My musing on how a conversation between Obama and Rahm Emanuel might have gone.
Imagine the following conversation as a hypothetical about he recent full-throated defense of DOMA by Obama's Justice Department. This is a speculation only.
POTUS: so what’s with this DOMA thing we gotta file? What did Eric say?
The Rahm: Well the queers aren’t going anywhere, cannot fight their way out of a piss-soaked paper bag. Meanwhile we want to get this healthcare thing done and we need southern votes.
POTUS: so what did Holder tell you?
The Rahm: He’s got a Mormon hard-on holdover from #43, writing the damn thing like Fred Phelps would.
POTUS: Fred Ph-
The Rahm: Sorry, lunatic fucking gasbag who hates the queers and protests military funerals because we aren’t anti-queer enough.
POTUS: I don’t need gay trouble, Rahm. I don’t need any trouble.
The Rahm: Mr. President, I refer you to my prior comment about the queeritariat not being able to fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag. Losing candidates for central committee in my part of Chicago are a lot smarter than the ahem machers in fucking Queers ‘R’ Us. They cannot win in the state that gave us San Francisco AND West Hollywood, they don’t know how to talk to Black people.
POTUS: A problem I DON’T have. Fuck’em, is that how you pronounce it, Rahm?
The Rahm: Hahaha! That's "FUCK'm." We will work on your pronounciation of “shmendrik” another time, Mr. President.
Now I make a jest here, but only about "shmendrik" - I am quite sure that the President knows how to pronounce that untranslatable Yiddish word and many others; he graduated from Columbia undergrad, after all, not from BYU.
The point is that Gay Inc.'s massive, persistent weakness, its political timidity, its lack of self-respect, actually reinforce the idea that gays are weak and can safely be ignored. It's sort of the Roy Cohn thesis of homosexual identity out of Angels in America, writ large - that a man who has power and sleeps with men (and by analogy a woman who sleeps with women) by definition CANNOT be a "homosexual," because to be a "homosexual" means not to have power, to have NO CLOUT, to be ineffectual. Now I don't believe this thesis but apparently much of Gay Rights Inc., does, by its persisent incompetence.
Where the hell are GLTB spokesmen and spokeswomen in the national media? No, Dan Fucking Savage's occasional appearances on CNN - while great - are non-responsive to this inquiry. You are out and you are proud? Maybe you are individually but as a group, the GLBT movement is shockingly hidden under a bushel basket, if not a landfill.
Yeah, it's great that more celebrities are out, that more of Gen Y is enlightened. But do gay activists expect to win this by default? Did they expect the LDS church to be poorly organized? The LDS Church is one of the strongest centrally-organized religious organizations in the history of the universe; the Roman Catholic Church has nothing on it. Practically every cent of every local ward's budget goes through Salt Lake City; there is almost nothing in the way of "subsidiarity" as known in the Catholic Church, where local funds fund local projects primarily. Ever wonder why you don't hear about fundraisers for the local Mormon church the way you do for a Catholic parish? That's why.
In a few instances, some LDS wards (not many, but some) even pressured faithful Mormons seeking their "temple recommend" - the card that lets you into the temples to perform sacred ordinances - about Prop 8 support, seeking donations and a yard sign for the movement. It's clear that the LDS church and LDS church members donated big resources to Prop 8, and they are about 2% of the population, many with below-average per capita incomes with large families, so that it's fewer adult donors proportionately than the U.S. public at large donating off of smaller disposable income bases - especially after the 10% tithe.
And where were the 5-10% of America that's gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgendered, with (I think it's fair to say) smaller average family sizes than the average Mormon family, and probably more disposable income, and probably a tithe to their house of worship of lower than 10% in many cases? (2% seems more like it among the staunchly pro-gay Unitarian Universalist churches whose "beg" literature I have read.) And those supportive among their siblings and friends and parents and parishioners/worshippers in liberal houses of worship? The LDS church slew Goliath; in their minds, we who are pro-gay rights are the Goliath that needed killing on Prop 8.
But they had to have been encouraged by the militant stupidity by No on 8. Did No on 8 recognize the threat? I did, and I am a straight father of two in Maryland who has to spend his time on issues other than gay marriage, such as ending his own fucking straight marriage and caring for two autistic toddlers. Did No on Prop 8 make a single intelligent move towards Black voters in California, who came out over 2-1 against (hint: one ad with Samuel L. Jackson, while pretty good, didn't come close to cutting it.) I kind of got the idea that the peacetime consiglieri at Gay Rights Inc. fought this as a private discussion among white-collar white people, rather than as a 58-county and really 50-state street fight. They should have predicted that Black voters were going to show up on principle and pride for Obama and, if ignored by intra-class "white" marketing style and targeting, would sink No on Prop 8. It was as if the appearance of a train arriving on schedule at the announced platform surprised them. Stupid.
The problem isn't that one battle got lost, but rather that the willingness to win seems gone. Why should I - a straight guy - be more fired up about this civil rights issue than millions of gay and lesbian Americans who patently do not and did not give a FUCK about Prop 8 or gay marriage?
For a year I lived and worked in Washington DC (have since returned to suburban Baltimore.) My work was just south of Dupont Circle, and I lived at Fort Totten Station. Now that's too far to walk, but I would occasionally walk up Connecticut Avenue through the heart of DC's gay village, sometimes up 17th Street past bars and restaurants to U Street. I would frequent Busboys and Poets - a great pro-gay, multi-ethnic, super-progressive restaurant, bar and bookstore. Everyone was excited about Obama, of course - as was I. But no one even thought about Prop 8, it seemed. Ditto the gay press. And this in the universe's most political city. No signage, no fundraisers advertised, nothing.
What if No on Prop 8 had offered, for a $50.00 donation, a medallion that a bartender could see at a gay or lesbian, or progressive straight or mixed venue, for cheaper drinks? Even if local liquor laws barred that sort of thing, you can certainly have the bouncer politely encourage patrons to go earn a medallion down the hall, or have the barkeep serve medallion holders first on a crowded Friday night? It could have worked at every venue from Busboys and Poets to the Eagle leather bar on New York Avenue, and in every city in the country. Maybe they just didn't have enough beer drinkers on the national committee. But the partying continued, while the deserts of Utah showed a little more organizational discipline and now have a more real place at the table politically among the theocratic right.
They slew Goliath while Goliath was tipsy and partying. We needed Harvey Milk, we needed Bayard Rustin; sadly, it appears, we came closer to getting Jack from Will & Grace. They had archbishops, stake presidents, prophets and the poor righteous of the Utah deserts and suburbs and from all 50 states; we had - what? We needed Oprah but could barely get Ellen DeGeneres onboard.
There are going to be some people in this community who will be pissed at me for being this blunt, this impolite. On the other hand, maybe this diary will piss off a GLBT reader into thinking that straight allies are not reliable and that no substitute exists for community self-reliance. Instead of being pissed off at me, she or he will look at herself or himself as the next dynamic leader to move their civil rights movement forward. Maybe she or he will recall the words of Bayard Rustin's close friend A. Philip Randolph, the socialist, atheist African-American union organizer who wrote (among many other wise things):
At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can't take anything, you won't get anything, and if you can't hold anything, you won't keep anything. And you can't take anything without organization.
As for me, from now on I will not be speaking about the gay rights' movement in the first person plural. I don't have time to be, as one reader urged previously, the "nice" liberal discussed in Dr. King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. If millions of gay and lesbian Americans don't give a shit about gay marriage enough to step up and fight, why should this straight guy take time away from caring for his autistic sons and from his clients to do so?
UPDATE: I regard this as a good move by Aravosis, who deserves some support. More like this, and less like Prop 8's fiasco. If I see a lot more like this I will change my mind.