IGF CultureWatch

By the end of Barack Obama's first 100 days, it became clear: gays and lesbians are not this president's priority.

He stopped mentioning us, except for two notable cases: the brouhaha surrounding the invitation of Rev. Rick Warren to give the inaugural prayer, and the call to Congress to support including sexual orientation and gender identity in hate crimes.

Then, at just about the 100 day mark, bloggers started pointing out something disturbing: WhiteHouse.gov had stripped its "civil rights" page of almost all things gay.

It narrowed down promises to the LGBT community from eight to three, and from a full half-page to a few sentences.

When bloggers called the White House to protest, some of the promises came back, including a full repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell - but talk of repealing the Defense of Marriage Act had disappeared.

What also disappeared was this moving quote from Obama himself, on June 1, 2007, when he was still in campaign mode and working for our votes:

"While we have come a long way since the Stonewall riots in 1969, we still have a lot of work to do. Too often, the issue of LGBT rights is exploited by those seeking to divide us. But at its core, this issue is about who we are as Americans. It's about whether this nation is going to live up to its founding promise of equality by treating all its citizens with dignity and respect."

When blogger John Aravosis called the White House to ask what was going on, this is what he was told:

"Recently we overhauled the issues section to concisely reflect the President's broad agenda, and will continue to update these pages. The President's commitment on LGBT issues has not changed, and any suggestions to the contrary are false."

Well. Maybe we'd believe that Obama's commitment hasn't changed if we saw some action on our issues, instead of almost complete avoidance.

Obama made that call for hate crimes legislation, great. Of course, that was the easiest of our issues to get behind - it is supported by the majority of our police forces and attorneys general, after all.

And yes, he's facing big issues - the economic meltdown, two wars, now a retiring Supreme Court Justice. But in his first 100 days, he was somehow able to make it easier for women to sue for equal pay, lift Bush's ban on stem cell research, lift the traveling restrictions for Cuban-Americans to Cuba, and protect two million acres of wilderness.

In other words, he made significant, sweeping change in government and for some groups of people, change that is only tangentially related - if at all - to the economy, or to the wars.

We've seen change, all right. Good change. For others. But we haven't seen change for gays and lesbians and we haven't seen proof of commitment to our issues.

Campaign promises are campaign promises. It is not enough that Obama said he was our "fierce advocate" during the campaign. He needs to now show us that he is our president as well.

Richard Socarides, a former adviser to President Clinton, pointed out in the Washington Post that Obama has no gay friends close to him in the administration. He does, however, seem to have evangelical friends.

If it's true that you can tell a person by the company they keep, then we may be in deeper trouble than we know. We'll have to see what the next 100 days brings.

Obama is a good president. But we are clearly not his priority. He has forgotten, perhaps, that we are part of America's "founding promise." Which means we need to stop being patient, stop giving him time, and start raising our voices until we are heard.

Of all the slogans chanted and displayed at anti-Israel rallies over the past month, surely "Queers for Palestine" ranks as the most oxymoronic. It is the motto of the San Francisco-based Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT), a group advocating financial divestment from the Jewish State. QUIT contends that Zionism is racism, regularly demonstrates at gay pride marches, organizes with far-right Muslim organizations, and successfully lobbied the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission to boycott the 2006 World Pride Conference due to its location that year in Jerusalem.

What makes QUIT oxymoronic is that their affinity for Palestine isn't reciprocated. There may be queers for Palestine, but Palestine certainly isn't for queers, either in the livable or empathetic sense. Like all Islamic polities, the Palestinian Authority systematically harasses gay people. Under the cloak of rooting out Israeli "collaborators," P.A. officials extort, imprison, and torture gays. But Palestinian oppression of homosexuality isn't merely a matter of state policy, it's one firmly rooted in Palestinian society, where hatred of gays surpasses even that of Jews. Last October, a gay Palestinian man with an Israeli lover petitioned Israel's high court of justice for asylum, claiming that his family threatened to kill him if he did not "reform." He's one of the few lucky Palestinians to be able to challenge his plight.

And that"s only in the relatively benign West Bank. The Gaza Strip, which has stagnated under the heel of Hamas"s Islamofascist rule since 2007, is an even more dangerous place for gays, 'a minority of perverts and the mentally and morally sick,' in the words of a senior Hamas leader. As in Iran, Hamas"s patron and the chief sponsor of international terrorism, even the mere suspicion of homosexuality will get one killed in Gaza, being hurled from the roof of a tall building the method of choice.

It's these facts that make the notion of "Queers for Palestine" so bizarre. Contrary to what some gay activists might have you believe, there really are not that many political subjects where one's sexuality ought influence an opinion. Aside from the obvious issues related to civic equality (recognition of partnerships, open service in the military, etc.), how does homosexuality imply a particular viewpoint on complicated matters like Social Security Reform, health care policy, or the war in Iraq?

The answer, at least for some of those on the left side of the spectrum, is one found in the early rhetoric of the Gay Liberation Front, the leading gay rights organization to emerge after the Stonewall riots. The GLF was, in the words of historian Paul Berman, the "gay wing of the revolutionary alliance" that in the 1970s challenged the liberal consensus and came to be known as the "New Left."

GLF leaders, for instance, played an instrumental role in the creation of the Venceremos Brigade, which dispatched starry-eyed American radicals to pick sugar cane in Cuba as a show of solidarity with the regime of Fidel Castro. (Like the Palestinian Authority, Communist Cuba didn't exactly return the kindness of its gay sympathizers; for decades it interned gays and HIV-positive individuals in prison labor camps). The GLF allied itself with a whole host of radical organizations (like the murderous Black Panthers) whose role in the struggle for gay equality was tenuous at best. And the very name of the GLF was adopted from the National Liberation Front, the moniker of the Vietnamese Communists.

Why does this history matter now? Although you will find few out-and-out Marxists in the leadership of gay organizations today, most gay activists still view the world with the same sort of "oppression" complex epitomized by the early radicals who led the GLF. They believe gay people to be "oppressed," and hold that any other group claiming the same victim status should earn the support of gays.

It's for this reason that every major gay organization was so hesitant to talk about the overwhelming support among African-Americans to ban gay marriage in California, and why the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force went so far as to commission a bogus study ostensibly refuting that disturbing statistic itself. In the estimation of the gay rights establishment, African-Americans, like gays, are "oppressed," and there is no room for enemies on the left.

But gays will never get anywhere as long as they view the world in this constrictive and counterproductive way. Indeed, if one wanted to construe a "gay" position on the Arab-Israeli conflict - that is, examine the issue purely through the prism of the welfare of gay people - the inescapable stance is nothing less than partiality for Israel. Israel, after all, is the only state in the Middle East that legally enshrines the rights of gay people. Gays serve openly in the military and occupy high-profile positions in business and public life, and Tel Aviv is an international gay mecca. As cliched as it may sound, Israel is an oasis of liberal tolerance in a reactionary religious backwater, and if gay people want to stand with the "oppressed" of the region, it is the Palestinians seeking a peaceful, two-state solution, not the murderers of Hamas or their backers in Tehran, who merit support.

None of this is to say that gay people are wrong for sympathizing with the downtrodden and genuinely oppressed; on the contrary, it's an admirable quality. But all too often, ideologues with ulterior motives and radical agendas pervert this worthy instinct.

It's one thing to express concern about the humanitarian conditions in the Palestinian territories. But to stand alongside the enthusiasts of religious fascism isn't "progressive." It's obscene.

On Dec. 11, at a candid community discussion on the pursuit of D.C. marriage equality, a few participants noted that D.C. domestic partners already enjoy protections comparable to gay married couples in Massachusetts and Connecticut. That raises a question: What are the potential gains and risks of proceeding with a marriage bill early in 2009, as D.C. Councilmember David Catania has indicated he plans to do?

There are several factors to consider. First, the U.S. Constitution gives Congress exclusive legislative power over the District of Columbia, and past Democratic congresses have infringed on D.C. Home Rule over gay issues. The fact that Democrats increased their majorities in both houses and won the White House does not mean they will respect D.C.'s local autonomy or support marriage equality. The many conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats elected in 2006 and 2008 certainly will not. Even activists who favor moving forward on marriage equality expect Congress to bar the District from implementing it.

Second, D.C. Delegate to Congress Eleanor Holmes Norton wants the marriage bill postponed until she can press her legislative agenda for the District, including a full voting member of Congress as well as legislative and budgetary autonomy. Winning those first would put us in a stronger position to move ahead with marriage.

Third, the plan to block a ballot measure on the bill by making it an amendment to the D.C. Human Rights Act (whose protections are not subject to referendum or initiative) will be firmly challenged - including by Congress members - as an attempt to foil the popular will. While I agree that minority rights should not be subject to majority vote, politically this stratagem is too clever by half.

Fourth, nearly 60 percent of the D.C. population is African American, and polls show that a majority of black voters opposes marriage equality while a majority of white voters supports it. Those numbers can be improved, but it will require a concerted grassroots effort coupled with a well-funded media campaign.

Catania claims that those who say "not now" are really saying "not ever." It is absurd to suggest that Norton, a staunch ally of the LGBT community, wants to put off marriage equality forever just because she asks for a few months' delay. Treating those who don't support one's preferred timetable as opponents on the underlying issue is a poor way to cultivate allies, and fails to refute the reality-based activists who urge that we proceed in a smart and strategic way.

Jon Hoadley of Stonewall Democrats said at the town hall meeting that we should make it clear that we will not accept the D.C. marriage bill being traded away for the sake of passing other legislation. That is easier said than done when we lack the votes on the Hill for marriage but are better situated on hate crimes and employment discrimination. Denouncing congressional allies for such pragmatic trade-offs is likelier to grind the national LGBT legislative agenda to a halt than advance D.C. marriage equality.

Until marriage equality is achieved federally, marriages granted to same-sex couples by D.C. or the states will be unequal, and the difference between marriages and comprehensive domestic partnerships or civil unions will be largely symbolic. To be sure, marriage carries powerful symbolism, and nationwide demonstrations on Nov. 15 revealed new enthusiasm. Translating enthusiasm into victories, however, requires political savvy, outreach and organizing. With the holidays upon us and no campaign in place, the prospect of introducing a hot bill in a few weeks seems more a grandstanding gesture than part of a serious plan.

With Catania bent on moving ahead in January, we are faced with recruiting key allies in the African American and faith communities within a few weeks. This work, which would provide political cover for wavering D.C. Council members, requires far more hands than the relative few who have reached across our city's social divides over the years. As it stands, Catania is putting the cart before the horse.

I will be faulted for broaching these concerns publicly, but keeping silent out of solidarity will not make the problems disappear. Those whose enthusiasm outstrips their judgment should stop using talk of a generational split to dismiss the concerns of more experienced activists. Reality has a way of coming back to bite you. Let's work methodically toward real, sustainable marriage equality, not chase a mirage.

He is the most gifted political figure in two generations. He ran a smart, disciplined, and innovative campaign that made the most of his charisma, toughness, and confidence. When hit with a possibly fatal compilation of inflammatory clips from his pastor, he rose to the occasion with a searching and luminous speech on race that dared to treat his audience like adults. He responded to the financial crisis with a calm deliberation that belied his adversaries' charges of unreadiness. As he redrew the political map on Nov. 4, he gave our nation a moment of redemption that prompted dancing in the streets of the world.

In the process, Barack Obama showed the LGBT movement how to win. More on that shortly.

The other big news of the election - the revocation of marriage equality by California voters - has provoked plenty of drama, from massive marches to racial scapegoating. Some are claiming that the Nov. 15 protests across the country are the true start of the marriage equality movement, but that is false. The flashpoint of Proposition 8, like Stonewall before it, galvanized large numbers of people, but in both cases the movement's pioneers began laying the groundwork more than a decade before.

The racist recriminations directed by some against African Americans for the Prop 8 vote were an awful counterpoint to Obama's transformative victory. Some even blamed Obama for the result because of the increased turnout he generated, but Nate Silver of www.fivethirtyeight.com points out that new California voters actually opposed the initiative by 62 to 38 percent.

Furthermore, singling out African Americans out of all electoral subgroups for casting blame, aside from being monumentally counterproductive, ignores the fact that Prop 8's opponents included the California NAACP, the National Black Justice Coalition, the National Black Police Association, the National Congress of Black Women, and many black pastors. That we lost (although the pro-gay numbers improved from 2000) calls not for bitterness but for reassessment and recommitment.

Kathryn Kolbert, President of People for the American Way Foundation, wrote on Nov. 7 about the far right's wedge politics: "The Religious Right has invested in systematic outreach to the most conservative elements of the Black Church, creating and promoting national spokespeople like Bishop Harry Jackson, and spreading the big lie that gays are out to destroy religious freedom and prevent pastors from preaching about homosexuality from the pulpit."

Not only must LGBT advocates improve our own outreach efforts, we need to avoid playing into right-wing hands as we do when we denigrate religion and talk about taking away churches' tax exemptions. We are too often reactive, while our adversaries are strategic. We need to catch up.

In the aftermath of Prop 8, some in our community have resorted to bad old habits: ranking oppressions; referring to "the LGBT Community" as if it were monolithic and distinct from the black gay community; calling the marriage fight a "white thing"; and making disparaging generalizations about one another instead of working to build trust.

Obama's landmark campaign offers gay activists many lessons: Believe in yourself. Tell your story. Frame the issues rather than letting your adversaries frame them. Wrap yourself in faith, flag, and family - the other side deserves no monopoly. Listen to people who disagree with you; you may find common ground and supporters in unexpected places. Do your homework. Organize in a way that motivates and empowers your volunteers. Speak to your listeners' better angels instead of rebuking or pandering to them. Talk to voters like adults. Don't flee from challenges, rise to them.

One who rose to the occasion on Nov. 15 was comedian and actress Wanda Sykes, who publicly came out at a Las Vegas rally, saying that the Prop 8 supporters "have galvanized a community. We are so together now and we all want the same thing and we are not gonna settle for less. Instead of having gay marriage in California, no, we're gonna get it across the country. When my wife and I leave California, I want to have my marriage also recognized in Nevada, in Arizona, all the way to New York. ... I am proud to be a woman, I'm proud to be a black woman and I'm proud to be gay."

The source of progress is risking the next step, whatever that is for each of us. Yes we can.

For decades, bigots objected to interracial marriage because the participants were too different from each other. But now the bigots are objecting to same-sex marriage because-get this-this participants are too much alike. Many of today's bigots are in the same demographic groups as the bigots back then, so I wish they'd make up their minds whether it is sameness or difference they object too.

Homophobes like to argue that if we legalize gay civil marriage it will lead to heterosexual polygamy. As usual with homophobes, they have things backwards. For much of recorded history, marriage was a man and a number of women, depending on the man's economic status. Any reader of the Old Testament knows this. That tradition continues to this day in Muslim countries and existed for several decades among Mormons in the U.S. So, as same-sex marriage becomes a reality, we can accurately say that polygamy preceded same-sex marriage, not followed as a result.

"Ex-gay" advocates and their fundamentalist supporters say that one of the reasons people "become" homosexual is that they were "molested" as youths. Since almost all molesters are men, that means that young males molested by a man develop a sexual desire for men, but young woman molested by a man develop a sexual desire for women. So molestation supposedly makes men's desires turn toward the sex of the molester, but women's desires turn away from the sex of the m olester. No one has explained this contradiction. And how do they explain the far larger number of male and female youths who were molested but did not "become" homosexual? What does that do to their theory?

Robert Cary, director of "Save Me," a small-budget fictional film about an ex-gay ministry said, "Many [ex-gay functionaries] genuinely believe that they are helping people to live good lives. But they believe that you're born with your religion and choose your sexuality, when that is the opposite of the truth."-The Times of London, Oct. 7, 2008.

It is interesting that Alcoholics Anonymous insists that people who used to drink a lot but now abstain continue to refer to themselves as alcoholics long after they have stopped drinking. By contrast, the "ex-gay" proponents insist that people who used to engage in homosexuality but are trying to abstain not refer to themselves as homosexuals. One of them is surely wrong. I suspect both are.

I am not sure that sexual orientation makes us a community. We may be what Kurt Vonnegut called a "granfalloon." I think I have more in common with the thoughtful heterosexual man who likes music and art and literature than I do with a gay man who loves drag queens, "divas," and hip-hop. As hostility to gays lessens and gay people's defensive clannishness declines, other factors than sexuality will become more important in our lives. Will gays then become completely absorbed into the mainstream? That's not likely; unattached gays will still want same-sex partners and seek out places where those are most available. That does have some social ramifications.

And finally, two belated notes for Gay History Month. First, gay liberation did not begin with Stonewall; one source was in the arts community. "As some of us would later learn, if we didn't know already, sexual preference did play a part in the politics of the New York art world. New York Surrealists like Pavel Tchelitchew and Eugene Berman belonged to a gay subculture that had found greater acceptance in the uptown worlds of ballet and fashion than in the downtown Cedar Tavern scene populated by Pollock, Rothko, and company." -Herbert Muschamp, "The Secret History," New York Times, Jan. 8, 2006, section 2, pg. 1.

Art journalist Calvin Tomkins agrees: "Quite a few of the sixties artists were either bisexual or homosexual, and not a bit uptight about it. The attention and money lavished on the newcomers led to talk if a 'homintern,' a network of homosexual artists, dealers, and numerous curators in league to promote the work of certain favorites at the expense of 'straight' talents." -Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time (1980), p. 260.

Second, it seems to me that sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey redefined homosexuality. Before Kinsey, the homosexual was the man who was penetrated, whether by bottoming in anal sex or by fellating a man. The man getting fellated was simply "trade" and could consider himself (and often was) heterosexual. But Kinsey defined homosexuality as having an orgasm with another man. So if the man getting fellated had an orgasm, Kinsey counted that as a homosexual act. And if the man doing the fellating did not have an orgasm, then he was not included in the count.

In case you hadn't noticed, we are in the middle of October's annual observance of Gay History Month. Nor would anyone's failure to notice be surprising.

Gay History Month has been institutionally homeless in recent years, so no organization is really publicizing it. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation was once eager to host it, but quickly lost interest. A few gay Web sites, email lists, gay community centers and gay newspapers have continued to promote gay history, but too few and too little.

I suppose the question arises, Why should anyone bother with gay history? After all, the past is only prologue to our own time. It's over. The important point is to move on from here. So learning about gay history is a merely antiquarian enterprise.

True enough, you can live a reasonably happy and satisfying life without knowing any gay history. But I don't see it as quite so irrelevant to our own time. I think knowing gay history has some continuing value. For one thing, we can be encouraged and energized by learning about the lives and pioneering activist efforts of many gays in the past.

I admire the courage and self-confidence of the gay men and women who came out in the 1950s and 1960s-before the "Stonewall" street theater of late June 1969 gave a populist boost to the gay movement. And I admire the continuous struggle, sometimes successful, sometimes not, to find an audience for gay-affirming arguments among politicians and the media in order to confront the culture's homophobia at a time when it was much more pervasive than now.

No one can fail to be moved by the story of San Francisco city supervisor (i.e., city councilman) and pioneering activist Harvey Milk who was assassinated on Nov. 27, 1970s. Milk had a premonition that he might at some point be assassinated, and in a tape of his "political will" he made the now famous statement, "If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door."

Randy Shilts's book "The Mayor of Castro Street" (1982) tells the story. It also contains Milk's speeches, including one called "The Hope Speech," in which he said our goal as gay activists is to provide hope for isolated young gays in such places as Altoona, Pa., and Richmond, Minn. Longtime Chicago activist Tim Drake once told me he re-reads that speech at least once a year.

Another reason to learn some gay history is that we can find out from the experiences of gays in the past what survival techniques and what activist measures worked better and worse and what ones didn't work at all, all the more important since so much of the world (and the U.S.!) is still not very enlightened about gays.

Most people find it helpful to think of themselves as part of a community. And that community extends not only to other gays in the neighborhood and the city but back in time. From there it is but a short step to realizing that each of us is the latest but not last element in that community. There are young gays just being born and there are gays yet to be born who will continue our struggle for legal equality and social acceptance. They will build on whatever we are able to achieve culturally and politically and whatever institutional structures we are able to create.

At present, learning gay history is a "do it yourself" project. Fortunately, there are several good books covering different phases of gay history. If they aren't available to bookstores, public libraries probably have them. The earliest good one is John D'Emilio's Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1983) which covers the period 1940 to 1970. The more recent Out for Good (1999) by Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney covers the period from 1969 to the late 1980s.

Three collections of accounts of gay activists provide valuable historical perspective: Before Stonewall (2002) begun by Wayne Dynes and completed by Vern Bullough contains brief biographies of nearly 50 early gay figures. The others are Eric Marcus's two overlapping but enjoyable collections of interview material, Making History (1992) and Making Gay History (2002).

And there are plenty of books on specialized topics-the history of the AIDS epidemic, homosexuality in 17th-century England, gay activism internationally, gays in the military, homosexuality in ancient Greece and homosexuality in New York City from the late 1890s to the 1930s. Perhaps the most comprehensive book of all is Louis Crompton's beautifully illustrated Homosexuality and Civilization (2003). Do not deprive yourself of the pleasures of these books.