Assimilation Does Not Lead to Victory

These days in America, gay men and women enjoy a visibility unequaled by any other time in our short history. We host talk shows and make movies. We have our own TV and radio channels. Our fundamental rights have become swing issues in the biggest presidential campaigns of our generation. We were heralded in the acceptance speech of the new president-elect. We come out in never-before-seen numbers, so that everyone has a gay cousin or classmate or best friend. Thanks to our newfound ubiquity, we now have full civil rights including marriage, employment protection and increased protection from hate crimes.

Oops, my mistake. We don't have any of that. If gay causes are supposedly the next wave of civil rights battles, if being gay is supposedly so acceptable in progressive society, where are the results? The truth is that no one is looking out for us. For as long as I've been out I've operated under the theory that that being a proud, vocal "that gay guy" in a group of straight friends would humanize our cause and lead to first class citizenship. This might be the case in 20 or 30 years, but gay rights should not be a slow drip of water eating away at the rock of establishment. In the name of building allies, it's important that we don't lose site of our own queer identities.

Stephanie's World War Gay post makes the case that it is time to stand up and be counted (or at least stand up and stop being marginalized) among straight society. This is true, but I often feel that we're doing this the wrong way. The solution to full rights, and eventual acceptance, is to get the world to accept us as we are. Not as whitewashed, sexless caricatures. We have to be unapologetic about every aspect of our gay lives and make it absolutely clear that these qualities must be tolerated.

I often get scared that the gay people with the most access to straights are often the ones who are most likely to conform to some ideal of what a straight person can handle. So we rarely talk about our sex life, or our anger, or the actual things that make us imperfect like everybody else. Instead we are forced to represent every gay person, and in doing so we give up ourselves. If straight people see us as ashamed and repressed, how will they see the real us as deserving of their support?

I think the best way to actually be accepted for who we are, not for who people wish we were, is to fully embrace our gay identities. This does not mean a certain style of music or way of dressing. Rather, I believe people should try to function as fully within gay culture (whatever that may be) as they do outside of it. We can no longer afford to claim that being gay is just a part of who we are, or that sexuality shouldn't matter. Being gay is everything. There is a middle path between ghettoization and assimilation. If we want full rights, we'll have to tread it.

I was not alive in the '70s, but as I understand it gay culture operated in a vacuum. People either lived in it completely or put on their hetero suit for the day before rejoining it at the nightclubs, house parties or bath houses that served their purposes. AIDS then galvanized us and we were angry. Larry Kramer and others ensured that we were sincerely, unapologetically gay and that we were not ignored. Then somehow after the ACTUP movements of the 90s, gay ire fell out of fashion. Will and Grace happened. Ellen came out. Suddenly everyone had a friendly gay face in their living room, right there on their TV. They thought we were happy. The disenfranchisement and rage that we have every right to feel became an anomaly. The activists merely became upstarts — Nuisances to those that already had all their needs met.

These days, the days I am actually qualified to talk about, I feel that people treat gay culture as either a way-station or some sort of home for wounded birds: when you first come out you take succor from gay culture, and use it to build a group of friends or lovers or simply just to feel accepted. And then once people have gotten all they need, they fly the coop for the greener pastures of assimilation. They've been greenlighted to function in greater society and they turn their back on what made them. People return from time to time when they feel unaccepted or when they're looking for ass, but otherwise they're quick to say that being gay doesn't define everything about them.

Newsflash: It does. It might not define what kind of alcohol you drink or what kind of haircut you have. But it does define how you are treated and what kind of rights you are granted. It defines whether or not you can get married. It defines why you get beaten up on the street for expressing who you are.

Does any straight person apologize for only reading books with straight main characters? Or for only seeing "straight" movies? Have you ever heard a straight person brag that the bars they go to are usually predominantly gay? Is there such a thing as the straight ghetto?

The answer to all those questions is no. So why do so many of us take pride in belonging more to the straight world than to our own? I am not saying that everything has to be political or cause-oriented: Next Thursday's "Apolitical Woman's Party" shows that. Nor should life be one endless homo party. I think we need to to take our gay culture, for good or for bad, and show straight people that its real and its thriving. Show them that they need to accept it as it is.

I once said that the only thing that all gay people inherently had in common was having sex with members of the same sex. I spoke to soon, because I left out our other universal commonality: We all share a history of oppression. We all need to embrace this history, to reconcile the party and the search for assimilation that defines so much of gay life, and be a people. A collection of individuals has little power to change society. A pissed-off, unified culture? Now that can get something done.