Delivered at the Log Cabin Republican national convention, New York City, August 28, 1999; televised on C-SPAN.
THE INVITATION HAS ME SPEAKING about an "independent vision," and my first reaction on receiving it was, "This guy's not a Republican but we're inviting him anyway." But in fact it's an extremely apt topic, and I'll take the next ten minutes explaining why I think it's so appropriate at the moment.
The bottom line is this: I'm 40 on my next birthday, which is longer than I ever thought I would live. But, in particular, I never thought I would live long enough to see the opportunity that now, at this moment, and in just the last very few years, is opening itself to gay and lesbian Americans.
The center in this country may soon belong to us. The old dynamic where we were the fringe and the centrist position was that we were strange, is very, very rapidly crumbling. And let me also add that the center is where the future is. In many ways the most profoundly interesting and deeply felt pro-gay, non-gay politician in the country is not a Republican and not a Democrat. It's Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota, whom I've had the pleasure of interviewing. This is a man who stood up in a campaign debate against two much better-funded candidates, a Republican and a Democrat, and when asked a question about gay rights said that he felt it was dreadful and ridiculous for the government to prevent, for example, a gay man from visiting his sick lover in the hospital; he said that the government should not be against love.
That's not the way Republicans and Democrats talk, but it is the way radical centrists talk. And the radical center, I think, is where we will go and where we will belong, and where the American public increasingly is. To get there, however, requires a kind of new vow of political independence, and thus the "independent vision."
We, I think, meaning gay people, are moving towards the center, but slowly -- and I think not quickly enough, given the extraordinary opportunity that now arises. And that happens mostly as a matter of a historical accident. I recently finished reading a marvelous book called Out for Good, by Adam Nagourney and Dudley Clendinen, a history of the gay movement since 1969 -- a book that's been mysteriously given the back of critics' hands. What comes out of this book very clearly, when you take 30 years of gay history in a single gulp, is the extent to which this movement was born of extremes -- on both the gay left and the right. As you know, the initial activists, the people who were willing to be openly gay, were predominantly of the left and far left. And also, you know, the only conservatives who were willing to talk about homosexuals, who weren't just too embarrassed to do it, was the radical right. So the initial gay groups had names like The Gay Liberation Front, and had their roots in '60s and '70s radicalism.
Now these people of course were important, courageous, bold, and were there when we needed them. But I think also that in 1999, thirty years later, the movement has basically paid its debt to the radical wing of the movement. And it's time to move on.
We are in fact moving on. But we have a hangover from our historical roots: dependence of two kinds. First, political. And second, intellectual.
The political dependence is that fact that from the beginning the gay movement has been linked at the belly button with the Democratic Party. And you all know all about that. And you probably also know the consequences, which I think have not been particularly good for gays and lesbians. It means that because gays are predominantly identified as Democrats, Republicans have typically had no use for us because they weren't getting our votes anyway; that moderates also had no use for us, because they were so turned off by some of the extreme rhetoric and by some of the extreme behavior that they saw from gay and lesbians. And perhaps worst of all, the Democrats used us as doormats, for the most part.
When looking at Bill Clinton's behavior as President, I'm often reminded of how masterly Ronald Reagan was in dealing with the Religious Right. He kept them happy by throwing them a few bones. He would give a speech, now and then, about the need for school prayer, knowing the Supreme Court would never allow it. And he'd give a speech, now and then, about abortion and how terrible it is, knowing again that the Supreme Court would never actually allow him to change the policy. And with a few words, he would keep the Religious Right happy, and they managed for eight years not to notice that he hadn't done a thing for them. [applause]
It was brilliant, and Bill Clinton, being Bill Clinton, noticed it and I think has done the same thing with gays, who also have not noticed that after eight years, not only has he basically not done a thing for us, but we now have two extremely anti-gay pieces of legislation on the books: the Defense of Marriage Act and the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy. [applause]
I certainly think it's nice to be met with in the White House, and it's nice to have the odd appointment or two, the ambassadorship to Luxembourg. I'm all for that. But I don't think it's enough. The significance of what you people are doing, and what Rich Tafel is doing, is not, in fact, the overt significance. The overt story line is that you folks are opening up the Republican Party to embrace homosexuals. You're often derided for that work because the Republican Party again and again all but says, "Don't bother, we don't want you." So why would you want to join a club that doesn't want to have you as members?
The real significance of what you're doing, however, is creating the possibility of a homosexual swing vote. There is a large block of people in this country who are gay, who are not deeply committed to either party, who vote Republican, or who are Democrats who will vote for Republicans or who will vote for people like Jesse Ventura, radical centrists. When those people have an alternative to the Democratic Party, both parties will have to fight for us -- and that may be beginning to happen now. In effect, what the Log Cabin Republicans are doing is making the world safe for gay independence, and making it possible to be a genuine gay independent. And only when that happens, [applause] only when we are free to swing and the parties have to bid for us, does our power becomes real.
Meanwhile, by the way, notice what is happening to the Religious Right. They only have one place to go, which is the Republican Party, and because they are now not getting what they want, they are in the same position that we used to be in. They're talking about separatism. More power to them, say I. [applause]
Beyond the political swing vote, however, more important and more fundamental to liberating ourselves from dependence is creating an intellectual center. Now, of course, intellectual sounds awfully airy and abstract, and I don't just mean the Queer Studies people and people like that. I'm talking about a place where you can go, for example, if you are comfortable with basic bourgeois values, like marriage; if you're comfortable with religion; if you believe that basic liberal (small 'l') institutions -- markets and property -- are basically good things that we should keep; if you believe that prosperity is as important in the long-run as equality, and in fact that the two must go hand in hand; and if, finally, you are not a revolutionary, if you don't feel the need to radically reform American society at its roots, if in fact you feel pretty darn happy to be here, and you feel that it's basically the most decent society that the world has ever produced.
If you think all of those things, you need a place to go where all your ideas seem to make sense. And as you all know, the signals from the gay movement have been at best diffident to these ideas and sometimes outright hostile. If you believe that abortion is not particularly a gay issue, you may be puzzled by some of what you hear from the activists, and you will certainly by puzzled by what you hear from the Queer Studies community, and many of the Marxists and so on who run that establishment in the academic institutions.
But on the other hand, if you're a member of this intellectual swing vote, you're probably also in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s.You're of a generation that's used to being out. You have no intention of going back into the closet and pretending to be straight.And you have no intention of ever insisting on anything less than full equality. Full equality means serving in the military, it means being able to get married, it means not being arrested in your home, as two men were in Texas this year, for making love. You simply won't stand for that; it's not on the table.
You need a place to go if you have these ideas, and I think that, too, is beginning to happen -- and really quite recently, in the '90s. To me a landmark was the publication of Bruce Bawer's book A Place at the Table in 1993. Andrew Sullivan's book Virtually Normal has been extremely important. And we're seeing these ideas now come out in various places. I think of Elizabeth Birch as fundamentally an ally in the center, which is where I think we need to be.
The center at the moment, as we've seen from the behavior from the congressional Republicans in impeachment, has become the great terra incognita of American politics and of American thinking. It's an amazing phenomenon to me.Politicians, and the parties, seem to be unable to find the center even if they trip on it. It's just an extraordinary thing; there's an enormous vacuum that's been created. To get there, I think, an important thing we can do, and are beginning to do, is to develop an intellectual critical mass that says to ourselves and to the public: to be a homosexual does not mean that you have to throw away the standard compact with American society. You can be pro-family, you can be pro-church, you can be pro-responsibility. You can also be pro-equality.
I'll end by telling you briefly about an effort that some of us are making to carve out a this intellectual radical center, this independent place, and begin to create a beachhead. We're calling it the Independent Gay Forum, a name that's modeled on the Independent Women's Forum, though I think the group is quite different. And it's small, we don't have much money. We're just a group of basically writers and thinkers, informally associated, who looked around about a year ago, and said, Hey wait a minute, there's now a critical mass of people out there, of writers -- Bawer, Sullivan, David Boaz, Walter Olson, me, Stephen Miller, Paul Varnell, you could go on -- who don't feel at home with the radical left, who don't feel at home with the radical right, who are writing things and saying things.
So we've created a Web site where we are pulling these ideas together and posting new material every week. There's quite a bit of it out there. You can find the Web site at the address www.indegayforum.org. And what you'll find there are articles where we attempt -- there's no orthodoxy, no single point of view -- to explore the ideas in this radical center.
For instance, why carrying concealed weapons can be a very good thing for homosexuals, as a self-defense strategy. Entirely apart from how you feel about gun control, in 31 states, you can get a license and carry a gun. Now only the most law-abiding people in the country do this, because you have to pay a $100 fee, in many states you have to take a gun safety course, you have to not have a criminal record, you can't have any mental problems, and so on. I know three gay people who will personally say that either their lives were saved or that they avoided very long hospital stays because at that critical moment, when the bashers were coming at them, somebody had a gun.
You can find writing about partner benefits, and why, yes, partner benefits may make sense for homosexuals; but that we as homosexuals ought to oppose partner benefits for heterosexuals, because those benefits really are a substitute for marriage and really do undermine the family. And indeed, when gay marriage is legalized, we ought to be against partner benefits for homosexuals as well.
You'll find criticism of the right wing. You'll find, for example, David Boaz's landmark New York Times piece pointing out, as no one had ever done, that the pro-family right has virtually nothing to say about divorce. He counted their publications and discovered that they have reams of stuff on the homosexual threat to the family, but they never want to talk about divorce. Which do you think is the greater threat to American families?
You'll find attacks on the quota mentality among many of the leading gay groups, for example, who want to say that 50 percent of the board for the Washington march, I'm told, has to be of certain colors, certain genders and so on -- and why that's bad for us. A lively debate on hate-crimes laws. Et cetera.
All this, I think, is beginning to come together in an intellectual safe place for independent thinking. And I suppose the message I want to leave you with is that what I fully expect to happen in the next ten years is a convergence of independent thinking and a convergence of independent political activity that means, finally, we will be the swing vote, and we will be the people you have to capture in the center. And that, I think, is the key to our future.