Pride Month — Doing It Right

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First published May 25, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

The celebration of gay pride originally confined to the end-of-June Gay Pride parades has now expanded to include the entire month of June as Gay Pride Month, so it seems appropriate to say something about the celebration of gay pride and how to do it better.

Over the years I have held a variety of views about gay pride:

  1. Being gay is simply a natural characteristic like having blue eyes or brown hair. There is no rational basis for feeling pride about things that are just the way we turned out and that we had nothing to do with accomplishing.
  2. Gay Pride is a healthy and reasonable response for gays in a society where many people still view being gay as something to be ashamed of or embarrassed about or discreetly silent about. It promotes a positive message to closeted gays and skeptical heterosexuals to counter and neutralize the negative messages promoted by anti-gay elements.
  3. Although being gay is not itself a valid basis for pride (see No. 1), people can take legitimate pride in how well they handle being gay: How comfortable they are with being gay, how well they integrate being gay into their character and daily life, how adeptly they deal with other people, how much they achieve as an openly gay person.
  4. Gay Pride is so 1970s. The slogan was invented back when the main gay activist goal was to lure gays out of the closet and promote a healthy self-esteem. But our current goals are civic and social equality for gays and gay relationships. The old slogan doesn't address those newer goals. Instead it sounds as if we were stuck in some sort of narcissistic time-warp.

Take your pick.

But what I miss in most organized Gay Pride celebrations is any real effort to go beyond the mere assertion of gay pride, any sense that something follows from that either to solidify the gay pride we assert or to give gay pride some focus or direction. It is as if we satisfy ourselves with shaking our pompoms and shouting "Gay Pride." But what follows from that?

So it seems to me that our gay communities should make some effort to use Gay Pride Month to promote our goals, increase our effectiveness, heighten our awareness, lure people into greater involvement and promote community contacts.

I was led to this line of thought when a friend recently asked if there were any Gay Pride Month events that were "must see." I honestly could not think of any. That surprised me. And I think we are missing an opportunity. For instance:

  • Some political, business or social service groups could invite a well-known gay or gay-supportive figure to give a speech on an important current gay issue. Think, for instance, of Barney Frank, Camille Paglia, Gavin Newsom, Andrew Sullivan or Evan Wolfson. The idea is to have an event that would draw a large number of people, stimulate thought and add to their political/social awareness.
  • Gay and gay-friendly religious groups could join together to hold an ecumenical Gay Pride Month religious or "spirituality" service. Many people are religious or "spiritual" and such an event might help people find ways to integrate their religious beliefs and their sexuality. It might also foster a willingness by the various religious groups to work together toward common goals.
  • Gay Pride Month would be a good time to hold an annual community forum featuring four or five prominent local gay community functionaries - political activists, business owners, heads of social service agencies - to discuss "The State of the Gay Community," share their concerns, answer questions about their businesses or organizations, listen to suggestions and criticism and so forth.
  • A few years ago Chicago started a program designating one book that it encouraged everyone to read. Gay communities could do the same thing. The idea is to give everybody one thing in common to provide a basis for conversation. Possibilities: Mary Renault's The Persian Boy, Sheila Ortiz Taylor's Faultline, Eric Marcus' Making Gay History, or George Weinberg's timeless Society and the Healthy Homosexual. I think all of these are in print and in paperback.

If you are not impressed by any of these ideas, create your own. The point is to use Gay Pride Month to create circumstances where gays and lesbians get to know a few more people, learn a little more, develop a greater appreciation of the community they are a part of and experience something in common beyond the mere datum of being gay.

Aristotle observed that statesmen rightly try to promote friendship more than anything else. That would be good advice for our community leaders. People who may not be moved to do anything on their own or for themselves may be more likely do things with their friends and for their friends.

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Land of Liberty?

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This week, a "moderate" Republican governor with national aspirations, Maryland's Robert Ehrlich, vetoed a modest domestic partnership bill and mouthed drivel about protecting the "sanctity of marriage," in an attempt to curry favor with religious conservatives. Meanwhile, the supposed "moderate" bloc of congressional "New Democrats" pledged to oppose a modest free trade expansion with Central America, in deference to big-labor contributors who think the U.S. government can freeze the present manufacturing sector in place by forfeiting the prosperity and growth that freer trade invariable brings.

One party thinks its purpose is to stifle personal liberty and the familial relationships two life partners can enter into, and the other thinks its purpose is to stifle economic liberty and the business relationships that trading partners can enter into. That's politics, I guess.

P.S. I'll be away for a few days. Catch you later. (Also, new letters in the mailbag)

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Not Monolithic Blocs.

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A new Pew Research Center study makes clear that Republicans are no longer the party just of the wealthy, nor are Democrats the party of the working class. And both have constituencies of anti-gay conservatives (though a bigger percentage of the GOP base). As the Washington Post's report on the study puts it:

Both parties now are coalitions of the wealthy and not-so-wealthy, and of well-educated and less-educated voters. Taken together, the findings show why neither party can take its coalition for granted in future campaigns.

Republicans can be pro-business Enterprisers, Social Conservatives or Pro-Government Conservatives, while Democrats can be Liberals, Disadvantaged Democrats and Conservative Democrats. According to the study:

While agreeing with the conservative position on most key issues, Enterprisers [9% of the general population, 11% of registered voters] are distinguished from other Republican-leaning groups by their relative lack of intensity with respect to individual or social moral beliefs. . . .

Overall, divisions over social and religious issues continue to be far more intense on the left than on the right. Conservative Democrats - who represent 14% of the general public [15% of registered voters] and a quarter of John Kerry's voting base in 2004 - tend to agree with Republican groups more than other Democratic groups when it comes to key social issues such as gay marriage and abortion.

Which may be why, despite all the gay money Democrats receive, their pro-gay actions at the national level have been mostly rhetorical, and often their record has been scarcely better than that of the Republicans (the Defense of Marriage Act, Don't Ask, Don't Tell, etc.).

Want to know what category you fit into? Take the test. (Not surprisingly, I'm an Enterpriser).

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Drugs, Sex, and AIDS

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First published May 18, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

Recently, our fair city of Chicago issued a report by an ad hoc group calling itself The Chicago Task Force on LGBT Substance Use and Abuse.

The original advocates of the report deserve credit for wanting to address a long-standing problem in the gay community. But the final report, long-delayed and over-edited in order to offend no one, was so infected with drug treatment industry myths, mealy-mouthed social worker jargon and such feeble suggestions for dealing with the problem that it was almost useless.

The report called for a "safe, visible, sustained and supportive dialogue on the topic of substance use and abuse." It confidently asserted that "not all substance use is problematic." It preachily admonished us all to be "supportive and nonjudgmental about ... substance use and abuse" and urged us to "find common ground on which to define when substance use becomes abuse."

Well, no. I don't plan on being "supportive and nonjudgmental" or to regard "substance use" as non-problematic, or to try to "find common ground" with users who disagree. Here is what we know: Many drugs can and do cause long term physical and mental damage to the user, damage not immediately apparent. And some drugs increase a person's desire to engage in sexual behavior with high risk of HIV infection.

One recent study in the Journal of Urban Health as summarized by the Gay Men's Health Crisis newsletter found that "Drug use was significantly associated with higher numbers of sex partners, higher social isolation scores, and participation in unprotected receptive anal intercourse."

Another study found that people who used meth with other drugs such as cocaine and ketamine "reported more unprotected sex with more partners of ... unknown status. Heavy drug users also had higher scores on tests of impulsivity and negative self-perceptions."

A third study of meth and cocaine use concluded: "During periods of drug use, high risk sexual behavior increased along with the increasing frequency of drug use. ... To reduce and prevent risks of HIV, no level of use of these drugs should be considered 'safe.'"

What is the solution? There is no solution. Drug use is not going away. All we can do is promote strategies to limit the wider use of drugs. Clearly, we must find out what messages can best persuade current users to stop, discourage young people from starting and break the connection between drugs and the social aspects of being gay. Important steps to take include:

  • Publicize - without exaggeration - the effects of the various drugs.This includes the biochemistry of how they work, the physical effects they produce, the behaviors they can lead to, and long term physical and mental impact. Drug dealers seldom provide that information.
  • Be judgmental! Instead of being "supportive and nonjudgmental," be judgmental and non-supportive. The capacity for judgment is why God - and evolution - gave you a brain. Use it or lose it.
  • Don't let people get away with the fiction that they are not responsible for their drug use. "Addiction" is a loaded word used to convince people that they are not responsible for their actions - that it is the drug's fault. But when we say people are "addicted" to a drug we only mean they like to use it and don't want to stop enough to actually stop. The same is true of the so-called "disease" of "alcoholism."*

In fact, people on their own can and do stop using drugs all the time. Cigarette smokers stop smoking, heavy drinkers cut down or stop drinking entirely, cocaine users stop using cocaine and meth users stop using meth. They just have to want to enough.

For many people, drug use as a way of avoiding coping with other problems in their lives: a hostile or unsatisfying home environment, stress at work, boredom due to a lack of any real interests or goals, personal fears or insecurities, a failure to develop enjoyable social contacts.

As psychologist Jeffrey Schaler pointed out five years ago in Addiction Is a Choice (Open Court, 2000), "I've witnessed over and over again that focusing on clients' drug-using behavior is no way to help them give up drugs. ... It's only by talking about their problems-in-living and encouraging them to confront and solve those ... that the drug use subsides."

Making this more widely known might encourage people to address their problems instead of using drugs as a coping or avoidance technique. The more that people understand their own motivations - and know that we are on to them - the more likely they are to act rationally.

Finally, young people have had too little time to learn from painful experience that the seeming benefits of drug use are immediate and the costs tend to be in the long run. And, of course, some adults never seem to learn. How we communicate that information effectively is a problem. But weak, permissive task force reports seem a counter-productive way to start.

*See, for elaboration, Herbert Fingarette, Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (University of California Press, 1988).

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Gays Defending Gay-Bashers.

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Cathy Young takes on the cultural relativists. She writes:

Welcome to Politically Correct World, where acts that would merit unequivocal condemnation if committed by white males are viewed in a very different light when the offenders belong to an "oppressed group."

It's worth the 10 seconds it will take to register with the Boston Globe.

Update: The bashing made the Times of London, which reports:

For the first time, the Amsterdam Tourist Board has issued a warning to gay visitors to be careful in the city. In the first country to legalise homosexual marriage, gays are increasingly fearful of holding hands in public. Some have been chased out of their houses and middle-class gays are moving to rural areas for safety.

Perhaps all the negative international publicity will embolden the Dutch to stand up and defend their way of life.

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Left Foot First, as Always.

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Human Rights Campaign head honcho Joe Solmonese tells D.C.'s Metro Weekly (in the May 12th issue) that "there are a lot of people out there who are advancing this [anti-gay agenda] because it makes rich people richer and poor people poorer."

Yeah, that's it, Joe. Fall back on hackneyed, leftist dogma to explain the culture wars. But thanks for making it clear how you intend to address the fears of middle Americans that gay marriage is too great a change to bedrock social institutions. Just explain that they're being manipulated by the forces of capitalist exploitation. I'm sure they'll jump right up to support your oh-so appealing redistributionist political agenda!

By the way, Solmonese's remark could have come right out of What's the Matter with Kansas, the best-seller by liberal strategist Thomas Frank, alleging that the rightwing uses hot-button social issues (gays, abortion) to fool the "working class" into voting against its economic self-interests. The problem with this thesis is that higher taxes and more business regulation are not in the interest of working Americans, since such policies slow the very economic growth that creates jobs and raises incomes.

But to Thomas, Solmonese and many on the left, working Americans vote Republican because of "false consciousness." It's exactly the sort of paternalistic, patronizing thinking that ensures Democrats will keep losing national elections for years to come.

Update 1: I disagree with the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto regarding his embrace of social conservatives, but I think his critique of liberal condescension toward the "working class" hits the nail on the head. Those on the liberal-left would help themselves if they listened - but they won't.

Update 2: Reader "Remy" comments:

Steve may have let his reflexive opposition to leftwing ideologues like Matt Foreman of NGLTF color his critique of Joe Solmonese somewhat. Foreman is a redistributionist; Solmonese is just an abortion rights advocate.

Still, even if Solmonese's remark was not some major declaration, I think it does reveal a worldview that refuses to see that the values fight is about, well, "values" (rather than economics). And given Solmonese's background as an abortion activist, maybe he'd prefer not to face that truth (i.e., associating abortion and gay rights doesn't win support for gay rights among so-called "red state" voters).

More Recent Postings
5/8/05 - 5/14/05

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Weekend Reading.

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A Washington Post editorial, "Gay Marriage Overreaction," is spot on. In discussing the ruling by a federal district court judge in Nebraska striking down that state's anti-gay marriage amendment, the Post notes something I had missed - the decision by judge Joseph F. Bataillon does not claim that a gay marriage ban per se would violate the U.S. Constitution, but that the broad sweep of this particular state amendment, voiding civil unions and any partnership agreement - even preventing gay couples from making organ donation decisions for one another - was the constitutional offense.

That hasn't stopped anti-gay advocates from claiming, disingenuously, that the ruling proves the case for a federal marriage amendment. But then honesty never has been their policy.

Another editorial worth noting: The latest issue of the Washington Blade offers what last week's print issue didn't - a discussion by editor Chris Crain, recently bashed by Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands, of the cultural conflict in a country with the most inclusive gay rights laws, and the most illiberal of immigrant populations.

Crain strives to take a middle path here, criticizing those who blame the Dutch for being racists who are intolerant toward immigrants (who are thus provoked into bashing gays), while also castigating those who would limit the rights of immigrants. He writes:

The Dutch Culture Wars should not be fought by shutting down the borders or by using the law to silence those who do not share the country's tradition of tolerance. Those are the arm-twisting tactics of the cultural conservatives who control the majority party here in the U.S.

Whether a tougher stand is necessary to preserve their liberal society, however, will be for the Dutch, not American tourists, to decide.

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What Happened to Federalism?

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IGF contributing author David Boaz has penned an insightful commentary taking aim at the GOP for abandoning its commitment to federalism on marriage and other issues:

Perhaps most notoriously, President Bush and conservatives are pushing for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in all 50 states. They talk about runaway judges and democratic decision-making, but their amendment would forbid the people of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, California or any other state from deciding to allow same-sex marriage.

Democrats, on the other hand, bear some responsibility for this situation:

Liberal Democrats...spent 50 years eroding federalism and expanding the power of the federal government at every turn. ... For decades, liberals scoffed at federalist arguments that the people of Wisconsin or Wyoming understood their own needs better than a distant Congress. ... Now those chickens have come home to roost.

Reader Tom Scharbach commented (on the item below) about the GOP, "pandering out of cynical self-interest cost the party it's soul, it's reason for being, it's genius. The party no longer stands for Constitutional conservatism..." I'll add that it's certainly an opening for the opposition, which unfortunately remains frozen in time. As Boaz notes, "most liberals can't give up their addiction to centralization."

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And the Pot Gets Stirred Some More.

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A federal district court judge has struck down Nebraska's state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and civil unions, passed overwhelming by the voters of that state, saying it violates the U.S. Constitution.

In all likelihood, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals will reverse the decision; and if it doesn't, the U.S. Supreme Court will have its shot. And then there's the issue of whether the whole brouhaha will invigorate the now-stalled federal marriage amendment push in Congress.

I say this not to wallow in pessimism, but because it's vital to understand that actions breed reactions, and if we're not prepared to deal with the consequences, we'll continue our record of initial judicial victories followed by a tsunami of defeats.

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Targeting a Homophobe, Hitting Us All.

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An interesting story in the L.A. Times about the outing of closeted (as of last week), homophobic Spokane mayor James West. While I'm in no way condoning West, who is at best deeply disturbed and at worst just plain evil, the tactics of the mayor's antagonists at the Spokane Spokesman-Review are also disturbing, and none too gay friendly.

The Spokane paper claims it wanted to investigate charges - made by two men with criminal drug records - that West molested them years ago when he was a Boy Scout leader. So the paper created a fictional 17-year-old to entice West on a gay chat site. [Note: other stories have said the phony flirt was 18 years old.] Well, excuse me, but if they wanted to investigate alleged pedophilia, shouldn't the paper have created a fictional 10-year-old? Do the editors care about the distinction between homosexuality and pedophilia?

The reason this matters is because the story is being played not as "closeted mayor persecuted gays" but "gay mayor could be pedophile." In this respect, it's like those who outed Jeff Gannon (a conservative who, unlike West, did not engage in anti-gay polemics) by demonizing his consensual, adult sex life and claiming it made him unworthy of the refined company of White House reporters. Our straight liberal friends seem quick to repeatedly play on anti-gay (and, specifically, anti-gay sex) prejudices to destroy their target, as gay liberals cheer them on - and then wonder why so many Americans view gay marriage equality as beyond the pale.

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