Part two of a two-part series.
It’s
the flip side of pop singer George Michael’s arrest for “lewd conduct.” And it
has odd analogies with bathroom humor. But the following news item means
serious political business.
In mid-January, while many New
Yorkers were celebrating the enactment of the state’s Sexual Orientation
Non-Discrimination Act, the American Civil Liberties Union trumpeted an
“important victory” for transgendered people. (SONDA was no victory for the transgendered,
who weren’t covered by SONDA’s civil rights guarantees.).
The victory came in a New York City
courtroom. It seems that in 2001, a landlord had thrown the Hispanic AIDS Forum
out of its offices because some transgendered clients were “using the wrong
bathroom.” The AIDS Forum sued the landlord, who then asked the court to force
the group “to disclose the anatomical sex at birth of its clients.” The judge
said no, ruling, in the ACLU’s words, “that the physical anatomy of
transgendered people is not relevant to gender identity.” That is, those who
identify as women may use the women’s restroom, regardless of genitalia.
A small
victory, perhaps. But as the Empire State Pride Agenda says, pending
legislation may stop such arbitrary actions against the transgendered and other
groups.
In mid-April, for example, State
Senator Thomas Duane and Assemblymember Richard Gottfried, both Manhattan
Democrats, introduced the Gender Non-Discrimination Act, a bill that would
bring transgendered persons under SONDA’s civil rights umbrella. “GENDA” would
protect against discrimination in housing, lending, public accommodations, and
so forth. The bill covers everyone whose “behavior or expression is different from
that traditionally associated with the sex assigned to that person at birth.”
The Senate version, S.4457, has been referred to committee, according to the
legislature website.
The Pride Agenda is pushing other
measures, too. There’s the Dignity For All Students Act (S.1925, A.1118), which
“would create safe, harassment-free school environments for all students,”
regardless of “gender identity” and sexual orientation, as well as race,
religion, and so forth. The act would lead schools to establish policies
against harassment of gay students and create training programs to “raise staff
sensitivity.” More than 100 groups have joined a statewide Dignity for All
Students Coalition to back it. The coalition members include some from
Rochester: the Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley; Dignity-Integrity; the
Fairport Educators Association (New York State United Teachers); the First
Unitarian Church’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Concerns Task Force;
Interfaith Advocates; and local chapters of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight
Education Network and Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.
This initiative fits with the
stronger emphasis the local Gay Alliance promises to put on gay students’
issues, including support for the “gay-straight alliances” springing up in many
high schools.
So a lot’s
happening in Albany and communities like ours. But how’s the gay movement doing on a grander scale?
Joe Tarver, the Pride Agenda’s
communications director, sounds confident when speaking of a march toward “full
equality.” But there are wrinkles. “New York State has always been a laggard”
on gay and lesbian issues, he says. (New York City is the obvious exception.).
We’re no rival to Vermont or Massachusetts, he says.
Indeed, Vermont’s “civil unions,”
which provide many benefits of marriage, have set a standard. But civil unions
aren’t the endpoint. The Pride Agenda “is on record as supporting gay
marriage,” says Tarver. This isn’t just rhetorical; it’s also tactical, he
says. “When you go for something less than marriage,” he says, “you get
something [even] less” than civil unions.
One way or another, the Pride Agenda
is committed to winning “the 800 rights and responsibilities granted by the
states when two people marry,” Tarver says.
A worthy goal. But are the gay
movement’s many parts working smoothly together toward it? Yes and no.
One dynamic that has characterized
the movement from the beginning is an ancient one: male and female. And in the
beginning, gay groups tended to be single-sex. Take the (male) Mattachine
Society and the (female) Daughters of Bilitis of a half-century ago. Likewise,
the Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley descended from the Gay Brotherhood and
the Lesbian Resource Center. Some groups remain unisex, of course — like the
Rochester Rams, a men’s motorcycle club that also runs an annual “Toys for
Tots” campaign.
The Pride Agenda’s Tarver sees no
gender problem today. “From our experience, it’s not a significant issue,” he
says. “There are nuances: Lesbian couples are sometimes more interested in
adoption,” for example. And there are some tensions, he says, between or within
groups that work on gay men’s or lesbians’ distinctive health needs.
One local activist detects other
things. “When I go to Pride Agenda or Gay Alliance events, there are few
lesbians there,” says Barbara Moore, with the Lesbian Rights Task Force of
Rochester’s National Organization for Women chapter. “I’ve always wondered why
lesbians aren’t more active” with established groups, she says. There’s
“speculation,” she says, about economic factors: “Many of the men that are
active have the money that allows them to be active,” unlike lesbians who earn
less than men and must exhaust their time and energy making ends meet. And
fewer outlets for women’s activism exist today, she says. One example: a local
Lesbian Avengers group that dissolved years ago.
But gender issues, and class issues
too, sometimes dissolve when groups focus on bread-and-butter things like
workplace and housing discrimination, parenting and adoption. Historic
demographic changes have their effect, too. For example, Tarver says one-third
of his group’s board members have children, and many of these board members are
gay men with partners.
The post-post-Stonewall era has seen
the rise of large gay-and-lesbian organizations with seats in the halls of
power, corporate as well as governmental. On the national level, groups like
the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against
Defamation (GLAAD), the Human Rights Campaign, and the Log Cabin Republicans
have real clout.
They’ve got the resources to be
players in controversies like one now before the US Supreme Court: the Lawrence v. Texas case, in which two gay
men prosecuted and sentenced for having sex with each other have challenged the
constitutionality of that state’s sodomy law. The Human Rights Campaign, the
Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, and other groups have signed onto an
amicus brief in this case.
“Homosexual sodomy laws, not gay
people, are the real social and legal deviants,” says the brief. It also cites
gay heroes like Father Mychal Judge, a New York Fire Department chaplain killed
on 9/11 at the World Trade Center; and Mark Bingham, a gay man who died
fighting the 9/11 attackers aboard doomed Flight 93.
But these
stories — which tell how “we’re all getting along” even during a politically
difficult time — are matched by tales of internal strife.
Not so long after Judge and Bingham
met their heroic deaths, gay organizations began taking sides regarding the
“war on terror.”
Recently, and quite visibly, the
Washington-based National Gay and Lesbian Task Force became an organizational
member of the Win Without War Coalition, an effort that includes groups like
Greenpeace, the NAACP, the Tikkun Community, the United Church of Christ, and
many others. Many smaller gay organizations have joined the anti-war movement,
too.
In any case, the Win Without War
Coalition isn’t exactly rabble-rousing. Its mission statement says “patriotic
Americans” should support UN weapons inspections and “legal diplomatic means.”
The “preemptive military invasion of Iraq is harming American national
interests,” it says.
That sort of thing was too much for
conservative gay writer-editor Andrew Sullivan, however. In The Advocate this February, he lashed
out at the Task Force and its allies. “War isn’t a gay issue,” read the
headline. “What should a gay organization not do?” he asked. It should not, he maintained, take up “a non-gay topic, alienate
large numbers of people… divide the gay population unnecessarily, and devote
energy and resources to a subject far, far away from the issue of gay
equality.”
Task Force head Lorri Jean responded
in an Advocate piece of her own. Many
groups, she said, “contribute to the national debate on issues that are not
exclusively related to their own constituencies,” for example, groups like the
Sierra Club. She said the Task Force was “not devoting resources to antiwar
activities” but taking “a rhetorical position” that would ultimately benefit
the cause of gay equality. Jean mentioned, too, that the Log Cabin Republicans,
a gay caucus within the national party, had supported the Iraq war without
raising Sullivan’s ire.
Is there a middle ground, or should
there be? “No one organization represents a collective viewpoint of the [gay
and lesbian] movement,” Human Rights Campaign spokesperson David Smith tells
us. HRC, he says, will emphasize not war abroad but “equality in the United
States.”
There’s more agreement, perhaps, on
past wars. Take a recent gay and human-rights movement accomplishment: an
exhibition at the US Holocaust Museum called “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals,”
now bound for showings across the country. (See it online at www.ushmm.org;
click on “online exhibitions.”)
In Rochester, current
fights have to do more with organizational control than national and world
politics (see Path of the Rainbow,
City Newspaper, April 16-22). This is partly because gay organizations whose
primary work is political — like the Pride Agenda, which once had an office
at Village Gate — no longer have offices here.
But there’s big stuff below the
surface. Like the big one that won’t go away: liberationist versus accommodationist.
That is: Should gay people fight for
the full range of ideals and a separate “culture”? Or should they seek only to
establish credentials as good citizens, neighbors, and in a sense “ordinary
folks.”
The two tendencies don’t inevitably
cancel each other out. But they do battle, especially in big cities, where
you’ll find groups like the Lavender Greens (Green Party of the US), ACT-UP
(AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, a direct-action group that once had a chapter
in Rochester), and even one called “Gay Shame,” which tweaks the “Pride”
movement and seeks “a new queer activism that addresses issues of race, class,
gender, and sexuality, to counter the ‘values’ of the gay mainstream.”
In this connection, some may be
tempted to think gay people are in
essence better or less violent than others. But veteran gay activist David
McReynolds, who’s spent four decades with the War Resisters League, dismisses
this. “Considering that Hitler’s early supporters were gay, violent, and then
murdered on Hitler’s orders… and that Sparta was a gay society, I’m not at all
sure that gay men are more peaceful,” McReynolds says by e-mail.
But McReynolds adds a mini-timeline
that tells how much has been won, despite all the squabbles and divergences. He
recalls living “through the ‘glory days’ of the gay underground, when no one in
the straight world knew about us, and we were both repressed and excited by our
strange sub-society, and the ‘liberation’ period just before AIDS, then the
post-AIDS sobering-up period, and now today when ‘queer studies’ is taught in
the academy.”
The grand old man acknowledges a
“huge generational gap.” But you can feel the pride, too.
Alliance
on the move
In
the week since we covered dissension in the ranks at the Gay Alliance of the
Genesee Valley, things have moved forward. (See “Path of the rainbow,” City Newspaper, April 16-22, which
profiles the Alliance’s new executive director and investigates certain charges
made public after he fired the organization’s longtime program director.)
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย First, according to Naples-based
member Susan Braman, a group of dissidents asked for the Alliance mailing list
to circulate their grievances. They suggested the Alliance could handle the
actual mailing to safeguard confidentiality — always a top concern for such
an organization. At presstime, the matter was still up in the air.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย Second, the Alliance has made a
significant scheduling change. The organization’s annual meeting, originally
scheduled for April 27, has been moved to June 8, says board vice president Tom
Carlock. The reason? Carlock says the auditors have not yet completed the
annual report.
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย The original time slot won’t be
wasted, Carlock says: The Alliance will hold a members-only “town meeting”
(place TBA) Sunday, April 27, from 6 to 9 p.m. where all points of view can be
aired.
This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2003.
