Andrew Sullivan has been editor of the New Republic since 1991. Born and raised in Great Britain, he holds a B.A. in modern history and modern languages from Oxford University and a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University. The following essay, which appeared in the New Republic on 10 May, 1993, essentially outlines the argument of Sullivan's 1995 book Virtually Normal.
Over the last four years I have been
sent letters from strangers caught in doomed, desperate marriages
because of repressed homosexuality and witnessed several thousand
virtually naked, muscle-bound men dance for hours in the middle
of New York City, in the middle of the day. I have lain down on
top of a dying friend to restrain his hundred-pound body as it
violently shook with the death-throes of AIDS and listened to
soldiers equate the existence of homosexuals in the military with
the dissolution of the meaning of the United States. I have openly
discussed my sexuality on a television talk show and sat on the
porch of an apartment building in downtown D.C. with an arm around
a male friend and watched as a dozen cars in a half hour slowed
to hurl abuse. I have seen mass advertising explicitly cater to
an openly gay audience and watched my own father break down and
weep at the declaration of his son's sexuality.
These different experiences of homosexuality
are not new, of course. But that they can now be experienced within
one life (and that you are now reading about them) is new.
The cultural categories and social departments into which we once
successfully consigned sexuality - departments that helped us
avoid the anger and honesty with which we are now confronted -
have begun to collapse. Where once there were patterns of discreet
and discrete behavior to follow, there is now only an unnerving
confusion of roles and identities. Where once there was only the
unmentionable, there are now only the unavoidable: gays, "queers",
homosexuals, closet cases, bisexuals, the "out" and
the "in", paraded for every heterosexual to see. As
the straight world has been confronted with this, it has found
itself reaching for a response: embarrassment, tolerance, fear,
violence, oversensitivity, recognition. When Sam Nunn conducts
hearings, he knows there is no common discourse in which he can
now speak, that even the words he uses will betray worlds of conflicting
experience and anxieties. Yet speak he must. In place of the silence
that once encased the lives of homosexuals, there is now a loud
argument. And there is no easy going back.
This fracturing of discourse is more
than a cultural problem; it is a political problem. Without at
least some common ground, no effective compromise to the homosexual
question will be possible. Matters may be resolved, as they have
been in the case of abortion, by a stand-off in the forces of
cultural war. But unless we begin to discuss this subject with
a degree of restraint and reason, the visceral unpleasantness
that exploded earlier this year will dog the question of homosexuality
for a long time to come, intensifying the anxieties that politics
is supposed to relieve.
There are as many politics of homosexuality
as there are words for it, and not all of them contain reason.
And it is harder perhaps in this passionate area than in any other
to separate a wish from an argument, a desire from a denial. Nevertheless,
without such an effort, no true politics of sexuality can emerge.
And besides, there are some discernible patterns, some sketches
of political theory that have begun to emerge with clarity. I
will discuss here only four, but four that encompass a reasonable
span of possible arguments. Each has a separate analysis of sexuality
and a distinct solution to the problem of gay-straight relations.
Perhaps no single person belongs in any single category; and they
are by no means exclusive of one another. What follows is a brief
description of each: why each is riven by internal and external
conflict; and why none, finally, works.
The first I'll call, for the sake of
argument, the conservative politics of sexuality. Its view of
homosexuality is as dark as it is popular as it is unfashionable.
It informs much of the opposition to allowing openly gay men and
women to serve in the military and can be heard in living rooms,
churches, bars, and computer bulletin boards across America. It
is found in most of the families in which homosexuals grow up
and critically frames many homosexuals' view of their own identity.
Its fundamental assertion is that homosexuality as such does not
properly exist. Homosexual behavior is aberrant activity, either
on the part of heterosexuals intent on subverting traditional
society or by people who are prey to psychological, emotional,
or sexual dysfunction.
For adherents to the conservative politics
of sexuality, therefore, the homosexual question concerns everyone.
It cannot be dismissed merely as an affliction of the individual
but is rather one that afflicts society at large. Since society
depends on the rearing of a healthy future generation, the existence
of homosexuals is a grave problem. People who would otherwise
be living productive and socially beneficial lives are diverted
by homosexuality into unhappiness and sterility, and they may
seek, in their bleak attempts at solace, to persuade others to
join them. Two gerundives cling to this view of homosexuals: practicing
and proselytizing. And both are habitually uttered with a mixture
of pity and disgust.
The politics that springs out of this
view of homosexuality has two essential parts: with the depraved,
it must punish; with the sick, it must cure. There are, of course,
degrees to which these two activities can be promoted. The recent
practice in modern liberal democracies of imprisoning homosexuals
or subjecting them to psychological or physiological "cures"
is a good deal less repressive than the camps for homosexuals
in Castro's Cuba, the spasmodic attempt at annihilation in Nazi
Germany, or the brutality of modern Islamic states. And the sporadic
entrapment of gay men in public restrooms or parks is a good deal
less repressive than the systematic hunting down and discharging
of homosexuals that we require of our armed forces. But the differences
are matters of degree rather than of kind, and the essential characteristic
of the conservative politics of homosexuality is that it pursues
the logic of repression. Not for conservatives the hypocrisy of
those who tolerate homosexuality in private and abhor it in public.
They seek rather to grapple with the issue directly and to sustain
the carapace if public condemnation and legal sanction that can
keep the dark presence of homosexuality at bay.
This is not a distant politics. In twenty-four
states sodomy is still illegal, and the constitutionality of these
statutes was recently upheld by the Supreme Court. Much of the
Republican Party supports this politics with varying degrees of
sympathy for the victims of the affliction. The Houston convention
was replete with jokes by speaker Patrick Buchanan that implicitly
affirmed this view. Banners held aloft by delegates asserted "Family
Rights For Ever, Gay Rights Never", implying a direct trade-off
between tolerating homosexuals and maintaining the traditional
family.
In its crudest and politically most
dismissible form, this politics invokes biblical revelation to
make its civic claims. But in its subtler form, it draws strength
from the natural law tradition, which, for all its failings, is
a resilient pillar of Western thought. Following a Thomist argument,
conservatives argue that the natural function of sexuality is
clearly procreative; all expressions of it outside procreation
destroy human beings' potential for full and healthy development.
Homosexuality - far from being natural - is clearly a perversion
of, or turning away from, the legitimate and healthy growth of
the human person.
Perhaps the least helpful element in
the current debate is the assertion that this politics is simply
bigotry. It isn't. Many bigots may, of course, support it, and
by bigots I mean those whose "visceral recoil" from
homosexuals (to quote Buchanan) expresses itself in thuggery and
name-calling. But there are some who don't support anti-gay violence
and who sincerely believe discouragement of homosexuality by law
and "curing" homosexuals is in the best interest of
everybody.
Nevertheless, this politics suffers
from an in increasingly acute internal contradiction and an irresistible
external development. It is damaged, first, by the growing evidence
that homosexuality does in fact exist as an identifiable and involuntary
characteristic of some people, and that these people do not as
a matter of course suffer from moral or psychological dysfunction;
that it is, in other words, as close to "natural" as
any human condition can be. New data about the possible genetic
origins of homosexuality are only one part of this development.
By far the most important element is the testimony of countless
homosexuals. The number who say their orientation is a choice
make up only a tiny minority, and the candor of those who say
it isn't is overwhelming. To be sure, it is in the interests of
gay people to affirm their lack of choice over the matter; but
the consensus among homosexuals, the resilience of lesbian and
gay minorities in the face of deep social disapproval and even
a plague, suggests that homosexuality, whatever one would like
to think, simply is not often chosen. A fundamental claim of natural
law is that its truths are self-evident: across continents and
centuries, homosexuality is a self-evident fact of life.
How large this population is does not
matter. One percent or 10 percent: as long as a small but persistent
part of the population is involuntarily gay, then the entire conservative
politics of homosexuality rests on an unstable footing. It becomes
simply a politics of denial or repression. Faced with a sizable
and inextinguishable part of society, it can only pretend that
it does not exist, or needn't be addressed, or can somehow be
dismissed. This politics is less coherent than even the politics
that opposed civil rights for blacks thirty years ago, because
at least that had some answer to the question of the role of blacks
in society, however subordinate. Today's conservatives have no
role for homosexuals; they want them somehow to disappear, an
option that was once illusory and is now impossible.
Some conservatives and conservative
institutions have recognized this. They've even begun to use the
term homosexual, implicitly accepting the existence of
a constitutive characteristic. Some have avoided it by the innovative
term homosexualist, but most cannot do so without a wry
grin on their faces. The more serious opponents of equality for
homosexuals finesse the problem by restricting their objections
to "radical homosexuals", but the distinction doesn't
help. They are still forced to confront the problem of unradical
homosexuals, people whose sexuality is, presumably, constitutive.
To make matters worse, the Roman Catholic Church - the firmest
religious proponent of the conservative politics of homosexuality
- has explicitly conceded the point. It declared in 1975 that
homosexuality is indeed involuntary for many. In the recent Universal
Catechism, the church goes even further. Homosexuality is described
as a "condition" of a "not negligible" number
of people who "do not choose" their sexuality and deserve
to be treated with "respect, compassion and sensitivity".
More critically, because of homosexuality's involuntary nature,
it cannot of itself be morally culpable (although homosexual acts
still are). The doctrine is thus no longer "hate the sin
but love the sinner"; it's "hate the sin but accept
the condition", a position unique in Catholic theology, and
one that has already begun to creak under the strain of its own
tortuousness.
But the loss of intellectual solidity
isn't the only problem for the conservative politics of homosexuality.
In a liberal polity, it has lost a good deal of its political
coherence as well. When many people in a liberal society insist
upon their validity as citizens and human beings, repression becomes
a harder and harder task. It offends against fundamental notions
of decency and civility to treat them as simple criminals or patients.
To hunt them down, imprison them for private acts, subject government
workers to surveillance and dismissal for reasons related to their
deepest sense of personal identity becomes a policy not simply
cruel but politically impossible in a civil order. For American
society to return to the social norms around the question of homosexuality
of a generation ago would require a renewed act of repression
that not even many zealots could contemplate. What generations
of inherited shame could not do, what AIDS could not accomplish,
what the most decisive swing toward conservatism in the 1980s
could not muster, must somehow be accomplished in the next few
years. It simply cannot be done.
So even Patrick Buchanan is reduced
to joke-telling; senators to professions of ignorance; military
leaders to rationalizations of sheer discomfort. For those whose
politics are a mere extension of religious faith, such impossibilism
is part of the attraction (and spiritually, if not politically,
defensible). But for conservatives who seek to act as citizens
in a secular, civil order, the dilemma is terminal. An unremittingly
hostile stance toward homosexuals runs the risk of sectarianism.
At some point, not reached yet but fast approaching, their politics
could become so estranged from the society in which it operates
that it could cease to operate as a politics altogether.
The second politics of homosexuality
shares with the first a conviction that homosexuality as an inherent
and natural condition does not exist. Homosexuality, in this politics,
is a cultural construction, a binary social conceit (along with
heterosexuality) forced upon the sexually amorphous (all of us).
This politics attempts to resist this oppressive construct, subverting
it and subverting the society that allows it to fester. Where
the first politics takes as its starting point the Thomist faith
in nature, the second springs from the Nietzschean desire to surpass
all natural necessities, to attack the construct of "nature"
itself. Thus the pursuit of a homosexual existence is but one
strategy of many to enlarge the possibility for human liberation.
Call this the radical politics of homosexuality.
For the radicals, like the conservatives, homosexuality is definitely
a choice: the choice to be a "queer", the choice to
subvert oppressive institutions, the choice to be an activist.
And it is a politics that, insofar as it finds its way from academic
discourse into gay activism (and it does so fitfully), exercises
a peculiar fascination for the adherents of the first politics.
At times, indeed, both seem to exist in a bond of mutual contempt
and admiration. That both prefer to use the word queer
- the one in private, the other in irony - is only one of many
resemblances. They both react with disdain to those studies that
seem to reflect a genetic source for homosexuality. And they both
favor, to some extent or other, the process of outing, because
for both it is the flushing out of deviant behavior; for conservatives,
of the morally impure, for radicals, of the politically incorrect.
For conservatives, radical "queers" provide a frisson
of cultural apocalypse and a steady stream of funding dollars.
For radicals, the religious right can be tapped as an unreflective
and easy justification for virtually any political impulse whatsoever.
Insofar as this radical politics is
synonymous with a subcultural experience, it has stretched the
limits of homosexual identity and expanded the cultural space
in which some homosexuals can live. In the late 1980s the tactics
of groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation did not merely shock and
anger, but took the logic of shame-abandonment to a thrilling
conclusion. To exist within their sudden energy was to be caught
in a liberating rite of passage, which, when it did not transgress
into political puritanism, exploded many of the cozy assumptions
of closeted homosexual and liberal heterosexual alike.
This politics is as open-minded as the
conservative politics is closed-minded. It seeks an end to all
restrictions on homosexuality, but also the subversion of heterosexual
norms as taught in schools or the media. By virtue of its intellectual
origins, it affirms a close connection with every other minority
group, whose cultural subversion of white, heterosexual, male
norms is just as vital. It sees its crusades - now for an AIDS
czar, now against the Catholic Church's abortion stance, now for
the Rainbow Curriculum, now against the military ban - as a unified
whole of protest, glorifying in its indiscriminateness as in its
universality.
But like the conservative politics of
homosexuality, which also provides a protective ghetto of liberation
for its disciples, the radical politics of homosexuality now finds
itself in an acute state of crisis. Its problem is twofold: its
conception of homosexuality is so amorphous and indistinguishable
from other minority concerns that it is doomed to be ultimately
unfocused: and its relationship with the views of most homosexuals
- let alone heterosexuals - is so tenuous that at moments of truth
(like the military ban) it strains to have a viable politics at
all.
The trouble with gay radicalism, in
short, is the problem with subversive politics as a whole. It
tends to subvert itself. ACT UP, for example, an AIDS group that
began in the late 1980s as an activist group dedicated to finding
a cure and better treatment for people with AIDS, soon found itself
awash in a cacaphony of internal division. Its belief that sexuality
was only one of many oppressive constructions meant that it was
constantly tempted to broaden its reach, to solve a whole range
of gender and ethnic grievances. Similarly, each organizing committee
in each state of this weekend's march on Washington was required
to have a 50 % "minority" composition - even Utah.
Although this universalist temptation was not always given in
to, it exercised an enervating and dissipating effect on gay radicalism's
political punch.
More important, the notion of sexuality
as a cultural subversion distanced it from the vast majority of
gay people who not only accept the natural origin of their sexual
orientation, but wish to be integrated into society as it is.
For most gay people - the closet cases and barflies, the construction
workers and investment bankers, the computer programmers and parents
- a "queer" identitity is precisely what they want to
avoid. In this way, the radical politics of homosexuality is caught
in a political trap. The more it purifies its own belief about
sexuality, the less able it is to engage the broader world as
a whole. The more it acts upon its convictions, the less able
it is to engage in politics at all.
For the "queer" fundamentalists,
like the religious fundamentalists, this is no problem. Politics
for both groups is essentially an exercise in theater and rhetoric,
in which dialogue with one's opponent is an admission of defeat.
It is no accident that ACT UP was founded by a playwright, since
its politics was essentially theatrical: a fantastic display of
rhetorical pique and visual brilliance. It became a national media
hit, but eventually its lines became familiar and the audience's
attention wavered, New shows have taken its place and will continue
to do so - but they will always be constrained by their essential
nature, which is performance, not persuasion.
The limits of this strategy can be seen
in the politics of the military ban. Logically, there is no reason
for radicals to support the ending of the ban: it means acceptance
of presumably one of the most repressive institutions in American
society. And, to be sure, no radical arguments have been made
to end the ban. But in the last few months, "queers"
have been appearing on television proclaiming that gay people
are just like anybody else and defending the right of gay midwestern
Republicans to serve their country. In the pinch, "queer"
politics was forced to abandon its theoretical essence if it was
to advance its purported aims: the advancement of gay equality.
The military ban illustrated the dilemma perfectly. As soon as
radicalism was required actually to engage America, its politics
disintegrated.
Similarly, "queer" radicalism's
doctrine of cultural subversion and separatism has the effect
of alienating those very gay Americans most in need of support
and help: the young and teenagers. Separatism is even less of
an option for gays than for any other minority, since each generation
is literally connected umbilically to the majority. The young
are permanently in the hands of the other. By erecting a politics
on a doctrine of separation and difference from the majority,
"queer" politics ironically broke off dialogue with
the heterosexual families whose cooperation is needed in every
generation if gay children are to be accorded a modicum of dignity
and hope.
There's an argument, of course, that
radicalism's politics is essentially instrumental; that by stretching
the limits of what is acceptable, it opens up space for more moderate
types to negotiate; that without ACT UP and Queer Nation, no progress
would have been made at all. But this both insults the theoretical
integrity of the radical position (they surely do not see themselves
as mere adjuncts to liberals) and underestimates the scope of
the gay revolution that has been quietly taking place in America.
Far more subversive than media-grabbing demonstrations on the
evening news has been the slow effect of individual, private Americans
becoming more open about their sexuality. The emergence of role
models, the development of professional organizations and student
groups, the growing influence of openly gay people in the media,
and the extraordinary impact of AIDS on families and friends have
dwarfed radicalism's impact on the national consciousness. Likewise,
the greatest public debate about homosexuality yet - the military
debate - took place not because radicals besieged the Pentagon,
but because of the ordinary and once-anonymous Americans within
the military who simply refused to acquiesce in their own humiliation
any longer. Their courage was illustrated not in taking to the
streets in rage but in facing their families and colleagues with
integrity.
And this presents the deepest problem
for radicalism. As the closet slowly collapses, as gay people
enter into the mainstream, as suburban homosexuals and Republican
homosexuals emerge blinking into the daylight, as the gay ghettos
of the inner cities are diluted by the gay enclaves of the suburbs,
the whole notion of a separate and "queer" identity
will become harder to defend. Far from redefining gay identity,
"queer" radicalism may actually have to define itself
in opposition to it. This is implicit in the punitive practice
of "outing" and in the increasingly anti-gay politics
of some "queer" radicals. But if "queer" politics
is to survive, it will either have to be proved right about America's
inherent hostility to gay people or become more insistent in its
separatism. It will have to intensify its hatred of straights
or its contempt for gays. Either path is likely to be as culturally
creative as it is politically sterile.
Between these two cultural poles, an
appealing alternative presents itself. You can hear it in the
tone if not substance of civilized columnists and embarrassed
legislators, who are united most strongly by the desire that this
awkward subject simply go away. It is the moderate politics of
homosexuality. Unlike the conservatives and radicals, the moderates
do believe that a small number of people are inherently homosexual,
but they also believe that another group is susceptible to persuasion
in that direction and should be dissuaded. These people do not
want persecution of homosexuals, but they do not want overt approval
either. They are most antsy when it comes to the questions of
the education of children but feel acute discomfort in supporting
the likes of Patrick Buchanan and Pat Robertson.
Thus their politics has all the nuance
and all the disingenuousness of classically conservative politics.
They are not intolerant, but they oppose the presence of openly
gay teachers in school; they have gay friends but hope their child
isn't homosexual; they are in favor of ending the military ban
but would seek to do so either by reimposing the closet (ending
discrimination in return for gay people never mentioning their
sexuality) or by finding some other kind of solution, such as
simply ending the witch hunts. If they support sodomy laws (pour
décourager les autres), they prefer to see them unenforced.
In either case, they do not regard the matter as very important.
They are ambivalent about domestic partnership legislation but
are offended by gay marriage. Above all, they prefer that the
subject of homosexuality be discussed with delicacy and restraint,
and they are only likely to complain to their gay friends if the
latter insist upon "bringing the subject up" too often.
This position too has a certain coherence.
It insists that politics is a matter of custom as well as principle
and that, in the words of Nunn, caution on the matter of sexuality
is not so much a matter of prejudice as of prudence. It places
a premium on discouraging the sexually ambivalent from resolving
their ambiguity freely in the direction of homosexuality, because,
society being as it is, such a life is more onerous than a heterosexual
one. It sometimes exchanges the argument for the more honest one:
that it wishes to promote procreation and the healthy rearing
of the next generation and so wishes to create a cultural climate
that promotes heterosexuality.
But this politics too has become somewhat
unstable, if not as unstable as the first two. And this instability
stems from an internal problem and a related external one. Being
privately tolerant and publicly disapproving exacts something
of a psychological cost on those who maintain it. In theory, it
is not the same as hypocrisy: in practice, it comes perilously
close. As the question of homosexuality refuses to disappear from
public debate, explicit positions have to be taken. What once
could be shrouded in discretion now has to be argued in public.
For those who privately do not believe that homosexuality is inherently
evil or always chosen, it has become increasingly difficult to
pretend otherwise in public. Silence is an option - and numberless
politicians are nor availing themselves of it - but increasingly
a decision will have to be made. Are you in favor of or against
allowing openly gay women and men to continue serving their country?
Do you favor or oppose gay marriage? Do you support the idea of
gay civil rights laws? Once these questions are asked, the gentle
ambiguity of the moderates must be flushed out; they have to be
forced either into the conservative camp or into formulating a
new politics that does not depend on a code of discourse that
is fast becoming defunct.
They cannot even rely upon their gay
friends anymore. What ultimately sustained this politics was the
complicity of the gay elites in it: their willingness to stay
silent when a gay joke was made in their presence, their deference
to the euphemisms - roommate, friend, companion - that denoted
their lovers, husbands, and wives, their support of the heterosexual
assumptions of polite society. Now that complicity, if not vanished,
has come under strain. There are fewer and fewer J. Edgar Hoovers
and Roy Cohns, and the thousands of discreet gay executives and
journalists, businessmen and politicians who long deferred to
their sexual betters in matters of etiquette. AIDS rendered their
balancing act finally absurd. Many people - gay and straight -
were forced to have the public courage of their private convictions.
They had to confront the fact that their delicacy was a way of
disguising shame; that their silence was a means of hiding from
themselves their intolerance. This is not an easy process; indeed,
it can be a terrifying one for both gay and straight people alike.
But there comes a point after which omissions become commissions;
and that point, if not here yet, is coming. When it arrives, the
moderate politics of homosexuality will be essentially over.
The politics that is the most durable
in our current attempt to deal with the homosexual question is
the contemporary liberal politics of homosexuality. Like the moderates,
the liberals accept that homosexuality exists, that it is involuntary
for a proportion of society, that for a few more it is an option
and that it need not be discouraged. Viewing the issue primarily
through the prism of the civil rights movement, the liberals seek
to extend to homosexuals the same protections they have granted
to other minorities. The prime instrument for this is the regulation
of private activities of heterosexuals, primarily in employment
and housing, to guarantee nondiscrimination against homosexuals.
Sometimes this strategy is echoed in
the rhetoric of Edward Kennedy, who, in the hearings on the military
gay ban, linked the gay rights agenda with the work of such disparate
characters as John Kennedy, Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King,
Jr. In other places, it is reflected in the fact that sexual orientation
is simply added to the end of a list of minority conditions in
formulaic civil rights legislation. And this strategy makes a
certain sense. Homosexuals are clearly subject to private discrimination
in the same way as many other minorities, and linking the causes
helps defuse some of the trauma that the subject of homosexuality
raises. Liberalism properly restricts itself to law - not culture
- in addressing social problems; and by describing all homosexuals
as a monolithic minority, it is able to avoid the complexities
of the gay world as a whole, just as blanket civil rights legislation
draws a veil over the varieties of black America by casting the
question entirely in terms of non-black attitudes.
But this strategy is based on two assumptions:
that sexuality is equivalent to race in terms of discrimination,
and that the full equality of homosexuals can be accomplished
by designating gay people as victims. Both are extremely dubious.
And the consequence of these errors is to mistarget the good that
liberals are trying to do.
Consider the first. Two truths (at least)
profoundly alter the way the process of discrimination takes place
against homosexuals and against racial minorities and distinguish
the history of racial discrimination in this country from the
history of homophobia. Race is always visible; sexuality can be
hidden. Race is in no way behavioral; sexuality, though distinct
from sexual activity, is profoundly linked to a settled pattern
of behavior.
For lesbians and gay men, the option
of self-concealment has always existed and still exists, an option
that means that in a profound way, discrimination against them
is linked to their own involvement, even acquiescence. Unlike
blacks three decades ago, gay men and lesbians suffer no discernible
communal economic deprivation and already operate at the highest
levels of society: in boardrooms, governments, the media, the
military, the law, and industry. They may have advanced so far
because they have not disclosed their sexuality, but their sexuality
as such has not been an immediate cause for their disadvantage.
In many cases their sexuality is known, but it is disclosed at
such a carefully calibrated level that it never actually works
against them. At lower levels of society, the same pattern continues.
As in the military, gay people are not uniformly discriminated
against; openly gay people are.
Moreover, unlike blacks or other racial
minorities, gay people are not subject to inherited patterns of
discrimination. When generation after generation is discriminated
against, a cumulative effect of deprivation may take place, where
the gradual immiseration of a particular ethnic group may intensify
with the years. A child born into a family subject to decades
of accumulated poverty is clearly affected by a past history of
discrimination in terms of his or her race. But homosexuality
occurs randomly anew with every generation. No sociological pattern
can be deduced from it. Each generation gets a completely fresh
start in terms of the socioeconomic conditions inherited from
the family unit.
This is not to say that the psychological
toll of homosexuality is less problematic than that of race, but
that it is different: in some ways better, in others worse. Because
the stigma is geared toward behavior, the level of shame and collapse
of self-esteem may be more intractable. To reach puberty and find
oneself falling in love with members of one's own sex is to experience
a mixture of self-discovery and self-disgust that never leaves
a human consciousness. If the stigma is attached not simply to
an obviously random characteristic, such as skin pigmentation,
but to the deepest desires of the human heart, then it can eat
away at a person's sense of his own dignity with peculiar ferocity.
When a young person confronts her sexuality, she is also completely
alone. A young heterosexual black or Latino girl invariably has
an existing network of people like her to interpret, support,
and explain the emotions she feels when confronting racial prejudice
for the first time. But a gay child generally has no one. The
very people she would most naturally turn to - the family - may
be the very people she is most ashamed in front of.
The stigma attached to sexuality is
also different that that attached to race because it attacks the
very heart of what makes a human being human: her ability to love
and be loved. Even the most vicious persecution of racial minorities
allowed, in many cases, for the integrity of the marital bond
or the emotional core of a human being. When it did not, when
Nazism split husbands from wives, children from parents, when
apartheid or slavery broke up familial bonds, it was clear that
a particularly noxious form of repression was taking place. But
the stigma attached to homosexuality begins with such a
repression. It forbids, at a child's earliest stage of development,
the possibility of the highest form of human happiness. It starts
with emotional terror and ends with mild social disapproval. It's
no accident that later in life, when many gay people learn to
reconnect the bonds of love and sex, they seek to do so in private,
even protected from the knowledge of their family.
This unique combination of superficial
privilege, acquiescence in repression, and psychological pain
is a human mix no politics can easily tackle. But it is the mix
liberalism must address if it is to reach its goal of using politics
to ease human suffering. The internal inconsistency of this politics
is that by relying on the regulation of private activity, it misses
this its essential target - and may even make matters worse. In
theory, a human rights statute sounds like an ideal solution,
a way for straights to express their concern and homosexuals to
legitimate their identity. But in practice, it misses the point.
It might grant workers a greater sense of security were to come
out in the office; and it might, by the publicity it generates,
allow for greater tolerance and approval of homosexuality generally.
But the real terror of coming out is deeper than economic security,
and is not resolved by it; it is related to emotional and interpersonal
dignity. However effective or comprehensive antidiscrimination
laws are, they cannot reach far enough to tackle this issue; it
is one that can only be addressed person by person, life by life,
heart by heart.
For these reasons, such legislation
rarely touches the people most in need of it: those who live in
communities where disapproval of homosexuality is so intense that
the real obstacles to oadvancement remain impervious to legal
remedy. And even in major urban areas, it can be largely irrelevant.
(On average some 1 to 2 percent of antidsicrimination cases have
to do with sexual orientation; in Wisconsin, which has had such
a law in force for more than a decade and is the largest case
study, the figure is 1.1 percent.) As with other civil rights
legislation, those least in need of it may take fullest advantage:
the most litigious and articulate homosexuals, who would likely
brave the harsh winds of homophobia in any case.
Antidiscrimination laws scratch the
privileged surface while avoiding the problematic depths. Like
too many drugs for AIDS, they treat the symptoms of the homosexual
problem without being anything like a cure. They may buy some
time, and it is a cruel doctor who, in the face of human need,
would refuse them. But they have about as much chance of tackling
the deep roots of the gay-straight relationship as AZT has of
curing AIDS. They want to substitute for the traumatic and difficult
act of coming out the more formal and procedural act of legislation.
But law cannot do the work of life. Even culture cannot do the
work of life. Only life can do the work of life.
As the experience in Colorado and elsewhere
shows, this strategy of using law to change private behavior also
gives a fatal opening to the conservative politics of homosexuality.
Civil rights laws essentially dictate the behavior of heterosexuals,
in curtailing their ability to discriminate. They can, with justification,
be portrayed as being an infringement on individual liberties.
If the purpose of the liberal politics is to ensure the equality
of homosexuals and their integration into society, it has thus
achieved something quite peculiar. It has provided fuel for those
who want to argue that homosexuals are actually seeking the infringement
of heterosexuals' rights and the imposition of their values onto
others. Much of this is propaganda, of course, and is fueled by
fear and bigotry. But it works because it contains a germ of truth.
Before most homosexuals have even come out of the closet, they
are demanding concessions from the majority, including a clear
curtailment of economic and social liberties, in order to ensure
protections few of them will even avail themselves of. It is no
wonder there is opposition, or that it seems to be growing. Nine
states now have propositions to respond to what they see as the
"special rights" onslaught.
In the process, the liberal politics
of homosexuality has also reframed the position of gays in relation
to straights. It has defined them in a permanent supplicant status,
seeing gay freedom as dependent on straight enlightenment, achievable
only by changing the behavior of heterosexuals. The valuable political
insight of radicalism is that this is a fatal step. It could enshrine
forever the notion that gay people are a vulnerable group in need
of protection. By legislating homosexuals as victims, it sets
up a psychological dynamic of supplication that too often only
perpetuates cycles of inadequacy and self-doubt. Like blacks before
them, gay people may grasp at what seems to be an escape from
the prison of self-hatred, only to find it is another prison of
patronized victimology. By seeking salvation in the hands of others,
they may actually entrench in law and in their minds the notion
that their equality is dependent on the goodwill of their betters.
It isn't. This may have made a good deal of sense in the case
of American blacks, with a clear and overwhelming history of accumulated
discrimination and a social ghetto that seemed impossible to breach.
But for gay people - already prosperous, independent, and on the
brink of real integration - that lesson should surely now be learned.
To place our self-esteem in the benevolent hands of contemporary
liberalism is more than a mistake. It is a historic error.
If there were no alternative to today's
liberal politics of homosexuality, it should perhaps be embraced
by default. But there is an alternative politics that is imaginable,
which once too was called liberal. It begins with the view that
for a small minority of people, homosexuality is an involuntary
condition that can neither be denied nor permanently repressed.
It adheres to an understanding that there is a limit to what politics
can achieve in such an area, and trains its focus not on the behavior
of private heterosexual citizens but on the actions of the public
and allegedly neutral state. While it eschews the use lof law
to legislate culture, it strongly believes that law can affect
culture indirectly. Its goal would be full civil equality for
those who, through no fault of their own, happen to be homosexual;
and would not deny homosexuals, as the four other politics do,
their existence, integrity, dignity, or distinctness. It would
attempt neither to patronize nor to exclude.
This liberal politics affirms a simple
and limited criterion: that all public (as opposed to private)
discrimination against homosexuals be ended and that every right
and responsibility that heterosexuals enjoy by virtue of the state
be extended to those who grow up different. And that is all. No
cures or re-educations; no wrenching civil litigation; no political
imposition of tolerance; merely a political attempt to enshrine
formal civil equality, in the hope that eventually the private
sphere will reflect this public civility. For these reasons, it
is the only politics that actually tackles the core political
problem of homosexuality and perhaps the only one that fully
respects liberalism's public-private distinction. For these reasons,
it has also the least chance of being adopted by gays and straights
alike.
But is it impossible? By sheer circumstance,
this politics has just been given its biggest boost since the
beginning of the debate over the homosexual question. The military
ban is by far the most egregious example of proactive government
discrimination in this country. By conceding, as the military
has done, the excellent service that many gay and lesbian soldiers
have given to their country, the military has helped shatter a
thousand stereotypes about their nature and competence. By focusing
on the mere admission of homosexuality, the ban has purified the
debate into a matter of the public enforcement of homophobia.
Unlike anti-discrimination law, the campaign against the ban does
not ask any private citizens to hire or fire anyone of whom they
do not approve; it merely asks public servants to behave the same
way with avowed homosexuals as with closeted ones.
Because of its timing, because of the
way in which it has intersected with the coming of age of gay
politics, the military debate has a chance of transforming the
issue for good. Its real political power - and the real source
of the resistance to it - comes from its symbolism. The acceptance
of gay people at the heart of the state, at the core of the notion
of patriotism, is anathema to those who wish to consign homosexuals
to the margins of society. It offends conservatives by the simplicity
of its demands, and radicalism by the traditionalism of the gay
people involved; it dismays moderates, who are forced publicly
to discuss this issue for the first time; and it disorients liberals,
who find it hard to fit the cause simply into the rubric of minority
politics. For instead of seeking access, as other minorities have
done, gays in the military are simply demanding recognition. They
start not from the premise of suppliance, but of success, of proven
ability and prowess in battle, of exemplary conduct and ability.
This is a new kind of minority politics. It is less a matter of
complaint than of pride; less about subversion than about the
desire to contribute equally.
The military ban also forced our society
to deal with the real issues at stake in dealing with homosexuals.
The country has been forced to discuss sleeping arrangements,
fears of sexual intimidation, the fraught emotional relations
between gays and straights, the violent reaction to homosexuality
among many young males, the hypocrisy involved in much condemnation
of gays, and the possible psychological and emotional syndromes
that make homosexuals allegedly unfit for service. Like a family
engaged in the first, angry steps toward dealing with a gay member,
the country has been forced to debate a subject honestly - even
calmly - in a way it has never done before. This is a clear and
enormous gain. Whatever the result of this process, it cannot
be undone.
But the critical measure necessary for
full gay equality is something deeper and more emotional perhaps
than even the military. It is equal access to marriage. As with
the military, this is a question of formal public discrimination.
If the military ban deals with the heart of what it is to be a
citizen, the marriage ban deals with the core of what it is to
be a member of civil society. Marriage is not simply a private
contract; it is a social and public recognition of our personal
integrity. Denying it to gay people is the most public affront
possible to their civil equality.
This issue may be the hardest for many
heterosexuals to accept. Even those tolerant of homosexuals may
find this institution so wedded to the notion of heterosexual
commitment that to extend it would be to undo its very essence.
And there may be religious reasons for resisting this that require
far greater discussion than I can give them here. But civilly
and emotionally, the case is compelling. The heterosexuality of
marriage is civilly intrinsic only if it is understood to be inherently
procreative; and that definition has long been abandoned in civil
society. In contemporary America, marriage has become a way in
which the state recognizes an emotional and economic commitment
of two people to each other for life. No law requires children
to consummate it. And within that definition, there is no civil
way it can logically be denied homosexuals, except as a pure gesture
of public disapproval. (I leave aside here the thorny issue of
adoption rights, which I support in full. They are not the same
as the right to marriage and can be legislated, or not, separately.)
In the same way, emotionally, marriage
is characterized by a kind of commitment that is rare even among
heterosexuals. Extending it to homosexuals need not dilute the
special nature of that commitment, unless it is understood that
gay people, by their very nature, are incapable of it. History
and experience suggest the opposite. It is not necessary to prove
that gay people are more or less able to form long-term relationships
than straights for it to be clear that, at least, some
are. Giving these people a right to affirm their commitment doesn't
reduce the incentive for heterosexuals to do the same, and even
provides a social incentive for lesbians and gay men to adopt
socially beneficial relationships.
But for gay people, it would mean far
more than simple civil equality. The vast majority of us - gay
and straight - are brought up to understand that the apex of emotional
life is found in the marital bond. It may not be something we
achieve, or even ultimately desire, but its very existence premises
the core of our emotional development. It is the architectonic
institution that frames our emotional life. The marriages of others
are a moment for celebration and self-affirmation; they are the
way in which our families and friends reinforce us as human beings.
Our parents consider our emotional lives to be more important
than our professional ones, because they care about us at our
core, not at our periphery. And it is not hard to see why the
marriage of an offspring is often regarded as the high point of
any parent's life.
Gay people always know this essential
affirmation will be denied them. Thus their relationships are
given no anchor, no endpoint, no way of integrating them fully
into the network of family and friends that makes someone a full
member of civil society. Even when those relationships become
essentially the same - or even stronger - than straight relationships,
they are never accorded the same dignity of actual equality. Husbands
remain "friends"; wives remain "partners".
The very language sends a powerful signal of fault, a silent assumption
of internal disorder or insufficiency. The euphemisms - and the
brave attempt to pretend that gay people don't need marriage -
do not successfully conceal the true emotional cost and psychological
damage that this signal exacts. No true progress in the potential
happiness of gay teenagers or in the stability of gay adults or
in the full integration of gay and straight life is possible,
or even imaginable, without it.
These two measures - simple, direct,
requiring no change in heterosexual behavior and no sacrifice
from heterosexuals - represent a politics that tackles the heart
of homophobia while leaving homophobes their freedom. It allows
homosexuals to define their own future and their own identity
and does not place it in the hands of the other. It makes a clear,
public statement of equality, while leaving all the inequalities
of emotion and passion to the private sphere, where they belong.
It does not legislate private tolerance, it declares public equality.
It banishes the paradigm of victimology and replaces it with one
of integrity. It requires one further step, of course, which is
to say the continuing effort for honesty on the part of homosexuals
themselves. This is not easily summed up in the crude phrase "coming
out"; but it finds expression in the myriad ways in which
gay men and lesbians talk, engage, explain, confront, and seek
out the other. Politics cannot substitute for this; heterosexuals
cannot provide it. And while it is not in some sense fair that
homosexuals have to initiate the dialogue, it is a fact of life.
Silence, if it does not equal death, equals the living equivalent.
It is not the least of the ironies of this politics that its objectives are in some sense not political at all. The family is prior to the liberal state; the military is coincident with it. Heterosexuals would not conceive of such rights as things to be won, but as things that predate modern political discussion. But it says something about the unique status of homosexuals in our society that we now have to be political in order to be prepolitical. Our battle is not for political victory but for personal integrity. Just as many of us had to leave our families in order to join them again, so now as citizens, we have to embrace politics, if only ultimately to be free of it. Our lives may have begun in simplicity, but they have not ended there. Our dream, perhaps, is that they might.