IGF CultureWatch

I am a gay Republican. I am not "self-hating." I am not confused.

I am comfortable enough with my sexuality to think of myself in terms of traits other than simply my sexual orientation. I believe that my attraction to the same sex should have no bearing to my thoughts on tax policy, trade, foreign affairs or abortion. I believe that my sexuality is merely an incidental part of my life and should not be a major factor in my decision-making.

I am aware that there is a rich tradition of intellectualism, secularism and equality within the Republican Party outside of the Religious Right. I am aware that Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney hold the same positions on gay rights. I am aware that Bill Clinton signed into law the last major anti-gay piece of legislation passed by Congress - the so-called Defense of Marriage Act. I am self-respecting enough to know that the words of the Democrats on gay rights are no substitute for their lack of action.

I believe that the virtues of classical liberalism - individualism, self-reliance and a rejection of cultural relativism - help gay men, just as they do all of mankind and are better exemplified by the Republican Party than by the Democratic Party. I am furthermore woefully confused by gay men's ambivalence toward radical Islam, which holds them in a particularly low esteem.

I believe that the gay subculture is destructive. I am not completely sure why a person should be "proud" of his sexuality, which is not an accomplishment. I am confused by the discord between a group of people who insist that they're just like everyone else on one hand and then on the other refuse to assimilate into mainstream society.

I am unable to relate to the faction of gay men who revolve their lives around their sexuality: their neighborhood is gay, their friends are gay, their music and movies are gay, their academic interests are gay, the stores that they frequent are gay - their lives are gay. I am not interested, though, in living my life as a gay man, but simply as a man. I envision a future in which a person's sexual orientation will be an afterthought. I do not in any way whatsoever see the Democratic Party furthering that.

I have been discriminated against more by Democrats than by Republicans. I have been shunned and mocked by Democrats, many of whom will not accept me as a gay man unless I fit into their neatly packaged view of what a gay man is "supposed" to be. I have yet to encounter, on the other hand, a Republican who has rejected my presence in the party, shunned me on a personal level or refused to engage me on the issues.

I have come to understand on a very personal basis that the stereotypes and caricatures of the parties are no substitute for experiencing their members up close. I see that the "tolerance" and "compassion" of the left only extend as far as a person is willing to further their ideological worldview.

I am not Alex Knepper, the gay man. I am Alex Knepper, a man who just so happens to be gay. I believe that my chosen virtues and the actions that I take, not my unchosen sexual orientation, defines me as a person. I am a man who chooses to think for himself and shape his life on his own terms.

I don't think that makes me so radical.

Last week, a Grand Rapids, Mich., television station decided to pull an hour-long infomercial called "Speechless: Silencing the Christians."

Whether this was a good decision for gay and lesbian civil rights or a bad one depends on what happens next.

On the surface, of course, it seems good. The infomercial, produced by the gay-hating, radical right wing religious organization the American Family Association, is a stream of misdirection, misinformation and outright lies.

Through interviews with leaders of a small number of far-right organizations like Concerned Women for America, the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, the Media Research Center and the ex-gay group Exodus International, Speechless tells a story that would be horrifying if it were true: gay and lesbian activists are using violence and intimidation to keep Christians from practicing their religion.

Of course, it's not true at all. Gay people aren't trying to pass laws to keep Christians from marrying, or attacking them on the street because they're Christian, or firing them from their places of employment (which would be illegal anyway, under federal anti-discrimination law that we'd like to extend to ourselves).

These things happen to gays and lesbians all the time.

The infomercial is dangerous, because it feeds on fear and uncertainty with inflammatory language and stock video that tries to scare viewers into believing that if even basic anti-discrimination laws are passed, then America's children (who, interestingly, all seem to be white in the pictures flashed across the screen) are in danger.

What, exactly, they are in danger of isn't made clear. Open-mindedness? Independent thinking?

This sort of infomercial, though, sways opinions in the same way those ridiculous, hate-mongering internet forwards do - by feeding on people's doubts and prejudices by saying things that aren't true, but that people fear are true. So in the world of internet forwards, then-candidate Barack Obama was a Muslim terrorist. And in the world of Speechless, gay people are opening fire on places of worship (really).

When the Human Rights Campaign learned that the station in Grand Rapids planned to air the infomercial, they put out a call to action. The station was flooded with messages from angry gays and lesbians demanding the piece be pulled.

And it was.

What I like about the HRC's call is that it requested that a reasoned debate on hate crime be substituted for the deceitful infomercial. That seems fair.

But the other side, of course, won't see it that way.

In fact, my guess is that the pulling of the infomercial will only lend fuel to the AFA fire - now they'll be able to point to it as just another example of gays and lesbians - and the "liberal" media - trying to stifle Christian speech.

I also worry that the controversy over the Grand Rapids television decision means that many more people are watching Speechless on the AFA website than would have ever seen it on a small, local TV channel.

And yet, when faced with trash like the AFA infomercial, we can't do nothing. We know that lies like these affect real people in our community, giving bigots who fire us and bash us an air of legitimacy.

So what should we do?

First, of course, we need to counter the AFA's lies with point-by-point truth.

But it is not facts that sway hearts - it is points of commonality.

We need to do a better job of building bridges between the gay and lesbian civil rights movement and more liberal faith communities. We need to highlight the experiences of gay and lesbian faith leaders - like Gene Robinson, Mel White and Peter Gomes. We need to start flooding the airwaves with pictures of gay people attending religious services.

We need to end the lie that religion and gayness are incompatible.

I know that a lot of gay people will be uncomfortable with this. Many gays and lesbians, religious or not, have been hurt by religious institutions. But the fact is that America is a religious country, far more religious than other Western countries. And many gays and lesbians who grew up in America are religious, too. We attend church and synagogue. We go to Buddhist temples. We celebrate annual religious holidays. We pray.

Gays and lesbians shouldn't have to deny any parts of ourselves - not our sexual orientation, and not our religious affiliation, should we have one. We can be both religious and gay.

We need to show that gays and lesbians aren't silencing Christians - because many of us are Christian, too.

I am something of a fan of gay-owned businesses. I myself don't have much of the entrepreneurial spirit, but I admire it in others and am delighted when they make a success of it.

As I explained in a recent article, gay businesses not only serve the gay community and their neighborhood, they also help to anchor the community geographically. Their owners tend to recycle their income through the gay community and they bring non-gay patrons and their money into the process. Often too they provide employment for area gays and lesbians.

I should add that a consumer's first concern should be to patronize businesses that provide the best products and services at the best prices. Not attracting patronage is the market's signal to a business to shape up. But other things being equal, without being the least bit anti-heterosexual, I encourage gays to patronize gay-owned businesses when they can and when the businesses offer products and services at least as good as other businesses.

I've done a few pieces on area gay-owned businesses in the past (a bookstore, an art gallelry), so when my editor asked me to write more about gay small businesses, I welcomed the opportunity to learn more about gay businesses: how they started, how they grew, the problems they encounter, etc.

After doing a couple of such pieces (e.g., on a candy-store), it is already clear to me that it is more complicated than I realized. Maybe most people think you decide to open a business, do so, and you're on your way. It's far from being that straightforward. A would-be entrepreneur has to scour the neighborhood to check for other businesses that would draw people to the area, check the density of street traffic that could provide "walk-in" business, look for similar competing stores nearby, check rents to see if they are affordable, and consider if advertising is desirable or necessary and whether local media are affordable.

One business owner told me that he had planned on opening one kind of store, but then saw that a similar store was planning to open up just a few doors away. So he switched to Plan B-a different kind of store. Another gay shop owner was able to find and afford only a second-floor space-a definite disadvantage for any business that hopes for appealing window displays or walk-in traffic.

A high density of similar businesses is not always a disadvantage, however. Bars and nightclubs tend to welcome nearby bars since a larger number of bars draws people to the area and many patrons wander from bar to bar. Probably there is a maximum density of gay bars, but I don't know what that is. Maybe I'll learn.

If gay businesses are selling a product, they have to find out what wholesalers supply the products they want in sufficient quantities, at affordable prices, and in a timely fashion. Unabridged Books, for instance, can replace any books that are selling well and get them within a day or two. The system is called JIT-Just In Time supplying. It means that any store does not have to maintain a huge stock of potentially popular titles. Other businesses may use something similar. I'll find out.

Not every gay-owned business manages to survive. A cheese shop and a gay-owned store selling a variety of coffees opened up in the area. The coffee store closed after barely a year while the cheese shop seems to be doing fine. That is the opposite of what I would have expected. So reading the market and the neighborhood can be more complicated than I realized.

Two gay-owned art galleries opened near each other. One seems to be doing fine. The other moved away, the owner claiming that the area was a poor one for art. To be sure, the kinds of art they were offering differed significantly, and the price range was considerably different, but still ... the differing market responses is an important piece of information.

The quality, knowledgeability, and friendliness of the staff are important variables too. Some gay-owned businesses have staff people who welcome you and ask if they can help you find anything in particular or if you would prefer to just look around. At the other extreme, I visited a gay-owned business (not one of those mentioned here) recently, but during five minutes of my poking around, no one asked me if they could help me find anything. Does the owner know about this? I don't know if I'll go back. Does the owner care about that?

As I pursue this project I'll try to report back to readers what I learn, either explicitly or between the lines. Let me know if there are questions you'd like to see answered.

Two decades ago, when I first came out of the closet, my mother had an irritating habit of referring to my boyfriend as my "friend."

You could almost hear the scare-quotes around the word as she would speak it. "This is John's, um, 'friend.'"

When I complained to her about it, she feigned innocence. "Well, he is your friend, isn't he?"

"No, Mom, he's my boyfriend," I retorted.

"Isn't that based in friendship?" she tried.

"Mom, how would you feel if someone referred to Dad as your 'friend'?"

"That's not the same thing!"

Which was true, as far as it went. Mom and Dad had been together for decades; the boyfriend and I had been together for mere weeks. Still, he was my boyfriend, not my "friend," and I bristled every time she would use the latter term to refer to him.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when Mark (my partner of seven years) and I were visiting my parents in Texas. We stopped by the large salon where Mom recently started working.

I'd visited the place before, but Mark hadn't, so Mom grabbed him by the hand and started introducing him around. "Hey, everybody-I want you to meet my son-in-law."

I smiled to myself.

Mind you, there's no "law"-either where we live in Michigan or where my parents live in Texas-that recognizes the relationship Mark and I have. We have a big fat expensive binder full of powers of attorney and what-not, but legally speaking, that's it.

But "son-in-law" wasn't about legal reality. It was about our familial reality, which is far more important to Mom. (Us, too.)

The funniest part of it is that she often didn't even bother to mention his name. This pleased me. My family has a longstanding habit of referring to family members by roles instead of names. So Mom will say, "Your sister called" instead of "Jennifer called;" "It's your uncle's birthday" instead of "It's Uncle Raymond's birthday." This never struck me as odd until a high-school friend pointed it out. It's certainly inefficient ("Which uncle?") but it nicely expresses the tight fabric of our family.

Mom's comfort-level transformation happened years ago, and I wouldn't have even noticed "son-in-law" were it not for the occasional perplexed reaction it evoked. (Jennifer, who lives near my parents, is unmarried.)

"Your son-in-law?" her co-workers would ask, wondering if there was another daughter they hadn't met.

"Yes, my son's partner!" She now says it without batting an eyelash.

Notwithstanding the importance of law, these kinds of shifts will do more to bring about marriage equality than any court decision or legislative initiative.

That's not just because black-robed justices are no match for red-aproned Brooklyn-Sicilian mothers. It's because marriage is, at some level, a pre-political reality. Yes, the law creates something, but it also acknowledges something that's already present. Both roles are important.

In calling Mark her "son-in-law," Mom is saying something that is false legally but true socially. The fight for marriage equality is largely a fight to align the legal reality with the social one. And the more often ordinary people refer openly to that social reality, the easier it will be for the legal reality to catch up.

With a switch of just two percent of the votes, the leaders of the "No on 8" campaign would today be heroes. We'd be lauding their powerful advertising campaign. We'd be celebrating their coalition-building. We'd wonder at their unprecedented fund-raising prowess. And we'd still have gay marriage in California.

But life is a vale of tears, so the conventional wisdom is that the leaders of No on 8 are clueless cowards who squandered a large lead in a blue state in a bright blue year.

Never mind that they were trying to overcome deeply embedded views about something Americans think is the foundation of responsible family life.

Never mind that winning on Prop 8 would have been a first for gay marriage at the polls anywhere in America (except for a brief win in Arizona in 2006, reversed in 2008), including in blue states like Oregon and Wisconsin.

Never mind that the early public polls suggesting a big defeat for Prop 8 were never reliable, and were criticized as such at the time. There was no lead to be squandered.

Everybody now seems to know what went wrong on Prop 8. But the truth is, nobody really knows how that extra two percent might have been persuaded to vote "no."

The main "problem" identified by many critics is that the campaign left gay people invisible. Anti-Prop 8 literature made no mention of gays, instead complaining that it was "unfair" and "wrong" to discriminate against an unnamed group of people. The television ads didn't portray gay families.

This deliberate omission deeply offends a lot of people. The gay-rights command of the past forty years has been to come out. The logic was recently summed up by veteran lesbian activist Robin Tyler at a post-Prop 8 "Equality Summit" in Los Angeles. "When you get to know us," she said, "you don't want to discriminate against us." No on 8 was a "know-nothing" campaign.

Campaign leaders have defended the know-nothing approach as the only way to win. Political consultants, whom we're told know better about such things than ordinary mortals, advised them that frank images of homosexuals would turn off persuadable voters. An "openly gay" campaign would not have won. It would have lost by an even larger margin, they claim.

The political professionals may be right. The error of the know-nothing critique is that it treats a strategy for winning the culture war (come out) as a tactic for winning a ballot battle. Coming out is an interpersonal act that works because the person already knows and likes you. It's not something you tell forty million strangers expecting their immediate understanding and support. Contrary to Tyler's admonition, can you really "know us" via thirty second ads aired over a period of a few months?

But there are a couple of potential problems with the adult, responsible, realistic, political-consultant perspective. First, to know whether it's right we'd need to see the actual data - the polling, the focus-group analysis - that underlie this judgment. My untutored sense is that focus groups and polls are often applied too statically and mechanically to real-life politics, which are dynamic and contextualized. Focus groups might have loved New Coke, but the public didn't.

Second, there's a paradox here. Almost everyone agrees that victory in the gay-marriage struggle ultimately requires the deep cultural shift brought on by coming out, by acquainting Americans with the real problems faced by real gay families, and by showing them how gay people are no threat to their own churches, families, and values.

We aren't going to fool people into supporting gay marriage. We can't just coldly claim legal rights. We may persuade gay activists that it's "wrong" and "unfair" to eliminate rights created five minutes ago by four judges. But most people don't believe there's a right to something that's not right. And they need to know a lot more about gay families over a long period to reach the conclusion that gay marriage is right.

How can that be done without talking about actual gay people? And when will it be done on a large scale except when we have the resources and energy to do it, as we do in a ballot fight? Winning in the end may depend on losing a few preliminary rounds in a way that progressively erodes the opposition. Instead, in every single ballot fight in thirty states, we have squandered the opportunity to educate voters for the future. Losing smartly now means winning later; losing ignorantly just means endless losing.

None of this is to say that the know-nothing choice made by No on 8 leaders was wrong in its context. My sense is that leaders of No on 8 reasonably thought they were within striking distance of winning and let their analysis overcome their instincts. They placed the safest bet available and narrowly lost.

Some people would say on principle that we should always reject "closet" tactics, regardless of the political consequences. That's too hard and pure for my taste. If we could have secured marriage in California in 2008 by parading Dykes on Bikes before the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, I would have done that. If we could have won by replaying Pat Robertson's meteorological ruminations, I would have done that, too.

But the hard truth is that in the long run, and in other places, we'll need less "No" and more "Know."