by Dan Savage
The Republican platform in my county contained all the usual gay-bashing planks, so I went to the convention and made a few motions. A few dozen. I moved to remove the antigay planks, I moved to amend them, I moved to add a pro–gay rights plank, I made a motion to welcome gays and lesbians into the Republican party. Rules allowed for five minutes to make a motion, debate for four minutes, then a minute to respond. I had a captive audience of sixteen hundred Republican activists. All of my motions failed, of course, and my sixteen hundred fellow delegates loudly booed me every time I stood to make another motion. (The daily papers credited me with derailing the convention.) But no one at the convention was actually unpleasant to me personally. Even in the bathroom. And the ladies and gentlemen seated around me in the stands were as nice as could be; some even made suggestions on how better to present my next motion, which they proceeded to vote down.
As homophobes have gotten used to the idea of us, they've become more subtle. Arresting us, electroshocking us, and killing us have gone out of style. Of course, gay-bashing remains a popular coming-of-age ritual for disturbed young straight boys all over the country (R.I.P., Billy Jack Gaither), but it is no longer sanctioned by the state (the men who murdered Matthew Shepard and Billy Jack Gaither will, with any luck, soon be resting in peace themselves).
Even the most recent attacks on gays and lesbians by religious conservatives arrived disguised as compassion. When Christian conservatives began buying ads in newspapers and on television promoting an almost entirely fictional “ex-gay movement,” the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force called the campaign a “kinder and gentler homophobia.” Men and women who claimed to have “freed themselves” from the gay lifestyle beamed at us from full-page ads in The New York Times and other papers. It was hard to take these ads seriously. Many gays and lesbians asked, “What harm could they do?”
A considerable amount, as we quickly discovered. Gays and lesbians were never the true targets of these ads and their “ message of compassion.” The target was straight people, and the message was not that Jesus loves the little homos, all the little homos of the world. No, the advertisers wanted straight people to believe that the only thing preventing them from living in a world free of homosexuality were those stubborn gays and lesbians (“Why can't they just give themselves to Jesus Christ?”). By arguing that we didn't have to exist, these ads implicitly argued that we had no right to exist.
This was an attempt by religious conservatives to introduce a deadly new kind of hatred into American culture: eliminationist homophobia. In his book Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Daniel Goldhagen described prewar German anti-Semitism as unique and murderous; he called it eliminationist. German Christian churches inspired visions of Jews as “Christ-killers,” and Jews came to be regarded as a poisonous anti-race that had to be eliminated in order to purify German culture. Well, Christian conservatives in America were attempting to inspire visions of gays and lesbians as “Christ-rejectors,” and of homosexuality as a “behavior” that must be eliminated to purify American culture. And they were calling it compassion!
The distance is short between some people's arguing that gays and lesbians as a group have no right to exist, and someone else's taking it into his own hands to end the existence of an individual gay or lesbian person; in the wake of these ads came the murders of Matthew Shepard and Billy Jack Gaither. If the religious right is serious about “washing the stain of homosexuality off the face of this great nation,” as one fundy web site I read puts it, there will have to be more murders. Few gays and lesbians will subject themselves to “reparative therapy” quacks, and the vast majority of us have no interest in becoming “ex-gay.” Homosexual behavior cannot be eliminated without eliminating homosexual people.
Still, these days even the biggest antigay bigots take pride in appearing indifferent to the presence of homos. We can sweep into almost any room, even into Republican conventions, and brows hardly rise. The bigot may grip the facial muscles, locking a casual expression in place, but he doesn't sneer, spit up, or throw things. He plays it cool.
And that's what I thought I saw around the table at Lloyd Center: gripped faces, expressions locked into place. They were playing it cool. One minute I was thinking, They hate us, they really hate us. The next minute, I thought: Don't be so self-involved; they didn't even notice that we're both men. The next, I hoped that maybe all these nice straight couples were just as nervous as Terry and I. Maybe they couldn't have cared less. Maybe they got lost in the mall too, and they all rushed in a split second before we got there, and everyone was out of breath. Maybe this seminar was a statistical anomaly, and there were no Christian fundies in the room at all. Maybe they were all progressive Democrats, with gay and lesbian friends and neighbors, and they couldn't have been more delighted that Terry and I were there. Maybe they were all bi.
Since we can no longer tell the difference between a bigot and our best friend, we should give everyone the benefit of the doubt and assume folks are tolerant until they prove themselves otherwise. But if we do that, we make it easier for the bigot with a smile on his face to sneak up on us. So I'm inclined to assume the worst.
Early in the gay lib movement, gay politicos wished every closet-case homo in the country would turn blue. If we couldn't hide, the logic went, we'd have to fight. (Then a whole bunch of us did turn blue in the early eighties, and, just as predicted, we came out fighting.) These days, I find myself wishing the bigots would turn blue. If bigots were blue, we'd only have to take a quick look around when we walked into a conference room full of straight people, or wanted to sit at a bar in Wyoming and have a beer. No blue people, no worries. We'd know whom we had to fight, and when we had to fight, and, more important, we'd know when we could finally relax.
Grieving Our Infertility
The director of the agency officially welcomed all of us to the two-day seminar, “Adoption: A Lifelong Process,” rousing me from my paranoid fantasies. Ruth had headed the agency for three years, but first she was a client. She showed us a picture of her adopted son and told us she knew what we were going through. Ruth had a look of practiced empathy on her face. We saw this look a lot over the next two days, from the counselors, lawyers, and adoptive parents who came to share their experiences and answer our questions. Doubtless, Ruth's concern was genuine, but she'd probably given this speech thirty-six times already. She'd probably heard a similar speech herself before she adopted her son through the agency. Empathy had become a mark she hit.
Ruth was in her early thirties, attractive, with curly brown hair; she had that contradictory mix of concern and distance that sets social workers apart from mere mortals. The parent-wannabes sitting around the table were not quite abstractions to her, but we were pretty close—we were clients. As she spoke, Ruth made it clear that she and the agency cared very deeply about each and every one of us. But her tone communicated that she wouldn't be getting involved in our private dramas. She had too much work to do. Her overt message was compassion, but her covert message was “You're here, you're adopting, get used to it.”
Apparently it took some getting over for the straight couples, who in agency-speak had “come to” or “arrived at” adoption, as if it were a physical destination. I was unprepared for the funereal tone of the seminar's first day. And as Ruth's opening comments picked up steam, Terry and I began to feel more out of place, and even more conspicuous than we had when we first walked through the door.
I opened my ten-pound notebook and peeked at the agenda: “Grieving Your Infertility.” “Coping with Infertility.” “Infertility and Its Impact on Adoption.” “Losses Inherent in Adoption.” I nudged Terry and slid the notebook over. His eyebrows shot up. Infertility was never an issue for us, just a fact, so we hadn't spent much time thinking about it, let alone learning to cope with it. And there were no “losses inherent in adoption” for us, but only victory. When I came out in 1980, it didn't occur to me that one day I would be able to ado
pt a child. I assumed, incorrectly, that it was illegal for gay men to adopt children. After all, gay men didn't have families—we were a threat to families.
My boyfriend passed me a note: “Maybe they should have let us skip the first day.”
Ruth walked the group through our infertility issues. “Infertilitycan sabotage the adoption process,” Ruth explained. “You felt you had no control over your fertility, so you may attempt to impose control over this process. Or you may come to resent the child you adopt because it isn't your dream biological child. You're successful people, with successful lives and successful relationships—having a child is probably the first thing you have not succeeded at, your first failure as individuals.”
At this point, we were positive we should have skipped the first day. The boyfriend and I had accepted our infertility a long time ago, and sitting with the straight couples, we felt our very presence was mocking their “loss.”
“If you need to feel sad or angry about not having your ‘own’ biological children—that's fine,” Ruth continued. “But do not let those feelings dominate your life. Enter parenting from a place of abundance, not a place of need. . . .”
In high school and college, my straight friends would point out the many disadvantages of being gay; it was supposed to be a joke, but they sounded serious. Their understanding of sexuality was pretty limited, and so was mine at the time, and they were trying to talk me out of being gay. They didn't want to lose my friendship, and they assumed they would if I “turned” gay. In 1980, being gay still meant going off and joining a secret society, moving away and becoming someone else. They would spot me on a street corner years later, wearing leather pants and a teal T-shirt, waiting for a bus. To prevent this fate, my friends would warn me that gays couldn't get married, or hold certain jobs, or live where we wanted to. And we couldn't have kids.
I would respond by pointing out the many advantages of being gay, as I saw them at the time. Before he got the boot, Jimmy Carter showed Iran he meant business by making high school–age boys register for the draft. When Ronald Reagan became president, it looked like he'd be declaring war on the Sandinistas any day and calling us up. Advantage, gay: they didn't take my kind in the army, so I wouldn't get shot up in Central America. But the ultimate advantage of being gay in 1980 was that it freed me from having to worry about birth control. For my straight friends, birth control was a major headache; first they had to worry about getting it, then they had to worry about hiding it from their parents. Advantage, gay: I didn't have to worry about the pill, or condoms, or missed periods, or babies, or abortions. On this one point they agreed that being gay was better than being straight. Then the tables turned, of course, and I was spending more time worrying about death control than my straight friends ever spent worrying about birth control. And if their birth control failed and they got pregnant, they could always have abortions; if my death control failed, and I got infected, there was no way to abort the virus. I would die. Advantage, straight.
After years of careful birth control it must have come as a shock to the straight couples around the table to learn that they needn't have bothered. Unable to have “their own” kids, they'd had to reconcile themselves to having someone else's before they could walk into this conference room. As we went around the table and introduced ourselves, everyone put on brave faces, trying to get to Ruth's “place of abundance,” but it was clear from some watery eyes and thrust-out chins that having to sit in this room represented a painfully humiliating defeat. Each told or hinted at horror stories: tens of thousands of dollars spent on unsuccessful fertility treatments, in-vitro this, test-tube that, egg harvesting. Years wasted. Even calm and centered Ruth had pumped money and drugs into her uterus in a failed attempt to have her own bio-kid.
Ruth explained how infertility placed an enormous strain on her marriage, and how during treatments she fell into a deep depression. One day, at the end of her rope, she read about the side effects of an infertility drug she'd been taking. Third on the list was “mild insanity.” She decided that having her own biological child was not worth her sanity, and stopped taking the drugs. This was how Ruth “arrived at” adoption, and her story was very similar to the others we heard that day as we went around the table telling our stories.
When it came time for Terry and me to introduce ourselves, what were we supposed to say? “Thrilled to be here, couldn't be happier?” We couldn't seem too upbeat, but we were feeling pretty up. When I came out, my straight friends told me I'd never have kids; a guy I knew to be gay in 1980 (we slept together) told me he'd never come out because he wanted a family. He died in 1986, never having come out, and never having that family he wanted. In Florida it's illegal for gays to adopt, and soon it may be illegal in other states. In some, our bio-kids are taken from us by homophobic courts in cahoots with homophobic relatives.
So sitting in this room, looking into adoption, living in a free state, being taken seriously by this agency—this was no defeat for us. This was a great, big, honkin' victory. A triumph. And while adoption was where the straight couples at the table ended up after a long and painful journey, it was practically where we began. So what did we say?
The wrong thing, naturally. When I'm under pressure and feeling awkward, my mouth opens and something idiotic, something totally Tourette's-y, drops right out. This day was no exception. We were the next-to-last couple to speak, and we'd heard five very sad stories. Some wayward synapse in my pea-brain told me a joke might be in order, something to lighten the mood and cheer up the straight folks.
“Hi, I'm Dan, and this is Terry, and as you can see, we have some fertility issues of our own.”
If there was any way to take it back, I would. No one laughed, no one smiled—and why should they? Thankfully, the couple after us, Carol and Jack, cracked a couple of jokes, too. Jack was an engineer, Carol a business executive. They'd spent years trying to get pregnant, to no avail.
“We're here, ” Jack explained, “because I finally scored a zero on a test.”
Heterosexual identity is all wrapped up in the ability of heterosexuals to make babies. Straight sex can do what gay sex cannot, make “miracles.” The straights at our seminar had expected to grow up, fall in love, get married, make love for fun, and sooner or later make love to make life. Infertility did more than shatter their expectations; it undermined their sexual identities.
Straight sex can be recreational or procreational—or both— but gay sex can only ever be recreational. Gay sex is never a means, only an end, and the end is pleasure. Homophobes use this to justify their hatred of gays and lesbians: straight sex, since it can make a baby, is “natural”; gay sex, since it can only make a mess, is not. Babies make straight sex more important than gay sex, so straights are therefore more important than gays. Babies underpin all hetero-supremacism, from “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” to “Gays don't have children, so they have to recruit yours.” Even when straights are using birth control, procreation still sanctifies straight sex. Even when straights are having sex that couldn't possibly make babies (oral, anal, phone, cyber), the fact that these two people could make babies under other circumstances or in other positions legitimizes straight sex.
This is pounded into the heads of gay people and straight people alike. Gays grow up believing their desires, pleasures, and loves are illegitimate; and straights who fall for the hype believe they gotta work that magic, gotta make that baby, or . . . what? A straight person who can't make a baby isn't really a straight person at all. And if you're not straight, you must be . . . what? You're like my boyfriend and me. Suddenly your sex is all recreational, like gay sex, delegitimized and desanctified. Straight sex absent fertility has no larger significance. Oh, it's an expression of love— but so is gay sex, and that never made gay sex okay. No babies means no miracles, no magic. The sex you're having may still be pleasurable, but in a sex-hating (and consequently sex-obsessed) culture, pleasure is not a good enough reason, otherwise gay and lesbian se
x would never have been stigmatized.
I sympathized with the straight people sitting around the conference table. I understood what they must have been going through. I had been through it myself, a long time ago. When I hit puberty, I got the news that I was functionally infertile. But the straight couples at the seminar had only recently gotten that news, and they were still adjusting to it. How much we had in common with them was driven home by the rhetoric the counselors used during the seminar. It was the rhetoric of coming out. The straight couples were encouraged to accept what they could not change. In time, they'd see their “problem” as a blessing. It was important to tell family and friends the truth, even if they might not understand at first. They might in their ignorance ask hurtful questions, but be patient and try to answer. And while it is possible to live a lie, possible to adopt a child and pass it off as your biological child, no one can spend a lifetime in the closet.
Now we all had some common ground.
While the straight couples at the seminar were getting a little gay by coming out to themselves and each other about their infertility, my boyfriend and I were getting a little straight. Terry and I would be giving up certain things that, for better or worse, define what it means to be gay. Good things, things we enjoyed and that had value and meaning for us. Like promiscuity. Safely and respectfully done, whorin' around, like travel, is broadening. One night in Amsterdam, I met a guy in a leather bar, a twenty-eight-year-old German student. We had a beer, left the bar, and went back to his apartment. We messed around, nothing serious, and when we were done, talked all night about German reunifi-cation, what it was like growing up in the East, and what his grandparents had been up to during the Second World War.