IGF CultureWatch

Over the last several years, a number of gay and lesbian characters have appeared in mainstream comic books, most often as incidental or occasional characters, but in a few cases, as important main characters.

You might remember "The Rawhide Kid," an older comic character who was reinvented for a five part series as a super gunslinger and gay man with a modern gay sensibility and exquisite taste but inserted back into the old west.

Gay novelist Robert Rodi's comic series just a few years ago, "Code Name: Knockout," was one of the most enjoyable--smart, funny, and entirely gay positive with a gay male sidekick for the voluptuous heroine.

But the most significant gay characters have to be Apollo and the Midnighter, ongoing major characters in the ensemble cast of the science fiction comic series "The Authority." Like the other main characters Apollo and the Midnighter are genetically enhanced super-humans who live on a sort of spaceship and spend their time fighting super-villains on earth as well as from the future, other dimensions, and parallel universes.

Blond Apollo can fly and is nourished by solar radiation. The Midnighter, clad entirely in black, is the ultimate fighting machine who can anticipate his opponents' moves. The origin of their relationship is obscure, but they are deeply in love and their relationship is comfortably accepted by the other members of the Authority.

Their relationship is not always in the forefront of the action, but it is constantly there as part of the background. In one episode where they were separated and their survival was in doubt, when they were reunited they hugged and kissed passionately, leading another character to yell playfully, "Hey, you two, get a room."

Midnighter is apparently a popular character. He now has his own series as well. In one recent issue (No. 5) when Midnighter encounters some friendly people from the 96th century, one of the women asks if he wants to have sex, and Midnighter explains that he is gay. The concept makes no sense to her and she eventually explains that in her time there is no gender-based sexual preference at all. At that Midnighter bursts out laughing and exclaims "That's great. That really is outstanding," and then louder, "Hey, can you hear me in the Bible Belt? You're all wasting your time."

In the following issue (No. 6) the Apollo-Midnighter relationship is re-imagined as taking place in Shogunate Japan. Midnighter is a wandering samurai who is hired by the Shogun after he kills the Shogun's guards who challenge him. Eventually Apollo, also a wandering samurai, passes by and after a standoff in the briefest of sparing, they agree not to fight. Instead they become lovers.

Apollo joins the Shogun's household and tells the fascinated Shogun of the many things he has seen in his wide travels. "It was a joyful time," says the Midnighter. "By day I did my duty. The nights were ours." Fearing to lose his power and influence, the Shogun's prime minister hires men to kill the pair in their bed. The two fight back killing all the attackers, but Apollo too is killed. His last words to Midnighter: "I love you."

Midnighter buries him in a wooded area. "We were happy in these woods," he explains. "We walked together and the shining sun seemed not one-tenth as bright as he. It seemed a fitting place." Bereft, Midnighter leaves the Shogun's service, but returns a year later to kill the prime minister.

This story is told as a series of flashbacks to a group of samurai swordsmen Midnighter has lured to Apollo's gravesite by sending each an invitation addressed to "To the greatest swordsman in all the land." Throughout Midnighter's story, the assembled samurai express disgust and revulsion at the idea of two men as lovers and seek to challenge and kill him. At the end Midnighter springs upon them and kills them all, leaving their bodies as a sacrifice to his dead lover.

The narrative that continues inside Midnighter's head explains, "Every year I come here and bring my lover (sacrifices). And every year I weep for it is all I know." And he walks off alone under a cloudy, wintry sky.

It is a depressing ending, but in a way satisfying as a gay revenge fantasy. Still, I cannot imagine what the young straight men who typically buy comic books make of this. Maybe they are lured by the vividly depicted violence and gore itself. Or maybe they adjust the revenge motif to their own particular targets. Or maybe, just maybe, they absorb the notion that homophobia springs from irrational hatred and deserves to be condemned.

Most adults have figured out that everything is not about them. But some leading international LGBT rights activists based in the U.S. can hardly focus on our great, multifaceted global struggle without making it about their grievances against America. Take Paula Ettelbrick. Please.

Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), is quoted in the March 29 Bay Area Reporter justifying her silence on the U.S. State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2006 by saying, "Who is the U.S. to issue a report on every other government in the world on its human rights activities, especially in light of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib?"

If only the perfectly virtuous were fit to report on human rights practices, there would be no reporting. But since Ettelbrick gives the impression that the reports are simply an extension of President Bush, let's look at the State Department's description of those who did the work: "This information-gathering can be hazardous, and US Foreign Service Officers regularly go to great lengths, under trying and sometimes dangerous conditions, to investigate reports of human rights abuse, monitor elections, and come to the aid of individuals at risk...."

The work of hundreds of foreign service officers should not be reduced to a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush. My main impression from the LGBT- and HIV/AIDS-related excerpts is of the bravery and determination of LGBT people around the world in the face of often brutal repression-people who endure incredible suffering yet refuse to be victims. It is quite humbling. I see no need to interrupt it for a commercial denouncing America.

Scott Long, director of the LGBT Rights Program at Human Rights Watch (HRW), sent a culling from the State Department reports to activists around the world in early March, noting that "the usefulness of this will very much depend on how much or little credibility the US's own human rights record leaves its reporting in your own country or community." In a March 16 email to blogger Michael Petrelis, he wrote, "We are not going to web-post the compilation we have done without being in a position to perform a critique of its comprehensiveness and accuracy...." It is unclear why they can't simply post a disclaimer.

In a March 14 email, Long insisted "that we ... recognize the structures of power in which we are implicated...." On March 29 I accused him of post-colonial Western guilt. Long replied on March 30, "No, Rick, 'structures of power' are a fact ... and there are people who suffer and die because of them. I am sitting here in Geneva, as it happens, but surrounded by LGBT activists from the South-Argentina, Brazil, South Africa-and when I read this exchange aloud to them they alternate between anger and hilarity at the US's incomprehension of its actions and its reputation now in the world, not in some colonial past...."

Notice how glibly I am turned into a mere stand-in for the United States. Is this supposed to show how much more sophisticated people are in Geneva? If I thought things were fine in my country I would not have become an activist. My refusal to pander does not blind me to the faults of the Bush Administration; but why are only Westerners expected to recite their nations' sins?

The left loves to dwell on Western oppression without acknowledging Western reforms, which range from Britain's prohibition of the slave trade two centuries ago to the creation of global human rights structures. Treating the West as the root of all oppression infantilizes others in the world by denying their own responsibility, and gives comfort to despots like Robert Mugabe, who routinely deflects criticism with denunciations of Britain.

In his March 30 email, Long notes that the State Department's concern about homophobia in (say) Uganda means nothing to gay Ugandans when the U.S. simultaneously uses the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief to fund "evangelical churches that promote that homophobia and create a climate of violence that has endangered quite a few lives." Fair point, but I didn't say that anyone should be grateful to America. I said that the State Department reports should be recognized as a tool-not the only tool, and not perfect, but valuable nonetheless.

Consider some context. In a March 23 speech before the UN Human Rights Council, Hillel Neuer of UN Watch said, "This Council has, after all, done something. It has enacted one resolution after another condemning one single state: Israel ... The entire rest of the world-millions upon millions of victims, in 191 countries-continue to go ignored." The Council president responded by condemning Neuer's remarks, despite having thanked many others for testimony filled with slanders.

Six decades after the birth of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Council repeatedly attacks one besieged democracy while refusing to scrutinize the likes of Iran, Cuba, Myanmar and North Korea. One-sided guilt-mongering by Western leftists makes them complicit in this travesty and subordinates the global LGBT struggle to other disputes.

Petrelis blogged on March 8, "I grieve for my community and how it doesn't demand consistent quality gay advocacy on crucial global gay rights abuses from our paid advocates." The answer, as Petrelis has demonstrated, is twofold: more scrutiny and more independent organizing. This is your movement; don't be a silent partner.

Opposition to homosexuality has long been marked by bad science. In the past, that usually meant bad psychology or even bad physiology. Today, the more common problem is bad social science, usually involving cherry-picked data about alarming social trends followed by breathtaking leaps of logic connecting these trends to same-sex marriage.

David Blankenhorn positions himself as an exception. In his new book The Future of Marriage, and in a recent Weekly Standard article entitled "Defining Marriage Down…Is No Way to Save It," Blankenhorn makes the familiar argument that supporting same-sex marriage weakens marriage as a valuable social institution. But he claims to do so in way that avoids some of the simplistic analyses common in the debate, including those made by his conservative allies.

In particular, Blankenhorn criticizes Stanley Kurtz's argument that same-sex marriage in the Netherlands and Scandinavia has caused the erosion of traditional marriage there. Blankenhorn rightly recognizes Kurtz's causal claims to be unsupported: "Neither Kurtz nor anyone else can scientifically prove that allowing gay marriage causes the institution of marriage to get weaker," Blankenhorn writes. "Correlation does not imply causation." This is a refreshing concession.

But having made that concession, Blankenhorn proceeds as if it makes no difference: "Scholars and commentators have expended much effort trying in vain to wring proof of causation from the data, all the while ignoring the meaning of some simple correlations that the numbers do indubitably show." But what can these correlations mean, if not that same-sex marriage is causally responsible for the alleged problems? What do the numbers "indubitably show"? Blankenhorn's answer provides a textbook example of a circular argument:

Certain trends in values and attitudes tend to cluster with each other and with certain trends in behavior…The legal endorsement of gay marriage occurs where the belief prevails that marriage itself should be redefined as a private personal relationship. And all of these marriage-weakening attitudes and behaviors are linked. Around the world, the surveys show, these things go together.

In other words, what the correlations show is that these things are correlated. Not very helpful.

From there, Blankenhorn argues that if things "go together," opposition to one is good reason for opposition to all. He attempts to illustrate by analogy:

"Find some teenagers who smoke, and you can confidently predict that they are more likely to drink than their nonsmoking peers. Why? Because teen smoking and drinking tend to hang together." So if you oppose teenage drinking, you ought to oppose teenage smoking, because of the correlation between the two. In a similar way, if you oppose nonmarital cohabitation, single-parent parenting, or other "marriage-weakening behaviors," you ought to oppose same-sex marriage, since they, too, "tend to hang together."

This is breathtakingly bad logic. The analogy sounds initially plausible because teen drinking and teen smoking are both bad things. But the things that correlate with bad things are not necessarily bad. Find some teenagers who have tried cocaine, and you can confidently predict that they are more likely to have gone to top-notch public schools than their non-cocaine-using peers. It's not because superior education causes cocaine use. It's because cocaine is an expensive drug, and expensive drugs tend to show up in affluent communities, which tend to have better public schools than their poor counterparts. Yet it would be ridiculous to conclude that, if you oppose teen cocaine use, you ought to oppose top-notch public education.

The whole point of noting that "correlation does not equal cause" is to acknowledge that things that "tend to hang together" are not necessarily mutually reinforcing. They are sometimes both the result of third-party causes, and even more often the result of a complex web of causes that we haven't quite figured out yet. In any case, when babies correlate with dirty bathwater, we don't take that as a reason for throwing out babies.

Which brings me to another significant flaw in Blankenhorn's analysis. Even if we grant that support for same-sex marriage correlates with negative factors such as higher divorce rates, it also seems to correlate with positive factors such as higher education, greater support for religious freedom, and greater respect for women's rights. On Blankenhorn's logic, we ought to oppose those things as well, since they "tend to hang together" with the negative trends.

I don't often find myself agreeing with Stanley Kurtz. But at least he seems to understand that, without the causal connections, the "negative marriage trends" argument gets no traction.

It's getting to be a tradition. Like some ancient Hebrew prophet, Larry Kramer descends from Mt. Sinai, or maybe just Mt. Kramer, and ascends a podium in the harsh, barren deserts of New York City to deliver his latest denunciations and warnings to a world awaiting them with decreasingly bated breath.

These presentations are generally attended by a public of younger gays and characterized by substantial exaggerations of fact, hyperbolic rhetoric, and a certain amount of vulgarity--all of which are apparently how Kramer thinks you communicate with fellow gays. Think of it as performance art.

The burden of Kramer's latest speech was that everybody hates us: politicians, judges, the U.S. government, "they," "them," "America"--they all hate us. "We are still facing the same danger, our extermination, and from the same entity, our own country." Even our so-called friends are not willing to fight for us, he says.

Kramer's view is that the best, the only, response to all this is a newly formulated, hierarchical organized ACT-UP: an Army Corps to Unleash Power.

Kramer points to genuine injustices and the malign neglect of many gay concerns: equal treatment of gay relationships, the ban on immigration of foreign partners, anti-gay violence, the murder of gays abroad. But the gay press writes about these things regularly and the national and state gay organizations work on those as well as other issues such as military access and gay adoption. Kramer is unjust to say that "our movement has confined its feeble demands to marriage." Nor does he acknowledge that marriage would solve some of the problems he lists--e.g., tax equality and partner immigration.

In addition, there are conceptual problems with Kramer's new solution. When ACT-UP was created it had:

• A specific set of goals--the development of effective treatments for AIDS, faster drug trials and access to those drugs and research for a cure.

• A specific set of targets: the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, pharmaceutical firms, and Presidents Reagan and Bush and their administrations.

• An intensely involved constituency of HIV-infected gay men who knew that their lives literally depended on their activism.

But in Kramer's proposed new organization and its vastly expanded agenda, who specifically are the targets, what are the specific goals and where is the intensely concerned constituency? A "Lo here, Lo there" approach to a wide array of gay issues seems at risk of a quick diffusion of focus, exhaustion of energy and rapid demise.

Kramer focuses on politicians. "Much of what I am calling for involves laws, changing them, getting them," he says. And he proposes an omnibus gay rights bill and "hold(ing) every politician's feet to this fire until he or she supports it." Great. How do we do that? By demonstrations? Can you produce personnel regularly? And sometimes demonstrations can be counter-productive by antagonizing politicians and public opinion. Then with votes? But Kramer says "There is not one single candidate running for public office anywhere that deserves our support."

And Kramer forgets that politicians are elected by "the people" so politicians are not going to change until they sense a change in popular sentiment regarding gays. So persuading the American public about gay moral equality has to be a vital part of the project. But how do you do that, especially if the people are our enemy, and if, as Kramer says, "They hate us and want us dead"? Kramer even seems to scorn "our own country's 'democratic process.'"

In short, Kramer's speech does not seem to cohere. Some parts conflict with other parts or depend on supports that Kramer has already yanked away.

Nor does Kramer seem to have thought through what is involved in changing Americans' minds about gays and lesbians so they will stop "hating" us. He seems to want to threaten and bully people into respecting and fearing gays as he claims the original ACT-UP did to drug companies and government agencies. But that probably won't work with a whole nation.

And as always Kramer simply ignores the obvious political progress gays have made in the last 20 years. He exaggerates the number of our opponents, distorts the extent of their power and intensity of their hostility and exaggerates the extent and likelihood of looming homophobia. He airily dismisses the existence of genuine friends and supporters. And he repeatedly distorts facts to support his claims--a column topic in itself. Not a way to build credibilty for a new movement.