Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

Recently a friend narrated the following story to me: not too long back, he had attended a public function somewhere on the Harvard University campus. The featured speaker that night was author/activist Susie Bright. She came out on stage in a lovely coat. Having taken her position on stage, she gingerly removed her coat and revealed her dress, a diaphanous gown that clung to her body, making her look her most attractive. "The sex wars are over," she announced to the audience. "We won!" The crowd went wild.

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Was this meant to be a victory party? Was Bright Napoleon? She's certainly put her time in at the various battles in the sex wars. But was she factually correct? Have we won? And if we did, what did we win? Who are "we"?

The status of women and their opportunities in this culture have improved in the past 40 years. Social acceptance of open gay men and lesbians is much greater now than 30 years ago; though I must admit I am often surprised at the virulence of homophobia from persons and institutions where I hadn't anticipated it. Having so many people come out turns out to have been a wise strategy-- a movement needed density; homosexuals are no longer seen as oddities. We see the change in the generational responses to the same-sex marriage controversy. The younger the demographic, the more accepting they are of the idea of same-sex marriage. Old people are the most hostile; the world is a different place from when they were young. Getting homosexual behavior de-pathologized by the APA in December 1973 was the major achievement. So much oppression was built on that keystone. Model penal reforms codes had proposed elimination of anti-sodomy statutes before the APA dropped homosexual behavior from its DSM II. Last year's Lawrence decision by the US Supreme Court was just the final gesture pushing anti-sodomy laws into the dustbin of history-- that overcrowded pit of social refuse. Dissenter Scalia, in his howl, hit the right note for a person of his ilk-- that Lawrence would bring on the end of western civilization. (Gandhi, when once asked what he thought of western civilization, quipped: "It sounds like a good idea.")

Getting the shrinks out of our lives was an Olympic gold medal-- some did an awful lot of damage; can we sue? Some were more enlightened. I recall the story about poet Allen Ginsberg. AG, back in the 1940s, struggling with his homosexual desires, went to see a shrink and told the shrink he was thinking of becoming a homosexual. The doctor recommended: "Well, if that's what you want to do, become the best homosexual you can possibly be," advice Allen took to heart and put in practice. Then getting the bad laws shot down and the protection laws encoded were other achievements, but at some time I do wonder about the fetish of law-making-- yes, I know that in this culture, law-making is the primary way to establish a resolution to conflict in some matters, and it certainly is better than the way of the priests or the shrinks.

Are the victories in what Bright called The Sex Wars the same as for the famous Gay Agenda? A handsome fellow from the Netherlands was in my bookshop some time back. We spoke about the anti-drug wars in America; we spoke about the struggle for equal protection for same-sex couples. The Dutch are wonderfully patient and, I think, make excellent travelers. Theirs is such a small country I suspect they like to get out and about on occasion. At any rate, he told me, re the drugs and the marriage stuff, "In my country, these are no longer issues of concern." The Dutch, also, tend to be very practical. Why have so many European countries successfully managed to become so secular while here in the United States we still invent and observe so many religious credos? I don't get it.

But so many of these religious spewings get in the way of social improvements. Some of our local Roman Catholic churches are on a jihad against "gay marriage," showing attack videos during religious services and shouting about diseases. The category is: I think the lady doth protest too much. There are lots of progressive people in the religious communities, and I'm always pleased to acknowledge this fact. But they always seem to be outnumbered by the fundies and the orthodox; thus the fruits of "Freedom Of Religion." Susie Bright may be right. The wars may be over. I tend to be cautious. I see more of an armistice. There are still many in our polity who don't think women should have social parity with the males. There are even more who can't fathom The Gay Experience-- I had a girlfriend, a nice liberal-minded Jewish woman from Queens, at PU, a university I attended back in the 60s, who told me, and not in a nice way: "I don't get the gay thing at all." Oh, dear.

The status of minorities in a majoritarian culture is something yet to be settled in a satisfactory manner, so crude the discourse even today that many deny same-sexers as even the status of minority. Bright illuminates, always helpful. I was down in the dumps the other day. What did I do? I read aloud from The Kinsey Report on male sexual behavior. It perked me right up. If Susie declared victory after the battles, Alfred fired the first salvo and gets proper credit as a revolutionary hero, a founding father.

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com