Date: Mon, 21 Aug 1995 11:56:50 -0500 From: mohr richard d Angry Gay Voters by Richard D. Mohr (Novemeber 1994) The data is in. The November 13th edition of the New York Times published exit-poll statistics for one-hundred demographic groups across the last eight races for the U.S. House -- with "gay, lesbian, bisexual" added as a category for the first time in 1990. That year, 78% of gays voted Democratic. In the 1992 election, 77% of gays voted Democratic, but in this year's election only 68% did so -- a 9 point shift to the Republicans. By contrast, the shift for whites was 8%, men 6%, union households 4%, women 1%, blacks 1% (89 to 88), and jews 1% (79 to 78). The overall national shift was 4% (54 to 50). In the year of the angry electorate, gays were over twice as angry as your Average Jo(e). How is one to interpret these results? Some gays may simply have given up on the Democrats and reverted to voting their middle and upper class interests -- Log Cabin types returning home, as it were. But something morally more interesting was afoot as well -- a case of rising gay consciousness in action. When the Democrats seized control of the White House and both branches of Congress, they degraded gays as gays had not been degraded before. They jointly wrote discrimination against gays into federal law for the first time ever, doing so for the very institution -- the military -- whose embrace has traditionally been for America the mark of full personhood. And so gays justifiably struck back, putting their self-interest on the line for the sake of what is right. Gays at the ballot box made the sort of sacrifice by which identities are asserted and solidified. The vote was not a benighted power grab for gays, rather it was a morally-motivated assertion of gay dignity gained at the very risk of power and self-interest lost. Though the strategy entails short-term social disadvantage, it is expedient over the long haul. For it means that gays cannot be taken for granted by the Democrats -- or by anyone. The problem with being taken for granted by some group is not that the group's opponents simply write you off, but that the group itself writes you off -- as, for example, Clinton has done to blacks with his racist stance on Haitian immigration, by his jettisoning the Racial Justice provisions from the crime bill, and by using the same racial codes as the religious Right when discussing crime and welfare. In the voting booth, gays refused to passively accept similar humiliation and discrimination. But have gays simply cut off their nose to spite their face? No. Can gays live with the results of the election? Yes. There may well be some ugly, largely symbolic legislation passed, like this year's nearly passed Helms Amendment, which would cut federal funding to school districts which teach that it's okay to be gay. Look for similar restrictions at the National Endowment for the Arts. But none of this is worse than what the Democrats have already done. And if we can successfully defend ourselves against the anti-gay referendum initiative in Idaho -- where The Aryan Nation feels at home -- we can be fairly certain that the more paranoid fantasies of some gay leaders are misplaced. But even the non-paranoid seem to be seriously off the beam. Sheila Kuehl -- 'Zelda Gilroy' turned gay Democratic political operative -- said at and of NGLTF's post-election national gay leadership conference, "People are in mourning, as they well should be." This whining is one more sign that the national gay "leadership" is out of touch with its constituency. Our organizations are still stuck on the Democrats even as we are moving on. It's time to send our own national leaders the message we sent to Clinton: we can do without you. Take Canada. There gays can serve openly in the armed forces, encounter no sodomy laws, have been given constitutional protections, and have legislated civil rights in virtually all provinces. These gains have been achieved even though the country has no national gay political organization, indeed has never had one. Ditto for gay-progressive Norway. It is the culture that matters and gays need not worry too much that we are generally losing the political wars, for we continue to win the cultural ones. In these wars, we will do better to ally with principled conservatives than with phoney liberals, by whom we have been too frequently betrayed. -30-