Queering Marriage: Challenging Family Formation in the United States

Methodological Appendix

161 Participant Interviews Between May and December of 2006, I interviewed forty-two individuals who were married at city hall during the 2004 events in San Francisco. Interviews were semistructured and ranged in length from forty minutes to two and a half hours, averaging about ninety minutes . All interviews were taped and transcribed for analysis. Recruitment and Sampling Respondents were found using snowball sampling. In response to an email sent to personal contacts, my first interview took place in May 2006 and all other interviews flowed from that first one, save for three that were also generated by personal contacts. My request for participants was posted to several listservs by respondents after our interview, including one for Bay Area lesbians, one for East Bay gay and lesbian seniors, one for lesbian and gay parents, and one of contributors to an anthology of personal stories about the weddings. I did not post the request anywhere myself. Although participants were recruited through these postings, they did not necessarily personally know the poster. Respondents contacted me directly by email and we coordinated a time and place for the interview. Because of my desire to conduct the interviews in person, I scheduled the interviews for times when I would be in the Bay Area (the majority of my respondents lived in the Bay Area, see below, although they were geographically spread out among several counties): May, June, August–September, and December 2006. over half of the interviews were conducted during my August–September visit. I continued to interview until I reached theoretical saturation. M E T H o D o L o G I C A L A P P E N D I x 162 Methodological Appendix Timing of Interviews When I conducted my interviews in 2006, more than two years had passed since the weddings. This gap between the occasion and the interview afforded respondents the opportunity to reflect back on the whole series of events, from their weddings to their marriages to the invalidation . The distance in time was especially useful for capturing how the events did and did not serve to mobilize participants into activism. However, the delay between the weddings and the interviews also creates the possibility of respondents’ sentimentalizing their marriages. Retrospective data carries the risk of incomplete memory, which may inaccurately characterize the San Francisco wedding experience. It also makes it difficult to distinguish among effects of the weddings, the marriages, and the invalidation. As I discuss below, interviewing couples together may have ameliorated some tendency to romanticize the past. I also suggest that, keeping the possibility of sentimentalizing in mind, there is still great value in assessing respondents’ narratives as they stood in 2006 as testament to the ongoing process of unpacking what the practice of same-sex marriage means to the hegemony of heteronormativity. Participant Characteristics My sample included twenty-four women and eighteen men. This breakdown of 57 percent women and 43 percent men mirrors the overall demographics of the population of couples married in San Francisco (see table A.1). These forty-two interviewees represent sixteen lesbian couples and eleven gay men couples. At the time of their 2004 wedding, the interviewees ranged in age from twenty-seven to sixty-eight, with a median age of forty-one. Compared to the demographic data released by the Assessor-Recorder’s office, my interviewees slightly underrepresent the eighteen to thirty-five and the fifty-five to sixty-five age groups and overrepresent the thirty-six to fifty-four and sixty-six and over age groups. About two-fifths of the respondents in my sample were from San Francisco, representing a diverse range of neighborhoods. This is a higher representation than existed in the population of couples married during the events (Teng 2004). However, my sample was in line with the population’s representation of other California locales; 55 percent of the table a.1 demographic comparison of respondents and assessor-recorder’s report Assessor-recorder’s data* (N = 8,074 total) Respondents (N = 42 total)** Gender: % (N) Women 57 (4,622) 57 (24) Men 42 (3,430) 43 (18) Transgender — — Unknown 0.3 (22) — Age: % (N) 18–35 25.8 21 (9) 36–54 55.4 60 (25) 55–65 17.4 14 (6) 66+ 0.9 5 (2) No age 0.4 — Education: % (N) K–12 11.6 2 (1) Some college 19 17 (7) College and higher 68.8 79 (33...