Same Old, Same Old,

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Writing in the American Prospect, E.J. Graff breathlessly announces an exciting new strategy to energize the gay movement and the fight for marriage equality. Here it comes: "LGBT groups are helping to build a new progressive coalition from the ground up." Ta-da!

Sadly, it sounds like the "new strategy" is once again to practice diversity fetishism with an alphabet-soup-of-the-left project, which always does so well (not). If you believe that a grand coalition led by the likes of Urvashi Vaid (a blast from the past, see here) and built around efforts by the NAACP, the United Farm Workers, and "Asian American and Pacific Islander groups" will win over the suburban independents, enjoy your fantasy.

More. Reader Lori Heine commments:

We have not done ourselves any real favors by becoming so entangled with broad, Left-Wing coalitions. In my conversations with conservatives, I generally find these individuals less hostile to gay rights than they are to liberals in general. And they tend to stick all "liberal" issues together into one big, gooey, scary mess.

I believe we would get a better reception from those Right-of-Center, or even at the Center, if we made them deal with our own issue apart from any other. ...

Quite so, or at least ensure a real "diversity" of approaches, with frozen-in-time "progressives" outreaching to labor unions and racial-grievance collectors, while those of a more conservative or libertarian bent form alliances with their kindred spirits.

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The Adoption Battle.

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USA Today looks at the growing efforts to ban gays and lesbians from adopting children, which it labels "a second front in the culture wars" over same-sex marriage. Steps to pass laws or secure November ballot initiatives are underway in at least 16 states.

It could be that before too long, gays-especially couples-who are able to do so, really will have to relocate themselves to those states that don't trample them underfoot.

Reason Online responds, primarily by referencing Julian Sanchez's Reason magazine article on the growing fight. Sanchez suggests that opponents of gay adoption:

...visit Florida and ask a child in foster care which makes him feel more threatened: the thought of being raised by homosexuals, or the prospect of an indefinite number of years spent passing through an indefinite number of homes.

One of the Reason blog's readers disputes that the kids would choose the gay parents (I guess some probably wouldn't, depending on whether they're old enough to have imbibed schoolyard homophobia). Another reader paraphrases libertarian humorist P.J. O'Rourke along the lines of:

I am such an extreme Republican that I support gay marriage and adoption. If gay people get married and raise kids, pretty soon they'll be living in suburbs, driving SUV's and voting Republican.

Well, in another universe where Republicans where true to their own best values, maybe.

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Sight Unseen Preferred.

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The "Ask Amy" advice column receives a query from a Colorado woman who had a gay couple move in next door, and who was so shocked by witnessing a goodbye kiss one morning that (on the advice of her pastor) she circulated a petition urging that they refrain from such displays of affection. The woman can't understand why her gay neighbors took it personally.

This dovetails with the point Paul Varnell makes in his recent column, "The War on Gay Visibility."

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Flawed Messenger.

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I'm glad former congressman Kweisi Mfume, one of the leading Democratic candidates for Maryland's U.S. Senate seat, has endorsed marriage rights for gay couples. However, his endorsement would be more likely to sway the uncommitted if his own record on marriage had been more, let's say, supportive (i.e., Mfume has fathered five children out of wedlock with four different women). His more recent behavior has also been less than exemplary on the marriage front.

True, Mfume is certainly less of a hypocrite than gay marriage opponents such as Bob Barr, the former Georgia congressman who pushed the Defense of Marriage Act prohibiting federal recognition of gay unions, which led many to wonder which of his three marriages (via two divorces) he was defending. Still, supporters like Mfume aren't very likely to advance the cause.

More Recent Postings
02/12/06 - 02/18/06

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Cowboys and Hunters

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I liked this column in The Advocate by gay outdoorsman David Stalling, who-referencing the elk hunt in "Brokeback Mountain"-posted a query at a website for bow hunters. He writes:

For fun, on the Big Game Forum, I posted a new thread: "Brokeback Mountain: Best Elk-Hunting Movie?" Since folks on this site often and justly complain of poor Hollywood depictions of hunting, I mentioned that here was a good positive portrayal. The response didn't surprise me. People with screen names like Terminator, Sewer Rat, Bearman, and ElkSlayer wrote things like "No queers could really hunt elk"; "Elk are too majestic an animal to be killed by faggots"; "Imagine a gay elk camp: guys would worry that camouflage makes them look fat."

A lot of anti-gay swill? Sure. But considering that the media images of gays (excepting Brokeback) run the gamut from "Queer Eye" to "Will & Grace"-and these are the representations upon which GLAAD, HRC and The Advocate bestow their effusive praise-is it really any wonder that rural America sees gays the way it does?

Maybe Willie Nelson's new gay cowboy song will help. Or maybe not.

More. I guess not. Willie means well, but the song (penned by Ned Sublette in 1981) promotes the same old stereotypes that conflate sexual orientation and gender identity:

"What did you think all them saddles and boots was about?...Inside every cowboy there's a lady who'd love to slip out."

Alas, still more confusion about sexual orientation and gender identity isn't what gay people need.

Say Anything blog's posting has a link to an audio excerpt.

Some very thoughtful comments (ok, obviously not the first one). Check 'em out.

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Brave Move.

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As Variety reports, gay Indian Muslim filmmaker Parvez Sharma is directing a documentary called "In the Name of Allah" about gay, lesbian, and transgender Muslims across the Muslim and Western worlds. He's working with Sandi Dubowski, whose documentary "Trembling Before G-d" movingly looked at gay orthodox Jews as they told their stories.

Good luck to Sharma and Dubowski. But as the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto warns:

One wonders how this will go over in the Muslim world, which has not of late gained a reputation for tolerance. And if Muslims react to "In the Name of Allah" with half the fury they've directed at those Danish cartoons, which side will our Western multiculturalists come down on?

I guess we'll see.

Given Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh's brutal murder by an Islamic militant upset over Van Gogh's making a movie about the mistreatment of women in Islamic societies, Sharma and Dubowski are brave men.

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Right on the Internet

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First published in the Bay Area Reporter on February 16, 2006.

Perhaps more than any invention since the printing press, the Internet has decentralized information and opinion. The marketplace of ideas, including ideas about the appropriate tactics and even direction of the gay-rights cause, is more robust than ever. Gay-conservative bloggers and Web sites, of which there are now dozens, are major competitors in this marketplace.

When I began writing my syndicated OutRight column in 1994, a narrow ideological band monopolized the gay press. The views expressed in gay periodicals, either explicitly in opinion columns or implicitly in "news" features, ranged from liberal to radical. It brought to mind what Dorothy Parker once said of Katherine Hepburn's performance in a movie: "She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B." This limited range could and did produce disagreement that the protagonists regarded as profound. But to an outsider it was all pretty dismal.

Gay publishers and editors acted as gatekeepers of opinion, defining what was acceptable. There were a handful of libertarians writing for gay papers, but real conservatives could hardly be found. Even gay periodicals that ran my column back then often felt the need to run a left-wing counterpart, as if doing so was necessary to provide "balance" in a paper already dominated by liberal views and reporting.

Two nearly simultaneous developments changed this. First, beginning in the 1980s mainstream gay people, whose wide spectrum of political views mirrors the country's, came out of the closet in large numbers. They could not be ignored. And they could not understand why their sexual orientation necessarily entailed support for things like high marginal tax rates or liberal abortion laws.

Second, the flowering of the Internet in the mid-1990s ensured that anybody could become a self-publisher whose views were immediately available to millions of people.

The day of the opinion gatekeeper is finished. What has taken its place? A cacophony of views, including those of gay conservatives and libertarians, whose energy and intellectual vibrance seems disproportionate to their numbers.

Here are a few of the Web sites and blogs by gay writers who dissent in important ways from the tactics and goals of the gay left and its organizations. Not all of these writers can easily be categorized as either conservative or libertarian. All are committed to equality for gay Americans.

(1) Independent Gay Forum (www.indegayforum.org): This ought to be the first stop for anyone interested in gay conservative and libertarian views. It features columns from more than 40 different writers (including me) on just about every gay-related topic. It also features a terrific blog called CultureWatch, written by Steph H. Miller, who has something trenchant to say about everything.

(2) Andrew Sullivan (www.andrewsullivan.com): Sullivan is the granddaddy of all bloggers, and easily the most widely read gay blogger in the country, getting 70,000 to 80,000 visits a day. Passionate, perceptive, and wickedly smart, he's interesting and challenging even when he's wrong. Cruise him daily.

(3) Jonathan Rauch (www.jonathanrauch.com): Rauch is one of the most influential and finest gay authors on the planet. He writes for respected mainstream publications, like The Atlantic and National Journal, on a wide range of issues. His recent book, Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, is the best and most concise argument for gay marriage I've ever read. While his Web site is not a blog, it will quickly get you to his irreplaceable work.

(4) Bruce Bawer (www.brucebawer.com): Bawer wrote the most important book of the 1990s on gay issues, A Place at the Table. It awakened a generation of gay Americans to the possibility of an alternative to gay-left orthodoxy. Now he's defending classical liberal values against Muslim extremism. Also not a blog, this site will give you entree to Bawer's best stuff.

(5) Beth Elliott (www.thebethzone.com): Elliott, who has been active on gay issues since the 1970s, calls herself "a girl-kissing California girl with a Southern heritage and a Jesuit education." Her irreverent blog effectively takes on lesbian-feminist shibboleths from a libertarian perspective.

(6) Gay Patriot (www.gaypatriot.net): Two skillful and informed pundits take turns whacking at Democrats and the gay left on this blog. It's probably the most reliably conservative gay blog on the Internet.

(7) Tim Hulsey/My Stupid Dog (www.mystupiddog.blogspot.com): Hulsey, a "gay, conservative grad student and former writing teacher," ruminates articulately on culture and politics. When I want a thoughtful analysis of a movie I'm thinking about seeing, I go to Hulsey's blog.

(8) Jon Rowe (www.jonrowe.blogspot.com): Rowe is a libertarian college professor with a law degree. His blog covers everything from constitutional theory to sex to religion, all the things one shouldn't talk about in polite company. It is intelligent, refined, and measured—qualities badly lacking in much of the blogosphere.

There are many more good ones:

and too many more to list.

Be aware that many blogs often offer little more than links to, or quotes from, substantive points made by others, contributing nothing original of their own. But whether you're a budding gay conservative looking for some intellectual support or a skeptical gay liberal monitoring the right, you'll find something on the gay-conservative Internet to keep your mind humming.

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Blacks on Gay Marriage

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First published in the Chicago Free Press on February 15, 2006.

During the 2004 election campaign, the Bush administration hoped that its promotion of a Constitutional ban on gay marriage could help peel off 4 to 5 percent of the most theologically and socially conservative African Americans from the Democrats. But are African Americans as a whole more hostile to gay marriage than are whites?

Few if any recent polls on the issue offered a breakdown of data by black and white respondents. However, a recent report on black college freshmen provides some clues. The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, which annually surveys freshmen, issued a report based just on data from freshmen at 440 colleges and universities in fall 2004 who designate themselves "African American/Black."

The survey did seem to find evidence that black freshmen were somewhat more likely than white freshmen to oppose gay marriage:

  • 47 percent of black freshmen thought that "same sex couples should have the right to legal marital status" (rounding to the nearest whole percent).

The separately issued comprehensive report on all freshmen, however, found that:

  • 57 percent of all freshmen (90 percent of whom were white) thought gay couples should have "legal marital status"-a 10 point greater support.

On the related question of whether "It is important to have laws prohibiting homosexual relationships"-presumably interpreted as prohibitions on gay marriage:

  • 36 percent of black freshmen agreed but only 30 percent of all freshmen agreed-a difference of 6 points.

So in the aggregate, black freshmen do seem more likely than whites to oppose gay marriage and to favor (although by a lesser amount) prohibitions on gay marriage. But when examined carefully, the data on black freshmen reveal some interesting subgroup differences.

It turns out that:

  • Half (50 percent) of black freshmen at "predominantly white institutions" favor gay civil marriage.

  • But only 42 percent of the black freshmen at "historically black colleges and universities" favor gay marriage, bringing down the average for black freshmen as a whole.

Similarly:

  • Only 33 percent of black freshmen at mostly white institutions favor bans on gay marriage, a figure that is only 3 percentage points higher than the average for all freshmen.

  • By contrast, 42 percent of the black freshmen at black colleges favor bans on gay marriage, a figure that is fully 12 points higher than the average for all freshmen.

It seems useful to try to determine reasons for these differences among black freshmen by college type. There are at least two obvious possibilities: location and religion.

First, the vast majority of black colleges are in the South, the most socially conservative section of the U.S. The main reason black colleges were founded in the first place was that state segregation laws in the Confederate south barred black students from attending white institutions. There are few black colleges in other parts of the country.

Second, freshmen at black colleges are more likely to state their religion as "Baptist"--for many the conservative, black National Baptist Convention-than are black freshmen at mostly white schools:

  • Only 39 percent of black freshmen at mostly white schools call themselves Baptist while 53 percent of black freshmen at mostly black schools say they are Baptist-a 14 point difference.

The other obvious subgroup difference is between males and females-a difference that parallels white freshman opinion:

  • 40 percent of black freshman males support "legal marital status" for gays, but a significantly larger 51 percent of the black freshman women support gay marriage.

On the question about bans on "homosexual relationships:

  • 46 percent of the black males support such bans, but only 29 percent of the black women-a 17 point difference.

And on both questions, among black freshmen at mostly white colleges both men and women are more pro-gay than freshman men and women at mostly black colleges.

What all this means for gay advocacy efforts-where gay groups should target their efforts, who can most persuasively represent gay concerns, what kind of arguments will be most persuasive-is a matter for the most tactically adept rather than the most politically doctrinaire members of our movement to determine. But three things seem obvious:

  1. They must speak to people in language and with arguments that they will listen to and can relate to. Repeating the same stock phrases about gay civil rights and gay equality, however valid, has limited effect.

  2. They will need to realize that not all African Americans can be reached equally well by the same arguments any more than all white people can.

  3. And they need even more to be aware that compared with a similar survey in 1971, black freshmen have become much less "liberal" or "far left" (down from 50 percent to 36 percent), much more "middle of the road" (up from 38 percent to 47 percent) and more conservative even (up from 12 percent to 17 percent).

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The Power of Love?

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Mickey Kaus of Slate's Kausfiles argues that advocates of gay marriage are mistaken if they think that Brokeback Mountain's playing well in blue enclaves within red states heralds some sort of cultural shift, as some claim. It's a long piece with a fair measure of Kaus's queasiness toward gays but a caution worth considering, when Kaus warns:

If you think the visceral straight male reaction against male homosexual sex has effectively disappeared-look at Plano, etc. -you won't spend a lot of time trying to figure out the possible deep-seated, even innate, sources of resistance to liberalization, and you'll tend to be surprised and baffled by their persistence. At worst, you'll pass them off as sheer redneck bigotry-a proven way to lose the red states for good.

Andrew Sullivan responds that:

[A]ssuming a huge, overnight shift in sentiment toward gay men is foolhardy. At the same time, the pace of change these past couple of decades is astonishing. And can I really be blamed for being heartened by the way in which so many people, including many straight men, now seem able to deal with the idea of gay love?

Sullivan also scores a well-placed point about "putting love at the core of gay identity, rather than merely sex (while not being anti-sex at the same time)." I'd argue that while social conservatives may be focused on gay sex, gay activists have misstepped by single-mindedly focusing on "rights talk," either in the sense of access to government benefits or as an abstract call for "equality" (as Dale Carpenter explains so well here).

Love, however, is something much more comprehensible to those not typically predisposed to the liberal line. And that's my thought for this Valentine's Day.

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