IGF CultureWatch

Originally published July 4, 2003, in The Washington Blade.

Inevitably, somebody had to rain on our victory parade, in the middle of Stonewall Sunday. I refer not to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., who endorsed the Let's Blame Gays for Our Marital Problems Amendment, but to John Rechy, author of the landmark gay novel "City of Night."

In a commentary in the Los Angeles Times, Rechy praises the Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, but then immediately launches into a litany of all the discrimination and indignities and violence endured by gay people during the past thirty years. Refusing to celebrate our monumental victory without griping, he drags gloom and doom into the room like Snoopy sitting on the television set imitating a vulture.

"Without in any way belittling the decency of the justices in their brave opinion," Rechy says as he does it anyway, "some might view the decision as a vastly imperfect apology for the many lives devastated by cruel laws that made possible the myriad humiliations of gay people, the verbal assaults and screams of 'faggot!' - the muggings, the suicides, the murders...." Well, happy Pride to you, too!

Pardon me, Mr. Rechy, but the news on June 26 was so bad for right wing bigots that Strom Thurmond finally keeled over. As Paddy Chayefsky said to Vanessa Redgrave the night she ranted against "Zionist hoodlums" in accepting an Oscar, "a simple 'thank you' would have sufficed."

Rechy is not the only one among us who won't take yes for an answer. Earlier in June, at a State of the Movement confab in Washington, Matt Foreman of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force talked as if we were about to be overrun by the radical right. He even discounted the anticipated victory on sodomy laws, saying that the mere removal of a negative was no big deal. Considering that people have lost their jobs and children over it, it's a very big deal, indeed.

As to the increasing apoplexy of the far right, black lesbian activist Mandy Carter got it exactly right when she replied to Foreman that the reason they are so upset is that they know we are winning. Maybe we'll get lucky when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issues its upcoming marriage ruling, and all the nutty fundamentalists will have a collective Rapture and be sucked into the void.

Pardon my irreverence, but I just got an email from Focus on the Family trying to sell me two videos challenging Darwin's theory of evolution, and I am thinking, Bush is afraid these guys will bolt the party? He should worry that they'll stay. It is hardly in his interest to have the culture war take center stage in his re-election effort.

It is high time that we acknowledge we are winning. This is not to say we have won, despite conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg having so declared. Of course our fight is not over. But as veteran gay activist Frank Kameny says, the tide of history is with us. At last the Supreme Court has upheld our right to liberty and to respect for our relationships. The implications are profound, which is precisely why the right-wing scapegoaters are up in arms.

In San Francisco on the day of the Lawrence ruling, members of a gay American Legion post took down the huge rainbow flag that flies over the Castro District and raised the Stars and Stripes. The only other time this was done was after 9/11, when Mark Bingham died among the heroes of Flight 93. We already knew that the flag flew for us too, but Justice Kennedy and his colleagues have made it official.

There may be no such intersection, but symbolically gay people are turning in growing numbers from Christopher Street onto Main Street. This does not mean that we are abandoning our gay identities, but simply that we are shedding our outsider status. Those who cherish the film noir appeal of cruising windowless bars in warehouse districts are free to indulge themselves. The rest of us can enjoy the sunshine.

As to the so-called "crime against Nature," given that the theocrats are impervious to the evidence and logic refuting this old slander, I can only quote the late Kate Hepburn in "The African Queen": "Nature, Mr. Alnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above."

Originally published May 9, 2003, in The Washington Blade .

ON APRIL 19, the day before the notorious AP interview with Senator Rick Santorum, R-Pa., appeared, the Salt Lake Tribune ran an AP story featuring Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, talking about polygamy.

At a town meeting Hatch attended in southern Utah, the director of an anti-polygamy group said that teenage girls in nearby Hildale were forced into plural marriages, and he asked how children could be raped and nothing was done about it. Hatch replied that of course children should not be raped, but said, "I wouldn't throw accusations around unless you know they're true." He went on, "I'm not here to justify polygamy. All I can say is, I know people in Hildale who are polygamists who are very fine people."

As the Church Lady would say, isn't that special? His disavowal notwithstanding, Hatch sounded more concerned about the rights of polygamists than about the plight of child brides. My point is not to call the senator soft on child rape, but to observe that politicians are influenced not just by religious beliefs (the elders of Hatch's Mormon faith renounced polygamy more than a century ago), but by calculations about voters. Senator Hatch has a lot of polygamists for constituents.

With the initial outrage and jokes on Santorum having run their course (Jay Leno, noting that the senator has a problem with gay sex, said, "Maybe he's just not doing it right"), those of us who wish to defend our privacy rights need to make political calculations of our own.

A few weeks before the 1993 gay march on Washington, Congressman Barney Frank, D-Mass., warned that gay cultural advances do not automatically translate into success at the ballot box. Referring to the upcoming march, he said that having a big party on the Mall is fine, but it would be more effective for gays to spend the price of first-class postage to mail letters to their senators and representatives.

Santorum's "love the sinner, hate the sin" stance - he has nothing against us, he just thinks we should be arrested if we act on our feelings - remains hard to dismiss in the Republican party because that party has a large, well-motivated constituency that agrees with him. As Andrew Sullivan observes, "It's not that far from saying that you have nothing against Jews, as long as they go to Church each Sunday. (Which was, of course, the Catholic position for a very long time.)"

When Senator Trent Lott, R-Miss., lamented the 1948 loss of Strom Thurmond's racist presidential campaign, and when Congressman Jim Moran, D-Va., blamed Jews for the war in Iraq, both men lost their respective leadership positions because of respect for black and Jewish citizens. Gays have made great strides politically, but we are well short of the goal of making homophobia political poison. In the last election, candidates from both major parties used anti-gay tactics against their opponents.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and White House spokesman Ari Fleischer have publicly defended Santorum, not for their stated reasons but because scapegoating gays is still largely accepted in the GOP. Alas, moderate Republicans like Senators Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I., who repudiated Santorum's remarks, are rare outside New England. Republican leaders may be out of step with the moderate voters they need to win elections, but this must be proven on election day.

With all due respect to my fellow Democrats, who in general have been much more welcoming to gays, the answer is not simply partisan. Persuading and motivating voters is easier when you appeal to, rather than attack, their own values. Santorum's coercive worldview violates conservative principles of smaller government. Crusading to impose one's religious beliefs on others is distracting and spiritually corrupting. A governing majority for gay rights can best be achieved by making the conservative case for respecting gay families and not just the liberal one.

Democrats can try advancing gay equality by embracing traditional values such as "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" and respecting rather than scorning Middle America. Republicans, including my friends in Log Cabin who are fighting for the soul of their party, need to convince more candidates and local party organizations that catering to the fanaticism of the far right will cost them more votes in the long run than it will gain them.

In Pennsylvania as elsewhere, this means working locally and statewide to promote winning alternatives to the likes of Rick Santorum. The other side is working too.

Originally appeared October 25, 2002, in The Washington Blade.

IN A RECENT COMMENTARY circulated to the gay press, gay Muslim activist Faisal Alam laments the absence of gay voices from recent anti-war rallies. I, on the contrary, regard this as a sign of our community's maturity and good sense.

We have been here before. Twelve years ago, several fellow activists and I met with the board of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to criticize its formal opposition to the Persian Gulf War. In brief, we said that the war was not a gay issue, and that in any case appeasement was not the way toward peace any more than it was in World War II.

Then, to counter the radical gays who had joined the anti-war protests, my friend Barrett Brick and I formed a group called GAIA, which alternately stood for Gays Against Iraqi Aggression and Gays Against Isolationism and Appeasement.

With a large, hand-made placard, Brick applied the slogan "Silence = Death" to those who favored a passive response to Saddam's reckless aggression. This upset the radicals, but it also got the attention of other groups defending the war effort, who were surprised to find gays on their side. We told them that gays have been fighting for America since its founding. We cited polls showing that most gays agreed with the overwhelming majority of Americans who supported the war, not the few who opposed it.

This time around, with NGLTF thus far avoiding its earlier mistake, Alam has taken up the anti-war standard. Remarkably, he manages to write an entire column opposing war with Iraq without once mentioning Saddam Hussein. Instead, he complains that spending money on war would take money from "social welfare programs." But this is as arbitrary as pitting housing needs against mental health needs. Alam ignores the primacy of national defense as a responsibility of government, preferring to call for an unspecified "peaceful solution." The fact that Iraq has violated 16 United Nations resolutions does not convince him that peaceful efforts have failed.

Alam ignores Saddam's long record of international mayhem that brought us to this point. The only country he is willing to blame for anything is the United States. This upside-down worldview would be comical if Alam and others on the anti-American left were not in dead earnest. And because he includes every conceivable issue in the gay agenda, he declares the war with Iraq a "queer" issue, without showing the slightest awareness of which side actually treats gays better. (Hint: It's the one that allows gay Muslims to organize and publish op-eds.)

Alam writes as if gays who disagree with his anti-war stand are all going to "$250 tuxedo dinners" - ignoring the fact that these events are fundraisers for gay causes - and as if enjoying the fruits of our labor is disreputable. He gratuitously insults an extraordinarily generous community, while asserting that "the real fight for freedom" occurs elsewhere. How are the downtrodden helped by this ridiculous, mendacious class warfare?

Alam says we once "understood that single-issue politics would not win us anything." Here he falsifies the history of the gay rights movement in order to portray us as having fallen away from a nobler early period. In fact, some of our movement's pioneers, like DC's Frank Kameny (another critic of NGLTF 12 years ago), maintained a laser-like focus on gay issues.

Alam should check out the website of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, DC (of which Kameny and I are members) at www.glaa.org, and review our timeline for examples of how much a group singly focused on gay rights can accomplish.

Alam could also learn a lot from English gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell, who opposes war with Iraq but says, "It is disturbing the way the anti-war campaign is ignoring the Iraqi government's monstrous human rights abuses, and is offering no counter-plan for overthrowing the murderous regime in Baghdad."

To the extent that past American policies have contributed to the problem that now threatens the Middle East, we make a fine choice for the ones to do something about it. As even Tatchell says, "A democratic Iraq would be a beacon for human rights throughout the Middle East. It could give lesbian and gay people their first taste of freedom in a region that is dominated by brutal Islamic fundamentalist regimes."

Alam brazenly invokes an early flashpoint of our movement in support of his untimely pacifism. Pardon me, but at Stonewall they fought back.

Originally appeared May 31, 2002, in The Washington Blade.

Syndicated columnist Mubarak Dahir recently slammed "several gay writers," whom he did not identify, for using the assassination of Dutch gay politician Pim Fortuyn as an excuse to demonize Muslims. He charges that these writers "have even marked followers of Islam as responsible for Fortuyn's demise, if not his actual murder."

As one of the writers in question, I must dispute Dahir's characterizations. Dahir, usually a more accurate writer, offers no evidence that anyone has blamed Muslims for Fortuyn's murder. He fails to quote anything that columnist Paul Varnell or I wrote in our Fortuyn essays. He refers to "gay writers masquerading as experts on the Dutch political system," as if we could not possibly be informed on the subject, and as if only experts approved by him have a right to comment. This is merely a ploy to avoid seriously addressing our arguments.

Dahir suggests that there has been no similar criticism of Christians, despite the fact that the religious leaders most often criticized by gay Americans are the Reverends Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Dahir asserts that "few mainstream religious leaders of any faith openly embrace us," whereas a number of Protestant denominations perform gay weddings and ordain gay ministers. Where are the gay-affirming Muslims?

I once dated a devout Muslim who expressed anger at the portrayal of Muslims as terrorists, while he himself celebrated the murder of the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses. He insisted that he did not have to read the book in order to make conclusions about it, and that no one had the right to commit blasphemy.

When Martin Scorsese released his film of the Nikos Kazantzakis novel The Last Temptation of Christ, there were indeed cries of blasphemy by theocratic Christians who demanded that the film be banned. But unlike censors in Muslim countries, the fundamentalists are not in charge here, and filmgoers were mostly free to make up their own minds. In his acclaimed novel The Tin Drum, German author Günter Grass refers to Jesus as "Athlete of Athletes, world's champion hanger on the cross," and describes seagulls attacking a carcass as "the Holy Ghost descending to feast the Pentecost." Instead of being sentenced to death, he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Three decades ago, when I began questioning my Roman Catholic upbringing, my uncle, an Augustinian priest, said to me, "Who are you to question centuries of Church teaching?" My answer was, "A human being with a brain." Yet I later managed to graduate in the Honors Program at Villanova University, where my uncle had been a prominent official. The card catalog in the campus library still noted books that were on the old Index Prohibitorum, but the condemned books were nonetheless available on the library shelves. Christendom has its problems, but it has had a Reformation. Islam desperately needs something similar.

Dahir quotes Fortuyn as condemning "third-generation Moroccans" who "won't live by our values." The values to which Fortuyn referred were social tolerance and equality for gays and women. Dahir does not explain what is wrong with these values or with defending them. He also attacks Fortuyn for blaming crime on gangs of immigrant Muslim youths, while ignoring the fact that Fortuyn's crime statistics were accurate. Apparently we are expected to ignore reality to protect Muslim sensibilities.

Dahir attributes criticism of Muslims to "fear and ignorance and stereotyping." As my colleague Bruce Bawer writes, "Fear is right. Fear of having a wall dropped on you! Fear of gay-rights advances in the Netherlands and other countries in western Europe - and of liberal democracy generally - being watered down, or reversed, by a growing Muslim minority that, generation by generation, refuses to adapt to democratic ways." As to ignorance, Bawer asks, "Ignorance of what? The strong, vibrant democratic systems in place throughout the Islamic world?"

According to Dahir, "Muslims are the new communists. an easy scapegoat for all our political woes." Here Dahir joins the leftists who talk, against overwhelming evidence, as if the Communist threat to the West was entirely invented by Joe McCarthy. Does Dahir claim that the persecutions of gays in Muslim countries were fabricated? As to scapegoating, even after September 11, Muslims enjoy far more protections in the West than under Islam, which may be one reason so many come here.

Islam has a serious problem in its treatment of gays and women, and in its suppression of free expression and free worship. Portraying critics of this as villains is mere evasion. I can sympathize with the cautious approach of Faisal Alam, leader of the gay Muslim group Al-Fatiha, since he has received death threats as I have not, but that only illustrates the problem. And I do not recall any Christian fundamentalists flying fuel-laden aircraft into office buildings. I do not blame Dahir for this. I just want him to stop his distortions and stop blaming the West for defending its hard-won secular tradition of personal liberty.

Originally appeared May 16, 2002, in the San Francisco Bay Times.

Just as musical silences can be as eloquent as any note struck, political silences can speak volumes. The silence of America's national gay organizations after the assassination of gay Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn is revealing. Let me summarize it this way: If you are gay and perceived to be on the political right, do not send to know for whom the bell tolls. It does not toll for thee.

Fortuyn, an outspoken defender of the rights of gays and women against intolerant Muslims who enjoy his country's public benefits while attacking its values, was widely and falsely characterized by news reports as a racist, right-wing extremist -- despite the racial diversity in his own party. Responding to media distortions is normally the stock in trade of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, yet in this prominent case GLAAD has had nothing to say.

The Human Rights Campaign has been quick to issue press releases and organize vigils when it connected the killings of gay people to a climate of hate. Yet now, when an openly gay candidate is murdered after being demonized by establishment politicians and journalists, HRC is silent. And the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, which considered the Persian Gulf War a vital gay issue, sees no relevance when a man who stood a good chance of becoming the world's first openly gay head of government is savagely cut down.

One explanation for this silence might be uncritical acceptance of stories that caricatured Fortuyn as just another fascist clone, despite his liberalism on many issues and his loathing for France's Jean-Marie Le Pen. But there is a more telling explanation. Pim's campaign was a nuisance because he highlighted the conflict between two cherished liberal values: the rights of gays and women on the one hand, and multiculturalism on the other. By criticizing Islam, he broke a taboo.

There is nothing progressive about refusing to distinguish cultures that persecute gays from those in which we have thrived. We are not supposed to notice that our rights have prospered in the capitalist, democratic West, because this would contradict the notion that all cultures are created equal. Never mind that the Islamists who hate us do not share this egalitarian view, but instead wish to impose Islam on the entire world. According to the left's double standard, any projection of Western values - even domestically - represents economic and cultural imperialism, while the most violent hate-mongering is overlooked if done in the name of the oppressed.

As Steven Emerson details in his book American Jihad, America's open society is being used against us by our enemies, who have only to couch their activities as religious or charitable or civil-rights related in order to operate with impunity. They are aided by a left that romanticizes Palestinians the way earlier radicals romanticized Ho Chi Minh.

This can have comical results. As Steve Miller of the Independent Gay Forum reports, a group calling itself Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism participated in a recent pro-Palestinian rally at UC Berkeley. A Palestinian objected, saying, "Gay people have no place in society, whether in Palestine or in the U.S." When someone took issue with him, he replied, "You are a cultural imperialist." Meanwhile, the only Middle Eastern country that respects gay rights, Israel, is condemned by queers for defending itself.

Freedom cannot last without preserving the social climate that nourishes it. Why should any country, much less one of 16 million people on a mere 16 thousand square miles, feel obliged to continue welcoming immigrants who refuse to embrace its values or its language? How is it unreasonable to oppose criminal gangs of immigrant youths? Dismissing such concerns as racist rather than considering their merits will not make them go away. And reacting to the murder of a democratic candidate as if he had it coming, simply because he had the temerity to challenge prevailing wisdom, is depraved.

Fittingly, Fortuyn is attacked from the right as well as the left. In a posting on The National Review's "The Corner" the day of Fortuyn's funeral, Rod Dreher called Pim a "libertine" and compared the West to Weimar Germany as a society endangered by moral decline. In fact, as a champion of personal responsibility, Pim opposed threats to liberty whether they were dressed in the censoriousness of the religious right or the nannyism of the socialist European mega-state.

The reaction to Pim's death in many quarters demonstrates how right he was about the bankruptcy of the political establishment. It is not Fortuyn, smeared posthumously as both a libertine and a fascist, who represents the decadence of the West, but the entrenched elites who are indignant at his challenge to their simplistic political categories. In death, Pim's invigorating voice has not been silenced. As I join my Dutch cousins in their grief for what has been taken from them, I recall the words of Walt Whitman:

"Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac."

Thursday, August 13, 1998

DEAR FATHER MORROW:

I have read with interest your remarks at the Family Research Council's anti-gay conference yesterday here in Washington, and I wanted to share my thoughts with you.

I am a graduate of the Saint Catherine Labouré Elementary School Class of 1970, where I was a straight-A student. I grew up in the parish and received my Baptism, First Communion, and Confirmation there. I also attended my mother's funeral there. As you can see, I have extensive ties to your parish...

You will be less happy to learn that two days before my graduation from Villanova University twenty years ago, I came out as a gay man. Since then, in addition to my career as a computer specialist, I have cofounded the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington, written and officiated at a gay wedding ceremony, and worked for equal rights as a member of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, DC, of which I have been president since January, 1996. I am writing to you today to take strong issue with your remarks at the FRC conference.

Referring to the "not negligible" number of people with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies" (which makes them sound like loose change that fell behind the sofa cushions), you state, "This inclination, which is not objectively good, constitutes for most of them a trial." This is a reference to the Church's declaration that homosexuality is an objective moral disorder; it is objective only in the sense that an authoritarian religious organization has so declared it. Since there is in fact no objective basis for such an assertion, it is no more objective than any religious dogma. Your citation of First Corinthians 6:10 that homosexual acts are intrinsically wrong is hardly persuasive, since if I took the trouble I could cite Old Testament verses in defense of slavery, among other horrors. It is amazing, and less than inspiring, how otherwise intelligent and decent people make selective use of biblical texts to justify their preexisting prejudices.

I presume that in any case you would agree with another participant in the FRC conference, who stated that of course we would not want to carry out the biblically prescribed death penalty for homosexuals today. While I appreciate such generous sentiments, they help make clear that it is not homosexuality itself which constitutes a trial for homosexual children growing up, but rather all the bigotry and intolerance disguised as religion which they face as they come to terms with their sexuality�often with a frightening degree of isolation. No child is done any favor by a ministering adult who insists that the child's most basic feelings for another person are somehow intrinsically wrong. All this does is add to the disproportionately high suicide rate among gay youth.

The bottom line, in a practical context, is that, whether you and the Roman Catholic Church Magisterium like it or not, a great many people�including self-professed Christians�disagree with your religious views on homosexual sexual acts being intrinsically wrong, and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees their right so to do.

You state that "legislation protecting homosexual persons becomes protection of behavior or a point of view. This is quite different from laws which prevent discrimination based on race, sex or age." As a matter of fact, it is rather like religion, since religion is chosen. Your reference to "a point of view" as something not deserving protected status is telling. No doubt the Church, despite the Reformation being four centuries behind us, would like to enforce its point of view on everyone. Indeed, the Archdiocese of Washington does not just defend its views at right-wing conferences, but also lobbies against the equal rights of gay citizens before the DC Council�such as when Cardinal Hickey denounced the District's Domestic Partners law in 1992 as equivalent to marriage (which, unfortunately, it is not), and denounced the District's repeal of its sodomy law in 1993.

Let me tell you something, Father Morrow. When I see my lover asleep beside me, I am as happy as a mortal can be and as sure of the rightness of my love as Monsignor Russell used to be of his reactionary approach to Church discipline [in punishing dissent on birth control]. That you can talk seriously about sharing God's love when you work for an institution that supports laws that would imprison me for my own love, is as hypocritical and perverted as anything can be.

Your remarks at the FRC conference make clear that you oppose the constitutional principle of the separation of church and state, and that you advocate the forcible imposition of your religious beliefs on the rest of the population by the state. This is the case despite your disingenuous protestation that "every sign of unjust discrimination" against us "should be avoided," since you quickly make it clear that you consider legal discrimination against us to be entirely just.

I am quite prepared to participate in a bloody war before I will allow your narrow and intolerant vision of America to prevail, before I will give up my liberty as a gay citizen. But already gay people are gradually winning the cultural war that was declared against us by the sorts of people who attended the FRC conference with you. We are also beginning to win the political war, as demonstrated by the crushing defeat in Congress last week of the attempt to overturn the President's executive order barring anti-gay discrimination in the federal workplace.

In reading about your weekly "support group" for homosexuals, I am thankful that I long ago escaped the repressive clutches of St. Catherine's. I can assure you of this: if any of my nephews or nieces should turn out to be gay, and I should learn that they are in the "loving embrace" of a "support group" that teaches them that they are intrinsically disordered, I will storm into the room and interpose myself bodily between you and them, and any sibling that supports such ministering to flesh and blood of mine will have to leave my body cold and bloody on the floor before I will allow such abuse in the name of love to continue. Not with my family, you don't.

It is appalling that a minister of Christ should fail to recognize the very real harm that your intolerance (however dressed up as pastoral care) can cause to real citizens and real families, such as the loving gay couples and their adopted children that I know�not to mention the gay child that I was when I first arrived at St. Catherine's in September 1962. I owed it to every boy I ever gave a valentine at that school not to let your remarks at the FRC hatefest go unchallenged.

Sincerely,

Richard J. Rosendall
St. Catherine Labouré Class of 1970