APA Newsletters
Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1

Articles

The summer of 1998 witnessed a sudden upsurge in media and political attacks on gays by the Republican and Christian Right. Wisconsin Christians United blitzed four cities of the relatively liberal Dairy State with billboards declaring "Homosexuality is not a family value. Homosexuality is a sin!" On a religious talk show, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott called homosexuality a sin and compared it to alcoholism and kleptomania. The Reverend Pat Robertson claimed that widespread fires in Florida were God’s punishment for the state’s toleration of gay pride celebrations. The Christian Coalition, the American Family Association, and the Family Research Council pooled funds to air television spots and run full-page ads in the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today claiming that through repentance and the Lord, gays can be "cured" and converted to heterosexuality, the one and only true sexuality.

These attacks have thrown gay organizations into a tizzy and stricken fear into a surprising number of individual gays. But I believe gays and our allies have been making too big a deal of the attacks. Indeed some marked shifts in the reception, style, and content of the Right’s latest attacks demonstrate the tremendous cultural gains that gays have recently achieved and betoken still greater progress.

Consider that it was only three years earlier that Newt Gingrich had made the very same attack on gays—gays are the moral equivalents of alcoholics.’ But what a different response his and Lott’s identical claims received. The mainstream media didn’t agree with Newt’s claim but treated it with respect. It was a position worth hearing. After all, it was announced in a New York Times Magazine feature. By contrast, Lott’s comments oozed into the general media where they were greeted with the equivalent of "Excuse me, what did you say?" as though an off-color or racist joke had just been told at a press conference. Even the mainstream conservative press, like U.S. News & World Report, editorialized against Lott. And Newt himself, exercising a selective memory, scolded Lott: "I don’t think it helps to have public leaders engaged in that kind of dialogue."

Moreover, the style of the attacks represent a major shift in focus and strategy on the Right’s part, a shift not of the Right’s choosing. Until quite recently, the Right focused its antigay energies almost exclusively on trying to get gays to shut up and gay issues to go away. The aim was to re-establish and ritualize the shame and degradation of the taboo that used to blanket gays and any talk about or association with gays. The Right worked on tossing gay books out of schools, defunding gay art, keeping gays out of "our" parades, and institutionalizing "don’t ask, don’t tell." Admittedly the Right won most of these battles, but in a manner that was self-defeating in the long run. For these battles generated so much "asking and telling" about gays that the taboo over gay issues and gays themselves has all but collapsed in mainstream America.

And so, the Right has had to refocus. Because the taboo has collapsed, the Right for once has to address substantive issues and give reasons for its dislike of gays and for its policy initiatives around gay issues. The Right can no longer simply assume that people will have intense, automatic, non-thinking, visceral responses of fear and loathing to gays. Debating gay issues now is akin to any other substantive public policy debate like where to build the new school, whether taxes should be raised, and who should be mayor. But now that the substantive issues are on the table, the Right will lose over the long haul. For it is too late in the cultural day for the country to turn back on principles of non-discrimination that it has already worked into the fabric of everyday thinking on issues of race, gender, disability, and religion. So once the anti-gay taboo and its shaming mechanisms fall into retreat, there is little to stop society from consistently applying its principles to gays.

Notice that even the specific content of Lott’s gays-as-alcoholics analogy concedes much too much to gays for Lott’s own good. Everyone has friends and family members who are alcoholics. To have gone this far, Lott has already drawn gays out of the spectral realm of unnatural monsters and into the human community. It is only a small step farther to viewing gays as being like Muslims or Mormons, groups which one might not want to join oneself, but which one nevertheless views as deserving the full protection of civil law and social equality. Polls suggest that mainstream America is taking that step right now. 

Let’s not be naive, though. Gays’ legislative battles will take decades to win. Brush fires and backwaters of anxiety and resentment remain. But the central engine of anti-gay discrimination has been irreparably monkey-wrenched. Far from panicking, gays should be breathing a sigh of relief. For it is now inevitable that gays will win the cultural wars.