Originally appeared June 28, 2000, in the Chicago Free Press.
We go through this every year. The annual Gay Pride parade brings on the same old chest pounding, breast beating, or tub thumping about diversity, normalization, inclusion, representativeness, self-expression, flamboyance, and much more.
Even as gays and lesbians make economic and social progress in society at large, we seem to make no progress in our internal arguments or rhetoric. Most gays just tune it out - probably rightly.
A favorite current target for the socio-cultural left is the menace of gay "assimilation." "Sex Panic" founder Michael Warner has written of "the trouble with normal." Activist Urvashi Vaid has written of the hostility she feels for bourgeois gay men.
Many other have gleaned in this same field. The latest to add his voice is Mattachine Society co-founder Harry Hay who told the San Francisco Chronicle, "The assimilationist movement is running us into the ground. Most gay people want to be like everyone else."
Hay thinks this is A Bad Thing.
But it is not very clear what Hay means by the "assimilationist movement." There is no organized movement telling gays and lesbians to move, say, to the suburbs and behave like heterosexuals. Besides, that is not really what is happening.
And who is this "us" Hay refers to? It cannot be gays because they are the ones doing it. Hay himself says "most gays" want to be like everyone else.
The point Hay is missing is that it is false to say that gays want to be like everyone else. Gays are already pretty much like everyone else. And this is what Hay, Warner, Vaid and so many others on the cultural left are really unhappy about. And it is why they constantly denounce most of the actually existing gay community.
Their disappointment probably derives ultimately from the ancient Marxist beliefs that the proletariat was the natural vehicle of revolution.
Since the gay left views gays as marginalized and oppressed in the same way classical Marxist thought the proletariat was, they have the same expectations for gays. So when gays do not live up to those expectations, they denounce gays as traitors to, uh, well, the expectations of the gay left.
(The proletariat similarly disappointed classical Marxists: It turned out to be the most conservative social class of all. The workers did not want a revolution; they wanted higher wages and shorter hours.)
The gay left assumed (or hoped) that coming out was a politically transformative act that would somehow (it was never quite clear why) transform torpid, bourgeois closeted gays into zealous out-of-the-closet social radicals. Their message was not simply "Come out" but rather: "Come out and adopt our beliefs and act the way we think you should."
It turned out, of course, that coming out was a transformative process, but psychologically transformative, not politically transformative. Coming out acted along vectors of increased self-esteem, enhanced personal integrity, and a sense of individual empowerment.
Gays who came out of the closet were the very last people willing to be told what to do with their lives. On the contrary, most of them felt more capable of self-determination than they had ever felt before. Trying to tell gays how to act out their liberation just does not work.
There are plenty of ironies here. Harry Hay, long a member of the American Communist Party during its most Stalinist phrase, says he has always been seeking brotherhood.
Referring to a 1930s labor strike he participated in (on Party orders) he told the Chronicle, "The brotherhood was intense. You couldn't be a part of that and not have your life changed."
Hay apparently hoped to find something similar among gays. But as a leader of Mattachine, Hay apparently carried over the Communist Party tendency to be directive and controlling. He claimed to be seeking universal brotherhood, but there are hints he did not always get along so well with actually existing individuals.
If so, it need not be surprising. It is a common enough syndrome among highly ideological people. If you have specific aims and expectations for how people should be, most people are going to disappoint your expectations and turn out to be unworthy. And if they fail to move toward your dream then, of course, they are traitors.
This seems to be the source of Hay's current animus as well as that of the others.
Most gays and lesbians, it seems, want to live happy, healthy, prosperous, fulfilled lives, pretty much the way their friends, relatives, and neighbors do. This perfectly reasonable desire is what is denounced as "assimilation."
But the word "assimilation" is somewhat disingenuous if it is meant to imply that gays are thereby sacrificing something that is part of their natural character or essential nature. No one is urging gays to sacrifice anything inherent in or natural to being gay or lesbian, and clearly gays do not see themselves as doing that.
Much the opposite, in fact. More and more gays are insisting that they be accepted for who they are wherever they happen to be and however they want to live.
Better words for this process might be "inclusion" or "integration" - words that suggest that a person is regarded and treated equally at the same time he remains fully himself. Whatever you call this, it would seem to be not a betrayal of the gay movement, but its triumph.