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The Day After. The Republicans have now taken back control of the Senate and expanded their House majority. For those of us who tend to be socially libertarian and fiscally conservative, it's always a mixed bag. But there is no doubt that the movement for gay equality must be pursued through both major parties, and that the arch partisanship of so many gay groups, both local and national, who seem more interested in being part of an increasingly anachronistic Grand Coalition of the Liberal-Left than in securing equal treatment for gays and lesbians, is more suspect than ever.

Here's a "day after" statement from the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force:

Democrats have traditionally been very supportive on GLBT issues -- the projected Republican Senate and House majority leaves GLBT constituents in jeopardy of seeing more anti-GLBT legislation introduced. "The projected outcomes in this election now allows the party of the 'compassionate conservative' to show how truly compassionate they are," said [NGLTF leader Lorri] Jean. "NGLTF calls on both House and Senate Republicans to work toward eliminating discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity."

Well, you can't suddenly call on Republicans to work with you after demonizing them year after year. More to the point, given a conservative majority, the idea that anti-discrimination law should remain the single top priority is short-sighted.

Conservatism in America is very much a mixture of the intolerant religious right (actually very much a minority in comparison to mainstream conservatives), pro-growth forces that oppose excessive taxation and business over-regulation, proponents of a strong national defense, and -- more generally -- those who speak and understand the language of freedom from government interference and who traditionally favor a right to be left alone. That's why the Log Cabin Republicans and the Republican Unity Coalition are correct that working within the GOP, despite its failure to support gay equality, is far wiser than refusing to challenge anti-gay religious conservatives on their own complex political turf.

There are good conservatives and bad conservatives, and building a dialogue with those who understand the goal of "equality before the law" will be key to the continued advancement of our liberty.
--Stephen H. Miller

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The Partisan's Quandary. IGF contributor Dale Carpenter has written an ever-so-timely column titled What's a Gay Republican To Do? Rejecting both simplistic rah-rah partisanship and single (gay) issue myopia, he observes that:

As politically progressive gays tirelessly remind us, "gay" issues are not the only issues that matter. Good citizens must be concerned about other things too, like national defense and the economy. A candidate may be terrific on gay issues but terrible on just about everything else important to a responsible voter. Voting is a matter of balancing candidates" overall pluses against their overall minuses".

But there are circumstances in which the candidates" stands on gay issues should weigh more heavily, and perhaps be decisive, for a gay Republican. First, there are some public policy positions that strike so fundamentally at the core of gays" full citizenship that no politician advocating them should get our votes.

This, I concur, is a sensible approach. Oppose candidates of whichever party if they seek to deny us our fundamental liberties as citizens. On the other hand, don't fall into the zealot's trap of giving primacy to feel-good rhetoric over everything else of critical importance to our well-being as Americans.
--Stephen H. Miller

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Fun in the Hawaiian Sun. On Hawaii's gubernatorial election, the Hawaii Reporter website related the following:

Yesterday, Hawaii Reporter talked to a handful of people outside the Republican Party who had direct knowledge of a new secret whispering campaign against Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Linda Lingle. Apparently a woman claiming to be the former lover of Lingle is calling targeted Republicans as a part of a smear campaign against Lingle. Lingle says she is not gay and in fact has been married twice.

Lingle supporters says smear mongers are hoping to distract voters from the real issues like the fact that the state has hit rock bottom in almost every category -- education, business, social problems, importation of drugs, domestic violence, theft -- because of poor political leadership.

Democrats tried this same smear in 1998 against Lingle when she ran for governor against incumbent Benjamin Cayetano and against some of their own candidates in years prior who weren't the "chosen" party candidates, including a Democrat candidate for mayor and a Democrat candidate for governor.

And then there's this, as reported by the Washington Times:

When [Lingle] denied lesbian rumors, Democratic Gov. Benjamin J. Cayetano, who is term-limited, said that her denial suggested she felt that homosexuality is "something to be ashamed of" and therefore she was "denigrating gays."

She says her opponents have falsely accused her of everything from wanting to privatize the whole state government to wanting to cancel Christmas as a state holiday.

She says they have lied about her favoring the legalization of same-sex "marriage" and physician-assisted suicides and making Hawaii a right-to-work state.

So first her opponents spread a gay rumor to hurt her, and when she denies the rumor they call her homophobic. No wonder people hate politics.

(Note: The Hawaii Reporter story was first noted on the blogsphere by David Hogberg's Cornfield Commentary site and andrewsullivan.com)

Destructive Therapy. A sad but interesting piece ran in the San Jose Mercury News about the self-destructive behavior and ultimate brutal murder of transsexual teen Gwen/Eddie Araujo. Of particular interest is the following:

People offered Eddie their help, including Linda Skerbec, a therapist associated with the Focus on the Family ministry who had known the family for years and saw Araujo between the ages of 14 and 16. She said she was on the verge of persuading Araujo to "move beyond the label" of transgender and "claim the sexual identity that matched his anatomy."

We"re also told, however:

This would have been Araujo's senior year at Crossroads High School, but he never showed up".Araujo's behavior grew more self-destructive, and his mother concedes now that she "never understood the magnitude of his pain."" Aaraujo attempted suicide and drank more frequently. He had no job and wasn't studying. Friends told police he traded sex for beer and marijuana. Last month, Araujo was found unconscious"passed out after a night of drinking. But it wasn't unusual. He often wouldn't come home at night.

Sounds like the fundametalist, homophobic "therapy" was of great help, right? Shouldn't this quackery be considered a form of child abuse?

[Update: Read Ms. Skerbec's letter to us, stating that the allegations against her were false.]

Speaking of ex-gay quackery, here's a not-too-bad piece on the re-emergence of ex-gay activist John Paulk, from the conservative Washington Times.
--Stephen H. Miller

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Partisan Grave Diggers. Glad I wasn't the only one who found the televised stadium rally, ahem "memorial service," for Paul Wellstone deeply offensive. No wonder the organizers told Vice President Cheney not to come.

They"ve Surrendered! Not quite, but the recent lament from syndicated columnist Cal Thomas, a Christian conservative who once worked for the Moral Majority, is revealing. Writes Thomas in his column titled The Gay Rights War is Over and We Lost:

Let's be honest. The battle over so-called "gay rights" is over. Politicians, the media, and the medical and psychological professions -- everyone is completely on board. It's simply a matter of time -- weeks, months, but not more than a few years-- before homosexual "marriage" and child adoption are made completely legal.

New York Republican Governor George Pataki has pushed his state senate to pass gay rights legislation in December. -- When Republicans -- the "family values" party -- start signing off on this stuff, you know the war is officially over.

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Harry Hay: One Big Idea

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Originally appeared October 30, 2002, in the Chicago Free Press.

HARRY HAY, who died recently at the age of 90, was the principal founder in 1950/51 of the early gay Mattachine Society. But Hay lived to see the gay movement grow in a very different direction from his original vision and he denounced it for what most of us would regard as its very successes - legal reform, partner recognition, media visibility - and played little role in organized gay activism after 1953.

Hay had one big idea. After reading Kinsey and recalling a short-lived Chicago gay organization in the 1920s Hay decided that homosexuals should form an organization to advance their interests. And he had the courage and perseverance to create one. But for the rest, his ideas seem now, from a distance of 50 years, largely without merit.

A Communist Party member from 1933 to 1951, Hay was asked to withdraw because Party members felt his homosexuality was "a security risk" (to the Party!) but the Party formally declared him "a lifelong friend of the people" - i.e., non-Party communist. He apparently retained his radical sympathies for the rest of his life, visiting the Soviet Union shortly before its collapse.

As a Communist Hay imbibed secrecy, paranoia and an ideology of authoritarian control by unknown leaders and he brought those to Mattachine. But in 1953 members rebelled, forcing Hay to withdraw. In a 1974 interview, Hay said, "What the opposition wanted was an open, democratic organization." Hay didn't want that: "In order to be such an organization, all the idealism that we held while we were a private organization would have to go."

The "idealism" amounted to this: "... a great transcendent dream of what being Gay was all about. I had proposed from the very beginning that it would be Mattachine's job to find out who we Gays were (and had been over the millennia) and what we were for and, on such bases to find ways to make our contributions to our parent hetero society."

Why that required secret leaders, dictatorial control, and no elections Hay never explained.

Hay's "idealism" had three components: a) gays are qualitatively different from heterosexuals, mentally, psychologically, spiritually, not just in "what they do in bed;" b) the core difference lies in the natural androgyny of homosexuals, that they embody both male and female elements; and c) in order to help promote their acceptance gays need to explain the contribution this difference makes to society.

Each of these deserves extended discussion; this is just a sketch.

Androgyny seemed to be a continuing obsession for Hay. In a 1950 prospectus for what became Mattachine, Hay repeatedly referred to "Society's Androgynous Minority," and "We, the Androgynes of the world." He exaggerated and romanticized intermediate gender roles occasionally found in earlier societies, ignoring examples of masculine warrior homosexuality in other cultures.

Today the idea that gays are androgynous seems based on selective perception and merely a capitulation to a social stereotype. Gay men work out to attract men who are attracted to men. More sports figures are coming out. One 1938 photo of Hay himself suggests a sullen James Dean masculinity. Nor has psychological testing discovered any noticeable psychological androgyny among gays that cannot also be found among educated heterosexuals.

Second, whether gays and lesbians have any intrinsic, special "gay consciousness" at all seems doubtful. Hay told biographer Stuart Timmons, "We differ most from heterosexuals in how we perceive the world. That ability to offer insights and solutions is our contribution to humanity ... ."

It may be that under conditions of prejudice and discrimination, gays can develop a heightened awareness of the arbitrariness of social conventions that impact them differentially, and even learn a heightened sensitivity to unconscious signals and nuances of personal interaction. But whether those would develop in the absence of prejudice and discrimination seems doubtful.

Alternatively gays may, like other minorities, learn to view the world from the mainstream perspective as well as their own. If so, that double vision - like looking at those 3-dimensional "Magic Eye" pictures - may provide a kind of "depth perception." But if so, that capacity would not be limited to gays, but be common to any minority.

Finally, Hay's idea that being gay has to be "about" something, that gays should account for their existence as a group, to answer the question "What are homosexuals for?" feels odd. But steeped as he was in Communist doctrine, Hay thought in terms of classes and "peoples" and conceived of gay liberation as "bargaining ... between Gays and straights as groups."

Most of us today probably realize that the purpose of our individual life is whatever we want it to be and that we can insist on respect as gay individuals whether or not being gay contributes to our purpose. The idea that gays need to justify our existence as gays falsely assumes that reproduction is itself a justification the lack of which gays need to compensate for.

Hay may have been wrong about almost everything. But in the end we do not insist that founders have the right answers, not even ask the right questions. We can honor them as founders and leave it at that.

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More Democrats Behaving Badly. The Wall Street Journal's opinionjournal.com - Best of the Web column on Monday included the following item, titled "If He Were A Republican, This Would Be Hate Speech," with a link to a story from Columbia, South Carolina's The State newspaper, and this summary:

Alex Sanders, the Democratic nominee for Senate in South Carolina, is blasting his Republican opponent, Rep. Lindsey Graham, for running an ad featuring an endorsement from former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, the Columbia State reports. "He's an ultraliberal," Sanders said of Giuliani during a debate Friday. "His wife kicked him out and he moved in with two gay men and a Shih Tzu. Is that South Carolina values? I don't think so."

Nice, huh. Coming on top of Montana Sen. Max Baucus's sleazy "Not in Our State!" ads, those who argue all we need is a one-party movement have some spinning to do.

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Iraq a Gay Issue? This weekend saw another rally in our nation's capital opposing military action to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. On this matter, IGF contributor Rick Rosendall has a timely column in the Washington Blade taking issue with those, such as gay Muslim activist Faisal Alam, who argue gay groups should oppose the war, in Rosendall's words

"without showing the slightest awareness of which side actually treats gays better. (Hint: It's the one that allows gay Muslims to organize and publish op-eds.)"

Also of interest is syndicated columnist Hastings Wyman's recent roundup of where gay movement organizations stand in relation to the question -- and the not surprising fact that many on the LGBT left favor joining the alliance opposing action to free the Iraqi people, and the world, from this monster.

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Sen. Wellstone, in Perspective. The tragic death of Sen. Paul Wellstone, perhaps the Senate's most left-leaning lawmaker, is being noted by the Human Rights Campaign, which issued a statement that lauds him as "a hero of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender movement," as well as "a powerfully eloquent and passionate voice for fairness today," whose death represents "a devastating loss to our community." And, indeed, Wellstone was a leading advocate for the proposed Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a federal bill that would forbid private companies from discriminating against gays and lesbians.

But it's also important to remember this, as reported by the Associated Press:

Labeled by a magazine, Mother Jones, as "the first 1960s radical elected to the U.S. Senate," Wellstone still managed to disappoint liberal followers on occasion. In 1996, he angered gay rights supporters by voting for the "Defense of Marriage" bill, which allowed states to withhold legal recognition of same-sex unions from other states [and bars the federal government from recognizing such unions].

HRC considers ENDA, which the group carefully crafted and which it promotes to contributors as its chief product, as the most important issue on the gay agenda (so to speak). Many of us feel that the denial of gay marriage and government discrimination toward gays in the military -- the nation's single largest employer -- impact more gay lives to a far greater degree than private-sector employment discrimination, given that surprisingly few cases can truly be documented, that a rapidly growing number of companies are formally adding gays to their non-discrimination policies on their own despite the lack of government decree, and that a libertarian case can be made that employers should be entitled to hire the workers they choose, and that ENDA paves the way for both baseless lawsuits (profiting trial lawyers, if no one else) while creating an incentive not to hire open gays (for fear that you could never fire them).

I"m not among those who oppose ENDA; on the whole, it would be a nice symbolic statement. But discrimination sanctioned and practiced by our government, especially denial of the right to marry, should be our main focus, and it's not. And it certainly wasn't for Paul Wellstone, and it isn't for HRC, NGLTF, and many other movement leaders.
--Stephen H. Miller

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A Tradition of Fighting Back

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Originally appeared October 25, 2002, in The Washington Blade.

IN A RECENT COMMENTARY circulated to the gay press, gay Muslim activist Faisal Alam laments the absence of gay voices from recent anti-war rallies. I, on the contrary, regard this as a sign of our community's maturity and good sense.

We have been here before. Twelve years ago, several fellow activists and I met with the board of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to criticize its formal opposition to the Persian Gulf War. In brief, we said that the war was not a gay issue, and that in any case appeasement was not the way toward peace any more than it was in World War II.

Then, to counter the radical gays who had joined the anti-war protests, my friend Barrett Brick and I formed a group called GAIA, which alternately stood for Gays Against Iraqi Aggression and Gays Against Isolationism and Appeasement.

With a large, hand-made placard, Brick applied the slogan "Silence = Death" to those who favored a passive response to Saddam's reckless aggression. This upset the radicals, but it also got the attention of other groups defending the war effort, who were surprised to find gays on their side. We told them that gays have been fighting for America since its founding. We cited polls showing that most gays agreed with the overwhelming majority of Americans who supported the war, not the few who opposed it.

This time around, with NGLTF thus far avoiding its earlier mistake, Alam has taken up the anti-war standard. Remarkably, he manages to write an entire column opposing war with Iraq without once mentioning Saddam Hussein. Instead, he complains that spending money on war would take money from "social welfare programs." But this is as arbitrary as pitting housing needs against mental health needs. Alam ignores the primacy of national defense as a responsibility of government, preferring to call for an unspecified "peaceful solution." The fact that Iraq has violated 16 United Nations resolutions does not convince him that peaceful efforts have failed.

Alam ignores Saddam's long record of international mayhem that brought us to this point. The only country he is willing to blame for anything is the United States. This upside-down worldview would be comical if Alam and others on the anti-American left were not in dead earnest. And because he includes every conceivable issue in the gay agenda, he declares the war with Iraq a "queer" issue, without showing the slightest awareness of which side actually treats gays better. (Hint: It's the one that allows gay Muslims to organize and publish op-eds.)

Alam writes as if gays who disagree with his anti-war stand are all going to "$250 tuxedo dinners" - ignoring the fact that these events are fundraisers for gay causes - and as if enjoying the fruits of our labor is disreputable. He gratuitously insults an extraordinarily generous community, while asserting that "the real fight for freedom" occurs elsewhere. How are the downtrodden helped by this ridiculous, mendacious class warfare?

Alam says we once "understood that single-issue politics would not win us anything." Here he falsifies the history of the gay rights movement in order to portray us as having fallen away from a nobler early period. In fact, some of our movement's pioneers, like DC's Frank Kameny (another critic of NGLTF 12 years ago), maintained a laser-like focus on gay issues.

Alam should check out the website of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, DC (of which Kameny and I are members) at www.glaa.org, and review our timeline for examples of how much a group singly focused on gay rights can accomplish.

Alam could also learn a lot from English gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell, who opposes war with Iraq but says, "It is disturbing the way the anti-war campaign is ignoring the Iraqi government's monstrous human rights abuses, and is offering no counter-plan for overthrowing the murderous regime in Baghdad."

To the extent that past American policies have contributed to the problem that now threatens the Middle East, we make a fine choice for the ones to do something about it. As even Tatchell says, "A democratic Iraq would be a beacon for human rights throughout the Middle East. It could give lesbian and gay people their first taste of freedom in a region that is dominated by brutal Islamic fundamentalist regimes."

Alam brazenly invokes an early flashpoint of our movement in support of his untimely pacifism. Pardon me, but at Stonewall they fought back.

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The Political Zoo. If I don't often focus on the bad stuff coming out of the GOP camp, it's because mindless Republican-bashing is the heart of most gay websites, which obscures the real progress that's been made as of late. But as it is campaign season, there are plenty of instances of Republicans behaving badly that can, in fact, be noted. And some examples where they"re getting a bad rap as well. Among the transgressors, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush disgraced himself in a recent debate with Democratic challenger Bill McBride, who quite rightly called Florida's law prohibiting gay couples from adopting children discriminatory and ''not the American way.'' Bush the younger defended the ban, saying that children should find permanent homes only with couples who are ''a man and a wife.'' He added, for good measure, ''It's the law of the land, but I believe it personally.''

Sadly, Bush is on target about most issues in this campaign. For instance, McBride thinks the school problem can be solved be shoveling still more money down the system's bureaucratic rat hole, while his backers at the teachers" unions oppose the sort of real reforms that could, finally, make schools accountable for their wretched performance. Too bad Jeb is combining his support for innovation and enterprise with subservience to the religious right on an important matter of equality and fairness. If I were a Floridian, I might vote Libertarian in this race.

As an international aside, the British have also been debating the adoption question, and Lady Thatcher made a special appearance at the House of Lords to take part in "heated exchanges" and drive a stake through the heart of Tony Blair's bill to allow gay and unmarried partners to adopt. Of course, if gays could marry then the matter wouldn't be confused by throwing unmarried heterosexuals (who can, but don't , make the commitment) into the mix. But it's not like conservatives are supporting that idea, either.

One of the most bizarre cases of reactionary Republicanism comes from Houston, Texas, where a GOP candidate for justice of the peace, who also happens to be openly gay and president of the Houston chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans, is being attacked by a GOP political activist who sent his party's voters an automated telephone message telling them not to vote the straight Republican ticket because, as the
Houston Chronicle paraphrased it, "If you vote straight, you vote gay." It's just a wacko case, but shows how deep the hatred is among the unreconstructed right.

The Other Side. On the other hand, there are some happier examples of Republicans behaving well. For instance, New York's Gov. George Pataki is successfully pushing a resistant Republican-controlled state senate to pass a gay rights bill, which he promises to sign. Regardless of the merits of such bills, his support indicates a more generally enlightened attitude towards inclusiveness. Pataki has also backed post-9/11 survivors benefits for gay partners.

Finally, there's an instance where a Republican may be getting a raw deal. In the Massachusetts gubernatorial race, the GOP's Mitt Romney has pledged: "As Governor, I will introduce legislation to establish a domestic partnership law in Massachusetts, and I support any city, medical facility or business that chooses to extend these rights and benefits to their employees." So of course he's being denounced as a homophobe. A Mormon, Romney endowed a management school with a $1 million donation to Brigham Young University, a Church school with clearly antigay policies (he is not on the board or otherwise affiliated with BYU). As the executive who ran the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, gay groups praised Romney's outreach to gays and lesbians.
(A Human Rights Campaign press release from last January stated: "Our community's level of participation is unprecedented, thanks to the Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee's inclusive policies that respect all residents who want to help make this the most successful Olympics ever").

For a highly visible Mormon to support gay rights and domestic-partner benefits is a Big Deal, and perhaps of more value than support from a liberal, or even an ex-Mormon (which is what Romney would be if he took on his Church's anti-gay policies directly). If gay activists truly believe in the separation of Church and State, they might cut Romney a little slack on this one.
--Stephen H. Miller

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