“Now I feel great. For the first time people see the glimmer of a real cure. And so there’s life ahead of them all of a sudden, instead of death. And like all the people who have unraveled their lives and prepared themselves to die, are suddenly like, ‘Oh, I guess I’m going back to work. I guess I have a life again.’”
Other treatments had seemed to offer similar hope at earlier stages of the epidemic. But none had had such dramatic effects on so many people so quickly. In the first nine months of 1996, the number of deaths from AIDS in the United States dropped 19 percent.
“AIDS has been the best thing and the worst thing for the planet,” said Xax. “Because I really think that AIDS is the crux of the change of the turn of the century: to force everyone on the planet to accept people who are different from themselves—of every kind. … It is our role as a sacred people to do this. Our culture has become so huge that it encompasses the whole world now—the huge media culture. We are all so connected now. So it’s taken a very huge event to affect things on that scale.
“And I think that’s why AIDS is here. I think that’s why the cure is in sight now, because enough people have bonded together with a common goal. I have a friend who was doing medical research who stopped because there was no communication within the research world, everyone was so out to find their own discovery, everyone was so selfish, that nothing ever happened. AIDS, it forced people to finally come together to find something.
“And I think that’s what the whole thing is about: it’s about unity, it’s about inclusion—and it’s forcing everyone to wake up.”
The Reverend Peter Gomes of Harvard saw America as it approached the millennium this way: “The place for creative hope that arises out of suffering most likely now is to be found among blacks, women and homosexuals. These outcasts may well be the custodians of those thin places; they may in fact be the watchers at the frontier between what is and what is to be.”
MORE QUICKLY—and more permanently—than any other federal institution, the Supreme Court has the capacity to set the tone for the treatment of any minority group—sometimes for decades at a time. Two and a half years after Stoddard’s marriage, the country’s highest Court rendered the kind of decision that Stoddard had been hoping for since he first came out in 1970. In Romer v. Evans, on May 20,1996, the Court voted six to three to throw out the Colorado state constitutional initiative that had forbidden protection for gay people from discrimination.
Very significantly, the decision was written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, an appointee of Ronald Reagan. Kennedy began by quoting Justice John Marshall Harlan’s famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 case that subjected blacks to legally sanctioned discrimination for another fifty-eight years—until the precedent reversing Brown v. Board of Education.
“One century ago, the first Justice Harlan admonished this Court that the Constitution ‘neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.’ Unheeded then, those words are now understood to state a commitment to the law’s neutrality where the rights of persons are at stake. The Equal Protection Clause enforces this principle and today requires us to hold invalid a provision of Colorado’s Constitution.
“A state cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws,” Kennedy continued. The Colorado provision had singled out the state’s homosexuals as “a solitary class,” creating a legal disability so sweeping, it could only be explained by “animus.”
“It is not within our constitutional tradition to enact laws of this sort.” Justice Kennedy said the Colorado amendment did not meet even the lowest level of scrutiny accorded an official action that is challenged as a violation of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. Under that test, as Kennedy described it, “a law must bear a rational relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose, and Amendment 2 does not.”
Justice Antonin Scalia filed a furious dissent for the three-member minority which included a concise description of the decision’s huge significance: it placed “the prestige of this institution behind the proposition that opposition to homosexuality is as reprehensible as racial or religious bias.”
Suzanne B. Goldberg, a lawyer with the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, who was part of the winning legal team in the case, summarized the decision even more simply:
“This is the most important victory ever for lesbian and gay rights,” she said.
THE DECISION FIT beautifully into Tom Stoddard’s vision for the gay movement:
“It’s about the tenor of a society which is intolerant of those people and those things that are different,” he said. “There’s no point in having a movement if you’re just going to turn everyone into a suburban homemaker. The whole point is to celebrate difference. And there is something deeply offensive about a movement that only argues for its own people. The underlying idea behind the movement, to anyone’s mind, it seems to me, is equality. If the idea is equality, it can’t possibly be said that it should be equality for only one group of people. The idea of equality has to apply across the board, and therefore, it’s not just that there ought to be interconnectedness between the African American community and the Latino community and the gay community. It’s that what motivates those movements is exactly the same thing. And it is a terrible thing to just promote one’s own equality. It’s what lawyers call special pleading. It’s unprincipled and it’s selfish—and it will never sell.
“We are engaged in the remaking of the culture in a way that benefits everybody. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood that: the significance of the black civil rights movement for white Americans. And he said it again and again. It wasn’t just a device; he knew exactly what he was doing. It uplifted people. It not only touched them—because it made people listen to him who otherwise wouldn’t—it made people feel better about themselves and their culture. It moved them forward.
“We want a richer, more diverse, more compassionate culture, in which everyone feels the possibility of self-expression and self-actualization. And that is what it’s about. I say that as a true believer because it was true for me. As I mentioned before, I would have a miserable, unhappy, meaningless life if not for being gay and I would like for other people to experience that as well.”
The day after the Court’s decision in Romer v. Evans was announced, Stoddard felt “a sense of legitimization.”
“It’s a big deal both doctrinally and spiritually,” he said. “But I worry that some people will decide that the Supreme Court is their savior and they therefore don’t have to work hard politically. That’s a very genuine danger, especially with the military issue and the marriage issue bearing down on us.
“The opinion was beautifully done—both a larger majority and a larger theory put forward than any of us expected. The theory being that animus is not a legitimate basis for distinctions among classes of people. And while the Court has said that before, it’s especially important in this context—not just because it’s us, but because we’re an especially controversial group of people. And the majority was very political in its approach. It cited very little precedent because there is very little precedent on this subject, unfortunately. And it went out of its way to dispose of the vile arguments on the other side—especially the special rights arguments. And it knew what it was doing in citing Plessy v. Ferguson at the beginning. That was a sign of the moral outrage of the majority. And just a wonderful thing to be on our behalf.
“I hope our people remember that this happened in part because a Democrat is holding the White House [and appointed two of the justices who joined in the majority opinion].
“The point that I want to communicate is that this does not mean things are over and we can now sit safely at home. This is our christening or bar mitzvah.
“It’s not our entry into heaven.”
Afterword
NINE MONTHS AFTER REJOICING OVER the Supreme Court’s decision in Romer v. Evans, Tom Stoddard succumbed to AIDS. The great gay visionary had been diagnosed with the
disease eight years earlier; by the time the most effective drugs were available, his illness was too advanced to be halted by the new therapies. Had he lived just a decade longer, Stoddard might have spotted our “entry into heaven,” just over the horizon.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, gay life’s imprint on everyday life exploded as America embraced everything from the first gay megahit in prime- time televison to the first gay Hollywood movie to capture universal acclaim—and collect $178 million at the box office.
When Will & Grace debuted in 1998, there was no indication that it might change the cultural landscape. As America’s first almost completely gay sitcom, it got off to a slow start, despite the presence of two straight women as main characters. Even office workers in hip Manhattan were a little nervous about it: what would people think if they started to laugh at those jokes in front of the watercooler? But the quality of the humor gradually won them over. Beginning with its fourth season, the program attracted more than seventeen million viewers every week, and it became the second-highest-rated sitcom among young adults five years in a row. With the even more popular and equally gay-friendly Friends as its lead-in on Thursday nights, Will & Grace gradually appropriated a larger space in American pop culture than anything gay ever had before. Some critics carped that its characters were clichés, but many more decided that the show’s sharp writing had placed it within the pantheon of great American sitcoms.
The success of Will & Grace opened the market to all kinds of gay entertainment; it also gave a few celebrities the courage to finally proclaim who they really were. In 2002, during the seventh and final season of her syndicated talk show, Rosie O’Donnell confirmed one of the worst-kept secrets in show business, when her autobiography revealed that she was a lesbian. The online magazine Slate noted, “if someone that accessible and brazenly mainstream … can publicly acknowledge who she is and who she loves, it’s time to call Jerry Falwell and tell him it’s over … Rosie’s disclosure [is] revolutionary by virtue of its ordinariness.”
Ellen DeGeneres had made the same revelation about herself on her own show, Ellen, five years earlier. The mini-media event she created around her announcement, which included the cover of Time, was not enough to prevent the cancellation of her sitcom a year later, but her TV career began to take off again after she hosted the Emmy Awards following the attacks of 9/11. She reminded the audience that they were supposed to go on with their lives as usual, because to do otherwise “is to let the terrorists win—and really, what would upset the Taliban more than a gay woman wearing a suit in front of a room full of Jews?” (Imagine someone saying that in prime time thirty years ago.) In 2003, she finally had a bona fide TV hit when she launched her daytime program, The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Four years later, she was the face of American Express on television and the emcee of the Academy Awards.
Will & Grace didn’t just change the landscape of American TV—by the end of its original run it has been broadcast in thirty-eight countries, including France, Germany, Croatia, Pakistan, Sweden, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. But just five months after its American debut, a new show started across the Atlantic that made Will & Grace look almost as tame as The Love Boat.
Created by veteran English television writer Russell T. Davies, Queer as Folk inspired a tsunami of criticism when it burst out from Britain’s Channel Four in 1999, with an opening episode that showed a twenty-nine-year-old man making very explicit love to a beautiful fifteen-year-old boy. The installment featured the same twenty-nine-year-old at the birth of his son to a lesbian friend. After the twenty-nine-year-old bragged about his teenaged conquest in front of the mother of his child, a woman friend observed: “So, you’ve both had a child this evening!”
The principal characters were young gay men in Manchester who were frankly sexual, extremely drug-friendly, and never the least bit apologetic about any of it. Sarah Lyall of The New York Times called the show “an explosion of graphic language, male nudity, and explicit sex guaranteed to offend as many people as it enthralled.” Gay activists were angered by the reinforcement of gay stereotypes (Davies called these critics “boneheaded, politically correct gay political fossils”), while straight viewers were squeamish with the reality that every gay adult begins life as a gay child. The fact that gay teenagers often seek out their first sexual experience with someone older was something else most people didn’t want to be reminded of in prime time.
BUT NEARLY EVERYONE WAS WON over by the vivid writing, which was funny, poignant, and always on key. It was obvious that the show’s creator knew the life he was writing about from the inside. Within weeks the show became a critical smash as well as a commercial success. The truth of Davies’s credo had become self-evident: “There is no drama in political correctness.”
When bootleg copies of the British show began circulating on the other side of the Atlantic, many people recognized the show as one of the freshest gay dramas since The Boys in the Band. Just as Boys had blown the lid off a slice of gay life that had been hiding in plain sight for years, Queer as Folk was the first completely honest depiction of the ordinary lives of millions of twenty-something urban gay men around the world—with absolutely nothing held back.
Almost everyone who saw it also had another reaction: nothing like the British program would ever be broadcast in America. But, in the fall of 2000, Americans got to watch the tongue of a twenty-nine-year-old man travel further down the backside of a seventeen-year-old boy than any tongue had ever traveled on American television before (in the only compromise with the original, the boy was made two years older to soften the blow to American sensibilities). The American sex scenes were just as explicit as the British ones; but in the land of the free, the program was available only to cable subscribers, instead of being broadcast on network television. That distinction meant the American version never had the same kind of mainstream impact that the original had in Britain. But thanks to the enthusiasm of gay viewers, it quickly became the most-watched program ever on Showtime. Five years and eighty-three episodes later, it had probably done more to demystify gay men and lesbians in small towns across America than anything else on TV. It also paved the way for The L-Word, which offered the same type of unvarnished portraits of high-powered Hollywood lesbians that Queer had provided of young, urban, gay men.
From explicit gay sex on cable it was a very short hop to the much tamer Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, a show that argued that there were no shortcomings in a straight geek that couldn’t be cured by the superior savoir faire of five gay tastemakers. The show also marked the final reclamation of the previously pejorative “queer” by the gay community. In 2005, MTV launched Logo, a Viacom-owned gay cable channel, which quickly made distribution deals with every major cable and satellite network. Suddenly, American kids in twenty-five million homes had access to gay programming whenever they wanted it—at least when their parents weren’t watching them. The predicted backlash from the religious right never happened, and within two years Logo’s sponsors included Kodak, Pepsi, and Sears, proving that threatened boycotts by the right would no longer prevent Fortune 500 companies from supporting gay television.
Seven years after the launch of Queer as Folk in England, Russell Davies was tapped to revive Dr. Who, a venerable British television science-fiction franchise, which occupies roughly the same cultural space in Britain as Star Trek does in the United States. “I’m in a very lucky position now because I personally can get away with murder and nobody stops me,” Davies told me. Dr. Who features a bisexual who “freely sleeps with men and women, and he takes his clothes off at the drop of a hat. I know if I was a different writer, someone might question me. But because I’ve got QAF behind me, no one will say, ‘Do you know what you’re doing here?’ We just filmed an episode with two seventy-year-old lesbians in it. They very clearly say they’re married and it’s absolutely beautiful: eight million viewers for the highest-rated drama here on BBC-i.” In a Dr. Who spin-off called Torch-wood, Davies cast gay a
ctor John Barrowman (who is married in real life to his partner) in the leading role: the bisexual Captain Jack Harness. “It has a lead cast of five characters,” said Davies, “and every single one of them has a bisexual experience!”
WITH SO MUCH INCREASED VISIBILITY for gay people and gay life, the world was primed for another cultural breakthrough. In 2006, there were nine big movies with gay themes or gay characters, but only one that caused a sensation. Brokeback Mountain was an A-list Hollywood feature that presented two gay cowboys as a perfectly normal part of Wyoming in the 1960s—and that depiction of these archetypes of American masculinity turned out to be revolutionary all by itself. It was also the first gay love story on film which felt so universal that the enthusiasm of the audience wasn’t dampened by the sexual orientation of the principals. The fact that Brokeback was promoted with a poster that imitated the one showing the star-crossed lovers of Titanic didn’t hurt either. Frank Rich wrote that the film forced everyone “to recognize that gay people were fixtures in [red states] long before Matthew Shepard and Mary Cheney were born. This laconic film dramatizes homosexuality as an inherent and immutable identity, rather than some aberrant and elective ‘agenda’ concocted by conspiratorial ‘elites.’”
The kind of movie that would have caused an uproar twenty years earlier became newsworthy because it provoked hardly any attacks. “What if they held a culture war and no one fired a shot?” Frank Rich asked. There was almost “no controversy, no Fox News tar and feathering, no roar from the religious right.” The following spring the film was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won three of them, including best director and best adapted screenplay. It also made more top-ten lists than any other movie of the year.
A CRUCIAL ELEMENT IN THE movement’s steady progress was a simple matter of demographics: since the 1960s, every new generation of Americans has been more accepting of sexual diversity than the one before it. Although harassment of gay high school students remains rampant, every year there are a growing number of young men and women coming out to their parents and their peers long before they reach college.
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