1.
There were fourteen of us at the family dinner table. Among us we represented four generations
We were at my sister's house just outside of Victorville, part of a growing community in Southern California's high desert, about two hours east of Los Angeles. It was a little above 30 degrees outside, and the sky was a clear window on a million stars.
My sister and parents, as well as a number of my uncles and aunts had moved here partly because of the affordable housing, partly because they are golfers and their neighborhood is built around a lovely golf course, and partly because it is the kind of quiet community that is the antithesis of the city none of them ever liked. They are endlessly satisfied with the distance they have put between themselves and Los Angeles. In most of these details, I am very different from my family.
Still, I come up to visit them often. They are my family, and I enjoy spending time with them. But they are also something else to me, they are my ground. A large part of the country is made up of people like them, people who do not often get involved in the political rhetoric I am used to-the rhetoric of the media, of academic debates, of the centers of power. People like my family, suburban, church-going people, are consumed with the day-to-day details their lives demand, and have little time for things like the Big Picture, the Effect that Society has on Individuals, the Law. I have always been drawn toward Big Picture issues.
But in the small things, the family rituals, I share a great deal with them. My family is located squarely at the heart of the middle class, and so am I. In that among other things, I am much like them. And here among these people I loved, having one more in a lifetime of family dinners, I noticed something that struck a chord in me, not because it was unusual, but because it was so very usual that it went without any comment at all. As I looked around the table, I realized that of the fourteen people busily loading their plates and talking, five of us were gay.
And no one cared.
The cast of characters was for the most part as familiar to me as the photographs on the walls of my apartment. My grandmother and parents were there, as were my sister and brother-in-law. Two of my seven uncles were with us: One sat next to his wife, while the other was there with his long-time male partner. My sister's stepson Rick had brought his girlfriend. Early in the evening Rick's brother called to let us know he would be there, too. When he arrived, he introduced us to the young man he had brought along as his date. Since in my family there is always enough food, my sister set another place at the table for the additional guest with little fuss or concern.
The fact that he and his date were the same sex was no big deal.
Just before dessert, my aunt Ann and uncle Fred dropped by. Even among my family, who, with rare exceptions are politically conservative Republicans, these two have always been especially conservative. I have long been uneasy with both major parties, but am a registered Democrat, and sometimes adopt democratic party positions I don't wholly support so Fred and I will have something to argue about. The never-ending political debates between Fred and me are a family tradition as anticipated and invariable as turkey on Thanksgiving, and Ann is always there to chide me with some argument Fred might have forgotten. Our debates are usually loud and intense; whatever the details, we both care deeply about politics. Because of our political passions I have long felt a special kinship with Fred and Ann, and they have always felt close to me. Most of the rest of the family discusses politics only reluctantly.
In making her greetings to everyone, Ann, as usual, saved her special zeal for my uncle's partner. He is, in fact, one of those people who came into the family's enthusiastic embrace easily. While my family generally accepts all comers, in the natural course of things some are more loved than others. My uncle's partner was a favorite from the start.
2.
This domestic picture will be an affront to some people who are homosexual. I have long been aware that the family I come from is not like the families many lesbians and gay men were brought up in and had to escape, the families the Mad Pats at the notorious 1992 Republican Convention thought they could use as a weapon against lesbians and gay men. While that strategy backfired badly for the party the Pats were trying to help, it remains true that because of the disquiet these people exploit, many gay people are unable to have the kind of relationship with their family that I have.
That said, I bring my family up for a very specific reason. They are not alone. They and hundreds of thousands of families like them are too often absent in the discussion about gay rights, not as weapons against gay people, but as their imperfect allies. The public discussion of homosexuality tends to take place at the extremes-since the loudest objections come from radical conservatives, the opposition tends to be equally intense, equally extreme. While this makes for symmetry, the fervor on both sides sometimes excludes people like my family who have a more moderate interest in the issue. Those people, who are neither particularly articulate nor especially inflamed feel as if they have no place in the ring.
I think these families and family members should be acknowledged-people of good faith who, while they are not champions of gay rights, have found a way to respect and accept their lesbian and gay members as well as they can. In some ways, that kind of unexpressed but lived support is more important than all the manifestos and the blood-boiling demonstrations.
Those families and those children can have the relationship they have because giants paved the way, lesbians and gay men who took what, for the time was a radical position in a wholly uncomprehending world--that they should be accepted in their entirety, regardless of their sexual orientation. The almost unbelievable bravery of Harry Hay and Frank Kameny and the other men and women who can be counted as founders of the gay rights movement in America helped to change the way we think about people who are homosexual.
New leaders are always emerging, but some of them do not always recognize that there are differing styles of activism. Since the mid-nineties, a number of high-profile lesbians and gay men have proudly been calling themselves Queer. This is particularly true in the gay press. While groups like Queer Nation have come and gone, there continues to be a number of activists who seem to be most satisfied when they can make others most uncomfortable.
When it comes to use of the term "queer," I am one of those who feels uncomfortable.
3.
There is no shortage of lesbians and gay men who employ this in-your-face attitude toward the world at large. But what is it supposed to accomplish?
It is true that linguistics are a part of the strategy of identifying as Queer. When minorities embrace the words used against them, they mitigate, to some extent, the use of the words as weapons.
But that strategy has never been fully successful. African-Americans once tried to defuse the word "nigger" in a similar way. But despite their best intentions, the word never lost its force as an expletive, as any member of the Ku Klux Klan can attest. "Nigger" still pierces, still causes harm.
A second reason for lesbians and gay men to identify themselves as Queer is to exercise some control over their position in the world. Rather than having a name imposed, the group chooses its own. Even if the group chooses a name that already exists, it is still a form of empowerment, or at least is said to feel that way.
Whatever its value, though, this tactic has the potential to try the public's patience. Minority groups are not like nations or states; they do not have a unified government that can decide once and for all what the country and its people will be called. As group members debate, editorial rooms across the country do their level best to keep up.
It is in this context that I have wrestled with myself over whether, as a gay man, I am Queer. I have decided that I am not. "Queer" is the word of the Other, of the Outsider. I do not feel like I am outside anything due to my sexual orientation.
4.
The generations of lesbians and gay men who lived in the time leading up to the Stonewall riots in 1969 were radicals by definition. They said out loud what at the time was unsayable - that sexual orientation should not matter. While sexual orientation is obviously a difference among people, people are different in a multitude of ways. Hair color, for example, is a more obvious difference than sexual orientation, since it is immediately visible. But we did not create a systematic or legal hierarchy of preferred over less-preferred and non-preferred hair color, granting blondes and brunettes rights that are unavailable to redheads, requiring people who choose to marry to marry someone whose hair color is different than theirs, or the same. Hair color is one of thousands of differences that can be noticed but carries no legal or normative weight.
Since the pioneering sex studies in Germany early in the Twentieth Century, those arguing for equality for lesbians and gay men have asserted that sexual orientation is not a sickness or pathology, that it is another neutral difference that should be treated neutrally. For most of the last century, the established society disagreed, said that sexual orientation was a difference that mattered, and would be treated under law as if it mattered.
Since Stonewall, though, the law has made considerable strides toward neutrality. Equality was the ultimate goal, the elimination of the laws that treated homosexuality and heterosexuality differently. Bit by bit that equality is being recognized. As Barney Frank has observed, movements like that mid-nineties Colorado explicitly to deny equality to lesbians and gay men arose in part because tolerant cities like Aspen enacted their equal-protection guarantees. Colorado For Family Values, the group which backed the Colorado constitutional amendment, wanted to return to the inequality that its members were comfortable with because they felt that inequality slipping away. If the gay rights movement had not had its successes, CFV would not have been necessary.
Like members of CFV, those who want to identify themselves as Queer are capitalizing on the significance of the surface difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Some have been outspoken in their focus on this difference.
But to say that lesbians and gay men are different from heterosexuals is no more than a tautology. The game of definitional difference can be played on a number of axes. In addition to being gay, for example, I am also male, of Italian background, and am Catholic; I practice law and write for a living, am reasonably well-educated, and a baby boomer. To some extent, each of these is as important to my identity as my sexual orientation. Therefore, I could identify myself at any given moment as a gay man, a male, an Italian (or more broadly a Caucasian), a Catholic, a baby-boomer, a lawyer or a writer, and would be telling the truth.
But by choosing one group to identify with, I would also be leaving out a great deal. I am no more male than I am Italian or Catholic or lawyer or writer or homosexual. All fit together in some way that adds up to me. Therefore, while I do claim membership in all of those groups, and while some are more important to me than others, it would be too easy to lose sight of the whole if I were to grant one group status as The Group I identified with. To me, each is an adjective about me, none is me.
Each of us belongs in a lot of groups, many of which overlap. Any individual could draw a Venn diagram of the dozens or hundreds of groups she or he belongs in, and the intersection of all those circles would be a group of one.
The poet Maya Angelou has made this point explicit:
"In my work, in everything I do, I mean to say that we human beings are more alike than we are unalike, and to use that statement to break down the walls we set between ourselves because we are different. I suggest that we should herald the differences, because the differences make us interesting, and also enrich and make us stronger. [But] the differences are minuscule compared to the similarities. That's what I mean to say."
Experiences of love and loss, trust, betrayal, jealousy, injustice, joy and pain, comfort, rage--all these are points at which we can touch one another as people because they are experiences every one of us shares. One of the jobs of the artist has been to explore those touching points, to bring us together from our varied and diverse particulars into a single place where we can recognize something we have in common. Hamlet, for example, is a Dane, a heterosexual, and a male, but he is also the embodiment of something that transcends all human categories, the human dilemma of indecision. The particulars of his story are interesting and relevant, but in his very particular story we can also find something universal, something all of us know. From the moment Shakespeare created his Hamlet, agonizing with the decision he faces, generations of individuals who have encountered this ambivalent hero have seen something of themselves on the stage. Anyone who has ever had to choose a restaurant or a video to rent knows on a trivial level how hard it is to finally decide to act. And everyone knows how difficult the larger decisions are - what profession or job to enter, where to live, who to trust, or to love. Hamlet's truth about the difficulty of decision defies gender and race and sexual orientation, and everything else.
5.
Balancing our similarities and differences is the juggling act of identity. The current focus on the ways lesbians and gay men differ from heterosexuals simply reinforces the walls between us, and leaves no gate. In this, lesbians and gay men dishonor the success of those whose work has so much changed the world.
A generation ago, I could not have had the dinner with my family that I did. What my family and I have in common would have been destroyed by a single difference. To maintain a relationship with them, the burden would have been on me to lie. In my family, those days are gone. The five gay men who were at that family table could be honest, and we were not penalized for our honesty. And the family as a whole was benefited by remaining intact, by keeping all of the bonds between us alive. We could find some reassurance in our similarities while taking advantage of the differing viewpoints each brings to the family's dynamic.
That is only one measure of what the very loose phrase "gay rights" means. It is my understanding that the goal of the gay rights movement all along was to allow lesbians and gay men to live their lives irrespective of their sexual orientation, not superrespective of it. This was difficult to do when heterosexuals focused - sometimes obsessively - on homosexuality. Lesbians and gay men know their sexual orientation is a part of their make-up, but it isn't any more important to them than a heterosexual's sexual orientation is to them. Sex is certainly a part of an ordinary life, but most people - lesbians and gay men included - spend more time watching TV than having sexual intercourse. Most people spend more time on hold waiting to talk to a live customer service representative than having sexual intercourse.
But by identifying as Queer, lesbians and gay men do exactly the same thing that the most virulent homophobes do, make their sexual orientation hyper-important, more important than any single factor should be in a complex human personality. By marking ourselves as Outsiders, we deny what we have in common with others.
Lesbians and gay men in the past were radicals because they had no other choice. That is no longer true. Because of decades of radical work, millions of people are able to view homosexuality now within the context of ordinary human variations, and like my family, pay it no mind. That seems to me to be the goal achieved. It has clearly not been achieved everywhere, but we are far enough along the road that the choice to avoid a radical identity is available.
Some lesbians and gay men may choose to follow the path of the sexual outlaws, determine that they prefer to be the Outsider. This pose has long been a kick for the young, whether straight or gay. But in adopting that pose in the modern world, lesbians and gay men will have made a choice that no one else imposed. In that they will be less like the gay sexual outlaw John Rechy proclaimed himself to be and more like pop icon Madonna. Whatever else can be said about Madonna's various choices of persona, she has made each one as a choice and not let anyone else dictate what part her sexuality plays within her identity. As a gay man in the sixties, no one gave Rechy that choice.
The act of making an identity has always been a difficult one. The surface advantage of group identification is that an identity comes prefabricated. Choosing an identity off the rack saves a great deal of time and hard emotional exploration. The downside, of course, is that an off-the-rack identity was designed for the mass-market, does not have the individual in mind. Thus, some people who are homosexual find that they are criticized for not being "gay enough," of departing from the party line in certain instances, of not wearing their gay identity properly. But that is because, unlike the tailor-made identity, one bought in the current department store of identities will only come close to the actual proportions of its wearer. The small gaps and sags may be tolerable to an individual, but the purchaser must know he or she is buying something that was manufactured for millions. And like all uniforms, it comes with expectations.
6.
For the most part, homosexuality is no longer outside the law. While there are certainly laws that still need to be changed - some dramatically - the strategy for change may need to be rethought. While confrontations were required in the early days because a majority of people were simply dead to the problems faced by lesbians and gay men, confrontations are less necessary now, and in some cases are probably harmful.
That is because confrontation is a strategy for those who are not being heard. Lesbians and gay men do not want to argue with the heterosexual majority because we like arguing; the point is to persuade a majority that the law is unfair when it treats them differently than heterosexuals, and to get those who disagree to change their minds. That is how the Constitution's First Amendment is supposed to work. Confrontation is a last resort. It is dramatic, extreme, a battering ram to bust down a door that will not open. Confrontation is the antithesis of persuasion.
But in most cases, the doors of discussion are open to sexual orientation. After all of the work that has been done, particularly in the last two or three decades, most people are aware that lesbians and gay men have a grievance, and will listen, even though many will not agree. The work that is left, then, is not acknowledgment that lesbians and gay men exist; the task is to change what minds can be changed.
Radicals, though, continue to live in a world where they believe they are not being heard at all. They treat the world as if it were populated only by their polar opposites. This is as true of the religious radicals as it is of the gay radicals. Both sides hurl images out of their own personal horror movies into the debate. The crusades in Colorado and Oregon were not so much about homosexuality and religion as they were about sado-masochism and the Spanish Inquisition. Grotesque images of chained and (barely) leather-garbed San Francisco parade-goers were pitted against the sour faces of paranoid preachers and the bruised bodies of the victims of gay-bashings. No matter which side you talked to, the end of the world was imminent. The same strategy pervaded the debate over the American military's "don't-ask-don't-tell" policy. The military's argument was a simple one: removing the ban on open lesbians and gay men would destroy our armed forces. The prejudice against lesbians and gay men is so powerful, it was argued, that heterosexual service members would ignore their too-fragile military discipline, violence and chaos would be unstoppable, and the country would be left defenseless.
Most people are aware that such apocalyptic thinking is just self-dramatization in a world that adores indulgence. There is no winning with the extremists. It should be clear by now that the Mad Pats of the world will never accept open homosexuality. But they do not need to. No political issue is ever settled finally. There are no public questions whose resolution will command 100 percent of the population. In that sense, politics is not mathematics. From the death penalty and abortion to requirements that all drivers wear seat belts, no law completely satisfies.
But it is a mistake to attribute the intransigence of the relatively small numbers of zealots to the public at large. Lesbians and gay men have many friends among the voters, even among religious voters, and many more whose vague fears can be answered. Oregon's law was defeated by a majority in that state, and before being overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Colorado initiative won by only a slim margin.
Those numbers are important. By even the best counts, only ten percent of the population is homosexual. That means that there are millions of heterosexuals who have already come to understand the issue of inequality lesbians and gay men face. Even the loss in Colorado could have been won if a few thousand votes had been different. Persuading those numbers is a far different task than the homosexual pioneers faced.
The people who have yet to be persuaded are going to be like my family. Grand Theories about Justice and Social Change will not do the trick with them, and visions of the apocalypse leave them cold. They do not much care for theories. They respond to what is in front of them, to what they can see and feel. They are not interested in how lesbians and gay men are different from them - that much is obvious. They want to know about the common ground. Lives become connected not through difference, but through similarity. Connected lives become interesting because of difference, but they do not initially connect at that level. Remember the first stages of love, where so much time is devoted to revelations such as, "Oh, you like Rocky and Bullwinkle, too."
There are many more people yet to make those connections with. The task is finding where the connections can be made. Sexual orientation is no longer so all-important that it overrides everything else about a person. My family used to think that. They do not anymore. My gay uncle and his partner are just like the rest of my family, sexual orientation aside. The news is that sexual orientation can be set aside. Being gay makes my uncle and his lover interesting, but other things make them interesting, too.
Some lesbians and gay men, especially the artists, may balk at the implication that in certain ways they are quite ordinary. To a generation brought up to worship individuality, this is anathema. But there are many things that make each of us unique. Sometimes it is very nice to share small and common things, to just watch TV with someone or talk about sports, or help a sister making cookies in the kitchen. It is on those ordinary battlefields that what is left of this war can be won.
It is a great burden to make your life always and everywhere extraordinary. Homosexuality used to be that kind of a burden. But homosexuality no longer makes anyone extraordinary by default. Perhaps the new radicals regret that sort of specialness and are trying to reconstruct it. There are probably, though, many more valuable ways in which they are unique. What lesbians and gay men have lost in forced distinctiveness, they have gained in options. They do not have to approach politics only from the outside-there are gay lobbyists and elected officials as well as street protesters.
The battle for gay rights has not left the streets and the books, but it is now being waged inside a million private homes, too. The assumption that heterosexuals are irretrievably opposed to gay rights is unfair, one more stereotype that hinders this debate. Heterosexuals of good faith have every right to find such an assumption as offensive as lesbians and gay men have ever found any stereotype about them, and for the same reasons.
I am not a Queer because I do not have to be one. I am not that different from most people in this country. As a gay man who is other things besides, I stand my best chance of finding a connection with someone, of starting a conversation, of changing a mind. That exposure is one of the fundamental principles of coming out-reality undermine the fears that invisibility permits, and opens the possibility of dialogue. It is in those plain and often tentative encounters that I and millions of others can make our contributions.
It is unfair that the burden is still on lesbians and gay men, but that is a reality we cannot wish away. But this residue of injustice cannot be compared to the injustice those who came before us faced. The world is listening now because of what those pioneers did, and to assume anything less is to deny what my heroes have accomplished, those men and women whose work in a hostile world gave me the gift of a family I love. Those men and women were radical so I would not have to be.