Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

Time to look over the shoulder and see how far we've come. How do we judge success? If the times they are a'changing, have they changed enough? What shall be our base line? 1965? 1969? 1970? Does it matter? Let's start the year the Advocate, the gay-and-lesbian publication, first started publishing, which was 1968, I think. At least that's when I started reading it. What were big issues then? There were issues about Gays-in-the-Military. There were issues of partnership-- even marriage! There were issues about violence against gay people. There were issues of employment discrimination. There were issues of addiction-- mostly alcohol and illegal drugs-- and there was lots of focus on entertainment, as remains the case with the Advocate today in its latest incarnation. The editors and many of their writers live in an entertainment town and an entertainment culture.

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How has our movement done? Let us count the ways. The open presentation of gay folks and their lives has been the largest wedge. The mantra once was: We Are Everywhere, and I still think that's one of the best promos. I read about some people who claim they've never met anybody gay; they must live very sheltered lives. Stonewall was about generational change as much as it was about implementing a social and political agenda. Sexual attitudes and acceptances expanded from an uptight, censorious culture into a more tolerant, if still largely censorious, general culture.

One thing I've learned after all these years is how painfully slow social change is. Except, of course, when it isn't. There are those breakthrough events-- Brown v. Board of Education in the black civil rights movement, Roe v. Wade for women's rights, Lawrence v. Texas for the gay folks. These decisions crack the logjam. They come all too infrequently.

The recent court decision on sodomy not only overturned Hardwick but also noted that it had been decided wrong in the first place; yes, Virginia, a girl can change her mind! (And, of course, Whizzer White left the court and then dropped dead.) What briefs were submitted which educated the majority to see the light? What in the culture had changed?

Two recent books take us back to earlier decades. James McCourt, in his new Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985, makes the case-- in a sly, witty, entertaining way-- that the gay culture of New York City in those years was particularly advanced and intense. I think McCourt is right. I subscribe to the hydraulic theory: as gay men faced harassment, discrimination, clubs raided, everyday violence, and firings, much of their considerable energy got focused on cultural matters-- the theater, the opera, the concert, the star cult, the poetry reviews, the art movements-- and made on these phenomena a special imprint. This, of course, dovetailed with New York becoming cultural capital of the Western world.

Our other title-- The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government-- is just what it says-- a detailed account of harassment and firings of federal workers in one of the most paranoiac anti-gay campaigns in US history. These events happened in parallel-- the flowering of gay men's culture in the 50s, a remarkable achievement on all levels, and a government-sponsored campaign to smear, defame, and incite violence against homosexuals. The 50s were really schizo, Mary, to use a term of the trade from Shrink world-- schizo, that is, not Mary.

Just think of Cardinal Spellman, my favorite American Roman Catholic, and John Edgar Hoover, my favorite American Protestant-- both at the peaks of their notoriety in the 50s. And the shrinks did quite well, thank you very much, off the Gay-Is-Sick racket, which was the established cult mentality for most of that profession.

Was the homosexual sick or was it his/her society which was deranged? Strangely, this question, or variations of it, is still in play. In 1973, when the shrinks removed homosexuality from their list of pathologies (but not completely)-- and the recent obituary of Judd Marmor reminded us what a significant role he played in making this change-- the shrinks added smoking and obesity as pathologies, thus jacking up their roster of "sicknesses" and getting the "afflicted" to line up out their doors, shelling out their fees so that the shrinks could keep their concubines in the fashionable furs of the era-- ermine, chinchilla, and mink for those on a budget.

Can our class-report rate a passing grade? Yes, it can. We've passed some goals and have others ahead. There are those speed bumps along the way. There's a lot of same old, same old, both good and bad. But the needle on the compass still tends to point in the familiar direction and I'll go with that. Class dismissed.

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