Gay pride month is finally over, after a big weekend of partying and parades in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and other cities around the world. Millions of people commemorated the Stonewall rebellion, the shot-heard-’round-the-world brawl in 1969 that catalyzed a movement. We got together and restated positions on everything from hate-crimes to gay marriage, and if dykes on bikes, feather boas and shirtless gym boys are any measure, a good time was had by all.
In the midst of this good-natured celebration of Stonewall, however, a reappraisal of the pride strategy is beginning to emerge. After three decades, the politics of pride is beginning to look a little stale and out of step with the times, and it is becoming clear to both gay people and our straight allies that we need to take a new step forward. With June’s pride celebrations over, that step is to ask what the politics of pride has left undone, and why.
Gay pride has been an enormous success. It’s increasingly safe to come out, we’ve won passage of a few gay-rights laws and it’s becoming politically expedient (at least for Democrats) to support us. But there have been setbacks. Anti-gay legislation like the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act is the law of the land. Brutal hate crimes like the murder of Matthew Shepard are reminders of what can still happen to any gay person in the country — or even straight people suspected of being gay — if we’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. We need to understand why we seem to take a step back for almost every step we take forward.
The usual answer is simply that we’re up against a deep, powerful prejudice. There’s more to it than that: The politics of gay pride is in a rut. It seems unable to appreciate its own success or acknowledge that circumstances have changed. Instead, pride is becoming an end in itself.
Once pride was essential to curing the shame of the closet. Today it is the medication we’re addicted to. Once pride captured the spirit of a revolution. Today it is too often the gay equivalent of pro forma patriotism. Once pride made a compelling moral argument. Today it is becoming the Ten Commandments on every wall. And when pride in the simple courage that it takes to come out of the closet in a hostile world turns into complacence and ideological rigidity, it threatens everything that we’ve won so far.
Recognizing this isn’t easy.
A few years ago, Bruce Bawer, the author of “A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society,” was almost burned at the stake as an allegedly sex-negative, assimilationist conservative by gay activists without much more tolerance for questions than their counterparts on the right. Among other blasphemies, Bawer suggested that stereotypes reinforced by gay publications and events might have the same negative effects as stereotypes promoted by anti-gay conservatives.
Even gay activists as outspoken as Larry Kramer have been charged with neoconservatism for asking forthright questions about the overt sexualization of gay culture. The resulting fury has said less about Bawer and Kramer’s arguments than it did about the touchiness of their attackers.
I’ve been through a limited version of this treatment myself. I recently wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times that asked whether gay pride might be easily — and needlessly — misunderstood. In a circulated response, Robin Tyler, executive producer of the Millennium March on Washington for Equality, objected. She insisted that concern about how gay pride is interpreted is of no concern because everybody on the other side is an irredeemable bigot. She bragged, “The Radical Right is in decline … We have the numbers and the commitment not to have to choose ‘which fight,’ but to continue to mobilize on all fronts.” And equating pride with self-esteem, she asked, “How can you have too much self-esteem?”
Well, how about when it leads to conceit, overconfidence and solipsism?
Tyler’s statements are an extreme example, but this is where overuse of the pride slogan is headed. And although it’s frightening to think that anybody in a position of leadership in gay politics could actually believe that we are gloriously advancing on all fronts against an enemy whose tactics we can ignore, we can take some comfort in the fact that questions about the pride strategy are becoming more widespread, and harder to dismiss.
Today the questions are less about what other people will think of us — does whipping the slave boys down Main Street send the right message? — than what we think of ourselves. Do constant exhortations to gay pride encourage us to become self-absorbed?
As Dan Savage has recently argued, pride wasn’t counted as one of the Seven Deadly Sins for nothing. “The fwap of rainbow windsocks is making us dull and slow,” he writes. “Thirty years after the antidote arrived, gays and lesbians stand in renewed danger of being poisoned. The poison threatening us now isn’t shame, however, it’s pride … we’ll never be truly whole until gay people are neither crippled by shame nor addicted to pride.”
Raising questions about whether pride is still effective is emphatically not to say that gay people need to tone down, fit in and ask bigots for acceptance. Most gay people, after years of pressure not to “flaunt it,” are rightly leery of any suggestion that we should “assimilate.” But we can’t rule out consideration of a more sophisticated approach that allows us to become even more forceful and assertive about the need for equality.
In the reevaluation that this requires, we need to admit that pride isn’t always helpful anymore. In some cases, in fact, it simply gets in the way. Like fabulous versions of Soviet parades to commemorate the October revolution, pride celebrations prop up the memory of a victory that, while no less important, is less and less relevant.
I started to understand the problem with pride through a conversation in an airport. The last flight of the night to my destination, Atlanta, had been canceled, and while I was in line for a hotel voucher, a straight guy named Will struck up a conversation with me.
For every gay person, daily life means coming out to strangers if you’re not going to lie or go to absurd lengths to avoid the subject. So when my conversation with Will turned to why I was going to Atlanta — my boyfriend lived there at the time — I told him.
For a second, Will looked like he was afraid I would kiss him right there on the moving sidewalk. He thought he had been talking to just another ordinary guy in his mid-20s, not somebody gay. And to make matters worse for poor Will, he had even asked me to dinner at the airport restaurant.
To his credit, Will recovered quickly, and he asked if I’d mind answering some questions about what it’s like to be gay. I didn’t mind, but I was caught off guard by what he asked over the next hour. He was polite, curious and candid, but his questions were surprisingly negative. One of them was, “Why would anybody be proud to be gay?”
I don’t know if Will — a recent college graduate, a friendly enough guy and kind of a dude — had ever seen a pride parade, but he had certainly heard all the politically correct explanations about gay pride and they made no impression on him. Or rather, they made the wrong impression. He continued to think that for some reason, gay pride meant that gay people are strangely proud of something alien and bizarre, like an illness or a bad habit.
Will was not a fire-breathing homophobic lunatic, he was just a guy who didn’t know what he was talking about. Lots of talk about pride — the cornerstone of gay politics — hadn’t changed what he thought he already knew. But a more direct approach, highlighting the discrimination that gay people still face, did.
The fact is that the concept of pride remains useful, but it’s crucial to ask who it’s useful for. It’s useful to us to help counteract the shame of the closet, and it’s a nice pat on the back for being honest about who we are. But people like Will — and there are millions of them, and they can vote — don’t get it. Talk to anti-gay conservatives (as I make a point of doing, if for no other reason than a kind of clinical curiosity), and over and over again what you’ll find is that they misinterpret the idea of gay pride.
At first it’s easy to think, “Well, fuck them if they’re not comfortable with out-and-proud sexuality.” This is dangerous and unnecessary. It’s true that we’ll never reach the rabid anti-gay kooks, but writing off average people like Will assures that millions who might be persuaded to help us — or who at least might be vaccinated against inflammatory anti-gay rhetoric — will remain obstacles to overcome. These are basically well-intentioned people who are doing what’s “right” based on the wrong premise. Shake up that premise and it gives them pause. It even, occasionally, changes their minds.
Pride can’t do this because it doesn’t take into account their false assumptions about us. The problem with pride is not that it’s too in-your-face, but that it’s not in-your-face enough. It doesn’t state clearly what the gay-rights movement is really all about: equal legal and social treatment for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. The “gay pride” slogan doesn’t reach people who don’t already know the facts of sexual orientation. In fact, the rallying cry of pride may even have helped provoke the backlash against us.
The language of gay pride reinforces the idea that gay people are fundamentally different — an impression to avoid if we can, given the way anti-gay conservatives portray our human rights as “special rights.” In everyday speech, people use the word “pride” to talk about things they believe are special, extraordinary and exclusive. Talking too much about pride, therefore, can be counterproductive. Gay people base our claim to civil rights on the fact that our sexual orientation and our relationships are no different — no more worthy of shame or pride — than anyone else’s.
Endless declarations about pride also reinforce negative stereotypes. Talking too much about pride can give the impression that we have something to prove, and that we still can’t quite put the shame of the closet behind us. As Savage says, “Surrounding oneself with constant reminders to feel prideful is to constantly be reminded of shame … American gays and lesbians act like cancer patients who, having been cured, remind themselves that they aren’t sick anymore by dropping by the hospital every once in a while for a little chemotherapy.”
The good news is that more and more of us are putting the shame of the closet behind us — but this means that pride-based celebrations have less and less to offer. It’s not that we’re “unproud” of what’s been accomplished, and we’re grateful to those who blazed the trail. We owe them, but we also recognize that their efforts have paid off. We don’t question our basic self-worth anymore.
Yet pride-based activism, with its constant doses of self-esteem, implies that the problem is never getting any better, and that we’re all going to need pride pep talks and a rainbow-colored I.V. drip for the rest of our lives. That’s not just depressing, it’s not true. We’re OK. Let’s talk about something else.
What might a movement more focused on equality than pride look like? Well, nobody at the time knew exactly what Stonewall would lead to either, but a shift to a strategy that emphasizes equality instead of pride could be just as significant.
Gay equality — which wouldn’t be a bad replacement for the “gay pride” slogan — would be more open to people who are “not proud,” whether they are simply gay people who are over the need for self-esteem therapy, or straight people who support gay rights but see little point in participating in typical pride celebrations today.
As it is, lots of us continue to show up every year at pride celebrations out of habit. We usually have a good time, but we have only a vague idea of why we’re there anymore. Showing support and being counted is all well and good, but take away the party — we might even go so far as to call gay pride month “gay party month” — and there wouldn’t be much left.
There’s no reason why we can’t have a party — and do we know how to throw one — but it’s a PR disaster if a party is the main way in which we as a group bring ourselves to the attention of society every year. The focus on gay pride ends where a focus on equality would begin. Pride has become an event in June, and a mantra the rest of the year. Equality is a cause.
A focus on gay equality could also change our thinking.
It would move us beyond the oddly passive “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” aspect of current pride celebrations. The fact is that we want people to do a lot more than get used to us. We want them to help us get the equality we deserve. Current pride celebrations are, at best, a roundabout way of motivating anybody to do that.
Finally, a new slogan like “gay equality” would help to make absolutely clear what we’re after: legal and social equality.
When our message to the rest of society is “gay pride,” people who aren’t already on our side can comfortably ignore it and continue to think, “Who cares if the queers are proud?” If the focus instead were on “gay equality,” these same people would be forced to argue that we either already have equality or don’t need it. Those are arguments they cannot win, and often don’t even feel comfortable making.
Pride helped get us where we are today. We’re in a better position than ever to put tough questions to the people who aren’t on our side yet, and to set the terms of this debate. But whether we are proud has become politically irrelevant, and this is no cause for alarm. The fact that we’re outgrowing the need for pride is the biggest testament to its success.
At the height of the real estate boom in the 2000s, Robert M. “Robby” Browne, 2007 Corcoran Real Estate National Sales Person of the Year, put on his woman’s bathing suit and silver heels and walked out onto the Club Exit stage. A thousand screaming, cheering, photo-snapping real estate brokers roared their approval. The openly gay Browne, six feet tall and nearly two hundred pounds, danced a sweetly amateurish version of the Village People’s gay anthem, “YMCA,” as ten half naked male Broadway dancers backed him up.
“Is there any question of who the star is?” Browne asks proudly, watching the video today. For most real estate brokers, a third year as Corcoran’s top producer would have been stardom enough, but when Corcoran CEO Pam Liebman began planning the 2007 event, Browne thought he wouldn’t bother to attend. He’d had enough top-earner, $100-million-club years. He was turning sixty, and he was thinking about his life as a whole. Finally he said he would show up, but only if he could accept the award in drag. Browne’s beloved gay older brother, Roscoe Willett Browne, died of AIDS in 1985. He’d never forget the day when President George H. W. Bush said that dying of AIDS wasn’t as important as losing your job. “George H. W. Bush did not acknowledge the sacrifice of my brother and our love. My brother. He’s in his eighties and he still has his brothers and I don’t have any brothers,” says Browne. “And my brother was a Yalie and he was in Vietnam; Bush, how could he be more your person?” We exist, says Browne, looking at the video of his awards ceremony. “This show says we exist.”
Exist? You can’t pick up a paper without seeing evidence that gay people exist and are compelling American society to acknowledge them. The federal government protects them from homophobic violence and twenty-one states have laws against discrimination; 141 cities across the country constitute enclaves of equal treatment. A federal nondiscrimination bill gains more support in Congress with each passing year. Poll numbers show Americans overwhelmingly support protection for gays and lesbians against hate crimes and equality in health benefits, housing, and jobs. In July 2010, a federal judge struck down the federal law, the Defense of Marriage Act, that excluded gays from the federal benefits for which married people were eligible and that allowed the states to refuse to recognize the marriages if they pleased. In August, another federal judge invalidated the amendment to the California constitution, added by Proposition 8, that limited marriage to a man and a woman. September had hardly dawned when a third federal judge found the policy requiring gay soldiers to hide their sexual orientation, don’t ask/don’t tell, unconstitutional as well. The United States Congress repealed the law prohibiting out gays and lesbians from serving in the armed forces. Right after the Fourth of July in 2011, the federal courts in California ordered the United States military to stop screwing around getting ready and just cease enforcing it at once.
Gay playwright Edward Albee’s play about the unbounded nature of love objects, “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?,” won the Tony Award for best play in 2002; the heroic biopic about San Francisco gay activist Harvey Milk, “Milk,” won two Oscars in 2009. So many people in show business have come out as gay that some gay media are now pooh-poohing their confessions as cheap shots meant to bolster their flagging careers.
Two of the most famous heterosexual lawyers in America, David Boies and Ted Olson, brought the suit against the California marriage ban in 2009. Win or lose, Boies and Olson’s case has already achieved the crucial social goal of making same-sex marriage a legitimate claim. On the eve of the closing argument in the case in 2010, a New York Times editorial called same-sex marriage “A Basic Civil Right.” In 2011 the poll numbers in favor of same-sex marriage crossed 50 percent. Regardless of intermittent setbacks, gay people like Robby Browne have succeeded in forcing society to acknowledge that they exist—as humans with a right to life and as American citizens with a claim to equality under the United States Constitution. Most of all, they have staked their claim to be treated, without lying or hiding, as moral persons, whose lives, loves, and ambitions have value and cannot be discounted.
The year 2009 saw the fortieth anniversary of the uprising in a New York gay bar called Stonewall. In 1969, “homosexuals,” people who wanted to have sex with members of their own sex, were considered sinful by the church, their sexual practices were criminal in forty-nine states, the psychiatrists said they were crazy, and the State Department held that they were subversive. Forty-two years later, almost to the day, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of the state of New York, signed the law that enabled them to marry in New York. The Empire State Building was lit up in the rainbow colors of the symbolic gay flag.
How did this tiny minority of despised and marginalized people do it? They did it in America, what we philosophers call a “liberal (small L) state.” America’s roots go back to the beginning of modern Western political thought in the seventeenth century, when the philosopher Thomas Hobbes speculated that people create their governments; states are not handed down from God to Adam to the king. During the century and a half after Hobbes wrote, the English and their American colonists launched a variety of social movements—the English Revolution and the American Revolution among them—that pushed and pulled on the deal between people and government until they produced the basic outline of the modern western state, the liberal state. The liberal state makes three promises to its citizens. First, security: the state will protect its citizens from one another and not hurt them worse than the people it is protecting them from. Second, liberty: citizens have certain rights as human beings that even the state cannot interfere with. And finally, self-governance: for those aspects of life the state can control, citizens must decide for themselves on equal terms what they want the state to do. It’s a good deal. No wonder so many people want in.
By the late twentieth century, Americans had already undertaken two great social movements for inclusion in the liberal state, the racial civil rights movement and the feminist movement. Since people aren’t all that easy to organize, theorists have often speculated about how they did it. Their conclusions are that movements arise only when people come to see that their problems are political, not natural or personal, what theorists call “oppositional consciousness.” This “aha!” moment in the civil rights movement dates back at least to W. E. B. Du Bois in 1903, when he observed that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” In addition, movements need access to resources, as when the NAACP started getting hold of real money and the movement gained astute leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr.
Students of the racial civil rights movement made the assumption that before people engage in new movements they do a rational cost-benefit analysis, weighing the benefits of political action against the cost. When people created social movements against all odds and acted against their own individual self-interest on behalf of the group, theorists had to rethink what really drives people to take action. As the racial civil rights movement gave way to other movements—the feminist, and, finally, the gay-liberation movement—sociologists produced more theories to explain the new movements; indeed, the later thinking is often called “new social-movement” theory. In the newer thinking, theorists speculated that people draw their sense of who they are from the groups or social networks they are already in. From those starting places, they conceive a positive vision of themselves and then a desire to change the way the larger society perceives them all. New social-movement theorists came to the realization that sometimes group identity is so strong that people act on behalf of the group whether it benefits them individually or not.
Classical or new, each of the movements before the gay movement was seeking citizenship in the liberal state. Women and racial minorities did not necessarily ask the dominant society to love them or approve of them. They sought to be secure against violence, to be tolerated as they exercised their human liberty, and to have equal access to political and economic life. Each movement got traction in these crucial areas. But both of them fell short of achieving all the elements of a full human life for most of the people they represented: they got little or no economic assistance or cultural validation, and, when the inevitable backlash came, they stalled or lost ground. It would take a newer new movement to make the next moves: it would take the gay revolution.
The gay revolution achieved more because it faced different challenges. The path to liberal equality almost always involves mimicking as much as possible the behaviors and beliefs of the straight white men in power. The racial civil rights and feminist movements both made substantial detours into defending difference—black separatism and difference feminism. They failed to establish that their divergent cultures were as worthy as the dominant one and all they did was to split their movements. At the end of the day, both these modern movements got most of their traction from maximizing their similarity to dominant political and social hierarchies.
By definition, people involved in the gay revolution could not replicate the majority behavior. Their very political identity was behavior that distinguished them from the majority, including, but not limited to, their sex lives. The liberal state has a basic concept of a person entitled to be a citizen. When gay activists began their efforts, the churches considered them sinful, all but one state criminalized their sex acts, the doctors thought they were crazy, and politicians saw them as traitors to the nation. Sinners were kept away from sacred rites like marriage; criminals were imprisoned; crazy people were put in asylums; and people of doubtful loyalty were fired from their government jobs. Sinful, criminal, crazy, and subversive, the gays who made the gay revolution had the vastly harder task of convincing society to recognize they were even suitable candidates for citizenship despite their difference. Although liberalism pretends to be morally neutral, homosexual sexual behavior pressed that liberal commitment to the limit. In so doing, instead of bringing their marginal group into conformity with the mainstream norms, they challenged the accepted versions of sin, crime, sanity, and loyalty and changed America for everyone.
The movement succeeded, uniquely and in large part because, at the critical moments, its leaders made a moral claim. “Gay,” as movement pioneer Franklin Kameny put it on the iconic button of the gay revolution in 1968, “Is Good.” Even though it’s different. No one told it better than activist Arthur Evans: “It was more than just being gay and having gay sex. We discovered who we were and we built authentic lives around who we were and we supported each other doing that and in the process came to very important questions about the meaning of life, ethics, the vision of the common good and we debated these issues and we lived them.”
Morally ambitious and clearly identified as different, the gay movement came from further behind than either the civil rights or the feminist movements had done. It took on the liberal state and achieved formal equality, as did the other two movements. During the AIDS epidemic, it took on not just oppression, but neglect. And then it took on the traditional institutions of heterosexual morality—marriage and the military—and is rapidly conquering those arenas as well.
Fueled by its moral ambition, the gay movement is the model of a new era. It is ironic, yet fitting, that the only counterpart to the morally driven gay revolution is its contemporary and fiercest opponent, the morally driven religious right. Indeed, it is the moral certainty of the gay revolution that explains why, unlike the racial and feminist movements, it has been able to stand up to that powerful counterforce and, slowly but surely, prevail.
The theories all suggest that a whole lot of things have to go really right for people to act collectively against legitimate political authority. Lacking the religious and historical jet fuel of racial civil rights and the demographic advantage of feminism, the gay revolution started out from much the weakest position of any of the modern movements. Brilliantly led, endlessly resourceful, and stunningly creative, it came the furthest. When we ask how a cross-dressing homosexual activist got to be the poster boy of the most successful real estate brokerage firm in New York, we are also asking how people cooperate to get anything done, much less take on their whole society and wrench it onto a different path altogether. The gay Victory is not just a story, although that would be enough. It’s an epic.
From the book “Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution.” Copyright © 2012 by Linda Hirshman. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
TOKYO, Japan — In one respect, the decision by Tokyo Disneyland to allow a gay couple to hold their “wedding” at the theme park is a sign of progress in a country that has, until recently, largely ignored the issue of same-sex unions.
But some campaigners have argued that leaving it to Mickey Mouse to give his blessing to Koyuki Higashi and her partner, Hiroko Masuhara — in a strictly symbolic ceremony — is also a mark of how far Japan has to go before it affords the same rights to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community as it does to heterosexual couples.
Tokyo Disneyland condoned this and all future same-sex ceremonies after receiving an inquiry from Higashi. Cue a confused response from a subsidiary, Oriental Land Company, which licenses the name and characters from Disney in the United States.
Higashi, 27, and her partner could “marry” at the park, they were told, but only if they dressed “like a man and a woman.” Park officials were worried that other visitors might be offended by the sight of two women in wedding dresses or morning suits.
The park relented on the dress code after a storm of protest on Twitter and other social media networks — it had all been a misunderstanding by an individual employee, it said — but the couple will not be allowed to exchange vows in the park’s chapel due to “Christian teachings.”
Those restrictions go to the heart of the flimsy protection offered to the rights of LGBT people in Japan, say campaigners. Homosexuality is not illegal, but same-sex marriages are not legally recognized.
“There needs to be more pressure for legal unions between gay people in Japan,” said Taiga Ishikawa, one of only a handful of openly gay politicians in the country. “This is only a guess, but I’d say there are more people now who are in long-term relationships and want that to be recognized in the form of a civil partnership.”
The 37-year-old, who won a seat on the Toshima Ward assembly in Tokyo last year, is campaigning to introduce an ordinance in the area to offer some form of marital recognition and to increase the number of administrative rights and services afforded to same-sex couples. But he admits that it’s “some way off.”
If Disneyland was being held up as an agent of progress, one of Japan’s most popular celebrities popped up to demonstrate that, in some quarters, ignorance reigns.
Commenting on TV on President Barack Obama’s recent declaration of support for gay marriages in the US, the film director and comedian Takeshi Kitano told a fellow guest: “Obama supports gay marriage. You would support marriage between humanoid and animals eventually, then,” before questioning the ability of gay couples to raise children.
Kitano has since tried to explain his outburst: “I was only talking about people who love their pets so much that they may think of marrying them,” AFP reported him as saying. “There is no way I look at gay people in the same way as I do animals, let alone implying sexual relations with animals.”
His were not the first comments with homophobic overtones to be made by a high-profile public figure in Japan. In late 2010, Shintaro Ishihara, the outspoken governor of Tokyo, suggested gay people were “deficient” after watching same-sex couples take part in a parade in San Francisco. “We have even got homosexuals casually appearing on television,” he said. “Japan has become far too untamed.”
Yuji Kitamaru, a journalist who writes about LGBT issues, said he was “very disappointed” by Kitano’s remarks, particularly as he has spoken up for minorities, including transgender people, in the past. “I felt it was a big betrayal not only to us and the audience, but also to himself. Public figures like Kitano can easily indulge in that kind of bigotry because Japanese people in general haven’t considered the difference between public discourse and private gossip.”
Yet Kitamaru, who has written on LGBT issues in Japan for two decades, believes social media has quickly become the forum for a more open discussion about sexuality, citing Twitter’s role in the Disneyland decision and a meeting held in Ni-chome, a gay neighborhood of Tokyo, to thank Obama for his support.
Higashi and her partner, meanwhile, have visited Disneyland to break their good news to Mickey Mouse. They have yet to set a date for the wedding, and there are reports that their inquiries were intended only to test the theme park’s commitment to equality.
Ishikawa welcomed Disneyland’s decision, which apparently came after officials in Tokyo contacted the company’s US headquarters. “I wrote 10 years ago that I looked forward to the day when gay and lesbian couples could hold hands and go to Tokyo Disneyland, so I’m very happy,” he said. “But we’re still not at the point where a man or woman can tell people, especially co-workers, that they have a same-sex partner.”
There are two ways to bring about positive, long-term social change: the fast one and the slow one. In the first version, statues are toppled, walls are torn down, laws are dramatically enacted. There is, forever, a clear before and after. It’s days like July 24, 2011, when New York state approved same-sex marriage. Or May 9, 2012, when Barack Obama became the first president to announce his support for the issue — an occasion that prompted incoming Human Rights Campaign president Chad Griffin to remark, “You will not forget where you were when you saw the president deliver those remarks.”
Then there’s the subtler version. The kind where you look around one day and suddenly realize that gay people have been building families and creating homes together this whole time. They’re your neighbors. They’re your fellow parents on the PTA. And they are totally the couple building an amazing new deck this weekend. For 18 years now, HGTV has been a steadfast force for exactly that kind of tolerance, simply by advancing the radical notion that homosexuals are out there in the world obtaining mortgages and painting their interiors just like straight people.
It’s not that LGBT-friendly content doesn’t exist elsewhere on television. I mean, Christ, have you ever seen Bravo? We could start with Andy Cohen and not even get around to “Project Runway” for days. There are entire gay-oriented networks, like Logo. But what distinguishes HGTV is both its durability and its ordinariness.
HGTV doesn’t trade in drama or high camp; it doesn’t offer “Wig Parties and Threesomes” stereotypes. Sure, one might suggest that the network’s high population of flamboyant gay designers panders to a different kind of typecasting. But the presence of hosts like David Bromstad and the married, father of two Vern Yip seems more like a logical, ordinary reflection of the makeup of the field. It’s also likely why there are so many gay contestants on its competitions as well. Just look at last year’s “Design Star” combatants, which included the lesbian former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader (and mother of four) Leslie Ezelle, and “average gay dad” Tyler Wisler.
More significant than its regular on-air talent pool, however, is the network’s consistent depiction of America’s gay and lesbian population as normal, carpooling, Home Depot-shopping folks whose agenda includes upgrading the kitchen backsplash. Far from the cavalcade of dysfunction on networks like TLC, the network regularly presents typical families of different ages and ethnicities — some of whom happen to be same-sex — on shows like “Property Virgins” and “House Hunters,” where the most shocking element of an odyssey is likely to be the property’s price tag.
That a network built around design would position itself as gay-friendly might seem like a no-brainer. But it’s also a network that still has an overwhelmingly female core audience that isn’t necessarily going to identify with male same-sex couples. But by depicting a variety of couples and families, the Scripps-owned empire is broadening its base and appealing to a wider demographic. It’s also reflecting the reality of contemporary America. As “Property Virgins” casting director Michael Barrick said when he put out the call for Atlanta-area LGBT parents last month, “I do prefer to see as diverse a population featured on television as possible. People like to watch a show that they can relate with, be it black, white, Asian, interracial, gay and straight. If they don’t see that representation, they are more likely to change the channel – and that is something as a casting director, that I just don’t want to see.”
There are still plenty of people out there stuck with antiquated ideals. Some of them are even running for president. But the fact that the American family doesn’t always resemble an Eisenhower-era sitcom is something more and more of us accept. It’s been a long time coming and it’s still a work in progress, but our American image of home and family is, in the words of the president, evolving. It evolves when a law is changed or a leader speaks out. And it evolves when two guys buy a house together on basic cable, and then another two, and another two, and the two ladies. Suddenly it’s not weird or unique or groundbreaking at all. It’s improvement. One home at a time.
Updated below
Let’s get something straight, so to speak, right off the bat. There’s no disputing that Manny Pacquiao is not the most enlightened guy to ever put on gloves and fight for a belt. In a story for Examiner.com this past weekend, blogger Granville Ampong wrote of how the boxing champ takes issue with Barack Obama’s recent groundbreaking declaration of support for same-sex unions. “God’s words first … obey God’s law first before considering the laws of man,” Pacquiao told Ampong, in what the writer described as “an exclusive interview.” Pacquiao was further quoted explaining that “God only expects man and woman to be together and to be legally married, only if they so are in love with each other… It should not be of the same sex so as to adulterate the altar of matrimony, like in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah of Old.”
OK, it’s generally accepted that invoking Sodom and Gomorrah in general — and Sodom and Gomorrah of Old, in particular — is not going to win anybody a seat at the GLAAD awards. Sure enough, Pacquiao’s statements quickly set off a chain of angry and just plain disappointed responses from across the Net, where Pacquiao has been celebrated as a Filipino icon, and beloved for his humanitarian works. On Tuesday evening, the Los Angeles shopping center the Grove, where Pacquiao was to be interviewed for “Extra,” called off the event. “Based on news reports of statements made by Mr. Pacquiao,” read a statement from the center’s spokesman Bill Reich, “we have made it be known that he is not welcome at the Grove and will not be interviewed here now or in the future. The Grove is a gathering place for all Angelenos and not a place for intolerance.”
It’s a relatively free country, which means that the Catholic Pacquiao is welcome to express his views, even views many of us find backward and exclusionary. In return, a business like a shopping mall may choose to decline his patronage. What is not OK is what happened along the way.
You see, within the original Examiner.com piece, Ampong went off on a bit of biblical tangent. “Pacquiao’s directive for Obama calls societies to fear God and not to promote sin, inclusive of same-sex marriage and cohabitation,” he wrote, “notwithstanding what Leviticus 20:13 has been pointing all along: ‘If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.’”
That’s Ampong. Quoting Leviticus. You could go ahead and infer that this is what Pacquiao was alluding to in his remarks, and you definitely could say that’s some convoluted writing there. But Pacquiao himself clearly didn’t issue the quote. But let’s not let the barest understanding of attribution get in the way of a sensational headline, shall we? Before you could say gross perversion of the facts, Change.org was running a petition asking Nike to drop “homophobic boxer Manny Pacquiao,” declaring, “In an interview published Tuesday, March 15th with the conservative Examiner newspaper, the world-famous boxer and Los Angeles resident quoted Leviticus…” And except for the fact that Pacquiao didn’t quote Leviticus, Examiner.com is not a conservative newspaper, and the interview didn’t run on Tuesday, sure.
The confusion stems largely from a Tuesday L.A. Weekly blog post by Simone Wilson, in which she wrote, “Pacquiao told the National Conservative Examiner over the weekend that gay men should be ‘put to death’ for their sexual crimes.” She then backpedaled a tad by noting “Yes, he was quoting Leviticus 20:13, but he hasn’t backed down from his harsh stance.” She continued further in the piece to invoke “what Pacquiao said” and ponder that “For the sports star to announce that he thinks thousands of gay Angelenos should be ‘put to death’ for loving a same-sex partner should hugely alienate him to the locals,” adding that “Because … uh … ‘put to death’? You just don’t say that kind of thing in 21st century America.” Maybe that’s why he didn’t. And by the way, calling the source “the National Conservative Examiner” greatly glorifies Examiner.com, a site anybody with an Internet connection and rudimentary typing ability can write for, “even if you’re not a professional writer.” It’s a site with all the journalistic credibility of, oh, L.A. Weekly.
But what kind of commitment to facts could we have expected from Simone Wilson? This is the person who, when real journalist Lara Logan was attacked in Egypt last year, hastily banged out a grotesquely offensive fantasy version of events, writing, “In a rush of frenzied excitement, some Egyptian protestors apparently consummated their newfound independence by sexually assaulting the blonde reporter.”
Wilson’s colleague Dennis Romero added more fuel to the mythic Pacquiao interview story Tuesday, in a piece headlined “Manny Pacquiao Says Gay Men Should Be ‘Put to Death.’” USA Today then jumped in, reporting that “Pacquiao also invoked Old Testament, and recited Leviticus 20:13, saying: “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman.” And the Village Voice blog, for good measure, reported, “The Bible Via-Manny Pacquiao: Gays Shouldn’t Get Married, They Should Be ‘Put To Death.’” How ridiculous did the whole thing get? On Pacquiao’s own “official” website Tuesday, writer Keith Terceira said, “Manny Pacquiao was recently quoted in the USAToday as invoking the old testament.” [sic]
I get that nobody really pays attention to what anybody posts on Examiner.com, but seriously. If you’re going to quote someone, read the damn source material already. You need to have an eighth-grade reading proficiency level to get a driver’s license, yet apparently you can be functionally illiterate and work for L.A. Weekly and USA Today.
On Wednesday, Granville Ampong wrote a follow-up post on the matter, saying of the Leviticus quote, “Pacquiao never said nor recited, nor invoked and nor did he ever refer to such context.” And Pacquiao likewise issued a statement, saying, “I didn’t say that, that’s a lie… I didn’t know that quote from Leviticus because I haven’t read the Book of Leviticus yet,” and adding, “I’m not against gay people … I have a relative who is also gay. We can’t help it if they were born that way. What I’m critical off are actions that violate the word of God. I only gave out my opinion that same-sex marriage is against the law of God.”
Pacquiao inarguably has a long way to go in the tolerance department. And his remarks were ignorant, to be sure. But you can’t cure ignorant with stupid. And you can’t change minds with lies.
UPDATE: LA Weekly writer Simone Wilson called us Wednesday to clarify our assertion that she initiated the story that Pacquiao himself deployed the Leviticus quote, telling us that “USA Today, the Village Voice, and his own Web site had already reported it” by the time she wrote her piece. Though the misleading content of her story remains the same, her place in the fray was not first. For which we apologize — and offer the sincere hope that the story can’t get any more meta now.
(Credit: iStockphoto/lisafx) 
(Credit: Cindy Hughes via Shutterstock) 
Dharun Ravi (Credit: AP/John Munson) 
(Credit: Karina Kononenko via Shutterstock) 
Manny Pacquiao (Credit: Reuters/Steve Marcus) 
