queer followings, like “Alternative Facts,”
a parody interview of Kellyanne Conway set to Cats’ “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats” or “Russia
Ties,” a parody edit of Jeff Sessions and James Comey’s congressional hearings, set to “Summer
Nights” from Grease. While Rainbow gained prominence for this series based on the election
and the current administration, he was humorously editing and remixing himself into
conversations with famous figures and uploading them to YouTube since 2010. Rainbow’s
videos and performance rely on sass, camp, and intertextual wit. They bring comedy and queer
character together with political and social commentary, digital production, and networked
media. In similar fashion, this dissertation investigates video campaigns, not unlike Randy
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Rainbow’s work, that emerged in a particularly potent timeframe for LGBT representation in
networked politics and popular culture.
It Gets Popular is about the form and function of LGBT video activism in popular culture
from 2008-2010. This project analyzes three different non-concerted, largely grassroots and user-
generated campaigns that utilized digital video to push back on dominant narratives and
institutional violence against LGBT people and images. I draw on the practices of content
creators and media discourses surrounding LGBT video campaigns at a key moment of
mainstreaming LGBT politics to networked publics. Mainstreaming, here, denotes taking a
participatory approach to LGBT activism that entails an appeal to the popular through digital
production and distribution.
The three cases I look at include independent video campaigns from amateur, grassroots, and
professional practitioners against Proposition 8 in California; a collection of remix and parody
videos of the anti-gay ad “A Gathering Storm”; and the discourses around the widespread It Gets
Better project. These three campaigns, and the individual videos that comprise them, reached
varying levels of circulation, some garnering many million views and others barely breaking a
thousand. The imperatives of this project are to analyze the circumstances, motivations, and
historical antecedents of these movements, however big or small, in order to argue that they
contribute to an engagement with LGBT media and politics that will come to shape the politics
of participation in LGBT discourses and popular culture.
2008-2010 seemed to be a turning point in LGBT representation in America, both in the
state-democratic and media industry sense. Within a few years, gay characters in scripted and
streaming television would more than triple, the Supreme Court would legalize marriage for
same-sex couples, and a host of other issues—gays in the military, gays in sports, transgender
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rights and gender identity—would continuously dominate headlines. Proposition 8 was in some
ways the damn that opened the floodgates. The passage of Prop 8—banning same-sex marriage
in California—in the November 2008 election sent a ripple effect throughout the nation.
Hollywood certainly paved some of this road to national attention. For instance, Milk had already
premiered in the fall of 2008, but its subsequent wins a few months later for its openly out
screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black, and lead actor Sean Penn—asserting in his speech (2009), “I
think it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and
anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren’s eyes if they continue that way
of support”—tied the film closely to the activism following Prop 8. A-list stars, including George
Clooney, Brad Pitt, Martin Sheen, Jamie Lee Curtis, and a host of others reenacted the closing
arguments of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the court case to overturn the proposition and broadcast
it on YouTube. Both Glee and Modern Family were greenlit in the pilot season following Prop 8,
and, per GLAAD’s (2007, 2009, 2017) annual television reports, the number of LGBT characters
on broadcast programming doubled from nine in the fall of 2007 to eighteen by the fall of
2009—and as of 2017, it was 58. In some ways, these are measurements of popularity and how
mainstream LGBT images and narratives had become.
But in many other ways, that road was already trodden by users, networks, communities and
their digital practices through increasing participation in then relatively nascent social media
platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. This is, then, a different measure of the
popular—how every-day users are engaging with LGBT politics and narratives through
networked and participatory practices. The scholarship on LGBTQ activity on social media,
especially digital video, is growing yet idiosyncratic. The vast, fragmented, and shifting nature of
digital worlds, along with its lack of “organizing” events makes it necessarily difficult to map out
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definitive histories and trajectories of use. The field of queer media studies, on the other hand, is
more organized around histories (Benshoff & Griffin, 2004; Gross, 2001; White, 1999), queer
readings (Doty, 1993; Muñoz, 1999), queer theory (Edelman, 2004; Halberstam, 2006), and
intersectionality (Keeling, 2007). LGBT activism also has a growing bibliography (Doyle, 2016;
Gould, 1999; Juhasz, 1995; Shepard, 2010; Warner, 2012), yet very few manuscript-length
projects address the intersection of these three fields in the expanding practices of LGBT media
activism in the digital age. It Gets Popular fills some of this gap by connecting three different
video campaigns to demonstrate that the explosion in everything queer and LGBT in the 2010s
came not just from Hollywood and Washington, but rather the motivated, creative, connected,
and collaborative work of casual and amateur media creators, independent and grassroots
organizations, and was in dialogue with dominant, corporate institutions in a way that is neither
wholly authentic nor selling out. It Gets Popular analyzes the production and distribution of
digital video activism to argue that such networked and participatory practices contributed to the
popular rise of LGBT politics and media publics.
By connecting the three video campaigns, I am not so much invested in “finding” or
calcifying a particular history of digital LGBT media activism, as I am invested in the
connections across these cases that illustrate their shared affinities and approaches, establishing
them as part of the histories of digital LGBT media activism, particularly in the era of growing
LGBT prominence in popular culture. All three also present unique cases unto themselves that
have not been properly historicized, contextualized, or some even analyzed at all. The media
history of Proposition 8 so far, for instance, has focused on an incomprehensive analysis of the
TV ad campaign, with almost no attention paid to the host of independent media that sprung up
online. “A Gathering Storm” is a great case study of a digital demonstration—an uncoordinated
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yet concertedly rapid response—using camp, parody, and intertextuality, styles and genres of
LGBT activism rarely placed in larger conversations of digital politics. While the videos from
these two cases lack nearly any scholarly attention, the It Gets Better videos and campaign have
been analyzed ad nauseum. Thus, the chapter on It Gets Better focuses more on situating the
campaign along a lineage of testimonial video activism and contextualizing some key critical
discourses it engendered.
It Gets Popular ultimately investigates the function each of these campaigns serve in their
respective milieu and together as a prime moment for mainstreaming LGBT politics and
discourses in the digital era. I use a mixed set of methodologies, chiefly relying on interviews,
textual analysis, and a combination of digital historiography and discourse analysis. I use the
latter approach to (re)construct the context and digital narratives of these videos and campaigns
and deconstruct some of the discourses that may overdetermine their narratives. Through this
project, I am interested in finding how the campaigns and videos I analyze bring these fields
together. How do these videos utilize digital practices, leverage social media, mobilize queer
tactics and LGBT histories, and challenge dominant narratives? In bridging these campaigns
across this specific period, 2008-2010, I am invested in analyzing the role they play in the
development of LGBT culture and politics online at the brink of a popular explosion in rights
and representation in the dominant cultural discourse. How do they carry with them and evolve
from a lineage of LGBT media activism from the past half century? What did the work of these
videos and their participants reveal and signal for what was to come in networked LGBT
activism? This project is chiefly situated at the intersection of popular culture, participatory
media, and queer publics and LGBTQ politics. I detail these three areas below, followed by an
overview of the chapters.
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Popular Culture
This project is firmly situated in the popular, and here I take Stuart Hall’s (1998) lead
when he “insists what is essential to the definition of popular culture is the relations which define
‘popular culture’ in a continuing tension (relationship, influence, and antagonism) to the
dominant culture” (p. 449). Thus, the approach in this dissertation to studying images and
narratives in the mainstream—and increasingly networked—media does not take for granted the
intricate, embedded, and contentious struggles over power on which the popular shifts. The
dynamics of power, insofar as they inform the analytic lens of this project, are based on
Foucault’s theory of discourse and Gramsci’s central thesis of hegemony. Gramsci emphasizes
looking beyond economic reductionism, and a totalizing emphasis on class, of various forms of
Marxism to consider different axes around which social identities and social systems are
organized. As Hall (1986) points out, Gramsci “introduces the critical notion that what we are
looking for is not the absolute victory of this side or that, nor the total incorporation of one set of
forces into another, [but] rather, the analysis is a relational matter […including] the idea of
‘unstable balance’” (p. 14). Thus, hegemony is multi-dimensional and “cannot be constructed or
sustained on one front of struggle alone [as] it represents a degree of mastery over a whole series
of ‘positions at once” (p. 15). I relate this understanding to some projects in the related field of
critical media studies that offer astute analyses of the neoliberal imperative in then-emerging
forms of new media (see Andrejevic 2008, 2010; Dean 2010), but which also tend to foreclose or
demean the different ways participating in these new media systems are motivated by a variety
of reasons which can create alternative forms of value within or alongside the market logic of
neoliberalism. It Gets Popular recognizes the unequal playing fields in the evolution of media
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cultures, particularly as supported by the platform infrastructures of Silicon Valley, but pays
closer attention to the motivations, functions, and biases that shape popular and networked
participation in these developing media systems as a way of teasing out the dynamic flows of
power in popular culture.
As Hall further unpacks, “Gramsci points to the diversification of social antagonisms, the
‘dispersal’ of power, which occurs in societies where hegemony is sustained, not exclusively
through the enforced instrumentality of the state, but rather, it is grounded in the relations and
institutions of civil society” (p. 18). Here we see threads of Foucault’s theory of power as
dispersed and mobilized more so through social institutions, and, in neoliberalism, increasingly
through technologies of the self. Discourse, then, becomes connective tissue, for it is a theory of
language and practice, a process of production and proliferation. While Foucault alludes to
counter-discourses as challenges to hegemonic discourses, he provides little evidence of their
operation, which returns us to interpreting culture always as both a breeding ground for common
sense, but also a type of common ground for good sense-making. As Fiske (1993) elaborates,
“culture always has both sense-making and power-bearing functions. Its sense-making function
contains concerns such as those of knowledge, discourse, representation, and practice; within its
power-bearing functions are those of power, control, discipline, struggle, resistance, and
evasion” (p. 13). I think of this use and practice of culture as instrumental in the propagation of
queer images and LGBT identities.
While Foucault’s (1978) theory of discourse has had a foundational impact on the
modern understanding of gay identity—homosexual as a species born through nineteenth century
institutional discourses—it is also important to think about discourse through the economy of
visual images and the politics of its production, particularly in the formation of queer culture and
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LGBT identity, extending to the digital videos analyzed in this dissertation. While the majority
of mass-circulated images in the first half of the twentieth century were produced by dominant
and economically-driven institutions that did not explicitly acknowledge queerness, many studies
have illustrated the organizing power of queer discourses through the production and reception
of these images, predominantly in cinema (see, Doty 1993, Dyer 1984, Russo 1987, White
1999). Moving into the latter half of the twentieth century, the rise of gay homophile, lesbian,
and other radical activist groups led to the production and dissemination of explicitly queer
media, particularly as pamphlets and zines (Gross 2001). With this increase in visibility and
organizing, coupled with more access to filmmaking equipment, we also see a rise in LGBT
media-making, from well-preserved documentaries, like Word is Out, to avant-garde fare like the
works of Kenneth Anger and Barbara Hammer, we can retroactively establish the emergence of
queer media publics. But there are also many other smaller archives and networks of queer media
production and circulation—like the home movies of Pat Rocco, including gay erotica that
screened in Los Angeles in the sixties (Strub 2012, Wuest 2017), or queer and feminist
distribution and exhibition networks, like Videoletters in the seventies and eighties (Samer
2016)—that illustrate a long history of identity and community building through networked
participation in media cultures.
The digital video campaigns analyzed in It Gets Popular, I posit, carry with them these
legacies of inciting collective identities and producing queer media publics through the visual
discourse of representation. This characterizes the push against the pull of the market forces that
keep the power dynamics in tension in popular culture. It brings into relief the longstanding
imbrication of capitalism with LGBT identity, community, and queer cultural production. The
discourses of knowability and visibility for LGBTQ constituents, for instance have always relied
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on dominant institutions in the age of capitalism (D’Emilio 1983). As Miranda Joseph (2002)
contends, community is one the most motivating discourses and practices circulating in
contemporary society. She states, in fact, “fundamental practices of modernity—liberalism, the
nation-state, identity political emancipatory movements, and I argue most importantly,
capitalism—depend on and generate community” (p. xxxi). Relying on a liberal democratic
notion of capitalism, Joseph’s project might now be eclipsed by the turn to neoliberalism, but
which still depends on various forms of community—today’s networked, hashtag publics;
creative and artist-based collectives—and the evolving currency, i.e. value, they generate for
capitalism. As aforementioned examples from the sixties and seventies demonstrate, though,
queers have always been able to leverage the tools and platforms of dominant institutions for
their needs. Cunningham and Craig’s work (2018) on LGBT YouTube content creators is case in
point. They demonstrate how such LGBT YouTube personalities incorporate not only their
queerness, but also LGBT content into their brand, but which also generates different forms of
non-monetary value, especially to the communities that support their channels. Cunningham and
Craig (2018) also note how several of these YouTube entrepreneurs—who in this case have
established followings before identifying as LGBT—consciously turn off advertising on their
coming out videos so as not to monetize specific forms of identity and community work.
Another case illustrating how queer communities, through using these platforms for their
content, are focused on generating alternative forms of value, is OpenTV. In his study and
production of OpenTV, Christian (2017), “quares the pilot and development process to explore
forms of value based in queer of color social relations and shaped by local and digital arts
markets.” OpenTV is specifically invested in producing intersectional content and the value that
generates for its producers, its potential audiences, but also the local communities, artist
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collectives, and businesses that prop up and support these productions. Yet, it is still reliant on
popular social networking and content publishing platforms to perform this work. Even as
OpenTV is an experiment in serial and narrative programming and the video campaigns I
analyze in It Gets Popular are more campaign, agitprop, and mimetic productions that do not
emulate or seek to create new entertainment industry models, they share an ethos with the indie
productions of OpenTV, not least of the reasons being that a portion of the producers of the
videos in the following chapters come from actors and industry practitioners along with every
day users, political activists, and casual content creators.
The point here, and with It Gets Popular, then is not to find the point of resistance or
capture in the power dynamics of popular culture in neoliberal capitalism, but rather to
investigate the means and motivations, opportunities and exploitations, proficiencies and
deficiencies, and successes and biases of participating in emerging modes of LGBT activism
through digital video on networked platforms. This project, thus, defines “popular” through such
networked and participatory practices in an ambivalent context of neoliberal capitalism and its
resistance playing out on the same platforms even. As Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) suggests, it is
important to think beyond mere commercialization and marketing (as necessarily top-down and
co-optive strategies) but think more about, among other things, the “cultural value of emotion
and affect and the potential of ambivalence, its generative power, for it is within these spaces
that hope and anxiety, pleasure and desire, fear and insecurity are nurtured and maintained” (p.
218). The sentiments of ambivalence here echo Lisa Henderson’s (2013) concept of queer relay,
which brokers a kind of reciprocal relationship between queer communities and commercial
markets when considering such cultural products like films made by LGBTQ artists. As
Henderson writes,
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I intend relay to mark – in ways those terms do not – cultural-economic difference
and relation, a particular (if movable) politics of recognition, and the materiality
of practice, the idea that practice matters in nondominant cultural production […]
Relay is a historicizing concept for a changing cultural economy, a world not
accounted for by an anachronistic calculus in which the expressive ambitions of
lesbian and other outsider cultural producers are suspect, whether for selling out
to industry ambition or holding on to queer cultural autonomy. Suspicion is
punitive and paralyzing; relay looks for movement and repair. (p. 103, 127)
While Henderson focuses on traditional media texts proper (mostly films), relay also offers a
productive opening through which to consider how various discourses and practices, in my cases
found mostly in video digital media texts, are worked through—how they demonstrate the taut
tension, perhaps queer tension, in popular culture and the mainstreaming of LGBT politics. Each
of the three media campaigns analyzed in It Gets Popular is tied, and often responding, to
dominant ideologies, institutions, and narratives. They are also embedded within and worked
through the dominant industry platforms—YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I avoid using
suspicion as the analytic mode of this project; rather, I rely on history, context, and practice to
assess both the productive and inhibiting functions and features across the work media
participants and practitioners perform.

Participatory Politics and Media Activism
Participation, activism, and politics are important terms that inform the analysis of both
the production and content of the media throughout It Gets Popular. The videos across the Prop
8, Gathering Storm, and It Gets Better campaigns fall squarely in line with the rise of
Sarkissian 12
participatory politics as networked platforms and digital affordances gave way to broadening
media-making publics. As Cohen and Khane (2012) define it, participatory politics are
“interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and
influence on issues of public concern” (p. vi). Henry Jenkins (2016) posits that participatory
politics is rooted in the participatory culture predating the digital turn, notably in audience and
fan cultures. Many scholars have documented the participatory practices of audiences and fans in
older media regimes (Ang, 1985; Jenkins, 1992; McRobbie, 1990; Penley, 1992; Radway, 1991)
and more contemporary media systems (Jenkins, 2006; Kligler-Vilenchik, 2016, Lopez, 2016).
These practices all involve some form of reading, analysis, remix, and storytelling that
challenges both the dominant representations and production practices in mainstream media.
Things get “political,” per Jenkins (2016), at “that point where participatory culture meets
political and civic participation” (p. 2). In this setup, Jenkins adds, “political change is promoted
through social and cultural mechanisms rather than through established political institutions, and
where citizens see themselves as capable of expressing their political concerns—often through
the production and circulation of media” (p. 2). The parody responses to “A Gathering Storm”
and the contributions to the It Gets Better project demonstrate this phenomenon. Each uses a
different genre—PSA parody versus confessional documentary—but both are predicated on its
participants making and circulating media and both rely on mimesis to bound and connect the
different entries into a collective movement. Even as the independent and grassroots video
campaigns against Proposition 8 are directly related to institutional politics, their form of
participation still veers from the traditional expressions of civic participation that has dominated
for so long, and a large part of that is due to the advent of networked technologies.
Sarkissian 13
The role technology plays in these campaigns and their import, however, is more in
service to the means of these political efforts than the end in itself. As Jenkins elaborates, “focus
is not on new technologies per se, but on the possibilities (real and imaged) that we might use
these tools to achieve greater political participation” (p. 39). For instance, digital video is the
central medium of analysis in this project, but utilizing video in LGBT activism is not something
new. The genres they utilize are not altogether new either. All three campaigns I analyze have
roots in historical uses of visual storytelling for social and cultural activism. Yet, it is the
prevalence and increased access to these technologies, especially production and circulation, that
is integral to understand the political accomplishment of their efforts. It is both about the content
they produce—images and narratives are vital for LGBTQ communities—and about the
practices that, in doing so, facilitate connecting queer publics and expanding the broader reach
and engagement with LGBT politics.
Lori Lopez (2016) echoes the above sentiment in her work on Asian American media
activism when she raises the question of what it is that new media facilitates: “not how new
media provides a solution to the problem of Asian American media images, but rather what role
cultural formations, political identities, and affective relationships play in the way new media
technologies are adopted as part of an activist project” (p. 183). Similarly, It Gets Popular is
about representation in media and all three media campaigns I analyze carry with them implicit
or explicit critiques of dominant media systems and the narratives they tell about LGBTQ
people. The online Prop 8 videos I analyze resist both the opposition’s narratives but also those
controlled by dominant LGBT interests. The Gathering Storm parodies offer the most direct
rebuke of the conservative discourses that have shaped LGBT images and narratives in both
politics and broader culture. The It Gets Better project, while an address to youth, is also a direct
Sarkissian 14
reaction to the media’s coverage of gay youth suicides and ultimately an indirect response to the
dearth of LGBT stories in mainstream media. In one form or another, through their production
and propagation, all three are participating in challenging the dominant media’s portrayal and
treatment of LGBT people.
Media activism, as Lopez uses the term, encompasses work that includes both
traditional—media watchdog groups—and new media forms of critique and participation in
issues of representation; the latter groups includes hashtag campaigns like #CancelColbert and
#StarringJohnCho. For Lopez, activism is “intentional participation in a political act designed to
remedy a social injustice” (p. 24). While this conception of activism informs much of the work I
analyze in this dissertation, “political act” is often up for interpretation, and thus I mobilize
“activism” more broadly to include what Tim Highfield (2016) calls everyday politics—“how
political themes are framed around our own experiences and interests” (p. 3). Here, I am thinking
of the profile change movements, first to the red equal sign then the rainbow filter, in 2013 and
2015 respectively, as a way of participating in LGBT rights discourses. Both Highfield and
Jenkins et al. (2016) stress the populist, highly informal nature of such politics. It Gets Popular
shares and builds on this perspective, particularly through the analysis of the It Gets Better
project, which features a wide range of contributions, including written and rehearsed
confessionals, casual thoughts, music videos, and highly orchestrated compilations from schools,
companies, and public service entities. Whether they think of or describe their videos as a
political act, participation in all three of the media campaigns I analyze are correctives to social
injustices as they pertain to LGBT rights and dignities.
Most of the activism Lopez discusses in her book are organized and concerted
campaigns, even if among unrelated Twitter users collectively using a hashtag. The activism I
Sarkissian 15
analyze in It Gets Popular is often messy, uncoordinated, and internally divisive. They don’t
always cohere to the collective forms of political action that inform the goals of cultural
citizenship Lopez discusses (p. 15). Even the successful memetic spread of It Gets Better was
rather heterogeneous. Yet, I argue these campaigns offer key insights into different kinds of
collective action in online media activism for LGBT rights and representations: more dispersed,
more variable, and more creative. Their impact, in terms of quantifiable effects or institutional
changes, were minimal or unknowable; but they served different functions than simply changing
the dominant narrative. They distributed alternative, subversive, and more explicit
representations of LGBT people and stories; encouraged more mainstream participation in
LGBT politics; and contributed to the broader evolution of cause-related political participation
through online video and networked publics in the late 2000s.

Queer Publics and LGBT Politics
The two key terms that inform the crux of the argument in It Gets Popular are queer
publics and mainstreaming LGBT politics. These concepts and practices are not opposed, but
rather, borrowing Lisa Henderson’s terminology, they operate in relay, especially in the porous
networks of digital communication. These terms also have histories and the way I mobilize them
here to analyze the three video campaigns adjust, challenge, and wrestle with previous
scholarship in the field. When I address queer publics, I am drawing from a rich genealogy of
work on publics and counterpublics, originating with Habermas’ (1989) initial work on the
public sphere, but animated most by Nancy Fraser’s (1990) and Michael Warner’s (2002)
critiques and explorations of publics. Per Warner, publics are a cultural form, and in some way
“a kind of practical fiction” (p. 8). When people address publics, Warner asserts, “they engage in
Sarkissian 16
struggles over the conditions that bring them together as a public” (p. 12). Further, “publics are
essentially intertextual, frameworks for understanding texts against an organized background of
the circulation of other texts, all interwoven not just by citational references but by the
incorporation of a reflexive circulatory field in the modes of address and consumption” (p. 16).
In essence, I subscribe to the belief that the publics and public-making I describe in the following
chapters are not necessarily phenomenon I observe and report, but rather in bringing these set of
texts—videos, campaigns, networks—together through my analysis, I am making a case to see
them as publics. Part of the goal of this project is not to trace the lines, so to speak, but connect
the dots across these texts and events in ways that I find meaningful.
When I say queer digital publics, I am referring to networks, spaces, and communication
that give voice to LGBT and queer people and content made by them. I refer to the phenomenon
that connects these content creators and their media to one another. When I say their work
“deepens” queer publics, I mean that it provides these spaces, networks, and texts—the queer
publics—with a rich(er) engagement not only with the politics of the present, but notably the
queer tactics of the past, as they have been passed down through the generational evolution of
LGBT media activism. My formulation of queer publics grapples with the world-making
property of queer culture, as formulated by Berlant and Warner (2002). This world-making queer
culture they describe is often based in mobile, ephemeral, and affective public intimacies, and is
harder to locate in the digital realm. In this regard, it is perhaps more akin to the border publics
Mary Gray (2009) discusses in her work on queer rural youth in the earlier days of social
networking. The cases of video activism in It Gets Popular pose a complicated answer to the
question of counterpublics, which by Warner’s (2002) account are publics too, in conflict with
the dominant social group, and “ideological in that they provide a sense of active belonging that
Sarkissian 17
masks or compensates for the real powerlessness of human agents in capitalist society” (p. 112-
113). Each of the video campaigns demonstrate their dialectical opposition to the dominant
group—in the case of Prop 8, the dominant group being the consultant-based No on 8 campaign,
run by a coalition of leaders from elite LGBT non-profits—but they also inscribe themselves
within various commitments and rhetoric of the dominant order. This is why I see these queer
publics as ambivalent cases of activism, where ambivalence, per Banet-Weiser, does not provide
a way “out”—to be figured out, or made out, as Vincent Doyle (2016) puts it—but rather a way
to understand the complicated and conflicting politics of queer culture in an age of increased
salience in the mainstream.
This is not to say that LGBTQ people were not necessarily as active online before 2008.
To the contrary, LGBTQ communities have always been at the forefront of new communication
technologies from capitalism (D’Emilio, 1983) to the Internet (Gross, 2003, 2007). Several
edited volumes—Queer Online: Media, Technology and Sexuality (O’Riordan & Phillips, 2007),
LGBT Identity and Online New Media (Pullen and Cooper, 2010), and Queer Youth and Media
Culture (Pullen, 2014), among others—demonstrate numerous examples of communities and
practices LGBTQ people were engaged in online before 2008 and continuing after. They were
creating political videos before Proposition 8, parody videos before “A Gathering Storm,” and
vlogging their lives and coming out stories before It Gets Better. The three campaigns I analyze
in It Gets Popular, though, together directed the attention to and expansion of queer publics to
more mainstream LGBT politics.
My distinction between queer and LGBT here does not necessarily speak to the binary
politics of assimilation versus liberation or conformist versus radical, which have always had
more of a theoretical use than a practical consideration of how queer existence is nearly always
Sarkissian 18
implicated in both. Rather, my distinction comes from mobilizing queer to describe the
specificity of LGBTQ people and the work that they do, the spaces they inhabit, the networks
they create through that doing. When I mention LGBT politics, it is my way of acknowledging
the broad appeal and participation in a spectrum of issues and politics pertaining to LGBTQ
folks and communities. Thus, “LGBT politics” recognizes that more visibility and inclusion does
usually come with costs and privileges, among them being able to define or even brand oneself
in a neoliberal configuration of identity politics. But it also recognizes that counter-hegemonic
and queer politics have more exposure in mainstream culture. This goes back to situating this
project through an understanding of popular culture as a tension, a relationality. I call the process
of the broader participation in LGBT politics mainstreaming.
My formulation of mainstreaming LGBT politics, however, is different from previous
ways it has been used in the scholarship of LGBT media studies. Some of these works, which
have played an integral role in shaping the field until the late 2000s, refer to marketing practices
that are intended to make LGBT content more appealing to non-LGBT audiences. Scholars have
variously described this phenomenon as dualcasting (Sender, 2007), multicasting (Himberg,
2014), and gaystreaming (Ng, 2013). Urvashi Vaid (1995) and Vincent Doyle (2016) use the
term mainstreaming to describe corporate practices of integration, especially at LGBT advocacy
groups like GLAAD. In other words, all these projects use this concept as a top-down approach,
as decisions made by dominant institutions. In It Gets Popular, I take mainstreaming to mean the
networked practices that expand participation—not just consumption and corporate strategy—in
LGBT issues, politics, and activism. The three video campaigns in this dissertation bear this out;
together they illustrate how networking, content production, and storytelling from casual users,
amateurs, and professionals play a significant role in bringing these issues out to broader publics.
Sarkissian 19
They also demonstrate that LGBT politics and activism are complicated and messy, and that the
people on the ground—not the networks and corporations—have been doing it for decades.

Chapter Overviews
In the first case study chapter, “A Participatory Proposition,” I provide a comprehensive
analysis of the media campaigns against Proposition 8 in California, a ballot measure in the 2008
November election that defined marriage in California as between a man and woman,
eliminating the right for same-sex couples to marry in the state. This chapter walks through the
official No on 8 television ad campaign, run by Equality for All, and four independently-
produced video campaigns against Proposition 8 that were uploaded on YouTube in the months
leading up to the election. I argue that the amateur and grassroots video campaigns were not only
directed against Proposition 8, but were also motivated by intra-community frustrations with the
dominant, televised campaign. The consultant-based Equality for All No on 8 campaign
excluded LGBT representation from all their ads, faltered in their response to Yes on 8’s
accusations, and failed to properly coalition build with communities of color. The four
individuals and organizations who produced the online video campaigns were thus responding as
much to the dominant No on 8 campaign as they were to the Yes on 8 campaign.
Through their varied formats—including traditional PSA, narrative, and parody—and
genres—agit-prop, satire, documentary, and direct address—the independent online video
campaigns expanded the modes of participation in digital and networked publics. Whether
seasoned LGBT activists, San Francisco bloggers, entertainment industry practitioners, or
fledgling grassroots organizations, the producers and participants of these campaigns rode the
wave of online civic activism of mid-late 2000s to bring LGBT politics to diverse and
Sarkissian 20
mainstream networked publics. In their varied levels of production value and exposure, these
producers and their videos also demonstrated the role traditional networking, access to resources,
and community outreach play in emerging online activism. Most notably, though, the dialectic
between the dominant and independent No on 8 media campaigns, including their distinct and
overlapping generic and rhetorical approaches, illustrate the way the tensions between
institutional politics and grassroots activism continue to shape LGBT and queer politics as the
discourses move into the digital era. This chapter, then, also becomes a way to document and
track these discourses, through video publics, in an otherwise fragmented and ephemeral digital
history.
The second campaign is comprised of the campy remix and parody responses to “A
Gathering Storm,” an anti-gay marriage ad that aired on the East Coast and posted online in
April of 2009. I pair interviews of some of the producers of these videos with a textual analysis
of the parodies to establish, first, how the similarities in style and content across the productions
establish the ad as a meme. Second, I highlight six common characteristics from the parodies—
parodying visual aesthetics; highlighting the folly of the storm metaphor; exposing bigotry and
hypocrisy in argumentation; calling out multicultural baiting; playing up queer incongruities and
hetero fragility; and their overall use of intertextuality—to illustrate how these parodies work
collectively to critique and challenge the homophobia but also the ad’s sanctimonious defense of
marriage as mired in white heteropatriarchal ideologies. Finally, I argue that the verve and
collaborative ethos behind the group parodies echo the performance and play of older forms of
LGBT activism like zaps from lesbian feminist, gay liberation, and AIDS groups throughout the
latter half of the twentieth century.
Sarkissian 21
The last campaign is the It Gets Better Project, a response to a string of reported queer
youth suicides in September 2010 that had participants recording video messages addressed to
queer youth about bullying, often detailing their own youth traumas and life experiences. Unlike
the relative low cultural penetration of the videos from the previous two campaigns, It Gets
Better soared in visibility and participation, video contributions estimated in the tens of
thousands and coming in still years after it started. Given the volume of content for It Gets
Better, and the many scholarly works already analyzing the videos, this chapter takes a different
approach. First, while the popularity of the project presented a case par excellence for realizing
the potential of networked activism for LGBT issues, I contextualize the campaign’s popularity
by tracing its form and content back to a lineage of LGBT use of visual media for documentary
and testimonial oral histories. Investigating the antecedents of this type of participatory action
before social media also reveals the evolution of the ideologies and rhetoric of LGBT
movements from collective action frames to more personal and diffused connective action.
Second, this chapter engages with three disputed critiques of the It Gets Better Project—
authorship, representation, and ideology—to better understand the affordances and limitations of
networked activism and participatory politics, and how these social technologies carry various
biases that structure the makeup of and message from its contributors. Finally, I turn to the
organizing force of affect as a way to analyze the loud and lasting movement of the videos in this
campaign. Ultimately, by analyzing the context and discourses that shaped It Gets Better, I argue
that, much like the previous campaigns, these videos were inherently speaking against systems of
domination—not just bullying, but institutional violence that has inhibited a richer history of
LGBTQ narratives.
Sarkissian 22
In the conclusion, I consider the ways mainstreaming, as the practice of making popular
participatory LGBT activism, took hold after It Gets Better. In particular, I use the red equal sign
profile picture phenomenon and the growing convergence of LGBT politics across media,
legislation, celebrity, and corporate practices to think through the landscape of LGBT politics
following the early work the case study campaigns put in motion. Following, I synthesize the
import of the contributions of this project to the intersecting fields of participatory digital LGBT
media activism.

Sarkissian 23
Chapter 2: A Participatory Proposition

“You basically had a bunch of people with no expertise in their field just throwing things at the
wall to see what would stick, which is kind of inspiring but also pathetic—but also says
something about how frustrated people were with what was going on institutionally.”
–David Atkins (personal communication, March 30, 2018)

On October 7, 2008, Courage Campaign, a California-based online organizing network,
uploaded a video—“Gender Auditors: No on Prop 8”—to YouTube.
1
The video starts with a
heterosexual couple in wedding attire walking into city hall and exclaiming to a clerk, “We just
got married. All we need’s our license.” The clerk retorts, “We’ll see if you pass the state
inspection,” and rings an alarm, prompting a team of gender auditors—identified by a shot of the
back of their jackets reading “GA Gender Auditors” a la FBI or DEA uniforms—to arrive on the
scene. The lead auditor walks up behind the couple and facing the camera says, “Let’s see if they
match up. Check their goodies.” While the team brings out step stools, motions for the couple to
step onto them, lifts the woman’s wedding dress, and unzips the man’s pants, the voice-over
claims, “Think the IRS is invasive? Prop 8 lets the government into your pants.” The female
auditor under the wedding dress announces, “Yep, this one’s got state approved equipment,” as
another auditor checkmarks the “HERS” box on a form under the heading “Equipment.” The
lead auditor calls attention to the man’s unzipped pants, shining a flashlight, and saying, “Look
guys, code four.” The rest let out a collective “Ooh,” as the female auditor estimates, “I’m sure
you have a great personality though,” and the lead auditor follows up, “or money, right?” As
jokes and gawking ensue, the voiceover continues: “The government has no business telling
people who can and can’t get married. We don’t need more government in our lives or our pants.

1
All videos referenced in this chapter are on YouTube as of July 11, 2018 and can be found on a custom playlist:
https://tinyurl.com/Prop8playlist
Sarkissian 24
Pledge to vote no on Prop 8. Go to CourageCampaign.org/NoOnProp8. Paid for by Courage
Campaign Issues Committee.”
“Gender Auditors” blends parody and satire to ridicule and critique Proposition 8 for its
hostile interference in regulating who and which types of couples are allowed to get married in
California. Its satire is a call to a common trope in LGBT activism that uses the marriage license
office as a site of protest, dating back to playful 1970s gay zaps and queer political theater
(Shepard, 2010; Warner, 2012). In more recent years, same-sex couples would go in to city halls
on designated days—Valentine’s Day common among them—and use the office’s license refusal
as a statement for the unequal treatment toward same-sex couples under law. In an interview,
Sabrina Petrescu (personal communication, February 11, 2018) describes a couple, Jeff and
Peter, part of a San Francisco group Marriage USA, who would go to city hall every year on
Valentine’s Day requesting a marriage license up until when then-mayor Gavin Newsom allowed
the city to marry same-sex couples in 2004. The zing of the parody device remains relevant years
after Prop 8 when Kim Davis, a Kentucky clerk, famously declined to give out marriage licenses
to same-sex couples in 2015 after it was legalized across the country. As a tongue-in-cheek
parody, then, “Gender Auditors,” builds on protest iconography that ties contemporary grassroots
digital content to tried and traditional forms of LGBTQ activism.
There is also more to the satire that drives the video than meets the eye. While most of
the arguments against opponents of same-sex marriage rely on appeals to emotion (love is love),
religious hypocrisy (picking and choosing Bible verses), or civil rights rhetoric (fair treatment of
minority groups), “Gender Auditors” establishes the less popular argument that the root of
opposition to same-sex marriage is not sexual orientation per se, but rather gender. The video
insinuates that sex—“matching goodies” or genitalia—is conflated with gender and held to be
Sarkissian 25
the determining factor in ascertaining who is a legitimate party for marriage. This reasoning
foreshadows both a line of argument in the 2015 landmark case Obergfell v. Hodges—likening
denial of same-sex marriage to sex discrimination—and the premise for nearly all of the
transgender-focused bathroom bills in years to follow. Since the couple in the video is
heterosexual, they are presumably approved for their marriage license. The end of the video,
however, leaves them (and the audience) in an uncomfortable and embarrassed state, thus
managing to undermine some of the ideologies of marriage and unmask the connection between
sex and sexual orientation. Accentuating the extent of the government’s interest in policing sex
and gender identity drives the nuanced satire of the video. The libertarian argument, the satire,
and the independent production of “Gender Auditors” was strikingly different from the
sanctioned and narrowly message-focused ads that ran on television for the official No on 8
campaign.
Proposition 8 inspired a great deal of participatory activism on social media, notably in
video production and distribution, primarily on YouTube. “Gender Auditors” was one of
countless videos made by a variety of grassroots organizations and amateur content creators
opposed to Prop 8. The volume of online video activity around Prop 8, however, was not simply
a political mobilization against the ballot measure and its proponents seeking to ban same-sex
marriage in California. Rather, it represented a multitude of motivations and demonstrated the
varied approaches to digital-era political campaigning more broadly and LGBT messaging
strategies more specifically. This chapter documents and details the official No on 8 campaign’s
television advertising campaign and places it in conversation with the many different online
video and media efforts during the election. In doing so, this chapter illustrates the dialectic
Sarkissian 26
tension between dominant and more dispersed, grassroots strategies for the emerging popular
movement for same-sex marriage and LGBT rights and politics writ large.
This chapter uses a combination of interviews and textual analysis of videos, websites,
press releases, news reports, official and independent campaign reports and autopsies to, first,
construct as holistic a narrative of the organized video campaigns for No on 8 as possible. Part of
the purpose of this study, in fact, is to create a comprehensive archive and account of one of the
earliest concerted efforts to use online video and YouTube for ballot measure campaigning.
Much of this work has not been formally documented and, as a result of the often-ephemeral
content of digital and online media, is no longer readily available. Some of the websites and
documents I use to make my arguments in this chapter were only available through personal
archiving from ten years ago or through the Internet Archive’s WaybackMachine.org. Even
though the campaign website for No on 8 does not exist anymore, the bulk of their activity has
been covered in numerous articles and autopsies. The grassroots campaigns, however, were not
as readily documented. Thus, a secondary goal here is to properly historicize the independent and
grassroots efforts and their relational dynamics with Proposition 8’s official ad campaign.
Second, I use the comparison between the official No on 8 ad campaign and various other
grassroots video projects against Proposition 8 to argue that the video activism “on the ground”
and by amateur, independent, and networked constituents was a complex blend of pushback
politics. Together, they demonstrated independent yet concerted critiques against same-sex
marriage opponents but also, notably, the institutional structures of the No on 8 campaign as
well. I analyze four different grassroots video campaigns and/or organizations——Stop the Hate,
Stop8, Homotracker, and Courage Campaign—that used form, function, and content to provide
alternative tactics, genres, and persuasive appeals in an effort to diversify and expand the
Sarkissian 27
strategy to stop Proposition 8. Finally, I use the structural similarities and differences in these
amateur and grassroots efforts’ organizing to map out a typology of the gradations of networked
video activism.

No on 8: Equality for All
In the March 7, 2000 primary election, Californians voted 61.4–38.6% to adopt
Proposition 22, an initiated statute that “adds a provision to the Family Code providing that only
marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California” (“State Ballot
Measures,” 2000; League of Women Voters, 2000). Following the Massachusetts Superior
Judicial Court decision in November 2003 to legalize same-sex marriage in their state, newly
elected San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom instructed city officials on February 11, 2004 to
issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. By March 11, California Attorney General Bill
Lockyer managed to get the California Supreme Court to issue a stay on same-sex marriages as
the issue worked itself out through the courts. Later in August, the state Supreme Court ruled that
the city and county of San Francisco had overstepped their authority and voided some 4,000
licenses issued earlier that year, but left open the issue of constitutionality of same-sex
marriages. Following, the city and county of San Francisco filed In Re Marriage Cases, a
consolidated case for legalizing same-sex marriage. On May 15, 2008, the California Supreme
Court ruled that existing statutes and measures restricting marriage to heterosexual couples were
unconstitutional, formally legalizing same-sex marriage in the state.
Anticipating such a ruling, ProtectMarriage.com, an organization formed following the
Prop 22 decision in 2000 to preserve the state statute, authored and qualified Proposition 8 for
the November 2008 ballot. Proposition 8, a proposed state constitutional amendment eliminating
Sarkissian 28
the rights of same-sex couples to marry, would override the California Supreme Court decision
months earlier. ProtectMarriage.com, supported by several other conservative organizations and
churches, most notably Mormons from the Church of Ladder Day Saints, established the Yes on
8 campaign. The No on 8 campaign was run by Equality for All, a large coalition led by a
committee comprised of representatives from several California LGBT and civil rights
organizations. Both campaigns hired professional advertising agencies to construct their message
and television ads. Combined, both sides of the proposition raised over $83 million, making
Proposition 8 the most expensive social-issue ballot measure in United States history (Associated
Press, 2009).
The vast majority of the resources and funds raised on both sides went into the ad buys
for their television campaigns. Yes on 8 hired successful consultant Frank Schubert who
orchestrated the influential ad campaign that tipped the vote in their favor. The Schubert-led
campaign delivered their biggest ace with their second ad, “Princes” (VoteYesonProp8, 2008),
which featured a young girl running up to her mother, handing her the children’s book King and
King, and excitedly exclaiming, “Mommy, mommy, guess what I learned in school today? I
learned that a prince can marry a prince, and I can marry a princess.” As the mother’s face turns
into shocked concern, a Pepperdine University Law professor walks on screen and declares,
“Think it can’t happen? It’s already happened. When Massachusetts legalized gay marriage,
schools began teaching second-graders that boys can marry boys. The courts ruled that parents
had no right to object.” This ad effectively shifted the entire discourse on Proposition 8 towards
its purported—but groundless—effect on children and public education. Campaign autopsies
from both sides of the proposition concluded that No on 8’s two-week delay in countering this ad
and its false accusations caused the largest shift in voter sentiment during the campaign
Sarkissian 29
(Fleischer, 2010; Kery, 2009; Schubert and Flint, 2009). The rest of Yes on 8’s ads honed in and
built on this messaging. Schubert’s campaign won political consulting awards and his firm was
subsequently hired for many of the following same-sex marriage ballot measures in Maine,
North Carolina, and several others (Eckholm, 2012).
While Yes on 8 was disciplined in their message—after their second spot, “Princes,” their
entire ad campaign was focused around effects on children—No on 8, on the other hand, was less
unified and lacked the internal coherence within the campaign to develop a successful television
and ground campaign. Like their opponents, No on 8 also hired a team of consultants and
pollsters to create the messaging for their TV commercials. Interviewing campaign officials on
this process, Julia Himberg (2010) reports that the No on 8 campaign relied solely on public
polling and focus groups to construct the campaign’s strategy. Public polling indicated that only
20% of voters were undecided on Proposition 8 and that the largest segment of news consumers
(46%) were “Traditionalists”: less educated, median age of 25, and prefer television as their
source of news (Himberg, 2010). The No on 8 strategists used this information to aggressively
seek this demo for their focus groups. These focus groups, Himberg reports, found that
“undecided” voters preferred to see ambiguously conceived “neutral figures” instead of gay and
lesbian couples in campaign commercials because they thought same-sex couples would
inevitably be self-interested. These focus groups also found the rhetoric of being treated
differently more effective than parallels with Black civil rights discrimination. This information
informed the beginning of No on 8’s campaign until they were hit with the “Princes” ad.
After watching the No on 8 commercials, I break their TV ad campaign into three stages:
Offense, Defense, and Kitchen Sink. The first phase, Offense, started on September 22 when
they aired their first ad, “Thorons” (NoOnProp8dotcom, 2008a), one week ahead of Yes on 8’s
Sarkissian 30
first ad.
2
“Thorons” featured an older, white, heterosexual couple sitting on a couch, talking
about their children:
Sam: Julia and I have been married for 46 years.
Julie: Together, we’ve raised three children who are now adults.
Sam: My wife and I never treated them differently, we never loved them any differently,
and the law shouldn’t treat them differently either.
Julie: If Prop 8 passes, our gay daughter and thousands of Californians lose the right to
marry. Please don’t eliminate that right for anyone’s family.
Announcer: Don’t eliminate marriage for anyone. Vote No on Prop 8
Their second ad, “Conversation” (NoOnProp8dotcom, 2008b), started airing two weeks later on
October 6 and featured two female adult friends looking at family pictures in a kitchen setting:
Friend 1: Here’s Bob at the barbeque.
Friend 2: [giggling] Look at his sunburn.
Friend 1: And here’s our niece Maria and her partner Julia at their wedding.
Friend 2: [Uncomfortable smile] Listen, honestly, I just don’t know how I feel
about this same-sex marriage thing.
Friend 1: No, it’s okay and I really think it’s fine if you don’t know how you feel,
but are you willing to eliminate rights and have our laws treat people
differently?
Friend 2: [decidedly confident] No.
Announcer: Don’t eliminate marriage for anyone. Vote no on Proposition 8.

2
Many of the ads from the official No on 8 campaign were referred to by different names in articles, campaign
reports, and the titles on YouTube. For consistency, I use one title for each ad, which is not always reflected as the
video’s title on YouTube.
Sarkissian 31
These two ads—the first a direct address, the second a narrative—are framed around family
relations and staged in domestic spaces. Both ads feature heterosexual family members of
alluded-to lesbian couples who themselves are never visible. Both ads feature a soft and soothing
background score with a warm-voiced announcer and end on a positive and assuring intonation
to vote “No.” The end is accompanied by a blue background with white block letters, reading
“VOTE NO / ON PROP 8” (Figure 2.1). The hollow space in the “O” in “NO” is made into a
filled in with a green animated checkmark. The tone is non-aggressively affirmative and the
language, per the conclusions of their focus groups, prominently features a persuasive argument
that hinges on an emotional appeal to “fair treatment” and a universalizing imperative not to
eliminate rights for anyone.
The debut of Yes on 8’s aforementioned “Princes” ad—airing in Spanish starting October
6 and in English October 8—prompted the second phase of the No on 8 Campaign: Rebuttal. In
the next two weeks, No on 8 released three ads—“Lies” (NoOnProp8dotcom, 2008c), “Unfair”
(NoOnProp8dotcom, 2008d) and “O’Connell” (NoOnProp8dotcom, 2008e)—which shifted the
tone and rhetoric of their message as they moved from offense to defense. On October 9
th
, No on
8 started airing “Lies,” which featured a slow zoom-out on a space filled with many TVs playing
different content as an announcer narrates:
Their attacks have come before and they always use the same scare tactics. This
time they want to eliminate rights and they’re using lies to persuade you. Prop 8
will not affect church tax status. That’s a lie. And it will not affect teaching in
schools, another lie. It’s time to shut down the scare tactics. Keep government out
of all of our lives. Don’t eliminate marriage for anyone. Vote no on Prop 8.
Sarkissian 32
Accompanying the vocals is a background audio track that heightens the tension by increading
the indistinguishable background noise as more TVs come into view until the announcer gets to
“shut down the scare tactics,” when the TVs disappear and the familiar No on 8 graphic with the
green checkmark appears, accompanied by a more assertive intonation to vote “no.”
The next ad, “Unfair” also relies heavily on audio, scripted by quotes from newspapers
that appear on screen against a darker background and a static graphic of blurred newspapers.
However, the announcer’s voice and accompanying score are starkly different from the previous
ads, striking a prominently more alarmist tone. The quotes largely address the negative
consequences of Proposition 8—stripping rights, wrong to treat people differently—and for the
first time explicitly mention discrimination in a quote from League of Women Voters: “No
person should suffer discrimination.” “NO on 8” reads across the screen for the duration of the
ad, “No” in red and “on 8” in white. The announcer ends with “No on 8. Unfair. Unnecessary.
Wrong.” The blue “Vote No on 8” logo with the green checkmark at the end of the ads is gone.
Instead, nearly all the TV ads after this point have a black background with red and white
lettering “No on 8,” often accompanied by “Unfair and Wrong.” This is also reflected in the
campaign paraphernalia as the blue and green is replaced with blue and red, with an “X” in the
hollow “O” space (Figure 2.2). Both these ads played to a more generalist rebuttal, neither
addressing the specific arguments about children and schools in the “Princes” ad.
“O’Connell” rounded out this phase of the campaign as Equality for All finally addressed
the issue of same-sex marriage being taught in schools from someone with authority on the
subject. The ad starts with a replay of the little girl from the “Princes” ad and the announcer asks,
“Have you seen the TV ads for Prop 8? They’re absolutely not true, says California
Sarkissian 33

Figure 2.1: “Vote No on Prop 8” banner with green checkmark.

Figure 2.2: “Vote No on Prop 8” banner with red “X.”
Sarkissian 34
Superintendent of Public Schools.” Then, Jack O’Connell, the superintendent appears on screen
to authoritatively denounce the lies. The ad is aesthetically and thematically connected to
“Unfair” that came before it as well as “Feinstein,” and “Divisive” that would come after with
similar visuals and using the same serious music score. “O’Connell” aired on October 22
nd
for
the first time, a full two weeks after the English version of “Princes” from Yes on 8 started
broadcasting on television. “O’Connell” also demonstrated a shift for the No on 8 campaign to
largely using trusted figures to deliver their messages from here on out. While Jack O’Connell
was not a household name, he held credentials to speak on the issue of school curriculum. Every
major ad buy for the remainder of the campaign went to spots featuring or evoking prominent
celebrities or political figures.
These last four ads—“For Latinos” (NoOnProp8dotcom, 2008g), “Feinstein”
(NoOnProp8dotcom, 2008h), “Internment” (NoOnProp8dotcom, 2008i), and “Divisive”
(NoOnProp8dotcom, 2008j)—not only featured endorsements and statements from famous
figures, they also threw every kind of argument and appeal on the wall, which is why I attribute
this final phase of the campaign as “everything but the kitchen sink.” “For Latinos,” first airing
on October 27, was the only ad directly targeting Hispanic voters as most of the ad buy for this
ad was for the Spanish-language version they shot and aimed at heavily Hispanic markets
(Fleischer, 2010). This ad featured the Latinx stars of “Ugly Betty,” then a relatively popular
dramedy on ABC. Tony Plana starts the ad: “For Latinos, family is very important… 8
discriminates against our family and friends by eliminating their rights to a civil marriage.” Ana
Ortiz follow, “Laws should not be used to discriminate against anyone.” Discrimination comes
on strong in this stage of the campaign—eight days from election—a remarkable turn
Sarkissian 35
considering the campaign’s initial refusal, based on their consultant focus groups, to lean on the
discrimination argument.
The final three major ads lay the discrimination angle in thick. In “Feinstein,” California
Senator Dianne Feinstein recounts:
In my lifetime, I’ve seen discrimination and I see it again in Proposition 8. Eight
would be a terrible mistake for California. It changes our constitution, eliminates
fundamental rights, and treats people differently under the law. Proposition 8 is
not about schools or kids. It’s about discrimination, and we must always say no to
that. No matter how you feel about marriage, vote no against discrimination, and
vote no on 8.
3

The sharp turn in strategy and rhetoric is conveyed in that last line, where they try to shift
the vote completely away from marriage and focus it on a matter of discrimination. This is
echoed in the most densely aired ad in the final week of the campaign, “Internment,” featuring
Samuel L. Jackson narrating over stock images and video about California’s “sorry” history of
discrimination against various ethnic groups and communities, from Japanese internment and
laws against interracial marriage to housing discrimination. In the final major ad, “Divisive,”
which started airing on November 1
st
, the announcer uses choice quotes from Presidential
candidate Barack Obama, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Diane Feinstein,
California Teachers Association, and editorials from three newspapers to echo the discrimination
argument. Equality for All also aired a few other ads in this last phase of the campaign—some of
which it produced and some of which it licensed from independent producers of the content—but

3
Feinstein’s remark about seeing discrimination in her lifetime seems general, but can also be interpreted as
referring to her proximity to the killing of gay icon and elected official Harvey Milk. Another way LGBT people are
alluded to or inferred (or dog whistled) but never made real in this campaign.
Sarkissian 36
these had very low ad buys, so they weren’t seen by many. Regardless, they also homed in on
discrimination.
4
For instance, “Parents” features several parents, shown in various settings,
talking about what they want for their kids. The first parent, a woman holding a baby in her
arms, starts, “I don’t want my kids to grow up with discrimination or thinking it’s okay to take
away people’s rights.” The ad cuts to a second woman who exclaims, “I want our kids to know
that discrimination is wrong and that Prop 8 is wrong.” The decisive shift to such strong use of
the discrimination frame was a “last resort” strategy that was “supposed to be used if the
campaign got desperate” (Smith quoted in Himberg, 2010).
The burst of many different ads in the last week or so of the campaign is indicative of the
late change in leadership and the internal discord within the campaign. Himberg’s interviews
reveal that by October, six different consultants were involved in the television ad campaign,
which slowed down their process throughout much of that crucial month. They shifted into
overdrive when more money poured in during the last week and the campaign aired commercials
produced by four different companies without a unifying message aside from continuing to
refute the argument about children and focus on discrimination instead. The effect of the school
children argument from the “Princes” ad is clearly on display as most of the No on 8 ads
thereafter—including “Lies,” “O’Connell,” “Feinstein,” “Divisive,” “Moms,” “For Latinos,”—
kept referencing it. In “Divisive,” the announcer claims, “It will not affect teaching in our
schools, say California Teachers.” In “Moms” (VoteNoOnProp8dotcom, 2008f), a mom on
screen says, “We refuse to be scared by all the lies about what will be taught in schools.” And in

4
These included a spot featuring Ellen Degeneres, one titled “Moms,” one titled “Parents,” and one by Homotracker
as a riff on the classic “I’m a Mac” ads (which is discussed in the next section). Equality for All spent up to
$112,211 (for “Moms”) on these ads, while the major ones above, like “Unfair,” “O’Connell,” and “Internment” had
ad buys north of $3 million. Fleischer’s Prop 8 Report does not have data on how much was spent on “Parents.”
(Fleischer, 2010).
Sarkissian 37
“For Latinos,” Plano pleads, “Please don’t believe the lies. Proposition 8 has nothing to do with
religion or schools.”
Despite moves to expand their messaging in the last stage of the election, Equality for
All’s No on 8 campaign still operated on two key exclusions that reverberated across both
grassroots activists and the public at large during and after the election. First, the campaign
notoriously avoided ever including same-sex couples in their messaging. “The LGBT community
hated the ‘Conversation’ commercial,” noted the campaign manager (Himberg, 2010). The
strategy of gay and lesbian invisibility was picked up and critiqued by the press and by the larger
LGBT community (Rauch, 2008). While the first two ads reference lesbian couples, albeit
without naming them as such, the second and third phase of the television campaign avoided
mentioning same-sex couples completely and instead spun the proposition on a vague plea
against discrimination. All the talking heads in the campaign-produced ads were presumably or
implicitly straight, a strategy that obscures the effects on same-sex couples by privileging a more
universalizing appeal, which inherently places straight individuals, couples, and children at the
center of the issue. Himberg concludes that this invisibility—including a refusal to use “lesbian”
to refer to the two same-sex couples alluded to in the first two ads—is used to contain and
control lesbian and gay sexualities and circumscribe them in assimilationist and homonormative
terms. “Internment,” the ad narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, came closest to any visual inclusion
with a rapid four-second succession of four family pictures that cap the ad. These split-second
images are the only glimpses of same-sex couples and their families throughout the eleven or so
total ads that No on 8 ran on TV, and even in these all-too-brief visuals, the same-sex couples
were obscured—in the background or masked by large family pictures, making such visibility
Sarkissian 38
inconsequential. The ad encapsulates the overall No on 8 campaign strategy to hide the subjects
of the proposition.
The second key issue was an unwillingness to conduct outreach to, engage with, and
mobilize communities of color, both in their ads and in their door-to-door efforts throughout
most of the campaign. The “For Latinos” ad released on October 27
th
, featuring the stars of Ugly
Betty, was the only Spanish-language ad developed for Equality for All, and the only one with
data reporting that it aired in Spanish-language markets (Fleischer, 2010). In contrast, Yes on 8
had three Spanish-language ads, including “Princes,” which aired first in Spanish-language
markets starting October 6
th
. The only other prominent appeals to communities of color using
figureheads were in the campaign’s last two ads, “Internment”—wholly about ethnic-based
discrimination in California—and “Decisive,” which used Obama’s non-committal declaration
that the proposition is “divisive and discriminatory.” Sabrina Petrescu, one of my interviewees,
who worked on the ground for the No on 8 campaign, also confirmed in an interview the
organization’s lack of outreach to communities of color. The racial divide came into sharp relief
once Proposition 8 passed when racial scapegoating brought more attention to the campaign’s
lack of inclusive outreach.
In contrast to the controlled and limiting scope of the official No on 8 campaign, the
volume of video activity online around the proposition sent a clear message that many were
clamoring to find a voice throughout the election. As detailed in the introduction, LGBT people
are fast adopters of new communication technologies to connect with one another. For LGBT
people, though, making and sharing videos are not simply interpersonal practices. Whether
intended or not, LGBT content on social and networked media carves out and populates new
spaces for representation and discourse that may not be available in other forms offline. The
Sarkissian 39
presence and visibility of LGBT bodies and voices, particularly in the visual form of video, is
integral in the politics of representation, especially in the context of publics and discourses
centering LGBT rights and experiences. Proposition 8 and the marriage debate that followed did
not simply coincide with a rise in popular depictions of LGBT people—Glee and Modern
Family, for instance, both premiered in 2009. Rather, I contend the increased networked
discourse Prop 8 wrought online contributed to the conditions for amplified attention not only to
LGBT representation and political issues, but also for creative LGBTQ content producers online.
While much of the LGBT video content before Prop 8 revolved around interpersonal
politics (like coming out videos) and entertainment consumption (porn, marketable content), the
California measure provoked a groundswell of video participation in markedly political
discourses. The distinct engagement with video activism Prop 8 inspired, particularly in the No
camp, illustrates the pronounced shift to more visible LGBT publics online. In a content analysis
comparing the YouTube movements of Prop 8 with that of Occupy Wall Street three years later,
Vraga et al. (2014) found that videos about Prop 8, in a less mature and populated YouTube
environment, garnered substantially more views and elicited more interaction (both in ratings
and commentary) than Occupy videos. The study concluded that while a majority of videos from
both campaigns contained more original—scripted, monologue, filmed live events—than
borrowed content, the scripted videos for Prop 8 garnered more viewers and engagement than
monologues and filmed events. In contrast, there was no discernable difference in terms of
appeal and engagement among the different types of original content for Occupy. This indicates
that Prop 8 not only motivated more thought-out and rehearsed content than extemporaneously
filmed events, but that this type of media also solicited the most engaged discourse online.
Sarkissian 40
In a related study, focusing only on Prop 8 YouTube videos, Thorson et al. (2013)
distinguished between the volume of videos coded in support versus opposition of the marriage
ban. Their content analysis of over 800 Prop 8 videos on YouTube, found that 75% (roughly
600) came from opposition to Prop 8, 10.5% (around 80) in support, and 14% neutral. The
majority of the Yes on 8 coded videos—in a 3:2 ratio—were uploaded before the election, while
most of the No on 8 coded videos—in a 1:3 ratio—were uploaded after the election. The
research team concluded that the sample of Yes on 8 videos resembled a traditional campaign
while the No on 8 side’s use of video resembled a protest movement. Since the video sample
ranged from summer 2008 to August 2009—about nine months after the election—it is
understandable that the No on 8 videos would follow a protest trajectory. Yet it is important to
note that video activity opposing Prop 8 displayed a distinctly engaging movement. Based on the
different YouTube ecologies of Prop 8 and Occupy, Vraga et al. asserted that social media
activism was not a unitary phenomenon. I reference these empirical studies to set up an argument
that video activism around and following Proposition 8 deserves closer analysis as a maturing
form of digital participatory politics more broadly and as networked LGBT activism more
specifically. I argue that this video-based participatory movement, especially in the form of
collaborative production, did more than just get out the vote and voice dissent. It provided value
to LGBT publics beyond Prop 8, instigating a new direction in LGBT political discourses online.
With this background in mind, the rest of this chapter will detail and analyze four
independently organized campaigns that used digital video and online distribution to release ads
against Proposition 8. These videos demonstrate not only motivations to contribute to the
political dialogue, but were strategically produced to offer alternatives to the No on 8, Equality
for All campaign. Through networked labor and digital distribution, these videos also played a
Sarkissian 41
role beyond online campaign spots, triggering wider participation in mainstreaming LGBT
politics and digital publics.

Stop the Hate
The first set of videos addressing the Prop 8 campaign to be released online was a joint
collaboration between Equality Campaign—a 501(C)(4) organization led by seasoned LGBT
activist Robin Tyler—and Professional Organization of Women in Entertainment Reaching Up,
or POWER UP, a 501(C)(3) non-profit film production company and educational organization
geared “to promote the visibility and integration of gay women in entertainment, arts and all
forms of media” (POWER UP, n.d.). Together, they created the “Stop the Hate, Vote No on 8”
PSA campaign, featuring a couple dozen celebrities and activists in a series of short individual
videos, along with two compilation PSAs and a “behind the scenes” featurette. The shoot was
organized primarily by Robin Tyler, using POWER UP’s production crew and resources, but
also took strategic advantage of participants scheduled for a Feminist Majority Foundation shoot
on the same day. As reported on Advocate.com, Anne Stockwell (2008) describes that many
celebrities who were organized for pro-choice and pro-immigrant ads on August 17, 2008 at the
Beverly Hills office of Ms. Magazine agreed on the day to also shoot messaging for Tyler’s
campaign against Proposition 8. The goal, according to Tyler, was visibility on their terms: “The
more we are seen and heard from and correctly present ourselves, the more people become
acquainted with us and are less likely to discriminate against us” (Stockwell, 2008). Following,
the “Stop the Hate” spots featured several straight female actors—including Christine Lahti,
Tyne Daly, Amy Brenneman, Camryn Manheim, Melonie Diaz, and Carolyn Hennessy—but
Sarkissian 42
also included videos with five same-sex couples and families, and solo videos featured queer
actor Wilson Cruz and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta.
The rhetorical script for each of these videos varied widely from appeals to (1) cultural
arguments, (2) emotion, or (3) law and politics. Some videos included overlapping appeals, but
those stressing culture mostly focused on rebutting right-wing arguments around health, religion,
and society as well as making abstract declarations of love and equality. For instance, in her
video, Christine Lahti states, “Apparently there’s some silly notion going around that same-sex
marriages diminish and threaten heterosexual marriages. Well, that’s completely absurd. Love
doesn’t divide; it multiplies” (TheEqualityCampaign, 2008a). Amy Brenneman in her solo video
asks, “Will same-sex marriage hurt families?” (TheEqualityCampaign, 2008b). She answers:
Quite the opposite. The American Association of Pediatrics, the American
Psychoanalytic Association, and the American Psychiatric Association have all
endorsed civil marriage for same-sex couples because marriage strengthens the
mental and physical health of couples and provides greater legal and financial
security for children, parents, and seniors. (Figure 2.3)
Reverend Neil Thomas of the Metropolitan Community Church affirms that “God doesn’t make
mistakes. God loves everyone, and so should you. Vote no on 8” (TheEqualityCampaign,
2008c). In her brief spot, Camryn Manheim declares, “Same-sex marriage is about love. It’s
about equality. Vote no on 8” (TheEqualityCampaign, 2008d). While many of these cultural or
moral appeals position same-sex marriage supporters in the defensive position, they nonetheless
address the issue on the ballot directly, anticipating and countering talking points from their
opposition.

Sarkissian 43

Figure 2.3: Amy Brenneman solo video in “Stop the Hate” campaign.

Figure 2.4: Dolores Huerta solo video in “Stop the Hate” campaign.

Figure 2.5: Frangela duo video in “Stop the Hate” campaign.
Sarkissian 44
Appealing to legal and political arguments, several participants recall the California
Supreme Court’s ruling months earlier to legalize same-sex marriage and emphasize that the
issue is about civil marriage, minority rights, and changing the state constitution. Dolores
Huerta’s videos—in both English and Spanish (Figure 2.4)—for instance, point out that civil
rights are human rights and that civil marriages are performed by a magistrate
(TheEqualityCampaign. 2008e). Melonie Diaz, in one of the compilation PSAs, states, “Denying
gay and lesbian couples the right to marry relegates them to second class status: separate, but not
equal” (TheEqualityCampaign, 2008f). In addressing the protection of rights of a minority group
from majority rule, Wilson Cruz parallels the slow public acceptance of interracial marriage
decades after its ruling to warn against minority discrimination (TheEqualityCampaign, 2008g).
Carolyn Hennesy lists the top political leaders in California against Proposition 8
(TheEqualityCampaign, 2008h). Finally, in a bit of levity, comedy duo Frangelina exclaim, “I’m
sorry, I didn’t know we voted on civil rights,” and retort, “Yeah, when did that happen? […] Is it
us?” (Figure 2.5) (TheEqualityCampaign, 2008i). The brevity of these many different political
approaches presents a fractured narrative that nonetheless coheres around one overarching
theme: discrimination. As research on the dominant Equality for All campaign revealed, this is
the precise strategy they avoided until the last couple weeks of the campaign. Here it was front
and center a month before the television ads started airing.
The videos that appealed to emotion—those that include personal stories and pleading
rhetoric—were exclusively the spots that featured gay and lesbian couples and their families
(Figures 2.6-2.8). All these videos tell how long the couple had been together and/or when they
got married earlier that summer. Diane Goodman and Nicolasa Nevarez, for instance, had been
together for thirty years; Billy Walker and Kelly Ziegler, who had met at church and had their
Sarkissian 45

Figure 2.6: Jillian Armenante, Alice Dodd, and family video in “Stop the Hate” campaign.

Figure 2.7: Kelly, William, and Elizabeth Walker-Ziegler family video in “Stop the Hate”
campaign.

Figure 2.8: Robin Tyler and Diane Olson couple video in “Stop the Hate” campaign.
Sarkissian 46
daughter with them, were together for nine years; Jillian Armenante and Alice Dodd, together for
fourteen years, had their daughter and Jillian’s mother in the video too. Every single one of these
videos ended with the same plea: “don’t take our marriage away. Vote ‘no’ on 8.” In the case of
Billy and Kelly’s video, their daughter is the one to implore, “don’t take my daddies’ marriage
away” (TheEqualityCampaign 2008j). Only one of these videos—featuring creator and activist
Robin Tyler herself with her wife Diane Olson, who were the first couple to get married after the
2008 court ruling—included explicit mention of politics when Olson says her father was a big
proponent of separation of church and state (TheEqualityCampaign 2008k). They too ended their
video with a plea not to take their marriage away (Figure 2.8). This rhetorical approach not only
framed same-sex marriage in an entirely assimilationist and homonormative move, but also
positioned same-sex couples as disempowered, at the whim of a dominant majority.
Taken as a collection of sixteen brief videos, the campaign communicated a mixed
rhetorical strategy and confused tone. While the primary goal may have been to produce the
increasingly familiar celebrity compilation PSA video, the creative and production process
focused on disparate arguments and rebuttals to an assortment of anticipated arguments from the
opposition. This is different from the standard PSAs where everyone reads the same lines and
editors stitch together a cohesive script. Stockwell substantiates this as she recalls the shoot,
“with Tyler behind the reception desk banging out speeches to suit each individual.” Nearly all
of the videos began and ended with a musical cue set to Felix Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,”
which gave the videos a fanciful tone that sometimes clashed with the serious delivery or
emotionally wringing pleas of its participants. While the specter of discrimination looms heavy
as the one constant in all the spots, the varied approaches across the videos display a variety of
talking points without a coherent message. Their brevity makes for easy soundbites but do not
Sarkissian 47
tease out any sustained political arguments. The compilation PSA strings together a line or two
from each of the contributors into a somewhat clearer narrative of the trajectory and stakes of the
vote. Further, while “discrimination” becomes an overarching theme throughout these videos and
the issues are addressed more directly, their appeals still adhere to the “moveable middle”
demographic that the dominant campaign focused on as well. This is evident in both their use of
predominantly straight celebrities and the strong emotional appeal in the aforementioned same-
sex couple videos.
The multiplicity of perspectives and people represented, however, I argue contributes to
widening the discourse of LGBT politics in digital video publics online. While this collection of
videos as a whole offered a mixed variety of messaging strategies, the “Stop the Hate” campaign
most notably anticipated the discord between the dominant No on 8 campaign strategy and
grassroots activists, particularly around representation. Organized and released online a month
before the first televisions ads came out, the impetus for “Stop the Hate” was predicated on and
foreshadowed the contentious campaign strategy issues that would plague No on 8 during and
after the election. Robin Tyler, herself a seasoned veteran of LGBT activism for gay rights ballot
measures, spoke in direct defiance of consultant-run campaigns and claimed in press interviews
for her PSAs, “I do not believe that de-gaying the issue will win it for us. Not being direct in
other states, i.e. Hawaii definitely did not help us. We pay millions to these pollsters to tell us
how to win these initiatives, and despite the failure of these campaigns, we keep following their
advice” (Stockwell, 2008). The advice Tyler refers to brings to mind No on 8’s aforementioned
emphasis on targeting only who they thought were “movable voters,” not swayed by seeing gay
and lesbian figures. Tyler ostensibly tries to do both, using celebrities to appeal to appeal to
Sarkissian 48
voters seeking “unbiased” endorsements but also putting faces and names to same-sex couples
whose marriage rights are at risk.
While Julia Himberg details the lack of gay, and more specifically lesbian, couples in the
No on 8 campaign ads, her analysis largely covers the videos that aired on television, including
some post-election videos from “Get to Know Us First” (also produced by POWER UP). This
chapter complements Himberg’s analysis and uses online and participatory video production to
argue that the lack of explicit representation anticipated and (not) seen on television played an
influential role in the motivation and messaging strategy of digital videos made by smaller
grassroots organizations and everyday contributors during and after the November 2008 election.
Tyler’s anticipation of a de-gayed television campaign led to including five gay and lesbian
couples and families in their project. This was also a large motivating factor for the content put
out by a second grassroots organization, “Stop8.org.”

Stop 8
Spearheaded by Matt Baume, Stop8 recorded and released eight videos online, about a
couple minutes each on average, featuring gay and lesbian couples discussing their relationships
and what marriage means to them, concluding with a call to vote “no” on Proposition 8. Stop8
also produced and released four more explicitly call-to-action spots, including two shot in
Spanish, at the height of electioneering in October. Matt Baume was also an instrumental conduit
between amateur content creators and the No on 8 campaign for the “Internment” ad featuring
Samuel L. Jackson. These three distinct projects produced and orchestrated by Baume not only
demonstrate again parallel “on-the-ground,” critical efforts against Prop 8, but also trace how the
No on 8 Equality for All campaign eventually ceded ground, moving from their narrow
Sarkissian 49
messaging strategy to incorporating some of the rhetorical strategies coming from critical
grassroots activism.
In an interview, Matt Baume tells me he was not very involved in marriage equality
activism prior to the summer of 2008 (personal communication, October 4, 2017). Baume was
living in San Francisco at the time of the California Supreme Court ruling in May of 2008 and
recalls thinking, “Oh this is really great, but it’s really sad that people are gonna try to take this
away. And that’s what got the ball rolling on making videos about why marriage equality
mattered to people. That’s how I got started.” At the time, Baume was blogging as a hobby for
several sites, including SFist—an all-purpose website addressing social issues in San Francisco.
On August 13, 2008, he put out a call on SFist, titled, “Only You Can Save Marriage,” asking
gay couples to get in touch if they were interested in getting interviewed for a “This American
Life”-type online video project to help stop the proposition. While Baume initially envisioned
this as a photo project—a collage of people holding up signs to “Vote No on Prop 8”—he and his
partner James decided to turn it into a video project. “We both know how to shoot and edit things
because James and I met in film school,” Baum explains, though he goes on to claim that neither
had produced any video for distribution before this project. Baume and his partner shot seven of
these videos at the participants’ residences and the eighth at their own place. They used an
average consumer camera and digitized the mini-tapes into Final Cut, edited the footage
themselves, and eventually uploaded them to YouTube.
The eight videos released as part of this project had a distinct style and strategy, but most
prominently performed a more intimate and personable function than any of the other campaigns
at the time. Four videos featured gay male couples and four focused on lesbian couples (Figures
2.9-2.11). Three of the eight were interracial couples and all participants were older than
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Figure 2.9: Cynthia and Eva in “Stop8.org” campaign.

Figure 2.10: Scott and Victor in “Stop8.org” campaign.

Figure 2.11: Jacqui and Britta in “Stop8.org” campaign.
Sarkissian 51
30. Nearly all of the videos started with a short humorous anecdote or meaningful statement
before the couples introduce themselves. In “Leah and Barb,” for instance, Barbara starts the
video recalling, “When I think back to when we met, which was twenty-five years ago, we met
on a political campaign” (stop8org, 2008a). Leah interjects, “You might say it was a typical
lesbian meeting because we met at a potluck.” The video then cuts to introductions: “Hi
California, I’m Leah Brooks,” then “Hey there, California, I’m Barbara Tenenbaum.” In another
video, Cynthia and Eva describe their comically botched message-in-a-bottle proposal on the
beach before greeting California as well. In “BJ and Steve,” Steve starts out describing the
circumstances of their first meeting as “one of those smitten at first sight, he was certainly funny,
smart.” “—and older,” BJ adds quickly as they both chuckle before introducing themselves: “Hi
neighbors in California, I’m BJ Styles. I live in San Francisco” and “Hi California, I’m Steve
McCollum” (stop8org, 2008b). In “Jacqui and Britta,” Britta begins, “I called my dad—‘dad, I’m
getting married in two weeks’—and he said, ‘well, can she cook?’” (stop8org, 2008c). Michael
and Tom open their video revealing the gendered baby names they have chosen for the child they
are expecting through surrogacy. And on a more serious note, Scott Bree starts his video with
partner Victor, directly addressing Proposition 8:
It’s a sort of mean piece of legislation to take away rights that are, you know that
have been given a group of people. Most people have values; they may just have
different values than what your values are and so for them to try to enforce or
force their values on other people is just so, I don’t know, un-American to me.
Hi California, I’m Scott Bree and this is my husband Victor Rivera and we were
married on June 25
th
after being together for thirteen years (stop8org, 2008d).
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All these opening remarks use a friendly greeting to strategically establish an intimate hook,
setting up the personable narratives that follow.
Almost all the videos run between two and two-and-a-half minutes (“Jacqui and Britta
clock in at 1:49), which allows for more breathable conversations that touch on a range of
personal, political, and social issues. As opposed to the fifteen-to-twenty second scripts in “Stop
the Hate,” the interview format and slightly longer running time here help make the “Stop8”
videos pop with more pathos, personality, and more grounded political arguments. For instance,
in describing their surrogacy arrangement, Michael and Tom also walk the viewer through some
of the specific legal challenges non-marital status presents to same-sex parents and their children.
In “Sharon and Amber,” Sharon describes and flips through the scrapbook Amber made her,
featuring a marriage proposal on the last page, then recounts:
We had a “wedding” in 2005 that was a wedding, but it wasn’t a legal wedding.
Every time you fill out a W-9 form and you say ‘oh I’m single’ even though we
had a ceremony and I wear this ring…people say oh it’s the same but equal, but
the truth is it’s very scary having separate rights. You don’t know if another law
can pass that says domestic partners get different rights. I mean separate but equal
has not been equal again and again and again. [In unison with Amber] California,
we need your help. Please vote no on 8. Don’t take our marriage away (stop8org,
2008e).
In “Stuart and John,” Stuart Gaffney talks about the anti-miscegenation laws that would have
prevented his Chinese-American mother from marrying his Irish-American father had California
not led the nation sixty years prior in striking down such laws. He relates this to Proposition 8,
which he claims “would exclude many loving couples from marriage. It would really demean the
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institution of marriage to say it’s an exclusive country club now” (stop8org, 2008f). Along with
other couples’ stories and accounts about their committed relationships and the state of
acceptance for gay and lesbian rights, these videos feature the most sustained representations of
and from same-sex couples produced during the election campaign.
The utility of such a personal and narrative approach in this video campaign presents a
complicated politics that toes the line between a conservative argument for inclusion and a
rebuttal to an exclusionary politics of representation. Marriage’s long history of enforcing white,
heteropatriarchal norms often pits the institution as antithetical to movements like gay liberation
(Cohen, 1997; Rich, 1980; Warner, 2012). Lisa Duggan (2002) draws on conservative strains of
AIDS-era moralism within the LGBT community to claim that the neoliberal sexual politics of
the modern age has led to a new homonormativity, “a politics that does not contest dominant
heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the
possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture
anchored in domesticity and consumption” (p. 179). The aim of this chapter is not to adjudicate
the political project of marriage or its supporters, but rather illustrate the complicated politics of
inclusion and exclusion in the dialectic of grassroots versus corporate-consultant electioneering,
and how that played out in an era of increased digital video distribution online.
On the one hand, then, a close reading of the anecdotes and arguments in these video
campaigns reveal hegemonic conceptions of relationships and marital norms. For instance, the
couples represented in Stop8’s eight videos were all middle-aged friends of Baume or active
readers of local social and cultural blogs residing in or near San Francisco. Discussing the oddity
of getting married twenty-five years into their relationship, Leah and Barb talk about how
“you’re supposed to do it [wedding ceremony] at the beginning of your life and the beginning of
Sarkissian 54
your journey.” Cynthia and Eva explicitly claim, “it’s the next natural step in a relationship”
(stop8org, 2008g). Victor Rivera goes so far as to explicitly reject the notion that Scott is his
“partner,” holding on to the traditional terminology, “the man I’m married to.” BJ perhaps
articulates it most succinctly when he asserts, “Being married ought to provide same-sex
individuals who are younger than I am with tremendous opportunity for child rearing and
participating in all of mainstream activity.” With their surrogacy in progress, Michael and Tom
echo the reproductive imperative of marriage when they claim, “we’re both meant to be parents,
I think. We both have that gene in us” (stop8org, 2008h). These statements perform a great deal
of work to naturalize their inclusion in the institution of marriage, but also to reify the normative
expectations of that inclusion.
On the other hand, not only do their arguments on the legal and political effects of
banning marriage hold true, but their very ability to express such views as gay and lesbian
couples through networked platforms of distribution challenges some of the same cultural (and
increasingly corporate) norms that regulate, often eliding, their visibility and their voices. Both
Stop the Hate and Stop8 utilized resources at their amateur creators’ disposal to put together their
video campaigns. What made Stop8 different, however, was its reliance on community outreach
in a more mom-and-pop style grassroots activism. Whereas both projects, conceived practically
around the same time in August, were the brainchild of their nearly singular leaders, Robin
Tyler’s approach for Stop the Hate used the script of traditional PSA-style political activism that
relies on both social and cultural capital to be seen and shared. Matt Baume’s project sought to
direct and highlight not only the representative bodies of gay and lesbian couples, but the
narratives and arguments coming from this affected constituency. In other words, he allowed the
gay and lesbian couples to tell their own stories, in contrast to Tyler crafting short scripts for her
Sarkissian 55
participants. While both projects end up espousing overlapping arguments—separate but equal,
protections for children, etc.—Stop8 taps into a more traditional documentary and video-
activism approach that lends the videos a more collective, communal, and grassroots aesthetic
from conception to call to action.
The rhetorical and release strategy for the Stop8 couple videos distinguishes itself from
both the dominant campaign and some of the other PSA-style grassroots efforts in this chapter.
Much how all the introductions in the eight videos began with “Hi California,” they all also end
with virtually the same refrain: “Please vote no on 8. Don’t take our marriage away. We’re
counting on you, California.” The plea not to take marriage away was also emphasized in Stop
the Hate’s videos featuring same-sex couples, and it reinforces a seemingly powerless appeal to
pathos. What is most striking and effectively different with the Stop8 videos, however, is its
appeal to ethos through the California address. By framing the narratives at the start and end with
a call to fellow constituents—and in one instance, “neighbors”—the videos double-down on the
outreach to community. It neutralizes the negative valence of “don’t take our marriage away” by
framing their vote as an affirmative practice, a means to help fellow Californians.
While Baume started shooting the interviews in August 2008, he started releasing the
edited videos in a staggered pattern, starting in late September, coinciding with No on 8 and Yes
on 8’s television ad campaigns. The first television spot was released on September 22. Baume
uploaded an eighty-second compilation of participant intros repeating “Hi California,” stating
their names, and asking the viewer to vote no on the proposition on a new YouTube channel,
Stop8org, on September 27. Three days later, he posted the first solo video featuring one of the
couples, “Jacqui and Britta,” followed by six more, staggered, over the course of three weeks in
October. This meant that there was a new video being released on their YouTube channel
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featuring a gay or lesbian couple’s story every few days as ads were being released on television
and online from the Yes and No campaigns without any gay and lesbian representation. Thus,
while the conception for this project preceded Equality for All’s public ad strategy, Baume
recalls, “I was frustrated that there weren’t any queer people in the ads.” He used his own
project, then, to counter the lack of queer representation in the dominant television campaign.
In our interview, Baume shared his frustrations with a coworker, Glen, as they were both
“talking at work about being dissatisfied with the commercials that were on TV […] frustrated
that they weren’t being more aggressive or responsive in their messaging.” Together, they
decided to make some ads of their own to express the call to action they felt was missing from
the dominant campaign. They reached out to friends and Baume reached out to a mailing list he
had accumulated since his first call for the couples video project in August. In our interview,
Baume read the email he sent to about sixty subscribers:
Hey, I didn’t think I’d be shooting more videos but things have changed. An
opportunity just came up to make some very interesting, very different videos.
Would you like to be in them? We’re gonna be shooting them Saturday, October
18 from noon to four. Tell me your name, your age, and if you can speak Spanish.
The videos we’re gonna be doing this weekend are more aggressive. I’m gonna
need your help to get the message across. We need large groups of people,
especially young people. Write to me at this address if you want to participate.
As the email suggests, this project was mostly the work of Baume, Glen, and whoever they were
able to get through personal and communal outreach. Baume details that it was just him and Glen
working on the scripts: “We literally just sat down at work and wrote out what we wanted people
to say. Made a few tweaks, emailed each other different versions.” They used a consumer, high-8
Sarkissian 57
camera that James, Baume’s partner, had bought on eBay. They shot them all at Baume’s
residence against a green screen, using cue cards. He details, “We would hold up cue cards on
one side of the camera and had each person read the English version. If they spoke Spanish, we
had them read the Spanish version.” They used this shoot to produce four forty-to-seventy-eight
second ads, two in English and another two, mirroring the same content, in Spanish.
The process of producing these grassroots campaign ads reveals not only differences
motivated by content, but more significantly, an alternative approach to form and collaborative
assembly. On the surface, Baume’s primary frustration with the television spots were that “they
were very slow to respond […] to what the other side was saying, so we wanted them to be
more—to debunk what the Yes on 8 side was saying. Ours were specifically trying to attack their
message and attack their credibility.” This was directly reflected in the ad “Lies” (stop8org,
2008i) and its Spanish counterpart, “Mentiras,” when the participants address the opposing
arguments:
Some people want to change the constitution to take away rights.
5

They’re trying to manipulate us with lies.
In text on screen: They’re trying to manipulate us with lies
They say it’ll protect churches from lawsuits, but they won’t.
Their imaginary “lawsuit threat” doesn’t really exist
They say they’ll protect children.
Their phony “threat to education” can’t happen in California
That’s a lie too.
They say they’ll protect marriage and that’s their biggest lie of all. Prop 8 ends

5
For these extended quotes, every new line return represents a different speaker in the ad and italicized text
represents text that appears on screen as the line above it is being spoken.
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marriages.
Prop 8 ends marriages
Why are they doing this? They don’t really want to protect anyone.
What they really want is to write discrimination into our constitution.
Our constitution is fine the way it is.
Don’t fall for the Prop 8 trick.
We don’t need it and we don’t want it.
Here in California, we don’t discriminate against anyone.
Vote no on Prop 8 to protect our rights and our families.
No on Prop 8
Beyond content, though, Baume’s email and their decisions in production—from a call for a
large group to specifically targeting young people and Spanish-speaking participants—convey
more significant differences when compared to the Equality for All campaign. The official No on
8 ads were squarely aimed at middle-aged or older undecided voters, using either interpersonal
scripts for non-queer subjects or traditional voice-over, and devoid of significant inclusion of
non-white demographic appeal. Stop8’s ads, on the other hand, ended up using collective
representations: multiple people speaking one at a time in direct address, culminating with all
participants superimposed in the same frame, like an army of activists, for the final shot of all
four videos (Figures 2.12 and 2.13). This visual tactic echoes the collective sentiment and
messaging in the ads that strikes a more militant tone, a more urgent call-to-arms that is not only
addressed to those undecided on the proposition, but directed towards LGBT and allied voters.

Sarkissian 59

Figure 2.12: “Lies” video from “Stop.org” campaign.

Figure 2.13: “Mentiras” video from “Stop8.org” campaign.
Sarkissian 60
About thirteen seconds into “Together” (stop8org, 2008j), for instance, the script plays
out as follows:
Of course you’re going to vote no. But this year, just voting isn’t enough. You’ve
got to bring your friends.
In California, only half of eligible voters even show up. That means half your
friends are sitting on the sidelines, doing nothing.
They could have a voice, but they need your help.
Start fighting 8 today by telling your friends to vote “no” on 8.
Then on November 4
th
, go to the polls and vote no on 8. Take your friends with
you too. Vote together.
This is our moment to protect the constitution, to stand up for our families and
friends, and to make sure the right to marry won’t be taken away.
Our constitution doesn’t need their changes. It’s fine the way it is.
Join us. Vote no on 8.
[in unison] Together
“Together” is one of the only ads across both TV and other grassroots campaign videos to
directly address and mobilize their base. Nearly all participants in Stop8’s ads register as
demographically young, particularly when compared to the PSA and couples videos and the first
two narrative ads, “Thorons” and “Conversation,” from the televised campaign. While not
marked as either queer or straight, the assemblage of participants in these Stop8 videos are made
up of queer and allied people who responded to Baume’s email. Perhaps most notable, though, is
the inclusion of Latinx participants in all four videos and the two Spanish-language versions,
featuring the same four Spanish-speaking participants. Yes on 8 cut a Spanish-language version
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of their game-changing “Princes” ad and aired it on Spanish-language stations. Not only did it
take No on 8 a considerable amount of time to properly rebut the argument in “Princes” in their
own ads, they only cut an ad and targeted Spanish-language markets on TV about nine days
before the election, noteworthy here considering California’s significant Hispanic constituency.
Sabrina Petrescu, who worked for the No on 8 campaign, confirms in an interview with the
author that there was virtually no concerted outreach to communities of color. In this regard, the
decision to shoot and distribute the Stop8 ads in Spanish were doubly meaningful as a reactive
towards both the rhetorical and outreach inactions of the dominant campaign.
By this time in the campaign, No on 8 was starting to pay attention to the increased
activity of these grassroots ad projects. Baume’s coworker Glen had a friend who worked on the
No on 8 campaign. Baume disclosed to me that Glen would send his friend the videos they were
making, even garnering some cursory feedback from said friend in the No on 8 campaign. The
latter four Stop8 ads were thus cross-posted on the official No on 8’s YouTube channel, an
indication that perhaps the change in leadership for the No on 8 campaign was more receptive to
incorporating or appropriating the creative efforts of the activists on the ground. This created a
communication channel that quickly led to Baume’s role in drafting a revised edit of another
grassroots ad, which then turned into “Internment,” narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, that the
campaign released in the final days before the election.
Baume told me that a different friend of his, Cheshire Isaacs, had made a one-minute
long spot using stock footage and text, set to a blaring audio track, to link Proposition 8 to a
history of discriminatory policies in California (cheshireisaacs 2008). The ad starts with photos
and footage from the civil rights era with white text on a red banner reading, “You wouldn’t vote
for segregation …in 2008.” Next, there are a couple of video clips depicting the Japanese
Sarkissian 62
internment camps with text that reads, “You wouldn’t send Japanese-Americans to internment
camps …in 2008.” A photo of Richard and Mildred Loving follows, with text reading, “You
wouldn’t ban interracial marriage …in 2008.” Then the video cuts to graphics of Prop 8 in the
election guidebook with text on the screen: “Don’t ban same-sex marriage in 2008.” The screen
goes black, followed by only text now: Don’t put yourself on the wrong side of history. Vote no
on hate. Vote no on 8.” Baume claims that someone from the official campaign saw it, liked it,
and wanted to do their version of it. Baume ended being an intermediary and edited a thirty-
second version, using assets from the original that Isaacs had produced and passed on to him.
Baume handed his edited version to the campaign. The No on 8 spot that aired on TV thus used
Isaac’s collected footage from Japanese internment camps and the Loving photo, but also added
images of highlighted California policy text concerning the prohibition of selling lands to
Armenians and outlawing interracial marriages. Samuel L Jackson narrates over these media:
It wasn’t that long ago that discrimination was legal in California. Japanese-
Americans were confined in internment camps. Armenians couldn’t buy a house
in the central valley. Latinos and African-Americans were told who they could
and could not marry. It was a sorry time in our history. Today, the sponsors of
Prop 8 want to eliminate fundamental rights. We have an obligation to pass along
to our children a more tolerant, more decent society. Vote no on Prop 8. It’s unfair
and it’s wrong. (NoOnProp8dotcom, 2008i).
As previously mentioned, this ad was produced and aired on television in the final five days
before the election, along with several other new official ads that finally resorted to using the
term “discrimination” and drawing parallels, however problematic, between the goal of Prop 8
and other historic forms of minority discrimination in California. This change, coupled with the
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dominant campaign cross-posting and featuring several grassroots video ads on their official
YouTube channel, and most notably the direct appropriation of Isaacs’ independently produced
online spot, demonstrates the acknowledgment of the increasing influence of the grassroots video
productions and their messaging, wielding representation and outreach in both form and content.

Homotracker
The most widely seen and tonally innovative non-campaign ads were a trio of riffs on the
popular “I’m a Mac” ads from the mid-2000s, and came from another independent production
effort. Founded in 2006, Homotracker started as a small closed network of LGBT
professionals—from agents, managers, and publicists to writers, directors and others—in the
entertainment industry whose primary function is “the sharing of information among members,
via an online tracking board, as well as assisting and supporting each other's promotion in the
industry” (Homotracker, 2008).

By 2008, their efforts expanded to community outreach,
including a spring and fall social fundraiser benefitting the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center. During
the election, Homotracker assembled a team of more than forty writers, directors, producers,
actors and crew from their professional and personal networks to produce four playful PSA-style
videos to promote voting No on Prop 8. This team took a creative turn with their independent
campaign, using humor, parody, and satire alongside an upbeat and more affirmative tone,
polished production value, and a slick and simple message strategy arguably aimed at a younger,
hipper demographic.
While three of these videos were imitating popular Apple ads, Homotracker produced a
fourth video as an instructional guide on what a “yes” and “no” vote meant. In this video,
Margaret Cho and another woman identified as “Margaret’s neighbor” are engaged in a
Sarkissian 64
conversation about which way to vote if you support same-sex marriage. Played to a cute back-
and-forth, this PSA echoed No on 8’s “Conversation” spot that featured two women talking
about a lesbian family member’s wedding, but instead of confusion over how to feel about same-
sex marriage, Cho’s neighbor is confused about which way to vote if she supports her friend
Matilda’s grandson’s same-sex union. “So, I have to vote no if I’m for gay marriage,” asks Cho’s
neighbor (Homotracker, 2008b). Margaret responds, “I know it’s confusing but here’s the deal.
Prop 8 calls for the banning of gay marriage, so if you believe that Matilda’s grandson or any
person, gay or straight, should have the same fundamental right to marry, then you gotta vote no
on Proposition 8. Got it?” The confusion over what a Yes or No vote meant was a documented
issue for the proposition with one analysis estimating 11% of the electorate voted the wrong way
(Fleischer, 2010). Withholding any explicit arguments, this video assumed opposition to the
proposition and was the only produced spot across all the campaigns to explain and clarify the
logistics and meaning of the Prop 8 vote.
The other three Homotracker videos were a trio of parodies of Apple’s Mac vs. PC ads
from the mid 2000s (Figure 2.14). The original ads featured two white men against an all-white
backdrop, one introducing himself as Mac and the other as PC. The Mac character, usually
dressed in jeans and a tee, is portrayed as young, slim, and hip, while the PC character, often
dressed in drab suits, is portrayed as average-looking, uncool, and bumbling. The two usually
engage in competitive repartee, personifying the brand image and user experience of Macs
versus PCs with Mac always coming out on top. Homotracker emulates these ads by having two
white men represent “Yes” and “No” on Proposition 8. Mirroring the Apple version, No on 8 is
dressed in jeans, a tee that says “No,” and a hoodie, depicted as the younger, cooler option
standing in for fairness and equality. Yes on 8, dressed in a light brown suit with a short tie, is
Sarkissian 65
presented as older with a receding hairline, conjuring stereotypes of a used car salesman. In the
first of these three ads, “No vs Yes” (Homotracker, 2008c), the two characters address their case
to the audience:
No: Hello, I’m “No on Prop 8”
Yes: And I’m “Yes”
No: I maintain the current constitution and give everyone equality under the eyes
of the law.
Yes: And I eliminate rights…but just for certain people, so it’s cool.
No: Right. I’m into fairness and dignity.
Yes: Me too, totally.
No: But Yes, you just said—
Yes: No, just not for everyone. I want to preserve tradition.
No: by putting discrimination into the constitution?
Yes: Yup.
No: Doesn’t sound like the California I know.
Yes: Okay, you know what? Name one thing more important to Californians than
stopping same-sex marriage.
No: Um, the economy, unemployment, health care, the war, the environment?
Yes: Ugh, bo-ring. I’d like to see where all this fairness and dignity is gonna get
you.
No: Yeah, me too. We’re all Californians. We’re all equal. Let’s keep it that.
Make sure, you, your friends, and your family vote No on Prop 8.
Yes: Wh-what?
Sarkissian 66

Figure 2.14: “No vs Yes” video from Homotracker campaign.

Figure 2.15: “Constitution” video from Homotracker campaign.

Figure 2.16: “Family” video from Homotracker campaign.
Sarkissian 67
No: Yeah, it’s the right thing to do buddy.
Yes: That hurts.
The other two videos bring in third parties to emphasize the social and legal ramifications
of the proposition and to refute same-sex marriage’s purported negative effects on family
(Figures 2.15 and 2.16). In “Constitution,” after No and Yes announce themselves to the viewer,
while an attractive woman holding up an open book introduces herself as the California
constitution (Homotracker, 2008d). Winded by her presence, Yes confides in No, “She’s more
beautiful in person…I’m totally going to amend her.” When No tells him that it is not a good
idea, that she’s perfect the way she is, he asserts, “Yeah, she is, but she’d be better with a little
discrimination in her, ‘know what I mean?” A patient Constitution entertains Yes’ initial advance
until the pick-up goes awry:
Yes: What’s up? What are you into?
Constitution: Well, equality, justice. I guess you can say I’m all about giving
everyone a fair shot. What are you into?
Yes: Oh me? You know, just deciding what’s appropriate for everyone else,
government interference in personal life, judgment.
Constitution: (closes the book in her hands, eyes Yes up and down) You should
go play with something other than the state constitution. (walks away)
No: Ouch. (to Constitution) sorry about that. (turns to audience) Leave our
constitution alone. Support marriage equality. Vote No on Prop 8.
Finally, in “Family,” Yes and No are joined by a straight couple—Molly Ringwald and
her husband (Homotracker, 2008e). Yes is wearing a Roman galea on his head and holding a
shield in one hand. When prompted, Yes claims he is protecting the family—the straight
Sarkissian 68
couple—from gays and lesbians getting married. Ringwald interjects, “Actually we’re fine.
Same-sex marriages have been legal here for months and nothing’s happened.” Yes presses on,
“Okay, right. You’re telling me it doesn’t undermine the sanctity of your marriage?” When
Ringwald and her husband respond in the negative, No chimes in, “See? They’re cool. That’s
equality.” Ringwald continues, “I would feel really horrible if two people who loved each other
as much as we do couldn’t get married.” When Yes tries to turn it around and get the couple to
rally with him, a young girl runs across the screen to the straight couple. The husband tells Yes
they can’t join because they are spending the day with their kids and then walk away.
Flabbergasted, Yes calls out to them, “What do you mean your kids? What about family? Where
are some people’s priorities? I’m gonna go get ‘em.” No turns to the audience, “That’s a good
question. Where are people’s priorities? We’re all Californians. We’re all equal. Let’s keep it
that way. Vote no on Prop 8.”
These three videos illustrated striking differences in aesthetics and tonal strategy from the
rest of the official campaign and grassroots ads. The stripped-down look, upbeat tone, and use of
humor to satirize the opponent together achieved a slick and effortless quality. In contrast to the
urgent, alarmist, confrontational, and victimized rhetoric of the other televised and digitally
distributed No on 8 ads, Homotracker effectively removed the negative noise by emulating the
simple, stripped down, all white, neutral aesthetic of the Mac/PC ads. These parodies are
accompanied by an playful, high piano tune. The Homotracker videos used clever and witty
dialogue to add some whimsy to the issue and based their satire on the sometime naïve and
sometimes willful ignorance of Yes to ridicule his position on the ballot measure.
The Homotracker videos offered a mixed bag in terms of LGBT representation and queer
politics. Their narratively scripted scenarios also recall the first two ads of the No on 8 TV
Sarkissian 69
campaign—“Thorons” and “Conversation”—which were attempting to be upbeat and positive
but lacking any gay and lesbian—and intersectional—representation. All four Homotracker ads
are conversation-themed and, whether intentional or not, tellingly follow the focus group and
polling data that informed the message strategy of No on 8 and nearly all LGBT-issue measures
before it. The Homotracker videos feature not only neutral aesthetics, but neutral parties as well,
recalling how focus group participants wanted to hear from “neutral,” not affected, parties when
it came to seeking spokespeople for the political ads. The Homotracker parodies use
personifications of Yes and No arguments, but No is never identified as an “affected” party. We
can extend the campaign’s neutral approach to using all white actors to personify No, Yes,
Constitution, and the stand-in Family These PSAs thus follow the ill-informed approach to gay
and lesbian invisibility and lack of bridging across intersectional communities and
demographics. Perhaps the organization’s professional ties and proximity to the entertainment
industry and its visibility politics aligns Homotracker more with the political consulting firms
who are as concerned over image and optics as LGBT practitioners working in media industries.
Regardless of this de-queered ideology, what these videos successfully accomplish is not
simply a change in tone when compared to other independent and dominant campaign ads, but an
alternative persuasive strategy, shifting the debate to highlight an appeal to ethos. The persuasive
strategy employed in the No on 8 ads, including some of the other grassroots productions, rely to
some extent on appeals to logic and ethos, but overwhelmingly depend on pathos. For instance,
relying on the affective support from family and friends of gays and lesbians or using same-sex
couples narrating their love stories and pleading, “please don’t take our marriage away” exploits
the appeal to emotion. While the Homotracker ads also use an appeal to logic with their
arguments, they largely build their persuasion on an appeal to ethos. The appeal to ethos relies on
Sarkissian 70
building character, believability, likability, and trust with your audience—or attacking these
qualities in an opponent. It aims for an alignment with the values of your audience. The conceit
of the Mac/PC ads and their replication here is built completely on such an appeal to character,
likability, and values. Right from the start, the viewer recognizes that No, in this case, is coded as
more approachable, reasonable, and attractive. Throughout the script, No is also revealed to be
more clever and respectful. From casting and costume alone, this strategy challenges the viewer
and voter’s willingness to associate with Yes, an undesirable proposition.
All three iterations also attempt to align the character No, and thus voting No, with the
shared values the audience holds as Californians. In the first Homotracker spot, No questions
Yes’s eagerness for adding discrimination into the constitution by saying, “That’s not the
California I know.” When Yes asks what’s more important than stopping gay marriage, No lists
off a variety of hot topic election issues—unemployment, health care, war, the environment—to
assert that Californians have more important things to worry about. At the end of this spot, No
instructs the audience, “We’re all Californians. We’re all equal. Let’s keep it that way.” Here, No
is appealing to its audience by establishing common values it shares with them as Californians.
In the other two PSAs, Yes rarely addresses the audience, but No frequently breaks the fourth
wall not only to address the audience but align voting No with the presumed values of the
viewer.
Further. in “Constitution,” the producers use sexual harassment and digital mise en scéne
to further establish distance from Yes’s values. When Yes claims he wants to amend the
constitution (an innuendo for sexual intercourse here), No lets out a surprised and disconcerted
“what? No, I don’t think you should do that.” Later, when the woman representing the state
constitution is telling Yes that she is into fairness and equality, the video cuts to a close-up of No
Sarkissian 71
turning towards the audience and nodding in approval. When Yes is exposing his intent for
government interference and judgment, the video cuts to No shaking his head in annoyed
disapproval. When the constitution rejects Yes and walks away, No calls out, “Sorry about that,”
apologizing on behalf of Yes’s crude advance. In the tag at the end, Yes asks No, “what do she
mean by [I should] play with something [else]?” No retorts, “get over it man,” in a frustrated and
irritated inflection. During these last lines, the rectangle logo, “Vote No on Prop 8” appears in
the center of the screen, separating the two to opposite sides of the screen, establishing distance
from Yes’s slimy values (Figure 2.17). To compare, in the first video, No ends by placing his
hand on a bewildered Yes’s shoulder, saying “it’s the right thing to do, buddy,” as the rectangle
logo appears to the right of both characters (Figure 2.18). In “Family,” Yes has run off after
Molly Ringwald’s family, so No closes out the ad by himself, once again by invoking his fellow
neighbors: “We’re all Californians. We’re all equal. Let’s keep it that way” (Figure 2.19).
This appeal to ethos by a call to a collective California consciousness was also threaded
in Stop8’s eight videos featuring gay and lesbian couples. All the videos featured the couples
addressing the camera with, “Hi California” near the beginning and ended with “We’re counting
on you” to illustrate some sense of camaraderie and trust. Stop8’s call-to-action ads, shot after
the release of Homotracker’s videos, also incorporate this appeal to Californians. In “Lies,” for
instance, the script goes, “Don’t fall for the Prop 8 trick. We don’t need it and we don’t want it.
Here in California, we don’t discriminate against anyone.” The strategic use of “we” goes
lengths in establishing this appeal to ethos. The Homotracker spots effectively transform that into
their entire visual and rhetorical strategy.
The trio of Homotracker ads were the most widely seen, going by YouTube views, and
were enough of a hit with the dominant campaign that they edited down the “Constitution” spot
Sarkissian 72
Figure 2.17: Ending shot of “Constitution” video from Homotracker campaign, illustrating the
distancing of “No” from “Yes” using digital banner.

Figure 2.18: Ending shot of “No vs Yes” video from Homotracker campaign, contrasting the
distance displayed in “Constitution” video above.

Figure 2.19: Ending shot of “Family” video from Homotracker campaign for comparison.
Sarkissian 73
to thirty seconds and paid to air it in a few markets two days before the election. In “The Prop 8
Report,” David Fleischer’s case study autopsy of the No on 8 campaign documents that the
campaign paid $97,308 to run the thirty second edited spot “on a small scale in the final weekend
on late night TV in LA, San Francisco, San Diego, and Sacramento” (Fleischer, 2010). While
this demonstrates the biggest mainstream success for any of the independent or grassroots
efforts, the ad buy was still relatively small considering No on 8 spent a total of $6.8 million in
airtime during that last week of the campaign alone. On YouTube, Homotracker uploaded all
four of their videos on October 10
th
, while No on 8’s YouTube channel added them four days
later on October 14
th
—with their own edited thirty second “Constitution” ad uploaded on
October 28
th
. Across both channels, the five videos have garnered over 882,000 views to date,
the vast majority of which came from the election timeframe in 2008. To compare, the four call-
to-action Stop8 spots, also featured on No on 8 and Stop8’s own YouTube channels, together
earned just over 6,000 total views. This speaks less to the impact of the different campaigns and
more to the organizational and networked resources and affiliations that differentiate varying
levels of independent video projects, from the amateur and mom-and-pop operations to the more
professional and organizationally brokered efforts, all of which still originate and operate outside
the dominant campaign.

Courage Campaign
This chapter’s opening video, “Gender Auditors,” was one of two videos produced or
distributed by Courage Campaign, a California-based non-profit organization that advocates for
progressive change. Working independently from the official No on 8 campaign, Courage
Campaign took a bolder and more confrontational approach in the content they greenlit to sway
Sarkissian 74
voters against the proposition. Under the direction of Rick Jacobs, its Issues Committee Chair,
Courage Campaign released “Gender Auditors” on October 7
th
, 2008 on YouTube and to its
roughly 100,000 member listserv. In a press release, Courage writes, “It’s up to us to spread the
word to our friends, family, and neighbors that Prop 8 is a fundamental invasion of our privacy.
But we’re going to do it with a wink and a smile. Watch “Gender Auditors”—our satirical
new YouTube video—and pledge to vote “No on 8” today” (Courage Campaign, 2008b).
Courage used this video with its distinct libertarian angle and satirical tone as an alternative to
the quieter Equality for All campaign on television up to that point in time, to rally the base,
much like Stop8’s call-to-action spots did.
The other ad, pushed by Courage Campaign, was “Home Invasion,” created by Dante and
David Atkins, which also went on to be the only independently paid ad on the No side to air on
television. Unlike Homotracker’s “Constitution” ad, which Equality for All paid to air in a few
markets on TV, “Home Invasion” was produced in partnership with Courage, and it was Courage
Campaign that, due to an anonymous organization donor, bought air time in the last two days of
the campaign (Atkins, personal communication, March 30, 2018). In “Home Invasion,” two men
knock on the door of an unsuspecting lesbian couple and announce themselves as from the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Courage Campaign, 2008c). As they assert, “we’re
here to take away your rights,” they step into the house and take the wedding bands off the
couple’s hands (Figure 2.20). The screen freezes as text appears and is narrated by a female
announcer: “Fact. Proposition 8 would take away the legal rights of thousands of same-sex
couples. Fact. Members of the Mormon Church have given over $20 million to pass Proposition
8” (Figure 2.21). The two men proceed to raid the house, looking through their bags, books,
jewelry, and drawers until one of them finds their marriage license. One of the women exclaims,
Sarkissian 75

Figure 2.20: Mormons enter couple’s home in “Home Invasion” video from Courage Campaign.

Figure 2.21: Freeze frame with voice-over in “Home Invasion” video from Courage Campaign.

Figure 2.22: Mormon invaders tearing couple’s marriage license in “Home Invasion.”
Sarkissian 76
“Hey, wait, we have rights.” The men retort, “not if we can help it,” as they rip the piece of paper
(Figure 2.22). They are seen walking out of the house in conversation: “That was too easy. Yeah,
what should we ban next?” The announcer concludes: “Say No to a Church taking over your
government. Vote No on Proposition 8.”
“Home Invasion” was independently conceived by brothers Dante and David Atkins,
both straight allies, who were veterans of early netroots activism, dating back to Howard Dean’s
2004 campaign. In an interview, David explained to me, “Through our activism, trying to pull
the Democratic party to the left, we were in touch and involved with a large number of activists
across California, among them being the folks at Courage Campaign. We were all in the same
network of folks around southern California—some gay, some straight” (personal
communication, March 30, 2018). David revealed that they were watching what was going on
with Prop 8 and Equality California—one of the affiliate organizations that made up Equality for
All—and other organizations doing work in this area. Much like the previous content producers,
David expressed their frustration before doing something about it:
As has always been the case in the center left, there tends to be a less aggressive
and pugilistic ways of combating the opposition forces. At the time [of Prop 8],
what that meant was a trepidation about showing gay couples on camera for
advertising and a trepidation about naming the opponent. […] So it was
frustrating to a lot of us that there were no gay couples and there were no pictures
of a villain. Almost instinctively, folks at EQCA and others were pushing this sort
of “well, think of this if it were your relationship” or “think about what it feels
like for you”—this sort of very concept-driven [approach]. […] you didn’t have
Sarkissian 77
protagonists in your messaging and you didn’t have villains in your messaging.
And a good story needs a protagonist and a villain.
He claimed that the use of narrative in political discourse, particularly among activists looking
for different approaches, was on the rise at this time, and that this was missing from the No on 8
campaign. His critique of the concept-driven appeal using a heterosexual subjectivity was
corroborated by Equality California’s “Let California Ring” campaign that was an effort to
improve attitudes on same-sex marriage in a case-study in Santa Barbara. “Let California Ring”
produced and used a video, “Garden Wedding,” featuring a heterosexual bride who keeps
running into roadblocks on her wedding day and physically can’t make it down the aisle to her
groom as text appears across the screen: “what if you couldn’t marry the one you love”
(PoliticalRealm, 2008). Equality California made a big ad buy in August—before the official
Prop 8 ads started airing in late September—and aired this ad in both English and Spanish in
targeted markets, thus demonstrating their continued reliance on this rhetoric during the 2008
campaign (Lightbox Collaborative, n.d.).
Atkins discussed how he and his brother were thinking about how they might be able to
do something different. “There wasn’t a whole lot of money and there wasn’t a whole lot of
organizing around something different,” he explained to me, “but we thought maybe we could
bootstrap something else.” Coming from two Classics bachelor’s degrees, Atkins revealed, “We
had never storyboarded. We had never written any fiction. All we had done was write and rant
politically online.” This fell right in line with the netroots activist experience they had
accumulated, “where you had a ton of people with no real prior experience in any of this, who
were just saying you can’t do worse than the people in charge are doing.” Based on his brother’s
Sarkissian 78
initial idea, they started thinking about how they might be able to do something different with a
narrative formula and came up with the following:
this idea of having a gay couple—admittedly a lesbian couple seemed like a more
relatable choice, one that would be less intimidating to people at the time—and
naming the Mormon Church specifically as a major donor and as the major funder
and talking about this as an outside-influenced campaign.
It had been widely reported, during and after the election, that financial contributions from
Mormons and the Mormon Church made up half or more of the $40 million raised by Yes on 8
(Karger, 2009; Schoofs, 2008). Atkins recalls thinking that this was something someone with
connections can do, and after a few days of frustration over what such an ad would look like, he
says, “I was like wait, we’re not entirely powerless. Let’s maybe talk to some people who have
money to maybe turn it into a web ad or something.” They reached out to their contacts at
Courage Campaign, who were eager about this alternative narrative approach, and soon enough
were getting ready to shoot the ad.
Atkins relied on personal connections with both Courage Campaign and filmmakers,
including Gary Abramson, who came on board to direct the ad, to put this into production. They
shot it during the height of the campaign in mid-October. Rick Jacobs, founding chair of
Courage Campaign, secured the filming location. Director Abramson procured all the actors who
worked for free. Atkins projects costs around $500—for lighting and camera-related
equipment—which was shared among all interested parties. “Everything else fell together
entirely volunteer, pro-bono,” Atkins remembers, “it took about half a day [to shoot]. There were
no conflicts. Everyone was excited to be there.” Abramson edited the ad and Courage Campaign
uploaded the video on their official YouTube channel on October 31, 2008, four days before
Sarkissian 79
election day. Per Courage, the video made it onto Daily Kos, AmericaBlog, Calitics, Wonkette,
and several other blogs. Atkins reveals that an organization donor had given money to Courage
Campaign at the last minute to air the ad on television. In an email and press release, Courage
Campaign announced that the ad would air on CNN, MSNBC, and Comedy Central in select
markets on election day as a final get-out-the-vote play (Atkins, 2008). In his Prop 8 report,
David Fleischer estimates that the ad buy for “Home Invasion” was $13,000, which means it
only ran a few times on the air.
“Without Courage this would never have happened,” explains Atkins. Indeed, the
significant lesson here is what institutional resources affords. While Dante and David’s
motivations mirrored Robin Tyler’s and Matt Baume’s, if it weren’t for their networked ties to
Courage, the ad would not have been produced and distributed. Given his netroots and 2004
campaign activism experience, Atkins is forthright in that this needed organizational capacity
and affiliates to give it credibility, and official channel someone could watch so, he expresses in
humility, it wouldn’t just come out of David and Dante’s page. “There were a number of
fledgling organizations that were coming up on the political spectrum on the left,” Atkins
explicates, “[but] none of them were heavily resourced […] and it took an organization like
Courage with the willingness to be, well, courageous about taking a different approach.” He
claims no one on the map was willing to do it and, further, he asserts that part of it wasn’t just
getting the resources to make the ad:
I don’t want to sound too confrontational about this. It wasn’t just punching at the
Mormon Church. It was also a direct message to our coalition partners about what
is possible and the strategies that could have been used throughout the entire
campaign […] A lot of us were convinced that had that approach been taken a
Sarkissian 80
month before then we would have won. So yeah, it was not only a shot at the
Mormon Church, but—I wouldn’t call it a punch at—constructive criticism of the
discourse at the time (personal communication, March 30, 2018).
This is ultimately the case that all these independent video campaigns and ads made through both
their form and content
By using a distinctly different argument and approach than the official No on 8 message,
“Gender Auditors” and “Home Invasion” together made successful interventions into the
discourse and representation about the proposition not only in terms of reaching potential voters
but more so addressing its base and queer publics at large. While not as polished as official ads,
these minute-long videos were well produced enough to pass as formidable spots, thus opening
up the range of representation and rhetoric that the No on 8 campaign never addressed.
6
Only
one No on 8 ad—“Lies,” aired briefly—explicitly took the libertarian “keep government out of
our lives” line of reasoning and none of the television spots ever mentioned the influence of the
Mormon Church on Proposition 8, though it was well covered in the press. While these
arguments were common on the ground, No on 8 arguably never entertained them because they
were not found to work with the small percentage of undecided voters their campaign narrowly
targeted based on focus groups. Focusing on government and religious interference—two
institutions that have long histories of opposition to LGBT rights—these Courage Campaign
videos sought to link the debates around Prop 8 with more recognizable discourses in histories of
anti-LGBT organizing and experiences.

6
Courage Campaign is estimated to have spent $13,000 to air this on cable TV on the last day before the election.
Fleischer estimates that at that rate, the ad would have only aired a few times. The minute-long video, however,
spread wide enough to elicit a strong statement from ProtectMarriage.com (official Yes on 8 campaign) denouncing
the ad as religious bigotry and demanding TV stations pull it from airing. There are no details if and where on cable
the ad may have aired.
Sarkissian 81
Geared more towards their base of supporters than targeting conservative and undecided
voters, these two videos used satire and an explicit appeal to gay, lesbian, and supportive
audiences to bring attention to the proposition and the larger discourse of oppression. In “Home
Invasion,” they used absurdist scenarios to personify the role the LDS Church played in the
election. While some of the No on 8 ads used an alarmist tone, these videos went a step further,
using satire to represent Prop 8 proponents as bigoted and hostile. The brash representation of the
Church provoked backlash from Yes on 8, but was clearly used to drum up support across the No
camp as the website for the videos prompted viewers to share the ad and sign a pledge. In his
autoposy report on the proposition, Fleischer suggests that both Courage videos were
predominantly aimed to bring up their base. “Home Invasion” was indeed the only instance of
using a gay or lesbian couple as imagined narrative subjects to illustrate the effects of the
proposition on those who it would directly affect. In line with Matt Baume’s explicit plea to get
supporters of same-sex marriage to spread the word and bring their friends to vote, these videos
and their attached pledge campaign implicitly direct their base to boost awareness of the Prop 8
vote specifically and discourse around the issue of LGBT rights more generally. By using
creatively and ideologically different approaches to representing the issue and its affected
parties, the Courage Campaign videos demonstrate the possibilities that independent content
creators hold not only in expanding the parameters of the political debate, but using
representational address to include and mobilize a wider segment of the public, and in this case,
LGBT publics.

Sarkissian 82
Takeaways
The key takeaways from this concentrated analysis on grassroots Prop 8 media online are
manifold. First, whether preemptive or reactive, all four creative forces behind the many
campaigns and videos were expressing frustration not just with the proposition, but more
specifically with the way No on 8 would be or was running their operation. As a result, all these
independently produced projects, whether they ended up remaining an independent contribution
or being absorbed by No on 8 were in some way in conversation with the dominant campaign.
Stop the Hate’s videos, Stop8’s couples series, and the Atkins brothers’ “Home Invasion” ad for
Courage Campaign remained independent with widely varying levels of success and visibility,
but all were conceived or released in relation to or in-step with the official campaign strategy.
Robin Tyler and David Atkins were vocal in their motivations to go “around” the traditional
consultant-run and increasingly institutionalized methods of the larger and more dominant LGBT
advocacy organizations. While Matt Baume did not conceive of the couples video series in direct
anticipation of No on 8’s strict message, he staggered the release of these videos—each featuring
a gay or lesbian couple—to coincide with the first couple phases of the official No on 8
campaign ads on television from late September through mid-October. Baume’s call-to-action
series and the Homotracker videos managed to grab No on 8’s attention and make it onto their
official YouTube channel, showing the campaign’s increased attention to alternative messaging
as the election wore on. This point was all too clear when in the last days of the election, No on 8
opted to appropriate an amateur-produced video into an official campaign ad, “Internment,”
using Baume’s thirty-second model as well as when they decided to spend some air time on an
edited version of Homotracker’s “Constitution” ad.
Sarkissian 83
Second, the particular ways these grassroots organizers used their videos to make a
point—in both form and content—illustrated common critiques of the Equality for All campaign,
including a lack of LGBT visibility, a lack of outreach to communities of color, and a lack of
collaboration with the grassroots efforts or activists who strayed from the consultant-informed
messaging rhetoric. Virtually everyone who produced independent videos for Prop 8 expressed
frustrations with the lack of LGBT people in the entire No on 8 campaign. To combat this, Stop
the Hate and Stop8 produced videos with real-life gay and lesbian couples directly addressing the
audience and speaking about their relationships. Baume’s call-to-action videos came together
with outreach to and featuring queer people in their ads. David and Dante Atkins were the only
ones to use a narrative strategy, along with an explicitly visible lesbian couple as subjects and
protagonists.
The No on 8 campaign also notoriously ignored outreach to communities of color. Stop
the Hate and Baume’s work with Stop8 most forcefully brought this point home as they both shot
and cut spots in Spanish and utilized queer participants of color in their projects. Baume’s work
on the “Internment” ad that made it to the campaign explicitly called upon California’s history of
racial and ethnic discrimination. Finally, No on 8 barely entertained any messaging that deviated
from their supposedly focus-group-proof strategy, excluding different perspectives and
demographics—libertarians, religious communities—that would have diversified the reach of
their message.
That work was thus taken up by the grassroots efforts described in this chapter. Third,
then, was the way they wielded those critiques within alternative modes of campaign narratives.
The videos produced by these independent content creators, for instance, offered up a range of
different genres from the typical campaign ad. Stop the Hate’s celebrity-style PSA most closely
Sarkissian 84
resembled a traditionalist approach, but overall the campaigns covered genres from collective
call-to-action (Stop8), satire (Courage Campaign, Homotracker), and brash agit-prop (Courage
Campaign) to docu-narratives (Stop8) and fictional narrative (Courage Campaign).
Fourth, networks and resources play a large role in the gradations of visibility and
support for grassroots efforts. The work to independently make and distribute videos online
against the proposition, along with many other online videos and parodies for the national
election, illustrated the early possibilities of grassroots video publics. It also showed how these
campaigns are still distinguishable by how they are made and who is distributing them. For
instance, based on the thirty-six grassroots videos from these four independent organizer-
producers, there emerged differences along aesthetics and networked visibility. Thus, I
categorize productions as amateur, resourceful, or professional. Most of the videos described and
analyzed in this chapter would fall under resourceful because the producers and/or crew have
various levels of video experience, but a large volume of Prop 8 videos on YouTube not
discussed in this chapter would qualify as amateur productions. These are solo or mom-and-pop-
style produced content, including videos that may not require much editing or even using a
camera other than the one on your laptop.
The fact that Stop8’s Matt Baume undertook the first project on interviewing same-sex
couples nearly on his own, verged on amateur, but he and his partner had gone to film school,
owned proper cameras, and had very capable editing skills. In the following call-to-action
videos, he used a green screen too. These features would categorize Baume and his Stop8 work
more squarely as resourceful. This type of production also entails relying on various networks
for material or labor. In Baume’s case, he made use of his positions in and access to blog sites to
post and email a call for participants. Making use of your networks and calling on community to
Sarkissian 85
build your project make it resourceful. The same goes for Robin Tyler’s work on Stop the Hate.
Tyler made use of her connections to POWER UP to piggyback on their production resources,
and the Feminist Majority, which had access to a lot of celebrities already assembling for a
different PSA shoot. David and Dante’s “Home Invasion” ad is another great example of
utilizing their netroots networks and connections to fellow progressive Democrats, including
leaders of Courage Campaign, to turn their idea into a reality.
Homotracker best represents the professional category of independent production, which
also toes a line between grassroots and corporate. Homotracker itself is a network of industry
professionals, so their efforts more easily draw upon their professional resources. They need not
rely only on personal networks because projects in this category of production are
organizationally brokered. They can use the privileges and protections that an established
organization offers, including access to other professional and established organizations. In this
way, both Courage Campaign and, to some extent, POWER UP also lent Stop the Hate and
“Home Invasion” various levels of organizational support. David Atkins is forthright in his
admission of how essential Courage Campaign—with a YouTube page people would watch
content on and a donor base who would tune into their message—was to the successful
distribution of their video. This goes to show how these different gradations of independent and
grassroots production are also fluid.
Finally, the ultimate goal of this chapter is to bring these videos and grassroots
campaigns not only within a media history of Prop 8 but to a better understanding of early video
and media participation that played an integral role in mainstreaming LGBT politics and
expanding queer digital publics. The reason why this chapter focuses on these grassroots and
independent campaigns, more so than the hundreds of other YouTube videos on Proposition 8, is
Sarkissian 86
their basis in mostly community and networked practice. Here, I do not mean networked online
in the phase of distribution, but rather production—using resources at their disposal, calling upon
friends and allies, posting calls on blogs as opposed to the minimalist effort of either vlog style
videos or filmed live events. There is an affective quality in collaboration whose success is not
predicated on view counts, “going viral,” or measurable effects (like moving voter disposition).
The goal here is antithetical to arguments about whether these videos changed people’s minds as
the more productive effects of these projects were actually shoring up and strengthening not just
the voter base for same-sex marriage support, but participation in digital publics at large.
David Fleischer, in his Prop 8 Report, remarks on the prospects of “Home Invasion’s”
minimal airtime on television: “In any event, there’s no evidence that the Courage Campaign ads
had any impact on the election results” (Fleischer, 2010). However, I argue they did have an
effect on expanding the scope, publics, and range of tactics for participation in LGBT politics,
and instrumental in kicking off the mainstreaming of marriage and other LGBT rights across
social media in the coming years. David Atkins acknowledges that even with all the resources
Campaign Courage had that other organizations did not, “Courage Campaign was not then what
it is now. And this ad helped make it what it is now.” Courage was a broad progressive
organization that doubled down on same-sex marriage as one of its key issues during and after
Prop 8. They rode the tide of notoriety after Mormon backlash for their “Home Invasion” ad and
used it to put themselves on the map with LGBT and marriage rights. In response to briefs filed
to the state Supreme Court a couple months after Prop 8 to annul the 18,000+ marriages
performed in 2008, Courage produced and released, “Fidelity: Don’t Divorce,” a music video-
style photo slideshow, showing images of married same-sex couples, set to Regina Specktor’s
“Fidelity” on February 5, 2009. The video amassed a million view on YouTube and Vimeo
Sarkissian 87
combined and was planned in coordination with Courage’s letter to the California Supreme
Court. Accompanying the video, on Vimeo, Courage urged, “Watch ‘Fidelity’ and sign our letter
to the state Supreme Court before they hear oral arguments in the case on March 5” (Courage
Campaign, 2009).
Courage’s involvement in “Home Invasion” and the Prop 8 fight more generally, then
already started demonstrating the widening reach and effects of their grassroots activism. In this
case, it also illustrated how these digital publics had already started expanding to include non-
queer participants in ways that foreshadowed mainstream rallying efforts around marriage and
LGBT rights, particularly through video campaigns like It Gets Better (discussed in Chapter 4)
and the widespread red equal sign and rainbow filter profile pictures (discussed in the
Conclusion).

Sarkissian 88
Chapter 3: A Perfect Storm

“Everyone should do it and do a terrible one, with their iPhones, and post it.”
–Mike Rose (personal communication, January 25, 2018)

On April 17, 2009, Katharine Heller, a straight, cisgender white actress from New York
posted “Response to NOM’s Gathering Storm” (HappyCousin, 2009)
7
, a video she had shot with
friends and improv colleagues just a day or so prior, on YouTube. The video starts with a
medium shot of a white woman (Lynne Rosenberg) in front of a gloomy backdrop accompanied
by a slow, somber, and crackly piano score as she says, “There is a rainbow forming” (Figure
3.1). The video cuts to Katharine Heller who repeats with loud emphasis, “A RAINBOW.” Back
to Rosenberg, she adds, “The colors are colorful and the arches are archeful.” “And I am afraid,”
adds a black man (Charles Wood) in the next frame. The video then cuts to a black woman (Tai
Verley) who tells us she is a scientist and that “I am forced to believe in science.” Back to Heller,
who goes off on a rant: “I’m a Massachusetts single mother forced to watch her son go to a
dilapidated high school with history books from 1973 while we wage two never-ending deadly
wars as we spiral into a massive recession [pause, then with emphasis] because of gay
marriage.” A white man (John Knefel) appears next, declaring, “I’m barely straight.” Cut to an
Asian woman (Sonya Rhee) proclaiming, “I’m Asian.” After these ambiguous introductions,
these subjects (along with a heavily accented Tony Rodriguez) deliver deadpan lines in
successive shots:
Rosenberg: The gays took my lunch money.
Rodriguez: They’re going to take away my child.

7
All videos referenced in this chapter can be found on curated YouTube playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F40LRG9wDWY&list=PL8Huio5K9Wasosq6WBWR_fVE_1dJ8Sbdw
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Figure 3.1: Rosenberg in GS21, “Response to NOM’s Gathering Storm.”

Figure 3.2: Wood, center, delivering his line, “They’re going to turn my father gay” in GS21,
“Response to NOM’s Gathering Storm.”

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Rhee: They’re taking away my Asian-ninity.
Knefel: I didn’t go to camp to become not-gay just to become gay again.
Wood: They’re going to turn my father gay. (Figure 3.2)
Rosenberg: They are shape shifters.
Rodriguez: They want to end baseball.
Verley: They’re gonna turn tampons into rocket ships.
Rodriguez: They’re going to eat baby Jesus.
Knefel: What’s next? Interracial marriage?
In that last shot, Heller and Wood are standing behind Knefel, and when Heller steps forward
and whispers in Knefel’s ear—presumably notifying him that interracial marriage is already
legal—his eyes expand in surprised disbelief. As it cuts to the next shot, the score turns upbeat
and Heller claims, “Luckily, there’s hope. A coalition of multicultural and multi-ethnic people of
all races, creeds, and colors are coming together to form a veritable shitstorm of fear mongering.
Won’t you join us?” Finally, all the subjects awkwardly cramp the medium shot in a random
visual formation as Wood, center, tells the audience, “Together, we can stop this.”
This video, produced by Heller and her friend Calen Lang, was one of many satirical
video remixes and parodies that proliferated online in April of 2009 following the release of
National Organization for Marriage’s (NOM) sixty-second anti-gay marriage ad. Founded in
2007, National Organization for Marriage is a non-profit political organization and lobbying
group, operating, per their website, “in response to the growing need for an organized opposition
to same-sex marriage in state legislatures” (NOM, n.d.). Emboldened by the defeat of same-sex
marriage in California in the 2008 election, to which NOM contributed financially, the
organization set its sights on several states that had just legalized or were entertaining ballot
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measures to (re)define legal marriage as only between a man and a woman. NOM spent $1.5
million to air a new television campaign ad across several states, including New York, New
Jersey, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Iowa (Montopoli, 2009; Smith, 2009). Released on
April 7, 2009, the ad, titled “A Gathering Storm” (Human Rights Campaign, 2009), featured
several people telling the audience how same-sex marriage affects their lives as straight citizens
and how same-sex marriage would take away their freedoms. As the ad was also posted online
through YouTube, it engendered immediate backlash and ridicule online and eventually on cable
news and TV shows due to the unintentionally comedic storm metaphor and the preposterous
accusations of damage same-sex marriage caused straight people. While the ad featured fine
print, deatiling “the stories these actors are telling are based on real incidents,” it caught even
more attention from opponents when the Human Rights Campaign released acquired footage of
the audition outtakes for the actors playing the part of affected parties and reportedly stumbling
on their lines (Terkel, 2009; Wolfson, 2009). The user response was swift and the ad’s legacy
was ultimately predicated not on its intended message but the widespread parody phenomenon
that followed.
Dozens of satirical remixes and parodies appeared immediately following “A Gathering
Storm,” and here I argue that they served an integral function at a key moment in the mainstream
spread of LGBT rights discourse online and the proliferation of queer digital media publics. The
video responses to “A Gathering Storm” rode the wave of online grassroots political satire
starting in the 2004 election and contributed to the rising tide of the video meme phenomenon of
the late 2000s. It also brought a uniquely queer and campy critique, reminiscent of the humor and
play in gay, lesbian feminist, and AIDS activism of decades past. With their astute
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deconstruction of racist, homophobic, and ideologically bating tropes in “A Gathering Storm,”
the remixes and parodies brought an analytic flair to LGBT video activism.
To analyze the “Gathering Storm” responses, I have collected a data set of thirty videos
through periodical YouTube searches, convenient and snowball sampling (on YouTube), links to
videos in online posts and articles, and personal bookmarked archives. The videos gathered
illustrate a range of formats and styles, including marked-up and remixed version of the ad,
scripted animations, vlog-style impersonations, and group collaborations parodying the scale of
production. They represent a sample of videos that were still online during the time of research
from 2017 and 2018, eight years after they were initially uploaded. Searching for web and
YouTube pages on the Internet’s Archive—through Way Back Machine—for instance, reveals
entries listed in “related videos” that no longer exist online, indicating more entries than covered
in this chapter. Here, I analyze common strategies in satire and parody, and investigate the mode
of collective production around these videos. To perform this task, then, I employ a textual
analysis of the thirty videos, though focusing more on the ten collaborative parody productions,
accompanied by five interviews with select producers and participants in these videos.
In the first section of the chapter, I make a case for why “A Gathering Storm” was a ripe
and productive text for parody based on a growing impulse online to do this kind of political
satire. Here, I utilize Limor Shifman’s mapping of the features and functions of video memes to
read “A Gathering Storm” as a flash meme, a spurt of video productions on a particular topic
released digitally in a short time frame. I also argue that a camp reading of “A Gathering Storm”
is essential to its resonance with queer and mimetic imitation. In the next section, I walk through
several of the tropes that emerge across the videos, demonstrating the analytic acumen of their
collective intersectional deconstruction. Focusing most on the group-based original parody
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productions, I argue that collective organizing and performative style illustrate the social and
cultural functions of the overall phenomenon, tying the impulse for quick and dirty digital
production to historical uses of camp and theater in queer and LGBT activism.

Cause for Parody; Parody for a Cause
The original ad is set in an ambiguous digital backdrop resembling a field with dark
clouds ruminating in the background along with occasional strikes of lightning (Figure 3.3).
While each shot focuses on one speaker, several sequences feature the other characters digitally
superimposed in the background, arranged in different “floating” formations behind the speaker
(Figure 3.4). The ad starts with a white woman announcing, “There’s a storm gathering.” A
white man continues, “the clouds are dark and the winds are strong.” “And I am afraid,”
exclaims a black woman. Next, a black man argues, “Some who advocate for same-sex marriage
take the issue far beyond same-sex couples.” “They want to bring the issue into my life,” follows
a gray-haired white man. Another white woman asserts, “My freedom will be taken away.” More
white actors follow to recite purported evidence for the changes they fear, each of the following
lines delivered by a different person:
I am a California doctor who must choose between my faith and my job.
I am part of a New Jersey church group punished by the government because we
can’t support same-sex marriage.
I am a Massachusetts parent helplessly watching public schools teach my son that
gay marriage is okay.
But some who advocate for same-sex marriage have not been content with same-
sex couples living as they wish.
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Figure 3.3: Opening shot of original “A Gathering Storm” ad from NOM.

Figure 3.4: Example of lightning and background figures in original “A Gathering Storm” ad.

Figure 3.5: Closing shot of “A Gathering Storm” ad featuring Damon Owens.
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Those advocates want to change the way I live.
A white teenage girl then expresses somberly that she will have no choice. A Latino man with a
noticeable accent re-emphasizes, “the storm is coming.” Then the dark clouds clear as another
black man, identified in text as Damon Owens from the National Organization for Marriage,
appears to announce that there is hope (Figure 3.5). As the music also shifts to an uplifting tune,
Owens reveals, “A rainbow coalition of people of every creed and color are coming together in
love to protect marriage. Visit nation for marriage dot org. Join us.”
The targeted user-generated responses to “A Gathering Storm” represented the
confluence of the rising tide of political satire, parody, and humor in online video content, and
cause-oriented LGBT activism in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Much of the
scholarship on political comedy and satire up until this time had focused on the growing
popularity of comedy news programs in the post-network era in television. Satire TV (2009), for
instance assembles a host of articles on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report,
and other cable-era comedies like South Park that offer direct commentary on state politics
through biting satire and parody (Gray et al., 2009). Yet, the case for the spread of political
humor and parody video to the post-cable platforms of YouTube and online networks was
already under way, coalescing to the explosion of amateur, grassroots, and ambiguously
professional videos online marking 2008 as the first “YouTube election.”
Online grassroots activism—and what also became termed as the netroots movement—
had a great deal of traction during Howard Dean’s 2004 Presidential primary campaign and the
rising popularity of online political parody can most directly be traced to the wild success of Jib
Jab’s pre-YouTube flash-animated video sensation, “This Land” (Jenkins, 2008; Atkins personal
communication, March 30, 2018). This video, which appropriated Woody Guthrie’s “This Land
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is Your Land” to lampoon then-presidential candidates George Bush, Jon Kerry, and their
campaigns, was posted online and subsequently picked up by traditional news outlets that
ballooned its reach to an estimated 10 million viewers in its first month (Baumgartner, 2007;
Meyer, 2014). The impulse for online, grassroots parody continued with the 2006 U.S. midterm
elections when two different groups produced spoofs of the Mac/PC ads with Republicans and
Democrats standing in for the consumer/voter’s choices. SmallMediaXL produced four videos,
while another series written and produced by John T. Kramer released twelve videos (Kramer,
2006; Jenkins 2008). With the rise of YouTube, we also saw the two phenomenon—cable
comedy and amateur videos—intermix online. Gray et al. (2009), for instance, discuss the
importance of the clip of Colbert’s roast at the 2006 White House Correspondence Association
Dinner spreading rapidly as satire’s ability “to travel far beyond the television set almost
instantaneously” (p. 4). Similarly, Jenkins (2008) recalls CNN’s 2007 Democratic
CNN/YouTube debate featuring a video-submitted question from a Snowman on global warming
as a key moment for the function of parody as political rhetoric and YouTube as a site of civic
discourse (p. 272).
All thirty of the satirical videos I analyze use some combination of parody or remix of the
original “Gathering Storm” ad and all but two of them rely heavily on humor. Of the two humor
holdouts, one was a voice-over rant accompanied by random imagery and the other was a sincere
and direct PSA response to “A Gathering Storm,” but which also imitated the green-screen
backdrop of the original ad, replacing the stormy background with a sunny horizon. As Gray et
al. expound, “humor reveals a form that is always quintessentially about that which it seems to
be an escape from, and hence that is always already analytical, critical, and rational, albeit to
varying degrees” (p. 8). Humor and comedy become an immediate impulse, then to work
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through complicated and more negative feelings like anger and frustration, especially in the face
of something like “A Gathering Storm.” This is reflected in the quick instincts of the creators for
some of the parodies. In an interview, gay, Mexican comedian Mike Rose, for instance, recalled
to me that upon seeing the original ad online for the first time, he immediately sent the link to his
friend and fellow comedy writer Liz Feldman. “I sent some parody lines like making fun of,
mocking what they were saying,” he told me, “and she was doing it back and forth, and we were
like ‘we should do a video,’ and this happened within five minutes.” He later adds, “There
wasn’t a lot of thought other than just seeing it and knowing exactly how to treat it” (personal
communication, January 25, 2018). Katharine Heller, who created the parody video that opened
this chapter, validated this instinct when she said, “I was like ‘this needs to be parodied
immediately.’ And I remember saying to my friend, Calen Lang, who is my co-producer on that,
this is going to be parodied within 24 hours. We have a day, let’s do this” (personal
communication, February 2, 2018). It was not just parody, but the widespread resort to satire that
collectively shaped this remix and parody movement.
As Gray et al. explain, “Satire’s calling card is the ability to produce social scorn or
damning indictment through playful means and, in the process, transform the aggressive act of
ridicule into the more socially acceptable act of rendering something ridiculous” (p. 12-13). This
sentiment was reflected in all my interviews with video creators and participants, explicitly
labeling their very first impressions of the ad as absurd and ridiculous. Straight-identified Victor
Oliveira, who produced his own parody of “A Gathering Storm” as part of a larger thesis project
on comedy news, said he was thrown back when he saw the original: “I found the absurdity of
how small-minded this way of thinking was and when you watch my version of the commercial
parody, I didn’t change much” (personal communication, January 22, 2018). Queer activist in
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post-Prop 8 Los Angeles, Teresa Wang thought it was ridiculous: “I mean there were a lot of
ridiculous things at the time, but this one, if it wasn’t such a terrible message, was also hilarious”
(personal communication, February 14, 2018). Fellow queer Los Angeles activist Sabrina
Petrescu said, “I don’t remember where it was the first time we saw it other than remembering
how absolutely absurd it was” (personal communication, February 11, 2018). “From a comedy
perspective, it was fucking nuts,” recalled Heller. Finally, Mike Rose hammers in the argument:
“It was such a parody on its own that it deserved to be skewered, and I think that’s such a great
thing to do in the face of hate. To just laugh—here’s how ridiculous you are, here’s a mirror,
here’s how you look to us and here’s how you look to people.” Everyone’s initial interpretation
of the ad was ridiculousness and the videos they created were their way of communicating those
impressions.
Finally, Gray et al. claim, “satire provides a valuable means through which citizens can
analyze and interrogate power and the realm of politics rather than remain simple subjects of it
[…] it is a historically persistent form of cultural expression that is spawned by societal and
individual needs for such forms of expression” (15-7). Further, parody, as aligned with satire, is
a media literacy educator. Jenkins extends this practice to illustrates amateur and grassroots
parody efforts online as provoking audience skepticism and questions (instead of answers). He
frames this form of participation as a response to Duncombe’s (2007) call for “manufacturing
dissent,” in which he asserts, “our dreamscapes will be participatory: dreams that the public can
mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if the people help
create them” (p. 17). For the most part, this call was heeded if the 2008 Presidential primary and
election were any indication.
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Chuck Tryon (2008) builds on Jenkins’ argument to analyze parodies of two 2008
campaign ads by Clinton and McCain. In this context, Tryon claims, “parody offers a useful
technique for challenging campaign rhetoric in particular.” He continues, “mock advertisements
treat campaign advertisements as genres in order to question the accepted narratives associated
with a given campaign, providing viewers with a kind of meta-commentary on the workings of
political discourse” (p. 210). Echoing the literature above, da Silva and Garcia (2012) discuss
humor in the age of YouTube and regard “satirical remixing as a new form of participation,
especially as cause-oriented political action, and contribut[ing] to the formation of
counterpublics, bringing new vitality to democratic debate” (p. 109). We see this with the
“Gathering Storm” phenomenon, which while not part of a traditional or particular electoral
campaign at its time of release stands in for a genre of anti-gay campaigns that had been running
for decades. Further, I interpret the eagerness expressed by many participants in these parody
videos as signaling a moment, precipitated by the passage of Prop 8 six months earlier, wherein
same-sex marriage and LGBT rights more broadly came to embody what Pippa Norris calls
cause-oriented activism.
Responding to the purported crisis in civic participation, put forth by scholars like Robert
Putnam, Pippa Norris (2009) builds on scholarship mapping alternative organizational forms of
activism, typified by the women’s movement, environmental movement, anti-war coalitions,
other non-governmental organizations, and multinational policy advocacy groups, all of which
are “usually characterized by more fluid boundaries, looser networked coalitions, and
decentralized organizational structures” (p. 12). These new social movements, with primary
goals “focused upon achieving social change through direct action strategies and community
building, as well as by altering lifestyles and social identities” (p. 12-13), led to the growth of
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cause-oriented politics, which she distinguishes from citizen-oriented activities exemplified
mostly by voting and party membership. Cause-oriented politics, Norris asserts, “focus attention
upon specific issues and policy concerns, exemplified by consumer politics (buying or
boycotting certain products for political or ethical reasons), petitioning, demonstrations, and
protests” (p. 14). Cause-oriented politics does not preclude citizen-oriented activities, but it plays
a larger role in blurring the line between the “social” and the “political” (p. 15).
Same-sex marriage and the increased attention to LGBT representation and rights in
media and politics during this time provides evidence that “A Gathering Storm” hit at a time
when these issues were peaking as a cause the mainstream—understood here to include
discourses in publics outside only queer circles—deemed worthy of orienting their attention and
involvement towards. Courage Campaign’s decision to invest in the fight for same-sex marriage
pre- and post-Prop 8 from the previous chapter, for instance, is case in point. Courage was an
organization with broad interests in progressive causes and doubled down on same-sex marriage.
The passage of Prop 8 itself became a turning point for marriage politics at the national level.
While Massachusetts had led the way several years earlier, it was not until Prop 8 rippled
through the country that half a dozen states legalized same-sex marriage within a year. Vermont
and Iowa legalized it, through the legislature and the courts, respectively, just days prior to “A
Gathering Storm’s” release. Thus, marriage was top of mind.
This is also reflected directly in reports from my interviewees who discussed the
willingness of their participants to get involved in something in order to make a statement.
Sabrina and Teresa, who were involved in the same parody video, “The Darkness is Coming”
(GS10), were part of the post-Prop 8 activist movement in Los Angeles, so their participation
was very much in keeping with the protests, meetings, and other actions they were involved with
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locally. Katharine, an actor in New York, remarked on the role of artists in times and issues like
these:
There’s a big correlation with artists, right? Artists, I think have been known to be
accepting way earlier about the LGBT community, social activism, statements
about society, so when you get a bunch of pissed off New Yorkers who see this
and are like, “meet me in the studio in ten minutes,” everyone was on it. […] We
asked our friends to be in it. Half of them were in our improv group. In New York
City it’s not that hard to find an actor willing to do anything at the drop of a hat if
it’s for a good cause. Either money or a good cause.
Victor, for whom the parody video was part of a larger thesis project, noted how people at his
college, particularly in the art school, were always against anything with discrimination. His gay
roommate and many of his friends wanted to be in the video: “They felt how absurd the
commercial was, and a lot of my actor friends, it was something they wanted to be a part of…it
was something that was very easy to convince people [to do].” Mike Rose, who managed to get
Funny Or Die to produce the parody he developed with his friend Liz, spoke about the celebrities
who were involved in their video. He says he was surprised when Jane Lynch called in last
minute to say she could drive right over after having finished her day on set at Glee:
And I was like whoa. That’s why I say when it’s a message, you know people
connect to those. People jumped on it. They understood it. People see the parody
by then and they’re angered and any opportunity to be a part of saying, “this is
fucked up,” things take off like that because you’re taking on so many other
people’s voices. […] I think people are scared, especially celebrities. Progress
happens and people catch up when they do, and a lot of times it’s when it’s
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popular and when it benefits them. It’s easier for people to have opinions when
they’re popular.
This speaks directly to the case that LGBT issues had broken into the mainstream of cause-
oriented politics.

Making of a Meme
To better understand the strong collective impulse to parody—and to critique many of the
same aesthetic and ideological elements—across nearly all the videos, I first analyze the original
“Gathering Storm” ad as an originating meme. The current concept and application of the
internet meme originates from Richard Dawkins’ (1976) formulation of mimesis to describe
“small cultural units of transmission, analogous to genes, which are spread by copying or
imitation” (Shifman, 2011, p. 188). Limor Shifman (2011), whose expansive work on applying
and analyzing this interpretation of the meme to digital culture has been instructive here,
“stresses that human agency should be an integral part of our conceptualization of memes by
describing them as dynamic entities that spread in response to technological, cultural, and social
choices made by people” (p. 189). Harking back to Jenkins and Duncombe’s arguments, Shifman
herself understands the YouTube meme here “as a popular clip that lures extensive creative user
engagement in the form of parody, pastiche, mash-ups or other derivative work […and]
highlight[s] the unique traits of the Internet as a facilitator of participatory culture” (p. 190). In
her study of thirty of the “all time” most popular videos on YouTube (collected incidentally in
2009) that engendered high volumes of derivative work, Shifman identified six common features
that largely determined their memetic value: ‘ordinary’ people, flawed masculinity, humor,
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simplicity, repetitiveness, and whimsical content. All six of these features are present in one
form or another in “A Gathering Storm” and, thus, its cause for memetic parody.
The first common feature to inspire parody or derivative work in the popular videos
Shifman analyzes is a focus on ordinary people, like the subjects of “Numa Numa,” “David After
Dentist,” “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!,” “Charlie Bit My Finger – Again!,” and a host of
others. The “Gathering Storm,” loosely falls into this category for even though it is clearly an
ad—and even explicitly references in fine print on screen at some point that the participants are
hired actors—they are intended to simulate ordinary people, first by their ambiguous
identifications and interchangeability, but also most notably in the section of the ad when three
participants stand in for various real ‘ordinary’ people who were involved in some form of legal
disputes or controversies related to same-sex marriage. The whole conceit of the ad is predicated
on the assertion that same-sex marriage will affect you, the ordinary, straight person. Those three
aforementioned stand-ins also form a large part of the video’s appeal to repetitiveness, another
feature of the YouTube meme. The repeated format—“I’m a California doctor affected by,” “I’m
a Massachusetts mother affected by…,” “I’m part of a church group affected by…”—is primed
for imitation. In fact, it serves as one of the focal and most humorous parts of one of the
individually-produced parodies, “Audition 34” (GS8), when one person is in front of a visible
green screen reciting take after take, identifying himself as ‘ordinary’ people with increasingly
humorous job descriptions (Figure 3.17):
I’m a Massachusetts parent helplessly watching the public schools teach my child
that gay buttsex is sloppy.
I’m an Iowa wet nurse, helplessly watching my patients get gay aborted.
I’m a Wisconsin mold expert.
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I’m an Arkansas bear wrestler.
I’m a Montana shoe buckler.
I’m a Utah igloo farmer.
I’m a Mississippi ninja trader forced to trade my ninjas to gay people.
I’m a Hawaii luau person.
I’m a Florida power-bottom.
I’m a South Carolina giraffe masturbator.
I’m a Kentucky derby.
I’m a Chilean sea bass.
Forced by the government at gun point to gay marry my own child.
Forced to eat AIDS burgers every day at 2:00.
I’m an Oklahoma jungle-gym designer forced to push gay children down slides.
The storm is coming.
Simplicity and whimsical content are practically packaged together in the original ad
mostly through the use of the storm metaphor and its accompanying visual effects. Not only is
the message broad and simple, but every line delivered by a new subject on screen is also bite-
size enough to play up dramatic emphasis. The metaphor of the storm is effective in condensing
the entire ad down to a traditional fear tactic. This metaphor, though, is literalized through the
dark clouds and lightning which play in the digital background throughout the entire ad. The
actors’ seemingly floating placement and odd background arrangements also add an element of
unintentional whimsy. In other words, the fact of its actors “playing out” or playing up these
oppressed straight people, heightened by the release of their audition tapes, the CG element, and
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the relatively poor production value go a long way in baking in whimsical content ripe for
parody.
Humor is an interesting feature here because while the original ad may play as humorous
to some, its intentions were far from comedic. Shifman, though, breaks down humor featured in
memetic videos to three attributes: playfulness, incongruity, and superiority. The strongest of
these to actualize in “A Gathering Storm” is superiority, which Shifman argues features people
whose unintentional funniness connects the comic (the viewer who then parodies it) with
superiority over the video’s subject(s). This is reflected in the aforementioned unanimous reads
of the ad by my interviewees as absurd and ridiculous. To add, one of my interviewees, Victor,
said that the first time he saw it, he thought it was a fake commercial: “I was so flabbergasted. It
was laughable because I thought it was a joke.” Teresa, another interviewee, purported that the
comedy was right there, that “it was easy prey […] and such low hanging fruit; it was like
tracing, really.” Sabrina drives home this superiority when she told me, “You almost felt bad for
them because it was so bad, like ‘no, who is doing your marketing right now?’ Everything you
get you’re gonna deserve.”
The last feature, flawed masculinity, does not appear precisely here in the way Shifman
initially posits it, as pulled from the sitcom-esque “far-from-perfect men who fail to fulfill basic
functions in their personal and professional lives” (p. 195). However, what the “Storm” parodies
reveal, I argue, is a clear reading of a type of failed heteronormativity, in a way that turns the
original ad into camp. Shifman recognizes that parodies of a meme may retroactively reveal
alternative interpretations of the flawed masculinity feature, as I argue it does here. A
complicated concept to identify and explicate, the deployment of camp I draw upon relies
heavily on Susan Sontag’s (1964) seminal essay on camp and Jack Babuscio’s (1999) follow-up.
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As Sontag puts it, camp is a sensibility, a mode of aestheticism, a way of seeing the world, not
“in terms of beauty, but of the degree of artifice, of stylization” (p. 2). Many examples of camp,
Sontag claims, “are things which, from a ‘serious’ point of view, are either bad art or kitsch” (p.
3). Further, camp is either completely naïve or wholly conscious: “In naïve, or pure, Camp, the
essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails” (p. 6-7). “A Gathering Storm,” then, is
pure camp because it goes all in for seriousness and falls flat in a multitude of ways that the
analysis of the parody videos below will illustrate.
While Sontag’s notes on camp still leave it somewhat abstract, Babuscio attempts to
bring camp down to more concrete associations, namely tying it to a gay sensibility more
explicitly. He claims, “the link with gayness is established when the camp aspect of an individual
or thing is identified as such by a gay sensibility” (p. 119). The power of camp—to identify it—
comes more exclusively from such a gay sensibility, which Babuscio defines as “a creative
energy reflecting a consciousness that is different from the mainstream; a heightened awareness
of certain human complications of feeling that spring from the fact of social expression; in short,
a perception of the world which is coloured, shaped, directed, and defined by the fact of one’s
gayness” (p. 118). As Sontag explains camp as a way of looking at things, Babuscio asserts that
camp is never solely a thing or person, but rather a relationship between activities, individuals,
situations, and gayness. In this sense, the “Gathering Storm” ad is in and of itself not camp, but
rather becomes camp through the lens of its derivative work, which strongly comes from gay and
queer reactions and interpretations. The remixes and parodies, then, expose its camp and even
indulge in it.
The humor in camp is very much related to the incongruity component of Shifman’s
humor feature in the analysis of memetic YouTube videos. The humor in camp, per Babuscio,
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“results from an identification of a strong incongruity between an object, person, or situation and
its context” (p. 126). The incongruity in “A Gathering Storm” plays out in two ways. In short,
the incongruity comes first from the transparency of the ad’s strategy, based on fear tactics and
lies, and second, from the ad’s own seemingly unaware gayness, from its use of rainbow and
readings of some of its characters as closeted, a recurring theme in the remix and parodies. The
latter incongruity also comes from a particular insecurity which informs the argument that same-
sex marriage will somehow damage heterosexual unions. This demonstrates, almost in their own
words, fragile or failed heterosexuality, an adjustment to Shifman’s failed masculinity feature of
YouTube memes.
I contend that it is because of its camp affinity that “A Gathering Storm” engendered
such simultaneous and largely similar remixes and parodies. Many of Shifman’s features
predicting memetic value are in fact wrapped up in camp: whimsy, naiveté, exaggerated
aesthetics, unintentional queerness, and so on. Further, Shifman suggests that ‘bad’ texts could
have a direct relationship to ‘good’ memes. She adds, “Each of the six features to be common to
memetic videos marks them as textually incomplete or flawed, thus distinct and perhaps defiant
of glossy corporate content,” and thus, pulling from Jenkins, “invites people to fill in the gaps,
address the puzzles or mock the creators” (p. 198). The rest of this chapter will offer a detailed
breakdown of the common tropes and satirical arguments the group of thirty derivative videos
collectively communicate. The chapter will conclude by considering the function of this parody
phenomenon not in terms of “reach” or “effects” on attitudes and behaviors, but instead as an
affective mode of coping and a social and cultural practice that helped deepen queer publics and
mainstream LGBT politics in digitally networked popular culture.

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Analysis of the videos
In addition to interviews with select producers and participants, I also assembled a set of
thirty remix and parody production videos of “A Gathering Storm” distributed online, mostly on
YouTube. While broadly labeled satirical parodies as a group, the corpus of videos in fact
represents a wide variety of remix and original parodies. All thirty of these videos were
conceived and/or produced for online distribution. The Colbert Report also made a parody video
that was featured on the April 16, 2009 episode of the comedy news show and subsequently
posted via flash player on different websites, including Funny or Die, where it still plays. One of
the videos, “A Gaythering Storm” (GS24), written by Mike Rose, one of my interviewees, was
produced by Funny or Die (as an “FOD Exclusive”) and subsequently posted on YouTube. “A
Gaythering Storm” was made in conjunction with Funny or Die because Mike and his co-writer
and director Liz Feldman had a close friend at the company who helped orchestrate the shoot
with the celebrities. Mike and Liz wrote and directed the video, and invited some of their fellow
comedian and actor friends to join, but otherwise, as Mike told me, Funny or Die covered the
entire shoot, including finding the space, using their own PAs, and editing the video. There was
only one video, “Rainbow Coalition” (GS29), that was found only on Funny or Die (and not
YouTube) at the time of video collection, but it is unclear where the video originated from as it
was not produced by the company (it was not a “FOD Exclusive”). All other videos were found
on YouTube at the time of data collections. All, except for Victor’s video (GS30), show upload
dates throughout April 2009. Victor’s video, which was shot sometime in the summer or fall of
2009 as part of his larger thesis project, was uploaded on November 6, 2009.
Mike Rose’s parody on Funny or Die became the most watched from the online-
distributed videos, amassing nearly two million views across Funny or Die and YouTube. The
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next most watched remix or parody was GS20, “The Best Parody of NOM’s ‘Gathering Storm’
Ad,” which had a little over 246,000 views on YouTube at the time of this writing, while many
more came in under 100,000. These numbers paint a familiar picture regarding the capital of
celebrity, since Rose’s parody managed to star several recognizable actors. There is much to be
mined in follow-up studies that more critically investigate the cultural ramifications of celebrity-
infused politics. Yet, It Gets Popular is more about digital production and online distribution,
especially in how it motivates and conditions that production. The numbers and reach are
important to note, but Rose’s video started out just like all the others—a kneejerk response to
lampoon outrageous claims by the religious right against gay, lesbian, and queer people.
To analyze the videos, I categorized them by type: remix, scripted animation, individual
original productions, and group original productions (see Table 1).
8
Ten of the videos were
categorized as remix, which included videos that mashed-up the original “Gathering Storm” ad
with other imagery, marked-up the original ad with layered text or symbols, simulated or
responded to some of the ad’s content with voice-over or text but using other images, or a mix of
all of these. Three of the videos were scripted animations, which entailed using a program to turn
user-inputted text into a dialog between two animated characters. The third and fourth categories
cover original productions, split between individual and group efforts. All the videos in the latter
two categories feature participants on the screen, parodying or responding to the original ad or
the audition outtakes. Seven of these videos were individual productions. Ten videos were group
productions. While I include brief references to the remix, scripted animation, and individually
produced original productions in the analysis below, I concentrate much of the analysis of this
chapter on the ten group productions. I focus on these videos for a couple important reasons.

8
For ease of reference, in-text citations for the videos will refer to these IDs given in Figure 1. They will be listed in
the references by their video authors, which can be cross-referenced with Table 1.
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Table 1: List of analyzed video parodies of “A Gathering Storm”
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First, it helps narrow the scope of analysis. Many of the other types of videos shared similar
themes and rhetorical strategies in their satire, but ultimately brought too much idiosyncratic
variation in format for a cogent analysis.
Second, and more crucially, the collaborative aspect of these videos, I argue, lends them
an affective resonance and collective flair that is tied more directly to LGBT and queer street
theater and film/video activism from the sixties to the nineties. I argue in the discussion
following the analysis in this chapter how these videos represent digital incarnations of queer
modes of activism, like zaps carried out by gay and lesbian organizations in gay liberation and
AIDS-era activism. The group and collaborative nature provides the production of these videos a
collectivity, even community ethos. This also reflects on the decision to focus only on
collaborative videos in the previous chapter on grassroots Proposition 8 media. These videos
require recruiting and practicing coalition and community organizing not just behind the scenes
but also on screen. There are many affordances to the remix and vlog formats that are more
emblematic of the rise of digital culture, including their instantaneity. In the first five days
following the release of “A Gathering Storm,” only one out of fifteen videos I captured was a
group production, while all the rest were solo productions or digital remixes. By the end of the
second week, however, the group videos started flooding the results, demonstrating that while
they took a little longer, they represented a different kind of response.
After watching the videos several times, and concentrating more on the group
productions, six common themes emerged in the satirical styles and strategies across all the
productions: parodying visual aesthetics; highlighting the folly of the storm metaphor; exposing
bigotry and hypocrisy in argumentation; calling out multicultural baiting; playing up queer
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incongruities and hetero fragility; and their overall use of intertextuality. The following sections
provide closer textual readings of the videos for each of these themes.

Parodying Visual Aesthetics
The heart of the parody of “A Gathering Storm” lay in recreating the visual aesthetic of
its green screen storm and digitally superimposing its subjects in the fore and background. Aside
the issues with its messaging, it was really how “bad” the video looked that dumbfounded all my
interviewees. It was the incongruity between the seriousness the actors in the spot tried to convey
and the ridiculousness of the visual conceit of the ad, compounded by the outlandish storm
metaphor. It was accentuating and calling out this incongruity that led to much of the humor and
camp that the parodies revealed and reveled in. Per Babuscio, “when the stress on style is
‘outrageous’ or ‘too much’, it results in incongruities: the emphasis shifts from what a thing or
person is to what it looks like; from what is being done to how it’s is being done” (p. 122).
Emulating the bad effects of the ad was consistent among practically all these videos. Only one
out of the ten, “Rainbow Coalition” (GS29), did not attempt to emulate the visuals of the
original, using a simple black background and focusing more on content and delivery instead of
visual style and effects. Otherwise, the shared impulse to lampoon the green-screen storm—with
or without access to an actual green screen—was consistent across all the other videos. Out of
the six themes, this was the only one based purely on style and aesthetics, which is why it goes
the farthest to establish the camp reading. It critically draws the attention away from what is
being said and to how they are saying it. The strategy to parody the visual style and delivery can
be broken down to three components: the storm effects, the background formations of the
different participant bodies, and the fact that the subjects in the video were hired actors.
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Out of the nine videos emulating the storm effects, six also used a green or blue screen to
set up a digital backdrop. Two of the remaining videos made do with a DIY approach for the
background, while the last one was a parody of the audition outtakes, so they had the green
screen curtain visible in the background in true “behind-the-scenes” fashion. The videos
employing green screen all had some arrangements of dark clouds, lightning, and thunder in the
background. Some even used it in diegetic fashion for further comedic effect. For instance, in
Victor’s video (GS30), when one of the characters claims, “Every time it thunders it represents
when gay people are having sex,” he is suddenly taken aback when he hears thunder, mumbles
“shit,” and makes a cross across his chest with his hand. The most extensive use of the green-
screen for comedic effect was in Mike Rose’s Funny or Die parody (GS24), when the script,
unspooling across several speakers, warns:
That’s what’s up there: married gay people, and they’re doing all this.
Soon, gay people will start falling out of the sky, onto our homes,
Onto our churches,
And onto our families.
A downpour of gay people threatening the way we live.
And this gay rain army won’t stop. They’ll come at us, marching.
Not marching; more like a dance. They’ll dance at us.
And it will be choreographed. It will be good.
At this point dozens of tiny gay people—digital copies of one man and one woman—start falling
onto the figures in the background of each shot as they try to block, shoo away, and rabidly rub
the gay rain army off their bodies (Figures 3.5 and 3.6).
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Figure 3.5: Funny or Die’s “A Gaythering Storm” (GS26).

Figure 3.6: Funny or Die’s “A Gaythering Storm” (GS26).

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While the Funny or Die-produced visuals up the ante on satirically expanding the storm
metaphor, some of the other videos without access to professional studio editors parody the ad by
making the green screen work less seamless. As Victor told me, for example, this was his first
time using blue screen: “you can see the lighting wasn’t perfect because you can still see the blue
outline of the actors, which is fine because it adds another layer to it.” Indeed, one of the other
videos, “Gathering Storm Spoof” (GS18), has glaringly bad cutouts for its superimposed
background extras, but it only accentuates the incongruity. In other words, the worse it looks, the
funnier the parody (Figures 3.7 and 3.8).
Both Teresa Wang and Katharine Heller’s productions did not have access to green
screen technology, so they improvised with a more DIY aesthetic, further contributing to a
critique of the awkwardness and artifice of the original ad. Wang’s video was shot in her own
studio apartment with several friends of hers. She had large windows, so they decided to shoot at
night to make it as dark as possible. In fact, they named their video, “The Darkness is Coming.”
To play up the storm aesthetic, they made cut out lightning bolts and taped them to the window
in the background, and in one instance after one of the characters says, “and I’m afraid,” you see
a hand come into frame, striking down one of the paper lightning bolts, “frightening” the speaker
(Figure 3.9). Instead of superimposed extras in the background, they have one or two friends
standing in the same frame, behind the speaker. In one of these shots, a background character is
manually moving an American flag to mimic a natural wave motion from the wind (Figure 3.10).
The same tactic is used in Katherine’s video (GS21)—having the participants actually stand
behind or around the speaker in a given shot, rather than superimposing them with after effects—
except in this one, the space and the shot is so tight and close up that the characters are right
behind the speaker, in one shot even coming up to whisper something in the speaker’s ear
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Figure 3.7: Superimposed digital cutouts in GS18, “Gathering Storm Spoof.”

Figure 3.8: More digital cutouts from GS18, “Gathering Storm Spoof.”
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Figure 3.9: DIY lightning bolt in GS10, “The Darkness is Coming.”

Figure 3.10: DIY background lightning and waving flag in GS10, “The Darkness is Coming.”
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Figure 3.11: Parodying background subjects: GS21, “Response to NOM’s Gathering Storm.”

Figure 3.12: Parodying background formations: GS21, “Response to NOM’s Gathering Storm.”
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(Figure 3.11). A few shots feature up to five of the participants on screen in a medium close-up,
which forces them into highly cramped and awkward formations within the frame (Figure 3.12).
This was, in fact, part of the sendup for Katharine’s parody. She told me what she found most
captivating about the original were the formations: “I was just amazed at the weirdness of how
they’d put it together; who’s standing where, what they’re doing, what position they’re in—
where’d they come from?” The play with background formations was integral to nearly all of the
productions.
In addition to the two DIY efforts with people literally standing behind the speakers, the
green-screen parodies also made comedic use of the formations. Some videos, like “Best Parody
of NOM’s Gathering Storm Ad” (GS18), kept using new combinations and arrangements of
participants in the background, spread out or huddled together right behind the speaker. Others,
like “Gathering Storm Spoof” (GS18) uses one stock digital animation of each character, so you
see the same loop every time that person is used in the background. In Victor Oliveira’s
production, background characters sometimes look at their nails or turn around and “touch” the
storm behind them (Figures 3.13 and 3.14). In “The Crimson Tide is Coming” (GS25),
backgrounded figures also check or bite their nails and are sometimes standing in deliberate
poses for the camera, or even looking away (Figures 3.15 and 3.16). The idiosyncratic and
distracting background comedy in these videos all comment on the awkward and stilted function
the background characters play as affected parties in NOM’s ad.
This dovetails with the final component of the aesthetic critique in that the characters in
the original ad, who all have both speaking and background roles, are hired actors impersonating
heterosexual people and faith organizations that have purportedly been or will be negatively
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Figure 3.13: Distracted background actors in GS30, “The best response to NOM’s ad.”

Figure 3.14: More distracted background actors in GS30, “The best response to NOM’s ad.”
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Figure 3.15: Parodying background poses in GS25, “The Crimson Tide is Coming.”

Figure 3.16: More parodying of background poses in GS25, “The Crimson Tide is Coming.”
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impacted by gay marriage. As Teresa mentioned in her interview with me, “[it was] so
melodramatic and like they were making themselves out to be the victims. It was so dramatic for
such a silly thing.” While it is this very notion of intensity in the theatrical that plays into the
camp value here. The leaked audition tapes and outtakes from the original ad, which feature the
actors struggling with the simple lines, help bring the artifice of the ad further into focus and
became prime fodder for the parodies. Rose added in his interview, “When you watch that video,
it’s so bad. They hired actors—local non-union actors. And I think something like that needs to
be put in its place by something like a parody video.” It was later reported that the actors were
largely from the Mormon Church of Latter Day Saints (Blanco, 2009). In Victor’s production
(GS30), one of the characters breaks the fourth wall and asks, “how much am I getting paid for
this again?” Teresa’s video (GS10) ends with one of the participants asking, “Is this the audition
for Perfect Storm 2?” The same people behind “Gathering Storm Spoof” (GS18) even produced
a separate and longer video (GS19) featuring the fake outtakes of its own spoof characters
offering some internal intertextuality to the parodies but also humorously skewering the original
as these fake outtakes display the actors not understanding the claims or often reluctant to say
their lines.
The outtakes parody was also more popular in the individual original productions with
several people making their own “audition” tapes, complete with jump cutting successions of
multiple takes. One of the scripted animations also finds its satirical conceit on scripting a scene
between two actors who are having a discussion during the auditions. In “NOM: Before the
Auditions” (GS11), the first animated character recites, “I am an actor forced to choose between
my career and my faith. Well, I guess lying to thwart gay marriage is okay by God, so what’s my
line? Oh yeah, I’m a doctor who is forced to choose between my career and my faith.” His
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Figure 3.17: Parody of outtakes in GS8, “’Gathering Storm’ Audition 34.”

Figure 3.18: Scripted animation video GS11, “NOM: Before the Auditions.”
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“acting partner” in the scene adds, “But if the storm is because of gay marriage and I am not gay,
why am I afraid? Is it because I am lying for money?” (Figure 3.18) Together, the storm effects,
background formations, and the meta-awareness of role-playing actors made the style and visual
aesthetic ripe for camp critique and memetic satire.

Folly of the storm metaphor
“Wait, is there actually a storm coming?” asks one of the speakers to someone off-camera
in Victor’s parody, breaking the fourth wall again (GS30). “Because I’m clearly not dressed for
storm weather” he adds in a follow-up shot. Expanding the critical parody on the storm mise-en-
scéne was also linked with satirically exaggerating the storm as a metaphor for the ills of gay
marriage. Nearly all the videos ran with this theme. When Mike Rose’s video (GS24) starts,
actress Sarah Chalke delivers the opening line, “There’s a storm gathering.” Actor Jason Lewis
follows by clarifying, “That’s why there are these clouds behind me. They represent a storm
that’s gathering.” The “gay” storm is the foundation of Rose’s script. Before the aforementioned
gay rain army, the other celebrities in this video warn that “the storm is getting worser and
worser” before concluding, “this storm is being cause by gay marriage.” The participants in
“The Best Parody of NOM’s ad” (GS20) also lay it in thick and play briefly on the raining
metaphor: “The clouds are dark and winds are strong. Just like Katrina, but worse. Soon, it will
be raining men.” In “Gathering Storm Spoof” (GS18), the storm isn’t just coming, “it has
arrived. It is like a flood in the living room and the whole family is being washed away by the
wiles of Satan and his dark army of homos.” “The Crimson Tide is Coming” (GS25) employs an
altogether different metaphor—based on menstruation—but nearly the same script structure as
“A Gathering Storm,” turning vaginal douching, instead of gay marriage, into the unnatural evil
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that must be stopped. They lambast the storm metaphor through an intertextual reference to the
“crimson tide” euphemism. Together, these videos call out the commitment to the metaphor in
the original ad—the seriousness that fails, as Sontag mapped out—as its ticket to camp.

Exposing Bigotry and Hypocrisy
The vast majority of the parody content throughout the videos is directed at debunking
and ridiculing the various assertions made about the ill effects same-sex marriage will have on
society and individuals and the persuasive strategy used to pedal those claims. I group these
critiques around a few sub-themes: fear tactics, exaggerated social effects, and true intentions.
Resorting to scare tactics, particularly around the effects that gay exposure will have on
children, is one of the surest strategies the conservative right uses throughout American history,
especially for garnering support for legislation and ballot measures. While this strategy is often
thinly veiled, its direct and explicit use here—“and I am afraid”—juxtaposed with the artificiality
of the CG storm and theatricality of hired actors stands out, and is what the parodies take down
through exaggerated humor. In Rose’s “A Gaythering Storm” (GS24), three people repeat “and I
am afraid” until the third person finally looks off-camera and asks, “wait, did someone say that?
Oh, he did? My bad.” As mentioned earlier, Teresa’s video (GS10) features one of the speakers
frightened by the paper lightning bolt. This is followed by the next speaker announcing, “I just
shit myself” as one of the background characters in this shot slowly backs away in concerned
disgust. In one of the solo original productions, “NOM Gathering Storm – What Storm? (My
Response)” (GS2), the creator Sean Chapin intercuts the video with himself in front of a
flickering digital backdrop of an animated rainbow and remarks after the ad’s line about being
afraid, “If I was afraid, I’d look afraid.” Among the very first responses online, one of the remix
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videos (GS1) frames the whole ad as a horror film. It starts with a brass instrumental horror score
accompanying title cards that read: “UNIMAGINABLE HORROR AWAITS YOU!!” “A
GROTESQUE MONSTROSITY THAT WILL DESTROY THE WORLD,” “GAY
MARRIAGE!!” (Figure 3.19). When we get the “and I am afraid” line, the video then cuts to a
shot of a woman from a black-and-white film recoiling in a scream as the words “SHOCK,”
“FRENZY,” and “DEVASTATION” are strewn across the screen (Figure 3.20). At one point,
half the screen is taken up by an image photoshopped to read “Night of the Living Gays.” At
other points, the background characters in the ad are marked up, with some wearing lizard
masks, or featuring a Godzilla-like monster inserted into the background of another shot (Figure
3.21). These over the top reenactments with references to horror movie iconography call out the
false environment of fear imposed by the ad.
The meat of several of the parodies, though, lies in how they address the notion that
same-sex marriage will harm heterosexuals, the fact that they will have no choice and be forced
to accept gay marriage. These lines from NOM’s original ad are taken to exaggerated extremes
to ridicule the idea that someone else’s marriage or changes to the state’s definition of marriage
will have any direct effects on those who are not gay. The parody that opened this chapter
provides one of the best examples of the comic effect not only of the content, but also, when one
watches the video, the comedic timing in both delivery and editing. Many of the videos feature
expected lines about participants claiming to be forced to get “gay married,” but other lines
provide more incisive critiques. In “The Darkness is Coming,” one of the characters says, “My
God-given U.S. American, patriotic freedom eagle will be snatched from me” as a small “Uncle
Sam”-type stuffed animal bird rises up in the frame. Several of the lines throughout these videos,
in fact, tie the absurdities of the ad’s assertions with other conservative arguments—based on
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Figure 3.19: Opening shot of GS1, “The Gathering Storm (Fixed).”

Figure 3.20: Inserted “reaction shot” in GS1, “The Gathering Storm (Fixed).”

Figure 3.21: Doctored shot of background subjects in GS1, “The Gathering Storm (Fixed).”

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tradition, patriarchal gender roles, nationalism and religious hypocrisy—that are often mobilized
against LGBT rights and communities.
“The Best Parody of NOM’s ad” (GS20), for example, features a couple subjects
asserting, “They want to bring the issue into my life. And take away my guns.” Victor’s script
for his parody, for instance, replaced “same-sex marriage” with “gay sex” to bring out the
underlying tension between gay sexuality and religion into clearer relief. “I’m a little more
straightforward,” Victor claimed in his interview with me, “especially at the end when I call out
ignorant Christian faith and the second amendment, which is something they always bring up.”
The line he is referring to is the part that parodies the section of the original ad that talks about a
multicultural coalition coming together to fight gay marriage. The line in Victor’s video goes:
But we have hope. A rainbow coalition of white trash conservatives are
brainwashing the gay minds and scaring them with the second amendment. We
are here to protect that good ol’ ignorant Christian faith, so God bless us all,
especially the gays. They’re gonna need it.
Egging on the religious rhetoric, one of the female subjects in Victor’s video earlier claims,
“They are forcing me to be gay with them but I love Jesus,” as another adds, “I will get closer to
Jesus for every gay person I turn straight.” Other lines, though, use preposterous scenarios to
further lampoon the narrative of losing rights, freedoms, and ability to refuse gay marriage:
GS20: If gays and lesbians are allowed to marry, we will have no choice but to switch to
digital TV.
GS24: They want to end baseball. They’re gonna turn tampons into rocket ships.
GS29: Why are they forcing the issue by bringing it up?
GS30: These people want to change the way I live. I don’t want to wake up to “Dancing
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Queen” every day.
The exaggeration of societal effects hit their stride as they critique the three successive
accusations in the middle of NOM’s ad about a doctor having to choose between her faith and
her job, a mother being helpless against having gay marriage taught in her children’s schools,
and an ambiguous claim about churches being punished by the government for not supporting
same-sex marriage. The Human Rights Campaign (2009b) posted a rebuttal press release to the
“Gathering Storm” ad the day after it aired in which they identified the three cases NOM was
basing these accusations on. The case about the doctor was based on a 2008 California Supreme
Court decision that ruled a doctor’s refusal to artificially inseminate a lesbian woman on grounds
of his Christian faith as unconstitutional. The second case is predicated on Massachusetts parents
who sued over a public school’s curriculum on diversity of family types, which included same-
sex households. The third was based on a New Jersey Methodist Association, which was forced
to allow use of their tax-exempt property for a lesbian civil union or face paying back taxes.
Many of the parodies satirized these cases:
GS10: I’m a California gynecologist and gay marriage forces me to touch lesbian
vaginas.
GS20: I must choose between my faith and moving gay couples to the top of the
transplant list.
GS21: I am a scientist and I am forced to believe in science.
GS24: I’m a California doctor who must choose between my faith and my job because
doctors hate gay marriage.
GS30: I’m a New York state doctor and I must choose between my faith and my job
because I’m not a gay doctor, I’m a people doctor.
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On the terror of having gay marriage taught in schools, the parodies had this to say:
GS10: I’m a Massachusetts parent helplessly standing by as our public schools teach our
children that gay marriage exists. What’s next? Acknowledgment of the
Holocaust?
GS20: I’m a proud Iowan watching helplessly as public schools teach my kids that gay
marriage will replace corporate farming.
GS24: I’m a Massachusetts mother helplessly standing by as the schools teach my
children that gay marriage is okay. I also have an issue with their hot lunch
program.
GS29: Why is my school teaching tolerance? God created gay people so we can have
someone to hate.
Finally, taking on the impact on churches, they joke:
GS10: I’m a part of a New Jersey church group, punished by the government because
we can’t lynch gay people. What will we do on Tuesdays?
GS29: I don’t want the government to force me to get gay married.
GS30: I am part of a New Jersey church group that is constantly getting raped by the
government because we can’t support gay sex.
The sharpest ideological critiques in the parodies, though, were typically deployed in the
final segment, mirroring the original ad’s pivot to a hopeful message about bringing people of
“all creeds and colors” together to protect marriage. Just as Victor’s version, described above, let
loose a torrent of sarcastic barbs against the real motives of the ad’s organizers, all the videos
shared similar strategies based on truth-telling and sarcasm to unveil the nefarious implications
behind the rhetoric of protection. This approach was collectively used to highlight the truer
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intentions of an appeal to religion, tradition, and an ambiguous means to accomplish their goals.
Much of the satire here relies on the original ad’s use of rainbow and appeal to multiculturalism
in their call for coalition, both of which are further analyzed in the following sections. The
closing sections from several of the parodies:
GS10: But we have hope. A rainbow coalition of homophobes from every creed and
color are coming together with love to prevent this darkness. We love them so
much, we want them to shut the fuck up and stop asking for things. So join us.
Pick up a pitchfork and torch and head to www.marriageisoursstayoutofit.org.
GS18: But we have hope. A pink triangle of people is coming together to sing Judy
Garland torch songs against gay marriage. Join forces with LGBT—Loving Gays
Begets Terror. Fight the gay agenda and help engage in S and M—Saints and
Ministries.
GS20: But we have hope. A brownbow coalition of every creed and color are coming
together, joining hands, united in their shared intolerance to protect dual-sex
marriage. Visit www.rimsjob.org [R.I.M. – Restoring Integrity to Marriage]. Join
us. Conservatives who have extra money in this economy to make this non-issue
an issue are responsible for the content of this ad.
GS24: But we have hope. People of every creed, race, and color are coming together to
create a giant umbrella of faith, morality, and righteousness that will protect us
from this gay rain army. And that’s not just a metaphor. We’re actually building
an umbrella. So, if you want to protect marriage and if you have any experience
building a giant umbrella, join us at www.giantgayrepellentumbrella.com.
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Whether announcing themselves as homophobic, intolerant, and fear mongers or keeping up with
the straight-faced protectionist rhetoric, all the endings hammer in the sarcasm and satire to
deride the strategy and denounce the bigoted underpinnings of the content from the original ad.

Multicultural Baiting
One of the clearest critiques that ran through nearly all the parodies was NOM’s inclusion
of non-white actors to demonstrate their “rainbow coalition” of “every creed and color” who are
coming together to “protect marriage.” At least three of the thirteen speaking actors in the ad can
visibly or audibly be read as non-white and the ad ends with Damon Owens, a Black American
and the New Jersey Director for NOM at the time, who delivers the call for hope in preserving
marriage. In first recollecting her impression of the ad in her interview with me, Katherine Heller
said, “At one point, it was like ‘get all the multicultural people.’ It was like very ethnically
diverse. Like, they really went there. It was their top priority.” My interviewees on the whole
were all in sync in seeing this strategy of racial and ethnic inclusion not only as token
representation but also a ploy to appeal to the conservative demographics within various
communities of color. Mike elaborated:
I think what they were doing was so clear to us and our response was so clear that
it wasn’t even a discussion. It was like, ‘oh they’re clearly doing that’ and I’m
Mexican—people trying to manipulate Hispanic people knowing that they’re
large part Catholic and they’re gonna manipulate their Catholic faith to get them
to jump on board with this anti-gay shit. So that’s pretty disgusting. Do you think
we don’t see this, how transparent this is?
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This strategy, I contend, is related to the success of Yes on 8’s campaign—which included the
young Latina girl in the game-changing “Princes” ad—the failure of the No on 8 campaign’s
outreach to communities of color, and the impressions from the widely reported racial
breakdown of the election exit polls. Sabrina, who appeared in Teresa’s video, was also
employed by the No on 8 campaign up through mid-October 2008. In our interview, she
validated the accusations leveled against the Equality for All campaign, recalling “it was a lot of
white outreach, and there were people who were upset about it; I was upset about it. There was
actually somebody who came into our office once and was like, ‘you know black people vote,
right?’” It was widely reported shortly after the election that the Black and Latino vote went for
Yes, while the white and Asian exit polls indicated narrow support for No, 51-49 in both cases
(Analysis, n.d.). While the magnitude of the impact of this racial breakdown of the vote was
eventually debunked, the racial scapegoating still hung in the air (Coates, 2009; Egan and
Sherrill, 2009).
There were two ways the parodies pointed out this multicultural approach from NOM:
heavy accents and employing a racially diverse pool of participants. All the parodies featured a
perceptible mix of ethnic and racial diversity and several employed one of their black
participants to deliver the final message, mirroring NOM’s choice to have Damon Owens close
out their ad, often playing up the racialized aspect in the content of the script. In “The Best
Parody of NOM’s Ad” (GS20), for instance, the final speaker calls it a “brownbow coalition.”
“The Crimson Tide is Coming” (G25), which replaced the issue of same-sex marriage with a
satirically ardent position against vaginal douching, also emulated the tokenized strategy.
Victor’s script (GS30)—“white trash conservatives brainwashing […] to protect that good ol’
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ignorant Christian faith”— was one of the more complex and loaded as it implied an
intersectional reading of race, class, and religion as interlocking identities.
Satirizing NOM’s use of a racialized accent at a key point in the ad was the most
common feature across all the parody videos. The last line in the ad—“the storm is coming”—
delivered before Damon Owens comes out with his uplifting message, is spoken by a man with a
clearly audible Spanish accent. Nearly all the parodies played up this accent and some integrated
it more thoroughly throughout their videos in way to critique the accent as a signal of sorts for
implicating ethnic communities. In Mike Rose’s iteration (GS24), Mike himself put on a wig and
played this role (Figure 3.22). In “The Crimson Tide is Coming” (G25), it is the only line
delivered by the accented character. Victor revealed in an interview how central he believed this
line reading to be—“To poke fun at what they were trying to do, there had to be an accent”—and
some of the difficulty he faced getting one of his participants to agree to do the accent. This
actor-friend was of Indian descent and had qualms about brandishing the accent. Per Victor:
He doesn’t have that accent, and he didn’t feel comfortable at first using that
accent, but I was trying to explain to him that because of the original, [which] had
the Hispanic gentleman with the accent almost to make it seem like they were
diverse with their way of thinking. We did multiple takes with him, a whole
bunch of accents. At the end of the day […he] was okay with the accent.
“The Best Parody of NOM’s Ad” (GS20), on the other hand, did not include the accented
“the storm is coming” line, but instead had one of their participants earlier in the video wearing a
cowboy-style hat and fake mustache to accompany his accented delivery of another line (Figure
3.23). The same video also features a different man in a smock delivering a line in a South Asian
accent (Figure 3.24). “Gathering Storm Spoof” (GS18) features loud and overdramatized
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Figure 3.22: Mike Rose delivering central accented line in GS24, “A Gaythering Storm.”

Figure 3.23: Accentuating stereotypes in GS20, “The Best Parody of NOM’s Ad.”

Figure 3.24: Accentuating stereotypes in GS20, “The Best Parody of NOM’s Ad.”
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Spanish and East Asian accents. The participants delivering both accents stereotypically
mispronounce various words and phrases are further exaggerate them in the additional audition
outtakes version of this production team (GS19). Tony Rodriguez, in Katharine’s parody (GS21),
also played up an accent he did not have and delivered several of the lines in that production,
including, “They’re going to take away my child” and “They’re going to eat baby Jesus.” In the
same video Sonya Rhee, who was a high school friend of Katharine’s, follows up all the
proclamations from other characters about being affected and helpless doctors and mothers, to
announce, “I’m Asian.” The simple declaration with no other context plays up the critique that
the subjects of color in the original ad are only defined by their racial or ethnic identity. Later,
when all the characters are discussing what same-sex couples are going to take away from them,
Rhee delivers her only other line in deadpan: “They’re going to take away my Asian-inity.” This
once again reinforces the notion that the actors or participants of color are used in these
campaigns only as stand-ins to signal ambiguous harm same-sex marriage will bring to them and
their representative communities. Rhee’s last line could also be read as commentary on the
homophobic perception of queerness as a “Western disease” and the generally fraught
relationships between queerness and the Other in colonialism and Orientalism (Puar, 2007; Said,
1979).
What places these readings of the multicultural inclusion in the realm of cynicism is best
encapsulated by Mike’s remarks of how “The original is also such an amazing example of white
fragility, especially with that ‘I’m a Massachusetts mother, oh my God I’m victimized by this
gay thing.’” In one sense, what Mike said points out that the three primary arguments of harm
from same-sex marriage are narrated by and based on white subjects, echoing the tokenization of
the people of color represented in the original ad. In a more critical and historically rich context,
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though, Mike’s remarks actually call upon the integral role of whiteness in the construction of
the ideologies that undergird marriage and domesticity. Here, I refer to Ann McClintock (1995)
and Cathy Cohen’s (1997) analysis of both the historical—Western colonial—and contemporary
function of whiteness as the foundation of the legal and ideological institution of marriage. This
gets further complicated when the modern neoliberal project, as laid out by David Harvey
(2005), illustrates the marriage between the white working class and the cultural conservatism of
the religious right in the United States started in the eighties and maintained through partisan
politics in the nineties and on. This amalgamation comes through best in the aforementioned
closing lines in Victor’s parody as well as one of the scripted animations, “D.U.N.G.: Parody of
National Organization for Marriage Ad” (GS4), when they get to the turning point in the script:
John: A rainbow coalition in every shade of white is coming together from ivory
to pink to eggshell, people from all walks of life that don’t require a diploma.
Sarah: Plumbers. People who claim to be plumbers but aren’t licensed to be
plumbers. Trailer park managers. Klansmen. Klansmen who live in trailer parks
and claim to be plumbers but aren’t licensed to be plumbers. […] Join us. It’s
time that overly religious ignorant white people announced to the world with one
voice, ‘we are D.U.N.G.’ [Dumbfucks Urging No Gays].
This video pulls from pejorative white working-class stereotypes—as ignorant, “white trash,”
and racist—to satirize the presumed targeting appeal, particularly in tying whiteness to religious
sanctimony, that NOM and other similarly conservative organizations routinely rely on. In the
description for the “D.U.N.G.” video, user wayferer418 (2008) writes, “Obviously this is a
parodied response to the hate-speech, ass-backwards, ‘family-values’ bigotry of the National
Organization for Marriage’s recent Gathering Storm ad.” Thus, taken collectively, these parodies
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are really teasing apart the racialized construction of marriage which they see NOM doing a poor
job of hiding.

Intertextuality
Intertextuality becomes an important mode of engagement in and with these parodies.
The cultural texts that are invoked and referred throughout the entire set of videos are from two
distinct fields. The first are insignia of LGBT history and queer subcultures, including mass
media texts, particularly ones that have established connections with queer culture. These are
more strongly present in the remix videos from my data set, as they better represent the rich
history of remix appropriating mass media IP and using it as raw materials to reinterpret media
messages (Jenkins 2009, da Silva and Garcia 2012). Two particularly potent remix parodies are
analyzed below. The second field of intertextual texts that the parodies traffic in are age-old
conservative talking points about queers and gay marriage. I explore this further in the next
themed section on queer incongruity and hetero fragility.
Returning to one of the previous themes, ridiculing the storm metaphor is one of the
parody tactics that comes through strongest in the remixes of NOM’s ad. Two in particular—
“Gay Marriage Chasers” (GS6) and “The Gay Divas and Icons Remix” (GS15)—expertly deploy
intertextual references to appropriate and redirect the ad into new, more critical texts. “Gay
Marriage Chasers” combines the “Gathering Storm” ad with footage from the Discovery Channel
docu-reality show, “Storm Chasers” (2007-2012), which followed a teams of professional storm
chasers as they intercepted various storms and tornadoes in the Midwest. The high-stakes and
dangerous nature of storm chasing in the television series lent itself to a lot of intense storm
tracking and action scenes. The creators of this mashup expertly cut back and forth between “A
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Gathering Storm” and footage from “Storm Chasers” to insinuate that the chase is to intercept
gay marriage. The following excerpt represents the edited mashup—plain text represents scenes
from “A Gathering Storm” and the bolded text represents every cut to scenes from “Storm
Chasers”:
There’s a storm gathering. The clouds are dark.
There it is. It’s here, it’s here! Lock everything, it’s here!
And the winds are strong. And I am afraid. […] The storm is coming.
[Intense footage of storms]
But we have hope,
using state of the art technology and this armored 14,000-pound tank, they
try to plunge into the heart of
same-sex marriage.
Every spring,
a rainbow coalition of people of every creed and color
take on the impossible:
same-sex couples living as they wish.
We’re gonna put ourselves right here in northeast Oklahoma, southeast
Kansas. The other area that it could happen is up here in Iowa.
We can’t support same-sex marriage.
That’s why we need these 16,000 pound vehicles. We’re going where no sane
research team has gone before.
Join us.
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Key of Awesome, the group who produced the “I Have a Crush on Obama” video two years
earlier, were the producers behind this remix. The video relies on adept intertextuality, not just of
storm chasers, but also the political context of same-sex marriage updates across the nation, to
understand its critique. In one of the intercut “Storm Chasers” scenes, for instance, a team is
looking at a map, trying to track one of the storms when someone suggests that one of the areas
could be Iowa. Iowa had just legalized same-sex marriage—April 3, 2009—days before the
NOM ad aired. This brief intertextual morsel is key to deciphering the satire, making more
transparent NOM’s strategy of “chasing” states that are legalizing or considering legalizing
same-sex marriage, and deploying the ad in question in those states.
Another one of the remixes, “NOM Gathering Storm Response Parody: The Gay Divas
and Icons Remix” (GS15), mashes the original ad with clips from music videos, triggered by
various words or phrases the original ad’s subjects utter. After the first line, “There is a storm
gathering,” the video cuts to the starting melodic cues of the Eurhythmics’ “Here Comes the
Rain Again.” Back to the ad, after “the clouds are dark and the winds are strong” line the remix
cuts back to the music video and Annie Lennox singing, “Here comes the rain again, raining in
my head like a tragedy.” After the second of the ad’s subjects says they are afraid, the video cuts
to Cher singing “I should not be afraid” in the music video for her song, “Love is a Lonely
Place.” The video also employs rewind, repetition, and emphasis on the word “sex”—when it is
uttered as “same-sex marriage” in the original ad—and intercuts it with clips of Madonna’s
“Human Nature” and Marcy Playground’s “Sex and Candy” at points where they too sing “sex.”
They also cut to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” after the ad mentions “faith”; Kylie Minogue’s
“Come Into My World” when the ad claims, “They want to bring the issue into my life”; Dolly
Parton’s “9 to 5” after the word “job” in the ad; Avenue Q’s “Just so you know, if you were gay,
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that’d be okay” following the part in the ad about teaching gay marriage in schools; and so on.
At some point, they also layer in scenes of intimate same-sex couples from queer films and TV
shows—The L Word, Queer as Folk, Trick, Shelter, Boy Culture—to songs from Madonna and
others.
The work in this remix is less bitingly satirical and based more on an affective release, a
type of queer-affirming response to the homophobic call of NOM’s ad. The intertextual
references to music artists who have historic resonance to gay and queer culture are seemingly
all on the surface, simply aligning trigger words with matching lyrics. Some of the song and
lyrical choices, though, have more critical implications. Madonna’s “Human Nature,” for
instance is used twice, first cut in to the part of the video where she sings, “oops, I didn’t know
we couldn’t talk about sex,” and later to the select lyrics, “You punished me for telling you my
fantasy.” These choices get after a more historically dense intertextual critique of conservative
policies, like the ones NOM is after, that are always, at their root, more about policing non-
normative or unsanctioned sexuality than about protecting children and heterosexual families
(see Warner, 2000; Berlant and Warner, 2002; Cohen, 1997; Rubin, 1992). This remix is a salve
for queer viewers. The queer intertextuality reveals more about the functions of these remix
parodies in queer and liberal spaces and contexts—digital publics, if you will—than in the spaces
of and for political deliberation. It begs the question: what larger purpose do these parodies
serve?

Queer Incongruence and Hetero Fragility
Another common target of satire across the parodies was simply how “gay” the original
ad was. This dovetails back to the pure camp nature of the style and rhetoric of “A Gathering
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Storm” that stems heavily from its failure at appearing “straight.” “Straight,” here, takes on
several meanings, including individuals in the ad being read as heterosexual, secure, honest,
believable, and devoid of any gay or queer innuendo. Judging from the collective imperative
across the parodies, the ad fails on all these fronts. It reveals a certain insecurity among
heterosexuals that I term hetero fragility, and the juxtaposition of homophobia with
melodramatic theater and using “rainbow” as an integral metaphor leads to humor through
incongruity, exploited by the parodies.
The notion of hetero fragility is based mostly on the unfounded slippery slope argument
fallacies that same-sex marriage will not only harm society as a whole but also individually
affect non-queer people. “A Gathering Storm” doubles down on these vague claims when many
of the subjects in their ad announce that their freedoms will be taken away, that they will have no
choice but to accept same-sex marriage into their lives: “Those advocates want to change the
way I live. I will have no choice.” The parodies extend this line of argument, and often bring in
the adjacent claims that same-sex marriage will weaken heterosexual marriages either
interpersonally or institutionally, to call out and ridicule the idea that same-sex marriage will
affect non-gay couples, their children, or their families. A prominent sarcastic response to this
perception is that exposure to same-sex couples or queer content will turn straight people gay.
The parodies take this on:
GS21: They’re going to turn my father gay.
GS24: But they won’t stop until all of us and our children are gay married.
GS29: I don’t want the government to force me to get gay married.
GS30: They’re forcing me to be gay with them, but I love Jesus.
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Most notably, “Gathering Storm Spoof” (GS18) and “Gathering Storm Spoof-The Auditions”
(GS19) take the most liberty to alter the structure of the original script and instead paint a vivid
picture of this threat:
You’re at home with your wife and children,
Peacefully watching some primetime TV,
When suddenly homosexuals appear on screen.
What’s that you hear? Homosexuals getting married? That’s right!
Instantly, there’s a nagging feeling in your gut that causes you to question your
love for your wife.
What’s worse, turning your head slowly to little Molly and Peter,
You see your worst fears realized:
Both of your children have probably just turned gay.
Peter begins playing with Molly’s dolls.
Molly has decided she’s a vegetarian.
Your wife leaves the house a mess and goes back to college.
And you? You’re giving blow jobs behind the local gay bar, The Cock Pit, to pay
for your meth addiction.
You will have no choice.
You will have no choice.
No choice.
But we have hope.
A pink triangle of people is coming together to sing Judy Garland torch songs
against gay marriage.
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This parody plays up intertextual references to a host of conservative fear tactics and gay
cultural stereotypes for satiric effect. They dramatize the fear that queer content will have
damaging (and queering) effects on children, an ideology that has governed much censorship in
American media throughout much of the twentieth century. They pull in stereotypes of lesbians
being vegetarians and gay boys playing with dolls to dial up this so-called threat. They also rely
on gendered and sexist logics that happy marriages keep the woman in the house, that the idea of
a woman leaving the house or pursuing an education is the result of a disruption to the
heteronormative order of things. Similar to the other videos quoted above, they suggest that the
mere appearance of same-sex couples on their TV screen will eventually lead to the husband
turning tricks. They also weave in many gay cultural references to play up the queer
intertextuality, from the prominence of meth addiction in the gay community to the pink triangle
and Judy Garland.
The idea of gay marriage disrupting heterosexual marriages is also explicitly referenced
in one of the individually produced original productions (GS9), in which a man parodies the
audition outtakes. In one of these takes, he wonders: “It threatens my marriage because, like,
what if some gay couple moves in next door and they’re all like buff and polite, and my wife
says to me, ‘why can’t you be more like that?’” These familiar scripts and rebuttals thus play a
key role in the parodies’ strategy of exposing the implied fragilities of masculinity,
heterosexuality, and heteronormativity.
Several of the videos also employ cultural scripts and stereotypes that routinely expose
morally conservative figures, often Republican politicians with anti-gay policies, as being
closeted homosexuals. “The Gathering Storm (Fixed)” (GS1), for instance, uses text and images
to mark up the original ad, mockingly “outs” three of the men in the ad by using arrows on the
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screen with text that reads “Gay” or “Makes Boy George Sound Butch,” or superimposing an
image of a “Gayometer” with the dial pointing to 7.5/9 on the face of another speaker (Figures
3.25 and 3.26). “Gathering Storm Spoof” (GS18) features a male participant with a slight lisp,
who in the separate video that includes outtakes, is being given instructions to read the lines “just
a little more grounded and masculine.” John Knefel’s character in Katharine’s video (GS21)
parodies “ex-gay” converts admitting, “I’m barely straight,” and that he had gone to camp to “get
not gay.” Mike’s Funny or Die production (GS24) was one of the only videos to feature known
actors and celebrities, and the incorporation of several known, if niche, gay figures also amps up
the incongruity of gay people “acting” straight.
Finally, many of the parodies, from remix to scripted animations, from solo productions
to group projects go after the ad’s “rainbow coalition” line as unarguably gay in our cultural
lexicon, and thus all the more comic when employed straight-faced in an anti-gay ad. The use of
rainbow in the ad, of course, is what the storm metaphor builds to—the bright rainbow after the
storm, the hope that lies past the same-sex marriage turmoil—and thus, further camps up the
whole conceit of the campaign.
GS1: [Text mark-up on screen] We won’t let the fags take away our rainbow!!
GS3: Hey wait a minute. Rainbow sounds kinda gay, doesn’t it?
GS9: A rainbow coalition…[pause] Rainbow?
GS11: I hope you join the rainbow coalition to stop the rainbow coalition.
GS29: We have a rainbow coalition. Not the homosexual rainbow visible at so
many pride parades, but a new, exclusive rainbow. A rainbow that doesn’t
arc but is completely straight. You won’t find a pot of gold at the end of
this rainbow, but maybe a six-pack of Coors and a “Jugs” magazine.
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Figure 3.25: Faux-outing markups in GS1, “The Gathering Storm (Fixed).”

Figure 3.26: Faux-outing markups in GS1, “The Gathering Storm (Fixed).”

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The “Gaythering Storm” parody (GS24), featuring Jane Lynch as the final speaker, foregoes the
rainbow for a different weather-related metaphor—building “a giant umbrella of faith, morality,
and righteousness that will protect us from this gay rain army. And that’s not just a metaphor.
We’re actually building an, um, umbrella.” These call-outs serve not only to lampoon the naiveté
of the original ad for using such potently queer iconography but, coupled with the other decoded
references above, suggest the repression of queerness that lies beneath the surface of many
iterations of conservatism.

The Social and Cultural Logics of Participation
Establishing “A Gathering Storm” as a bona fide meme, the above analysis situates the
parodies in the growing practices of participatory digital culture of the time. As Shifman (2011)
concludes, “people are emulating not only specific videos, but the cluster of textual traits
identified here as catalysts for imitation by others […] suggest[ing] that more than anything these
memetic videos spread the notion of participatory culture itself” (p. 199). But there is more here
than participatory culture as an end in itself. In thinking about the significance of these videos, I
return back to Shifman’s (2011) conclusion which further puts forth the argument that the
impetus driving imitation and parody is tied to economic, social, and cultural logics of
participation. I extend Shifman’s ideas on social and cultural logics of participation to argue that
the parodies analyzed in this chapter serve to deepen queer digital publics and mainstream LGBT
politics.
The social logic of participation, Shifman asserts, “would suggest that the mimesis of
famous videos is highly compatible with the age of ‘networked individualism’” (p. 200).
Derivative videos, she claims, both establish connections between members of a social network
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and are “emblems of a culture saturated with personal branding and strategic self-
commodification” (p. 200). To a certain extent, this is true of the “Gathering Storm” videos. As
the original ad and parodies started spreading, the newer iterations were more self-aware of
contributing to a network of political commentary. Yet the individual motivations of the
producers of these parodies revealed a range of reasons driving their interest in satirizing the ad.
Victor made his as one small component of a larger thesis project on comedy and political satire.
Katharine and Mike were both actors and comedians in their own right, so these projects were in
part inherently a showcase for their own brands, but also, as they told me, for themselves too. “I
have learned,” Katharine states, “that at the end of the day the audience I am making things for is
me—if I’m happy with it. When I release content, the only rule at this point is ‘do I like it? Does
it make me laugh and also think?’” Mike echoes this sentiment, but adds some queer specificity
to it: “I don’t necessarily make anything for an audience. But I do ‘cause I’m making it for me
and there’s a lot of people like me out there […] searching, searching, searching [for content].”
Remarking on how he was gay, his friend and co-writer was a lesbian, and their contact at Funny
or Die was also a lesbian, he reveled in that “it was this kind of gay comedy people going like,
‘ooh wouldn’t this be? Oh, look at that! Oh yeah, we should do this […] we were just young gay
people in comedy [and] wanted to make stuff.”
Teresa and Sabrina had a different take as they were both entrenched in the Los Angeles
LGBT activism at the time, following the Prop 8 fall out. Teresa explained the context:
After Prop 8, everyone went to West Hollywood that first night. Then they started
talking about what to do next. [Some people] put together a meeting between all
the different grassroots groups that were starting. It was messy, but at the same
time it got us all to know who everyone was now. So we met a lot of people at
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that, and we continued to coordinate different marches and events. That’s how we
met a bunch of people, including a bunch of the women who were in the video.
Sabrina corroborated this account, adding “there was literally a meeting happening every single
day at night, multiple times, and I was the only one that didn’t really solidify myself with one
group. I would just travel to all of them so we could all be on the same page.” They both express
the seemingly non-stop planning after November for different actions and demonstrations. In our
interview, Sabrina elaborated:
When we were in the streets, there was a feeling of connectedness and then there
was the frustration and anger and all the different emotions that came along […]
So many people felt what happened on election day and had very little outlets,
ways to express themselves, so I think we just wanted to do something silly […]
We wanted our friends to see it and we wanted people to know that we didn’t
have to take everything seriously. Here’s a little satire in your face.
Relating to that double sense of connectedness and frustration, Teresa said:
We all had the same mission. There were a lot of disagreements on how to get
there, but this [parody] was something that was easy to agree upon. During that
time, it was a lot of work, a lot of discussions, conflicts sometimes, and a lot of
uncertainty. And anything we could do to have fun with it, we did. I think we did
[the parody] ‘cause we enjoyed it ourselves.
These last accounts reveal a different social function of the parodies, a release valve in some
way. While Victor, Katharine, and Mike shared some of the same political sentiments, they also
had varying levels of access to and interest in content production, while Teresa and Sabrina
represent those who came together at a drop of a dime in a DIY ethos as a way to relieve some of
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the stress of non-stop political organizing and to share this affective byproduct with those who
could also relate.
Common throughout all the recollected experiences from interviewees was a communal
ethos and an excited urgency. They all describe how fast everything came together, how willing
everyone was, how relatively short the shoots were, all despite the varying levels of production
experience. Teresa, for instance, lacked any production experience but orchestrated everything
almost instantaneously: “I just wrote something up really quick, asked who was available, and
got together and did it in like half an hour or an hour”—and her video, which also featured
Sabrina, was the first group production from my data set to be posted online. Mike and
Katharine, who both had writing partners, said that within a day or one coffee-shop session they
had their scripts. These accounts demonstrate a certain affinity with what Aymar Jean Christian
(2014) calls “sweat equity” when he describes the production process of many early indie web
series. While Christian’s project is about a specific type of narrative production, there are
certainly overlaps here, not least of which due to the fact that some of these parody producers do
work in the same industries Christian writes about. He claims that some of these projects are
producer-driven, “involving a team of creative and technical workers collaborating on a
project—investing labor time for an unguaranteed payoff, or ‘sweat equity’—in the hopes it
finds an audience or a buyer” (p. 167). The parodies here are not seeking buyers or even specific
audiences in the sense of financial investment and capital, and they were also not invested in
changing people’s minds with their satire. But they were still speaking to a community, which
could be their friends and fellow activists, artist communities, improv collectives, queer comic
circles, their wider social media networks—since they all expressed posting and sharing their
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videos on their personal social media accounts—thus, generating a form of value: political value,
community value, social bonding value, that contributes to deepening queer digital publics.
What I mean by deepening queer digital publics is expanding the pool of queer
producers, content creators, and queer, campy media in the participatory cultures of digital
publics. I am drawing on Mike’s proclamation, for instance, of the opportunity this video opened
up for “gay comedy people” to simply put content out there. But I am also drawing on the outlet
it provided for Teresa, who was not in entertainment or production, but who made this and one
other parody video during the height of post-Prop 8 activism. Thus, the social function here was
not simply self-commodification or establishing connections between members of a social
network, but the layered meanings and motivations between those connections, most of all the
value of circulating queer content.
It was not only deepening queer connectivity and collective relief, however. The parodies
were also an outlet for expanding the cultural parameters of participation in LGBT politics. I
distinguish here between ‘queer’ as people or content from people who identify as LGBTQ, and
‘LGBT politics’ as a broader and more mainstream project that includes queer and straight
participants. Victor and Katharine, for example, both identified as straight, yet had several queer
participants in their productions. Mike’s Funny or Die parody had both straight and queer
celebrities, and I imagine the rest of the productions and remixes had healthy combinations of
both queer and straight producers and participants. The parodies’ coverage on mainstream cable
news (CNN), news comedy shows (Colbert Report), and television series (Futurama) also
provides a case in point for the growing appeal of LGBT political content for wider and more
mainstream audiences, and the increasing interest and willingness for those audiences to
contribute to the cultural production and circulation of LGBT-issue media.
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The cultural logic of participation, on the other hand, considers how as building blocks of
complex cultures, the practices embodied in the production and distribution of these videos have
historical roots. Using Jenkins’ work on fan cultures as a template, and Peters and Seier’s study
of YouTube dance video remakes “as a new public expansion of a long-time tradition of
bedroom dancing,” Shifman makes the case that “mimetic videos and their derivatives can be
seen as sites in which historical modes of cultural production meet the new advances of Web 2.0
(p. 200). Here, I argue that the satirical parodies—with an extra emphasis on the original group
productions—along with some of the grassroots and independent videos from the Prop 8 chapter
are very much rooted in historical uses of camp, play, and theater in LGBT activism from at least
the sixties and on. These digital demonstrations extend the ethos of humor and pleasure, essential
to LGBT and other radical organizing efforts of the past, to contemporary, albeit more
mainstream, activism through digital platforms.
Camp, play, and parody have a rich history in LGBT and queer activism, particularly
from the late sixties gay liberation up through the eighties-era AIDS epidemic, mostly expressed
through public demonstrations that incorporated a lot of theatricality, spontaneity, and satire. In
her project on “acts of gaiety,”—“which includes but is by no means limited to zap actions,
pageants, parades, spectacles, kiss-ins, camp, kitsch, and drag”—Sara Warner (2012) writes
about “the role of pleasure, humor, fun, and frivolity in shaping the ways sexual minorities come
to understand ourselves and the roles in which we have been cast” (p. xi-xiii). Warner’s work is
largely focused on the queer community and literature’s amnesiac relation to gay history and
lesbian feminist structures of feeling that elides the roots of this integrated humor and pleasure in
favor of mainstreaming what she terms homoliberalism. Thus, while the political perspective that
animates Warner’s work is antithetical to, say, the marriage movement for same-sex couples—in
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fact, much of the critique in her book is aimed at gay marriage, leading to her dismissal of Funny
or Die’s “Prop 8: The Musical,” which preceded Mike Rose’s “A Gaythering Storm” as a star-
studded satire—the activist practices she historicizes have strong resonance with the style,
production, and distribution of these parody videos.
The motivation, organization, and distribution of some of the parodies analyzed in this
chapter, for instance, bear a striking resemblance to zaps. Per Warner:
First staged by anarchist hippies associated with the antiwar and free speech
movements, zaps combine physical comedy, symbolic costumes, expressive
gestures, and farcical timing in brief, improvised skits that are designed to shock
and awe people, jolting them out of their complacency and fixed frames of
reference […] The term refers to playful methods of social activism and mirthful
modes of political performance that inspire and sustain deadly serious struggles
for revolutionary change (x-xi).
Warner discusses the use of zaps by various feminist and lesbian feminist groups, like WITCH—
Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell—in the context of highlighting the
violence of marriage on women’s rights. Warner also recognizes the use of zaps in the more
remembered activities of the Gay Activist Alliance, who sometimes used them for pro-marriage
demonstrations in the seventies, which oftentimes did not include any women. Further, Benjamin
Shepard (2010) interviewed activists from the Stonewall period who recalled the surge of zaps
following the riots. One of his interviewees, Donald Gallgher, remembered: “You just called
people up on the phone and had them just show up somewhere” (p. 39-40). Zaps during the
AIDS crisis, orchestrated by ACT-UP or its affiliate groups, Shepard explains, were often
intended to disrupt the shooting of homophobic movies or news reports with orchestrated banner
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drops. Along with these zaps, other forms of street theatrics and rituals, like sit-ins, die-ins, and
kiss-ins, were part of an external organizing strategy. Warner assesses that “answering the call
for a ‘participatory democracy,’ these actions enabled the direct involvement of individuals in
social decisions determining the quality of their lives” (p. 80). The “Gathering Storm” parodies, I
argue, build on this legacy and enact this work in the new, digital era context.
While media content distributed through digital networks cannot replace or fully emulate
the function of public demonstrations and street theater, they have implemented their own
languages and modes of engagement, which are not completely divorced from older cultural
forms of political organizing. This brings the chapter’s emphasis on the group productions into
relief because they still embody some of the affective impulses in play and performance crucial
to the survival and functioning of LGBT, queer, and AIDS activism networks, but adapt it to
digital-era currencies. Katharine, Mike, and Teresa’s similar and virtually spontaneous impulse
after seeing the original NOM ad—calling up friends and partners, meeting up almost
immediately, collaborative and quick shoots—resembles Donald Gallgher’s recollection of zap
organizing above. The reliance on camp, humor, and theatricality follows the style of play and
performance Shepard and Warner document. In other words, the parody videos discussed here
were not necessarily breaking the mold, but like many things that emerge in digital platforms
today, they were adaptations of historically rooted cultural forms of queer and LGBT activism.

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Chapter 4: It Gets Complicated

In early October 2010, Project Runway mentor Tim Gunn uploaded a two-minute video
to a nondescript YouTube channel that opens with “a very important message to gay, lesbian,
bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth.” Simply titled, “It Gets Better,” the video is
Gunn’s contribution to the similarly titled project started two weeks prior by online columnist
Dan Savage as a response to a spike in news reports of gay-related teen suicides in September of
that year. In his video appeal to queer youth, Tim Gunn insists he understand their desperation,
despair, and how isolated they can feel, and reveals that, as a teen, he too attempted to kill
himself. Claiming there are people that can help them, and that they cannot go at this alone,
Gunn implores his target audience to seek help, including reaching out to the Trevor Project, a
suicide hotline for LGBT and questioning youth.
During the same week, Erika Davis (2010) uploaded a five-minute video to her own
YouTube channel, prefacing in the video description, “After watching all of the wonderful It
Gets Better videos I thought I’d post one myself.” Unlike Tim Gunn, the bullying experiences
described in Davis’s video, titled “It Gets Better-Black Gay Jew,” were not related to her sexual
orientation—as she claims she did not come out till age 28—and there was no recounting of
suicide attempts. Despite the title of her video, Davis cautions her audience that it does not
necessarily get better after high school: “I’m not going to say that when you leave high school
everything gets better because it doesn’t necessarily and there are still dumb people out there and
really hateful people out there and they unfortunately get older like us too.” She goes on,
however, to insist that, even if you can’t be out, “as long as you love yourself and believe in
yourself, know that you are worthy of love.”
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These are but two of the many thousand videos that were uploaded online in response to
Savage’s call for outreach and hope to queer youth contemplating suicide, but they call attention
to many of the issues that have shaped the It Gets Better campaign’s practices and continued
effects on popular LGBT activism and its contested politics. For instance, with Gunn’s video
amassing more than 750,000 views and Davis’s upload clearing just 4,200, the two bring into
relief the difference celebrity plays in the unequal circulation of some videos—and by extension,
varying viewpoints—over others. As a middle-aged, wealthy, white, gay man, Gunn, like project
initiator Savage, also stands in for the overshadowing visibility of one particular demographic
over many others. His message is more scripted and direct, while hers, though meandering and
less cohesive, is also more nuanced. The aesthetics of Gunn’s video—well lit, standing,
background art—present a more polished look, while the lower production value of Davis’s
darker and more intimate angle and space—in her bedroom, presumably—add to the distinctions
in content between the two videos. Despite these differences, though, both Gunn and Davis
uploaded their videos, along with over a thousand others, within two weeks of Savage’s, and
both make their motivation for their videos evident. They both delve into personal memories and
experiences of trauma to relate to their audience. Both videos bear the “it gets better” tag and
continue to circulate online seven years after their release. While the noted differences between
these two videos have posed and provoked important questions and challenges regarding various
biases in representation and social media technology, it is the underlying significance of the
latter similarities between these two videos—and among the thousands of others—and the
attendant impact on digital LGBT discourses that grounds this chapter.
Appearing in late September 2010, the It Gets Better Project came out at a particularly
prime moment for both social media action and LGBT visibility in media and politics. By social
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media action here, I mean both the emerging uses of social media for various movement politics
and the increasing incursion of celebrity culture into self-presentation practices in socially
networked media cultures. Preceding Occupy and the Arab Spring uprisings, It Gets Better offers
an earlier iteration of how these networked technologies and platforms structure participation.
More specifically, it is a case study for analyzing not only the affordances and limitations of
various social media, but how affect underlies those flows of participation. At the same time,
following California’s Proposition 8 and a record number of LGBT characters on television,
LGBT rights and visibility is gaining unprecedented attention. This visibility also dovetails with
the various digital publics and networks coming together online, allowing more voices more
opportunities and avenues to be heard. With this increase in access and platforms, various long-
held tensions within LGBT communities also move to more public and potentially popular
spaces. Some of these disputes critique LGBT inroads into the mainstream for relying on and
privileging whiteness, homonormativity, and a politics of respectability (Duggan, 2002). Yet,
they often overlook many intervening and underlying factors that contribute to the conditions of
participation. In fact, much of what has been written on It Gets Better both in academic journals
and popular outlets is focused only at the level of content or potential and purported impact on
queer youth. It Gets Better, thus, not only comes through at this moment of social media action
and LGBT visibility, but is caught at the intersection of these critical discourses.
In the first section of the chapter, I detail the background of the campaign and then tie it
to legacies of LGBT media activism. Then, I address and contextualize three critical
discourses—authorship, representation, and ideology—that have followed It Gets Better and
work through the premises of these critiques to argue that the culminating import of the project is
not contained in any one message, but rather through the politics and practices of participation.
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Finally, I move to demonstrate the critical role affect plays in both structuring and sustaining the
phenomenon. Together, these analyses reveal the structural limitations of digital participation,
but also exhibit new modes of LGBT activism in the way they collectively build intimate and felt
publics.

Background

On September 9, 2010, fifteen year-old Billy Lucas from Greensburg, Indiana hung
himself in a barn at his grandmother’s home after being bullied and tormented by students at his
school for being perceived as gay. Local affiliate news stations Fox59 and Wthr13 Eyewitness
News picked up the story and by September 14 it was blogged by gay online news outlets
Towleroad, LGBTQ Nation, QWEERTY, The Advocate, and blogged by Dan Savage on
Seattle’s online news journal The Stranger. Billy Lucas’s death followed the quieter news of
fifteen year-old Justin Aaberg, an out gay teen in Minnesota who also hanged himself two
months prior—July 9, 2010—after being bullied at Anoka High School. After Billy Lucas, on
September 13, seventeen year-old Cody Barker from Shiocton, Wisconsin took his own life; on
September 19, thirteen year-old Seth Walsh of Tehachapi, California; on September 22, eighteen
year-old Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi from Ridgewood, Ohio; on September 23,
thirteen year-old Asher Brown of Houston, Texas; and on September 29, nineteen year-old,
openly gay sophomore Raymond Chase at Johnson and Whales University in Rhode Island all
committed suicide as result of various forms of bullying centered on their affirmed or perceived
sexual orientation.
The six September suicides received global coverage, particularly online, and placed an
extended spotlight on LGBT-related teen bullying. Though the successive reports of the many
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deaths temporarily sustained its coverage on mainstream outlets, what really turned this news
story into an ongoing cultural discussion and phenomenon was the launch of the It Gets Better
Project. The project was initiated by syndicated sex columnist and well-known LGBT figure Dan
Savage as a vlog-style reaction to reports of Billy Lucas’s death. Savage (2010a) and his partner
Terry (recorded an eight-and-a-half-minute video at a local Seattle bar detailing their individual
bullying histories from high school, followed by improved conditions after high school, how
they met, and the joys of raising their son. At the end of the video, they direct their attention to
any prospective middle school and high school viewers who are being tormented and bullied for
being gay and considering suicide to hold on to the promise that it gets better, their own afore-
discussed happiness as anecdotal proof that life improves after high school. According to
Savage, they shot the video and registered the website domain on September 15, though the
video was not posted online until September 21. Two days later, in response to a reader email
that asked, “what can we do,” Savage shared his video on his column, writing about his
motivation for the project. He invited others to “add submissions from gay and lesbian adults—
singles and couples, with kids and without, established careers or just starting out, urban and
rural, of all races and religious backgrounds” to his YouTube channel (Savage, 2010b). The
additional suicide reports that came in after they recorded the first video—and even shortly after
the project launched—incidentally gave Savage’s message an increasingly urgent and propitious
platform.
In the days and weeks that followed, waves of video submissions poured into the It Gets
Better YouTube channel, maxing out its capacity and leading Savage to invest in a website to
accommodate hosting the volume of videos still coming in. The range of contributors came from
an unusually diverse power index, meaning the grassroots campaign received video messages not
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only from other niche and queer bloggers—most notably Perez Hilton—but also a large number
of “ordinary” people and, increasingly, more celebrities and politicians, including Ellen
Degeneres, Neil Patrick Harris, Chris Colfer, Sarah Silverman, Adam Lambert, Ke$ha, Lady
Gaga, then-President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and many more. A
large portion of these were homemade single-subject videos, recorded in private spaces (like the
bedroom), and extemporaneous, addressing the camera directly. Others, typically celebrity
videos, had a cleaner look with better lighting, strategic background, and speaking more scripted.
Another popular variation that emerged within a month of the project’s launch was the
compilation video. These videos, coming from a wide variety of groups (companies, schools,
public sector agencies) each featured an edited compilation of their LGBT members or
employees addressing the spectrum of narratives and advice that all the other standard It Gets
Better videos had. While all the videos that were submitted to the It Gets Better YouTube
channel initially needed approval by Savage, there was no official protocol on how to make a
video, and users could certainly upload them on their own channels and profiles, which many of
them did.
A majority of the videos follow the formula Dan and Terry’s original upload established,
seemingly turning into a trope with the countless repeated narrative structure. Here I will use two
compilation videos—one from the first wave of submissions in the fall of 2010 and another one
uploaded five years later—to better establish the narrative structure and tone across a majority of
videos. I turn to the compilation videos not only because they became an increasingly common
variation, but also because they crystallize what has been observed as the dominant narrative
structure of the project. These compilation videos edit together about a dozen individual stories
in a way that creates an echo for each step of the narrative.
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Many of the narratives open with a brief introduction of who the speaker is and
sometimes make a reference to either the suicide reports or the It Gets Better Project as their
motivation to contribute. Their stories then move to recounting their youth, what it was like to
grow up feeling different. In the Pixar (2010) compilation video, the following revelations come
from different participants in rapid succession:
-I knew from a very young age that I was different.
-I started out as sort of a tomboy and I liked to play with the boys and I liked to
play with boy things
-I walked around, I talked around, I wasn’t interested in the right things—I loved
show tunes.
-I brought my sister’s doll to show and tell
-I was able to compartmentalize being gay
-I always felt that if I don’t want this hard enough, it would go away
-It was sort of all I could to keep it under wraps, to keep it hidden

The FDNY (2015) compilation video, uploaded in October of 2015, echoes these same
sentiments:
-Growing up, I never felt like I belonged anywhere
-I was always trying to figure out why me and not them
-This deep secret, dark secret that I was afraid of, that I didn’t want to be me
-I struggled with being queer
-I struggled with just wanting to be like everyone. I wanted to fit in, I wanted to be
accepted, to be loved.

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These were followed by slightly lengthier anecdotes about family and school experiences,
instances that displayed their difference or the oppression they felt to conform and hide. The
FDNY service members also detailed their coming out experiences with their family, another
common narrative event included in many other It Gets Better videos. Soon after, the stories shift
to more aggravated conflicts—bullying, harassment, and thoughts or attempts of suicide:
-All of the people in the stands were like, “dyke” and “lesbo” and “get off the field”
-I got harassed verbally and physically
-They’d call me faggot and push me around
-It escalated to be pretty violent not only inside the campus of the school, but outside
-I felt full of self-hatred.
-I started getting these thoughts that if I’m not around, no one would really miss me,
no one would really care.
-Someone interrupted me from jumping off the roof of my dorm. I am so grateful to
that person today because things got so much better, and I wouldn’t have known it
if they hadn’t stopped me. (Pixar)

These narratives of despair are usually followed with thoughts about what they would have
missed if they had decided to end their lives, bringing in many of the milestones and experiences
that they have had since their adolescence and the general benefits of being queer.
-I would have missed so much of my life.
-I would have missed an entire future that was genuine.
-Making art, discovering new music
-Going to birthday parties with my daughter’s friends
-Walking into a gay bar and feeling like you really belonged
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-The most amazing experiences that you can have with a friend
-I would have missed meeting Colin, my amazing cubemate (Pixar)

-Had I ended it, I would have missed so many wonderful things in my life. Since
that time, I’ve found a really healthy relationship with someone I truly love and
I’m incredibly grateful to be married to, and we have really delightful children,
and I have a healthy relationship with my parents, and a really fulfilling career,
and I never would have imagined it in that instance.
-A lot of who I am now, a lot of the strong, confident, proud person that I am now
is not just me, I owe it to so many people along the way.
-A lot of my queer community I consider family, more than my blood family.
(FDNY)

The final sections of the narrative address queer youth more explicitly to offer advice and tell
them it gets better:
-Don’t let anyone tell you you’re less than zero just because you’re gay
-There are lots of people here who acre about you and want to see you live
-So please stay strong and stay in it. It gets better.
-And know that no matter how hard things can seem that you’re connected to
everyone else goin through that same thing.
-You will find your place and it will get better, I promise.
-Focus on the future, don’t focus on the problems you’re going through right now.
Focus on the greatness of your life that’s going to become.
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-I promise you that it not only gets better, but it’s so much more than you could
possibly imagine.
-It gets better (Pixar)

-Don’t let anyone tell you who to be or how to be that’s not true to who you are.
-Love and understand yourself and you’ll get to everywhere you need to be.
-Love yourself, be okay with yourself because it is okay and you’re worthy of love.
-Search for the love.
-So please hold on for one more day because I promise it gets better.
-Keep moving forward, it gets better
-Give it time, it gets better.
-It doesn’t just get better, it gets amazing. (FDNY)
The collective effect of these many voices in each compilation is also emblematic of how every
video functions as part of the larger project. They all echo and build on one another as they
strengthen and expand the campaign through their willful responses. The many thousand
messages culminate into a shared effect, though not all accounts cohere to these exact structures.
Some are shorter and without as much personal revelation, while other single-subject videos can
run for ten minutes with a lot more detail about their experiences and reactions to the suicides
and the project. Some are from straight allies and famous figures, while others are from more
radical activists that take the opportunity to critique the campaign for its assimilationist and
heteronormative impulses. I bring up the variety of people and narratives that make up It Gets
Better not to argue for any merits based on multiplicity or plurality of voices. This chapter is less
concerned with making evaluations about a quantifiable impact of the project—or how it has
affected its supposed target of queer youth—and more concerned with how the project and its
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participants build on historical trajectories of LGBT video activism, mobilize affect to political
effects, and how these modes of participation need to be interrogated at the level of technology
and representation bias to better situate the effect they have on broader discourses of LGBT
digital publics and networked politics of popular LGBT movements.

Vernacular Video and Alternative Media
The immediate attention and both its resounding and sustained participation turned It
Gets Better into a flashpoint of sorts for digital LGBT action and visibility at the time. Both the
high praise and sharp critique have also spurred contentious debates that have brought queer
political discussions into popular digital communication practices. Consequently, while the
assessment of It Gets Better’s cultural import is an essential question this chapter undertakes, it is
grounded by an important preliminary appraisal, often ignored, of the structural formations that
preceded the success of It Gets Better. Success here entails many meanings: how it spread both
so rapidly and broadly; why it resonated so strongly with a wide range of participants; how it
provoked and popularized critical queer and LGBT debates on sprawling social media and digital
platforms. To gain a better understanding of this success, it is first imperative to interrogate the
project at a fundamental level of form and genre. This section will analyze the formative
elements undergirding the production and intelligibility of It Gets Better, arguing how the
affordances of both connective action and affective publics of new digital organizing couple with
historically LGBT-resonant modes of video production and the testimonial genre to provide a
familiar frame for widespread participation.
While the scope and reach of the It Gets Better Project was unprecedented for an online
LGBT campaign, the conceit of the project builds on many preceding types of collective
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organizing and social communication efforts in LGBT media histories. The first It Gets Better
contribution, Dan and Terry’s digitally shot video, was individually produced and uploaded onto
YouTube, then embedded in a blog post and shared across various online networks and press
articles. While this first video was shot by a professional, a majority of single-subject videos
followed suit with the digital video format, but instead predominantly used laptop or phone
cameras. Thus, the widespread form of the videos is far from original, utilizing the capabilities of
either cheap or integrated phone and laptop cameras, affordable or built-in video editing
software, and a free, public distribution platform (YouTube). The solo-shot digital video has also
been the basis for one of the most common genres of online video, the video blog—or vlog for
short—that entails speaking to the camera, sharing personal stories, opinions, explanations,
ramblings, tutorials, etc.
Whereas the vlog, or any variety of direct address YouTube videos, describes a broad
phenomenon of video production, It Gets Better has also been categorized as vernacular video, a
somewhat narrower genre of vlogging that entails or implicates your video as part of a dialog. It
describes the approach of informal user-generated “response” videos that are in reaction or
conversation with various other texts (Brabham, 2010; Alexander and Losh, 2010; Tropiano,
2014). West et al assert, “vernacular videos, which share a dialectical rather than oppositional
relationship with more established and institutionalized forms of media, are increasingly popular
because the more accessible means of production make it possible for individuals to share their
thoughts and experiences through outlets such as YouTube or Vine” (2013, p. 51). It Gets Better
falls in line with the dialectical relationship alluded to here in two distinct ways. First, they are
explicitly responding to the widespread coverage of the suicides and potential at-risk queer
youth. Second, there is an implicit response—though sometimes it is also called out explicitly—
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to the historically stagnant state of visibility of LGBT stories in the mass media and popular
culture. This is often cited for the lack of role models for now-adult LGBT contributors. In fact,
Dan Savage (2010b) cites the institutional impediments to addressing queer youth in person—not
being allowed to talk to high school students in the ways he gives talks on college campuses—as
one of the formative reasons why he resorted to the public accessibility of online video. Many It
Gets Better contributors also frame their messages as a response to the lack of attention and
visibility through mainstream channels—including common sentiments, “I did not grow up with
gay role models” or “if only there was someone who could tell me this when I was young”—
reinforcing how the project as a whole and their individual videos are efforts to correct or
provide alternative images to established forms of media.
In fact, this notion of vernacular video as “responding” to mainstream offerings dates
back before the prominence of web 2.0 and digital video online. Patricia Aufdenheide (1995)
deploys this term to describe the early to mid-90s trend to broadcast viewer-produced videos,
which back then were home-made videotapes that proliferated across the general population due
to the affordability of camcorders in the eighties and nineties. Citing the commercial success and
appeal of America’s Funniest Home Videos and the choreographed realism of Cops,
Aufdenheide details the efforts of a couple independent networks (PBS in the U.S. and ITVS in
U.K.) to tap into a type of citizen journalism genre and establish series that “talk back,” so to
speak, through both independently produced episodes and home-videotaped viewer comments in
response. A key example Aufdenheide points to is Silverlake Life, a 1993 film made by Tom
Joslin and his lover Mark Massi recounting the final days of their lives before succumbing to
complications due to AIDS. The film aired as part of PBS’s P.O.V. series, a showcase for films
with an emphasis on intimacy to put human faces to contemporary social issues. The broadcast
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reportedly resulted in numerous video “responses” sent in from the public. Thus, there has long
been a tradition of using affordable technology to contribute to a dialog when given the channel,
especially as a way to provide alternatives to the mainstream.
Silverlake Life, however, occupied a unique position given the video work on AIDS done
prior to its airing, particularly the many constellations of activist communities involved in
producing media around AIDS at a time when they received either damning or no coverage at
all. Alexandra Juhasz (1995) details a large cross-section of AIDS video production as what she
terms alternative media—or AIDS TV. According to Juhasz, the purpose of alternative AIDS
media is “the use of video production to form a local response to AIDS, to articulate a rebuttal to
or revision of the mainstream media’s definitions and representations of AIDS, and to form
community around a new identity forced into existence by the fact of AIDS” (p. 3). I find it
fruitful to think through these two phenomenon—vernacular video and alternative media—as a
way of distinguishing the historical and cultural differences between video activism of the
eighties and early nineties and the politics of a popular campaign like It Gets Better a decade into
the twenty-first century. It is difficult to necessarily compare the two—much less try to compare
different forms of trauma—due to their wholly different contexts and conditions of production,
but I argue there are important differences and lines of continuity to map between these two
efforts to contextualize the response to It Gets Better, both its participation and critique.
Two primary features differentiate the work and role of alternative AIDS media from that
of the It Gets Better project. First is the genesis of each movement. AIDS media activism and It
Gets Better, at their base, were both responding to traumas exacerbated by oppressive systems of
homophobia—as well as race, class, and health discrimination. They both also brought swarms
of people together, in one sense or another, to produce media to address and provide voice for
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the marginalized and the vulnerable. However, the two media projects represent diametrically
opposed starting points. The It Gets Better project was born from a position of exposure and
celebrity—from the spotlight, if you will. The conditions for the construction of its campaign
relied on mainstream play and visible platforms. AIDS media activism, on the other hand, was
operating from a place of—in fact, as a response to—widespread inaction and invisibility,
working against the violence of the dominant culture. This “rebuttal to or revision of”
mainstream images and narratives, per Juhasz’s account, also seems situated in a dialectical
relationship with established media. Thus, both movements can be interpreted as vernacular
media. However, Juhasz insists that the alternative work of AIDS media is antithetical to
mainstream media. By definition, she asserts, “the work of the alternative media can never be
standardized, as has been true for the mainstream media, because the specific needs of unique
communities and producers serve to define the conditions of production: that is, what format to
use, how quickly to produce, whether or not to work collaboratively, how to fund, how to
distribute” (p. 11). In other words, the critical and alternative work of this media is just as much
in the content (that we don’t see on mainstream channels) as it is the process of its production.
This begs the question, how do we position “alternative” in online digital worlds? As
instigating discourse and attention to their respective issues through their response format, both
AIDS media and It Gets Better fall under the parameters of vernacular video. But can they both
also be considered alternative media? If it is on corporately owned websites or communication
platforms (such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter), does it not qualify as alternative media?
During the time of Juhasz’s writing, established media were the broadcast TV networks, whereas
now corporate interests may shape but not necessarily dictate the content on dominant
communication/content distribution platforms. Furthermore, the standardization Juhasz calls
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out—presumably of series formats on television—is also in blurrier territory online, for we may
have standardized digital tools, but that does not extend to the content people create and share on
them. Does exponentially easier production practices and readily available distribution networks
render any media content on YouTube or similar channels as established or mainstream? The 15-
20 year gap between the height of AIDS activism and It Gets Better is not a long period of time
but it has proven to be significant in reorganizing the way we think about the politics of
participation and LGBT activism.

The Politics of Connected Action
Another distinguishing feature between AIDS era video activism and the emergence of
the It Gets Better Project is that the two phenomena represent the difference between what
Bennet and Segerberg (2013) distinguish between collective action and its evolved digital form,
connective action. AIDS media activism, in other words, falls more in line with the collective
action of classic social movements. Collective action frames are often based on hierarchical
institutions and membership groups that favor streamlining social identities or ideological
affiliation of its participants. In short, they are organizationally brokered (p. 11, 26). They argue
that what used to be collective action frames are giving way to personal action frames that come
instead from what they term connective action in the digitally network context. The It Gets
Better Project falls in line with this mode of action which relies more on social media as
organizing processes that do not require as much control or symbolic, united identities (p. 27-
28). Thus, more and more frequently, we see individualized publics that are less prone to join
political organizations (or formally organized groups) that require trading off personal beliefs for
group identifications. Yet those making up these publics don’t stop experiencing common
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interests and political concerns. “Their decoupling from the institutions of social and political
aggregation,” Bennet and Segerberg contend, “has led to the adoption of more personalized
brands of politics organized around individual lifestyles and social networks” (p. 6). Large-scale
personal-level communication becomes an organizational structure in its own right; they are
organizationally enabled. These two formative differences have been handily mediated by time,
which from the early nineties to the late aughts saw decisive shifts in both communication
technologies and the increasing inclusion of LGBT issues and narratives into the dominant
cultural framework. Despite these distinctions, they both represent ways of understanding how,
as Juhasz puts it, “communication through video allows for other levels of power: a larger
audience, a mimetic hold on history, an accessible and familiar form” (p. 232).
Most notably, Bennet and Segerberg claim that these personalized forms of involvement
form issue networks that are “more likely to deploy creative forms of interactive and social
media that enable individuals to join action networks and share their engagement along their
social networks, all on their own terms” (p. 11). We see this all the time, particularly with digital
networks’ penchant for meme-ifying everything. Take, for example, the red equal sign—that
took over many people’s profile pictures on social media during the Supreme Court hearings on
the Defense of Marriage Act—that changed and mutated as it spread across networks and
platforms. This personalized brand of engagement extends to projects like It Gets Better, which
are by nature open and susceptible to morphing and mutating into any number of things. Gal et
al. argue that It Gets Better should be read as a meme, as its message is replicated but also
always negotiated (and sometimes altered, “personalized”) based on each individual participant,
adding unprecedented variability. According to Yoichai Benkler, participation in these types of
networks often arises from self-motivation, “as personally expressive content shared with, and
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recognized by others who in turn repeat these networked sharing activities” (quoted in Bennet
and Segerberg, p. 34).
It Gets Better videos exhibit the meme-based behavior and effects in two ways. First, as
noted above, every new video provides an opportunity to alter or personalize the message and tag
it with “it gets better,” thereby expanding the meaning but reinforcing the sentiment at the same
time. These variations, like memes, are at the level of content. It Gets Better videos are also
altering the representative scope of LGBT narratives and subjects, lending faces, identities, and,
as the rhetoric of the non-profit insists, possibilities to the range of LGBT lives and
representations. In this second way, the projects also reverses the direction of the meme, and the
authors become an integral part of what changes with each replication. For instance, in the
FDNY compilation above, it is not just that each firefighter contributes their story to the many
permutations, but that their participation—or, rather, the fire department’s participation as
author—alters the meaning of the author. In a sense, it outs its authors as LGBT or LGBT-
supportive. I would argue that by presenting the fire department as a space that supports gay,
lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people queers the New York fire department. Then one might
come across the “Mormon itgetsbetter” YouTube channel that houses over two dozen individual
It Gets Better videos from Mormons. Next, one might stumble upon “It Gets Better, DCGFFL
straight players,” which features straight men who have joined the Washington DC Gay Flag
Football League, or “It Gets Better: The LA Leather Community.” All these videos add new
valences to its authors as much as they add and alter meanings to It Gets Better.
Thus, we have two different types of production. Eighties and nineties activism entailed
local collective action, which required organizing for funding, making, and distributing. Peer
production today involves easier means of making and is focused instead on personal tailoring
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and sharing in order to be effective. How do we reconcile the disparities between these
historically situated processes? Alexandra Juhasz states, “Video and activists depend upon a
sense of identity and community which is at once stable enough to fight and malleable enough to
change” (p. 234). Collective action frames are thus built on organizing social identities; they rely
on presenting a cohesive community, which can often cause sacrificing personal identities to
effect a stronger front. Concerted organizing effort provides collective action frames with
stability, but their ideological or political flexibility is more up in the air. While there is some
collective framing on part of the official It Gets Better non-profit and Savage’s curation, the
largely personal action frame of the project certainly allows it more malleability not only to keep
adapting to changes in digital network organization, but also porous enough to withstand the
multiple ways of deploying and critiquing the message without losing its impact.

Logging On, Coming Out
Personal action frames are not necessarily new inventions of the digital age. In the case of
It Gets Better, in which most video contributors spend a fair amount of time divulging in their
personal narratives not only as a way of forming a sense of solidarity with their target audience,
but also a way of giving accounts of their lives as coming (out) to be LGBT individuals, builds
on the confessional genre of coming out stories. The narrative impulse for telling these stories
about coming into our sexual and/or gender identities has evolved since mid-twentieth century as
ways of communicating with each other through both media and political organizing kept
shifting. Kenneth Plummer (1995) remarks how the coming out story underwent major change
during the 1960s and 1970s when it was communicated more publicly throughout gay liberation
rhetoric and more media visibility. Prior to this moment, the coming out story did not have a
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necessarily linear or progressive bent, unable to imagine life as the “happy homosexual.”
Throughout the next few decades, however, the coming out story calcified into the central
narrative of a positive gay experience. This emerging emancipatory narrative turned into
modernist tales of linear progression and “discovering a truth”—“they built a story of the past,
finding gay and lesbian history…a new story of identities, coming out, gay culture and politics”
(p. 82-3). Plummer argues, however, that by the nineties, another change was well underway,
one from emancipatory politics to life politics of late modernity.
This shift is paralleled with the increased expectations of the individual and personal
responsibility that has defined the neoliberal turn. Initially an economic ideology that took hold
in the 1980s, predominantly in the U.S. and U.K., many theorists have also tracked the way the
neoliberal mindset also infiltrates the social and cultural world, increasingly being incorporated
in entertainment media—especially reality TV—and embedded in celebrity-tinged self-
presentation culture of social media (Harvey, 2007; Rose, 1999; Brown, 2003; Duggan, 2002;
Marshall, 2014). These accounts of the neoliberal turn analyze its emphasis on distinguishing the
self through publishing an account of oneself—using one’s life as the means for their own
empowerment or branding oneself as such. This now dovetails with Plummer’s described change
from emancipatory politics of LGBT liberation—focusing on telling stories to form collective
identity—to the life politics of LGBT rhetoric today, which places the collective in the
background and foregrounds the individual’s narrative as the selling point. To further complicate
matters, Plummer posits, “as the dominant metanarrative gets fractured, dispersed, or even
eliminated, it may become easier for personal stories to be told in a more pastiched, potpurried,
pluralistic, polycentric, polysemic mode in which narratives are assembled with a less clear
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driving, linear force behind them” (p. 42) These changes become embedded in much of the
social and digital media that precedes It Gets Better.
To contextualize this further, I turn to the online phenomenon that is arguably the closest
predecessor to the It Gets Better project: coming out videos. In fact the coming out video really
bridges the many gaps between collective and individual—as well as pre-digital and digitally
networked—communication of LGBT identities. It extends Plummer’s argument about the
current transition of the coming out story to the digital age. It also provides a stark contrast to
activist media creation of the seventies and eighties, though follows a throughline across LGBT
media cultures of self-documentation and the testimonial. While for the most part it infers a more
intimate audience, I contend the coming out video anticipates the more public vernacular form of
It Gets Better. In short, coming out videos followed online chat room and forums as spaces for
LGBT people—especially youth—to come out, share their coming out narratives, or, in a slight
deviation of the form, upload recorded video of them coming out to someone in-person. Jonathan
Alexander and Elizabeth Losh describe the coming out video as “often an intentionally broadcast
statement that attempts to negotiate the boundary between intensely personal desires and public
identities” (p. 38). Thus, they see coming out videos as appropriating Youtube’s modes of
personal confession and mutual surveillance, while at the same time affirming the existence of
separate online communities of potential resistance. Through repetition, the coming out video
develops its own tropes and dominant narratives, which engender a community of shared
experiences while also producing pressures to conform to normative discourses of coming out.
Some of these norms and tropes become so calcified that Alexander and Losh open their chapter
by analyzing a fake coming out video by ostensibly straight teen supposedly coming out in
standard vlog confessional form only to reveal it as an April Fool’s joke. He even asks his
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audience to comment on the authenticity of his performance. Furthermore, as a testament to its
reputation and utility, the coming out subgenre also spread beyond the LGBT circles, being taken
up by other identity groups, most prominently undocumented DREAM activists (Costanza-
Chock, 2014; Gamber-Thompson and Zimmerman, 2016).
Recalling the second effect of the proliferation of coming out videos, Bryan Wuest
expounds on what Alexander and Losh referred to as the community of shared experiences, in
his analysis of coming out videos by highlighting two important methods—visibility and
acculturation—queer youth utilize through both producing and consuming coming out videos as
they navigate their own identity development. Visibility here speaks to the self-evident value of
counteracting isolation, and by acculturation, Wuest (2014) refers to “youth receiving
information about shared culture and experience in order to better equip themselves to both
interact within the queer community and to survive in the mainstream” (p. 21). This reflects
dialectical strategies of advice giving and advice seeking, which extends from preceding text-
based bulletin-style forums and chat rooms. This example demonstrates the act of coming out
online—clearly utilizing a personal action frame—as providing specific ways of building not
only networked connections, but also instilling a strong sense of engagement through informal
community practices. The prevalence of coming out videos, particularly among LGBT online
networks provided an added layer of familiarity to form for It Gets Better. Both projects, of
course, whether intentionally or not, follow decades-old practices of testimonial storytelling as
political action—using new technologies to represent and document images and narratives that
are not seen through mainstream media. The coming out video places a confessional specificity
to the testimonial genre, but this carries through with the It Gets Better project videos, most of
which are hybrid testimonial confessions.
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Contending with Critical Discourses
Almost as soon as the project launched, it was subjected to a barrage of critiques from a
range of general commentators, queer activists, and academics. The criticisms leveled at It Gets
Better have largely contended with the lack of diverse perspectives and the problematic
ideologies they found embedded in the rhetoric of the videos. They have sparked engaged
disputes in video comment sections, press coverage, blogs, and academic journals on the overall
efficacy of the project. These critiques have themselves engendered defensive counter-responses
(Goltz, 2013; West et al,, 2013). At the center is a disagreement over whether the project’s
intentions to combat queer youth suicide and anti-gay bullying pan out or whether the rhetoric of
the campaign and its stories are precariously exacerbating the conditions for queer youth by not
doing enough to address and alter the structuring and intersecting issues that underlie the
bullying and homophobia. The trouble with both impulses to praise or critique the project on its
merits and value is that these discussions are, for the most part, at the level of content, taking
rhetoric at face value, and overlooking the complicated politics of participation, including
reception practices and infrastructural issues relating to digital platforms. Below, I discuss three
overarching issues that run through the critiques—authorship, representation, and ideology—to
argue that a more holistic consideration of the project’s multifaceted elements allows for a better
understanding of the campaign’s affordances and limitations.
While all three of these critical discourses overlap and interact with one another, it makes
the most sense to start at the beginning—authorship. As the founder and most vocal proponent of
the campaign, Dan Savage has become the singular spokesperson of sorts for the It Gets Better
Project. Central problems arise around attribution and control, however, when you have one
person speaking on behalf of a popular—open, participatory—movement. Dan and Terry’s
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original It Gets Better video is by far the most referenced and shared video from the project,
undoubtedly due to its inclusion in countless press articles and blogs referencing the campaign
online. Since it spearheaded the campaign, it is also, understandably, the most often critiqued
video. In particular, Dan and Terry’s shared personal memories, with accompanying pictures,
about taking their son to Paris and ski resorts strike many as coming from out-of-touch and
privileged gay men and perpetuating notions of homonormativity. Already a divisive figure in
the LGBT community, Savage has been taken to task on many of these issues. Despite Savage’s
initial call for video submissions from varied demographic backgrounds and the wide spectrum
of participants over seven years, the It Gets Better Project—and the issues of representation and
ideology, discussed later—are still widely attributed to Dan Savage and his personal politics.
Given its popularity, then, many of the objections to the project’s perceived primary
conceit cohere around Savage as an arbiter representing LGBT politics to mainstream publics.
Following, his video also becomes the harbinger of the project’s perceived dominant narrative—
reinforcing and promising normative and classed notions of successful and happy lives to those
who wait it out. Jaspir Puar (2002), for instance, posits, “Savage has mastered…the technique of
converting Clementi’s injury into cultural capital, not only through affectations of blame, guilt,
and suffering, but also through those of triumph, transgression, and success” (p. 151). The aura
of suspicion, which pervades Puar and many others’ critiques often conflate Savage’s ideologies
or the perceived dominant rhetoric of the campaign with the reach of the project. This is not to
salvage Savage’s politics or refute the critics’ claims, but rather to raise issue with the reduction
of the project to a single narrative or ideology. The problem when both critiques and blanket
praise rely on assigning a singular position to the project as its defining effect, they lose sight of
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its productive multidimensionality and polysemy in favor of authorship as monolithic
subjectivity.
To be fair, there is an organizational directive behind the official It Gets Better Project.
Despite his claims not to be the face of the campaign, through his continued participation in
events and continued media exposure for the project, Savage has become the de facto
spokesperson for It Gets Better. It is also clear from histories revealed through interviews and
others’ reports that Savage was responsible for curating the It Gets Better YouTube channel,
approving videos before they were featured (Phillips-Honda, 2014). Early instructions on the It
Gets Better website also indicate that the organization strongly encourages videos that stay “on
message,” which entails uplifting stories. Yet, these efforts, first on part of Savage, then on
behalf of the non-profit, to control a particular narrative can only go so far to reign in what very
quickly grew beyond the capabilities to contain. The YouTube channel could initially only hold
650 videos, while submissions quickly surpassed this number in less than two weeks of the
project launch, which is not to say anything of contributors who simply uploaded videos to their
own accounts. I contend that the emerging organization became one thing, eventually tied more
and more with corporate sponsorships and partnerships—now including Wells Fargo, West Elm,
Doritos, Uber, Lexus, and many others—while the popular movement remained its own force.
As it gets shared, replicated, and mutated, It Gets Better turns into a product of its
participants, platforms, networks, popularity, and all their inherent biases, affordances, and
limitations. As referenced earlier, Gal et al ingeniously argue that It Gets Better should be read
more closely as a meme, which allows for a more distinctly discursive analysis instead of a
moral or value-laden assessment. Since memes are closely related to the process of norm
formation—and much of the discussion around IGB has been around calcifying and
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homogenizing various assimilationist norms—Gal et al assert, “the memetic practice is not
merely an expression of existing social-cultural norms, it is also a tool for negotiating them” (p.
3). As the campaign expanded beyond its initial supportive function into an alternative public
sphere brought forth by the individuals and groups who took part in the project, Gal et al. claim
that through both imitating and altering previous videos, participants were formulating and
negotiating LGBTQ collective identities (p. 2). In this way, we should approach It Gets Better
and its many participatory formulations as its own movement.
The second overarching critical discourse encompasses the seemingly homogenous
narratives and ideologies that reverberate across a majority of the uploaded messages—namely
that it springs from a uniformly white, metropolitan, middle class, male perspective, with Savage
as its de facto leader. Quiet Riot Girl (2010), in an oft-cited blog response a couple weeks after
the project launched, claimed, “Dissent and diversity does not seem to be encouraged. This is
borne out of the vast number of videos being uploaded by white university-educated gay men, in
comparison to those from women, transgender people, and working class people, and people
from diverse ethnic backgrounds.” Doug Meyer (2015) picks up on this trend of college
education when he finds that a quarter of the videos he analyzed in his study center around
college, bolstering the extent to which the project is infused by middle-class expectations of
success and “better” lives. For instance, in his study, he finds 31 out of 128 analyzed videos
center around college, and he remarks that a cursory search will also bring up many college
groups who have participated in the project. These expectations are reinforced by one of the
more common solutions, whether implied through anecdote or pronouncement, proposed by the
adults in the videos: to leave one’s small town, conservative upbringing and move to somewhere
more accepting, namely urban and metropolitan meccas. This privileges what Jack Halberstam
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(2005) calls a metronormative trajectory, one in which high school and rural/conservative
environments are conflated and denounced as America’s backwater closet while the urban city is
positioned as the solution to homophobia (see also Gray, 2009). Further, Brett Krutzsch (2014)
concludes, “In creating a ‘tidy’ narrative where one does not exist, It Gets Better presents the
immanent future as a site of equal access for all queers without accounting for power
differentials across race, gender, citizenship, and religion, or how things may get better for some
white gay men at a faster rate than other queers” (p. 1247). The project and its participants have
thus been roundly criticized for its appeal to homogenous and homonormative representations of
what “it” and “better” looks like, and for whom.
The response to such critiques is not an insistence on plurality—adding diverse
perspectives. Calling out the project for the homogenous demographics and stories that
predominate its dominant narrative addresses a problem without interrogating the systems and
circumstances that underlie its prominence. Such critiques presume a coordinated imperative
that, while not unfounded, tells only part of the story. As mentioned earlier, Savage and the IGB
website are invested in “on message” contributions, though that does not necessarily stop
alternative, negotiated, and oppositional takes to take hold. In fact, curatorial efforts are typically
more inclusive of a range of perspectives and demographic representations. Many of the
compilation videos referenced earlier, for example, often feature more women, people of color,
and trans folks than the average single-subject video. The It Gets Better companion book,
published in 2011, features original essays and expanded testimonials from 100 contributors
ranging from a wide spectrum of perspectives, professions, locations, and orientations. The
solution, though, is not about simply pointing to multiplicity or relying on curated
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representations, as that does not reflect the true reach and participatory work of a project like It
Gets Better.
There is indeed a predominating presence of white gay men and/or middle and upper
class participants and to fully understand the underlying issues that allow such homogeneity to
overshadow and outnumber the diversity of contributions, we must take into account three key
features of the project: celebrity, the influence of media representations, and the role of digital
media topographies. First, celebrity plays an integral role in the promotion and visibility of It
Gets Better. Savage’s relative renown in gay media and online journalism undoubtedly gave It
Gets Better a healthy platform, but what almost no account of the campaign recognize is the key
role played by another celebrity: Perez Hilton. Hilton was one of the very first responders to
Savage’s message. On the first day of release, Hilton, an infamous online tabloid reporter, made
his own video and posted it on his blogs and twitter account, actively tagging dozens of other
celebrities to encourage their participation. Reports at the time even cite Hilton’s video to be the
most watched after the first few days (Miller, 2010). In essence, Savage and Hilton’s reputations
helped snowball a celebrity effect, which grew to include the likes of Lady Gaga, Ellen
Degeneres, and even the President of the United States. The celebrity factor helped raise
awareness of the project while at the same time overwhelming its media coverage and not
helping quell its dominant narrative of class privilege.
Homogeneity in representation, in a case like It Gets Better, also stems from decisions at
the level of stereotyping and media reporting. The key determinant of the reach and resonance of
stories like the September suicides becomes a matter of exposure: which outlets cover the story
and how the story spreads thereafter. For instance, Justin Aaberg’s suicide, dated July 9
th
, 2010,
received very little media attention and was only retroactively lumped with September’s “cause
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for concern.” On the other hand, Billy Lucas’s suicide, two months later, first reported by local
news affiliate Fox59, was then picked up by major LGBT online news outlets, like Towleroad,
The Advocate, and LGBTQ News. Dan Savage first blogged about the suicide amidst this uptick,
citing the original Fox59 story. With increased attention on Billy Lucas, coincidental timing
brought proceeding reports of Cody Barker and Seth Walsh’s deaths more visibility, and
subsequently hit a peak with Tyler Clementi’s high-profile death and ensuing court case. There is
no telling why Billy Lucas was a flashpoint for media attention, but visibility undeniably
snowballed with every new report.
I argue part of the reason why these deaths became so saleable is due to their coherence
around the classic gay stereotype of the sad young man. Richard Dyer (2001) describes
stereotypes as “a function of the desire to control through knowledge…its fixed contours and
endless repetition, constantly reassures ‘us’ that such-and-such a group is known” (p. 131). Dyer
expounds on the cultural development of the sad young man, which he traces across all forms of
media throughout the twentieth century, but also anchoring its historical roots centuries back in
classic Christian and Romantic texts and iconography.
In also pointing out the distinct whiteness of the stereotype, Dyer details its roots in
Christianity—“at the level of dominant representation a white (and gentile) tradition, focuses on
the suffering male body, the moral worth and erotic beauty of white male flesh always seen at the
point of agony”—and through the Romantic poet, who “promotes the association of paleness
with emotionality and femininity, from which it is but a short step to queer masculinity as white
sensitivity” (p. 124). The image—often literally on book covers—of the melancholic young gay
man, Dyer attests, is a combination and condensation of many traditions of representation. It is
complex, varied, intense and contradictory across its manifestations, but also singularly
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identifiable—“an image of otherness in which it is still possible to find oneself” (p. 117). He
describes the stereotype as delivering a reassurance that there will be resolution and certainty for
the sad young man in one of four ways—“death, normality, becoming a dreadful old queen, or
finding ‘someone like oneself’ with whom one can settle down” (p. 132). He asserts that while
many stereotypes remain static, others can represent a state of impermanence or transience. The
sad young man, due both to its age and its unfixed position between normative and queer worlds,
is especially marked in terms of transition. Thus, the long-standing stereotype of the sad young
man offers a culturally intelligible narrative that media coverage of the September suicides
utilized for their reports.
Dyer’s analysis not only expounds on the construction of the stereotype’s gender and
youth, but also finds something specifically white in its formation.

The sad young man, Dyer
writes, “becomes part of much wider constructions of white identity in terms of suffering (the
burden which becomes the badge of our superiority)” (p. 124). Accordingly, what arguably
makes the queer suicides more “fit” to report, to be taken up by mainstream outlets is also its
whiteness.
9
This simplicity with which the bullying of these victims was reported—cohering
singularly around their perceived or identified queerness—or, the elision of how race intervenes
(or, for a matter of fact, doesn’t) with sexuality, demonstrates the limitations of these flat
stereotypes and the failure to grapple with the complexities of how race and even mental health
intersect with sexuality and homophobic bullying. This is brought into relief with the reporting
on the last of the September suicides, Raymond Chase, a black, openly gay sophomore at
Johnson and Whales University in Rhode Island. Due to the media narrative building around the

9
It should be noted that Billy Lucas is not white. There is almost no mention of his race or ethnicity, which in itself
leads to a default that relies on whiteness. In one interview with his mother and stepfather, they mention Billy being
part Hispanic, part Asian. Whiteness is often (un)marked as the default in entertainment and news media, whereas
non-whiteness is always heightened through its fetishization or problem-making.
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number of reported queer youth suicides, Chase was sorted as part of the unfortunate trend.
Details of the incident—hung in his dorm room—were scarce and confounding the
circumstances of his death were reports that he did not appear to have endured any anti-gay
bullying. Nonetheless, Campus Pride, a national nonprofit organization centered around the
safety of LGBT students on campuses, issued a statement, reprinted in nearly all the news reports
from mainstream to local and gay presses, calling to end anti-LGBT bias and discrimination. At
least two things differentiate Chase from the rest of the suicides: race and being openly out. Yet,
his death is pulled into the centripetal force of the narrative around anti-gay bullying and
discrimination. There is no discussion of mental health or other possibly contravening factors
that may have led to Chase’s death. There is no discussion of race. In fact, the absence of race
from Chase’s account points to his inclusion as a form of conscious colorblindness. When such
considerations are ignored and when the media picks up on representations that fit an existing
mold (white, precocious, vulnerable), it already begins to plant the seeds for the type of people
who will be identifying with and responding to these stories.
In the contemporary context of digitally mediated networks and social activity, though,
we must also consider the integral role technology and differences in digital practices of social
communication has on who sees, shares, responds to any distributed media. Thus, in addition to
residual modes of media representation—that still take on a top-down approach, push media and
news that will presumably generate view counts—what nearly all of the critical coverage on It
Gets Better misses is interrogating the platforms and participatory practices that shape how,
where, and why digital users are engaging with content like It Gets Better. For instance, thinking
through the defining functions and participant uses among the various apps and social
networking sites that feature video sharing will yield a more holistic picture of which ones favor
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projects like It Gets Better and how different demographics of users on them will influence the
content represented in the videos. The most prominent apps and sites to consider at the time are
YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. While practically all It Gets Better videos are uploaded and
live on YouTube, the online video distribution platform operates less like a social network for
sharing media and more of a search engine and repository for the content that is shared
elsewhere. The real question, then, comes down to ascertaining whether Facebook and Twitter
have enough divergence in uses and types of users to potentially influence the trajectory of the
project.
In his study of youth engagement with digital and social media, Craig Watkins (2009)
investigates how young people differentiate between their perceptions and practices using
MySpace and Facebook (see also boyd, 2014). Through interviews, Watkins finds distinct
patterns in the way different youth demographics describe and use these social network sites.
Overall, Facebook tends to be used more by white and Asian-American youth while MySpace
was dominated by Latino and black youth. Facebook was seen as the network you “graduate” to
once you enter college, with some of his interviews with youth of color bearing witness to the
tensions of moving to Facebook to better acquaint themselves with their new environments while
maintaining MySpace accounts to remain in touch with hometown friends who mostly do not
attend college. The link between Facebook and college—as well as that between Facebook and
middle class and whiteness—is not at all surprising given the origins of MySpace as open to
anyone and Facebook being restricted to .edu accounts as it began to grow in its first two years.
Facebook became open to the public in 2006, far later than MySpace in 2003. These
demographic differences also come loaded with prejudiced, and often racist and classist,
perceptions of the difference between these two spaces, MySpace being described by exclusive
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Facebook users as “sketchy,” “ghetto,” and generally unsafe, alluding to its more open and
public parameters than the restrictions—what Watkins describes as digital gates—that make
Facebook more of an insular social network. Thus, we can already see class and race biases in
the way various demographics, especially youth here, use different social networking sites.
The race and class elements that differentiated Facebook from MySpace in the mid-2000s
are echoed in the differences between Facebook and Twitter by 2010, around the time the It Gets
Better project came about. Studies demonstrate, for example, that Twitter houses a higher
proportion of participants and users of color than Facebook (Duggan and Brenner, 2013). There
is also strong evidence and patterns of use that establishes that the age demographics on
Facebook are markedly older than those using Twitter (and even more so, Instagram and
Snapchat). Add to these demographic data the way participants use each of these platforms.
More than Twitter and Instagram, Facebook tends to be a space meant for more intimate
networks—friends, family, acquaintances, friends of friends—than Twitter, which does not
require mutual approval for one to access and follow any other person; hence, the more
“celebrity” culture of followers, fans, and broader publics on Twitter. This makes user
engagement on Twitter far shorter, more casual, and ephemeral than Facebook. Twitter, while
capable of sharing video and links to videos is also limited to short spans of communication. All
this is to suggest that sharing videos—particularly ones that demand more time and attention—
are not only better suited for Facebook, but plausibly are more effective and engaging when seen
on Facebook. All this is to argue that the uses and demographic users of Facebook make it more
amenable to sharing It Gets Better videos—both posting others’ and making and posting one’s
own. Given the data on the racial, class, and age demographics of Facebook users, we can also
plausibly conclude that the prominence of Facebook for older, white, middle-class, and college-
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educated groups, coupled with Facebook’s amenability with the It Gets Better project more than
others social media platforms, may tell us something about the unbalanced representation in a
large corpus of IGB videos that favors this demographic.
This line of analysis is not meant to mollify or rebut critiques; it is to more astutely
understand how the platform and network biases of digital communication can shape—and
limit—the representational content of a project like It Gets Better. Scholarship on online activity
conclude that the digital sphere does not work like a democracy, but this does not mean they are
the antithesis of democratic representation. It is imperative to approach digital communication
and emergent projects like It Gets Better with a mixed set of analytic tools. Content analysis in
and of itself is no longer a sufficient method for understanding the import and impact of our
media cultures. This should not invalidate the critiques; rather, it should strengthen their modes
of analysis to also address the “why” and how the source of that “why” is no longer merely
broadcast corporate politics, but an ambivalent hybrid of neoliberal capitalism and participatory
cultures that blend the proprietary, the popular, the personal, and the political.
The third critical discourse encompasses a set of messages read in the dominant narrative
of many It Gets Better videos—that the video makers don’t address institutional problems, don’t
offer solutions, tell youth to “wait it out”—which taken together coalesce into placing a burden
of responsibility on the victims of bullying, promising future comfort and security by enforcing a
neoliberal mantra of individual empowerment. A prominent problem, per these analyses, is the
understanding that queer youth who are experiencing bullying and violence simply need to ride
out their time in high school, that just by waiting their lives will necessarily improve, that life
post-High School is inevitably a stark different to their current predicaments. Kellinger and
Levine (2016) point out that this message of waiting relieves both the bullies and the adults from
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the responsibility to change homophobic and bullying cultures in schools and protect queer
youth. They write, “The message of sticking it out through the torment while waiting for an
uncertain future puts the burden on those being bullied to persevere rather than implicating larger
systems that perpetuate bullying” (p. 89). Brett Krutzsch (2015) also claims also that instead of
systems that privilege heterosexuality and blatantly harm queers everywhere, bullies become the
convenient villains (p. 1250). Similarly, Meyer argues that IGB addresses the social problem of
anti-LGBT bullying but only through reinforcing individualistic social class narratives. His
findings, based on a content analysis of 128 videos, reveal that a common strategy the video
makers used to emphasize or imply where their lives had improved was to draw on class-based
standards of success, while at the same time associating the bullies’ prospective futures with
negative stereotypes of the poor. What these critical observations build towards, they argue, is
both a neoliberal appeal for reliance on the self to combat or power through the difficult
experiences of high school and a neoliberal promise of triumph post-high school.
Following, Kellinger and Levine find that the majority of the adults in the analyzed
videos urge queer youth to seek out help instead of offering ways to help or commit to changing
toxic high school culture themselves, thus placing the responsibility on the victims. Hope
without action, they claim, is ephemeral. Krutzsch likens this rhetoric of waiting for an assured
improvement or turning to the power of the self to persevere expressed by the adults in It Gets
Better videos—pointing to Savage as prime example—to the idioms of Christianity that focus on
personal salvation, where there is paradise after pain. He argues, “this neoliberal cry for the
individual to shape her own life unmediated by surrounding influences resounds with Protestant
influence...[which] is also the language of American individualism” (p. 1252). The “it gets
better” pronouncement, then, Krutzsch concludes, “acts as a set of instructions for queers to
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overcome their surroundings and their pasts, move to cities, and in so doing, they are promised
neoliberal social stability” (p. 1248). The problem with the assault on It Gets Better’s neoliberal
slant, however, is not necessarily whether it is the dominant narrative imprinted on the project
but that it is presented as necessarily nefarious.
In a response article to It Gets Better, Puar (2012) asks, “how can affective politics move
beyond the conventional narratives of resistance to neoliberalism?” Conventional or critical
resistances to neoliberalism rely on de-saturating the cultural complexities, inconsistencies, and
idiosyncrasies of how people live and interpret life in late capitalism. Moving beyond such
narratives involves thinking less along binaries and more with ambivalence. What arises within
the critiques is their collective assumption of the totalizing effect of the neoliberal framing. In
other words, they take for granted that the dominant ideology they observe (read) as being
pushed by the rhetoric of the videos is the exact way queer youth—to say nothing of the
assumption that queer youth are or are the only ones consuming these videos—will necessarily
read these videos. For instance, another common critique leveled against both Savage and the
project overall is that since the message appeals only to LGBT persons who can document
success in normative ways, that “for low-income LGBT people who have little access to these
normative dimensions of financial success—going to college, moving from a small town to a big
city—the hope provided by the project may turn to disappointment when they reach adulthood
and find these benchmarks of success out-of-reach” (Meyer, p. 122). In other words, the
presumed queer youth watching such unattainable images of “better” will necessarily internalize
these neoliberal, homonormative, metronormative ideals to damaging effects. Kellinger and
Levine add, “the testimonies can further the despondency felt by disenfranchised youth by
presenting a world that can feel unattainable for those who do not see themselves as possible
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being successful in those ways” (p. 86). This places an inordinate amount of power in their
dominant readings and turns viewers of these videos into particularly susceptible subjects.
Conjectures about viewer effects also impacts the critical assessments that counter the
homogenous and neoliberal frames. West et al, for example, who in their appraisal of 200 videos
find the project to be more of a worldmaking endeavor, base parts of their analysis on
assumptions of how queer youth would be reading these videos.
The critiques in these discourses are important, but they also only tell part of the story.
The goal is not necessarily to support or discredit them, but rather, to place them in a more
holistic context that takes into account the ways digital and platform bias, ideologies, and
structural issues in media representation influence the visible and most popular narratives. In the
final section of this paper, I move to an exploratory analysis of affect as structuring and
sustaining the impetus of the participatory call and response exhibited in the proliferation of It
Gets Better videos.

Affect and its Publics/Effects
While the role of social media platforms and practices on political movements was
already in full swing by 2010, the rapid spread of It Gets Better’s emergence poses novel
questions still, particularly around the role of affect for political attunement and action. In the
year and a half following the launch of It Get Better, using social media for networked activism
led to several other widespread movements—Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring uprisings,
#blacklivesmatter—with more overtly political objectives, but also inspired largely by affect.
Since scholarship on It Gets Better that considers affect as an integral component of its
propagation and political import is lacking, I turn to work that considers the affective component
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of the aforementioned movements. In applying this framework to the It Gets Better Project, I
argue that affect plays a strong role only in the campaign’s popularity (and some extent,
notoriety), but also in relation to its potentiality—its ability to call on hope to imagine futures not
laid out, but rather on the horizon, or as Jose Muñoz (2009) puts it, queer futurity.
Affect here is related to but distinct from emotion. Per Zizi Papacharissi (2016), affect is
the intensity with which we experience emotion. In other words, affect is pre-emotive—“it is the
drive or sense of movement experienced before we have cognitively identified a reaction and
labeled it as a particular emotion” (p. 316). Affect is the energy that drives emotion but it does
not dictate its direction or form; thus, affect cannot predict particular emotions, much less
behaviors based on them (Papacharissi, 2014, p. 7-15). This key but often overlooked distinction
leads to conflating the two and, in the context of networked movements, concentrating on the
impact of emotion while overlooking the motivating force of affect. Emotions are easily read, as
sentiment is often embedded in and discerned at the level of content. Affect lies beneath the
content and is more directly connected to flows of technologies. Through her study collecting
meta-data trends of various movements observed on Twitter, Papacharissi demonstrates how
affect contributes to and helps us understand the set of moving forces that intensify or subtract
from any given event or idea. Affect as intensity, then, indicates when an idea or event has struck
a social nerve.
Most of the analyses of It Gets Better, thus far, focus on the shape affect takes: the visible
emotions and how those emotions manifest, and coalesce, into a particular narrative. Dwelling on
its attendant level of affect, however, provides an added, if not foundational, perspective on how
and why It Gets Better resonated and sustained its momentum many years following the initial
outburst. While the mainstream media coverage certainly raised its profile, and the range of
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highly varied types of participants in the campaign—including non-profit organizations,
corporations, local community groups, and government officials—attests to its deep cultural
resonance, the clearest marker of the movement’s affect lies in examining the volume of activity,
regardless of who or what particular message is attached to it. Here, I rely on the reported
analytics and anecdotes on the flood of videos and view counts during the launch of the project
to attest to the intensity of user engagement, suggesting a highly affective response.
10
Several
reports corroborate that over a thousand videos were sent to the It Gets Better YouTube channel
within its first ten days, exceeding the 650 video cap. In one case study, Laurie Phillips Honda
(2015) reveals that queer-identified YouTube engineer Carol Chen, who took a personal interest
in tracking the data patterns of It Gets Better when it emerged, noticed the channel limitations
and, without authorization, reached out to Savage and wrote code to alter the Youtube channel’s
capacity. Still overwhelmed with more videos coming in, Savage launched an official website to
feature all the It Gets Better videos without constraint. Within the first month of Savage’s initial
video upload, the It Get Better Project had reportedly accumulated over 10 million views from its
ten thousand plus videos. The last reported numbers—from 2012—disclose that the project had
amassed over 50,000 video contributions, totaling more than 50 million views (It Gets Better
Project, 2010).
Similar to the spread of popular memes or hashtags, this heightened activity and the
corresponding responses from participants for It Gets Better results from accumulated affect. To
illustrate, it is important to see the wave of video contributions as a response not just to the
reported suicides, but equally, if not more, to the campaign itself. In other words, in addition to

10
While Papacharissi’s study was focused solely on tweets, it is harder to replicate such data analysis on YouTube
videos, which are not as quickly consumed as tweets and are spread and embedded across different social media
platforms (notably, Facebook, with its own likes and comment measures).
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the urgency to address bullying and homophobia, participants were also moved by the
outpouring of stories and support. This is observed in many of the video subjects recognizing the
project or other videos they watched as inspiration or motivation to add their voice. We can think
of each video, then, as a response to and inspiration for another video. Each video, then, carries
with it the immediate affect as well as the accumulated—residual—affect of the ones it came
from. In this way, affect is tagging affect. It is not so much a large group of people responding
individually to an even as it is people intimately responding, affectively, to others’ feelings. I
argue that what many are responding to is not the content, or the message, but rather the affect, a
shared affect. The resulting energy, then, is responding to something beyond a particular event.
Rather, it is tapping in and adding to a reservoir of raw feeling.
I relate this affective impulse to the queerness Jose Munoz ascribes as potentiality.
Building on the theories of Ernst Bloch and Georgio Agamben, Munoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009)
argues that the future is queerness’s domain. As a rejection of the here and now, “a structuring
and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the
present,” queerness, Munoz contends, is a potentiality—it not quite here, but permits us to access
futurity (p. 1). Unlike a possibility, a thing that simply might happen, Munoz writes, “a
potentiality is a certain mode of nonbeing that is eminent, a thing that is present but not actually
existing in the present tense” (p. 9). In other words, whereas possibilities exist in the present, in
what may come to be in the real world, potentiality is present in the horizon, its power to access
hope and futurity tied to its indeterminacy. I perceive this potentiality in the affect that drives
participation in—as well as critique of—the It Gets Better Project. Both Munoz and IGB are
concerned with hope and futurity, though in distinctly different—even conflicting—ways. The
utopia Munoz conjures as the domain of potentiality, a mode of critique that reminds us that the
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present is not enough, is opposed to a great deal of the gay pragmatism shared through the
message of many It Gets Better videos (p. 100). What these messages offer are possibilities—
what may come to be, “what you will also experience if you hang in there.” Possibilities,
however, restrain or limit potentiality. Similarly, affect, once named, turned into a conscious
emotion or action, halts potentiality. Its power, as Papacharissi (2014) claims, lies in its
liminality, its pre-emergence, its imagined but not yet articulated form (p. 9). This is not to say
that affect is more important than action or expressed emotion, but rather, to recognize affect’s
crucial role alongside, or rather, preceding action.
Affect is also integral to understanding how movements and particular cultures are
sustained. Affect, as both unbridled and anticipatory energy—what futurity holds—is the base of
a continued investment. In her project on feeling(s) through lesbian sites of trauma, Ann
Cvetkovich (2003) is interested in how such sites become archives of feeling, and how affect
serves as the foundation for the formation of public cultures. Coming back to this notion of It
Gets Better as a response to trauma—not just the public trauma of the publicized suicides but
more so an effect of traumatic pasts and memories which are evoked or provoked by the
project—leads to reading the collective responses of It Gets Better as an archive of feelings too.
Here is where emotion and affect interact most strongly, for affect drives the impulse to share
and, in doing so, archive LGBT stories, which are so strongly mediated through emotion. One
need not go further than the most popular video of the campaign, a twelve-minute speech Fort
Worth council member Joel Burns delivers at a local meeting in Texas, to understand this project
as not just a response to the suicides, but a provocation to reopen and inadvertently document
queer histories as sites of unresolved trauma that continue to shape our identities and politics
today.
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Like many of the It Gets Better stories, Burns revisits his past to relate with, and
contextualize for, his audience despair and negative feelings of his youth. In telling the story,
Burns is overwhelmed with emotion as he approaches telling the audience what we presume is
an attempt to kill himself. Choked up, Burns recites:
One day, when I was in the ninth grade, just starting Crawley High School, I was
cornered afterschool by some older kids who roughed me up. They said that I was
a faggot and that I should die and go to hell where I belong. That erupted the fear
that I had kept pushed down: that what I was feeling on the inside must somehow
be showing on the outside. Ashamed, humiliated, and confused, I went home.
There must be something very wrong with me, I thought—something I could
never let my family or anyone else know. [pausing to maintain composure] I think
I’m going to have too hard a time with the next couple sentences that I wrote, and
also I don’t want my mother and father to bear the pain of having to hear me say
them [pausing to maintain composure], so I will just say, and I will skip ahead,
that I have never told this story to anyone before tonight, not my family, not my
husband, not anyone. But the recent suicides have upset me so much and have just
torn at my heart.

While not all the submissions to the project are this overwhleming, most do convey a similar
unearthing of personal trauma and intimate feelings to what is, ostensibly, the most public of
digital spaces. This brings into question the audience and effects of It Gets Better videos. The
project—as spearheaded by Savage and turned into a non-profit—has always been directed at
queer youth, but participation was never contained to the official website. In fact, it is important
to read the many stories and personal experiences detailed in these videos as informal oral
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histories. They seem to be motivated by the urgency of the suicides, but I contend that they are
equally driven by an impulse to contribute and make public the participants’ own histories and
feelings. Cvetkovich posits, “Trauma puts pressure on the conventional forms of documentation,
representation, and commemoration, giving rise to new genres of expression, such as testimony
and new forms of monuments, rituals, and performances that call into being collective witnesses
and publics” (p. 7). This is evident in the way It Gets Better individual videos bring collective
histories to bear witness on the effects of homophobia, transphobia, and heteropatriarchy. Much
like Erika Davis’s reason for making her video from the beginning of this chapter, many express
that they too want to add their voice to the project and credit the project as the inciting occasion
or inspiration to contribute.
For the most part, the imperative of this chapter has been less to analyze the videos and
more to track the histories, context, and critiques as a way of better understanding It Gets
Better’s success and its role in queer publics and mainstreaming LGBT politics. This is largely
because the videos were numerous, their analysis already covered in other studies, and the scale
of its popularity across many different fields and industries—entertainment, politics, business,
public service—made analyzing the circulated discourses more pertinent. The videos comprising
the It Gets Better project, while not the focus of this chapter, still demonstrate, as this last section
on affect suggests, the transformative power of people’s participation in storytelling, creating
content, bringing histories to life through digital video and networked publics. The collective
impulse to contribute, especially in the lesser viewed videos from more marginalized users,
reveal layered relationships with one’s own narrative and in relation to dominant narratives that
have proliferated for generations. The phenomenon here, interpreted more as a response to those
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dominant institutions than only as a message to queer youth, places it in the company of the
previous two chapters as engagement in LGBT activism.

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Chapter 5: Conclusion

It Got Popular: The Red Equal Sign
On March 27, 2013, Beyoncé posted a handwritten note on rich red paper on Instagram
that read, “If you like it you should be able to put a ring on it. #wewillunite4marriageequality,”
and signed it “B.” She was one of many celebrities posting messages of support for marriage
equality that week as the United States Supreme Court heard arguments for two high profile
cases—Hollingsworth v. Perry and United States v. Windsor—on the issue of same-sex marriage
rights. The bright color of Beyoncé’s handwritten note emulated the sea of red across social
media as countless supporters for same-sex marriage changed their profile pictures on Facebook
and other platforms to a red equal sign symbol, and through its spread, effectively turned it into a
meme. The red square with a thick pink equal sign at the center was an altered version of the
Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) original yellow-on-blue equal sign logo, “selected because the
color [red] is synonymous with love,” (HRC 2015). The fast spread of the red equal sign also
prompted critical evaluations of the wide use of the symbol and HRC logo due mainly to the
organization’s politics.
The Human Rights Campaign has long been held by factions within the LGBT
community as an emblem of queer assimilation into the white heteropatriarchal order of society’s
dominant institutions. While it has lobbied for important inclusive legislation, its politics have
also often been taken to task for privileging expediency over full inclusion and liberation
(Clifton, 2013)—acceptance for more respectable politics and driven by the interests of a “white
men’s club” as described by an internal audit of the organization’s leadership (Geidner, 2015).
Some of the issues people have with the HRC are also present in many large LGBT
organizations, including GLAAD, an entertainment watchdog organizations whose work is more
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squarely in the field of media activism. Using GLAAD as a book-length case study, Vincent
Doyle (2016) “analyzes some of the implications of the LGBT movement’s increasing emphasis
on inclusion within dominant institutions” (p. 7). In a nutshell, he argues that:
Earlier coming out strategies—the dismantling of the closet, the right to sexual
privacy, the creation of a mass movement and of a gay public sphere—were
largely supplanted by the politics of making out: a desire to derive maximum
(personal, political, and economic) advantage from the legitimation of
homosexuality within mainstream institutions and to promote representations of
gay and lesbian people that are compatible with a social order that defines good
citizenship in terms of market-based values of self-betterment through
consumption, middle-class respectability, professionalism, and
entrepreneurialism” (p. 8).
I agree that LGBT acceptance and inclusion, especially in the media industries, have largely been
driven by such market forces and that even political participation can operate through neoliberal
logics of identity and activism. Yet, like Doyle, I don’t subscribe to the position made by critics
and theorists who see this turn necessarily as a foreclosure of political possibility and queer
liberation. This dissertation, in a sense, is an exercise to illustrate that such theories of complete
queer capture are mostly top-down and rely on binary understandings of assimilation versus
liberation. The participatory practices of networked users and content creators and curators
engage with politics and activism in complicated, concerted, and ambivalent ways.
In the case of the red equal sign, for instance, as some criticized the widespread
allegiance to the equal sign logo, calling out its adopters as willingly or unwittingly supporting
the troubled politics of the HRC, various other user-generated appropriations of the red equal
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sign popped up throughout the web, including fan-made hybrids featuring Star Trek, My Little
Pony, and Burt and Ernie insignia. In fact, Joel Penney (2014), conducting qualitative interviews
with respondents who took part in the profile change, reported that a couple of his interviewees
who happened to be critical of the HRC’s politics changed their profile to a critical parody of the
equal sign to register their disapproval. Response and reproduction of memes in this case, then,
suggests, as Henry Jenkins does, that “users who share media content across digital networks
also help shape it in the process, often expanding potential meanings as they actively and
selectively engage in practices of circulation” (quoted in Penney, 2014, p. 59). As Penney’s
findings showed, motivations in a case like this cannot be reduced to a single formula. At the
same time, jumping on the bandwagon, some companies created and posted their own version of
the meme, whether it was Martha Stewart’s post of a cake with two layers of filling standing in
for the equal sign or Bonobos’ aligned khakis resembling the logo (Vie, 2014). The amateur and
grassroots work that drives much of the analysis in this dissertation, thus, does not preclude their
on-and-off reliance on and cooptation by the more dominant interests that play a role in the push
and pull of popular culture in the networked era.
Two particular ways to consider how these participatory practices are mediated by more
dominant power dynamics throughout all three campaigns are celebrity and corporate
participation. The role celebrities play in driving attention to—sometimes overshadowing—
various political causes they champion or participate in should not be taken for granted here. The
celebrity factor, though, has different discursive and circulation effects when it is mobilized by
LGBTQ versus straight participants; by establishment gays—prominent industry figures like
Ellen Degeneres, Neil Patrick Harris, Jane Lynch—versus entrepreneurial gays, like Gigi
Gorgeous or any number of queer YouTube personalities (Cunningham and Craig, 2018),
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LGBTQ bloggers, porn stars, and other microcelebrities (Senft, 2008; Marwick, 2016). As I
mentioned in chapter four, part of the initial success of It Gets Better was not only due to Dan
Savage’s platform—as a known figure in the gay press for well over a decade before he uploaded
his video—but also Perez Hilton’s, quite popular in 2010, who in turn tagged other more
traditional celebrities with his video post in the first days of the campaign. Cue, then, other big-
name celebrities and figures, including allies, like Lady Gaga and President Barack Obama, who
made It Gets Better videos, broadening the politics of their participation.
The relationship straight celebrities, particularly Hollywood actors, have with the LGBT
community has always been fraught and messy due to the industry’s homophobia which
routinely leads to straight actors cast in LGBTQ roles and being spokespeople for LGBT
inclusion, particularly when those actors win accolades and Oscars (William Hurt, Tom Hanks,
Hillary Swank, Charlize Theron, Sean Penn, Jared Leto). Their support and participation in the
campaigns in this dissertation, then, are also fraught and ambivalent in the way it helps with
visibility, lends the issues palatability, and also works as currency for liberal branding of
inclusivity and diversity. The video landscape of the networked era, though, further blurs the
lines between activism and exploitation as straight and queer celebrities work together in several
of these video campaigns. Stop the Hate, for instance, even before the official No on 8 campaign
took off, had a roster of straight female actors alongside some queer actors and gay and lesbian
families stumping against Proposition 8.
After the election, many celebrities—gay and straight—came together on a day’s notice
to shoot “Prop 8: The Musical,” reminiscent of the stories of how quickly some of the Gathering
Storm” parodies came together a few months later. Tony award-winning songwriter Marc
Shaiman conceived, wrote, cast, and shot the three-minute video all within a couple days,
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recruiting any celebrities available right before Thanksgiving—including John C. Reilly, Craig
Robinson, Maya Rudolph, Margaret Cho, and Jack Black as Jesus among many others (Itzkoff,
2008). The video was directed by Shaiman’s friend, Adam McKay, who was one of the co-
creators of Funny or Die, where they released the video on December 2
nd
to a couple million
views in a few days. This practically echoes how Mike Rose’s “A Gaythering Storm” came
together—similarly with a mix of straight and queer actors. Funny or Die, in both cases, is a
crucial lynchpin, lending these projects the material capital but also social and celebrity capital
(Driessens, 2013) to reach more viewers. Although impact and reach is not central to my
argument here, as the mainstreaming I argue taking place through the three case studies is
predicated more on production and distribution practices, it is an important element to consider
and expand in follow-up studies.
The corporate sector’s interest in LGBT issues and related legislation is also a related
outgrowth of the mainstreaming of LGBT politics, including the work covered in this
dissertation. Funny or Die, The Colbert Report, and a few other cable shows’ interests to
incorporate Proposition 8 and “A Gathering Storm” demonstrated early attention from the
entertainment industry, but It Gets Better really proved the extent to which these popular
phenomena also court corporate interest. Chapter four previewed this with the breakdown of
Pixar’s It Gets Better video, which was one of many dozens of corporate video contributions to
campaign, all mirroring the same format of a repetitious stringing together of the life experiences
of their LGBTQ employees. Google, Apple, Facebook, GAP, CBS, NBC, Dreamworks, Sony
Picture, Microsoft, Dell, Target, McGraw-Hill, and many others all made It Gets Better videos.
Notably, Google, who owns YouTube, fashioned a savvy ninety-second ad for Chrome, their
web browser, by visually narrating the It Gets Better phenomenon. The video edits shots of the
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suicide headlines, then starts playing Dan Savage’s original video. With Savage’s voice in the
background, the ad follows a cursor opening a tab, logging on YouTube, clicking upload,
copying the link and sending it to others. It then opens the campaign’s website as a medley of It
Gets Better videos start playing. It shows the view count rise, and edits in snippets of Kathy
Griffin, Chaz Bono, and Lady Gaga’s uploads among others. It shows positive text responses to
the project and ends with “Dan Savage, Messenger. The web is what you make of it.”
Once It Gets Better became a non-profit, it also got involved in corporate sponsorship,
and one of their most noteworthy sponsors was Lexus. The car company runs L/Studio, a hosting
platform for a variety of visual media, most notably the web series Web Therapy (2008), starring
Lisa Kudrow. Kudrow and her producing partner Dan Bucatinsky’s production company, Is or
Isn’t Entertainment, teamed up with Savage and his producing partner, Brian Pines, to make It
Got Better, a docuseries with out LGBT celebrities telling their stories in bite-size vignettes,
hosted on L/Studio (Goldberg, 2014). The first season, launched in 2014, included episodes with
Tim Gunn, Jane Lynch, George Takei, Jason Collins, Laverne Cox, and Tegan and Sara. The
docuseries ran for two more seasons and twelve more stories. Producing these episodes six years
after the campaign started, It Got Better really showed the lasting form and impact of It Gets
Better as well as its amenability for branding corporate progressiveness.
As LGBT rights pressed on after 2010, some corporations doubled down, getting
involved in legislation and politics. When North Carolina passed HB-2, the “bathroom bill,” seen
as an affront to trans rights to use bathrooms in accordance with their gender identity, many
companies loudly took their business out of the state, causing hundreds of millions in losses and
ultimately leading to a partial repeal of the bill. Notably, Paypal withdrew its newly announced
plans to open a global operations center in Charlotte (Schulman, 2016) and the NBA moved its
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2017 All-Star game out of the state because of the bill (Vasilogambros, 2016). In 2017, Texas’s
own bathroom bill led fourteen CEOs from Dallas-based companies, like Southwest Airlines,
AT&T, and Texas Instruments to sign a letter against the bill, while IBM “dispatched about 20
executives to persuade lawmakers against passing the bill” (Phippen, J. W., 2017). And most
recently, Jonathan O’Connell in The Washington Post (2018) reported that “Amazon has quietly
made rights for and acceptance of gay and transgender people part of its criteria in choosing a
second headquarters.” It seems we have come to a point where corporations are more
instrumental than the state in securing and safeguarding LGBT rights.
There is, of course, a healthy skepticism here in trusting dominant institutions, especially
from the tech industry, when it comes to rights and recognition, including the right to refuse
recognition for those for whom recognition means more violence (Keeling, 2009, cárdenas,
2015). Yet, this is not to say I bring these examples up to illustrate the cooptation of LGBT
politics by dominant interests. Rather, it is to think of this turn—celebrity and corporate
participation and activism—as part and parcel of the same movement and phenomenon, of
participatory politics in a networked age because many of these actions and movements are
taking place on or mediated through the same platforms. There is a cynical perspective that is
easy to employ here, but coming back to the motivating ethos of this study from the introduction,
I evaluate these changes with ambivalence to see the complicated work of participatory culture,
the messy work of mainstreaming LGBT politics, and the exhilarating work of collaboration and
connection. This convergence of grassroots activism, independent media production, legislation
and state politics, celebrity culture, and corporate influence is the aftermath of early LGBT
activism online analyzed in It Gets Popular and it is where the analysis needs to move next.

Sarkissian 206
Coda
I started this conclusion with the example of the red equal sign because it best illustrates
the convergence of popular LGBT media representation and participation that I argue is, in part,
the product of the LGBT video activism covered in the preceding chapters. The spread of the red
equal sign—as well as the rainbow filter profile picture two years later on occasion of the U.S.
Supreme Court case that would federally legalize same-sex marriage—was largely a popular,
networked movement in that most of its participants were everyday Facebook and social media
users. At the same time, the red equal sign and its attendant gay rights politics were a platform
for celebrity activism, which usually attracts more attention from and for legacy media. The logo
was initiated by a corporate, lobbying enterprise and taken up by other companies as an
opportunity for brand activism. All of this was in service of visibility for and approval of legal
protections for same-sex couples. Whether performed by individuals, celebrities, corporations, or
the state, the sentiments around the red equal sign were expressed by participating in digital
practices. This convergence is afforded by socially networked technologies. The antecedents of
this moment of convergence—and their contributions to the study of the popular, media
activism, and LGBTQ publics—trace back to the participatory politics of video activism of the
three case studies in It Gets Popular. The production of independent campaigns against
Proposition 8 and “A Gathering Storm,” and contributions to the It Gets Better campaign, broke
substantial ground in the mainstreaming of LGBT politics in popular culture.
Mainstreaming here, to reiterate, is the process by which LGBT politics is taken up and
made popular by digital participatory practices, largely expressed and performed by every day,
independent, and grassroots efforts. In this project, then, I distinguish mainstreaming from the
way the term has been historically mobilized in related scholarship as a strategy for broadening
Sarkissian 207
the inclusion of LGBT images and narratives in media representation or making LGBT people
and politics more palatable to wider demographics. In It Gets Popular, mainstreaming signals
digital practices taken up mostly by participants challenging dominant interests and institutions
through networked technologies. It is not a condition or effect, but rather a mode of production
and distribution.
The three case studies in It Gets Popular demonstrate this type of mainstreaming. The
many grassroots video efforts against Prop 8, for instance, came from activists and interested
parties on-the-ground who utilized digital video and the affordances of online distribution to
make ads and PSAs in anticipation of the election. These projects came together through
community organizing and networking with the goal of responding to the politics of the Prop 8
campaigns and releasing their message to the public. Their collaborative approach to outreach,
inclusive politics, and a broad range of messaging tactics showcased their appeal to the popular.
The popular, then, in relation to mainstreaming, entails the same type of dynamic tension with
dominant institutions and interests laid out in the introduction. Through the three cases, however,
It Gets Popular updates that tension to reflect the shifting and more complicated politics,
overlap, and ambivalence of the media landscape, notably because the popular has gained more
power through a proliferation of digital and networked practices.
In a similar vein, the satirical and parody responses to “A Gathering Storm” exhibited an
update to traditional forms of queer and campy protest in what emerged as mostly spontaneous
collaborations aimed at contributing to the popular discourse on LGBT rights through video
activism. These remixed and parody videos were essentially a flash meme, a cross between gay
zaps and more contemporary flash mobs, but intended for digitally native distribution. While a
couple traditional media outlets, like Colbert Report and Futurama, also partook in the critique
Sarkissian 208
of “A Gathering Storm,” the short-lived but culturally penetrating meme was largely the work of
independent groups of friends and collaborators choosing to participate in these discourses on
LGBT politics. In doing so, they helped propagate the practice of using digital tools and
networked participation as a growing form of popular protest to express dissent on LGBT
discrimination and support for LGBT rights and dignities.
It Gets Better demonstrates the convergence potential of mainstreaming par excellence as
it amassed tens of thousands of video contributions from both countless everyday people and an
assortment of celebrities, state actors, corporations, non-profits, colleges, and many others. As
the chapter on this phenomenon chronicles, the popular impulse of It Gets Better—to offer an
alternative message, to challenge the dominant LGBT narrative, to fill in the lack of first-hand
queer experiences and stories in the cultural imagination—was predicated on a history of using
traditional then digital media as a tool for documenting, testifying, and spotlighting LGBTQ
lives. The longevity of It Gets Better as a popular practice and cultural phenomenon attest to and
predict the potential of mainstreaming to bring LGBT politics to the forefront of media and
cultural discourses through continued digital and networked activism in the years to follow.
Mainstreaming is thus the key to understanding the contribution of It Gets Popular to
several fields of scholarship and how it connects them through an interdisciplinary analysis. It
helps us understand the popular, for instance, as a participatory practice, one carried out today
through digital production, networked participation, and online distribution. Recalling Stuart
Hall’s (1998) positing of the popular as that which is in continuing tension with dominant
culture, the three cases of video activism in It Gets Popular updates our understanding of both
popular and dominant culture, particularly in the shifting arena of media industries. The popular
is practiced through an imbrication with the media platforms of dominant industries today. It is a
Sarkissian 209
way of working with and through this implication—sometimes succumbing to its biases, but also
utilizing its affordances that enable us to push and continually challenge the status quo.
In this way, It Gets Popular is in conversation with recent projects detailed in the
introduction (Christian, 2018; Cunningham and Craig, 2018; Jenkins et al.; Lopez, 2016) that
foreground content creators using digital production, networking, and distribution for both
engaged consumption and political advocacy. Like those projects, this dissertation stakes out the
popular as the space and practice through which all types of participants contribute to media
discourses and digital publics. Like those projects, It Gets Popular provides new insight into
communities and networks of digital production that have been going on throughout the past
decade. More specifically, this project highlights the early waves of LGBT activism online that
led a concerted turn to video as its participatory tool of choice for protesting homophobia, LGBT
discrimination, and challenging the sometimes-myopic approach to gay rights instituted by
dominant interests within LGBT rights organizations. This participatory practice, which I have
called mainstreaming here, foreshadowed the more sustainable movements and political
discourses to follow the It Gets Better project, like the red equal sign.
It Gets Popular enriches the literature on participatory politics and media activism by
fleshing out these previously unwritten LGBT chapters. It provides not only the queer-specific
history and trajectory of media and, more precisely, video activism for LGBT rights, but through
interviews and paratextual historiographies also shows the connections between the overlapping
participatory networks of netroots activists, LGBT activists, and media producers among others.
While queer identity permeates through some of the scholarship on participatory activism
(Kligler-Vilenchik, 2016; Costanza-Chock, 2016), the focus on queer cultural production in
media activism is seldom studied. Much of the emerging literature on the intersectional work of
Sarkissian 210
undocuqueer immigrants (Seif, 2014; Cisneros & Bracho, 2018), for instance, focuses more on
identity and discursive speech that may also inform activism in the streets, but not necessarily
networked media practices. It Gets Popular fills in this gap by detailing the work LGBT and
allied people were producing around LGBT rights and representation. Crucial to understanding
the contributions of these independent campaigns inspired by Prop 8, A Gathering Storm, and
queer youth suicides is how they incorporate a mixture of camp, humor, community, outreach,
and narrative within emerging forms and genres of digital production, like memes and political
parodies. The campaigns analyzed here, then, are not simply LGBT versions of participatory
politics, but a unique blend of queer participatory media activism.
Finally, It Gets Popular contributes most substantially to the study of LGBT politics and
queer publics in the age of digital media. Here is where the project most substantively
demonstrates the affordances of the “new” and “social” in new media and social media,
respectively. As all the chapters detail, the genres and tactics used throughout the digital
productions across the three case studies are not necessarily anything new in queer activism.
What is new, however, is how online distribution and circulation reveal shared affective
sentiments across these campaigns. For instance, the four independent video campaigns against
Proposition 8 were orchestrated by completely different groups of organizers and individually
accomplished different tasks. Yet, taken together—something the digital distribution of YouTube
and networking affordances of social media platforms make possible—they reveal a common
critical impulse. It sends a powerful message that would not be discerned if these projects were
not circulating in overlapping platforms and networks in a pre-digital age of media activism.
The deep affective penetration afforded by new and social media is even more evident in
“A Gathering Storm” and It Gets Better. The concentrated volume of responses to “A Gathering
Sarkissian 211
Storm” in a short span of time—nearly all the documented videos here were released in April of
2009—communicated more about the affective compulsion of the phenomenon than the sum of
the individual takes. As the number of videos grew and were often linked algorithmically
through similar titles and tags they started forming their own publics and crossed over into
related and linked publics as well. It Gets Better took this to a whole different level as that
campaign broke into the national discourse due both to the unprecedented number of
contributions and the celebrity of some of those participants. This convergence, though, only
illustrates the power of the shared affective sentiment that compels everyone from fifteen-year-
old teens in their bedroom to the PR team at Dell or Target to join in. It also speaks to new
media’s—specifically, YouTube’s—leveling effect, in that every video is shared on the same
platform. Together, these characteristics allow for a principally different engagement with queer
media.
To contrast the effect of these affordances with pre-digital and analog forms of activism,
we can turn to the AIDS Memorial Quilt. This monument to the victims of AIDS added
personally individualized quilt panels for every life lost to AIDS, extending the growing
monument for over a mile. Each panel represents a story and stitched together the amassed quilt
signals powerful and moving form of media activism (Sturken, 1997). Yet, people’s engagement
with the AIDS Memorial Quilt was largely mediated through television broadcasts and news
reports, particularly when it was laid out on the National Mall and when then President Bill
Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton visited to view the quilt in 1996 (AP Archive, 2015). This
mediated experience for anyone who was not able to visit the quilt the few times it was out on
full display is dramatically different from the way we engage with the videos discussed in It Gets
Popular, which in their way are also archiving lives and perspectives historically ignored in
Sarkissian 212
mainstream channels. Think, for instance, about the difference between watching the Clintons
silently walking across the quilt on the news versus watching President Obama’s direct address It
Gets Better video on your laptop among the many other thousands you might see. The direct
consumption and social engagement with It Gets Better videos, for instance, is integral to the
project’s very function and import, as it is this social and networked engagement that compels
and sustains participation.
Further, the networked and participatory character of social media is also essential to
understanding how mainstreaming broadens the publics engaged in LGBT politics, including
non-LGBT people. All three of the campaigns included heterosexual participants and content
creators. Several people involved in the Prop 8 videos were straight allies, including David
Atkins, one of my interviewees, who co-created Courage Campaign’s “Home Invasion” video
with his also-straight brother. Two of my “Gathering Storm” interviewees who created a couple
of those parodies were also straight allies. It Gets Better videos included a host of allies
uploading their videos of support. But this is not just about non-LGBT people helping produce
this media; after all, pre-digital media activism very well had allies on the front lines too. The
advent of sharing this media and placing it into networked circulation and more intimate “flows”
of social media feeds not only reaches but invites a diverse set of audiences to witness, invest, or
even partake and make more popular these discourses centering LGBT politics. This brings us
back to the red equal sign and the proliferating LGBT issues that are continuously part of the
cultural discourse. As the studies by Penny and Vie above attest, memes and movements like It
Gets Better and the red equal sign are polysemic in their uses, intentions, and effects. It raises the
personal stakes of all participants in these movements. This very variability is what broadens
LGBT politics to wider publics.
Sarkissian 213
The videos and discourses across independent Prop 8 media, “A Gathering Storm”
parodies, and It Gets Better narratives were all in dialectical tension with the dominant
organizations and ideologies they challenged. Those interests, as well as the dynamics of
celebrity and corporate support discussed in this conclusion, are still mostly top-down forces in
popular culture. The campaigns in this dissertation contend with these forces, but through
analyzing their motivation, production, content, distribution, and proceeding discourses, I argue
these networked efforts complicate and nuance the narrative of digital and online LGBT activism
of the past decade. It Gets Popular intervenes in fleshing out the digital histories and
participatory practices in LGBT video activism at a crucial moment in online organizing and
networked activism. Through analyzing these campaigns, I highlight not only their ingenuity, but
their lineage in the evolving form and styles of LGBT activism. The verve and political
commitments that went in to producing these videos, showcasing them, and circulating,
especially at a particularly ripe moment in the growth of digital politics—before #Occupy,
#BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo—translated into deepening queer publics online and mainstreaming
LGBT politics. Humor, affect, media savvy, and performance have always been an essential part
of queer life and activism; and whether that is through broadcasting the story of your suicide
attempt at a Fort-Worth city council meeting or the satirical styling of your musical parodies of
the current administration, it’s an integral component of understanding the power of participatory
politics in popular culture.

Sarkissian 214
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Asset Metadata

Creator Sarkissian, Raffi (author)

Core Title It gets popular: LGBT video activism in the digital age

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 11/13/2020

Defense Date 05/15/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag digital activism,digital publics,It Gets Better,LGBT,LGBT activism,LGBT politics,OAI-PMH Harvest,participatory politics,Proposition 8,video activism

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Jenkins, Henry (committee chair), Gross, Larry (committee member), Keeling, Kara (committee member)

Creator Email raffisar@usc.edu,rsark87@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-106229

Unique identifier UC11675392

Identifier etd-Sarkissian-6969.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-106229 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Sarkissian-6969.pdf

Dmrecord 106229

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Sarkissian, Raffi

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA