IGF CultureWatch

Franklin Kameny was, as they say, a pioneer of the early days of the modern gay civil rights movement. Before even the Stonewall riot in New York in 1969, in days when 49 of 50 states banned sodomy (and meant it), when the police routinely raided gay bars and arrested patrons for dancing together or for no reason at all, when the America Psychiatric Association still considered homosexuality a mental disorder, when homosexuality was a disqualification from any federal employment, when the FBI was busy monitoring and harassing nascent gay political groups, Kameny was leading the very first demonstrations of homosexuals in front of the White House and generally giving the government hell for its anti-gay policies.

Now an octogenarian, Kameny has kept almost all of his letters and other documents and pictures from those days - from the early 1960's on. That's very fortunate for anyone interested in the history of the movement. What's worrisome, however, is that none of this precious material has yet found a permanent and safe home in a library or other collection where it can be made available to researchers and, most importantly, be preserved for posterity. An effort is underway to change that.

Some of Kameny's archives have now been collected at a website called "The Kameny Papers", set up run and by Charles Francis. Francis is raising money for the effort to preserve this original source material.

The website is worth a visit if you have any interest in the subject at all. The pictures, including marvelous color photos of the original 1965 White House pickets, can be accessed by clicking the "Memorabilia" tab to the left on the home page of the website.

Much more interesting and often heart-breaking, however, is the material under the tab "Correspondence," also to the left on the home page. These materials have been photocopied and are presented in their original form. Some highlights:

* In 1961, Kameny founded the Mattachine Society in Washington, D.C., an association devoted to ending discrimination against gays. He wrote polite letters to members of Congress introducing himself, explaining the purposes of the Society, and offering to meet with them. Rep. Paul C. Jones (D-MO) responded by scribbling the following note on the letter and returning it to Kameny: "I am unalterably opposed to your proposal and cannot see how any person in his right mind can condone the practices which you would justify. Please do not contaminate my mail with such filthy trash."

* Rep. Charles Chamberlain (R-MI), who now has a federal building named after him in Grand Rapids, responded to the same letter from Kameny with this: "Your letter of August 28 has been received, and in reply may I state unequivocally that in all my six years of service in the United States Congress I have not received such a revolting communication."

* A letter from the APA in 1963, ten years before it would remove homosexuality from its list of disorders, refusing even to meet with Kameny's group or to "publicize your meetings."

* Vice President Hubert Humphrey writing to Kameny in 1965 that federal civil rights laws are not "relevant to the problems of homosexuals."

* A 1962 letter to an employee of the Library of Congress (!) informing him that the library had "received a report concerning you," asking whether he had performed a homosexual act, whether he was attracted to other men, whether he had been in bed with men, and whether he "enjoyed embracing them." The letter concludes, "I am quite shook-up over this matter" and requests an interview with the employee as soon as possible. I can only imagine how terrified the employee must have been.

* A 1962 letter from Kameny to Attorney General Robert Kennedy asking him to "halt immediately" the FBI's investigation and infiltration of Mattachine and the interrogation of its members.

* A memorandum from the FBI (headed by J. Edgar Hoover at the time) urging that the Attorney General not respond to Kameny's letter and justifying its harrassment of Mattachine as part of the investigation of "crimes perpetrated by sex deviates," as homosexuals were commonly called at the time. Alas, large parts of the memo are blacked out.

* A 1973 memo from Kameny to his supporters describing the sequence of events that led the APA to remove homosexuality from its list of disorders or, in his words, "'curing' us all, instantaneously, en masse, in one fell swoop, by semantics and by vote, rather than by therapy."

There's much more on the website.

Let's hope the whole archives will be publicly available soon. You can help make that happen by donating to the effort. To do that, contact Francis at ccfrancis@aol.com.

The headline of the lead story in the Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco's gay newspaper of record, said it all: "Gay Families Join Easter Egg Roll."

We've come a long way from the Stonewall riot, the sexual liberationism of the 1970s, and "We're Here, We're Queer, Get Used to It." There are unmistakable signs that the emphasis on relationships and families in gay life, politics, and media is having traditionalizing effects on gay culture.

This is evident in the causes and trends that have dominated the gay movement for the past 15 years or so: serving in the military, joining the Boy Scouts, attending services at large gay-friendly churches, and above all, gay marriage.

This development can even be seen in America's capital of gay sexual liberation, San Francisco. Recent stories in the B.A.R. and the Los Angeles Times document the beginnings of a change in attitudes toward open and explicit displays of sexuality in the Castro. The change is being spurred especially by gay families with children, who want a more family-friendly environment and are chafing at a culture they see as saturated with sex.

According to a recent report in the L.A. Times:

In the Castro, restaurants oriented toward gay singles now offer child-size portions and even highchairs. One coffee shop features a hot chocolate "Castro Kids Special," a popular item during the morning rush that the owners call the "stroller hour."

At Cliff's Variety store, children shop for toy unicorns and jasmine-scented clay putty alongside cross-dressers perusing feather boas and rhinestone tiaras....

Last year, a lesbian mother of two, now 6 and 2, complained about a sadomasochistic tableau in a clothing shop window that featured a male mannequin chained to a toilet. "As an adult I find this disgusting," she wrote in an e-mail to city officials. "As a parent I find it unconscionable."

Just a couple of months ago, the B.A.R. ran several stories about a life-sized wooden statue of an aroused naked man that was displayed in a Castro storefront. Parents in the neighborhood objected that it should not be visible to children who pass by on their way to and from school. After police got involved, the owner reluctantly covered the statue's private parts.

Some business owners are sensitive to families' concerns. A lesbian mother reported to the Times that a clothing store manager helpfully warned her about taking her 12-year-old daughter into a back room where "suggestive leather outfits were displayed." With more children in the neighborhood, she predicted, "businesses that accommodate the sensibilities of families will survive, while those that are less child-friendly will not."

"Our kids need a place in the community," said July Appel, executive director of an organization for gay families and a lesbian mother of two. "The Castro is big enough for everyone. Gay cruising has its place. But so do playgrounds."

The trend is being felt beyond commercial venues, reaching into the heart of gay organizations and events. The annual gay pride parade in San Francisco, by far the largest in the country, now provides a children's area with licensed day care. This year's parade will include a float celebrating gay families, complete with children singing Village People songs.

At the gay community center, nudity is now forbidden in the hallways-requiring bondage classes to stay behind closed doors. "Twenty years ago we couldn't have had such a rule," the center's director, Thom Lynch, told the Times. "People would have fought it."

These changes in San Francisco reflect larger national trends in gay life. According to the 2000 Census, there are about 594,000 same-sex "unmarried partner" households, almost evenly split between gay male and lesbian couples. The Census figure is almost certainly an undercount since many gay couples probably reported their status as "boarders" or "roommates" rather than as "unmarried partners."

Lots of children are being raised by these gay couples. Of the reported female partners, more than a third are raising children. Of the reported male partners, more than a fifth are raising children. That's about 162,000 same-sex households in the U.S. raising children. This number, too, is almost certainly an undercount.

Once we include single gay people raising children, reasonable estimates of the total number of children in the U.S. being raised by gay parents (singles and couples) range from one million to two million kids. By all accounts, the number of gay families is growing.

The effect of all this on gay culture is inescapable. Stable relationships have a settling effect on people. Saturday nights become an opportunity to stay home with your partner watching DVD's instead of another chance for a furtive sexual encounter.

Children encourage yet more domestication. Aside from the practical and time-consuming work that goes into raising kids, which reduces one's energy and opportunities for libertinism, parents tend to be more concerned than single people about a community's moral environment. It's turning out that gay parents can be just as concerned about these matters as straight parents.

"Many gay people once referred to couples with children as 'breeders,' a term with considerable bite to it," the director of the city's gay community center observed. "It's rarely used anymore. Now many gays are breeders as well."

We're here, we're families, let the Easter Egg Roll begin.

In a 1980 essay entitled "The Boys on the Beach," conservative writer Midge Decter described the gay men who summered at Fire Island in the 1960s:

No households of wives and children requiring security; no entailments of school bills, doctor and dentist bills; no lifetime of acquiring the goods needed for family welfare and the goods desired for family entertainment, with a margin left over for that greatest of all heterosexual entailments, the Future: no such households burdened the overwhelmingly vast majority of homosexuals.

Homosexuality, argued Decter, is a flight from adult responsibility. Heterosexual men who accept their share of the burden to raise the next generation feel "mocked," especially by gay men, because male "homosexuality paints them with the color of sheer entrapment." Being gay, she concluded, means "taking oneself out of the tides of ordinary mortal existence."

From early on in Brokeback Mountain, the Oscar-contending film by director Ang Lee, I found myself thinking about Decter's essay.

The basic story is by now familiar: two young men, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), meet and fall in love in 1963 while tending sheep in the mountains of Wyoming. Subsequently, they each get married and have kids but get together a couple of times a year to go "fishing," the euphemism they give their wives for the periodic renewal of their affair. The story ends in 1983.

There's much to admire in this film. Ennis and Jack bust stereotypes of gay men. They aren't effeminate. When they meet, they are modern "cowboys" who live on profanity, fighting, country music, beer, and hard work for low pay. Yet their masculinity is also not the posed hyper-masculinity of leather, Levi, and uniform fetish scenes.

There's no mention of Stonewall, Harvey Milk, or even San Francisco. It's a welcome corrective to the urban-centered study of gay life in America.

For the most part we do not see sensationalized homophobia. That would be too easy. Instead, we see the everyday contempt for gays that still suffuses life in much of the country. Disdain for homosexuals mostly comes to Ennis and Jack in the sneers of others and in their own shame.

Still, the film-or more precisely, the gay reaction to it-offers some support for the hoary notion that homosexuality is "taking oneself out of the tides of ordinary mortal existence." Critics have rushed to praise Brokeback Mountain as a universal love story. Perhaps that's true, but it's not the whole story.

It's almost never mentioned that their affair is juxtaposed to the consequences of neglecting life's obligations. The first time Ennis and Jack have sex they shirk their responsibility to watch the flock. That night, a sheep is killed by a wolf; the aftermath is graphically depicted. A large portion of the flock is ultimately lost while they frolic.

More importantly, in their occasional fishing retreats, Ennis and Jack leave behind families. They are adulterers. This doesn't seem so terrible in the case of Jack, whose cartoonish wife is obsessed with her career and her press-on nails. But in the case of Ennis the result is poignant. Rushing out of the house to meet Jack, Ennis bodily passes off his two daughters to his wife (Michelle Williams), who stoically bears the burden left by a homosexual fleeing his entrapment. Eventually they divorce.

The film speaks powerfully to the sense of lost love and opportunity every closeted gay person must feel. "Heartbreaking" is not too strong a word to describe the loss this film confronts us with. But it's difficult to buy the widespread idea that the love between Jack and Ennis is an unvarnished good thing made tragic only by a homophobic world.

Part of the reason is that the love story itself is a bit strained. Hollywood delights in acting of the stumbling-and-mumbling sort (think James Dean and Marlon Brando) because it is thought to convey authenticity. Ledger in particular nails this style. But the spare dialogue between Jack and Ennis puts a lot of interpretive pressure on the meaningful glances they exchange.

Their sexual intimacy seems contrived. The sex-full of wrestling and snorting-is the kind that a person who's neither gay nor a cowboy imagines gay cowboys must have.

But the deeper reason their love doesn't completely register is that every time they go off together one is left wondering, what about the kids? What Ennis and Jack experience as an exhilarating liberation from the mundane and the stifling is for their families an abandonment. Ennis at least talks about living up to his familial obligations, but in truth he's checked out of them almost from the start.

For these reasons, I couldn't quite join in the symphony of sniffles I heard in the theater at the undeniably sad end of the film.

Yes, the world around Ennis and Jack channeled them into unhappy heterosexual lives. All concerned-including their families-would have been better off if that hadn't happened. By itself, that's a powerful argument against homophobia.

I don't have good answers to the problems confronting Ennis and Jack in their time and circumstance. I only have more questions than are currently being asked. Once families have been formed, do the interests of those families count for anything at all? Do we think Ennis and Jack have no obligation except to fulfill their own deepest desires? Do we really believe that the only tragedy in the film is the thwarted love of these two men? Why is nobody in the gay community even considering the moral complexity Brokeback Mountain presents?

Which brings us back to Midge Decter. Much that's happened in the past quarter-century has thoroughly discredited her view of homosexuality as escapism. She was wrong about gays even then, and she's more wrong now. But you would not know that from the sentimental and myopic reaction to this film, which sees in a multi-layered calamity only a beautiful but doomed gay romance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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