IGF CultureWatch

A few weeks ago I was in Ripon, Wisconsin, for a same-sex marriage debate with Glenn Stanton of Focus on the Family, when the Ted Haggard story broke. Haggard, then president of the National Association of Evangelicals and pastor of the massive New Life Church in Colorado Springs, was being accused by former Denver prostitute Ted Jones of having regular drug-fueled gay trysts with Jones over a period of several years.

"So, do you think there's anything to this?" I asked Stanton, who told me that Haggard was not only his pastor but also a friend.

"No way," he replied. (At the time no tapes had yet been released, and Haggard was denying the story.) "It's just incongruous. John, it would be like finding out that you secretly have a wife and family in the suburbs. No."

(Betty, if you're reading this, be sure to get Timmy a haircut before his little-league game this weekend, and give Mary Jane a kiss from Daddy.)

Kidding aside, my reaction to the story's unfolding was marked more by sadness than schadenfreude. I could see the shock on my friend and opponent Glenn Stanton's face the next day, as further revelations made it increasingly clear that Haggard was pretty much guilty as charged. I was sad for Haggard, sad for his family, and sad for all the people he had mislead.

But he deserved his downfall, didn't he? Certainly. Here was a leader in a movement that actively fights gay rights. Haggard openly proclaimed that the Bible tells us everything we need to know about homosexuality -- namely, that it's just plain wrong. And as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, he helped to spread this view far and wide--apparently carrying on an affair with a male prostitute all the while.

So I wasn't surprised that many relished his fall from grace. A few days after returning from my trip I ran into a friend who, upon my mentioning Haggard's name, gleefully started dancing and singing "Another one bites the dust…" Schadenfreude--taking pleasure at the misfortune of others--is a natural human tendency, especially when those others are royal hypocrites. And it's not just schadenfreude, it's relief: one less person will be out there spreading lies about gays (though others will doubtless take his place).

Haggard is Exhibit N in a recent line of examples of the dangers of the closet. Some of them are Republicans, some Democrats; some are religious leaders, some not. While their stories differ in detail, they all highlight a major pitfall of trying to fight one's gayness, rather than embracing it openly.

I am of course not saying that when heterosexually married people act on homosexual desires, it automatically proves that they ought to have been doing so all along. Whether they ought to have been doing so depends, crucially, their own predominant sexual orientation, as well as on the moral status of homosexual conduct.

Nor am I saying, "If you don't let us be gay, then we will become lying, cheating, predatory assholes." I am saying that a world that doesn't provide healthy avenues for gay people to pursue intimacy should not be terribly surprised when some turn to unhealthy ones. Barney Frank put it well in a Newsweek interview regarding the Mark Foley scandal: "Being in the closet doesn't make you do dumb things, doesn't justify you doing dumb things, it just makes them likelier."

Of course, there are non-closeted people who (like Haggard and former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey) commit adultery or (like Foley) chase after sixteen-year-old employees. But it doesn't follow that the closet is not a contributing factor, any more than non-smokers with cancer disprove that smoking increases cancer risk. It's common sense, really: double lives are a recipe for danger. There are other recipes, to be sure, but this one's pretty reliable.

Partly this is because the closet demands, not just a lie, but an entire pattern of lies, which in turn make deception easier in other areas of life. Partly it's because this pattern is emotionally and spiritually draining. And partly it's because deception poisons relationships, cutting one off from the friends who could otherwise monitor one's behavior, offering support, guidance, and an occasional good smack upside the head when needed.

Haggard's much-needed smack did not come from his friends: it came from a public scandal. In response, he plans to begin a lengthy process of "spiritual restoration," which begins with owning up to one's sins. And that saddens me too--not because I'm against his (or anyone's) acknowledging fault, but because there's good reason to believe that Haggard and his advisers will miss the key ones. Homosexuality is not a sin. Making the world needlessly more difficult for gay and lesbian people surely is.

During 12 years of congresses disproportionately influenced by the GOP's religious right "core constituency" gays and lesbians became so used to tempering their political expectations that it is hard to know how to react to the sudden change in party control wrought by the Nov. 7 election.

Giddy excitement would be one possible reaction. Cautious optimism would probably be better. After all, gays won some and lost some. And George Bush is still president and can wield a veto pen.

Two results stand out: Gays and lesbians will no longer always need to play defense and an implicit rebuke to the religious right for overreaching.

The party switch places gay-friendly Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House and gay and gay friendly chairmen such as Barney Frank and Henry Waxman in charge of some congressional committees. And because gays are a constituency of the Democratic party, Congress is unlikely to approve any specifically anti-gay legislation.

Nor is a constitutional amendment barring gay marriage likely to get further than being introduced. It would be blocked at the committee level. In a related gain, the amendment's major fan Rick ("man on dog") Santorum went down to substantial defeat (Thank you, Pennsylvania voters), and although amendment co-sponsor Colorado Rep. Marilyn Musgrave was reelected, she won only 46 percent of the vote, so she is likely to take a lower profile role.

Can we expect any positive actions from a Democratic congress? Among the possibilities that have been mentioned are overturning the military's ban on openly gay service members, inclusion of gays in a federal hate crimes law and passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). Certainly public opinion supports all three.

The Hate Crimes law is perhaps the likeliest since it produces the least opposition. Both ENDA and repeal of DADT are possibilities, but are more likely to be vetoed. Something very limited for same-sex partners has also been mentioned, but seems unlikely.

To be sure, many of the new Democratic legislators are more socially conservative than the Democratic leadership--Rep. Rahm Emanuel recruited them specifically to counter the GOP's appeal on social issues.

But simply because they originally joined the Democratic rather than the Republican party, they may not be as hostile to equal treatment for gays as the Republicans were. Whatever they may believe about guns, abortion, or tariffs, they tend--if only "tend"--to think that discrimination is wrong--unlike most Republicans who approve of discrimination if it is called "values." Even if Bush vetoes such enactments, congressional passage itself is a powerful precedent to build on in the future.

We can even dare to hope for greater congressional insistence that federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and the Drug Enforcement Agency begin to tell the truth about marijuana, condoms, oral sex, abortion and a host of HIV issues. And that the National Institutes of Health might finally be adequately funded to research vaccines for syphilis and gonorrhea.

As to the religious right: With their remarkable capacity for self-pity and victim mongering when they do not get every jot and tittle they want, some religious right figures claimed to be devastated by the election. The New York Times quoted the head of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue describing it as "Bloody Tuesday" because South Dakota turned back a state law banning almost all abortions, California and Oregon rejected parental notification of a minor's abortion, and Missouri rejected a ban on stem-celll research.

Yet they managed to pass seven out of the eight state amendments barring same-sex marriage. Even though gays were heartened by Arizona's rejection of a gay marriage ban, a national first, they should be kicking themselves that they lost by 52 to 48 percent in South Dakota.

It may be that the October 25 New Jersey civil unions/marriage decision influenced the vote in some states. Heterosexuals who say they support civil unions or marriage in the abstract--even if they are telling the truth--seem to get skittish when confronted with the actual possibility. Is it an accident that of states with marriage bans on the ballot Arizona is the farthest away from New Jersey? Perhaps more important, Arizona retains a strong Goldwater/Kolbe libertarian tradition of live and let live.

It is hard to know how effective gay groups' anti-amendment efforts were in states such as Wisconsin, Colorado and Idaho. A friend reports that he walked into the Wisconsin group's Madison headquarters prepared to donate a few hundred dollars. Although people were standing around in the office, they all ignored him, so after a few minutes he walked out, keeping his money. When are gay advocacy groups going to stop depending on untrained volunteers and get serious about our lives?

With Hallowe'en and the mid-term elections now behind us we are, it seems, hurtling headlong into the "Holiday Season." Already stores are offering Holiday sales, drug stores are selling Christmas tree lights and ornaments and, believe it or not, one Chicago radio station began playing Christmas music around the clock in the first week of November.

But it would be a shame if in all this flurry of activity the venerable holiday of Thanksgiving got lost. Thanksgiving is the only occasion during the year when each of us is encouraged to think about the things we are grateful for.

Originally the idea was to be thankful to a god people then believed in. But even in our more secular age we can still be aware that much of what makes our lives satisfying is not the result of our own efforts but the efforts of others, often people we do not even know--for example, the people who invented antibiotics or the founding fathers who created America's free political institutions.

But rather than telling you what you should be giving thanks for, it might be better if I share a few things I am thankful for in hopes that it will stimulate some ideas of your own. I am aware that a personal approach risks seeming sappy, but that is a necessary risk.

I suppose, first of all, I am thankful to be alive. It could easily have been otherwise. As a gay man who was sexually active during the late 1970s and early 1980s when, unknown to us all, HIV was spreading rapidly through our community, I could have been among those who contracted the virus and died early in the epidemic. Most of my friends from that era are dead.

So I am also thankful for the handful of friends I have left from that period as well as the ones I have managed to acquire since. They are the people who connect me to the world, entertain and inform me, offer help when needed and admonish me when I am wrong. More than most of us realize, we depend on friends to keep us sane and balanced.

As a single man and, it would seem, a confirmed bachelor, I am comfortable living without a partner. But for many people, having a partner can be a great blessing and certainly something to be thankful for. I can pass on the comment of one of my friends who observed one evening, "I am so lucky to have found a man I love and who loves me."

I am thankful that I am living at a time and in a country where a person can live openly with integrity as a gay person and lead a reasonably normal life. This opportunity is unique in recorded history and is still not possible in most of the world today. If we have not yet achieved full equality, we are closer than at any time in the past. Much of the freedom we have today is due to the courageous work of the pioneers of the gay movement and I am grateful to and thankful for them.

I am thankful for the two men from whom I have learned the most--Leo Strauss and Friedrich Hayek. Hayek and Strauss agree on almost nothing, so they exist in an unresolvable tension in my mind, a constant reminder that the world is more complicated than it seems, and serve as a stimulus to think carefully and write as clearly as possible. Two men whose erudition on homosexuality I am thankful for are psychologist C. A. Tripp and historian Wayne Dynes. Both shed light where there was darkness.

I am thankful for the proliferating variety and creativity of Western culture. Most of us will never absorb even half of it, but its music, art and literature have enriched my life and in many ways made my life worth living. A sampling of specifics: Literature--Conrad, Austen, Bely, Rand, Johnson, Swift; Music--Bach, Rachmaninoff, Vaughn Williams, Martinu, Gershwin; Art--Caravaggio, Caspar David Friedrich, De Chirico. My lists could be extended indefinitely, but then you have your own list.

Does it go without saying that I am thankful for my parents who did their best to guide and educate me? Perhaps it does not. When I have written appreciatively of my parents in the past, some people have commented to me that they did not have any such warm relationship with their parents. Reminders like that make me realize that supportive parents were not something I should take for granted but were the constant effort of two people trying hard to be good parents. For that I am thankful too.

After I wrote recently about the impediments--or lack of inducements--society presents for gay men to become adults, a reader referred me to an article on "Gay Adults" by Los Angeles psychologist Don Kilhefner in the magazine "White Crane."

Although the article contains too much Radical Faery politics and spirituality for my taste, Kilhefner's main point about the need for recognition of "gay adult" as a stage in the gay life-cycle is important and he develops it thoughtfully.

Kilhefner writes that one time after a public discussion about gay men's lives during which he discussed gay adulthood, "a bright, 30-something, gay man ... shared that he had never heard of the concept of a 'gay adult' ... and he found it intriguing. He always heard people talking about "older gays" and "younger gays" but he had never heard of gay men having an adult stage of development."

Maybe things are a little worse in the Hollywood fantasyland of perpetual youth, but perceptions are probably not much different elsewhere.

Kilhefner critiques the rationales (or excuses) offered--that I too have offered--for why gay men so often seem not to mature into adulthood.

Consider the supposed delayed adolescence of men who come out in their 20s. He points out that adolescence normally lasts about eight years at most. So, he wonders, "why am I seeing large numbers of gay men in their late 30's, 40's and 50's still thinking and acting like 20-somethings?"

He acknowledges that AIDS took the lives of many of the gay 30-65 generation, but cites CDC estimates that only 8-12 percent of gay men have died because of AIDS. "Where are the remaining 90% of gay men who are not missing in action?" he asks pointedly.

His critique of the "absence of children" argument is the weakest, depending on his notion that gays as a group have some purpose and that purpose is "the spiritual survival of the species." That sort of unprovable metaphysical speculation won't convince many people. But I think better arguments could be offered: Gay men who marry or otherwise join their lives to a long term partner generally act more mature. And even single men who see their own immature behavior mirrored in younger gay men eventually find the sight distasteful and abandon it.

I think there are counter-arguments to each of these, but they may be only partially successful so the critique of gay immaturity has considerable force and deserves a serious hearing.

There are actually gay adults around in considerable numbers. They run gay businesses, the gay cultural institutions, the gay bars and clubs, the community health and social service organizations. But perhaps they are inconspicuous to young people focused on the bar, party and hook-up scene.

Still, there are millions of gay adult besides those. And indeed, where are they? Perhaps they withdraw from the gay community because they view being gay as largely about drinking, drugs, and fast-food sex. That is a sad misunderstanding. More than anything, gay is about Civic Life. The gay community is an affinity group. It is about interpersonal empathy, friendships, social and political progress and cultural creativity.

For those who do not know how to stay involved: We need gay adults to volunteer at gay organizations, to serve on committees that can use their skills, to hold a fund-raising house party, or even start a new organization or group when the need arises, as all the AIDS organizations once were.

From time to time, I get emails from readers saying, "I wish there were a group that ..." to which I usually reply: "Start one!" Gay adults are the ones with the knowledge and self-confidence to be entrepreneurial about such things. (For instance, a young artist I know is currently forming a gay artists and art photographers network.)

And we need gay adults to engage in an unobtrusive calming and mentoring of young people (and juvenile adults) in the arts of growing up. They can do this in large measure just by being themselves. They can exemplify simple maturity and self-possession, an example of someone with a source of internal authority and sense of what is appropriate in varying circumstances.

"We have been busy mothering (i.e., accepting) each other and our young," Kilhefner writes, "accepting behaviors that are clearly self-destructive to us individually and collectively--at a time when we need to be fathering (i.e., communicating expectations to) ourselves and our young--developing a community-wide ethos ... that expects young gay men to become adults."

And I add: Sometimes it may take more overt social pressure. We have all seen people behave stupidly and thought to ourselves, "Oh, grow up!" Maybe we should occasionally say that out loud.