In today’s NYT, Jeremy Peters tries to answer what I think is our next big question: Where is our leader?
Gay people have no national standard-bearer, no go-to sound-byte machine for the media. So when President Obama last week extended benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees, there was no alpha gay leader to respond with the movement’s official voice, though some activists criticized the president for not going far enough.
Last week, both Max Mutchnick and AKA William’s Ben Rimalower asked, in their own ways, the very same question. I’ve been asking it myself, and the confluence of these articles’ references to old school gay thinking, the need for a new mindset, and Martin Luther King, Jr. is convincing me that this is a question that, once asked enough times, will create its own answer. Our answer.
Peters does a great job of breaking down the reasons the LGBT movement has no national leader into four main components: up to now we haven’t needed one, our lack of moral authority, the state-by-state necessity of fighting for LGBT rights, and AIDS.
On not needing one:
One explanation is that gay and lesbian activists learned early on that they could get along just fine without one. Even in the movement’s earliest days following the violent uprising at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village 40 years ago this week, no singular leader emerged.
On our historical perceived lack of moral authority:
“The gay movement has always had a problem of achieving a dignity or a moral imperative that the black civil rights movement had, or the women’s rights movement claimed,” said Dudley Clendinen, who co-wrote the book “Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America” and now teaches writing at Johns Hopkins University. “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,” he said.
By contrast, the moral authority that leaders like Dr. King, Ms. Friedan and Ms. Steinem could claim — and the fact that Americans did not look at them and imagine their sex lives — made it easier to build respectability with the public.
On the state-by-state fight for LGBT rights:
Another reason for the absence of a nationally prominent gay leader is the highly local nature of the movement. Unlike the civil rights and the feminist movements, the gay movement lacked a galvanizing national issue.
. . . “The issues of gay rights are mainly state issues, so the focus for activism is going to be on the local level,” said David Eisenbach, a lecturer in history at Columbia University and the author of “Gay Power: An American Revolution.”
David J. Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who has written about the civil rights and women’s rights movements, “[Activists on the state and local levels] see dispersal as a great thing, that it’s better not to have a concentration or too much attention overinvested in one individual,”
This is changing specifically with the federal Boies-Olson Prop 8 challenge and generally with the idea of marriage equality itself.
And on AIDS:
That movement for equality was later overshadowed by efforts to combat AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s. And AIDS itself is a reason leaders were hard to come by. “AIDS wiped out a whole generation,” Mr. Eisenbach said. “What you have is a vacuum. And that still has not been filled.”
Garrow also said, “The speed and breadth of change [in LGBT rights] has been just breathtaking, but it’s happened without a Martin Luther King.”
For now.
Read the full article over on the“> New York Times.
20. June 2009 at 11:42 pm
I still don’t think we need a widely recognized leader to tell us what to do. There’s a lot of people that have the mindset that because the first civil rights movement had martin luther king, then we have to have some equivalent for the gay rights movement. But when you look at all of history, the vast majority of movements and large changes in the way the world works have not required one person the lead the way. In fact a lot of movements could not have happened if there was one person because it would go against the entire point.
The American Revolution is a prime example. Even though we have examples of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin who certainly helped the movement, they were not in control of it. Rather, it was the people’s own moral compass that lead the way.
Anyway, we have our own George Washingtons and Benjamin Franklins in the gay rights movement, its just that ours tend to be the directors of large lobbying firms like the HRC or ACLU. But just because a person has a financial interest in doing moral things does not make them immoral. Just like the vast majority of the Founding Fathers had vested financial interests in an sovereign American democracy.
21. June 2009 at 12:57 pm
Although, I personally am so far to the left that even the democrats appear to me to be “right-wing,” I consider myself to be a strict constitutionalist. It is my opinion that since its inception there has been an organized and systematic assault by the conservatives in the United States on the civil liberties written into the US Constitution. The “War on Drugs”; “War on Terror”; “War on Communism” and a host of other wars waged by the right wing are really nothing more than a War on People–an excuse to erode civil rights to the point of non-existence. I invite you to my website devoted to raising awareness on this puritan attack on freedom: http://pltcldscsn.blogspot.com/
21. June 2009 at 3:53 pm
What about gays in the military? I mean in recent years, the military has taken ex-felons, white supremacists, gang members, and other undesirables to fill its slots. The only NATO member, besides the United States, that doesn’t allow gays in the military is Muslim Turkey. Gay military from Canada and European nations serve honorably in joint exercises with our homophobic military. Article seems to be written by an reporter with a bias, but without dissenting opinion. I beg to differ.