IGF CultureWatch

MUST THE GAY CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT tie its fate to uneasy alliances with various left-leaning groups - labor unions, plaintiffs' lawyers, peace activists, the civil rights establishment, reformed Marxists - in order to win equality? After all, even liberals like Bill "The Era of Big Government is Over" Clinton run to the center of the national political spectrum in order to put together an electoral majority.

The evidence suggests that the time may be right to form new alliances that will give us a chance to put together a lasting gay-friendly majority. That evidence comes from no less than the single most homophobic major political party in Western civilization - the Republicans.

A poll of GOP voters has produced some useful and encouraging results. The poll grouped Republicans into five categories: "Moralists" (about 19 percent of all GOP voters), who emphasize cultural and social issues over economic concerns and tend to be both anti-abortion and anti-gay; "Cultural Populists" (26 percent of GOP voters), who also put cultural/social issues ahead of economic ones, but emphasize conservative stands on issues like crime, drugs, affirmative action, and welfare; "Deficit Hawks" (25 percent of GOP voters), who emphasize economic issues, especially the necessity of balanced budgets; "Supply Siders" (20 percent of GOP voters), who also emphasize economic issues, but concentrate on cutting taxes; and "Progressives" (10 percent of GOP voters), who put social/cultural issues first and support a more activist government.

Non-Moralist Republicans constitute 81 percent of the total GOP vote. They are the ones who, along with at least 26 percent of gay voters (and probably more), gave us a Republican Congress in 1994 on the basis of a "Contract with America" that highlighted economic issues and nowhere mentioned gays.

Strong majorities of all GOP voter groups except the Moralists oppose government repression of homosexuality. For example, more than 60 percent each of the Cultural Populists, Deficit Hawks, and Supply Siders, and 83 percent of the Progressives, agree that government has no right to interfere in gays' private lives.

Other polls have shown similar majorities of Republicans who oppose anti-gay discrimination in employment, housing, and even in the military. Their views are represented in public by prominent Republicans like Barry Goldwater, who supported gay equality late in life; William Weld, the most pro-gay governor the nation has ever seen; and commentator Mary Matalin, who said recently that the party did not deserve to be in the majority if it continues gay-baiting.

So if the non-Moralists oppose government repression of homosexuality, and condemn anti-gay discrimination, why haven't they reined in the anti-gay rhetoric and actions of party leaders like Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.)? Though there's only anecdotal evidence of it, part of the reason may be that until now the gay civil rights movement has made little effort to reach out to these groups who (along with independents and moderate Democrats) comprise a solid majority of all voters. On the contrary, many of our organizations and leaders have repeatedly taken stands that seem calculated to offend them.

An example of what I'm talking about occurred in a recent online debate between renowned gay leftist Urvashi Vaid and a senior editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, David Brooks. Vaid has publicly linked capitalism to the evils of sexism, racism, and homophobia.

Brooks took note of this and retorted: "If gay and lesbian liberation means a New Left-style assault on mainstream American values and institutions, like the regulated market system we now enjoy, then I will be against the gay and lesbian liberation movement and so will many of the people who would otherwise be sympathetic to the cause." With nothing to gain except the wrath of the religious right, the non-Moralist Republican majority sees no advantage in standing up for gays and possibly plenty to lose.

So what do these non-Moralists believe in? Most of them oppose affirmative action and gun control, support balanced budgets even at the expense of social programs, and favor school choice in the form of vouchers. Overall, they like free markets and tax cuts and dislike government regulation and lawsuit abuse. None of that is inconsistent with gay equality, but it is incompatible with the views of one or another part of the progressive coalition to which we seem wedded.

If we can show the broad middle of America that gays do not monolithically oppose them on a range of important economic and social issues, we may win their trust and support. If we can show them that equality for gays does not threaten the national consensus in favor of limited government, and even most traditional values, they will not fear our admission to that consensus. That will forge a coalition of the majority, one that will finally bring equality.

None of this will persuade committed gay leftists to slough off their own political agenda, nor should it. Nor should it lead us to the conceit so common on the left that any position we take on these issues is the true "gay position." But it should embolden the rest of us - most gay men and women, I believe - to make ourselves heard in debates about public policy and not fear offending our traditional allies on the left.

The Barry Goldwaters, William Welds, and Mary Matalins of the world can be brought into the fold. But old-style progressive coalition politics will never be able to enlist them. That's a job for the rest of us.

MY MOM WOULDN'T THINK OF herself as having gay pride. But she has it. It is simpler than the form of gay pride many of us believe in; Mom's gay pride hasn't developed the accretions that sophisticated activists' pride has.

Mom is not a citizen of any Queer Nation. In fact, she doesn't use the word "queer" to talk about gay people at all. In the small town in central Texas where she was raised, queer wasn't a nice word to describe homosexuals. She wouldn't understand the need to reclaim it.

Mom doesn't believe that silence always equals death. When you don't have something good to say, don't say anything. That's not death; it's maturity.

She's never seen a "post-gay."

Mom doesn't think of Hillary Clinton as a "First Lady we can fuck," as comedienne Lea DeLaria described Mrs. Clinton from the stage of the 1993 March on Washington. Mom's never been to a March on Washington. It's not that she's against marches. She just works a lot.

She thinks HIV causes AIDS, so you should avoid getting HIV. Simple-minded, huh?

She wouldn't understand why supporting equality for gay people means that she should oppose NAFTA or the Gulf War, as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force thinks. She doesn't make the connections.

Mom thinks of an "outing" as a trip to the beach or an amusement park, not as the practice of exposing someone's private life to the world in order to embarrass them for some political purpose.

If she thinks of sexual freedom at all, it is probably in the form of relief that the birth-control pill came along when she was growing up. Two children were enough, thank you. If someone tried to explain the concept of an open relationship to her, she'd probably think, what's the point? She's never read Foucault.

She wouldn't storm a church during mass to protest against the anti-gay statements of its leaders. She believes in God, but not too much.

To be honest, I don't think she gets this gay Republican thing either. To her, the Republican Party is just mean to gays. Why bother trying to recall a party to principles of limited government and individual freedom when it has honored those ideas more in the breach than the observance anyway? She probably wonders about my sanity in trying to fight within the GOP. Sometimes I do too.

Mom's gay pride is best exemplified by an exchange she had with a co-worker not long after I told her I am gay. Mom was telling the co-worker about how I had come out and how emotional it all was. The co-worker was very understanding and sympathetic. She put her hand on mom's shoulder and said, "I'll pray with you to change him."

"I don't want to change him," Mom replied, stunned at the suggestion. "He's my son. I love him the way he is."

In most of America in 1999, that is a revolutionary statement. The thing that got to me when she told me that story is that she really believed it. She hadn't learned it as a slogan at some meeting or in the pages of some book. She felt it.

Most parents, even loving parents, would change their children from gay to straight if they could. It would make life easier on everyone, after all. Less fear of getting that midnight call from the police telling you your kid got beaten into a sidewalk somewhere. Less worry about discrimination and ridicule. Less concern about the possibility of a lonely future without kids or a stable relationship. Less anxiety about AIDS.

I suspect a lot of gay people share these fears. I don't think we're really very proud of being gay most of the time -- even many of those who go shouting in the streets declaring their gay pride. I remember during the 1993 March on Washington one speaker asked the crowd whether anyone present would take a pill if it would make them straight. There was silence for a moment. I think it was the saddest silence I ever heard.

Then the crowd's political instincts took over and people shouted, "No!" It was a rehearsed, activist "no," expressed with the kind of exaggerated defiance people use when they don't really believe what they're saying.

I don't know what my life would be like if I were straight. I have no doubt it would be easier in many ways. But if I were straight, I wouldn't be me. I would be some other person. It is difficult to have any kind of pride when, deep down, you want to be someone else.

My mom doesn't want me to be someone else. She would do many things for me. But she would not give me that pill. She makes me proud to be gay.

WHAT DO GAY CONSERVATIVES BELIEVE IN? Can one support equality for gays and at the same time remain faithful to conservatism? Or does embracing one mean abandoning the other?

What follows is an incomplete and simplified attempt to respond to these questions. Religious issues, for example, are omitted, though for many people they are an important part of conservative philosophy. The conservatism described is my own, but it leans much on classic conservative thinkers like Edmund Burke, T.S. Eliot, and Russell Kirk.

First and foremost, conservatism respects tradition and history. It prefers stability to change, continuity to experiment, the tried to the untried. Conservatives recognize the occasional need for reform, of course, for that is one means of a society's preservation. But we approach change with pessimism, caution, and a great deal of humility.

We see society more as a tree than as a machine. It is organic, developing slowly over centuries. The generation that thinks it can wholly remake society according to some preconceived design soon adorns the Hotel de Ville with human heads on pikes, or dots the land with gulags, or encircles the concentration camp with barbed wire.

How does a commitment to tradition square with a belief in gay equality? America's political tradition is centered on the protection of individual liberty and autonomy. This country, at its best, has welcomed those who do not conform to others' judgments about what they should be. The political and religious misfits, the poor, the unwelcome, came here because America promised they would be judged on their own merits.

Yet despite the nation's principled stand on liberty and equality, it also has a legacy of homophobia, just as it once enshrined racism and sexism in its laws. Gay conservatives are dissatisfied with present practices regarding homosexuals - on everything from marriage to the military - precisely because, laid beside the nation's higher tradition of respect for individuality, these anti-gay practices are found wanting.

When principle and higher traditions collide with particular practices, the latter must give way. In his "Letter from the Birmingham Jail" and other writings and speeches, Martin Luther King, Jr. appealed not to fashionable third-world nostrums, but to distinctly American notions concerning liberty and equality under law. His rhetoric drew from Jefferson and Lincoln, not Marx or Castro. We see America as he saw it: a great nation that has fallen short of its own noble promise.

Second, conservatives cultivate a profound distrust of government, both because of the encroachments it makes on liberty and because of the unintended mischief it can do. Limited government is our constitutional design. The state's first and primary obligation is to preserve order and protect the physical security and property of the citizenry. Beyond these tasks, conservatives are wary of government involvement.

Government has been no friend of gays, intruding on gay lives with its sodomy laws and so much more. Among other things, it reinforces prejudice through its refusal to recognize gay relationships. It has often done a poor job of protecting our physical security from gay-bashers, either because it did not care or because it implicitly endorsed the beatings.

Crime, as a threat to physical security and property, must be unsentimentally suppressed. According to a recent study, gays live disproportionately in large cities. That's also where crime is most prevalent. Crime is therefore of particular concern to gays. Put more police in the streets, more criminals in jail for a longer time, make punishment surer and swifter, and - gasp - crime goes down.

Third, property rights are at the core of the conservative's vision of a just society. Private property provides a haven into which the citizen can retreat from the coercive and expropriative hand of government, as well as from the irrational prejudices and actions of other citizens. Property rights are therefore both a bulwark against despotism and a haven of privacy.

Gays are well served by a strong system of property rights. Camp Sister Spirit, a privately owned gay women's retreat in Ovett, Miss., was threatened a few years ago by the breakdown of respect for property rights and the reluctance of local authorities to preserve those rights in the face of anti-gay prejudice. The retreat's owners would have fared much better much sooner if the citizens of Ovett had known their property laws from their burning crosses.

Finally, gay conservatives do not recoil from "values" or morality, as the gay left so often seems to do. The learned wisdom of human experience as reflected by widely held moral principles is not lightly to be discarded. Love, courage, thrift, honesty, respect for life, generosity, duty, and many other virtues our parents taught us are powerful instruments for good.

But we gay conservatives have set ourselves on a course to strike intolerance of gays from any respectable enumeration of values worth preserving. Like other generations before us, we have discovered how far removed hatred is from the core of our heritage.

So there it is: respect for the nation's highest traditions, distrust of government encroachments and power, high regard for private property, and adherence to the moral values that make a society good as well as wealthy. All of these broad principles of conservatism are entirely consistent with - and, indeed, should result in - an unapologetic commitment to full civil rights for gay Americans.

SHOULD THE GAY CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT rename itself "The Transgender Rights Movement?" You'd think so, if you believe the recent comments of some of our leaders. For example, openly gay Houston City Councilwoman Annise Parker recently wrote, "Transgender is a much broader term than gay, and encompasses the entire group of gays and lesbians" who by their choice of same-sex mates "transgress" gender boundaries.

Georgia gay leader Cindy Abel also calls gays "gender transgressors." In a recent column she proclaimed, "We're not so different from those whose internal identity doesn't match their exterior bodies."

Since when?

This whole business about gays as "gender transgressors" and not matching our "exterior bodies" calls to mind the long-discredited theories of the early German gay civil rights advocate, Karl Ulrichs. In a well-intentioned effort to help gays in his time, Ulrichs concocted a theory that homosexuals constitute an "intermediate" or "third" sex - not really male or female. He even invented a special name for us: urnings. "That an actual man would feel sexual love for a man is impossible," Ulrichs wrote in 1870. "The urning is not a true man. He is a mixture of man and woman. He is man only in terms of body build." Ulrichs's theory was, of course, completely wrong.

Parker, Abel, and other gender rebels (some of them transgender but most not) often cast their theories as a plea for the "inclusion" of transgender issues in the gay civil rights struggle. However, they are nothing more than the modern-day inheritors of the embarrassing legacy of Ulrichs and his hypothesis about gays as some kind of third sex. Some people must have not been to school in the last century. They are trying to resuscitate the urning.

Our new gender rebels argue that gays transgress at least one boundary expected of them, whether male or female: they have sex with people of the same sex. This one fact, we are told, makes gays natural upstarts against the very idea of defined gender roles. At heart, like Ulrichs, they really don't believe that an "actual man" can love another man. If a man loves another man it must be because he challenges the very concept of manhood itself.

The evidence concerning how we gays see ourselves suggests otherwise. A recent study by psychologist Michael Bailey concluded that gays see themselves in gender-conforming terms and seek gender-conforming traits in prospective mates. Bailey studied the personal ads in gay magazines. Out of 673 personal ads placed by gay men, 98 percent described themselves as masculine or in similar terms. Of 210 ads placed by gay women, 59 percent described themselves as feminine or in similar terms. If Bailey had not counted athletic activities as masculine, an even larger percentage of the gay women's ads described themselves in feminine terms.

Equally frustrating for our gender rebels, Bailey found that 96 percent of gay men and 80 percent of gay women sought partners with gender-conforming traits. Bailey also studied gays who never placed such ads and came to the same conclusions.

None of this is very shocking to those of us who live in the real world, as opposed to the fantasy-land of the gender rebels and their urnings. All of us, gay and straight, exhibit gender-nonconforming behavior at some times and to varying degrees. Are we all gender transgressors by that logic? A single riotous act is not exactly a revolution.

Among gays, moreover, gender nonconformance has historically served the function of signaling to other gays who we are. Gender nonconformance is an observable trait, after all; homosexuality is not. And we have needed to conceal ourselves because of anti-gay prejudice. Gender nonconforming behavior among gays may often be, in that sense, a vestige of the need to "hide" produced by the very homophobia we are supposed to be fighting.

And the fact that some of us occasionally exhibit gender nonconformance no more makes the gay civil rights struggle a "transgender movement" than the fact that some of us have good taste in design makes it an "interior-decorating movement." All such reductionist theories, whether invented by our enemies or by our supposed friends, confine gay life to a particular pattern and thus do us a great disservice. They fuel stereotypes that hurt us - not because being an effeminate man or a butch woman is bad - but because they are stereotypes.

Our gender rebels may retort: "Fine. Gays may not be fighting oppressive patriarchal gender roles, but we ought to start fighting them." That's an interesting but much more radical argument, because it shifts the debate from focusing on what gays are to what gays should be.

Poor souls, our rebels must try to enlist us in a war against gender that few of us believe in, and indeed, one in which most of us appear to be fierce partisans for the other side. It seems that someone, whether from the far right or the far left, is always trying to tell us how to live.

But the gender rebels are entitled to their idiosyncratic strategy for achieving equality. I will leave them to the care of Karl Ulrichs, the "third sex" theory, the mythical urnings, and the other anti-gay stereotypes they hold so dear. We gender patriots have work to do.