A Great Hill to Die On

Now for unChristian's chapter on Homosexuality.

This passage encapsulates Kinnaman and Lyons's approach, not just to homosexuality but to Christian/"outsider" interaction and perception in general.

In our research, the perception that Christians are “against” gays and lesbians—not only objecting to their lifestyles but also harboring irrational fear and unmerited scorn toward them—has reached critical mass. The gay issue has become the “big one,” the negative image most likely to be intertwined with Christianity’s reputation. It is also the dimension that most clearly demonstrates the unChristian faith to young people today, surfacing a spate of negative perceptions: judgmental, bigoted, sheltered, right-wingers, hypocritical, insincere, and uncaring. Outsiders say our hostility toward gays—not just opposition to homosexual politics and behaviors but disdain for gay individuals—has become virtually synonymous with the Christian faith.

Let me begin by assuring the reader that unlike more extreme atheists, I do not hate Christians; I object to their lifestyles but do not harbor irrational fear and unmerited scorn toward them.  I know and love many Christians, some of whom I assume are good people.  I don't disdain them, I only oppose Christian politics and behaviors, and would like to help them, if I can.  That includes David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, whose painful struggle with Christianity is evident on every page of unChristian.  David and Gabe, it's not you, it's your lifestyle.  You can change.

Of course I don't believe that Kinnaman and Lyons would feel warmed by my welcoming words, though I mean them sincerely.  I imagine they'd feel patronized, and recognize that my insistence on my love and concern for them is only meant to distract attention from my principled rejection of Christianity.  My acceptance of them doesn't mean I accept their faith.  In the same way, it's not their surface conduct toward gay people that I, and I presume the young Christians and ex-Christians they surveyed, reject: it's their teachings about homosexuality.  (And about many other issues as well, but they're not my subject here.)

I'm not surprised that many of the young Christians Kinnaman interviewed put their objections to conservative evangelical Christianity in terms of hate and hostility, or in terms of opposition to gays and lesbians.  As Kinnaman admits, hatred and hostility have been hard to miss in Christian antigay campaigns.

Here is an example: one seventeen-year-old churchgoer described her experience bringing a gay friend to church. “The youth pastor knew I was going to bring him, and even though his talk really had nothing to do with homosexuality, he still found a way to insert ‘God created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve’ into his comments. I was sitting there, just dying. This happened more than once. My friend was at a point where he was interested in seeing what Jesus might offer, and the door was just slammed shut” [102].

It will be an uphill struggle for Christians like Kinnaman who profess goodwill toward us to convince us that they really do mean well.  I suggest that merely professing their good intentions and biting back the "Adam and Steve" jokes is not going to be enough; at the very least they're going to have to put more pressure on their leaders and peers to change their attitudes.  Lots of luck with that.

People do have a tendency to confuse opposition to someone's actions with opposition to the person him or herself, which presumably is why so many people told Kinnaman that Christians are "against" gay men and lesbians.  Kinnaman himself slips up on page 103: "Because of our opposition to homosexuals, outsiders cannot picture the church as the loving community of believers Jesus envisioned."  Much if not most of the time, the distinction is made dishonestly, because in practice the distinction doesn't matter.  I suppose there are a few heterosexual "unChristians" with LGBT friends or relatives who'd be reassured by Kinnaman's moderate tone, for a while at least, in some cases long enough to drift back into the churches they'd previously rejected.  I doubt that many gay people or many straight friends and relatives will fall for it.

It's difficult to figure out exactly what Kinnaman and Lyons think the place of LGBT people in their church should be.  For one thing, they and the commentators to whom they give space in unChristian tend to focus less on us than on themselves.  For example, the writer Sarah Raymond Cunningham, who informs us that "I have braved a few real-life conversations with homosexual friends" (113):

There were dozens of tangible traits I cherished about my friend, and I told him so. But—in a voice trembling with nervousness and compassion—I confessed I was afraid my friendship might seem insincere if I couldn’t affirm what he held to be a central part of his identity: his sexuality.

“As far as I can tell,” I gulped, “the Bible only introduces one kind of sexual union, and that is between a man and a woman. So, I have to believe this is the course that leads to the fullest life—the life the Creator intended for us.”

When I spit out these defining sentences, I worried all my friend could hear was Blah-Blah-Christian-Blah-Blah.  But he stared back at me kindly, so I continued...

I think the conversation changed me more than my friend, because it forced me to acknowledge parts of God’s will I sometimes overlooked. To accept that God doesn’t want me to do things even he does not choose to do—to control or hijack someone else’s freedom [113, 114].

It's as if what matters most is her, not her friend.  Given that "he stared back at me kindly," it sounds as if he was counseling her, not the other way around.  Perhaps that's how it was, and should have been.

I've run into my share of people like Cunningham, and I try to reassure them that I don't mind much if they can't "affirm" my homosexuality.  It's not really their business anyway.  But if they keep trying to negate it, if they can't let it fade into the background and attend to other traits or interests that we do have in common, we can't be friends.  That's only a problem if they see me not as a person, but as a notch on their missionary bedposts.  But if they do, and if they can accept that I don't affirm what they hold to be a central part of their identity -- their Christianity -- friendship is possible. 

Or consider Rick McKinley, pastor of Imago Dei Church in Portland:

Recently, I spent a year with a guy who thought he was born gay. We spent time working through what I believed to be God’s design for him. I believe God’s design is clearly male/female union or heterosexuality, however, he concluded that God made him that way (homosexual) and wanted to embrace this lifestyle fully. Therefore, he left the church, but it was a healthy parting. I am not sure how you avoid this kind of messiness when building relationships and loving people who are struggling with sexual identification issues [116].

Here too the gay man fades into the background.  It's all about the "healthy parting" and the kinds of "messiness" a pastor has to deal with.

Third one's the charm.  Chris Seay, of Ecclesia in Montrose, Houston:

As I walked closer to the place where our church was positioned, I realized there were three transvestite prostitutes working on the street corner. I decided to strike up a conversation with them, which led to me going inside and bringing them water. They were thirsty, so I gave them something to drink [114].

That's the whole story.  I suppose I should be glad he didn't tell us that the three transvestite prostitutes were so moved by Seay's Christian charity that they joined his church and in a few short months had become linebackers for the Houston Texans; but as it is, they are just props in a story about himself, his compassion, his courage in going near three homosexuals, braving the peril of homosexual cooties. Just like Jesus. 

Throughout unChristian the writers and commentators give the impression that homosexuals are something Out There, a kind of person they've never met before.  (The chapter following "Homosexuality" is "Sheltered," but I think that's the wrong word; "Closed Off" or "Hermetically Sealed" would be more like it.) You'd think the book had been written in the early 1970s, not the first decade of the twenty-first century.  "Despite widespread mobilization over the last decade, most Christians have become even more isolated from homosexuals," Kinnaman declares on page 106.  It may be true of the circles Kinnaman and Lyons and their commentators move in, but as Kinnaman admits,

Our research shows that one-third of gays and lesbians attend church regularly, going to churches across a wide spectrum of denominations and backgrounds, including Catholic, mainline, nonmainline, and nondenominational churches. Most gays and lesbians in America align themselves with Christianity, and one-sixth have beliefs that qualify them as born-again Christians. Most have been active in a church at one time, such as this gay man: “Sometimes it’s hard for me to reconcile the ‘Christian movement’ I see in politics today with the kind, generous people I knew from my own days in the church. I remember the Christians I knew (and once considered myself) to be students of God, who wanted to serve him and spread his good news and message of hope to a needy world.” The bottom line: some gays are antagonistic to Christianity, but many are not [97].

It appears to me that Kinnaman is being disingenuous here, equivocating in a typically conservative-evangelical way.  He'd like the reader to suppose that the gays and lesbians in America [who] align themselves with Christianity" agree that homosexual behavior is sinful, and so do the "wide spectrum of denominations and backgrounds."  No doubt many do, but not those churches that offer union or even marriage ceremonies to same-sex couples, nor the couples who exchange their vows in those churches.

Going by the gay Christians I've known, it's a safe bet that not even all those whose beliefs "qualify them as born-again Christians" agree that they are sinning when they have sex, in marriage or out of it.  UnChristian was published several years before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex civil marriage in the US, but American churches had been examining and revising their positions for decades by then.  Those gay people who still want to join churches have other options available to them than the brand represented by the writers of unChristian.

Because of the increased numbers of more or less openly gay people around, it takes strong determination for conservative Christians to avoid knowing us, or to pretend that they don't know us.  The rise of fundamentalist-run businesses and spaces since the 1980s might have made it easier for evangelicals to avoid dealing with outsiders, but since gay people are already Christians, we are already inside those spaces.  We are already in their families and workplaces and churches.  Even if we are immediately expelled upon discovery, they still have known us.  Perhaps they repress the unpleasant knowledge.

What, then, do Kinnaman and Lyons and their commentators have to offer to Christian LGBT people?  They are carefully vague.  Even the gay man given space at the end of the chapter, one Levi Walker, who reports that he returned to church four years earlier after "twenty years of depression, twelve years of drug addiction and dealing, and several suicide attempts" (117), says nothing about the kind of church he's in now, how it treats him, his place in it.  Walker's the kind of homosexual Christians like Kinnaman love: the drugs, the suicide attempts, the depression -- only AIDS is missing, but nobody's perfect.  The heterosexual commentators, as I noted, mainly talk about themselves and their spirituality, how bad they feel when they're stereotyped as "gay-hating bigots" (110), how they bravely had "real life" (as opposed to imaginary?)  conversations with homosexuals.

To their limited credit, no one in this book touts ex-gay ministries, at least not explicitly.  Maybe they're aware of what ineffective and scandal-ridden scams they are.  But it's fair to find in their ramblings a belief that change will occur once a homosexual joins a welcoming community, and if not that ...

As a church [writes Rick McKinley of Imago Dei], we have to hold to what Scripture says is true about the practice of homosexuality—the acting out of same sex relationships is a sin. However, we are wondering if it is possible to experience same-sex attraction but give yourself to living a celibate lifestyle. What if we could provide intimate Christ-centered community and accountability for him or her in that pursuit? We believe that community is the answer to everyone feeling loved and human [116-17].

Celibacy may be "possible" for a few, just as it's possible for a few to run a mile in under four minutes or scale Mount Everest, but it is not a realistic option for most human beings. Offering it as a solution -- to gay people, not to straights of course -- is not a good-faith approach.  (It's also Albert Mohler's bad-faith recommendation.)  As for experiencing same-sex attraction without acting on it, Kinnaman points out that "Jesus raised the bar beyond skin-on-skin contact and said even a simple thing like sexual thoughts can defile us [Matthew 5:28].  Our approach should embrace this high standard of sexuality" (104).  So Kinnaman's church, at any rate, can't even offer membership to gays on condition of overt sexual abstinence.

"It is necessary and appropriate for Christians to affirm that marriage is between one man and one woman," Kinnaman declares (105).  Appropriate perhaps, but hardly necessary, since the Biblical model was one man and numerous women, whether wives, concubines, or the odd harlot by the side of the road.  That's the original Biblical standard; the New Testament standard is that marriage is for weaklings who can't cut the mustard, either by self-mutilation (Matthew 19:12) or gritting one's teeth and abstaining from sexual life altogether (1 Corinthians 7).  Monogamy became the Christian standard not because of biblical teaching but because gentile Christians adopted Roman customs.

One would think it necessary and appropriate for Christians to affirm that divorce is not acceptable except under very narrowly defined conditions, but although Kinnaman and his commentators occasionally mention divorce as a problem because of our broken sexuality and our decadent society, they don't discuss its acceptance by evangelicals, both for themselves and their chosen politicians.  Ronald Reagan's divorced and remarried status didn't bother them at all, nor does Donald Trump's evangelical base mind his multiple marriages and divorces.  If they can overlook a lifestyle that was specifically prohibited by Jesus, perhaps they can (and probably will) learn to overlook the conflict between the Bible (though not Jesus, at least not explicitly) and same-sex sexual expression.

The olive branch Kinnaman and his commentators hold out to potential gay converts is that everybody's sexuality is "broken."  "But there is not a special judgment for homosexuals, and there is not a a special righteousness for heterosexuals," writes Shayne Wheeler of All Souls Fellowship in Georgia (page 111).  Rev. Alfred Ells of Leaders Last Ministries chimes in:

And I would add this caution: I have counseled many more straight Christians than homosexuals. Many believers are dealing with significant sexual issues, from marital unfaithfulness to pornographic addictions and other things you would not believe. Don’t underestimate the power of sexual problems—gay or straight—to devastate even the best families and the best churches [118].

That, like the recommendation of celibacy, is not going to win many homosexuals for Jesus.  Heterosexuals are granted presumably unbroken sexual expression in marriage, but homosexuals are a "sexual problem" in ourselves, like "pornographic addictions or other things you would not believe," with no loophole.  Fewer and fewer people, gay or straight, will go along with this anymore, and since there is no real moral argument against homosexuality except a biblical prohibition -- which evangelicals are as ready as other Christians to ignore when it's convenient for them -- conservative evangelicals had better expect to see their numbers continue to dwindle.

Kinnaman doesn't advocate secular laws against homosexual activity, though he's not clear as to why. He does claim that "laws provide significant parameters that determine Americans' behaviors, so lawyers and legislators should work diligently to pursue a biblical perspective that achieves appropriate goals" (105).  This is followed by his remark, quoted above, about one-man / one-woman marriage.  Apparently he hasn't heard of the First Amendment.  He concludes that "You change a country not merely by bolstering its laws but by transforming the hearts of its people" (106), but he and his ilk have failed, thankfully, to do even that much -- they have not, on the evidence of this book, even managed to transform their own.

Christians point out the importance of a father and a mother in child development and reject the claims that gay couples should be able to adopt. And, of course, I recognize that it’s offensive to homosexuals to say that a child needs both a father and a mother; it’s a difficult part of what Christians believe. However, though this is an important conviction, Christians have to avoid rhetoric that dehumanizes people, especially in interpersonal interactions. Our most important concern must be the response of young people to Christ, not merely what type of home they grew up in ... If the people of Christ attack, mock, and criticize a child's parents, the chances that the child will ever commit his or her life to Christ are diminished [106].

There's plenty wrong here, starting with the invalid assumption that gay people only become parents through adoption, and moving on to the assumption that if you can't offer an ideal (by Kinnaman's standards) set of parents you should not be allowed to have or raise children at all.  Children have been successfully raised by widowed parents, for example.  I've known children who grew up in households headed by two women, both widowed or abandoned by husbands, who turned out okay.  Children will also have an easier time if their parents aren't poor, or members of other despised minorities; but I doubt Kinnaman would want to take them away from their parents or tell them they should never have been born, no offense kids but your parents fail to meet our high Christian standards of Family.  Same-sex couples, as far as we can tell, do as well by their children as mixed ones; the absence of both male and female in the parent couple doesn't mean the kids won't have meaningful interaction with other adults.  But Kinnaman has evidently ignored all the research and discussion on this matter; if you have Scripture and Christian-Right publications, what more do you need?

I find myself wondering, though, just how he envisions Christians of his sort coming into contact with children of gay parents.  Surely not because the parents attend his church?  Maybe he just visualizes such kids wandering into his youth coffeehouse or being brought to his church by friends.  (It's a trap, kids! Don't go in!)  He even seems to be aware of the harm done by bullying. But in the end, he sees them purely as targets for conversion, though it's not impossible or unlikely that they will already be Christians, attending with their parents a church that Kinnaman doesn't approve of.

It's easy to see, on the evidence of unChristian and other handwringing writings on the declining influence of fundamentalist Christianity, why young people are staying away from their faction in droves.  (It shouldn't be forgotten that all denominations, including liberal ones, have the same problem, if it is a problem for anyone but them.)  I'm not talking only about their reactionary and harmful politics, but about their lack of engagement with actual human beings.  Despite their talk about being confident and fearless in the Lord, they come across in this book as terrified of just about everyone, to the point that having a "real life" conversation with an outsider (or even another Christian with differing views) feels risky and brave to them.  They recommend listening to others, but there's little indication in their own accounts that they do so.  They have to force themselves to make outreach, which is their right but incompatible with their own missionary platform.  As a queer atheist who's worked and talked with a wide range of people who don't agree with me over the years, I had trouble at first realizing how disengaged Kinnaman and his collaborators are.

Whatever they're selling, there's a dwindling market for it.  (I noticed that one of the more successful ministries touted by the commentators is a coffeehouse in Washington, DC, which is still around a dozen years after unChristian was published.  The commercial front, not the evangelism, probably accounts for its longevity.)  That's no ground for complacency, because even small groups of fanatics can do a lot of damage to a society.

I kept thinking of the prominent evangelical Carl F. H. Henry's remark* that "A redemptive totalitarianism is far preferable to an unredemptive democracy; a redemptive Communism far more advantageous than an unredemptive Capitalism, and vice versa."  This implies what should be obvious from much other evidence: Christianity is about purity (doctrinal and moral) and salvation, not about social justice or ordinary human decency.  Sure, you can import a concern with social justice into your implementation of Christianity (many have done it), but it's not the core of Christian concern.  According to the Gospel, helping others is not an end in itself but a means to getting oneself into Heaven.  (Besides, Christianity is about the Kingdom of God, not the Democracy of God.  Its worldview is hierarchical, not egalitarian.)

As I've said before, I don't advocate the a priori exclusion of Christians (or members of other religions) from public discourse.  But their Christianity is independent of whatever of value they have to contribute.  (I feel the same way about many atheists, who are apt to inject their fantasies about "the visions of Bronze Age goatherds" and other village-atheist bullshit to derail serious discussions.)  As unChristian shows once again, even on their own turf conservative evangelicals have very little to contribute; at best they distract from the serious thought and work that needs to be done.

*In The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, originally published in 1947.  Quoted here.

The Is-ness of "Is"

The other day I was on a GLB panel addressing an education class, and the perennial question came up: What should you do when a student says That's so gay?

Aside from the usual expressions of deep concern, which I've written about before, one of the other speakers said that it's important to tell kids the "real meaning of 'gay.'"  I didn't know whether to address that, but I wish now that I had.

There is no "real meaning of 'gay.'"  Words don't have "real" meanings.  His remark was especially funny given the fraught recent history of the word.  It may be that this guy, who's in his late 40s I think, is a bit too young to remember the fuss that swept America after 1970 over homosexuals' brutal appropriation of "gay," a nice innocent little word that you can't use in front of children anymore because of Teh Political Correctness.  If "gay" had a real meaning, it wouldn't be "homosexual," it would be one of the older ones, like "happily excited" or "keenly alive and exuberant."  Like it or not, using "gay" to mean stupid, uncool, weird, is as "real" as any other meaning.  It appears that Merriam-Webster hasn't caught up with the newer meaning yet, though it has already been with us for about thirty years.

It happened that this week I finally began reading Gender Trouble, Judith Butler's classic of queer and gender theory, originally published by Routledge in 1990.  The copy I'm reading was printed in 1999, and includes a ten-years-after preface by Butler.  So far -- I'm going slowly, because I have so much else I need to read and this isn't the kind of book one dashes through in any case -- the preface is interesting, and I'll probably be writing more about the book as I proceed.

Butler wrote a few things that I liked quite a lot.  But then I came to this:

Much of my work in recent years has been devoted to clarifying and revising the theory of performativity that is outlined in Gender Trouble.  It is difficult to say precisely what performativity is not only because my own views on what “performativity” might mean have changed over time, most often in response to excellent criticisms, but because so many others have taken it up and given it their own forms [xiv].

Performativity, like any other complex abstraction, "is" not anything.  From what I've read elsewhere over the years, it seems that Butler had not really thought through what she meant by "performativity" when she wrote the book; and as she says here, her views on the subject have changed over time.  She goes on to say that her usage was influenced by Jacques Derrida, which surprised me a little because I thought that the word was popularized by the philosopher John L. Austin and his followers.  It seemed to me that (as is commonly the case in and out of academia) many of the people who appropriated the term from Gender Trouble didn't bother to understand what Butler meant, or thought she might mean, by it.

So I'm not saying that Butler, or other writers, don't know "the real meaning" of "performativity."  To some extent you can, for analytic purposes, define a term to mean anything you like, though it takes great care and effort to leave out the historical baggage that the term carries with it.  This happened to Richard Dawkins, for example, in The Selfish Gene: though he insisted that he wasn't using "selfish" to mean what it does in everyday discourse, in practice the everyday associations kept sneaking back in.  "Homosexual" ("as we think of it today") is another case.  And as I've complained before, many academics seem to believe that meanings inhere in words, and need only to be excavated to find what is already, mystically there.  It appears to me that Butler in that passage was making the same error.

In the Beginning Was the Word

Maybe I overuse the "X for me, Not-X for thee" template, but it encompasses so much bad faith that it's hard to resist.  Yesterday a queer friend of mine posted one of those "Labels are for cans, not for people" memes.  I have at least two reactions to this slogan; one is that you can't really have language without labels; the other is that the people who claim to dislike labels actually like them quite a lot: first for other people, but also for themselves.

For other people there are labels like: homophobe, transphobe, bigot, Bible-thumper, so-called Christians, redneck, and so on.  That leaves aside the more straightforwardly abusive neologisms, often constructed with the -tard suffix: theotard, Republitard, Reichtard, and so on.  These latter have their right-wing counterparts (libtard, etc.), but for the moment I'm talking about people who'd consider themselves liberal, rational, compassionate, loving, open-minded.  More labels, of course.

For themselves, the labels proliferate.  I was recently invited to give a presentation on LGBT history in the area, and while putting it together I was struck by how many labels were coined in the late nineteenth century -- invert, Urning, Uranian, homosexual, androgyne, third sex, etc.  These were words that sex/gender nonconformists invented for ourselves, or adopted for our use.  When I was newly out forty-some years ago, gay men were fond of labeling sexual acts and roles: French active/passive, Greek active/passive, and an older man laid out for me a full list of nationalities linked to sexual practices.  We were also fond of constructions based on "queen": chicken queen, closet queen, opera queen, and (my favorite) fish queen.  (I liked "fish queen" not because of its misogyny but because it incorporated straight men into its taxonomy, classifying them as homosexuals so twisted that they were queer for women.)  Lesbians of the period had their own system: butch, femme, butchy-femme, soft butch, and so on.  I don't know how much of this is still current, but similar self-labeling is certainly going on today: pansexual, asexual, demisexual, genderqueer, transman, transwoman, and so on.

Just a few weeks ago, Caitlyn Jenner's "I am a woman" pull quote was all over the media, and none of the anti-label people got on her case for labeling herself: indeed, they celebrated and defended her.  In this case too, the label is a moving target: "man" and "woman" are meaningless social constructions on one hand, and pre-existent, pre-social benchmarks that define who one is.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.  It's the hypocrisy, the doublethink, of those who claim to reject labels but use them anyway that I'm criticizing here.

I'm presently working my way through a collection of stories by Vincent Czyz, Adrift in a Vanishing City (Vanishing Mountain Press, 2015).  In one story, the French narrator reflects on another character who's labeled a pédé (location 2061 of the Kindle edition):

We French also say pedale, homosexual, tante, de la jacquette flottante – he whose jacket blows lightly behind him – not much else.  It is not the big deal of snow to the Eskimos who have 50 or 60 words for it to distinguish between wet, powdery, crusted, high drifts and so on.  Americans must hold most sacred of all the homosexual since they have any number of words for it – fairy, fag, tinkerbell, queer, three-dollar bill, limp-wrist, homo, fruit, pansy, queen, flit – imagine if my English were up to date.

(I wonder how true it is that French has relatively few words for men who take it up the butt; I doubt it, but my French isn't good enough for me to say. I do know that Spanish has a rich supply of such labels, rivaling what we have in English.)  Even if it were true that Eskimos "have 50 or 60 words" for snow, the variety of American terms for queer men wouldn't be the same kind of thing.  They aren't a taxonomy to enable fine-grained distinctions between varieties of homosexual, they're a ragbag of epithets for the same supposed species.  Some are abusive epithets used by ostensibly heterosexual culture cops, others are self-classifications invented and used by queers ourselves, some moved from one side to the other and back again.  As I mentioned above, though, queers are fond of proliferating labels for ourselves, which sometimes distinguish and sometimes lump us all together.  Unless you're still an adherent of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -- and I think a lot of laypeople are, especially in its more deterministic forms -- I don't think there's much to be learned from the existence of all those terms.

On the other hand, I think the linguist Tim Machan's reflections on language change are interesting.  From Language Anxiety: Conflict and Change in the History of English (Oxford, 2009, digital edition):

Indeed, as Labov has noted, language actually points to conclusions that oppose natural selection: ‘the major agent of linguistic change – sound change – is actually maladaptive, in that it leads to the loss of the information that the original forms were designed to carry’.  More generally, change and variation are responsible for a great many socially debilitating situations.  They produce mutually unintelligible languages and their attendant barriers to communication, the communication, the communicative obstacles that even regional variation can present, and the sociolinguistic drive to instruct generation after generation of students in the details of spelling, punctuation, and usage, which are never internalized and transmitted to subsequent generations in some Lamarckian fashion.  In view of the tumult of history and the blame placed on inadequate communication, I would venture that if there truly is a general drive to optimal communication, it has failed miserably.

Which would seem to imply that people who insist that language is essentially for communication and demand that people communicate clearly with language may be trying to use language for a purpose it didn't evolve to perform.

Back to the desirability of labels, then.  It could be argued that labeling impedes communication, but it seems to me that the people who refuse certain labels (while, remember, embracing others) aren't really worried about that.  Inventing new labels in the name of rejecting labels is hardly an improvement in the communication department.

Take the rejection of the label "gay," which I've written about before.  I'm fascinated by the reasons people give for rejecting it.  They may see it as a pejorative, which is understandable but not so much when they want to replace it with something like "queer."  Again, from the way such people talk, they seem to believe that the word "gay" is inherently and essentially negative, which it wasn't always; sometimes they claim to prefer "queer" because it's somehow indeterminate, though given the negative baggage that attaches to it historically, this explanation makes no sense.  It sometimes is expressed precisely as a refusal to communicate, because of the supposed indeterminacy of "queer": I have my own personal special-snowflake definition of what it means, which I might or might not share with you.  Well, to each his or her own.  Take the African-American graduate student I mentioned in another post, who rejected "gay" because in his mind it referred to two "cis" men together; presumably he thought "queer" doesn't have this denotation.  But "gay" doesn't mean that: its use during most of the twentieth century involved a lot of gender nonconformity and gendered division of sexual labor.  The same goes for "homosexual," which (conflated with "gay") supposedly involves "two individuals who are of the same sex and the same gender," though in fact gender nonconformity is associated with homosexuality both at the popular and at the academic level.  (There's also the notion of "a (postmodern) gay ideology, in which both partners in a same-sex sexual relationship are viewed equally in terms of their sexual orientation."  This, as I've argued before, involves a basic confusion about the "ideology.")

Another common factor in the rejection of "gay" or any other label is stigma: people will look down on me if I say I'm gay.  Another student who preferred not to label himself on a recent classroom panel explained that if he called himself "gay," or even "bisexual," people would misunderstand and think things about him that weren't true.  He didn't specify what those untrue things were.  Of course if he didn't label himself, people would also think things about him that weren't true.  They might believe him to be exclusively heterosexual, for example, or they might label him "faggot" or "punk," no matter how many women he also dates.  And often the trouble with those "misunderstandings" that people worry about is that they aren't misunderstandings at all.  I sympathize completely with the ambivalence other people feel about adopting a stigmatized identity; though they often refuse to believe it, I felt exactly the same way before I came out.  But the only way I know of to counter these misunderstandings is to face them and counteract them, as best we can.  If someone has stereotypes about gay people (and let me remind you, gay people also have stereotypes about gay people!), you won't get them to give their stereotypes up by pretending to be straight.  To add to the fun, many of the people who fear "misunderstandings" involving stereotypes do their best to embody the stereotypes when they do come out.  I can understand and sympathize with that too, but it's a consequence of the prior denial.

Labels can be misused, and I argue that this historical ignorance and self-serving, inconsistent rejection of labels constitutes misuse, because of the confusion that it engenders, probably by design.  There's no foolproof way to avoid confusion, stereotyping, historical baggage, or the limitations of labels; you just have to try to deal with these matters as best you can, in conversation with others, educating yourself and them as you go.  You won't get anywhere by refusing to use labels, because people will go on using them around you, like it or not.  So you must engage with others -- and don't assume that you already know everything and they know nothing.  As human beings using labels, we can't avoid using them altogether; we must learn to use them as well as we can.

The Teeman Multitudes

The Daily Beast has an article up, "How Gay Was Gore Vidal?"  The author, Tim Teeman, is apparently a successful British journalist, the kind you cannot hope to bribe or twist, with an upcoming biography of Vidal due to be published later this year.  The article is, well, painful.

Vidal said he was bisexual, but his family and friends say he was gay. Vidal adamantly believed “gay” referred to a sexual act, not a sexual identity. 

Oh, no.  No, no, no.  First, I'm not sure Vidal ever said he was bisexual.  He did talk and write of having copulated with males and females, and maybe that's what Teeman means.  But as far as I know Vidal never labeled himself sexually, at least for the record.  (Readers, correct me if you know otherwise.)

Vidal did not believe "'gay' referred to a sexual act, not a sexual identity."  The word Teeman has in mind, I suspect, is "homosexual," which Vidal insisted referred only to acts, not to persons. "Gay" does not equal "homosexual."  In this he followed Alfred Kinsey, whose research into sexual behavior Vidal supported and aided.  Nor would Vidal have used the term "identity" in this context; that's a post-70s usage, which has led to immense confusion.

On "gay," Vidal told Fag Rag in the 1970s,

I prefer the word faggot which I tend to use myself. I have never allowed, actively, in my life the word “gay” to pass my lips. I don’t know why I hate that word ... Also, I mean, historically it meant a girl of easy virtue in the 17th century. They’d say: “Is she gay?” Which meant: “Is she available?” And this, I don’t think, is highly descriptive of anybody. It’s just a bad word. You see, I don’t think you have to have a word for it. This is what you have to evolve. These words have got to wither away in a true Hegelian cycle.

Vidal wasn't the only fag of his generation who hated the word "gay."  (Just as gay men of my generation hated "queer" when it was reclaimed by younger people in the 90s, and a few years later younger queers rejected "gay" because they knew it only as a homophobic schoolyard slur.)  Christopher Isherwood was another, though he eventually grew accustomed to it as he made common cause with the post-Stonewall gay movement.  There were a number of reasons for this distaste, but since Teeman can't even get Vidal's words right, he can't shed much light on his reasons.

Teeman condescends to Vidal as a man of "his time," but he's too ignorant of even recent history to be taken seriously.  Writing of Howard Austen, with whom Vidal lived for over fifty years, Teeman writes "For most of their lives together, Vidal referred to Austen as his friend," and adds, "This was no 'friendship,' but, as I sketch in the book, a deep, enduring relationship."  "Friend" was queer code for "boyfriend" in those days (you can see this in Isherwood's writings) and for quite some time afterward, and not everyone even now would agree that a friendship, even a non-sexual one, can't be "deep" or "enduring."  It looks like Teeman's upcoming book will have some hot dish, but he too is a man of his time, and it's a time of shallow, sensational, ill-informed tabloid writing.

When Being Gay Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Be Gay -- Oh, Wait ...

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Queen of Queens

Sometimes I think that all aspiring anthropologists should have to do an ethnography of their own communities before they're turned loose on other societies.  It has been an ongoing complaint of mine that so many writers compare non-Western homosexualities to an imaginary mental model of gay life in the West, especially the US.

This happens even when these writers' subject is a Western society like Mexico.  (Or Mississippi, for that matter.)  In Flaming Souls: Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Social Change in Barbados (University of Toronto Press, 2012), David A. Murray does it even though he acknowledges that Barbados -- an English-speaking independent Caribbean state -- is Western, or at least not non-Western.  The antigay bigotry he documents is thoroughly Western, in fact Christian.  (As Saleem Kidwai and Ruth Vanita observed about India, the people who denounce homosexuality like to "associate homosexuality with the West. ... On the other hand, they draw on Western sources to legitimize their homophobia.")  He therefore relies on the imperial metropole/colony binary, though he cites Ann Stoler to the effect that "imperial formations are unlike empires in that they are processes of becoming; they are fixed things" (115), and he claims:

From the days of the plantation to the present there have been multiple, fluid, and shifting social, economic, and moral practices operating in Barbados, affecting hegemonic discourses of respectable citizenship, so that these discourses do not sit in as stable a position as they do in settler states like the United States, where the moral codification of white heteropatriarchy has established a stranglehold on sociopolitical and economic order [115-6].

Well, no, I don't think so.  I don't agree that hegemonic discourses of respectable citizenship are stable in the United States,  They're always prone to slippage, because whiteness for example is a highly unstable category, which is constantly being renegotiated.  So is manhood, which is always in crisis.  That the US is a settler state has nothing to do with it.  Empires are "processes of becoming," not "fixed things."  I haven't read Stoler, so I don't know if Murray is representing her views accurately.

Murray also claims that antigay bigotry in Barbados is connected to other, perhaps larger social forces.

Specifically, I argue that it is no coincidence that homosexuality was increasingly debated in public contexts at this historical juncture because Barbados faced major social and economic challenges in its marginal position relative to other international political and economic alliances ... These realignments (or potential realignments) of political and economic power were bringing about significant changes in the socio-economic fabric of life of many Bajans, resulting in what some observers claimed was a submissive, subordinated, or 'feminized' (defined through a heteropatriarchal lens) economy.  Like many other societies, Barbados was also going undergoing rapid technological changes through the increasing presence of computer, television, and mobile communication technologies, which in turn linked Barbadians to multiple, globally circulating ideas, values, and identities relating to sexuality [9].

No doubt this is true, but the same is true of an imperial settler society like the United States.  There was a sharp rise in antigay bigotry here after World War II, associated with very similar "challenges."  And as Sarah Schulman reminded us in Stagestruck (Duke, 1998, p. 124), "Historically, dominant people have always been comfortable with the idea of oppressed people as secretly powerful. The easiest example, of course, is how for almost two thousand years, dominant groups of various stripes have convinced themselves that they were ruled over by a secret cabal of Jews."  Even as the US has imposed its will on much of the world, it still has imagined itself as a pitiful helpless giant, pushed around by its critics and enemies.  Maybe Murray does well to stress these factors in Barbadian life, but since he seems to think that they aren't relevant in the US, he gives a misleading impression.  The same difficulty arises in his discussion of "rights."

These matters are more about history and cultural theory, however.  I was startled when Murray expressed his confusion at the way some of his gay Barbadian informants spoke about themselves, for example:

Throughout our conversations Darcy would interchangeably refer to himself as gay and a queen, which confused me at the time based on my understandings of these terms derived from my experiences as a white, North American, gay-identified male.  In North America gay and transgendered communities are popularly thought of as distinct groups based on their different sexual and gendered orientations ... At this time I thought Darcy's usage of these terms indicated the possibility of at least two or more queer communities existing in Barbados, transgender and gay or lesbian, and that perhaps [he] was telling me that [he] felt comfortable in both groups [65].

My understanding as a white, North American, gay-identified male is different, though it may be out of date.  In the predominantly white college-town gay community in which I made my debut in the early 1970s, "queen" was a generic term for gay men.  One sign of this was the use of "queen" qualified by various modifiers -- chicken queen, opera queen, trade queen, theater queen, danger queen, etc. -- that indicated an individual's quirks and fetishes, not all of them erotic.  Drag (female impersonation) wasn't seen as a transgender phenomenon but a part of gay life, however much it bothered many public-relations-minded homosexuals, and as far as I can tell it still is: Miss Gay IU pageants were annual events in my community until the past few years, when financial woes brought them to an end for the time being.  "Transgender" is a relatively recent category, and it has led to a lot of confusion over who qualifies and who doesn't.

In larger cities, there are enough people to generate specialized segments of the community, so that a young gay man like Murray can perhaps go for years without meeting queeny individuals, and might come to imagine that "gay" refers exclusively to gender-compliant gay males, with everyone else being "transgender" and not "gay."  But I really doubt it.  I immediately think of Seventies clones, one of whom told the gay sociologist Martin Levine, "Darling, beneath all this butch drag, we are still girls."  (Dancer from the Dance, Andrew Holleran's classic novel of the gay Manhattan disco scene of the Sixties and Seventies, depicts this world and mentality very well.)  And then I think of the high-end real estate agent Robby Browne, who celebrated his achievement as Corcoran's 2007 salesperson of the year by putting on a drag show starring himself and a dozen Broadway chorus boys.

No, someone hasn't been paying attention to the community he's been living in.  And once again I wonder how this book found its way into print without one of the many fellow-academics thanked in the Acknowledgements pointing out these misunderstandings.

P.S. Which doesn't mean Flaming Souls isn't worth reading.  Like many academics, Murray gives good research, and his account of Barbadian gay life is engaging.  I especially enjoyed his story, in chapter 6, of the "Jamaican invasion": some Barbadian queens go to Jamaica on vacation and bring some Jamaican men back with them.  (Sexual tourism also works horizontally, you see: between the colonized nations, as well as vertically.)  Hilarity ensues when the Jamaicans turns out not to be as different from their shiftless, no-account Barbadian counterparts as the queens had hoped.  Besides, unlike many academics, Murray actually understands most of the theoretical jargon he must use, and his discussion of political and economic factors is well done.  The problem, as I said, is his faulty picture of gay life in the US.

Overlooking the Obvious Again

One thing I've learned over the years from speaking to classes and from online discussion is that very often a question has an unspoken assumption I don't hear at first.  Discovering such an assumption may drastically change the way I answer the question.

Once, for example, a young woman told us that an older male relative, maybe a policeman, had referred to "gay rape" in her presence.  This upset her a great deal, and the other panelists tried to answer it without succeeding in assuaging her concern.  Finally we figured out that she had concluded that her relative meant that rape was a normal part of the gay male experience.  I explained to her that he must have been talking about the rape of a male by another male, which he called "gay rape" just as many people refer to marriage between two men or two women as "gay marriage."  When she understood that gay men don't usually rape each other, she was visibly relieved.  Years later, I'm still baffled at how anyone could have drawn such a conclusion, but that was a learning experience in itself.

I just finished reading I Am Your Sister, the posthumous collection of Audre Lorde's nonfiction writings I wrote about yesterday, and I came again on the notion that, as one Third World queer writer phrased it, concern about women or non-heterosexuals is a "luxury," a monkey wrench thrown into the struggle for liberation.  Or, as a young African-American man asked Audre Lorde in Germany in the 1980s, "Would you think that the Black women's liberation struggle causes harm to the overall struggle for Black freedom?"  (The notable thing about Lorde's answer, which can be heard in Dagmar Schultz' documentary Audre Lorde -- The Berlin Years 1984-1992, is the way she changes her spoken delivery.  Her voice goes up about an octave, sounding almost girlish.  I presume that she did so in an attempt to make her forthright answer less threatening to her male interlocutor.  I'm not sure it worked.)

Of course, this notion assumes that liberation is for men only.  Lorde tells a chilling anecdote in I Am Your Sister:

In 1985 I had a dialogue with James Baldwin at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, not far from Boston.  One of the most heated discussions was around the issue of the twelve murdered Black women, and sexual violence and assault against Black women in general within our Black communities.  There were present two other Black women, two other Black men, one white man, and a young Black male student.

Jimmy and one of the older Black men were in agreement that under the tremendous pressures of racism, Black men could not be held responsible for their violence against Black women, since it was a response to an unjust system, and Black women were only incidental victims.  One of the Black men went so far as to say:

"The Black male is not attacking the Black female; it would be a sheep if that's what was there ..."  To this I replied, and still reply:

"Yes, but I'm not a sheep, I'm your sister ... who is learning to use a gun.  If we wind up having to kill each other instead of our enemies, what a terrible waste for us all."

And at this point it was the young Black male student in the room who spoke up to the older men, in defense of his mother and sisters and their right to defend themselves in the street [179].

It suddenly occurred to me that people who raise this objection are thinking in terms of struggle against the First World oppressor, and assume that women's and gay concerns are going to be added to the list of demands that the liberation movement makes of the oppressor.  But the real issue is internal to the struggle for liberation: Third World men must stop oppressing Third World women and other Third World men.  It's not surprising that such men should object to this condition: they have generally absorbed First World sexism and and anti-gay bigotry along with First World political theories like Marxism and psychoanalysis, using these principles to reinforce indigenous inequities.  Still, it is easier for Third World men to stop oppressing other members of their own group than to demand that the First World stop doing so. (Do I need to add that this applies just as much to sexism and racism among gay white Americans?)  All they need to do is stop harming their own people; this will add nothing to the burden of their struggle against the West.  As Lorde told a mostly white female German audience in The Berlin Years, "Each one of you sitting here has some power.  I know that makes you uncomfortable enough to laugh, but you are responsible for using that power, whatever it is.  And that is not altruism, that is survival."

Bugs Bunny Made Me Gay

(I began this post a couple of months ago, then left it in Draft-mode limbo. Rather than rewrite it completely to bring it up to date -- the Blogger update is old news now, for instance, and some of the bugs have been fixed -- I'm finishing it and posting it without a lot of changes to what I originally wrote.)

So I was just going to jump in and do a quick post on something that had caught my attention (which I'll get to in a moment), but I discovered that Blogger had picked this moment to dump its New Look on me.  It took me ten minutes just to find my way past the help screens to the posting page.  (The autosave feature is great too -- it's noticeably slower than it was in the previous version.)  Thanks, Blogger, you've made my day!

But here's what I meant to write about.  Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams posted yesterday that FOX News's Bill "Loofah" O'Reilly is up in arms over Glee, grappling

with the terrible, terrible paradox that while “Glee” may have some merits, it also sends the message “that alternative lifestyles for children may be positive.” And then, oh no, he showed a clip of the character Unique performing a KC and the Sunshine Band song in a dress and heels. O’Reilly, who is terribly concerned that America’s youth “might go out and experiment with this stuff,” next welcomed Carlson, along with Judge Jeanine Pirro, for an old-fashioned round of pearl-clutching. “Here we go again,” said [Gretchen] Carlson, “pandering to .3 percent of the American population that consider themselves transgender. Now I get to explain this to my 8-year-old, if I just wanted to watch a nice family show with some nice music?”

As Williams pointed out, it's perfectly legitimate for a parent not to let her 8-year-old watch Glee in the first place: "I think it’s too racy for her – and I question any high and mighty moralizer who thinks it’s just 'a nice family show with some nice music.'"  She adds quickly that her "daughter knows that there are gay and lesbian and transgender people in the world – she even knows gay and lesbian and transgender people! And yes, sometimes it’s confusing for kids to get their heads around identity and sexual orientation."  Hell, adults also find gender, identity and sexual orientation confusing -- a good many posts right here on This Is So Gay are about that confusion.

But here's what I wanted to get at: cross-dressing is a time-honored, even ancient feature of popular entertainment.  Classic Warner Brothers cartoons featured cross-dressing regularly, and what could be more mainstream than Lucy and Desi?  (That was also a prime-time program that I watched regularly in its day; I don't remember the "Auntie Mildred" scene, but I almost certainly saw it.)  Or William Powell?  Or White Christmas?  Or The Flintstones?  It's true that drag has a different function in such cases than it usually does on Glee, but I don't think that eight-year-olds subject their entertainment to very searching analysis.  Bugs Bunny usually cross-dresses to fool his antagonists, but at least once he dressed Elmer Fudd up as a hot babe.

Did any of this, and much more, induce me to "go out and experiment with this stuff"?  (Wingnut please!  I think anyone who's going to "experiment" with cross-dressing will stay in rather than go out.)  When I was about five, I tried on my mother's shoes, as I tried on my father's at some point.  They didn't fit, and that was that for me.  I was never interested in women's clothes, which seemed too flimsy (as they were supposed to be); stage makeup in high school taught me that I didn't like having grease on my face.  As an adult, after I came out, I once tried on a dress, but not for long: I didn't feel covered by it, and never looked back after I got my pants back on.  If I'm a girl at heart (as the conventional scientific wisdom has it), she's a dyke.

More seriously (and yes, I recognize that O'Reilly probably didn't mean "go out" literally -- that's the trouble, he was channeling cliches, not thinking), so what if some kids did "experiment" with cross-dressing, whether they were inspired by Glee or by Bugs Bunny?  (Bugs is a much better role model, to my mind.)  In many, probably most cases, the "experiment" will fail.  Kids try on many roles, identities, images, costumes in their lives, and most don't take.  We have no idea why some do and others don't.

O'Reilly and many other people clearly think that it will be terrible if a boy puts on a frock, a wig, makeup, and heels.  There was a fuss last year about a J. Crew ad involving a five-year-old boy wearing pink nail polish; I thought it was interesting that both the screamers and the supporters tended to assume that the boy was trans, not merely playing with his mom.  I don't see what's terrible about it.  I haven't been following Glee this season, so I don't know anything about Unique's backstory, but I'm not very moved by his apotheosis on the stage. (And girl, please -- there's nothing unique about being either a drag queen or transgendered.  Take this kid to a drag club, and see how "unique" he is.)  For someone like Unique, of course, there's more to it than the stage; I suppose that by appearing onstage "as a woman," he is expressing his inner self, his true being; the applause he receives validates the expression, and by extension validates his true being.  That's another, probably dangerous, mistake: the sadness of the actor alone in his or her dressing room after the show, removing the character and becoming his or her everyday self, is a stereotype of long standing.  If his identity is pinned to stage performance, he's in trouble: performing can only ever be a small part of a performer's life, and actors have often found themselves deeply torn between the persona they present on stage or before the camera, and who they really are.  Unique is a narrative (to use the current jargon) about a trans kid, not any kind of reflection of reality.

The same is true of all those cartoons and comedy sketches I grew up on: they were not, by any stretch of the imagination, meant to imply that homosexuality or transsexuality were okay.  On the contrary, you were supposed to laugh at the absurdity of Bugs or Elmer in drag, and the device had different meanings for each of them.  For Bugs, drag (and the big sloppy kisses he often planted on the faces of male adversaries) cemented his identity as Trickster: Elmer was so dumb he couldn't recognize the boy rabbit beneath the makeup.  For Elmer, drag was humiliating, or put him in a subordinate position next to Bugs, as when he plays the bride to the Hare's groom.  There were plenty of he-she's, girlymen, diesel dykes, passing women, and other sexual nonconformists in those days, and every adult knew about them, but  Production-Code entertainment was forbidden to deal with them.  The fault lay in the Code, not the nonconformists, though we haven't made that much progress since it was dismantled.

Back to Gretchen Carlson's complaint, quoted by Williams.  She claimed that Glee was pandering to the ".3 percent of the population that consider themselves transgender," and what about the children?  I've been hearing variations on this complaint for decades.  First, it's not necessary to go into full clinical detail about transgender, transsexualism, homosexuality, or even heterosexuality when answering young children's questions.  So much of the discussion of sex education has consisted of reassuring parents that little kids usually don't want to know about Reverse Cowgirl or Pearl Necklaces, and that their questions about where babies come from can and should be answered in age-appropriate ways.  An eight-year-old doesn't have to know how to make a baby herself.  Second, though, as they get older, fuller explanations will be necessary, because they're likely to meet sexual nonconformists of various kinds.  Even if the transgendered do constitute 'only' three-tenths of a percent of the population, the transgendered have families and relatives and coworkers: they are known to people other than themselves, and they come from all backgrounds.  The first transsexual I ever met, forty years ago, was a redneck boy from rural southern Indiana who was saving up for his operation; the most recent one was about my age, a highly educated and renowned computer scientist.  You can't avoid trans people simply through Fundamentalist Republican separatism, since it's not impossible that your minister will resign his post at the age of fifty-five to become the woman he always wanted to be; if not him, then it might be his son or daughter.

You don't have to be nonjudgmental in answering your own children's questions.  If your six-year-old asks about the gay male couple down the block, you're completely within your rights to say something like "Well, sometimes men fall in love with each other instead of with a lady -- but we think it's wrong, because God doesn't like it."  You can do the same with religious differences; you don't even have to be accurate about your Episcopalian or Muslim neighbors, though if you aren't, eventually your child will learn on his or her own that Episcopalians don't worship Satan and Muslims don't eat babies for dinner, and you'll have some explaining to do.  Even if you have no moral reasons to tell the truth, there are practical ones.  It's one of the prices we pay for living in a pluralistic society, which allows you to be a Roman Catholic or a conservative evangelical.  You might think you'd be happier if America were less pluralistic, but if it were you wouldn't be free to hold your own beliefs.

The real problem I see is that we still don't have great answers about these matters.  The discourse on transgender is confused and incoherent, probably because our discourse on gender is confused and incoherent.  But it's not such a big problem, because you don't really have to understand why a person is trans to support their quest for being the person they want and need to be.  (Ditto for sexual orientation: it's not at all important why people are gay or straight.  And isn't the multiplicity of religions a bit tricky to explain to kids?)  But "I don't know" are the three scariest words in English to many people, and not just to the people at Fox News.

The Gaze Militant

Here's an interesting exchange. It's fun and easy to laugh at Romney's discomfiture here, but one thing jumped out at me: if this Vietnam veteran is going to make same-sex marriage the deciding issue when he votes, he won't be able to vote for Barack Obama either. Obama has always made his opposition to same-sex marriage clear and unmistakable, except for those who absolutely insist on deluding themselves.

“I’m a Christian,” Mr. Obama said on a radio program in his 2004 race for Senate. “And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman.”

Luckily, his religious beliefs apparently don't say anything about homosexuals serving in the military, though even on that matter, despite his promises, he did nothing for two years. It took him just about as long to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act against legal challenges. If I had a magic wand, I'd wave it to let Bob Garon, the veteran who challenged Romney, sit down to breakfast with President Obama and ask him the same questions.

At the same time, I wouldn't mind putting some questions to Mr. Garon. The U.S. Constitution doesn't say anything about marriage, so it's not correct to say that denying him marriage denies him his Constitutional rights. (According to the Queerty article from which I learned his name, he's married to another man under Vermont law. Even without DOMA, other states aren't required to recognize that marriage. That's likely to be contested for some time, even if DOMA is repealed.) I do get tired of people talking about marriage "rights," when what marriage confers is privileges and benefits, and why should married people get special privileges and benefits? One negative side effect of the push for same-sex marriage is that it has devalued other relationships, such as domestic partnerships, that extended recognition to nonmarital relationships. If the Family and Medical Leave Act were passed today, would it extend its benefits to people who aren't related by marriage or "blood"? I doubt it. The more I watch the debates over marriage, the more I agree with Nancy Polikoff that it is families that need support and recognition, whether they involve marriage or not.

Having said that, I must add that I enjoyed watching Bob Garon make Romney uncomfortable. As one commenter at Queerty pointed out, Romney could hardly have expected, when he sat down with those two old men that morning, that they would not only be gay but let him know it, and that one of them would challenge him on gay marriage. Things have certainly changed since I was a boy, but then, Bob Garon is only a few years older than I am. Those of us old gay militants who are still around have not become less militant. But I'd still like to see him confront Barack Obama.

To See Ourselves As Others See Us

What I was looking for when I found that previous story was the latest Dan Savage column (which I first read at the Onion AV Club). It contained a letter from a scared, gay college freshman:

I'm still unable to admit my sexuality to my friends, teammates, classmates, and hallmates. I have thought about joining the LGBT organizations, but those guys are too "out" for me. Not that there's any problem with that. I just don't think that being gay is anyone else's business unless I want them to know. The hardest part is seeing other freshmen go out to parties, hook up, and date when I don't have the opportunity to do so. I've resorted to going on Craigslist, but my encounters have been weird. What should I do?

Closeted Undergrad

I've heard versions of this story many times over the past forty years, so I was curious to see what Dan Savage would have to say about it.

He begins adequately, by lecturing him gently on the psychic cost of the closet, inviting him to imagine his straight friends in the same boat:

What would the straight guys on your team have to do in order to hide their straightness from you? They could never mention their girlfriends, go out on dates, or hook up with someone they met at a party. They would have to hide their porn and be careful not to check out girls in public. They could never get engaged, get married, or have kids. They might be able to have furtive, secretive, and shame-driven sexual encounters with other closeted heterosexuals they met online or in places where closeted straight people gathered to have anonymous sex, but finding love—true and lasting love—would be extremely difficult.

"Team"? Closeted Undergrad didn't mention a team; or maybe he did but Savage edited down the letter and forgot what he'd cut out. No matter, really. So far so good. [P.S. How did I miss the word "teammates" in the first sentence I quoted from CU's letter? Senility is icumen in.]

It wouldn't be impossible—some gay people managed to find lasting love back in the bad old days—but it would be difficult. And the sneaking around and hiding and lying would ultimately warp their psyches and their lives.

Not so good. I think Savage is trying to scare the boy with old folklore. In fact, from what I've read and the older gay people I've known, a lot more than "some" managed to find "lasting love," though we'll never know exactly how many. We don't know how many do so now. Contrariwise, a lot of out gay people never find "lasting love." Some don't want to. Some want to but can't make a relationship last. The same is true of straight people.

... once you're out, you don't have to hang out with gay people with whom you don't click, and you don't have to be gay the way, say, the LGBT groupers on your campus are gay. Remember: Gay men who are out at your age (18?) tend to be a bit gayer than the average gay dude. They're out in part because they can't be in. And God bless 'em and more power to 'em and the gay rights/liberation movement would never have gotten off the ground without 'em. But since you can pass, CU, you've had the option of waiting.

Again, not so good. Rather worse, in fact. Neither Savage nor I know how "gay" the people in this kid's campus LGBT group are. What the kid complained about was how "out" they were, which is something else again, but many people think of being out as being flamboyantly, flamingly "stereotypical." But a deeply closeted kid like Closeted Undergrad might simply be frightened by the fact that the "groupers" aren't closeted: their straight friends know they're gay, they participate in public action like writing letters or columns in the student newspaper, and so on. That in itself is enough to terrify the closeted. I speak from experience.

Some years ago, the campus LGBT group here at IU met in a room at the top of the Student Activities Tower in the student Union building. The room was one floor higher than the elevator would go, so there was a landing below the stairway you took to get to the meeting. Often people going to meetings would notice other people pacing around on that landing. Later on some of them finally climbed the stairs, and some of them told us how hard it had been for them to do it, how afraid they were of walking through the door and entering a gay space. I could (and still can) sympathize with them, because I had a similar experience myself.

Occasionally someone would tell us that the group should change its name (OUT) to something less ... obvious. A lot of people were afraid to come to meetings, they told us, because they couldn't tell their straight friends where they were going without giving themselves away. They also thought the meetings were in too public a place. Meanie that I am, I suggested that an additional group be started for such people: call it "Almost Out." The date, time, contact information, and location of its meetings would be kept secret. Someone asked me, "So, when's the next meeting?"

"I'm sorry," I said innocently, "I can't tell you that."

But maybe Closeted Undergrad does consider the members of his campus LGBT group to be, like, too gay. I've heard that one before too. A guy once complained to me that when he attended an OUT meeting, it was full of screaming queens. I remembered that meeting, and it was nothing of the kind: true, there were some big queens and dykes there, but there were more people who weren't. I told him this. I did not tell him that he was not nearly as butch himself as he evidently liked to think, though that was true. Nor was he unique in this attitude. Unlike Dan Savage, I wouldn't assume that Closeted Undergrad is passing. Maybe he only thinks he is; he won't know until he comes out to his straight friends and they tell him, "Finally! What took you so long?" I'd bet that six months after he comes out, CU will be performing in amateur drag nights. (As I recall from Dan Savage's own It Gets Better video, he was no John Wayne at that age himself, and got picked on because he "couldn't be in." Why is he talking about such people as "they" instead of "we"?)

Not that it matters. I've also met people who complained that OUT was just a "meatrack" (they all used the same word, interestingly), that everybody there was just looking for sex, and the complainers complained that they never got laid. Some cognitive dissonance there, no? I've talked to people who complained after attending one or two meetings that they hadn't met the love of their life, so there was no point in going to another. ("I know that you hate me for going back into the closet," one of them told me. How they do love to project onto others! I didn't hate him; I thought he was probably right, he wasn't ready to come out yet.) People do "hook up" at campus LGBT groups, but they are better sites for making friends and learning something of the range of gay people's experience. If you go looking for love, without taking any other kind of interest in the people you meet there, you will probably be disappointed. As Dan told CU, he doesn't have to hang out with gay people with whom he doesn't click -- but he won't be able to find people he clicks with unless he gets out a little.

On the other hand, Closeted Undergrad doesn't have to start with the community we call gay. Lots of gay people told their straight friends first, and only later went looking for other gay people, especially when we found out that we were still going to have to watch our straight friends go to parties, "hook up", and date while we tended the music or the keg by ourselves. ("Hook up" is a term that confuses me. Usually it seems to mean "find a one-night sexual partner", sometimes it seems to mean "make the acquaintance of someone who might become a sexual or romantic partner in the indefinite future.") But Closeted Undergrad needs to get it through his rather thick skull that he can't expect every gay person he meets to be a potential sex partner or even friend -- anymore than straights can expect the same of each other. Some of them he may not even like, and vice versa. It looks to me like CU is just looking for what used to be called "tricks", or today "hookups." Which is his privilege, but in that case he should stick with Craigslist or the local adult bookstore -- whatever. It also sounds as if he's surprised to find that hookups aren't particularly fulfilling and don't lead to true love; but the same can be said of most dates.

So it might be just as well if Closeted Undergrad waits a while before he comes out; that he went to personal ads on Craigslist (which I am bound to say seems to me to show a somewhat impatient nature) supports this. So does the remark "I just don't think that being gay is anyone else's business unless I want them to know." Evidently he feels that way even about his sexual partners. Unlike Dan, I don't think he's ready to come out yet. It won't kill him to wait another year or two; many people have waited longer. (I was 20 when I came out, and I've known people who were older, often much older.) His penis won't fall off nor will his heart shrivel if he waits until he's ready to stop playing games with himself and with other people.

It's not like he's trapped in some podunk town with no resources but the Internet and the nearest highway rest stop; if his college has a campus LGBT group, it also must have other social possibilities as well: parties, friendship circles, maybe a gay Christian group if he's kinky that way. He's not interested in people: I suspect that what he wants, or fantasizes, is a hot stud being left anonymously at his door, wrapped in cellophane for his protection, to be disposed of when he tires of him. This kind of self-absorption isn't evil; it's merely adolescent. But then, he is only eighteen.

Even his letter is a game: he presents Dan with an impossible problem -- how to "hook up" without letting anyone else know he's gay. I've known many people over the years with the same attitude, and Dan Savage has surely received even more letters from such people. Usually he doesn't go all moist about them. It's good to be gentle with the young, but not to overindulge them; that's not Dan Savage's style at all.

Accentuate the Obvious

Today I was one of the speakers on a GLB panel for a college class, and the question of choice came up again. It occurred to me as I listened to the other speakers that they were even more confused than I'd thought. They talked about people who'd had bad coming-out experiences, and who would choose that? No one, perhaps. This was a variation on the familiar rhetorical question, "Would anyone choose a 'lifestyle' that causes them to be hated, condemned, and vilified?" Why, yes, they would, and they have. But I hadn't heard it applied to coming out before, which has nothing to do with the question whether being gay is a choice.

Or does it? Coming out -- the process of telling other people, gay or straight, that you are not heterosexual -- is pretty clearly a choice. When I started that process, four decades ago, I anticipated that I would have some bad experiences (rejection, hostility, malignant ignorance, etc.), and did my best to prepare myself to deal with them. I was lucky: very few people reacted negatively. But when I did have bad experiences with straight people, it wasn't my choice, it was theirs.

At the risk of distracting the reader, let me suggest an analogy. Anti-choice bigots often try to confuse the issue by conflating the choice of having sexual intercourse with the choice to have a baby: if a woman has sex with a man, they claim, she should expect to get pregnant, and therefore her decision to have sex was a decision to have a baby, regardless of her actual intent -- and if she does become pregnant, she has forfeited all choice thereafter, except the choice of putting the baby up for adoption after its birth. Not all sex leads to conception, however, so choosing to have intercourse is not equivalent to choosing to have a baby. Nor is driving a car equivalent to deciding to die in a fiery collision. Nor is coming out a decision to be disowned by one's parents. Nor, for that matter, is expressing anti-gay opinions a decision to have those opinions derided, rebutted, and vilified -- bigots can usually recognize that distinction, at least!

I'd have thought that all this was obvious, but it obviously isn't, worse luck. I was disturbed by this mutation of the "Would anyone choose a 'lifestyle' ..." meme, which is obnoxious enough in its own right. If gay people (and their allies, presumably) are going to start trying to claim coming out and gay identity as non-choices, then where will we go from there? Evidently the trend is to deny any responsibility and choice in their lives at all, but in order to do that consistently they would have to exempt antigay people from responsibility and choice too, and I don't think that will happen. (Freedom and responsibility for thee, but not for me!) As I said in my own answer to the question about choice, no one knows what choice is, and the science which is used to claim that homosexuality is not a choice doesn't recognize that human beings make any choices at all, since it considers free will an illusion. But the people who claim they were born gay don't realize this: they do believe they make choices, but being gay isn't one of them... and now, it appears, coming out wasn't a choice either.

I must admit, of course, that this has to do with a blind spot of my own. To quote myself:

... unlike most gay people I’ve known, I did not expect everything to be easy when I came out. There’s a weird paradox there: most people who, like me, made a conscious move to come out to straights, seem to have delayed that move as long as we did because we feared the consequences: that our friends, our families, random strangers would hate and despise us for being queer. And yet, after coming out, a good many gay people express shock and dismay that not everyone treats them with respect, let alone acceptance. I’m deliberately echoing Captain Renault’s famous line from Casablanca: I am shocked! shocked, I tell you! to find that there is homophobia going on here. Their shock may be as theatrical, as fake, as Captain Renault's; what I don't get is what it's supposed to achieve.