JULY 4, 1997 GAY PEOPLE's ChroniCLE

SPEAK OUT

As Pride '97 passes, we are down in the doldrums

by Paul Varnell

Do you have the sense that there is a kind of lassitude, even a kind of malaise in the gay community right now? It is summer, of course, but it is more than that.

It is hard to escape the impression that we are in a relatively quiet period now, with no major projects demanding attention and no obvious opponents constituting an immediate threat.

And yet, it is safe to expect that this year's Gay Pride celebrations will be adjudged the biggest and best-attended and most festive ever. There may be a link.

Last year there was a flurry of activity and interest surrounding passage of the Defense of Marriage Act, and the political maneuvering to bring the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) to a vote and its narrow defeat in the U.S. Senate. Last year there was the election campaign, such as it

was.

Last year there was the excitement over Supreme Court Justice Kennedy's broadly written Romer v. Evans decision striking down Colorado's Amendment 2.

But this year ENDA was reintroduced, late in the session, to yawns. It will pass some day, even in the House, but not in this Congress or the next, no matter what we do. Expectations for initiatives by President Bill Clinton have been greatly scaled back, almost to invisibility. To a degree, our activism has now been professionalized, handed over to full-time paid functionaries in national and state organizations, so the rest of us don't feel we have to do anything.

Romer is now safely in place, a broad if vague precedent permitting, or forcing, the Supreme Court to block any egregious legal threat to our equality, so we have less to worry about there. The Hawaii Supreme

Court seems poised to order the state to recognize gay marriages, but that process is completely out of our hands; all we can do is watch.

Ellen came out this year, and that was exciting, perhaps the year's high point, but that too is over. She received high ratings, she got renewed, but that coming-out was largely driven not by viewers (unless by their absence earlier in the season) but by Ellen DeGeneres herself. Once again, we were appreciative spectators, but spectators still.

And lurking powerfully in the background is the astonishing success of protease inhibitors in providing relative health and longevity to thousands of people with AIDS (at least temporarily), a fact which greatly reduces the sense of urgency about the disease and about prevention efforts. As witness: Attendance at displays of the AIDS Memorial Quilt dropped by 50 percent in the last year. In sum, the sense is that things aren't so bad-in fact they are pretty good, that there is progress, but the progress is now in the hands of others, and that the whole process is pretty much running on its own steam, on its own internal dynamic. This is not a farfetched notion.

Writing in Commentary last November, aging neo-conservative polemicist Norman Podhoretz pointed with dismay to the “almost complete triumph of the gay rights agenda and its sustaining attitudes in the institutions of the culture--from the universities and the arts to the media of information and entertainment-and even to an astonishing extent in the churches."

And the "polity," Podhoretz says-by which he means the political decision-making bodies—is slowly following the culture's lead on the issue of gay legitimacy, rather

than the polity guiding and controlling the culture, as he thinks should be the case. Well, that is what happens in a free, capitalist society, Norman, like it or not.

So when we all go out to Gay Pride celebrations, as many of us already have this year, we are going not so much to a struggle or crusade or "movement," but joining a party, a kind of gay Mardi Gras. We go out to celebrate what we might call a slowmotion victory.

There is a little more to it than that, of

course.

Gay advocates for years have sought to bring about changes in the laws and public attitudes to lessen the political and psychological burdens on gays and reduce the costs and risks of coming out. That in turn enabled more people to come out, which in turn led more people to know someone gay, which helped lessen prejudice, which in turn enabled yet more people to come out.

This process, too, has its own dynamic, continuously fostering its own progress as ever greater numbers of people decide to

come out.

It is hard to think of any social circumstances or political actions that could inhibit the continuous expansion of this process.

This makes us something of a problem to our opponents. If they ignore us, people come out. If they try to attack us, gays come out "mad as hell" and start getting involved in defending themselves. So here we are in ever greater numbers, no matter what.

In a way, this is also what the gay pride celebrations are about: us just being us. Nothing so militant or defensive—as “Gay Pride," just gay being, gay satisfactoriness, an odd combination of assertiveness and mellowness saying rather casually, "Being gay is not a problem for me." And tacitly adding, with a slightly raised eyebrow, "Is it

some sort of problem for you?”

If this is true, it is very interesting and perhaps unique. It is hard to think of another example of a group of people who celebrate their own bourgeoisification, their own assimilation into society. Perhaps St. Patrick's Day parades in the United States do that for the once-stigmatized Irish, but I doubt if most Irish-Americans really experience them that way.

It is a misleading use of language, of course, to use terms such as gay "assimilation." Gays never came from somewhere else and sought to be assimilated. Rather, we are born and grow up assimilated and seek, if anything, to be openly gay. For many years that almost necessarily involved "deassimilating": moving to a large city where there was already a supportive gay community, or at least where there was a degree of privacy and anonymity.

But now, many gays are apparently doing that far less than they were. Now they are coming out and staying pretty much where they are, because they perceive that it is relatively safe and comfortable, and there is ample support directly from the general culture as well as from friends, neighbors, and relatives.

Gay activists have always said, “We are everywhere." And like those Polaroid photographs that develop while you watch them, those people "everywhere" are becoming increasingly evident to everyone. Perhaps more than anything, that is what gay pride celebrations are about. Those people are our success story.

Paul Varnell is a columnist for Chicago's gay weekly Windy City Times, and a contributor to the anthology Beyond Queer, edited by Bruce Bawer.

DANCIN

the streets

CLE V E L ELA AND

LIVE

ENTERTAINMENT

DANCIN' WILL FEATURE THE FOLLOWING GUESTS

WITH A SPECIAL APPEARANCE BY:

LOGIC RECORDING ARTIST

MARTHA WASH

BIG MGMT. RECORDING ARTIST SHANNON CHAMPION RECORDING ARTIST SANDY B. SVENGALI RECORDING ARTIST PRETTY POISON

FROM SAN FRANCISCO:

PANSY DIVISION

FROM CLEVELAND:

DJ DEAN RUFUS

SLAMMIN RECORDING ARTIST BENNY VELEZ

SOMETHING DADA-IMPROV COMEDY THE SWAGGER KINGS

WEDGE

WITH EMCEE MELISSA ROSS

LAKEFRONT LEGEND TWIGGY

MAGNOLIA THUNDERPUSSY

FROM YOUNGSTOWN: IVET

INFORMATION

ADVANCE TICKETS ore $10 ($15 day of eventi

For more information or to charge tickets by phone call the

AIDS TASKFORCE OF GREATER CLEVELAND 216.621.0766 (ext.244)

PLEASE BRING ONE NON-PERISHABLE

FOOD ITEM TO THE EVENT.

GUILTY PARTY-IMPROV COMEDY

FROM DETROIT:

DJ CHUCK ARIDA

MALL "B'

SUNDAY

JULY 13,1997

Located between lakeside and St. Clair Ave.

just West of the Cleveland Convention Center

1:00 TO 10:30 P.M.

Dancin' in the Streets will be held rain or shine! No bottles,cans or coolers Proper I.D. required

ALL PROCEEDS BENEFIT THE AIDS TASKFORCE OF GREATER CLEVELAND WHICH PROVIDES AIDS PREVENTION EDUCATION AND OUTREACH SERVICES

BAR NIGHT SCHEDULE

With

will t

Following

1 ADVANC TICKET

FROM CHICAGO:

im uli

107.9 END

TASKFORCE