IGF CultureWatch

Allow, if you will, a few dissenting notes from gay orthodoxy. If a writer only wrote things you agreed with, what good is he? And why read him? Better just talk to yourself in the mirror. "Politically correct" originated as an orthodoxy-enforcing Communist Party term in the 1930s.

• Pride weekend and the Pride parade are becoming more like Mardi Gras every year-something we do mainly because a) it is traditional and b) it brings revenue into the city from suburban and regional visitors who buy food and alcohol, shop, maybe rent overnight accommodations, and spend money on other tourist things while here.

• It may be all very well to take government (taxpayers') money for various gay projects-after all everyone else does it too-but there is always the risk that to get the money one's agenda will be compromised or that people will shape their agenda to things the government (i.e., politicians) would approve-avoiding "sensitive" issues, for instance. "He who pays the piper calls the tune." And politicians always want a payback in the form of political support. It is better to rely on private funding from individuals, supportive corporations or sympathetic foundations less subject to majoritarian dictates.

• Gay leaders repeat endlessly that abortion is a gay issue, but it isn't. Personally, I support all forms of abortion: A fetus may be "human" but it is not a "person." Nevertheless, how abortion can be an issue for gays and lesbians whose sexual activity does not produce fetuses is never explained. Yes, some lesbians might want to get pregnant but then abort a badly deformed fetus. Fine. Get an abortion, but don't say doing it is a gay issue just because you are gay. Gay leaders say people have a right to control their own bodies. I agree. But do they mean it? Do they therefore also defend, as I do, the right to assisted suicide, S/M, drug use, ex-gay therapy, prostitution, promiscuity, etc.? And the central issue remains whether a fetus is just part of a woman's body or an autonomous person. That argument is seldom joined.

• The gay left seems terminally afflicted with "mission drift." As if there were not enough work to do to attain gay equality, they want to include other issues as part of our agenda such as environmentalism, global warming, free trade limitations, illegal immigration, government health care, support for unions, etc. To some gays, those issues are more important than gay freedom and equality. Well, fine, there are plenty of organizations working on those issues. Go join those. But don't try to claim that those are gay issues just because they might affect some gays. I may even be on the other side-and I'm gay too.

• GLBT (or more recently-ladies first) LGBT is a relatively young orthodoxy. It originates from a 1995 meeting of gay organization leaders in Washington who decided that we were no longer the gay/lesbian movement but the "gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender" movement. Well, I don't feel bound by what "gay leaders" try to dictate. It was amusing at the time to hear people initially spit out the whole litany (instead of just saying "gay") before the acronym was contrived. But these aren't all one movement and what we have in common is limited.

• I don't have much in common with a man who want to be a woman. Gays can support transsexuals in their political efforts and work together on areas of common concern (e.g., defamation by Prof. Michael Bailey), but by and large their issues are not my issues, nor are mine theirs. Awkwardly, they embody the very 19th century stereotype about gays we have been trying to overcome for 100 years--that gay men are women trapped in male bodies. Even less do I have anything in common with some transvestite heterosexual man who wants to wear a frilly frock around the house. Fine, do it with my blessing, but that doesn't make him part of the gay movement.

• And bisexuals? How many bisexual men are there in our movement? No doubt there are a few-there are always a few of everything. But as the prominent gay psychiatrist Richard Pillard said in a 2003 interview "I think female sexual orientation is more variable than is male. Men seem more often to be fixed from early adolescence, even from early childhood." Some women are no doubt technically "bisexual," but most admit, as one informed me, that "of course" she had a "preference." And years ago, when I wrote something skeptical about bisexuality, I got three indignant replies from "bisexual" women-all of whom admitted that they were in relationships with men.

Let the fur fly.

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.

On Friday, June 1, I called my friend Robert on his cell phone shortly before 6 p.m., when he is usually preparing to leave his office in Manhattan. This time he was in Brooklyn, approaching Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church for the 10th anniversary celebration of the Audre Lorde Project (ALP), which calls itself a "Community Organizing Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit and Transgender People of Color." As Robert pronounced this I added, "When the Rainbow is Enuf," referring to the famously long name of Ntozake Shange's play For Colored Girls.... He laughed and said, "Yes, when does it stop?!"

Titled "Living a Legacy: Celebrating Action, Imagination and Struggle," the fundraiser was to start with food and gallery at 6 p.m., and performers and speakers at 7:30 p.m. The program included several speakers plus performances by the Lavender Light Gospel Choir and the Legendary House of Ninja (those are two separate groups, incidentally). I told Robert I had enjoyed the music of Lavender Light, a member of the Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses and the world's first non-church-affiliated LGBT gospel choir. By then he was at the church door, and we hung up.

The next morning I returned from breakfast to find this message in Robert's rich, bass-baritone drawl:

"The goddamn thing went on - it started at six with the dinner, and lasted until ten minutes till eleven. And I have to tell you that I knew something about the Audre Lorde Project, and I laud some of the work that they do, but I owe you an apology for some of the things that I've been dismissive about that you've said about some of these groups [meaning leftists]. Some of these people are crazy.

"It's like, America's a horrible place, and we're neo-colonialist and need to open our borders and let everybody in the world come in if they want to for whatever opportunities they want, and we need to end the war on terrorism. Perhaps we need to end the war in Iraq, but why the war on terrorism? Oh, let's just be sitting ducks and let them kill us all. And how America is no longer a democracy despite the fact that you can stand up in this church and say all these things."

Experience suggests that if I were to express these views myself, I would be charged with neo-colonialism, based on the idea that as a white person I have no right to oppress people of color with my opinions. Robert, on the other hand, is African American, though I doubt it will go any better for me on this account with the professionally outraged left, who can charge me with arrogantly appropriating opinions of color. As Katharine Hepburn once said, "Never. The less."

The ALP website (at www.alp.org) includes statements on war, immigration and marriage. In each case, as Robert suggested, they take things to extremes.

ALP opposes not just the war in Iraq but the war in Afghanistan and the war on terrorism. In the case of Afghanistan, the U.S. overthrew the Taliban regime for refusing to turn over the Al Qaeda terrorists who were behind the 9/11 attacks and whom the Taliban were harboring. As to the war on terrorism, ALP throws out the anti-terrorism baby with the Bush Administration bathwater. Many of us who oppose President Bush's use of torture, warrantless wiretaps and suspension of habeas corpus nonetheless recognize the need to defend our country against Islamist extremists. Similarly, one can oppose Bush's unilateralism, military overreach and doctrine of pre-emptive strikes without ignoring the need for a strong military.

ALP not only opposes the recent nativist hysteria on immigration, but states, "Full legalization is a nonnegotiable demand." They oppose the "path to legalization" compromise, oppose all guest worker proposals, and support "immediate access to full legalization" for all illegal aliens. I agree with their call for repeal of the HIV immigration ban; I agree that undocumented workers contribute to America's economy; and I would like family unification with my own foreign partner. But the notion that we have no right to control our borders amounts to a denial of national sovereignty, which is radical indeed. And ALP's rhetoric about dismantling the "prison-industrial complex" is designed to persuade no one.

ALP supports gay people's right to civil marriage, but also embraces the more radical principles of the "Beyond Marriage" manifesto which I criticized last year, and of which ALP's executive director, Kris Hayashi, is a signatory. As an example of the lunacy to which their Marxist-inspired, all-oppressions-are-linked philosophy leads them, they criticize gay-owned businesses that encouraged gay wedding trips to Hawai'i during that state's marriage struggle. This is because "many within the indigenous Hawai'ian sovereignty movement - who had supported same-gender marriage - consider tourism to be one of the most destructive forces impacting Native Hawai'ians and their struggle for sovereignty."

Robert had nothing but praise for one aspect of ALP's celebration: the food. "It was quite ethnically diverse. They had Caribbean food and Indian food and soul food. They served several different kinds of meat, including pork. One of my friends pulled off some pieces of fatback, and this is a guy who's a big health nut, and he went back and had a second piece."

Let's give credit: while they may charge bravely into political irrelevance, seizing the furthest margins of the national conversation, they sure can lay out a first-rate buffet.