IGF CultureWatch

NEAR THE FRONT of the pride parade in Minneapolis this year marched a stern-faced woman dressed in leather-dominatrix regalia leading around by spiked chain and whip a person (sex undetermined) hunched over and disguised as a four-legged beast, probably a horse. Similar displays - which are less about "being yourself" than about simply being seen - assaulted the senses in parades around the country. I ask you, must we continue to put ourselves through this every year?

For the most part, the annual pride parades are a dreary procession of the ordinary: businesses, politicians, gay professionals, and social service organizations wanting money. Where they are not dreary, however, the parades seem calculated to offend the very folk we must win over.

In the 1970s, the parades served the important purpose of giving gays a sense of community and identity necessary to organize in a time when there were no positive images of gays in the mass media, when most states had sodomy laws, and when homosexuality was still officially listed as a mental disorder. In the 1980s, they helped rally us against AIDS. Always characterized by an in-your-face outrageousness, the parades nevertheless had some offsetting value.

But in the age of Will & Grace, when even Republicans are coming around, the parades are an anachronism, perpetuated more out of habit and nostalgia than necessity.

There is an inverse relationship between the degree of weirdness in a city's pride parade and the genuine need for that parade. In the big cities, where the parades are the most outlandish, they serve the least useful purpose. New York, San Francisco, Washington, Houston, and other large American cities are dotted with gay bars, restaurants, and book stores. They have gay bowling leagues and choruses and political groups and civil rights ordinances. A parade designed to foster awareness and community in these cities is an expensive and time-consuming redundancy.

Maybe, you say, the big-city parades benefit people in the surrounding suburbs and small towns. The gay Chicagoan may not need a parade to feel proud but the closeted guy from Peoria needs the Chicago parade to have just one day a year to commune with other gay people. There's surely some benefit to that.

Yes, but at what cost? If our concern is truly to give hope to the gay people who live in the hinterlands, the pride parades may do more harm than good. Simulated sex acts, near-naked men gyrating to music, and bare-breasted women don't play well in Peoria. And like it or not when the local nightly news there turns to gay pride, that's what plays.

That can't be good for the social environment in which gay Peorians must live and work. It hardens anti-gay attitudes, frightening Americans with what they imagine a gay-friendly future would look like. As a result, parents come down harder on any hint of homosexuality in their children. It doesn't matter that these images are unrepresentative of gay life; to Americans who live nowhere near a gay coffee shop, that's what gay means.

And unfortunately it's what gay comes to mean to youths wrestling with their own feelings of same-sex attraction. As a teenager growing up in southern Texas, I saw footage of S&M leather fetishists in the San Francisco parade. If that's gay, I thought, I must not be gay.

Gay youth around the country are forced into the closet by these parades, either because of the backlash they suffer in their communities or because of their own alienation from the public image of gayness thus created.

So there is a large hidden human cost to these displays. It's awfully selfish for us in big cities to have this fabulous annual party at their expense.

What's the alternative? We'll never get the media to stop focusing on the sensational. That's not because the media are uniformly homophobic; it's because they're profit-driven, profits are determined by audience size, and audiences prefer outrageous to dreary. It doesn't matter how many contingents of gay-suburbanite couples proudly brandish their joint mortgage statements, the TV stations will still feature the square-dancing drag queens.

It's also not an option to exclude weirdness from the parades. First of all, we could never agree on what's weird. Second, even if we could, people would scream censorship. Third, parade organizers tend to be so drenched in the easy rhetoric of inclusion and diversity they could never be trusted to make sensible judgments about such things.

The answer is to end the parades, at least in the big cities, where the weirdness of them is at a maximum and the need for them is at a minimum.

We should replace them with park festivals featuring civil rights and other groups with booths, food, and live concerts. That would make the annual pride celebrations fun and informative while minimizing the incentive for counterproductive media spectacles. Something like this already happens in most cities at the end of the parade. Let's skip the parade and go straight to the festival.

The parades themselves could justifiably go on in medium- and small-sized cities where they now flourish. Parades in these places tend to reflect the values and tastes of local communities, which can actually help the gay people who live there.

And no, this is not a proposal to "hide" the marginalized. Hey, if you want to walk around dressed as a farm animal, go for it.

But don't ask us to have a parade for you.

Originally appeared July 10, 2002, in the Chicago Free Press.

On July 6, the day of England's annual Gay Pride parade, British activist Peter Tatchell wrote a column for the left-leaning London Independent deploring changes in the gay movement over the last 30 years.

"We had a beautiful dream," he wrote. "Our demand was liberation. We wanted to change society, not conform to it. Our radical, idealistic vision involved creating a new sexual democracy, without homophobia and misogyny. Erotic shame and guilt would be banished, together with compulsory monogamy, gender roles and the nuclear family."

Tatchell went on to criticize gay organizations that focus on issues such as gay marriage which reflect traditional heterosexual goals, rather than "more contentious issues such as ... consensual sex between underage partners, the censorship of sexual imagery, the timidity of sex education lessons, and the criminalization of sex workers and sadomasochistic relationships."

Tatchell articulates both the nostalgia and the bafflement frequently expressed in the U.S. as well as England by old-timers on the gay left. At some point, the gay movement seemed to slip out from under them and they are not quite sure what happened, why it happened or who to blame.

But Tatchell underestimates both the success of the gay movement and the extent to which society has changed. To a great degree gays and lesbians have achieved the liberation that Tatchell and his colleagues sought from the repression imposed by government and public opinion.

Increasing numbers of gays fully accept themselves and live their lives openly and happily, accepted by family and friends, their sexuality accorded respect and their relationships treated with dignity. If that is not a revolution, then Tatchell is forgetting what a revolution is.

We have even achieved some of the sexual liberation Tatchell sought. Whatever Tatchell's "sexual democracy" means - and majority rule over people's sex lives seems like a dangerous idea - we have moved toward a more libertarian sexual individualism in which people can determine their own sexual and romantic lives, independent of what others think. The right conceptual model here is free market individualism not some governmental "sexual democracy."

Second, Tatchell and other early leaders on the left deceived themselves in assuming that early participants in gay liberation - the "we" he keeps referring to - all supported some sort of social and sexual radicalism. A substantial number of leaders and "activists" no doubt did since people with the most zeal about their views tend to push themselves forward most vigorously.

But the majority of gays even then were all over the political map. The thousands of gays and lesbians who marched in the earliest Gay Pride parades were hardly affirming any left-wing or radical agenda. They were simply making themselves visible, affirming their existence and moral legitimacy.

Films of early gay pride rallies show thousands of well-scrubbed, wholesome-looking gays and lesbians in T-shirts and jeans, looking slightly bored as they are harangued from the stage about the oppression of transvestites, prostitutes, gender roles, etc., and you know they're sitting there thinking, "When does the band get to play?" and "I wonder if that guy over there wants to hook up later."

Third, Tatchell seems to assume that any social movement such as ours should never depart from its original agenda (such as he imagines it). This is the nerve of the current liberationist position and it is repeated endlessly. Unfortunately, Tatchell never offers any argument for it.

But any movement that wants to stay vital and grow has to reflect the goals of its constituents and supporters. And if the primary slogan of gay lib was "come out, wherever you are," gays did come out in large numbers, bringing their own needs, beliefs and personal goals with them.

And it turned out that what most gay and lesbians wanted was "a normal life" - a stable, comfortable home, a primary relationship with someone they loved, a degree of freedom to explore their sexuality, and opportunities to live and socialize free of stigma and prejudice. If they felt any concern about prostitutes, transsexuals, sadomasochism, etc., it was hardly a priority.

Fourth, the good news for Tatchell is that he fails to consider how the open participation of gays in our social institutions will gradually change those institutions. If, as leftists sometimes argue, there is an inherent gay sensibility, they should have faith that it will have an effect wherever it is present. Dennis Altman caught this in his book title "The Homosexualization of America."

But more than that, the presence and legitimacy in our social institutions of people with a slightly different way of engaging with the world will result - is already resulting - in the relaxation of social strictures and open those institutions to other possibilities as well. In a free market of social behavior, once a legal monopoly is broken, more options will offer themselves for consideration.

This is, of course, an unintended effect, but it is a powerful effect nevertheless, and impossible to prevent because it has no direct cause. So Tatchell may obtain more of his goals than he expects, but in modified form and by means he never anticipated.

Originally appeared June 29, 2002, in National Journal.

EVEN IF YOU BELIEVE, as I do, that the birth of the United States was the single best thing that ever happened to the human race, it is easy, in the procession of years, to become blas? about Independence Day. I suppose this year I will do what I usually do: snooze, sunbathe, shop, maybe brave the crowds to watch fireworks, or maybe not. But it will not be an ordinary Fourth of July. It will be like none before.

Life, it is true, has not changed much since the last Fourth of July, unless you happen to be waiting in the baggage line at Dulles International Airport. Even in Washington, where so much has changed, life is much as it was. "There seems little left of the 'new' post-September America," an article in The Economist recently observed.

Is that really so? Usefully, Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research has assembled a wealth of polling data on post-9/11 America (you can find it by going to www.aei.org and clicking on "War on Terrorism"). The data suggest that there are many respects in which The Economist is right. The rally around the president persists, but the public's approval of Congress, an astonishing and charitable 84 percent in October (according to Gallup/CNN/USA Today), had deflated to a more earthbound 52 percent by June. Trust in the federal government, and belief that the government "is doing all it reasonably can do to try to prevent further terrorist attacks" (ABC News/Washington Post), have likewise floated back down from the stratosphere.

In the aftermath of the attacks last year, three-fourths of the public told Zogby International that they approved of random car searches, and 67 percent approved of random mail searches. By March, a majority had changed their minds, disapproving of both kinds of measures. In September, only 12 percent of respondents told Harris Interactive that they lacked confidence that the government would use expanded surveillance powers properly; by March, the doubting Thomases had doubled to 23 percent. I never thought I would live to see a majority of Americans saying that the media were doing an "excellent" job, but in September that is what they said (in a Pew Research Center poll). By April, that bubble, too, had burst. If Americans normally view powerful institutions with a cynical eye, then America is clearly getting back to normal.

Behavior has also largely reverted. Do you display the flag? The proportion saying yes (in Gallup/CNN/USA Today polls) fell from 82 percent in September to 68 percent in March. Do you pray more than usual? Three-fourths said yes in September, only 37 percent said so in March. Thank goodness, the percentage who reported crying as a result of September 11 fell from 70 percent to only 21 percent. The tears have dried.

And yet, for all that, people insist they are not the same. They are quite firm on that point. At least two polling firms have asked people whether their own lives have changed as a result of September 11, and both found 55 percent saying yes, not just once but consistently, in December, January, and March. Almost three-fourths said the change was for the better.

A skeptic might understandably look around and ask to see some evidence of all this improvement. After all, isn't Congress back to partisan bickering and the public back to shopping? The rejoinder is in the answer to this interesting follow-up question, which ABC and The Post put to respondents who said that 9/11 had changed their lives: "Have [the events of September 11] mainly changed the way you live your day-to-day life or mainly changed the way you feel about things?" In both December and March, respondents said, by about a 3-1 ratio, that what had changed was the way they felt.

What does that mean, exactly? What, if anything, does it amount to? I know of no applicable data and so turn to introspection. Although my own life goes on much as it did, I do not feel as I did on September 10 about myself, and I do not feel as I did about my country.

The largest change for me, after September 11, is that I no longer care so much how long I live. This attitude did not come in a revelatory flash or as a result of thoughtful analysis; quite suddenly, it was simply there. What it means is not that I have little regard for my life or would throw it away. I love living and would fight passionately, I hope, for the privilege. I would be very sorry and bitter to have been aboard one of the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center.

On the other hand, I would be very proud to have been on United Airlines Flight 93, whose passengers fought off the terrorists, crashed their plane, and quite possibly saved the Capitol or the White House. The last three or four minutes of those people's lives were more noble than the next three or four decades of my life are likely to be.

Whether I would have had the courage, in their place, to do what they did, I have no idea. What I no longer feel, however, is that it is important to die an old man. There is such a thing as nobility, and it is better to live a short and noble life than a long and ignoble or characterless one. The ancients and many Americans of earlier generations understood this, and I thought I understood it, too; but now I think I never fully grasped what nobility meant until I saw how the firefighters of September 11 marched unhesitatingly up the stairs to oblivion.

Although America has no aristocracy, it has nobility in abundance, nobility that walks among us every day in the streets. In November, Newsweek magazine quoted Osama bin Laden as telling a Pakistani journalist: "We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us." Well, it is certainly true that Americans love life. What bin Laden did not understand, however, is that many Americans will die willingly, so long as they die in the service of life. Living for life, as Americans do, is not at all the same thing as living merely to live, as bin Laden wrongly believed Americans do.

If others feel as I feel, and perhaps some do, then indeed the country has changed. Not changed in that all who were cowards before September 11 now are brave, or all who were base now are noble. Changed, rather, in that millions of people have taken stock and chosen to be resolute, even at considerable personal cost. Millions, in that sense, have enlisted.

I would like to mention one quite particular and personal respect in which my feelings about the country have changed. As in no national emergency ever before in American history, open homosexuals were participants in the events of September 11. We participated as victims, of course (a co-pilot and several passengers aboard the ill-fated planes, for example, were gay); and we also participated as heroes. The Rev. Mychal Judge, the New York City Fire Department's beloved chaplain, died in the World Trade Center's north tower soon after administering last rites to a firefighter. Mark Bingham, an openly gay passenger, is thought to have been among the leaders in the reconquest of Flight 93.

In the days and weeks that followed 9/11, mainstream Americans never for a moment begrudged homosexuals their place in the narrative. This was something new. When the Rev. Jerry Falwell blamed, among others, "the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle" for "mak[ing] God mad" and helping bring about the 9/11 attacks, and when the Rev. Pat Robertson concurred, there was no debate about whether they had a point, not even among cultural conservatives. There was merely revulsion. All at once, it was Mychal Judge and Mark Bingham who were in the mainstream, and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who were at odds with core American values.

That is not to deny that many Americans are uncomfortable with homosexuality. It is to affirm that they are much more uncomfortable with intolerance. In the social order that America's militant Islamic enemies would impose, my partner Michael and I would probably not be suffered to live, except perhaps as liars and fugitives. In that sense, this war is not being fought for an abstraction. It is being fought for me. It is being fought for the right of homosexuals to pursue happiness in the only way possible for us. The fact that many of the American fighters do not approve of homosexuality only redoubles my admiration for their sacrifice.

On this Fourth of July, wherever I am and whatever else I may be doing, I will be giving those fighters my thanks. Never have I been as proud of my country and my fellow citizens as I have been since September 11. On no prior Independence Day have I so well understood, and so keenly felt, my debt to the men who, in 1776, risked everything for what they called certain unalienable rights. They pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the defense of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and so again, today, do their 285 million descendants; and so do I.

Copyright � 2002 National Journal.