Respect your queer elders, childBy Marke B.
A photo from SAGE, the LGBT senior advocacy group
Every year around Pride, I get a little teary about all the show of LGBT elder power in the parade (and berate myself for not including more gay senior content in our annual Queer Issue, though I try -- and this year we got to look indepth at the Stonewall and Gay Liberation Front generation). In the current issue of the New Yorker, Senior Editor Hendrik Hertzberg commemorated Stonewall's 40th and got in a few jibes at Obama's campaign promise foot-dragging. I could have done without some of Hertzberg's "daddy" tone (apparently we're overreacting to that awful DoJ DoMA brief that equated anti-same-sex marriage statutes with incest injunctions -- although who knows if it'll help us out in the long run once people see what we're up against?) but he did come out swinging.
The thing that really caught my eye though, was this snatch Hertzberg included from a heinous, unsigned 1966 Time article called "The Homosexual in America":
[Homosexuality] is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.
I just adore that "pathetic little" formulation. It makes me feel so BDSM bottom. Via Hertzberg's blog, Hilzoy over at Washington Monthly has followed up on the Time story to dig up the original atrocity (take your blood pressure pills before you read it), and pull out this precious nugget:
Both [male homosexuality and lesbianism] are essentially a case of arrested development, a failure of learning, a refusal to accept the full responsibilities of life. This is nowhere more apparent than in the pathetic pseudo marriages in which many homosexuals act out conventional roles -- wearing wedding rings, calling themselves "he" and "she."
Yes, she went there. So the confounding hypocrisy of anti-same-sex marriage creeps (how exactly is acting like you're married refusing to accept responsibilty? I suppose it's like nosing other peoples' sex life means you don't have sex) is an ages-old story, barfed up again and again.
But more importantly, this is what our elders faced pretty much all the time, in the mainstream media, slung anonymously under the rubric of "research." We younger gays may get impatient with some of our seniors -- for not always being comfortable with the "queer" tag, for not rioting for their rights earlier, for just plain daring to be older -- but the timely disinterment of this "journalistic" hogwash serves to remind me: Every coming out then was an act of incalculable bravery, every cruise a protest. Bully for them!
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Comments (2)
Lemme get this straight, as it were. Marke B is complaining that his elders did not RIOT for their rights earlier? Within three years of the offensive Time magazine piece, both the Compton Cafeteria and Stonewall RIOTS went down and this only on the coasts.
In the 1970s, the GLF brought the first organized direct action pressure to bear towards ending discrimination. 20 years later, we, LGBT, took up direct action to care for our own, to bring PWAs to the public policy table and we changed the game.
It is on the shoulders of giants who came before us upon which we stand to make further progress, embarrassingly more progress than many oppressed longer and worse than we. Obama recently drawing a line of equivalence between blacks and queers demanding speedy civil rights is HUGE and will do much to dissolve opposition to Prop 8 repeal.
I am fortunate enough to have known and have worked with several gay men who came from that generation, who have worked around politics for the past 40 years, and who take proactive steps to ensure that these lessons are not lost on queers of my generation or younger. To the extent that I am minimally effective locally, it is due in no small degree to standing on the shoulders of these giants. Prog hets lack compared to prog queers on this.
Those folks, and my generation inspired by and working with giants like Hank Wilson, managed to accomplish positive change using a variety of political tools. What we've got now is a younger generation fetishized on marriage to the extent that the HRC and NGLTF are blowing yet another opportunity by pushing hate crimes and DADT legislation over housing and job protections. Hate crimes and DADT don't enjoy overwhelming popular support, drawing fire from both left and right, while housing and job protections are supported by > 80% of the general public nationwide. In politics, I've been told by one giant, you don't lead with your jaw.
When we've got youth not really rioting for assimilation by pathologically focusing on same sex marriage and the worst bang for buck nonprofit advocacy imaginable, given our reservoir of popular support and poor record of national accomplishment, I'm not optimistic that we'll see the kind of game changing initiative from this young generation that we'd seen from others. They're just too comfortable to even channel one percent of a Michael Petrelis' outrage into game changing rage.
Gay shame got this right, non-profits don't RIOT. They should have added unions as well, which should be evident in the stark contrast between this week's 75th anniversary celebration of the 1934 general strike and labor's current compromised and vulnerable position in San Francisco.
While we're here, ENDA is probably going to come up soon. Have United ENDA or trans advocates done the as much political work over the past 18 months to secure the votes required to pass ENDA with trans protections as they did trying to stop a less inclusive bill last time, or are we going to have to pick bodies from a train wreck of self abnegation again as we stand on the tracks saying "this is not happening, this is not happening?"
Frankly, I am glad that queerness freaks out homophobes and hope that we might reach a point where the legal system credibly threatens the same punishment of homophobic violence as to all violence, to prevent them from acting out their hatred against us so that they would just steep in hatred, powerless. Breaking out of dual polar definitions of sexuality is a radical thing, cutting to the core of patriarchy, and that is all incompatible with conservative Christianity. Some people will always hate us and what we do and that is okay and it makes me a better queer that they do.
Respect your elders indeed. I'd always thought that gay men should get our senior discount when we reach age 45.
-marc
Posted by marcos | July 8, 2009 10:23 AM
As usual, you're completely misreading me Marc. Sigh.
Posted by Marke B. | July 8, 2009 03:03 PM