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LIKE all students caught up in the civil rights and antiwar
movements of the 1960s, I was riveted by the violent confrontations
between the police and protestors in Selma, 1965, and Chicago, 1968.
But I never heard about the several days of riots that rocked Greenwich
Village after the police raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in
the wee hours of June 28, 1969 — 40 years ago today.
Then
again, I didn’t know a single person, student or teacher, male or
female, in my entire Ivy League university who was openly identified as
gay. And though my friends and I were obsessed with every iteration of
the era’s political tumult, we somehow missed the Stonewall story. Not
hard to do, really. The Times — which would not even permit the use of
the word gay until 1987 — covered the riots in tiny, bowdlerized
articles, one of them but three paragraphs long, buried successively on
pages 33, 22 and 19.
But
if we had read them, would we have cared? It was typical of my
generation, like others before and after, that the issue of gay civil
rights wasn’t on our radar screen. Not least because gay people,
fearful of harassment, violence and arrest, were often forced into the
shadows. As David Carter writes in his book “Stonewall,” at the end of
the 1960s homosexual sex was still illegal in every state but Illinois.
It was a crime punishable by castration in seven states. No laws —
federal, state or local — protected gay people from being denied jobs
or housing. If a homosexual character appeared in a movie, his life
ended with either murder or suicide.
The younger gay men — and
scattered women — who acted up at the Stonewall on those early summer
nights in 1969 had little in common with their contemporaries in the
front-page political movements of the time. They often lived on the
streets, having been thrown out of their blue-collar homes by their
families before they finished high school. They migrated to the Village
because they’d heard it was one American neighborhood where it was safe
to be who they were.
Stonewall “wasn’t a 1960s student riot,” wrote one of them, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, in a poignant handwritten flier on display at the New York Public Library in the exhibition
“1969: The Year of Gay Liberation.” They had “no nice dorms for
sleeping,” “no school cafeteria for certain food” and “no affluent
parents” to send checks. They had no powerful allies of any kind, no
rights, no future. But they were brave. They risked their necks to
prove, as Lanigan-Schmidt put it, that “the mystery of history” could
happen “in the least likely of places.”
After the gay liberation
movement was born at Stonewall, this strand of history advanced
haltingly until the 1980s. It took AIDS and the new wave of gay
activism it engendered to fully awaken many, including me, to the gay
people all around them. But that tardy and still embryonic national
awareness did not save the lives of those whose abridged rights made
them even more vulnerable during a rampaging plague.
On Monday, President Obama will commemorate Stonewall with an East Room reception for gay leaders. Some of the invitees have been fiercely critical of what they see as his failure, thus far, to redeem his promise to be a “fierce advocate” for their still unfulfilled cause. The rancor increased this month, after the Department of Justice filed a brief defending the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the most ignominious civil rights betrayal under the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton.
The
Obama White House has said that the Justice Department action was
merely a bureaucratic speed bump on the way to repealing DOMA — which
hardly mitigates the brief’s denigration of same-sex marriage, now
legal in six states after many hard-fought battles. The White House has
also asserted that its Stonewall ceremony was “long planned” — even
though it sure looks like damage control. News of the event trickled
out publicly only last Monday, after dozens of aggrieved, heavy-hitting
gay donors dropped out of a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser with a top ticket of $30,400.
In
conversations with gay activists on both coasts last week, I heard
several theories as to why Obama has seemed alternately clumsy and
foot-dragging in honoring his campaign commitments to dismantle DOMA
and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. The most charitable take had it that he was
following a deliberate strategy, given his habit of pursuing his goals
through long-term game plans. After all, he’s only five months into his
term and must first juggle two wars, the cratered economy, health care
and Iran. Some speculated that the president is fearful of crossing
preachers, especially black preachers, who are adamantly opposed to
same-sex marriage. Still others said that the president was tone-deaf
on the issue because his inner White House circle lacks any known gay
people.
But the most prevalent theory is that Obama, surrounded
by Clinton White House alumni with painful memories, doesn’t want to
risk gay issues upending his presidency, as they did his predecessor’s
in 1993. After having promised to lift the ban on gays in the military,
Clinton beat a hasty retreat into Don’t Ask once Congress and the
Pentagon rebelled. This early pratfall became a lasting symbol of his
chaotic management style — and a precursor to another fiasco,
Hillarycare, that Obama is also working hard not to emulate.
But
2009 is not then, and if the current administration really is worried
that it could repeat Clinton’s history on Don’t Ask, that’s ludicrous.
Clinton failed less because of the policy’s substance than his fumbling
of the politics. Even in 1992 a majority of the country (57 percent) supported an end to the military ban on gays. But Clinton blundered into the issue with no strategy at all and little or no advance consultation with the Joint Chiefs and Congress. That’s never been Obama’s way.
The cultural climate is far different today, besides. Now, roughly 75 percent of Americans support an end
to Don’t Ask, and gay issues are no longer a third rail in American
politics. Gay civil rights history is moving faster in the country,
including on the once-theoretical front of same-sex marriage, than it
is in Washington. If the country needs any Defense of Marriage Act at
this point, it would be to defend heterosexual marriage from the
right-wing “family values” trinity of Sanford, Ensign and Vitter.
But full gay citizenship is far from complete. “There’s a
perception in Washington that you can throw little bits of partial
equality to gay people and that gay people will be satisfied with
that,” said Dustin Lance Black, the screenwriter who won an Oscar for
“Milk,” last year’s movie about Harvey Milk, the pioneering gay civil
rights politician of the 1970s. Such “crumbs,” Black added, cannot
substitute for “full and equal rights in all matters of civil law in
all 50 states.”
As anger at White House missteps boiled over this month, the president abruptly staged a ceremony to offer some crumbs.
The pretext was the signing of an executive memorandum bestowing
benefits to the domestic partners of federal employees. But some of
those benefits were already in force, and the most important of them
all, health care, was not included because it is forbidden by DOMA.
One
gay leader invited to the Oval Office that day was Jennifer Chrisler of
the Family Equality Council, an advocacy organization for gay families
based in Massachusetts. She showed a photo of her 7-year-old twin sons,
Tom and Tim, to Obama. The president cooed. “I told him they’re
following in Sasha’s footsteps, entering the second grade,” she
recounted to me last week. “It was a very human exchange between two
parents.”
Chrisler seized the moment to appeal to the president
on behalf of her boys. “The worst thing you can experience as parents
is to feel your children are discriminated against,” she told him.
“Imagine if you have to explain every day who your parents are and that
they’re as real as every family is.” Chrisler said that she and her
children “want a president who will make that go away,” adding, “I
believe in his heart he wants that to happen, his political mistakes
notwithstanding.”
No president possesses that magic wand, but
Obama’s inaction on gay civil rights is striking. So is his utterly
uncharacteristic inarticulateness. The Justice Department brief
defending DOMA has spoken louder for this president than any of his own
words on the subject. Chrisler noted that he has given major speeches
on race, on abortion and to the Muslim world. “People are waiting for
that passionate speech from him on equal rights,” she said, “and the
time is now.”
Action would be even better. It’s a press cliché
that “gay supporters” are disappointed with Obama, but we should all
be. Gay Americans aren’t just another political special interest group.
They are Americans who are actively discriminated against by federal
laws. If the president is to properly honor the memory of Stonewall, he
should get up to speed on what happened there 40 years ago, when
courageous kids who had nothing, not even a public acknowledgment of
their existence, stood up to make history happen in the least likely of
places.
The New York Times
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