IGF CultureWatch

What does it mean to be an American?

Some people seem to think it means wearing a flag pin. Or slapping a "Support Our Troops" bumper sticker on the family auto. Or singing "God Bless America." Or putting our hand over our hearts when the national anthem plays.

But these things have nothing to do with being an American at all. They are only rituals, expressions of blind patriotism. They are, I suppose, a sign of nominal respect, but really they are lip service. Anyone, after all, can wave the American flag, no matter what they believe.

No, to be an American is to cradle American values in our hearts - and the first of these is our bone-deep love of liberty.

We show this love not by proclaiming it or wearing it on our sleeve, but by acting in it's service - that is, by exercising our political rights. By voting, for example. Or running for office. Or speaking out to ensure that the state recognizes that we are all created with certain inalienable rights, and whether we are gay or straight, we should have access to them.

Not long ago, I visited Philadelphia to see the Liberty Bell. The Liberty Bell was the abolitionist icon and it should be the gay icon, too. The bell hangs solidly now in a fragile glass room, overwhelming the visitors who solemnly stand beside it to have their pictures taken. It hasn't pealed since 1846, and yet the message it rings out is explosive.

"Proclaim liberty," it reads, "throughout all the land."

Liberty is a dangerous notion. It means that the poorest have as many rights as presidents; that someone doesn't need moral approval from the majority in order to be a full citizen. We are moved by the Liberty Bell, but it isn't because of its craftsmanship. No, we love the Liberty Bell because of the crack that divides the bronze without sundering it.

We love the bell for reminding us both that freedom is vulnerable and that divisions of opinion don't destroy it.

America is that bell. Solid, loud, divided in its unity. That very division, in fact, is what makes us American. Homogeneity is for dictatorships, theocracies, kingdoms. Diversity and division, not obedience and trust, is what ultimately gives strength and beauty to democracy.

Liberty means freedom, and we now understand that freedom is the ability to have full political agency, whether you're male or female, black or white, gay or straight. To be an American is to exercise this agency. To be a gay American is to remind others that there is nothing more American than fighting for our fundamental rights.

Unlike flag pins or car stickers, the Liberty Bell isn't a symbol about bowing to blind patriotism. It isn't about doing things the way they've always been done in order to convince someone (who?) that you're a good American.

The Liberty Bell shows us that to be a good American, in fact, is to keep liberty - not patriotism - in our hearts.

For gay citizens, this is especially important. No one needs to approve of us. Not the president, not the courts, not the legislature, not a majority of citizens. Approval is not what we're seeking. And the Liberty Bell isn't about that, isn't about moral approval. It's about the clear, deep tone of freedom.

What GLBTs are looking for is what is promised to every American - liberty and the freedom to pursue happiness.

I love how Independence Day follows Pride so closely each year. They seem to go together, Pride and Independence. America was won not because people bowed to the conservative majority - majorities are always conservative - but because they rebelled.

They didn't go along to get along. They took risks and fought for their rights as citizens and human beings.

This is what we do, too. Every day that LGBTs march for our rights, write our Congressional representatives, expose governmental hypocrisy on our blogs, talk to others about equality, is a day that we are taking a stand for liberty.

Pride shouldn't stop - doesn't stop - at the end of June. It continues into July, where the gay story becomes part of the American story.

Let's ring our bell. Fighting for equal rights is fighting for liberty. And in America, liberty rings for us all.

"What we have is a culture in which we no longer define ourselves according to our similarities but according to our differences. We are proud of our unique qualities and want everyone else to appreciate these traits, too. ... We also devalue commonality in favor of radical uniqueness. We are more interested in freedom of expression than in commitment to unity."

I ran across this quotation in evangelical authors George Barna and Mark Hatch's interesting book Boiling Point (Regal Books, 2001). The quotation might seem to have been more appropriate to my companion piece last week on "Diversity" except that diversity seems to be about different groupings. Barna and Hatch aren't talking about diversity. They are talking about individuality. Barna and Hatch see individuality as a cultural threat; I see it as an essential component of our culture.

When I was growing up, some people worried about the threat of "conformity"-of people taking their cue for what to believe and how to live from their friends and neighbors. People were said to be "other directed" rather than "inner directed." But at the same time, the whole goal of our educational system was to produce compliant, obedient citizens, thoroughly "adjusted"-that was a key term-young social units.

I will give just one example. When I was in eighth grade, our English class made a field trip to the nearby branch library. Then at our next class we broke into working groups and were told to sketch out a floor plan of the library and show where various types of books were. I was a frequent visitor to the library and knew it well. My group got the floor plan badly wrong, a fact I pointed out. I must have done so quite vociferously because after class the teacher called me up to her desk.

"Paul," she began. "The purpose of this exercise is to learn to work with groups of other people." "But they got the floor plan all wrong," I protested. "Go to the library. You'll see." "Paul," she replied, "that doesn't matter. The purpose is to learn how to work with other people." "But they're wrong," I insisted. "It doesn't matter," she repeated. Shaken, I had the feeling that I had just gained a valuable insight into the contemporary culture.

With that background, you can see why my suspicions are raised any time I hear calls for unity or solidarity or any similar goal. Calls for national unity, religious unity, racial unity, community unity often amount to nothing more than the demand that other people agree with the speaker and do things his (or her) way. It sounds like it means "Get with the program," "Follow the Party Line," suppress your doubts, don't express disagreement.

Each Pride season just as we hear ritualistic praise for "diversity" (referring to groups not individuals), we hear equally ritualistic calls for "unity." But it is never specified what we are supposed to be united about. Early in the gay movement, I think most people took the term to urge gays to work together for the elimination of prejudice and discrimination. In other words, they didn't want unity so much as they wanted to promote involvement and cooperation on specific tasks.

Nowadays, as the gay movement has achieved more of its goals and our opponents (I trust, I hope) are on the defensive, I am not so sure what unity is about, or how it is supposed to be demonstrated. We don't seem to be in agreement on goals: Most of us support gay marriage, whether we personally want to marry or not. But there are people who oppose gay marriage as, oh, you know, the usual claptrap about patriarchal institutions, as if that could apply to two men or two women.

But we also disagree about tactics. Many people, especially gay leaders, opposed California gay couples' filing suit to obtain marriage rights. Opponents said it was the wrong time, the wrong route, guaranteed to get slapped down by the court. And it may yet-by California voters this November. Opinion was legitimately divided. That's not a bad thing; it's a good thing.

We are not of one mind about whether drag queens are entertaining expressions of gay creativity or self-promoting parasites who serve to confirm heterosexuals' views of gay men as feminine. We are not unified on whether transgenders and transsexuals are part of the gay community-particularly if they are not homosexual.

Does the fact that we are all gay produce any real "unity"? Maybe on Gay Pride Day. But otherwise, I often think the only thing that unites us is the desire to have a good time.

We often hear from gay leaders of the diversity of the gay (or GLBT, or LGBTQ, etc.) community. Each June we have Pride Parade slogans like "Celebrate Diversity," or "Unity in Diversity" (or maybe it's the other way around). But no one ever explains exactly what our diversity consists in, nor why diversity is a good thing or why we should celebrate it, nor do they explain how this diversity can be forged into some sort of unity, nor what kind of unity or for what.

I suspect that our diversity, like our unity, is merely a linguistic construct, designed to mean anything people want it to. No doubt each of us is different from every other gay person. But celebrating a fact like that is like a slogan to "Celebrate Gravity." Nor are we any more diverse than the rest of America; we're just part of America's own diversity.

There is a fairly sophisticated philosophical argument for diversity connected with the (Karl) Popperian notion that "all life is problem solving." At its simplest, the argument is that the more perspectives you have on a problem, the better chance you have to discover solutions as problems come along. But I don't hear anything like that from gay spokespersons. I hear the claim that the fact of diversity is a good thing in itself.

Think for a moment of the ways in which we are different from one another, or, if you like, of the constituent groups in our community. We differ by sex, race, ethnicity, sexual tastes, age, and economic level. As more people have come out and our community has grown larger these various groups have become large enough for people to find ample stimulus and friendship within their own groups. Old-time gay bars in small towns were home to men and women, drags and leather men, and different races. So you would think that there is a centrifugal tendency in the community resulting from its growth.

But some of these differences are lessening. Once Latinos and other immigrants learn English, ethnicity has a fading significance except as an additional cultural heritage. Race, I think, is slowly fading as a differentiator. As "leather" diversifies, "leathermen" seem to be feeling less need for separate space. So there are some centripetal (if not exactly unifying) forces at work. On the other hand, as gays who came out when young live into their 60s and 70s, age may become an increasing differentiator. That is not clear yet.

One thing that helps overcome these various divisions is the fact of sexual attraction. That can exist on the basis of physical attractiveness (not the constituent group of the other person) but also on the appeal of differentness or exoticism. And in both cases, the appeal no doubt consists to some degree of the cultural meaning attached to the qualities of the other person. That is too individual to generalize about.

But gay men and lesbians do not have sexual attraction to draw them to one another. Or put playfully, all they have in common is their lack of (sexual) interest in each other. That's not quite true. They continue to work together, as they have since the beginning of the movement, for common political goals: marriage, military access, adoption and child custody rights. But as our political goals are gradually achieved there will be less reason to work together and get to know each other well enough to become friends, although there will continue to be links at our various social service agencies.

Within the GLBT acronym, the whole status of bisexuals is uncertain. Bisexuality seems far more common among women than men. No doubt there are a few lifelong bisexual men (Kinsey 2, 3, 4)-there are a few of everything-but they are rare. According to The New York Times, a recent research study found that "men who called themselves bisexuals were significantly more aroused by one gender, usually by men."

According to the same article, "heterosexual women physically don't seem to differentiate between genders in their sexual responses." As some women put it, they are attracted more to the person rather than the person's specific sex. Hence the ease of "bisexual chic"-among women, but not men. Consider too the women who remain with their partners even after the partner has gone through sexual reassignment surgery. Whereas if a man's wife became a transsexual man... ?

Market research firms count bisexual in a long term relationship with a person of the same sex as a member of the gay community, but not if they are in one with the opposite sex. We could also rate them on their degree of commitment to or identification with the gay community. Some may feel such a commitment, others may not. So bisexuals may or may not be members of our community.