IGF CultureWatch

We've made so much progress over the past four decades that it's easy to forget how far we still have to go. You can see that in the marriage fight, where gay relationships are routinely equated with the destruction of civilization. But you can see it more clearly, I think, in day-to-day life.

I live in Minneapolis, one of the most politically liberal places in the country. Minnesota has a statewide law protecting gays from discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations. Minneapolis has three openly gay city council members, the largest proportion of any major city in the country. A Republican couldn't get elected dog catcher in this town. My employer, the University of Minnesota, offers same-sex domestic partners' benefits to employees.

Not long ago I briefly dated a guy living in San Francisco. He came to visit me in Minneapolis for a long weekend, during which we did the kinds of things that dating couples do in order to get to know one another better. We went out to eat. We went to the movies. We walked together down the street and in the mall.

He lives in the Castro and when he dates people he's used to holding hands, kissing, hugging, showing affection in dozens of little ways. And he gives no thought to doing these things in public places. Yet when we did these things in public in liberal Minneapolis, the reception we got ranged from cold disapproval to open hostility.

In one of my favorite neighborhood restaurants, while we were waiting in line to order, he hugged me from behind and lingered there a few moments. The wait-staff shot us nervous looks, like they feared we might start sodomizing each other right next to the lamb kebobs. Some guy walked by us singing to his portable CD player, and spelled aloud the word "G-A-Y" as if it were part of the song.

Driving back from a movie, I put my arm around my date's shoulders. Several other drivers slowed down beside us to take a closer look at my car, a 1959 Chrysler Windsor. When they noticed my arm around my date their appreciative attitudes changed. The nice ones pointed us out to their friends and laughed, then sped ahead. A couple of carloads of young men were more menacing, throwing paper cups and even empty bottles of beer at my car.

At the zoo, walking down the street, and in the mall, we held hands at several points (always at my date's initiative). Each time we got nasty looks. We would pass someone, then I'd turn my head and see that they were looking back at us and whispering to each other. A few parents turned their children away from us, as if we were contagious, harmful on sight.

All in all, in the space of a few days, things like this happened more times than I can count. At the end of the weekend, I apologized to him. I was embarrassed. I felt terrible that I brought him out of a place where he could be himself to a place where being himself meant living with a constant sense of low-level danger. There was no way I could ever ask him to leave San Francisco to come to this place. There being no future, we stopped dating.

Sad as I was about that, I was mostly stunned. Though I knew things weren't perfect here, I had not experienced anything like it in the five years I'd lived in Minneapolis. Had all this really happened in my cocoon of tolerance and acceptance, my liberal bastion? Had it been a fluke, an unlucky weekend of chance encounters with the only ignoramuses around?

Then it dawned on me why it had happened that weekend in Minneapolis, but not before. In previous dating relationships, all with men from the area, my dates and I had censored our public conduct in ways to avoid these problems. We'd engaged in little or no hugging, or hand-holding, or other obvious signs of affection in public. We had held back without even realizing it. It was second nature to us.

My San Francisco date, however, hadn't been properly trained in this way. He had initiated each of these shameless, heedless displays and I had somewhat nervously gone along with them. He felt free in a way I never really have.

What does this atmosphere do to gay people who live outside a few square blocks of freedom in a few big cities? What effect does it have on our chances of forming lasting relationships? When straight couples need a touch of reassurance, they hold hands without a thought. A husband will casually lean over and plant a kiss on his wife. These gestures, mild and routine as they are, help sustain a relationship. Yet for gay couples they are social faux pas, perhaps an invitation to abuse.

The truth is, there's a deep aversion to gay people that will not be eliminated by enlightened laws. It's a gut-level disgust that defies rationalization, that resists education, that fears without thinking. The laws that rule our lives are not written on statute books; they are written on hearts. And the heart of this country, in the heart of this country, is still darker than many of us had hoped it would be by now.

First published June 22, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

Although little noted at the time, one of the most interesting aspects of last year's Senate debate on the so-called Federal Marriage Amendment was the relative absence of overt criticism of gays and lesbians and their relationships.

Instead, amendment supporters focused primarily on how the amendment would solidify the association of parenthood with marriage and would benefit children by assuring them an optimal family of two opposite sex parents.

As Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) expressed it, however disingenuously, "This amendment is not about prejudice. It is about safeguarding the best environment for our children."

Even some of the most conservative amendment supporters seemed to go out of their way to explicitly disclaim even a jot of anti-gay sentiment. For instance, lead sponsor Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.) averred, "Gays and lesbians have the right to live the way they want."

And arch-conservative Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) emphasized during floor debate, "I do not believe it is appropriate for me to judge someone else's behavior. That is between them and their Lord."

What accounts for this shift in rhetorical emphasis from attacking gays as immoral, sodomical, perverts to a seemingly benign desire merely to help children?

In a fascinating article ("The Federal Marriage Amendment and the Strange Evolution of the Conservative Case against Gay Marriage," in the April issue of the journal PS: Political Science and Politics), former GOP intern Frederick Liu and Princeton University Professor Stephen Macedo suggest that one reason surely is that just a year earlier the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas had struck down all state anti-sodomy laws, removing any judicial legitimacy for conservative efforts to legislate anti-gay animus.

Perhaps more importantly, there was virtually no public outcry following the decision. One need only contrast that reaction with the uproar that followed the court's Brown v. Board of Education anti-segregation decision, or the Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision, still controversial after more than three decades.

A third reason would have to be that public opinion polls have shown a gradual decline in the number of Americans who view homosexuality as "always wrong" from nearly two-thirds (73 percent) some 30 years ago to barely half (53 percent) today.

And certainly a contributing factor would have to be the widespread criticism of Pennsylvania's gift to statesmanship Sen. Rick Santorum (R) as bigoted and intolerant after he harshly criticized the Lawrence decision, lumping homosexuality in the "everything is permitted" category with polygamy, incest, adultery, and bestiality.

Those might or might not induce a thoughtful conservative to rein in his vituperative attacks on gays but it turns out there was more to it than that.

In interviews with a number of aides to Republicans senators, co-author Frederick Liu found that there was a deliberate and concerted effort by Senate Republicans to avoid explicitly moralistic and religious arguments associated with the Religious Right.

One GOP legislative aide described her senator as "a religious man" whose opposition to gay marriage came first but who then "put words to it" afterwards that completely avoided any religious arguments.

Another legislative aide said his senator decided not to include in his floor statement references to "the Judeo-Christian tradition" that were in his original draft.

Yet another staff member acknowledged that her senator felt he could not reveal his religious reasons for opposing gay marriage for fear his constituents would view him as homophobic.

And what of Sen. Rick "Man-on-Dog" Santorum? Liu and Macedo report that even though Santorum was a fervent supporter of the amendment, the Senate GOP leadership decided not to have him be a lead sponsor, hoping thereby to evade the kind of criticism Santorum himself experienced.

In a way it is good news if nationally prominent politicians feel that they cannot with impunity directly attack gays and lesbians or even gay and lesbian relationships.

But there is a downside as well. If legislators - and voters - reach their positions about gay issues on the basis of a religious commitment but offer only what we might call "social policy" arguments for their positions, then any counter-arguments we make to refute or disprove those arguments will have no effect on their position.

The legislator, and supportive voters, are immune to counter-evidence because "evidence" was never the reason for their position in the first place. The legislator will simply repeat his argument so long as he thinks it sounds plausible and when that is no longer possible he will simply hunt around for some different "social policy" reason.

You can encounter the same problem in discussions with religious fundamentalists. One woman assured me once that homosexuality was obviously unnatural because even dumb animals didn't do it. When I listed a number of species in which homosexuality has been observed, she shot back, "Well, they're just dumb animals. What do they know?!" Evidence counted only when it supported what she already believed. Counter-evidence had no significance.

How we conduct our legislative lobbying and public discussion in light of this fact is a knotty problem, but being aware of it is a necessary beginning.

I am a gay American.

Last summer, when I heard disgraced New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey use this phrase to deflect the country's attention from his extramarital affair with a man, I laughed.

Huh, I thought. Good spin.

And then I forgot about it - sort of.

Every now and then the phrase "I am a gay American" would cross my mind, and I wondered why it seemed so startling. Perhaps "gay American" seems strange because as gay men and lesbians, we are used to categorizing ourselves as outlaws - and for a long time we were, literally, living outside the law since our relationships were illegal, and of course still aren't legally validated in most states.

We are used to fighting these unfair laws. We are used to fighting the government, particularly this government, this administration. And we have relished our status as outsiders, breaking society's gender rules, creating our own culture, redefining what it means to have a family. Redefining what it means to be in love.

Every year, Gay Pride celebrates this. We find the most outrageous clothes in our closets, and we march and sway and dance to show our cities and ourselves that there is strength in numbers, that there are many, many, many of us here, and we are living the way we choose - which, it seems, it not the way most mainstream Americans want us to live. We are different, we say. And we are happy about this difference and we love this difference and we want this difference to be accepted.

And yet, even in seeking acceptance, we are the same.

I am a gay American.

McGreevey said this for the wrong reasons, but I think he used the right words. As pundit Andrew Sullivan has pointed out:

It was the announcement of a new category, a new identity. . . .After all, 'gay American' is designed to sound like 'African-American.' It insists on the fixed identity of a group of citizens. And it celebrates their public citizenship: These people are as American as they are homosexual, and their homosexual orientation is as unremarkable a feature as the color of someone's skin.

Isn't this what so many of us have been saying, but in different words? We're here. We're queer. Get used to it. We're not going away. Our identity has a culture of its own, rules of its own, joys and trials of its own. But most of us also live easily in the larger American culture. We are assimilated. We have jobs and cousins and roots in hometowns. We ride the bus. We go camping. We buy iPods. We want yards and fireplaces and granite countertops and Jacuzzi tubs. We walk our dogs and treasure our cats. We send our mom flowers on Mother's Day. We are gay Americans.

We are not fighting against our country when we battle for our civil rights. We are fighting for it. We are fighting for a better America, a more democratic America, an America that gives equal opportunity to its citizens whether black or white, male or female, gay or straight.

We don't need to move to Canada to be free to be gay. That is, we shouldn't need to move. Our fight is here. Our war is here. And if, right now, we are ashamed to be Americans - because of our country's rampant xenophobia, because of the narrow-mindedness that threatens gays everywhere - well, there is no better reason to redefine what it means to be American. Redefinition is, after all, our specialty.

I am a gay American.

The phrase makes me wish a little that Pride month was longer, that it stretched into early July, that it included Independence Day. What better time, on that most American of days, to declare that we want what all Americans want: to live our lives the way we choose, to pursue happiness, to have representation in our government, to be free from laws and social restrictions that pressure us into being something less than what we are.

I am a gay American. And I've never been more proud of that.