GLR May June

OMEN ARE MARRYING WOMEN

, men are

marrying men; many of either persua-

sion are, with beatific smiles, pushing

baby carriages. One’s sister, daughter,

wife, mother, brother, son, husband, fa-

ther, grandmother, grandfather, aunt,

uncle, colleagues, friends, and neighbors are not just tiptoeing

out of the closet but publicly claiming their gayness in all

spheres of life. It is, to be sure, a cultural sea change, and one that

seems to have happened overnight, at least from the perspective

of mainstreamAmerica. Who would have imagined such a state

of affairs? Certainly not the early gay and lesbian activists of the

Stonewall era, those who have now reached a certain age, the

folks, along with those who have passed on, who were at the

barricades of the early gay

liberation

movement, years before

the alphabet soup of

LGBTQ

rights

. Indeed the shift from “liber-

ation” to “rights,” which was a slow morphing over the years, is

itself emblematic of what has changed.

Assimilation into the social mainstream has moved steadily

apace, and with it have come complications that face all mi-

norities: co-optation, tokenism, paternalism, and a veneer of tol-

erance. What happened to re-imagining and

re-inventing social institutions such as mar-

riage and family, hallmarks of early activist

groups? It’s astonishing to rediscover the

mission statement of New York City’s Gay

Liberation Front, formed in 1969 following

the Stonewall Riots, which included the fol-

lowing self-declaration: “We are a revolu-

tionary group of men and women formed

with the realization that complete sexual lib-

eration for all people cannot come about unless existing social

institutions are abolished.” Can we possibly imagine today’s

dominant

LGBTQ

rights organizations describing themselves as

“revolutionary” and calling for universal “sexual liberation”?

Gay and lesbian folks who aren’t old enough to remember ei-

ther the bad old days or the early days of gay and lesbian liber-

ation—a growing majority at this time—may be overjoyed that

they can partake of the fruits of acceptance (however incom-

plete) into mainstream society. Most are probably oblivious to

the vision of meaningful social change that animated the early

activists. Let me consider a few of the major areas in which

things have undoubtedly changed, but not quite in the ways that

were hoped for when the early movement began.

ARRIAGE

. I turn first to an interview with the cult

filmmaker John Waters and his much quoted line, “I always

thought the privilege of being gay is that we don’t have to get

ESSAY

The Price of Going Mainstream

OLORES

LAICH

Dolores Klaich is writing a memoir of the early days of the gay and les-

bian liberation movement.

married or go into the army.” And later in this

New Yorker

in-

terview (March 26, 2007) he proclaimed that marriage, an en-

trenched heterosexual tradition, was a corny and expensive

tradition. Of course gay or lesbian marriages can be more than

corny and expensive. Just ask the smart, feisty, hot, cute,

charming 83-year-old woman, Edie Windsor (straight out of

central casting), who put the Supreme Court’s feet to the fire in

2013 to strike down a monumentally unfair law, the Defense of

Marriage Act (DOMA), thus paving the way for state after

state, a veritable domino effect (with attendant backlash), to

proclaim gay or lesbian marriage to be okay.

But I wonder, in a country still awash in racism and clas-

sism, would an overweight, impoverished woman of color

who is lesbian have been as acceptable a plaintiff as was this

attractive, wealthy, former IBM executive with a house in the

Hamptons? (Full disclosure: Edie is a friend of mine, a kind,

loving woman who gives the best hugs around.) One can eas-

ily imagine the decision going the other way, which would

have been disastrous for lesbians and gay men everywhere.

Edie Windsor’s undertaking was just plain brave and heroic,

and she deserves all the accolades she has garnered. But

where in this important scenario is the orig-

inal vision of the gay, lesbian, and feminist

liberation movements, which included a

radical agenda of progressive society-wide

change, such as a rethinking of the whole

institution of marriage, a longing to exper-

iment with a more open-ended, flexible,

and varied model for intimate human rela-

tionships? As things now stand, one is re-

minded of the quips by late-night TV hosts

when the subject of gay marriage was first in the air: “Sure,

I’m all for gay marriage. Why shouldn’t they be as miserable

as the rest of us?”

ILITARY

. In 2012 on a military base in Hawaii at a

family return-from-duty homecoming celebration, a buff gay

Marine—as of September 2011 no longer needing

not

to tell—

planted a passionate kiss and a wildly loving hug onto his

boyfriend that in minutes went viral on social media sites. One

thinks of Judy Grahn, the lesbian poet and activist who in the

early 1960s was kicked out of the Air Force for being a lesbian.

Or Lenny Matlovich, the highly decorated Vietnam veteran,

also kicked out of the military, who became a gay liberation

activist and whose tombstone, carved upon his death in 1988,

memorably reads: “When I was in the military, they gave me a

medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.” At

the same time, as this quotation poignantly reminds us, the mil-

itary is a very conservative institution, in times of war a “killing

machine,” participation in which should be problematical for

anyone who questions the legitimacy of war in general and re-

Assimilation has moved

steadily apace, and with

it the complications that

face all minorities:

co-optation, tokenism,

paternalism, and

a veneer of tolerance.

The Gay & Lesbian Review

WORLDWIDE