Gay, lesbian issues come out of societal closet By Frank Bruni Knight-Ridder Newspapers I knew that things were changing, but it took Ross Perot to show me just how much. During an interview with television's Barbara Walters, he made a remark that seemed to me almost innocuous: No gays or lesbians would be appointed to a President Perot Cabinet. Big deal, I thought. No serious presidential candidate had ever pledged such an appointment. But Perot's declaration made headlines the following morning in newspapers nationwide. Other candidates pounced on him. Pundits joined in. This was blatant discrimination, they cried. This was unacceptable. This was America, land of the free, and Perot hadn't caught the spirit. He soon did. In the months after the interview, populist Perot not only reversed his pledge. He did everything short of the Texas two-step in gay dance bars to repair what he clearly saw as major damage to his independent presidential candidacy. He even named a lesbian to a high post in his campaign. Meanwhile, Democrats Bill Clinton, Paul Tsongas and Jerry Brown seemed to be falling over each other trying to win the gay vote. They all adopted positions against the ban on gays in the military and for federal civil rights legislation to protect gays. This was not politics as usual. This was politics as never before. Seemingly overnight, gay rights and gay issues O a danger zone where only fools rushed in, never the truly ambitious O had come out of America's political closet. And all at once, I knew I was witnessing history. When I stopped to inventory the world around me, it didn't look much like the world in which I was born and raised in the 1960s and 1970s, or the world in which I went to college in the 1980s. It didn't even look too much like the world I had known just five years before. There were gay and lesbian characters on prime-time television O and they weren't being exploited for cheap melodrama or cheaper laughs. There were scores of corporations with the words ``sexual orientation'' in their nondiscrimination policies. A few even extended benefits to same-sex partners. There were mainstream Christian and Jewish denominations engaged in passionate, divisive debate about whether homosexual behavior is a sin. In this new world, a gay person might open the course book at college and see a whole range of electives focusing on homosexuality. A gay candidate might come out to voters in cities other than New York and San Francisco, and still win. A gay man might fetch the mail one day and find a postcard from a heterosexual boss O a guy's guy, a husky veteran of fraternity parties and rugby tournaments O that bore a Hawaiian postmark, a picture of a barrel-chested surfer and the following missive: ``Dunno if this guy is your type, but as I was mailing similar cards to some `breeder' friends, I thought I should not discriminate.'' This happened to me, around the same time that Perot was backpedaling from his statement to Walters. This happened around the same time my little sister, then in her junior year at Princeton University and decidedly heterosexual, casually relayed this news: She had chosen as a thesis topic the need to include gays in federal civil rights laws, and she occasionally attended meetings of gay students, prompting some speculation she was lesbian. She didn't care. She just wanted to get to know these people better, and if others drew the wrong conclusion from that, so be it. That conclusion, at least in America in the 1990s, didn't seem so awful to her. On April 25, a million or more people, most of them gays, lesbians, their friends and families, will march through the streets of this nation's capital to assert the dignity of gay people and demand a formal end to discrimination against them. The long-planned event promises to be the largest gay rights demonstration the country O indeed, the world O has ever witnessed. That's both telling and appropriate, because it marks unprecedented gay visibility and the unprecedented inclusion of gays in American discourse, both formal and informal. Marchers will fume about the ardent and often vitriolic opposition many Americans are voicing to gays in the military, but make no mistake: The moral of that particular story was not gay persecution, but gay power. Has an American president ever before put his image and influence on the line for gays? Has an argument over this country's treatment of gays ever dominated news media attention and dinner table talk for days on end? Marchers will protest the void of federal legislation protecting gays, but take note of the empty spaces that have been filled: Over the past 11 years, eight states have enacted laws that, to varying degrees, make anti-gay discrimination illegal. Six of those states did so in the past two and one-half years. One was California, the most populous state. Marchers also will denounce the current backlash against gays in many places and among many people. This backlash is real and potent, but it too tells a larger tale of progress. If gays and lesbians had not come so far so fast, foes of gay rights would not have channeled so much money and energy into campaigns last fall against them. If things had not changed, these people would not be warning that gay rights is the issue that will decide whether a moral consensus exists in this country or whether floodgates should be opened to an apocalyptic permissiveness. Gays are on a hot seat O no doubt about it. But that's because we've succeeded, for the first time, in reaching the front burner. The months to come promise to be pivotal and bitterly contentious. We are at a crossroads, a scary and exhilarating place. When I was growing up two decades ago, there was a TV commercial that showed a blond boy and blond girl, arms around each other's waists, strolling beneath palm fronds and sunshine toward some cold drink, Hawaiian Punch, I think. It was a silly image in its way, but evoked in me thoughts of endless summer, carefree spirits and young romance. Lying in bed at night, I wanted to be that boy and often pictured myself in his place. But whenever I did, the fantasy hit a snag. The person on whose hip my arm rested was another boy. I hoped and prayed the vision would change, but it never did. Not through countless back-seat gropings of girls during my teen-age years. Not through swimming meets that filled eight shelves in the family den with trophies O my hard-won proof that I was as much a jock as the next guy. And at some deep, gut level O that level from which the truth always whispers to us O I knew the vision never would change. For me, at least, this wasn't right or wrong. It just was. Pundits and preachers, scientists and school administrators can argue all they want about whether homosexuality is natural or unnatural, inherited or learned: No one has a definitive answer, including me. But I can say without equivocation that from the time I first became aware of sexual feelings O around age 10, I think O those feelings were for other boys. They grew, as I did, into feelings for other young men. And the world looked terrifying. As I saw it, I had two choices: I could keep my secret, live a lie and buy acceptance. Or I could be honest, open, and resigned to a sort of social exile. To believe TV comedies, I would take up residence in the most flamboyantly decorated house on the street and prance occasionally into somebody else's kitchen to raise eyebrows and elicit belly laughs. To believe movies, I would become so disgusted with my desires that I would turn self-loathing into drug abuse or violence. Junkie or killer, take your pick. To listen to politicians or look at newspapers, I would cease to exist, except as one of the nameless and faceless figures Anita Bryant wanted to tie to a stake and pelt with Florida oranges. And to listen to the idle chatter of schoolmates and even relatives, I would become a beautician or an interior decorator, and though I'd be a good one, my customers would forever snicker behind my back. I remember, when I was 15 and carefully keeping my secret, a beloved aunt talking about her son, then a toddler: ``He can grow up to be anything he wants,'' she declared. ``Except, of course, a hairdresser.'' Everyone nodded vigorously and guffawed. I began erecting defenses, elaborate and steel-strong. I distrusted my parents' and siblings' love, sure that it would dissipate as soon as they learned the truth about me. I distrusted the future, because I had no role model to prepare me for it. Who would I hang out with at college? I couldn't pledge a fraternity, as my older brother did. I had spent too many years already trying to mimic the dating rituals and sexual braggadocio of my heterosexual peers, and I didn't have it in me anymore: The farce was taking a greater and greater toll. I wanted something genuine. Something honest. What would I do for a living? I couldn't be a business executive like my father or a lawyer like my best friend's father. What would my colleagues come to say and think over the years about my stag appearances at cocktail parties? I would have to be an outsider and revel in my difference. I would have to divine a path and select a profession where mavericks, dissidents and outright freaks were prized rather than punished. Maybe I'd live abroad. Maybe I'd be an artist, if I could discover some hidden talent. Maybe I'd be a writer. I made a deal: Since I couldn't have what was behind curtains Number One, Two or Three, I would take what was in the small box in the corner of the stage, and would do so proudly, without apology. Then something horrible happened, and everything changed. In the beginning, many gay people expected AIDS to be our social and political downfall, to take away whatever tiny, tenuous niche we had. We feared that religious zealots would define AIDS as God's judgment upon homosexuals; that terror about the disease would exacerbate people's irrational fears of us; that resentment would well up about the drain of public health money for sick gay men. All of that did occur to some degree, but it was eclipsed. Because for all its devastation, the AIDS epidemic did some good, unmasking the country's gay and lesbian people and engaging them in activism as never before. Not by accident did the last massive march of gays and lesbians on Washington, D.C., in 1987 coincide with the first full unfurling of the breathtakingly expansive AIDS quilt. Gay rage and grief over AIDS and gay political resolve went hand in hand. The former stoked the latter, which burned brighter and hotter as the death toll climbed. AIDS made the gay community truly newsworthy, in the eyes of most media, for the first time. As journalists delved deeper into coverage of the epidemic, gay people began popping up on TV newscasts and in periodicals. The exposure demystified homosexuals. Others saw that we looked like everybody else. We cried like everybody else. We raged like everybody else. And we were loving and sometimes altruistic and occasionally even heroic, just like everybody else. Through stories about AIDS, Americans met gay male couples so committed to each other that one partner carried the other home from the hospital and kept a grueling bedside vigil for weeks, even months, until death came. America met gays and lesbians who built mammoth relief organizations, like the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City, to help the sick and teach about safer sex. The country saw a badly hurting community tending its wounds with an inspiring sense of responsibility and dignity. Before AIDS, gays and lesbians could be ignored, brushed aside O a comfortable option for the majority and, truth be told, for many gays and lesbians who more than anything, wanted to be left alone. The thought of political activism was scary. It required stepping out, identifying yourself, and facing certain consequences for uncertain benefits. AIDS changed all that. Now gays wanted something more than benign neglect. They wanted government money, muscle and medical intervention to fight a modern plague. Gays could no longer afford to hide. And people in power could no longer ignore the cries. Gays understood that to get Americans to care about people dying from AIDS, we must first get them to realize that they cared about gay people O that, in fact, they knew many of us. We had to come out. And we did, in an ever-swelling tide, each wave making it easier for the next. As the numbers escalated, they promised greater and greater strength. With each month it seemed more imperative to be open about being gay. And with each month, the decision to do so seemed to cause less shock. Straight people were dealing with it. In the early 1980s, when I started college, I told only close friends I was gay. I didn't want attention or affection from anyone who would pull away if they knew. That decision was personal, not political. By the mid-1980s, I was telling not just close friends but family members, neighbors, people at work. That decision was still largely personal O I didn't want to feel the fear that goes along with keeping secrets. But it was now in part political, too. I felt I owed that honesty to all gay people and to our desire to be treated with less contempt. And by the late 1980s, I was telling everyone I knew O not stopping them to announce it, mind you, but making it abundantly clear. This decision was primarily political, buttressed by a conviction that I belonged to a distinct minority with a shared, important mission: making this a society in which everyone felt comfortable and free. My decisions mirrored those of thousands of other gays and lesbians. And the effect of our openness was that increasingly, when Americans discussed homosexuality, they weren't talking about a theory or an oddity. They were talking about an old high school classmate or college roommate; a generous neighbor or respected colleague; a sister or brother; a son or daughter. They were talking about people whose treatment in the world mattered to them. People who seemed every bit as honorable as anyone else. People they liked. People they loved. That's why so many churches have been rent by debates over what to say about homosexuality. It wasn't an intellectual awakening but an emotional one: Parishioners learned that the two warm, generous men sitting side by side in the front pew were a gay couple and suddenly felt strange about branding them sinners. That's why, in large part, there's been such a revolution in media coverage of gay issues: The people who make the decisions about which stories get told and which don't know more gay people in their immediate circles. The ``gay story'' is so hot these days that gay leaders, who used to spend hours on the phone with the rare reporter willing to listen that long, now must rank-order all the requests that pour in: ``60 Minutes'' first, Time second, Los Angeles Times third etc. In the past three years, gays have made the cover of Newsweek four times. The New York Times now writes so frequently about gays that some activists fondly call it ``the lavender rag.'' The word ``gay'' no longer stops all conversation the way it once did. Many people use it with a new ease O no pause, no whisper, no blushing. When a good-looking, single man starts work at an office and people ask each other whether he might be gay or straight, the question often carries no greater meaning than this: Who's got the best shot at him? At dinner with my mother in a restaurant a few years ago, she remarked that our waiter was handsome and seemed to be eyeing me with interest. When he brought back her credit card chit, she insisted that I sign it and leave my telephone number. ``That way,'' she whispered, ``he can call you if he wants to.'' My younger brother constantly nags me about settling down, even suggesting I have a wedding-style ceremony when I find the right guy. A few months ago, he informed me that he had stopped listening to his favorite radio station because it became apparent during a call-in program about gays in the military that the disc jockey and most of the listeners were rabid homophobes. My little sister, meanwhile, encountered a peculiar situation during her job interviews in February. When recruiters brought up the topic of her thesis, she could tell they were thinking she must be lesbian. Part of her wanted to assure them she wasn't. But a larger and stronger part of her believed it shouldn't matter one way or the other. So she said nothing, letting interviewers make whatever assumptions they would. She landed a job. I see the word `gay' in places I never used to, in contexts I never expected. On the comics pages of the newspaper, a teenager in the strip ``For Better or for Worse'' tells his friend and his mom that he's homosexual. An issue of Soap Opera Digest at the supermarket checkout reports that a handsome new male character on one daytime drama prefers men to women. A new novel, ``The Dreyfus Affair,'' is a baseball story about a shortstop and second baseman who fall in love. I am sometimes dumbfounded by the tenor of these times. And I am sometimes filled with a profound sense of gratitude, even if what I see around me is only as it should be, is only the start of what is just. Don't get me wrong: I know that my experience as a gay person is not everyone's. I know, too, that there's a long, long way to go until tolerance and compassion rule the land. I have one friend whose parents didn't speak to him for a decade after he told them he was gay. I have another who just died of AIDS and said, in one of his last lucid moments, that he could not go easy into the night because his religion preached that unrepentant homosexuals like him were damned. Every time I write an article about homosexuality, I get mail that reeks of closed-mindedness and fear. One recent letter opened with a sentence decrying ``maggot faggots.'' Another, written in graceful strokes on pastel stationery, suggested that I shove my article where the sun doesn't shine O my euphemism, not the letter writer's. In spite of such vitriol, the truth is that we gay and lesbian Americans, for all that's still ahead of us, have made amazing strides in recent years. But I fear we may be jeopardizing our progress if we don't stop to appreciate it, if we don't temper our rage with wisdom and good sense, if we don't realize that it takes time to change generations of thinking. We sometimes come across as shrill and disingenuous, I know. Some gay activists wail that we're the most oppressed people in America, as if there were some competition under way. One lesbian journalist recently compared our current lot to that of Jews in Nazi Germany. We sometimes aren't as honest as we should be. For years we've been insisting that gays represent 10 percent of the population, a figure with dubious support. The truth is that no one knows how many of us there are. The truth is it shouldn't matter. We sometimes seem self-obsessed and hopelessly naive, insisting that our treatment be public issue number one and branding as an enemy anyone who would not make it so. If Clinton, for example, backs off a bit on his gays-in-the-military pledge, it doesn't necessarily mean he's a traitor, as some of us have begun to mutter. It may mean he simply cannot afford to expend any more political clout on this issue now and still push through the rest of his agenda. Our courage doesn't always match the urgency of our demands for equal treatment. For all the gays and lesbians who came out in the past decade, probably a larger number still hide. They complain that society is unenlightened, but won't personally try to enlighten employers, neighbors, friends. They rail against gay stereotypes O but won't offer up their own stories and examples to dispel them. We also don't explain ourselves and our grievances as well as we should or answer our opponents as well as we could. These opponents say gays and lesbians want a federal civil rights law because it will be the best advertisement conceivable for the so-called ``gay life-style,'' luring more people into the aberrant fold. Please. If sexual orientation were that flimsy and changeable, wouldn't most gays switch tomorrow, jettisoning their worries about ostracism and even violent assault? If sexual orientation were a product of hucksterism, how is it that so many of us ended up this way despite advertisements for heterosexuality in every Top 40 song and on every cigarette billboard? The opponents like to cite surveys which conclude that gays and lesbians are richer on average than other Americans and they ask: Where's the discrimination? What is it that gays and lesbians want? I will speak only for myself here, but suspect that in doing so, I speak for many. I want to live in a world where I and my friend whose parents abandoned him and my other friend who feared eternal damnation are judged not by the gender of whom we love but by the quality of our character, our friendship, our work. If it takes a law to accomplish that, then bring on the law. I want the right to experience the fullest, richest love I know O a right, I submit, that is inalienable and essential to the pursuit of happiness. As long as that love carries the threat of punishment and vilification, this right is being attacked and compromised. I want to be able to write an article like this and not wonder whether its candor will make some of my coworkers and neighbors uncomfortable, whether it will cost me the easy rapport I have with them. Because even today, that worry tugs at me. The pull is gentler, but I can still feel it. X X X (Frank Bruni is a reporter for the Detroit Free Press.)