The Martin Duberman Reader (44 page)

Many black church leaders, moreover, had long stigmatized AIDS as “a gay thing” and therefore—talk about massive denial—not a black (or Latino) issue. AIDS was not to be discussed from the pulpit, nor information about its treatment made available in the lobby. But it soon became undeniably clear that HIV had increasingly become a disease of color; AIDS decimated the African continent and in this country cut a horrifying swath through black and Latino communities. By 2007, African Americans, just 13 percent of the U.S. population, accounted for more than 50 percent of
new HIV diagnoses, and those in black leadership positions finally proved willing to engage with the issue.

In the interim, President Clinton, having (unlike his predecessors) directly addressed the AIDS crisis and increased funding for research and services early on in his administration, then showed little sustained interest or resolve. Despite the findings of the National Institutes of Health, for example, that needle-exchange programs unquestionably lowered the incidence of AIDS, and despite the support of his own senior health officials (including Secretary Donna E. Shalala) for such programs, Clinton refused federal funding for them. Instead, he signed the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which denied same-sex couples the right to have their unions legalized—thereby serving notice that recent progress in the acceptance of gay people (itself pretty much confined to the most assimilable segment of the gay population) shouldn't be equated with any inevitable march toward first-class citizenship—or even second-class for the truly, proudly different (which is to say, in mainstream lingo, the freaks).

Most gay teenagers didn't need to be reminded that they weren't considered quality goods, but by the midnineties many in the gay world, and particularly in the more tolerant urban areas, did choose to believe that equality was around the corner, bound to happen, that a little more tidying up around the edges—perhaps best done by pushing the freaks as far offstage as possible—and the struggle would be over.

Paralleling the rise of optimism about the goal of converting AIDS to a “manageable disease” was a surge of conviction that as a people we were now unstoppable. Some prominent gay leaders and organizations, and in particular Elizabeth Birch and the influential (largest and wealthiest) Human Rights Campaign, were entirely in accord with the goal of assimilation and with fostering an image of gay people that would accelerate that process. That meant replicating themselves, featuring one segment only of a diverse gay community: mostly white, educated, well-spoken folks who dressed for success and held mainstream values.

Those gay people with left-wing politics saw assimilationism as
defeat and deceit—a misrepresentation of the many different communities that constituted the gay world and a denial of the subversive potential of our distinctive values and perspectives. The lefties didn't want to serve openly in the military; they wanted to destroy the war machine. They didn't want to settle down into traditional marital relationships, nor give them privileged status; they wanted to challenge sexual monogamy, gender stereotyping, and traditional patterns of child rearing.

But left-wing gays had shrunk by the midnineties, in contrast to the early seventies, to a small, nearly silent voice in the community as a whole. The majority of gay people chose to see themselves as “just folks”; their highest aspiration was to join the mainstream, not to challenge its orthodoxies.

Many ACT-UP chapters had ceased to operate by the late 1990s and others had refocused their efforts on the global issue of getting affordable versions of the new drugs to poor countries. By this point the gay movement as a whole had drifted decidedly to the right, with the issues of gay marriage and gays in the military leapfrogging to the top of the agendas of the most powerful movement organizations (and especially the Human Rights Campaign). As early as 1994, during the celebrations of Stonewall's twenty-fifth anniversary, one of the top fund-raising events—to the disgust of everyone one inch left of center—was held on the deck of the aircraft carrier
Intrepid
; for weeks before, ads for credit cards with rainbow flags appeared in the gay male press. That press, incidentally, was itself becoming un-recognizably different from the politically aware publications (
New York Native, QW,
etc.) that had once held sway. By the late nineties, the popular favorites were
Genre
(specializing in poolside swimwear) and
OUT,
which as late as 2008 boasted a five-man fashion department, but not a single literary, theater, or politics editor.

—from
Midlife Queer
(1996) and
Waiting to Land
(2009)

I
n the dozen years since Stonewall, most of the radical goals set by the early gay liberation movement have been diluted or discarded. As our movement has grown in numbers, its initial values have atrophied. Originally, the gay movement strove to speak and act boldly against entrenched privilege based on gender, racial, ethnic, and class discrimination. That commitment has been largely displaced by “liberal” goals and strategies that emphasize the need to work within the established system to secure social tolerance and legal redress.

Worthy goals, to be sure. And ones which we have made some notable progress in advancing in recent years. We've gained greater visibility and protection. We're more “tolerable” to the general public. But at no small cost: the cost of making ourselves over in order better to conform to an acceptable public image, the cost of bending
our energies toward adjusting to mainstream mores, to becoming Good Americans. The inevitable concomitant has been to downplay differences we once proudly affirmed, to discard radical social analysis, soft-pedal our distinctiveness, discourage and deny the very diversity of behavior and lifestyle our conformist society stands most in need of.

This quest for respectability first publicly showed itself in 1982 when we filled the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria—1,000 strong and paying $150 a plate—to celebrate the first annual Human Rights Campaign dinner. Resplendent in our finery, we gave Walter Mondale, chief speaker of the evening, a standing ovation—roared our enthusiasm for what in fact was a standard (and tedious) anti-Reagan stump speech that never once directly addressed the reason for the occasion: the cause of gay rights. Nor was any resentment apparent when Mondale, the instant he finished his speech, quickly left the platform—missing the subsequent presentations and resolutely refusing any comment to the crowd of reporters that awaited him at the Waldorf's exit.

It's no coincidence that the dinner crowd, which so lustily cheered Mondale's shameful performance, was composed almost entirely of dinner-jacketed white males (along with a handful of women, and almost no blacks or Hispanics). Surely the nature of Mondale's audience goes far toward accounting for their grateful, even enthusiastic, response to him. A leading member of the ruling patriarchy had—at last!—graced a gay white male event with his actual presence, given it at least token legitimacy. What matter how minimal the gesture; the symbol was what counted. With Mondale appearing at an openly gay affair, surely the time was not distant when the ruling elite would grant full admission to the inner sanctum of white male privilege.

We can take some hope in the fact that at least some gay men have banded together to form an organization, Black and White Men Together, devoted to confronting rather than evading the endemic racism in our community. The ultimate impact the organization will have is unforeseeable. But what can and should be said is
that it has already punctured the reigning complacency, insisting we face up to serious problems dividing and disfiguring our community, encouraging us to reclaim our radical roots, to rechart our course.

The gay movement's evolution from radicalism to reform is typical, alas, of how protest movements in this country have always (and, usually, quickly) shifted their priorities. Originating in fierce anger and initially marked by broad-gauged demands for social change, they rapidly evolve into well-behaved, self-protective associations, and in the process abandon demands for challenging the vast inequities in our social and economic systems, substituting (at best) token liberalism.

No movement born to protest inequality can hope to accomplish contradictory purposes. In its current guise, the gay movement may well succeed in gaining broader access to the preexisting clubhouses of power, but it can't pretend that it's centrally devoted to a struggle for improving the lot of the many. The gay movement can't opt for putting its primary energy toward winning mainstream America's approval and simultaneously pretend not to have jettisoned its earlier determination to address the plight of
all
gay people: the invisibility of lesbians, the discrimination against nonwhites and gender nonconformists, the scornful disregard of the rural poor.

Of the national gay organizations, none focuses its current efforts on behalf of those nonaffluent, nonprivileged gays who constitute our actual majority, who everywhere dot the land, doing its dirty work, unacknowledged and unorganized, self-esteem disfigured, future hopes dim. Who among the leaders of our burgeoning gay officialdom speaks to those needs, acknowledges their existence? When has
one
of the proliferating weeklong strategy conferences that our national organizations proudly sponsor included such concerns prominently in its agenda or issued in its imposing statements of purpose any awareness of the terrible daily burdens that weigh down the lives of so many of our people? Having at one period attended many such gatherings, I bear my share of responsibility for this callousness, now endemic.

As the black-tie dinner at the Waldorf demonstrated, the gay movement has finally managed to secure the allegiance of—by surrendering control over its priorities to—prosperous white male recruits who'd previously disdained association with a movement they regarded as controlled by “impractical, noisome visionaries.” The more those who earlier eschewed the gay movement have now joined it, the more their bland deportment and narrow social perspectives have come to dominate: they have “upgraded” our image while diluting demands for substantive social change, shifting organizational policies into comfortable conformity with their own reformist goals.

The gay movement, radical at its inception, has lost courage. Its national organizations are currently dominated by skilled lobbyists pressing for narrow assimilationist goals through traditional political channels. Its chief priority is to win acceptance for the most conformist, most conservative, mostly privileged, mostly male few.

It is a perilous path. The drive to establish our credentials as mainstream Americans is inextricably yoked to deemphasizing our “differentness”—and that, in turn, is tantamount to falsifying our unique historical experience and the subculture it has generated. The result is not only to rob gay people of their heritage but also to negate the potential contribution our “off-center” lifestyle(s) held out for challenging reigning assumptions—for contributing our special perspectives on the nature of partnership, family, gender, and friendship.

The “official”—organized, national—gay movement's current emphasis on winning short-term gains for the few
has
produced its notable successes and
has
increased “tolerance.” But it may have done so at the expense of producing any substantive long-range impact on the nation's institutionalized inequalities. The more we press for limited gains, the more we twist our identity to conform with mainstream values, the more we jeopardize our chance to offer new perspectives to a nation desperately in need of them.

—from the
New York Native,
June 20 and July 3, 1983

The birth of ACT-UP in the mid eighties went a long way toward restoring
some
hope that the gay movement might return to its roots. Indeed, when I dedicated a plaque at an outdoor ceremony in June 1989, renaming a portion of Christopher Street as “Stonewall Place,” I devoted most of my speech to hailing ACT-UP as “a potential reincarnation of the radical, broad-gauged Gay Liberation Front of the early seventies: what we are seeing are gay men and lesbians acting in concert, welcoming and appreciating each other's differences, and also welcoming other minority people.”

Since the midnineties, however, that radical spirit has mostly dissipated and liberal goals (gays in the military, gay marriage, etc.) have once again come to dominate the movement. I'm far from alone in regretting this. In 2007 some twenty queer activists hammered out in a two-day conference a document (“Beyond Same-Sex Marriage”) that was subsequently signed by hundreds and hundreds of movement people, myself included. The statement offered a clear, eloquent, densely argued challenge to current strategies for “marriage equality” being pursued by the major LGBT organizations. It aimed at honoring the diverse ways people actually “practice love, form relationships, create . . . networks of caring and support, establish households, bring families into being, and build innovative structures to support and sustain community.”

“Beyond Same-Sex Marriage” reminded us that the majority of people in the United States do not live in traditional nuclear families. Rather, diverse households are already the norm and range from kinship networks and extended families to senior citizens living together to single-parent households. Marriage and the nuclear family, the statement argued, “are not the only worthy forms of family or relationship and should not be legally and economically privileged above all others.” The call is for a new vision of human relatedness and a civic commitment to recognizing and securing the wide diversity of household arrangements that actually characterize the country's domestic topology. Lifetime monogamous
pair-bonding (whether “legally” sanctioned or not) isn't the only path to human happiness and may not even be among the best: 50 percent of marriages now end in divorce and the figure would probably go higher if more women with limited education and job histories could figure out how to independently support themselves and their children.