GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

❤

SEPTEMBER 2, 1994

SPEAK OUT

How things stand for gays in America

by Richard D. Mohr

This period, tumbling between the celebration of gay being at Stonewall 25 and the fall elections, is perhaps an apt time for general reflection on the state of lesbians and gays in America. What are we doing? What is to become of us? Where are we headed?

I, in particular, have been prompted to such musing because a number of lesbian and gay pundits-people I respect-have found my political writings unwarrantedly gloomy. The pundits are right to point out that some progress, gradual progress, is being made here and there in lots of different, if sometimes small, ways.

But gays and lesbians are naive if we adopt the American myth that the future is a single, unbent, unwavering vector of betterment. For we know-should know-from history that gay life can take hairpin turns for the worse, as occurred during the early 1930s both under right-wing populist ascendency in Germany and under left-wing populist ascendency in the U.S. led by Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is ironic-which is to say totally predictable—that gays should have had our worst political year since Stonewall during the very year that another populist Democrat took the White House-this time with massive organized gay help.

Yet, despite the military disaster and the referendum drives, change is in the air. Paradoxically, America has experienced some sort of ground shift on gay issues over the last couple of years. What is it? To sloganize: lesbians and gays are winning the cultural wars, even as we are losing the political ones. The good news is that in the long run, social practices, political power, and received opinions align themselves with broader cultural forms and values-the general body of ideas by which a civilization defines itself and

whose maintenance civilization's life.

constitutes a

Take, for example, the changing relation between the Bible and the institution of slavery. When slavery was a defining part of culture, certain passages of the Bible were interpreted as supporting the social practice; slavery didn't stop because people ceased interpreting the Bible as approving of it; rather, when civilization gave up on slavery, people ceased using the Bible passages to justify it. The passages became cultural dead letters-addressee unknown. The Bible didn't change, the culture did. The bad news is that in general, culture is a slowpoke.

Still, the clearest sign that gays are winning the cultural wars is the near total collapse in the mainstream of the taboo covering the discussion of gay issues. The New York Times now carries more gay news than does the Advocate. Everybody—except Bill Clinton-is talking about gay issues. The effect of this structural change in public life cannot be overestimated. Taboos encourage, indeed enforce, the aping of opinions from one person to the next, causing them to circulate independently of both critical assessment and authentic feeling. With the collapse of the taboo, straight people can for the first time really listen to gay lives, change their views, and in turn express publicly their own real feelings.

Also with the taboo's collapse, for the first time there will be a press toward the development of coherent, rational public policy on gay issues. Public policy, like God, abhors a vacuum. And reason, argument, and justice are all on the side of gays. In this cultural shift, the role of gay ideas and of arguments for gays' justice is not so much to change Average Joe's beliefs but to provide a seed crystal around which a new configuration of cultural forms and values may grow. Then

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Average Joe will change his mind.

The Right senses and fears the cultural shift underway: just look where Christian Supremacists and other Rightists are investing their energies. They are not trying to "punish the sin" by restoring sodomy laws to states without them. Rather they want to get "the sinner" to shut up. They need to reestablish the taboo, seeing it as essential to their world. Thus, they focus on representations of gay life. They target museum exhibitions, public television, school curricula, gay books, and our presence in parades. Their referendum drives too are part of this pattern—— attempts to sweep the whole "gay thing" off the political agenda, out of the arena of public discussion. But, however successful as politics, their strategies necessarily trip over themselves as a cultural project. For the more they talk about things gay, the more the taboo collapses. The more they debate in public, the more they have to appeal to the tenets of reasoned discourse.

Our own political strategies can be improved, if we understand that political results follow cultural norms. We should view politics not narrowly as a means of garnering votes but broadly as a way of transforming culture. A placard that says "No on 2: Stop Discrimination" does no educating, changes no culture. Placards that say. "I'm gay" or "My son is gay” or "Straights for Gay Rights" do both.

In this broad view, much that we might not at first think of as political actually is so. Urvashi Vaid recently moaned that gay youth, though leading open lives, are completely apolitical. But these brave youth are key to culture's change on gay issues. Thanks to them, nearly everyone knows someone for whom being gay is an issue. Their measure has made the gay movement achieve critical mass.

And some gay critics rued the fact that virtually all the mainstream media coverage of Stonewall 25-though extensive-was "soft news": personality profiles and entertainment coverage, nothing political, nothing about gay rights. But "soft news" changes culture. A newspaper feature in "Lifestyles" about a lesbian couple who run a real estate business is at least as culturally important as a gay parade pictured on page one. The parade is the extraordinary; the lesbians are America's neighbors. To acknowledge their everydayness is to change the everyday.

Will Rogers was probably right when he said "People's minds are changed through observation, not through argument." Certainly, arguing Bible passages with fundamentalists has no point or prospect. But I think Will Rogers was wrong when he also claimed that "We do more talking progress than we do progressing." On gay issues at least, America is taking the talking cure.

Richard D. Mohr is a professor of phil losophy at the University of Illinois in Urbana. His most recent book is A More Perfect Union: Why Straight America Must Stand Up for Gay Rights (Beacon Press).

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

Volume 10, Issue 5

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Correction

Two photos in the August 5 issue, both of softball players; and three in the August 19 issue, of the Gallery Hop, the Cycle Club, and a softball player, lacked photographer's credits. All five photos were by Charles Warnecke. The Chronicle regrets the error.

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