Where’s The Gays?

Conventional wisdom tells us that the absence of Will & Grace—or Will & Will—from this presidential election is a good sign for gays and lesbians. During the 2000 and 2004 campaigns, the Republican Party used gay and lesbian issues to stir up their base. They used the breakdown of the traditional family as a rallying point around which millions of voters were mobilized. Timothy P. McCarthy ’93, a lecturer on History and Literature and Public Policy and a member of Barack Obama’s National LGBT Leadership Task Force, put it best: “Republicans made Democrats look like the vessel for the homosexual agenda.”

And yet I can’t say that I am elated by the silence that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues have received during this long and hard-fought race—a race so often touted for breaking glass ceilings. I can’t help but worry that this silence is the product of apathy among progressives in the fight to end homophobia rather than a sea change in America’s opinion of LGBT people and their “lifestyles.”

The country’s acceptance of LGBT people has changed remarkably, of course, in the past generation, but the recent killing of a gay 14-year-old in Los Angeles by his classmate is just another reminder of how much work remains. If the “ceiling” that still confronts LGBT people in this country—“don’t ask, don’t tell,” marriage prohibitions, and homophobia in general—is going to be broken, silence will not be the tool that does it.

I have sympathy, however, for Democrats who say, “Wait. LGBT issues will only make us lose the election. Isn’t it better to look the other way and make sure a Democrat gets elected? What will a Republican in the White House do for LGBT issues, anyway?”

Nothing, I agree. But the cynic in me also questions whether a Democrat in the White House will ever vigorously support LGBT rights if he—or she—does not believe victory hinged on voters mobilized around this issue.

Bill Clinton, who Toni Morrison could have also called the “first gay president” because of his outreach to LGBT people in 1992, stepped away from his campaign promise to undo “don’t ask, don’t tell” as soon as he became president-elect in the face of a wave of opposition that startled him. Would a sitting Democratic president risk mobilizing the Right in 2012 by stepping out on a limb for LGBT rights?

The only way that a Democratic president will take that risk is if people concerned with LGBT issues give him or her a reason to. It’s simply too much to ask of politicians to “just do it.” Although Senator Clinton might disagree, Lyndon Johnson did not step in front of a segregationist truck for the Civil Rights Act in 1964; he jumped on a much bigger truck, driven by the people of the Civil Rights Movement, that was barreling through its opposition.

The hearts and minds of millions of Americans will not be changed by back-door negotiating and the swipe of a president’s pen. Jacob P. Reitan, a prominent LGBT activist and current student at Harvard Divinity School, expressed disappointment in the state of LGBT activism precisely for this reason. “The LGBT community is very weak on raw action,” he said. “We lobby Congress, work on getting votes for legislative decisions, but we rarely take to the streets to convince people of our rights.” He asked, “Why haven’t activists staged sit-ins at military recruitment centers, which immediately kick people out if they declare their homosexuality?” I don’t have any good answer for him, but if recent American history is any indication, actions like these will be crucial in shifting the country’s landscape of acceptance.

So can I blame Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for not waving the LGBT flag during this primary? No. I can point fingers at myself, however, and everyone else who intellectually supports LGBT rights but has yet to take up Reitan’s call to action (which is so movingly portrayed in the new movie, “For the Bible Tells Me So”). Much of the country has made remarkable progress over the past 20 years in its treatment of LGBT people, but we are far from any finish line. McCarthy described the situation perfectly to me: “We shouldn’t ever be satisfied with where we are. Complacency is the death of democracy.”

Andrew D. Fine ’09, a former Crimson associate editorial chair, is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.