The Future of Gay America

The '90s reflect a new spirit of anger, activism and political clout. But how far will the limits of tolerance extend ?

(Article published in Newsweek, March 12, 1990)

It is a chilly morning in Atlanta and, outside the Centres for Disease Control, the confrontation is just heating up. Mark Weaver, a minister who travelled from Texas, waves his "GAY IS NOT OKAY" placard at the demonstrators massing to protest some of the CDC's AIDS policies. The gauntlet is thrown - and so are some punches. "This man has just assaulted me, Officer, Officer", says Weaver. "Officer, Officer," some of the gay activists croon back in falsetto. "Hey, I talk in tongues, too - look," says one, grabbing the nearest man for some explicit kissing. As Weaver and a policeman wearing AIDS-proof gloves approach, the crowd lets up a new chant: "Your gloves don't match your shoes. You'll see it on the news." Derision, outrage, civil disobedience - these are the hallmarks of ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), the gay community's shock troops in the war against AIDS.

Every May the Fritsch Rudser family of San Francisco celebrates its own whimsical tradition: the presentation, on Mother's Day, of the Michael Douglas Fritsch Rudser Surrogate Mother's Award. Michael, 6 1/2, picks a woman he wishes to honor - his teacher, say - gives her a rose and a present, and serves brunch with Dad's help. But the holiday Michael, sister Crystal, 3, brother Raphael, 2, and father Steven Fritsch Rudser observe with greatest fanfare is Gay Freedom Day. Fritsch Rudser, who adopted his children, is gay - one of a growing group of homosexual parents. "After having worked in the trenches in the AIDS crisis, I've become familiar with the end of life," he says. "I wanted contact with the beginning of it."

Since the first diagnosis nearly a decade ago, AIDS has threatened the very life and spirit of gay America. To date, at least 50,500 homosexuals have died; with a minimum of 82,500 already infected with the HIV virus, the death toll will continue to mount for at least another five years. But while black plagues don't have silver linings, AIDS has also galvanized the gay community in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. With the flip of the calendar from the '80s to the '90s, gays have leaped from political exclusion to a place in the corridors of power. And they have channelled their anger over what they regard as the government's inadequate response to the AIDS epidemic into a rebirth of activism. Today, says San Francisco author Randy Shilts, gays "are more interested in protest than in candlelight processions and quilt patches."

The No. 1 item on the political agenda remains AIDS. But gay leaders have also begun fighting for a slate of family rights including social security, medical benefits, inheritance, child custody and even gay marriage. For a growing number of homosexual men and women, such family concerns are a day-to-day reality: a new generation of gay parents has produced the first-ever "gayby boom." The gay community's goal is "integration - just as it was with Martin Luther King," says Harry Britt, president of the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco. "We want the same rights to happiness and success as the nongay."

By some yardsticks, gays are well on their way - not just in the gay meccas of New York and San Francisco but in the very heart of Middle America.(See "Lesbians: Portraits of a Community") Public attitudes toward the nation's estimated 25 million gays and lesbians are more tolerant than at any time since the AIDS epidemic triggered a negative backlash in the early '80s. Certainly, ACT UP's provocations have offended many mainstream gays - and threatened to jeopardize their acceptance by straight society. But by and large, the devastation AIDS has created had led to greater sympathy in the straight world, and gays' responsible handling of the crisis has led to new respect for the community. According to a Gallup poll taken last fall, 47 percent of all adults believe that homosexual relations between consenting adults should be legal, up from only 33 percent in 1987; 71 percent of the respondents said gays should have equal job opportunities, compared with 59 percent opposed two years before. "The world has been genuinely transformed in two decades. It is not possible to live in the United States today and not be aware of gay people," says Tom Stoddard, executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, which works for gay rights. "That by itself is a revolution."

Arguably, the most extraordinary development is the gay community's new political clout. There are 50 openly gay elected officials around the country, compared with fewer than half a dozen in 1980. The Human Rights Campaign Fund, a gay lobbying group, was the ninth largest independent PAC during the last presidential election, and 25th on the Federal Election Commission's list of fund raisers. Politicians have come to recognize the implications of the rise of an openly gay middle class - vast numbers of educated, articulate gays who can and do vote. "At the end of the '60s, most gays thought of themselves as outsiders," says John D'Emilio, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "I don't think that gays then thought they could ever influence that system, or be a power within it."

"Second epidemic": Yet most gay leaders would agree that there are many battles left - starting with the armed forces. Last week the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider two constitutional challen- ges to the military lonsgstanding prohibition against gays in the service. Sodomy laws remain on the books in 24 states, and only two states - Wisconsin and Massachusetts - have passed measures banning discrimination against gays. And gay-bashing remains a fact of life in this country. "Homophobia is the second epidemic," says Robert Bray, a spokesman at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and advocacy group. The Task Force says that gays are seven times more likely to be crime victims than the average American. Last month the Senate passed a bill requiring the Justice Department to publish hate-crime statistics according to classification that will include sexual orientation.

More than any other organization, ACT UP has become the voice of gay rage. The group got its start three years ago this week when, according to gay lore, activist playwright Larry Kramer happened to be addressing a community group in Greenwich Village. He told half of the gathered crowd to stand up, then screamed: "You could be dead in less than five years! What are you going to do about it ?" The answer was ACT UP New York, a group dedicated to broadening the role of government and private industry in the fight against AIDS. Since Kramer's call to arms, offshoots have sprung up in about 40 cities here and abroad, with an estimated 6,000 members. Its accomplishments have been impressive. Members have sat on advisory panels at the Food and Drug Administration and played an important role in speeding the approval of experimental antiviral drugs, including DDI. When Burroughs Wellcome lowered the price of AZT from $8,000.00 to $6,400.00 last year, ACT UP received a measure of the credit. After months of internal debate, some chapters have lent troops to other cause, such as the repeal of sodomy laws, and even to the pro-choice movement in the abortion battle.

Drawing on a mix of guerrilla theater, passive resistance and state-of-the-art media manipulation, ACT UP uses tactics that shock - and often offend - many Americans. The group has halted trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to protest drug pricing by pharmaceutical companies, staged traffic jams from Boston to San Francisco, even necked in Jesse Helms's Capitol Hill office. At St.Patrick's Cathedral in New York shortly before Christmas, one member crumbled a communion wafer - a desecration of what Roman Catholics believe to be the body of Christ. " It is ACT UP's job to be disruptive and it is the job of other AIDS groups to pick up the pieces," says Ggreg Taylor, 23, a San Francisco member.

Officially, most mainstream gay leaders say that ACT UP's firebrand politics serve the cause well. " My view is that you need to use all the tactics available, even when you know that some of the things you do will antagonize and even repel potential supporters," says Urvashi Vaid, executive director of the Washington-based Task Force. But despite a certain reluctance to criticize another gay group, some prominent gays worry that ACT UP has created new tensions within the movement. They have questioned whether the more obnoxious actions - particularly the one at St.Patrick's - are counterproductive. Shilts, who wrote "And the Band Played On," a book critical of the establishment's response to the AIDS crisis, suggests ACT UP is at its best as an outlet for rage. But "the goals of political action are different from the goal of psychotherapy," he says. "We don't have time for ineffective tactics."

Perhaps the most controversial statement a member of the gay community can make is that it's time to move beyond AIDS. Longtime activist and author Darrell Yates Rist has argued that gays have become so obsessed with the disease that they have neglected other matters of vital importance for the community. The increase in anti-gay violence, the perpetuation of sodomy laws and civil-rights abuses, says Rist, "are going to destroy more lives than AIDS will ever destroy." Because epidemic-related cases could consume all its resources, Lambda long ago made the decision to split its docket 50-50 between AIDS and sexual-orientation cases.

How to live: The tensions over tactics reflect a larger schism within the gay community today between the separatists and the assimilationists. Gay leaders all agree that "coming out" is the most important political and personal act anyone can make. Beyond that, however, there is widespread disagreement over how best to live outside the closet. Should gays pursue their own countercultural lifestyle in such urban ghettos as San Francisco's Castro district, or assimilate into the dominant straight culture? Should they continue - within the bounds of safe sex - to have multiple partners or emulate heterosexual monogamy ? A certain amount of conflict is inevitable, suggests Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson's biographer and a history professor at Lehman College in New York. "You have to minimize your differentness from the mainstream in order to win acceptance," says Duberman. "But in fact the whole value of the subculture is in its differentness."

The debate reached a high pitch last summer, when two gay authors from Boston declared "the gay revolution has failed." In "After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear & Hatred of Gays in the 90's," Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen argued that certain extreme forms of homosexual behavior - for example, promiscuity or public sex - alienate straights and ultimately harm gays. Madsen, an advertising executive, and Kirk have suggested that gays should mount publicity campaigns designed to allay straight fears - say, buying up as space for pictures of great figures like Alexander the Great that ask: "Did you know he was gay?" Their critics have called them self-hating gays who have sold out heir people to get along with society at large.

The ultimate act of assimilation would be marriage, a right some gays have placed on their future agenda. The impetus comes partly from AIDS, which revealed the degree to which gays did not have the rights straights take for granted. The partners of gay men who died intestate found they had no claims on property that would have gone to a spouse; others found themselves evicted from apartments because they weren't on the lease. "Gay men suddenly realized they needed the support systems which the state and society give as a right to heterosexual families," says Roberta Achtenberg, a lesbian activist and attorney in San Francisco. Seven U.S. cities, Los Angeles and Seattle among them, now have "domestic partnership" laws that grant gays a variety of spousal right including insurance benefits, bereavement leaves and credit agreements.

Given the objections of church and state, legal marriage remains unlikely for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, gays themselves are divided over whether marriage hetero style is even desirable. Many in the community oppose quasi-straight unions, on the ground that they are too imitative and not uniquely gay. But Frank Kameny, a veteran gay activist, sees no reason why homosexuals can't have the whole package: "I've never heard a rational explanation for the prejudice against them - after all, marriage licenses aren't rationed, so we wouldn't be taking them from someone else." In the New Republic last year, Andrew Sullivan argued that marriage was not only good for gays but for society at large, because it would promote sexual and economic stability.

Parents concerns: While theorists debate the merits of marriage between gays, many are already living the settled-down life of their "breeder" peers. That includes children - either through adoption, artificial insemination or arrangements between lesbians and gay "uncles." There are an estimated 3 million to 5 million lesbian and gay parents who have had children in the context of a heterosexual relationship. But in the San Francisco area alone, at least 1,000 children have been born to gay or lesbian couples in the last five years. A number of organizations have sprung up to meet their social needs. San Francisco boasts the Lesbian and Gay Parenting Group, storytelling hours for tots at gay bookstores and Congregation Sha'ar Zahav, a largely gay synagogue with a Hebrew School for member's children.

According to the parents, the concerns of gay families are both unique and quite routine. Tom White and his lover Dmitri (who didn't want his last name used) have a house in the suburbs, three dogs and a 4-year-old adopted son, Elliott. The men had arranged for the adoption when Elliott's mother was still pregnant. Present in the delivery room, Dmitri cut the ombilical cord, while White became the first person to hold the baby after his birth mother. Elliott calls White "Daddy" and Dmitri "Poppa." Dmitri, a coordinator for deaf-student services at San Francisco State University, has since cut his work schedule in half; "I'm on the mommy track," he says. Instead of going to parties, the two men organize picnics. While many American parents try to limit the time their kids spend in front of the tube, White says "we make sure Elliott watches enough TV so he can relate to the world."

While acceptance of such families has grown, the arrangements can lead to some difficult moments. When the teacher of 6-year-old Jacob Rios asked him who the man in front of the classroom was, he answered: "That's my dad's husband." John Rios, 30, and Don Harrelson, 42, were united by a minister before moving in together two years ago. Harrelson, a trade-show organizer who became one of the nation's first openly gay adoptive father 13 years ago, had already raised two boys. Now he is helping bring up Rios's two kids from a heterosexual marriage, Jacob and Jennifer, 9.

Role models: Psychologists have investigated the impact of gay parents on children with somewhat surprising results. In a 1980 Massachusetts custody case, a judge allowed testimony showing that all 35 studies on homosexual parents from the previous 15 years found no adverse effect on the kids. A study by Dr. Richard Green of the Long Island Research Institute found that the daughters of lesbians tended to have strong female identities, while the boys like to hang out with the guys and play sports. But one prominent child psychiatrist questions whether the existing literature is indeed conclusive. "When one studies the children of such couples, you have to look at the totality of their development, especially as they enter adolescence," says Dr. Eleanor Galenson, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. Until more work is done, "we will not really know whether these children are faring well in their development, sexual and otherwise."

For gays coming of age in 1990, America is both infinitely scarier and immeasurably safer than it was for the Stonewall generation. Frightening because AIDS will continue to cut a deadly swath through the community. More hospitable because of the legal and social milestones that have made homosexuality acceptable in many corners of straight America. "In the past, before Stonewall, it was a matter of surviving in almost underground conditions, like the French Resistance in the second world war," says Adrienne Smith, president of the gay and lesbian division of the American Psychological Association. "Now the cry is, `We demand equal rights in all areas'." As the decade progresses, gays will continue testing the limits of this country's tolerance. They have a long way to go: homophobia remains a serious problem, and even some Americans who oppose discrimination may have trouble accepting gay lifestyles. But as the rebirth of activism proves, gays won't let up in their quest for a more visible - and influential - place in American society.

© 2005 LINQ Communications