IGF CultureWatch

The undeniable success of gay Democrats was on full display in the August 9 presidential candidates' forum. The questions were pretty good, interrupted only by the emotions of Melissa Etheridge. No new positions were taken but the candidates all said pleasant things. The question is, what did the event really accomplish?

In order of appearance, here's how I think the candidates (excluding the quixotic ones) did:

Barack Obama. Obama now orates like a politician, which means his speech is stunted with "ahs" and "uhs" and that he tends to fall back on stock phrases. He's the most interesting and thoughtful of the candidates, but you'd hardly know that nowadays.

Obama avers that we should separate the word "marriage," which he says is religious, from the legal rights associated with marriage. But marriage as religious rite and as legal right are already separate. So Obama is really saying that only for gay couples should the law distinguish rights from marriage. Like the other candidates, he never explains why.

Civil unions, which he supports, may be the best next step. But to say that it is simply a matter of "semantics," as Obama does, suggests either that he is being disingenuous or that at a very deep level he doesn't get it.

Obama made several references to his race ("When you're a black guy . . .") as if this is supposed to immunize him from criticism or give us the sense that he feels our pain. But it has the opposite effect, suggesting that he has not thought very deeply about applying the lessons of his experience to others. When he says, for example, that gay couples should be satisfied with civil unions, it's worth asking whether he thinks his interracial parents should have been satisfied with calling their marriage a civil union.

John Edwards. Edwards is like Phil Hartman's "Caveman Lawyer" from the 1990s Saturday Night Live skit. He stresses humble origins and simulates empathy. Still, he might be good at this as president. Edwards wore his plastic heart on his sleeve as he described meeting homeless gay youth at the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center and criticized parents who disavow their gay kids. Presidents need to speak in moral terms, not just policy terms, and Edwards comes closest to realizing this.

He committed the only real policy gaffe of the night, insisting that the president could reverse "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" all by himself. That's been untrue since 1993, when the ban on gay service was made federal statute. Even with a Democratic Congress and president it will be very difficult to repeal that law, requiring a president willing to explain publicly why the change is in the country's best interests. But first the president has to understand the policy.

Edwards opposes gay marriage, for no particular reason. Earlier in the campaign he explained that he opposes it for religious reasons, which is probably the only honest account we've heard from any of them. At the forum, he apologized for his earlier candor. He painted this as a matter of separating church from state, but left us with no substitute explanation.

Bill Richardson. On substance, Richardson shined. Especially impressive was his emphasis on actual accomplishments over rhetoric. After the Clinton presidency, many of us are unimpressed by promises; we want results. When it comes to actual accomplishments, Richardson has done more for gay equality than the other Democrats.

I wasn't troubled by Richardson's suggestion that homosexuality is a choice since it seemed that, in context, he was trying to say only that people should be free to be gay. He was also correct, by the way, that we really don't know what causes someone to have a particular sexual orientation. For this bit of honesty, he was flayed by pundits. He did seem tired and listless, so he lost badly in the eyes of those who demand flash and charm.

Hillary Clinton. Clinton's policy positions on gay issues are probably as good as any viable candidate's could be right now. Her problem in general is that she has a hard time conveying personal warmth. This, combined with her association with the last president named Clinton, leaves one wondering whether she's really committed to anything.

Clinton was the cleverest of the lot. She both defended and distanced herself from her husband's two signature anti-gay acts, DADT and DOMA. She painted DADT as an improvement on what came before, which it was not. She was correct that DOMA helped stave off a federal constitutional amendment in 2004, but that was not the rationale when it passed in 1996. These answers were dishonest.

Clinton said she opposed gay marriage for "personal reasons," which tells us nothing except that she is a careful politician.

The truth is, in contrast to the Republicans, there's nothing in the Democratic ethos circa 2007 that justifies opposing gay marriage. The leading contenders oppose it only because it's politically necessary. When the political calculus changes so will they, but not a moment sooner. But it's hard to blame them for not committing political suicide.

All of the Democrats are better on gay issues than any of the Republicans. But we have many times seen these paper commitments decompose in the slightest heat. This presidential forum left us little reason to believe it will be any different this time.

"I can't date someone with a different belief system" is what he told me. I expected this answer from the guy I had been casually seeing. From early on, I suspected that our differing political bents - his liberal, mine more conservative - would ultimately cause a split. Once, we had a heated argument when I said offhandedly that people who could not afford to care for children should not have them (not a policy prescription, just a profession of personal ethics). After that, I tried to avoid political discussions altogether. So his answer did not come as much of a surprise when, a few weeks after we broke up, I asked him for his reasons. His beliefs euphemism didn't render the blow any softer: We're both Jewish.

So much for dating a proud, progressive, and ostensibly tolerant liberal. But with him, as with other liberals I know, tolerance does not always extend to appreciating someone else's differing political views. Now living in Cambridge and having grown up in the suburbs of Boston and gone to school at Yale, I've been surrounded by liberals for nearly all of my life. Most would be astonished to hear that they're the most intolerant people I've ever met. After all, I, the supposedly closed-minded conservative, never considered this guy's liberal politics anathema to the point of wanting to call off our relationship. A Mary Matalin-James Carville pairing (she the Republican adviser to Dick Cheney, he the Democratic strategist who helped Bill Clinton get elected) ours would not be.

As a gay recovering leftist - to my eternal shame, I canvassed for Ralph Nader in high school - I have grown accustomed to having difficulties in the dating world. At Yale, most people knew me as "the gay conservative" for a column I wrote in the school paper, and my notoriety - not the source of sexy fascination that I might have hoped it to be - certainly did not help my dating prospects. My reputation preceded me. Once, at a party, a gay freshman who had only been on campus for a few days was introduced to me and said, "Oh, you're that [expletive] conservative." On Facebook.com - where people of my generation self-importantly advertise themselves to the world - I selected "Libertarian" to describe my "political views." I hate using labels and am hardly a doctrinaire free-marketeer, but I generally believe that government makes a mess of things and that society is better off when the state only does what's absolutely necessary.

Most gay people are liberal, and this is somewhat understandable; the left has embraced gay rights as a part of its political agenda, whereas the right, with some important exceptions, has not. But for many gays, liberalism is just as much a visceral, reactionary tendency as it is a positive affirmation of political belief. Many gays I know - especially those from red states - blame conservatism writ large as the villain that repressed them for so many years. Thus, their homosexuality dictates their political views on everything. For these gays, it is just as much a part of the "coming out" process to be a loud liberal as a proud homosexual.

But there's nothing about my homosexuality that dictates a belief about raising the minimum wage, withdrawing immediately from Iraq, and backing teachers' unions: all liberal causes that I strongly oppose. Yet there's a common, unattractive feature that many conservative gay men share: a serious chip on their shoulder. Being part of a community that is so intolerant of their views, gay conservatives can be embittered, patronizing, and castigatory of their gay brothers. It's not a particularly attractive attitude. Perhaps it's for this reason that I have not started cruising Log Cabin Republican meetings for dates.

Luckily, I am now dating someone who, though more liberal than I, appreciates my political independence. Let's just hope it lasts through this long campaign season.

When I was in junior high I used to sit at the "black" lunch table in the cafeteria, much to the shock (and occasional ridicule) of my white schoolmates. The seating was not officially segregated, but with rare exceptions African-Americans sat together, and I sat with them.

It wasn't a grand political statement or a conscious act of solidarity or anything high-minded. On the contrary, it was a reluctant acknowledgment of my outsider status. While members of the white, mostly affluent student majority called me a "fag," the black students were nice to me, and I felt more comfortable around them.

Some years later I started going to the gay beaches on Fire Island, where I noticed a number of interracial straight couples. Interestingly, the "straight" part stuck out more than the "interracial" part-which, I later learned, was their main reason for choosing the gay beach. "We get a lot of flak at the straight beaches," they told me. "But gays are cool about it." Fellow outsiders, once again.

I thought about both of these events recently as I watched the movie Hairspray, the 2007 incarnation of the 1988 John Waters film (later a Broadway musical). One of the film's most poignant moments occurs when Penny, a working-class white girl, and Seaweed, a black male, reveal their relationship to Seaweed's mom, Motormouth Mabelle (played by Queen Latifah).

"Well, love is a gift," Mabelle responds. "A lot of people don't remember that. So, you two better brace yourselves for a whole lotta ugly comin' at you from a never-ending parade of stupid."

Many have speculated about whether and how Hairspray counts as a "gay" movie. Of course, there's the John Waters provenance, the drag lead character (originated by Divine and played on Broadway by Harvey Fierstein), and the inherent campiness of movie musicals. But the most profound connection lies in its message of acceptance: Hairspray celebrates forbidden love in the face of "a never-ending parade of stupid." It's a theme gays know well.

Gay-rights opponents often object to comparisons between the civil-rights movement and the gay-rights movement. Race, they say, is an immutable, non-behavioral characteristic, whereas homosexuality involves chosen behaviors; thus it's wrong (even insulting) to compare the two.

Even putting aside the fact that "civil rights" are something we're all fighting for-equal treatment under the law-this objection founders. It misunderstands the nature of racism, the nature of homophobia, and the point of the analogy between the two.

Although race is in some sense "an immutable, non-behavioral characteristic," racism is all about chosen behaviors. The racist doesn't simply object to people's skin color: he objects to their moving into "our" neighborhoods, marrying "our" daughters, attacking "our" values and so on. In other words, he objects to behaviors, both real and imagined. What's more, discriminating on the basis of race is most certainly chosen behavior. Calling race "non-behavioral" misses that important fact.

At the same time, calling homosexuality "behavioral" misses quite a bit as well. Yes, homosexuality (like heterosexuality) is expressed in behaviors, and some of those behaviors offend people. But one need not be sexually active to be kicked out of the house, fired from a job, or verbally or physically abused for being gay. Merely being perceived as gay (without any homosexual "behavior") is enough to trigger the abuse.

Even where chosen behaviors trigger the abuse, it doesn't follow that they warrant the abuse-any more than blacks' choosing to marry whites (and vice versa) warrants abuse. So the insistence that race is immutable whereas homosexuality is behavioral, even if it were accurate, misses the point. Gays, like blacks, face unjust discrimination, often in the name of religion, that interferes with some of the most intimate aspects of their lives. Hence the analogy.

I'm not denying that there are important differences between race and sexual orientation (or between racism and heterosexism). Gays and lesbians do not face the cumulative generational effects of discrimination the way ethnic minorities do, and we have nothing in American history comparable to slavery or Jim Crow. On the other hand, no one is kicked out of the house because his biological parents figured out that he's black. There are plusses and minuses to the lack of generational continuity (as well as the other differences)-and little point in arguing over who's worse off.

Early in Hairspray the young lead character announces, "People who are different-their time is coming." We "different" people have much to learn from one another, as the never-ending parade of stupid marches on.