LGBT Acceptance in the Home

Home Life magazine

                            The Simpsons

Traditional Home magazine

House of Leaves - Mark Z Danielewski

Bizarre Foods host Andrew Zimmern

Representative of a Google search on "home."

 Holy Moley, Me-oh-My, you're the apple of my eye
Girl, I've never loved one like you

Man, oh man, you're my best friend,
I scream it to the nothingness
There ain't nothin' that I need

Well, hot & heavy, pumpkin pie,
chocolate candy, Jesus Christ
There ain't nothin' please me more than you

Ahh, Home
Let me come Home
Home is wherever I'm with you

"Home" lyrics - Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

 Many of the examples that I have presented above capture some aspect of the physical, normative home we discussed in class. Magazines focused on the home, as well as television shows and advertisements paint a picture of the idyllic home, a sort of mommy, daddy, two beautiful children and a dog style “perfection” that mainstream American society embraces. We can see this in the depictions of family (see the cover of Home Life, The Simpsons, American Airlines commercial) but also in the physical outline of the home as well. The screenshot above from AMC’s Mad Men depicts the kitchen (always perfectly clean, I should note) as viewed from the living room. The front door to the house leads to the living room after passing through the parlor. Domosh and Seager discuss this traditional home layout in their chapter “Putting Women in Place.” They argue that this home layout characterizes the division of public and private spheres of life, which is a theme that is laced throughout the television series.

Other examples demonstrate a deeper conception of home. For example, the song “Home” by Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros touches on another aspect of home we discussed in class: namely, that home is more than a physical location. This theme comes out strongly in a number of class readings, including “Routes to Home” and “The Everyday Geography of the Homeless in Kansas City.” The authors of these articles, May et al. and Rollinson respectively, detail that in order to properly grasp the complexities of homelessness, it must be understood that home is not just a roof, it is a place of welcoming acceptance, love, and social processes.

 Finally, it is worth noting that not every depiction of home in mainstream American society is of the normative variety. For example, in almost every episode of Bizarre Foods America, host Andrew Zimmern is invited to a family’s home to understand an unusual food way. While most of these people would be considered mainstream Americans, the show depicts a particular aspect of their lives that would not be immediately knowable and represents an alternate geography of home. Similarly, in the novel  House of Leaves, author Mark Z Danielewski creates a home that is literally (and substantially, as the characters gradually learn) larger on the inside than the outside. The structure of the house acts as a metaphor for, and directly parallels, the secrets the family members keep from each other, and represents that while love and acceptance are important aspects of home, it is an eminently private place.

The goal of this ad campaign will be to raise awareness of LGBT rights and acceptance. Hunter (2008) demonstrates that a number of LGBT teens are kicked out of their homes because of their sexual preferences or transgendered identities. He tells a heart breaking story of what can happen when a caring home is not provide for these under privileged youth:

Eighteen-year-old Kelly R.¹ was homeless. At the age of sixteen, her parents kicked her out of her home because she is transgender. Subsequently, she ran away from the group home in which she had been placed by the Administration for Children’s Services. When the weather got too cold for her to sleep outside and she could not earn enough money from prostitution to rent a hotel room, she stayed at a large emergency youth housing facility in lower Manhattan. The staff regularly forced her to bathe in an open showering facility with the shelter’s male occupants. One day in the shower, a group of these males attacked her. They beat her against the cement floor until her entire body was inflamed with contusions. They did not stop until her jaw was ripped from her face. This all occurred with staff present. This actually happened to a transgender girl in 2002.² Sadly, similar acts of violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth in emergency and transitional housing programs for homeless youth are very common.³

This is an affront to the equality that Americans profess to care so deeply for, and even more critically a shocking statement of how closed mindedness affects the very foundation of families. Every parent claims to wish nothing but the best for their child, suggesting that this issue should be nonexistent. It isn’t. Self-examination is required for anyone who wants the best for their children but denies them the comfort, love, and acceptance of home simply because they are different from themselves. This campaign will target parents whose own ideals prevent them from providing a home for their children.

While it is easy and certainly important to examine this issue as a problem regarding homelessness, I believe it is more important to target the issue where it begins: the home. Ideally, this campaign would do a number of things. I would first like to target magazines such as the ones I describes above. While the majority of Americans likely find this idea of home to be just what they want, it also contributes to the notion that anything else is unacceptable, so I would like to encourage writers for these magazines to include in their stories homes that are made not only of the “normal” heterosexual couple with heterosexual children, but also stories of parents who embrace, love, and care for their LGBT children, or are in fact LGBT themselves. Perhaps this would encourage those who read these magazines to think more critically about what home can truly mean.

However, this is likely an unrealistic goal. If the Ad Council were the only group to fund this campaign, television commercials would be used to get the message across. The Ad Council’s commercials are often very simple and visually striking. My commercials would be the same, perhaps depicting parents accepting and reassuring a coming-out teenager. In lieu of a commercial, I have constructed a poster using Adobe Illustrator: