The Borg, John Lewis, and The Gay Right

Why do people insist that all minorities must share a single perspective? It's not like we're the Borg.

John Lewis's decision not to endorse Barack Obama has triggered a wave of mumbling about What It All Means. Well, it means that not all African Americans like Barack. Some aren't thrilled that he isn't purely home-grown--possibly an offshoot of a long-standing antipathy grounded in resentment at those white Americans who have an easier time recognizing the Actual Humanity of Africans than of African Americans.

Some aren't thrilled that he isn't more left of center, and others that he isn't further to the Right. Some may be ticked that he appears to have done an end-run around the traditional media's High Priests of Blackness, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson--arriving at the altitude of presidential contender without their explicit imprimatur and assistance. This renders Sharpton and Jackson a good deal less influential vis a vis Obama regardless of his role after the election.

Whatever. It is what it is, and a lot of it is that not all African Americans look alike or think alike. Ain't it amazing.

And then there's the Gay Right. I think I can pretty much count them on one hand: Camille Paglia, Andrew Sullivan, Norah Vincent, that Cheney woman and her partner, and that smarmy White House "reporter" guy. That about it? Anybody else? Oh -- yeah. The Log Cabin Republicans and the Republican Unity Coalition, and I'm sure there're one or two serving as the "gay ambassadors" for some Fortune 500 companies.

I'm not crazy about the Gay Left, if HRC is the Gay Left, and this is not a recent turn of events for me. Like most radical lesbian feminists, there's a venerable distrust of well-heeled gay white boys who set the national gay rights agenda, mainy because it just never seems to include much of anything of specific concern to lesbians. So, although my politics are certainly anything but Right, I don't bow the knee to HRC.

That said, it does seem to me that there is a fundamental oxymoron in being an out gay or lesbian conservative, a core contradiction that doesn't pertain to being a conservative African American. I don't understand why an African American would be a conservative Republican, and I think it is politically contradictory, but I don't see it as inherently contradictory. There's nothing inherently untraditional about being Black.

That's not the case for the gay conservative. When the hallmark of conservatism is reluctance to deviate from tradition and the propensity to genuflect to older conservatives, then coming out Queer is anything but conservative. It's inherently radical, and if it involves even a little claim to rights as an Actual Human Being, then it's inherently liberal, progressive.

I wonder what they do about that. Do they tuck that fact away in a drawer somewhere so they don't have to look at it?

But anyway. I just found this--Richard Goldstein's "Fighting the Gay Right," from The Nation. It's worth a read.