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| Kevin Kühnert |
If you share my view that the world is going to hell in a
handbasket – an expression which, I realize, marks me as 110 years old – you
will probably appreciate the occasional suggestion that comes down the pike
that the news is not all bad. I felt the uplift when I read the other day that
Kevin Kühnert, the young socialist in Germany currently making the rounds
on all the talk shows on German television as the great hope of the Socialist
Party, just came out as gay.
I’m marked as old not just because I tend to use expressions
like the handbasket one – or think in terms of something “coming down the
pike,” but because I still have a keen awareness of how the world has changed
since homophobia was as much a part of the fabric of American society as
separate drinking fountains for blacks and whites and the custom my mother
followed when she signed my report cards with my father’s name with a “Mrs.”
tacked to the front of it. I remember when.
And I’m now in a place in my life where future shock is a constant companion,
as I imagine it must be to everyone my age.
“I thought people like that killed themselves,” was the
attitude of the day toward LGBT people when I was growing up in the 1940s and
50s. No member of modern society would say that anymore, thank God. We’ve
progressed. Mightily.
I shared the happy news to some of my gay friends yesterday that one of our tribe had made a
splash on the German political scene by coming out. One friend wrote back, “We’ve come a long way since
Ernst Röhm was the model for homosexuals.” Words to that effect. He clearly
meant it as a way of saying thank God we’ve risen out of the darkness, but I
zeroed in on the use of the word “model” in connection with this thug who was
close enough to Hitler to call him Adolf, long before “Mein Führer” became the prescribed form of
address. Röhm created the SA, the “brown shirts,” a private police force to
protect the Nazis as they roamed the country in the days of the Weimar Republic, hunting down communists, Jews, journalists and editors and university
professors and anyone else conspicuously hostile to the Nazi Party. Their
methods were violent and commonly lethal. Röhm was the very essence of National
Socialism. He was also homosexual.
I wrote back that my first impulse in reading the suggestion
in my friend’s note that “we’ve come a long way” was not to celebrate progress
but to want to go back to beating the drum on the importance of keeping the
distinction alive that “gay” does not mean the same thing as “homosexual.”
Homosexual is a neutral term to describe a sexuality. Gay is a political term.
Anybody can be homosexual. One has to earn the right to be called gay.
I am a great fan of Tony Kushner, as a man and as a writer.
You may remember the scene in the movie Munich
where Golda Meir has set up a clandestine assassination team to hunt down the
killers of Israel’s Olympic Team who were massacred at the Summer Olympics in
Munich in 1972. A profoundly moving scene is the one in which one of the
revenge killer team finally tracks down the man he is assigned to kill and finds he can’t pull the trigger. He hears the voice of his grandmother, and she is
saying, “It isn’t Jewish.”
Jews don’t kill, his grandmother believed. Good Jews don’t
murder people.
By the same token, I believe that gays cannot kill people
either. They cannot support an Adolf Hitler, cannot dedicate themselves to
intimidation, cannot become fascists. Homosexuals can; gays can’t.
We’ve merged the terms and it is now common to hear people
substitute “gay” for “homosexual,” thinking they are simply bringing their
language up to date, as they do when they say “African-American” instead of “Negro.”
There are similarities, of course. Both are attempts to shed the negative
connotations of a word used to identify a disparaged class. But whereas
African-American is largely the substitution of one neutral term for another
(there was never anything inherently wrong with Negro - the problem was always with the users), gay carries the
additional connotation of pride and a seizure of the power to define oneself by
a political-cultural term rather than a medical one.
The official name for the modern-day socialist party in
Germany is the Sozialdemokratische Partei
Deutschlands (SPD). They are not socialists, strictly speaking, but social
democrats. The SPD is active in 14 of the 16 state governments, and it has ruled in
coalition with the Christian Democrats and Christian Socialists (the CDU and
the CSU, respectively) since the 2013 federal election. It is the oldest party
in Germany, going back to 1863.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, he outlawed the
socialists and had their leaders killed or sent into exile. Only in 1949 did
they regain their earlier power and influence. Social Democrats held the office
of chancellor from 1969 to 1982 and 1998 to 2005. It (the SPD) is the chief
rival of the Union Parties (the CDU and CSU govern “in union” at the federal
level – the CSU in Bavaria and the CDU in the rest of the country), and at the
risk of oversimplification, they represent the kind of right and left division
represented in the U.S. by Republicans and Democrats, the “right” representing
the interests of the corporations and big business, the “left” placing a higher
value on social equity and social justice – including a decent minimum wage and
a fair distribution of wealth. The midpoint of the division is further to the
right in the U.S., but the parallel between the two sides is still valid, I
believe.
Imagine what it would be like if we had a multi-party system
in the United States, with the Republicans taking the place the CDU/CSU holds
in Germany, the Democrats taking the place of the SPD, the Green Party being the
same in both countries, and the left represented in Germany by Die Linke (the Left) and in the U.S. by
the communists. Then imagine we had an additional party – let’s call it the Business Party, which we might propose
as a counterpart to the German Free Democratic Party (FDP), currently shrunk to
such a point they represent only about 10% of the electorate.
Now imagine a new party is created in the U.S. Let’s call
it the Nationalist Party. Its main raison d'être is to keep out immigrants.
Some of their members are relatively moderate, but many of them are
neo-fascists and outwardly racist. And imagine that for the past eight years,
the U.S. has been run by a coalition of Republicans and Democrats, because
neither party won enough votes to go it alone. The Republicans dominated and
the Democrats played the role of Junior Partner in order to get a few jobs
where they might exert influence – the State Department, say.
Over time, the Bernie Sanders Democrats got fed up with what
they saw as the ass-kissing nature of their leaders, all for a few crumbs from
the table, and they began leaving the party in droves, many leaving to join up
with the party of the far left.
To make sense of what I’m getting at, note that in the most
recent federal election in Germany, Merkel’s CDU party won only 33% of the
vote, a drop of 8% since the previous election.
The Schulz-led SPD did even worse, with only 20%. And, probably most
disconcerting is the fact that many of the those who fell away from the two
parties went and joined the AfD, who, with 12.6% of the vote got to take seats
in Parliament, where they are free to push their anti-immigrant agenda and
generally wreak havoc with the traditional way of doing things.
I’ve pushed this US/German comparison much too far already,
so I’ll stop. Except to say in the U.S., the hopes of the democratic socialists
were on Bernie Sanders. And the failure of the Hillary Clinton democrats to
inspire general enthusiasm among the Democratic mainstream led in large part to
the rise of the nationalist Donald Trump. (Don’t let my comparisons tempt you
to make too many one-to-one comparisons – I’d hate to have to take
responsibility for that).
And in Germany, the feeling is the old school SPD’s time has
passed and the only way around the horror of watching the nasty folk with their
anti-immigrant agenda take over is a serious infusion of young blood. Ditto
for the U.S., by the way, and even more so when you consider that in addition
to Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda you’d have to add anti-environment,
anti-globalism, anti-abortion, pro-gun and pro-corporate welfare. (And an
obscene level of deception and incompetence, but that’s a story for another
day.)
Enter young Kevin. Cute, if a bit nerdy. Smart as hell.
Articulate. Still in his 20s (he'll turn 30 in July of next year), he plays with the big boys and holds his own.
With the embarrassing showing in the 2016 election, the
ruling coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats looked like it was
going to be over and done with. Socialists were tired of selling out their
principles, and their new leader, Martin Schulz swore he would never work with
Angela Merkel again. He would become the opposition party instead.
I want to keep the focus here on gay accomplishments rather than play amateur political historian, but just to finish the train of thought... fast
forward to today, when the Germans are breathing a sigh of relief that they once
again have a government. The haggling took more than five months and the
only reasonable solution – surprise, surprise – was for the two parties, CDU/CSU and SPD, to go
back into coalition (CDU and CSU being considered as a single union party, remember).
Bad idea, says Kevin. Don’t want to work with the
capitalists. Got to get back to democratic socialist principles. Got to be a
party we can be proud of, the socialists that represented the best of German
political forces – most equitable, most committed to peace and freedom and
equality. The party of Willy Brandt.
No such luck. The SDP caved “for the sake of the country” –
can’t have a country without a government to run it. What can I say?
Kevin accepted defeat gracefully. His day is yet to come.
Merkel is slowing down and the hawks are circling already. Tomorrow is another
day.
Now where am I going with all this, you (if you are still
reading) will no doubt ask yourself. Are you saying that to be gay is to be
leftist? To be a Bernie Sanders supporter and an opponent of both Hillary and
Trump? No, I’m not saying that, although that’s where my heart is. On the
contrary, I want to see gay people everywhere, speaking for conservatives
in their role of keeping progressives honest, as well as for progressives. Much
as I loathe the AfD in Germany, there is a part of me happy to note that one of
its leaders, Alice Weidel, is a lesbian. How she manages that in such a
homophobic environment I can’t tell you. I don’t want to make the mistake of
assuming if you’re not a progressive Klaus Wowereit (the SPD former gay mayor
of Berlin) you’re a Nazi Ernst Röhm,
and Wowereit has more than a few bungles under his belt, so I have to assume at
some level, Ms. Weidel has some integrity. Haven’t seen it, but I’m sure it’s
there.
A better example
of good guys on what is in my view the wrong side is Jens Spahn, one of the
people many consider might make a good successor in the CDU to Angela Merkel.
Another well-spoken, articulate gay man, he has devoted much of his energy to
health care in Germany. He is currently part of the Finance Ministry, a job
many consider a proving ground for the chancellorship. A practicing Roman
Catholic, he nonetheless used his influence within his party to push for
same-sex marriage in Germany. A hero of mine, in other words, even if his
efforts went nowhere. On the other hand, he’s on record for his criticism of
Merkel’s refugee policy as being too „humanitarian“ somehow. Did I say hero?
OK, maybe not hero.
To balance off Jens Spahn's position to the right of the SPD, there is Volker Beck to the left of the SPD. Beck is a
member of the Green Party. Beck went down in flames, unfortunately, when he was
caught playing with crystal meth. But not before leaving parliament to a
standing ovation for his efforts to bring about same-sex marriage. A real
tragedy. Beck was the real advocate for gay rights in Parliament and is known
as the father of the German Registered Partnership Act, the forerunner to
same-sex marriage. I won’t list his many superb contributions (you can find them here) to human rights,
inside and outside of Germany. Nor will I bang on about his wrong-headedness,
in my view, in regard to Palestinians. He’s a politician. He takes stands. Some
you support. Some you want to throw eggs at him for.
My point is that
gays are now at the heart of our modern political systems. They are not heroes,
even when they perform what we consider to be ennobling acts. They don’t have
to be heroic all the time to be entitled to call themselves gay, as opposed to
homosexual. But they have to have a gay consciousness, have to seek to advance
the cause of gay liberation in some corner of their brain, whether they are
heroic or wrong-headed.
At the same time,
just as I feel a kinship with a Jew who tells me "it is not Jewish" to
assassinate one’s enemies, no matter how much they may deserve to pay for
unspeakable crimes with their lives, I feel we owe it to the likes of Harry
Hay, Frank Kameny, Bayard Rustin, Harvey Milk, Cleve Jones and Barney Frank, just to name only a select few
of the many American contributers to the
welfare of LGBT people over time, to keep the word gay a word we can use with
pride.
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