Sexual Politics

The Gay Person in America Today

Shannon Gilreath

• Publisher: University of Akron Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781931968348
• eBook ISBN: 9781935603313
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary and controversial, Shannon Gilreath's Sexual Politics is an important update to the continuing debate over the place of gay people in American law, politics, and religion. Gilreath incisively navigates a number of complex issues, including the delicate balance between sexual privacy and public equality, the entwining of religion and U.S. law and politics, and gay marriage. He offers astute academic observation and depth of personal reflection to create an unmatched critique of gay people in American society. Ultimately, Gilreath argues for the further emergence of a gay and lesbian ethos of public attentiveness and the practice of "transformative politics, " encompassing all those activities of gay and lesbian people: art, literature, sports, business, education, spirituality, and otherwise conventional forms of politics. Conversational and written with a compelling frankness, this book is vital for the serious legal and political student and the informed general reader alike.

PART 1

Oh, I ran to the rock to hide my face.

The rock cried out, “No hiding place!”

No hiding place down here.

—Traditional

INTRODUCTION

For Jimmy

The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.

—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

AMONG THE MANY ICONS cluttering the walls of my home library is a photograph of James Baldwin. Baldwin has been my hero since I read with voracious interest The Fire Next Time many years ago. The Fire Next Time, a book that ignited blacks and whites alike in the other great civil rights struggle in our country, the struggle for African American equality, is, in my opinion, a work never equaled. Baldwin, also a gay man, wrote in contribution to the gay rights struggle as well, notably Giovanni’s Room. But there is nothing like The Fire Next Time. It was something of a love letter to the American people; critical and chastening at times, it was, above all, loving and hopeful.

The love letter is an art little-practiced these days. In our instant-messaging, Internet world, few people know how to write a good one, and fewer still know how to receive one in the right spirit. This book, despite its weighty title, is my own love letter to my country, for I love it above all other countries. It is because of that very love that I reserve the right to criticize it—vehemently and frequently. Like the themes explored in these pages, the love letter is at once a private and a public thing: private in its intimate, sensitive topics and public in its commitment of such thoughts to paper and delivering them to the beloved. The love letter is an act of some courage, for it lays out things that are frightening because there is the possibility they will go unfulfilled, unrealized, unrecognized. Yet these things so terrific as to be otherwise unutterable must be uttered, because to do otherwise would be a horrible, untenable neglect.

These things must be spoken because gay people, on the whole, live lives of silent disillusionment, believing that their country and its politics have failed them. They ignore their inner urgings to action and swallow hard against the voice struggling to find its way into the open, because they believe that the voice will fall on deaf ears. What I hope for is a turning of some of these secret longings into public aspirations, worked for and toward as public realities. I hope for a gay community that approaches its country, mindful of its circumstances, with attention and care and with a broader, deeper politics of transformation than the gay community otherwise has practiced. This book is an invitation to turn essential attention to our neglected lives and needs and desires. My writing is nurtured by political commitment and the hope that writing of the kind represented here can make a difference in changing the rancor and discord of the gay rights debate into a conversation of reason and understanding.

I don’t think it unfair of me to say that society in general does not know what to think about gay people. Generations of social taboos about sexuality, and homosexuality in particular, have left a void in the community’s understanding. Recent times have seen enormous advances in filling that void. Slowly, slowly, the homosexual as a socially tolerable sexual variation has replaced the homosexual as a sexual invert. Despite the reactionary backlash that followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas, enormous strides have been made in the recognition of gays as valid, contributing members of our society, deserving of some measure of respect and legal protection. But gays remain unequal citizens. Even the gay rights movement has been scant on actual discourse about gays as people, as opposed to political or legal objects about whom much has been said in the way of rights and legalities but about whom very little has been said in terms of personal experience. Some of that has been a necessary consequence of policy arguments that have resulted in an increased measure of social tolerance for gays but have done little to advance true understanding. The gap between tolerance, which, in my opinion, is worth little more than the effort to say the word, and true understanding is very wide indeed.

This book is titled Sexual Politics. For some, no doubt, this is a curious concept. To the many Americans not engaged in the battle for gay rights, what happens in the bedroom (the sexual) is a matter completely separate from what happens in the public forum (the political). No doubt, too, there are some involved in the gay rights movement who bristle at the title, and various formulations of the idea—the truth—that we are more than sex have leapt to their lips. This book is, therefore, an answer to both audiences. To make the work as accessible as possible, I have used citation sparingly. The reader may rely upon the selected bibliography for those sources that have most informed my argument. Because this book is as much a political pamphlet as anything else, I have relied heavily on the historical and expository work of those authors listed there; I am in their debt.

The gay person in American society is as he is because his interpersonal sexual relationships have been politicized and used as an instrument of his domination by others. In the United States today, one’s sexuality remains the chief factor in defining one’s civic fitness and, indeed, one’s entire humanity. If one falls into the disfavored sexual category—homosexual—one is automatically unfit to serve openly in one’s country’s armed forces. In most of the United States, one is not allowed to marry the person of one’s choosing; one is unfit to adopt and raise children; one can be fired or not be hired in the first place. All of these things are very real possibilities simply if one is a gay person. To deny the politicization of sexuality in such circumstances is foolishness.

Social definition on the basis of sexual orientation is quintessentially political; in many ways, it is the heart of American politics today. Whether out of the closet or in, the gay person assumes a slotted role in a predefined power structure. The out person finds himself set against the predominating political grain, whereas the closeted gay person also fills a political role by accommodating the prevailing sociopolitical power structure. Even the most closeted of the closeted is not apolitical.

But there is another view of sexual politics—that of the gay rights movement as progressive social reengineering. Gays sexualize politics simply by bucking long-held notions of pathology and inferiority by claiming and asserting those rights held in common by other Americans. Thus, this book is also my attempt to articulate the current political position of the homosexual and to call for political attentiveness by those who have buried their heads, believing—like much of straight America—that what goes on behind the closed doors of the bedroom or, more aptly, the closed doors of America’s closets doesn’t affect their status as American citizens. My argument for collective concern and for the further emergence of a gay and lesbian ethos of public attentiveness is essentially political because it is bent toward the reshaping of public norms that ultimately define private life.

Today, America remains a place where virtually no act by a gay or lesbian person can be apolitical; simply because that act is performed by a gay or lesbian person, it takes on a dimension and meaning to the greater society that it otherwise would not have. The very act of publicly acknowledging oneself as gay or lesbian is itself a quintessentially political act, because it challenges the otherwise coerced definition of what it means to be a normal, natural person and a fully participating member of society. That very visibility provides the basis for the transformative politics discussed later, which is an overall cultural politic encompassing all those activities of the gay and lesbian person: art, literature, sports, business, education, spirituality, and otherwise conventional forms of politics.

A purely private reconciliation with one’s homosexuality is an inadequate response to the political sexualization faced by the gay individual in the United States. Consequently, the first chapter of this book seeks to give definition and meaning to the otherwise amorphous concept of the closet and to address the need of closeted individuals to move outside the isolation and secrecy of the closet to claim their dignity and the rights concomitant with that dignity. Chapter 1 explores the historical foundations of the closet and the effects of the closet on the private and communal lives of gay people in America, and it makes a plea for honest and responsible living on a personal and civic level.

Chapter 2 discusses the religious factors that have resulted in the pariah status of gays and lesbians in the United States. The condemnation of same-sex sexuality as sinful and abominable is not historically static, nor is it based on some universal principle. Despite constitutional guarantees of a separation between religion and government, America is the only modern Western nation in which religion and politics remain extensively commingled. For that reason, chapter 2 explores the religious foundations of homophobia and the inescapable consequences of America’s religiously infused politics, while offering a hopeful solution to the American religious dilemma.

Any understanding of the historical and contemporary position of an oppressed minority is virtually meaningless unless its ultimate end is to feed a healthy politics of social progression. Consequently, after outlining the position of the gay person in American society, chapter 3 frames a plea for political involvement and attentiveness to the public dimensions of homosexuality. And because a civil rights movement must, by its very nature, operate within the confines of the prevailing political system, some knowledge and understanding of the sociopolitical climate as it affects gays in the United States is imperative to the development of an effective politics. Thus, chapter 3 also outlines the institutional obstacles to successful gay politics and addresses the future prospects for equality.

Chapter 4 is a summation of the legitimate desires of gay people and an attempt to describe the necessary means of getting there.

Because this book is based, in large part, on my own experiences and observations, it is to some extent autobiographical. It may, therefore, seem to emphasize the experiences of gay men at the expense of a discussion of issues exclusively affecting lesbians in this country. To the extent that this is so, it was merely unavoidable. It certainly should not be taken as a suggestion that I do not feel that the plight of the lesbian is equally as important as the plight of the gay man in America.

It is my hope that this work will shed some light, for straight people, on gays as individuals rather than simply as political or legal lightning rods. It is also my hope that it will be enlightening for the gay reader, because the gay rights movement itself has been largely devoid of personal discourse. A necessary part of enlightenment is taking the unpleasant along with the pleasant. In this book, I discuss many unpleasant aspects of the gay experience. The knowledge void and, in some cases, willful ignorance have made the discussion of those things unavoidable. In discussing those things, however, my idea is not to project an utterly morbid outlook on gay life in America but rather to put forth some knowledge about the reality of being gay in America—and that reality in relation to gays and straights alike. I hope that, by discussing these unpleasant, unattractive aspects of our society, I will prove that the advancement of gay rights is good not only for gays but for everyone—for every member of our society.

Ultimately, of course, I realize the enormity of the problem of arguing for social change in an area in which feelings are as deeply entrenched as they are in the area of gay rights: One’s opponents are not always willing to discuss and debate in good faith. In matters as politically, emotionally, and spiritually charged as gay rights, reason is often the missing ingredient. A huge contributing factor to the slow pace of gay advancement in this country is that, from the beginning, the debate has been dominated by people who have nothing at all to say. The content of their argument is a mystery to all but them, and they make no effort to say more than a bald assertion of their empty belief. But reason and truth are the enemies of the bigot. Thus, the goal of this work is to share some useful knowledge with the sympathetically inclined or impartial participant in the gay rights debate—they have been ignored for too long. It is with these individuals that the future of gay rights in this country rests. Filling the void with useful knowledge rather than empty rhetoric will arm these critical people with the information they need to spot the disingenuous argument of the bigot when confronted by it. Like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I believe that, when all is said and done, it is not “the violent actions and the vitriolic words of the bad people” that will be remembered but rather “the appalling silence and indifference of the good people.” Surely, we will be asked to account not only for the misdeeds of the “children of darkness,” but also for the “fears and apathy of the children of light.”¹ Fears must be confronted. Only when the good people are given the necessary understanding can they be expected to break their silence.

CHAPTER 1

A World Not of Their Making

The Closet in American Life

His remembrance shall perish from the earth and He shall have no name in the street. He shall be driven from light into darkness, and chased out of the world.

—Job 18:17–18

HISTORY, FOR ALL TOO MANY PEOPLE, is the convenient referent for a fact or set of facts that has fallen into a void of unimportance, irrelevant to modern concerns. The historical knowledge possessed by most Americans is sadly substandard, and gays as a community share this abysmal appreciation of time gone by. But “[y]ou have to look at history as an evolution of society,” said Jean Chrétien, prime minister of Canada, after his cabinet approved a policy to open marriage to gay couples.¹ Indeed, a society pays a consuming price for failing to understand its own history. In that spirit, understanding the closet as a cultural phenomenon necessitates understanding the history that created the closet.

Unfortunately, there is much in American history to suggest that our democratic social ideal is perhaps more the possession of theoreticians than it is a practically attainable goal. By letter, the United States began as a society in which religious passion was kept separate from public reason and separation of church and state was the benchmark. This much is enshrined in that great monument of democracy, the Constitution.

The roots of what became American society, however, reach further than 1787 and the drafting of the Constitution; they reach back to groups like the Puritans, who came to America’s shores in search of a place to practice a way of life so stern that even the Cromwellian harshness of their contemporary England was unacceptably lax. They migrated to Holland, but the Dutch of five centuries ago were too liberal to countenance the heavy-handed righteousness of the Puritans, whom they promptly expelled.

Like most religious fundamentalists, the Puritans were inclined to see God as an evasive being who created a labyrinth of rules to thwart the petty human’s attempt to attain everlasting life. For them, the charity of Jesus was a footnote, whereas the sum of biblical wisdom was to be found in the severer passages of the Old Testament and in the unforgiving dicta of Saint Paul. Accordingly, because adultery was forbidden by commandment and because Saint Paul specifically denounced homosexuality, the Puritans promptly criminalized such abominations in the theocracy they were eventually free to create in the American wilderness.

The Puritans’ rigorous persecution of the sinner—in an effort to save his soul by force, if he would not do so volitionally—developed into a legal moralism that American society has never quite been able to rise above. The result: American penal history, and even modern criminal law, are the scandal of the free world. Only in the twenty-first century were gay Americans afforded the basic rights of sexual privacy and bodily autonomy by order of the U.S. Supreme Court.² Yet since its earliest days, the republic has been a place of sharp division between the scarlet letter of the law and the actual practice of citizens’ private lives. The states’ police powers over morality resulted in a host of laws governing sex, which, while often textually neutral (that is, applying to both heterosexual and homosexual conduct), were usually applied inequitably to punish the vilest offender, the sexual deviant—the homosexual.

Because of this concerted effort to stamp out homosexuality for the good of the greater society, homosexual history in the United States must be pulled from a past of degradation and shame. We might say that our history itself has been buried in the back of our communal closet. Despite this, once uncovered, the history is a vital one from which much can be learned about the pre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Epilogue: Who Has Believed Our Report?
• Appendix: Helpful Resources for Activists and Concerned Citizens
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index