Date: Sun, 15 Oct 1995 16:05:18 -0500 From: "Richard D. Mohr" __________________________________________________________________ Change the Culture by Richard D. Mohr (August 1995) Especially in light of last November's rout of the Democratic Party, the gay liberation movement needs to advance as a general cultural project rather than a narrowly political one. Gays should not be focusing on standard political forms, like electing officials and passing bills. Efforts in these directions, given the current status of the culture, usually just end up pandering to the very forces that have traditionally oppressed gay people. Consistent political progress will be made only when we change the feelings of the "common man" driven, as they currently are, by taboos and stereotypes. The needed change will occur not by accommodating these feelings, but by changing the culture that bears and nurtures the taboos and stereotypes. Change the culture and political forms will in general follow suit. Now, the good news is that gays have or are rapidly coming to have creative access to the machinery of cultural change -- the media, the arts, books, magazines, editorial pages, educational forums, talk-shows, movies, plays, computer networks, even religious study groups. To a large degree, hope for a better gay future lies in these vectors of transformation rather than in posterpaint and cardboard. When gays do choose to invest in politics narrowly understood, strategies should be chosen with an eye to their effect in transforming culture rather than specifically as means of garnering votes. A placard that says "No on 2: Stop Discrimination" does no educating, changes no culture. Indeed it leaves gay issues entirely unmentioned, just exactly the way anti-gay forces prefer them. In contrast, placards that read "I'm gay" or "My son is gay," or "Straights for Gay Rights" both educate and change culture. And they change culture in part because their message has a tug on people's feelings, on the way people view things. Since stereotypes operate as self-perpetuating lenses which determine what counts as good evidence and argument, education, to be effective, cannot simplbe a tter f getting the facts right. America treats gays badly not because it has the wrong facts, but because it has the wrong ideas. So, for example, "Brandies brief" approaches to the law, approaches which try to win cases by wow-ing judges with the facts, won't work -- as gays painfully learned from the Supreme Court's 1986 sodomy decision. The Court simply disregarded -- didn't see as relevant -- the mountains of information presented to them in the fact-ladened gay-supportive legal briefs. Taking a cultural view of politics enables us to sort out some of the current tangled gay political scene. It means, for instance, that the current disarray, indeed near collapse, of the national gay political organizations may not be the disaster that it at first appears to be -- if, that is, the general culture is moving in the right direction. 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 protections in virtually all provinces. But 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. 's the culture that counts. Also in this broad view of gay politics, much that one might not at first think of as political actually is so. Former head of NGLTF, Urvashi Vaid, has moaned that current gay youth, though leading open lives, are completely apolitical. But these brave youth are key to culture's change on gay issues. Thanks to them, increasingly people omeone for whom g gay is an issue. Thanks to them he gay movement is achieving critical mass. And some gay critics rued the fact that virtually all of the mainstream media coverage of Stonewall 25 -- though extensive -- was "soft news": personality profiles and entertainment coverage galore, yet nothing political, nothing about gay rights. But "soft news" changes culture. A newspaper feature in "Lifestyles" about a lesbian couple who run a real estate business is at least as culturally important as a gay parade pictured on page one. The parade is the extraordinary; the lesbians are America's neighbors. To acknowledge their everydayness is to change the everyday. Will Rogers correctly recognized the limited role of cognition in politics when he quipped "People's minds are changed though observation, not through argument." Certainly arguing Bible passages with Fundamentalists has no point or prospect. But I think Will Rogers was wrong when he also claimed "We do more talking progress than we do progressing." Though virtually everything remains to be done, on gay issues at least, America is gradually taking the talking cure.