IGF CultureWatch

Back in the old days, there were those who supported gay rights and those who opposed them-vocally. There was also a third group whose opposition was so deep that they objected even to discussing the issue. For them, to debate gay rights would be to dignify depravity, and depravity merits chilly silence, not invitations to dialogue.

In the last decade or so, a fourth group has appeared mirroring the third. This group's support for gay rights runs so deep that they object even to discussing the issue. For them, to debate gay rights would be to dignify bigotry, and bigotry merits chilly silence, not invitations to dialogue.

While the above sketch is somewhat simplistic, I think it captures an important shift in the gay-rights debate. Increasingly, one finds people on both sides who object not merely to their opponents' position but even to engaging that position. Why debate the obvious, they ask. Surely anyone who holds THAT position must be too stubborn, brainwashed or dumb to reason with.

The upshot is that supporters and opponents of gay rights are talking to each other less and less. This fact distresses me.

It distresses me for several reasons. First, it lulls gay-rights advocates into a complacency where we mistake others' silence for acquiescence. Then we are shocked-shocked!-when, for example, an Oklahoma state representative says that gays pose a greater threat than terrorism-and her constituents rally around her. Think Sally Kern will have a hard time getting re-elected? Think again.

It distresses me, too, because dialogue works. Not always, and not easily, but it makes a difference. Indeed, ironically enough, healthy dialogue about our issues helped move many people from the "supportive-but-open-to-discussion" camp to the "so-supportive-I-can't-believe-we're-discussing-this" camp.

It distresses me most of all because both of the "opposed" camps include families with gay kids. How do we help those kids? How do we let them know that it's okay to be gay, despite the hurtful messages that they're hearing from their parents?

True, it is easier than ever to reach such kids directly, through MTV, the internet, and the like. But some of those messages will be blocked or distorted by their parents. And even those that reach them untrammeled will be counterbalanced by painful opposition. I feel for these kids, and I want to help them. Helping them requires acknowledging their important relationships with people whose views I find deeply wrong.

There are those who find my emphasis on dialogue naïve. As someone who has spent sixteen years traveling the country speaking and debating about homosexuality and ethics, I'm well aware of dialogue's limitations.

Yet I'm also frequently reminded of its power. Recently Aquinas College, a Catholic school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, cancelled a lecture I was scheduled to give because of concerns about my opposition to Catholic teaching on homosexuality. Students angered by the cancellation arranged to have me speak off-campus. The event drew hundreds of audience members, including some who had been critical of my initial invitation. The next day I learned that one of those critics, after hearing my talk, had begun advocating bringing me to campus next year. Over time, such conversions can have a huge impact.

Then there are those who wonder whether the silence I'm lamenting really is a problem at all. My Aquinas cancellation suggests that it is: intentionally or not, the cancellation sent students the message that this topic is literally unspeakable. But the problem is by no means limited to one side. Last year I did a same-sex marriage debate (with Glenn Stanton of Focus on the Family) at another Catholic college. A week before the event, my host told me that a student was trying to organize a protest. "Because he doesn't want a gay-rights speaker on a Catholic campus?" I asked.

"No, because he doesn't want your opponent here," she answered. The student thought that opposition to same-sex marriage should not be dignified with a hearing. On a Catholic campus!

That student, like the rest of us, would do well to recall the words of John Stuart Mill. In his 1859 classic On Liberty Mill argued that those who silence opinions - even false ones - rob the world of great gifts:

"If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."

The moral of the story? Let's keep talking.

Lesbians are funny.

Just a few years ago, this wasn't obvious. Lesbians were stereotyped as angry and whining. In fact, lesbians were thought to take things way too seriously, to become offended by any slip of the tongue. It was dangerous to talk to lesbians, because if you said something wrong, they might choke you with their flannel shirt, or run you over with their motorcycle.

Remember this joke?

Q: How many lesbians does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: That isn't funny.

Gay men had camp. Lesbians had anger.

We were the gay community's wet blanket.

But now lesbians are starting to be seen in a new light. We've got Rosie (who, OK, sometimes falls into the anger category, but still - she produces the Big Gay Sketch Show.) We've got Lily Tomlin. We've got Kate Clinton, Suzanne Westenhoefer, Marga Gomex, Julie Goldman. We've even sort of got Margaret Cho, who identifies as queer and bisexual, though usually seems more like she's a gay man in drag.

Best of all, we've got Ellen, who almost single handedly has helped America find lesbians to be endearingly funny.

Here's a joke from her, back when she did standup: "My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the hell she is."

See? Lesbians are funny. And not just to other lesbians. Lesbians are funny to THE ENTIRE WORLD (or at least the English-speaking, non-fundamentalist part of it. Westenhoeffer has made the point that people in the Bible Belt often will just not find lesbians funny, no matter how funny the lesbian actually is. Their morals keep them from laughing.)

Why the change? Why are lesbians seen as funny now when they were seen as angry before? Well, it partly must be because of Ellen's wide audience and general folksiness. But it may also be due in part to the changing role of women.

Vanity Fair's April cover story examined the reasons why women comedians are now appreciated more than ever. It used to be, they say, that women were not considered funny at all (maybe because men valued male cut-ups, but women with wit were frightening and liberated). Women as a group were thought to have no a sense of humor.

But expectations for women and women's roles are changing. As women are more accepted in every level of society, they become more accepted as comedians, too. And women are more likely to let themselves be funny, and to hone their humor.

Or maybe there's an easier answer. Cable. "There are so many hours to fill, and they ran out of men, so then there were women," Nora Ephron joked to VF.

But straight women have an added burden. No longer is it enough that they are funny - now they have to be sexy and glamorous as well, in order to make it big.

As Vanity Fair points out, "It used to be that women were not funny. Then they couldn't be funny if they were pretty. Now a female comedian has to be pretty-even sexy-to get a laugh."

Female straight comedians have to be sexy. But lesbian comedians? Lesbian comedians have a pass. They can be attractive - Ellen certainly is - but they don't have to take the stage in stilettos and a cocktail dress. Audiences understand that lesbians aren't out to attract men, so they're not held to the same high beauty standards as straight women comedians.

Lesbians are outsiders, so they are expected to poke sharp fun at political figures and "regular" people. They are expected to have a quirky, non-mainstream, even shocking perspective.

And they are more free to have the range of physical attractiveness that men have. When's the last time that a male comedian was expected to be handsome?

Lesbian comedians are lucky that way. They don't have to be sexually seductive in order to seduce the audience into laughing. Instead, they can be more like Lucille Ball, emphasizing the comical over their cup size.

The fact that lesbians are becoming more accepted as funny is lucky for the gay community, too. Laughter is a great way to win people over. It's how outsiders have insinuated themselves into the mainstream from time immemorial.

Someday, our funny women might help us laugh all the way to our full civil rights.

When is it ok to tell a gay joke? Consider three scenarios:

First scenario. In a magazine interview, a person says this: "The one thing I always say that I really, really mean is I should have had a gay son. [My child] doesn't care that Ann Miller can tap without shoes. Doesn't care! This breaks my heart. I've put on the Sirius show-tunes channel in the car and [she] gets upset with me. This is not right!"

Second scenario. In a meeting with an important client, a senior partner in a law firm tells a joke in which he makes light of gay men's attachment to feminine things. The joke ends with the punch-line, "Faggot!"

Third scenario. An interviewer asks a guest who previously starred as an openly gay character on television to turn to the camera and give the audience his "gayest look."

Based only on the information provided, are these jokes all anti-gay? Are all acceptable? Are some acceptable and others not?

From early on, we learn not to make fun of others in a way that is hurtful and demeaning to them. Polite people don't make fun of others' physical and mental infirmities, for example. Jokes about mentally retarded people are the sign of a cad, not a bon vivant.

We also learn that jokes directed against some groups of people - like racial and religious minorities - can be especially harmful because of the discrimination, stigma, and even violence the members of these groups have historically faced. Jokes at the expense of other groups of people - like politicians or lawyers - don't raise the same kinds of concerns because the targets of the fun aren't disadvantaged.

Jokes are often funny when they rely on some generalization about members of the group - some trait or characteristic they are widely believed to share, whether true or not. For this reason, a joke that made fun of Republicans for being too compassionate toward the poor or that took a jab at Moveon.org for being biased in favor of conservatives wouldn't work.

But this same reliance on stereotypes can reinforce prejudice. And prejudice is the first step toward harmful discrimination. Consider jokes that refer to blacks as stupid, lazy, or criminal; or that treat Jews as conspiratorial, undeservedly rich, or miserly. Though properly protected by the First Amendment, such jokes are socially unacceptable because they reinforce harmful prejudgments about these groups.

What's acceptable when it comes to joking about gay people? Very few of us would take the extreme position that it's never acceptable for anyone ever to tell a joke of any kind about gays. Even the gay-media watchdog group, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), is not so humorless.

Jokes about gays are not necessarily objectionable simply because they exploit some kinds of stereotypes about gays. Think of the stereotype of gay men as promiscuous, effeminate, and obsessed with couture and entertainment. These stereotypes were the basis for much of the humor in Will & Grace, which was a breakthrough triumph for the equal treatment of homosexuals on television. (For this reason, the attempted humor in Scenarios 1 and 2 isn't necessarily objectionable on this ground, though it may be for other reasons.)

At the same time, there has been a history of anti-gay discrimination, stigma, and violence that should make us sensitive to the ways in which we joke about homosexuals.

So gays are neither in the category in which are all jokes are presumptively objectionable nor in the category in which all are presumptively acceptable. How do we know when the line is crossed?

There is no bright-line answer applicable to all cases. Everything depends on context. In the three scenarios above, it's impossible to know whether the jokes are "anti-gay" without knowing much more.

The audience matters. If I told you that the person in Scenario 1 was speaking to a general audience magazine, like Time, you might be at least uneasy that she was exploiting stereotypes of gay men as frivolously obsessed with Hollywood and Broadway. If I said she was being interviewed by a gay men's magazine, this concern would be muted. In fact, it was Joan Rivers speaking to Instinct, a periodical for gay men that focuses on celebrities, fashion, and gossip.

The identity and history of the speaker matter. If I told you, for example, that the "senior partner" in Scenario 2 is openly gay, you'd have one kind of reaction. If I said he was a homophobic straight man who believed he was speaking to other heterosexual men, you'd be more concerned. In fact, the latter was true. It happened in my presence when I was a young lawyer and not yet out at my law firm.

Lots of intangibles matter, too, like whether the joke was told in a mean-spirited way or employed stereotypes in a way that undermined the stereotypes themselves. In Scenario 3, the very idea of a giving a "gay look" to a camera is so completely ridiculous that it might be making fun of benighted people who think there is a distinctively "gay look" one can give. In fact, it was Jay Leno on the Tonight Show speaking to actor Ryan Phillipe.

The latter cases are the hardest ones to judge. GLAAD objected to Leno's attempted humor and Leno subsequently apologized. I'm not so sure. It was an awkward moment and not very funny. But bad comedy is not necessarily bad comedy.

Rain had snarled Nairobi's traffic, so after waiting at a standstill for almost two hours, our driver Daniel roared over the divider, faced the oncoming traffic for a harrowing few seconds, and pulled into a side road.

It was really more path than road, alternating between muddy ditches and dust. But we weren't the only ones to take it. So many of us did that we were only prowling around at about three miles an hour, giving us plenty of time to look at the locals - and for the locals to look at us.

This could have been one of the Nairobi slums where post-election violence ripped lives apart a few months ago. A ditch between houses colleted waste; children were without shoes. The buildings huddled close to the road, so close to us it seemed we could touch them if we stuck our arms out wide enough.

The locals lined up to watch the parade of cars go through, and it felt like a parade, like a festival, with people smiling and waving at us and all of us waving back.

One woman caught my attention. She had a butch energy about her, and was wearing a rugby shirt, a long, patterned skirt, a bald head and a vivid smile. She was in her mid-twenties, I thought, or perhaps five years younger.

When the van stopped, waiting for traffic ahead to move forward, she sauntered around to the front of the van, stopping at the open window of a pretty, dark-haired woman I'll call Ann.

"Hello," the Kenyan purred, sliding her elbows onto the window. "How are you?"

I almost laughed in shock and recognition. If she had said, "How YOU doin'" in a dark lesbian bar, it would have sounded exactly the same - as a come on.

"Fine," Ann said briskly. She's straight - I'm not sure she saw it as anything but a friendly gesture. "How are you?"

"I'm gooood. And what's your name?" The van moved forward with a jerk. The Kenyan stayed alongside it for a while, fingertips resting on the van, but then fell behind.

A few minutes later, the van stopped again, and the Kenyan, unhurried, took her place again at the window.

"What's your name?" she asked again, in an intimate voice, and then said, "My name is Caroline." The two of them could have been alone. Ann, flustered perhaps, reached into her bag and handed Caroline a rose. We had vases of them in our hotel rooms.

Caroline pressed it to her chest and turned in a circle. Her face glowed. "I'm in love!" she said. "Marry me!" She called out to a friend, "She gave me a rose!"

Sex between men is illegal in Kenya and punishable by jail time. Sex between women is completely invisible and simply doesn't officially happen.

Homosexuality is considered to be un-African, either a curse bestowed by an angry enemy or a Western disease. Former Kenyan president Daniel Arap Moi once said, "Kenya has no room for homosexuals and lesbians."

This attitude is not only wrong - it is dangerous.

An American I met while in Kenya does HIV research in Nairobi - he said that a startling number of "men who have sex with men" weren't aware that HIV/AIDS was transmitted through sex, and could be partly prevented through condoms. And, he said, it's difficult to target a community for education, awareness and treatment when you don't know who exactly they are.

Africa's commitment to fighting AIDS doesn't extend to allowing gays and lesbians civil rights in order to help educate them. There is strong hostility to gay organizing in Kenya, as there is in much of Africa, even for health reasons. So most gays and lesbians go to cruising spots, or to places known for their gay clientele, and then home to their wives and husbands.

They are invisible, or try to be. But they still exist.

Caroline exists.

The rose was still clasped to Caroline's chest when the van started moving again. She reached out with the rose to touch it, and ran forward a few steps when it started to pull away.

"What an intense young man," the only male in our group said.

"She was a woman," all the women replied at once.

The van started moving faster, having reached a portion of clear road. Caroline was left behind, a single hand in the air, waving goodbye.