GLR May June

ESSAY The Price of Going Mainstream D OLORES K LAICH

W OMEN ARE MARRYING WOMEN , men are marrying men; many of either persua- sion are, with beatific smiles, pushing baby carriages. One’s sister, daughter, wife, mother, brother, son, husband, fa- ther, grandmother, grandfather, aunt, uncle, colleagues, friends, and neighbors are not just tiptoeing out of the closet but publicly claiming their gayness in all spheres of life. It is, to be sure, a cultural sea change, and one that seems to have happened overnight, at least from the perspective of mainstreamAmerica. Who would have imagined such a state of affairs? Certainly not the early gay and lesbian activists of the Stonewall era, those who have now reached a certain age, the folks, along with those who have passed on, who were at the barricades of the early gay liberation movement, years before the alphabet soup of LGBTQ rights . Indeed the shift from “liber- ation” to “rights,” which was a slow morphing over the years, is itself emblematic of what has changed. Assimilation into the social mainstream has moved steadily apace, and with it have come complications that face all mi- norities: co-optation, tokenism, paternalism, and a veneer of tol-

married or go into the army.” And later in this New Yorker in- terview (March 26, 2007) he proclaimed that marriage, an en- trenched heterosexual tradition, was a corny and expensive tradition. Of course gay or lesbian marriages can be more than corny and expensive. Just ask the smart, feisty, hot, cute, charming 83-year-old woman, Edie Windsor (straight out of central casting), who put the Supreme Court’s feet to the fire in 2013 to strike down a monumentally unfair law, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), thus paving the way for state after state, a veritable domino effect (with attendant backlash), to proclaim gay or lesbian marriage to be okay. But I wonder, in a country still awash in racism and clas- sism, would an overweight, impoverished woman of color who is lesbian have been as acceptable a plaintiff as was this attractive, wealthy, former IBM executive with a house in the Hamptons? (Full disclosure: Edie is a friend of mine, a kind, loving woman who gives the best hugs around.) One can eas- ily imagine the decision going the other way, which would have been disastrous for lesbians and gay men everywhere. Edie Windsor’s undertaking was just plain brave and heroic, and she deserves all the accolades she has garnered. But

erance. What happened to re-imagining and re-inventing social institutions such as mar- riage and family, hallmarks of early activist groups? It’s astonishing to rediscover the mission statement of New York City’s Gay Liberation Front, formed in 1969 following the Stonewall Riots, which included the fol- lowing self-declaration: “We are a revolu- tionary group of men and women formed with the realization that complete sexual lib-

where in this important scenario is the orig- inal vision of the gay, lesbian, and feminist liberation movements, which included a radical agenda of progressive society-wide change, such as a rethinking of the whole institution of marriage, a longing to exper- iment with a more open-ended, flexible, and varied model for intimate human rela- tionships? As things now stand, one is re- minded of the quips by late-night TV hosts

Assimilation has moved steadily apace, and with it the complications that face all minorities: co-optation, tokenism, paternalism, and a veneer of tolerance.

eration for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished.” Can we possibly imagine today’s dominant LGBTQ rights organizations describing themselves as “revolutionary” and calling for universal “sexual liberation”? Gay and lesbian folks who aren’t old enough to remember ei- ther the bad old days or the early days of gay and lesbian liber- ation—a growing majority at this time—may be overjoyed that they can partake of the fruits of acceptance (however incom- plete) into mainstream society. Most are probably oblivious to the vision of meaningful social change that animated the early activists. Let me consider a few of the major areas in which things have undoubtedly changed, but not quite in the ways that were hoped for when the early movement began. G AY M ARRIAGE . I turn first to an interview with the cult filmmaker John Waters and his much quoted line, “I always thought the privilege of being gay is that we don’t have to get

when the subject of gay marriage was first in the air: “Sure, I’m all for gay marriage. Why shouldn’t they be as miserable as the rest of us?” T HE M ILITARY . In 2012 on a military base in Hawaii at a family return-from-duty homecoming celebration, a buff gay Marine—as of September 2011 no longer needing not to tell— planted a passionate kiss and a wildly loving hug onto his boyfriend that in minutes went viral on social media sites. One thinks of Judy Grahn, the lesbian poet and activist who in the early 1960s was kicked out of the Air Force for being a lesbian. Or Lenny Matlovich, the highly decorated Vietnam veteran, also kicked out of the military, who became a gay liberation activist and whose tombstone, carved upon his death in 1988, memorably reads: “When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.” At the same time, as this quotation poignantly reminds us, the mil- itary is a very conservative institution, in times of war a “killing machine,” participation in which should be problematical for anyone who questions the legitimacy of war in general and re-

Dolores Klaich is writing a memoir of the early days of the gay and les- bian liberation movement.

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