IGF CultureWatch

In the recent debate over ENDA, it has frequently been said that "the community" solidly opposes the first-ever federal gay civil rights bill unless it includes transgenders.

The evidence for this surprising unity is the fact that more than 300 organizations have signed an online petition, available at UnitedENDA.org. "United ENDA," the website boasts, "effectively communicated the strong opposition of hundreds of organizations and millions of members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community."

The correctness of an all-or-nothing approach to civil rights is not determined solely by the number of organizations or people who favor or oppose it. The strategy could be wrong even if everybody supported it; conversely, it could be right even if everybody opposed it. But in a society that values representative politics, claiming that you speak for millions of people lends moral authority and democratic legitimacy to your cause.

So is it true that United ENDA speaks for the community? The answer depends on which "community" we mean.

If we mean "the community of gay and trans activists" who lead organizations like the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force and Queers for Economic Justice, the answer is "yes."

This is a small and select group of people, however. They are very liberal, highly educated, and unusually politically aware. They long ago bought the idea that the "T" is necessarily part of the "GLB." This view is strongly influenced by academic queer and gender theory that, whatever its merits, is probably not widely understood or actively embraced.

This does not mean that the leaders of these organizations are wrong; their dedication to their beliefs is admirable. It is only to suggest that they may not be representative of many people.

But, it might be answered, they lead more than 300 organizations that collectively do represent millions of members of the community. To determine whether this might be true, I looked at the organizations listed on the United ENDA website. The list is much less impressive than it first seems.

Some of the groups are well-known players on the national stage, like NGLTF and Lambda Legal. The vast majority are very obscure local and state groups. For example, one is called "Coqsure," described online as a "social group" in Portland, Oregon, "for people who were born or raised female who don't presently identify as totally female."

Missing from the list is the largest and most influential gay political group, the Human Rights Campaign. There are no gay Republican organizations listed, yet more than 25 percent of gay people regularly vote Republican in national elections.

The list is padded. The National Stonewall Democrats are there, but so are a dozen of the group's state and local chapters, including both the Colorado chapter and that chapter's "Transgender Caucus." The national PFLAG organization is listed, but so are more than half a dozen of its subsidiaries. On and on it goes like that.

The list also includes numerous non-gay organizations, like the Alliance for Jewish Renewal and a single local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. They're free to oppose a bill that protects gay civil rights, of course, but they don't represent the gay community.

There are about ten million gay Americans, of whom perhaps 7.5 million are adults. How many of them are "represented" by the United ENDA signatory groups?

One way to determine that is by asking how many active members the groups have. Unfortunately, membership figures are mostly unavailable and are often inflated when they are available, consisting of little more than a mailing list. Membership in the listed organizations also overlaps.

The active membership of most of these groups, especially the more than 70 transgender groups listed, is probably tiny. Even many of the gay groups aren't very large. To take just one example, the Houston GLBT Political Caucus, "representing" gays in a metropolitan area of more than four million people, regularly gets fewer than 30 people at meetings.

Let's assume very generously that the 300 groups average 1,000 non-overlapping members each. That's a total of 300,000 people-well short of "millions" and less than five percent of the 7.5 million gay adults in the country.

Do the listed groups even represent their own members? A fascinating recent article in the Washington Blade about growing defections from the United ENDA front quoted gay Democratic activist Peter Rosenstein as saying that few of the 300 groups canvassed their members before taking a stand.

For example, Geoff Kors, head of Equality California, acknowledged that his group did not poll its members. But, he added, he had received lots of supportive emails. Getting email from people who agree with you is not a vote.

United ENDA could assert that it speaks for many in the community who aren't members of the signatory groups. The problem with claim that is that there are no reliable polls telling us how many gay people would forego their civil rights until "gender identity" is included.

More than two-thirds of the United ENDA signatories appear to be headquartered in states or cities where gay people are already protected from discrimination. I'm confident many members of the Harvard University Transgender Task Force and the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club of San Francisco fully support making gay people in Mississippi wait until ENDA is ideologically pure, but they don't speak for anyone outside their privileged precincts.

In short, there is simply no good evidence for United ENDA's claim that the community opposes an incremental approach to civil rights.

Last weekend, Oct. 19-20, more than 2,000 members of the religious right held a "Values Voter Summit" in Washington, D.C. Several Republican presidential aspirants--Romney, Giuliani, McCain, Thompson, Huckabee--addressed the group, all (except Giuliani) trying to assert their conservative and religious credentials.

But a couple of odd elements hovered over the event. John McCain spoke movingly of his Christian faith, but one wonders just what values that religion promotes. Only a few days before he had asserted that the Constitution establishes the U.S. as a Christian nation. But of course it does nothing of the sort.

So either McCain is desperately ignorant about the Constitution, not unusual in a politician, I suppose, or else he was mendaciously playing to a voter constituency who apparently believe just that. Neither seems very admirable. Why did no one publicly ask him exactly where the Constitution says that?

Then at the "summit" itself, Mitt Romney praised families with a mother and father and listed the reasons for their superiority, including more financial resources, more parental time with the children, the assurance of "a compassionate caregiver" when someone becomes ill, etc. But notice that all the advantages Romney mentioned of a mother-father family are also true of any gay or lesbian two-parent family.

Theoretically Romney could be telegraphing actual pro-gay marriage views over the head of his audience while seeming to agree with their opposition. I know of philosophers in repressive regimes who have written that way. But based on Romney's record of opposition to gay marriage, it seems more likely that he stupidly just didn't realize that his reasons don't support his conclusion and his religious blinders prevent him from seeing winvite me to their "values voter" summit. I certainly think of myself as a "values voter" since I try to live my life and cast my vote (or abstain) based on my values.

For instance, I value honesty, civil behavior, tolerance (for other tolerant people), a certain amount of social and cultural variety, personal freedom (including economic and sexual freedom), total disjunction of religion and government, freedom for speech and press (including for thoughts that may dismay or offend people). These, among others, are values I hold.

You will probably notice that several of these values are meant to accommodate or provide for a variety of individuals values. We could call them "meta-values." That's primarily because I admit that I don't know enough about every other person's character and capacities to know what will enable them to flourish and find happiness and personal fulfillment. They may even choose wrongly, but it is their life.

Nor, I will quickly add, do other people, much less the government, know enough about me to know what will bring me happiness and fulfillment-and some of those are things that would bore other people: listening to music by certain composers, going to galleries and learning more about art, reading books by authors I like, conversation with a few good friends, settling in every morning with my New York Times, etc.

So how did it happen that the religious right managed to commandeer and monopolize the notion of values, as if to suggest that all the rest of us don't have values at all? Part of the answer must be that people who hold to rock-ribbed values, particularly values said to be divinely revealed, have a hard time taking seriously any other positions said to be values: Real values are my values, other people's values aren't real values.

Another reason may be that people advocating the two main alternative positions, liberals and libertarians, don't seem comfortable asserting their positions as "values," and are even worse at explaining reasons for them-either in social or individual terms. The next time someone asserts the value of free speech, ask them "Why?" and see what happens. They may say it is in the Constitution, which isn't quite true, but even if it were that would only be providing a source of authority, not a reason for it as a value.

Or the next time someone praises tolerance or diversity, ask them why. Diversity is certainly a fact but we seldom celebrate facts. Nobody says, "Celebrate gravity." And tolerance? If we know the right way to think and act, why let people do otherwise? It only promotes social discord and their own ruin. Or so the Saudi Arabians seem to believe.

So it might be helpful if we started promoting our own values as values and explaining the reasons for them. We have to assume our reasons are better than theirs so if they win this rhetorical battle it will only be by default.

Of all the absurd claims expressed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his recent address at Columbia University, his assertion that homosexuality does not exist in his country is the most ridiculous.

Ahmadinejad's florid statements regarding Jews ("We are friends with the Jewish people"), prevarications about Holocaust denial ("There are researchers who want to approach the topic from a different perspective"), and hedging about Iranian nuclear ambitions ("they are completely peaceful") paled in comparison to inflammatory statements he has made on those subjects in the past and were clearly tempered for his live American audience.

Even on the status of women, Ahmadinejad skirted critical questions, instead effusing, "Women are the best creatures created by God." But when asked about Iran's oppression of homosexuals, Ahmadinejad was uncompromising and unapologetic: "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country. We don't have that in our country ... We do not have this phenomenon. I do not know who's told you that we have it."

By this far-reaching statement, Ahmadinejad probably did not mean that out-and-proud gays of the Liberace variety ("like in your country") do not traipse through gay ghettos in Tehran, that Iran's homosexuals are more subdued and "butch" than America's; rather, it is reasonable to deduce that he meant homosexuality itself does not exist.

This notion is preposterous, particularly so to the Columbia faculty and students that rightly laughed at Ahmadinejad. Homosexuality is a natural feature of the human condition; it has existed since nearly the beginning of recorded history, spanning cultures all around the world. While homosexuals in Western democracies (where they largely don't have to fear for their lives) may identify themselves differently than they do in a place like Iran (where the state executes them), the notion that people attracted exclusively to people of the same sex don't exist in Iran-or any country, for that matter-is empirically false.

Yet while the audience in the Roone Arledge Auditorium and millions of television viewers laughed and booed at the Islamist rube, there was one man-ensconced at Columbia University, no less-who was likely nodding along in agreement. His name is Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History, and he legitimizes, with a complex academic posture, the deservedly reviled views on homosexuality espoused by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

According to Massad, a Palestinian Christian and disciple of the late Columbia professor Edward Said, the case for gay rights in the Middle East is an elaborate scheme hatched by activists in the West. Massad posited this thesis in a 2002 article, "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World," for the academic journal Public Culture, and he has expanded it into a book, Desiring Arabs, published this year by the University of Chicago Press. In it, he writes that such activists constitute the "Gay International" whose "discourse ... produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist."

The "missionary tasks" of this worldwide conspiracy are part of a broader attempt to legitimize American and Israeli global conquest by undermining the very moral basis of Muslim societies, as the "Orientalist impulse ... continues to guide all branches of the human rights community." Massad's intellectual project is a not-so-tacit apology for the oppression of people who identify openly as homosexual. In so doing, he sides with Islamist regimes over Islamic liberals.

Desiring Arabs posits that the West views the Middle East as backwards, politically, culturally, and--ultimately Massad's field of interest--sexually; in this sense, his book fits comfortably in the postcolonial intellectual movement of which Said was the intellectual father. "For the Gay International, transforming sexual practices into identities through the universalizing of gayness and gaining 'rights' for those who identify (or more precisely, are identified by the Gay International) with it becomes the mark of an ascending civilization, just as repressing those rights and restricting the circulation of gayness is a mark of backwardness and barbarism," he writes.

From the start, Massad rejects the contemporary liberal view of homosexuality as an identity, seeing only "sexual practices." What's worse, he says, is that the attempt to "universalize" this supposedly provincial Western homosexual identity onto Arabs is used as a tool to distinguish between the "civilized" West and the "barbaric" Middle East.

Massad's thesis rests largely on Queer Theory, a voguish academic theory from the 1990s that stipulates that homosexuality is merely a "social construction" and not an inherent state of being. Massad writes that, "The categories gay and lesbian are not universal at all and can only be universalized by the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the rest of the world by the very international human rights advocates whose aim is to defend the very people their intervention is creating (emphasis mine)." Thus, not only are gay rights activists unleashing "epistemic...violence" on Arabs and Muslims who have same-sex relations by claiming them to be homosexual, they are responsible for the "political violence" of the regimes that oppress them.

As one illustration of his thesis, Massad chooses the "Queen Boat" incident of May 11, 2001, when a horde of truncheon-wielding Egyptian police officers boarded a Nile River cruise known as the Queen Boat, a floating disco for gay men. Fifty-two men were arrested, and many of them were tortured and sexually humiliated in prison. In a sensational, months-long ordeal, they were paraded in public, and images of them shielding their faces were blared on state television and printed in government newspapers. Most of the men were eventually acquitted, but 23 received convictions for either the "habitual debauchery," "contempt for religion" or both.

State repression against gay people happens on a frequent basis across the Middle East. Massad, however, who claims to be a supporter of sexual freedom per se, is oddly impassive when confronted with the vast catalogue of anti-gay state violence in the Muslim world. Massad, unlike Ahmadinejad, does acknowledge that "gay-identified" people exist in the Middle East, but he views them with derision. Take, for instance, his description of the Queen Boat victims as "westernized, Egyptian, gay-identified men" who consort with European and American tourists.

A simple "gay" would have sufficed. He smears efforts to free the men by writing of the "openly gay and anti-Palestinian Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank" and the "anti-Arab and anti-Egyptian [Congressman] Tom Lantos" who circulated a petition amongst their colleagues to cut off U.S. funding to Egypt unless the men were released. He then goes onto belittle not just gay activists (one of whom, a founder of the Gay and Lesbian Arabic Society, referred to the Queen Boat affair as "our own Stonewall," in reference to the 1969 Stonewall riot when a group of patrons at a New York City gay bar resisted arrest, a moment credited with sparking the American gay rights movement) but the persecuted men themselves.

The Queen Boat cannot be Stonewall, Massad insists, because the "drag Queens at the Stonewall bar" embraced their homosexual identity, whereas the Egyptian men "not only" did "not seek publicity for their alleged homosexuality, they resisted the very publicity of the events by the media by covering their faces in order to hide from the cameras and from hysterical public scrutiny." Massad does not pause to consider that perhaps the reason why these men covered their faces was because of the brutal consequences they would endure if their identities became public, repercussions far worse than anything the rioters at Stonewall experienced. "These are hardly manifestations of gay pride or gay liberation," Massad sneers.

Massad claims that those Arabs who do accept a Western-style homosexual identity "remain a miniscule minority among those men who engage in same-sex relations and who do not identify as 'gay' nor express a need for gay politics." He makes this sweeping assertion-upon which his entire, 418-page book is predicated-without any statistical evidence. Furthermore, he does not consider that the reason why Arab homosexuals may not "express a need for gay politics" might be because they would be killed if they did.

It becomes clear why Massad views gay-identifying Arab men with such scorn. In his mind, they have become willing victims of colonization. That's why Massad tacitly supports Middle Eastern governments' crackdown on organized gay political activity: He sees this repression as a legitimate expression of anti-colonialism. "It is not the same-sex sexual practices that are being repressed by the Egyptian police but rather the sociopolitical identification of these practices with the Western identity of gayness and the publicness that these gay-identified men seek."

Thus, Arab gays (or, to use Massad's terminology, "so-called 'gays' ") should not identify as such, because to do so is accepting Western cultural hegemony. Massad even throws in a swipe at the "U.S.-based anti-Arab British Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya," a strong supporter of the Iraq war, for his alleged attempt to include protections in the new Iraqi constitution for homosexuals. How dare these men fight for their dignity as homosexuals!

It is true that the current understanding of "gay identity" is a relatively new concept, formed by Western thinkers over the past century years. This does not mean, however, as Massad contends, that a gay identity is inherently Western. The increasing acceptance of homosexuality as an acceptable way of life is a fruit of Western liberalism, but so is equality for women. Just because these notions originated in the West does not also mean that gays around the world do not also yearn for them or deserve them. But that is the logic of Joseph Massad.

Five years ago, a few months after Massad's article exposing the "Gay International" appeared, Yossi Klein Halevi wrote a piece for The New Republic about the condition of Palestinian gay men living illegally in Israel. Halevi interviewed young men (who, Massad should note, all identified as homosexual) who had formed an unlikely subculture on the streets of Tel Aviv, fleeing their own families out of fear for how they'd be treated if they came out of the closet. Some had been the victims of torture by Palestinian Authority officials. One 21-year-old man given the pseudonym "Tayseer" was implicated in a sex sting devised by Palestinian police. Halevi reported:

Tayseer refused to implicate others. He was arrested and hung by his arms from the ceiling. A high-ranking officer he didn't know arranged for his release and then demanded sex as payback. Tayseer fled Gaza to Tulkarem on the West Bank, but there too he was eventually arrested. He was forced to stand in sewage water up to his neck, his head covered by a sack filled with feces, and then he was thrown into a dark cell infested with insects and other creatures he could feel but not see. ("You slap one part of your body, and then you have to slap another," he recounts.) During one interrogation, police stripped him and forced him to sit on a Coke bottle. Through the entire ordeal he was taunted by interrogators, jailers, and fellow prisoners for being a homosexual.

We in the West may scoff at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's views on homosexuality in Iran, but while we laugh, a Columbia University professor-currently up for tenure-carries forth an insidious attempt to convince the world that men like Tayseer are somehow figments of the Western world's imagination. And who are we to complain about the murders of people who "do not exist"?

In 1972, the Democratic Party made a fateful decision from which it has never recovered: it nominated George McGovern for president. The gay rights movement is on track to emulate this disastrous choice.

Later this month, Congress is expected to vote on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill that would make it illegal to fire someone based upon his or her sexual orientation, as it is currently legal to do in 31 states. ENDA has existed in some form or another for more than 30 years, but only now does it have the votes to pass Congress.

The bill's chief sponsor is Rep. Barney Frank, the greatest champion of gay rights in Washington (full disclosure: I was an intern in Frank's district office in high school, many moons ago). Frank, oddly enough, is now being assailed by a coalition of nearly 300 gay rights organizations across the country calling itself "United ENDA," whose supporters have called him names like "sell out" and "traitor" because he opposes adding a provision protecting gender identity to the bill.

Frank does not disagree with the notion of protecting transgender people from workplace discrimination; he just realizes that a bill with such language has no chance of passing. For more than a decade, he has tirelessly worked to build a coalition of liberal and conservative Democrats along with moderate Republicans to support his version of ENDA. But this is not good enough for the all-or-nothing McGovern wing of the gay rights establishment.

Many of these activists would do well to brush up on the history of the 1972 Democratic presidential primary. For liberals, it felt redeeming to nominate an ideologically pure leftist like McGovern, whose mantra in the '72 campaign was "Come Home, America." But America overwhelmingly rejected this message and re-elected Richard Nixon in a landslide, giving him the second largest popular vote margin of victory in the history of the United States (McGovern won a single state, Massachusetts, losing his own, South Dakota).

It's not that the Democrats had a dearth of eligible candidates at the time.

There was Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a champion of organized labor and a hawk on defense in the mold of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. Or Hubert Humphrey, vice president under Lyndon Johnson, the party¹s nominee in 1968 and a hero of the civil rights movement. Either of those men could have presented a formidable challenge to Nixon.

Those who supported McGovern, like those who support inclusion of the transgender provision, were no doubt motivated by their desire to have clean consciences; McGovern believed in everything they did. But how clean could their consciences have been for enabling the re-election of Nixon, and how clean will the consciences of Barney Frank's critics be if their insistence on the transgender provision leads to ENDA's failure? People's jobs are at stake here, not just the lofty abstractions of "solidarity" and "justice" about which the anti-ENDA forces so melodramatically whine.

The objective position of Frank's critics is that gay people should continue to be fired just because a miniscule minority (transgender people) is not included in this bill.

Those comprising United ENDA characterize the people who oppose a transgender-inclusive bill as "selfish." But who's really being selfish? The pragmatists like Frank who want to pass a good bill rather than fail with a perfect one, or the noisy activists claiming that all our rights be put on hold until they get their way? One expects this sort of political naïveté from grassroots activists and the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force. What's appalling is that ostensibly wiser heads at organizations such as Lambda Legal, National Stonewall Democrats and even the Human Rights Campaign (which has withheld support, but does not openly oppose the current version of ENDA) are acting so irresponsibly.

Let us all praise the faux-heroics of the gay rights movement¹s McGovernites; fawning recognition, after all, is what they seek. Don't get me wrong: These folks are perfectly entitled to go down in a blaze of glory, ideologically pure on the road to abject political failure. But they should not expect to drag the majority of gay people down with them.