_____________________________________________________________________________ "Rainbow's End" by Richard D. Mohr (February 1996) No gay political strategy has been more touted by our national leaders than that of building coalitions with other dispossessed groups. This "rainbow" strategy is an attempt to get around the prospect that as a permanent, numerically small minority, gays are likely to get crunched in the press of democratic processes. But the position falsely assumes that there is a community of interest among minority groups and wildly overestimates the political support other minority groups are likely to provide gay causes. The recent progressive gay political anthology _The Question of Equality_ is instructive. In valorizing "diversity," the book's many authors presume that there are "deep structural links" among all oppressions. But for all the book's mentions of "links," "connections," "connectedness," "interconnections," and "bonds," it makes only one attempt to spell out reciprocally causal relations between oppressions. The claim is made that because proportionally more lesbians than gay men are thrown out of the armed forces, sexism and heterosexism stand or fall together. But the armed forces, unable to get rid of women in general, simply uses still-legal anti-gay policies as convenient instruments to get rid of as many women as it can, just as the Nazis, unable to get rid of as many Catholics as they would have liked, used anti-gay accusations as convenient instruments to get rid of Catholics they found bothersome. But then the military example no more shows that women's and gays' fortunes stand or fall together than the Nazi example shows that Catholics' and gays' fortunes do. And different minorities will frequently have conflicting interests. Take the ROTC. Gays and lesbians have worked valiantly to get ROTC programs thrown off campuses as leverage against the military's ban on gays, but blacks have supported the retention of the programs since in recent tradition the military has provided a path of upward mobility for blacks -- think of Colin Powell. In this support, blacks have provided bigoted legislators a seemingly nonbigoted way of backing legislation that preemptively blocks state universities from throwing out their ROTC programs. The bigots claim, "We're helping the minorities." Communities of common interest between minorities are at best patchy and discontinuous. When coalitions are morally coherent and politically effective, they will be topical, local, and tactical rather than structural, global, and strategic. But the chief ugly truth that progressive gay activists are unwilling to face is that for gays other minorities are more of a problem as political forces than are culturally dominant groups. Though most members of the Congressional Black Caucus are co-sponsors of the federal gay rights bill, on gay issues they do not represent their constituents. Louis Farrakhan does. Who can forget his first lieutenant's November 1994 Kean College speech which was greeted by the roaring cheers of black students as he wound up his call to justice: "We kill the faggot, we kill the lesbian, we kill them all." Earlier the same month during a speech at California State-Northridge, Farrakhan himself joyfully entertained the prospect of blacks shooting gay men with Uzis, and to lesbians he said, "I'm telling you, if you ever got exposed to a real man, you would never see a woman, 'cause can't no woman do for you what a real man can do. Just can't happen. When the real thing comes along, you're going to put the fake thing down." Even the NAACP's magazine _Crisis_ admits that blacks in general are more homophobic than whites. Electoral results and opinion polls -- most recently those of UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute -- consistently show the same is true for Latinos, the poor, the homeless, trade unionists, "trailer trash," and rural Americans: in general they are all more homophobic than their Anglo middle-class urban counterparts. Of "minorities," only women are, on average, more sympathetic to gays than are the people who control the country. If it takes twice as much energy to get a black person up to speed on gay issues as it does a white person, then it is doubly inefficient to expend limited gay political resources to solicit the black person's allegiances: on average the white person both is more easily converted and has more power with which then to make a difference. This isn't an argument for an all-white movement: it _is_ an argument that the gay rights movement will make significant progress only if it recognizes the brute facts of American political life and doesn't let wish-driven ideology govern its strategies and deployments of resources. The metaphor of the rainbow -- with its suggestion of tandem parallel trajectories -- neither captures the reality of minority pluralism nor acts as a guide for coalition politics. It is a beguiling, yet false, hope.