One of the most devastating blows to my ego occurred after I saw the 2015 feature film, “Freeheld.” The movie, which was based on the documentary of the same name that won the Oscar® for Best Short Documentary in 2008, featured the all-star line up of Julianne Moore, Ellen Page, and Steve Carrel. If you can believe it, the great Steve Carell—an actor who possesses an unsurpassed ability to be both touching and hilarious at the same time—was cast to play me! Why then was I so disappointed by the portrayal once I saw it on screen? At the time, I was ecstatic not only to get the narrative out there, but by the A-list interest in the film. You see, the story in “Freeheld” is near and dear to my heart. The movie follows a lesbian couples quest for legal rights in New Jersey and covers a few of my activism adventures at Garden State Equality, New Jersey’s gay rights organization I founded and led until I became a professor of law and political science at Rutgers University in 2013. Aided by yours truly, the couple succeeds in XXXXXX. Then I saw the final cut.
My excitement quickly turned to discomfort. The movie was about as sappy as a maple tree and, though critical reception was underwhelming, that is not why my ego took such a hit. The 2015 fiction film choose to build out a love story in the name of character development to get the audience to relate and feel invested in the storyline (and also to flesh out the 38 minute documentary to full length). One of the main problems with the film was the characters, Laurel and Stacie. In reality, the real couple were not entertaining protagonists for a film. What happened to them was interesting – they were not. As the movie dragged on, it was clear something had to change.
And then the ultimate gut punch came. Carell entered about half way through the movie—shaking up not only the pace of the film in a jarring way, but also seemingly being offered to audiences as comedic relief to breathe life into the dragging film. An Oscar-winning movie producer I interviewed told me that for a film to be successful, it “has a very specific tone, creates a very specific world, and then you are perfectly in that world and in that tone through the entire film.” Carell’s entrance proved the antithesis to this counsel. The deathly slow pace of the first half of the film, followed by the sudden appearance of Carell’s character half way through, made his performance all the more noticeable. That performance was laced with all kinds of stereotypes about gay advocates: the Steven Goldstein presented in “Freeheld” was the worst version of myself—a cardboard cutout of a flamboyant gay man. Not only was in an awful treatment of me in terms of the role I played in the story, but also it was contemptuous in its stereotypes of LGBT people. As one critic noted, Carell’s flamboyant character was the only “visible/risible stereotype” in the film. However, because films “based on true stories” are often purported to be true, instead Steve Carell playing Steven Goldstein flamboyantly, critics and audiences alike saw Steve Carell play the flamboyant Steven Goldstein. It was art meshing into reality, the inability of filmgoers to differentiate between the authentic and the fiction.
What killed me the most was not the cardboard character portrayal of me, but that in the real story many of the actions I took were directly transferred to another character because the screenwriter and producers thought he was more relatable to audiences as a straight male. The same was the case in the critically acclaimed 2007 documentary, as great as it was, which took license to minimize my role in the story too. In 2007, the documentary filmmaker sat me down after she finished the film to tell me she minimized my role in order to make her documentary 40 minutes or shorter, a requirement to qualify in the Best Short Documentary category at the Oscars, an award that the documentary eventually won. She then went on to tell me that she made the choice to emphasize this other character over me because he was straight and more relatable to straight people in the audience (Read: Academy voters who would decide the film’s fate). Perhaps I should have spoken up then. Or perhaps I should have spoken up during my time as a consultant for the feature length film. Life is filled with those decisions we wish we had made in retrospect.
Though the past is the past, my experience with “Freeheld” highlights an all too pervasive problem public figures in the LGBT community still face today, despite a more warm and accepting environment: the need to either play it up or shut up. For much of my life, I have been a pretty serious guy. But as my career has taken an increasingly public turn, that gravitas has made way for the conscious adoption of a more campy side to my personality. Under pressure to act the part, I have become, at least in part, Jack from Will and Grace – and I have instantly became more liked as a result. To this day, if I am in an interview situation or a group situation, and I’m even slightly uncomfortable, I’ll go to the Jack side in an effort to live up to the connotations associated with my sexuality. Perhaps I am reinforcing the unauthentic nature of these stereotypes, but it is a hard choice faced by most, if not all, LGBT individuals in public life—and one that we shouldn’t have to make. That’s not to say that being out has not become easier over the past two decades—it most certainly has—but in public life there are still biases against LGBT people, no matter how sensitized our society has become.
Though Hollywood has certainly made strides, and even the political and business communities are beginning to pick up the mantle of LGBT rights, one area in particular still lags behind, that of professional sports. No one can forget how in 2014, Michael Sam, the first openly LGBT player drafted into the NFL, endured attacks on his likeability when, in a natural moment of joy upon learning he was drafted, kissed his boyfriend on television. As the LGBT journalist Robin Roberts observed: “What was he supposed to do – shake his boyfriend’s hand?” It’s natural for professional athletes to celebrate success with a significant other, and the chauvinist world of elite sports we often collectively ogle them if they comport to societal standards of heteronormative beauty: take for example Alabama quarterback AJ McCarron’s then-girlfriend, who just so happened to also be Miss Alabama. When she appeared on screen during the 2013 BCS National Championship Game, she practically broke the Internet. It’s not that we don’t find deep interest in these perfectly chiseled athlete’s personal lives, it’s that the athletic world is deeply uncomfortable outside of heterosexual norms.
The events following the NFL draft prove case in point. Though the media seemed genuinely excited to cover such a historic event, the public reaction to Sam kissing his boyfriend was swift and ugly, and highlighted the gross blemishes of social media and its penchant for anonymous cowardice. The two combined to create the perfect storm, and Sam became a spectacle rather than a hard working professional athlete. Following a successful preseason, the then St. Louis Rams (now Los Angeles Rams) cut Sam from their regular seasons roster. As Mike Freeman, a reporter for Bleacher Report, noted, “A player who produces like Sam did almost always makes it on some roster in the league, either on a practice squad or a 53-man roster…Sam not making it is like seeing Bigfoot on the hood of a UFO.” Freeman interviewed a number of Rams officials, and not one cited his lack of talent as the reason he did not make the roster. Instead, they highlighted the media storm that might follow if him made the team. As Freeman noted,
“NFL teams have also signed woman-beaters, drug addicts and players who killed people while driving drunk. Michael Vick was a convicted felon whose criminal enterprise included electrocuting the testicles of dogs, yet the Eagles somehow were not circus-phobic. There is no way to get around it: Sam isn't signed because teams fear his being gay.”
The Michel Sam incident is just one example of a startling phenomenon. According to a FiveThirtyEight investigation, in a study of homosexuality in athletics the United States received the lowest “inclusion score” of any country surveyed. Approximately 83 percent of gay males hide their sexual preferences from most of their team, while 63 percent of lesbian athletes avoid sharing their sexual orientation. According to Sam, a number of NFL players have since come out to him, but many fear publically sharing their sexual orientation because of Sam’s experience in the league. When asked what he’d like a Google search about him to say, Sam responded, “’I’d rather it not even say, ‘Michael Sam the football player,’ as long as it says, ‘Michael Sam is changing lives. Michael Sam is making a difference. Michael Sam is standing for others who can’t stand for themselves.’” In a league that still employs a man who said, “We should round up all the gays, send them to an island, and then nuke it until it glows,” change may be slow. However, Sam is certainly giving hope to thousands of closeted athletes around the world. If only he could use his talents on the field as well.
“Likeable Enough”: Breaking the Glass Ceiling Only to Find the Glass Cliff
Though the experiences of public LGBT figure range dramatically, women, more than any other group, face the most frequent double standards across all industries. From the business world, to Hollywood, to politics, they are held to a different, more critical rubric of evaluation that often hinders likeability and challenges even the most effective and powerful women. Take Melissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo! News, who at a 2013 shareholders’ meeting heard this from one shareholder: “I’m a dirty old man and you look attractive, Melissa.” Or Hollywood darling Jennifer Lawrence who, despite being the highest paid actress in the industry, still made significantly less money than her male American Hustle co-stars. In a blog post she wrote, “this might have NOTHING to do with my vagina, but I wasn't completely wrong when another leaked Sony email revealed a producer referring to a fellow lead actress in a negotiation as a ‘spoiled brat.’ For some reason, I just can't picture someone saying that about a man.” Case in point.
But here’s a political proposition so simple, any third-grader could understand it: The stronger and more confident you come across as a leader, the more likeable that voters will find you. Not so fast. The calculus is different for how Americans view women in public life, including for the woman who almost became President in 2008 and is favored for the job in 2016: Hillary Rodham Clinton. In an incomprehensible likeability jujutsu, she has been forced to build and rebuild her likeability more times than a Jenga set. Due to more aggressive than usual scrutiny, minor gaffs that would be considered pardonable for others have led to major dips in Clinton’s popularity throughout her more than 30 years in public life. Throughout her career, the times in which she has been the most publicly vulnerable, or at least low key, have also been the times in which her approval ratings have been highest. When she’s come across as strong, her approval ratings have been at their lowest. Talk about a likeability paradox.
The inverse relationship between the popularity and perceived personal strength of Hillary Clinton first became evident when she burst onto the national political scene in Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for President. Bill ran with Hillary as a “Buy One, Get Two” ticket—a strategy Americans had never seen a Presidential candidate promulgate before. As Hillary Clinton’s early public likeability hit bumps in the road, it only added to the importance of whomever Governor Clinton might choose as his running-mate, replacing his co-star Hillary with another co-star Americans might find more likeable.
True to herself – being authentic rather than campaign-crafted authentic – Hillary Clinton, one of America’s highest-powered attorneys who would have made it to any new Democratic President’s list of potential cabinet or high sub-cabinet officials, defended her role in March 1992 as a health care policy counsel to her husband’s campaign. “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” Hillary Clinton told ABC’s “Nightline,” “but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.” Perhaps America wasn’t quite ready for this no-nonsense approach. In the next month’s Gallup poll, 40 percent of Americans said they had an unfavorable impression of Hillary Clinton, up from 26 percent unfavorable in the days before she made those remarks. She would not recover fast, particularly as she emerged as the Administration’s leader on health care as her husband had promised.
During Bill Clinton’s first term as President, Hillary Clinton’s unfavorables often ranged from 40 to 50 percent or even higher, unthinkable numbers for any other First Lady prior to or since. The main problem with Hillary’s remark, which set the tone for her initial years as First Lady, was its lack of perceptiveness. How could anyone as smart as she – among the most brilliant people who would ever live in the White House – say what any layperson outside politics could see as offensive to millions of American women? Her remarks seemed to bring out the political consultant in everyone. “Who says something so dumb?” I remember so many of my friends asking. They were feminists like me who agreed, as I did, both with the substance of what Hillary said and frankly admired her for it. But if any remarks could demonstrate the difference between our likeability trait of perceptiveness from straight-up intelligence – the latter not being among our eight required likeability traits, and which no one has ever doubted in Hillary Clinton – those particular comments did the trick. At the same time, Hillary came across as unrelatable to millions of American women who made a choice to stay home, and perhaps uncompassionate to women who might not have had a choice if family circumstances left them none. For husbands who expected their wives to play that role, which likeability traits of Hillary Clinton’s, back then, could they have possibly latched onto? After her cookies-and-tea remarks, Hillary Clinton’s favorability ratings among men were even worse than among women. Ironically, in the earliest stage of her national public life, Hillary Clinton’s weakest likeability traits—perceptiveness and compassion—became the traditional, softer Democratic traits and effected how Americans perceived her in her entirety.
What brought her likeability back to life? Aside from the end of the Clinton Administration’s vastly unpopular attempt to reform health care – which allowed Hillary to recede to a more traditional First Lady role – came the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Hillary Clinton became a victim, more vulnerable than she had ever been in public. At the height of the scandal in March 1998, 65 percent of Americans expressed a favorable opinion of her, with just 31 percent viewing her unfavorably. Similar to her husband’s popularity, her favorable ratings remained above 60 percent through the remainder of 1998, the same year the U.S. House voted to impeach her husband. Hillary was now relatable to every couple in America who had experienced tough times. She was relatable to spouses who strayed but who hoped their husbands, wives or partners would remain; and to the husbands, wives and partners who made the choice, authentic to them – the comeback of another likeability trait for Hillary – to stay with their spouses no matter who told them otherwise.
Hillary Clinton was at the peak of her popularity when she ran for the U.S. Senate from New York in 2000 – a likeability base that made her 1992 entrance into the national spotlight seem so distant, it could have been recalled only with carbon dating. Her years in the Senate, where she served until she became Secretary of State in 2009, empowered the nation to fall head over heels in like with her for the first time in her national career – solidifying the artificially inflated “like” that had been rooted in vulnerability during the final years of the Bill Clinton presidency. The likeability magic of Hillary Clinton’s years in the Senate, and especially in her subsequent years as Secretary of State, is that she became likeable by being strong, transforming the public’s concept of likeability for women in American politics. To be sure, Hillary’s way of becoming likeable by being strong was to work exhaustively as Senator and Secretary of State to master each job with competence and aplomb that won her universal praise, including from Republicans who scurried to retract it as the 2016 campaign went into full swing. When other Americans with national fame won election to the U.S. Senate – such as Al Franken did in 2008 and Cory Booker in 2013 – their colleagues pointed to Hillary Clinton as the model to follow for hunkering down, doing the job and winning bipartisan respect.
Hunkering down for Hillary Clinton meant being low-key only in part. She was anything but low-key as Secretary of State, visiting 112 countries and expanding the State Department’s mission further into global economic issues and the defense of human rights, particularly for women and LGBT people, as no other Secretary of State had ever done. Echoing her groundbreaking remarks at the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women, in December 2011 in Geneva she declared, “Gay Rights are Human Rights.” Following these remarks, Hillary Clinton saw her popularity to unpopularity ratio among Americans reach 2:1, or 62 percent to 31 percent, months before President Obama dramatically changed the American climate on LGBT rights when he endorsed marriage equality. As Secretary of State, she injected herself into the national security team as much as any of her predecessors arguably had – and she did so often hawkishly. Hillary Clinton became likeable not merely by being strong, but by being bold.
She entered the 2016 Presidential campaign having already traveled a journey across decades to achieve high marks all eight likeability traits. Under the increased scrutiny of an election season, her fight in 2016 would be to maintain these advantages. Much like 2008 when Barack Obama burned Hillary for being “likeable, enough,” her public persona yet again came under intense examination. Once more the age old question, “Is this a politician I’d like to have a beer with?” reared its ugly head. And according to the polls, Hillary did not rate high in this department. Throughout the campaign Clinton has watched her hard-earned likeability dissipate before her eyes, and her unfavorable ratings even pulled even with the bombastic and highly polarizing Donald Trump. Unlike Trump, she has made no comments about barring Muslims from the United States or building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. She’s had no serious campaign disasters, and largely stayed above the petty fray of personal attacks (something she failed to do in 2008). And yet, her likeability advantages have disappeared in the blink of an eye.
Her team has done everything they can to make her appear more relatable—sometimes at the cost of appearing authentic. Through turns on Saturday Night Live and the popular series Broad City, Clinton has fought tooth and nail to prove that she has a softer, less serious side. It seems baffling that a woman would have to prove she is soft enough to be fit for the role of President. In a New York Times opinion piece columnist David Brooks argued that Clinton’s low likeability ratings stem from her persona as a workaholic. He writes, “At least in her public persona, Clinton gives off an exclusively professional vibe: industrious, calculated, goal-oriented, distrustful. It’s hard from the outside to have a sense of her as a person; she is a role.” Call it the gender card if you’d like, but no other Presidential candidate has faced such an intense level of scrutiny while running for office and no other candidates likeability can boast ups and downs comparable to Clinton’s. As Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public policy at Princeton University, noted, “Her challenge remains the same as it always has been — show voters who she is and reveal the person beneath the candidate…To win people’s trust and to generate enthusiasm, she has to let some of her character come out.” True as it may be, this counsel only seems to apply to Hillary Clinton—the only women to ever break the political glass ceiling—and she has fought hard to get there.
The double standards faced by women extend beyond politics and into the business world. A number of pioneering women have had to do far more to appear likeable or defend themselves against charges of being unlikeable, including Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times. Abramson led the Times from 2011 to 2014, until her very public ousting made headlines as distraught journalists tried to piece together what led to such a sudden dismissal. As the story goes, Abramson—the first female to lead the most widely read newspaper in the United States as it transitioned to the digital age— found out that her compensation and benefits were significantly less than the previous executive editor—a male—whom she had replaced. This news cut right to the heart of a challenge faced by a wide range of women, from entry-level employees to executives. Abramson confronted management about the disparity, which was viewed as a “pushy” move, and only served to bolster their disdain for her seemingly brusque management style. As Abramson reflected years later, “There are many studies that show that as women achieve power and get promoted and get more powerful, that their likability quotient goes down.” Though the Times claimed that her ousting was purely about difference in management, her product was still of exceptional quality. Under her leadership, the Times won eight Pulitzer prizes in three years and she worked hard to expand the paper’s digital footprint. This fact alone is jarring: A no-nonsense male with an expert track record in any given industry might be viewed as tough on his employees, but valued for his success. By contrast, no matter how you slice it, Abramson was cast aside for being aggressive, despite her clear successes.
Abramson’s tumultuous tenure, as well as the tenures of many other women in positions of power is representative of a widespread problem known as the glass cliff, the glass ceiling’s evil twin. A term coined in 2004 by psychologists Michelle Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam, the glass cliff refers to a situation in which women are appointed to leadership roles only during times of tumultuous change or crisis within a given organization. This is due to inherent societal biases about gender and management style. Typically feminine traits like communication and encouragement are valued in times of upheaval, while more masculine traits, such as resolve and competitiveness, are valued during times of prosperity. Though the glass cliff doesn’t explicitly disadvantage women, it does put them in charge during higher risk times, when failure is more likely. As a result, women who manage to shatter the glass ceiling and climb to the top often fall prey to the glass cliff, blamed for the failings of the already doomed ship.
Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, also a former 2016 Republican presidential candidate, is one such victim of the glass cliff. Brought in to Hewlett-Packard after many of the company’s dot-com endeavors went belly up, Fiorina was forced to make a number of highly unpopular decisions to save the company, including laying off nearly 30,000 workers. The effect of the glass cliff followed her throughout her 2016 campaign, and at least in part, played a significant role in her failure as a candidate. In the case of former Director of the United States Secret Service, Julie Pierson was appointed as the first woman to helm the agency in an effort to rehabilitate it following a prostitution scandal. After a number of highly public security failure, Pierson was forced to resign, in a way unlike her male predecessor, who likely contributed to the challenges she faced, including a lack of funds and staff to adequately meet demands.