OutRight

What Unites Us?
For GLBT people, success comes with a price
by Dale Carpenter

The annual gay pride celebrations prompt some reflection on the state of the movement and the community of interests it represents. It's fair to ask, for example, do we really have a "community of interests" that a civil rights movement could be said to represent? Or do gays comprise so many constituencies with such divergent (and even conflicting) interests that labeling us a community is more aspiration than description?

The truth is somewhere between the two, but closer to the latter. This fact concerns a lot of gay activists, who plead for "unity," but it shouldn't.

It's trite to say we're everywhere, but in this case trite is right. We come from North, South, East, and West. Gay people are born into rich families and poor families, understanding families and bigoted families. We worship God in every religious tradition. Some of us do not worship Him at all. Gays come in all ages, shapes, sizes, and colors. We like every kind of food, music, and dress. We're in every occupation, from highway construction worker to CEO.

We are Republicans, Democrats, Greens, Libertarians, Independents, and none of the aforementioned. We are liberal, conservative, radical, reactionary, and uninterested. We voted for Bush, Gore, Nader, and Daffy Duck.

With all this diversity, it would be very surprising to find that we could reach a consensus on almost anything. We can't even settle on what to call this purported community. Gay? Gay and Lesbian? GLBT? Queer?

So what does a 50-year-old conservative, religious, closeted white gay man from the rural South who works in a factory have in common with a 20-year-old radical, atheist, out-and-proud self-identified "queer" Latina from New York City who attends an elite university? Can these people really be part of the same community?
What, for that matter, do I have in common with Barney Frank?
Gay people have two things, and only two things, in common. The first is sexual attraction to members of one's own sex. By itself, that is hardly anything to form a community over. Straight people, after all, share with each other an attraction to members of the opposite sex. But it would be bizarre to speak of a single "straight community." No, we would say, heterosexuals' interests and perspectives are too divergent to merit the moniker. Gays are fewer in number than straights but no less diverse, so the mere fact that gays share a sexual orientation is insufficient.

If there is any basis to recognize some kind of community, it must come from the second thing that all gay people have in common: an experience of stigma and discrimination that arises from society's reaction to the sexual orientation we share.

Some such experience is an inescapable fact of life in modern America. No matter how cocooned you are in a tolerant atmosphere, you will experience some of this simply because you're gay. It could be a funny look from someone on the street, or an epithet shouted from a passing car, or a job lost, or a family member who no longer wants you around her kids.

If you hide in the closet in order to avoid these hazards, you face a different set of problems. Feeling the need to hide is itself discrimination and stigma affecting your life.

But is this experience enough to say we have anything significant in common? The intensity and duration of these experiences vary wildly from person to person, depending on many factors, including just dumb luck. Chances are, our 20-year-old university student will have a very different experience of stigma than our 50-year-old rural Southerner.

More importantly, our “common” experience can be as disuniting as it is uniting. The lessons we draw from our life experiences, even when those experiences are roughly the same, can be radically different.

Person A is attacked on the streets by some ruffians yelling antigay slurs and concludes she should start a Pink Pistols brigade to encourage gay people to arm themselves against such aggression. Person B suffers the same attack and thinks the best response is to lobby for a hate crimes law.

Person A is rejected by his family when they learn he is gay and opts to win them over by emphasizing how fundamentally similar to them he is. Person B suffers the same rejection and opts to emphasize how really different her homosexuality makes her.
When it comes to public policy, our common experience of discrimination gives us almost no common ground. For example, the gay left seems most concerned to get the government into our lives in order to protect us; the gay right is most concerned to get the government out of our lives in order to free us.

There ought to be, and there is, a strong consensus that outright state-sponsored antigay discrimination (marriage, the military, sodomy laws) should be eliminated. We all agree that such legally enforced inequality should go.

Even with this agreement, however, there are differences over how much priority to give the protection-enhancing measures vs. the equality-enhancing measures.

So there's not much unity in this community, and there will be even less as social stigma and legal discrimination fade. Our success in the cultural and political battles erodes the basis for the very community that organized to fight those battles. We ought to see our fragmentation as a marker of progress, not as a reason for despair. It's a sign we're winning.

Writing from the conservative end of the political spectrum, Dale Carpenter began his column for OutSmart in 1994, when he resided in Houston. Now living in Minneapolis, Carpenter can be reached at OutRight@aol.com.