IGF CultureWatch

After a very lively discussion among the IGF commenters about Adam Lambert and politics vs. art, it struck me that we have forgotten about the reason we are having the discussion in the first place: political artists. They're the ones who run the two categories together, and have given some people the impression that art and politics are necessarily interrelated.

I was reminded of that when watching the American Music Awards last night. While Lambert's flamboyant and aggressive performance really did bring "Sexy Back" (with no apologies to Justin Timberlake or anyone else), it was just a performance -- one that involved Lambert kissing one of his male dancers, and making the censors scurry to avoid showing the nation another male dancer simulating oral sex on Lambert. This is the guy Aaron Hicklin thinks is worried about being perceived as too gay.

Lady Gaga gave one hell of a performance as well. But in contrast to Lambert, she is more than happy to take up the flag of gay rights as part of her persona. Most recently, she openly criticized prominent music industry figures whose homophobia and misogyny continue to be a point of pride, and she does it with style and sense.

There's a long line of artists who have been gratifyingly or gratingly political. But there is an equally long line of artists who had no taste for politics. In our highly politicized age, particularly for homosexuals who have to be political in order to obtain our fundamental rights, it may seem to a lot of people that gay artists have the onus of using their talent and fame for the greater purpose of equality.

But art is its own justification. Ironically, Lada Gaga's performance was the less political one. Playing a piano on fire is as pure and striking an image as Magritte's flaming horns - with the added attraction of breaking glass. Lambert's performance was more political, but only because being gay is political; nothing lesbians and gay men do in America can be simply personal, from getting married to joining the military to paying their taxes to burying their partner.

But that doesn't have anything to do with us; it is purely a function of the fact that those who refuse to see us as ordinary citizens insist on having us fight against the status quo in the political process. We engage that battle simply by refusing to deny who we are.

That is a battle Lambert has engaged. But beyond that, it's his call, as it is Lady Gaga's or Kanye West's or that of any other artist. Politics is one available tool to create art. Beauty is another, and the list is unlimited. Only an individual artist can determine which tools work best for him or her.

I confess I am not going to be reading the Manhattan Declaration. I was a Catholic for too many years, and from Timothy Kincaid's description, it looks like there's nothing new in the rhetoric or the justifications. Been there, had my intelligence insulted by that.

But you don't have to read it to see the point. This is the formalization of a new Axis of Homophobia, which begins in the Vatican, runs through Nigeria to pick up the homophobic wing of the Anglican church, and then crosses the Atlantic to plant its flag in the American South.

The only usual suspect missing from the Axis is the Taliban, but they're involved in an actual war, and don't have time for manifestos. The document might seem to exclude them, since it is "A Call of Christian Conscience," but the Taliban do seem to be a good fit. Their conscience is as homophobic as any of these Christians. Maybe next year.

The anti-gay forces are now circling the wagons. As the rest of the civilized world moves past its fevered imaginings about homosexuals, the most intense religious objectors are huddling together for heat. The Catholics, in particular, are feeling particularly vulnerable as the Vatican watches half of its Americans (and God knows how many Europeans and Latin Americans) supporting civil equality for same-sex couples. What's a celibate bunch of fey men to do?

All I can say is I hope they enjoy one another's company. They're certainly not doing much to win over anyone else's.

The House-passed health care bill included one decent provision that would have extended the payroll tax exclusion on employer-provided health benefits that spouses receive to domestic partners. The New York Times described it here. But despite the Senate bill running to an amazing 2,074 pages in which all sorts of social engineering are hidden, with a less-strict abortion-funding ban than in the House bill, there is apparently no provision for remedying the tax inequality faced by gay spouses and partners.

So despite raising taxpayer costs by at least $1 trillion and imposing costs on businesses and individuals of another $1.5 trillion, in its 400,000 words Harry Reid couldn't find a sentence or two for equality under the law.

Yet another fawning Washington Post puff piece on an Obama staffer looks at White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, who was formerly chief of staff to Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.).The post relates this bit of history. In Baucus's 2002 senate race:

Messina masterminded a bruising attack ad against Republican state Sen. Mike Taylor, a former hairdresser. The ad featured video footage of Taylor, then decades younger and bearded, setting the hair and massaging the temples of a mustachioed man in a beauty salon chair-with a funky bomp-chic-a-bomp-bomp '70s beat in the background. The spot ends with a frozen frame of Taylor reaching down and out of sight toward the other man's lap. Disapprovingly, a voice-over declares, "Mike Taylor: Not the way we do business here in Montana." ...

Stephanie Schriock [Montana's junior senator Jon Tester's chief of staff] cited the ad as one example of how Baucus has long appreciated and been served by Messina's killer instinct. "Jim was willing to make the hard call to put an ad out there," she said.

Nowhere does reporter Jason Horowitz question the use of overt homophobic stereotypes (regardless of the fact that Taylor wasn't, in fact, gay) to aid the Democrat's cause. But then, neither the politically supplicant media nor LGBT Democratic activists seem to mind pandering and promoting the denigration of gay people when it serves the interests of their party. (Which is to say, if it were a Republican administration, the appointment of a White House deputy chief of staff with this history would have triggered loud protests; under Obama, it's just an amusing anecdote.)

I have to side with Adam Lambert over Out editor Aaron Hicklin in their recent dust-up. Hicklin is critical of Lambert for conditions Lambert imposed on a cover shoot and interview, and he argues that Lambert is trying to avoid being perceived as "too gay."

No one could fairly argue that Lambert is in the closet, or anywhere close to one. Hicklin's real beef, I think, comes from an assumption that lesbians and gay men - particularly those who are out -- have an obligation not only to be public about their sexual orientation, but also to be politically active. Lambert's failure to fully embrace Out magazine seems, in Hicklin's view, to show that Lambert is backing away from this obligation to the gay community at large.

As someone who's been politically active in gay rights for over a quarter of a century, I sympathize with Hicklin. I, too, wish all homosexuals would spend a lot of their time and resources fighting in the political arena for our equality. It is not fair to us that heterosexuals have made our sexual orientation (not theirs) a political matter, and because we are such a small minority, this places an enormous burden on all of us.

But ever since the time of Harvey Milk, those of us who are active in politics have now and then needed to urge our fellow homosexuals, "Out of the bars and into the streets." Politics does not come naturally to everyone, or even to most people.

I would love for Lambert to use his celebrity to help us cross the finish line to full equality. But the thing is, he earned that celebrity with amazing talent and work, and can use it as he sees fit. He shows considerable and admirable awareness of his own talents and limitations when he says, "I'm not a politician. I'm an entertainer." We can all tote up a personal list of entertainers and others our community has thrust into the political arena to be our champions, only to regret our pushiness. Better for those who are politically inclined -- Dustin Lance Black, Rachel Maddow, Melissa Etheridge -- to take up the cause willingly and competently.

None of this is to say that Lambert will not be helping us simply by being out. Ellen DeGeneres and Neil Patrick Harris aren't expressly political, but like Lambert, just being out is a political act for us, and that's a lot more than any of them, as entertainers, would have bargained for.

Also, remember it took a long time for Elton John to come out, get his balance in the very bizarre world of politics, and develop into a kind of elder statesman. Maybe that's in Lambert's future. He's only in his mid-twenties.

But in the end, that is his choice, not ours.

Did the voters make opposite-sex marriage illegal in Texas? That's what Barbara Ann Radnofsky claims, and there's reason to take her argument seriously.

She's running for Attorney General in that state, and when you read the amendment passed in 2005, her analysis is pretty cogent. The voters in Texas, swept up in Karl Rove's anti-gay marriage fever, amended their constitution to say that marriage is between one man and one woman. They then added this belt to the constitutional suspenders: "This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage."

Heterosexual marriage is not just "similar" to itself, it is (by definition) "identical" to itself. It's not only hard to argue with that proposition, as a logical matter it's pretty close to impossible. Therefore, a plain reading of this language would mean that Texas is prohibited from recognizing heterosexual marriage.

But Kelly Shackleford, president of the Liberty Legal Institute in Plano says this argument is "silly." And I have to agree with her. Only conservative legal thinkers follow the plain language of a statute, and who could accuse Texas voters of being conservative? Them's fighting words. Everyone knows that in Texas, they favor the liberal, Let's Look At What The Voters Really Meant kind of statutory analysis. Words and their plain meanings are for sissies.

OK, I kid Texas (as Bill Maher says). But I still have to side with Shackleford over Radnovsky. It truly is "silly" to think that Texas heterosexuals would discriminate against themselves. Of course they meant only to discriminate against the homosexual minority. Who could seriously think they had anything else in mind? Any other conclusion would be a slander on the good name of Texas Prejudice.

I've obviously been in a foul mood since Maine, and needed some good cheer. So Karen Ocamb's interview with Charlie Beck, the new chief of the L.A. Police Department couldn't have come along at a better moment.

As Stuart Timmons has documented, L.A. has a long history of pretty brutal police harassment against lesbians and gay men. That has been fading into the dustbin of history, and Beck embodies the view that is slowly but inevitably deflating our opponents.

Ocamb asks him, right off, whether he thinks sexual orientation is chosen or innate. His response is profound only because it's so matter-of-fact: "Sexual orientation is formed long before you have the ability to make a choice. I'm heterosexual and I never made that choice." He comfortably discusses an uncle who'd been with his partner for fifty years ("Imagine what they went through"), and chuckles about whether he should tell her how he voted on Prop. 8, ultimately saying, "I support gay marriage."

Compare those last four words with the hundreds it took poor Melody Barnes to almost confess the same sentiment in Boston. That is Maggie Gallagher's greatest challenge -- an emerging epidemic of common sense. Frank Schubert has been clear how hard he needs to work to create fear in his campaigns against us, and his partner, Jeff Flint, was brutally honest in confessing that even they're surprised at how easy it is for them to win, even when we outperform them, as we did in Maine.

But that's only because they can exploit existing prejudice, and eagerly do. We're the ones who have to fight uphill. Prejudice is what confounds common sense. Once heterosexuals can get past that - can see our sexual orientation as forming in the same way as theirs does ("I'm heterosexual and I never made that choice") the distortions that bias creates melt away.

Charlie Beck seems to have that common sense. Bit by bit, it's breaking out all over the country.