Originally appeared June 11, 1995, in The Washington Post.
I AM GAY AND have been in the gay rights movement since I came out in 1981. I am also a conservative, a libertarian.
Sad to say, the gay rights movement has always been seen as being on the political left, as one more whining interest group claiming entitlement to all sorts of special treatment from the government. Or we are seen as having a simply fabulous time cavorting at Gay Pride parades and throwing condoms at Catholic services. Whether as crybabies or as Dionysian celebrants, we always appear outside the mainstream.
I cringe at both images. Most gay men and women do not go around demanding government favors or living a hedonistic "gay lifestyle." But just enough of us act out these images, or tolerate them, that they become real in the public mind. Middle America feels uncomfortable about this, at the very least. Our right-wing enemies love it, because it gives them someone to hate and someone to use as a foil for attracting mainstream support to their own causes. By accepting, and in some cases cultivating, these images, we lose friends and help our enemies.
As a conservative, I wish such images would evaporate. If there was ever a time when they made sense, on grounds of either truthfulness or usefulness, it ended when the Republicans took control of Congress. The waiting line for government benefits now leads nowhere, and public frolics now gain nothing but disapproval.
What can government give gays? Merely the form, not the substance, of what we need and want. What we are really after is not merely legal rights but acceptance into the mainstream of American life - and acceptance is granted or withheld by the mainstream majority at its pleasure. If we want to be accepted, we must be welcomed. Lord knows it's easier to change the votes of a few legislators than the hearts and minds of millions of our fellow citizens. But politicians are weathervanes, they are not the wind.
So we should end some of our present practices:
We should loudly reject all "compensatory" agendas: hiring quotas, affirmative action and group reparations - all of which I've heard advocated for "when we get our rights." The people who benefit most from such programs are the bureaucrats who administer them and the members of the "victim" groups with the best political connections.
We should stop pressing for "domestic partners" legislation. It creates a special class of rights for a small class of people. The real beneficiaries would be the lawyers who would litigate the differences and similarities between domestic partnership and marriage.
We should not hate Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson and their allies. Leave the hating to them. They will eventually destroy themselves, as Joe McCarthy and other haters did.
We should stop feeling sorry for ourselves. We may be victims, but frankly no one cares. This country's wellsprings of liberal guilt began running dry about 20 years ago, and by now they are flat empty.
Finally, we should stop seeing AIDS as anybody else's problem. The sad fact is that every gay man who got AIDS by sex got it from another gay man, and by doing something he chose to do. People with AIDS deserve sympathy, but it is the sympathy one extends to a chain smoker who comes down with lung cancer. It is not the same kind of sympathy one feels for someone who was struck by lightning or run down by a drunk driver.
But that's enough on the negative side. What positive actions can we take?
For starters, each of us should come out whenever it is reasonably safe. The best way to explode the myths about us is for each of us to become known as just another human being with the same needs, goals and drives as other human beings - except in a single respect that poses no threat to anyone else.
Our legislative goal should be for civil rights legislation with disclaimers of any quotas, guidelines, reparations or government-imposed and group-based remedies. It should emphasize private lawsuits for damages rather than enforcement by a bureaucracy.
In the legislatures, we should also lobby for the right to marry. Domestic-partners legislation makes us an officially sanctioned class of oddities and freaks. By seeking marriage, we demonstrate our wish to be part of the great American middle-class way of life.
Among ourselves, we must be willing to talk about morals, to impose them on ourselves and to do so conspicuously. As long as our primary image is one of gleeful promiscuity - an image promoted not only by our enemies but also by our own magazines and our own bars - we will be ostracized. Until we start imposing honesty, fidelity and emotion on our lives - in other words, until we are willing to talk about moral standards - we will make little real progress in social acceptance.
In a curious way, AIDS itself may be helping us find social acceptance. This terrible disease has brought to a screeching halt - at least in my generation of gay men - the manic boozing, drugging and screwing of the '70s and '80s. It has forced us to attend more to friendships, stability and the consequences of our actions. It has opened us to human suffering; one friend told me that caring for someone with AIDS was the first unselfish thing he had done in his adult life. AIDS has enabled us to show, to ourselves and to the mainstream, that we too are capable of great suffering, compassion, work and sacrifice. By our work with each other, we have shown mainstream society what we have to offer it, and how much it loses and wastes by excluding us.
The common theme of all this is simply facing the facts, working to bring out the best in ourselves and offering something admirable to the mainstream. All these views put me in odd company politically. But if you had to agree about everything with everyone else in an organization before you could join it, we'd have 260 million political parties in this country.
Conservatives are the people I happen to agree with most of the time. At least they are attempting to deal with the moral issues of our time (such as welfare dependency and violence) on a moral plane, and not as something for which the only remedy is another government program and more spending.
After I come out to them, I find that most conservatives are perfectly tolerant (and not as cloyingly condescending as my liberal straight friends). The Helmses and Robertsons are in the minority. And it eventually dawns on the conservatives that if they want to keep the support of gays like me, they had better keep at least a distance between themselves and the haters.
Finally, moving in conservative circles permits me to ask my conservative friends where this country would be without those great gays - Whittaker Chambers, J. Edgar Hoover, Walt Whitman and Cardinal Spellman. It's a polite way to remind them that we have been in their midst and doing good deeds from the beginning.
My liberal friends tend to employ three styles of attack on my views. The first is ad hominem: How can you talk about morality when we all know that once you did this or that randy deed? My answer is that a) the fact that your first response is to attack the messenger (me) shows that you can't repel the message; and b) I had my adolescence like everyone else, and it's over.
My liberal friends' second attack is some variation on "Do you mean that you're against all attempts to right the wrongs that have been done to us?" My answer is that I am as much in favor of basic civil rights for gays as they are. Where we differ is in the need for group-based remedies and in perceiving ourselves as victims whose main recourse should be coercion by the government.
The third attack from my liberal friends is usually some form of "Well, you have a good point, but..." At that, I know I've made some progress.
I have a feeling there are many more conservative gays than there seem to be. The time is ripe for us to leave the plantation of liberal government and start acting like what we are - a group of adults who want to live lives as normal and as healthy as everyone else in the mainstream. If we do, I think we will be on the path to my dream - an America in which being gay is no more remarkable than being left-handed.