OutRight

by Dale Carpenter

LOOKING AHEAD

Four ways of considering the future can help us prepare

In my last column, I argued the gay movement struggles on two planes-one legal and one social. That column looked at what gays might try to achieve in the legal domain. This column deals with what gays might try to achieve in the domain of social relations dominated by family members, friends, private organizations, education, and the media.

This column presents four possible goals in the social domain. Each seeks to deal in some way with the following question: How do we want to be treated (or be thought of) as gay people by those around us? It is possible to answer this question differently for different parts of one's life (e.g., one answer for coworkers, another for family), but in general we tend to embrace one approach over the others.

Indifference. The first possible response to this question is to be almost offended by it. This approach suggests we should not care how straight society views us because our sense of self-worth and our quality of life should not depend on what others think. If straight people like us, fine. If not, that's fine, too. The indifference model reached its zenith in the heady years after Stonewall when activists imagined that gay power, like black power, would free an oppressed group from having to rely on the good will of people outside the group.

The primary attraction of this vision of gay-straight relations is that it represents a sharp break from the world of overwhelming shame from which it emerged. For much of gay history, shame-our reaction to others' disapproval of homosexuality-has been so powerful as to be disabling emotionally, intellectually, and politically. Indifference offers to free us from shame.

The problem with the indifference approach is the world it would leave us with. Most gay kids still grow up in families where homosexuality is considered shameful, which makes their lives appreciably more difficult. Most major religions still teach homosexuality is an abomination and that gays are going to hell. Walking down the street holding your lover's hand is still guaranteed to get you nasty stares, maybe ugly insults, possibly physical assault. We are indifferent to the attitudes that shape these social facts at our peril.

Tolerance. A second approach is to say we should demand nothing more or less from straight society than tolerance of our homosexuality. Under this approach, nobody is expected to affirm the validity or genuineness of our loves or lives. But neither do they reproach us openly for those things. Under this approach, there is a cease-fire in the culture war between gays and antigays. Neither side cedes any ground, but the shooting stops.

The attraction of this vision is that it has already been achieved to a remarkable degree in American society. Even many religious conservatives are now willing to say gays should be "tolerated," a concession that even 20 years ago would have been unthinkable.

Still, there is something awfully tinny about tolerance. Certainly, mere tolerance from our families and friends seems inadequate.
Acceptance. A third approach is to seek full acceptance of our homosexuality from the people around us. In a world of acceptance, families would celebrate our relationships as they would any straight child's. Major religions would welcome us as God's children and teach that our love is not a sin any more than heterosexual love is. Few would look twice when we walk hand-in-hand down the street.

The attraction of this vision is that its achievement would solve many of the problems we have organized to combat. For example, if we were equally accepted in the lives of the straight people around us, we wouldn't need a law to protect us from discrimination in employment or housing or education because we wouldn't encounter such antigay discrimination. I suspect most gay people want acceptance because they know it would make life easier and richer.

But the acceptance model is firmly rejected by both the religious right and the queer left. The religious right fears the full integration of gays into American life because it would entail the death of their moral worldview. The queer left opposes acceptance as a goal because they see it as "assimilationist," requiring gays to surrender whatever it is that supposedly makes us distinctive.

Erasure. Beyond acceptance of homosexuality lies its complete elimination as a social category. Under this vision, we would cease to think of people as "gay" or "straight" because the distinction itself would carry no significance. We don't have a word for left-handed people and we don't think of them as a distinct kind of person. Identity based on sexual orientation, like identity based on handedness, would not exist. A few years back, a small "post-gay" movement embraced something like erasure.

The erasure model has the advantages of the acceptance model, only more so. The problem is that it seems far-fetched. Not only are we not close to it, we are unlikely ever to be. Few aspects of human behavior have been as subject to obsession, praise, and condemnation as sexuality. And few aspects of human sexuality have received as much attention as homosexuality. To imagine a world unaware of it is like imagining a world of peace and harmony. In other words, fat chance.

Writing from the conservative end of the political spectrum, Dale Carpenter began his column for OutSmart in 1994, when he lived in Houston. Now residing in Minneapolis, Carpenter is a law professor. He can be reached at OutRight@aol.com.