OutRight
by Dale Carpenter

FIRE ON THE RIGHT

Highlights from 10 years of columns and a tumultuous decade

The first of two parts

I’ve had the incredible honor and pleasure of writing this column for 10 years now. I had been thinking of writing for a local gay publication for some time, but nothing seemed suitable. This Week in Texas (now defunct) was a bar rag. The Houston Voice was little better. I was bursting with ideas and wanted to reach an audience that was serious about politics and gay rights, one for whom life wasn’t all one long party. There was nothing … until OutSmart came along. Having seen the quality of the first issue, I submitted a column for the second. My column has appeared in every issue since then.

Just 27 years old at the time, and less than three years out of the closet, I was gay and conservative. My philosophy was obvious to me but, it seemed, hardly obvious to anyone else. First, to conservatives I argued gay equality is fully consistent with conservative principles. Second, to gays I argued there would be no security for us until we had the support of both major political parties.

Much has changed for me in the last 10 years. I’ve changed jobs, lost a lover, and spread this column to gay newspapers coast to coast. I no longer live in Houston, but I visit frequently, and in the deepest sense my home will always be in Texas.

Much has happened to gay America in the past 10 years. AIDS. Clinton. DOMA. Tinky Winky. Ellen. Will & Grace. Civil unions. The Boy Scouts. Matthew Shepard. Bush. Lawrence v. Texas. Gay marriage. It’s been the most tumultuous 10 years in the history of the gay civil rights movement, with more advances in the law and in public opinion than ever before.

My column has touched on all these matters, and much more. Looking back, I haven’t written much I regret. I changed my mind about hate crimes laws. I once thought they were important. I now think they don’t really accomplish much. I was right that there is a principled distinction between the gay cause and the transgender cause, but I exaggerated the practical harm of fusing the two.

The editors have been good enough to stick with me, even when readers lambasted me. Only once have the editors refused to print a column based on its content—two years ago when I argued for an end to pride parades. I’ll always feel a special affection for OutSmart and for its visionary publisher, Greg Jeu.

Below are passages from some of my best work from the past 10 years. Here’s to the next 10.

I don’t say the sky will open up and the glorious light of God will radiate evermore upon your angelic face if you come out. I don’t say the bigots will wilt before your eyes. I do say there will be no equality for us in the law or in our lives if we do not make coming out our First Commandment. —“Why Out Is Right,” March 1994

The price of a life lived well is the risk of failure. To be gay at this hour in our history is to stand at the edge of the canyon, the wind swirling about you, with freedom’s hearth across the chasm. It is to know that neither you nor anyone passing these words today may ever breathe free air; but to believe with every sinew that you seek the right; that true liberation will be the fruit of that conviction; that determination in the face of wrong is its own triumph; and that at last America will welcome you home. —“Real Freedom,” May 1994

The gay left has just discovered the gay right, and the resulting tumult of discomfort reverberates in gay life across the country. —“The Gay Right: Fear, Loathing, and the Power of Diversity,” August 1994

I walked out of the hospital into a beautiful fall afternoon. A front had blown away the rain at last. It was perfectly clear and cool, one of those rare days when the air is somehow softer and you especially like the way music sounds in your car, and you feel alive. There were children running absently on a playground, shouting and laughing, oblivious to the horrors just five stories up on the AIDS floor. —“Rage Against the Dying of the Light,” December 1994

Every gay who ever lived spends eternity in Hellfire and Damnation, like Grandpa said…. So how many gay comrades will greet us at the fiery gate? The math is easy. About eight billion people have lived during all of human history. By even the most stingy estimate, we’re one percent of the population. Assuming the one-percent figure holds constant across time and cultures, that means there will be eighty million queer souls in Hellfire and Damnation. Say what you will about the place, it can’t be all bad. —“Go to Hell,” January 1995

The radical message of the gay civil rights movement is that you can love members of your own sex and still be entirely comfortable with your assigned gender. Many in the straight world expect gays to have gender dysphoria, as transgendered people do. They cannot imagine a “real man” who loves another man. To that settled, homophobic expectation, the gay civil rights movement responds with two words: guess again. It should be apparent that fusing the gay and transgendered movements will obscure and confuse that fundamental message. —“The Uneasy Case for Limits,” April 1995

Then he hit me with it. We must forbid gay marriage, he offered at last, because, otherwise, heterosexual marriage will lose its luster…. If people of the same sex are allowed to marry, civilization as we know it will crumble, the barbarians will be at the gates, there will be no more moist towelettes, and there will not be a single tax-exempt church on this good flat earth of ours. —“The Coming Demise of Heterosexuality,” October 1995

Clinton will be remembered as the President who signed the first-ever federal law banning homosexuals from the military and defining marriage as the “union of one man and one woman.”… [A]t the same time he pledges to sign the most mean-spirited and unnecessary antigay legislation in history, he huffs and puffs about his gay civil rights record. The man is an evolutionary marvel, a kind of living human Dodo bird. Centuries of moral development and teaching on subjects like shame, modesty, and honesty have passed him right by. —“Our Family Values President,” June 1996

As we exited the Alamodome, we approached the booth Log Cabin had been promised. It had been taken over by the Georgia State College Republicans. The fraternity boys running the booth had put up a large sign, which read, “We’re not the Log Cabin Republicans, we love women.” When I asked the freshly scrubbed Georgian why he would put up such an insulting sign, he told me to go away and called me a “faggot.” “And I’ll bet you call black people ‘niggers’ too, don’t you?” I asked. “When I feel like it, I do,” he responded in his best third-grade tone. We exchanged a few more greetings and I left San Antonio. Driving back to Houston, alone, I was overcome for the first time with despair. I hardly recognized the party of Abraham Lincoln. —“Remember the Alamodome,” July 1996

Start the dirge. Send a wreath. Get your shovel. The Democratic Party of Texas is dead. The only real question for gays and lesbians is, What do we do about it? —“The Death of the Texas Democratic Party,” December 1996

We have been told for so long that we can’t have children, that we’re not fit to be around them, that perhaps we’re even dangerous to them, that we ourselves cannot imagine things any other way…. But here were these men, sitting in a diner in Houston, Texas, imagining a different world for us, living a different world for us, showing us that we could know the fulfillment of having children if we wanted to, oblivious to whether anybody approved. There was a small revolution taking place before our eyes over lunch that day at Avalon, just as there is anytime a gay person refuses to live by the expectations of prejudice. —“Life Goes on at Avalon,” January 1997

It’s fortunate for us that we no longer have to rely on a single drummer to march us into the polling place to vote as a “bloc” for a party or candidate. There is now a world of possibility awaiting us. Placed directly on our shoulders is the responsibility of distinguishing the conservative from the conservative homophobe, of translating gay equality into unfamiliar political languages, and of making unlikely friends in unlikely places. —“Unlikely Friends in Unlikely Places,” June 1997

The convening of a state legislature fills the heart of every good citizen with dread. You never really know what to expect from this collection of convicts and dullards we call “representatives” and “senators.” Many of them are just failed businessmen and second-rate lawyers who go to Austin to be bribed or fondled or both. —“Legislature Blues,” July 1997

LGRL [Lesbian & Gay Rights Lobby of Texas] has virtually formed a Mutual Admiration Society for the Success of Alikes (MASSA) with Democratic Party officials…. As a consequence of this symbiotic back-patting, gays continue to plow the Democratic plantation, and LGRL continues to get our money through its extensive fundraising apparatus. MASSA works for LGRL and LGRL works for MASSA. —“LGRL and the Coming Republican Majority in Austin,” May 1998

Capitalism—not democracy, not laws, not progressive coalitions—has been gays’ most reliable friend in the 20th century…. Ellen failed the test of the marketplace, failed the test of politics, and most of all failed to be funny. We should stop our whining about losing her. She blazed her short trail. As tends to happen in a free marketplace, something better and more effective will replace her in due time. —“Ellen: Goodbye and Good Riddance,” June 1998

On gay issues, despite some disappointments, he [Bill Clinton] has been the best president so far. He should now resign. —“Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire,” September 1998

Hounded in life and beaten into death, Matthew Shepard broke many rules: by being gay, by being openly gay, by being an effeminate man, and by living in a small town…. God rest your weary soul, Matthew. —“Halloween in Wyoming,” November 1998

Two-year-olds and Jerry Falwell are fascinated by the Teletubbies. —“Tinky Winky Hanky Panky,” March 1999

On March 19, when the Democratic National Committee (DNC) voted to reserve a seat exclusively for gays on its executive committee, we lost the only major political party devoted to the cause of our equality. Henceforth, the DNC will treat gays like invalids requiring care and feeding. —“Quotas, Left and Right,” June 1999

Carpenter will continue his 10-year retrospective in the May issue.

Writing from the conservative side, Dale Carpenter began his column for OutSmart in 1994, when he lived in Houston. Now residing in Minneapolis, Carpenter is a University of Minnesota Law School professor. Many of his referenced columns are archived at www.outsmartmagazine.com. Other past columns can be read at www.indegayforum.com.

If you have any comments about this article, please email them to letters@outsmartmagazine.com.