There
aren't many years that change everything. 1861. 1945.
For gays, the most obvious is 1969, the year of
Stonewall, although I am also fond of 1869, the year
Karl Maria Kertbeny coined the term homosexual in
pamphlets arguing against the Prussian antisodomy law. Even
1769 counts -- gays seem to be good at '69s --
as it was the year an influential essay explored
Socrates' sexuality, including his fondness for young
men.
A couple of other
years come to mind: 1985, when Roy Scherer Jr.
announced he had AIDS, which came as a shock to those who
knew him as Rock Hudson. You could also include 1957,
the year a psychology journal published a paper by
researcher Evelyn Hooker showing that sample groups of
gays and straights performed no differently on psychological
tests. The paper was later used to help persuade the
American Psychiatric Association to withdraw its
classification of homosexuality as an illness.
It happens that
1957 was also the year the term tipping point
first appeared. Actually, University of Chicago political
scientist Morton Grodzins deployed the more elegant
expression "tip point" to describe the
moment when the proportion of African-Americans in a
neighborhood grew sufficient to spark "white
flight." His phrase was later popularized to
the point of cliche to mean any social change that
has reached a critical juncture.
I'm
dallying in the past because the nice people at The
Advocate have asked me to write about our year
just ending, and 2007 was among the least
consequential for gay history in some time. Not only did
2007 look nothing like a tipping point; it was
actually a year when the struggle for gay equality
took a half step back. It was a pathetic excuse for a
year.
A few silly
things happened. During the Super Bowl, CBS aired a
harmless, funny ad showing a couple of unkempt (and
presumably straight) guys accidentally kissing when
their lips meet in the middle of a candy bar. One of
the men then says they should "do something
manly," so they fling open their shirts and rip
out patches of chest hair. They scream primordially,
and one shows the other the body hair in his hand. It all
seems highly precoital; in fact I haven't seen
something so gay since I watched my last Falcon DVD.
And yet the ever-vigilant Gay and Lesbian Alliance
Against Defamation somehow got offended.
It was a whole
year of such inanity. In February an evangelical church
official told The Denver Post that defrocked minister
Ted Haggard -- who admitted "sexual
immorality" after an escort said he had sex
repeatedly with Haggard for years -- was now
"completely heterosexual." Which was not
completely believable.
Meanwhile, amid
the trivial there was no progress, only lateral movement.
No state authorized gays to marry in 2007, unless you count
Iowa, which equalized marriage law for four hours,
literally, before the judge who had ruled that the
state's ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional
issued a stay on his own ruling. (Exactly one gay couple was
able to wed.) Instead, New Hampshire became the latest
state to offer the separate-but-equal indignity known
as civil unions.
Even in a year of
continued war, the federal government didn't stop
discharging gays under the fatuous "don't ask,
don't tell" policy. In fact, the
now-departed Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Gen. Peter
Pace, told the Chicago Tribune in March that he
believes gay sex is "immoral." The next
day, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both cravenly
declined to disagree with Pace when reporters asked the
senators whether homosexuality is wrong. Clinton and
Obama waited until that evening to trot out
spokespeople to say gays aren't actually immoral.
Throughout the
year, Obama, Clinton, and John Edwards embarrassed
themselves by defending marriage inequality in various
debates. And just recently, Obama's campaign
signed up a preacher who claims to believe the twaddle
that sexuality can be changed if you just pray hard enough.
And those are the
Democrats. Rudolph Giuliani, who has generally
supported gay equality and famously lived with a gay couple
when one of his marriages was failing, promised the
Christianists in 2007 that, if elected, he would
appoint right-wing judges like the preposterous
Clarence Thomas. Wondering whom to vote for among these
twits, I am reminded of the great Italian polemicist
Oriana Fallaci, who told The New Yorker before she
died in 2006, "Why do the people humiliate themselves
by voting? I didn't vote. No! Because I have
dignity.... If, at a certain moment, I had closed
my nose and voted for one of them, I would spit on my
own face."
So when do we get
to the part of 2007 that was a tipping point? Surely
not May -- and yes, I am only up to May, though I promise to
speed up -- when, in a little-noticed decision, the
Food and Drug Administration said it would continue
its policy of barring men from giving blood if they
have had any sexual contact with another male in the
previous 30 years. You can visit a gonorrheal call
girl in the morning and then go give blood in the
afternoon, but if you and another guy jacked each other off
at summer camp when you were 13, you are ineligible. The
policy dates to 1983--1983! A year of AIDS panic
and Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell (who, blessedly,
went to heaven in 2007, along with fellow cretin D. James
Kennedy).
OK, here's
the sum total of good news from 2007: In California gay
inmates can have even more prison sex now that state
officials have changed their policy to allow conjugal
visits for gays. Hot. But that's all I can
think of.
Oh, wait -- there
was that pro basketball player who came out. Except
he's actually a retired basketball player. And no one
had ever heard of him. I'll buy you a cocktail
if you can spell his name correctly without the aid of
Google.
It was a long
year of near misses. We almost got a gay mayor in Dallas,
but Councilman Ed Oakley came in second. Instead, we got the
straight Republican mayor of San Diego, Gerald
Sanders, who joined the gay cause with a weepy press
conference announcing he had reversed his position and
now supports same-sex marriage. The press conference was
very sweet -- Mayor Sanders, who has a lesbian
daughter, blubbered like an overgrown hound -- but at
this very late date in history, what he said was
completely obvious: We are human beings who deserve
equality. Thanks.
We almost got a
gay character in the best-selling children's book
series of all time -- but actually Albus Dumbledore is
dead, and although he is the mightiest wizard of the
era, he apparently couldn't find a boyfriend in
115 years of life. (What hope have I?) J.K. Rowling outed
Dumbledore post-publication, not letting him speak for
himself in the thousands of pages of books in which he
he appeared.
We almost got a
gay senator -- except he says he's not, that he just
takes a wide stance. Once again we will not get the
Employment Non-Discrimination Act; as I write this,
the House has passed ENDA and the Senate is
considering it, but this president will never sign it.
Which means the bill is entirely symbolic -- and yet in the
process of getting enough votes for ENDA in the House,
we sold out transgender people yet again by removing
protections for them from the bill.
We did get Doogie
Howser -- nearly 20 years after he was a (presumably)
gay teenager, with a hit show, whose coming-out would have
really meant something. We also got a former college
basketball player named Zach
Puchtel who came
out as bi, although on his blog he recently said that
though he's "not straight," he prefers
to be with women. (He's also now an insurance
salesman -- seriously -- so I'm not even sure why
we're talking about him.) Similarly, we almost
got an emo musician named Pete Wentz -- except that,
oh, yeah, he told The Advocate he
doesn't like penises. Sorry, but you're not a
bisexual if you dislike penises.
And finally, we
got word from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that "in Iran we
don't have homosexuals like in your
country." Which is true. In Iran the
homosexuals are castrated and murdered by the state. They
live in fear of the religious fanatics who run the
country, the ones who publicly hanged two teenage boys
in 2005 just for being gay. (Have you seen the pictures?
I can barely look at the kids -- one not old enough to shave
-- as the hangmen begin their work.) Ahmadinejad is
the one person who can make Dick Cheney look better.
Cheney, the proud father of a lesbian. Cheney, who can
be seen in photos beaming over his grandson, who was born in
2007 to Mary Cheney and partner Heather Poe. Cheney,
who is said to want to bomb Iran. Perhaps he'll
get his way in the New Year, which could make 2008 a
real tipping point, for us and everyone else.
Cloud is a staff writer at Time.