Originally published April 22, 1996, in the New York Native.
WHY IS IT THAT SO MANY ACTIVISTS see the current renewed emphasis on "values" as simply a reactionary plot to oppress gays and lesbians, keep women subordinate, and preserve "white skin privilege"? True, calls for the assertion of "traditional family values" by the religious right often include a hefty dose of anti-gay venom, but the yearning for a new commitment to personal responsibility and rectitude goes far beyond the diatribes of the intolerant right. From Bill Clinton's State of the Union address to best-sellers such as Bill Bennett's The Book of Virtues and Ben Wattenberg's Values Matter Most, and from plans to "end welfare as we know it" to efforts to elevate personal merit over group-based entitlement, the call for a return to moral discipline is widespread.
While some dissident gay intellectuals - Bruce Bawer, Andrew Sullivan, and Jonathan Rauch come to mind - have argued that traditional morality, including the commitment of marriage, can and must be expanded to encompass out-and-proud gay people, many movement activists who came of age in the post-Stonewall years reject such assimilationist pleading as a betrayal of "liberation" and a surrender to oppressive bourgeois morality. Feminists see a plot to restore "patriarchy."
Values advocates, alternatively, argue that crime, welfare dependency, and other social pathologies can be traced to the rejection since the 1960s of "shame" as a motivating concept. That's the thesis in books such as Saving Face: America and the Politics of Shame by Stuart Schneiderman, a former anti-Vietnam War activist who is now a psychoanalyst. Drawing on the work of anthropologist Ruth Benedict, he defines shame as the fear of looking bad before others, an internalized monitor that keeps bad behavior in check. "Shame cultures educate by persuasion," he says, "by showing the right things to do."
In America today, where shame has been banished as unhealthy, only the fear of punishment for major transgressions maintains what remains of civil order. Schneiderman writes that as a consequence, "Obnoxious and insulting behavior becomes acceptable" while "the idea of being a 'pillar' of the community sounds like a stale joke."
But there's a reason why we, as gays and lesbians, tend to resist the idea of a healthy sense of shame, and it's developed in another recently published book. In Coming Out of Shame: Transforming Gay and Lesbian Lives, Lev Raphael argues that "most gay men and lesbians grow up learning that to be gay is to be sick, to be unnatural, to be a sinner. By adolescence such negative attitudes have produced and reinforced a single, powerful emotion: shame, the feeling that you're inferior and judged as 'bad' not for what you do, but for what you are: gay."
It's hard to argue with that perspective, as well. The trouble is that many who want to get rid of the bad shame (internalized homophobia) would throw the baby (civil behavior) out with the bath water. This is the camp that likes to argue that because some values proponents don't support gay equality, we must oppose all of the "personal responsibility" positions that it happens they do support. Moreover, this line of reasoning goes, we must make allies with all groups that continue to define themselves in revolt against bourgeois normality.
Yet welfare as a way of life is now too expensive for American taxpayers to maintain, even if the besieged middle class weren't demanding tax relief. And as the cry heats up to jettison liberal judges who think criminals are "oppressed" by police, our movement could find itself on the backward-marching side of history, even more so than today, when activists loudly defend maintaining preferences based on group membership rather than individual merit and oppose attempts to reform the very welfare system that breeds dependence and despondency.
But what about the anti-sex message in all this shame talk? One answer is to dare to make distinctions when it comes to sexual behavior. We can, for example, say forthrightly that gay men and lesbians should overcome and heal the scars produced by the negative self-images imposed on us owing to our sexuality. Like other adults, we must be free to lead healthy, hearty, but responsible and safe sex lives, whether or not we choose to form committed relationships. Moreover, gay and lesbian youth should have access to information and resources so they do not grow up mired in the self-negating belief that they are sick or "queer," so to speak.
On the other hand, teenagers unequipped emotionally to make the self-assertions and engage in the negotiations required for safe sex are better off remaining abstinent for awhile, and a heathy sense of shame regarding premature sexual behavior is not a bad thing. Despite liberal sex-ed programs and free condom distributions, rates of AIDS transmission are up among gay male teens, and teen pregnancy rates have skyrocketed (up 9 percent from 1985 to 1990). Children reared in welfare-dependent, fatherless homes have become an inner-city norm, and demograpahic experts say juvenile crime is soaring as a result. [Since '96, with welfare reform and a more 'conservative' mood in the country, some of the statistics cited above for social pathology have begun to reverse.]
For all our sakes, these teenage mothers, and the boys who notch their belts for every girl they get pregnant, could use more than a little dose of old-fashioned shame.
Still, many lesbigay activists can't see the forest for the trees. Arlene Zarembka, a lesbian-feminist writer, asserted last year that "welfare reform has become a phrase for re-asserting patriarchal control over women." It accomplished this, she claimed, by "arresting the independence" of women because they are lesbians or otherwise choose not to marry but still want children - and somebody to support them. Moreover, she even decried efforts to "penalize women for bearing an additional child" while on welfare by not increasing the welfare-recipient's taxpayer-funded benefits. Similar writings by self-styled "liberationists" celebrate teenage sexual expression and romanticize criminal behavior.
But as fears of "moral meltdown" escalate, the pendulum clearly is swinging back toward a renewed emphasis on personal shame and civility. Those who argue otherwise are woefully out of touch with the tenor of the times. Movement activists who oppose the trend toward tying individual accountability to a renewed sense of shame will only convince the bigots that they are right to see homosexuality as inherently destructive to the social order and restraint on which civil society rests.