A COMMON CHARGE against gay conservatives is that we are narrow and selfish, ignoring the needs of the disadvantaged. A typical example of this criticism is a recent article by Richard Goldstein in New York's Village Voice. Goldstein dismisses gay conservatives as "a recent arrival in the movement," then chides the Log Cabin Republicans for including too few poor, black, and female members. Finally, he upbraids Andrew Sullivan, the most prominent gay conservative in America, for focusing on gay marriage instead of things like "justice" and economic "security" for oppressed people.
Among progressives, words like "justice" and "security" are placeholders for a broad range of policy choices. As one recent and especially articulate letter to San Francisco's Bay Area Reporter put it, "our struggle for equality should include the struggle for universal access to health care, a guaranteed living wage, affordable and adequate housing for all," and so on. The writer reasons that these are "gay rights issues" because "we are everywhere." Gay conservatives, whom he disparages as out-of-touch, upper-class white males, are then faulted for not backing his policy preferences.
These critics are dead wrong about the gay right. As a matter of fact, gay conservatives are not "new arrivals" to the movement. Contrary to the widespread pop-history about the Stonewall riot, the American gay civil rights movement did not begin in any radical upheaval of the late 1960s. Embarrassing as this may be to some, many of the organizers of the movement in the 1950s were middle-class, white, male, and distinctly "assimilationist" (read: conservative) in their approach to gay civil rights. While it's true that there were also dedicated communists among these pre-Stonewall organizers, some, like Dorr Legg, were lifelong Republicans. They risked losing their freedom, jobs, families, and homes to a far greater degree than we do now.
Further, the undeniable demographic imbalance in the movement has not been limited to gay Republicans. As Stephen Murray notes in American Gay, even radical "queer" and AIDS street-theater groups have been mostly white and middle-class. Of course, there is no reason to conclude from this history that only conservative, wealthy, white males should lead the movement today.
Aside from its errors of history and fact, the left's critique of gay conservatives suffers more serious theoretical weaknesses.
First, it operates from an unworkably expansive definition of what constitutes a gay issue. If, as some would have it, anything that affects the life of any gay person anywhere is a gay issue, then there are no issues that aren't gay issues. It may make strategic sense occasionally to take sides on other issues in order to form political alliances (and the ideological tilt of those alliances will vary). An all-encompassing conception of gay civil rights, however, would make it illegitimate to focus on narrowly defined gay concerns.
That has profound consequences. Any organization that took this definition seriously would get little done for gay civil rights since it would constantly be distracted and divided by important peripheral questions. To avoid being unduly narrow, we become impossibly wide.
Even granting this limitless conception of gay civil rights, why are gays more qualified to hold forth on race and class issues than, say, a union of bricklayers? Sure, we're not incompetent to talk about them; but we're not more competent by virtue of being gay, either. To avoid being selfish, then, we become arrogant.
Second, accepting the notion that every conscientious citizen (gay or not) should be concerned about the problems of beleaguered groups, the next question is how to deal with those problems. Bromides about justice cannot mask how complicated the inquiry now becomes.
Consider the above-mentioned proposals, for example. There's a good argument that state-controlled "universal access to health care" would mean rationed and inefficient health care, with less incentive for entrepreneurial investment in lifesaving treatments and drugs for diseases like AIDS. A government-mandated "guaranteed living wage" - essentially a dramatically higher minimum wage - would be inflationary and would depress employment, hurting the lower classes most of all. "Affordable and adequate housing for all" is pleasant-sounding code language for things like rent control. Yet rent control discourages private investment in low-cost housing, hardly a boon to the poor. It goes on and on like that.
Third, even on strictly gay issues, the critique of gay conservatives' priorities badly misfires. Same-sex marriage, for example, offers more to Goldstein's disenfranchised constituencies than he imagines.
Allowed to wed, poverty-stricken gays will have an opening to the array of advantages marriage provides, including health care, tax breaks, testimonial privileges, and Social Security benefits. The generally higher physical, emotional, and financial health enjoyed by married couples will finally be available to disadvantaged gays - people that are in far greater need of those benefits than rich white boys are.
Women, whose desire for variety in sexual partners is on average lower than men's, are disproportionately more likely to access the benefits of same-sex marriage. Why belittle this simple measure of justice and security for gay women?
What we have is not a debate between a generous group of people who care about the downtrodden and a stingy group of people who don't. What we have, among other things, is a complicated debate between distinct visions of how to help them. That's a serious discussion, unlike the polemical one Goldstein and friends want.