Top Quotes: “Has The Gay Movement Failed?” — Martin Duberman

Background: Duberman digs into the history of queer organizing and shares some deeply thought-out insight into whether achieving same-sex marriage and equality in the military (albeit since reversed :() can truly be seen as the wins the LGBTQ community needs and comparing them to the aims of queer movements from 50+ years ago. I really enjoyed his presentation of alternate goals the community could aim for and it does seem that even the corporate-run mainstream orgs are finally catching on this way of thinking joyfully.

Origins of the Gay Movement

“From its inception following the 1969 Stonewall riots, the Gay Liberation Front had called for a fierce, full-scale assault on sexual and gender norms, on imperialistic wars and capitalistic greed, and on the shameful mistreatment of minorities.”

“Most of the radical young recruits to GLF had previously been in the closet; they felt that now, in ‘speaking truth’ about their own lives, they would forthwith be welcomed and would link arms with those telling the truth about racism, sexism, and unjust war — -with the result of creating a powerful politican coalition that would refashion society as a whole.”

“London’s Gay Revolution Party branch of the GLF issued a manifesto that envisioned a polyamorous sexuality freed from all association with procreation, and posited as well an ideal of androgyny — individuals combining in their persons the traits previously parceled out as intrinsic either to males or to females. A successful nonviolent gay revolution would be characterized, the manifesto read, by the extent to which it did not ‘lead to straight-defined homosexuality with marriages and exclusive monogamy.’ Instead of fighting to gain entry to those antiquated institutions, the focus should be on expanding the scope of sexual expression for everyone. It wasn’t the case of ‘an out-group needing concessions, but rather the mainstream needing correction.’”

“The ultimate success of all forms of oppression is our self-oppression, which is achieved when a gay person has adopted and internalized straight people’s definition of what is good and bad.”

“A 1974 work posited that gay people ‘have been taught to hate ourselves.’ Even as young children, ‘we never hear anything good said about gay life and only see it referred to as a subject for mockery, disgust, or pity. Reared in ‘alien, heterosexual nests,’ we grow up hearing the same message reiterated at home, and it’s one that, inescapably, we come to internalize. The vast majority of gay people manage to avoid or deny that fundamental fact — which in turn explains why the ranks of gay liberation remain so thin; the vast majority of gays remain ‘masochistically’ detached from active protest. ‘Like underpaid but genteel office-workers, they refuse to join the union. They prefer the imagined status that comes from identifying with the management’ — a historical yet telling retort to a gay movement that 40 years later would put ‘marriage rights’ at the top of its agenda.”

“The attack on gay male promiscuity as ‘sick’ and ‘degenerate,’ the authors argued, should be met not with shamefaced apology, but with an expression of ‘pity for heterosexuals who find themselves trapped in an unhappy marriage.’ Gay men should ‘rejoice in the liberty their own homosexuality bestows,’ in the accessibility and ease with which they’re able to make sexual contact and to avoid the ‘tedious process of persuasion — the ritualized escalation of intimacy to be carried out before sexual pleasure is reached.’”

“Lasting same-sex relationships, they argued, were usually not carbon copies of durable heterosexual ones. Along with being more egalitarian and emotionally expressive, same-same couples (they asserted) ‘can identify with the sexual feelings of those they care for in a way logistically impossible for non-gay people.’”

“In the face of persistent male chauvinism among some of the male members of the GLF, the women members decided to form the Radicalesbians collective in 1970. Their founding document, ‘Woman-Identified Woman,’ famously declared that ‘a lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion’ and described her as ‘in a state of continual war with everything about her, and usually with herself.’ Eschewing rationality and ‘balance’ as the essence of ‘maturity,’ the Radicalesbians elevated outrage and fury as the appropriate emotions for combating the dehumanizing sexism long leveled against women. They regarded their perspective as superior to the heterosexual woman’s demeaning compromises with male supremacy.”

“Sex roles, a Chicago manifesto insisted, had been ingrained for so long ‘that normal heterosexual relationships are so unequal, so exploitative…that a ridiculously unloving standard of love is accepted.’ Women were treated, according to the manifesto, as an appendage — as an ornament, a toy, alter ego, parasite, burden or slave.’”

“Along with renouncing marriage and monogamy, Wittman applauded adolescent sexuality. ‘Kids can take care of themselves and are sexual beings way earlier than we’d like to admit…those of us who began cruising in early adolescence know this.’”

“As for minority sexualities within the gay community, such as sadomasocists (or even those cohabitate with animals), Wittman urges us not to automatically denounce that which we neither share nor understand. He feels such sexualities might be ‘enactments of spiritual or important phenomena’: for example, ‘sex with animals may be the beginning of interspecies communications.’ Wittman views the harm done in these ‘perversions’ as ‘undoubtedly less dangerous or unhealthy than is tobacco or alcohol’ (though Wittman’s dog may have disagreed).”

“Whites in the Gay Liberation Front may have had trouble detecting their own prejudice, but blacks did not.”

“Homosexuality at the time seems to have been more acceptable to black families — ’We don’t throw our children away’ — -than to white, though with a qualifier: acceptable so long as the gay family member didn’t constantly reference the fact or become ‘political’ about it.”

Lisa Kron, writer of Fun Home, on hearing news of the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage, said: “The thing I miss is the specialness of being gay. Because the traditional paths were closed, there was a consciousness to our lives, a necessary invention to the way we were going to celebrate and mark family and mark connections. That felt magical and beautiful.’”

“She, too, wanted ‘the option of random sex with no emotional commitment,’ when in the mood for physical release, though she predicted that if women also had bathhouses, they would be ‘less competitive than the gay men’s baths, more laughter would ring in the sauna, and you’d touch not only to fuck but just to touch.’ In any case, she wanted options, choices — ’deep long-term relationships and short-term affairs’ — and didn’t regard the two as mutually exclusive.”

“As Lee saw it, ‘monogamy — -as we understand it in our culture — takes two individuals and molds them into one unit, then kills the individual, including that individual’s needs, wants, desires, and independent action. She puzzled over why some lesbians, outlaw in many ways, were drawn to defending the hidebound institution of monogamy. She thought part of the answer was ‘security’; most people ‘need someone to be with, to feel part of,’ but the need itself was strictly the result of having been socialized as women. She felt, too, that some gay men and women who did form stable couples were driven by the need to gain at least a modicum of social approval.”

“To become more like [heterosexuals] would be to forget our own singular history and the special insights and perspectives that derive from it, giving us, as spies in the culture, a unique perspective for evaluating and critiquing aspects of mainstream culture.”

Origins of Today’s Gay Agenda

“How is it that the Gay Liberation Front’s radical agenda morphed, more than 40 years later, into a movement that stresses above all else the importance of the right to marriage — -and secondarily, to participation on equal terms in killing our country’s ‘enemies?’”

“Marriage rights landed on top of the agenda because that’s where the majority of gay Americans want it to be: it’s proven the issue above all others capable of galvanizing the widest support.”

“In the 80s, the advent of AIDS ripped apart and devastated the gay community. Political energy returned in tandem with a refocused target: an indifferent federal government deaf to the swiftly rising death toll and the dire need for help. Where once the gay movement had fought to remove hostile government from their lives, it now marshaled its strength in trying to persuade — and then in militarily demanding — that Washington mobilize its immense resources to combat an elusive and terrifying epidemic.”

“In the gradually reconfigured political landscape of the ’90s, ‘sexual liberation’ no longer widely appealed as a rallying cry. Had not the bathhouses, the backroom orgy bars been the very breeding ground of the epidemic? Had not the self-indulgent sexual revolution gone haywire, mistakenly substituting an endless string of casual, anonymous encounters for the mature comfort of long-term relationships? It was in this climate that the marriage crusade surfaced and began to pick up steam. The tiny Gay Rights National Lobby, founded in 1980 in DC, quickly mushroomed into the renamed Human Rights Campaign. HRC proved ready and eager to lead the battered and besmirched gay community out of the wilderness and into the Eden of white picket fences and the miracle of monogamy. By 1999, HRC boasted a yearly budget of more than 15 million dollars. As befitted a mainstream, corporate-like organization, it boasted a board of wealthy, mostly male donors disdainful of any political agenda that even remotely smacked of the revolutionary ‘nonsense’ once spouted by the piddling likes of the Gay Liberation Front. The new gay politics was bent on respectability, which didn’t quite mean a renunciation of ‘promiscuous’ sex but which tacitly removed any discussion of it from the public domain.”

“In 1972, the National Coalition of Gay Organizations called for ‘the repeal of all legislative provisions that restrict the sex or number of persons entering into a marriage unit, and [the] extension of legal benefits of marriage to all persons who cohabit regardless of sex or number’ — thereby eliminating tax inequities that victimized single people.”

“From the beginning, the leaders of the gay marriage movement fought for those who looked exactly like the ‘ideal’ straight couple — a two-person monogamous unit. Nontraditional families need not apply — no blended households of spinster siblings or senior citizens, no polyamorous lovers, no adult children serving as caretakers to elderly parents, no extended kinship networks or cross-generational partnerships (or revision of ‘age of consent’ laws) — and certainly no entry for those who’d ever taken up sex work to support themselves, or who championed serial monogamy or group sex. No ‘queer’ notions would be entertained about ending the assorted privileges that attend state-sanctioned marriage and instead making them available to everyone as universal rights. As the writer-activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore plaintively asked, ‘When did our dreams get so small?’” “Like advocates of marriage do, advocates of non- or serial monogamy — or for that matter, of one-night stands — could generalize from their very best experiences and insist that those instances accurately reflect the whole.

“To presume morality follows on marriage is to ignore centuries of evidence that each is very much possible without the other.”

“The studies of heterosexual marriage largely agree that it is not good for one’s erotic health: sexual attraction to one’s mate usually lasts, with luck, for about five years; thereafter orgasm generally depends on artificial stimulants like porn and distancing fantasies about someone — anyone — other than your partner. Those same studies also confirm that in many of those marriages women still do most of the chores and child-rearing and in significant numbers still suffer varying forms of domestic violence. If you survive all that, and have a high tolerance for ourtine, there is something to be said for having another eighty-year-old at your side as you pass into the twilight zone.”

“Only a small subset from the middle class (or any class), of course, ever becomes active in left-wing protest. The vast majority — as the current agenda of the gay movement testifies — focus not on attacking established values and institutions, but on saluting them. The great majority want to win their stripes in the society as it is. Most people, quite simply, want to belong. Life’s daily struggles consume the bulk of one’s time and sap most of one’s energy, with the rest of it consumed by the gnawing sense, which not even the busiest of lives can entirely blot out, that life is going to end, and in all likelihood painfully. In the brief interlude preceding, we need all the comfort we can get, and that includes for most of us the comfort of being certified and approved — accepted as a human being in good standing. It should therefore come as no surprise that most gay people are happy to pledge allegiance to whatever the going institutional structure is and whatever official formula for happiness reigns — which in our culture reigns (though it’s wobbling) lifetime monogamous pair-bonding.”

“We strive to have our relationships mimic as closely as possible those of the straight majority — even as heterosexuals, ironically, are in ever-increasing numbers defecting from traditional marriage and binding monogamy.”

“In the years immediately following Stonewall, the overwhelming majority of gay people remained closeted, their energy focused on avoiding detection and disgrace. Only a comparative handful gave voice to heretical views, or denounced what the majority accepted: racism, sexism, imperialism, and capitalism.”

Sexuality in Adolescence

“The very concept of adolescence began to emerge only in the last quarter of the 19th century; before that, children were regarded as having achieved adulthood at the onset of puberty. As for marriage, before about 1850, it was thought entirely ordinary for girls to be married off at ten, sometimes as young as seven. The presence or absence of the young girl’s ‘informed consent’ was not, it seems, a consideration.”

“In the instance of religious indoctrination, no one seems concerned about the morality of indoctrinating young children to believe in and serve a supernatural being — though they lack the ‘cognitive capacity’ to ‘consent’ to such brainwashing.”

“If an overzealous police officer raids the local lovers’ lane and arrests two minors for having sex with each other — or sometimes just for touching or kissing — their names will likely be entered on the state’s sex offender registry. And once on the registry, you stay on — and the consequences are devastating in terms of being unable to find jobs, shelter, companionship — or staying out of jail. A quarter of convicted ‘sex offenders’ are minors, 11 to 17 years old.”

“Isn’t it perfectly natural that 14-year-olds want to explore their sexuality — -that such experimentation isn’t a crime or a sin? After all, Freud revealed that children much younger than 14 are curious about their bodies, engage in sex play, and masturbate. The real crime is to tell ourselves that we’re ‘protecting’ the young; they do need protection — from ‘sexual predators’ but not usually from themselves or one another. What we’re protecting when we interfere with and condemn youthful experimentation is our own excessively priggish selves. To punish sexual experimentation in the young is the surest way to turn out yet another generation of guilt-ridden prudes, of adults who associate sex with shame and filth.”

“The culture in general has grown more accepting of LGBTQ people in recent years, but for many gay teens, high school remains a living hell. In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control released the results of an in-depth study of more than 15,000 queer high school students and found that they are 3x as likely to skip school out of fear for their safety, are forced 4x more often than their straight counterparts ‘to have unwanted sex,’ and are roughly 5x as likely to have accepted suicide in the past year.”

“These days, it’s more acceptable in our high schools (sometimes even ‘cool’) to be different, but not too different.”

Covering

“A legal scholar discovered that in case after case a gay individual who ‘covers’ — that is downplays ‘stigmatized attributes’ like male effeminacy — fares far better in the courts (indeed, in life in general) than one who does not. Individuals whose homosexuality is ‘discreetly’ (though openly) displayed win their discrimination or custody cases far more often than those who behave in court ‘flamboyantly.’ Affectionate acts like hugging and kissing that are treated as normal in a heterosexual couple are regarded as ‘inappropriate behavior’ in a gay one. Such ‘flagrancy’ is often treated as ‘dangerous’ in front of children whose gender and sexual identities are not yet formed. The courts also regard being politically active as suspect. The courts react similarly in regard to race: a black person able to prove that skin color was the reason for having been fired will win in court, but that same person will lose if fired for sporting a braided hairstyle. ‘Immutable’ aspects of racial identity are protected; ‘Mutable’ aspects are not. Women, too, are subject to the double bind: they must appear ‘masculine’ enough to do the job, but not as masculine as to threaten the gender binary.”

“Anal sex is in fact characteristically the interaction of two active partners, not one aggressor and one passive recipient of aggression. No anal sex worth a candle involves a limp, passive, nearly comatose ‘victim’: both participants write the script, both actively orchestrate the scene, both gyrate their bodies with interactive abandon.”

What Should The Agenda Be?

“How about an agenda beyond the right to volunteer for the potential killing fields? How about, for example, a campaign for unilateral disarmament, or perhaps an international ban on nuclear weapons? Impractical? Foolishly idealistic? That’s what they told the abolitionists in the mid 19th century. Humanitarian concerns are always dismissed as impractical, at least initially.”

“It’s a narrative of progress that features a particular, and limited, set of issues: marriage equality, open service in the military, safe schools, adoption rights, antidiscrimination and hate crime legislation. The first two have been achieved (though not set to rest); the latter four remain controversial works in progress. A host of other matters that affect the lives of many LGBTQ people — among them, healthcare, senior centers, immigration, poverty, homelessness, diet, and education — are currently being given short shrift.”

“A shift away from incarceration has begun, the imprisonment rate having dropped by 8% between 2010 and 2015.”

“The explanation for higher rates of certain physical and emotional disorders among gay people is social: they’re the by-products of prejudice, discrimination, victimization, and rejection, as well as the coping mechanisms developed to contain them — including concealment, distrust, and internalized homophobia. Some evidence also suggests that such ‘stressors’ are directly linked to elevated levels of cardiovascular disease, asthma, and diabetes in the gay community. Comparable stressors are higher than average among all racial and sexual minorities.”

“A Yale stress researcher believes that in regard to gay people, the greatest damage gets done ‘in the five or so years between realizing your sexuality and starting to tell other people.’ The felt need to be constantly on guard, the fear of slipping up and revealing too much, takes a long-term toll, both psychologically and physically. And that toll doesn’t simply disappear after we’ve grown into adulthood and ‘accepted’ or revealed our sexuality (for some, guilt, shame, and regret remain omnipresent). If during adolescence we spend a good deal of psychic energy on concealing who we are from other people, including our families, our capacity for trust and intimacy can become permanently compromised. Which would mean, among other things, that we might not be as good at friendship as we often claim. ‘Gay men in particular are just not very nice to each other.’ The researcher believes that ‘in-group discrimination’ does more harm to your psyche than getting rejected by members of the majority, because it feels as if you’ve lost ‘your only way of making friends and finding love. Being pushed away from your own people hurts because you need them more.’ The result, he claims, is that unlike other minority groups whose members find that ‘living in a community like them is linked to lower rates of anxiety and depression,’ it’s the opposite for gay men.”

‘Gay Genes’ & Fluidity

“Anthropological findings have clustered firmly around the conclusion that human sexual behavior primarily derives from culturally learned norms, not instinctual imperatives. Evidence demonstrates that ‘we’re capable of seeking pleasure and relatedness wherever our socially constructed psyches cue us to look for them…Even a cursory glance at other cultures confirms the dependency of our own psychosexual patterns on parochial and largely tacit social dictates.”

“Fluidity manifests differently for men and women. As a result of being ‘rigidly de-feminized’ starting an early age, boys learn to disassociate tenderness from sex. Where a bisexual woman might say, ‘It’s not the gender, it’s the person,’ a fluid man would be much more likely to say, ‘Hey, if my dick likes it, I’m going to go for it.’ Women combine — while men separate — emotions and sex. Which further means that men navigate casual sex more easily — -and helps to explain why backroom orgy bars and bathhouses have long been features of gay male, but not lesbian culture.”

“The proportion of those who believe in a biological explanation for sexual orientation has risen from a mere 13% in 1977 to 52% in 2010. Yet the majority of academic specialists and intellectuals haven’t joined that particular bandwagon. Any number of them are willing to pay at least pro forma lip service to the possibility that some unknown combination of genes and hormones interacts with unspecified environmental circumstances to create sexual desire.”

“The notion that our traditional sex roles are foreordained has been dethroned, and with it the cramped depiction of men and women as destined to inhabit separate worlds — a view that has for so long constricted our (female and male) humanity. There’s still a distance to go, but currently women are much more likely to be seen as temperamentally equipped for an expansive set of social roles than they were, say, 50 years ago — with the result that they’ve become much more prominent in the worlds of higher education, medicine, etc. and much less confined to child-rearing and domestic chores. ‘Gender can be re-conceptualized as an ‘effect’ rather than a mere fact, something that requires explanation rather than something that explains the social world.’”

“The role prenatal hormones play in gender development has been grossly exaggerated. Even in regard to spatial cognition — one of the few areas where hormonal differences are still thought (though the matter remains contested) — to give males, on average, something of an advantage — behavioral intervention, such as encouraging women to watch video games, has produced ‘substantial gains’ in their spatial capacity, all but eliminating the male advantage. Even if the few areas where prenatal hormones do appear to have some effect on postnatal behavior, we’re dealing not with hard-wired differences — as is usually claimed — but with plastic, malleable traits.”

Moving Forward

“In contrast to HRC, the younger generation of radical gay local orgs is focused on survival issues — like how to provide for homeless youth, how to combat brutal deportation policies and an inhumane criminal justice system, and how to cope with violence against trans people. Their primary concern is with the least privileged members of the LGBTQ community, the people most desperately in need of help.”

“A recent report on hunger in the U.S. found that more than 1 in 4 of the 20,000 lesbian and gay adults surveyed has at least once in the past year been unable to feed themselves or their families, compared to 1 in 10 heterosexual adults. (Had trans people and homeless LGBTQ teenagers been included in the study, the story would have been more dire still.) Another report found that gay people also had high rates of job discrimination and low rates of health insurance. For nonwhite gays, the figures are still worse. Nearly half of gay black people have experienced hunger in the past year (compared with 28% of straight blacks) and the comparable figures for gay Latinxs are 33% (24% for those who are straight).”

“Unlike the middle- and upper-class gay people who seem content with HRC’s single-issue politics, the youthful radicals at work on the grassroots level are attuned to many of the issues that currently dominate the straight left’s agenda.”

“A Yale PhD candidate focuses on the way in which the traditional heterosexual family continues to oppress women. She dismisses the ‘maternal instinct’ as ‘largely a bogus concept’ and, further, deplores the fact that many working-class women are forced to hire themselves out, often at low wages, to ease the domestic burdens of middle-class mothers.”