For Your Entertainment

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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.

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Stop Subsidizing Homophobia

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Since its inception in 2003, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief - PEPFAR - has become the largest public health program in history. Created by President George W. Bush, it has distributed nearly $50 billion worldwide, mostly in Africa, to prevent the spread of HIV and to treat its victims. Over the last five years, the fund has provided care for 3 million people and prevented an estimated 12 million new infections. Even Bush's harshest critics do not deny that PEPFAR has been a huge success in combating the AIDS epidemic.

In spite of all that the program has accomplished, however, a persistent problem remains: the promotion of homophobia by African governments receiving American aid money. In no nation is this problem more acute than in Uganda, one of 15 PEPFAR "focus" countries that collectively account for half of the world's HIV infections. Homosexuality is considered a taboo in most of Africa, yet few governments have gone to the lengths of Uganda's in punishing it. The consequences are devastating not only for the people directly affected by these adverse policies but for the fight against AIDS in general.

Uganda's campaign against homosexuality took a disturbing turn last month when a member of parliament in the nation's governing majority introduced legislation that would stiffen penalties for actual or perceived homosexual activity, which is already illegal under Ugandan law. According to the proposed law, "repeat offenders" could be sentenced to death, as would anyone engaging in a same-sex relationship in which one of the members is under the age of 18 or HIV-positive. Gay-rights advocacy would be illegal, and citizens would be compelled to report suspected homosexuals or those "promoting" homosexuality to police; if they failed to do so within 24 hours, they could also be punished.

International human rights groups have protested the bill, but their complaints have only made the government more defiant. "It is with joy we see that everyone is interested in what Uganda is doing, and it is an opportunity for Uganda to provide leadership where it matters most," the country's ethics and integrity minister has said.

Aside from its evident inhumanity, such draconian legislation will only do massive harm to HIV-prevention efforts. Gay men are an at-risk community, and they already face severe repression in most African countries. Because of conservative social mores and government repression, many are hesitant to come forward to get information regarding safe sexual practices. This bill could make the very discussion of condom use and HIV prevention for gay men illegal. By driving gays even further underground, such governmental homophobia only ensures that HIV will continue to spread unabated.

When a government actively encourages homophobia, the effect reverberates throughout society. Uganda's president, Yoweri Museveni, has accused European gays of coming to his country to "recruit" people into homosexuality. Ugandan newspapers and bloggers have seized on the proposed law to launch their own broadsides against gays, posting the names and photographs of individuals in Wild West-style "wanted" posters in print and online. A major tabloid, the Red Pepper, trumpeted an expose headlined "Top Homos in Uganda Named" as "a killer dossier, a heat-pounding and sensational masterpiece that largely exposes Uganda's shameless men and unabashed women that have deliberately exported the Western evils to our dear and sacred society."

From 2004 through 2008, Uganda received a total of $1.2 billion in PEPFAR money, and this year it is receiving $285 million more. Clearly, the United States has a great deal of leverage over the Ugandan government, and the American taxpayer should not be expected to fund a regime that targets a vulnerable minority for attack - an attack that will only render the vast amount of money that we have donated moot.

Earlier this month, members of Congress led by the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, Howard L. Berman (D-Valley Village), and its ranking minority member, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton calling on the U.S. "to convey to Ugandan leaders that this bill is appalling, reckless and should be withdrawn immediately." And in an open letter to Dr. Eric Goosby, the new U.S. global AIDS coordinator, Charles Francis, a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS during the Bush administration, asked, "Will we stand by and let national governments scapegoat a sexual minority for HIV/AIDS while receiving major funding for AIDS relief?"

Irresponsible and reprehensible behavior on the part of Ugandan officials should lead to a serious re-evaluation of U.S. policy and an ultimatum for the Ugandan government: It must desist in its promotion of deadly homophobia or say goodbye to the hundreds of millions of dollars it has received due to the generosity and goodwill of the American people.

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Silly

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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.

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Common Decency, Common Sense

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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.

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A Window Slams Shut

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I came out in the 1990s at the tail of the glory days of gay culture. There were gay bookstores then in most major cities, and a mix of gay social clubs, where you could gather to bowl, two step, play cards or organize for LGBT rights.

Most important, there was a gay paper in every city that could sustain one.

At the time, the mainstream media didn't cover gay issues often or well. The New York Times called us homosexuals and didn't cover our unions in their social pages. It was tough to find articles about our rights that didn't have an obligatory quote from a religious conservative explaining that being gay is immoral, wrong and in many places illegal.

Before the internet, the gay press was the only place where you could find reliable, objective information about LGBT issues. It was the only place you could learn about vigils, bars specials, group gatherings, protests.

And now it is disappearing.

The demise this week of the Washington Blade (40 years old), Southern Voice (20 years) and other publications owned by Window Media hit me hard. Like many young gay writers who came out in the 80s and 90s, my first job was at a gay paper. I learned how to interview politicians, how to report on events, how to copy edit and assign stories and crop photos and layout pages. And I gathered deep knowledge about gay and lesbian history, icons, politics, culture.

Gay papers are our community's treasure. The stories there are more local and gay-specific than the mainstream media, more reflective and better reported than what often appears on the internet. Gay reporters who work at gay papers take politicians to task and hold them to their promises. And gay papers themselves - since they are staffed by a small group not by individuals working remotely - pass along knowledge, skills and expertise to the next generation of gay reporters.

Blogs are wonderful, of course. We all read them. They can disseminate a lot of information quickly. But they also get things wrong; and in the constant churn of information, important stories - stories that dominate front pages for a week - can be lost under other, less significant posts.

And don't forget that few blogs actually report news - most only link to and comment on news that has already been reported by other sites.

Newspapers as a class are being killed by many things besides blogs. The rise of free and convenient information and news on the web. The loss of classified advertising to sites like Craigslist. The expense of paper.

And the gay press is further hurt by the rise of gay reporting in the mainstream media.

But don't be fooled. Just like chain bookstores reduced their gay and lesbian section to barely an aisle after forcing local gay and feminist bookstores out of business, the mainstream media reports only on stories about the gay community that are of mainsteam - not LGBT - interest.

Gay papers and gay reporters are important. We need to support and nurture the ones we have. Perhaps, too, we need a new model - something like Pro Publica, the non-profit organization devoted to investigative news gathering. If we were able to gather the best LGBT reporters from around the country and give them the resources to investigate important local stories, we could provide fuel to activists and bloggers everywhere.

I mourn the Washington Blade and all the other gay papers now gone that both built a community and explained it to itself.

But I celebrate the papers we have left. And I admire the reporters who staff them, providing the information to our community we just can't get anywhere else.

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Why Approval Matters

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It's November, which means bookstores have next year's calendars on display.

When I was a teenager, this annual occurrence unnerved me. The "male interest" calendars"-think "Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model of the Month"-held no appeal for me. Instead, I would nervously reach for a Chippendales calendar, hiding it behind something innocuously themed (race cars, puppies, whatever) so that I could stare admiringly at half-naked men. As soon as I noticed anyone approaching, I would throw both calendars back on the shelf and dart out of the store.

I laugh now at the thought that I could ever find the overly pumped and coiffed 1980's Chippendales dancers appealing. But when I see these calendars on the shelves today, I still feel a residual emotional tug. Like the underwear models in the J.C. Penney catalog (and so many other ordinary features of American life), the calendars were a painful signal: you are not like other boys.

I noticed a calendar display in a bookstore the other day just shortly after receiving an e-mail from a reader complaining that I waste too much time trying to win over straight society's approval. "When are you going to stop seeking other people's acceptance?" he asks.

My answer? I'll stop seeking it once we get it.

The calendars reminded me of why. It's not because I'm still scared that other people will know my "secret." Today, I can walk into a bookstore and look at whatever I want. Indeed, I sometimes make a point of picking up the "female interest" calendars just to remind myself-and anyone else watching-that I can. It's my way of saying: No, I am not like (most) other boys, and I'm okay with that. Honestly, I really don't give a flying fig whether you give me a dirty look when I do it.

But there are plenty of boys and girls growing up who are not there yet. They still get unnerved when they see the calendars, or the catalogs, or countless other possible triggers. They still feel that nauseous shame and isolation. They have yet to learn that the feelings they dread can eventually be a source of great joy, and beauty, and comfort.

Social approval can make a huge difference in the lives of these kids, not to mention those who come after them.

This is one significant way in which LGBT people differ from most other minority groups. Whereas black children generally have black parents, Jewish children generally have Jewish parents, and so on, LGBT people can have any sort of parents-and most often have straight ones. Far from being able to take for granted our parents' understanding of the discrimination we face, we often have to struggle for their acceptance, too.

So while their parents' opinion on homosexuality may not directly matter to me, you can be damn sure it matters to them.

I don't mean that they can't go on to have happy, fulfilling, successful lives even if their parents ultimately reject them. I just mean that doing so will be harder-needlessly, sometimes tragically so.

Moreover, it's not as if I have no stake at all in their parents' opinion. As we've seen over and over, their opinion affects how they vote. And their votes make a difference to our legal rights, whether we like it or not.

Of course it isn't fair. But that doesn't mean it isn't true.

So I'll stop seeking their approval when we get it, and not a moment sooner. Because their approval helps make our political struggle easier. Because it's crucial to the lives of their kids, some of whom are LGBT. And because it's the right thing.

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No Argument

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This is the last straw for me. I took Americablog's pledge.

Melody Barnes seems to be a shining example of the kind of person I expected Barack Obama to surround himself with when I voted for him for President. She is Obama's Senior Domestic Policy Advisor, and Director of his Domestic Policy Council. A tape of a speech she gave at the Boston College of Law included a response to a question about same-sex marriage. When the White House got the tape, they went through the Agonies of the Damned over two full days determining whether they'd let Boston College make it public or not. Eventually the White House saw that it would be futile to try and censor it.

Like the President she works for, and so many others in the administration, Barnes is articulate, humane, self-possessed, good-humored and exceptionally intelligent. But look at the damage done to all that because of the administration's decision to side with the Catholic Church and the National Organization for Marriage. I was going to say the administration is incoherent on same-sex marriage, but it is not - the Obama administration opposes our equality.

That prevents the most senior advisors like Barnes from issuing a simple declarative sentence - "I support same-sex marriage" - even when it is clear that is her position. Instead, when asked a direct question, she has to speak in the wild circumlocutions and detours that are now becoming characteristic of this administration on this topic:

"I guess I would respond in a couple of different ways. One, I appreciate, I really appreciate your frustration and your disappointment with the president's position on this issue. He has taken a position, and at the same time, he has also articulated the number of ways that he wants to try and move the ball forward for gay, lesbian and transgendered Americans, including signing the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, and a whole host of other things that we've started to do to model as a leader in terms of what the federal government is doing, as well as to encourage changes both in the military, in the workplace, and certainly with regard to hate crimes."

For the record, the President's position in same-sex marriage is this: "I'm a Christian. And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman."

While that is a position, it is not an argument. Rather, it is indistinguishable from the positions (not arguments) adopted by the Vatican and NOM - which is to say, it is unchallengeable in any civic forum. And it is intended to be unchallengeable in any civic forum. References to tradition and particularly sanctification have little purpose other than to short circuit any opposition - certainly any secular opposition, which is what the President was being asked about.

So when Barnes says . . .

"when I walk into the White House . . . I work to put all arguments in front of the president, [but] as you say, I also work for the president. And we have very robust policy conversations, very robust constitutional conversations with the White House counsel, and others about these issues, and we'll see what happens from there"

. . . it's hard to believe she's talking about same-sex marriage. What policy or "robust constitutional" conversation can you have with a man who tells all of the American people in response to a secular question that his religious beliefs say that marriage is "something sanctified between a man and a woman"?

The tragedy of this - for both the President and for us - is that he knows better, and we all know that he knows better. He is presiding over the historical turning point, not for gay rights in general, but for marriage in particular, and he is stuck in reverse. The President's opposition is giving support to the very people who hate him as much as they resist us.

It says everything that the most articulate president in my lifetime - on the most controversial issues like race, the Middle East, war, and all the rest - is reduced to verbal sputters and clichés on gay marriage. That's all there is on the other side - on his side; if there were anything reasonable to argue, he'd have done so.

This has to be hard on his own conscience; he has to know that his opposition to equality will stain his legacy. But it is our lives - and the hopes we had - that he is playing with here. And it is decent people like Melody Barnes whose best is being corrupted and tortured to serve the Administration's retrograde cynicism.

Sadly, the President's party has to follow his lead. That's why I had to take the pledge, and I urge others to do so. The President is encouraging a rot in his own party, the same rot of prejudice that is invigorating the worst of the Republicans, and terrifying their best.

That is not what I voted for, and I cannot possibly support it.

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Aiding Homophobia?

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Conditioning humanitarian aid, including health assistance, should always be a last resort. However, when a country that receives hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. HIV/AIDS assistance gets busy publicly vilifying homosexuals and even threatening to put them to death, hasn't the last resort been reached?

Charles Francis thinks so. He is an openly gay former member of the President's Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS who thinks it's time to draw a line:

American lawmakers are asked to appropriate billions of dollars through the PEPFAR program to many of the countries now escalating anti-gay rhetoric into a verbal assault with threats to imprison gay Africans and NGO workers. A growing number of PEPFAR countries are considering legislative proposals to criminalize homosexuality with a death penalty, enact bans on homosexual organizations and to imprison homosexual citizens....

This is a critical juncture for PEPFAR before the world community. Will we stand by and let national governments scapegoat a sexual minority for HIV/AIDS while receiving major funding for AIDS relief? Will the U.S. fund radical, anti-gay prevention programs that could become a model for other parliaments and governments?

Read his open letter to the Global AIDS Coordinator here.

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Are New Yorkers Stonewalling Their Own Progress?

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Twenty years ago, New York's highest court ruled, in Braschi v. Stahl Associates that a same-sex couple could be treated as a "family" under New York's rent control law. This was a landmark decision because at the time same-sex couples had virtually no legal recognition of any kind in New York - or any other state's - law.

I know about this because I helped Tom Coleman do legal research for a brief in Braschi that helped situate gay couples in the broad term "family" as we had just done the prior year in passing the first domestic partnership ordinance in Los Angeles. After the 1989 decision, we had every reason to believe New York would beat California in enacting statewide domestic partnership, and ultimately to marriage.

Two decades later, New York state not only does not offer domestic partnership to its homosexual citizens, it seems to have rejected any compromise other than full marriage rights, and doesn't seem interested in any political middle ground.

I hope they know what they're doing. Perhaps all the news reports are wrong, and they really do have the votes this time for full marriage equality. That would be terrific. Or perhaps they don't want to dilute the issue, keeping the arguments clearly focused on what really matters in the long-term.

But if they can't get marriage, how much longer will they leave New York state's same-sex couples with legal protections not that much different from their counterparts in Mississippi? Even New York City's same-sex couples can only claim domestic partnership rights that that include vendors licenses and visitation in NYC's prisons. One of the most vibrant gay communities in the entire world seems content, in 2009, with fewer legal rights than couples in Hawaii. Or Vermont. Or Maine.

If they pull this off, it'll be a tremendous, and long-overdue victory. But if they don't, they're making it look like the legacy of Stonewall is to do nothing but stonewall.

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Maine, Detroit, and the Closet

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When I was a "fag" on the junior high playground, getting punched hurt even when I saw it coming. So too with Maine this past week.

Like many, I was dispirited but not surprised when we lost. The rights of minorities (gays especially) generally don't do well when put to a popular vote. And the opposition's central message-that gays want to influence schoolchildren-remains as effective as it is sinister.

The message conjures up the image of gays as child molesters-a myth debunked but never fully extinguished.

A slightly less sinister (but still false) version portrays us as anti-family and anti-morality. Still another falsehood is that we're trying to "recruit."

Then there's the underlying truth that sustains the myth as plausible. Yes, of course marriage equality will affect what children are taught in schools, because if same-sex marriage is legal, they will naturally be taught that it's legal. That it's an option for consenting adults who want it. That women sometimes fall in love with women, and men with men, and live happily ever after.

We should not shrink from saying these things, but we do. No doubt, the ugliness of the sinister versions-not to mention our opponents' penchant for quoting us out of context-makes us nervous about discussing the truthful version. And that's surely one lesson of this loss: the closet is still powerful, and our opponents use it to their advantage.

But we will not go back in the closet again.

We will keep telling our stories. We will keep showing our faces. We will keep getting married, even if-for now-Maine doesn't legally recognize our relationships. We will not go back in the closet again.

And though we've lost this particular battle, we will continue to win the war.

On the same day that Maine voters took away marriage equality, Detroit (where I live) elected an openly gay City Council President. This, in a city that's 84% African-American and where churches exert considerable political influence. The rest of the country hardly noticed, but Detroit defied several stereotypes on Tuesday.

His name is Charles Pugh. A popular newscaster before running for City Council, Pugh was actually endorsed by both the Council of Baptist Pastors and the AME Ministerial Alliance. They knew he was gay and they endorsed him anyway.

One could argue that Pugh was endorsed-and won-because of name recognition. Detroit elects all nine council members at-large, and the top vote getter automatically becomes council president. It's a dumb system in several ways, and in the past it has resulted in famous but incompetent council members-Martha Reeves, of Martha and the Vandellas, leaps to mind. (Incidentally, in this year's primary Reeves was voted out, and in the general election voters overwhelming approved a referendum for council-by-district.)

But even if Pugh's landslide can be attributed to sheer popularity, it sends an encouraging message about the way the world is changing. Being openly gay is no longer an absolute bar to getting public support. And even those who regularly oppose us will sometimes let other factors trump whatever makes us scary otherwise.

Meanwhile, the more they know us, the less scary we become.

It's unfair and unfortunate that we need to work harder than our opponents to win. They win by exploiting fear, which is easy to do when you're in the majority. We win by building relationships-by letting voters know who we really are. That takes time.

So our opponents have a soundbite edge, but we have a long-term advantage. The closet is crumbling.

In the wake of the Maine loss, we will catch our breath and press on. We will continue to live our lives; we will keep speaking our truth. We will stand up in the firm conviction that our love is real, and valuable, and worthy of equal treatment under the law.

Because whatever legal roadblocks they may put in our way, we will never go back in the closet again.

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