IGF CultureWatch

American Idol is a show everyone watches - young, old, from Red States and Blue. It is a throwback, almost, to the days of television when families would gather around a television set and watch enriching programming together.

And one of its big draws these days is a lesbian.

The New York Times pointed out last weekend that Ellen DeGeneres "finds a way to remind audiences of her sexual status on almost every episode of 'American Idol.'"

It continues: "More than in any other of her ventures, Ms. DeGeneres's performace on America's favorite television show suggests how hard she works to seem effortlessly funny and how determined she is to be openly but unthreateningly gay."

She brings it up gently, making jokes and bright-eyed allusions, mentioning her wife Portia, talking about her suits and short, tousled hair.

And America loves it.

Ellen is America's sweetheart of the moment, funny, down to earth, a pretty, sparkly woman whom everyone can relate to. And the extraordinary thing is that her gayness doesn't get in the way of that or hide it - instead, she makes being gay seem to be the absolutely normal thing that it is.

And an icon of Gay Normal is important. All too often - still - anti-gay conservatives point to people on the edges of our community as being representative of all gays and lesbians. They take images from Pride Parades and television and gay circuit parties and try to paint us as social outliers who are strange and frightening (or inappropriate and silly) and thus a danger to mainstream marriage, work and family.

Those who lie on our edges - Adam Lambert, say, or Johnny Weir, or any of the Dykes on Bikes - are important to us and are part of our community. They help us define our LGBT culture as one that celebrates fiercely individual personalities who nonetheless come together for common causes and celebrations. We need them and we love them and we celebrate their outrageousness.

But we need our Ellen DeGenereses and Dan Chois (and now Ricky Martins and someday Anderson Coopers), too. We need public figures who seem like the best friend that you wish lived next door, people who are safely sexy, people you can trust to watch your dog, people who you'd welcome to meet your kids and your folks and your elderly Aunt Martha.

Ellen works hard for us. As the Times says, her private life is "served up as an affirmation of gay marriage set in a Harlequin romance frame." And she brings her life "with her on America's most conventional reality show."

She makes gay marriage and gay rights seem easy to take - and not just easy, but almost as if they are a fait accompli. Ellen had a beautiful wedding and the many pictures and videos of a beloved Gay Normal icon getting hitched surely made marriage equality easier for middle America to imagine.

They can picture being at a wedding of a gay couple now. Which means that they are slowly being won over to our side.

America loves Ellen. Her daytime talk show may collect the gigantic Oprah Winfrey audience once Oprah moves on at some point next year. (The Times says she is the best bet to inherit "Oprah's mantle as talk show queen.") Her gentle jokes and self-deprecating bits have made her the most amusing judge to watch on American Idol.

Ellen has hosted the Emmys and Oscars, won 12 Emmys herself, and convinced then-candidate Barack Obama to dance on her talk show.

She is happy and successful and famous and - normal.

She is what middle America wants to be.

The contest for best singer might still be going on over at Fox, but America has already crowned it's next American Idol - and it's Ellen DeGeneres.

They don't drive Subarus, wear comfortable shoes, or listen to folk music. But are the female pair-bonding albatross discussed in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine lesbians?

Despite its provocative title, the essay "Can Animals Be Gay?" is one of the more thoughtful and nuanced treatments to have appeared in a while. It achieves this largely by ignoring the title-question and instead focusing on what scientific research into animal behavior does-and more to the point, doesn't-tell us about humans.

These are the facts: Lindsay C. Young, a biologist studying a Laysan albatross colony in Kaena Point, Hawaii, discovered in the course of her doctoral research that a third of the nesting pairs there were actually female-female. Albatross typically pair off monogamously, copulate, and then collaboratively incubate the resulting single egg each year. Scientists who have observed nesting pairs generally assume-falsely, it turns out-that they are all male-female. (Albatross are difficult to sex by sight.) So Young and two colleagues published a paper explaining their surprising findings. From the Times essay:

"It turned out that many of the female-female pairs, at Kaena Point and at a colony that Young's colleague studied on Kauai, had been together for 4, 8 or even 19 years - as far back as the biologists' data went, in some cases. The female-female pairs had been incubating eggs together, rearing chicks and just generally passing under everybody's nose for what you might call 'straight' couples."

Like most scientists, Young and her colleagues were careful merely to share their observations, rather than to draw moral or political conclusions. But that didn't stop folks from both sides of the gay-rights debate from drawing foolish inferences and alternately either praising or attacking her research.

Gay-rights opponents derided the work as agenda-driven propaganda. Gay-rights advocates, by contrast, saw it as new evidence for the "naturalness" of homosexuality and even as providing a justification for marriage equality.

The simple truth that both sides overlook is this: Research about animals tells us what other animals' behavior is; it does not tell us what human behavior morally ought to be.

Notice the two key distinctions here. First, although humans are animals, they are not the same as other animals. That doesn't mean that studying other animals can't help us learn more about humans, often by suggesting hypotheses worth testing in humans. But species behave differently, and what's true of albatross, or bonobos, or fruit flies frequently isn't true of humans.

Second, there's the distinction between the descriptive and the normative; between what is and what ought to be. The fact that animals (including human animals) do something does not entail that we morally SHOULD do it.

Which means that all of the empirical research in the world, as interesting and important and valuable as it is, won't settle any moral disputes for us-at least not by itself.

I say "at least not by itself" because there are indirect ways in which this research may be relevant. Young's findings, for example, provide a nice illustration of heterosexist bias among previous scientists, and there are more general moral lessons to be gleaned when we uncover bias.

Moreover, such research can undermine the premises of bad arguments used by the other side. ("Animals don't even do that, therefore it's obviously wrong.") However, it's worth noting that the arguments would be bad even if they were not based on false premises, since they still involve invalid inferences. ("Animals don't cook their food either. What follows?")

There's also the undeniable fact that, whatever their logical flaws, these arguments have emotional resonance. As the Times essay notes:

"What animals do - what's perceived to be 'natural' - seems to carry a strange moral potency: it's out there, irrefutably, as either a validation or a denunciation of our own behavior, depending on how you happen to feel about homosexuality and about nature."

But that's just the point: the conclusion depends on "how you happen to feel." The feelings are doing the work, not the logic.

When bad arguments are used in the service of good aims, what should we do?

Suppose Young's study makes a parent less inclined to kick a gay child out of the house, because the parent (illogically) reads the study as proof that human homosexuality is "natural." This sort of thing happens all the time, and I'm hardly inclined to call up the parent and point out his or her logical lapse.

There are, however, long-range consequences to such laxity. The same logical sloppiness that motivates this particular parent to do the right thing helps others to rationalize discrimination. Repeat after me: what other animals do is one thing; what humans morally ought to do is another. Only when we distinguish those questions can we make a sound case for equality.

According to a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll, 50 percent of Americans would support having an openly gay president.

Bad news: That seems unlikely.

Thanks to the last Presidential election, we've all heard of the Bradley effect: voters tell pollsters that they'd vote for the black guy/woman/gay person, but then in the polls they vote for the same white male they always have.

They want to give the answer that's more socially acceptable.

This poll isn't asking the harder question - whether the person being polled would vote for a gay President. It's just asking if they would support a gay person once they magically made it into office (hear that, Charlie Crist? You can stay closeted, come out later when you've won the office, and people will support you. Maybe).

Yet 50 percent of the people polled said yes, they would. A gay President is A-OK with them.

Good news: If this indicates that the Bradley effect may now apply to us, it is a welcome sea change.

The President question is only one question, of course, in a silly (if scientific) poll that also asked whether someone would rather visit Bourbon Street, Graceland or Nashville.

And admittedly, the question also primed the person being polled to feel positively toward us. It said:

"The military's 'Don't ask, don't tell' policy-prohibiting openly gay soldiers from serving in uniform-may soon be changed. Would YOU SUPPORT OR OPPOSE having an openly gay person serve in any of the following roles?"

As we know, an overwhelming majority of Americans now support gays and lesbians serving openly in the military. So they probably were feeling kindly toward us patriotic gay people before the full question was asked.

And then the poll gets stranger. After asking about whether Americans would support a gay President (50 percent support), it lists Supreme Court Justice (55 percent), Secretary of State (56 percent), Commissioner of Baseball (61 percent!) and Super Bowl quarterback (62 percent!!!!)

Honestly, the only thing that seems less likely to be than Americans currently supporting a gay President is Americans supporting a gay Super Bowl quarterback.

Still, the point holds: Americans are becoming more sensitive to the idea that it is not OK to discriminate against gay people.

So what the question was really asking was: Do you feel like it's OK to be homophobic in public, to a stranger?

And the answer to that, it seems, is starting to be "No."

Finally.

This is just one step in a long series of steps toward equality, but it is an important one. Americans who are afraid of being labeled homophobic by a stranger in public (even by someone as innocuous as an anonymous over-the-phone pollster) are less likely to actually discriminate against gay people. They're less likely to call us names; less likely to allow their kids to bully us in school; less likely to fire us when they find out we have a same-sex partner; less likely to legislate against us.

This is very different from 25 or 30 or 40 years ago, when it seemed like the "natural" thing to do was to find gays and lesbians unnatural. And it is very, very different from the days when straight Americans could not even imagine gay people openly holding any kind of public office, let alone the most highly respected one.

It is steadily becoming more true that being anti-gay is not OK.

Being unwilling to be seen as homophobic in public is a long way from helping us gain full equality, of course.

And it is unlikely to translate into actual votes.

But it is an important step.

Recent reports about students in Mississippi and Georgia seeking to bring same-sex dates to prom stirred memories of my own prom experience.

The year was 1987. I was "straight" then-or so I convinced myself. I knew I had "gay feelings" (as I put it), I knew I had no straight feelings, and I knew that people with gay feelings but no straight feelings are gay. And yet, by not letting these various ideas "touch," I avoided drawing the obvious conclusion. (This, from someone who would later teach elementary logic.)

I had never been on a date with a woman before, or even kissed one. Sure, there was that time in fifth grade when I played spin-the-bottle, but as soon as I figured out what the game was, I ran from the room.

By the time I reached junior high and high school and noticed my "gay feelings," it was easy to find excuses:

"I go to an all-boys Catholic school; I don't know any girls," I told myself and anyone in earshot. "Besides, I'm planning on becoming a priest" (which was true, starting around sophomore year). Pressure's off!

Except that it wasn't. Because my "normal" friends, even the ones who planned on priesthood, sought and found girls. I wasn't feeling what I was "supposed" to feel, and it frightened me.

Patty Anne was someone with whom I served on the parish council. She went to an all-girls Catholic school. I called to invite her to my prom, she accepted, and minutes later she called back to invite me to hers. They were on consecutive nights, so I got a deal on the tux rental.

My prom went smoothly, and at the end of the evening, I gave her a prim kiss on the cheek.

Her prom was a little more involved. One of her friends with whom we were sharing the limo hosted a small pre-event party. Upon arriving, I had two very gay thoughts in rapid succession:

(1) [Upon seeing Patty:] That dress is hideous compared to last night's.

(2) [Upon seeing her friends' dates, all of whom were from a local military academy and looked stunningly handsome in their dress whites:] Uhhhhhh….HELLO!

I laugh about this now, but at the time, (2) was terrifying. Not-noticing girls was one thing, but noticing guys was quite another. And these guys, all dressed up and nicely groomed to impress their girlfriends, were hard for me not to notice.

These were the sorts of things spinning through my head on the post-prom limo ride to a club in Manhattan. Patty and I had the backwards-facing seats on either side of a small television; the remaining couples shared a large bench-seat facing forward.

Suddenly, the other couples started making out.

"Thank god for this little television separating us," I thought.

But the television couldn't protect me. Before I knew it, Patty was sitting on my lap.

We made out. It felt wrong-and that frightened me further.

When the limo dropped me home later that morning, I needed to "process," so I hopped into my car and drove over to my best friend Michael's house.

It was 6 a.m., and I stood in his backyard in my disheveled tux, throwing clothespins at his window to rouse him without waking his parents. (When his mother finally entered the kitchen, she glanced at me and asked, "Oh John-would you like an English muffin?" as if there were nothing unusual about daybreak guests in black tie.)

I think that conversation with Michael was the first time I told anyone other than a priest or a psychologist that I had "gay feelings"-all the while continuing to insist that I was basically straight. Baby steps.

A year later, when I moved from "gay feelings" to just plain "gay," Michael was among the first people I came out to. It would take another year beyond that before he mustered the courage to come out to me.

Which brings us back to Constance McMillen in Mississippi and Derrick Martin in Georgia, two brave young souls.

Constance's prom has been canceled. A private prom is being held instead, and many of her classmates claim to hate her for "ruining" their regular prom.

Derrick, by contrast, will be allowed to attend prom with his boyfriend. The bad news is that his parents have kicked him out of the house over the incident.

How many more children must suffer because of these perverted values? How many more must live in silence and in fear, forced to choose between pretense and rejection, all while being denied the simple joys their peers take for granted?

For that matter, how many more adults must suffer?

That last question became especially poignant after I received comments from Michael on a draft of this column.

You see, Patty Anne, Constance, and Derrick are all their real names. "Michael" is not. He asked me to change it because, as he put it, "I am still pretty covert in my professional life."