The left and antigay politics
Seidman, Steven
Between 1977 and 1986 there occurred a sweeping assault upon gays and their culture. Sadly, the left failed to respond to this offensive. This was not an episodic lapse but an abiding failure of...
...Discretion has always been a better defense of gay rights than the law will ever be...
...58-59, 1982-3...
...On the ideological front, the FALL • 1988 • 487 Communications "Save Our Children" crusade has been criticized by liberals and the left...
...Gay rights ordinances were successfully defended or enacted (e.g., in New York City...
...The Family Protection Act, resubmitted in 1981, failed to gain congressional approval...
...This was not an episodic lapse but an abiding failure of the left to take homosexual politics and oppression seriously...
...Many leftists are critical of the trend toward an ethic of sexual pleasure and expression for promoting instrumental and dehumanizing forms of intimate life...
...T]he possibility of a reversal [of the 1973 decision] cannot be dismissed...
...Of course, this leaves homosexuals in a marginal and quasi-deviant status...
...The most important effort at antigay legislation came at the federal level, where Senator Paul Laxalt introduced the Family Protection Act...
...Backed by fundamentalist religious groups SOC portrayed homosexuals as a threat to children, the family, and national security, violating the laws of God, Nature, and Society...
...Individuals are reduced to bodies...
...In the context of an antigay backlash and the AIDS crisis it is imperative that the left begin to rethink the place of sexuality, especially homosexuality, in its critical discourse and politics...
...There are a number of examples, but I shall limit myself to one: Jean Bethke Elshtain's "Homosexual Politics: The Paradox of Gay Liberation," published in Salmagundi, Vols...
...This conclusion is supported by research I did of four major left publications—Dissent, In These Times, Radical America, and Socialist Review...
...In simply quantitative terms the coverage of the antigay backlash between 1977 and 1986 is revealing...
...and, further, any organization that publicly accepted homosexuality would have been ineligible for government assistance...
...It must learn to see gays as oppressed in ways no less psychologically and socially meaningful than the poor, the working class, ethnic and racial groups, women, the disabled, and the elderly...
...Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota...
...It would have prohibited homosexual acts from ever receiving protected status under the law...
...For example, the prestigious Leadership Conference on Civil Rights repeatedly turned down an application by the National Gay Task Force for membership until 1982...
...Liberationists thus inadvertently promote a bureaucratic statist society in which individual rights and 488 • DISSENT Communications democratic opposition are jeopardized...
...q FALL • 1988 • 489...
...Although the American Psychiatric Association reversed itself in 1973 by withdrawing homosexuality from its list of personality disorders, there is currently a strong push in the opposite direction...
...In fact, Elshtain argues that at least some gay liberationists want more than social acceptance...
...Applied to gay people, this left analysis suggests a critique of the commercialization of sex in gay life...
...Radical America published just three pieces on the antigay backlash over this ten-year period...
...Homosexuals are oppressed by discriminatory practices and laws, by a culture that stigmatizes them as deviant figures, and by the double life and marginality that is often their fate...
...By the late 1970s an organized antigay backlash was in motion, spearheaded initially from the New Right...
...Although the Briggs initiative was defeated, a similar bill passed in Oklahoma...
...In 1978, gay rights ordinances were repealed in St...
...By the early 1980s, the conservative offensive against gay people appeared to be losing some momentum...
...In a National Review editorial, Patrick Buchanan remarked, "In a healthy society, it [homosexuality] will be contained, segregated, controlled, and stigmatized, carrying both a legal and social sanction...
...The Democratic Left's Response The antigay backlash did not sweep across the U.S...
...In this regard, the heterosexual male left frequently partakes of the general homophobia of our heterosexist society...
...without opposition...
...In These Times, a weekly newspaper, published just five short pieces on the antigay backlash...
...Indeed, in the 1950s being discrete left homosexuals easy prey...
...Dissent maintained an uninterrupted silence except for one short critical piece on Midge Decter's Commentary essay...
...Gay liberationists, then, pose a threat to society either by promoting an authoritarian statist order or by unleashing a socially destructive hedonism or because their hidden agenda is to establish a "homosexual dictatorship...
...Robinson argued that homosexuality conjured up "penises in mouths and anuses" and that was enough to make heterosexuals hysterical...
...Although the Family Protection Act and Resolution 1666 were defeated, they helped shape a political and ideological context in which antigay themes became an integral part of New Right ideology and politics...
...In 1977, the SOC campaign succeeded in repealing a local gay rights ordinance...
...Finally, the left's failure to seriously consider homosexual and, in general, sexual oppression reflects an often critical view of recent changes in socioerotic patterns...
...The poison quickly spread from the New Right to mainstream conservatism...
...In Homosexuality and American Psychiatry (1981), Ronald Bayer concluded that "a vast majority of psychiatrists continue to view homosexuality as a pathological condition...
...Resistance by the gay community has been crucial...
...Unfortunately, the AIDS epidemic reinvigorated the antigay crusade, "proving" the pathological character of homosexuality, hence legitimating homosexual oppression...
...As I read her, Elshtain is not criticizing the state apparatus as a force of homosexual oppression but homosexuals' effort to enlist the state to struggle against oppression...
...the New Yorker . . . does not accept gay advertising...
...Unfortunately, liberal support for gay people has frequently been overly cautious and, at times, absent...
...Equally menacing was Resolution 1666 introduced into Congress by Representative Larry McDonald...
...Although feminists have placed issues of sexual and homosexual oppression on the left agenda, feminism remains primarily a theory and politics of gender...
...For example, in One-Dimensional Man Marcuse assails the "sexual revolution" for promoting a narrow genital-centered, performance-oriented sexuality...
...Accordingly, since homosexuals are not discriminated against so long as they conceal their homosexuality, he advised them to give up their drive for social acceptance...
...He maintains that sex has become a mode of work or a performance to be judged in terms of technical criteria of competence in producing and sustaining orgasmic pleasure...
...An ambivalent response to the antigay backlash has been characteristic, as well, of the socialist left...
...Witness the failure of the New Right to enact its antigay agenda...
...Its first report on AIDS appeared in September 1982 and through 1986 it published four minor pieces on AIDS...
...The preoccupation with sexual fulfillment diverts attention from important social and political issues and the quest for erotic satisfaction replaces the project of social change...
...Under the influence of Marxism, the left still identifies the workplace as the primary site of social conflict and the working class as the major agent of social change...
...Marxism highlights issues relating to the public sphere (economy and state) and devalues issues of sex, gender, and the family in the private sphere...
...Gay people could have been fired from all government or government funded jobs, and made ineligible for Social Security, welfare, veteran's benefits, and student assistance...
...George Will defended the antigay campaigns on the grounds that the acceptance of homosexuality represents the "moral disarmament of society...
...Sexuality is still seen as a personal, nonpolitical topic...
...The aim behind these antigay initiatives was to drive homosexuals back into social invisibility...
...Her polemic is directed against a gay liberationist ideology, which is aimed "not simply at the removal of prejudicial and discriminatory laws and practices but at the full 'legitimation' of the homosexual identity and 'lifestyle.' " By claiming the status of an oppressed minority or class and insisting that the state make amends for a history of discrimination, liberationists, says Elshtain, propose an agenda that would give gays a privileged position and legitimate further intrusion of the state into private affairs...
...For example, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been in the vanguard of defending gay rights...
...the erotic exchange becomes impersonal and uncaring...
...Like any privileged group, they naturalize their source of empowerment and are threatened by any challenge to it...
...Only grudgingly have issues of race and gender penetrated left ideology and politics...
...It stipulated that "no federal funds may be made available . . . to any public individual or private individual, group, foundation, commission, corporation, association . . . which presented homosexuality . . . as an alternative . . . acceptable lifestyle...
...This only succeeds in narrowing public tolerance...
...Its relationship to movements of sexual liberation has always been ambivalent...
...The one exception to this generally dismal record is the Socialist Review...
...and Eugene, Oregon...
...The American Bar Association declined in 1980 to affirm that the constitutional right to privacy extends to homosexuals...
...On the positive side, when the left has addressed the issue it has consistently defended gay rights...
...Writing in the Nation in 1979, Doug Ireland observed, among other examples, that "Jimmy Breslin last month wrote a column in the New York Daily News attacking the Village Voice for running a special supplement on 'gay life,' asserting that the Voice editors had turned a once-great publication into a `fag paper...
...In the same year state Senator Briggs introduced Proposition 6 in California...
...They "conjure up a world in which everyone has become gay, or in which homosexuality is the preferred mode of sexual identity," and are romantic revolutionaries who project a "future society in which all distinctions have been eliminated, longterm relationships repudiated, and polymorphous perversity on demand legislated into existence...
...Second, the left's insensitivity to homosexual oppression is related to the continued dominance of Marxism in left culture...
...At least three considerations seem pertinent...
...The left, in particular the male-dominated heterosexual left, has not seriously addressed the realities of homosexual oppression...
...The National Education Association opposed the 1978 Briggs Initiative but made no comparable effort to fight a similar bill banning gays from public school employment that passed in Oklahoma one year later...
...Neither Radical America nor Dissent published anything on AIDS and its impact on gay people...
...In effect, Robinson recommended that gays renounce the ideal of an integrated and healthy life in exchange for a modicum of public tolerance...
...Wichita, Kansas...
...It published six major essays on homosexual politics and life...
...Nationally prominent conservatives endorsed the antigay campaign...
...Furthermore, gay people have been able to count on the organizational and ideological support of the democratic left...
...Elshtain defends the extension of basic civil rights to gays but not their right to participate in society as equal members...
...Liberal intellectuals have given ground all too easily to the conservative offensive...
...The Briggs initiative was defeated...
...In fact, Robinson held that gays themselves are less interested in legislative reform than in gaining visibility as part of their push for social acceptance...
...Furthermore, the left has pushed the analysis of gay oppression beyond issues of discrimination or the absence of civil rights...
...There is, however, little reason to believe that discretion promotes public tolerance...
...It would have forbidden the employment of teachers who are homosexual or who "advocate" homosexuality, giving schools the authority to fire these teachers...
...Elshtain endorses the protection of homosexuals from harassment by the state and other citizens...
...Homosexuals are oppressed because their sexual/affectional preference violates a sex/gender order that privileges heterosexuality and takes heterosexuality as a basis from which to claim masculine gender dominance...
...Yet the left has, at times, retreated from demands by gays for the acceptance of homosexuality on an equal footing with heterosexuality...
...it would see in gay patterns of nonmonogamous sex the conquest of the economizing or instrumental behavioral logic of capitalism...
...First, the continued dominance on the left of heterosexual men is crucial...
...Public tolerance is not something granted by heterosexuals but won by homosexuals through public struggle on a variety of political and cultural fronts...
...Writing in 1977, Paul Robinson suggested in the New Republic that the antigay backlash is less a reaction to the demand for legal rights than to the visibility of gays...
...Anita Bryant's "Save Our Children" (SOC) campaign in Dade County, Florida, sparked a wave of antigay actions...
...Essays in Commentary by Samuel McCracken and Midge Decter spread antigay militancy...
...Her critique of gay liberationism is, in the end, a response to the demands by homosexuals for public acceptance and social inclusion, displaying the penetration of backlash themes into left thinking The question needs to be asked: why the silence or the ambivalence on the part of the left toward homosexual oppression...
...Elshtain is something of a maverick but her writings have appeared in major left publications (including Dissent) and her views articulate one current of post-New Left critical theory...
Vol. 35 • September 1988 • No. 4
