The Martin Duberman Reader (51 page)

Here are a few myths that commonly pass for facts among many
non
-working-class people, gay as well as straight:

Such “facts” are widely held, dominate public discourse, deeply affect the culture of the workplace, the attempt to organize unions, and the personal lives of workers. These interconnected issues clarify why progressives active in class, gender, and sexual orientation politics need to recognize their linkages and combine their forces to a far greater degree than has been the case to date. The result could be a strengthened new engine of social reform.

The national LGBT movement must, if it has any hope of becoming genuinely representative of the majority of gay people, broaden its agenda to include working-class issues. And the union movement must—if it hopes to increase its numbers much beyond its current enrollment of 12 percent of the workforce—take far greater cognizance than it currently does of the oppressive conditions that dominate the lives of workers who are gender and sexual nonconformists.

Specifically, unions need to assume the responsibility of creating a climate in the workplace where those who are not straight white men can feel comfortable in being open about their lives and can be assured that their needs will be represented forcefully during contract negotiations with employers. The traditional union agenda of fighting for higher pay and better working conditions needs to be broadened to include such issues as homophobic harassment at
the workplace and domestic partnership benefits for LGBT employees.

Any sustainable alliance between the LGBT and union movements must be preceded or accompanied by a considerable amount of transformative work
within
each movement. The dominant ideology of most of the large national gay organizations, such as the Human Rights Campaign, would require a profound shift in emphasis away from their traditionalist, centrist concerns (the legal right to marry and serve openly in the military, for example), a shift that their middle-class constituency—and this is a huge sticking point—might not support.

The political scientist Cathy J. Cohen explains why such a shift is nonetheless urgent. In her brilliant essay, “What Is This Movement Doing to My Politics?” Cohen argues that ever since the demise of Queer Nation and the refocusing of ACT-UP on issues relating to
global
AIDS, there's no longer a radical domestic wing of any import in the national lesbian and gay movement (with the exception, I'd add, of the transgender movement; small though it is in numbers, its challenge to binary notions of gender is of potentially huge importance).

Otherwise, most of the numerically and monetarily significant national gay organizations appear indifferent to a genuinely transformative politics. In 1998, for example, the Human Rights Campaign endorsed Alfonse D'Amato for the Senate; the Log Cabin Republicans honored a black politician who has worked
against
affirmative action in California; the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force accepted (though later did return) a sizeable contribution from Nike, which employs sweatshop labor; and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation accepted (and did not return) a gift from the right-wing, union-busting Coors corporation.

Cohen's disgust with the national gay movement's efforts to “sanitize, whitenize, and normalize the public and visible representations” of the gay community—to embrace and focus on mainstream assimilation—has led her to ask, with justifiable anger, “Can
I have [radical] politics and be a part of this [gay] movement?” “Increasingly,” she concludes, “I am sorry to say, I'm not sure.”

Cohen doesn't minimize the importance of continuing to work through traditional political channels, such as electioneering and lobbying, in order to win much-needed civil rights legislation. But she does worry, rightly in my view, that a focus on civil rights alone has thus far been of most benefit to those gay people who are comparatively privileged and has closed the door to the less conforming members of the community—people of color, say, or cross-dressers, or S/M devotees, or those who self-identify as transgendered. What heightens concern is that so little discussion is taking place within the major gay political organizations about the right to a living wage and to decent working conditions. As Cohen pointedly puts it, “Without dialogue and debate about what greater good we are working for, we may in fact achieve inclusion, but inclusion in an oppressive society.”

There's some ground for hope in the emergence of smaller, more radically minded lesbian and gay organizations—for example, the Audre Lorde Project and Queers for Economic Justice in New York, Esperanza in San Antonio, and the national Black Radical Congress. The hope is that they will grow in strength, influence, and resources. But as matters stand, those who control the gay community's major resources and organizations are currently, one might even say smugly, committed to assimilationist goals that have little to do with gay working-class grievances and a lot to do with making it easier for the already privileged to “join up.” And the bitter truth, as gay progressives well know, is that these organizations are powerful because their assimilationist goals accurately reflect the values and hopes of the majority of gay people.

Patrick McCreery demonstrates this point clearly in his superb essay in the anthology
Out At Work
on the politics of the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). McCreery shows that the outpouring of mainstream gay support for ENDA is, on one level, understandable, since it
would,
if ever passed, extend needed
workplace protection. But those benefits would come, McCreery forcefully argues, “through an unabashed privileging of normative sexuality—meaning non-fetishistic sexual relations between two adults in a monogamous, committed relationship.” And this, in the long run, would
strengthen
the hetero-normative environment of the workplace.

If we turn to organized labor's side of a potential gay/labor alliance, we find a comparable picture: a formidable set of obstacles to cooperation, in tandem with some recent developments that provide at least limited grounds for optimism. Among the obstacles, the foremost is the still significant amount of homophobia in the workplace. A mere thirty years ago, homophobia was so fierce and endemic that only a rare homosexual would
think
about “coming out”—knowing that the consequences would almost certainly include being fired, verbally harassed, or physically assaulted. Today homophobia continues to run deep in the workplace, and gay bashing remains a constant threat. But harassment is now
somewhat
contained by the existence of gay caucuses within some unions, as well as by the determination of various union leaders, preeminently the head of the AFL-CIO, John J. Sweeney, to put gay rights and gay safety at the forefront of their agendas. Still, there's a very long way to go in combating homophobia.

Some of the worst offenders in the workplace, sadly, are members of other minorities. Their own experience with oppression hasn't automatically translated into sympathy for other oppressed people. And especially not those people who, by their very being, offend against deeply held religious beliefs and ingrained notions of “proper” gender behavior.

The inability of minority workers to join hands in solidarity has led some activists to feel that if further inroads against homophobia in the workplace are to come, they will have to be initiated from the top, from those in union leadership positions. Yet other activists deny this; they argue that the general increase over the past few decades in public understanding about homosexuality has already, at the workplace level, changed a significant number of hearts and
minds: gays are now more willing to come out, and their straight counterparts are more supportive in their response.

Those who hold to an optimistic view can point to the recent emergence of such bottom-up formations as the Lesbian and Gay Issues Committee (LAGIC) in District Council 37 (the union of New York City employees), as well as the creation of Pride at Work, a national caucus of gay, lesbian, and transgendered trade unionists, which in 1998 became an official constituency group of the AFL-CIO. In a deeply researched and closely reasoned essay in
Out At Work,
Tamara Jones illuminates the dynamics at play in these new groups. Using the formation and history of LAGIC as a case study, Jones demonstrates how the rules-driven bureaucratic structures of many unions thwart decentralized decision making and power sharing. In particular, they constrict the ability of gay and lesbian organizers to increase their numbers and leverage in the struggle to redefine “workers' rights” in a more expansive way.

Jones persuasively shows how LAGIC itself has adopted some of the formalistic features of its parent union, D.C. 37, and has become more traditional over time; it now largely forgoes the radical inclusivity that had marked its early days, and no longer addresses the significant variations in lifestyle and belief that exist among its highly diversified queer membership. The key lesson Jones draws from LAGIC's evolution is that “the existence of a lesbian and gay union caucus does not automatically pose a radical challenge to the status quo, nor is it inherently conservative.”

One has to look to the specific conditions in which a particular gay caucus is operating, Jones argues, and has to recognize that “often, mobilization and organizing occur within organizational fields and institutional settings that were not designed to support transformative or collectivist politics.” Jones's insights are persuasively stated and will hopefully be taken to heart. But we need to recognize, too, that—as with all social movements that are genuinely progressive—the struggle for gay rights in the workplace will inevitably pass through alternating cycles of advance and retreat.

As for the specific question of whether it's possible to create an
expanded alliance between gay and nongay workers that could serve as an important agency for social change, there's evidence available to feed both optimism and pessimism. The pessimists would emphasize the ongoing homophobia at most workplaces. As AFL-CIO head John J. Sweeney has put it, promoting the rights of gay and lesbian workers has “been a slow and painstaking process. . . . And we still have quite a long way to go. Historically, unions have had to be challenged and prodded before opening the door to people their members view as ‘different.' For gay and lesbian workers, in particular, that remains a hard reality to this day.” (Sweeney doesn't mention transgendered workers, but should have, since their travails are often severe and usually go unacknowledged.)

There's additional fuel for pessimism in the way those national gay and lesbian organizations with the greatest resources and the most visible public presence continue to ignore or marginalize economic issues. Many LGBT activists and organizations remain aloof from the union movement, in deference to a politics of assimilation that ignores any radical analysis of class. Transgender organizations stand apart from “a politics of assimilation” or any process of normalization—but the two largest LGBT organizations, the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, have in my view committed far too much time and money to assimilationist issues such as the right of gays to marry or to serve openly in the military.

Those who hold to an optimistic view of the prospects for an expanded gay/worker alliance can also cite a significant amount of evidence to bolster their hopes. Certain unions, particularly the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) have taken the lead in supporting strong LGBT caucuses and in educating straight workers about the significant amounts of fear and discrimination that gay workers experience in the workplace. Increasingly, straight workers recognize the material importance
and
the ethical rightness of making sure that domestic partnership benefits for gay people are negotiated into contracts with employers.
It's also true that an increasing number of gay and lesbian workers are casting aside their doubts about the value of unions and are beginning to recognize that organized labor, for all its shortcomings, could well become a significant force in the struggle for gay rights, benefits, and safeguards.

Not only might unions transform the workplace for gay people, but as gay workers take their place at the table, they, like women and people of color before them, could help to transform union culture. Once social identity issues join economic ones as an intrinsic part of union demands, hetero-normative standards could then, over time—probably over a
lot
of time—give way to a far more inclusive embodiment of the exceedingly varied lives, the amalgam of identities, that unions, like it or not, do in fact represent, even if, until recently, they mostly preferred not to notice. A reconfigured working class would fully acknowledge not merely the geographical and economic dimensions of its struggle, but also its racial, gender, and sexual ones.

Think of it: an economic-justice movement that included gay people, and a gay movement that concerned itself with a more equitable distribution of wealth. Emerging in tandem, they could engineer a revitalized workplace
and
a reinvigorated politics. With so much at stake, it's hard not to go with the optimists—and after all, how but through optimism have social justice movements ever come into being or been able to sustain themselves?