Gay Rights Beyond California

by John Corvino at 365Gay:

I received a lot of responses to my last column, mostly from people who hated it.

At the time I wrote it, I had two half-baked column ideas and multiple deadlines pressing. In principle I would still defend either:

Column-idea one was a lighthearted look at a march I had participated in. I reserve the right to poke fun at the community of which I’ve been an active part for two decades—especially now, when a sense of humor is needed to carry us through the fight ahead.

Column-idea two was about how, while people were looking at California and getting outraged about Prop. 8, they should look at the rest of the country (and the world) and get even more outraged. It was also a critique of some of the coasto-centrism of the gay-rights movement (more on that in a moment).

Unfortunately, the hasty combination of the two ideas resulted in a clumsy piece that struck many as saying, “California’s not so bad, let’s have a drink.” That was not my intention, and I’m sorry if the column suggested it.

California is important for precisely the reasons I stated in that column: “it’s an egregious injustice to have minority rights taken away by a majority vote” and “California progress (or lack thereof) has a profound effect on the rest of the nation.”

I wouldn’t have marched—or have dedicated six of my last eight columns to Prop. 8-related issues—if I thought otherwise.

And I do know something about injustice. I’ve been physically attacked for being gay—in New York, where I grew up, when I was 21. I’ve been harassed by a Texas State Trooper for kissing another man—and filed a successful complaint against him. Voters in my current home state revoked the domestic-partner benefits offered by my employer—just one of many examples of how California is NOT the first place where straight voters have taken away gay people’s rights.

Rhetorically, however, it is virtually impossible to say, “This is bad, BUT…” without people doubting your commitment to “This is bad.” So let me repeat: what happened in California is bad—very bad. Period. End of thought. New topic.

For several years I’ve noticed a kind of myopia from certain elements of the GLBT community—especially on the coasts. “We’ve won this war, John—gayness is a largely a non-issue. Sure, there are some stragglers in the South and the Midwest, but they’ll catch up soon enough. In the meantime, trying to engage them just dignifies their bigotry. It’s time for you to accept that we’re living in a post-gay society.”

Prop. 8 stung so much, in part, because it proves that we are not there yet.

So do Florida, and Arizona, and Arkansas, and over two dozen other states with amendments as bad as, or worse than, California’s. Only Massachusetts and Connecticut have marriage equality, and even there our marriages lack federal recognition.

Yet somehow, despite this vast land of inequality, we’ve supposedly “won the war” and are living in a “post-gay society.”

Except that we’re not. And so when the marches are over—the placards dismantled, the cute t-shirts washed, folded, and put away—there’s work to be done. Those of us in the “flyover states” can help.

We can help, as we did, with our donations. But more important, we can help with our insight.

You see, we understand very well that we’re not there yet. Most of us live and work among people for whom gayness is still very much an issue. We know how to talk to those people, because we do it daily.

That could have been useful in California. Amid the Monday-morning quarterbacking about the “No on 8” campaign, two themes stand out. One, which I’ve stressed before, is the failure to tell our stories. The other is complacency, and in particular, the failure to engage skeptical voters.

One of the more interesting intramural criticisms I’ve received—not just of my last column, but of my work generally—is that I’m an “apologist.” Critics toss the term as if it were an insult. But an apologist is precisely what I aim to be.

An apologist, in the traditional sense of the term, is not someone who says “I’m sorry”—something you’ll never find me doing with respect to gayness.

An apologist is someone who explains things to a skeptical audience. An apology (apologia), in this sense, is not a retraction, but a vigorous defense.

That’s something I’ve been doing for nearly two decades, and something I intend to keep doing. Because—as Prop. 8 harshly reminds us—even in California we are not there yet.

John Corvino, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, and philosophy professor at Wayne State University in Detroit.

For more about John Corvino, or to see clips from his “What’s Morally Wrong with Homosexuality?” DVD, visit www.johncorvino.com.