IGF CultureWatch

On election night, I stood in the heart of San Francisco's Castro district. Around me were thousands of people cheering and dancing for Barack Obama's victory and for the promise they believe it brings gay America. Meanwhile, on a large screen broadcasting local news it became more apparent with every passing hour that Californians had voted on the marriages of a small minority, and had found them wanting.

There will be a strong temptation among gay-marriage supporters to put on a brave face about the loss on Proposition 8. It has been noted that the vote was close, 52-48 percent, which is both heartbreaking because it was winnable now and encouraging because it may be winnable soon. We narrowed a gap that stood at 22 percent eight years ago, when Californians last voted to ban gay marriage, to just under 5 percent now.

But the narrow margin of the Prop 8 loss masks some hard facts for the gay-marriage movement. Counting the losses in Arizona and Florida, we are now 0-30 in the states. In California, we lost under circumstances that were as favorable to our side as they are likely to be for some time. We lost in deep blue territory on a blue night, when Obama carried the state with an astonishing 61 percent of the vote. We lost despite being on the "no" side in a ballot fight, with the built-in advantage that gives you among those who vote "no" on everything out of understandable proposition fatigue. We lost despite the state attorney general changing the ballot title to reflect that it "eliminates rights," something most Americans don't like to do no matter the subject.

All of this suggests that actual support for gay marriage in California is something less than 48 percent. My best guess is that actual electoral support for it in the state is somewhere in the low 40s, when you factor out ballot fatigue, the blue tide, and the favorable ballot title - all of which you would have to presume in trying to reverse Prop 8 in a future initiative requiring an actual "yes" to gay marriage.

And, of course, to reverse Prop 8 we'll have to raise lots of money and put together a petition drive just to get to the ballot. My estimate is that this loss - barring federal or state judicial intervention to undo Prop 8 - means there will be no gay marriage in California for several years, perhaps a decade. In fact, it might be a mistake to put this on the ballot again in two years, as some are planning. Voters may resent a quick re-vote.

Something else, however, concerns me even more than whether particular tacticians can manipulate a vote by a sufficient few percentage points to eke out a narrow win in the next few years.

The reality is that to a very large part of the country, and even in the bluest parts of the bluest states, homosexuality is not seen as normal and gay relationships are not seen as healthy and contributing to a society's well-being. Whether that's because of religion or because of the "ick" factor or some combination of the two, it doesn't much matter. It's there and it's only grudgingly and slowly giving up ground.

The smartest leaders of the gay-marriage movement know this. That's why gays were invisible in the No on 8 campaign. The "No" literature talked in generalities about "discrimination" and about how it was "wrong" and "unfair" to take away marriage from some unnamed group of people. There was no reference to "gays." The No on 8 ads featured almost no gay couples, and especially no male couples, who are especially repugnant to many people.

This may have been the only strategy that had any chance of winning under the circumstances. If the campaign had frankly presented the case for gay families and marriage we might have lost by a much larger margin. No on 8 leaders were trying to dislodge in five months what people have been taught for a lifetime about homosexuals and marriage. Given the size of the task, it's amazing we nearly succeeded.

Mostly, my heart breaks for the gay couples and their children who had a five-month window in which their families could celebrate the ultimate expression of commitment and love our culture knows. Now they have no idea whether they have just been divorced by their fellow citizens.

On the Sunday before the election, I spoke to a rally of about 100 of them in Vallejo, east of San Francisco. It was held in a park bordered by rolling and largely barren, brown hills, which funneled a chilly wind onto us. The park was empty except for gay and lesbian couples, many of them with young children. Some had gotten married already and others were planning to do so before the vote, just in case. They were wearing red and carrying signs. They were full of hope. They would be heading out that day to form a human sign constituting the words "No on 8" by the side of the freeway, trying to capture the attention and hearts of a few thousand passing motorists in a state of 40 million people. It seemed an impossibly small group taking on a lot for themselves.

We are going to get gay marriage in this country, but that day is now a little farther away.

I have a confession to make. I'm getting ever so slightly tired of the reaction to Prop. 8.

I know I shouldn't. I know that the loss in California is terrible, and far-reaching, and deserving of attention. We had marriage, and voters took it away. A majority took away minority rights in a close election. That sucks.

I also know that we should do everything possible to capitalize on the outrage gays and their supporters are feeling right now, organizing marches and coming out to their friends and family and whatnot. The last thing I'd want to do is curb their enthusiasm.

And if I follow any of the above with a "but…," it's going to look like I don't really mean it-even though I do. What happened in California really sucks.

But…

It's important, as always, to maintain some perspective.

Gay and lesbian Californians will go back to having virtually all the statewide legal incidents of marriage via domestic-partnership legislation. That's not quite as good as marriage, but it's better than what most of the rest of us have.

Here in Michigan, not only do we lack domestic-partner legislation, our constitution bans it. And our attorney general interprets that ban as prohibiting public employers from offering health-insurance benefits to same-sex partners. We had them, and voters took them away.

So while California may have been the first state to take marriage away from gays, it's hardly the first to take rights away from gays-or the most significant in terms of tangible benefits.

This past election day, Florida passed a ban similar to Michigan's, and thus much worse than California's Prop. 8. Not only did it pass, it passed with a whopping 62 percent of the vote. With all the fuss over California, you may not have heard about it.

Arizona passed a ban that was limited to marriage, and thus less obnoxious than Florida's and Michigan's (and many others). But Arizona's ban appeared on the ballot only because of a dishonest last-minute parliamentary maneuver-another story you should have heard about, but probably didn't.

And for what may be the worst bit of gay election-day news, consider Arkansas, which passed a ban on unmarried persons serving as adoptive or foster parents. That ban was specifically targeted to fight "the gay agenda," but what it means is that thousands of children who could have stable loving homes will instead languish in state care.

Of course, we could broaden our focus even further, and note that in some parts of the world, being gay is still grounds for arrest, imprisonment, and even execution. In that light, even Arkansas looks downright welcoming.

None of this should make us any less outraged about what happened in California. I repeat: what happened in California sucks.

But I hope the people getting outraged about California will take a moment to look around at the rest of the country-and the world-and get even more outraged. Because what happened in California is nothing new.

For some years I've noticed a kind of myopia from some quarters of the GLBT community. They tell me: "We've won this war, John-gayness is a largely a non-issue. Sure, there are some stragglers in the South and the Midwest, but they'll catch up soon enough. In the meantime, trying to engage them just dignifies their bigotry. It's time for you to accept that we're living in a post-gay society."

Prop. 8 stung so much, in part, because it proves that we are not there yet.

This myopia is not limited to California, or even the coasts, though it does show up more there. It exists anywhere that liberals have the luxury of spending their time mostly around other liberals. (I write this as a liberal philosophy professor in an urban center, so I'm hardly immune to the phenomenon myself.)

And so when Sally "Gays are a bigger threat than terrorists" Kern gets re-elected by a 16-point margin in Oklahoma, these liberals look on with a mix of perplexity, smugness, and pity. That is, if they look on at all. (In case you missed it, Kern's comfortable re-election happened on November 4, too.)

Of course, the other side has its own brand of myopia, as we all continue to become more polarized and isolated.

What's the solution? As I've said over and over again-in columns, in speeches, in any forum available-we need to keep talking to each other. We need to engage our opponents. We need to keep making the case.

If there's a silver lining to this Prop. 8 defeat, it's the wake-up call that reminds us that we're not there yet.

If you freeze-frame the Milk movie trailer on YouTube, you can see the "1051" atop the streetcar used in a scene portraying an angry demonstration. The car from San Francisco's Municipal Railway ("Muni") is now a "moving museum" dedicated to Harvey Milk, with informational panels on Milk's career.

In a larger sense, we have much to learn from Milk and other gay rights pioneers -- not just how to fight for ourselves, but how to change the terms of the debate.

The film shows Milk (in an extraordinary portrayal by Sean Penn) quoting Glinda the Good Witch: "Come out, come out, wherever you are!" Milk refused to accept the more closeted approach favored by David Goodstein of The Advocate. He understood that gaining power required public engagement. In contrast to this year's unsuccessful No on 8 campaign, Milk debated John Briggs, sponsor of 1978's Proposition 6, which would have banned gay people and their supporters from working in public schools. Briggs lost.

Grassroots methods were also used to good effect in 1971, when members of Washington, D.C.'s newly formed Gay Activists Alliance and others stormed the ballroom of the Shoreham Hotel and disrupted a convention of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which defined homosexuality as a pathology. Frank Kameny seized the microphone and told the assembled "experts" that it was not for them to describe homosexuality; it was for gay people to describe themselves. He declared homosexuality just as natural and healthy as heterosexuality. Two years later, as Kameny (now 83) enjoys putting it, the APA gave gay people "a mass cure."

Milk's coalition-building has modern echoes. At a Nov. 15 rally on the steps of San Francisco City Hall, where Milk stood thirty years before, former City Supervisor Rev. Amos Brown, pastor of the Third Baptist Church and president of the local branch of the NAACP, said, "We live in a nation in which we are in the Bill of Rights accorded freedom from religion and freedom of religion, and no religion tells the State what to do in America." He also invoked the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and said that LGBT people deserve its protection the same as African Americans.

Brown asked religious fundamentalists, "What makes you think that you can protect marriage? When you look at the record in these United States of America, the divorce rate is the highest not in California, not in Massachusetts, but the divorce rate is the highest in the Bible Belt. ... You can't blame gays and lesbians for not being able to keep your own stuff together!"

Brown's fiery remarks are consistent with the prophetic preaching tradition of the black church, a tradition that includes ruffling feathers. In the middle of a recent pro-gay sermon, Brown was interrupted by an outraged younger minister who charged the pulpit and seized a microphone before being led away. (Apparently the younger man was not as compelling as Kameny.) On Nov. 21, some black ministers boycotted the S.F. NAACP's annual fundraising dinner in reaction to Brown's opposition to Prop 8. One pastor said, "The people have spoken on this issue. It became law and everyone should abide by that." The civil rights movement would have died in the cradle had its leaders taken such an attitude.

Professionalizing the movement and hiring experts is fine and necessary to compete with well-funded adversaries, but we must keep in mind what pioneers like Milk and Kameny understood decades ago: that we are the authorities on ourselves. If we win establishment access but forget why we sought it, the greater movement is reduced to personal ambition.

It's not enough to find the right messaging to reach particular demographics. We must make personal connections to ensure that voters know individual LGBT people. After losing an expert-guided initiative battle that cost us $40 million, perhaps it's time to take fresh inspiration from our forebears in claiming our fundamental American right to the pursuit of happiness and rebuking fundamentalists who invoke sectarian dogma to deny us this right that they take for granted.

Naturally, what worked in one time and place may not work in another. A successful campaign requires more than stirring oratory. But the point of any fight is lost if we avoid getting to it. You are the world's leading expert on you. Help make history. Speak up.

Although Barack Obama stated his opposition to the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ban on open gays in the military, the Obama team has let it be known that it will not try to repeal the law during the next session of Congress.

And now there are reports that despite New York state Democrats' support for same-sex marriage, the state Senate will "probably" not take up the issue during the coming session.

Have gays been had? Maybe so.

A lot of gays contributed time and money to the Obama campaign, not only because Obama represented a welcome change from the dismal Bush administration, but because he espoused a number of gay-supportive positions, including repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

I can understand the Obama administration's desire not to make the same mistakes as the Clinton administration in 1993, when Clinton proceeded without taking account of the strong military opposition to the inclusion of gays such as Gen. Colin Powell's and congressional resistance as personified by Sen. Sam Nunn. You may remember Sen. Nunn's highly publicized visit to the "close quarters" of a submarine. The implication was obvious.

And I can even understand that there are more nationally pressing issues for Obama and the new Congress to deal with such as the state of the economy, the war in Iraq and the worsening situation in Afghanistan.

Then too, in 2006 and 2008 Rep. Rahm Emanuel helped create Democratic majorities by recruiting candidates who were "moderate" (and often socially conservative) Democrats to run in swing districts. He achieved his goal, but weakened the strength of Democratic support for gays.

But at some point, say within a year, I would want to see the administration form a working group or task force to develop a plan to gain military and congressional approval for repeal. It could include deployment of those 100-plus admirals and generals who recently signed a statement supporting gay inclusion, commissioning opinion polls on the issue in marginal districts, and targeting wavering members of Congress for serious lobbying and promises of pork. Without some real indication of administration intentions, I'd be inclined to think they aren't serious.

Turning to New York, The New York Times reported (Nov. 29) that "some" state Senate Democrats, who control the upper house for the first time in years-support delaying a vote on legalizing same-sex marriage until after the 2010 election-that is, until 2011 at the earliest.

"That would prevent Republicans from being able to use gay marriage as an issue against (Gov.) Paterson in socially conservative areas of the state or against Democratic Senate incumbents," the Times reported.

Maybe so, but a number of gays poured money into the campaigns of specific Democratic candidates with the aim of defeating anti-gay Republicans. What are they going to get for their money?

And why won't the same argument by Democratic leaders apply in 2011-that a positive vote on gay marriage would just give ammunition to their GOP opponents in the next election? This argument could be used in each subsequent year to justify avoiding a vote on same-sex marriage. It seems it is always jam tomorrow, but never jam today.

Further, without a popular Democrat like Obama at the head of the ticket in the 2010 election, the New York Senate Democrats might lose their narrow majority and the GOP could regain control. Then gays and pro-gay Democrats would have lost their opportunity to vote on (and maybe approve) same-sex marriage.

There is more than a whiff of a shell game in all their arguments.

I would not go so far as to say that the Democrats deliberately lie about their intentions on gay issues. But they certainly promise more than they can or know how to deliver and downplay the post-election difficulties of fulfilling their promises. And hearing their promises, gay "leaders" (most of whom are Democrats anyway) become excited and beat the drums for supporting the Democrats with money and get-out-the-vote efforts. Then they wind up with nothing. Strangely, they are never apologetic about all this.

None of this is to suggest that anyone need support Republicans instead. With but a handful of honorable exceptions, the GOP embrace of the Religious Right makes that implausible. But gays should be more selective about which candidates they support and sometimes vote for a minor party or not vote at all in a given race.

And we should demand specifics on how a given policy will be enacted, not just accept a general message of support. As Sam Goldwyn is alleged to have said, "A verbal contract is not worth the paper it's written on."

My grandfather used to quote the old axiom: Give me a lever, and I'll move the world.

What he meant was that the right tool makes the task possible.

We have many tools at our disposal as we react to the taking away of our marriage rights in California. National protests. Lawsuits. A new ballot amendment. Lobbying legislators. Wearing the White Knot.

But there's one popular tool that's more of a blunt instrument than a lever: boycotts on businesses because their CEO or other employees gave personal money to Yes on 8.

There are good boycotts and bad ones. This is the bad kind.

I know it's tempting. We're very angry and very hurt. We want to lash out. And so when we hear that Cinemark's CEO donated $9,999 to Yes on 8, or that a manager of the West Hollywood restaurant El Coyote donated to Yes on 8, or that a business is owned by a Mormon, then we want to strike out. We boycott.

Last weekend, for example, people protested Cinemark theaters across the country, in addition to the unofficial boycott.

But this is not the solution, for an important reason: it sets an unfortunate precedent.

A boycott is good when a company is bad. When it harasses its LGBT employees; fires them for being gay; will not promote them; sells anti-gay products or services (say an anti-gay t-shirt).

A boycott is bad when a company is being targeted because of the personal donations of someone in the company - especially when the company itself is pro-gay or gay neutral, as Cinemark is (it has high ranking, open gays in its leadership, it supports LGBT film festivals, it's running Milk). Or, for example, Marriott - which, yes, is owned by a Mormon family, but which also scored 100 in the 2009 HRC Corporate Equality Index.

Why is it a bad boycott? First, because it makes no sense. It's as if we are punishing an entire family because one member let loose a racial slur. And unfair, overzealous actions like this tend to lead to backlashes.

Second, because it is likely to fail. Boycotts are tough to sustain (look at the way Baptists tried to boycott Disney); and when they wind up having no significant impact, it makes the group boycotting seem less powerful.

Third - and most importantly - this sort of boycott is bad even if it succeeds. It's bad because companies are very reactive to losing business, especially in hard economic times. And corporations do a lot to protect themselves. I fear that the result of these sorts boycotts - if they are successful - will be for companies to add a "no personal political or campaign donations" clause to their employment contracts.

Journalism organizations already often do this, so that reporters do not seem to have a conflict of interest with stories they report. You could see a company deciding, "Well, if an employee goes rogue and supports some political cause other people disagree with, we may lose business. So might as well tell employees that they can't make political donations of any kind."

That might sound terrific - until we think about it for a minute. The last thing we want is for a giant group of corporations to start limiting personal donations to causes. Many of us contribute to LGBT advocacy organizations. It would cripple our causes if we were unable to keep financial supporting Lambda Legal and NGLTF because our jobs told us we could not.

And do we really want companies to fire employees whose personal donations raise the ire of the community? What happens when a company is based in Florida, say, and its learned that it's CEO gave money to support civil unions; should a protest of anti-gay Floridians mean that the CEO is let go?

Instead, let us remember that people are not businesses. Businesses change practices due to attacks on the wallet; people change their minds through attacks on the heart.

Punishing Cinemark or Marriott or El Coyote for the foolish personal choices of a few leaders is unlikely to change (already pretty gay-friendly) corporate policies. We must build rapport with those leaders instead; we must talk with them; we must introduce them to gay people and explain from our hearts why their positions are wrong. And we must save boycotts for the companies that actually deserve them.

Boycotting is a blunt instrument. Let's not smash through our own interests accidentally. Instead, let's use a lever. And move the world.