LGBT Pride as a Cultural Protest Tactic in a Southern City

Abstract

In 2009, Pride came to Dixieville. In this unlikely Southern city, 350 people participated in a Pride march to advocate for improved social conditions for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) citizens. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and observations, I reveal that this march did not fit with the contentious politics model of social movements which defines protest tactics as those that target the state for political/legal change. My findings indicate that the march served primarily as a powerful cultural statement enacted by LGBT community advocates. Guided by Verta Taylor’s framework of contestation, intentionality, and collective identity, I explain why the march participants viewed Pride as the most effective means to advocate for LGBT people despite its dissimilarity with state-targeted tactics. I also demonstrate how Pride answered the specific challenges faced by LGBT people in their city by enacting resistance to what participants understood as a damaging cultural cycle of hostility and invisibility. Finally, I show that this cultural protest tactic had rich symbolic meaning that went beyond the predictions of social movement research. Insights from this research can (and should) be applied to study tactics that target nonstate actors but tend to fall outside the scope of social movement research.

Keywords

social movements culture LGBT rights protest tactics parades

A central concern in the study of social movements is how social conditions influence and even determine collective actions. Scholars working with contentious politics, multi-institutional politics, and new social movements theories match the political and economic conditions of western nation-states with the activists’ repertoire of tactics. With their contentious politics model, Tilly and collaborators argued that the modern state coalesced power in the hands of the government, so social movements use tactics to make claims toward the state rather than nonstate landowners or institutions (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Tilly 1995, 2008). The state is a formal political community with a centralized government that has the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence (Tilly 1975; Weber 1978). Critics of the contentious politics program argue that while the modern state exercises power over its citizens via laws, market regulation, taxes, and state-run institutions like public education and the military, it is not the only entity with social power. Culture and institutions such as religion and the economic market are not wholly controlled by modern states and wield social power over individuals.¹ By overemphasizing state-directed tactics, critics argue, scholars neglect tactics with other targets.

Armstrong and Bernstein (2008) promoted a broader “multi-institutional politics” approach recognizing that power exists across society’s dominant institutions and thus activists direct their tactics at cultural, political, and institutional targets (see also Van Dyke, Soule, and Taylor 2004; Walker, Martin, and McCarthy 2008). Likewise, theorists of the maligned new social movements paradigm contended that the identity movements that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s fought for change primarily in the cultural rather than political sphere (Melucci 1985; Pichardo 1997). They attributed the new target to a postindustrial power shift in which people were subject to cultural domination instead of economic or political inequality. Despite heated theoretical debate about the targets of social action, most empirical research on collective action continues to analyze movements that seek formal institutional change with clearly defined demands.

In this article, I analyze a protest event that targeted cultural meanings in pursuit of cultural, rather than political/legal or institutional change. I made observations at the event and, with the help of research assistants, conducted interviews with organizers, marchers, and those who protested the first Pride parade in a midsize southeastern city. I draw on Taylor’s framework in which movement tactics are defined by contestation, intentionality, and collective identity to demonstrate that local conditions sometimes lend themselves to cultural, not political, movement goals (Taylor and Van Dyke 2004; Taylor et al. 2009). Moreover, I extend this framework to show how organizers and marchers challenged the local cultural cycle of invisibility and hostility toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people with a visible celebration of LGBT identity. My findings show that attention to local movements helps clarify when and why movements pursue cultural goals and demonstrate how culturally oriented movements differ in form, style, and meaning from state-oriented ones.

The Meaning of Mass Demonstrations

Most research on the purpose and meaning of mass demonstrations examines tactics that directly target the state in pursuit of political/legal change. According to Tilly (1995, 2008), mass demonstrations are collective enactments to demonstrate worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment. By showing these qualities, social movements claim the necessary political power to have their demands heard. In American political culture, the march on Washington is the epitome of a demonstration intended to claim political power by occupying space and to thereby compel legal change (Barber 2004; Ghaziani 2008). In his study of four lesbian and gay marches on Washington, Ghaziani (2008) showed that each march was precipitated by changing political and cultural contexts that activists recognized as opportunities to present specific movement demands through mass demonstration. Tactics like mass demonstrations are modular such that they are defined by their form rather than content and can be used by movements with a variety of causes (Tarrow 1994). They carry a simple symbolic meaning that is adaptable to the specific political needs of the movement in question.

Within this dominant model of state-directed movement tactics, scholars have elaborated two ways that activists use culture to respond to political opportunities. First, researchers have studied culture in the form of collective action frames: the interpretive schema that activists use to articulate grievances and propose solutions (Benford and Snow 2000). For example, LGBT activists invoke the civil rights movement by claiming that marriage, like voting, is a civil right deserving of state recognition and protection (McFarland 2011). Second, scholars have examined social movements with respect to internal movement cultures with the concept of collective identity, or a shared sense of self among activists (Polletta and Jasper 2001). Social movements rely on existing common identities—for example, by race, gender, or social class—to define the constituency for movement activism and to motivate participation and commitment by politicizing these identities (Hunt and Benford 2004; Taylor and Whittier 1992). They also construct collective identities as individuals work together in pursuit of movement goals (Hunt and Benford 2004; Melucci 1989). In addition to sustaining movement participation, collective identities inform activists’ choice of tactics and the means by which they make logistical decisions (Carmin and Balser 2002; Ghaziani 2008).

Despite efforts to examine the cultural messages delivered during tactical actions and the cultural factors involved in sustaining movement groups, empirical research on social movements still privileges tactics directed at the state. The effect is that scholars view tactics as having the sole purpose of claiming political power. Once a group claims this power, culture is relevant as either the content of their message or their internal collective identity. Cultural content and collective identity can vary, but the implication is that “serious” protest targets the state and looks like a traditional march, complete with fist-pumping and chanting, preferably in a recognized protest space like the National Mall or a state capitol building.

Although the blanket assumption among movement scholars tends to be that movements target the state, Taylor and colleagues (Taylor and Van Dyke 2004; Taylor et al. 2009) have developed a framework that allows for some flexibility in analyzing a diverse array of movement tactics and goals. In this scheme, social movement tactics have three essential elements: participants contest an existing social order; their challenge is intentional and not simply the by-product of other motivations; and a collective identity holds participants together. Its strength is that it allows for greater integration of culture into the analysis of movement tactics. With the first element, contestation, this framework overcomes the pitfalls of defining tactics by form and presuming the state as their primary target. Instead, researchers question the target of contention, which may be cultural symbols or nonstate institutions. In their 2009 study, for example, Taylor et al. identified cultural meanings that couple weddings with heterosexuality as the target of public same-sex weddings during a one-month period in San Francisco in 2004. Intentionality, the second element, incorporates participants’ individual motivations and allows researchers to consider the congruence between individual and group goals. Finally, collective identity refers to activists’ internal culture in which participants feel bonded to one another through a shared sense of self (Polletta and Jasper 2001). Scholars have shown that collective identity affects movement’s tactical choices, and by including this element from Taylor’s framework, researchers can further integrate internal culture with external contestation in both form and content. I use Taylor’s framework in this article to get past the culture–politics divide and instead investigate the means by which one group met local challenges to seek social change.

A few studies on tactics that directly challenge cultural meanings suggest that they may carry richer symbolic meaning than state-targeted political protests. In Taylor’s framework, these studies have used a more expansive definition of the site of contestation to include culture. In his study of the AIDS activist group ACT UP, Gamson (1989) detailed how activists used symbolic inversions to engage cultural conflict. The group’s most prominent symbol was a pink triangle—a symbol used by Nazis to mark homosexuals—emblazoned with the words “SILENCE=DEATH.” ACT UP reclaimed this symbol of powerlessness to mean action; instead of silently accepting death, they called for others to fight back. More recently, Rupp and Taylor (2003) argued that drag performers challenge the gender binary through their performances, while Bernstein and De La Cruz (2008) showed how Hapa movement activists challenge cultural insistence that each person has one race by asserting multiracial identities. This research points to the promise of studying movement actions directed at targets other than the state, even when that target is the intangible dominant culture. In each of these studies, activists do not simply adopt state-targeted tactics like protest marches and direct them at cultural targets. The tactics themselves are creative ways to challenge culture by enacting new meanings.

More research is needed to match the tactics activists use to their particular social contexts. Most research on culture-directed tactics comes from the LGBT movement. While this may be a mere coincidence, quantitative analysis by Van Dyke, Soule, and Taylor (2004) showed that protests for LGBT rights targeted public opinion rather than the state or other institutions more than protests for other causes. Foucault ([1976] 1990) argued that when it comes to regulating sexuality, power operates diffusely through discourse rather than through centralized state power. In other words, LGBT activists may target dominant culture rather than the state because they face inequality based on cultural exclusion rather than political oppression. In this study, I consider how participants used the Pride parade tactic to meet local cultural challenges and discuss whether culture is a particularly important site of contention for LGBT activists.

Finally, studies of tactics targeting culture do not incorporate individual and internal cultural elements of intentionality and collective identity. I investigate one LGBT Pride parade through the lenses of contestation, intentionality, and collective identity to better understand the meanings of its form and content and the influence of individual and internal cultural factors on these meanings.

LGBT Pride Parades

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Pride parades are an established annual occurrence around the world. A few thousand people gathered on June 28, 1970, in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles to stage the first events (The Advocate 1970). The marches commemorated the 1969 Stonewall riots, when patrons of a New York City gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, reacted violently to a routine police raid (Armstrong and Crage 2006; Carter 2004). While Stonewall rioters directly fought state agents, Pride marches one year later targeted cultural norms and meanings that constructed gays and lesbians as deviants (McFarland 2012). Pride participants intended to carry on what activists understood to be a new era of activism, characterized by the joyous and unashamed public declaration of gay and lesbian identity (Armstrong and Crage 2006; Browne 2007). Over one hundred Pride marches and parades were held in the United States in 2009, drawing more than six million total marchers and spectators (McFarland 2012). The stated purpose of these events is much the same as it was in 1970; to promote the visibility and validate the existence of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people (Carter 2004; InterPride 2009). At most Pride events, one will find contingents representing all facets of the LGBT community—marching bands, church groups, Gay-Straight Alliances from local high schools and colleges, plus the more distinctive “Dykes on Bikes” and “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence”—organized groups of lesbian women riding motorcycles and drag queens dressed as nuns, respectively (McFarland 2012).

Scholars have treated Pride events as serious attempts to claim public space and challenge dominant attitudes towards homosexuality (Brickell 2000; Browne 2007; Herrell 1992; Joseph 2010; Kates and Belk 2001; Kenney 2001).² I build on this literature in two ways: First, I view Pride events as coordinated tactics aimed at social change; second, I look beyond the largest, most established Pride parades and instead focus on a small event in its first year. Studying a new, small event illuminates the understandings of organizers, marchers, and counter-protesters and situates them in the local cultural milieu. Although understudied in favor of large-scale urban parades, smaller-scale Pride parades are increasingly critical sites of contestation. Nearly half of all Pride parades in 2009 were held in metropolitan statistical areas with fewer than one million people (McFarland 2012).

Pride in One Southern City

By the available evidence, Dixieville is not a welcoming place for LGBT people. In 2006, voters passed a state constitutional amendment barring marriage and all forms of relationship recognition for same-sex couples with an overwhelming 78 percent of the statewide vote. Additionally, LGBT people are not protected at any level of government from discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identity in housing, public accommodations, or employment (SC Equality 2011). A survey conducted by the state’s LGBT advocacy organization showed high rates of discrimination and harassment based on sexual or gender identity. Fifteen percent of respondents reported being the victims of physical violence, one third (30.1 percent) said they were discriminated against in their jobs, and more than half (58.9 percent) experienced verbal abuse for being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. Furthermore, more than half of respondents (54 percent) said they experienced homophobia, transphobia, or harassment either on the street or at a public establishment in the state in the last 12 months. When asked how comfortable they are sharing their sexual orientation with others, about half of respondents said they were “very open” with immediate family, teachers, and people at church (SC Equality 2010).

On June 20, 2009, in this hostile climate, approximately 350 people marched in Dixieville’s first ever LGBT Pride parade. Meanwhile, more than one hundred people, both individuals and church-organized groups, lined the streets in protest. The march was initially proposed by local Unitarian-Universalists who wanted to advocate for LGBT members of their community, and members of this church made up half of the organizing committee. These Unitarian-Universalists had many options: they could have opened a community center, started a program for LGBT youth, or lobbied city council for a local nondiscrimination policy, but they chose to hold a Pride march. In this article, I use ethnographic data to analyze this choice from the perspective of organizers, marchers, and protesters.

The Study

My study is an “ethnography of the ephemeral” (Paulsen 2009, 509) because unlike traditional ethnographies that involve months and even years of observation in the field, the phenomenon that I researched lasted only six hours. With this short time period, my major challenge was to go beyond my first impressions to compose a thick description based on participants’ own meanings (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995; Geertz 1973). Paulsen (2009) identified three challenges to short-term ethnography: gaining entrée and establishing a position from which to observe; moving beyond the immediately available informants; and refining research questions in light of emerging insights. Before I detail my research methods, I first discuss how I addressed each of Paulsen’s (2009) challenges.

I gained entrée for myself and three research assistants and established an observational position through my familiarity with LGBT Pride parades and by making contacts with the planning committee. I have personally attended many Pride events both informally and formally as an extended research project and I thus approach them as an insider. For the present event, I contacted the planning committee chair with my research interest in it and was immediately welcomed. She forwarded minutes from all meetings and correspondence among committee members and introduced me to other committee members at a meeting two weeks before the event. Though organizers initially treated me as an insider by including me in group emails and inviting me to social events, I established a partial outsider position by not participating in organizing activities or the march, turning down social invitations, and emphasizing my identity as a researcher. I did not form ongoing relationships with organizers beyond follow-up interviews conducted within a month of the event.

The welcome by organizers legitimated my and my research assistants’ presence among marchers during line-up and at the festival that followed the march. We complemented this partial insider position by presenting ourselves as outsiders that carried clipboards and tape recorders, did not march, and came from a university in another state. To gain entrée with those who protested the parade, I collected a list of groups that had been issued protest permits (all local churches) from the local newspaper and contacted each leader individually to notify him or her of my research and ask for the opportunity to interview their members at the event. I positioned myself an outsider to protesters by virtue of my noninvolvement in organizing and my cultural distance as a nonreligious (to them) academic from the liberal Chapel Hill area.

The next challenge was the flipside of the first: to avoid too close contact with those informants who were immediately available to ensure both diverse perspectives and as much as possible an unbiased perspective on the event. To this end, I used formal and informal quotas and employed research assistants to conduct interviews. As described below, I established sampling guidelines to ensure a diverse group of interviewees. By using research assistants, each with unique personal characteristics, I was able to reduce interviewer effects. Moreover, interviewers approached potential respondents rather than relying on unsolicited volunteers.

Finally, to mitigate my inability to refine research questions in light of new insights, I researched both the local climate for LGBT people and the concerns and conflicts among people in this community. I conducted interviews with ten organizers before the event and was able to make some revisions before the big day. Using what Paulsen calls the “swarm strategy” (2009, 521), I relied on research assistants’ perspectives to check my assumptions.

Data Collection

Three research assistants and I conducted 44 semi-structured interviews with people involved in all aspects of Pride of Dixie. I separate respondents according to their participation: organizers put on the event as members of the planning committee; marchers walked in the procession on the day of the event; and protesters demonstrated in opposition to Pride of Dixie. For brevity, I sometimes refer to organizers and marchers collectively as “participants.” I solicited interviews with all fifteen members of the planning committee and conducted interviews with ten who were heavily involved in putting the event together. I conducted interviews before the march lasting on average thirty minutes and post-march interviews with seven organizers lasting fifteen minutes each.

Research assistants and I interviewed marchers and protesters at the event itself. Each interview lasted approximately ten minutes. The two groups of people were easy to distinguish because very few people attended simply as spectators; thus, everyone in the procession was a marcher while all bystanders were protesters. We also identified protesters by their signs and chants in opposition to homosexuality. We recruited interviewees by approaching individuals at the event; thus, they are a convenience sample. We used a quota to sample women and men equally in order to ensure gender diversity in the sample. Since this was the first event of its kind in the area, this was the only type of diversity we could predict with accuracy. Informally, we sampled interviewees in order to match the relative diversity of those present by age, race/ethnicity, perceived sexual orientation, and gender performance.

To recruit interviewees, two research assistants scattered through the crowd of Pride marchers during parade line-up and at a post-parade festival while a third walked along the parade route to approach protesters. I made observations by recording audio field notes and interviewed protesters. Interviewers approached potential study subjects according to the gender quota and diversity guidelines and did not interview more than one person in a formal or informal group. Marchers and protesters were equally willing to be interviewed and we received fewer than three refusals.

I interviewed organizers before and after the Pride event either in person at a public location or over the phone. Research assistants interviewed marchers as they lined up before the march or immediately afterward at a post-march festival. Protesters were interviewed as they stood along the parade route either before or during the march. We conducted day-of interviews on site by moving interviewees away from the crowd enough to allow for privacy. All interviews covered respondents’ experience at the event, their motivation for participating, how they came to participate, and their opinions of Pride parades in general and Pride of Dixie in particular. Interviews were tape recorded and transcribed for analysis.

In total, we interviewed ten organizers, twenty-three marchers, and eleven protesters. Because of the gender quota, there were almost equal numbers of women and men in each group. Most interviewees (forty-one, 93 percent) were white; two marchers and one protester were African American. For participants (organizers and marchers), 42 percent self-identified as LGBT, 48 percent as straight allies, and 1 person did not self-identify. It is notable that, particularly for organizers, half did not identify as LGBT yet were heavily involved in planning and executing a march with the goal of supporting LGBT people. Neither organizers nor marchers had much direct experience with LGBT activism or Pride events; in fact, nearly half (44 percent) of participants had never before been to a Pride event. Finally, participants ranged greatly in age, from college-age to retirees.

Analysis

After transcribing interviews, I analyzed responses using MAXQDA. I used three features of social movement tactics—contestation, intentionality, and collective identity—as master frames for analysis (Taylor and Van Dyke 2004). I started by coding respondents’ statements by their relevance to each feature. I then developed specific codes within each master frame by grouping statements by common themes. I sought to capture respondents’ understandings of the nature of each feature and the causes behind it. When dealing with contestation, for example, I coded respondents’ statements about what divided marchers and protesters and what factors underlay that division. Analysis focused on the meanings respondents attributed to the Pride of Dixie march. I cross-tabulated code frequencies with self-identified sexual orientation (LGBT or straight ally), gender, and type of involvement (organizer, marcher, or protester) to explore differences between these groups. I used observational field notes to supplement interview data. While I analyzed participants’ and protesters’ actions and responses on all three dimensions, the focus of my study is the experiences and understandings of participants rather than protesters. I treat protesters as important actors in Pride of Dixie in that they are the most visible and extreme representation of the local cultural climate and their presence affected participants’ experiences.

Results

The Look of the March

Minutes before noon on June 20, 2009, LGBT advocates were ready to step off in the city’s first ever Pride march. Local police blocked streets from automobile traffic. Rather than spectators, groups of anti-LGBT protesters congregated at intervals along the parade route. They held signs declaring their opposition to the planned event. Signs such as “No rights for sodomites,” “In the Garden of Eden was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” and “Gay: a deadly choice. Romans 1” condemned homosexuality as a sin that was unnatural and undeserving of legal protections. Others called for march participants to turn away from their presumed sin, saying “Trust in Christ, he will deliver you” and “Please repent.” Protesters also publicly prayed for marchers, read from Bibles, and preached on the sin of homosexuality.

At noon, marchers left their gathering area at the Unitarian-Universalist church and began their procession. Planning committee members led the parade with a banner announcing this was the “Pride Movement: Support, Celebrate, Educate, Advocate. Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender.” They were followed by the slowest marchers—those who were older or with disabilities—who set the pace. The rest of the participants marched in a block and held signs declaring their affiliation with the LGBT community or affirming their support, like those that said, “Grannies for gays,” “Freedom for all people,” “Okay to be gay,” and “Closets are for clothes.” Expecting opposition, organizers encouraged children to march in the center so they would not hear negative comments from protesters. Police kept protesters and marchers separate to avoid direct conflict. Marchers cheered, clapped, held hands, played drums, and chanted slogans like, “Two, four, six, eight, God does not discriminate.”

In many ways, the scene resembled a traditional protest march. Supporters of a cause showed their strength by occupying city streets and creating a spectacle. Opponents voiced their disagreement with the cause by similarly occupying public space. But in tone, target, intended audience, and message this march was not traditional political protest. There was an air of festivity among marchers that, while often a component of traditional protest, dominated the march’s tone and made it feel like a celebratory parade. The target of marchers’ signs and chants was diffuse; they made no specific demands of a concrete entity but instead targeted cultural meanings about homosexuality, love, and acceptance. Likewise, their intended audience was nonspecific; they spoke to all members of Dixieville culture without identifying specific stakeholders and purposely avoided directly speaking to protesters. Participants’ message was similarly vague as they did not advocate the passage of a certain bill or object to a specific offense. In the following sections, I analyze the march through observations and interviews with its organizers, marchers, and protesters.

Contestation

With the first element of Taylor’s framework, activists stage a demonstration to contest an existing power (Taylor and Van Dyke 2004). That power may be wielded by the state, a formal institution, or local culture. This element distinguishes social movement tactics from benign community gatherings such as Fourth of July parades or neighborhood block parties. That there was contestation at the 2009 Pride of Dixie is virtually indisputable. There was roughly one protester for every three marchers at Pride of Dixie. The majority of protesters were part of one of the fifteen organized groups that were issued permits for the day, but there were also many who showed up on their own upon hearing of the event to take place.

While the two groups did not seem to agree on much, one thing they did agree on is that Pride of Dixie represented a change from the status quo. This change was cultural rather than political/legal or institutional because the two sides contested the cultural norms and meanings that dictate how LGBT people are understood and treated in Dixieville. Describing the local cultural climate for gays and lesbians, Helen, a protester, said:

I think [Dixieville] is not a good place for them. I think this is a family oriented town and I would like for it to stay that way. I don’t mind anybody living here as long as they’re loving and peaceful but you know, the thing is we would like to have families and we certainly don’t want our children to go in that direction because we disagree and we don’t believe that that is right, according to the Bible.

Fay, a lesbian marcher, described the attitude in Dixieville toward LGBT people from her perspective:

It’s more, it’s almost along the lines of the military “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—they don’t want to know about it and as long as you’re not in their face about it, they don’t really care.

Protesters, marchers, and organizers agreed that the status quo would be for gays to remain quiet about their sexuality. While existing literature treats mass demonstrations as visibility displays by marginalized groups or interests, research has not tied these displays to local cultural conditions. Instead scholars understand visibility as a simple demonstration of political power (Benford and Hunt 1992; Tilly 2008).

The code of silence for LGBT people in Dixieville meant that, like in the military, those who did not remain quiet about their sexuality faced hostility. Two gay men, David and Nicky, described the struggles they and others confronted as open gays and lesbians.

David:

To be quite honest, it can be difficult. I know I faced a huge risk when I came out of the closet. My dad moved out—lost my dad as a result. Church I went to—can’t go there anymore. I mean it can be very difficult, but you’re surrounded by such a great number of people at an event like this, lets you know it’s cool to be who you are.

Nicky:

Honestly, at times it can be difficult because I know a lot of them, myself, who basically have to live their lives in fear because they live around what we call rednecks or bible thumpers because they’re afraid they’re going to get shot in their own home.

Respondents talked about hostility ranging from disapproving looks to antigay violence. Three respondents described the cultural climate for LGBT people by telling me about the death of Sean Kennedy, who was beaten for being gay in 2007 outside a bar in a nearby town (WYFF 2008). Thus, respondents described a cycle of hostility and invisibility in which LGBT people kept invisible because they viewed the culture as hostile. Hostility spread as ordinary citizens saw only LGBT folks who fit more fringe and, to them, deviant stereotypes.

Contradicting movement literature’s emphasis on the state as a power behind social inequality (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008; Tilly 2008), few participants viewed the state as the source of the local hostility/invisibility cycle. Among all three types of respondents, thirteen people (30 percent) mentioned the state in any context. For participants, the state, through its laws, lingered in the background as neither a driver of hostility/invisibility nor a leading force for positive improvement. While fifteen respondents (45 percent of participants) said they wanted greater equality for LGBT people, only six mentioned the state as necessary to achieve this equality. Participants ultimately wanted laws to provide equal protection for LGBT people, but they viewed these laws as currently out of reach. Instead, they saw the march as a way to build positive cultural visibility for the LGBT community, which may one day lead to more favorable laws. Sandra, a lesbian organizer, explained the connection between Pride of Dixie and legal rights:

I think the big unknown for us here in Dixieville is how extensive a political action this will turn out being. I think that’s a real wild card, I think we have no idea and I think we’ve been really intentional in not focusing on that too much. . . . I’ve been here for 10 years, Dixieville’s not ready for [legal change].

Sandra did not think that it was politically possible to pass LGBT-favorable laws like a nondiscrimination ordinance or same-sex relationship recognition. Given this, organizers chose not to focus on legal change as a goal and instead emphasize cultural change. By improving the cultural climate for LGBT people, participants hoped to make Dixieville a better place to live and to pave the way for eventual legal change. Thus, while participants saw the state as part of the process to improve the social status of LGBT people, they did not view it as their most immediate goal and, consequently, did not target the state with Pride of Dixie.

Protesters, conversely, were quite clear about the state’s role. The four protesters who mentioned the state placed it squarely on the side of the marchers. They viewed the march as a product of a society and a state that encourages what they saw as deviant behavior, and their protest was a way to register their disapproval.

Instead of the state, participants identified three sources of the hostility/invisibility cycle: ignorance about LGBT people, religious intolerance, and Southern cultural views. These cultural sources were each specific targets of the march.

Ignorance was the most common reason given for the hostility/invisibility cycle, mentioned by three-quarters (72 percent) of participants. According to Margie, a straight marcher:

In Dixieville, [the image of Pride parades] is negative.

Interviewer:

How’s that?

Margie:

I don’t think the community is aware of the number of gay people we have in Dixieville. And I think people are not aware of what gay is. Whether it’s biological, a choice, or what—that’s the big debate.

Those that identified ignorance as the source of the hostility/invisibility cycle said that if Dixieville residents could learn more about the LGBT community, if they could only understand, then they would be more accepting. With Pride of Dixie, they hoped to show Dixieville residents that LGBT people are respectable, familiar members of their community. Interestingly, this thread was more common among LGBT respondents (92 percent) than straight allies (63 percent), perhaps because, like Barbara, their own lives bore this out:

In my personal experiences of coming out to people who are anti-gay if I got to know them first, or once they got to know me and realize that I’m just as normal or just as weird as anybody else, that then they kind of settle down a little bit and could deal with me more rationally than “those gay people over there, they’re all alike.”. . . We came from the same household that y’all did, our demographics are just like yours. I think we have the same percentage of rednecks, the same percentage of dumbasses, the same percentage of assholes as the straight community does. I like to think we don’t, but we do.

Participants also cited religion (56 percent) and Southern culture (44 percent), often together, as sources of the hostility/invisibility cycle. According to Elizabeth, a lesbian marcher,

[Dixieville is] a typical Southern small town; you still read editorials that talk about hate and sodomy and sinning.

For Elizabeth, being “typically Southern” meant having conservative views on religion including defining homosexuality as sinful. Others illustrated this view by referring to the Bible Belt, defining conservative religion—and thus opposition to homosexuality—as part of Southern culture. Christina, a straight organizer, explained the connection:

I think that it’s a combination of, there’s a lot of, a lot of the discrimination or whatever it is based in religion. But a lot of it is also cultural. I know that there are kids that are teased in school for being “so gay” and there’s that attitude that it’s okay to gay bash, I think. I guess they go hand in hand, the religion and the culture.

Interviewer:

Is there a specific way that this is Southern? Not that that doesn’t go on anywhere else, I know it does, but do you think that being in the South has anything to do with it?

Christina:

I do, I have, well for instance a friend in the church who moved here a couple years ago from Washington State. She didn’t really understand why we felt the need to do this, because where she came from, you’re gay, well all right; it wasn’t like it is here. So I think it’s definitely Southern. There’s somebody who contacted me from the Facebook page. He said he had a $25 dollar check, he’s from Oregon, he sent us a $25 check because he said he grew up in Dixieville and he couldn’t wait to get away. He knows how it is here and he said he’s just so grateful to be where he is now because life is just so much easier.

Christina’s comments evince an understanding of the South as a more hostile place for LGBT people. This perception is certainly validated by the lack of legal protections for LGBT people and by the success of popular votes to deny gay and lesbian couples legal relationship recognition.

Straight allies mentioned religious intolerance more than their LGBT counterparts (71 percent vs. 36 percent, respectively). One reason may be that many straight marchers cited their own progressive religious views as motivating them to support LGBT people. The march itself was spearheaded by many straight members of the Unitarian-Universalist church, a denomination with a long history of advocacy for LGBT people (UUA 2011). For many participants, then, the march was a contest between progressive, inclusive religious values and religious intolerance that they connected with Southern culture. Philip, a marcher who did not identify his sexual orientation, described this contest:

I did see people out there saying, “Jesus loves you and I love you too,” that’s a positive thing. While they [the protesters] are over there screaming “you’re going to hell” and all this stuff.

Through their actions and their statements in interviews, protesters confirmed what I describe as a cycle of hostility and invisibility. While most said they did not intend to be hostile, through their actions they stood squarely against the visibility of LGBT people. Protesters saw homosexuality as a sinful action, and their goal was to convince participants to stop being gay. Since virtually every scientific study has concluded that changing one’s sexuality is not possible (APA Task Force 2009), the effect of their protest was to show hostility toward the visibility of the LGBT community and its supporters. While participants identified many sources of the hostility and invisibility cycle, protesters were uniform saying that their religion motivated them to protest that day. Many expressed this motivation as concern for the souls of gays and lesbians that they believed were sinners by virtue of their homosexuality:

Linda:

We are a church and we are all participating because we are all worried about their lost souls. We want all of them to die and go to heaven with each and every one of us.

Marvin:

Yeah, so out of a Christian love and out of a Christian concern, we’re not standing out here saying, “Hey you wicked fag, you’re going to go to Hell.” We’re not saying that, we’re saying, “Hey there’s hope for you.” . . . We’re telling them they can come out of it. And if we reach one today, if we can get a track of one hand and get somebody out of sodomy, we’ve accomplished our purpose.

Others directed their message not so much at Pride participants but at those who may see or read about media reports about the march to let them know there were people who disagreed with the march. They saw their protest as a stand for their religious principles against those who wanted to weaken those principles.

Protesters constituted the most extreme element of the hostility that many participants felt from the Dixieville community. The contestation at Pride of Dixie was directed at breaking the less explicit but still powerfully experienced cycle of hostility and invisibility in the general culture. Scheff (1990) described pride and shame as contrasting social emotions that arise from viewing one’s self from the standpoint of another. By marching in celebration of LGBT people, Pride of Dixie participants inverted the cultural message of shame for one’s homosexuality and instead declared pride. They targeted cultural meanings and norms for change by offering new ones through both the form and content of their march. Their intended audience was similarly abstract in that they did not directly confront those espousing negative cultural meanings about queer sexuality. Rather, participants promoted new meanings to the abstract public that constitutes Dixieville culture.

Intentionality

To be considered a protest event, it is important that participants intend to contest established power (Taylor and Van Dyke 2004). Individuals may have many motivations for participating in collective action, like having fun or socializing, that do not evince intentional contestation (Jasper 2011; Schussman and Soule 2005). Individuals may unintentionally contest power while engaged in collective action (Taylor and Van Dyke 2004). For instance, participants may intend to hold a benign Pride parade to gather with friends and watch colorful floats and find that others in their community interpret this as a contentious act. Social movements scholars understand protest as an intentional, concerted effort of a group to improve social conditions, and thus it is important that participants intended to engage in the contestation that I observed (Snow, Soule, and Kriesi 2004).

Without exception, every organizer and marcher intended to be part of a contested performance. In fact, eleven people (one-third of participants) said explicitly that they participated in the march because they thought it was important and wanted it to be successful. Many said they were excited to be a part of what they saw as a historic event. Two marchers—David, a gay man, and Allison, a straight woman—explained why they participated in Pride of Dixie:

David:

I went really because this is the first time my town has had a Pride march, really anything to do with Pride so it’s a really important milestone for this town, being so deeply in the South. Things can only get better from here; we had a lot of enthusiastic support.

Allison:

I came [to Pride] because, number one, this is the very first time this town has had it and it’s a big deal so I wanted to be a part of it. And also because I support gay rights and I think that anyone who does should be out here making their voice heard.

Interviewer:

So why do you think it’s a big deal that this is the first one here?

Allison:

Well this is a semi-small town and it’s not exactly open and completely tolerant, it’s more tolerant than smaller places, but it’s a big step for a small town to do something like this.

Others cited more general support for the LGBT community as their reason for attending Pride of Dixie. While half of participants gave noncontentious reasons, such as having fun, seeing friends, and supporting gays directly rather than through the public statement of the march, everyone who listed noncontentious reasons for attending the event also mentioned contentious reasons. No one we talked to was there purely for entertainment.

According to Taylor and colleagues (Taylor and Van Dyke 2004; Taylor et al. 2009), one major way activists show intentionality is by stressing the numbers of people that attend their performances. Overall, fourteen participants (44 percent) mentioned the size of the crowd as a significant show of support for the LGBT community. Organizers, understandably, were the most enthusiastic about the number of people at the march. Originally, organizers thought a successful event would draw 50 people; while there are no official estimates, at least 350 people marched and some estimates from those present put the number as high as 600. Sandra, a straight organizer, explained why the numbers were important to her:

But I also think that if there were 500 people that came out the event, that Dixieville, that there were 500 people ready for it and I think that was a big surprise because all along we were like, “How many people are we going to get? How many people will commit? How many people from Dixieville would come out?” . . . So I think that it was sort of, I don’t know if you’d say a watershed event, but it was an opportunity that people were waiting for; it was very striking.

Regardless of participants’ intentions, Pride of Dixie engaged in contestation—that was clear from the shear amount of protesters. In addition, though, I found that every organizer and marcher intended for this contestation to happen. Uniformly, they came to Pride in order to make a statement of visibility and, well, pride in support for LGBT people.

Collective Identity

Most participants (27 of 33) mentioned some aspect of collective identity related to Pride of Dixie. Collective identity is when a group has a shared sense of self and feels that they are a group instead of a collection of individuals. This final, internal piece of social movement protest is important in that it shows a group forms a basis of solidarity and thus acts collectively (Polletta and Jasper 2001; Taylor et al. 2009). Participants did not speak in strong identity terms, but instead talked about the way the emotional experience of participating in the parade drew them closer to fellow participants. This was collective effervescence, in its most Durkheimian sense, when “in the midst of an assembly that becomes worked up, we become capable of feelings and conduct of which we are incapable when left to our individual resources” (Durkheim [1912] 1995, 211–12). Though distinct from collective identity, it has the same function for a social movement protest in that the shared emotional experience is a basis of solidarity and collective action (Jasper 2011; Taylor et al. 2009).

Twenty of thirty-three participants (61 percent) spoke of the “community feeling” and “joyful spirit” of the event. In my field observations, I noted the stark contrast in mood between marchers and protesters: while marchers cheered with smiles on their faces, protesters wore solemn expressions and looked like they did not enjoy themselves much.³ Francis, a straight organizer, described her favorite part about the event:

The whole joyous spirit of it. The, you know, kind of like a football rally. The togetherness, the community, I just felt that kind of support and of course I was kind of at the front of the line because some of the slower of us were supposed to go first. So in some ways I kind of felt like the leader that all of these people were following me and behind me and I mean not literally but figuratively in support.

Feelings of collective effervescence were mentioned more by organizers (80 percent) than by marchers (52 percent) and more by LGBT individuals (71 percent) than by straight allies (50 percent). For organizers, this is most likely explained by the fact that I interviewed them both before and after the event so they had time to process their experience. While in fewer numbers, straight allies mentioned feeling part of the LGBT community by virtue of their participation in Pride of Dixie.

For LGBT people, the heightened sense of collective effervescence seems to be directly related to the hostility/invisibility cycle they experienced in their everyday lives. They rarely felt accepted fully as LGBT, so being surrounded by supportive people was an exciting experience. Half of LGBT people interviewed spoke of Pride parades specifically as a place to receive support by being around other LGBT people and straight allies who support them. Kathryn, a lesbian organizer, described the first Pride parade she attended:

It was just so eye-opening. So I was in the process of coming out and I knew gays and lesbians from where I worked and you know I guess that was the only place I really knew that. But when I was invited to the Pride parade, it was just wow, this is my community and I didn’t know it was here.

Christina, another organizer, told a poignant story about meeting a seventeen-year-old girl who was dropped off at the march by her father. Christina saw her looking “lonely and nervous” and introduced her to many others. She said that her family did not understand her, and she did not have friends at school. Later, when the girl was getting ready to leave, she told Christina, “This is the first day of my life I remember being happy.” Like this girl, for many LGBT people Pride of Dixie created a visible community of LGBT and allies from which to receive support.

Conclusions

Scholars of social movements have long been concerned with the connection between the tactics activists employ to enact change and the social conditions they face. Those working within contentious politics, multi-institutional politics, and new social movements frameworks theorize that sites of contentious action reflect the distribution of power in society. Thus, they argue that movement tactics target the state, nonstate institutions, or culture, depending on which arena activists believe exerts more powerful influence on society. While these theoretical frameworks are well developed, the bulk of social movement research treats the state as the most powerful actor in society and therefore focuses on tactics directed at political/legal change. As a result, existing research interprets mass demonstrations as declarations of political power—simple and straightforward symbolic messages that leave out nuanced cultural meanings. While cultural factors internal to movements, such as collective identity, are well integrated with explanations of movement activity, culture and politics are dichotomized at the site of contention.

In this article, I examined Pride of Dixie, a movement event in a southeastern state that sought cultural, rather than political/legal or institutional, change. I considered the symbolic meaning of the event for its participants and protesters. Using framework developed by Taylor and colleagues (Taylor and Van Dyke 2004; Taylor et al. 2009), I analyzed Pride of Dixie in terms of contestation, intentionality, and collective identity. This framework allowed me to integrate cultural factors into my analysis of both the external contentious message and internal group effects of Pride of Dixie.

Pride of Dixie was not about claiming political power through a show of strength in numbers; it was a richly symbolic cultural contest. Participants perceived their main social challenge as a cultural cycle of invisibility and hostility, and they contested this cycle by symbolically inverting it at Pride of Dixie. In place of invisibility, LGBT people and their allies made themselves visible to the Dixieville community by parading down city streets. In the face of hostility, they celebrated sexual and gender diversity and declared their (and God’s) love for all people. For their part, protesters (perhaps inadvertently) resisted this symbolic inversion by insisting, through their presence, their signs, and their words, that LGBT people be neither visible nor celebrated. In the words of one protester, they delivered the message that “Dixieville is not a good place for them [LGBT people].”

At Pride of Dixie, form and content were intertwined as a symbolic message. Organizers and marchers drew on the culturally and politically salient tradition of marching through city streets in order to declare the cultural worth of LGBT people and allies. While LGBT people in Dixieville lacked many legal rights, including protection from employment, housing, and health care discrimination and civil relationship recognition, Pride of Dixie was not targeted at gaining these rights through political/legal change. Political/legal change was an ultimate goal for some individual participants but it was not the collective goal of the event. In fact, many participants viewed the state not as a target but as a partner who guaranteed the legal right to hold their march by providing police protection. Instead, since participants identified their main challenge as cultural, they targeted Dixieville culture with their Pride march. Through their march, participants enacted the cultural change they wanted, meeting invisibility with visibility and hostility with celebration.

Given participants’ perceptions of the hostile climate in Dixieville, it is unsurprising that they had a sense of purpose. All participants intended to make a difference by being there. As Armstrong (2002) noted, the gay identity movement expanded the field of movement activity so that all members of the LGBT community felt part and this field was even larger in Dixieville. Individuals who saw themselves as supporters of LGBT people felt part of this movement and participated both as organizers and participants in order to advocate on their behalf. Participants’ intentions meant that the cultural contestation was not a by-product of an otherwise uncontentious celebration. The presence of approximately one hundred protesters was, if not welcome, expected given participants’ perceptions of their cultural climate.

Finally, most participants mentioned a feeling of collective effervescence as they marched. I noted a strong contrast in mood and tone between participants and protesters, as the former group was joyous and the latter wore dour expressions. This contrast highlighted marchers’ strong collective emotion. Their collective effervescence translated into a feeling of solidarity for participants, particularly those who identified as LGBT. Because of the cycle of hostility and invisibility in the larger community, LGBT individuals said they often felt disconnected from one another, and Pride of Dixie brought them together. Additionally, some straight participants talked of feeling part of the LGBT community as allies through their participation in Pride. By marching together, LGBT and straight ally participants bonded with one another and acted as a group to advocate for cultural change. This finding follows previous scholarship on the importance of group solidarity and shared emotion for collective action (Jasper 2011; Polletta and Jasper 2001).

The present study adds to the literature on social movements with a thorough description and analysis of one tactic aimed at cultural change rather than political/legal or institutional change. Participants marched against cultural inequality, not political or legal inequality. They sought to challenge a cycle of invisibility and hostility towards LGBT people, not LGBT inequality under the law or at the hands of formal institutions. While most social movements research assumes that mass demonstrations target the state, Pride of Dixie targeted cultural norms and meanings because these are what most affected participants’ everyday lives.

My findings add to rather than contradict previous studies that have interpreted Pride parades as attempts to claim public space and challenge cultural attitudes towards homosexuality (Brickell 2000; Browne 2007; Herrell 1992; Joseph 2010; Kates and Belk 2001; Kenney 2001). Through a detailed analysis of one small Pride event in an unlikely place, I add theoretical depth by matching the event’s symbolic meaning with its local cultural challenges. Previous research has examined only large Pride parades in relatively LGBT-friendly cultural contexts and has not closely matched their symbolic meanings to local cultural challenges. By conceptualizing Pride of Dixie as a social movement tactic, I showed how the event contested local culture by inverting the dominant code of invisibility and hostility toward LGBT people. Without the level of detail about local cultural context, previous studies did not capture how Pride parades can challenge local meanings in both their form and content.

These results not only demonstrate that movements directly target culture, they suggest that local context and the lived experience of movement participants powerfully shape the goals and tactics of mass demonstrations. Further research should explore how Pride and other social movement tactics vary based on local cultural, political/legal, and institutional contexts. Dixieville represents one extreme in which neither local culture nor the political/legal system is LGBT-friendly. However, many metropolitan areas, such as Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Austin, Texas, foster LGBT-friendly local cultures that are not matched by broader state laws. My findings suggest that LGBT activism in these areas, including Pride events, would contest the state rather than target local culture.⁴ Likewise, activists may engage different cultural and institutional contests in areas with LGBT-friendly legal protections but unfriendly local cultures, as is the case in many communities in Iowa where same-sex marriage is legal but unpopular. Finally, scholars may consider whether Pride events can be considered social movement tactics in geographic areas with favorable political/legal, institutional, and cultural environments for LGBT people, such as in New England states. It may be that events in these areas are simple community celebrations without contention, or they may continue to contest negative cultural attitudes towards LGBT people. The visible celebration of LGBT identity at Pride of Dixie directly contested cultural invisibility and hostility. Moreover, the meanings of Pride and its role in LGBT activism may depend not just on political and cultural climates but on the other tactics local activists pursue. Pride of Dixie did not operate alongside other LGBT activism, such as state-focused lobbying efforts, but future research should examine these relationships.

If, as the current study and others suggest, cultural protest is a feature of most Pride parades, then the question is whether this target is unique to the LGBT movement. As noted earlier, there is both theoretical and empirical justification for the strong role of culture in LGBT social inequality. However, I believe that such conclusion is premature given the scarcity of research on the targets of social movement action.

Instead, I argue that this case points the need for further integration of culture in the empirical study of social movements. Though theoretically culture can be a site of contention and tactics can target culture rather than more concrete institutions or the state, empirically most research focuses on tactics aimed at the state. As I have shown in this article, not only did Pride of Dixie participants choose a Pride march as the best way to advocate for LGBT people, but the resulting event carried richer symbolic meaning than predicted by scholarship on state-targeted protest marches. Participants in Pride of Dixie contested their perceived cultural climate of hostility towards and invisibility of LGBT people through both the form and content of their event.

Social movement scholars should consider other tactics that attempt through their form and content to challenge symbolic meanings. For instance, there are myriad annual parades that celebrate ethnic identities or commemorate events with continued cultural and political significance, such as parades held in many cities to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. Research on these parades may find they are more than shows of political power, but like Pride they enact contested symbolic meanings in attempts to change culture. This research would then refine theoretical frameworks to better integrate culture in the study of social movements.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

For their helpful comments, I would like to acknowledge Andrew J. Perrin, Margarita Mooney, Tina Fetner, Hana Brown, Ian Conlon, and anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank research assistants Hillary Waugh Bruce, Rob Powell, and Andrea Ford.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Katherine McFarland Bruce is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Her research examines the interplay of cultural and political contention primarily through the lens of LGBT issues. She is currently working about Pride parades based on extensive fieldwork.

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