First appeared in the Windy City Times.
AFTER EQUALITY, what?
That is to say, at some point in the indefinite future when gays and lesbians achieve equality, when we are fully accepted as equal, what will gay life be like? What will the gay community be like? Will there even be a gay community?
o one knows. But it is not an idle question. Equality is, after all, the end-state toward which most of our political effort, our time, our energy, our money, is aimed. So asking the question amounts to asking "What are we working toward?"
To begin with, it is far from clear that gays will ever achieve complete (social, legal, moral) equality. Have other historically stigmatized groups been fully accepted as equal? We do not have a lot of evidence that that happens.
Just as likely, we will asymptotically achieve acceptance -- that is, gradually approaching equality but never quite reaching it. Eventually it just may not be possible to make any further progress against a hard core of resistance. In some places or among some social/cultural groups gays may continue to be thought of as inferior, defective, immoral, evil or threatening.
For one thing there may always be sources of hostility that will disseminate a message hostile to us. Just as there are still backwoods racists, anti-semitic groups, even anti-Catholic zealots in this country, so there may always be homophobes promoting their message to people seeking some definable group to blame for their own alienation, discontent or lack of success. And there will always be doctrinal groups that define themselves by rejecting something else (fundamentalist Islam comes to mind).
Then too, what if humans have hard-wired into their psychology a root notion that reproduction and success with the other sex has intrinsic merit? If that is inborn, then there will be a point beyond which our quest for equality cannot go. We do not currently know whether it is inborn or culturally induced. We may find out.
Even if we achieved complete acceptance it seems unlikely that we will ever be regarded as "the same." We are, after all, only a small percentage of the population. If two men walk down the street holding hands they may draw notice in a way that a man and a woman doing so might not, not because people will be disapproving but because it is uncommon, like a man in a top hat. So we will, at least on occasion, never be completely invisible to others.
For the same reason, we will never eliminate the so-called "heterosexual presumption," the assumption that you are heterosexual unless otherwise stated. The T-shirts and buttons that say "How dare you presume that I'm heterosexual" make an arresting consciousness-raising statement, but no statistical sense at all.
If 95 percent of the population is heterosexual, people are going to assume, reasonably enough, that any given person is heterosexual. It need not be hostile; it is simply a safe bet. (In most parts of the U.S. Jews encounter the "Christian presumption" and in most gay enclaves Republicans encounter the "Democratic presumption.")
The point is that we are not likely to cease being aware of ourselves as members of a minority, even if we become fully accepted. Those who long for a feeling of identicality, unobtrusiveness or unself-consciousness that they may (at best) now feel only in a totally gay environment are likely to be disappointed.
Will there be a gay community, even gay bars, when equality happens? Partly, of course, gays coalesce socially and politically in response to hostile external pressure. If there is no hostility, there will be no pressure forcing gays together. But gays may still converge because of a kind of natural attraction rooted in a desire to be among people like themselves, people whose erotic and emotional vectors are intuitively comprehensible.
So many gays will still gather together in enclaves, social groups or friendship clusters as an "affinity group" like any other. Other gays may feel it less imperative than they do now to escape suburbs or small towns. That is beginning to happen some places even now.
There is also an obvious statistical reason to join a gay group or go to a gay bar: The chances are far better that some man there will find me interesting and erotically appealing than in the typical neighborhood bar. So for the single, the young or the randy (and these categories may overlap), gay institutions usefully increase their erotic opportunities and chances of finding a compatible life-partner.
However, there may be less contact between lesbians and gay men than now, since those groups have little in common except similarly stigmatized status. Rhetoric aside, our sexual orientations are, in fact, opposite rather than similar.
Apart from romantic aspirations, are our lives, our lifestyles, our psyches really much different from heterosexuals? I don't know and frankly no one else does either.
That means that equality for gays will be not only a minor social experiment (how does the presence of lots of open gays affect society?), but also will tell us a lot about gays too. That is, how much of our difference, or our sense of difference, is inherent and natural, and how much is induced by growing up and living in a society that has in a variety of ways communicated disapproval of us.
We may find out if some of the psychological qualities (irony, creativity, aestheticism) believed common among (some? many?) gay men are created by growing up under a condition of stigma (and our fumbling youthful efforts to resist or compensate for it), or are in some mysterious way actually a function of same-sex attraction, or whether the whole notion of gay difference is just an illusion, a self-serving, compensatory myth.
Will gays, individuals and couples, want to live their lives pretty much like heterosexuals, sinking into bourgeois normality, living within the same range of options and in roughly the same proportions (ostensible monogamy, suburbs, family ties, etc.)? Not entirely, I suspect, partly because of men's well-attested inherent sexual and social adventurousness, but it may take forms we cannot anticipate.
But equality will not entail that every conduct or lifestyle will be equally acceptable any more than every conduct by heterosexuals is now equally acceptable. Majorities seem to provide acceptance only on their terms, so people will apply the same standards to us that they apply to everyone else. Those who find those standards limiting will continue to feel some disapproval, but based on how they act rather than who they are.