But once the dimensions of the epidemic became clear, many of Frank’s colleagues “started voting pro-gay because they saw that life-and-death issues were at stake. They had to do the right thing, even though they thought it might hurt them politically.
“Then, guess what? It turned out not to hurt them politically very much.”
VI
The Nineties
“New York is the best place on the face of the earth. There’s the best of everything here. The best people. The best art. But when I moved here, I thought everybody was going to die.”
—RICK WHITAKER
THE AIDS EPIDEMIC extinguished tens of thousands of lives and caused overwhelming anguish. But the seeds planted in the resulting wasteland would produce an era of amazing hope and progress.
While a small part of the country, inflamed by religious fundamentalists, portrayed AIDS as divine retribution for the immoral behavior of homosexuals, a much larger portion reacted generously. Because of the decency of millions of newly sympathetic heterosexuals, in hundreds of communities of all sizes, the nation’s old ideals of tolerance and inclusiveness would finally expand to include what had long been its most hated minority.
The lesbians and gay men who survived this holocaust reached out to one another to strengthen their sense of legitimacy by founding hundreds of new organizations. Powered by a new generation, ACT UP received most of the attention from the mainstream media. But beyond this new brigade of street fighters, there was an explosion of every kind of organizational activity.
By the middle of the nineties, in the New York metropolitan area alone there were associations of gay journalists, bankers, lawyers, artists, runners, opera lovers, Irishmen (and women), Israelis, Venezuelans, academics, adolescents, and Yeshiva graduates; groups for gay fathers, gay youth (Hetrick-Martin Institute), gay seniors (SAGE), lesbian mothers, gay and lesbian analysts (and Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Psychiatric Survivors), gay policemen and playwrights; a gay public high school with eighty students; seven chapters of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays; groups for gay wrestlers, sailors, and scuba divers; Jewish Lesbian Daughters of Holocaust Survivors; lesbian computer hackers, gay Physicians and Medical Students of Color, architects, advertisers, and pet owners; Catholics, Jews, and Unitarians; Democrats and Republicans; Wonderful Older Women; and a Lesbian Sex-Mafia—for lesbians fond of sadomasochism.
In 1996, a browser on the Internet could find 62,902 documents mentioning “queers”; 251,592 about lesbians and 663,239 about “gays”—and everything from an Australian Internet service provider for gays called “Rainbow.net” to the Filipino Queer Directory and a Glasgow Bisexual Women’s Group in Scotland. For millions of gays and lesbians living in small towns all over the world, the Internet eliminated the age-old problem of where to look for people just like themselves.
IT WAS Bill Clinton’s success as a presidential candidate in 1992 which ratified a basic shift in American attitudes toward its gay citizens. For the first time, a major-party candidate who had cultivated gay voters would go all the way to the White House. Instead of an insurmountable handicap, gay support was perceived in 1992 as a potentially decisive advantage in a close race.
By the beginning of the presidential campaign, 230,000 Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS, and at least 150,000 were dead—more than the combined total of U.S. soldiers killed in the Korean and Vietnam wars. Over a million were believed to have been infected by the virus. Now forty-three percent of those polled said they knew someone who was a homosexual—double the number just seven years earlier.
Clinton came to the presidential campaign as an agnostic on gay issues; as governor of Arkansas he had never made a public comment in support of a gay cause. His only close gay friend was David Mixner, whom he had met at a 1969 reunion of volunteers from Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign.
In 1992 Clinton was interviewed by Jeff Schmalz, a Times reporter who had been diagnosed with AIDS two years earlier, and then began to cover a newly created gay beat at the newspaper. Clinton told Schmalz that after his first important meeting with gay activists, he realized that “running for President would require me to think about things that I just didn’t have to deal with as Governor.”
The event that turned Clinton into a temporary hero of the gay community was his appearance at a Los Angeles fund-raiser. In May 1992, he told a gathering of the city’s wealthiest lesbians and gay men, “If I could wave my arm for those of you that are HIV positive and make it go away tomorrow, I would do it—so help me God, I would. If I gave up my race for the White House and everything else, I would do that.” Clinton promised a sharp increase in funds for AIDS research. He also endorsed an end to the ban on gays serving in the military—as did his four Democratic primary opponents, and, eventually, Ross Perot as well. A videotape of Clinton’s Los Angeles appearance was replayed dozens of times at gay fund-raisers for Clinton all fall.
“The gay community is the new Jewish community,” Clinton’s finance director, Rham Emanuel, declared during the campaign. “It’s highly politicized, with fundamental health and civil rights concerns. And it contributes money. All that makes for a potent political force, indeed.”
The Democratic National Convention in New York City marked a coming of age for the movement, with 133 lesbian and gay delegates and alternates inside Madison Square Garden—and a winning candidate supporting their cause. In another testament to the establishment’s new commitment to equal rights, the president of CNN, the executive editor of The Los Angeles Times, and the publisher of The New York Times all served as honorary cohosts of a reception held by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association on the eve of the convention.
Roberta Achtenberg, a former head of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, who had become a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors—and an early Clinton supporter—and Bob Hattoy, a gay environmental lobbyist suffering from AIDS, both addressed the convention. When Hattoy exhorted the hall to “vote this year as if our lives depended on it,” there were tears in the eyes of many delegates. And after a last-minute intervention by the gay adviser David Mixner, Clinton included gays in his list of those groups deemed outcasts in the politics of division.
Once again, the Republicans saw the open embrace of the gay cause by a Democratic candidate as an opportunity to exploit prejudice. But their reading of the electorate was finally out-of-date.
In March 1992, a senior Bush campaign adviser told a group of junior political appointees in the administration that the Republicans would use gay rights as a major dividing line in the election. All year, Vice President Dan Quayle described homosexuality as a “life style choice”—and a wrong one. President Bush said same-sex couples make poor parents, and his campaign demoted an openly gay staff member after fundamentalist groups objected to his prominence.
Gay bashing by a major-party speaker peaked when Patrick J. Buchanan addressed the Republican convention in August. Buchanan was a political pit bull who alternated stints as a communications specialist in Republican White Houses with a lucrative career as a newspaper columnist and commentator on CNN. When he decided to run for president in 1992, his status as ex-cohost of “Crossfire” made him very much a part of the Washington establishment, and most reporters shared a camaraderie with him which baffled gay Americans.
Typical of Buchanan’s vituperative attacks throughout the eighties was a column he wrote at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic: “the sexual revolution has begun to devour its children. And among the revolutionary vanguard, the Gay Rights activists, the mortality rate is highest and climbing. The poor homosexuals—they have declared war upon nature and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.” It was a theme he returned to frequently during his presidential campaign.
Although Buchanan’s speech at the Republican convention wasn’t surprising to anyone who had been following him on the campaign trail, his harsh tone was unfamiliar to millions of prime-time viewers. “There is a culture war g
oing on in our country for the soul of America,” Buchanan declared.
It is … as critical to the kind of nation we will be one day as was the Cold War itself. … A militant leader of the homosexual rights movement could rise at the [Democratic] convention and exult, “Bill Clinton and Al Gore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history.” And so they do. … Like many of you last month, I watched that giant masquerade ball at Madison Square Garden, where 20,000 radicals and liberals came dressed up as moderates and centrists in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history.
Many people assumed that this was just the ranting of a right-wing extremist. But Buchanan’s speech was actually a carefully considered part of the Bush campaign’s reelection strategy. Lesbian and gay activists were furious. “This is the most explicitly anti-gay campaign we’ve ever seen,” said Urvashi Vaid, then executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. “It’s hateful.”
Andrew Rosenthal reported in the Times that “behind the scenes, Republican strategists … unapologetically proclaimed their intention to follow Patrick J. Buchanan’s declaration of a religious and cultural war with the Democrats.” And the next day Jeff Schmalz reported that while Republicans were cautious in their public remarks about gay issues, “Privately top Bush campaign officials said they would hit the issue hard in the campaign, portraying Mr. Clinton as a promoter of homosexuals.”
Buchanan’s speech marked another turning point in the history of the gay movement in America—but not in the direction the Republicans had anticipated. The day after his address, Congressman Newt Gingrich was practically the only prominent Republican who publicly defended him. Gingrich accused the Democrats of promoting “a multicultural, nihilistic hedonism that is inherently destructive of a healthy society.”
Most mainstream commentators were appalled by Buchanan’s tone, and even among those Americans who may have privately agreed with him, a majority were clearly uncomfortable with his strident articulation of an antihomosexual agenda. While Traditional Values Coalition chairman Lou Sheldon thought that homosexuality still galvanized “Bible-believing Christians” even “more than right-to-life,” it no longer seemed to have the power to bring mainstream voters into the Republican column.
As Washington political analyst William Schneider put it, “Upper-middle-class suburban voters are not wildly pro-gay, but they do not want to be associated with a party that is overtly bigoted.” In a New York Times/CBS poll taken just ten days after the Republican convention, fewer than one in four voters said they were interested in hearing anything about legal rights for homosexuals. Reflecting their fundamental ambivalence about the subject, about eighty percent of those polled said gay people should have equal job opportunities, while fifty-seven percent favored the admission of gays into the military. But only thirty-eight percent described homosexuality as an “acceptable alternative lifestyle.”
Because Buchanan’s speech generated so many negative reactions, the Bush campaign never followed up on its threat to make homosexuality a leitmotif of the presidential contest. Even Bill Clinton’s promise to lift the ban on gays in the military never emerged as a major issue, although Bush held the opposite position. “I think there was a thought that [gay people] would be the new Willie Horton,” said the conservative political analyst Kevin Phillips, referring to the felon furloughed in Massachusetts who subsequently committed a rape—and became a nightmare for the Dukakis campaign in 1988. “But the Administration overdid it,” said Phillips. “The gay-bashing turned people off.”
The day after Clinton was elected, there was joy throughout the gay community. Pollsters estimated that Clinton had received about seventy-five percent of the gay vote, and lesbians and gay men had contributed $3 million to his coffers. “This is a rite of passage for the gay and lesbian movement,” said Urvashi Vaid. “For the first time in our history, we’re going to be full and open partners in the government.”
The most significant disappointment for the gay community on Election Day occurred in Colorado, where voters approved a ban on laws prohibiting antigay discrimination by the surprisingly large margin of 53 to 47. But even that result would ultimately be overturned because of Clinton’s election. On the evening of January 20,1993, gay activists held their own inaugural ball at the National Press Club. The new president did not make an appearance, but lesbian singing stars Melissa Etheridge and k. d. lang greeted the ecstatic throng from the balcony.
THOUSANDS OF GAY supporters of Clinton were disgusted by his failure to lift the ban on gays in the military as he had promised. Partly because the issue had caused so little commotion during the campaign, opponents of the ban had been lulled into a false sense of security about how easy it would be to change the policy after the election. But while gay supporters were basking in the Clinton victory, an impregnable alliance was forming among Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell, and the well-oiled political machine of the religious right. Having been humiliated in the presidential election, religious conservatives focused on gays in the military as the next great battle in the cultural war they were determined to perpetuate.
It wasn’t until February 1993 that Tom Stoddard moved to Washington to head the Campaign for Military Service, a hastily formed lobbying group organized by gay leaders to try to make the president keep his word. At that point, it was probably already too late to dislodge the committed majorities in the Senate and the House which opposed a lifting of the ban.
By now Stoddard was seriously ill with AIDS, but he threw himself into this final battle with all of his legendary energy. On April 16,1993, he was part of the first publicly announced meeting of gay representatives with any president in the Oval Office. He found his fellow Georgetown graduate to be noncommittal but extremely charming.
Clinton was “completely sympathetic,” said Stoddard. “Understood all the points that were raised. Was one of us, seemed one of us, of our generation, of our frame of mind. We were beguiled by him. I don’t think any of us believed that we would necessarily prevail on any of these issues, but we were beguiled personally. And it was thrilling simply to know that such a meeting had taken place and to be part of it. Symbols do matter, and this is a very important symbol.”
Stoddard believed that had the president issued an executive order lifting the ban on the day he took office, “It would have been a political disaster because the Senate would have simply voted to overturn it and nothing would have happened.” But he also considered the president’s “don’t ask, don’t tell compromise” a serious legal setback for the movement: “First of all it codifies something that was not a statute before. You have to go back to Congress now. Second of all, it establishes a principal that is really obnoxious, and could worm its way into the law: the idea that anyone who speaks out is engaging in conduct and can be fired not because of sexual orientation discrimination, but because of indiscretion. And that idea, if it gains any headway in the law, would be disastrous in public and private employment because the whole purpose of this movement is to permit people to be openly gay, not just to be gay.”
On the other hand, despite the outcome, Stoddard felt that the heated public debate had been good for the movement. He called it “the first national teach-in on gay rights. So I have no regrets about having participated in that.”
Many gay activists would never forgive the new president for the new policy that kept thousands of servicemen locked in their closets—and seemed to do nothing to lessen the military’s appetite for periodic witchhunts of lesbian and gay soldiers, sailors and airmen.
But the controversy did have one significant benefit for the movement. Even the most vociferous opponents of gays in the military had acknowledged—either explicitly or implicitly—that lesbians and gays were entitled to serve in all other professions. The most persistent argument against allowing gays to serve in the armed forces centered on the horrifying prospect of openly gay and straight men showering to
gether.
To gay activists, the 1993 battle was almost identical to President Harry Truman’s fight to integrate black and white battalions after World War II. The main argument made by Pentagon generals against racial integration in the forties was the same one they made against sexual integration in the nineties: the idea that if blacks and whites—or gays and straights—served together it would “weaken unit cohesion.” Although Stoddard succeeded in getting both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights to endorse the lifting of a ban on gay soldiers, sadly the position of Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell was much more important politically. Powell asserted that “skin color is a benign, nonbehavioral characteristic,” while sexual orientation is perhaps “the most profound of human behaviorial characteristics.” The general strongly opposed permitting gay soldiers to serve openly—even though the Pentagon already prohibited all discrimination against its civilian employees based on their sexual orientation. As Chris Bull and John Gallagher, the authors of Perfect Enemies, put it, Powell, a black man already being treated by the press as a potential president, was able to “inoculate the pro-ban forces from charges of prejudice.”
Despite the failure of the gay movement to change the military’s practices, the debate produced some extremely unlikely converts to its cause. Even Abe Rosenthal, who had done so much to make his own gay employees uncomfortable when he was executive editor of the Times, took General Powell to task for his opposition to a change in policy. “The military may have greater need for discipline than civilian groups,” Rosenthal wrote on the op-ed page six days after President Clinton’s inauguration, “but its executives also have a lot more clout.
“So I have an answer for a question General Powell raised last month at American University—what can he tell a heterosexual youngster who comes in and says that in his private accommodations he prefers to have heterosexuals around him, not gays?
The Gay Metropolis Page 44
