With the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall today, there's a lot to reflect on, gaywise.  The gay movement has made tremendous strides since 1969, despite, as an article in the Times the other day kvetched, never having had a national leader like other civil rights movements in our country. 

The article quotes Dudley Clendinen, who has written about the gay rights movement and concludes: “Because this movement is fundamentally about the right to be sexual, it’s hard for the larger public to see that as a moral issue." 

I know I write about sex here oftener than I probably should (though not nearly as often as I have a right), but it seems to me Clendinen's declaration overstates the case, and worse:  it takes unquestioningly and as a given the categories that have been invented for us and which the movement is only now breaking down. 

Sexuality — and sexual intimacy — is such a fundamental and multifarious part of being human, there is nothing exceptional about gays where the desire to explore and express it is concerned.  And it belittles the real potential significance of the gay movement and misrepresents its place in the broader struggle for civil rights to reduce it to "the right to be sexual."  And yet it's a common enough notion of what the movement represents. 

While "the right to be sexual" is a part of the gay rights movement, it has also been part of the women's movement, and was a major facet of the cultural revolution of the sixties, and continues (and will continue) to be an aspect of youth rebellion.  The discovery and exploration of sexuality is at the core of much of art and literature, from the Biblical epic to Anna Karenina to Gossip Girls.  It persists in providing the headline-making conflicts that define public figures from Michael Jackson to Mark Sanford.  We are all defined to some degree by our sexuality, in all its glory and squalor.

The use of sexuality to marginalize and persecute individuals and groups is, not surprisingly, as old as sexuality itself.  If you look at any civil rights struggle, hypersexuality and sexual perversity have been persistently attributed to marginalized or scapegoated populations: from blacks to Jews to women the threat of rampant sexuality has, in modernity, been an excuse to deny rights or inflame hatred of the other. 


The popular stereotype of black men as predators and rapists of white women, immortalized in the 1915 racist film epic Birth of A Nation, persists to this day.  The Nazi regime perpetuated an image of Jews as lecherous porn-mongers lifted from nineteenth century stereotypes of Jews as sexual deviants (in fact, there are hybrid conspiracy theories about the Jewish origins of the gay movement — linking what conspiracist view as the inherent sexual perversions of Jews with homosexuality). The sexual freedom conferred by the pill (introduced in 1960) unleashed a floodgate of fear about sexually insatiable females.  To this day powerful women like Hillary Clinton are seen as "ball-breakers". 

But in the wider discourse of identity, this is a watershed moment.  The discourses on gender and race in the US have been deepened and complicated by Hillary Clinton's viable run and Barack Obama's election to the Presidency.  The old identity politics, with its categories invented by and for the status quo, are no longer adequate to describe the times we live in. 

Likewise, the more visible gays are in daily life, the less the old discourse with its patronizing clinical categories applies.  Homosexual, in reference to not an act but a whole category of self, like its converse and complement, the heterosexual, is fundamentally a modern invention, but we are living in a postmodern world. Reducing what gay people are fighting for to "the right to be sexual" denies that two of the major struggles of the gay movement now —the repeal of DADT and DOMA — are actually about desexualizing, erasing the distinctions in the law based on gender and sexuality.  Constitutional protections against hiring and firing based on sexuality likewise seek to remove sexuality as a factor in these decisions.

Even if a man or a woman has sexual desire for or sex exclusively with others of the same gender, this fact, in a society that has no need to other people on the basis of it, is only sometimes interesting and nominally, categorically relevant.  The complexities of social interaction already extend to race, gender and class.  We negotiate these every day in multiple interactions, from work, to commerce, to play.  It's conceptually not a huge step to include sexuality. 

What laws protecting people against institutionalized racism, sexism, and homophobia do in part is acknowledge our ability to negotiate these issues among ourselves in a free and open society.  They broaden who and what is "permitted", expanding the kinds of experiences and variety of narratives, bringing out the potential for greater harmony from discourse, ultimately enriching our collective experience and presenting us with additional tools to break down the obstacles of needless falsehoods and fears, helping us get at the truth of that experience.  The danger is that the more demotic the discourse, the harder it is for any one person, class or interest to control.

In order to control discourse and interaction, certain categories of interaction are taken off the table.  What segregating (of races, ethnicities and genders) in various ways does, is takes the complexities of dealing with those who come, in a variety ways, from a different place, out of the equation. Segregation does this in the crudest way: by actually removing the persons themselves from the equation.  If whites don't have to mix with blacks, we don't have to finesse the uncomfortable complexities of our respective and collective histories (nor will we ever transcend them). With women segregating them also in obvious ways simplifies discourse and interaction, maintaining a social order based on a familiar hierarchy. 

Closeting is a form of coercion that calls for the complicity of gays in second-classing themselves.  Reducing gays to their basest sexual urges is a way of shaming them — there's a long-standing taboo of discussing the details, the mechanics of sex publicly.  Conjuring the image of specific sexual acts (real or imagined) whenever a "class" (real or imagined) of people is mentioned is thus a way of at least attempting to demean and ridicule them, regardless of whatever hypocrisy is inherent in doing so.

Alternative hierarchies and power structures arise with shifts in power and priorities.  We are seeing tremendous shifts today based both on demographics and values (and indeed the two are linked, but in much more volatile ways than we may suspect).  Shifts in population and values, of course, threaten other populations and values.  This is why racism resonates — because the notion of "racial purity" symbolizes the (imagined) integrity of a population as much as the idea of "traditional" gender and sex roles affirms the social hierarchy and power structure by imagining a fixed basis for them in biblical or natural history.

What we're seeing play out in the Obama administration's strategy on gays is the "official" version of the process of discouraging new complexities in open discourse.  Right now the state literally sanctions the closeting, segregation, and active persecution of gays — that is, the power structure officially prohibits a "class" of people from engaging in open discourse, actually deeming their contribution to open discourse a danger to national security.  It's a step up from laws on the books at the time of Stonewall that made homosexual acts punishable by castration, but still.  This stance tells us a lot about the administration's priorities in general.  The active pursuit of an ideal by those in power cannot beunderestimated, which is why Obama's bait and switch on gay rights isdisappointing and dispiriting. 

As power dynamics — ideas about what constitute our strengths as a society and the structure of relations within society — shift, so does what is allowed in open discourse and interaction.  And vice-versa.  The Obama administration would like us to believe that decisive moves toward equal rights for gays would actually undermine equal rights for gays in the long run.  But by sustaining the taboo, Obama may be doing more harm than good.  The administration is needlessly perpetuating the notion that the homosexual is some kind of strange predatory species (something between a butterfly and a vampire bat, if you believe the alarmists at the DOD) when it should be arguing that as a category of identity it is benign, irrelevant.

The question of how much of gay culture is described by homosexuality is one that the gay rights movement is struggling with in its own way, or should be.  We want to believe that the whole world is gay, of course, but when a social conservative like Larry Craig who has consistently voted against gay rights in the senate and congress is caught in a homosexual act and vehemently claims he's not gay, should we believe him? 

I think so.  Because consciousness of sexuality and gay identity are separate, though related issues — obviously, but in subtler ways than we might admit.  Gay liberation and gay rights challenge the social hierarchy — we call it a movement because it seeks to revolutionize — it is about deepening the discourse, and allowing in new complexities — things that even the current establishment balks at.

Just as we acknowledge that sex acts themselves do not determine one's sexual identity (many gay men have had sexual relationships with women, many straight men have had sex with other men — the notion of situational sexuality applies to everything from "experimentation" to rough trade), sexuality as a defining category of identity actually doesn't challenge the status quo.  It is not revolutionary.  Those who argue that the homosexual can simply be removed from the closet and placed in an office cubicle are missing the significance of what's happening.

The right to be sexual without sexuality defining identity is what the gay movement is about.  Gay people do not argue for the repeal of DADT in order to "be sexual" in the foxhole or barracks shower.  They are fighting for the right to serve regardless of their sexuality.  They are arguing, in essence, that sexuality while a component of identity is not the whole, or defining element of it. 

To be defined as homosexual is frankly demeaning.  Gays argue that they should be defined as mothers and fathers, lovers and friends, brothers and sisters, Christians, Muslims, and Jews, students, teachers, lawyers and doctors, politicians, artists, craftsmen, merchants, soldiers, Americans.  Even to be defined as gay is a provisional identity made necessary by an equally provisional power structure which it is the aim of the gay movement that began 40 years ago today to transcend, and by transcending transform.

When I think of Stonewall I think of the fall of the Bastille.

"Is it a rebellion?" Louis XVI asked his counsel.

"No, sire," came the reply. "It is a revolution."

Vive la Révolution!