Is the Gay Rights Movement Doomed to Fail?

As a result, the gay rights movement became culturally and politically isolated, as liberalism in the 1970s and 1980s gave way to identity politics. By focusing only on legal inequalities—albeit, an important aspect of seeking basic civil rights—the movement never argued, as the African American civil rights movement did, for a comprehensive vision of social justice. 

A clear example of this tunnel vision lies in the movement’s long- time insistence on fighting for the right to sexual and personal privacy. While the aim of the fight for privacy was to keep the government out of people’s bedrooms (a good thing), it also perpetuated the idiotic and incorrect idea that homosexuality was a completely separate aspect of a person’s identity. The “privacy” argument was attractive to mainstream culture because it kept gay people invisible. But the downside was that it also continued the social isolation of gay people, removing them from the public sphere. A right to privacy is no help to the openly queer high- school student who is forbidden by school administrators from forming a gay-straight alliance or wearing a gay T-shirt in the hallways. The right to privacy is of no use to the gay man who is visibly living with HIV/AIDS or to the lesbian couple with kids facing discrimination in school or housing. 

Perhaps the best and most recent example of the fallout from this single-issue mindset can be seen in the fight for same-sex marriage. True, the marriage equality movement scored a big win in Massachusetts. But this single win generated an enormous national backlash resulting in 17 states passing constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriage. In eight of those states the amendment language also prohibits civil unions and, in some cases, other legal protections, such as private-sector domestic-partnership programs. The Massachusetts win also piqued substantial interest in a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage on the federal level. 

This didn’t have to happen. For instance, queer activists and academics Lisa Duggan and Richard Kim (she is chair of American Studies at New York University where he is a graduate student) suggest in a July 18, 2005 Nation article “Beyond Gay Marriage” that, “in order to counter conservative Republican strategy...gay activists and progressives will have to come together to reframe the marriage debate” by building coalitions with labor activists and economic justice advocates to promote marriage as one of many ways individuals and households might access badly needed benefits. Duggan and Kim argue that the gay rights movement might have been far more successful by working in coalition with other groups and arguing for a comprehensive system of social and economic protections for all families and household groupings. 

This is political organizing 101 —find people with shared interests and bring them together to enact social change. But, in many ways, the gay rights movement never passed “political organizing 101” so this would be a total revamping and revisioning of how “gay politics” have traditionally been done. Indeed, it strikes at the heart of what has been wrong with the gay rights movement for three decades —its myopic view of what “justice” might mean. The gay rights platform—“equal rights for gay people”—has never seriously grappled with the hard fact that many gay people had rights based on wealth, race, gender, class status that other gay people didn’t have. But worse than that, it has refused to embrace a grander vision—a moral vision— of how the world might be better for everyone. 

The gay rights movement has learned a great deal from the civil rights movement’s anti-discrimination legal models to fight the overwhelming discrimination lesbians and gay men face in jobs and housing. Yet, national gay rights groups never thought of forming political or strategic alliances with the civil rights groups that pioneered this type of legislation. When fighting for the rights of gay men and lesbians to adopt and parent children, the gay rights movement never took a broader stand on children’s rights and health. While it is true that the movement often sought endorsements from groups such as the National Association of Social Workers, claiming that gay people could be fine parents, they never worked closely with these groups on larger issues relating to families and children. When fighting for the right of gay people to be in the military, they rarely grappled with the basic economic and class biases of how the military is constituted, not to mention the role of militarism in U.S. foreign policy. Perhaps the most shocking example of this refusal to entertain and enact a larger political and moral vision is that, after hundreds of thousands of gay deaths from AIDS, not one national gay rights or AIDS group broached the issue of universal health care or some other modification in the broken U.S. heath-care system. 

W ill a return to the political and moral vision of gay liberation be the best way to enact such changes? Well, yes and no. The vision of the Gay Liberation Movement to radically reorder the entire world on the principles of justice, fairness, and individual and collective freedom could not work in 1970 and will not work now. In the best tradition of utopianism, gay liberation was maddeningly ambiguous, incredibly naïve, and wildly impractical. It refused to take seriously the impact and importance of religion in people’s lives. It also turned a blind eye to deeply entrenched gender traditions and was woefully ignorant about money and the workings of capitalism, relying instead on romanticized notions of pre-industrial economics. 

The movement was also naïve in its view of human nature, feeling that people—and groups—would simply do the right thing because it was the right thing. So while they understood the concept of coalition politics, often they didn’t understand how to make those arguments convincingly and portrayed an almost comic insensitivity to the cultural and political differences among organizations. For instance, taking its cues from second wave feminism, GLF was adamantly against “macho” as a style of masculinity and celebrated a playful, gender-challenging male affect. But it had no ability to understand how black men—long subjugated as “boys” by white culture—would want to lionize their new found, aggressively masculine political personae. (Similarly, black leaders such as Eldridge Clever would attack openly gay black men such as James Baldwin as “faggots” and betrayers of black pride.) Very problematically, men in GLF would promote a newly-found sexual freedom, disregarding the fact that the experience of many feminists was that sex was a male weapon and “sexual liberation” was yet another patriarchal straight male ploy to further exploit them. 

 But despite these problems, the early Gay Liberation Front never believed in strict identity politics or a zero-sum approach to politics. Rather than seeing human and civil rights as identity specific they understood that if everyone worked together, there would be no losers. It also believed that truly productive political work could only occur when the full needs of all people— economic, health, safety, housing, spiritual, and sexual—were addressed and met. 

Luckily, there are signs that changes are under way. When lesbian commentator Jasmin Cannick argued on her website (jasmyne cannick.typepad.com) that the rights of native-born gay men and lesbians were more important than those of illegal immigrants, she was criticized by other gay activists. Over the past year, lesbian activist and civil rights lawyer Chai Feldbaum has argued, persuasively, that rather than hiding behind the slogan “gay people are just like everyone else,” facing sexual differences is important and that the best argument for same-sex marriage is that “gay sex is good.” Even Matt Foreman, the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, spoke in the human rights idiom of gay liberation when he told Bay Windows in January, “There is still a question of our fundamental humanity and equality. Either we’re fully equal and fully human or we are not. There is no other way to frame it.” 

Foreman’s radical recasting of gay politics, coming from a national gay rights spokesperson, is welcome even if it is more than three decades late. But if gay politics is going to survive and prosper, as it faces increasingly intense pressure over the next few years, it will have to continue committing itself to just such a new vision of openness, self-respect, and fairness—for all.