Subject: John D'Emilio Op-Ed 8/3
From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 1995 09:18:54 -0400

Gay/Lesbian Press Editors,

Following is an opinion article written by Dr. John D'Emilio, an author and
historian who is the director of the Policy Institute of the National Gay and
Lesbian Task Force in Washington, DC.  I hope you will consider publishing
this piece in your opinion/commentary section.  If you have any questions,
please contact me [Robin Kane, NGLTF Media Director] at (202) 332-6483, ext.
3311 or [email-masked].
********
 Where Have All the Homophobes Gone?:  
State Politics in the Gingrich Era

by John D'Emilio

 The Republican Party's Contract with America--and its younger sibling, the
Contract with the American Family--have dominated political reporting for
most of the year.  Because both have chosen to sidestep head-on discussion of
homosexuality, gay issues have slipped from the national media's radar
screen.  For many gay men, lesbians and bisexuals this must come as a welcome
relief, a moment of respite in a hard political season.  Who, after all,
could enjoy being the target of the kind of rhetoric generated in the last
few years--at the Republican convention in Houston, in the Senate hearings on
the military's exclusion policies, or in the fight over the NEA?

 The lull, however, is more apparent than real.  Congress is not the only
body that legislates.  In the fifty states, there was no Contract with
America to discipline local right-wing political leaders, but in many of them
there is an infrastructure of gay organizations eager to move forward their
quest for respect and equality.  The result is that state capitals rather
than Congress have become the battleground upon which the issue of equal
rights for gays is being fought.

 The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute recently released a
study of state legislation.  Because the survey is the first of its kind, it
is impossible to determine whether the action level is greater or less than
in recent years.  But what can be said with certainty is that legislative
debates about the place of gay, lesbian and bisexual citizens in society are
extensive.  At least 97 gay-related measures moved forward in 33 states.  In
30 states, anti-gay measures received serious consideration, while 18 states
advanced non-discrimination bills of one sort or another.

 The news, both good and bad, can tell us much about the political strength
of the gay community and of its most outspoken opponents.  

 The brightest spot was Rhode Island, which became the ninth state to enact a
statewide civil rights measure banning discrimination based on sexual
orientation.  

 The clearest pattern of gay-friendly activity was the tendency, expressed in
fifteen states, to include sexual orientation among a list of categories
needing protection against discrimination.  They tended to cluster around two
broad areas of policy-making legislation:  health care and hate crimes.   In
Massachusetts, for instance, several bills which prohibit discrimination in
the delivery of various kinds of health services made it through committee.  

 For close observers of gay politics, these results should provide some
measure of comfort.  The AIDS crisis has propelled activists out of their
community and into the center of the health-care field.  Their work, and that
of the women's and lesbian health care movements, is reaping dividends.  In
the same way, activists since the early 1980s have fought vigorously to call
attention to anti-gay hate violence.  At the state and national level, they
have worked closely in coalitions with other targeted groups to have hate
crimes recognized as a form of violence needing special remedies. 

 Meanwhile, the national climate of divisiveness and intolerance is playing
itself out in state politics.  Even in states like New York, California and
Massachusetts, where the gay community is well organized and has long been
visible, anti-gay measures were able to receive a hearing.  In other states,
right-wing Republicans had an easier time transforming their agenda into
policy.  In Arizona, where the Radical Right has a working majority of the
state Republican party's governing body, the governor signed into law a
measure prohibiting school districts from implementing any course of study
that "promotes" a homosexual lifestyle or portrays homosexuality as a
"positive alternative life-style."  And Utah became the first state to impose
an explicit ban on recognizing same-gender marriages that may be performed in
other states.

 As these last examples suggest, the right wing is choosing its targets
shrewdly.  From a proposal in Oregon that would effectively prohibit doctors
from performing alternative insemination on unmarried women--including
lesbians--to a bill in Vermont that would ban adoption by unmarried couples
and second-parent adoption, the Far Right is attempting to construct a
barbed-wire fence of law and public policy.  Its purpose:  to keep lesbians,
gay men and bisexuals out of the territory marked "children and family."   

 The strategy speaks both to the history of gay oppression and to the
contemporary state of lesbian and gay concerns.  In the past, medical, legal,
and religious discourse defined homosexuals in opposition to the heterosexual
nuclear family.  Inflammatory stereotypes defined queers, whether male or
female, as predators seeking to invade the sanctum of the home and to steal
the young.

 For previous generations, the price of adopting a gay, lesbian or bisexual
identity has often been to live outside the family.  When a gay political
agenda took shape after Stonewall, basic goals such as sodomy law repeal,
civil rights protections, and the removal of the stigma of mental illness
took precedence.  But now, the gay community across the country is reclaiming
family.  Lesbians are choosing to have children, gay men are seeking to
become foster parents, both men and women are insisting that their intimate
partnerships be recognized by law.  Lesbian,  gay and bisexual parents want
their children--and their children's peers--to be taught tolerance in school,
while the parents and advocates of gay youth are insisting that the schools
respond to the needs of their sexual minority students.  In almost every area
of public policy that impinges on family and youth, gay voices are being
heard.

 These voices are new, and not yet well organized.  And so the Radical Right
has rushed into the void, playing upon the emotional flashpoints that run
through American culture, and fomenting fear.  It is not hard to do.  With
the crisis of family and community that Americans are living through, gay
men, lesbians and bisexuals are easier, simpler targets than a changing labor
market with wage structures that compromise family stability, or school
systems without the resources to educate.  

 This year's legislative record suggests that battles over family are likely
to remain frontline conflicts.  It also suggests that the gay community needs
to apply to the arena of family the lessons it has learned in its fight for
health care and against hate-motivated violence--patient, deliberate, and
sustained organization; broad-based education of sympathetic allies; and the
careful articulation of an agenda rooted in the real needs of its members.

[Author and historian John D'Emilio is director of the Policy Institute at
the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington, DC.]