Whither Gay Rights

Do the gays need a Martin Luther King?

I’ve wondered about this for a long time. It seems to me that there are so many lazy gays out there who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about gay rights.

Meanwhile, the major gay organizations, as Chris Crain points out:

are so focused inside the Beltway that gay-friendly ignorance is permitted to persist. When was the last time you saw one of our national groups mount an effective public demontration of the rights denied gay and lesbian Americans? The Millennium March on Washington, perhaps? That was April 2000…

I’ve been reading Parting the Waters, the first part of Taylor Branch’s history of the black civil rights movement. Where is our Birmingham? Where are the gay people willing to go to jail for what they believe?

Granted, it’s hard to see what laws we could break that could force us into jail. Showing up at the county clerk’s office for a marriage license doesn’t get you thrown in jail. Sit-ins at lunch counters in the ’60s could get you thrown in jail, because the segregation laws barred black people’s actual physical presence from lunch counters and libraries and so forth. There are no laws that bar gay people’s physical presence anywhere.

Without the threat of jail and violence, what can we do to further our rights?

The point of the nonviolence movement of Martin Luther King and his allies, transmitted to them through Gandhi, was to show that justice and love can prevail over injustice and hate. By practicing nonviolence, they let the segregationists become the aggressors and thereby created sympathy.

What can we do today?

One difference between blacks in the ’60s and gays today is that the two groups have had to fight against different perceptions. Blacks Americans had to fight against the 300-year-old stereotype that they were stupid and shiftless and scary. Gay Americans today have to fight against the stereotype that we’re rich and privileged dilettantes who don’t have to deal with the same problems that “real, hard-working Americans” face. We also have to fight against the stereotype that we’re all white.

The public doesn’t see that gay couples aren’t all rich enough to hire lawyers to attain the same rights that straight couples get for free. The public doesn’t see that gay people suffer from employment discrimination. That gay Americans can watch their non-American life partners get deported.

The movements are not the same. Even into the 1960s, black Americans were denied the right to register to vote — they weren’t even allowed to participate in the political process. At least we don’t have to face that problem.

But we do have to face other misperceptions. As an uninformed straight person wrote to me in an email a few months ago:

As a group, homosexuals are portrayed in a significantly more positive light in the media than any other group in our culture. Homosexuals have the highest degree of societal acceptance of any community in the nation.

We’re like the Jews, apparently. While blacks were hated because they were powerless, Jews used to be hated because we appeared to have too much power.

We’re so entertaining, we gay people, aren’t we? How nice to have a cool gay friend, as long as he remembers that he’s just a court jester and doesn’t deserve equal rights.

Will and Grace did so much to hurt us. Rich, white, privileged Will Truman and his funny minstrel friend Jack. We never saw any gay bashings or any gay couples striving for the right to marriage on that show. I don’t mean to criticize it too much; it was a sitcom, and most sitcoms aren’t meant to be anything more than stupid trifles. (All in the Family notwithstanding. Maybe we actually need a gay Norman Lear.)

But last week on The View, the women were discussing a children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, based on a true story about two male penguins who cared for a baby penguin in a zoo because it had no mother. Sherri Shepherd stated that she didn’t want to teach her young son about such things “right now.” As usual, she didn’t know how to articulate it beyond saying that this was her child and she didn’t want him to know about such things “right now.”

Less than a week later, Mario Cantone showed up as one of the guests. As usual, he did his queeny little minstrel show. (Nothing against Mario Cantone; he’s a funny guy.) Sherri Shepherd enjoyed it like everyone else, laughing along with the other women. I would have loved for Mario at some point to have turned to Sherri and asked her, out of the blue, why she wants to “protect” her child from learning about non-traditional families and, by extension, gay rights. I would have loved to see her sputter something nonsensical in response.

They love laughing at us as long as we don’t, you know, make them uncomfortable by fighting for our rights.

I have to run. More later.

3 thoughts on “Whither Gay Rights

  1. I agree about how frustrating it is that the path to justice isn’t as clear today as it has been at times in the past–I posted about that not long ago–but I’m not sure it’s fair to point that out and then berate gay people who aren’t fighting for gay rights for being lazy.

    There’s another very important difference between the two movements that people usually forget. Members of the black community during the Civil Rights Movement were able to draw almost limitless strength and courage from their steadfast belief in a loving, merciful God. Show me all the gay people who believe the same and I’ll show you a group of gay people small enough that if they tried to stage a sit-in nobody would notice.

  2. I think you touch upon an interesting class based dimension that is so often left out of the analysis of queer issues/movement.

    Normative society is ok with gay people (and I do mean primarily gay men) as long as they are wealthy and emulate normative culture, they pair bond and embody expected gendered/embodied expectations. I think the activist push in favor of marriage is another part of making gayness acceptable: if there was a push around employment discrimination or equal rights (a la a new ERA), that would accuse normative society (and individuals) of being prejudiced in every day life. Marriage inequality activism pits gays against religious institutions, and only indicts the most reactionary elements of society as being implicit in homophobia, rather than the social institution as a whole–in the way that the civil rights movement challenged all of white society, not just Klan-esque radical elements.

    I think it’s probably important to recognize the role of Black Power in mobilizing and enflaming the civil rights issue. While joel is right that SCLC and the black churches were a major driving force behind the civil rights movement, there were more radical elements of the movement that I think gave energy, when it might have otherwise faltered (stokely charmichael, malcom x, etc.)

    Anyway, all this to say that while there’s a lot of class disparity between queer folks today in a way that there wasn’t such a visible disparity between black people in the 1950s. Or there was a disparity, but it was evenly distributed. So, for instance, it would be interesting to see/remember what the NAACP and the black intelegensia were saying then.

    In general though, I think that we expect that only 30 some years after the beginning of the gay rights movement (I’m putting it at a little bit before stonewall, but the precise moment is irrelevant) that we should be at a point that took black people nearly 60 years to achieve. (Logic: from abolition, there was an initial civil rights movement in the teens and 20s in conjunction with the suffrage/temperance movement (and ultimately eugenics movement, but I suppose that’s a different story) anyway, after that it took a long time for the 60s movement to really come together. If we draw a parallel between the movements, gay rights is stuck where the civil rights movement was in the 1880s and 90s).

    And in some ways this is a foolish comparison, really so I don’t think it’s worth belaboring too much but at the same time, I think there’s probably going to be a shift in the class dynamic in the next twenty years: as kids have started come out at younger ages and had to face hell in high schools (leading to disillusionment with school/academia, which in turn affects opportunity later) I think there’ll be a larger class disparity between in the coming generation, and that kind of inequality is the kind of thing that spurs activism in a much more tangible sort of way.

  3. This is from Tony Kushner’s introduction to Stuck Rubber Baby which tells the story of a gay man’s coming of age during the civil rights movement.

    “[Stuck Rubber Baby] articulates a crying need for solidarity. It performs the crucial function of remembering, for the queer community, how essential to the birth of our politics of liberation the civil rights movement was. . . We need to know the genealogies of our movements, and with that knowledge come to understand the interdependence of all liberation struggles. We must finally accept and practice what we’ve been saying for decades, for centuries: Freedom is only possible when it’s everyone’s freedom, and slavery anywhere means slavery everywhere.”

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