It has been nearly 22 month since my last diary and 11 months since my last comment here on DailyKos. The site has gone from nearly a daily read to a place I visit irregularly and infrequently, fallout from the homophobia in the wake of the controversy over Joy Reid's homophobic and transphobic writings and its brushing under the rug with little to no regard to the reaction of many LGBT people. One of my most recent comments (almost exactly a year ago) was tangentially related, a comment on the contrast between the Democratic reaction to Ralph Northam's racist yearbook photos and the reaction to Reid's writings. Despite the lip service paid to LGBT equality within the Democratic community, time and again Democrats, and a fair share of Kossacks, fail to grasp or even recognize their own homophobia or even allow LGBT people to be able to enjoy their moments of historic progress.
I'll say this upfront. Pete Buttigieg is not currently my first choice. In fact months ago before the field began to winnow, while he was assuredly in the mix for my support, he was probably as high as 4th on my list behind Warren, Harris and O'Rourke. But the idea of an openly gay candidate, the aspiration, was enough for me to kick in a few dollars to his campaign to make sure he hit the donor threshold to get into the first debate way back when that was not anywhere close to a given.
I used the word...aspiration. I'll come back to that at the end and hopefully this will make sense.
One theme I frequently hit upon in my diaries and comments is the importance, the necessity actually, for members of a society or movement to have plenipotentiaries representing them...in Congress, the Cabinet room, the legislature, the city council or county commissioners court, the school board, the board room, etc. and that necessity extends beyond the tokenism that shouts back "We have a [woman/black/Hispanic/transgendered person/Asian/Jew/gay] already! Isn't that enough? How much 'diversity' do need?" That is the battle cry of the last throes of our increasingly former male supremacist, Christian supremacist, white supremacist, cisgendered and heterosexual supremacist society. But now and again some vestigial part of that former society rears its ugly head, even among Democrats.
Recently I had a discussion with someone about legacy of JFK. They were floored I wasn't as effusive as they were about his impact on Civil Rights. It is an aspect of the Civil Rights Movement that gets glossed over by JFK's post-assassination apotheosis, but Kennedy was not the leader most people remember him to be on the subject. He talked the talk, but when it came to walking the walk, he lagged poorly behind because he was more concerned with placating the white southern Democrats he needed for his reelection. He and his Attorney General brother had to figuratively have some sense knocked into them by the most unlikely of people. In May of 1963, RFK invited James Baldwin to gather a group of African American cultural leaders to join him at the Kennedys' New York City apartment for an off the record meeting on race relations in America. With a list of attendees like the great Harry Belafonte, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, musician Lena Horne and the novelist/playwright Baldwin himself, the person who made the most impact, who ultimately sparked RFK's Damascene enlightenment as to the extent of his unintentional racism and white supremacist tendencies in handling the Civil Rights movement was a young member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) who had a pronounced stutter and who only happened to be in NYC because he was getting treatment from doctors for his most recent beating as a Freedom Rider. RFK was expecting the black leaders to be effusive with praise for him and his brother. Instead, the meeting devolved into this young man, Jerome Smith providing first person testimony to the Attorney General as to what it is like to be a young aspiring African-American man in America, or as Michael Eric Dyson put it in the title of his wonderful little book about the meeting, Smith gave Kennedy What Truth Sounds Like. I recommended the book to the friend, hoping to show them their white perspective of the period may not fully encompass the perspective of all the relevant parties to the Civil Rights Movement, particularly those whose rights were being denied. As an LGBT person, I know the perspective of the fight looking up from the depths minorities are pushed down to is quite different from the perspective often held by those in the benevolent majority who assert their friendship with the minorities' cause, but nonetheless look down upon those they claim as their equals.
Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark & Dr. Kenneth Clark
When I got home, I too picked the book back up off my bookshelf and gave portions of it another read as a refresher. I bring it up because that event of three weeks ago reminded me one of the other African-American luminaries in the room that day was the psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark, whose landmark study on the self-esteem and self-awareness of black children as to their race and society's imbibing that race with inferiority was crucial to convincing the Supreme Court of the United States to signal the end of racially segregated schools in the landmark Brown v Board of Education case. In one of the experiments Clark and his wife/research colleague Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark conducted, black children from segregated schools and integrated schools were presented dolls identical in every respect except one was white with blonde hair and the other brown skinned with black hair. The children were asked questions such as "which one is the nice doll?", "which is the bad doll?", "which doll do you want to play with?". The experiment showed a marked difference in the children between the segregated and integrated schools, that the black children in segregated schools had self hatred for their race, internalizing the racism society was enforcing upon them.
I would like you, dear reader, to now consider the perspective of the child coming to the realization that they are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered. Consider how society has enforced and is enforcing homophobia, the self hatred that LGBT people sometimes feel, that internalization of self hate. It is something that has driven uncountably many to suicide or to descend into the despair of drugs, alcoholism, prostitution and homelessness. Every single LGBT person on this site can likely give testimony of the emotional depths in their own past from this resultant homophobia. Last year, Pete Buttigieg even addressed his own confrontation with this self hatred. “If you could have offered me a pill that could make me straight, I would have swallowed it before you could give me a swig of water. It’s a hard thing to think about now. If you had shown me exactly what it was that made me gay, I would have cut it out with a knife. [...] Thank God there was no pill. Thank God there was no knife.”
Many of the LGBT people here have lived through the assassination of Harvey Milk, survived the ravaged of the AIDS epidemic in the 80's, hunkered down during the rise and reign of the "Moral Majority," held out when the lies of Paul Cameron, D. James Kennedy and their ilk were accepted by many as truth, persevered through the Democratic betrayals of the 90's with DADT and DOMA, pulled through through the dark days of the Bush administration and the Federal Marriage Amendment. We're still here. We're still queer and by golly, some of you are finally getting used to it. But it has left many of us emotionally scarred...probably for life. Because it has been hard to imagine things getting better. It has been hard to imagine achieving the equality, the normalcy and the peace we want and need.
Which brings us to the Pete Buttigieg win (or near win or tie or draw or whatever we call the product of this Iowan mishigas). In the scheme of the life of the LGBT people of the age who frequent this community, what happened in Iowa is roughly the equivalent of this...
And if you don't know what that is, that is the Rev. Jesse Jackson, crying, when the polls closed on the west coast election night 2008 and Barack Obama was declared the winner, the President-Elect, of the United States. The culmination of hopes and dreams of generations of African-Americans. An emotional catharsis. Another analog would be the reaction of women, the tears of joy, the night Hillary Clinton was nominated as the Democrat's Presidential candidate in 2016.
For many of us in the LGBT community, what Pete Buttigieg did the other night was the functional equivalent for us. I seriously doubt many of us have ever dared to dream of seeing the day we have a LGBT President. It is an aspiration we could not hope to have in a time we were fighting for our mere survival. And coming out of that hope for surviving, we merely hoped to be able to live our lives without discrimination with legal protection for our unions with the person we love, an aspiration that still has yet to be achieved as it is still legal to discriminate against LGBT people in employment, housing, public accommodations, credit, education, etc. in about half this country. Even in the most recent Democratic Presidential administration, we were apparently punching too high to aspire to having an openly LGBT cabinet secretary. Pftt! The "most inclusive" administration in American history still barely registered any LGBT people in positions of power, influence and policy shaping relative to the size of our community. We were still denied a seat at the table. We were barely allowed to stand in the corner of the room. Speaking out or speaking up got us sent back into the closet.
What happened the other night, though anti-climatic in its confusion and vagueness, was something most of us in the LGBT never dared aspired to see. And yet still it happened. An openly gay man has stepped out onto the stage of American politics, competing for the highest office in the land and in the opening contest for his party's nomination, has bested at the very least a former Vice President of the United States and two, if not three, veteran United States Senators. He delivered as victorious a victory speech as the circumstances permitted, taking a long step forward, showing us, yes, a LGBT person could someday become President. And as he stepped off the stage, he did so in the loving embrace of his same-sex spouse. Even for those LGBT people who do not support him as their pick in this nomination process, people such as myself, it is an emotional zenith. But more importantly, this isn't just for those of us who have survived the turmoil of the last decades... This is for the young people, the children who don't yet even know they are LGBT, to be able to see a LGBT person reaching those heights, to see that there is nothing wrong with being LGBT, to see that being LGBT is not and should not be a hinderance to any dream or aspiration they have for the future.
Buttigieg made note of that the next day in New Hampshire shortly after the first set of results were released. “It validates for a kid somewhere in a community wondering if he belongs or she belongs or they belong in their own family. That if you believe in yourself and your country, there is a lot backing up that belief."
For that, he was met with comments such as "peak white male privilege" and other derisive comments that totally missed the significance of what had just happened for LGBT people, old and young. Even a diary here had to be invaded with comments that tried to varnish over the significance and importance of the moment. So I ask all of you, even though you may not support Buttigieg, please don't belittle or diminish this important milestone. I know it might not be an important one to you, but it is to many of us in the LGBT community. Stop for a moment and consider how that sort of denigration looks to LGBT people and what message it sends to vulnerable LGBT youth. I know it may not be intentional and may be mild, but it is a form of homophobia nonetheless and we can do without it please.
