The Gay Metropolis (61 page)

On the other hand, despite the outcome, Stoddard felt that the heated public debate had been good for the movement. He called it “the first national teach-in on gay rights. So I have no regrets about having participated in that.”

Many gay activists would never forgive the new president for the new policy that kept thousands of servicemen locked in their closets—and seemed to do nothing to lessen the military's appetite for periodic witchhunts of lesbian and gay soldiers, sailors and airmen.

But the controversy did have one significant benefit for the movement. Even the most vociferous opponents of gays in the military had acknowledged—either explicitly or implicitly—that lesbians and gays were entitled to serve in all other professions. The most persistent argument against allowing gays to serve in the armed forces centered on the horrifying prospect of openly gay and straight men showering together.

To gay activists, the 1993 battle was almost identical to President Harry Truman's fight to integrate black and white battalions after World War II. The main argument made by Pentagon generals against racial integration in the forties was the same one they made against sexual integration in the nineties: the idea that if blacks and whites—or gays and straights—served together it would “weaken unit cohesion.” Although Stoddard succeeded in getting both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights to endorse the lifting of a ban on gay soldiers, sadly the position of Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell was much more important politically.
Powell asserted that “skin color is a benign, nonbehavioral characteristic,” while sexual orientation is perhaps “the most profound of human behaviorial characteristics.” The general strongly opposed permitting gay soldiers to serve openly—even though the Pentagon already prohibited all discrimination against its
civilian
employees based on their sexual orientation. As Chris Bull and John Gallagher, the authors of
Perfect Enemies,
put it, Powell, a black man already being treated by the press as a potential president, was able to “inoculate the pro-ban forces from charges of prejudice.”

Despite the failure of the gay movement to change the military's practices, the debate produced some extremely unlikely converts to its cause. Even Abe Rosenthal, who had done so much to make his own gay employees uncomfortable when he was executive editor of the
Times,
took General Powell to task for his opposition to a change in policy. “The military may have greater need for discipline than civilian groups,” Rosenthal wrote on the op-ed page six days after President Clinton's inauguration, “but its executives also have a lot more clout.

“So I have an answer for a question General Powell raised last month at American University—what can he tell a heterosexual youngster who comes in and says that in his private accommodations he prefers to have heterosexuals around him, not gays?

“General, I would ask him if he had been molested. If not, I would tell him exactly what an Army colonel commanding the R.O.T.C. wartime unit at City College suggested to me when I asked him some uppity question for the campus paper.

“‘Boy,' he said, ‘get the hell out of my office.'”

Three months later,
The National Review,
the bible of the Republican right for many decades, put the debate on its cover. Although it did not explicitly endorse a change in national policy, the magazine ran an article that included some startling conclusions for a conservative journal. “The truth is that without making a big deal about it most commanders tolerate homosexuals in the ranks,” wrote A. J. Bacevich, a visiting fellow at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Having

conformed to virtually every expression of cultural orthodoxy, the admirals and generals now argue that the military must preserve itself from contamination by “unmilitary influences.” The argument will not wash. Having embraced the American experiment, the military cannot now on the specific issue of gays opt out of what that experiment has come to
signify—with regard to individuals, unfettered equality of opportunity; and with regard to sex, a permissiveness that approaches the absolute. Like it or not, an
American
military cannot arbitrarily exempt itself from either the first or the second.

So the generals and the admirals will lose on the issue of gays. Although some will find the adjustment painful, those in the ranks will quickly adapt themselves to the new order of things—which will prove soon enough to be all but indistinguishable from the previous order.

OUTSIDE OF THE MILITARY
, Bill Clinton completed the decades-long process of prohibiting discrimination against gay people in every other federal agency. He also appointed nearly a hundred open lesbians and gay men to his administration, including Roberta Achtenberg, who became an assistant secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Despite Jesse Helms's attacks on her as a “damn lesbian,” she was easily confirmed by the Senate by a vote of fifty-eight to thirty-one.

Frank Kameny, who had started the assault on federal discrimination against gays with a lawsuit back in the 1950s, was generally pleased with Clinton's record at the end of 1995. “I think he's gotten an enormous amount of criticism on the military issue,” said Kameny. “But I think in the last analysis that's more a criticism for political ineptitude rather than for intentions.” The veteran activist noted there are now organizations of gay employees in nearly every federal agency, including the FBI and the Agriculture Department. “That kind of thing I find tremendously rewarding and vindicating.” Kameny said. “That sort of thing would be absolutely unthinkable in the sixties.”

In 1996 the president enraged the gay community by signing the Defense of Marriage Act, which said that neither the federal government nor any other state would recognize a gay marriage performed in Hawaii or anywhere else. The law was probably unconstitutional, but Clinton's willingness to pander to the right on this issue infuriated his gay supporters, even though he had always publicly opposed gay marriage.

On the other side of the ledger, after Congress passed a defense appropriations bill in 1996 which would have compelled the armed forces to discharge everyone who was infected with the HIV virus, the Clinton administration managed to put together a new majority in Congress which repealed this heinous provision.

PROPONENTS OF THE BAN
on gays in the military quoted copiously from the Bible. Writing in
The New York Times
in support of the gay
activists' position, the novelist James A. Michener noted that Sergeant Major S. H. Mellinger had offered “an extreme expression” of the antigay position in the
Marine Corps Gazette:
“The Bible has a very clear and specific message toward homosexuals—'those that practice such things are worthy of death.'”

“He is correct,” Michener continued. “In Leviticus 20:13, it says: ‘If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.'” But then the eighty-seven-year-old author of forty books offered a wonderfully simple rebuttal to all those who used the Bible to perpetuate this prejudice:

One must read all of Leviticus to understand the condition of the ancient Hebrews when this harsh judgment was being promulgated. They lived in a rude, brutal, almost uncivilized place where abominations abounded. To read the list of the things the Jews were enjoined to stop doing is to realize that God had to be unusually strict with such an undisciplined mob. Women who had sexual intercourse with animals were to be put to death. “And if a man take a wife and her mother, it is wickedness: they shall be burnt with fire, both he and they.” A father who had sex with his daughter-in-law “shall be put to death.” On and on goes the litany of common abuses that the Jews must henceforth forgo.

Two other verses from the same chapter of Leviticus bring into question the relevance of these edicts today. Verse 9 warns: “or every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death.” Would we be willing to require the death sentence for boys who in a fit of rage oppose their parents? How many of us would have been guilty of that act at some point in our upbringing?

Just as perplexing is Verse 10: “And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife … the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.” Can you imagine the holocaust that would ensue if that law were enforced today?

The Old Testament condemnation of homosexuality must be seen as one law among many intended to bring order to human relationships. Because the Jewish community was in deplorable disarray, harsh measures were required. As order was installed, the extreme penalties advocated in Leviticus were relaxed in the civilized nations that followed. …

Western society, reacting in its own way, has advanced far beyond the primitive days of Leviticus. We do not kill young people who oppose their parents or execute adulterers.

So when zealots remind us that the Bible says male homosexuals should be put to death rather than be admitted to the armed forces, it is proper
to reply: “You are correct that Leviticus says that. But it also has an enormous number of edicts, which have had to be modified as we became civilized.”

THE CONFIRMING EVIDENCE
of the transformation of American attitudes toward the gay minority came from corporate America.

Years after many of the Fortune 500 had promised to stop discriminating against gay employees, almost every major American corporation was still worried about any public identification with the gay market—just as every major presidential candidate had avoided courting any gay supporters for years after Stonewall.

Even as gay people prided themselves on being the secret tastemakers of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, they knew that any overt appeal to gay consumers remained almost unthinkable in what had been a relentlessly closeted society. In the early 1980s, Seagrams and Heublein were among a handful of alcohol manufacturers who had cautiously dipped into this market with print ads in gay publications. But before Bill Clinton's election, not even a master of homoerotic images like Calvin Klein had ever purchased a single advertisement in a gay magazine—seven years after Klein had surrounded a single naked woman with three naked men to sell the fragrance Obsession.

In the fall of 1992, all that began to change, largely because of the launching of
Out
magazine by Michael Goff and Roger Black.
Out
banned all sex ads to provide a more comforting environment for traditional advertisers, and the results were dramatic and almost immediate.

Out's
first issue featured ads for Absolut vodka, Benetton clothes and Geffen records. Banana Republic, North American Philips Consumer Electronics, Apple Computer and Calvin Klein (with jeans and underwear modeled by Marky Mark) quickly followed, along with His & His (and Hers & Hers) double-signature traveler's checks from American Express. AT&T and Continental Airlines were both sponsors of the Gay Games held in New York City during the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Stonewall in 1993. A year later the Ikea furniture store became the first general marketer to use identifiably gay characters (two men buying a dining room table) in a television ad broadcast on mainstream media.

In 1995, even the big guns of macho American commerce had joined the trend, including units of General Motors, Philip Morris and Procter & Gamble. By the following year, the list included Tanqueray, Stolichnaya,
Dewar's, Johnnie Walker (Red and Black), Southern Comfort, Miller beer, Nike, Movado, Bacardi, Benson & Hedges, Carlton, Camel, Swatch, Hush Puppies, RCA Victor, Virgin Atlantic, Glenfiddich, American Airlines, Amtrak, Aramis, Gucci, Versace, Ralph Lauren, Ticketmaster (selling tickets for gay dances), and Baileys Original Irish Cream. “It all comes down to education,” explained Sandra Lot, the publisher of
10 Percent,
another gay magazine. “We need to be like the Wizard of Oz and give them the courage to jump into the market.”

Gay radicals who had taken satisfaction from the separateness of gay culture were understandably perturbed by this digestion of gay market share by the very institutions that had spent so many decades shunning lesbians and gay men. But the sharply dropping shock value of being gay—or appearing in the pages of a gay publication—was an unavoidable side effect of the movement's steady progress.

A BOOMLET
for gay marriage was another portent of the mainstreaming of gay culture. It was also a very human response to the threat that AIDS continued to pose to the survival of gay culture. Just as marriage had been seen as a boon to the survival of the races by any number of ancient civilizations, some activists in the 1990s began to advocate marriage for exactly the same reason: they believed that anything that would help lesbians and gay men to focus on a single relationship would make it easier for gay culture to prosper in a new century.

Shortly after Hawaii's Supreme Court held that a state ban on gay marriage might be a violation of the state's constitution because it was gender discrimination, Tom Stoddard decided to marry Walter Rieman, his partner of five years.

Stoddard said the decision to solemnize their vows grew out of “a variety of converging factors,” including the simple realization that both of them would enjoy wearing wedding rings. The ceremony would confirm their status as official domestic partners in New York City, but like gay marriages in every other state that year, it would not be recognized as the equivalent of a marriage between a man and a woman. “I realized my desire to wear a ring was at bottom a desire to show off my relationship,” said Stoddard. “And we both decided that if we were going to wear rings, we wanted to wear them on the traditional wedding finger, and we wanted traditional wedding rings, to declare equivalency to heterosexual marriages.”