Now Is The Time To Lead

America's Gay Leadership Crisis

by Rupert Russell for The Huffington Post:

The leadership struggle for civil equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Americans is in crisis. A glut of organizations, with competing interests and shifting priorities, of professional lobbyists pitted against grassroots activists, splintered over race and religion, jostling for influence whilst shirking responsibility, has created an unprecedented leadership vacuum.


It is this crisis of leadership -- not the conservative movement, the Republican Party or the Mormon Church -- that represents the single greatest threat to LGBTQ rights. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the attempts to overturn Proposition 8 and restore marriage equality to California.

The Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest group, is abstaining from this "state" issue to focus on federal campaigns. A host of groups, lead by Prepare to Prevail, is undermining a 2010 attempt. Equality California, the single organization charged with repealing Prop 8, decided to ignore a ballot of its membership who voted 69 to 24 percent in favor of a 2010 challenge, to put it off until 2012 because that's when the "experts" told them they could win it.

So, the very organizations that so vocally criticized Congressional Democrats and the Obama administration for asking the LBGTQ community to "wait" for the appropriate political moment, have come to embrace the very same principle of "the fierce urgency of whenever," as Andrew Sullivan aptly puts it. Now, it is the Human Rights Campaign and Equality California, and not just the Democrats, who say: cut your checks now and wait a little longer, equality is right around the corner.

And they have been waiting, patiently: 13 years for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, 16 years to end Don't Ask Don't Tell, 22 years to lift the HIV travel and immigration ban, and 233 years to have their relationships recognized by a Republic that declared "all men are created equal."

Maybe the "experts" have a point. Isn't the practical road just the safest route to a principled destination? According to them, we must wait until support for repeal reaches a safe number, around 60%. How is this to be achieved? They say by a coordinated "grass-roots" campaign, "outreach" initiatives to minority communities, and "generational replacement," which is a cruel euphemism for waiting for our opponents to die.

Yet attempting to launch any mass volunteer based movement with the expectation that it will be able shift 10 points in the polls in the absence of an election campaign is perhaps the least practical of any of the options considered. The idea behind their thinking is that little actual campaigning needs to be done because in the long term society will move in a linear progression towards marriage equality by itself. But the long view has a short-term memory, forgetting that was precisely the mindset of activists in the 1970s on the eve of the Reagan-led conservative backlash that set them back decades.

Nor is this the consensus among political professionals: Steve Hildebrand, the deputy campaign manager for Obama's presidential bid, recently declared that "2010 is the right time to courageously win back marriage rights in California -- as strongly as I felt when I decided to devote two years of my life to help Barack Obama run for President despite warnings from the pundits and pollsters that he would never occupy the Oval Office."


America's LGBTQ leaders only want to lead when there is nobody left to be led. This could not be more opposed to the very leader from their own community who has been posthumously awarded this week the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Harvey Milk. Milk was not afraid to risk defeat, and was defeated many, many times. He also understood that each time he went into battle he was one step closer to winning the war, whether he won or lost.

This was not hopeless idealism, but a kind of pragmatism that is entirely missing from our political culture. Let us not forgot that the when the Brigg's Initiative was first placed on the ballot in September 1978, 61 to 31 percent favored the passage of the proposition. Had it passed, it would have fired the homosexual employees of California's public schools, under the slogan of Anita Bryant's "Save our Children." In fewer than three months, the numbers had flipped with 58% voting against the measure. The consultants who say we must wait for 60% approval before committing to a vote should take note of Briggs and Bryant's defeat.

At a time when gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are flourishing in America's public life like never before, those charged with advancing their civil equality have retreated into the closet. In the spirit of Milk, it's time to say: "come out!" not just to your friends and your families, but your own communities who need you now like never before. Now is the time to lead.

Rupert Russell is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at Harvard University

Our Struggle Is Local

Why the Gay Rights Movement Has No National Leader

By Jeremy W. Peters for the NY Times:

Every so often, the American social order is reshuffled. And that upheaval is typically accompanied by a prominent face.


Frederick Douglass became the face of the black abolitionist movement. A century later, Martin Luther King Jr. played that role in the civil rights movement. Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem became the spokeswomen for the modern women’s movement.

Yet the gay rights movement, which is about to enter its fifth decade, has never had a such a leader despite making remarkable strides in a relatively short period of time.

Gay people have no national standard-bearer, no go-to sound-byte machine for the media. So when President Obama last week extended benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees, there was no alpha gay leader to respond with the movement’s official voice, though some activists criticized the president for not going far enough.

Until 1973, homosexuality was classified as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association. Today, same-sex couples can marry in six states. How did a group that has been so successful over the last generation in countering cultural prejudice and winning civil rights make it so far without an obvious leader?

One explanation is that gay and lesbian activists learned early on that they could get along just fine without one. Even in the movement’s earliest days following the violent uprising at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village 40 years ago this week, no singular leader emerged. Some historians believe this is in part because it was — and still is — difficult for the average American to empathize with the struggles of gay people.

“The gay movement has always had a problem of achieving a dignity or a moral imperative that the black civil rights movement had, or the women’s rights movement claimed,” said Dudley Clendinen, who co-wrote the book “Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America” and now teaches writing at Johns Hopkins University. “Because this movement is fundamentally about the right to be sexual, it’s hard for the larger public to see that as a moral issue,” he said.

By contrast, the moral authority that leaders like Dr. King, Ms. Friedan and Ms. Steinem could claim — and the fact that Americans did not look at them and imagine their sex lives — made it easier to build respectability with the public.

Another reason for the absence of a nationally prominent gay leader is the highly local nature of the movement. Unlike the civil rights and the feminist movements, the gay movement lacked a galvanizing national issue.

In the 1950s and 1960s, black activists pushed for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and asserted their rights in the courts in cases like Brown v. Board of Education. Feminists campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.

“Betty and her group wanted to do it from a more top-down approach,” said Daniel Horowitz, a professor of American studies at Smith College who wrote a biography of Ms. Friedan. “You go to Washington and you lobby members of Congress. In fact, she talked explicitly about the N.A.A.C.P. as her model, and the N.A.A.C.P. had achieved its goals primarily through Supreme Court cases.”

Many gay activists pursued a different approach, focusing on issues pertinent to their local communities. Though he has achieved celebrity status of late, Harvey Milk was a mere San Francisco city supervisor, without much in the way of a national profile, when he was assassinated in 1978.

City councils and state legislatures are where domestic partnership laws and legislation extending anti-discrimination protections to gays and lesbians originated. In 1982, Wisconsin became the first state to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. And of the six states that now allow same-sex marriage, three — Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont — legalized the practice through a vote by the state legislature, without prodding by a court.

“The issues of gay rights are mainly state issues, so the focus for activism is going to be on the local level,” said David Eisenbach, a lecturer in history at Columbia University and the author of “Gay Power: An American Revolution.”

The shifting legal and political environment that has confronted the movement over the years has also made it difficult for a singular leader to emerge.

After the Stonewall uprising 40 years ago, the goal was to persuade society to stop treating gays and lesbians like social deviants.

That movement for equality was later overshadowed by efforts to combat AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s. And AIDS itself is a reason leaders were hard to come by. “AIDS wiped out a whole generation,” Mr. Eisenbach said. “What you have is a vacuum. And that still has not been filled.”


As the AIDS crisis was contained, gay activists shifted their focus in the late 1990s and early 2000s to laws about discrimination, hate crimes and domestic partnerships. Successes on those issues were due in large part to gay rights groups that rose up at the local level and learned to work with local lawmakers.

Until 2003, few even contemplated that gay couples would be able to marry. Then Massachusetts’ highest court ruled that gay couples had that right under the state’s Constitution, ushering in a whole new phase of the movement. Activists on the state and local levels were already well in place and found themselves positioned to wage the campaigns for same-sex marriage — as the recent successes in the Northeast have shown.

“They see dispersal as a great thing, that it’s better not to have a concentration or too much attention overinvested in one individual,” said David J. Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who has written about the civil rights and women’s rights movements.“The speed and breadth of change has been just breathtaking,” he added. “But it’s happened without a Martin Luther King.”