IGF CultureWatch

It's not surprising that Sean Penn, thanks to his star turn as Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant's biopic Milk, is becoming a hero to gays. His performance is moving and, judging by the archival film footage, flawless; Penn simultaneously renders Milk as a figure of historic importance and a vulnerable individual with a sparkling sense of humor. Aside from the acting prizes he will surely win (and deservingly), Penn is likely to earn himself the iconic status of "straight ally," a heterosexual who goes out of his way to take a stand for gay rights and is thus showered with praise from gays. A GLAAD Media Award, honors from the Human Rights Campaign, and a slew of prizes from other prominent gay rights organizations are only a matter of time.

Which is a shame, because Penn's political activism, irrespective of his views on gay rights, negates the values for which a movement based upon individual freedom must stand.

The same week that Milk premiered in theaters, The Nation published a cover story by Penn based on interviews he conducted recently with Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro, the dictators of Venezuela and Cuba respectively. The article is a love letter to the two men, defending them against all manner of Western "propaganda." It hearkens back to the notorious dispatches penned by Westerners fresh from the Soviet Union who reported on the amazing progress of the workers' paradise. These worshipful epistles, often published in The Nation, neglected to mention anything about the gulag, the "disappearance" of political dissidents, the Ukrainian famine, or any other such inconvenient truths about communism. Lenin termed the individuals who delivered these apologetics "useful idiots," and Penn and his enablers are nothing if not that.

Penn traveled to the region with the polemicist Christopher Hitchens, and while the loquacious Chavez was happy to entertain both men, the reclusive Castro was a harder get. Penn's long-standing defense of the communist regime in Cuba, however, must have endeared him to the Castro brothers, as Raul decided to grant an interview only with the actor. The import of a communist dictator purposely deciding to sit for an interview with Penn and not Hitchens, who would have been less - how to put it? - deferential in his line of questioning, was apparently lost on the movie star and his readers. Reporting on his dinnertime conversation, Penn dutifully made all the standard arguments in defense of the Cuban regime, from pointing out that the Communist Party would win 80% of the vote in an open election to morally equating the United States' Guantanamo Bay prison to Cuban jails that house the Castro brothers' political enemies.

It's only in the closing moments of his otherwise adulatory, seven-hour interview that Penn bothers to ask about human rights abuses on the island, and just the "allegations" of abuses at that. The lack of interest in individual liberty, hardly surprising for a far-left fellow traveler like Penn, is nonetheless ironic given the Cuban regime's treatment of gay people, a subject that one suspects Penn might have some interest in given his critically acclaimed performance in Milk. Not long after the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro ordered the internment of gay people in prison labor camps, where they were murdered or worked to death for their "counterrevolutionary tendencies."

Over the gate of one of these camps were the words "Work Will Make Men Out of You," an eerie homage to the welcome sign at Auschwitz instructing Jews on their way to the gas chambers that "Work Will Make You Free." (The plight of gays in the Cuban revolution is movingly told in the novel Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas, made into a film starring Javier Bardem. Playing a gay character in a film that has both an antitotalitarian and pro-gay message, Bardem is an "ally" less morally compromised than Penn.) In the early years of the regime, Raul Castro was notorious for ordering the summary execution of its opponents, including people whose only crime was their homosexuality. This is the man with whom Penn was "in stitches" knocking back glasses of red wine.

While homosexuality has since been decriminalized in Cuba, the communist government bans gay organizations, as it does any organization critical of the regime.

"There isn't a single individual that is taken seriously in the human rights community - whether you're talking about Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or Freedom House - that would describe the Castro brothers and their regime as anything other than a police state run by thugs and murderers," says Thor Halvorssen, president of the Human Rights Foundation, which focuses on Latin America. "That Sean Penn would be honored by anyone, let alone the gay community, for having stood by a dictator that put gays into concentration camps is mind-boggling."

Penn's credibility as an effective advocate for gay rights is also weakened by the generally illiberal policies of the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes. Chavez, in spite of Penn's apologetics to the contrary, is no democrat; the record of his rule is unmistakably authoritarian. The latest State Department human rights report cites the following government infringements in just the past few years: "unlawful killings; disappearances reportedly involving security forces; torture and abuse of detainees; harsh prison conditions; arbitrary arrests and detentions; a corrupt, inefficient, and politicized judicial system characterized by trial delays, impunity, and violations of due process; searches without warrants of private homes; official intimidation and attacks on the independent media; government-promoted anti-Semitism; widespread corruption at all levels of government; violence against women; trafficking in persons; and restrictions on workers' right of association."

Chavez has also cavorted on the world stage with individuals like Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe, trying to form a bloc of third-world, authoritarian regimes to stand in opposition to the West. Penn, playing the role of the apparatchik almost as well as he did the former San Francisco supervisor, doesn't bother to ask Chavez about any of these manifold abuses or associations, preferring to repeat without skepticism the crazed dictator's claim that the United States is plotting an invasion of his country. "It's true, Chavez may not be a good man," Penn declares. "But he may well be a great one."

That Penn would write an homage to Latin American caudillos is nothing new, as both he and The Nation have sung the praises of anti-American dictators for quite some time. Indeed, Penn fancies himself something of a foreign correspondent.

In December 2002 he traveled to Baghdad to meet with cronies of Saddam Hussein - the killer of hundreds of thousands, if not over a million people - to defend the Ba'athist regime against impending war. Penn hobnobbed with notorious individuals like Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister infamous as the public face of the Hussein regime, and pleaded on their behalf. This is not to condemn the notion of antiwar activism, but there were principled arguments to be made against the Iraq War and means of arguing against it that didn't require the knowing exploitation of oneself as a propaganda tool for a totalitarian regime. While Penn nary has a word of criticism about genuine tyrants and terrorists, last year he delivered a speech naming senior American government officials as "villainously and criminally obscene people" (Chavez proudly read the letter on state television).

Why should anyone care about an actor's politics? The bloviations of Hollywood stars tend to be ignorant and irrelevant to those interested in serious debate about the issues of the day, but Penn's grandstanding matters due to both his role in Milk and the film's political relevance in the context of Proposition 8 and the nationwide campaign for gay rights. Gay rights are human rights, as Milk said, and Penn discredits both when he rationalizes illiberal ideologies as "anti-imperialist" and rushes to the defense of thugs who posture as victims of the West. Penn's ignoble political side projects taint a noble cause.

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."