He looked like a
hero, and that was the problem. Barack Obama seemed
almost reckless with the truth, implausibly idealistic --
and (though we might not have said this out loud) we
worried that America wasn't "ready for a
black president."
After eight years
of George W. Bush, we were sick of being excluded, sick
of being hated. Hillary Clinton seemed the safer choice. We
knew that she knew how power worked, and we wanted
someone who could win. Moreover, many gay leaders --
the men and women with money and influence, whose
success was built on cunning -- looked at her and saw
themselves: making her way by wile, unafraid to
sacrifice integrity when the game demands it.
But truth will
out, and many placed their bets on Barack Obama, and when
he took the lead in the primaries, he won over most of the
rest. He talked to us -- and about us -- more, and
more explicitly, than any nominee before him. And not
just when he had to. Not just at Human Rights Campaign
dinners. At black churches, in his stump speech, on the
night he was elected: He said the word that every
major candidate before him had found every excuse not
to say. He named us. He said gay.
After his
election Obama named someone else. The world's most
influential Protestant minister, Rick Warren, who
campaigned against gay marriage, was asked to give the
inauguration's invocation. Obama tried to quell
outrage and concern by restating his commitment to be
"a fierce advocate of equality for gay and
lesbian Americans." And during his first months
in office, while he worked with Congress on the economic
stimulus package and the wars, and laid groundwork for
legislation to protect the environment and reform
health care, we were on our best behavior, waiting for
him to reveal his plans to keep his promises to us.
Momentum for gay
equality kept building -- in the courts, in
legislatures, and in culture. Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont,
and Maine legalized gay marriage -- which was,
significantly, also endorsed by the U.S. Conference of
Mayors. Dick Cheney too announced his support for
marriage equality, as did top Republican strategist Steve
Schmidt, who managed John McCain's presidential
campaign. Polls showed clear majorities supporting
repeal of "don't ask, don't
tell," even among conservatives and churchgoers
-- constituencies that had long been in favor of the
antigay military policy. Still, through all of this, one
word was conspicuously absent from the president's
vocabulary.
The hero was a
player after all.
We began to see
Obama differently. As the press took stock of his first
100 days, The Washington Post published an
op-ed by Richard Socarides, a former adviser to Bill Clinton
on gay issues, who called out President Obama's
inaction. A Post copy editor suggested the headline,
"Where's Our 'Fierce
Advocate'?" -- which inspired the title of a
new regular feature on the MSNBC show hosted by Rachel
Maddow, one of many journalists who began to ask,
relentlessly, why the president dropped the ball on
the Defense of Marriage Act, DADT, and other gay rights
issues.
During a May 18
White House press briefing, Kerry Eleveld, this
magazine's Washington correspondent, asked press
secretary Robert Gibbs what the president was doing to
push for repeal of DOMA, and Gibbs had no answer. Soon
White House correspondents from ABC, NBC, and Time.com were
joining Eleveld in hammering Gibbs with questions about gay
policies. What was Obama doing? Why not more, and why
not faster?
Dan Choi, an
articulate, telegenic Iraq war veteran and Arabic linguist
who was booted from the Army after he founded Knights Out, a
group of gay West Point alumni, became a leading
spokesman for the movement this summer. He says a few
TV producers told him, "We're so grateful to
you, because everyone says we don't criticize
the president enough, and this story lets us go after
him" -- without expending any real political
capital with the White House or with viewers.
Online, rhetoric
reached helium pitch. Frustrated on the one hand with
inaction in the White House and on the Hill, and on the
other with what they saw as unacceptably incremental
strategies pursued by gay rights groups, some
activists vented in the virtual realm. One group wrote a
document called "The Dallas Principles,"
demanding "full civil rights for the LGBT
community." (Visitors to the website are offered two
opportunities for action: They can sign an electronic
petition asking House speaker Nancy Pelosi to expand
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include LGBT people,
and they can download and print an image of pink
flip-flops to send to the White House, asking President
Obama not to "flip-flop" on DOMA.) On
his blog, Bill Clinton's gay former adviser
David Mixner suggested a gay march on Washington for October
-- an idea that was taken up by activists Cleve Jones
and Dustin Lance Black. The website for the march
features a blog with statements such as "I want it
all and I want it now" and one opportunity for
action: a video with instructions for making YouTube
clips (tagged "LGBTMeetOnTheMall") of
yourself reading a scripted statement in support of
equality. In the campaign's first 23 days,
YouTube videos were made by a total of 27 people --
most of whom identified themselves as straight allies.
On June 11 the
Justice Department filed a brief making vigorous defense
of DOMA in a California court. The White House first
defended the brief, then apologized for it, but many
in the movement erupted in fury. Prominent gay
Democrats, including Mixner, millionaire WordPerfect
founder Bruce Bastian, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and
Defenders civil rights project director Mary Bonauto,
and blogger Andy Towle, boycotted a major Democratic
National Committee fund-raiser where Vice President Joe
Biden gave the keynote address.
Pressure got
results. The next week the president issued a memorandum
granting same-sex partners of federal employees some
benefits, but it didn't include health
insurance, which Robert Gibbs said would require an
act of Congress. Then, to mark Pride Month, the White House
held a reception for 200 prominent gays, from Quark
founder Tim Gill to Vogue's Andre
Leon Talley. (One guest says the White House official
who invited him also asked if he'd
"behave.") The president gave an
impassioned speech, inviting his guests to pressure him, and
drew a dramatic analogy: "I know that many in
this room don't believe that progress has come
fast enough, and I understand that. It's not for me
to tell you to be patient, any more than it was for
others to counsel patience to African-Americans who
were petitioning for equal rights a half century
ago."
The following
week brought even more signs that the administration was
beginning to budge. Gibbs announced the goal of repealing
"don't ask, don't tell" by
the end of the first term -- the first time the White
House had named a deadline for repeal. A few days later
Defense secretary Robert Gates declared that his
department was considering interim measures to address
the ban (which might include issuing an executive
order to halt DADT investigations until the policy can be
reviewed).
"The die
is cast," Socarides says. "This administration
seems to respond to pressure on this issue. So, as a
community, we have to have our own timetable, and we
have to be focused like a laser beam on getting
Congress and the White House to act on our schedule."
I asked more than
a dozen leaders of the movement how that can happen --
how we can move from receptions to repeal -- and their
answers continually sent me back to one line from the
president's speech at the party in the East
Room: Obama described the Stonewall rebellion as a
moment when "these folks who had been marginalized
rose up to challenge not just how the world saw them
but also how they saw themselves." The
remark revealed, perhaps unintentionally, that this
movement can make no meaningful progress until we confront
an enemy that no one -- least of all the president --
can save us from.
"Rahm
Emanuel and David Axelrod are at the White House wondering,
If we actually file a bill to end
'don't ask, don't
tell," is the gay movement willing to work, to do
what environmental reform advocates are willing to
do, to get its legislation passed?"
says Patrick Guerriero, executive director of the Gill
Action Fund. "The question is, Are you ready to
own your responsibility to the movement?"
History offers an
uncomfortable answer. At the start of the 1990s, when
Bill Clinton had a vision for America and we were part of
it, gay people were intoxicated with excitement and a
sense of opportunity. By decade's end, the
president had signed DOMA and "don't ask,
don't tell." "The movement was
not honest enough with itself about our own
failures," Guerriero says. "The
president caved to Congress because we didn't show
up and provide the air cover he needed with smart,
strategic, robust activism."
That's
because, on the federal level, "we don't have
an organization that fights for us with sufficient
teeth in their arsenal," says novelist,
playwright, and gay rights pioneer Larry Kramer.
"I'm sick of saying it, and everyone
thinks I'm nothing but a curmudgeon. But I am
approaching closer and closer to death, to my death,
without being able to marry my lover, without being
able to leave my estate to my lover without it being
taxed into oblivion."
Kramer's
tone isn't curmudgeonly. It's weary, almost
shell-shocked. Gay activists in Washington are
feckless, he argues, because they are enchanted by a
false idea of power. "We are not here to
make friends," he says. "We are here
to get our rights. And these two statements do not
join together to blend into one happy halo."
The national gay
rights movement is trapped between activism and
politics, between anger and ambition. We are trapped between
wanting equal rights and wanting to get invited to
parties at the White House. Even Joe Solmonese, the
president of HRC, who according to Kramer represents
the movement at its most complacent, suggests that to become
real players we are going to have to start acting a little
more like heroes: "One of the things our
movement does not give enough appreciation and
reverence to is ACT UP. Their rage. Their anger. But always
with an endgame, always with a strategic
center," he says.
Kramer, who
founded ACT UP in 1987 to address the AIDS crisis, says the
group worked on very simple principles. "We all,
hundreds of us, got ourselves in a room, and we
planned very specific points of attack, and we divided
the various plans into segments, each of which was taken
over by one or another of our committees and put into
operation. You go after the things that you want.
Marriage, inheritance, adoption, 'don't ask,
don't tell,' repeal of DOMA. And then you
start doing public demonstrations about each of them.
Passing out detailed literature explaining the action.
Naming names of the people who are preventing progress
on these actions. You are merciless in confronting [those
people], day after day. Consistency is so important. You
have to be an activist every day, seven days a week,
until you reach your goal. It's not rocket
science, any of this. You want something that somebody
won't give you? You find out how to get
it."
The gay movement
today, he contends, lacks leaders with the level of
commitment that animated ACT UP -- people who are willing to
employ the shaming techniques that ACT UP used, and
people who are willing to identify as gay first and
foremost.
Kramer's
right on both points. Yet the problem is intractable. Shy of
another dozen equally well-publicized Matthew Shepards or a
new plague, it's hard to see how a critical
mass of gay people might be moved to experience
themselves as "gay first and foremost," how we
might be moved to choose the radically separatist
identity that has been, in our own history, our best
weapon. Is it possible that the enemy has changed? If
so, is it possible that different techniques are called for?
"I do not
see a different enemy," Kramer says. "The
enemy is the enemy. We are hated too much by too many.
And we are afraid to acknowledge this and to look it
in its face for what it really is, hate, and to stare it
down and fight it back. And become, as we did in ACT UP, our
own heroes."
There is in these
remarks a huge amount of truth. There is also, I
believe, a toxic measure of self-pity and sentimentality
that ignores the progress we have made.
Our progress is
measured by the generation gaps that fracture the
movement. There is a gap between the ACT UP cohort and the
daughters and sons of Will & Grace (who,
having escaped the worst of the plague, don't
share their elders' righteous anger except when
they try) -- and another between the Will & Grace
generation and the Facebook generation (most of whom
don't know a single person who has died of
AIDS).
These gaps
aggravate the mutual resentment of elders who see younger
gays as lazy and entitled, and younger gays who see
older ones as peevish and irascible. The gaps also
create confusion about what our goals should be,
because younger people want access to the very social
institutions from which older people struggled to
liberate themselves. The Stonewall generation and the
ACT UP generation were defined by separateness. It was
their salvation, the only way that they could live. It also
defined their suffering, and it continues to define
our suffering today.
To be, as Kramer
and many of the ACT UP generation wish us to be, "gay
first and foremost" is to make a fetish of our
separateness. To win equal rights, we must not only
reclaim the strongest parts of our collective history
but also look beyond it.
Maybe
there's a good reason that we have yet to rise up and
demand equality. Maybe most of us believe that ending
the wars, fixing the economy and health care, and
protecting the environment are more important than any
of the gay rights legislation before Congress. If you
offered me a choice between marriage equality and climate
change, I'd choose climate change.
Unquestionably, a
lot of us have been patient about progress on gay civil
rights during these first months because we are still
traumatized by the culture wars. We fought hard to get
this president and Congress elected, and we
don't want to mess up their chance to fix
what's broken. But the window of opportunity
for bold action on gay rights at the federal level
grows narrower every day. Obama will probably never have as
much political capital as he has now. Things will go
wrong: Unemployment shows no sign of slowing, the wars
could drag on for years. To move beyond this impasse
we must learn not only from our history as a movement but
also from our history as individuals.
The anxiety that
a fight for equal rights for gays could derail this
administration bears more than a passing resemblance to the
anxiety that the world will end if you come out to
your parents. For some people, of course, the world
does end. For most of us, however, those fears turn out
to be narcissistic fantasies. When we come out the truth
does set us free. Usually, the people we feared would
abandon us rise to the challenge and accept us.
We have to face
the fact that we are in a moral battle and that the truth
is on our side. Bruce Bastian says, "The president
and Congress have really big items on their plate.
I'm sure some politicians think, Why can't
the gays be patient? Well, every day that
we're patient we have more gay kids killing
themselves. We have more soldiers getting their
careers destroyed. We have more religious bigots
convincing people to stay in the closet. You can't
get rid of bigotry with legislation, but you certainly
can stall it. You can shut it up. Every day that we
sit quiet and stay patient, we are losing people."
Suspending
"don't ask, don't tell"
"is a winnable moral victory," says
Nathaniel Frank, the author of Unfriendly Fire: How
the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens
America. Frank thinks this issue, if framed in
moral terms, could remind both gay and straight people
of what we most admired about Obama in the first place.
"Obama can't get us out of the Middle East
overnight or cure poverty or fix the environment with
an executive order. But he can do this," he
says. Rep. Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania, the straight
Irish Catholic Iraq war veteran who became chief
sponsor of the House bill for repeal, makes the same
point: "This is about speaking truth to power,
choosing the harder right over the easier wrong. You
have to expect people to do the right thing."
To act with moral
authority we must confront and dismantle our enemies'
fears. "The antigay Christians are afraid that we
want to normalize homosexuality in the schools and
that their kids will be taught that homosexuality is
OK. They're right. That is what we're trying
to do," says Mitchell Gold, chairman of
Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams furniture and founder of
Faith in America, a nonprofit that fights religious
prejudice against gay people. "I want gay
14-year-olds to know that it's OK. What the
president is looking for is to have this great educational
epiphany with antigay opponents, but how is that going to
happen?"
We need better
tools for educating ourselves, our allies, and our
opponents about our issues. Some of these tools are
straightforward, old-fashioned techniques that have
been honed in recent years at the state level. Groups
like the Equality Federation and Gill Action have
organized grassroots work that's delivered
unprecedented progress with staggering speed toward
the goal of marriage equality -- which was, until the
first Massachusetts same-sex weddings took place in 2004, an
even more audacious concept than a black president.
Legislators, mayors, and governors who worried they
would lose elections if they supported us found out
instead that we had their backs.
So far no elected
official who voted for marriage in any state has been
defeated, because a network of LGBT volunteers and straight
allies knocked on doors, made phone calls, registered
voters, and made sure that those lawmakers got
reelected. At the state level this campaign strategy
has created strong bonds between gay activists and other
progressives -- labor, environmentalists, people of
color -- and defied the common, counterproductive, and
well-founded stereotype of gay activists as being
unable to think of anything but ourselves.
We also need to
be more intentional and strategic about telling our
stories, not just expressing our opinions. Kate Kendell,
executive director of the National Center for Lesbian
Rights, points out that most Americans have a false
idea of the story of gay life. "Most Americans
think we are rich, white, and live in big cities,"
she says. "But most of us are middle-class or
working poor. A huge number of us are LGBT folks of
color. And we live in rural and suburban settings. We are
not privileged -- economically or educationally -- any
more than anyone else. Families who are already
struggling to pay their bills and provide for their
kids on top of that have to worry about being harassed on
the job based on their sexual orientation. They fear
that their families and communities will alienate them
if they are honest about who they are. We have to show
the toll it takes to live that lie -- that narrative of
people living in fear. We have to give America a chance to
feel empathy for these people."
Chris Hughes, the
gay cofounder of Facebook who ran Barack Obama's
online campaign -- a virtual arsenal of tools that,
arguably, was the most decisive factor in
Obama's long-shot election -- says we
haven't even begun to tap the power of the Web
to "tell the story not just of gay politics,
but the story of everyday people who face injustice in their
everyday lives." We need an online resource, he says,
that pulls together "a chorus of individuals
who are united, focused, organized, seizing a
political moment in order to pull it together in a political
movement. This would send a powerful message to the
White House, to the people who make the news, who
decide what movies and books get made and published. A
well-organized movement of people who tell their own stories
loudly, together, diversely, would be the most
powerful thing. That's what's missing
right now."
Hughes says no
leaders of any national gay organizations have asked for
his help or advice about how to create virtual mechanisms
for creating publicity and leveraging action. Think
about that. Not asking this guy for help is like
having Marie Curie as your chemistry lab partner and
letting yourself flunk out of school. (To his credit, Hughes
is quick to add that he has not offered his advice to
these organizations either.)
We also have to
learn from the history of the liberation movements that
preceded us. Since ACT UP we have done nothing on a mass
scale to exploit the potential of passive resistance
and nonviolent civil disobedience, the most effective,
proven techniques of social action refined in the last
century. Aside from a few rogue players who've
applied for marriage licenses and small bands of
activists like Soulforce (who've been arrested
for trespassing on Christian college campuses where they try
to instigate conversations about homosexuality), we
have not even tried. When gay soldiers get kicked out
of the military, why don't they refuse to
leave? Why don't the rest of us go to support them?
Why haven't we tried? HRC's Joe
Solmonese says such action "has to be
organic."
But the
Montgomery bus boycott was not organic. Rosa Parks worked
for the NAACP. She did not just wake up one morning
and decide not to go to the back of the bus. Her
choice was deliberate. It was planned. It was part of
a strategy that entailed sacrifice, which is the basis of
the greatest moral authority in friendships, families,
businesses, schools, religions, governments, and
societies. Martin Luther King Jr. was not considered the
leader of the black civil rights movement until he was
arrested. Who among us--and who among our
leaders, who among those 200 that gathered in the East
Room--is willing to be arrested to bring attention to
our experience of inequality?
"When push
comes to shove, we always get pushed," says Rich
Tafel, founding president of Log Cabin Republicans.
"I want the chaos, the anger, the truth,
whatever it is, to come out. Otherwise it's a big
Kabuki dance in Washington, fund-raising letters about
nothing. Who's willing to fast? Who's
willing to get handcuffed? This president will
actually care. The last one didn't.
"People
like it when you appeal to their better angels. Because
people want to be better. Most people do. They want to
be appealed to."
And we are going
to have to make the appeal. It's true that where
we're concerned he has expressed no shortage of
understanding and good intentions. To the NAACP, he
said, "The pain of discrimination is still felt
in America...by our gay brothers and sisters, still
taunted, still attacked, still denied their
rights"--reiterating the analogy he made in the
East Room. It's as if he's daring us:
showing us the door is open, telling us to come in and get
him. Even if his heart is in the right place, Barack Obama
is not going to just wake up one morning and put you
at the top of his list. His primary task right now is
learning how to govern, learning how to work with
Congress to get things done. His primary link to the
Democratic caucus, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, is one
of the most risk-averse human beings in Washington.
Marsha Scott, a straight woman who worked closely with
Emanuel when she was chief of staff in Bill Clinton's
personnel office (Scott also served as
Clinton's first liaison to the LGBT community),
says, "Rahm can never stop thinking about winning
elections. Rahm is good at governing effectively, but
he's not good on social justice issues.
Rahm's goal is to not lose one seat in Congress at
midterms."
He looked like a
hero, and that was the problem. His apparent integrity
frightened us at first. Then it became the reason we chose
him. We voted for Obama because he appealed to our
better angels, because we wanted to be better.
And it worked.
One of the most profound and least remarked-upon effects
of this presidency is the speed with which doubt that
America was "ready" for a black
president has come to seem absurd. That doubt, which was
nursed by people of all races, has been exposed for what it
is: a delicate hatred, or self-hatred, on its very
best behavior.
We have him to
thank for shattering that hatred, for showing us that,
without knowing it, we were ready to do the right thing. Now
it's our turn to return the favor.