THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW URVASHI VAID
Cusac, Anne-Marie
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Urvashi Vaid 'What we need to do is transform the mainstream, not just integrate ourselves into it.' BY ANNE-MARIE CUSAC Urvashi Vaid is one of the lesbian and gay...
...I value that people listen to the things I say...
...I mentioned it, and I just kept putting it out there...
...Kate Clinton, the comedian and Progressive columnist...
...And now Nico doing "My Funny Valentine"is one of her favorite cuts...
...Virtual Equality...
...I do...
...I think some people are bisexual...
...I wasn't referring just to sexual pleasure...
...The Second Sex...
...From 1986 through 1989, Vaid served as public-information director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and from 1989 to 1992 as executive director...
...And that we haveK change values, change cultural institutions, change economic forces in order to have a society in which nay people are viewed as fundamentally equal, normal, healthy, natural human beings Q: How did you choose youi title...
...time passed, and in 1992 I was trying to figure out a number of things: How could Kate and I "bring our lives together because we were long-distance...
...actually...
...She was sixteen...
...James Brown will send her every time...
...Q: Is that what's disruptive...
...I feel that I have always been a progressive person who happened to be working in the gay and lesbian movement.' Her call for a comprehensive liberation movement poses a challenge to a gay and lesbian agenda that, over the past fifteen years, has tended to restrict the energy of activists to a narrow band of so-called gay issues...
...That was an incredibly political album...
...and transgendered people do not have equal tights, and do not haw the same status in society that heterosexual people do...
...You know, this is really reminiscent of bull hooks's title, and we should think about changing the title, because I don't want it to be confused...
...Gay people have a strong sense of responsibility to community that comes out of having to create institutions to take care of our own, but which is exactly the sense of civic community and civic responsibility that many straight people are bemoaning as being lost...
...Ynu ;ire never going to achieve liberation: therefore, the pragmatic approach is to achieve civil rights...
...I don't think everybody should be straight or gay...
...Hut in reality what happened was 1 really didn't have a name for what I felt until I met a bunch of out lesbians in college...
...I see people ot color, gay liherationists...
...Yes...
...And we're much more than that, in mv opinion...
...We met at a gay and lesbian conference in 1988...
...But there's the undertone in that title that we're virtually normal, or almost normal, but not quite...
...You know—where they ask you what you've done and who you are and why you want to go to law school...
...You know...
...You know, in immigrant households there's a lot of criticism of the dominant culture...
...Let's confess, we do that—Terminator, really bad ones...
...Too often heterosexual people see us as hedonists when we say "pleasure"—that we're pleasure-oriented...
...Back in her truck, she waved, rolled down the window, and called out to several passers-by...
...In my household there was—"Oh...
...resent being told that I have to give up one or the other...
...And our life is pretty much the life of two working people...
...Of course, a veai and a hall after that, when the book was go-ing to the printer, practically I learned that Andrew Sullivan's title was \irttially .\:orma/[ I mean, we couldn't have planned it worse...
...She cameupto mc and she said...
...One of the things I was thinking of when 1 wrote that gay culture is transformative was this notion that maybe we can help redeem the tired old categories of heterosexual relating, and freshen them up and give them new ways of dealing with each other and new possibilities...
...I like the Cranberries . . . the Breeders...
...Vaid: It's very threatening...
...I have never been a single-issue person,'1 she says...
...In the course of discovering I was a lesbian, 1 immediately started doing stuff as a feminist first...
...I thought, how lovely that some-bodv who's been sitting on the sidelines for thirty years pops up out of nowhere and repeats the backlash line about identity politics, without understanding, number one...
...It's been very good for me...
...Starting in the spring and the summer, Kate is just busy all the time...
...and the Black Panthers, and Malcolm X, and Doctor King, very affected by Doctor King...
...Q: You talk about the gay and lesbian movement as transformative and redemptive...
...It sounds so sappy...
...We don't necessarily speak for the economic realities of a large segment of our population that is struggling economically One example is the prominence of gav Republicans...
...The second gay America, in Vaid's words, "is much larger...
...It's helped a lot of us...
...One of my favorite bands of all time was the X-Ray Specs, an obscure British band...
...Half of those New Leftists hecame neoconservati ws...
...I don't think everybody should be gay at all, or will be...
...We've been the ones fueling the civil-rights movement...
...I think he's onto something, so I meant redemptive in that sense, too...
...Harry Hay, the founder of gay and lesbian liberation, alwavs maintained that gay people have a special purpose in the human family, and that in ancient cultures that purpose used to be valued as a spiritual dimension...
...I told you in the car on the way over here that I love January and February because the rhythm of these days is so peaceful and simple...
...The lead singer was Poly Styrene...
...Vaid: Hole...
...I think she's just such an intellect, and really, really one of the smartest people writing about feminism...
...We get up in the morning, read the paper, and have coffee...
...The book is really what I set out to write, which is a discussion of how- the process of "mainstream-ing" yields us a partial kind of freedom, that what we needtodo is transform the mainstream, not just intecrate ourselves into it-Using specific historical experiences, I try lo make the argument that pursuing civil rights is very important, but it is just partcfa process of broader social transformation...
...I think, because of the whole inheritance thing, the need to protect private property...
...Vaid: I take seriously the responsibility that people have given me the authority and the legitimacy to be a leader...
...I think I am...
...Q: So you feel that punk culture is important politically...
...The friendship circles that two people bring into each others' lives are probably more important than their so-called family...
...I'm so happy she's coming back...
...I'm in a monogamous relationship, so I'm not talking about monogamy/non-monogamy...
...Q: How would a broad-based political movement toim and how would it work.' Vaid: One of the missing links is that there is not a strong progressive movement in the media, or in the streets, or in the political world that is saving...
...It's a clash of Titans when we disagree...
...Most straight women just can't understand lesbians because they don't even understand their own sexual pleasure...
...And Etta James...
...And if sexuality were freed, truly freed, people would find their own comfort level with what they want to be...
...But] never stopped my political work, and I didn't stop being public Q: So you felt at the time that two of your cultures couldn'i mix...
...But it's also very helpful, because it's not about displacing it...
...Our relationships extend the definition of familv...
...Capitalism works brilliantly to divide people from their own self-interest...
...Gayness defines friends as family...
...Vaid: On one level, we have to debunk the myth of gav wealth and expose the truth that when you look at the statistics in a balanced way...
...A lot of people have read it, and 1 love hell hooks's work...
...We have to get up and go to another city to speak and do our work...
...I don't like Green Day...
...The turning point for my father, in my opinion, was when,almost ten years after I came out to them, he acknowledged thai he had difficulty with my lesbianism...
...And I think the icasou thev did was because thev were freaked out bv people of color and women and gay people emerging, and everybody asserting their difference...
...they actually broaden it and holster it beyond bloodlines...
...Vaid: I do...
...THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Urvashi Vaid 'What we need to do is transform the mainstream, not just integrate ourselves into it.' BY ANNE-MARIE CUSAC Urvashi Vaid is one of the lesbian and gay movement's most visible political figuip, Always provocative, she has distinguished herself by insisting that gay people share interests with African Americans, feminists, and blue-collar workers...
...And anyway, for me the process wasn't like, "Oh...
...have made in the gay and lesbian movement is to bring out ho* we are not single-issue people...
...I always paid attention to the news, ever since I was a little kid...
...they'd expected it.% mother was quite unhappy...
...Americans that," with the unstated assumption that "in our country things are better and different...
...and therefore we understand our pleasure more...
...I think that the New Left of the sixties leallv froze when confronted with racism and sexism and homophobia...
...She said she did, and pointed out the homes of several close friends before turning toward the house she shares with her lover of nearly eight years...
...When I turned in mv first dial'l—the publisher of Anchor Books is a wonderful woman named Martha Levin, a strong feminist--she said...
...I think clearly there is a need for that kind of organizing assistance, technical assistance...
...without understanding that within every identitv-based movement there is a radical critique of identity politics that's been going on for years' In the women's movement, m the gav and lesbian movement, in the black civil-rights movement...
...It's been valuable...
...so it was a time of great ferment in America...
...Anyway, that's when we decided to use the first chapter title as the book title...
...I think I earned it...
...I met Urvashi Vaid on a foggy January morning in Province-town...
...It was paralyzed, immobilized, threatened, unwilling, resistant...
...I also get questioned, like, "Do you really mean that...
...I think I'm gay" And I was always po-htical...
...If Jesse Jackson would say, "Hey...
...The hard, daily grind work of organizing for civil rights is being done by people who have a very different understanding of themselves as gay than the gay conservatives do...
...I would like to do progressive work from a multi-racial context...
...On vegetative days we get action and adventure movies...
...And when I tot my parents in 198U...
...By my use of the word "joy" in the last chapter of my book...
...We're two strong-willed babes, you know...
...They're from Boston...
...So that workinc-class and middle-class people will identify with the rich...
...I'm biased because my friend Thalia Zedek is the founder of it...
...And that can be hedonistic, in the sense of pleasure for pleasure's sake...
...We like different music, but we are interested in culture...
...Vaid: Heavenly...
...e want to expedite drugs, so we've got to attack the regulatory system...
...I think I was very affected bv that...
...In the first, gay people appear to have access to government, and some semblance of power and prestige...
...I can't sit there...
...I had a poster of him up in my room when I was a kid...
...We also love movies, all different kinds...
...Q: So, what is your life like with Kate...
...We talk politics all the time...
...And it also has a very community-minded definition uf family...
...And we were hugging and practically crying because it was so remarkable to meet another one...
...But now when I do that, I'm also more likely to make jokes and poke fun at the people I'm listening to, rather than just be consumed by fury at them...
...Q: What do you say lo people like Andrew Sullivan, who dismisses cultural issues altogether, and lakus a very narrow, conservative view of gay rights'* Vaid: Mv approach is to sav that I'm not part of a civil-rights movement: I'm part ot a liberation movement...
...And when I vu down lo write...
...Or it can be moral, in the sense that it's eros, which has a moral dimension...
...Vaid: Well, when I first started to write, the working title was 'We have to change values, change cultural institutions, change economic forces to have a society in which gay people are viewed as equal, normal, healthy, natural human beings.' Margin to Center: The Mainstreamm^ of Car and Lesbian Liberation...
...You know when you're newly out, or newly coming to accept yourself as a gay person, the strident activist tone puts people off...
...But it was very tense, and I withdrew from participation in a lot of family situations for a long time, and I withdrew from Indian events...
...Massachusetts...
...They have everything in there," she said as I squinted a! a hodgepodge of umbrellas, lanterns, stuffed lobsters, kites, and ceramic plates...
...I met at a women's music festival...
...You don't always have to yell at people in order to get them to really hear you...
...They never pulled the big drama thing on me...
...They're just playing...
...I've done that ever since I was a little kid...
...I am so in love with her, I feel like I've found my one true love . . . lucked into it...
...I like Bob Mould, who used to be in Husker Dii, a lot...
...It's not like we get up and go to the office or a factory nearby...
...I have a gay and lesbian family of friends—straight friends, gay friends, their kids—that to me is as important and strong and part of me as my sisters and their kids and brothers-in-law...
...I would read all the underground journals...
...And therefore I think it can redeem heterosexual misery...
...My idol, I have to say, is Patti Smith...
...I met one woman...
...She's really adapted to the punk...
...bv Simone de Beauvoif...
...We really are...
...And in the process of bringing out all these ideas about queerness, you have an impact on gender, you have an impact on family policy...
...She and her writings have been featured in Out/Look, Ms., The Nation, and The Advocate...
...They manipulate it and use the capitalist system to their advantage, but I clon'i believe any of the AIDS activists that I know really believe and have faith in capitalism...
...We don't read the same kinds of things...
...Well...
...Well, there's such instability...
...I remember when she first heard Nico, she was like "Who's this...
...We're always asking ourselves that in our relationships...
...in my case it's organizing...
...Men are free to be butch, and then put on a dress for a weekend if they want, and that doesn't even mean they're transgendered...
...But there's a way that we, by being conscious of sexuality and ourselves as sexual beings because we're gay...
...Liberation politics approaches the whole question of gay and lesbian freedom by saying...
...Vaid: It's a fitting thing to try to understand how I came out...
...The first Indian lesbian I met...
...The way I'm doing my work right now is that I work with community groups all over the country, who contact me and say...
...Store...
...We shouldn't give that up...
...Now there is a really thriving South Asian lesbian, gay...
...She's a prophet...
...Q: When did you decide to become politically active...
...Todd Ciitlin infuriates me...
...I'm like, you pig...
...Coming out is a process of self-acceptance and discovery, and for mc...
...We plav with gender roles, we play with gender rigidity, and we talk a lot about sex...
...Motown is her idea of heaven...
...We work very hard at our work, and our work is national...
...Vaid: Yes, ves, because 1 knew no other lesbian and gay South Asians for the longest time...
...I left my job in December of IW, and by March of 19931 had a sixty-page proposal...
...I think a lot of heterosexual people are miserable...
...Arc you Indian...
...Whereas they would sav...
...You know what a dream job would be for me...
...you sec that the proportion of those people who are the middle-class or rich is the same as in the general population...
...And I won't...
...And women are made miserable by being conditioned to accept what you get, and not go after what you really want...
...and so on...
...It's this force-feeding of family that produces a lot of discomfort and tension within heterosexuality...
...I lis is a perfect title for the argument he's making, that gav people are as normal as heterosexual people...
...my God, I'm gay...
...Her hook was Feminist Theory From Margin to Center...
...We have our little routines...
...More than anything, she is a jazz person, jazz and soul...
...In m\ title, "virtual equality" describes the slale thai we're in...
...At least before / thought I was...
...They're just furious at it and figure, well, we want more research, so we've got to push the drug companies in this way: or...
...And then I had to start thinking about why...
...During our talk, 1 was struck by Vaid's ability to create community out of the small interactions of life...
...If sexuality were freer, heterosexual people would have better relationships, because they would be able to learn and mirror and adopt some of the good things about our lives...
...We question each other and push each other on ideas...
...I could not have written this book without her constant support...
...I loved the old punk bands...
...Urvashi, why don't you become the national field director of the Rainbow Coalition...
...twentvfive years ago, gay and lesbian people were not as strong...
...keep it in our relationships and keep it really fresh...
...Well, I guess some of these bands are so marginal that they deserve to make a living...
...And I also don't think we should give up the sexual wildness in our relationships...
...And then the political work got more gay...
...But there's a way in which Kate is my anchor...
...Q: What are your favorite punk bands...
...I think I was affected by all of those movements and leaders, and SDS...
...women who have a very strong feminist background, and AIDS activists who are really very skeptical of the economic system and the way that it has hindered and affected AIDS research...
...we're rich and we're happv" It's part of the problem with contusion in this countrv among middle-class people about what policies are reallv in their own interests...
...Hal's the community that I felt I belonged in, and who I gravitated la Q: What led you to write Virtual Equality...
...So I really love our time like this...
...Incredible—they have an album called Germ-Free Adolescents...
...Unfortunately, like everything that bubbles up in our country, it gets co-opted and sold back to us...
...There were tons of them, mimeographed ones, and I just loved it...
...One of us works in the house and one in the space that we rent, called "the writing office...
...Q: Is that what you are talking about in your book when you talk about joy'.' Vaid: Yes, I mean pleasure...
...I don't think that will ever happen, because I think some people are heterosexual...
...Vaid: The redemptive potential of gay and lesbian sexuality is that it broadens and opens up gender rigidity...
...I feel very much a part of it, and I love my Indian side...
...I reallv identified as counterculture...
...She was the only out lesbian listed...
...That whole movement is about...
...With her direct gaze and her warm, candid conversational style, she continually strengthens her liaisons with neighbors, new acquaintances, and longtime friends...
...A dangerous strategy, in my opinion, but it's been necessary...
...I was in college, andl just thought, "God...
...I was verv affected bv books that I read, theory books, feminist theory The Dialectic of Sex...
...Number two...
...What do you mean by that...
...Our lives change very drastically according to the season...
...I just made a decision very early on that I was going to be out...
...And when he acknowledged that, his difficulties dissipated...
...how to move beyond the work I was doing at the Task Force because I was feeling ver\ intensely the limitations of being the head of an organization There are institutional constraints, there are political limits-1 was also feeling the limits of single-issue politics, because I'm not a single-issue person...
...She reads fiction, I read nonaction, primarily...
...Do you think you might return to the fray...
...Q: How do you change the culture...
...We'd like you to come and speak at a meeting, a statewide conference, a town meeting, a board...
...I love America, and 1 love American culture...
...And I think we do...
...Like the civil-rights movements that preceded us and on which we model our goals and strategies, we have reached the moment of partial fulfillment," Vaid writes in the opening pages of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation, "The system has adapted to our existence, but it still has not changed in fundamental ways...
...She attended Vassar College, where she came out to herself as a lesbian and a feminist, and she is a graduate of Northeastern University Law School...
...I don't want to lead a national gay and lesbian organization.I want to do multi-issue politics, but all my contacts and connections are in the gay and lesbian movement...
...coming out as a gav person initially took me away from my family and took me away from Indian culture, but it's come lull circle...
...Before there was a real South Asian movement—so that I could talk to people about family pressure, or cultural issues, or laugh about particularly Indian foibles and jokes—I got my support as a woman of color from mv black friends...
...That's a dream job, to be able to build a national progressive movement...
...by ShulamithFiK stone, in particular...
...These local communications, and their capacity to change strangers into allies, are the underpinnings of Vaid's grassroots politics...
...I think the experience of being an immigrant made me more skeptical of the culture I found...
...Most of the shops on Commercial Street were closed, but we stopped to peer through the window of her favorite, the Marine Supply Anne-Marie Cusac is the Associate Editor of The Progressive...
...There arc instead single-issue, balkanized movements, like the gay and lesbian movement, the women's movement, the black civil-rights movement, people-of-color movements, the disability movement, the environmental movement, and the labor movement...
...gayness comes along and redefines family beyond this economic realm of inheritance and blood into this other emotional and commitment and responsibility realm...
...Juliet Mitchell's work, and that kind of second-wave feminist stuff that came out in the early seventies...
...She expressed a lot of anger and frustration and unhappiness and "you've adopted the worst of Western civilization" kinds of attitudes...
...For Vaid, actual equality requires a return to the goal of liberation, of transforming institutions, economic structures, and cultures...
...It's really important to counter the myths that the rightwing puts out with the reality that there are working-class gav men and lesbians: by and huge most ol us are in the same position as the average working heterosexual person...
...They have no idea how hot lesbian sex is because the world is so set up around male sexual desire as being the only hot thing...
...And we support each other completely...
...Ihey're devalued and invalidated, friends as opposed to family...
...They say...
...I think they're all posers...
...And so...
...bisexual movement in this country, and so there is a greater possibility of connecting back to mv culture...
...I'm sorry, but it wasn't the Andrew Sullivans and Bruce Bawvers who were doing the scuttle work in the fillies, sixties, seventies, eighties, and even who are doing it today...
...I live here...
...But we also have similar interests—art, politics, music...
...I think gay relationships are really egalitarian, and they're refreshing in the context of the sexism of the world...
...We thought we were the only ones...
...I relate to punk's angst and its anger and its criticism of the status quo...
...No, you don't really mean that...
...Q: What convinced you of the importance of being out as a lesbian in your daily life...
...I looked at them and I thought, "God, I think those women arc so attractive...
...But in gay and lesbian relationships there is such a premium placed on pleasure, and such a premium placed on, "Are you fulfilled and are you happy...
...Men are just not supposed to be afraid...
...where 1 would dit'tcr w:ih Ciitlin is in saving that the emergence of all these identities was neecssarv You knov...
...She picked me up at the inn where I was staying and drove me through the resort town...
...But I also think that the other influence on me in the last four or five years definitely has been Kate—her impact on my politics and, especially, my ability to laugh...
...because on the one hand I want lo say I feel like I've always known that I was a lesbian...
...And so...
...She really has helped me lighten up...
...I think heterosexual men are made miserable by their cultural conditioning to not express their love of other men, and to not express their softness or their weakness or their fear...
...Vaid: We moved here when I was eight, in 1966...
...She emigrated to the United States in 1966...
...The liberty we have won is incomplete, conditional, and ultimately revocable...
...Vaid: Exactly, totally, because I think heterosexual people are really held back by this enforcement of "your family is your blood"—the property-based meiger of two families, And therefore, you have to start caring about all your in-laws and their inlaws and their cousins...
...They will look to Ross Perot and Sieve Forbes tor leadership when those people have absolutely zero in common with the average working man or woman...
...Vaid: Well, now, I still tend to scream and yell at the news when I hear it...
...Family has always been tied to blood...
...what identity politics has given all of us...
...Well, yes, and there's also a lot more honesty...
...It's not pretty music, although some of it is very melodic and beautiful...
...it is the one in which most of our people live, dominated by fear, permeated by discrimination, violence, and shame...
...And they are sometimes AIDS groups, they are feminist groups, they are student groups, they are South Asian, they are people-of-color groups, gay and lesbian groups...
...Who am I eonna tell...
...Q: How did they respond'' Vaid: They were not terribly surprised...
...I included my lesbian and gay organizing in my applications to law school...
...And, on my part, I understand that dynamic much more now than I did a few years ago, and I'm much more able to . . . not so much change my message, but change the tone or change the delivery so that people can hear it...
...Vaid: Yes, I believe that...
...I resisted that, Loo, even as a kid...
...In very specific ways, lesbians gay men, biscxuals...
...Which was there, but I took myself way too seriously...
...Kids love it...
...it was another turning point that freed die up from a lot of worry, because once they knew, it was like there was nothing anybody could do Lu me about it...
...She's away a lot...
...They don't see how female sexual desire is seething and hot...
...The movement itself has to take a position on economic issues...
...I asked her if she knew the whole town...
...Kate has a hard time hearing the beauty of it...
...And I think that means I have to be involved and be striving to put some messages and some ideas out to people...
...A band called Come...
...And I think one of the contributions...
...It's really discordant music...
...Q: What is it about the culture and the music...
...We've got to deal with the holistic piece of where sexuality fits into the whole human being, where it fits into gentler, and then race, and then class, and then ability, and all of the other things...
...Q: Has your activism changed you...
...There are moral dimensions of pleasure which are about affirming life...
...this is so amazing...
...Vaid was born in India in 1958...
...Unless they totally accept it, and then they're not miserable...
...Her social-service work has included a stint at Gay Community News in Boston, and several years with the National Prison Project at the American Civil Liberties Union...
...It was like...
...1 have a responsibility lo do something about where T live...
...They just can't see it...
...Thev don't undermine it or threaten it...
...We see ourselves as political people and our work as political work—in her case it's cultural political work...
...I don't like Veruca Salt...
...My father was more un-derstanding...
...Gay people, too...
...The straight community has rewarded the lesbian and gay civil-rights movement with "virtual equality," a state of seeming nondiscrimination marked by the coexistence of "two Americas," she argues...
...In 1994, Time magazine named Vaid one of its "Fifty for the Future," a catalog of promising young American leaders...
...I vividly remember the 1968 convention...
...I tilled my tirsi chapter "Virtual Equality" li just came to me the whole notion of a simulated equality, virtual in the sense ol computer-generated simulations ot reality, or approximate equality...
...1 was ten...
...Q: Can you give me specific examples of situations that you would take very differently now as opposed to before Kate...
...Vaid: Punk is a reaction to corporatized rock...
...And a liberation movement believes that the causes or sources of gay and lesbian somatization lie in the social attitudes toward women, in the categorization ot gender, in the whole construction of sexuality as something that is patriarchal and private...
...Bui what vvc haven't been doing in ihe last twentv-tive vears is recognizing that we still have a common vision, a progressive vision of a society in which the economic svstem works for the people, instead ot dividing the people So...
...Vaid: Well...
...Here is whv vour interest is more connected to the worker in Detroit than it is to Steve Forbes in New York City...
...I thought one day I'd love to write theory...
...I think this whole desire on our part to marry, and to mirror heterosexual ways of relating, is about our own devaluation of the relationships we have with each other and how exceptional they are...
...I don't agree with that...
...The more rigid the heterosexual scheme that they are living out, the more miserable I find them to be...
...In the seventies, any feminist was called a lesbian...
...I think people thought 1 was a dyke long betore 1 was...
...And mv argument is that it's as far as li mainstream strategy will get us...
...And if you're not happy, you leave...
...Right now the gav and leshian movement is outspoken for rich gav people, and not lor working-class gav people...
...Also there's always this whole gender-bending that happen* in gay and lesbian relationships...
...People who were gay and lesbian did not have the kind of self-esteem and empowerment and awareness that we do today...
...People are critiquing identity politics even as thev atfirm the value of it...
...So I was doing political work no matter what...
...We are freer than we were in the 1940s and 1960s, but we have failed to realize true equality or win full acceptance as moral human beings...
...I think gayness is about pleasure and pursuing pleasure...
...Q: And it has the potential to define family beyond national boundaries and racial boundaries, too...
...Over (he lasl Iwenlv-live lo thirty years, each of these streams has been defining itself, rinding itself, developing its history, articulating its ideas and visions in relationship to the mainstream...
...Americans this...
...Outsiders might look at that and say...
...Incredible music...
...I always used to challenge the chauvinism of my parents because I identified as bicultural very quickly...
...Q: Time magazine and The Advocate seem to be pushing you to take a national position...
Vol. 60 • March 1996 • No. 3
