The Tolerance Trap
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The Tolerance Trap

How God, Genes, and Good Intentions are Sabotaging Gay Equality

Suzanna Danuta Walters

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eBook - ePub

The Tolerance Trap

How God, Genes, and Good Intentions are Sabotaging Gay Equality

Suzanna Danuta Walters

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About This Book

From Glee to gay marriage, from lesbian senators to out gay Marines, we have undoubtedlyexperienced a seismic shift in attitudes about gays in American politics andculture. Our reigning national story isthat a new era of rainbow acceptance is at hand. But dig a bit deeper, and thisseemingly brave new gay world is disappointing. For all of the undeniable changes,the plea for tolerance has sabotaged the full integration of gays into Americanlife. Same-sex marriage is unrecognized and unpopular in the vast majority ofstates, hate crimes proliferate, and even in the much vaunted “gay friendly”world of Hollywood and celebrity culture, precious few stars are openly gay. In TheTolerance Trap, Suzanna Walterstakes on received wisdom about gay identities and gay rights, arguing that weare not “almost there,” but on thecontrary have settled for a watered-down goal of tolerance and acceptancerather than a robust claim to full civil rights. After all, we tolerate unpleasant realities: medicinewith strong side effects, a long commute, an annoying relative. Drawing on avast array of sources and sharing her own personal journey, Walters shows howthe low bar of tolerance demeans rather than ennobles both gays and straightsalike. Her fascinating examination covers the gains in political inclusion andthe persistence of anti-gay laws, the easy-out sexual freedom of queer youthand the suicides and murders of those in decidedly intolerant environments. Shechallenges both “born that way” storylines that root civil rights in biology,and “god made me that way” arguments that similarly situate sexuality as innateand impervious to decisions we make to shape it. A sharp and provocative cultural critique, thisbook deftly argues that a too-soon declaration of victory short-circuits fullequality and deprives us all of the transformative possibilities of fullintegration. Tolerance is not the endgoal, but a dead end. In The ToleranceTrap, Walters presents a complicated snapshot of a world-shifting moment inAmerican history—one that is both a wake-up call and a call to arms for anyoneseeking true equality.

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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2014
ISBN
9780814770597

PART I

The End of Coming Out?

If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.
—Harvey Milk
The single most important thing you can do politically for gay rights is to come out. Not to write a letter to your congressman but to come out.
—Barney Frank
Tom Cruise, this is Park County police! Please come out of the closet. Everybody here just wants you to come out of the closet, Tom. Nobody’s gonna be mad, everything’s gonna be all right. Just come out of the closet.
—South Park

1

Once upon a Time

Back in the day, this was how it went. You sidled or ambled or strode into the gay bar. You were nervous but so very excited to be there. You found this bar maybe through the one gay bookstore in town. Leaflets pointed the way. Maybe you found it through those early cheesy guidebooks that you could buy at those precious bookstores or through the mail, wrapped ever so discreetly in generic brown paper. Maybe you just knew. And you’d go up to the bar and order a drink. If you were me, underage and clearly looking it, you ordered that beer nervously and probably a bit too loudly, never making eye contact with the bartender. You would sit and sip that beer and look around, trying not to seem too new, too obviously inept and green. And finally, after what seemed like a lifetime, she would come and sit next to you. If you were like me, young, she would probably be older by at least a dozen years. And she would bring you out.
Years later, or maybe years earlier, you would tell your parents. Or maybe not. And it would go surprisingly well, although everyone squirmed and looked at their feet. Or it didn’t go well at all, and you were called names and told to leave. And there were tears and slaps. Or laughter. Or disgust or blame apportioned, probably to your mother. And you might tell friends, regale them with a story that you knew you were making up as you spoke it, a story that imposed a revelatory plotline even as you felt a bit uncomfortable with that linearity. You might, like me, speak it loudly and angrily (trying so hard not to look scared) to schoolmates in high school and watch those schoolmates shift uncomfortably in their seats and never really hang out with you anymore. You might fear reprisal or rejection, and you just might get it. But you also might feel that you just couldn’t live if you didn’t tell. Tell this story. Your story but not yours alone, which is what sometimes made it not only livable but thrilling. It was our pickup line, our bildungsroman, our coming of age, our grand narrative. Or so we thought. It was told in smoke-filled bars and in therapists’ offices and in tears in the college dormitory. It was told to lovers old and new and to family biological and constructed. It was most easily told to strangers. It was our origins story but also our grand finale, and like all melodramas, it was as obfuscating and narrow and riddled with contradictions as such stories inevitably are. So here is my story.
image
I was a snarly sixteen-year-old with a big secret before big secrets were TV worthy or at least fodder for drawn-out, media-friendly confessions. We were in London at the time while my mother—a family therapist—took a break from the rigors of working at a large urban clinic in Philadelphia to nip away at the recalcitrant hearts of the last true Freudians at the tony Tavistock Clinic for Psychotherapy. With my middle sister, we were living large in a very cramped basement apartment that had little to recommend it but for the gorgeous English garden that was ours to destroy. Our people had never been the gardening types, although I do remember my mother taking to the daffodils with gusto during her divorce. You could always tell when something personal was up with my mom: it was either vicious destruction of plant life or obsessive jigsaw-puzzle activity. There were more benign hobbies, like the endless stream of rainbow-colored ponchos that she knit for us, which would have been a big hit at gay pride festivals had I not developed a deep aversion to all things both poncho and rainbow.
Meanwhile, it was the height of punk and Rasta in London, and while I never indulged in either safety-pin piercings or dreadlocks (which I maintain no white person should do), I found myself flitting feverishly between those hardcore and hetero worlds and the vibrant feminist and nascent gay scenes, replete with disco clubbing and agitprop theater. I even became a doe-eyed helper with a women’s theater troupe named Monstrous Regiment, and I think I may have directed some plays in that wonderfully open period of history when lack of knowledge or expertise posed no impediment to career choice.
Given that it was the mid-’70s, I looked terrible in my mannish and vaguely Virginia Woolfish (or perhaps newsboyish) tweed jacket and cap and artfully tied neck scarf, so I never managed to find the girlfriend I was sure would liberate me from the twin hells of teenage sexual confusion and ’70s fashion nightmares. Directing righteous feminist plays or just drinking warm beer with the other vaguely newsboyish women was as good as it got.
How I had kept this one secret from my otherwise very tuned-in mother still mystifies me, although I do think the powers of parental denial kick into overdrive when the secrets being denied are sexual in nature. Come to think of it, though, for a very hands-on parent, my mother could morph into Nancy Botwin—TV’s fave suburban mom-cum-drug-dealer on Showtime’s Weeds—quicker than you can say “don’t be home late.” It’s not that she herself was a drug dealer: she could barely finish the whisky sour I would helpfully mix for her when she walked through the front door as she came home from work. She wouldn’t know a bud from a Bud Light. But it’s just that—like Nancy—she was a curious mix of hyperprofessional competence and “hmm, where are my kids tonight?” maternal bemusement. Which is to say half the time she didn’t know where we were or where we were headed, which was just as well because neither did we.
In my prepubescent tomboy days in Philadelphia, I frequently used to jump out of my second-story bedroom window and run away, with a Huck Finn–like stick and handkerchief of belongings perched jauntily on my shoulder. She rarely came after me, perhaps because she knew I was almost always in the nearby local park pretending hard to be (obviously gay) Harriet the Spy, writing furiously in my notebook and looking for clues among the tadpoles in the dirty stream that ran through Carpenter’s Woods. Or maybe my mom just had other things on her mind. Is running away really running away if no one runs after you? Sometimes, however, she did notice, maybe because I made a racket banging my handkerchief pole on the window of my room as I delicately climbed out and made my grand escape. Then she would send Michael, my sister’s six-foot-six black boyfriend, running after me to bring me home. It was always a test to see if he would get me before the police got him for chasing a little white girl while black.
“Can I see your driver’s license and registration?” they would say when they would pull us over. Michael would dutifully provide these, and they would inevitably inquire, “Who is this child in the car with you?” Answering “My girlfriend’s little sister,” as he typically did, only led to more questions, usually focused on the handkerchief pole and long digressions on Harriet the Spy, which usually led to “Just get her home right away.” A tall black man and a minuscule white girl sharing thoughts on Harriet the Spy with a burly South Philly Italian policeman produced not the expected arrest but enough confusion and disgust to allow us to slink home to my angry mother.
Even in London, when I was a more genuinely daring sixteen-year-old, she never did set chase on those nights I slipped out for activities a tad more nefarious than Harriet the Spy imitation, although truly some of the late-’70s gay bars did seem to contain an inordinate number of Harriet the Spy wannabes. Mom seemed to largely accept the lackluster excuses I offered even when they were patently silly. But at some point, all good secrets want to be told. And they don’t usually get revealed out of stupidity or carelessness but rather the opposite, out of deliberate seeding of distrust and watering the delicate sprout of disbelief. I mean, I couldn’t be a tragic gay teen without the audience. It was less important that she “know me” than that she be the one-woman Greek chorus to my epic tale of thwarted desire and flannel shirts. Without mutual hand-wringing and social disgust, this would devolve into a flaccid B movie. To be a full-fledged social-problem A-list extravaganza, one needed a torrid secret, a tortured secret keeper, and a revered receptacle for said secret.
I had dropped every hint I could muster, leaving books about “gay London” lying about the apartment, listening to Janis Ian records (“at seventeen I learned the truth …”) on the stereo, and blaring the more-charming-than-it-sounds “Sing If You’re Glad to Be Gay” anthem when Janis was off duty. I embodied as many stereotypes as I could gather into the body of one small sixteen-year-old. If hocking a loogie into a handy spittoon would have read “lesbian” to her, well I was up for that. But she just sang tunelessly along with “glad to be gay” and bought me another tweed jacket at the flea market. I was going to have to be more direct.
One night we were eating dinner in a fancy French restaurant with an American colleague of my mother’s who was visiting London at the time. My mother barely knew this woman and I had only just met her, but that didn’t stop us from airing our sexual linen in public. How apropos in a French restaurant! After civil introductions morphed into awkward pauses, my sullen silence prompted my mother to ask, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said, the ever-ready adolescent response that can only inspire exasperation or maybe violence.
“Well, it can’t be nothing,” replied my mother. “You’ve been acting strange for weeks. Not to mention what you’re dressed as.” At this point, our poor dinner guest coughed nervously and said, “Oh, I do think those knotted scarves are quite fun.” We didn’t even look her way. This train was out of the station and on its way to gay town. And there was no conductor in sight.
“Really. This is enough. You need to cut this out and tell me what’s wrong. I know there is something you want to say to me,” said my mother as she struggled to wrest the garlicky snail from its dark shell. I bit into a frog’s leg (it did taste like chicken!) and blurted out “OK. I’m gay.” My mother, briefly looking up from her recalcitrant snail, met my anxious eyes with a neutral gaze and an imperious (not missing a beat) “No, you’re not.” A bit of a conversation stopper, it quickly sent our dinner guest off to the ladies’ room, never to return or meet us again. Not a very good audience for this TV movie of the week.
I wonder if fundamentally new coming-out stories will be written in this changed era of gay visibility or if the power of shame and the status of the social outcast will continue to weigh so heavily on youth of the future. I’m no fan of shame and self-loathing, but it does make for a better life story than perky tolerance. I mean, if no one shoves your face into the school locker and instead competes with the other cool kids to have you as their gay best friend, a poignant melodrama is quickly turned into a saccharine chick flick and we’re all bored.
But back in the pre-Ellen ’70s, even my assiduously liberal mother greeted this announcement with disregard, if not contempt, and, upon our return to the US, hied me off to a child psychiatrist worthy of John Waters central casting. Much to my horror, he seemed transfixed by my breasts (and not in a nice, mildly pedophilic, admiring way) and kept asking me to identify my bra size in relation to that of my sisters. This was not a conversation I had with my sisters, so I was unable to answer, which must have meant I was in denial.
“How does it make you feel,” he queried, “that your breasts are bigger than your elder sisters’?” I guess it made me feel like a raving homosexual. My mother had the good sense and professional expertise to snap me away from my mammary analyst (and do everything to malign his boob-based therapy practice) and finally begin to reckon with the love that may not often speak its name but had now taken up residence in her family tree.
While the good doctor didn’t cure me of breast-based homosexuality, being an openly gay high school student in the 1970s did cure me of my need for high school. I rushed to complete it in three years, not from some burning sense of academic ambition (I was a theater buff at the time) or even from some anxious desire to leave home, but rather because high school for an openly gay teen in late-1970s Philadelphia offered little but scurried avoidance and furtive barhopping. Also there was the occasional snub and shove in the hallways of my liberal Quaker school.
I did, however, manage to turn the silent weekly “meeting for worship” required of all students and faculty into my own personal coming-out day. Usually we bad kids cut meeting (the Quaker version of a church service, although one without the preacher or the pulpit) for a toke and a hoagie, usually in that order. We might sidle in at the last minute, smelling suspiciously of sweet weed and oily onions. And, of course, the Quakers never punished us but patiently waited for the miscreants to find the light or finally graduate. So we would slouch in our seats during meeting, anticipating the heartfelt odes to community that usually came with regularity from one particularly devout teacher who seemed in a perpetual audition for Little House on the Prairie.
But one day I broke the slackers code and blurted out my secret to all attending. Maybe that is what the Friends meant by having God speak through you, or at least that was the interpretation of this Jewish kid in a deafeningly silent Quaker meetinghouse. I think I came out in the meeting as an act of social graciousness: somebody had to say something or the lull in conversation would be too deafening to bear. All that silence seemed to me a breach of etiquette rather than a sign of inner grace.
I never did understand the meeting protocols. I mean, you are supposed to sit together in silence in a state of “expectant waiting.” But expecting what? Waiting for whom? Godot? Elijah? And then you are only meant to speak if the spirit moves you. You are not supposed to just chat away or offer random thoughts on current trends in fashion or the meaning of life but rather to give yourself over to having a message speak through you, from God presumably, or some other preferably nondemonic spirit that temporarily inhabits you, although hopefully not in a Carrie-like way. But one advantage of having the gay God speak through you in a Quaker meeting is that no one is allowed to beat you up or even whistle incredulously as you offer a homily on teen sexual identity. And if you change your mind later, and maybe become not so gay or perhaps even gayer, then you can always claim that shooting the messenger is never a wise choice when the messenger is the Messenger.
While quite alone in those pre-gay-support-group days, I was helped immensely by an openly gay, very tall and handsome, plain-clothes Quaker teacher. In this school, the students were instructed to call the male teachers “Master” and the female teachers “Teacher.” So much for Quaker egalitarianism. I mean, it was easy to make “Master” funny (Master Bater being the best, but also “master” said like Marty Feldman from Young Frankenstein). “Teacher,” on the other hand, was not only obviously lower on the totem pole of school hierarchy, but there was just no way to tweak that appellation into whimsy. Master Larry counseled me into “the life” as we lifted weights together in the basement of the school. Well, he lifted the weights and I watched him—alternately bored and confused by how cute he looked in his tight black shorts and clingy white muscleman T-shirt. He was at turns imposing and alluring, like the outcast progeny of the Village People if they had spent a dirty night in an Amish town. It’s surprising, really, that I don’t have a fetish for collarless shirts and suspenders.
Master Larry introduced me to my first girlfriend, although that might be a strong word for her, given that I can’t recall her name. I do have memories of a skanky communal household where all the women seemed to drink cheap beer and wear kimonos but none of them were Japanese. These were not exactly pre-gay-pride days, but they sure were pre-gay/straight/bi/trans/queer/supportive/questioning high school support groups. So (Master) Larry found me some friends in a local university support group (itself pretty nascent), and the proverbial older woman welcomed me into the life, which seemed mostly to be about vague vegetarian casseroles served with the cheap beer while wearing inauthentic but fetching kimonos. It’s gotten better.
I do remember that first moment, even if I can’t remember her name. But let’s call her Catherine in honor of Catherine Deneuve, who played a very sexy, Sapphicly inclined vampire in the ’80s cult-classic vampire film The Hunger. So we’re in her attic room in the communal household in West Philadelphia, and Catherine is wearing the confusing kimono and I’m feeling a little sick from the vegetarian food and cheap beer that, as a teenager, I’m still not that used to. We’re sitting on the edge of her mattress on the floor, and she starts to take my clothes off. I can’t really reciprocate because a kimono is supposed to just gracefully slip away, so I kind of just keep my hands to myself. That might have tipped her off. A more seasoned lover or the real Catherine Deneuve would, I guess, have taken the kimono in her bared teeth and gnawed it off her paramour’s shoulders. So fake-kimono-wearing Catherine Deneuve stops and looks at me.
“Is this your first time?” she asks, with just a touch of nervousness in her voice. Just enough nervousness to make me really nervous that she will stop.
“Oh, nooo, of course not! I’ve even made barley bulgur kale casserole myself. All the time, really,” I respond with more than a hint of false pride. When she looks at me less like The Hunger and more like Halloween, I realize—a little late—that she may have been referring to the bed/kimono activity we were about to initiate on the forlorn mattress and not the “meal” we had just consumed with the fellow kimono wearers in the fetid household. But, luckily for this initiate, food-based misunderstandings can never stop a kimono from getting what it wants. And so goes the story of one particular sixteen-year-old, coming of age and coming out in the late ’70s in Philadelphia.

I Want the World to Know

My coming out story is personal and idiosyncratic yet also so mundane. It is rooted in a particular time and place, vectored through intimate politics and family expectations, but nevertheless recognizable to strangers and friends alike. Silly, sad, and embarrassing but nevertheless a tale that marks me in ways both ineffable and predictably obvious. For me, and for ot...

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