Beyond A Marriage Victory

The recent history of gay rights has produced a sensation akin to scuba-divers’ vertigo—the dizz ying ascent from the depths to the surface. In my article “Love on the March,” which appeared on the eve of the 2012 election, I described the monumental progress that has taken place in the past forty-five years: the rebellion at Stonewall, the emergence of gay politicians, the decline of homophobia in the media and in Hollywood, the decriminalization of sodomy, the end of the ban on gays in the military, the slow advance of marriage equality. Pundits had predicted further gains for gay rights last November, but few expected the clean sweep that resulted: the election of Tammy Baldwin as the nation’s first openly gay senator; victories for same-sex marriage in Washington, Maryland, and Maine; the defeat of a proposed gay-marriage ban in Minnesota. Things have changed since Time magazine, in 1966, described homosexuality as a “pernicious sickness.” Things have changed at this magazine, too. We did not get around to mentioning AIDS until 1986.

The vertigo intensified when President Obama, in his second inaugural address, ceremoniously added the Stonewall rebellion to the civil-rights pantheon: “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still, just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.” In essence, Obama was writing gay people into our founding documents. The gesture must have amazed surviving veterans of that chaotic night in the Village in 1969; homosexuality was then the great unspeakable in politics, spurned by left and right alike. Now the drag queens, bull dykes, and homeless youths of Stonewall were “forebears,” marching somewhere behind Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martin Luther King, Jr. When Obama spoke those words, he surely had his mind fixed upon the Supreme Court, which will take up the topic of gay marriage this morning. In this week’s Comment, Jeffrey Toobin argues that the die is cast, no matter how the court acts: “The country has changed, and it’s never going back to the way it was.”

One recent milestone is particularly telling, as Richard Socarides has attested. In mid-March, Rob Portman, the Republican senator from Ohio, revealed that his son, Will, is gay, and that he was supporting same-sex marriage as a result. Portman proceeded to make a conservative argument for marriage equality, not unlike the one that Andrew Sullivan advanced in his pioneering 1989 essay “Here Comes the Groom.” “We conservatives believe in personal liberty and minimal government interference in people’s lives,” Portman wrote. “We also consider the family unit to be the fundamental building block of society. We should encourage people to make long-term commitments to each other and build families, so as to foster strong, stable communities and promote personal responsibility.” Portman, too, seemed to be addressing the Supreme Court, and in a CNN interview he confirmed that the pending cases had prompted him to speak out.

Portman’s announcement aroused predictable consternation on the religious right, and also stirred up some surprising fury on the left. Commentators such as Matthew Yglesias, Paul Krugman, and Jonathan Chait labelled the Senator a narcissist, a hypocrite, a moral failure. He was criticized for having failed to notice the humanity of gay people until his son identified himself as one, and for having waited two years to reverse himself. (Yesterday, Will Portman, the son in question, said that his own reluctance to become a public figure was part of the reason for the delay.) Some gay pundits reacted with equal ire; others, especially those from conservative families, were more welcoming. Ari Ezra Waldman, in a post for the gay blog Towleroad, pointed out that Portman’s “conversion” illustrated with exceptional clarity the political logic that had underpinned the coming-out ritual from the beginning. Each family encounter of this kind—sometimes traumatic, sometimes cathartic, often a mixture of the two—is an isolated, intimate event, yet from a million such moments a social force emerges, a gathering wave.

Portman may represent the beginning of the end of gay politics as a purely liberal undertaking. Already in the last election it was clear that the national Republican Party had given up using the gays as a wedge; in coming years, politicians like Portman will actively court the gay and lesbian vote. Indeed, it’s not inconceivable that in 2016 we could find Portman and Hillary Clinton running against each other, in which case the gay issue would be effectively neutralized; in a debate, Portman could even claim that he had endorsed same-sex marriage before his Democratic opponent did. (Three days earlier, to be sure.) A gay-friendly stance, under the banner of the kind of extended-family-values rhetoric that Obama has perfected, will allow Republicans to frame themselves as truly compassionate conservatives, even more compassionate than the last bunch.

Such a spectacle would be discomfiting, even infuriating, for Democrats. But there is a historical catch: twentieth-century liberalism was unfriendly to gay people for much of its existence.

A frightening intensification of homophobia took place in the nineteen-thirties and forties, during the Roosevelt era. As Linda Hirshman points out in her book “Victory,” leading sixties radicals treated the nascent gay movement with disdain, even contempt. In the 1980 election, the most reliable supporter of gay rights was John Anderson, the Republican turned independent. In 1996, Bill Clinton, running for reëlection, cut loose his gay supporters by signing into law the Defense of Marriage Act, whose constitutionality the Supreme Court is now reviewing.

Homosexuality has been politicized, but it is not a political matter at the core: it has to do with sex, love, friendship, and cultural memory. A great many people have experienced a change of heart when a family member or close friend has come out to them, but not all have undergone an ideological Damascene epiphany and shifted from right to left. Conversely, while gay people have been reliable Democratic voters for generations, a boomlet of gay-positive Republicans may reveal that some of those voters are not as congenitally liberal as their recent actions at the polls would suggest. The white gay-male vote, in particular, might show substantial defections if such politicians come forward—or, indeed, if an openly gay Republican runs for national office.

In 1994, when same-sex marriage was first edging into the national consciousness, Tony Kushner, the far-seeing author of “Angels in America,” wrote a piece for The Nation in which he expressed unease with the latest pragmatic strain of gay politics, its focus on a few eminently wholesome and winning issues. He felt, as many had been feeling for years, that a radical, insurrectionary tradition in gay culture was falling away—that gays and lesbians were in danger of succeeding too well in their urge to join the mainstream. He put it this way:

It’s entirely conceivable that we will one day live miserably in a thoroughly ravaged world in which lesbians and gay men can marry and serve openly in the Army and that’s it. Capitalism, after all, can absorb a lot. Poverty, war, alienation, environmental destruction, colonialism, unequal development, boom/bust cycles, private property, individualism, commodity fetishism, the fetishization of the body, the fetishization of violence, guns, drugs, child abuse, underfunded and bad education (itself a form of child abuse)—these things are key to the successful functioning of the free market. Homophobia is not; the system could certainly accommodate demands for equal rights for homosexuals without danger to itself.

Two decades later, here we are, living in a ravaged world where the free-market principle reigns supreme, where inequality of income is greater than it has been in many decades, where huge corporations have an iron grasp on cultural life, the alleged free-for-all of the Internet included—and where gays can marry in nine states and join the military. Is there something illusory in this parade of victories? Does it somehow mask a deeper political regression? As a gay man who feels vastly more at ease in American society than he did twenty years ago, I can’t bring myself to see it that way: the progress is real and profound. But Kushner’s eerie prophecy gives me pause. –By Alex Ross/The New Yorker/March 26, 2013