Most people are already on our side

We just have to let them know it

October 6, 2006

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

by Rep. Barney Frank

FOR THE GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

While serving as an ambulance driver during the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell was shot in the neck. When people congratulated him on his good luck at having recovered from this, he very sensibly replied that he believed that people who had never been shot in the neck in the first place were even luckier than he.

That is an appropriate thing to keep in mind when we discuss the history of the fight of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people against the prejudice that has blighted so many lives. But no one should expect us to be grateful for this fact: people who were never subjected to a vi-

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cious prejudice in the first place are the ones who should be grateful, not those of us who have fought hard to diminish prejudice but still encounter it.

When I said above that we had made this progress in forty years, I was referring to the political history of LGBT people in this country. Obviously there are personal and cultural aspects to our lives and the history of those extend much further back. But few political movements in America have a more clear-cut starting point than our fight against sexual orientation and gender identification prejudice. I know this personally.

Beginning in January 1968, I served as the executive assistant to the mayor of Boston, with a particular responsibility for dealing with issues that were important to liber-

als. I worked hard on the rights of women, on racial equality, on the rights of workers (for example, we supported Cesar Chavez's boycotts) and on the then-nascent environmental movement.

One area where I did no political work was in the fight against homophobia, obviously, not because I was unsympathetic or uninterested, but because there simply was no such effort being waged in Boston, or indeed anywhere else in America.

The Stonewall resistance in 1969 clearly triggered a movement in which LGBT people, having participated in the movements against inequality regarding race and gender, finally said: What about us. Having left Boston for Washington for one year from June of 1971 to June of 1972, I returned as a candidate for state representative to find a new but vigorous political movement of gay men and lesbians that had not existed when I left.

While I did not personally publicly acknowledge being gay until May of 1987, I did join the fight in 1972 and in December of that year, having been elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, I filed for the first time in Massachusetts history what were then called gay rights bills as a legislator who strongly supported them, and not simply as an automatic passthrough of a constituent request.

The short summary of my view is that if you had asked me at any point in the past 34 years to predict what the state of our rights would have been three years down the road, I would have been too pessimistic.

Prejudice is not that deeply held

I realize that many LGBT activists today feel beleaguered by the flood of anti-marriage amendments that have sadly passed in a number of states, and to them speaking of progress may seem illusory. But that is the paradox of being involved in a movement committed to profound social change: By

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definition, at any given moment we will be engaged in an uphill fight. It is our job to change deeply held feelings although I must say that one of the happy discoveries we have made in my view is that these prejudices were not nearly as deeply held as many people thought. But it is one thing to change opinion in general; it is another to persuade members of a majority who do not feel the pain of the victims of discrimination that longstanding social practices should be changed in accordance with that senti-

ment.

The bad fact that change has not come nearly quickly enough, and that prejudice still blights the lives of many, shouldn't blind us to the other fact: that progress has come. The reason is not, as I said above, so that we can be grateful to a society that is less biased against us than it used to be, but rather because assessing whether or not one has made progress, and in particular understanding how that progress was made, is essential for figuring out the strategy best used going forward.

The best way to measure progress is to look back to 1962, when John Kennedy asked the Congress of the United States to toughen that part of American immigration law that aimed at excluding all gay men and lesbians from coming to the United States, even as tourists. The language in the law that did that was old-fashioned, and to avoid being offensively explicit, it called for us to be excluded on the grounds that we were people "of a psychopathic personality."

Fearful that the liberal Warren court might not hold this as a strong enough barrier against us, John Kennedy asked the Congress to add language more strictly referring to sexual deviance. After Kennedy's tragic murder, Lyndon Johnson took up where he left off. In 1965, he persuaded an extraordinarily liberal Congress--one elected in reaction to Barry Goldwater's candidacy-to

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Afternoon or

afterhours? Comfortable or kinky? Caloria

Continued on page 10

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