In Politics, Some Gays Are Their Own Worse Enemy

I grew up in a politically involved family where politics were discussed at the dinner table and sometimes quite vocally at family reunions and other extended family gatherings. Despite sometimes strenuous disagreements (one might think a fight was ensuing at times), my relatives fortunately stayed focus on the bigger picture and did not believe in circular firing squads in politics.  The same cannot be said for many in the LGBT community. Most idiotic, of course are the gay Republicans who increasingly suffer from a blindness that a 1930's German Jew would have had if they had joined and actively supported the Nazi Party. Only a fool - or someone with significant self-loathing - supports a party that opposes ones rights and embraces extreme elements that say gays are "worthy of death" as one Christofascists recently said about Pete Buttigieg.  

Next in line for the idiocy award are those in the LGBT community who oppose Pete Buttigieg because he is not "gay enough."  It's not his policy proposals that are the problem. No, Buttigieg's big sin is that he, like myself and so many others I know, stayed in the closet for years and blended in with the straight world rather than being flamboyant and marching in a pride parade in only a speedo.  Meanwhile, through his presidential campaign, Buttigieg is engaging in an amazing level of default gay rights activism and is changing many minds along the way.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at the idiocy, resentment and perhaps hidden jealousy - in my view - of those in the LGBT community who seemingly think they have the exclusive right to be the arbiters of and to define what it is to be gay.  

What most disturbs me is that what one might call the radical gays continue to miss the reality that without the rest of us gays - the ones who live in straight residential neighborhoods, have joined once exclusively straight social institutions and to an extent blended, if you will - have been a major reason gays rights have progressed so much over the last two decades.  They also forget that when one doesn't live in San Francisco, Chicago, New York or other ultra-liberal cities, being a radical revolutionary can be downright dangerous. Here are article excerpts that try to make excuses for those who once again prove to see themselves as superior and in the process are their own worse enemies, show that they cannot see the forest for the trees, and make the rest of us gays look ridiculous:

By now, you may have heard that some queer people think that Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a current contender for the Democratic Presidential nomination, is not gay enough. Unless you are immersed in this conversation with other queer people, you may have thought, “That’s ridiculous.”

The notion that some of us think Buttigieg is not gay enough has an identifiable relationship to the facts, which are that, for the purposes of this discussion, people who grew up queer in this country fall into two distinct categories of experience. One is the experience of never fitting in, being bullied by classmates for the way you walk, the way you look in clothes, the way you hit or fail to hit—all the things that set you apart before you have language to describe them. . . . . Millions of people have had a version of that experience.

And then there is the other experience, the life of blending in, only to surprise your classmates—or, more likely, former classmates who follow you on social media—with the revelation that you are gay. I am not arguing that one category of experience is worse or more difficult or painful than the other. [But, of course, she is doing so]. There are people who revel in their specialness from an early age, and there are people who fit in but feel tormented by their deep secret. I am saying only that these two kinds of experience are very different. . . . . Recently, a friend mentioned that, after thirty years of teaching, she had mentioned her wife in class for the first time, surprising her students with the revelation that she was gay—and I found myself momentarily marvelling at having the option to come out to one’s students or not.

As part of his campaign, and in developing his political persona, Buttigieg has repeatedly told a compelling story about his coming out. His is the story of someone who blended in and was therefore able—or, one might say, forced—to choose the circumstances and timing of his coming out. He chose to wait a long time: until after he graduated from college, after he had served in the military, after he had been elected mayor. He has made it clear that he feared that, if he had come out sooner, his political career might have suffered.

He also waited until after attitudes toward homosexuality had changed and same-sex marriage had become legal in more than half the states and was recognized by the federal government—all thanks to the courage and work of people who came out before Buttigieg did. Then, in 2015, he had the chutzpah to write an op-ed titled “Why Coming Out Matters,” in which he praised himself for “putting something this personal on the pages of a newspaper.” Many a reader might have wondered, as I did when my friend mentioned her relationship with her students, what it must be like to have the option of not being exposed.

Again, I am not saying that L.G.B.T. people who don’t pass are somehow morally superior to L.G.B.T. people who do [But, of course, she is doing so]. But these two distinct experiences are in some ways correlated with two divergent tracks in L.G.B.T. politics. One kind of queer politics is rooted in ideas of liberation, revolutionary change, and solidarity. . . . . The strategy of this brand of politics is to work across differences to bring about change.

The other, more mainstream, and often more visible kind of L.G.B.T. politics aims to erase difference. Its message to straight people is “We are just like you, and all we want is the right to have what you have: marriage, children, a house with a picket fence, and the right to serve in the military.” The vision of this politics is a society in all respects indistinguishable from the one in which we live now, except queer people have successfully and permanently blended in. To be sure, all kinds of queer people have been involved in both kinds of queer politics. But the politics of being “just like you” leaves out the people who cannot or do not want to be just like conventional straight people, whether in appearance or in the way we construct our lives and families.

Buttigieg embodies the second kind of gay experience and the second kind of gay politics. In a beautiful essay published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Greta LaFleur, a professor of American studies at Yale, analyzed a photograph of Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, that appeared on the cover of Time magazine in May of last year. “This photo is about a lot of things,” LaFleur wrote. “But one of its defining features is its heterosexuality. It’s offering us the promise that our first gay first family might actually be a straight one.

Buttigieg is the ultimate candidate of the country’s post-2016 trauma. He is not a woman. He is not a socialist. He is decidedly not a revolutionary. He does not make big, sweeping promises, except one: that nothing much will change, only Donald Trump won’t be President. “What I like about Mayor Pete is that he is not a strong ideologue,” Tod Sedgwick, a [straight] volunteer who had gone to New Hampshire to canvass for Buttigieg, told me.

What makes Buttigieg an easy and reassuring choice for these older, white, straight people, and a disturbing possibility for the queer people who seem to be criticizing him for not being gay enough? It is that he is profoundly, essentially conservative. He is an old politician in a young man’s body, a straight politician in a gay man’s body.

In truth, Buttigieg is proposing big changes should he be elected and just by his success to date  in the primary contest has raised gay acceptance to a level most of us would not have believed possible not many years ago.  As for the gays who attack Buttigieg, whether they know it or not, they are attacking the rest of us gays who according to the radicals suffer from the cardinal sin of having blended and wanted some of the same rights as the straight community enjoys. Sadly, they are blind to the reality that they need us more than we need them. 

Dropping the ‘LGBT’ From ‘LGBTQ’ Is a Bad Idea

Since "coming out" in mid-life, I have come to learn that the LGBT community is very diverse and as time has gone my, more letters have been - in my view - added by some to that acronym, turning it into an alphabet -soup list of letters in the quest of inclusiveness even as the end result becomes ridiculous.  Given the cumbersomeness of the terminology that this mindset has created, some are now arguing that all of us non-heterosexuals in society should be labeled as "queer," a term I find abhorrent and which plays directly into the hands of the enemies of gays, lesbians, the transgender, etc., citizens.  Indeed, one dictionary definition of "queer" means "differing from usual or normal" in some way, usually negatively.  Synonyms include odd, strange, freakish, peculiar, bizarre, weird, and unnatural. Why would anyone sane want to label themselves so that they encourage name calling and denigration?  Moreover, the agenda of LGBT rights is to achieve EQUAL treatment and rights and to educate the larger public that members of our community are "just like everyone else" save for our sexual orientation and/or gender expression.  A piece in The Atlantic blindly argues for the use of the single term "queer" which in my view would only fragment the non-heterosexual community and make some disavow those who are less conforming.  Here's a sampling of the batshitery: 

Frank Kameny, the last century’s greatest gay-rights activist, filed the first-ever Supreme Court petition challenging discrimination against homosexuals. He led some of the first gay-rights demonstrations. He was the first openly gay congressional candidate. He spearheaded the challenge to the psychiatric establishment’s categorization of homosexuality as a mental illness. He fought tirelessly against sodomy laws. He did a lot more than that. But there is one thing he never did—at least to my own recollection and that of associates of his whom I consulted. He did not use the term LGBTQ, or any of its variations.

This is partly because he was a creature of his era, born in the 1920s and active in an age when the whole argot was different. . . . . his friends say he abjured it. “My recollection is LGBT or its derivatives were expressly disliked by Frank,” one of them told me. “He would use gay to cover the full range; or gay and lesbian.” . . . . When it started in the ’80s with gay and lesbian, he correctly predicted that there would be no end of it.”

Kameny especially prized, among his many accomplishments, his slogan “Gay is good!”—a proud claim that homosexuals are heterosexuals’ moral as well as legal equals. He wasn’t excluding anyone by using the word gay. . . . He believed he was fighting for the values that define all Americans—the values he had fought for in combat during World War II. Gay rights, to him, meant American rights. Human rights.

In the past couple of years, however, I have come to believe, at long last, that Kameny was right. The alphabet-soup designation for sexual minorities has become a synecdoche for the excesses of identity politics—excesses that have helped empower the likes of Donald Trump. It’s time to retire the term and find a replacement. I propose a single letter: Q.

By 2007, when gay-rights advocates decided to make their support for a federal antidiscrimination bill conditional on the inclusion of protections for transgender people, it was clear that the gay-and-lesbian and trans movements had become politically joined at the hip; including the T made undeniable sense. Bisexual people, concerned that their issues would be overlooked, also sought acknowledgment, and their initial was stapled in too.

And so the unwieldy four-letter acronym reigned. It had its advantages. It signaled factional inclusion to those inside the movement, and factional solidarity to those outside the movement. In that sense, it was good politics and good symbolism. But it wasn’t stable. . . . Lately LGBTQ seems to have become the norm, on the assumption that Q, for queer, can stand in for all the rest.

LGBTQ is pointedly coalitional and inclusive, and we chose it ourselves. In that respect, its intended message is admirable. But it carries an unintended message as well: an embrace of the identity politics and group separatism that have soured millions of Americans on progressivism and egalitarianism.

For me, the ugliness and unwieldiness of LGBTQ add insult to injury. As does the fact that it is not a label that accurately describes me or any other American. It describes a coalition, yes, but not any actual person. Even as it seeks to explicitly include groups, the concatenation of initials implicitly blots out individuals.

Kameny’s preference for a single, simple, overarching designation was well founded. It deserves to be rediscovered. Today, however, that designation can no longer be gay, which, apart from being gendered, won’t do for transgender people. Queer is inclusive, but its radical baggage and derogatory undertones have precluded its mainstream acceptance. And so, herewith, my modest proposal: Q.

In my view, the author is delusional if he thanks "Q" won't immediately be substituted with "queer" by homophobes and anti-gay hate groups.  There’s more bloviating in the piece and what’s striking to me is that “queer” blots out individuals even more so than LGBT.  Plus, there is the reality that many of us, myself included, do NOT consider ourselves “queer” and loath that label.  The author's suggestion would do great harm to the movement in my opinion.  And lastly, I state for the record that any organization that tries to label me as “queer” and then asks for financial support from me will experience two things very quickly: (i) the monetary donations will cease immediately, and (ii) I will likely sever all ties with the organization.