Date: Mon, 21 Aug 1995 12:03:51 -0500 From: mohr richard d A Taboo is Ending by Richard D. Mohr (April 1995) The current American scene certainly provides materials with which a pessimist could paint a gloomy picture of gay politics: Gay litigative reform lurches two steps forward, two steps back. Unfriendly conservatives have swept both national and state legislatures. The G-word has dropped from Bill Clinton's vocabulary. Talk radio has declared open season on gays. Our national political groups are weak and stumbling. Still, I suggest that America is at a crucial turning point on gay issues and is undergoing an important structural change which bodes well for gays over the long haul. It is now at least acceptable to inquire about gay issues in public discussion. The taboo blanketing talk of lesbian and gay lives is dissolving. The clearest indicator of this shift can be found in the mass media. As little as a decade back _The New York Times_ refused to print the word gay; now it carries more gay news than _The Advocate_. Newt Gingrich is talking more about gay issues than Bill Clinton ever did, and is constantly keeping gay issues before the public. Children can now read a nationally syndicated comic strip with a gay character and even see movie idols of the same sex smooching on network television. The importance of lifting the taboo on gay speech and gay issues should not be underestimated. First it will have -- is having -- a significant effect on the public lives of many nongay people. Studies have shown that, on gay issues, people are greatly affected in their opinions by how they think other people will perceive them. Taboos encourage, indeed enforce, the aping of opinions from one person to the next, causing them to circulate independently of both critical assessment and authentic feeling. The result is that many nongay people feel socially required to be gay-fearing or gay-hating, even when they are not homophobic by personal inclination. As the taboo over talking about gay men and lesbians breaks down, so too will the echoes and apings that have maintained so many of the social forces directed against gays. Nongay people will be able to express in public contexts their own real feelings. Barney Frank has perceptively noted that people are now less homophobic than they think they should be. This fortuitous and surprising gap provides great opportunity to those working for gays' justice for it means that the majority population is now reachable. Further, with the ending of the taboo, anti-gay forces can no longer automatically count on visceral responses of revulsion to carry the day for them. This change in turn has several corollary consequences. First, with the collapse of the taboo, it is increasingly difficult for society to maintain the rituals that demonize gays and lesbians. Rituals of taboo create an eerie supernatural realm unspeakably beyond the pale and then populate it with ghouls and monsters. With the taboo's collapse, gays, in society's eye, are becoming less like monsters and demons and more like hippies and Mormons -- or in Newt's favored analogy, like alcoholics. Maybe not something nice, maybe something odd, something one might not chose for oneself, but gays are no longer something monstrous, repulsive, unthinkably abject. Though not an ideal achievement, this state does mark major cultural change. Second, note that it's okay to know and be around alcoholics and Mormons -- and now even around gay folk. Without demonization, it is hard, perhaps impossible, to view homosexuality as a vampire-like corruptive contagion, a disease that spreads itself to the pure and innocent by mere proximity. This change of conceptualization will eventually cause to abate the stereotype of the gay man as childmolester and more generally as sex crazed predator. And this change has already markedly lessened for straight folk both fear _of_ association and guilt _by_ association. For really the first time it is now possible for gays to have straight allies, people who cannot instantly and effectively be tarred and dismissed with the slur "queer lover." Finally, the collapse of the taboo and its visceral effects means that anti-gay forces now have to argue for and give rational accounts of their positions. And the good news here is that the arguments are all on the side of gays. Moreover, the very ground rules of reasoned discourse -- commitments to honesty, consistency, openness, and fair play -- make it inherently a force for liberalism. The Right senses and fears the cultural shift underway. It seems tacitly to recognize that to win the cultural wars it must shore up the deeply fractured taboo. Just look where radicals on the Right are investing their energies. They are _not_ trying to "punish the sin" by restoring sodomy laws to states without them. Rather they want to get "the sinner" to shut up. Thus they chiefly focus on representations of gay life. They target museum exhibitions, the funding of the arts, school curricula, public television, gay books, and the presence of gays in parades. But however successful as politics, the Right's strategies necessarily trip over themselves as a cultural project. For the more the Right has to talk about things gay, the more the taboo collapses. Newt's yammering on about gays, however mindless and wrongheaded, undoes him. The taboo's collapse suggests that we should be focusing our energies on changing the culture in general -- targeting the means by which values are created, transmitted, and nurtured -- rather than focusing on politics narrowly construed. And we must not worry too much if we take a few hits on the political front, for we are winning the cultural wars. -30-