IGF CultureWatch

When I was in junior high I used to sit at the "black" lunch table in the cafeteria, much to the shock (and occasional ridicule) of my white schoolmates. The seating was not officially segregated, but with rare exceptions African-Americans sat together, and I sat with them.

It wasn't a grand political statement or a conscious act of solidarity or anything high-minded. On the contrary, it was a reluctant acknowledgment of my outsider status. While members of the white, mostly affluent student majority called me a "fag," the black students were nice to me, and I felt more comfortable around them.

Some years later I started going to the gay beaches on Fire Island, where I noticed a number of interracial straight couples. Interestingly, the "straight" part stuck out more than the "interracial" part-which, I later learned, was their main reason for choosing the gay beach. "We get a lot of flak at the straight beaches," they told me. "But gays are cool about it." Fellow outsiders, once again.

I thought about both of these events recently as I watched the movie Hairspray, the 2007 incarnation of the 1988 John Waters film (later a Broadway musical). One of the film's most poignant moments occurs when Penny, a working-class white girl, and Seaweed, a black male, reveal their relationship to Seaweed's mom, Motormouth Mabelle (played by Queen Latifah).

"Well, love is a gift," Mabelle responds. "A lot of people don't remember that. So, you two better brace yourselves for a whole lotta ugly comin' at you from a never-ending parade of stupid."

Many have speculated about whether and how Hairspray counts as a "gay" movie. Of course, there's the John Waters provenance, the drag lead character (originated by Divine and played on Broadway by Harvey Fierstein), and the inherent campiness of movie musicals. But the most profound connection lies in its message of acceptance: Hairspray celebrates forbidden love in the face of "a never-ending parade of stupid." It's a theme gays know well.

Gay-rights opponents often object to comparisons between the civil-rights movement and the gay-rights movement. Race, they say, is an immutable, non-behavioral characteristic, whereas homosexuality involves chosen behaviors; thus it's wrong (even insulting) to compare the two.

Even putting aside the fact that "civil rights" are something we're all fighting for-equal treatment under the law-this objection founders. It misunderstands the nature of racism, the nature of homophobia, and the point of the analogy between the two.

Although race is in some sense "an immutable, non-behavioral characteristic," racism is all about chosen behaviors. The racist doesn't simply object to people's skin color: he objects to their moving into "our" neighborhoods, marrying "our" daughters, attacking "our" values and so on. In other words, he objects to behaviors, both real and imagined. What's more, discriminating on the basis of race is most certainly chosen behavior. Calling race "non-behavioral" misses that important fact.

At the same time, calling homosexuality "behavioral" misses quite a bit as well. Yes, homosexuality (like heterosexuality) is expressed in behaviors, and some of those behaviors offend people. But one need not be sexually active to be kicked out of the house, fired from a job, or verbally or physically abused for being gay. Merely being perceived as gay (without any homosexual "behavior") is enough to trigger the abuse.

Even where chosen behaviors trigger the abuse, it doesn't follow that they warrant the abuse-any more than blacks' choosing to marry whites (and vice versa) warrants abuse. So the insistence that race is immutable whereas homosexuality is behavioral, even if it were accurate, misses the point. Gays, like blacks, face unjust discrimination, often in the name of religion, that interferes with some of the most intimate aspects of their lives. Hence the analogy.

I'm not denying that there are important differences between race and sexual orientation (or between racism and heterosexism). Gays and lesbians do not face the cumulative generational effects of discrimination the way ethnic minorities do, and we have nothing in American history comparable to slavery or Jim Crow. On the other hand, no one is kicked out of the house because his biological parents figured out that he's black. There are plusses and minuses to the lack of generational continuity (as well as the other differences)-and little point in arguing over who's worse off.

Early in Hairspray the young lead character announces, "People who are different-their time is coming." We "different" people have much to learn from one another, as the never-ending parade of stupid marches on.