It has been only 56 years since the 1951 publication of Edward
Sagarin's pseudonymous "The Homosexual in America," which can be
said to mark the beginnings of the American gay rights movement.
And it has been only 38 years since the Stonewall events of 1969
that gave the movement a valuable boost.
Gays and lesbians have made remarkably fast progress in the
intervening years, although viewed on a day-to-day basis it seems
painfully slow. Millions of gays are now out of the closet, public
support for the acceptance of gays is growing, substantial
majorities favor ending the military ban on gays, gay marriage or
full civil unions enjoy majority support, and more.
The combined effect of our everyday visibility and the cogency
of our arguments continue to undermine long-standing and deeply
rooted prejudice. That is something to celebrate in the run-up to
our late June festivities.
Think how frustrated the zealots of the religious/social right
wing must be at this progress. They endlessly criticize us as
"radical homosexual activists"--enemies of family, church, and
nation. No doubt there is a lingering handful of old gay Marxists
and Marxian lesbian feminists, but don't forget that for the
religious right, "radical homosexual activist" is their term for
any person who is open about his sexual orientation. In their view,
that is "radical" because our very visibility constitutes an
argument "in the flesh" for our benignity and the legitimacy of our
claim to equality.
Far from being radicals of any sort, most of us are just plain
ol' bourgeois. How much more bourgeois can you be than wanting to
marry the person you love and wanting to serve in the military?
What we want, in short, is full inclusion in society--something we
had (at considerable psychological cost) when we were all in the
closet, and something we still deserve now that we are out.
Interestingly this same inclusion is feared by the radical left
as well as the religious right. The radical left scorns our full
inclusion as "assimilation," with that word's implication that,
once included, gays will somehow lose all those unique qualities
they have--qualities that could not survive without the continued
pressure of hostility, discrimination and exclusion. I don't know
if gays have any unique qualities, but I doubt if any such would be
lost if we achieved equality.
Consider how bourgeois we really are. Much of the early "gay
liberation" polemics seemed heavily focused on sexual
liberation--the liberating of the libido (a la Herbert Marcuse).
Certainly the legitimacy of gay sex needed to be vigorously
asserted in the face of harsh state sodomy laws and discomfort
among many gays about their sexual desires.
But sexual liberation is now much less an issue and more of a
background assumption. It is an availability rather than a mandate.
The task for most gays has become not so much one of obtaining more
sex with more partners, but that of finding a way to integrate
their sexual desires with their emotional longings. In this gays
are no different from most heterosexual Americans.
More gays are even procreating children or adopting them through
U.S. adoption agencies or from abroad. One couple I know adopted a
baby from China, another from Russia. As one male friend explained
to me, "The biological clock was ticking."
I have never heard the ticking of that particular clock, but I
can accept it as a metaphor for some people's nagging sense that
something is incomplete in their lives as a gay or lesbian couple.
Only polemicists for the religious could argue that it is better
for a child to have no parents rather than one parent or two
parents of the same sex.
The gay neighborhoods of many of our largest cities seem to be
slowly losing their gay density as more gay men move to other areas
of large cities or to the suburbs. San Francisco and Chicago are
good examples. Often this follows finding a partner and their
desire to have a house of their own.
Sometimes they move to find lower living costs but equally often
they move to find peace and quiet. I have not seen sociological
research on this, and we probably won't have a clear idea until a
new edition of Gary Gates' valuable "Gay and Lesbian Atlas" based
on the 2010 census data. But that population drift could also have
an impact on gay business.
And finally, let's point out that "queer" is pretty dead. It
never really caught on. Longtime gay writer and activist Gabriel
Rotello called it "the word that failed." It was floated as a
generic term for gays (etc.) on the assumption that adopting a term
of opprobrium would somehow reduce the hostility of homophobes
among whom it originally arose. To paraphrase Orwell, that is a
belief so absurd that only an intellectual could believe it.