Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are

We advocates of same-sex marriage need to face up to a fact that we will find unpleasant: we do not yet have a sufficient popular consensus behind our policy to implement it.

Yes, this is a case of America having an ideal -- treating people equally -- and falling short of it. Yes, the reasoning behind our position is sterling. But it's not about idealism and it's not about logic. Same-sex marriage touches deep and powerful emotions.

Folks, the country just isn't there yet. It may be that California is almost there, but as we learned Tuesday, almost isn't all the way. We can use the courts to help the process along, but that only gets us so far. Like I wrote yesterday, if we want to get SSM back in California, and see it happen elsewhere too, it's clear that we need to do more than file lawsuits and oppose initiatives.

As evidence, I cite the following facts:

• Same-sex marriage has been rejected by popular initiative 30 times out of 31; the one time a "protect marriage" initiative failed was in 2006 in Arizona, and Arizona just reversed that itself.
• No major-party candidate for high political office, anywhere, has discerned any political advantage in siding with us. The best we've gotten are domestic partnerships and civil unions.
  
• Only 4 out of 17 state supreme courts have gone along with what I still think is impeccable reasoning for the inescapable conclusion that if straight people should be able to get married to the ones they love, gay people should have the same right. And even one of those courts (Vermont) was satisfied with civil unions as the "equivalent" of marriage. Hell, I was satisfied with them before the Marriage Cases reminded me that separate but equal is inherently unequal.
  

So, neither litigation nor democracy are going to help us. Oh, sure, we might happen upon a case in which a gay couple was materially and objectively hurt by the fact that they couldn't be married, or that their marriage elsewhere (say, in Canada) was not recognized somewhere else. But the chances of that happening are, let's face it, quite low and would require a very particular and dramatic set of facts. The real harm is dignitary, anyway, and we ought not to need to import a gay couple from Canada to be subject to our discriminatory laws here. But the question is how to get a large number of people to recognize that this is a problem of dignity, decency, and basic human rights?

Without litigation and without democracy, we've got only one other way to go -- persuasion. Which is really an exercise in changing peoples' minds and opinions on the issue.

The civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's used impact litigation and attempts to influence the legislative process as significant parts of its strategy. But it also worked on a social level. They also made moral appeals to people in their communities -- churches, fraternal social groups like the Lions' Club or Rotary, and local civic organizations. They did this by sending a mixture of white and black people to these organizations and explaining, on a person-to-person level, why blacks should get the same shake as whites.

Those of you outside of California may not have noticed this, and some of you in California might have missed it, too. But the backers of Prop. 8, the anti-SSM crowd, were very, very careful to shy away from overt anti-gay bigotry. They wanted, very much, to avoid saying or doing anything to suggest that their real motives were prejudice against gay people. They realize that prejudice is not politically appealing, and if they ever took the cloak off and revealed this ugly underbelly to their movement, they knew they would lose. The sort of phrase you heard from Prop. 8 supporters, over and over again, was something like this: "People should do what they want to do, but it shouldn't be forced on others."*

And the "No" campaign also tried to shy away from images of gay couples, apparently thinking that a picture of two normally-dressed middle-aged women with their children would be too shocking for the public to see, and would conjure up images of leather-clad mustachioed gay bikers french-kissing and groping each other in front of a magazine rack selling classic editions of Tom of Finland magazine. The result was a campaign about gay marriage in which everyone involved did their best to pretend that gay people don't exist.

This is a problem. Yesterday, I looked into the data and found that the two political cleavages that made one most likely to vote for Prop. 8 were being a "conservative Republican" and being African-American. If you look into the data on the other end, to find out who was voting "no," the single most powerful factor in motivating a voter to vote "no" was personally knowing an out-of-the-closet homosexual person.

This has a strong analogy back to the 1950's and 1960's. When a white person came to know even a single black person on more than a superficial level, they found it hard to continue their bigotry against blacks in general. The same thing seems to be true for gays. When you get to know a gay person, you find out that he is, well, a person, much like yourself, with interests, preferences, hobbies, an education, a job, and all the other sorts of things that make people people.

To make the concept of gay marriage more palatable, simply being gay needs to be more socially accepted. Maybe this is already the case in the liberal intelligentsia and the world of entertainment. But it's only starting to really take root in the vast middle class. To make this work, gay people have to come out of the closet and announce themselves to their friends and families. And they have to be reasonably nice about it, and be reasonably nice people. Sure, some gay people are assholes. Some are sweethearts. Like other kinds of people, there is a spectrum. And it's only with experience that the rest of society will realize this, and understand that they are people like everyone else. That's why gays need to come out -- so that other people can know that they are gay and that they are still good people.

I'm probably preaching to the choir here on this blog on that point -- but what we ought to realize is that there are a lot of people out there who don't think they know any gay people. Their social networks are focused on their jobs and their churches; particularly within a church community, there is great social pressure against coming out of the closet. So while it's unlikely that they do not know gay people, it is quite likely that a lot of people don't know that one or more of their friends are gay. If they did know, they would be forced to take a step back and re-think their opinions about gay people.

Maybe it wouldn't change their minds, maybe not even most of the time. I know some people who have cut off ties with family members who came out of the closet. And there is overt discrimination against gay people, although at least in California we have laws that provide some level of protection and remedy for that in realms like employment and housing.

The point is to open the eyes of the bigots a little bit. The hard-core bigots, we can't do much about them. But some of the ones who may not even understand their own prejudice, because they have rationalized themselves into thinking that they are doing good by being bigots, this will have an effect on them.

If the objective is getting people to at least minimally accept the rights of gay people to marry their chosen partners, the single most powerful factor is actually socializing with openly gay people. It would seem that we have not yet reached a critical mass of openly gay people out there in the world for enough people to realize that their bigotry is hurting people they consider their own friends and within their own families.

So this is the most effective thing that can be done in the long run. It's not one that I can do, because I'm not gay myself. It's one that the people who can do it have to do voluntarily.

For many, coming out is an act of great personal courage. For some, there will be a price to pay that they may not be happy to pay. My attitude has always been, until now, that whether a gay person wants to stay in or come out of the closet is a deeply personal choice, a very complex choice, and one that I would respect because it's not my choice to make.

What I'm suggesting to closeted gay Readers is that another factor you should consider in deciding whether to come out or not is that there are a lot of other gay people out there who will benefit in a small way from your coming out and making some of the straight people around you who have been insensitive to their own (maybe not malicious but nevertheless indefensible) bigotry and how it has affected you. You may not change anyone's mind, but you probably will soften some ossified attitudes.


* The notion that gay people getting married is somehow forcing other people to be gay themselves is logic a little bit too fuzzy for me, but it does illustrate some level of tolerance for gay people among people who voted to ban gay marriage.