IGF CultureWatch

Nearly three decades after Anita Bryant's notorious "Save the Children" campaign, increasing numbers of gay people are doing just that - giving loving homes to children that straight people have thrown away or have had taken from them due to neglect or abuse. No good deed goes unpunished, of course. Anita's heirs don't want us saving children. What is surprising is that efforts to make "gay adoption" a red meat issue in this year's election have mostly fizzled.

It is seven years since I sat in the visitor's gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives and watched as an amendment that would have banned adoptions by unmarried couples in the District of Columbia was narrowly defeated. The reference to unmarried couples thinly veiled the measure's anti-gay purpose, and its defeat was a big victory for the Human Rights Campaign. Since then, the issue has not been used again by Congress to attack gay Washingtonians at the expense of orphaned children.

This year there have been encouraging developments in many states. Anti-gay adoption bills in Arizona and Ohio stalled in their respective statehouses. A Virginia bill to prohibit doctors and other health professionals from helping unmarried women become pregnant failed to win support. In Utah, the governor vetoed an anti-gay parenting bill. The Indiana Supreme Court let stand a ruling allowing adoptions by unmarried couples. A federal judge struck down an Oklahoma law barring recognition of adoptions by same-sex couples from other jurisdictions.

It is hard to see what threat is posed by gay parents when so many children of heterosexual households go home each day to single, divorced or absent parents. Voters seem to understand this, since the issue has not caught fire as some had hoped. With many thousands of children in need of homes, the question is not whether a given child will have an idealized set of parents. "The question," as Congressman Barney Frank says, "is whether the child will be adopted at all."

Gay parents are quietly changing the social landscape simply by being a part of it. The right wing showed its awareness of this in early 2005, when PBS pulled the "Sugartime!" segment of Postcards from Buster off the air after U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings condemned it for showing the lesbian parents of the children Buster was visiting at a Vermont farm. WGBH, which produces the program, still made the segment available to PBS affiliates. When WETA in D.C. refused to run it, some colleagues and I wrote to the station's management protesting their caving in to the radical right's insistence that gay parents should be invisible.

WETA's polite but evasive reply included, "I hope you will continue to enjoy the many fine programs that we bring to the community and that you will not allow one decision to color your entire opinion of WETA." This implied that we were the ones being unfair, despite the fact that WETA happily took gay viewers' money while acquiescing in an anti-gay slander. But Buster and his friends had the last laugh. Not only did at least 45 PBS stations run the "Sugartime!" segment, the Family Pride Coalition and Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere have used it as an educational tool.

With the boom in gay parenting, my Dupont Circle neighborhood is awash in baby carriers and strollers. Children bring the world alive in new ways, and they can teach us a lot. For example, babies are not blank slates. This dawned on me 25 years ago when I sensed my newborn niece Jennifer's personality as we looked at each other through the glass of the hospital nursery. I generally thought of infants as noise and poop generators, and wasn't expecting anything more than a vague smile probably caused by gas. Yet there Jenny was, not a generic Muppet baby at all but a particular person already striking up a friendship. As with many of life's mysteries, I cannot explain it, I can only attest to it.

My friend Robert's great-nephew Joshua used to follow him everywhere, and wanted to be just like him. When Robert hosted a holiday party at his home for his office staff, Joshua greeted each guest just as he had watched his uncle do. Once, as Joshua played beside Robert with his Spiderman action figure, he started crying because Spiderman had "died" - meaning the doll wouldn't stand up. Robert saved the day by fixing Spidey good as new, and Joshua was overjoyed. When I think of all the children who have no Uncle Robert in their lives, I don't know whether to be angry or sad that some people are more eager to use them as props for telling cruel lies than to give them the nurturing they need.

In the early 1990s, a song by Fred Small called "Everything Possible" was popularized by the gay vocal quintet The Flirtations, and was subsequently sung by many gay choruses. It includes the line, "You can be anybody that you want to be." I appreciate its message of unconditional love and acceptance, but I think it goes a bit squishy. Children can be sturdy creatures if we give them some guidance and support. Better to tell them this: The only person you can ever be is yourself, but you are the one who gets to decide who that is. And I will always be here to help you become the best possible you.

Franklin Kameny was, as they say, a pioneer of the early days of the modern gay civil rights movement. Before even the Stonewall riot in New York in 1969, in days when 49 of 50 states banned sodomy (and meant it), when the police routinely raided gay bars and arrested patrons for dancing together or for no reason at all, when the America Psychiatric Association still considered homosexuality a mental disorder, when homosexuality was a disqualification from any federal employment, when the FBI was busy monitoring and harassing nascent gay political groups, Kameny was leading the very first demonstrations of homosexuals in front of the White House and generally giving the government hell for its anti-gay policies.

Now an octogenarian, Kameny has kept almost all of his letters and other documents and pictures from those days - from the early 1960's on. That's very fortunate for anyone interested in the history of the movement. What's worrisome, however, is that none of this precious material has yet found a permanent and safe home in a library or other collection where it can be made available to researchers and, most importantly, be preserved for posterity. An effort is underway to change that.

Some of Kameny's archives have now been collected at a website called "The Kameny Papers", set up run and by Charles Francis. Francis is raising money for the effort to preserve this original source material.

The website is worth a visit if you have any interest in the subject at all. The pictures, including marvelous color photos of the original 1965 White House pickets, can be accessed by clicking the "Memorabilia" tab to the left on the home page of the website.

Much more interesting and often heart-breaking, however, is the material under the tab "Correspondence," also to the left on the home page. These materials have been photocopied and are presented in their original form. Some highlights:

* In 1961, Kameny founded the Mattachine Society in Washington, D.C., an association devoted to ending discrimination against gays. He wrote polite letters to members of Congress introducing himself, explaining the purposes of the Society, and offering to meet with them. Rep. Paul C. Jones (D-MO) responded by scribbling the following note on the letter and returning it to Kameny: "I am unalterably opposed to your proposal and cannot see how any person in his right mind can condone the practices which you would justify. Please do not contaminate my mail with such filthy trash."

* Rep. Charles Chamberlain (R-MI), who now has a federal building named after him in Grand Rapids, responded to the same letter from Kameny with this: "Your letter of August 28 has been received, and in reply may I state unequivocally that in all my six years of service in the United States Congress I have not received such a revolting communication."

* A letter from the APA in 1963, ten years before it would remove homosexuality from its list of disorders, refusing even to meet with Kameny's group or to "publicize your meetings."

* Vice President Hubert Humphrey writing to Kameny in 1965 that federal civil rights laws are not "relevant to the problems of homosexuals."

* A 1962 letter to an employee of the Library of Congress (!) informing him that the library had "received a report concerning you," asking whether he had performed a homosexual act, whether he was attracted to other men, whether he had been in bed with men, and whether he "enjoyed embracing them." The letter concludes, "I am quite shook-up over this matter" and requests an interview with the employee as soon as possible. I can only imagine how terrified the employee must have been.

* A 1962 letter from Kameny to Attorney General Robert Kennedy asking him to "halt immediately" the FBI's investigation and infiltration of Mattachine and the interrogation of its members.

* A memorandum from the FBI (headed by J. Edgar Hoover at the time) urging that the Attorney General not respond to Kameny's letter and justifying its harrassment of Mattachine as part of the investigation of "crimes perpetrated by sex deviates," as homosexuals were commonly called at the time. Alas, large parts of the memo are blacked out.

* A 1973 memo from Kameny to his supporters describing the sequence of events that led the APA to remove homosexuality from its list of disorders or, in his words, "'curing' us all, instantaneously, en masse, in one fell swoop, by semantics and by vote, rather than by therapy."

There's much more on the website.

Let's hope the whole archives will be publicly available soon. You can help make that happen by donating to the effort. To do that, contact Francis at ccfrancis@aol.com.

To the dismay of the religious right, in the last decade American corporations have moved rapidly in a gay-supportive direction, pledging not to discriminate, supporting gay employee groups, offering domestic partner benefits, advertising in gay media and contributing to gay non-profits. To the equal dismay of whatever remains of the anti-capitalist left, these quintessentially capitalist entities have done so at a pace that far outstrips most governments-local, state and national.

No one has done more to promote these changes in recent years than Washington, D.C.-based marketing and public relations consultants Robert Witeck and Wesley Combs of Witeck-Combs Communications. Witeck and Combs have now written "Business Inside Out: Capturing Millions of Brand Loyal Gay Consumers" (Chicago: Kaplan Publishing) to share what they learned about the gay community as an economic market, how they learned it, and how they used that information to help shift corporate attitudes and policies.

The main lesson Witeck and Combs teach is that corporations have to promote gay-friendly attitudes and policies internally before they can successfully market to a skeptical gay community. They explain, "This is the true basis of bringing business 'inside out' and establishing a lasting reputation in the market." So the relationship between gays and business is symbiotic. Gay consumers will support a company so long as the company supports gays. Both function on the most reliable economic principle there is: self-interest.

But the key to persuading corporate managers that making internal changes is in their best interest was showing managers and marketers that the gay market existed and was of a size and economic significance to make it worthwhile marketing to. So Witeck and Combs begin their book with a history of the growth of gays as an identifiable market and early efforts to measure the gay market by surveying gay newspaper readers or attendees at pride rallies.

Serious research really began in 2000 when Witeck and Combs formed a partnership with the highly respected survey research firm Harris Interactive. Harris had developed an enormous panel of online respondents it drew on for its research, then compared the results with an identical telephone poll to adjust for the fact that not every American is online.

Harris and Witeck-Combs separated out a sub-panel of people who self-identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual to use for gay research and comparison with a similar panel of heterosexuals. Since the gay panel was not selected from identifiable gay sources, it was more nearly representative of the community as a whole than earlier samples.

Online research consistently found that 6.5 to 7 percent of respondents identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual. (Bisexuals are included if their current or most recent partner is the same sex.) Based on Department of Commerce calculations that the total U.S. buying power (disposable income) is $9.1 trillion, that works out to $610 billion in buying power for the gay community-an enormous sum by any measure. And that is before you factor in the greater likelihood of two same-sex partners to be employed and the lower incidence of dependent children among gays.

Online survey research also found that most gays (78 percent) said they preferred doing business with companies that were committed to diversity and equal treatment of employees; 86 percent said they were "likely" to "extremely likely" to consider brands that treated gay employees equally; 63 percent were likely to extremely likely to consider brands from companies that marketed directly to them. And gays were attentive to these issues, saying that they would seek information from friends, acquaintances, gay newspapers and gay websites.

As many of us have long observed among our own friends, the research found that gays were important "early adopters" and "trend-setters" for many types of products and services. Just as they quickly took up the Internet and personal computers, so too they quickly adopted other consumer electronics, personal care products, beverages, and certain clothing styles. Absolut Vodka achieved its initial success among gays, for instance. So the gay market is important beyond its own bounds because it influences other consumers.

Finally, Witeck and Combs turn to those old corporate bugaboos, the fear of bad publicity, backlash and boycotts. They point out that most boycotts are paper tigers: They are short-lived, fewer people participate than say they will and most Americans pay no attention to them. Those who call for boycotts generally move on to other things after they have reaped the initial publicity. Witeck and Combs recommend that business simply stay on course and either ignore criticism or respond with solid business-based reasoning such as the economic importance of diversity and fairness to all employees and customers.

Although "Business Inside Out" chiefly addresses corporate managers and marketers, it will be of keen interest to many gays and lesbians as well because of the amount of solidly based information it contains about them, their lives and their attitudes. After all, who does not like to read about themselves and their importance?