By the mid-eighties, when I was beginning to come to terms with my sexuality, a few gay people held political office, many states had dropped long-standing laws criminalizing sodomy, and sundry celebrities had come out. (The tennis champion Martina Navratilova did so, memorably, in 1981.) But anti-gay crusades on the religious right threatened to roll back this progress. In 1986, the Supreme Court, upholding Georgia’s sodomy law, dismissed the notion of constitutional protection for gay sexuality as “at best, facetious.” aids was killing thousands of gay men each year. The initial response of the Reagan Administration—and of the mainstream media—is well summarized by a Larry Speakes press briefing in October, 1982:
Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement [from] the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta that aids is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases?
Mr. Speakes: What’s aids?
Q: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.” (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it?
Mr. Speakes: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter.)By the time Reagan first spoke at length about aids, in May, 1987, the death toll in the U.S. had surpassed twenty thousand. What I remember most about my first sexual experience is the fear.
Today, gay people of a certain age may feel as though they had stepped out of a lavender time machine. That’s the sensation that hit me when I watched the young man in Tempe shout down a homophobe in the name of the President-elect. Gay marriage is legal in six states and in Washington, D.C. Gays can serve in the military without hiding their sexuality. We’ve seen openly gay judges, congresspeople, mayors (including a four-term mayor of Tempe), movie stars, and talk-show hosts. Gay film and TV characters are almost annoyingly ubiquitous. The Supreme Court, which finally annulled sodomy laws in 2003, is set to begin examining the marriage issue. And the 2012 campaign has shown that Republicans no longer see the gays as a reliable wedge issue: although Mitt Romney opposes same-sex marriage, he has barely mentioned it this fall. If thirty-two people were to die today in a mass murder at a gay bar, both Obama and Romney would presumably express sympathy for the victims—more than any official in New Orleans did when, back in 1973, an arsonist set fire to the Upstairs Lounge. (...)
One fashionable explanation for the turnabout credits popular culture: out-and-proud celebrities and gay-friendly sitcoms have made straight Americans more comfortable with their other-minded neighbors. When, in May, Vice-President Joe Biden declared his support for gay marriage, prompting Obama to do the same, he said, “Things really begin to change . . . when the social culture changes. I think ‘Will & Grace’ probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far.” Not that long ago, though, Hollywood was regularly portraying gays and lesbians as flouncing sissies, pathetic suicide cases, and serial killers; Vito Russo documented that practice in his 1981 book, “The Celluloid Closet.” A decade later, I joined a demonstration, organized by the San Francisco chapter of Queer Nation, against the movie “Basic Instinct,” which was being filmed in the city, and whose plot featured homicidal lesbians. My activist career ended there, but the protest, and others like it, made headway. Belatedly, Hollywood stopped teaching America to fear homosexuality. The entertainment industry, far from leading the way, caught up with a new social reality.
Three-dimensional people are more persuasive than two-dimensional ones, as Biden surely knows. In the end, the big change likely came about because, each year, a few thousand more gay people make the awkward announcement to their families and friends, supplanting images from the folklore of disgust. My primary political moment happened when I wrote long, lugubrious letters to my closest friends, finally revealing the rest of me. In one, I came out in a footnote on the seventh page, amid pompous but heartfelt quotations from Wallace Stevens: “The greatest poverty is not to live / In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire / Is too difficult to tell from despair.” Harvey Milk always said that this was how the revolution would happen: one lonely kid at a time.
by Alex Ross, New Yorker | Read more:
Photos: Clockwise from top left: Terry Schmitt/San Francisco Chronicle/Corbis; Fred W. McDarrah/Getty; Gregory Bull/AP; Michael Abramson/Time Life Pictures/Getty; Justin Sullivan/Getty
