Subscribe to Breaking NewsDaigle: An American Question
So all porn is essentially gay (yeah, not only are we responsible for Titan men [further digression, not that it's such a bad thing, you know], but we’re also apparently responsible for midget porn and “Girls Gone Wild” and unattractive heterosexual couples making mediocre amateur porn on XTube).
I know that’s a bit much for a Wednesday. Sorry. At least I waited until after lunch.
And Carrie Prejean won’t go away. God keeps telling her to give press conferences. (Seriously, shouldn’t He be more invested in other things, like poverty and war and famine? Not Carrie Prejean. How did she get his direct line? Or is someone just messing with her, faking a booming voice over their cell phone and having major laughs with a bitchy friend at a Starbucks in Orange County?) She and Maggie Gallagher still keep popping up unexpectedly during my daily blog reads, Gallagher in that purple suit, looking up at an apparently very tall cameraman, standing in front of a bush that needs pruning, do you think she grew that herself or is that the handiwork of a gardener or a neighbor?
And there never seems to be an end to the rambling discursive rant of opposition to everything Gay (not little-g gay but big-G Gay, they’re different), because Gay things are powerful things, hulking agents of destruction, Gay things and Gay people and Gay marriages are apparently the weapons of mass destruction Bush failed to find in Iraq, because the Gay can not only steal children from heterosexual lives but it can bring down the whole of Western civilization, toppling Wal-Marts across the Midwest with a withering glance and ending “Everybody Loves Raymond” reruns forever.
A quote, if I may.
“The only politics than can survive an encounter with this world, and still speak convincingly of freedom and justice and democracy, is a politics that encompass both the harmonies and the dissonance.”
That’s Tony Kushner, from an essay called “American Things,” from his book of essays, Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness.
We’re quite used to the dissonance, aren’t we?
We spend a lot of our time thinking about the longstanding problems of that dissonance; we feel the repercussions of it every day. The public discourse (not discourse, really. Argument. The public argument, because it’s not talking dispassionately about ideas, it’s yelling, shrieking, tantrums and torrents, emotion, not reason, theatrics, not ethics) about our rights has become about how different we are – our relationships, our families, our beliefs, our belief systems, our proclivities, our perversions (we have them, fess up!, everyone does, no need to pretend we don’t), our identities, our lives.
They argue that our difference justifies our inequity. We argue that our difference shouldn’t matter.
(Or we argue that our differences make us who we are and we should celebrate them, glorify them, writhe in them naked in the middle of the street, and while I respect diversity of opinion, that option makes me little uncomfortable, I am a small town boy, after all, and I was taught not let your difference go wagging out in everyone’s faces).
This moment we’re living in is an interesting moment. It feels like a moment of great change, a moment where a skin is shed and a new one takes its place, where an old order falls and a new one forms, where old ideas make way for new ones, and if there was ever a time for our community to embrace change within itself, it seems like now is as good a moment as any.
We’ve spent the first forty years of our public struggle working to carve a space in the world for our difference to exist. Now, it seems we need to carve a space in the world for that difference to become irrelevant.
All the things we’re fighting for – marriage equality, employment non-discrimination, the end of DADT, hate crimes legislation, and the rest – all hinges upon a single, elegant notion: our difference does not outrank our role as citizen of this country, and our laws should reflect that commonality, not the difference.
American-ness trumps gayness.
Just as American-ness trumped blackness, woman-ness, Christian-ness, and whatever -ness you can think of that we’ve labeled a protected class. What links us is more important than what divides us.
The harmonies are more important than the dissonances.
As a community, we’ve done a pretty good job of finding a way for the harmonies and dissonances to coexist, and in the mingling (the sometimes painful, bruising mingling) many of us have built lives that are essentially different, yet oddly the same as everyone else. We’re living the politics we need to shout in the streets.
The question of gay rights isn’t a minority question. It’s an American question.
You’re right about this time of change. The truth is that the wingnuts know they’ve lost. They know that 40 years from now, small-town America won’t take issue with gays getting married. It’ll just be another wedding, that’s all. There’ll be trashy gay couples in trailer parks, broke gays trying to scrape up money to avoid eviction, prosperous gays using their wealth and influence for philanthropic interests. Gays leading churches. Gay school principals who tolerate neither gay-bashing nor gay as an excuse for poor performance or behavior. Gay Olympic athletes, gay football players, gay news anchors, gay Senators, gay people being themselves.
I may be wrong, and my perspective is kinda skewed from living in an extremely racist city (racist in almost every direction, not just stereotypical white-hates-black), but I like it when I turn on the TV and see a Walmart commercial with an interracial couple. I hate Walmart and will do without before I cross its threshold, but I like the fact that even Walmart sees value in American diversity. No way in hell would they have dared make that ad 25 years ago. Back then, you’d have to look to Benetton to be that progressive. 15 years ago it’d be Ikea. There is progress on racial stuff, as there has been on women taking their rightful place. We gays will follow suit and it’ll be a normal, natural thing. It won’t all happen at once, and truth is that gay white men will probably have an easier time than gay black men, or any gay women. But still we’ll be woven into our culture. I think that’s all we really want–to be part of the whole while still being ourselves. The same rights, the same responsibilities, the same access as anybody else. As that happens, the gay ghettoes will wane and maybe even disappear. (This has already started in Toronto, where the gay village has become all but irrelevant in daily life–the major battles have been fought and won.)
I really enjoyed reading your piece because I feel as though you make a very strong point about what we really are fighting for.
I think that there are many misconceptions as to what our fight is about. What we really need to do, like you have suggested, is make our differences irrelevant. By doing that, then generations yet to come will be able to grow up not thinking that being gay is being different and will know that being gay can just be another aspect of life.
Cody, your writing is so different, so interesting to read and so, on the point.
I have always found that being Gay in America was a constant quest for anonimity (at least for me). Anonimity meant I wouldnt stand out and be identified as Gay. it was an important part of my survival strategy in order to progress in my career. Then when I retired from the workplace, tht didnt matter anymore and I became actively involved in prmoting civil rights for Gay Americans, especially Federal civil rights. But your article reminded me that what we really seek is to one day, blend in and be harmonious with society around us or as you say to be irrelevant.
i would love to think that my life as a Gay American is irrelevant to the rest of society. I dont want to be seperate but equal I want to be irrelevant (and equal).
Cody, I like the end of your piece the best. “the harmonies are more important than the dissonances”. Right on.
Why is it that I can accept straight people, fat people, ugly people, hot people, religious people (bit of a struggle but yes accept) and even ignorant people.
I even accept people that put vinyl siding on their homes.
why is it that none of these people threaten me, but we are seen as threatening to so many people.
I’ll be honest: I do not tolerate religious people because they fund the hate machine. I know, there are “good” churches out there……but I really don’t tolerate the fact that people go to church, put money in the plate that is used to buy hate-ads and say they have gay friends and disagree with their church leadership.
But I digress….absent that ignorant funding of hate, I would tolerate everyone. I might complain (privately of course) about certain groups, like the dirt bikers that ruin the trails in our state forest, but as humans I still accept them and want them to have the same rights I do.
I just won’t understand why one group of society thinks it is ok to single us out for discrimination. It leads seemingly good people to go along because of the fear tactics used and it shows a level of insecurity that rises to the absurd.
Maybe it’s genetic. I believe I’m wired to accept the diverse world, maybe they are not.
I doubt it, though. More likely has something to do with parents and preachers, unfortunately.
Keep up the good work, you are making some good points on here.
I agree with everything you have stated here. I sometimes feel that people expect me to preface my nationality with “A Black Gay”…it’s ridiculous. Pride doesn’t have to display itself in a feather boa naked in the street. It comes from within. When our community can accept that pride and use it the right way, our voice will be unstoppable.