The gay rights march
Glenn, David
Recent mass marches on Washington, no matter how noble or well-attended, have generally been dispiriting affairs. On various days in the past six years liberals and leftists have gathered on the...
...Andrew Lichtenstein/ImpAcT VISUALS 296 • DISSENT...
...These harangues were, I think, genuinely untainted by homophobic bigotry, but they still disturbed me—they contradict my entire experience and understanding of the left...
...Earlier this year I lived with a German student of American intellectual history, who was making only his second visit to the United States...
...The week after the march, New York magazine ran a cover story on "Lesbian Chic...
...But not much of the media coverage captured the complexity of the mood in Washington...
...a few hundred yards behind them, the contingent from the lesbian-and-gay-based Metropolitan Community Church sang "Amazing Grace...
...On various days in the past six years liberals and leftists have gathered on the Mall by the tens of thousands in support of labor unions, abortion rights, and low-income housing—only to wake up the next morning to discover that the news coverage of the march had been slight, and that hardly a dent had been made in congressional agendas or in the political zeitgeist...
...But why is this issue so big...
...The march, whose date had been set over three years ago, turned out to be extraordinarily timely, perfectly positioned to catch the crest of national attention surrounding the military's ban on lesbian and gay soldiers...
...If our culture can't envision new ways of expressing sexuality or of structuring family life, it will be that much less likely to envision new, more just economic arrangements...
...All of this media attention, both the serious and the shallow, was palpable at the march itself—there was much more of a sense of history-in-the-making than at any other march in recent memory...
...Certainly there are tensions between feminism and gay liberation and movements for social justice, but on the deepest level egalitarianism and sexual freedom are allied...
...the major national newspapers gave it prominent notice...
...and, of course, MTV was there...
...on the other hand, a sense of bitterness and fear at the strength of recent public hostility to President Clinton's plan to lift the military ban...
...One large contingent of men from a gay/bisexual anarchist organization called Radical Faeries whooped and ran the length of the march, most of them wearing only loincloths...
...If my housemate had joined me at April's march on Washington, and had witnessed firsthand the kinds of political solidarity engendered by sexual dissidence, I hoped he would have seen my point...
...The April 25 lesbian and gay civil rights march dramatically escaped this fate...
...Of course gay rights are important," he would say...
...More broadly, the festive, carnival mood of the march competed with the sadness of reminders of the ongoing scourge of AIDS...
...SUMMER • 1993 • 295 A crowd chants at a rally for Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1990...
...Why are there no marches on behalf of the homeless or the unemployed...
...On one hand, there was elation at the sense of possibility presented by the end of the Reagan-Bush era...
...Cable news channels carried extensive live coverage of the march and rally...
...And he would proceed to give me familiar lectures about the legacies of Puritanism and familiar half-truths about how the United States is dangerously individualistic and insufficiently egalitarian...
...He was stupefied by the amount of attention the gays-in-the-military issue was receiving...
Vol. 40 • July 1993 • No. 3
