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Libbing it up

The gay-rights movement has learned a great deal from the civil-rights movement about how to fight the overwhelming discrimination lesbians and gay men face in jobs and housing. Yet, stunningly, national gay-rights groups never thought of forming political or strategic alliances with the civil-rights groups that pioneered equal-protection legislation. They never sought common ground. When fighting for the rights of gay men and lesbians to adopt and raise children, the gay-rights movement never took a broader stand on children’s rights or children’s health. While it is true that the movement often sought endorsements from groups such as the National Association of Social Workers, claiming that gay people could be fine parents, it never worked closely with these groups on larger issues relating to families or children. Likewise, the movement failed to look at the military in a larger context. It has been so preoccupied with the right to serve in the military that it has been blind to the economic constraints that force many of the working poor into the military, as well as to the growing role of militarism in US foreign policy.

Perhaps the most shocking example of this refusal to entertain and enact a larger political and moral vision is that after hundreds of thousands of gay men’s deaths from AIDS, an event that completely devastated gay rights and gay culture, not one national gay-rights or AIDS group broached the question of universal health care, or some other modification in the broken American heath-care system. If they had done so, they would have garnered support from a wide range of groups and constituencies with similar concerns.

No wild child left behind 
Will a return to the political and moral vision of gay liberation be the best way to enact such changes? Well, yes — and no. The simplistic vision of the gay-liberation movement — to radically reorder the entire world on the principles of justice, fairness, and individual and collective freedom — could not work in 1970, and will not work now. In the best tradition of utopianism, gay liberation was boundless and maddeningly ambiguous, incredibly naïve, and wildly impractical. And it had serious philosophical flaws. It refused to take seriously the importance of religion in people’s lives, a major problem given the current global, culture warfare between the Judeo-Christian tradition and Islam. It also turned a blind eye to deeply entrenched gender traditions — try telling a devout, traditional Afghan woman that her burqa oppresses her. It was woefully ignorant about money and the workings of capitalism, relying instead on romanticized notions of preindustrial economics. And it was appallingly naïve in its view of human nature, feeling that people — and groups — would simply do the right thing because it was the right thing. So while the movement understood the concept of coalition politics, all too often it didn’t understand how to make those arguments convincingly. And all too frequently, it betrayed an almost-comic insensitivity to the real cultural and political differences among organizations.  Taking cues from feminism, for instance, the GLF was adamantly against “macho” as a style of masculinity and celebrated a playful, sissy affect. We simply had no understanding of how black men — long subjugated as “boys” by white culture — would want to lionize their newfound, aggressively masculine political personas. (Pushing the point hard, black leaders such as Eldridge Clever would attack openly gay black men such as James Baldwin as “faggots” and betrayers of black pride.) And while men in the GLF rejoiced in our newfound sexual freedom, we disregarded the experience of many feminists: that sex was too often used by men as a weapon, and “sexual liberation” was yet another patriarchal straight-male ploy to further exploit women.

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