IGF CultureWatch

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.

Let me tell you three stories.

First story. One of my best friends, a middle-age man with whom I worked on AIDS issues in the 1980s, sent me an e-mail several months ago saying that he had recently tested positive for HIV. He acknowledged that he was extremely embarrassed to be confessing this fact: The message we had all promoted then-as now-was to have only "safe sex" and to use "a condom every time." "I must have neglected to use a condom," he said simply.

Second story. I was at my local grocery store during the late summer when I ran into a casual friend I've known from the bars, a man somewhere in his late 40s, I'd guess, and we stopped to chat. He said he recently found out that he was HIV-positive, which he confessed surprised him. "I thought I was safe because I was exclusively a top," he said. "But apparently not." I gathered that he was already taking an antiviral combination, which suggested that his T-cell count was low, so he may have been infected some time ago.

Third story. A good friend, an older man, told me that early this fall he had his first HIV test in several years and was surprised to learn that he was HIV-positive. Not only that but his T-cell count had sunk to the 100-150 range, clearly qualifying for an AIDS diagnosis. "I did what I considered 'safe sex' and assumed I was uninfected. I never had any symptoms that I recognized as being HIV-related," he told me. "But then I noticed that I was getting tired easily and wanted to take naps throughout the day. I thought that was just a function of getting older, but evidently not."

These men are all Americans, fellow Chicagoans. And, most of all, friends. World AIDS Day will be observed on December 1. Do I care about AIDS among people I do not know and will never see or meet? Only marginally. What I do care about is gay men in the U.S., in my city, in my neighborhood. In short, I care about my friends, present and potential. Anyone who cares as much about total strangers in foreign lands as he does his friends and people in his own community has a strange idea about the value of personal relationships.

I lived through the first wave of AIDS, 1981-1996. I lost a lot of friends during that time. Suddenly it feels as if I am beginning to live through a second wave of AIDS infections-not necessarily resulting in deaths this time, at least in the medium term, but decisively altering people's lives.

When people's T-cell levels decline to a certain point, they have to begin an anti-viral drug regimen that involves taking one to four drugs every day at the same time every day. If they travel, they have to pack their drugs and make sure nothing interferes with their drug regimen. They have to do this for the rest of their lives. And some of the drugs have inconvenient side effects, from nausea or wooziness to diarrhea to unpleasant dreams. But taking the drugs is better than not taking them.

It seems vitally important to remind people that AIDS is still a threatening presence in the gay community. I have read estimates that 20 percent of those infected do not know it. I have seen no statistical support for that estimate and I am sure the number is far higher-40 percent? 50 percent? Recall that the Centers for Disease Control acknowledged not many months ago that for years it had underestimated the number of people annually infected with HIV by more than 40 percent.

Every year, every day, young gay men come out and begin engaging in sex. They may think they are invulnerable, they may be heedless, or they may never see a safe-sex message or have had the term "safe sex" spelled out for them. When I have visited bathhouses or back-room bars, I have seen people of all ages and ethnicities engaging in unprotected sex. Clearly safe-sex messages have lost their impact or are not reaching them in a persuasive fashion.

Many people seem to care more about AIDS abroad than in the U.S. President Bush has sponsored billions of dollars in funding to prevent AIDS in third-world countries, but said little abut AIDS in the U.S. Some evangelical churches are involved in helping to combat AIDS abroad, but show no interest in AIDS in the U.S. It seems clear that they are interested in helping heterosexuals abroad, but want nothing to do with homosexuals in the U.S.

So it continues to be up to us.

Every national campaign has its moments of revelation, straws in the wind of change. For me, one of the most memorable blew past in a snippet of video.

It was June. Hillary Clinton was conceding the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama. A few minutes into her speech, as she called the roll of her supporters, she hit on the words "gay and straight." The camera angle was such that you could see young people in the crowd behind her erupt in boisterous cheers. A few minutes later a mention of "gay rights" elicited the same reaction.

Those young people, it struck me, were reacting to Clinton's gay-friendly rhetoric the way we are used to seeing social conservatives react to gay-hostile rhetoric: with joyful recognition that their brand of pro-American values, their brand of patriotism, was being affirmed. The "moral values" energy was on our side.

In 2004, when President Bush beat Sen. John Kerry in a tight race, we thought we had learned the continuing, indeed renewed, potency of values issues (read: gay marriage and abortion). An activist state supreme court had legalized gay marriage; Republicans gleefully seized the issue by putting gay marriage bans on state ballots, energizing the party's social conservative base. At a moment when voters were looking for stability and strength, the Republicans wove gay marriage into an overarching security narrative: America's core values were being challenged by radical Islamists from without as well as radical judges from within, and Republicans could be trusted to stand up to both. On the defensive, Democrats scrambled to change the subject, triangulating away from their gay and lesbian supporters.

What a difference four years makes. Again activist judges, this time in two states (California and Connecticut), order same-sex marriage. Again gay marriage bans sprout on state ballots. Again the public craves stability and security, though this time the threat is economic. On paper, the ingredients are the makings of another 2004.

But this time the results were entirely different. In 2008, Democrats used gays as an applause line, embracing us as a symbol of the change agenda. More important, Obama embedded gays in a security narrative of his own: America has been weakened by divisive politics and fruitless bellicosity; inclusiveness can restore the country's tattered unity, rebuilding strength at home and prestige abroad. This time it was the Republicans who mumbled and changed the subject, steering away from social issues both in their choice of nominee and in their campaign.

Which election, 2004 or 2008, tells us more about the future? You could argue that the values vote of 2004 was a fear-driven blip in the larger trend toward gay integration. Or you could argue that 2008 was really about the economy, and that culture-war issues will resurface when pocketbook issues recede.

It is too early to say, but that has never stopped a journalist before, so here goes: To me, 2008 looks more like the new normal. The cultural backlash against gay equality is far from over, and the marriage fight, in particular, has years to go. But the core message of legal equality has gotten through.

Now, "gotten through" does not mean "always wins." It means that the presumption of gay equality is at least as prevalent as the presumption of gay inferiority. According to Gallup polls, a clear majority of Americans now believe that homosexual relations between consenting adults should be legal and that "homosexuality should be considered an acceptable alternative lifestyle." In 2008, for the first time, Gallup found that as many respondents judged homosexual relations "morally acceptable" as judged them "morally wrong." At about 90%, support for "equal rights in terms of job opportunities" is now so overwhelming, as to be a nonissue.

What about marriage discrimination, then? Opposition to same-sex marriage remains predominant. Here, however, the problem is that the public sees gender as part of the core definition of marriage, not as a discriminatory detail. Eventually, albeit slowly, that is likely to change.

Meanwhile, the public already accepts the legitimacy of legal same-sex unions, provided they are not called marriage. Strikingly, a recent poll by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a Democratic-leaning firm, found that a majority of young white evangelicals, ages 18 to 29, favor either gay marriage (26%) or civil partnerships (32 percent). That places young evangelicals closer to the overall population than to their older confreres. In the foreseeable future, the principle of same-sex unions, though perhaps not "marriage," will be uncontroversial even on the Christian right.

I think, though I can't prove this, that there are two important transitions happening here. Both are good for gay and lesbian Americans, but one will require some hard rethinking.

The first is that the antigay culture war is winding down. The public has weighed the Karl Rove narrative (culture-war politics strengthens America by defending our values) against the Barack Obama narrative (culture-war politics weakens America by undermining our unity) and has come down on Obama's side - certainly for now but possibly for much longer.

Harder for us to adjust to will be this: The civil rights mind-set, with its focus on antidiscrimination laws and court-ordered remedies, has outlived its usefulness. There are still discrimination problems, of course-for example, when schools turn a blind eye to harassment. By and large, however, the public no longer regards gays as an oppressed minority, and by and large we aren't one.

The old civil rights model, with its roots in an era when homosexuals were politically friendless pariahs, focuses on such matters as protection from bigoted employers and hate crimes. In truth, for most gay Americans the civic responsibility agenda, with its focus on service to family (marriage), children (mentoring and adoption), and country (the military), is more relevant and important. With a comparatively sympathetic administration and Congress taking office in Washington, the time has come to pivot away from the culturally defensive pariah agenda - the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, for instance - and toward the culturally transformative family agenda.

Priority 1, and well ahead of whatever comes second, should be federal recognition of state civil unions. Obama supported this, as did, for that matter, all the other Democratic candidates. Marriage will take a while, but federal civil unions, though not a cinch, are attainable in the course of the next four to eight years, and they would be hugely beneficial to gay couples, who would get access to immigration rights, Social Security benefits, spousal tax status, and much, much more. Federal recognition of same-sex unions might also break the back of the "don't ask, don't tell" military policy. How can one part of the U.S. government banish gay couples while the rest embraces them?

Perhaps I'm Pollyanna. Perhaps the antigay political volcano is merely dormant, not dying. Perhaps it is too early to move on from civil rights. But I think it likelier that the country has turned a corner in the culture wars. If so, the question will be whether we can turn with it.