IGF CultureWatch

Originally appeared March 20, 2002, in the Chicago Free Press.

I have seen the post-gay world, and it serves really good beer.

My girlfriend and I were having dinner at a restaurant and bar nestled on the edge of the gay-friendly Chicago neighborhood of Andersonville, when we looked around.

The barkeep was a transwoman. There was a gay waiter and a lesbian chef. A group of gay men were flirting on the high barstools.

But something was missing.

There was no rainbow sticker on the door. Or neon rainbow in the window. Or anything external to denote this establishment as a gay bar.

And do you know why?

It isn't one.

T's calls itself a place "for everyone" and surprisingly, it really is. The same night we were there, two straight couples were playing pool. In fact, T's manages to be a place where it is as comfortable to bring your parents for dinner or straight friends for a drink as it is to flirt with a same-sex stranger or kiss your girlfriend. Perhaps even more amazingly, it is equally welcome to men and women-unlike a majority of places in gay ghettos, where gay men are often made uncomfortable in lesbian bars and vice versa.

T's is able to be most things to most people because it intentionally reaches out to all of its constituencies. It hosts regular womens' nights, sponsors gay sports teams and employs gay staff - but it also employs straight staff, and has events that also appeal to straight folks, such as Superbowl Sunday parties and the recent run of a quirky play devoted to drinking and writing.

In fact, T's is a pretty good representation of what it might be like to live in an (ideal) post-gay world.

What do I mean by post gay? I mean a world where gay couples aren't stared at, commented on or (heaven forbid) battered as they walk down the street holding hands or kissing.

I mean a world where being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered is interesting in the same way that learning that someone is left-handed or a twin is interesting - it is a fact about the individual that affects their worldview, but says nothing about his or her character, interests or politics.

By post gay, I mean a world where a lesbian marriage or a gay man in the military or a transgendered president is barely even remarked upon by the media gauntlet.

I first started imagining a post-gay world when I learned that a friend who worked part time as an advisor to a lesbitrans community at a Boston-area women's college no longer had a job.

"The students decided there was no need for an advisor anymore," my friend's life-partner told me. "They fit in fine and they just want to be students, not lesbian students or bi students."

The lesbians at this particular college can do this because their needs are being met. They face little discrimination or prejudice from the student body or administration. In fact, there is constant outreach to their community from faculty, staff and administrators. If students need something or are concerned about something, it is not difficult to find a friendly ear tuned to their frequency. They don't have to stay in their emotional or physical gay ghetto to be safe, because they feel safe where ever they are on campus.

For these lucky students, there's nothing to fight for and so they don't have to fight - they can just be.

There are pockets of places around the world like this - not only my own neighborhood of Andersonville (and upon closer reflection, most of it seems to be post-gay, not just this one bar), but also the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, the small college towns of Northampon, Mass. and Madison, Wis., parts of New York and Paris and most of San Francisco, Amsterdam and Stockholm.

The entire world, unfortunately, will likely never be post-gay. There will always be small redneck towns and large, unfriendly cities where gay people are not welcome. That's because post-gay places need a combination of things to make them possible: anti-discrimination laws, a strong gay and lesbian community, and a marketplace and political establishment that's responsive and pro-active to our needs. Being post-gay is more than cold tolerance; it is an understanding that GLBTs offer unique contributions that benefit everyone and should be sought out.

A post-gay world, which can only happen after the end of discrimination, isn't a place where we are all the same - it is a place where the needs of each of us are met equally. A place where we all feel safe and welcome. So in a post-gay bar, a lesbian might come to play pool after softball and a gay man might be flirting with his new lover while sitting next to a straight man doing the same thing.

A post-gay world is one where we are all just folks, sitting around talking and having a really good beer.

Originally appeared March 20, 2002, in the Chicago Free Press.

Celebrities, like ordinary folks, come out for a variety of reasons.

Some do it because they are tired of hiding and the psychological pressure of concealing their true identity becomes too much.

Some do it because they have no choice-they were outed.

Some do it to seem cooler to younger people, or to give a shot of adrenaline to a faltering career.

Some do it because they have been swayed by the strong argument that America's comfort with gays and lesbians is dependent on our visibility. And then we have Rosie.

For years, many of us have been calling on Rosie O'Donnell to come out. We mentioned the sly way she alluded to being a lesbian; we noted that she appeared with her partner in public. People like her, we said. With Rosie on our side, people might not be so quick to say that they don't know any gays or lesbians.

Yet for the longest time, Rosie didn't come out. She wouldn't come out. She would joke and hint and wink, but the word "lesbian" didn't cross her lips when she was speaking to the public.

And so we were mad at her.

But it seems that Rosie knew best all along. Because by picking her moment, she has sparked a national conversation about gay and lesbian adoption. Now she is proving that if anyone can change hearts in the heartland when it comes to adopting children, it is Rosie.

Last week, Rosie, who has three young, adopted children, spoke honestly and openly to Diane Sawyer about why it is unfair that gays and lesbians can't adopt children in Florida.

"I don't think it negates your skills as a parent if you1re homosexual," she said in her friendly, straightforward way. "I do think the kids will get teased and in some capacity that's very sad, and eventually I think that it will stop. ... Would it be easier for them if I were married to a man? It probably would. But as I said to my son, Parker, if you were to have a daddy, you wouldn't have me as a mommy. Because I'm the kind of mommy who wants another mommy."

Rosie is coming forward now because she recently learned that even though she can parent foster children in Florida, where she keeps a second home, a 1977 law prohibits adoption of those same children by any gays and lesbians, including herself.

Then she learned of a gay couple, Steve Lofton and Roger Croteau, who are in a similar predicament.

Lofton and Croteau are raising five HIV-positive children. Three of those are foster children; two were adopted in Oregon. But one of the foster children, Bert, 10, no longer tests positive for HIV. And because he is under 14, says the ACLU, "he is now considered �adoptable." Which means that the state of Florida is actively seeking another home for Bert, even though he has been raised by Lofton and Croteau since he was nine weeks old.

Lofton and Croteau have joined other parents in a lawsuit fighting against Florida's law against gay adoption, the most conservative adoption law in the country. Now, "for the first time ever," says an ACLU statement, "a federal appeals court is weighing the constitutionality of banning gay adoption."

Florida's law against gay and lesbian adoption - even when those same gays and lesbians are approved foster parents - would be simply silly if it didn't break so many hearts and break up so many loving families.

There are a half million children in foster care in the United States, and 3,400 who are waiting for adoption in Florida. Nationally, 25,000 kids a year leave the foster care system not because they were adopted, but because they became too old. Few people want to adopt physically or mentally ill children.

Croteau and Lofton are two of those few. There is no logical reason why they can't adopt the children they have raised. It is simply anti-gay bigotry.

In her interview, Rosie made this clear. "It takes a lot to become a foster parent," she told Sawyer. "You have to really want to save a child who others have deemed unsaveable. And for the state of Florida to tell anyone who's willing, capable, and able to do that, that they're unworthy, is wrong."

Rosie's interview has already changed minds.

On ABC's web page, one viewer commented, "Before tonight's show, I would say I was definitely against gay adoption. I do believe the gay life style is a sin. However ... I believe [some] sins do not carry more weight than others. So with that in mind, carrying out Florida's thinking, people who commit adultery are not fit to be parents, people who take the Lord's name in vain should not parents. Ideally, I would like to see kids with a mom and a dad, but it doesn't look likely for most foster kids. So any permanent loving and nurturing home is better than none."

That someone who seems to be a Christian fundamentalist would move that far in his or her position on gay adoption in the space of a two-hour interview is nothing short of a miracle.

By waiting to come out until she felt like she had a compelling reason, by worrying less about her public than about a vital cause, Rosie O'Donnell has done a great good. She has taken it upon herself to give the abstract idea of "gay parents" a human face - and better, a beloved face.

"I don't think America knows what a gay parent looks like: I am the gay parent," Rosie said.

All we can hope for is that America will take her message to heart the way they have taken her television show into their homes.

Originally appeared March 13, 2002, in the Chicago Free Press.

LAST FALL, the United Synagogues of Conservative Judaism, the largest branch of American Judaism, issued a new Torah and commentary titled "Etz Hayim" - "tree of life" - that includes several background essays discussing recent scholarship on the bible and Near Eastern archaeological findings.

According to the March 9 New York Times account, the new Torah, the first in 60 years for conservative Jews, is particularly notable because the new scholarship shows that the early books of the bible have no historical validity.

The Garden of Eden? An etiological myth. Noah and the flood? A legend that arose in Mesopotamia suggested by the regular flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Sodom and Gomorrah? Another myth. Abraham? Like most legendary founders, he probably never existed.

The Israelite captivity in Egypt and the Exodus probably never occurred. There are no Egyptian sources mentioning an Israelite presence and no archaeological evidence anywhere for Israelites wandering in the Sinai - "not a pottery shard," as Rabbi David Wolpe put it.

There was no Israelite conquest of Palestine. Instead, there was a gradual and largely peaceful settlement. And Jericho? It didn't have any walls and it wasn't even inhabited when Joshua's "battle of Jericho" supposedly occurred.

King David? If he existed at all, and there is some dispute, was probably a local tribal leader whose importance was later inflated to promote religious pride. There is an "almost total absence of archaeological evidence" for a sizable Jerusalem at that time.

These and other modern findings have long been accepted by most bible scholars and seminary teachers. They are well known by most priests, ministers and rabbis. But they have not been widely shared with the laity in the pews, so they may even come as a surprise to readers here. Nonetheless, they are now the views of most scholars and supported by substantial evidence.

Why clergy are reluctant to share this information with laymen is a topic for another time. But perhaps intelligent laymen will not be so shocked. After I wrote a column on the Sodom legend, a conservative Jewish friend asked why I bothered. "Some people believe those bible stories," I said. He shook his head. "Fairy tales," he said. "They're just fairy tales."

This growing willingness to face historical evidence is significant for gay men because two key texts religious conservatives cite to attack gay men are in the Leviticus "Holiness Code" purportedly given by the biblical god Yahweh to Moses on Mt. Sinai.

Leviticus 18:22 reads: "Do not lie with a man as with a woman. It is an abhorrence" - as the new Torah translates it.

But if there was no Exodus, no wandering in the desert and probably no Moses, then there was no revelation on Sinai and the prohibition of homosexuality lacks divine authority. It is merely the human creation of ancient Jewish scribes.

In fact, so far as biblical scholars can tell, based on internal evidence, the Holiness Code (Leviticus chs. 17-26) was probably compiled no earlier than 750 B.C., and maybe as late as 550 B.C. - far later than the purported revelation on Sinai (traditionally between 1200 and 1450 B.C.) The code was then "backdated" by being inserted into the Moses legend to give it divine authority.

Examined carefully, noting various repetitions and inconsistencies, that section of Leviticus seems to combine at least two sets of laws by different writers who did not entirely agree on what was important and what the penalties should be.

For example, Lev. 18:22 says that anyone who does a number of things including homosexual sex "shall be cut off from his people" because the acts are "unclean." But the scribe who wrote Lev. 20:13, perhaps writing later, had much stronger feelings about homosexuals: "They shall be put to death," he inveighs; "Their blood shall be upon them."

Recognizing that there is no divine mandate to prohibit homosexuality, how do the compilers of the new Torah handle homosexuality? Well, some wanted to preserve the prohibition anyway.

"We couldn't come to a formulation that we could all be comfortable with," Rabbi Joseph Kushner said. "Some people felt that homosexuality was wrong." So the committee ended by saying that the prohibitions on homosexuality "have engendered considerable debate," but that conservative synagogues should "welcome gay and lesbian congregants in all congregational activities."

But while this step forward is welcome, a problem lingers. If homosexuality is wrong, we know from this Torah that it is cannot be wrong for theological reasons but for some secular reasons.

But if the reasons are secular, then people have an obligation to explain them, rather than just asserting their position, so we can examine them. But many people cannot give up age-old habits of thought, even when the rationale for them no longer has any validity.

But having readily dropped the Levitical mandate that gays should be killed, the new Torah would have been well-advised to abandon the idea that homosexuality is wrong and acknowledge that believing so is merely a cultural atavism.

The recent death of Sylvia Rivera, an activist drag queen who threw quarters at the police during the Stonewall riot, has prompted much guilt-laden commentary about how the gay civil rights movement has pushed aside "the people who started it all." The commentary is dubious as a matter of history and wrong about the policy conclusions it draws from that history.

Here is the standard story: "On the night of June 28, 1969, the New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a bar that included a mix of drag queens and lesbians. Led by the drag queens, the patrons fought back, igniting the gay civil rights movement. Yet the new movement soon became overly image-conscious and pushed these brave heroes to the back of the bus. It's high time we repay our debt by fully including transgender issues in gay causes, including proposed legislation."

This fictionalized account of Stonewall and its aftermath has been repeated so many times by gay and transgender activists it now goes almost unquestioned. Typical of the genre is a recent Village Voice column by Riki Wilchins, executive director of GenderPAC. Wilchins describes the Stonewall Inn in 1969 as a "sanctuary" for "genderqueers," who were "unwelcome at the city's tonier gay bars."

Wilchins asserts Rivera "helped [give] birth" to the gay movement at Stonewall. Similarly, in his book The Gay Metropolis, Charles Kaiser says Stonewall was "sparked by drag queens." Despite these contributions, transgender causes are now excluded from the movement because, as Wilchins puts it, gay organizations are "determined to project an image of normalcy."

This is politics-by-guilt-trip, and it has been undeniably effective in redirecting many gay groups' priorities toward transgender issues. The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force has even withdrawn its support of the only federal legislation that would prohibit anti-gay employment discrimination because the bill does not include "gender identity" within its protections.

The standard tale is error piled on error. First, it exaggerates the undeniable importance of Stonewall as a catalytic event. As the careful work of numerous historians has demonstrated, there was an active gay civil rights effort underway long before Stonewall. Gay activists had organized the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in 1950, and in other cities later; had supported an openly gay candidate for public office; had fought the closing of gay bars; had founded a national magazine, The Advocate; had marched in front of the White House for equal rights; and had picketed businesses that discriminated against gays.

Outside of New York, according to Stephen Murray in his book American Gay, gay activists initially paid little attention to Stonewall. Only through the annual pride parade commemorations that began a year later and spread significantly in the mid-1970s did Stonewall take on the singular importance in gay history it now enjoys. At the time it happened, however, the event simply did not carry the incredible motivating force we now attach to it.

Second, the centrality of transgenders to Stonewall is probably exaggerated. Eyewitness accounts of what happened that night vary, as they usually do, and we have no videotape of the event and very few pictures.

But one thing is clear. It is wrong to characterize the Stonewall Inn as having been a sanctuary for genderqueers (unless that term encompasses non-transgendered gay men). Murray writes that "men familiar with the milieu then insist that the Stonewall clientele was middle-class white men and that very few drag queens or dykes or nonwhites were ever allowed admittance."

But don't take Murray's word for it, consider what Sylvia Rivera herself told the historian Eric Marcus for his book, Making History: "The Stonewall wasn't a bar for drag queens. Everybody keeps saying it was. ... If you were a drag queen, you could get into the Stonewall if they knew you. And only a certain number of drag queens were allowed into the Stonewall at that time." The night of the Stonewall riot was the first time Rivera had ever even been to the bar.

If Rivera is right, it seems likely the Stonewall patrons who rebelled that June night in 1969 included many (perhaps mostly) middle-class, non-transgendered, gay white males. It's possible that the few drag queens present provided all (or most of) the rebellion while the others cowered. But there is no reason to make that assumption unless we indulge stereotypes about the timidity of gay men. So a description of the riot as an uprising of drag queens may be more politically correct, but as history it seems partial.

This point does not deny that drag queens participated in the riot. They did. It only makes the point that their centrality to the event likely has been exaggerated, probably for ideological reasons.

Finally, these historical disputes have no bearing - either way - on whether "gender identity" ought to be included in gay civil rights legislation. Even if Stonewall was the single casus belli of the gay struggle, and even if transgenders were the only people there kicking shins and uprooting parking meters, so what? And even if no drag queens were present that night, what difference would it make now?

If we learned the Stonewall police had busted up a meeting of gay white racists, instead of drag queens, we wouldn't say that should make us more attentive to the concerns of racists. These matters rise or fall on their own merits, not on the relative role groups played in distant and disputed events.

And speaking of the merits, drafting legislation is an immensely complicated task that involves putting together a coalition of supporters. Gay civil rights legislation would be stalled or effectively killed in many places if transgenders were included. The choice is often between a more inclusive bill that goes nowhere and a less inclusive bill that actually becomes law. It is not "transphobic" to make this point; it is pragmatic.

These are hard realities that some people do not want to hear. We should not feel guilty because we want to make progress, least of all because someone is telling us fairy tales about our past.