Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 08:52:07 -0500 From: mohr richard d ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Rethinking Gay Pride by Richard D. Mohr To put more pride in Gay Pride, we need to put more gay there. Consider gays' first trip to the Supreme Court in nearly a decade. This April, our lawyers shamefully argued before the justices that in Boston's St. Patrick's Day Parade a banner identifying its bearers as gay conveyed no message at all. The justices were understandably skeptical. Right-wing Justice Scalia mocked that surely the banner "is an expression of pride in what gays are. How else does one show pride." And he was right. Our lawyers sold us down the river by denying the importance of coming out and being out, of gay presence and gay sociability. The gay movement must abandon its figleaf timidity and start asserting that gayness matters. Too often gays and our allies have argued that gayness is irrelevant -- that, after all, gays are just humans too. These rhetorical moves are inadvertent, even well intentioned, erasures of gay being. They suppose that gayness is a property, like having an eye color or wearing an earring, which a person could have in isolation from all other people and without significant effect on others. And it is perfectly understandable -- though wrong -- that gays and others have taken up this strategy. First, the gay rights movement for the longest part of its duration was singularly focused on civil rights legislation. In this context, if one could argue that gayness is irrelevant in general, then presumptively it is irrelevant to flying a plane, serving a meal, teaching a class, or being a cop. And so it would be unjust for society to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, since sexual orientation is not the basis for anything -- or so it goes. The view that gayness doesn't matter had a strategic pull as well. If a person's being gay was an irrelevant (or, even better, an immutable) characteristic, then other people would not have to be so afraid of it, afraid that they might be it or get it. As a tactic against persecution and a plea for tolerance, it wasn't a bad strategy. But if we stick with it now, we will be stuck indeed. In our social projects, we need to be thinking of gayness not as something that a person can have in splendid isolation. It takes two to be queer. We need to conceptualize gayness as a relational property, a connection between persons, a human bonding, one in need of tendance and social concern. Gayness situates the gay person in social and interpersonal contexts. It is both an outflow and a reception of perception, desire, affection, and knowing -- both Biblical and cognitive. We need to stop claiming that gayness is an irrelevant property and begin recognizing that it is crucially important to people's lives and identities, to social history, and, as the gay studies crowd is showing, to understanding central components of many of society's most important concepts and cherished institutions. We need to take more seriously that fundamental form of connectedness which is sex and cease treating the sexual law reform movement as an awkward political and educational step- child. Even when unenforced, sodomy laws have many spin-off effects. The courts use them to justify employment discrimination, to deny gays equal protection rights, and -- as we and Sharon Bottoms painfully learned -- to destroy gay families. On the plane of the nation's ideals, sodomy laws tell gays and lesbians "You are alone. Your being is not a form of connection." Add to this, the sexual gloom emanating from the AIDS crisis, and it is now time not only to defend sex against this tide but to valorize it, indeed acknowledge that it is one of the central values of human life: as the chief portal to ecstasy, as the satisfaction of a recurrent natural need, and as the near occasion of, undergirding for, and necessary prompt to love. Strategically nothing is to be gained and potentially much is to be lost by avoiding these issues, especially now that the nation seems again, as in the early 'thirties, to be sailing into an intensely anti-sexual period, even -- remember Joycelyn Elders' departure -- into sexual hysteria. In understanding gayness as connectedness, we need to begin paying more attention to issues of gay marriage, domestic partnership, child rearing, and mentoring. We cannot simply cede the "family values" agenda to the Right. Caught up in the old defensive gayness-doesn't-matter mode, our national gay lobbying and legal groups have been slow to take up these issues. Here "the people" have far outstripped their "leaders" in recognizing social needs and setting political agendas. Again, that's because gayness matters. For gays, sexuality affects -- is a foreground presence in -- everyday existence, whereas for straights sexuality, especially what might be called heterosexual presumption, is an unacknowledged background phenomenon. For straights, sexuality is like the air at room temperature, pervasive and dominant, yet entirely unnoticed. This socially induced asymmetry, which parallels a similar asymmetry between racial whiteness and blackness, unjustifiably permits straights and straight-identified gays to accuse gays of being obsessed with sex should gays make any mention of sex at all, even while straight lives are themselves pervasively structured by sexuality. The reason that gay marriage has become such a major issue for gays is that both gayness and marriage have their roots in everyday existence. Marriage is a way of incorporating gayness as connectedness into day-to-day living. It should not be surprising then that gay men and lesbians -- as a matter of pride and need -- have shifted issues of family life to the top of their political agenda. Gay sex, gay love, gay life, and gay presence all matter. Before the Supreme Court, our lawyers should have argued that gay presence is so important that government has a legitimate, indeed compelling interest in protecting it from discrimination even if our presence incidentally impinges on whatever message is being conveyed by plastic shamrocks and green bagels. __________________________ Richard D. Mohr is the author of GAY IDEAS: OUTING AND OTHER CONTROVERSIES.