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Who Is Afraid of Sexual Minorities? Homosexuals, Moral Panic and the Exercise of Social Control1

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Who Is Afraid of Sexual Minorities? Homosexuals, Moral Panic and the Exercise of Social Control1 Who is afraid of sexual minorities? Homosexuals, moral panic and the exercise of social control1 Iwona Zielinska (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, and Centre for Criminological Research, University of Sheffield) In spite of over thirty years existence in the British academy and almost twenty in the American moral panic theory is hardly known in Polish social science. There may be hundreds of other concepts that Polish scholars are unfamiliar with but that specific one is, I believe, a particular loss, as moral panic theory might provide a very useful tool for analysing many of the contemporary phenomena in Polish society. Most of the contemporary analyses of moral panics I am familiar with are limited to well established democratic countries like Britain (Critcher 2002), USA (Welch 2000), Sweden (Johansson 2000), and Australia (Gryson 2004). That situation is not, I believe, a result of the fact that ‘moral panics are a phenomenon of modern Western cultures’ (Grayson 2004) but rather that there is insufficient theoretical and empirical research among other societies. This is another reason for applying moral panic theory to a country like Poland, which in spite of fifteen years of democracy is still in transition (Sztompka 2003). It would be interesting to examine how and if economical and political situations determine moral panics. Also, the significantly unique cultural context of the country where more than 90 per cent of its people are Catholic2 may specifically affect the way the society regards some social issues, compared with other, less religious nations. The main purpose of my work is to introduce the theory and see how useful it may be when looking at some social problems in the Polish context. I am specifically interested in the panic that took place last year around gay lifestyles. Polish sociologist, Jan Kochanowski, commented on the events in 2004: ‘There is a growing aggression in the public sphere…..The so called ‘militants’ have been organised by angry lads (…) who want to get rid of anything that is strange and out of the ordinary’ (Trybuna 22.11.2004). There are two reasons for my choice of focus. First, unlike in some other moral panic cases (paedophilia in particular), in ‘gay’ panic there is no general agreement as to the threat posed by the ‘folk devils’3 – homosexuals, which makes the threat somewhat ambiguous. Second, the phenomenon is very characteristic of Polish society generally as there is no other example of such heightened concern about homosexuality in other, even very religious European countries. And it is probable that such culturally bound moral panics that might tell most about a nation’s condition. For years sexual minorities in Poland have been suppressed, culturally by strong Catholicism and politically, by the communist system before 1989 and the growing power of right-wing politicians at present. It seems though that 2004 was a crucial year for gay activists. The Polish membership of the EU from May 2004 gave homosexuals some courage to come out of the shadows and claim more 1 © Iwona Zielinska 2005. All rights reserved. I would like to thank Dr Maggie Wykes for her patience and invaluable help in completing this paper. 2 According to a national survey curried out by CBOS in 2001 96 per cent of Poles are Catholics, 86 per cent of them are fairly regular church-goers. This tendency has been stable since 1986 (probably much earlier that this, however there is not much data available as the communist government was making effort to suppress polish religiousness) (CBOS 2001). 3 Stanley Cohen popularised the term in his book Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) without actually giving a clear definition of it. He referred the phrase ‘folk devils’ to deviants, delinquents, wrongdoers, who disturb social order causing anxiety among the public. Goode and Ben-Yehuda, on the other hand, provide an unambiguous but rather narrow explanation, pointing out that ‘a folk devil is the personification of evil (…) that is stripped of all favourable characteristics and imparted with exclusively negative ones’ (1994:28). 1 Centre for Criminological Research, Sheffield University Occasional Paper 1 Who is afraid of sexual minorities? tolerance and acceptance from both the public and the politicians (Kaszubska 2004)4. Marches and parades were organised by gay, feminist and liberal organisations in order to draw attention and raise important questions about gays’ status in the legal and social systems. That caused great concern among many church people as well as politicians and nationalist organisations, who felt that social and moral order might be at a threat. A leading Polish newspaper noted: ‘The Festival ‘Culture for Tolerance’ organised by the gay movement is causing lots of controversy – there are protests from rightwing politicians as well as catholic organisations’ Wyborcza (03.05.2004). I will look at these events in 2004 by using a processual and attributional model of moral panics (Critcher 2004), in order to see what kind of formal and informal mechanisms of social control were employed, who by and why they felt threatened by these events What propositions were put forward for ‘coping’ and what kind of action was taken to deal with the problem?5 I will look at the media representations of gay people and the 2004 events to distinguish the main discourses used to account for the struggle for homosexual acceptance. Moral panic: a review of the literature The scholars and researchers interested in moral panic theory tend to agree that the main contribution belongs to Stanley Cohen, the author of Folk Devils and Moral Panics (see McRobbie 1994, Thompson 1998, Critcher 2003). Despite some ambiguities, the opening paragraph of the book has been widely used as a definition of a moral panic phenomena: ‘Society appears to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or a group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by the editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and become more visible’ (Cohen 2002: 1). Cohen looked at the genesis and development of moral panic and social labelling. For this the Mods and Rockers6 conflict, which took place in the 1960s, is used to explain the nature of social concern about this particular form of deviance. He highlights the role of the media in shaping and defining social problems but perhaps, the most interesting part of Cohen`s work is that on societal reaction to moral panic in general and to the Mods and Rockers in particular. He analysed in detail the reaction from two types of social control: the official – in the forms of the police and the courts, and the informal, represented by action groups, like that organised by an owner of a hotel, Mr. Blake who felt that rioting groups in a seaside town might threaten the tourist business (Cohen 2002: 166). Cohen argued that the nature of social reaction depends on the kind and amount of information available in the public arena. He also added that it is important to recognise ‘what interests are to be protected as this knowledge shapes the subsequent campaign for rule creation’ (ibid.: 93). Cohen’s media-oriented analysis of moral panics was elaborated by Stuart Hall and other researchers working at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural (Critcher 2003: 131). In 1976 Policing the Crisis was written from the Centre. The CCCS researchers examined the problem of mugging in the 1970s which, according to them, led to another national moral panic. But the perspective used in their analysis differs, in many respects, from the one used by Cohen. First of all they placed the media at the centre of their interests and introduced the notion of the ‘social creation of news’ (Hall et al 1976: 162-5). The stories presented by the media, they would say, do not simply illustrate the reality we live in. A story has to be considered as a final product of a complicated process which begins with the selection of what is to be reported and continues with the signification of the selected 4 A few days after joining the EU the Polish gay movement organised a four day festival ‘Culture for Tolerance’. One of the Polish journalists commented on this: ‘Just after entering the European Union some questions arose: are we tolerant, can we accept others, how people of different religion, different skin colour, different sexual orientation feel like in our society? Intolerance is now one of the pivotal issues we need to discuss during the Festival for Tolerance’ (Kaszubska 2004). 5 The term ‘problem’ will be used here in a constructionist perspective. That means that the situation might not be objectively problematic but is perceived as such by a significant part of a society (Miller, Holstein 1993). 6 Mods and Rockers were two rival youth gangs in the 1960s in Britan. In his work Stanley Cohen (1972) analysed the riots caused by the gangs in a seaside town Clacton in terms of the responses of the media, police, courts and the public. 2 Centre for Criminological Research, Sheffield University Occasional Paper 1 Who is afraid of sexual minorities? news by attributing meanings (ibid.: 162). Also, the organisation and hierarchy of the mass media institutions both play a role in the process of news-making (ibid.). In other words Hall et al. looked at the media in their analysis not only in relation to the public but also in relation to some other mechanisms such as pressure from the authorities and the role of gatekeepers7 in news-making.
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