Mr. President, Tear Down This Wall
With the public outcry surrounding the suicides of six young gay Americans in the span of one month, we are in the midst of a Richard Wright moment. In 1940 Wright published Native Son, which traced the story of twenty-year-old Bigger Thomas, a good black man who embarks on a crime spree, playing into stereotypes that connect race to violence. The novel suggests the invisible yet debilitating effects of growing up black in a society fringed with racial hatred during Jim Crow.
Similarly, gay youths face the temptation of internalizing the aggression they face from a very young age. On one side of the continuum are playground taunts, rampant use of the word “gay” as a catch-all insult, and the gay-baiting by pandering politicians. The Rust Belt Republican candidate for governor, Carl Paladino spoke before a group of Orthodox Jewish leaders on October 10 and placed gay Americans in the same category as pornographers and perverts who molest children. Criticizing his opponent, Andrew Cuomo, for marching in this year’s gay pride parade, Paladino warned that public approval of homosexuality harms kids. “I don’t want them to be brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option,” he cautioned. “It isn’t.” Yet in the same breath he insisted that his statements were not harmful to gays.
Delivering a public political speech that argues gay people do not deserve equal rights and that children need to be protected from them tells homosexuals that they are second-class citizens. This engenders shame and helps to justify violence at the other end of the continuum. Paladino made this statement, after all, only two days after front-page news accounts of the brutal beating, burning, and torturing of three gay men by a group of thugs in the Bronx.
October is national LGBTQ month. During last year’s commemoration, Cleve Jones, the founder of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, came to give a talk at Pacific University where I teach. Students in all three of my classes attended and then submitted response papers. The overwhelming majority wrote that they spent the hour and a half in the audience alternating between laughing and crying because he was so funny, yet so poignant. Cleve recalled being knifed and left for dead when a gang of teens attacked him just for being gay. He remembered friend after friend dying while the federal government, under Reagan’s watch, did nothing and watched as a disease rampaged through San Francisco, then flared out into an epidemic, then a pandemic. My students did not know the story of how and why AIDS became the global calamity that it now is. They had also never heard someone say, “I hate straight people,” as Cleve did when he voiced the helplessness he felt decades ago as disease-ravaged friends endured painful final days. Instead of receiving compassion or casseroles, family and friends of the victims were subject to silence and scorn. One student in my class on the history of the civil rights movement, however, derided Cleve’s talk. He said that the suffering of homosexuals is nothing compared to the suffering of blacks.
Without falling into comparative victimology, some juxtapositions are useful. The testimony of Dr. Kenneth Clark during the Brown v. Board of Education hearings, in which he explained his experiments when African American girls and boys pointed to the white doll as “good” and the “Negro” doll as “bad,” then felt shame in having to identify the black doll with themselves, engendered sympathy. Yet the suffering and humiliation suffered by kids whose heart or movements do not conform to heterosexual norms in living rooms, church pews, and on playgrounds is ignored.
That same student also said that gay people can hide their sexuality whereas blacks cannot hide their color, suggesting that gays can readily sidestep danger. Yet in their novels Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larson, Fannie Hurst, and Ralph Ellison deem this liminal position of “passing” untenable. Without knowing or consciously planning, homosexuals begin life with this dilemma. Moral decisions, big and small, involving courage and integrity abound: do I tell my friends, teacher, co-worker, doctor? How does a gay person convey the fear and trembling of encountering for the first time, beginning in the 1990s, a medical form box to check off their sexuality?
When I tell my students about African Americans woken up in the middle of the night to find crosses burning on their lawns, I ask them, “What would you do in this situation?” They reply, “Call the police.” I tell them to look closer, because some of those men in white hoods arrived in police cars; African Americans had no official protection. The students are shocked. This is bad. How much worse is it, though, when sheer terror and the daily threat, or reality, of violence is inflicted not by strangers who look different, but by your own family, people who share your bathroom and blood? In a recent documentary the writer Dominick Dunne recalls the sting and fury of his father. By all accounts his dad was a local hero, but in private, he mercilessly beat and berated his son for appearing effeminate. Dunne was in fact not gay, but his father called him a “sissy,” mimicked the way he talked and walked, and made him feel like an outsider in his own family. This past August, seventeen-month-old Roy Jones was struck dead by twenty-year old Pedro Jones. Why? “I was trying to make him act like a boy instead of a little girl. I never struck that kid that hard before,” Pedro explained.
Even trips to the store require ethical calibrations. Target donated $150,000 to the political action committee of the Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, who supports the band You Can Run But You Can’t Hide. The frontman and “minister” of the band, Bradlee Dean, while talking on his own radio show, said this:
He followed this with alleged statistics about gays: “They molest 117 people before they’re found out.” Vigilance to avoid oppressors or their supporters is constantly required.Muslims are calling for the executions of homosexuals in America. Just shows you they themselves are upholding the laws that are even in the Bible of the Judeo-Christian God, but they seem to be more moral than even the American Christians do, because these people are livid about enforcing their laws. They know homosexuality is an abomination.
Crossing the line from vigilance to paranoia is a peril. When I have students examine the reasons given for the lynching of African Americans in the South between 1882 and 1930, culled from Stewart Tolney and E.M. Beck’s A Festival of Violence, students read through the seventy-eight items, ranging from “Voting for the wrong party,” “unruly remarks,” “Testifying against a white man,” and “unpopularity,” to “acting suspiciously,” students throw up their hands: “You could get lynched for anything—you have to be paranoid to survive that!”
Paranoia and instability is the logical result of life under constant surveillance. In the midst of the Harlem Renaissance Alain Locke called for the “New Negro” to “repair a damaged group psychology and reshape a warped social perspective.” He noted approvingly the “gradual recovery from hyper-sensitiveness and ‘touchy’ nerves.” In 1940 Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Judge William Hastie, Dean of Howard University’s law school, as Civilian Aide to Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Hastie spent his first ten months researching the impact of segregation on black soldiers. As Morris MacGregor attests in Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965, “the effect on black morale was devastating.” “Beneath the surface,” Hastie himself wrote, “is widespread discontent. Most white persons are unable to appreciate the rancor and bitterness which the Negro, as a matter of self-preservation, has learned to hide beneath a smile, a joke, or merely an impassive face.” MacGregor highlighted "the inherent paradox of trying to inculcate pride, dignity, and aggressiveness in a black soldier while inflicting on him the segregationist's concept of the Negro's place in society created in him an insupportable tension.”
In the same way we must address the huge psychic costs of growing up gay in America.
During the Lavender Scare of the McCarthy years, Allen Ginsburg opened “Howl” with the line: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Whether we want to admit it or not, as the rash of teen suicides demonstrates, mental instability is an injury inflicted by second-class citizenship. How can someone build a solid sense of self while simultaneously fending off fear of abandonment? Gay people are routinely reminded that at any given moment they can be found out and hounded out. Little visual evidence exists to demonstrate the abuse because so much of it takes place behind closed doors by families, little children, fellow servicemen, and ministers. There were no photographs of the very first Stonewall riot in 1969 because the press did not cover gay issues.
By the time those six gay men and women took their lives, they had no doubt spent years watching and wondering, wary of the way straights might treat them. In 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois, who recalled the moment when a veil descended between him and the vast world simply because of his skin color, spoke about the “double-consciousness” that afflicted black Americans:
[T]his sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
As someone who was born just after the heyday of “If you’re gay stay away” signs hung in bar windows and just before Stonewall, and who came of age during the Plague years, it was easy to look at gay youths today and think how easy they have it, living as they do in the after-Ellen, post-Will and Grace era. The suicides, attacks, and political pandering demonstrate just how much more progress we have yet to make. To raise consciousness and engender support, we need to produce a gay nationalist cultural imaginary (to use a term by Henry Louis Gates). The g ay civil rights movement still has no equivalent of Native Son or Invisible Man, no cross-over books detailing our experience that raises awareness not only of straights but of ourselves. There is no painting comparable to Norman Rockwell’s 1964 “The Problem We All Live With.”
Whenever I ask a gay person what their experience has been like, they inevitably reply, “Oh, not bad. I haven’t had to go through much at all.” But then, talk with them for more than five minutes, and story after story comes out: a women whose female partner was dying of cancer and her family refused to let her into the hospital room, then kicked her out of the house after the partner died; a young teen whose mother chased him down the street with a knife after he came out to her; siblings who stop speaking; cousins who halt you mid-sentence, so that they do not have to deal with it; friends who think you are needlessly courting trouble by even discussing it. If gays cannot recognize and begin to plumb the way years of worry and self-policing have encased their hearts, how can we begin the process of healing?
One of the scariest moments in the 2008 film “Milk” came when Harvey Milk, played by Sean Penn in an Oscar-winning role, told his friends that the best thing they could do to advance the cause of gay civil rights was to call their parents on the phone and come out to them. This line made my mind reel with images of that moment of vulnerability, which too often results in pain. To this day, even well-meaning liberals respond to someone’s coming out by responding, “I have no problem with that,” which roughly translates into: “You are hated, but I am tolerant.” A more helpful reply might resemble the one given to Andrew Sullivan by his father, who wept in his son’s presence for the first time and said: “I’m crying because of everything you must have been through, and I did nothing to support you.”
Barack Obama has refused to take the lead on this issue. Some loyalists claim that he does not want to repeat the disastrous first two years of Clinton’s presidency, which ended with the Newt Gingrich-led takeover of both houses of Congress. But he learned the wrong lesson about Bill Clinton. The lesson is not that Clinton tried to desegregate the armed forces in 1993 and as a result Democrats lost in 1994. The lesson is that after twelve years of Republicans in the White House, Clinton stuck his neck out for gay Americans and was forced to backpedal, but he nonetheless sent a powerful, life-saving message to homosexuals that, for the first time in history, you have a friend in the White House. It is safe to come out. And they did. Ellen’s nationally-televised coming out opened the floodgates. Tens—perhaps hundreds—of thousands of gays turned their backs on a lifetime of lies and told the truth about who moved their hearts.
The night Obama was elected, people filled streets across America, cheering that now, it seemed, anyone could become president. While clapping along, I thought, “Really?” Can a gay person get elected president? Obama rose to power with the claim that he transcended the divides that separated black and white, red and blue. During the election, Obama sidestepped Clinton’s presidency to praise Reagan’s “transformational” leadership. In the long struggle to end legal discrimination in the military and in marriage is Barack Obama’s Berlin Wall opportunity. Mr. President, tear down this veil.