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No cheers for the madding mob
By
Mitzel
I recently had a conversation with a handsome young man in his early 20s. He had just returned to New England from Florida and was on his
way to see his Mother and sisters. Since he had an hour to kill before his bus left, I heard his life story. When this young man was sixteen, his
Dad found some publications and personal documents that led him to discover that his son was gay. Dad promptly tossed him out of the house;
the youth lived on the streets for a while and then went to Florida, worked in the food industry and danced in gay bars. I have heard variations
on this story many times before. It seems to go on and on in its interminable loop. Why is that?
Being thrown out. It's a thought that led me to a meditation on majoritarianism and particularly the kind of majoritarianism
seen exercised in our social and political cultures. This took my thoughts back to the founding of Boston, with the arrival of the first bunch of
English immigrants and the setting up of the colony here under John Winthrop. Say what you want about the Puritans, they had an agenda! How
did Winthrop's authority enforce the majority will? In several ways. There were the stocks, there was hanging, and there was exile. All were
used. The Puritans were sort of driven out of England by the culture of their time; Roger Williams was driven out of the Massachusetts Colony by
the culture of the Puritans; Rhode Island had a culture distinct from Massachusetts since it was "founded." (Has anyone ever been "thrown out"
of RI?) We seem to be a country of folks either thrown out or driven out of other places. Where is "home"? Are we all throw-outs and refugees?
Michael Bronski, in his book The Pleasure
Principle, quotes Carl Wittman's A Gay
Manifesto: "San Francisco is a refugee camp
for homosexuals. We have fled here from every part of the nation, and like refugees elsewhere, we came not because it is so great here,
but because it was so bad there. By tens of thousands, we fled small towns where to be ourselves would endanger our jobs and any hope of
a decent life; we have fled from blackmailing cops, from families who disowned or tolerated us; we have been drummed out of the
armed services, thrown out of schools, beaten by punks and policemen." Wittman wrote his manifesto in 1968 while resident in San Francisco.
This was a year before the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City, demonstrating how advanced the gay movement was on the West
Coast-- already a manifesto!-- though it was the New York queans who rioted and got all that fabulous publicity.
If this society is in fact made up of a polyglot and diverse population, full of conflicting interests, why do we have such an
odd attachment to the tyranny of the majority? E pluribus
unum. In a society filled with so many minorities of one kind or another, why is there
such a respect for the will of the majority? (Which parts of this mix constitute, on any occasion, a "majority"?) Part of it is our political system;
it is called the Westminster System, after the English way-- winner takes all, or in George W.'s case, loser takes all! Big time! The UK and the
USA are the only developed countries that still use the Westminster system, and even London, in its recent first mayoral election, used the
instant runoff system. As far as I know, Cambridge, Mass., is the only city to actually use a form of proportional representation, a very
nuanced repudiation of majoritarianism.
Our slant in favor of the majority distorts all sorts of things, particularly when it gets to the rights of minorities. For our community,
this battle goes back to the days of Anita Bryant, who, with her right-wing religious cadres, organized to repeal a Dade County human
rights ordinance, particularly the part which guaranteed legal protections for gay men and lesbians. Similar repeals followed in quick succession
in other cities. The city of Cincinnati had expanded its human rights ordinance to included gay men and lesbians and also added protection
to "persons of Appalachian origin." When repeal time rolled around, the good
volk repealed protections for the queers but kept it for the
hillbillies-- posing the question: what happens if a gay hillbilly gets fired?
The culmination of this ugly thrust came in Colorado. In 1992, the voters in that state passed a state constitutional amendment
that nullified all existing municipal protections for gay and lesbian citizens and banned all future efforts to reinstate such protections. The
Supreme Court of Colorado found this measure on its docket and declared it unconstitutional. The state AG petitioned the Supreme Court of the US
to weigh in. They did in 1995. In the same 6-3 split we saw in the recent sodomy decision, the six justices said the amendment was
an unconstitutional form of discrimination and violation of equal protection. So a majority struck down a majority, thus relying on the
most unrepresentative body on the public payroll to exercise some sense against the pandering of the voting majority.
Alas, it doesn't always happen this way. My dead friend Mike never voted, though he was an activist. I asked him why. He said: "It
only encourages them." There may be other reasons-- the idiocy of the system and its knack to provoke the worst form of exploiting
majority prejudices. I have, on occasion, been a minority of one-- hard to make of one a loyal opposition.
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