Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 06:46:05 -0600 From: "Richard D. Mohr" Backlash by Richard D. Mohr (November 1995) As I read local gay papers from across the country, I wonder, "Am I just being paranoid or is there something menacing afoot in the land?" In February, New York City vice squads closed Rounds the elegant Midtown hustler bar. Over the summer, they closed five gay movie theaters and started arresting gay masseurs and call boys. Also this past summer, for the first time in any one's memory, police arrested guys cruising for sex under Provincetown's "Dick Dock" pier. Caught up in the zeal, a local paper published the men's names. Indeed gay men trying to have _plein_ _air_ sex were arrested all over the country: sixty-one men in Topeka's Gage Park; seventeen men in two police sweeps of Baltimore's Loch Raven Watershed area; multiple arrests have been made in Lincoln, Nebraska's Pioneers Parks, Omaha's Turner Park, the Fenway of Boston, Raleigh's Oak Hollow Overlook Park, and Miami's Flamingo Park. In Atlanta, police have even busted six shops for selling dildos or what in the eyes of Peach State law are "devices whose primary purpose is to stimulate the genital organs." In all, fifteen people were arrested. Indecency, loitering, and solicitation statutes have sprung back to life. Every appearance suggests that this past year has witnessed a marked upsurge in the police's wholly discretionary enforcement of such "victimless crime" statutes against gay men. The general pattern of arrests suggests some sort of repression in the offing. But what is it? My hunch is that these police actions are not to be understood as just more of the usual run of things -- "rounding up the usual suspects." They are not, that is, on a par with the police's periodic harassment of the livelier elements of street culture -- prostitutes, urchins, druggies. Rather, I conjecture the actions represent a backlash to the progress gays have been making on the social and cultural fronts. For you see, society's thinking about gays is rapidly solidifying into an understanding of gayness as something akin to an ethnic classification, like being Irish, or more precisely something akin to a mixed ethnic and religious classification, like being a Hasidic Jew or Mormon. These are people who have a socially distinctive feature which is the basis of a whole way of life. Gays are on the verge of being considered just such a social group, one that while perhaps beig viewed as weird, is not viewed as repulsive or monstrous, and while perhaps being viewed as alien, still is not perceived as a threat. Such groups society deems worthy of legal tolerance and so of rights. Sensing this social ground shift, conservative institutional forces are striking back as best they can and each in its own distinctive way. The religious Right and cultural conservatives more generally are striking back chiefly by trying to reestablish taboos over discussing gays and gay issues -- in schools and libraries, on stage and screen, at the NEA and PBS. These are skirmishes, though, which for the most part conservatives are losing. The military has fared better, striking back narrowly but intensely on the plain of society's symbols and ideals. The policy "don't ask, don't tell" ritualistically treats gay people as scum or excrement -- as a dirty, loathsome, abject thing which cannot even be named among descent people. By contrast, the police are attacking gays not at the level of ideals, symbols, and ideology, but at the level of actual sexual behavior -- our weakest flank. Weakest, because our mainline institutions have never defended our sex lives. Sodomy law reform, let alone any radical rethinking of sex law, has never been integral to gay political agendas. Even perfectly legal sex seems to embarrass gay leaders. Who can forget NGLTF director Torie Osborn's 1994 rant against what she dubbed "sexual freedom": "The idea of sex as salvation and as self...dominates gay male -- and now young lesbian -- culture. [Such sex] holds no promise for real change; it is consumeristic and ultimately hollow." Thank you, Torie. Now, the weakness of our national organizations notwithstanding, the good news is that all these anti-gay attacks are really counter-attacks, reactions to the progress gays have been making in winning the heart and mind of America. With the collapse of taboos over discussing gay issues, Americans are being won over through one-on-one personal contacts with gay folk and through the media's coverage of gay issues which call out for justice. The bad news is that attacks on gays' sexual behavior may well survive the solidification of gayness as an acceptable social identity. Consider: three of the nine states that now have gay civil rights legislation -- Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Rhode Island -- had sodomy laws on their books when the legislation was passed. Indeed Minnesota and Rhode Island still do. Further, counter-attacks on gay sexual behavior may even provide a pivot for residual attacks on gay identity, just as attacks on black familial styles and arrangements are now used by conservatives implicitly to attack black identity. In any case, a lot of gay men's lives are being mangled right now by police attacks on gay sexual styles and arrangements. This backlash is probably part of a larger cultural trend. In their attacks on gays, the police may well feel emboldened by certain politicians calls "to renew America." Such calls are not exhortations to improve America by drawing it nearer onto yet unrealized general principles of justice. Rather they are attempts to drive America back to some largely imaginary but quite specific Golden Age which both offers and demands a particular, tribalistic vision of who counts as a person and how people must lead their lives. In consequence, such calls for "renewal" and for a "Return to Glory" are always fascisticly- tinged. The stakes are high. Gays might win the cultural wars only to lose the cultural peace, just as blacks were to lose the cultural peace of Reconstruction. When it comes to sex and the police, American gays would do well to learn a lesson from our Canadian counterparts. In the late 'seventies, Ontario police made sweeps of Toronto's gay bathhouses. During one, four-hundred men were arrested on a single day for being "found-ins in a bawdy house." Toronto's gay community organized to protest the raids and assist those arrested. Dogged organizational efforts paid off. A majority of cases against those arrested were dropped on various technicalities. And organizers so embarrassed the Ontario government that such raids have passed frome Canadian scene. Mind you, the laws under which the busts were carried out are still on the books, but cultural forces and gay activism have stamped them "dead letters." The same could happen to the solicitation and indecency laws which in this country provide the police with pretexts for anti-gay harassment, if only gays were a little more courageous in defending our sex lives.