IGF CultureWatch

There's nothing wrong with Democrats heading gay-rights groups, even in this Republican age. But the Human Rights Campaign's new leader, Joe Solmonese, is the most partisan Democrat ever hired by a "nonpartisan" national gay political group. While he may surprise us, Solmonese starts with a huge deficit in credibility and influence in Washington, D.C. That's bad for the movement.

With the federal government now firmly in the grips of conservative Republicans, HRC continues to move left. Last year HRC made error after error in this vein: appointing as its executive director Cheryl Jacques, a Massachusetts Democratic legislator whose tenure lasted barely longer than the process to select her; endorsing John Kerry for president so early it lost any hope to influence his campaign; backing transgender inclusion in a federal employment law that would kill the bill; and endorsing a Democratic challenger over Arlen Specter, a senior gay-friendly Republican who's now chairman of the critically important Senate Judiciary Committee. And now Solmonese.

Not long ago HRC was managed competently and smartly, growing in size and power. In the early 1990s the organization was headed by Tim McFeeley, who built strong relationships with GOP members of Congress and hired the group's first Republican lobbyist. Under McFeeley, the group worked with Republicans to pass significant legislation like the Ryan White CARE Act, the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, and a law barring discrimination against HIV-positive people. In the late1990s and continuing through 2003, under the leadership of Elizabeth Birch, HRC could usually be counted on to represent the whole gay community, including Republicans and Independents. Its lobbying, its rhetoric, and its hiring of staff reflected a reality obvious to all but the most obtuse: that gay equality will never be secure if we work only with one party while ignoring or blindly opposing the one in power.

While most of its money and its endorsements understandably went to Democrats, HRC supported gay-friendly Republicans in hotly contested races even when liberal Democrats ran against them, as when the group endorsed Al D'Amato over Chuck Schumer for the U.S. Senate in 1996. The gay left squawked about that but HRC never wobbled. As the Specter race showed, it is inconceivable that HRC would take a similar stand today.

Prior to coming to HRC, Solmonese worked exclusively to elect Democratic candidates. According to Federal Election Commission records obtained by gay activist Michael Petrelis, Solmonese has donated thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates but not one dime to any Republican, no matter how pro-gay.

Solmonese spent the last 12 years working for Emily's List, a fundraising group devoted solely to electing female Democratic candidates who support abortion rights. So if you're a male Democrat who supports abortion rights, you get no money. If you're a female Republican who supports abortion rights, you get nothing. But if you're anti-gay and support abortion rights and you're a female Democrat, Emily's List loves you.

An example of the latter is the support given by Emily's List, under Solmonese's leadership, to Inez Tanenbaum, a pro-choice Democrat who ran for the U.S. Senate seat last year in South Carolina. It did not matter to Solmonese's group that Tanenbaum supported a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, the very worst thing a candidate could do right now on the issue of gay equality.

Perhaps that's all in Solmonese's past, a necessary bow to the priorities of his old boss, and he will now adjust to the needs of his new employer. Fair enough, though this well-known track record won't help when he comes calling in Republican congressional offices.

There are more reasons to be concerned. Announcing his appointment, HRC's press release included the obligatory paean to bipartisanship. But this was overwhelmed by an emphasis on how "progressive" Solmonese is. (Progressive is now code language for that unspeakable thing, "liberal.") HRC informs us that he led "efforts to elect progressive candidates." He made Emily's List "the nation's foremost progressive electoral powerhouse." HRC quotes one supporter as praising him for a "tireless drive to create a more progressive America."

A Republican president just won another four-year term. The GOP has won seven out of the last ten presidential elections. Republicans have won majorities in the House of Representatives in six consecutive national elections. The Republican Senate majority grew in 2004 and is coming close to the super-majority needed to ram through anything it wants. The federal courts have become so conservative that liberal academics are starting to talk about the virtues of democracy. In this climate, it is not a political asset in Washington to be a foremost progressive.

That is, it's not a political asset if one wants to appeal to both parties. But that may not be what Solmonese, or HRC, want.

Here is Solmonese, quoted in the Washington Post, introducing himself to the world as a gay leader: "This struggle that we're in in this country right now is not just for GLBT Americans but for all progressives."

Mark that well. Solmonese wants to work for "all progressives." He sees himself leading the whole struggle of the proletariat. It's not just gay rights he wants, but a better world as defined by the left.

That's his right. But HRC once represented "all gays," some of whom are not progressives, and did so in a way that appealed to both parties, not just to the progressive one. With the appointment of Solmonese, it is much harder for HRC to present itself as nonpartisan; indeed, it now barely pretends to be.

The gay-rights movement needs effective political advocacy in Washington, so we must wish Solmonese and HRC the best. But we do so in the way one wishes the best to the unrepentant drunkard as he pours another.

First published March 16, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

During a recent series of reports on widespread drug use at gay circuit parties, Chicago's WBBM-AM news interviewed a man at the party who told him the reason gay men use drugs:

"I think there's a lot of insecurities in the gay community. That's why there's a lot of drug use and stuff like that. I think they use that to feel more comfortable with who they are. You know, it's hard to be accepted as gay people in America as it is, so this is something to sort of cut the edge."

That view seems to be common. Berkeley psychologist Walter Odets similarly explained to the Chicago Tribune that gay men use crystal meth as "a terrific self-esteem enhancer" because "we have a widely depressed [gay] community living in the midst of a deadly epidemic and a society that's still, for the most part, unapproving."

That reasoning seems plausible. But think back. Where have we heard this explanation before?

Back in the 1970s, when sociologists (doing their research at gay bars) purported to find high rates of alcohol consumption among gays and lesbians, the rationale immediately offered was that we lived in a homophobic society and the pressures of societal hostility and the tensions of having to remain in the closet led gays and lesbians to seek relief in the anodyne, pain-deadening effects of alcohol.

Then during the 1980s, as AIDS irrupted into the gay male community, when some gay men continued to have sex with a large number of partners, the explanation was that gay men lived in a hostile society that devalued their lives, so it was not surprising that they sought personal validation by proving to themselves that they could attract lots of sexual partners.

Even today, when some gay men continue to engage in unprotected sex, you occasionally hear that, well, unprotected sex is more "intimate," and after all as an oppressed minority gay men are just trying to find ways to compensate for social opprobrium, feel better about themselves, etc., etc.

Oddly, no one seems willing to say out loud that frequent drug use, unprotected sex, or heavy drinking can be enjoyable and that is the main reason people engage in them. They hardly need social hostility or internal discomfort to find them fun, pleasurable, gratifying and ego-enhancing.

But no, there seems almost no enjoyable but risk-laden activity gays and lesbians might engage in that someone does not try to explain as the result of societal hostility or compensation for internal discomfort about being gay.

But if you think about it very long, that social-psychological explanation begins to seem pretty tired and threadbare and look less like a reason than an excuse, a rationalization, an alibi, for not just one but several reasons.

For one thing, it is no longer 1970 or 1980. It has been more than 35 years since Stonewall and more than 30 years since homosexuality was de-pathologized by the psychology and counseling establishments. Institutional and societal homophobia have abated significantly, so if they were the cause of imprudent behavior, that behavior should have decreased proportionally rather than continued, much less increased.

Then too, this supposedly homophobia-induced behavior is being noticed most prominently not in Alabama or Oklahoma, which really are homophobic, but in the gay enclaves of our most tolerant, urbane, blue state cities - New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc. Some of the very people whose behavior is attributed to oppression even live and work in the gay enclave and hardly ever encounter societal hostility at all.

No doubt many of us felt, or at least were aware of, opprobrium toward gays when we were growing up - from our families, at school or from our churches. But people are not helpless victims of their childhood. We expect people to acquire a certain amount of self-knowledge and self-understanding as they mature, to come to terms with and get over the pains of childhood. That is part of what "growing up" means.

Furthermore, blaming homophobia fails to account for why most gays and lesbians, no less sensitive and subject to the same social pressures, now as well as during childhood, do not feel the need to engage to any great extent in these enjoyable but risk-laden activities. Somehow the majority of us manage to get along largely without them.

The social opprobrium model fails for all these reasons. But most of all it fails because it is too heavily influenced by an outdated behavioralist stimulus-response model of how humans function: Put in influence X, and generate behavior Y.

But people do not function that way; they are not machines. People have free will and personal agency. Talking as if they do not, as if they are in the grip of social influences they cannot resist is exactly the wrong message to send to them. We need to remind them of their ability to control their own lives. We effectuate their capacity for self-determination by reminding them that they have it, not by offering spurious reasons why they do not.

On March 14, a San Francisco County judge ruled that a state law banning same-sex marriage violates the California constitution. His ruling comes a month after a Manhattan trial court judge determined that there is no ban on same-sex marriage under current New York State law. Enforcement of both decisions has been suspended, pending appeal; even so, these bicoastal cases have given advocates of same-sex marriage great reason to cheer.

These cases also bring cause for concern, as they are part of a strategy that same-sex marriage advocates across the U.S. have embraced wholly, quickly and without much regard for its negative consequences. The strategy is litigation; the goal is a U.S. Supreme Court edict making equal access to marriage the law of the land.

At first blush, such a decision may seem appealing, due to its finality and far-reaching scope. Even if a majority of the Supremes would jump the broom for same-sex marriage on some distant day, the very way such litigation is pursued creates a series of political problems in the here and now. Presumably, these difficulties would fall away on that glorious day when equality for gay and lesbian Americans is handed down from on high. The question that must be asked is whether the damage in the meantime can be so easily reversed - even more so if that glorious day never comes to pass.

The litigation strategy would seem to bear the fullest fruit when the lawsuits are filed in cities like New York and San Francisco - the bluest epicenters of very blue states. Local judges in Kansas or Indiana would be far less inclined to rule in favor of the plaintiffs. At the same time, this strategy of focusing on liberal bastions sets up same-sex marriage advocates for a major backlash in more conservative states. When "judicial activism" takes root in the big coastal cities, state legislators in heartland capitals like Topeka and Indianapolis follow suit with state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage. Indeed, Kansas and Indiana are among states that have renewed efforts to pass such amendments in recent weeks.

Perhaps this dynamic can be written off as Newton's third law of American politics: A legal action in the blue states yields and equal and opposite legislative action in the red states. Many on the left view this dynamic and say, so what? If gay couples want to get married, they're better off moving to states like Massachusetts, California or New York, where things are much more progressive, anyway. What self-respecting gay person would ever want to set foot in a state like Kansas, where they've made such a name for themselves fighting the radical theory of evolution?

The answer, of course, is that there are gay and lesbian couples living at this very moment in Kansas, Indiana and all the other states, even those that voted for President Bush by double-digit margins. In fact, some 23 percent of gay and lesbian voters cast their ballot for W. this time around. Thus, it's vital to remember that marriage is not a partisan issue - it's a matter of the humanity and dignity of Americans of every political stripe in every state.

If litigation in some states leads to equality in marriage, resulting in legislation in other states that makes that same equality much more difficult to achieve, isn't it worth it? In practice, this is a false choice, because litigation is far from the only option. For all the flurry of anti-marriage legislation, there have been very few attempts to enact state recognition of same-sex relationships through the legislative process. Beefed-up domestic partnerships have gone into effect in California, and Connecticut is about to enact civil unions both passed by the legislature and signed by the governor, rather than signed by the judiciary.

I admit, these civil unions are not exactly the same as marriage; the states enacting them have strived to make them separate but equal. This is not the ideal, but it's darn close and historically impressive, especially considering that states could arrest gay people for having consensual sex in private until two years ago. If the only impediment to state recognition is the word marriage, why not work to pass civil unions now and save full marriage for the next generation?

Because there is a third element to achieving marriage equality: education. For all of the furor over gay marriage and moral values in last year's election, I remain surprised by how little time and energy advocates for same-sex marriage spent making their case to the public. When they got their moment in the spotlight, too often such advocates wasted precious airtime. They could have demonstrated how same-sex couples currently function and thrive in communities in every state, and why their relationships are worthy of recognition. Instead, they lambasted President Bush for changing the subject from the war in Iraq to gay marriage. Unsurprisingly, this strategy failed miserably.

True social change means changing hearts and minds. Laws will have to change as well, but solid and lasting equality will come when revisions to the law are backed by the will of the people. When new laws are imposed from on high, there is no guarantee that the mass of citizens will follow suit.

The place to start is not a court of law, but the court of public opinion. And the process should not be a struggle. There are still a lot of Americans who don't know a gay person very well - or don't know they know one. It is a grave moral and political error to confuse the uncertainty of such people - even when underpinned by fear - as a kind of hate. The better avenue is one of openness and dialogue that starts with the people next door. That's something no court can hand down.