Stonewall Triptych

One result of the recent procession of federal court cases, beginning with Romer v. Evans and including Lawrence v. Texas, and the latest, the Ninth Circuit panel rejection of Prop. 8 in Perry v. Brown and Galinski v. OPM, is that we can now see that the intellectual foundations of the future are being constructed. I don’t just mean the legal constitutional structures that are going to control how we are going to fit into the body of the republic, but also the emotional and psychological structures that will control the way we think about ourselves. The concept of “gay people” is congealing and solidifying. We are, apparently, here. “Gay people” is taking on a definition written by the courts—always a dangerous enterprise—and consequently we are probably headed into a prolonged period of intellectual and psychological error, when biological and legal constructs are out of whack with our felt reality.  

The heart of the error that’s developing is this: Our constitutional jurisprudence—and journalism and education and medicine and the rest—is beginning to agree that a person has a “sexuality.” We seem to agree there are two, or maybe three, sexualities, gay and straight and bisexual. Apparently the courts and the other opinion-makers in the culture agree that there aren’t any other possibilities. Sexuality is immutable. A person is either straight or gay or bi all that person’s life. And we know what these three possibilities mean. Sexuality, in this view, is like skin color. It doesn’t change. Sexuality and skin color both indicate characteristics of distinct populations that must be treated equally under the law. And, implicit in this construct that we’re seeing raised in front of us is the demand, written into law, that, to get our rights, we have to come out. 

I know how we got here. Before Romer we had no rights recognized by anybody that were founded in the constitution. Bowers v. Hardwick showed us that we wouldn’t get anywhere by claiming there was a right in the constitution to engage in sodomy. So, when they had a chance, legal theorists proposed to follow the lead of the great civil rights cases of the fifties and sixties. Gay people would claim to be a “suspect class,” that is, a class set aside by one immutable characteristic and by a history of discrimination. It seems to be working. Beginning with Romer, and then moving through the other gay civil rights cases, the federal judiciary seems to be buying this approach. Gay people are becoming a suspect class whose rights can only be abridged after “heightened scrutiny.”

The problem, buried in all this, is a version of human sexuality that ain’t necessarily so. 

There are many people whose sexuality is not defined by the words “gay” or “straight” or “bi”—men who want sometimes to have sex with another man but who call themselves “straight,” and women who sometimes want to have sex, or even long-term relationships, with men, but who call themselves “lesbians.” There is no hard line between gay and straight. A person may breach that line concurrently or serially, and it gets breached all the time, and over and over. It won’t do, in trying to understand people, to say, as gay people have long said about those who don’t fit its theories, that these people “don’t have courage” or “are confused.” We should take them at their word, and then see where that leads us. And yet, what we’ll actually do is tell them you don’t have courage, you are confused.

Since this is such a big error that is developing, the consequences are going to be dire and hard to correct. A man or a woman can have a real, deeply-felt, consuming sense that he or she is gay—and yet want to have sex with a person of the opposite sex. And a man or a woman can be straight—and yet want to have sex with someone of his or her own sex. People want to go back and forth, without changing any of the words they use to describe themselves, but the ideas that are developing don’t provide an intellectual framework for a description of these people. That’s the problem. For that man who is straight but who has sex only with men—where do his rights come from? How does he feel about himself? Lonely, I’ll bet. Nor do those ideas take into account what is happening in people’s heads. A straight friend, who has a monogamous relationship with his wife, told me that when he has sex with her, he always thinks of naked men. Jimmy Carter’s option—call that adultery—won’t work for most of us or for that friend of mine. 

Our culture is developing an understanding of sexuality—and writing it into the law through these court cases—that is rigid, narrow, confining, and immutable, while our sex is fluid, expansive, mutable, and constantly surprising. 

The consequence of what’s happening is that people who follow their hearts, or their genes or their lusts, are still not going to find themselves reflected in the structures laid down by the culture and are going to be told, “You do it wrong,” “You are wrong to feel that way.” We are developing an intellectual framework for our sexuality that is going to be as guilt-inducing as the one we’ve had for the last forty years, and it’s clear that it’s the culture, which likes binary thinking because it’s simpler, that has gotten it wrong again.   

Today, a federal district court in California declared DOMA unconstitutional in a summary judgment. Adam B of Daily Kos calls this a “big win,” and I recommend his analysis here. Ari Ezra Waldman, of Towleroad, continues his superb job of legal analysis of these court cases here. Ari analyzes what a summary judgment is and what it means in this case. What Ari has been emphasizing for several weeks now is the cumulative effect of each of these judgments. He does that again today. He suggests this is the way DOMA is going to be repealed—one brick at a time. 

Read these guys.

Queer is permanently outside the culture and therefore in opposition to it. Queer does not look for a time in the future when there will be resolution, when the failures of today will be corrected and those outside brought in. Queer neither seeks nor wishes for acceptance. Queer seeks to understand today. Queer accepts today what is—the crimes and the radical failures—and accepts that today doesn’t lead to any change for tomorrow. Queer does not mature into anything. Queer is not a transitional state. Queer is final. Queer understands that same-sex is only one aspect of queer. Queer stands in opposition. 

Queer does not fit in. Queer isn’t smooth. And there is some question whether Queer is cool. Queer is not dependent on what anyone else does or even anyone else’s understanding of it. And it is certainly not dependent on whether anyone else accepts it. Queer is independent of all that and stands alone. Proud, independent, unmoved. It is enough to learn what I stand for. 

I suspect that there are a number of ways to become Queer. One grows up and into Queer. One realizes at last that, after one has been everything else, one is Queer. It is therefore a state for old people. It is also a state for kids, who understand instinctively that they don’t need to try all those states that aren’t going to work, because they are temporary. Kids understand, having cut out all the transitional stages, they can go right for Queer and have done with it. Hey, this’s the way I am. I’m not ever gonna be part of that other stuff.. 

Gay used to be like this. It was way out there. It was not respectable. But Gay started trying to fit in and be respectable. It started being a transitional stage on the road to fitting in. But Queer is truth, right now, until everybody gets used to it, when we’re going to need a new word for this old truth. Something to describe those of us not on the path to anywhere. Just me. Just us. Out here. Queer. 

There is no point in our trying to convince anyone that we are not a danger to other people’s marriages—or any of the other things we have been charged with. As the appeals court said, these are cases of the majority’s private disapproval. So don’t try to persuade them. Don’t try to talk to them. Instead, bring force to bear on them. Disrupt their meetings, demonstrate in the street, shout loudly, have lawyers who are the toughest, most brilliant lawyers anywhere, and keep this up until the other side admits to being outgunned. The point here, when we are dealing with irrational opponents who are willing to lie, is to be stronger, to never let down our guard, to never assume, because we are good people, that our opponents will recognize us as good people and give us what we deserve. To the contrary, the history of the last sixty years in America proves that they won’t, so we have to take care of ourselves. We have to be fierce to be free. None of those folks who were willing to lie for sixty years are just going to give us anything.

For Ari Ezra Waldman’s most recent comments on the Perry v. Brown, see Towleroad. 

Two good places to go for commentary on the Ninth Circuit panel’s decision in the Perry v. Brown Proposition 8 case are Adam B on Daily Kos and Ari Ezra Waldman on Towleroad. I don’t know what Proposition 8 supporters are thinking right now—I don’t read that kind of stuff—but opponents of Proposition 8 agree that something momentous has just happened.

Adam B's last sentence, commenting on the fact that this decision is not the last word, "No, same-sex couples shouldn't have to wait, but make no mistake: equality is winning."

I’ll return in two or three days with more on Perry v. Brown.

Nothing in my last post should be read to imply that having children is a necessary part of having a “rich life” for gay people. That’s it for us, and that came about when I underwent a divorce, and then when I worked for the subsequent years with my children, as they grew older, so that I could be a gay man with children and they could be children with a gay father. As is sometimes the way with these things, my children—a boy and a girl—grew up and became an adult man and an adult woman who eventually got married and had their own children and so, by that time, my partner and I, who had found each other about the time our children became adults, became grandparents. This was at a time when having children seemed to be a relatively transgressive thing to do and didn’t seem like anything we were trying to foist off on any other set of people. In fact, the way we got here—finding ourselves gay grandparents with children—seemed at the time like the last thing anybody should do if they wanted to be assimilated into either the gay or the straight communities.

One of the cool things is that I have never lost my sense of gays as transgressive people, which they were when I was first dealing with them, a sense that I have carried right up through Adam in the Morning, my book on the Stonewall Riots. We were always fighting some oppressive force, and if, in my own case, these oppressive forces were also trying to keep me from having children, well, at least I had already learned how to fight them, and to win. 

One has to eventually impose oneself on one’s culture, not the other way around. In another context, having children might be the absolutely least transgressive thing a person could do. But in my context it was the most transgressive. Now, to bring all this back full circle, I have my being gay to thank for that. I think, for many people, having children grounds them firmly in their culture. For me, and since I am gay, it grounds me firmly in rebellion against my culture.