Civil Rights and Discrimination

Privacy As The Enemy

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Sally Ride is an American hero.  She is also an icon for women’s equality.

And, as Andrew Sullivan puts it, she is the absent heroine of the gay rights movement.

That is not necessarily damning.  There’s only so much one human being can do with her life.

But I don’t want to let Ride get off as easily as the media is allowing.  The New York Times obituary is typically lazy:

Dr. Ride was known for guarding her privacy. She rejected most offers for product endorsements, memoirs and movies, and her reticence lasted to the end. At her request, NASA kept her illness secret.

There are different kinds of privacy.  Resisting the commercial temptations of fame is not the same thing as keeping the fact that you have cancer a family matter.  And neither of those is the same as staying in the closet.

Ride was born into the two revolutions that directly affected her life: women’s equality and gay equality.  She took up one of those revolutions, and rejected the other.

Her life’s work was to make sure girls who were interested in science would not feel the pressure she faced to repress that inner drive.  She was instrumental in helping to change that, and the world is better for her accomplishments.

But the gay rights revolution was not her thing.  Even those of us who pay close attention had no idea she was a lesbian, much less a woman who had maintained a 27 year relationship with another woman.

No one has an obligation to be politically active.  Vito Russo, in the new HBO documentary about his very politically active life, articulates the point well:

This is a good question: What makes people political in their lives?  The world is full of injustice.  Some people it bothers, some people it doesn’t. Me, it bothers.

The injustice of gay inequality, and particularly the injustice of the closet did not bother Ride.  Or, maybe more accurately, it did not bother her enough to do anything with the public side of her life to try and change it.  She simply accepted the closet, and took advantage of the work that others were doing on that front in order to live in a not-very-public-but-not-entirely-private lesbian relationship.

She shares this approach to the gay rights revolution with Mary Cheney.  They are among the free-riders of this struggle, letting others do the fighting.

The psychological damage that cultural homophobia did to those of Ride’s generation cannot be underestimated, and maybe her passivity can be forgiven or excused or pitied.  In the world she grew up in, that brand of privacy was often the only natural protective device that those who lacked Russo’s political spirit and intolerance of injustice had.

But it’s time to retire privacy as the Get Out Of Politics Free Card.  Fear can still justify the closet in many places and circumstances.  So can personal economic strategy, I suppose.  But not privacy.  That cramped isolationism is exactly the thing we are fighting.  It’s a form of self-indulgence at best, and more often it’s just shame.  We should draw a distinction between external forces that make coming out problematic, and internal ones that are corrosive remnants of an older view of homosexuality.

Even heterosexuals are lining up to support our equality today.  Ted Olson and David Boies, Lady Gaga and Brad Pitt, Ben Cohen and Scott Fujita are on the front lines of our battle.  The bar should be extremely high for any of us to remain aloof from our own fight for our own self-worth.  Every homosexual does not need to be out in the streets if they are not politically inclined.  But that’s not a matter of privacy, it’s a matter of preference.  It should go by its right name.

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Privacy, Silence, Neutrality and Anderson Cooper

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I am as glad – and grateful – as anyone for Anderson Cooper’s non-coming-out coming out.  There are some lessons in this story worth talking about.

People who know Cooper seem to agree with him that he was not really in the closet except with respect to the general public.  That is a telling fact.  As the walls of the closet have come down on the private side of people’s lives, there is still that remaining door that can be opened or closed to the public.  The people we know on our side of the door – the private side – are far more likely today to know we are homosexual than they ever have been.  Cooper enjoyed that private side of the closet with his family and friends.

But Cooper is not like the rest of us (and not just in what he does for a black t-shirt).  For those of us without a public face, the need to come out or not to others – to decide whether to open that door — is a recurring issue; we are always meeting new people, and regularly face the problem of how much to reveal to whom, and in what circumstances.

People like Cooper who have a large public reputation have to deal with this a little differently.  Word spreads about the famous, particularly about something as personal and controversial (or at least pretty interesting) as homosexuality.  News of my homosexuality never hit Twitter; it never really achieved a threshold of being news.  For Cooper, opening that door once to a world that knows him as a personality pretty much brings him out in toto.  There will still be pockets of cluelessness, but for the most part, this is a one-time deal for someone of Cooper’s stature.

The Entertainment Weekly story that got this story moving makes the point that it’s possible for even celebrities today to come out without its being a big deal, and Cooper’s example contradicts that (in the short term, since it was kind of newsish) but reaffirms the larger point, having such a short shelf-life.  Writing this post all of two days after Andrew Sullivan broke the story already feels like I’m stretching it out.

But that’s where the political aspect of sexual orientation comes in.  For me, when it comes to sexual orientation and politics, I was born this way.  It has taken me a long time to accept that some people – a lot of people – are not born political, or at least don’t take to politics naturally.  I see a need for lesbians and gay men to take political action, but as people who are more activist than me can tell you, it’s always been an uphill battle.

Cooper reports on political stories, but as a journalist he should not be an activist.  As a gay man, that puts him in a difficult spot.

A lot of politically active lesbians and gay men resent celebrities who are privately lesbian or gay, but have not opened the public door.  We have an enormous public relations job to do, and need all the help we can get.  That is one of the things that animated the movement to out politicians and celebrities – the idea that they had an obligation to use their public face to help us all gain equality.  The worst of the worst were the ones who worked against legal equality, but the desire for even neutral or supportive public figures to come out – or be dragged out – came from the mathematical problem of being a minority in the first place.  We start out with numbers that are staggeringly against us in a democracy, and then have the additional problem of members of our group who won’t even admit they belong.

Cooper seems to have struggled with that.  He mentions “the unintended outcomes” of maintaining his privacy, and says he may have given the impression that he is trying to hide something that makes him uncomfortable, ashamed or afraid.  His coming out was intended to – and does — clarify any misimpressions.

But those misimpressions are, and always have been, a perfectly natural consequence of silence.  If about 95% of the population is heterosexual, and someone doesn’t positively identify as homosexual, is it unreasonable for people to assume that individual is straight?  The open discussion of homosexuality over the last quarter century or so changes the bet somewhat, since silence now looks more telling, when it isn’t downright implausible.  Yet many people still cling to the fig leaf of privacy as if it were without consequence.

In this impressive compilation of Cooper in the field, one quote stood out: “Journalists don’t like to become part of the story, but unfortunately they have been made part of the story. . . . “  That, I am afraid, is true of sexual orientation as well.  Our inequality is embedded in the status quo that recognizes only heterosexual relationships, and if we say or do nothing, we are part of a story that tolerates and accepts our second-class status.  We cannot get out of that story, or create a more appropriate status quo unless we act, unless we speak, unless we stand up as lesbians and gay men.

The false neutrality of silence is clear in this story about Jitters and Bliss Coffee.  The company claims to be neutral when it comes to marriage.  They say they don’t have a public position on the matter, and “respect the views of all their customers.”  To demonstrate that neutrality, they joined up with the National Organization for Marriage to offer NOM members a non-Starbuck’s coffee option, since Starbuck’s has taken a position supporting marriage equality.

That is the neutrality of the status quo, being nakedly manipulated to preserve itself.  Our silence, their silence, anyone’s silence is a vote for NOM, is a vote for the bias and prejudice that are woven into the fabric of current law.

In this politicized environment, privacy equals silence, and silence equals — well, not death anymore, but certainly some spiritual damage.  That was the unholy balance that Cooper upset.  Neutrality is a primary virtue of the journalistic profession, but when “neutrality” means “the status quo,” and if the status quo is, itself, biased, then neutrality is not neutral.  Anderson Cooper’s coming out helps expose that truth.

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Chess

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The sound you hear is Jay Carney breathing the world’s deepest sigh of relief.

For him, the squirming and hedging and sweating are over.  The President is on record supporting same-sex marriage.  There is an answer now to the question.

Yes, it’s Obama’s personal view, and yes, he’s said he supported same-sex marriage before, and then wandered afield.  But when you’re in any other political office, you can take positions that might play out differently when you’re being asked about the question in the presidential arena.  Ask Mitt Romney about health care.  Or anything.

Of course I think Obama did the right thing morally.  But for those of us who enjoy the chess of politics, I also think it was exquisite strategy.  First, after the loss in North Carolina, Obama’s campaign had a convention to worry about.  In that place and with that political context, any fudging on the bottom line would have been unacceptable to a lot of conventioneers at best, and could have led to some very ugly protests inside and/or outside the convention hall.

That’s taken care of now.  The only possible protests left will come from the motley, disgruntled religious types, who aren’t part of Obama’s base, and don’t figure into a winning electoral strategy for him.  Those protests, if they happen, now come under the heading of So What?

And that leads to the bigger point.  This is fine politics because it boxes Romney in with the worst part of his party.  Karl Rove poisoned the well on this issue, and now Obama is making Romney drink, and drink deeply.

Which Romney promptly did, and from a bigger cup than Obama could have hoped for.  Romney said he is not only opposed to same-sex marriage, but to any legal recognition of same-sex couples that approaches marriage equality — just what the worst part of North Carolina gave a big thumbs-up to.

How can Romney now appeal to the 2/3 of Americans who can no longer abide the complete exclusion of same-sex couples and their families from the law?  What he is stuck with are the politically tone-deaf, like the American Family Association and the Catholic League, who are so blinded by full marriage equality that they can’t see. . . um, straight.  Their hysteria increases in direct proportion to the growing support for full marriage equality, and for the middle ground of civil unions.  They are now 2/3 of the way to Spinal Tap’s famous eleven.

There are, of course, a lot of other issues, and an eternity until the election; lots of things are possible.  But on this issue, Obama just made his life a whole lot easier, and Romney’s a lot more difficult.  Obama has made it clear that he wants no part of the religious right’s intolerance on sexual orientation.  That’s a political strategy, and it’s a defensible moral stance.  But most of all, it’s got to be nice not to have to pretend you need the kind of votes that Bryan Fischer and the sadly devolved offspring of Billy Graham have to offer.

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Sweaters

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I take no pride in saying this, but I’m sort of enjoying watching the President and Mitt Romney — and their assistants — convulsing over same-sex marriage.  Lesbians and gay men have spent lifetimes feeling guilty about being homosexual, dodging the most obvious questions, and trying their damnedest to avoid the subject.  It’s kind of nice to see the shoe on the other foot for awhile.

The White House has outshone the Vatican in finesse, nuance and overthinking in trying to respond to Joe Biden’s comments over the weekend.  The Vice President tried to cut through the bullshit, but the bullshit prevailed.  Jay Carney had to devote half of a press conference to argue that the President’s current evolution has not yet brought him from fish to man.  Ironically, this is the one area where Romney’s folks are begging for a same-sex union between their candidate and the President, whose positions, they claim, are identical.

Actions, though, speak louder than words.  Jim Burroway aptly notes that whatever rhetorical symmetries Obama and Romney may share on same-sex marriage, it’s clear that the President won’t pander to the lingering brackishness of prejudice, while Romney not only will, he will do so with vigor. And David Weigel eviscerates any claim that Romney might have some humanity on this issue, having prominently signed NOM’s atrocious pledge against equal marriage rights.

Politics is ugly, and the politics of prejudice is ugliest of all.  Those of us who have had to suffer the prejudice about sexual orientation know that all too well.  But now that we’re comfortable being honest about ourselves and our relationships, I am hoping we can plead for some mercy for the guilty pleasure of watching some heterosexuals have to sweat it out for a change.

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Remembering Frank Kameny

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I was in San Francisco yesterday, about to go on stage to deliver a National Coming Out Day lecture, when I learned of the death of Frank Kameny. He was 86, and he died peacefully at home, apparently of heart failure.

Frank is a giant of the gay rights movement, and I hope his passing gets the attention it deserves—both to honor a great man, and to remind everyone of important but neglected chapters of our history. When Dr. Franklin Kameny was fired from his government job in 1957 for being gay, there was no national gay civil rights movement. It took pioneers like him to make it happen.

A Harvard-trained Ph.D. and World War II veteran, Frank lost his job as an Army Map Service astronomer for being a homosexual. Unsure of his future employability and outraged by the injustice, he petitioned all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. That firing and subsequent refusal sparked a tireless lifetime of activism.

(Incidentally, in 2009 the Federal Office of Personnel Management finally issued Frank a formal apology for the firing. In his inimitable style, he promptly replied that he was looking forward to his five decades of back pay.)

In 1961 Frank co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington D.C.—a “homophile organization” based on the original group in California.  Soon thereafter, in 1963, he began a decades-long campaign to revoke D.C.’s sodomy law. He personally drafted the repeal bill that was passed 30 years later.

In 1965, he picketed in front of the White House for gay rights. Signs from that demonstration, stored in his attic for decades, are now in the Smithsonian’s collection.

In 1971, he became the first openly gay person to run for Congress. (He came in fourth, which itself was a kind of victory given the anti-gay sentiment of the era.) He was instrumental in the battle that led to the declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973. He continued to fight over the decades against employment discrimination, sodomy laws, the military ban—unjust discrimination in all its forms.

Even in his 80s, Frank continued to send off pointed letters in pursuit of justice. He was fond of reminding me and other “young” activists, whenever he heard us complaining amongst ourselves, “Don’t tell us. Tell them. Contact the people who can do something about it.” (Even now I can hear his booming, irrepressible voice.) He served as an invaluable moral elder to me and multiple generations of gay activists, whom he constantly reminded of the slogan he coined in 1968: “Gay is good!”

One of my favorite personal experiences with him happened shortly after the 2004 documentary “Gay Pioneers” was released. Frank came to Detroit to speak at a screening of the film, and he visited my house for dinner. Frank was not much of a drinker, but when I offered after-dinner drinks in my living room, he asked if I had any peach schnapps. Oddly enough, I did, so I poured him some. Then some more, and more again, not really keeping track. Finally, when it was time to leave for the film, we all stood up…

…and Frank proceeded to trip over my coffee table and fall flat on the floor.

Everyone gasped. A news headline flashed before my mind: “Young gay writer kills veteran gay activist with cordial.” But then Frank laughed, spryly jumped up, and boomed in his unforgettable voice, “Too much peach schnapps!!!”

We proceeded to the movie, and as usual, Frank delivered a brilliant, commanding, rousing speech.

As soon as I fly home, I’ll be raising a glass of peach schnapps to Frank Kameny. Always remember: Gay is good.

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Where I’ve Been

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I’ve been quiet on this site for a while, in large part because I’ve retired my weekly column at 365gay.com, which has since announced that it’s going to shut down.  (I’ll resist the temptation to commit the post hoc fallacy.) Meanwhile I have been working on the book Debating Same-Sex Marriage for Oxford University Press, in which I argue against Maggie Gallagher; we’ve made progress and expect it to appear in Spring/Summer 2012. And I’ll be doing my usual Fall Speaking Tour, so if you’re near one of the venues, come listen, ask questions, applaud, cheer, heckle, or whatever.

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Pride and Prejudice

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I have never seen anything quite like the Minnesota House debate over the proposal to amend their state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.  The amendment passed last night, 70-62.

In the first place, I’ve seen a lot of legislative debates on this subject, and five and a quarter hours is a lot of talking on a single subject.  I don’t think California has ever broken the three-hour mark on same-sex marriage, and that was years ago.

But the length of the discussion wasn’t what made it so remarkable.  While Joe Jervis says, “The vote came after impassioned debate by legislators on both sides,” in fact there was no debate at all.  Every member who spoke opposed the amendment – and did I mention that went on for over five hours?

The only voice in support was the amendment’s author, Rep. Steve Gottwalt, who had no backup from anyone in his party.  And even he never weighed in on why it might be good to amend the constitution to prohibit same-sex couples from marrying.  His argument was about the virtue of legislative abdication.  This shouldn’t be our decision, it belongs to the voters.  In his cameo speaking role, he kept repeating that his opinion on same-sex couples, were he to have one, would be irrelevant to his authoring of the amendment.  The proposal wasn’t about same-sex couples or opposite-sex couples, or, really much of anything at all.  He never budged from this non-position, and then went into radio silence, along with every pro-amendment Republican in the body.  One other Republican, Rod Hamilton, did share how deeply he had struggled with his vote, but that was the extent of it.  He, too, offered no argument in favor of the constitutional amendment.

In contrast, John Kriesel, a Republican Iraq war vet, was truly impassioned in his opposition.  He spoke about the American values he fought for, and explained that the amendment was exactly the opposite of what he understood our principles to be.  Rather than Gottwalt’s dodges, or the silence of the rest of his party, Kriesel was eloquent and manifest about his vote: “I’m proud of this.  It’s the right thing to do,” he said.

Three other Republicans and all but two of the Democrats could say the same thing.  So what about those 68 other non-voices, that majority in favor of – nothing?  This is what the public discussion of gay equality has come to on the right, a combination of cowardice and embarrassment.  Again, in decades of paying very close attention to legislatures, I have never seen such a stone wall (you should pardon the expression).  In the past, opponents have always had something to say.  They don’t any more.

That is a testament to the merits of their position.  They are willing to let NOM’s commercials do their talking for them, since even they know it isn’t seemly for elected officials to so openly appeal to the vestiges of prejudice.  Far from having arguments they can take pride in, they want to say as little as possible, knowing that history will judge them badly and hoping to minimize the damage.  That seemed to be Gottwalt’s strategy.  He knew, going in, that the other side had the better of it, and the best he could do was avoid owning up to the position he’d wound up having to champion.

Alone.

So now it will be up to the voters of Minnesota.  How much of the GOP’s prejudice will they be willing to adopt as so supremely important that it is worthy of being placed in their state’s constitution?

The rules for passing a constitutional amendment in Minnesota are tougher than some other states, and that is an important fact.  It must be passed with a majority of all votes cast in the 2012 general election, not just those cast on the amendment, itself.  The increasing support for equality across the nation will also play a role.

But there is one other factor.  Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton has said he would fight the amendment with “every fiber of my being.”  That kind of public leadership from the state’s governor can make a difference.  California’s former governor once made a similar promise on Prop. 8; but like other promises he’d made, it wasn’t one he meant.  He spoke not one public word against the amendment, and only offered a tepid statement for use by the opposition.  I urge Minnesotans to do what California could not, hold their Governor to his word.

The rallying cry for this election should belong to Rep. Kriesel, though.  Looking down at his desk, and then up to his fellow representatives, he said, “If there was a Hell No button, I’d press that.”

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