Originally appeared Feb. 1, 1996, in the Windy City
Times.
We do not currently have an adequate theory of why gay progress is happening Our spokespeople are obscure, our organizations are small, and the opportunities for making our arguments are few.
Yet we know from a variety of surveys that homophobia is declining among high school graduates, college students and the general public. We do not know why. It is happening at different rates in each group. But we do not know why that is, either.
It is almost as if progress gets made without any effort on our part. But some theory would be valuable, if only to satisfy our natural human desire to make sense of the world.
I offer the following experimental explanation, oversimplified, no doubt, for the purposes of clarity.
I used to think that gays needed to persuade people of our value and moral legitimacy. Now, I have come to suspect that our task might better be to help foster conditions where people do not care about homosexuality one way or the other because they come to hold a hierarchy of values in which sexual orientation is of little or no significance.
The rate of pro-gay change among each of these populations-high school and college students and adult-is best understood as a function of the hierarchy of values each tacitly holds about what it means to be successful as a person, as that implicit value system presses against traditional social/religious homophobia.
1. For instance, high school students are strongly impressed by biology, by their intense realization of gender polarities. To a high degree, success as a person tends to be defined as success in embodying one of those polarities This is particularly true among males, for whom, as Camille Paglia usefully points out, masculinity is not a given but a hard-won achievement.
That achievement is fostered, certified, by athletic prowess and success with the opposite sex. Such a value system has little place for gays who are, at best viewed as non-participants, much less participants on the wrong side.
These values ought to reinforce social homophobia, but they are apparently countered to some degree, by the extraordinary attention young people pay to popular culture: film, MTV, television, popular, rock and "alternative" music.
Popular culture seems to be the chief way many young people learn about the world out there and-the conservatives are correct-they absorb its images and values. That homophobia is declining among teenagers is almost surely due to the growing presence of amiable, talented gays and gay characters: from "Roseanne" and "Friends" to "To Wong Fu," the Pet Shop Boys and Melissa Etheridge.
2. Among college students surveys show that homophobia drops as much as 50 percent between the freshman and senior years. The explanation may be that students who go to college are exposed to a new way of understanding what constitutes success as a person.
In college, if anywhere in our culture, success as a person is defined by intellectual capacity-learning new facts, learning to think about old facts in new ways. In such an evaluational scheme, gays and lesbians have an even, perhaps better than even, chance at doing well and being thought of well.
In addition, college students tend to absorb a new way of thinking about themselves. The constant emphasis on learning new things tacitly teaches the virtue of openness to new ideas and the concept of living as a process, a perpetually unfinished personal project. That too undermines prejudice.
Further, education leads to a kind of individualism. As Friedrich Hayek pointed out in "The Road to Serfdom," "The more intelligent people are, the more they are likely to have an individual scale of values." And we could add, have grown accustomed to the idea that other people have different values, desires and plans.
3. Opinion surveys of the general public show a gradual shift in a pro-gay direction despite the contrary efforts of religious fundamentalists and cultural conservatives.
The main new pressure against homophobia is the way in which the culture once again redefines for people the notion of what it means to excel as a person. To a large degree, this is understood as excellence in a skill or craft or function for which there is a market. The more exclusively this criterion is used to evaluate people, the less room there is for homophobia to play a significant role.
It is odd that the political left ever thought capitalism was anti-gay. To the contrary, it would seem to be the free market, with its ceaseless flux and stress on creative efforts to remain competitive, that generates the environment in which people assess one another more or their knowledge and skills than on other "personal" qualities.
In a way, that market dynamic reproduces the college-environment learning dynamic in that it stresses alertness to new information, skill in finding that information, and creativity in using it. Only now the information has a direct practical purpose rather than that of just passing an examination.
To all this sexual orientation is irrelevant. That David Geffen is a multi-millionaire entrepreneur is significant; that he is gay is merely interesting.
4. Such reflections as these, if they are correct, are not without practical vale. They can suggest what to encourage in society that will foster open, flexible attitudes.
Since the more educated and affluent people are the most pro-gay, we might want to support adult education programs and public awareness of scientific and technological change. We might want to support attitudes and institutions that promote the idea of life as an unfinished project, such as modern psychology with its emphasis on personal growth.
We might want to encourage interest in and education about music, art and literature, where gays are clearly plentiful, where excellence is judged by aesthetic standards.
In social dynamics, we might want to foster competition and the reduction of government decision-making. The more we can remove decision-making from the collective (or political) arena, the more we can tacitly teach people that they should have greater respect for other people's autonomy and that their own views should have no coercive role in deciding how others pursue personal fulfillment.
And we might be wise to focus our organizational attention on promoting gay presence in the mass media and popular culture, the most effective means of countering or preventing homophobia.