IGF CultureWatch

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?

Princeton natural-law theorist Robert George wrote recently at the First Things website that

For years, critics of the idea of same-sex 'marriage' have made the point that accepting the proposition that two persons of the same sex can marry each other entails abandoning any principled basis for understanding marriage as the union of two and only two persons. So far as I am aware, our opponents have made no serious effort to answer or rebut this point.

I found this last claim irritating, mainly because I'm one of the people who has answered the point-not only in several columns, but also in the academic journal Ethics, with which George (a professor of jurisprudence) is surely acquainted. Indeed, when I was working on that article, I corresponded with George about it, since it discusses his work at some length.

Fellow gay-rights advocate Jonathan Rauch quickly challenged George's absurd claim at the online Independent Gay Forum, prompting a rejoinder from George:

But the point that is most relevant here is that Rauch's arguments [against polygamy] are about social consequences and costs, they are not about the principles that constitute marriage as such. Rauch and the authors he cites (John Corvino, Dale Carpenter, and Paul Varnell) do not make a serious effort to show that, as a matter of principle, marriage is an exclusive union of the sort that is incompatible with polygamy (much less polyamory). Corvino doesn't even join Rauch in asserting that there is anything wrong with polygamy-much less that polygamy is incompatible in principle with true marriage. Putting it in the hypothetical, he says, "If there's a good argument against polygamy, it's likely to be a fairly complex public-policy argument having to do with marriage patterns, sexism, economics, and the like."

Time for some clarification.

First, George is right that I am agnostic on the question of whether polygamy is always and everywhere a bad idea. While I find Rauch's arguments on the typical social costs of polygamy persuasive, I remain open to the possibility that it could be structured in such a way to avoid those costs.

But the issue is not what I (or any other gay-rights advocate) happens to believe. The issue is whether being a gay-rights advocate inherently "entails abandoning any principled basis for understanding marriage as the union of two and only two persons," as George puts it. And the answer to that question is obviously "no." Rauch is a clear counterexample: he's a gay-rights advocate who adduces general moral principles to oppose polygamy.

Why does George claim otherwise? The answer has to do with his confusion about what it means to have a "principled" objection to something. More specifically, he confuses having "a principled objection" with having "an objection in principle." The difference is subtle but important. To have a principled objection is to base one's opposition on principles (rather than simply to assert it arbitrarily). Rauch surely does this.

By contrast, to have an "objection in principle" is to object to a thing in itself, not on the basis of any extrinsic reason. Rauch doesn't object to polygamy "in principle"; he objects to it for being harmful, and if it weren't harmful he presumably wouldn't object to it.

It's worth noting that relatively few things are wrong "in principle." Throwing knives at people isn't wrong "in principle": it's wrong because it's harmful, and if it weren't harmful (say, because humans had metal exoskeletons), it wouldn't be wrong. Of course, the world would have to be quite different than it is for that to be the case. Similarly, the world would have to be quite different than it is for polygamy not to have serious social costs. But public-policy arguments are quite rightly based on the actual world, not on bizarre hypotheticals.

This distinction is important, because once one moves from "no objection in principle" to "no principled objection," it's a short slide to "no serious objection"-and thus a bad misrepresentation of the position of mainstream gay-rights advocates.

So, to be clear: Rauch, Carpenter, Varnell, and others have a principled objection to polygamy, but not an objection in principle. But here's the kicker: neither does George. For George's natural-law position is based on the requirement that sex be "of the procreative kind." And polygamy is very much of the procreative kind. Even if one accepts George's nebulous "two-in-one-flesh union" requirement-which somehow allows permits sterile heterosexual couples to have sex but prohibits homosexual couples from doing so-nothing in that requirement precludes multiple iterations (and thus polygamy). If George wants to argue that polygamy is wrong, he's going to have to appeal to the same sort of extrinsic principles that Rauch invokes. Either that, or he's going to have to just baldly assert that marriage is two-person, period. If such ad hoc assertions don't count as abandoning "principled" argument, I'm not sure what does.

George has claimed before that "the intrinsic value of (opposite sex) marriage…has to be grasped in noninferential acts of understanding." In other words, you can't argue for it: you either get it or you don't. My guess is that he'd say the same thing about the two-person requirement. But two can play at that game. For there's nothing to prevent Rauch (or Carpenter or Varnell or me) from saying, "Hey-I don't get the opposite sex part, but I do get the two-person part. There's my principled reason for opposing polygamy."

Funny how it's no more convincing when we do it than when George does.

About a month ago a group of self-described "LGBT and allied activists, scholars, educators, writers, artists, lawyers, journalists, and community organizers" issued a manifesto titled "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage" in which they demanded legal "recognition of diverse kinds of partnerships, households, kinship relationships and families" with "access to a flexible set of economic benefits and options regardless of sexual orientation, race, gender/gender identity, class, or citizenship status."

The signers consisted mostly of "no-names"--people you've never heard of--along with a couple of handfuls of known gay and lesbian (mostly lesbian) academics, activists, former activists, and hangers-on. Some of the signers are heterosexual; most seem to be long-term advocates of the post-Marxian socialist and deconstructionist left.

As witness: The manifesto avoids gay/lesbian issues but is replete with venerable left-wing demands--e.g., an end of funding of "militarism, policing, and prison construction." And it emphasizes "women's issues" such as more money for "decent housing, childcare, healthcare and reproductive services," etc.

All this is not so much beyond same-sex marriage, it is in a different universe entirely. All gay marriage proponents want is a change in one law to allow them equal treatment. Manifesto signers want free goodies for everybody, subsidized by taxpayers. In other words, this is nothing but the economic and cultural left's attempt to link itself to the gay marriage movement.

This little exercise in socio-economic splenetics would have sunk without a trace except that social conservatives publicized it widely as proving their contention that gay marriage was the first step in a scheme to undermine and destroy marriage. Polygamy is just around the corner, they shouted. And, they added triumphantly, the gay marriage movement has finally come out of the closet and admitted what its real goal is.

Oh, blarney! None of this has been secret, none of it is new from the far left and it offers no support to gay marriage. In fact, vigorous opposition to marriage--a "bourgeois" institution denounced by Marx as legalized prostitution--has long been a mainstay of the Marxian and feminist left. They have routinely denounced marriage, any marriage, as an oppressive "patriarchal" institution, although no one bothers to explain exactly what is patriarchal about the marriage of two men or two women.

For instance, manifesto signer Paula Ettelbrick has written and debated in opposition to marriage--and specifically gay marriage--for more than two decades. For her to sign a manifesto that indicates even openness to gay marriage, if only as a tactical feint, seems disingenuous. I suspect the same is true for many other signers. If I didn't know better I would think the signers were trying to disrupt and discredit the gay marriage movement. Come to think of it, I don't know better.

Despite this well-known background, right wing polemicists eagerly welcomed the manifesto as proof that gay marriage advocates were finally being candid about their "real" intention to destroy marriage. It is, in fact, an indication of the utter poverty of the argument against same-sex marriage that instead of arguing against it directly, the right wing has to immediately change the subject and point to other familial configurations as social dangers--polygamy, legalized incest, whatever.

Bluntly put, there are no cogent arguments against gay marriage. One of the most prolific opponents of gay marriage, Princeton professor Robert George, after repeatedly trying to develop and present just such arguments, has more or less admitted that. In a co-authored article with one Gerard Bradley, George states that male-female marriage has an "intrinsic value" that "cannot, strictly speaking, be demonstrated" and that "if the intrinsic value of (opposite sex) marriage ... is to be affirmed it has to be grasped in noninferential acts of understanding."

That is about as close to acknowledging defeat as you can get without explicitly saying so. What if George Wallace had said that the superiority of the white race could not be demonstrated but could be "grasped in noninferential acts of understanding"? Certainly there was a sizable constituency for just such a view, but undemonstrable "noninferential acts of understanding" are a poor basis for creating public policy in a secular civil society.

Then too, Robert George and his colleagues have never explained very well what it is about their own requirement of a male-female polarity for marriage that excludes polygamy. It is hard not to suspect that George keeps harping on polygamy as an imagined consequence of same-sex marriage to distract attention from the far more obvious opening to polygamy his own principle entails. I'm sure many fine polygamous Muslims would agree.