James Kirchick, who’s at the Brookings Institution, has an
article in the June 28 issue of The Atlantic, which is bound to piss off
a whole lot of gay folks. I know, because two of my closest friends responded
to my positive review of the article, pissed off, kind of.
Kirchick argues that gays have made so much progress of late
(who can deny that!) that we really ought to lighten up on the world, stop making
demands for wedding cakes, for example, with the same vehemence we used in
demanding rights in housing and employment.
I’ve been on both sides of this argument. The angry gay that
still lives inside me still wants to roar that the battle isn’t done until the
last enemy is dead. That wedding cakes aren't the point – the point is that a
company doing business in America has no right to deny any customer who comes
into their shop.
The less easily riled part of me (there really is one) wants
us all to acknowledge that we live in a complex world of conflicting desires,
and that we accomplish more in the long run by following common sense,
showing a willingness to compromise, and above all by keeping things in perspective
and reacting to wrongs with proportional responses. For me, that means
screaming bloody murder and rallying the troops until the bastards take their
boot off your neck, but when told some twit doesn’t want to bake you a wedding
cake, taking your business elsewhere and reminding yourself you’re an ass if
you buy a cake from somebody who hates you enough to spit in the batter.
There’s a bigger reason, actually, why I think you don’t
fight every battle, don’t push the enemy to the wall whenever they look at you
cross-eyed. I believe prejudice comes from fear and ignorance and the goal, if even
remotely possible, should be conversion, not fighting till one of you drops. The
belief that there is something “inherently wrong” with homosexuality, to put it
in traditional Roman Catholic terms, comes from a starting point in the dark
ages, from the justified Hebrew conviction that there were enemies all around
and one had to make rules that would value life and survival at all costs. The
tribe (or tribes) came close a number of times to being eliminated from the
face of the earth. I have no trouble understanding how they would want to make
making babies an absolute good. From that comes a prohibition on
non-reproductive sex: no prostitution, no masturbation, no birth control. Made sense at the time, probably, just as
lopping off the hands of thieves made sense when, as nomads, they didn’t have
the means to lock them up and had to go on living with them.
Carrying on this practice of prohibiting non-reproductive
sex in this day and age makes no more sense than lopping off the hands of
thieves. Not only that, but just as a cut can get infected, the notion of
prohibiting non-reproductive sex got infected with the notion that the rule
comes not from the collective wisdom of society, but from an Almighty God who
makes laws and hands them to community leaders on mountaintops. And, by the way,
once a rule is made, it cannot be changed.
These are the vicious aspects of organized religion, the
stuff of bigotry and nonsense. You don’t get rid of that overnight. And it
strikes me that being smart is the way to go. Fight them with life experience
and reason, not with bigger sticks and stones. Kirchick’s point is well taken
here: the word has gotten around that one’s sexual orientation has virtually
nothing to do with whether you’re a decent sort. Tossing LGBT people in the
same hopper as rapists, murderers and thieves is cruel and stupid, and those
who advocate such things need to be exposed as such.
I actually had this argument with someone, a religious
person, who thought telling wedding cake bakers they couldn’t refuse customers
on religious grounds was an assault on their religion. Our conversation went
something like this.
Me: I absolutely agree. If you’re a baker, there’s no reason
why you should have to bake cakes for Jews.
Him: Jews? We’re not talking about Jews! We’re talking about
homosexuals!
Me: But don’t you agree that there are Christians who
believe that the Jews killed Christ, and maybe they don’t want to bake cakes
for murderers? Don’t they have the right to refuse on religious grounds too?
Him: It’s not the same thing. There’s nothing wrong with
being Jewish.
Me: Says you. Christians historically have had lots of
problems with Jews. Martin Luther hated them for not converting. His prejudice
was taken up by the Nazis. On religious grounds.
Him: But that was ignorance. And we don’t accept Nazis these
days.
Me: And some day you will look on your prejudice against gay
people the same way we now look at anti-semitism – a set of convictions we are
way overdue in shedding.
I’m not sure how persuasive I was, but I like to think at
least I might have planted some seeds of doubt. The widespread acceptance of
gays these days suggests that those seeds have taken hold in much of the
population.
But back to the wedding cake question, or more to the point,
the issue of how adamant we need to be in demanding gay rights for all,
absolutely, and now. Kirchick ticks off some of the many examples of progress
in most of America toward gay liberation, including the astonishing possibility
that a gay man might actually be a candidate for top office in 2020. I’d actually
argue the new willingness of many macho men to engage in gay sex because it’s “no
big deal” is a much bigger indicator of change, but let’s move on.
The implication is that, by focusing on the half-empty glass, we are missing the wonderful opportunity to pop
some champagne corks, and that makes us dull and humorless instead of the kind
of people we were meant to be: people who sing and dance and live life in technicolor
to the fullest.
I’m quite aware of the fact that I’m speaking as a gay man
living in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is thought of by much of the world
as a gay Mecca. And it’s easy to overlook what it’s like to be gay in places less exposed to diversity, where anybody different from the norm, not just gays, are at
risk of being shunned and faced with actual violence. To say nothing of the parts of the world where gay
people face state-sponsored homophobia. Gay liberation has advanced only in pockets around the world, and the battle is far from over. Liberation is
like democracy. It’s a journey, and never a destination. We’re always “working
on it” and will probably never see it completed.
Kirchick’s harshest charge is that many in the LBGT
community are being hysterical about homophobia. They are overreacting, he
says.
He’s right. Some are. But what’s the point of being gay if
you can’t be a hysterical queen now and again. It’s a real part of the culture.
Let the hysterics be. They perform a service. Progress goes hand in hand with a step or two back now and then. Good that somebody’s
paying attention. Blessed are the watchdogs who keep us all aware that we stop
being vigilant at our own peril.
Mostly, I draw from this Kirchick article what I draw from
virtually all sociological descriptions – the fact that we’re all looking at
our part of the elephant and assuming incorrectly we know the beast in its
entirety. The way around that, it seems to me, is not to argue over who’s got
the story right, but to keep adding to our understanding of the story. Do the
kids in your life know who Frank Kameny and Harvey Milk and Bayard Rustin are?
If not, get off your ass and make sure they appreciate both the trajectory of
gay liberation and the distance left to travel. That much we can all do.
Read Kirchick, I say, as a guy who’s focusing on the glass
as half-full, not as the last word in the battle for LGBT liberation.
Only a piece of the story.
(And what’s wrong with drinking champagne more often?)
HAPPY 50th ANNIVERSARY OF STONEWALL, everybody!
