Election ’06: Mixed Blessings
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN, Editor
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
An excerpt from this article appeared as the “First Word” editorial in the December 2006 Zenger’s Newsmagazine
I must confess I didn’t see the November 7 election result coming. As I noted in these pages, I was sure the Republican Party couldn’t possibly lose. Despite the obvious screw-ups — despite Iraq, Katrina and the “culture of corruption” in Congress — I didn’t think the poor, pathetic Democrats could possibly overcome the institutional advantages the Republicans had built up at least since Ronald Reagan won the presidency. After all, the Republicans had quite a lot going for them, including a quarter-century of omnipresent propaganda about how, in Reagan’s (in)famous words, “Government is not the solution to your problems; government is the problem.”
They also had a meticulous system of targeting sympathetic individual voters in hostile precincts, infrastructures in socially conservative churches expert at building massive turnout, a whole alternative media system anchored in talk radio and Fox News (by far America’s most popular cable news channel) to keep the faithful indoctrinated and give them their marching orders, and control of the actual machinery by which the votes are counted. Only three companies manufacture computer equipment and software for American elections, and the CEO’s of all of them are major Republican contributors.
Well, for once none of that was enough this November. Not even the best efforts of Karl Rove and his cadre of Republican apparatchiks either to seize on or manufacture an “October surprise” could pull out the 2006 election for them the way they did in 2002 and 2004. North Korea tested a nuclear weapon and the “court” of Iraq’s puppet “government” duly convicted Saddam Hussein of genocide and sentenced him to death — and the American voters couldn’t have cared less.
What motivated enough of them to vote Democrat to give the opposition party control of both houses of Congress was, first, their frustration at being stuck in a Viet Nam-like quagmire in Iraq — the sort of war former Secretary of State Colin Powell once warned against, the kind with no clear goal or criterion to let us know we’d won (or lost) — and second, the horror at seeing the Republicans not only take dubious “campaign contributions” from corporate officials and then faithfully do the corporations’ bidding, but their utter lack of shame about it.
The Democrats played the game expertly, neutralizing the so-called “social issues” by which the Republicans had killed them in 2000 and 2004 by picking candidates who were just as socially conservative as the Republicans they opposed. Twenty years ago, the notoriously anti-choice Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Robert Casey, was denied a chance to speak to the Democratic convention. This year Casey’s son, equally strident in his opposition to abortion rights, was the party’s consensus candidate for U.S. Senate and his anti-choice convictions instrumental in his victory over Republican incumbent Rick Santorum — and the Democrats’ capture of the Senate by the bare minimum, 51 to 49.
The nationwide poster boy for the new breed of Christian-Right Democrat was Heath Shuler, former National Football League quarterback and congressional candidate in North Carolina. His Web site proudly described him as a conservative Southern Baptist and a “pro-life Democrat,” and other reporting on the race indicated that he would favor a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Shuler also took a Right-wing position on the immigration issue, attacking President Bush’s guest-worker program as “amnesty” and indicating he would have voted with the House Republican majority on an immigration bill that concentrated on border enforcement only without acknowledging the rights of undocumented immigrants already in the U.S.
Whatever the motives of voters for repudiating the Republicans, it certainly had nothing to do with liking the Democrats any better. Polls on the eve of the election revealed that 60 percent of the voters felt they knew what the Republicans stood for as a party, while only 46 percent felt the same about the Democrats. The 2006 election was a perfect example of what the late political scientist V. O. Key meant when he wrote 40 years ago, in The Responsible Electorate, that Americans do vote on issues, but “retrospectively and negatively.” The Democrats didn’t win because they were offering Americans a better alternative to the Republicans; they won simply by being, to paraphrase the old 7-Up ad slogan, the “un-Republicans.”
The Democratic triumph in 2006 is already being compared to the Republican sweep of Congress in 1994, but the comparison is unfair. The Republican insurgents in 1994 ran on a nationwide platform, Newt Gingrich’s so-called “Contract with America,” and made it as clear as they possibly could — given the biases in America’s political and media systems against any serious discussion of issues — what they stood for and what they would do if elected (not that they kept all their promises). The Democrats of 2006, by contrast, tailored their message so closely to whatever district they were running in that they really weren’t a national party at all, just a collection of interest groups across the country united by nothing but the desire to get the Republicans out and enjoy the perks of power, especially in the House, after a 12-year drought.
This was the main reason why the national Democrats didn’t do what David Rolland, editor of San Diego CityBeat, suggested they do in one of his editorials: put forth a comprehensive House ethics reform package that would make the kind of corruption the Republicans engaged in impossible. Rolland missed the point: the Democrats didn’t want to become a majority in the House to get rid of the opportunities for corporate contributions and selling public policy the Republicans had exploited so effectively. Rather, the Democrats wanted a majority so they could get the money and the corporate perks for themselves. Despite the number of voters who said they were specifically upset about “earmarks” — Congressmembers’ practice of sneaking into bills provisions specifically setting aside money for projects in their home districts — the Democratic Speaker-elect, Nancy Pelosi; the new majority leader, Steny Hoyer; and the man Pelosi endorsed for the majority leader position, John Murtha, all turned out to be A-number-1 earmarkers themselves.
The newly ascendant Democrats need to realize that America remains a profoundly conservative country. They must avoid both the temptation of pursuing an overly liberal economic and social agenda and the temptation of thinking that the voters’ new-found concern over political corruption will dissipate and let them collect the boodle as usual. The worst thing the Democrats could possibly do in office, in terms of their ability to hold on to their majority and have a shot at regaining the White House in 2008, is to play the same pay-to-play games with corporate contributors and public policy the Republicans played during their 12 years in the majority (and the Democrats played in the years before that). If they yield to that temptation, voters will decide that both parties are equally corrupt, and that government is not to be trusted to serve the people — and they’ll go back to electing the Republicans who’ve been telling them that for at least 42 years.
The corruption issue is all the more important for Congressional Democrats because the other big issue that got them their majority — the war in Iraq — is, paradoxically, the one about which they can do the least. Donald Rumsfeld may have lost his job as a result of the election, but George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are still very much in command, still true believers in the “mission” in Iraq and still confident of overall “victory,” whatever that means. The administration shows every sign of continuing the war in Iraq indefinitely and possibly extending it to Iran, and short of cutting off the funding for the war — which ain’t gonna happen because any Congressmember or Senator who proposed it would be accused of “not supporting our troops” — there isn’t a damned thing Congress can do to stop them.
The November 7 election and its aftermath should have one more important effect: it should destroy forever any illusions about the U.S. having a “liberal media.” Not only did a conservative paper like the San Diego Union-Tribune headline the story “Democrats Seize Control of Congress” — as if they’d staged a coup d’état rather than winning a free and fair election — but even a supposedly “liberal” paper like the Los Angeles Times has been covering the Democrats’ election of their Congressional leaders and committee chairs in a blatantly patronizing way. The battles between Steny Hoyer and Jack Murtha over the position of House majority leader (won by Hoyer though speaker-elect Pelosi endorsed Murtha) and between Jane Harman and Alcee Hastings for the chair of the House Intelligence committee are being covered like playground disputes, and Right-wing outlets like Fox News are already declaring the Democratic Congress a failure more than a month before it even takes office.
Aside from the idea that a party whose members march in zombie-like precision to the dictates of their leaders is somehow better than one in which the members have their own minds and vote for the people they want — one would think a country that proclaims itself a democracy would celebrate the Democrats’ independence of thought over the Republicans’ rote obedience — the message American voters are getting from the mainstream media is, “You made a big mistake November 7. You let a bunch of kids take over Congress. Fortunately, you’ll have a chance to fix that error in two years and put the grownups” — i.e., the Republicans — “back in charge.”
State and Local Disasters
Whatever good might have come from the 2006 elections nationwide, for the most part the returns in California, and especially in San Diego, were disastrous for the progressive cause. I may have been wrong about the national battle for Congress but I was dead right about Arnold Schwarzenegger; while others were solemnly declaring him politically dead after the debacle of his special-election initiatives in November 2005, I had no doubt he would get re-elected, partly because he’s larger than life — he’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, damnit — and partly because, just as he started making comedies like Junior and Kindergarten Cop in the early 1990’s after the spectacular failure of his film The Last Action Hero, so he switched scripts as a politician, embraced an image as a moderate and undercut any possible Democratic challenger by cutting a deal with the Democrats in the legislature for his five “Rebuilding California” bond measures, all of which passed.
That astonished me — I’d thought the embers of the Proposition 13 tax revolt were still sufficiently hot to burn down any major new effort at state spending — but the combination of a bipartisan campaign and the siren song of “free money” turned the trick. The phrase “no new taxes” appeared so often in the campaign ads for Propositions 1A through 1E, it amounted to a deliberate deception. Given the addition of whopping new debt to the California state budget, on top of years of borrowing under both Schwarzenegger and his recalled predecessor, Gray Davis, just to pay the state’s operating expenses, the question is not whether state taxes will have to go up, but when, by how much, and whether the additional burden will fall primarily on corporations and the rich or (more likely in today’s political climate) on the working and middle classes through sales taxes, state fees and other regressive levies.
Only two other statewide ballot measures passed. Proposition 83, a draconian new batch of laws aimed at individuals convicted of sex crimes, sailed to victory by a 3-to-1 margin. It’s true that pedophiles aren’t exactly the most popular people in society, but the measures imposed by 83 — including sweeping restrictions on where they can live and a requirement that they wear global positioning devices and be monitored for the rest of their lives — not only offend against the basic principle of Anglo-American jurisprudence that people should be punished for what they’ve actually done, not for what somebody thinks they might do in the future, but in practice has only driven them more deeply underground and forced them on rural areas ill-equipped to handle them or provide them the therapy they need to keep from re-offending. Proposition 84, a water-quality bond measure, squeezed out a victory probably in the wake of 1A through 1E.
All six other statewide initiatives lost. The good news for progressives is that took down Proposition 85, San Diego Reader publisher Jim Holman’s latest attempt to swing the state against choice on abortion by imposing a parental notification requirement for minors; and Proposition 90, a deceptive initiative ostensibly curbing the abuse of eminent domain to benefit wealthy developers but really aimed at gutting all zoning restrictions and environmental regulations on land use. The bad news was that Propositions 86 and 87 — to impose new taxes on tobacco to fund health care and on the oil industry to bankroll alternative energy, respectively — both fell victim to blatantly deceptive ad campaigns paid for by the industries that would have been affected.
But the worst blow to California progressives was the sweeping 3-to-1 rejection of Proposition 89, the so-called “clean elections” campaign reform that allows grass-roots candidates to run for office and professional politicians an alternative to begging for millions of dollars from the corporate rich and other special interests. Every attempt at enacting any sort of public financing of elections in California has failed at the polls — and until the citizens of this state get wise and realize that the only workable alternative to private campaign financing and the “pay-to-play” politics that result is public financing, meaningful campaign reform is a dead issue in this state. It’s clear from the results on 86, 87 and 89 that California progressives can forget about the initiative as a means of achieving their political goals any time soon.
Locally, the election news was even worse for progressives than it was statewide. Propositions B and C, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders’ two initiatives to decimate the city’s work force and turn its jobs over to private companies (which usually hire the same workers but pay them about half as much and don’t offer health care, pensons or any other benefits), passed by sweeping margins. Voters in the 50th Congressional District in North County once again made it clear they prefer a corrupt Republican to an honest Democrat, and openly Gay Chula Vista Mayor Steve Padilla lost his bid for re-election by a landslide 60 to 40 percent margin. The silver lining in the Padilla race was that his sexual orientation had nothing to do with his defeat; even the famously homophobic paper La Prensa San Diego endorsed him.
Same-Sex Marriage: The Nail in the Coffin?
One of the ironies of the 2006 election is that it may have brought the passage of a Constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage nationwide closer, not pushed it farther away. Just before the election I published a long article on the Zenger’s blog, http://zengersmag.blogspot.com, called “The Game, Not the Name,” in which I argued that the Queer community needs to abandon the demand for marriage under that name and concentrate on winning domestic-partnership and civil-union rights for their relationships. Inspired by the New Jersey state supreme court decision that its Lesbian and Gay couples were entitled under its constitution to all the rights and responsibilities of marriage, but not the term “marriage” itself, I argued not only that polls show a far greater level of political support for granting rights to Queer couples without calling them “marriage,” but that the term “marriage” itself carries a lot of social, historical, psychological and spiritual baggage that makes it inappropriate as a description for how Queer people actually conduct their relationships.
The results in the November 2006 election offered mixed results for this strategy. In 2004, 13 state initiatives had sought to ban same-sex marriage, and every one of them passed — regardless of whether they also contained bans on domestic partnerships or civil unions, and regardless of whether the state had gone Republican or Democratic in the Presidential election. This year, the six states that had up-or-down votes on banning same-sex marriage without also banning domestic partnerships and civil unions — Wisconsin, South Dakota, Virginia, Idaho, South Carolina and Tennessee — all passed the bans, though in some cases by smaller margins than expected.
In Colorado, voters gave Queers the double whammy on the marriage issue: they passed a marriage ban and they defeated a measure that would have allowed for recognition of domestic partnerships. On the other hand, in Arizona, the one state in 2006 where a ballot measure combined a marriage and a domestic partnership/civil union ban, it was defeated by a razor-thin 51 to 49 percent margin. This indicates not only that the home state of Barry Goldwater, Sandra Day O’Connor and John McCain retains a share of cussed libertarianism in its conservatism — a sense that the term “limited government” means lassiez-faire not only in the economy but in people’s private lives as well — but that it’s possible to defeat a marriage ban if its proponents get too ambitious and try to deny any form of legal recognition for Gay and Lesbian couples.
All those new Congressional Democrats from conservative districts are going to be very concerned about “making their bones” on the social issues — persuading the voters back home that they’re not going to abandon their anti-choice, anti-Queer convictions as back-benchers in a party whose national leadership is still pretty liberal and whose newly elected speaker comes from “Queer Marriage Central,” San Francisco. There’s going to be a lot of pressure on the House Democratic leadership to schedule a vote on a hot-button social issue, and a good chance that Republicans and conservative Democrats will come together to give the radical Right something of a national victory.
The issue is unlikely to have anything to do with abortion for one simple reason: there are a not more straight women in the U.S. than there are Queers, and a blatantly anti-choice bill from the Democrats is going to piss off a lot more core voters in the Democratic coalition than a ban on same-sex marriage. I think a vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment is likely to come in the current Congress, and rather than continuing to fight it, the liberal/progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the Queer community should negotiate the language so the amendment only restricts marriage to one man and one woman, while continuing to allow states to recognize domestic partnerships or civil unions.
This sort of “grand compromise” is hardly ideal. It essentially means acknowledging that in the United States emotional commitments between people of the same gender are perpetually going to be considered less significant than those between opposite-gender couples. It also means that the struggle for relationship equality is going to be a long, hard, multi-decade slog on a state-by-state level, and that the best we can accomplish on the federal level — an amendment to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (passed by bipartisan majorities and signed into law by a Democratic president) providing that for purposes of federal benefits, domestic partnerships and civil unions in the states that have them would be considered functionally equivalent to marriages — will probably be at least 50 years away.
But I remain convinced that if the Queer community puts all its eggs in the basket called “marriage” — if it continues the insane political strategy of pursuing a goal that only one-quarter of the American people support — the result will be a sweeping Federal Marriage Amendment that will ban all legal or contractual recognition of Gay and Lesbian partnerships anywhere in the U.S. As the comic novelist Leonard Wibberley put it in The Mouse on the Moon, you can’t always snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, but sometimes you can achieve something even more difficult; you can snatch compromise from the jaws of disaster. That, I’m convinced, is the best we can hope for on the “marriage” issue.
Who Really Outed Ted Haggard?
One of the quirkier aspects of this year’s election was the weird morality play that got acted out in the last month or so of the campaign. First, Republican Congressmember Mark Foley of Florida, whose party leadership had put him in charge of a subcommittee on protecting children from sexual exploitation via the Internet — and who had pushed various versions of a bill to do that so draconian the U.S. Supreme Court twice declared it unconstitutional — was caught sending sleazy e-mails and instant text messages to teenage Congressional pages. (“Do I make you a little bit horny?” wrote the 52-year-old Congressmember to a 17-year-old page.)
Then Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, who had built a church in Denver from 12 families meeting in his basement to a mega-church drawing 14,000 members and filling a giant auditorium every Sunday, found himself “outed” as a crystal-using Queer by a 49-year-old man he’d paid to have sex with him and supply him with the drug. At first Haggard offered some of the usual dog-ate-my-homework excuses — he’d only hired the man for a massage, and he’d bought the drugs from him but never actually used them — but eventually he gave a blurry but unmistakable statement of no-contest to the charges and accepted losing his job at the National Association of Evangelicals and as pastor of the church he had built.
Queers across the country celebrated these stories as classic examples of the hypocrisy of the radical Right, blasting away at homosexuality in public while enjoying the forbidden joys in private. In both cases, the truth is a little more complicated. First of all, while Foley’s sexual approaches to House pages were disgusting and flagrant examples of sexual harassment, they weren’t illegal. The age of sexual consent in the District of Columbia is 16, and all the young men Foley approached with his sorry little missives were 16 or 17. What’s more, in 1973 a newly elected Democratic Congressmember from Massachusetts named Gerry Studds had actually had sex with a 17-year-old page — not just talked about it the way Foley had — and he’d kept the secret for 10 years before the former page who’d been his lover outed him.
What was different was that the Democratic majority in power in the House in 1983 held Studds — and a Republican who was caught at the same time having had sex with a female teenage page— to account. The House passed a resolution of censure and Studds apologized for his actions, acknowledged his Gay orientation and moved on, serving in Congress until he retired in 1997. Indeed, in one of those macabre coincidences a movie producer wouldn’t let a writer put into a script for fear the audience would find it unbelievable, Studds died this year just as the Foley scandal was at its peak, after having been off the radar screen of the American media for years.
Foley’s antics reminded me more than anyone else of another hot-pantsed Republican, former Oregon Senator Robert Packwood, who was a reliable vote for women’s rights on the Senate floor but in private never seemed to meet a woman he didn’t want to grope. On this particular “moral” issue, the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is that the Democrats tend to take sexual harassment seriously whether it’s Queer or straight — while the Republicans, with a few courageous exceptions, have invested so much political capital into demonizing Queers as a class that a Mark Foley seems more heinous to them than a Robert Packwood simply because his victims were the same gender as he was. Besides, at least one page who interacted with Foley actually did have sex with him a few years later — and went to the media with fond memories of the experience as an important milestone in his own coming-out as a Gay man.
As for Ted Haggard, his story is even more complex than Foley’s. Despite the statement of the man who outed him that he was motivated by Haggard’s support of the ban on same-sex marriage on the 2006 Colorado ballot, Haggard was actually a relative moderate within the world of evangelical Christianity. He was a key figure in a campaign within the evangelical movement to get the Christian Right to take global warming seriously, and along with his vice president for government affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals, Richard Cizik (who, ironically, had the task of announcing to the media that Haggard had been relieved of its presidency), had joined a group of evangelicals publicly challenging the government to do more to stop global warming.
What’s more, while Haggard endorsed the ban on same-sex marriage, he refused to take a position against the Colorado initiative to recognize Gay and Lesbian couples as domestic partners — thereby staking out the most pro-Queer, or at least Queer-neutral, position one could expect from an evangelical Christian leader. He made some powerful enemies, including such big guns on the radical Christian Right as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and James Dobson — and he also threatened the coalition between pro-business lassiez-faire Republicans and the radical Right that had made the Republican Party the dominant force in American politics for a generation.
An evangelical movement that started questioning its own marriage with the pro-business Right — that started harking back to the traditions of William Jennings Bryan and wondering whether “bash the environment” and “bash the poor” are truly Christian moral values — would be a threat to business interests in general and the energy industry in particular. With a Republican Party so in thrall to the energy industry that the president, vice-president and secretary of state are all former executives of it, it’s certainly conceivable that some energy-industry lobbyists spread money far and wide to come up with some dirt on Ted Haggard … and did.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Progressive San Diego Hosts Post-Election Forum
Focuses More on San Diego, California Failures than Nationwide Successes
By MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
The reception and program Progressive San Diego hosted November 17 in the 19th floor conference room of the Lerach, Coughlin, Stoia, Geller, Rudman and Robbins law firm downtown was called “Looking Back, Looking Forward: Election ‘Lessons Learned’ Forum.” It featured a stellar group of panelists, including three people who had run for office (and lost) in the 2006 elections: Francine Busby, who ran surprisingly close races against Republican Brian Bilbray in the 50th Congressional District; Richard Barrera, union activist who was swamped by Republican incumbent Ron Roberts for the County Board of Supervisors in the 4th District; and Lorena Gonzalez, who was beaten handily by establishment Democrat Ben Hueso for the 8th District seat on the San Diego City Council and is now political director for the San Diego-Imperial Counties Central Labor Council.
Also on the panel were San Diego Democratic County Central Committee chair and former San Diego Democratic Club president Jess Durfee; Laura Hunter, Clean Bay Campaign director of the Environmental Health Coalition (EHC); and Scott Lewis, political reporter for the Voice of San Diego news Web site and the token Republican on the panel — a status he and the other panelists joked about frequently. The moderator was David Rolland, editor of the San Diego CityBeat. But despite an enthusiastic preamble by Rolland ridiculing the idea that the Democratic Party’s takeover of both houses of Congress was “just a slight shift” of the electorate on the Iraq war and Congressional corruption, most of the program focused on the progressive community’s defeats in California — particularly on the statewide propositions — and locally in San Diego.
Durfee recalled doing media interviews on the floor of Golden Hall on election night — and having Busby’s 10-point loss to Congressmember Brian Bilbray, the Republican who had beaten her in the June 6 special election to fill out the rest of Cunningham’s term, thrown in his face by the reporters. “Typically the media don’t ask about local stuff, but on election night they kept asking about Francine and why the Democrats couldn’t pick up a seat here,” he said. He pointed to the 14 percentage point advantage the Republicans had over the Democrats in the district — far greater, he said, than the registration difference in the seats the Democrats did win in other states to give them the House majority — and said Busby’s race was a partial victory for Democrats because “the $5-6 million the Republicans spent on [defeating] Francine was money they couldn’t spend somewhere else.”
Busby herself said she was proud of having come so close, losing to Bilbray by only five points in the special election in June and then by 10 points in November. “When you look across the state, most races are divided by 30 to 40 points,” she said. “I came within 10 points and exploded the myth that this is a monolithic district.” She said that she raised $3 million for the November election, and $2.5 million was local money she raised herself (in contrast to the June election, where she had help from the Democratic National Congressional Committee). According to Busby, thanks to the efforts of her campaign the Democrats have “an organization of 6,000 people in the district ready now to start working for 2008. This is [Democratic national chair] Howard Dean’s model: if you write off districts as ‘unwinnable’ you can’t win them even when they become winnable.”
Durfee said he was proud of the fact that three Democratic candidates for state offices — Bill Lockyer for treasurer, John Chiang for controller and Jerry Brown for attorney general — carried San Diego County. “This county is slowly shifting to a more progressive county,” he said. “Personalities had something to do with it, but four years ago Lockyer was running for re-election as attorney general and he lost San Diego County. This year, he ran for a different office and won. A lot has to do with the ground organization and the momentum from the inspiration for Francine’s efforts. Outside the city of San Diego we were disappointed in the local nonpartisan races” — Democratic incumbent Steve Padilla lost the Chula Vista mayoralty to Republican Cheryl Cox, wife of county supervisor Bill Cox; and National City’s mayor’s office fell out of Democratic hands for the first time in 24 years — “and we need to do a better job of identifying and supporting candidates.”
Gonzalez said the key difference between the races the Democrats won in San Diego County and those they lost was whether they had the support of the San Diego Union-Tribune. “Lockyer and Chiang were endorsed by the Union-Tribune,” she explained. “They did not endorse Lockyer last time.” She also said that the Republicans are doing a better job than the Democrats of making nominally “nonpartisan” races for local offices like mayor, city councilmember and county supervisor tests of party loyalty. According to Gonzalez, Democrats were able to get Katherine Nakamura re-elected to the San Diego Unified School District board by making her race against a very partisan Republican opponent — Mike McSweeney, vice-chair of the San Diego County Republican Central Committee — a test of party loyalty. Padilla lost the mayor’s office in Chula Vista, she added, because “we were late in running it as a partisan race.”
Perhaps the bitterest part of the November 7 election, the panelists seemed to agree, was the 2 to 1 margin by which Proposition C, Mayor Jerry Sanders’ proposal to privatize city services, passed in the city of San Diego. According to Lewis, the main reason it won so easily was that here, as on so many other issues, the Republicans did their homework and strategized long-term — and the Democrats didn’t. “The C supporters started their campaign months ago,” he said. “One thing Tom Shepard [the Republican consultant who ran the Yes on C campaign] does is chase absentee ballots, and then send people mailings telling them how to vote right after they receive their ballots in the mail. When money finally came in from the unions against C, it was late and had a muddled message. Had it been seen the way some of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s initiatives were [in 2005], it would have been closer.”
“Proposition C was over before the campaign began because of Jerry Sanders, the money, the organizational strength of the proponents and also because conservatives are dominating the storyline in San Diego,” Barrera added. “The middle class is eroding all over the country and especially in San Diego. Half of all San Diego households can’t afford the basics, and yet the conventional wisdom about local government is all about how the unions blew a hole in the city budget. When we underfiunded the city’s pension obligations, we didn’t spend the money on working families; we spent it to expand the Convention Center and to bring the Republican national convention to San Diego.”
Barrera also said that instead of relying on a dubious argument that Proposition C would jeopardize public safety — which ended up in a pointless debate over whether front-line police and fire services could be contracted out under the proposition (nothing in its language said they couldn’t be, but Mayor Sanders, a former police chief, assured voters that wouldn’t happen and they believed him) — the issue should have been framed as, “Are we going to take jobs that now provide health care and outsource them to the private sector, so the same people will be doing them but without health care? We didn’t articulate that during the campaign, and now we have to raise the question of at least setting standards so that the jobs that are outsourced at least have health benefits.”
Lewis agreed that the passage of Proposition C was aided by the mistakes made by its opponents — “they made a mistake in saying your house was going to burn down” if it passed, he said — but he thought the victory for C was more than just an anti-union backlash. “It’s a mistake for progressives to let the unions take the fall for the city’s pension crisis,” Lewis explained. “Republicans have been in control of this city for years, and yet they’ve been able to cast the blame for the city’s problems on the unions. There has to be a way for you guys to find that higher ground and capture the voters’ outrage the way they have.”
Asked by Rolland if progressive campaigns in San Diego generally are as sophisticated as they could be, Durfee said, “Absolutely not. The Republicans in San Diego have, by comparison, virtually unlimited resources. There’s so much money coming from the business community to Republican candidates and consultants. We have very few consultants, and not all of them are exclusively Democratic. Lorena’s campaign consultant was from Sacramento, and it was a completely new experience for me to work with a fully professional consultant. We’ve got to be more sophisticated on our campaigns, working with and recruiting and training candidates.”
Gonzalez again pointed to the power of the Union-Tribune as one reason the Democrats in San Diego have such difficulty getting candidates to run for office. “We have a local newspaper that will set out to destroy any Democrat who runs in a competitive district. We’re trying to find candidates to run for City Council in District 7 [eastern San Diego and the College area, currently represented by Republican Jim Madaffer] and District 1 [La Jolla and northern San Diego, currently represented by moderate Democrat Scott Peters]. When you start talking to people who would be good candidates, they say, ‘Why would I want to put myself through that?’” She noted that the Union-Tribune endorsed Katherine Nakamura for school board the first time she ran, against a labor-backed Democrat; but this year, since her opponent was a Republican, “they wrote about how crazy she was.”
According to Gonzalez, at her own meeting with the Union-Tribune editorial board when they were deciding whom to endorse in District 8, “they asked me my position on illegal immigration and on late-term abortions. You can tell that the most fair the Union-Tribune will ever be to a competitive Democrat is, ‘She’s bright and articulate, but she’ll be a tool of Big Labor.”
“I would question whether the Union-Tribune editorial board has that much power,” Lewis replied. “I would doubt that somebody who knows enough about a City Council race to read an editorial like that would be swayed by it.”
“When we’re trying to find candidates, we have to convince people that they’ll have the resources and organization they need to run a campaign they can be proud of,” Gonzalez said. “Sometimes we have good candidates who have no idea of what it takes to be competitive. We have to be professional and do polling to find messages that work. That’s what the other side does.” She cited the example of independent businesswoman Olga Diaz, who ran unsuccessfully for city council in Escondido at least in part as a protest against the ordinance the current council passed making it illegal for landlords to rent to undocumented immigrants. “We need to take someone like that and give her the background and organization to run a race in a district in which she could actually win,” Gonzalez said.
Part of the discussion turned on the fate of three progressive propositions on the statewide ballot: 86, which would have increased the tax on cigarettes to fund health care; 87, which would have taxed oil companies to fund research on alternative energy; and 89, which would have established a so-called “clean elections” alternative for candidates to run in public funding similar to currently existing programs in Maine and Arizona. Propositions 86 and 87 were swamped by ad campaigns funded by the industries that would have been affected, but 89, even without a similarly intense corporate-funded campaign against it, was defeated by a 3 to 1 margin: the latest in a long series of statewide votes in which Californians have decisively rejected any proposals to fund political campaigns with tax money.
Of all the progressive losses on the statewide propositions, the overwhelming defeat of Proposition 89 clearly rankled the Progressive San Diego panelists and audience more than any other. “Clean campaigns is really important,” Barrera said. “The battle is the ad they can always run against us that ‘the taxpayers are paying for campaigns.’” Barrera said that while still looking for ways to pass clean elections, progressives need to recognize that the current system of financing elections through big-money private donors is going to be the status quo in California for the foreseeable future, and they need to learn to play the game and “figure out how to raise money and build our institutions.”
For an example, Barrera returned to the Proposition C campaign in San Diego and noted, “One thing I thought interesting was that the mayor and the campaign for C ran a message that was anti-labor but pro-worker. They understand there’s a need for a pro-worker message. We’ve got a challenge to build our local labor movement so it can compete with big business in funding campaigns. We do have an ability to raise money at the grass-roots level. We just have to do it consistently and figure out ways to get people to give money to the Democratic Party. In his Presidential campaign Howard Dean worked out a way to get people to give small individual donations through the Internet. I don’t think we should wave the white flag.”
Though disappointed at the outcome of the Chula Vista mayor’s race — particularly since it removed an important pro-environment voice from the California Coastal Commission, on which Padilla sat — Hunter said her group has had successes organizing residents of Barrio Logan, National City and Chula Vista around the problems caused by high-polluting industries in their neighborhoods. Though somewhat hampered by her group’s 501 ( c ) (3) status, which makes it impossible for them to endorse specific candidates, she said her group has been good at “linking issues with politics … and also improving voting habits among the people most impacted in this debate. We realized years ago that we really need to educate our people about the issues and their own self-interest. We need to do grass-roots outreach and really connect with people. We have to start the conversations earlier and make them ongoing.”
Focuses More on San Diego, California Failures than Nationwide Successes
By MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
The reception and program Progressive San Diego hosted November 17 in the 19th floor conference room of the Lerach, Coughlin, Stoia, Geller, Rudman and Robbins law firm downtown was called “Looking Back, Looking Forward: Election ‘Lessons Learned’ Forum.” It featured a stellar group of panelists, including three people who had run for office (and lost) in the 2006 elections: Francine Busby, who ran surprisingly close races against Republican Brian Bilbray in the 50th Congressional District; Richard Barrera, union activist who was swamped by Republican incumbent Ron Roberts for the County Board of Supervisors in the 4th District; and Lorena Gonzalez, who was beaten handily by establishment Democrat Ben Hueso for the 8th District seat on the San Diego City Council and is now political director for the San Diego-Imperial Counties Central Labor Council.
Also on the panel were San Diego Democratic County Central Committee chair and former San Diego Democratic Club president Jess Durfee; Laura Hunter, Clean Bay Campaign director of the Environmental Health Coalition (EHC); and Scott Lewis, political reporter for the Voice of San Diego news Web site and the token Republican on the panel — a status he and the other panelists joked about frequently. The moderator was David Rolland, editor of the San Diego CityBeat. But despite an enthusiastic preamble by Rolland ridiculing the idea that the Democratic Party’s takeover of both houses of Congress was “just a slight shift” of the electorate on the Iraq war and Congressional corruption, most of the program focused on the progressive community’s defeats in California — particularly on the statewide propositions — and locally in San Diego.
Durfee recalled doing media interviews on the floor of Golden Hall on election night — and having Busby’s 10-point loss to Congressmember Brian Bilbray, the Republican who had beaten her in the June 6 special election to fill out the rest of Cunningham’s term, thrown in his face by the reporters. “Typically the media don’t ask about local stuff, but on election night they kept asking about Francine and why the Democrats couldn’t pick up a seat here,” he said. He pointed to the 14 percentage point advantage the Republicans had over the Democrats in the district — far greater, he said, than the registration difference in the seats the Democrats did win in other states to give them the House majority — and said Busby’s race was a partial victory for Democrats because “the $5-6 million the Republicans spent on [defeating] Francine was money they couldn’t spend somewhere else.”
Busby herself said she was proud of having come so close, losing to Bilbray by only five points in the special election in June and then by 10 points in November. “When you look across the state, most races are divided by 30 to 40 points,” she said. “I came within 10 points and exploded the myth that this is a monolithic district.” She said that she raised $3 million for the November election, and $2.5 million was local money she raised herself (in contrast to the June election, where she had help from the Democratic National Congressional Committee). According to Busby, thanks to the efforts of her campaign the Democrats have “an organization of 6,000 people in the district ready now to start working for 2008. This is [Democratic national chair] Howard Dean’s model: if you write off districts as ‘unwinnable’ you can’t win them even when they become winnable.”
Durfee said he was proud of the fact that three Democratic candidates for state offices — Bill Lockyer for treasurer, John Chiang for controller and Jerry Brown for attorney general — carried San Diego County. “This county is slowly shifting to a more progressive county,” he said. “Personalities had something to do with it, but four years ago Lockyer was running for re-election as attorney general and he lost San Diego County. This year, he ran for a different office and won. A lot has to do with the ground organization and the momentum from the inspiration for Francine’s efforts. Outside the city of San Diego we were disappointed in the local nonpartisan races” — Democratic incumbent Steve Padilla lost the Chula Vista mayoralty to Republican Cheryl Cox, wife of county supervisor Bill Cox; and National City’s mayor’s office fell out of Democratic hands for the first time in 24 years — “and we need to do a better job of identifying and supporting candidates.”
Gonzalez said the key difference between the races the Democrats won in San Diego County and those they lost was whether they had the support of the San Diego Union-Tribune. “Lockyer and Chiang were endorsed by the Union-Tribune,” she explained. “They did not endorse Lockyer last time.” She also said that the Republicans are doing a better job than the Democrats of making nominally “nonpartisan” races for local offices like mayor, city councilmember and county supervisor tests of party loyalty. According to Gonzalez, Democrats were able to get Katherine Nakamura re-elected to the San Diego Unified School District board by making her race against a very partisan Republican opponent — Mike McSweeney, vice-chair of the San Diego County Republican Central Committee — a test of party loyalty. Padilla lost the mayor’s office in Chula Vista, she added, because “we were late in running it as a partisan race.”
Perhaps the bitterest part of the November 7 election, the panelists seemed to agree, was the 2 to 1 margin by which Proposition C, Mayor Jerry Sanders’ proposal to privatize city services, passed in the city of San Diego. According to Lewis, the main reason it won so easily was that here, as on so many other issues, the Republicans did their homework and strategized long-term — and the Democrats didn’t. “The C supporters started their campaign months ago,” he said. “One thing Tom Shepard [the Republican consultant who ran the Yes on C campaign] does is chase absentee ballots, and then send people mailings telling them how to vote right after they receive their ballots in the mail. When money finally came in from the unions against C, it was late and had a muddled message. Had it been seen the way some of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s initiatives were [in 2005], it would have been closer.”
“Proposition C was over before the campaign began because of Jerry Sanders, the money, the organizational strength of the proponents and also because conservatives are dominating the storyline in San Diego,” Barrera added. “The middle class is eroding all over the country and especially in San Diego. Half of all San Diego households can’t afford the basics, and yet the conventional wisdom about local government is all about how the unions blew a hole in the city budget. When we underfiunded the city’s pension obligations, we didn’t spend the money on working families; we spent it to expand the Convention Center and to bring the Republican national convention to San Diego.”
Barrera also said that instead of relying on a dubious argument that Proposition C would jeopardize public safety — which ended up in a pointless debate over whether front-line police and fire services could be contracted out under the proposition (nothing in its language said they couldn’t be, but Mayor Sanders, a former police chief, assured voters that wouldn’t happen and they believed him) — the issue should have been framed as, “Are we going to take jobs that now provide health care and outsource them to the private sector, so the same people will be doing them but without health care? We didn’t articulate that during the campaign, and now we have to raise the question of at least setting standards so that the jobs that are outsourced at least have health benefits.”
Lewis agreed that the passage of Proposition C was aided by the mistakes made by its opponents — “they made a mistake in saying your house was going to burn down” if it passed, he said — but he thought the victory for C was more than just an anti-union backlash. “It’s a mistake for progressives to let the unions take the fall for the city’s pension crisis,” Lewis explained. “Republicans have been in control of this city for years, and yet they’ve been able to cast the blame for the city’s problems on the unions. There has to be a way for you guys to find that higher ground and capture the voters’ outrage the way they have.”
Asked by Rolland if progressive campaigns in San Diego generally are as sophisticated as they could be, Durfee said, “Absolutely not. The Republicans in San Diego have, by comparison, virtually unlimited resources. There’s so much money coming from the business community to Republican candidates and consultants. We have very few consultants, and not all of them are exclusively Democratic. Lorena’s campaign consultant was from Sacramento, and it was a completely new experience for me to work with a fully professional consultant. We’ve got to be more sophisticated on our campaigns, working with and recruiting and training candidates.”
Gonzalez again pointed to the power of the Union-Tribune as one reason the Democrats in San Diego have such difficulty getting candidates to run for office. “We have a local newspaper that will set out to destroy any Democrat who runs in a competitive district. We’re trying to find candidates to run for City Council in District 7 [eastern San Diego and the College area, currently represented by Republican Jim Madaffer] and District 1 [La Jolla and northern San Diego, currently represented by moderate Democrat Scott Peters]. When you start talking to people who would be good candidates, they say, ‘Why would I want to put myself through that?’” She noted that the Union-Tribune endorsed Katherine Nakamura for school board the first time she ran, against a labor-backed Democrat; but this year, since her opponent was a Republican, “they wrote about how crazy she was.”
According to Gonzalez, at her own meeting with the Union-Tribune editorial board when they were deciding whom to endorse in District 8, “they asked me my position on illegal immigration and on late-term abortions. You can tell that the most fair the Union-Tribune will ever be to a competitive Democrat is, ‘She’s bright and articulate, but she’ll be a tool of Big Labor.”
“I would question whether the Union-Tribune editorial board has that much power,” Lewis replied. “I would doubt that somebody who knows enough about a City Council race to read an editorial like that would be swayed by it.”
“When we’re trying to find candidates, we have to convince people that they’ll have the resources and organization they need to run a campaign they can be proud of,” Gonzalez said. “Sometimes we have good candidates who have no idea of what it takes to be competitive. We have to be professional and do polling to find messages that work. That’s what the other side does.” She cited the example of independent businesswoman Olga Diaz, who ran unsuccessfully for city council in Escondido at least in part as a protest against the ordinance the current council passed making it illegal for landlords to rent to undocumented immigrants. “We need to take someone like that and give her the background and organization to run a race in a district in which she could actually win,” Gonzalez said.
Part of the discussion turned on the fate of three progressive propositions on the statewide ballot: 86, which would have increased the tax on cigarettes to fund health care; 87, which would have taxed oil companies to fund research on alternative energy; and 89, which would have established a so-called “clean elections” alternative for candidates to run in public funding similar to currently existing programs in Maine and Arizona. Propositions 86 and 87 were swamped by ad campaigns funded by the industries that would have been affected, but 89, even without a similarly intense corporate-funded campaign against it, was defeated by a 3 to 1 margin: the latest in a long series of statewide votes in which Californians have decisively rejected any proposals to fund political campaigns with tax money.
Of all the progressive losses on the statewide propositions, the overwhelming defeat of Proposition 89 clearly rankled the Progressive San Diego panelists and audience more than any other. “Clean campaigns is really important,” Barrera said. “The battle is the ad they can always run against us that ‘the taxpayers are paying for campaigns.’” Barrera said that while still looking for ways to pass clean elections, progressives need to recognize that the current system of financing elections through big-money private donors is going to be the status quo in California for the foreseeable future, and they need to learn to play the game and “figure out how to raise money and build our institutions.”
For an example, Barrera returned to the Proposition C campaign in San Diego and noted, “One thing I thought interesting was that the mayor and the campaign for C ran a message that was anti-labor but pro-worker. They understand there’s a need for a pro-worker message. We’ve got a challenge to build our local labor movement so it can compete with big business in funding campaigns. We do have an ability to raise money at the grass-roots level. We just have to do it consistently and figure out ways to get people to give money to the Democratic Party. In his Presidential campaign Howard Dean worked out a way to get people to give small individual donations through the Internet. I don’t think we should wave the white flag.”
Though disappointed at the outcome of the Chula Vista mayor’s race — particularly since it removed an important pro-environment voice from the California Coastal Commission, on which Padilla sat — Hunter said her group has had successes organizing residents of Barrio Logan, National City and Chula Vista around the problems caused by high-polluting industries in their neighborhoods. Though somewhat hampered by her group’s 501 ( c ) (3) status, which makes it impossible for them to endorse specific candidates, she said her group has been good at “linking issues with politics … and also improving voting habits among the people most impacted in this debate. We realized years ago that we really need to educate our people about the issues and their own self-interest. We need to do grass-roots outreach and really connect with people. We have to start the conversations earlier and make them ongoing.”
Lillian Faderman Speaks at Center November 8
Promotes Book She Co-Wrote on “Gay L.A.”
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Lillian Faderman didn’t just write the history of Gay Los Angeles in her latest book, Gay L.A., co-written with Stuart Timmons. She lived a good deal of it. “I grew up in L.A. and came out as a Lesbian in 1956 at 16,” she told an audience at the San Diego Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center November 8. Armed with a fake I.D., she crashed what she called the “working-class Lesbian bar culture” and, as she came of age, “I learned other aspects of the Lesbian community.” Timmons, best known for his biography of pioneering Gay activist Harry Hay, was part of the next generation of Queer folk and, unlike Faderman, didn’t grow up in L.A. “He came to Los Angeles in 1976 to study at UCLA and never left,” she explained.
“We both really loved the city, but we didn’t want to hide the warts,” Faderman explained. “We wanted to look at the Lesbian/Gay/Transgender population in Los Angeles in all its diversity. We talked to people not yet 16, over 90 and everything in between. We interviewed people in all social classes” — a largely unexplored avenue of Queer history because, aside from a handful of Lesbian authors like Faderman and Leslie Feinberg, most Queer writers have focused on middle- and upper-class Queer folk and written as if working-class Queers did not exist — “and we made a point to include people of all racial and ethnic diversities.”
One of the first issues Faderman and Timmons came to grips with was the knotty one of nomenclature. She explained that they called the book Gay L.A. and used the word “Gay” to include both men and women “because historically that was the term of choice for both Gay men and Lesbians from the turn of the century until the 1970’s.” When they wrote about the individuals she and/or Timmons had interviewed, she added, they referred to them by the terms they preferred: “Gay,” “Lesbian,” “Queer.”
Gay L.A.’s story starts in the 1890’s and continues to the present. “We found great archival material,” Faderman said, “including a city ordinance from 1898 that made cross-dressing illegal for the first time. We found in newspaper archives stories about the tolerance and fear of men who didn’t act like stereotypical men and women who didn’t act like stereotypical women.” As an indication both of how a history of homosexuality anywhere in the U.S. (or most of the world, for that matter) is also a history of homophobia, one of the stories they uncovered was a series of arrests in 1914 of 31 men who had belonged to one of two private clubs, the 606 Club in Long Beach and the 96 Club in Los Angeles. “The men on trial were called ‘social vagrants,’ and that became the usual term for male homosexuals,” Faderman said. “The Los Angeles Times called 606 Club member Harry Wharton a ‘social vagrant,’ ‘degenerate,’ and ‘queer.’”
According to Faderman, the 606 and 96 Clubs were private parties for oral sex, and the club members “were arrested specifically for practicing fellatio. In 1914 sodomy was a felony but fellatio was not.” Predictably, the California state legislature responded to the fact that the 606 and 96 Club members could only be convicted of misdemeanors by passing a law in 1915 making oral sex a felony — which remained on the books until California finally got rid of all laws banning sex in private between consenting adults in 1975. Faderman also discussed Dr. Paul DeRiver, a psychologist who consulted for the Los Angeles Police Department on Queer issues in the 1940’s and recommended that Queers be “cured” with shock treatments.
The repression against Queer people in the Los Angeles area reached its height in the late 1940’s and 1950’s, the period Faderman and Timmons call “the noir years” in their book. There had been a Queer underground in the city in the 1920’s and 1930’s, much of it centered around the movie industry and androgynous stars like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn as well as Queers behind the camera, including directors George Cukor, James Whale, Mitchell Leisen and Dorothy Arzner. America’s entry into World War II led to a congregation of Queer people in Los Angeles; many of the servicemen stationed there were Gay and many of the women who took “Rosie the Riveter” jobs in defense plants to fill in for the men in the war were Lesbian. But the end of the war and the renewed enforcement of gender norms — particularly for women, who were heavily propagandized to give up their careers, get married (to men) and be housewives and mothers — spelled an end to the wartime years of “don’t ask, don’t tell” quasi-acceptance.
One of the most serious challenges faced by both Gay men and Lesbians in postwar L.A. was the aggressiveness of the Los Angeles Police Department. Organized under the “reform” city charter of 1938 as a virtually independent authority with little or no oversight from the rest of the city government, the LAPD set its own priorities. Not only did they frequently stage raids on both Gay and Lesbian bars, often releasing the names of those they arrested to the media — which published them and ruined many people’s lives by “outing” them in this fashion — the LAPD hired young men to work undercover, posing as Gays and hanging out in bars, restrooms, public park and other cruisy areas to entrap Gay men and arrest them. Queers derisively called these undercover cops “Hollywood rejects” because many of them had come to L.A. hoping to succeed as movie actors and signed up with the police when their attempts at film careers didn’t pan out.
The police would also arrest both Gays and Lesbians for wearing clothing associated with the opposite gender — and even when a few victims actually took their cases to court and won rulings that there was no legal basis for these arrests, the police kept making them anyway. Many of the most poignant stories in Gay L.A. are about people who lost their livelihoods — particularly in sensitive positions like teaching, government service or defense work — when they were apprehended in police raids and exposed as Queer, even if the legal cases against them were ultimately dropped.
“Despite the repression, there was an active Gay culture in Los Angeles,” Faderman said. Accompanying her talk with a series of slides, she showed a surprisingly contemporary-looking portrait of a Gay male in a T-shirt and tight jeans, posed alluringly, and explained that the image was from 1954 and the man was a member of the Satyrs, the world’s first Queer motorcycle club, founded in Los Angeles in 1954. According to Faderman, that was just one of many “firsts” for Los Angeles in America’s Queer history:
• The first Lesbian magazine, Vice Versa, started in 1947 and published samizdat-style on hand-typed sheets and carbons by its editor and principal writer, Edythe Eyde, who wrote under the pseudonym “Lisa Ben” (an anagram of “Lesbian”) and did not reveal her real identity until shortly before she died.
• The Mattachine Society, founded in 1951, the first Queer organization to form around a structure of multi-city chapters and to call for Queer equality and pride.
• The first open campaign to defend the rights of Gay people, when Mattachine co-founder Dale Jennings was arrested on public sex charges in 1952 and the group chose to fight back, contesting the arrest and the Los Angeles Police Department’s entrapment campaigns.
• The first magazine for the overall Queer community, One, founded in 1952, which won an historic court battle against the United States Post Office six years later that took away the Post Office’s power to refuse to mail books or magazines as “obscene” simply because they were about homosexuality. One was mostly a Gay men’s magazine but did attempt to attract Lesbian writers and cover women’s issues, though some of the articles about women were actually by male writers using female pseudonyms.
• The first act of public resistance by Queers to a police raid when, in 1959 — in an incident strikingly similar to the legendary raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York 10 years later — patrons of a Cooper’s Donuts store frequented by Queers fought back and started throwing food and utensils at the police when they raided and tried to round up the customers.
• The Los Angeles Free Press, founded in 1964, which wasn’t a Queer publication but did run personal ads for men seeking men and women seeking women as well as men seeking women and women seeking men.
• The first use of the term “Pride” in connection with Queer rights, as an anagram for the organization Personal Rights In Defense and Education, founded in 1966. The group’s newsletter later became a stand-alone publication called The Advocate.
• The first religious organization that specifically reached out to Queers: Rev. Troy Perry’s Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), founded in 1968.
• The Gay Community Services Center, the first center and social-service organization specifically formed for Queers, in 1972.
• The first openly Queer synagogue, Beth Chayim Chadasim (BCC), founded in 1972 under MCC’s auspices and soon spun off into an independent congregation.
The later parts of Gay L.A. deal with the short-lived radical heyday of groups like the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), the fiercely contested splits between Lesbians and Gay men in the 1970’s, and the gradual takeover of the Queer movement by more affluent, “professional” Gay men and Lesbians. “The radicals in L.A. made possible the growth of a radical Gay movement, but the power centers soon stepped in and L.A.’s money and the Hollywood connection made it possible to accomplish things that were impossible in other cities,” Faderman explained.
Faderman also talked about the bitterness between Lesbians and Gay men, which reached its peak in the 1970’s and receded only when the community had to fight outside threats like the Briggs Initiative of 1978 — a ballot proposition which would have called for the firing of teachers who were Queer or said anything in the classroom that could be considered “advocacy” of Queer rights — and the AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s. One particulary nasty conflict began in 1975, when the Gay Community Services Center won a $1 million grant from the federal government specifically to reach out to Lesbian alcoholics and offer them treatment.
“The [male] board of the Center said, ‘We’re all brothers and sisters,’ and the money should be used to support the Gay men’s health clinic,” Faderman recalled. “The women reported this to the feds, who permitted them to leave the Center and set up their own program, the Alcoholism Center for Women, with the grant money.” Coupled with a bitter battle over the executive directorship of the Center, in which a Latina Lesbian was passed over in favor of a white Gay man on the ground that he would have an easier time tapping other white males for large donations to the Center than she would, this led to a bitter three-year strike by women against the Center that was settled only when the threat of the Briggs Initiative made cooperation between Lesbians and Gay men essential.
According to Faderman, L.A.’s response to AIDS mirrored the same establishment vs. radicals divisions that had wracked the overall Queer movement a decade before. “In Los Angeles, two main groups fought against AIDS,” she said. “Affluent people formed AIDS Project Los Angeles and had personal contact with the stars, including Barbra Striesand, who donated and raised money for the group. On the other hand, there was a very large and active ACT UP chapter in L.A. that wasn’t interested in star power but was interested in getting the message out in a much more forceful way.”
Gay L.A. ends with an epilogue in which, as Faderman explained, “we talk about what’s happened in the new century, including the Transgender movement and the huge and growing ethnic and racial diversity” of the Queer community. As an example of how intricate the organizational splits have become, she noted that “in the 1970’s there was an organization of Asian-Pacific Gay men and Lesbians. Today there are organizations specifically for Viet Namese Lesbians — and they’re being broken down even further between immigrant and U.S.-born Viet Namese. But whenever there’s an enemy, we fight together.”
Dreamgirls: Condon’s Musical Masterpiece
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Who said a big-studio, big-budget extravaganza can’t be every bit as powerful and moving as the cheapest, cheesiest indie financed by a film-school graduate using the family credit cards? Bill Condon’s Dreamgirls, the long-awaited big-screen adaptation of the 1981 Broadway musical that told a thinly veiled version of the rise and fall of 1960’s soul stars the Supremes (called “The Dreams” in both play and film) and the Motown company that employed them, is a great film, energetic and moving, true both to the enduring power of the music and the seaminess of the tactics with which it was (and is) marketed and sold. Impeccably directed by Condon, who also wrote the script from Tom Eyen’s musical, Dreamgirls features surprisingly good performances from Beyoncé Knowles (we knew she could sing; we didn’t know she could act) and Eddie Murphy (ordinarily one of the most repulsive performers around, but not here), a great job by Jamie Foxx as a smooth villain and a star-making turn by Jennifer Hudson, who out-acts and out-sings the rest of the cast in what’s truly the centerpiece role of Eyen’s take on the Supremes’ story.
The film opens in Detroit in the late 1950’s, at an amateur night contest at the all-Black (performers, staff and audience) Detroit Theatre. The Dreamettes — Effie White (Jennifer Hudson), Deena Jones (Beyoncé Knowles) and Lorrell Robinson (Anika Noni Rose) — arrive late because one of them had to wait for her mother to go to sleep before she could sneak out of the house and make it to the theatre. A sympathetic stage manager lets them go on last — after a B.B. King-style blues guitarist and singer has already torn up the audience and seems unfollowable — and, predictably, the Dreamettes lose the contest. But they win something better: a gig, starting that very night, as backup singers to the show’s professional headliner, soul star James “Thunder” Early (Eddie Murphy, doing his own singing and doing it surprisingly well). They and Effie’s brother C. C. (Keith Robinson), who writes their songs, also start an association with Curtis Taylor, Jr. (Jamie Foxx, top-billed), a used-car salesman who’s hoping to use Early and the Dreamettes to launch his new, all-Black record label, Rainbow Records.
After Early’s first Rainbow release is ripped off by a terminally lame white artist (much the way mid-1950’s rock ’n’ roll records by artists like Little Richard and Fats Domino were covered and bleached white — in both senses — by the likes of Pat Boone), Taylor and his associates at the label knuckle down to business. They sell off the cars and do everything they can think of, legal or otherwise, to raise the money needed to bribe enough D.J.’s to get their next record on the air and make it a hit. The ambitious Taylor splits Early and the Dreamettes, changing their name to the Dreams (“’-ettes’ are girls, and you’re women now,” he explains) and making Deena, not Effie, the lead singer because he figures Deena’s cooler, blander style would have a better shot at appealing to white audiences than Effie’s Aretha-like soul belting. Taylor also transforms Early from a righteous soul shaker in the manner of Jackie Wilson and James Brown to a bland nightclub singer in the Johnny Mathis mold, pissing him off and leading him to a self-destructive drug-fueled downward spiral.
The great virtue of Dreamgirls is writer-director Condon’s ability to balance the inspiring and the sordid aspects of the story. The righteous power of the music (good faux-soul songs by lyricist Eyen and composer Henry Krieger) and the more negative parts of the tale — particularly Taylor’s growing egomania as he treats his artists like interchangeable parts in the autos he used to sell, even while piously insisting his company is still a “family” — play off each other instead of getting in each other’s way. Eyen brought his version of the Supremes’ saga to a much happier and more sentimental close than the real one, but the central conflicts of his story — the cold war between Deena and Effie not only for leadership of the Dreams but for Taylor’s mercurial affections, and the collapse of Effie’s career and life after she’s booted out of the group and reduced to raising her (and Taylor’s) daughter on welfare — ring true.
It’s also a movie that confronts the basic artificiality of the musical as a form — the way a snatch of instrumental music steals in under the dialogue and all of a sudden the people have stopped speaking and started singing — in the way most of the great musicals of the past did: by making the story about people who sing and dance for a living. Most of the songs are presented realistically, performed in the course of the Dreams’ live appearances or recording sessions — and the record dates are shown the way they really happen, with the singers wearing headphones and adding vocals to previously recorded backing tracks. (It still rankles that in the otherwise excellent Tina Turner biopic, What’s Love Got to Do with It, she was shown recording “River Deep, Mountain High” with a full symphony orchestra in the studio with her — prohibitively expensive even for someone as crazy as Phil Spector, who produced that record.)
Even when the characters start singing to each other in the course of ordinary conversations — which, thank goodness, isn’t very often — the conceit works because the musical settings heighten the emotions and hammer home the dramatic points in ways ordinary dialogue couldn’t do. The only really bothersome musical convention Condon indulges in is the appearance of large bands on the soundtrack when the Dreamettes are performing in an amateur contest backed only by a five-piece group (we see one trumpeter and one saxophonist and we hear full brass and reed sections blasting away) and, later, when Effie is auditioning for a comeback gig in a nightclub with no accompaniment except a bored rehearsal pianist whom she doesn’t quite trust to know her material.
Dreamgirls is superbly cast. Though Eddie Murphy’s emergence as a quite capable soul vocalist is a real surprise, the rest of the leads are cast, thank goodness, with people who can really sing. (When Queen Latifah, the only cast member of Chicago who actually makes her living as a singer, belted out her number, she made the rest of the players seem pathetic by comparison.) Beyoncé Knowles’ physical and vocal resemblance to Diana Ross, the real-life model for her character, is almost uncanny. Yet the real star of the show is Jennifer Hudson, the first person since Jill Scott who’s really mastered the all-out style of Aretha Franklin and the other great soul divas of the 1960’s. The conflict between the two women is emphasized not only by the contrast between Hudson’s deep, rich, loud gospel-soul voice and Knowles’ thinner, almost white pop style but also the physical difference between them: Knowles is tall, thin, leggy, with a body shape perfectly suited to the Dreams’ costumes (expertly designed by Sharen Davis to evoke the Supremes’ stage outfits without slavishly copying them), while Hudson is built like the classic earth-mother type, chunky and hefty with plenty of lung power to drive those impassioned high notes home. Yet Hudson doesn’t coast on her vocal powers alone; in her dialogue scenes she brings the character of Effie to full life, dramatizing both the injustices wreaked on her and her own self-inflicted wounds.
The men in the cast are almost as powerful. Jamie Foxx so totally becomes Charles Taylor — smooth, unscrupulous, always in control, imperious in his decisions, consistently putting his own and his company’s welfare against the feelings of his artists — that anyone who goes to this movie not knowing who’s in it will have a hard time believing that this is the same actor who played so vividly on the other side of the artist/business divide in Ray. Eddie Murphy handles not only the performing side of his character but makes us feel his pain and understand what drives him to self-destruction. Danny Glover is reliable in a relatively minor role, and in the supporting cast child actor Jordan Wright is so chillingly accurate as the leader of the kids’ group “The Campbell Connection” (i.e., the Jackson 5) that you think, “Too bad he’s going to have to grow up to be Michael Jackson.”
Dreamgirls’ other star is Fatima Robinson, the choreographer. One of the enduring ironies of the Motown Records operation is that, while white rock artists were moving away from formal stage costumes and intricate dance routines, Motown was training its Black artists to dress more flashily and move more tightly and professionally than the older generations of Black performers had. Following in the footsteps of Motown’s original choreographer, the 1940’s Black tap-dancing star “Honi” Coles, Robinson creates dazzling routines and gets the cast members to execute them perfectly. The movie also benefits from the marvelous color scheme of cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler, ably contrasting the glitz and glamour of the Dreams’ performances with the grungy environment that gave birth to their act, the sleazy theatres his artists have to perform in in the early days, and the antiseptic Hollywood spaces Charles Taylor moves his company and his family to once he can afford it. (The closing credits are a visual treat in themselves; this is definitely one movie you shouldn’t walk out on during the final roll.)
The best thing that can be said about Dreamgirls is that it fully realizes the potential power of its story — which has become so bound up with the reality on which it was based that ex-Supreme Mary Wilson (the model for the Lorrell Robinson character) even titled her memoir Dreamgirl. It’s a breathtaking two-hour-and-15-minute ride through a still vibrant part of American culture, showing both the entertainment glories the Dreams (and their real-life prototypes) created and the human cost of creating and selling them. There’s been a lot of talk of late that the big-studio, big-blockbuster way of creating movies is incapable of creating anything artistic and possibly on its last legs commercially as well. Not if it can produce a work of the incandescent quality of Dreamgirls, it isn’t.
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Who said a big-studio, big-budget extravaganza can’t be every bit as powerful and moving as the cheapest, cheesiest indie financed by a film-school graduate using the family credit cards? Bill Condon’s Dreamgirls, the long-awaited big-screen adaptation of the 1981 Broadway musical that told a thinly veiled version of the rise and fall of 1960’s soul stars the Supremes (called “The Dreams” in both play and film) and the Motown company that employed them, is a great film, energetic and moving, true both to the enduring power of the music and the seaminess of the tactics with which it was (and is) marketed and sold. Impeccably directed by Condon, who also wrote the script from Tom Eyen’s musical, Dreamgirls features surprisingly good performances from Beyoncé Knowles (we knew she could sing; we didn’t know she could act) and Eddie Murphy (ordinarily one of the most repulsive performers around, but not here), a great job by Jamie Foxx as a smooth villain and a star-making turn by Jennifer Hudson, who out-acts and out-sings the rest of the cast in what’s truly the centerpiece role of Eyen’s take on the Supremes’ story.
The film opens in Detroit in the late 1950’s, at an amateur night contest at the all-Black (performers, staff and audience) Detroit Theatre. The Dreamettes — Effie White (Jennifer Hudson), Deena Jones (Beyoncé Knowles) and Lorrell Robinson (Anika Noni Rose) — arrive late because one of them had to wait for her mother to go to sleep before she could sneak out of the house and make it to the theatre. A sympathetic stage manager lets them go on last — after a B.B. King-style blues guitarist and singer has already torn up the audience and seems unfollowable — and, predictably, the Dreamettes lose the contest. But they win something better: a gig, starting that very night, as backup singers to the show’s professional headliner, soul star James “Thunder” Early (Eddie Murphy, doing his own singing and doing it surprisingly well). They and Effie’s brother C. C. (Keith Robinson), who writes their songs, also start an association with Curtis Taylor, Jr. (Jamie Foxx, top-billed), a used-car salesman who’s hoping to use Early and the Dreamettes to launch his new, all-Black record label, Rainbow Records.
After Early’s first Rainbow release is ripped off by a terminally lame white artist (much the way mid-1950’s rock ’n’ roll records by artists like Little Richard and Fats Domino were covered and bleached white — in both senses — by the likes of Pat Boone), Taylor and his associates at the label knuckle down to business. They sell off the cars and do everything they can think of, legal or otherwise, to raise the money needed to bribe enough D.J.’s to get their next record on the air and make it a hit. The ambitious Taylor splits Early and the Dreamettes, changing their name to the Dreams (“’-ettes’ are girls, and you’re women now,” he explains) and making Deena, not Effie, the lead singer because he figures Deena’s cooler, blander style would have a better shot at appealing to white audiences than Effie’s Aretha-like soul belting. Taylor also transforms Early from a righteous soul shaker in the manner of Jackie Wilson and James Brown to a bland nightclub singer in the Johnny Mathis mold, pissing him off and leading him to a self-destructive drug-fueled downward spiral.
The great virtue of Dreamgirls is writer-director Condon’s ability to balance the inspiring and the sordid aspects of the story. The righteous power of the music (good faux-soul songs by lyricist Eyen and composer Henry Krieger) and the more negative parts of the tale — particularly Taylor’s growing egomania as he treats his artists like interchangeable parts in the autos he used to sell, even while piously insisting his company is still a “family” — play off each other instead of getting in each other’s way. Eyen brought his version of the Supremes’ saga to a much happier and more sentimental close than the real one, but the central conflicts of his story — the cold war between Deena and Effie not only for leadership of the Dreams but for Taylor’s mercurial affections, and the collapse of Effie’s career and life after she’s booted out of the group and reduced to raising her (and Taylor’s) daughter on welfare — ring true.
It’s also a movie that confronts the basic artificiality of the musical as a form — the way a snatch of instrumental music steals in under the dialogue and all of a sudden the people have stopped speaking and started singing — in the way most of the great musicals of the past did: by making the story about people who sing and dance for a living. Most of the songs are presented realistically, performed in the course of the Dreams’ live appearances or recording sessions — and the record dates are shown the way they really happen, with the singers wearing headphones and adding vocals to previously recorded backing tracks. (It still rankles that in the otherwise excellent Tina Turner biopic, What’s Love Got to Do with It, she was shown recording “River Deep, Mountain High” with a full symphony orchestra in the studio with her — prohibitively expensive even for someone as crazy as Phil Spector, who produced that record.)
Even when the characters start singing to each other in the course of ordinary conversations — which, thank goodness, isn’t very often — the conceit works because the musical settings heighten the emotions and hammer home the dramatic points in ways ordinary dialogue couldn’t do. The only really bothersome musical convention Condon indulges in is the appearance of large bands on the soundtrack when the Dreamettes are performing in an amateur contest backed only by a five-piece group (we see one trumpeter and one saxophonist and we hear full brass and reed sections blasting away) and, later, when Effie is auditioning for a comeback gig in a nightclub with no accompaniment except a bored rehearsal pianist whom she doesn’t quite trust to know her material.
Dreamgirls is superbly cast. Though Eddie Murphy’s emergence as a quite capable soul vocalist is a real surprise, the rest of the leads are cast, thank goodness, with people who can really sing. (When Queen Latifah, the only cast member of Chicago who actually makes her living as a singer, belted out her number, she made the rest of the players seem pathetic by comparison.) Beyoncé Knowles’ physical and vocal resemblance to Diana Ross, the real-life model for her character, is almost uncanny. Yet the real star of the show is Jennifer Hudson, the first person since Jill Scott who’s really mastered the all-out style of Aretha Franklin and the other great soul divas of the 1960’s. The conflict between the two women is emphasized not only by the contrast between Hudson’s deep, rich, loud gospel-soul voice and Knowles’ thinner, almost white pop style but also the physical difference between them: Knowles is tall, thin, leggy, with a body shape perfectly suited to the Dreams’ costumes (expertly designed by Sharen Davis to evoke the Supremes’ stage outfits without slavishly copying them), while Hudson is built like the classic earth-mother type, chunky and hefty with plenty of lung power to drive those impassioned high notes home. Yet Hudson doesn’t coast on her vocal powers alone; in her dialogue scenes she brings the character of Effie to full life, dramatizing both the injustices wreaked on her and her own self-inflicted wounds.
The men in the cast are almost as powerful. Jamie Foxx so totally becomes Charles Taylor — smooth, unscrupulous, always in control, imperious in his decisions, consistently putting his own and his company’s welfare against the feelings of his artists — that anyone who goes to this movie not knowing who’s in it will have a hard time believing that this is the same actor who played so vividly on the other side of the artist/business divide in Ray. Eddie Murphy handles not only the performing side of his character but makes us feel his pain and understand what drives him to self-destruction. Danny Glover is reliable in a relatively minor role, and in the supporting cast child actor Jordan Wright is so chillingly accurate as the leader of the kids’ group “The Campbell Connection” (i.e., the Jackson 5) that you think, “Too bad he’s going to have to grow up to be Michael Jackson.”
Dreamgirls’ other star is Fatima Robinson, the choreographer. One of the enduring ironies of the Motown Records operation is that, while white rock artists were moving away from formal stage costumes and intricate dance routines, Motown was training its Black artists to dress more flashily and move more tightly and professionally than the older generations of Black performers had. Following in the footsteps of Motown’s original choreographer, the 1940’s Black tap-dancing star “Honi” Coles, Robinson creates dazzling routines and gets the cast members to execute them perfectly. The movie also benefits from the marvelous color scheme of cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler, ably contrasting the glitz and glamour of the Dreams’ performances with the grungy environment that gave birth to their act, the sleazy theatres his artists have to perform in in the early days, and the antiseptic Hollywood spaces Charles Taylor moves his company and his family to once he can afford it. (The closing credits are a visual treat in themselves; this is definitely one movie you shouldn’t walk out on during the final roll.)
The best thing that can be said about Dreamgirls is that it fully realizes the potential power of its story — which has become so bound up with the reality on which it was based that ex-Supreme Mary Wilson (the model for the Lorrell Robinson character) even titled her memoir Dreamgirl. It’s a breathtaking two-hour-and-15-minute ride through a still vibrant part of American culture, showing both the entertainment glories the Dreams (and their real-life prototypes) created and the human cost of creating and selling them. There’s been a lot of talk of late that the big-studio, big-blockbuster way of creating movies is incapable of creating anything artistic and possibly on its last legs commercially as well. Not if it can produce a work of the incandescent quality of Dreamgirls, it isn’t.
Almodóvar’s Volver: Modern “Women’s Picture”
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • Photo copyright © 2006 by Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc. • All rights reserved
Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar has become a brand-name director, one of the few in movie history whose own name on a film can attract an audience no matter what the movie is about or who’s in it. (D. W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman were brand-name directors for earlier generations of moviegoers.) His early features were nervy, polymorphously perverse tales drawing on his life as a Gay man and the cultural explosion in Spain called “La Movida” that followed the death of Right-wing Catholic dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. Then he followed the example of George Cukor and many other Gay filmmakers in cinema history and became a so-called “women’s director,” building his stories around female characters and performers in general and one especially powerful actress, Carmen Maura, in particular.
Almodóvar’s movies have actually ranged wildly between male and female leads. In Talk to Her (2002), the men were front and center and the women, though significant to the story, were literally “out of it,” locked in persistent vegetative states. Bad Education (2004) was an unexpectedly controversial return to Almodóvar’s Gay roots, a story about a Gay filmmaker and a straight actor who came to him with a film story based on dark secrets from both their pasts. While the Zenger’s review of Bad Education was headlined “Almodóvar Comes Home,” other critics got surprisingly huffy about it and questioned why a director who makes such superior films about women should suddenly feel compelled to make a movie about Gay men simply because he is one. (Aside: how, in a world in which Bad Education exists, something as one-dimensionally depressing as Brokeback Mountain could have been hailed as the greatest Queer film of all time beggars the imagination.)
Well, with Volver — a title that literally means “homecoming” or “return” — Almodóvar has given the critics and audience members who crave “women’s pictures” from him what they want. Indeed, men are so unimportant in this movie that the top-billed male cast member is seventh in the credits. It is a film about female solidarity and betrayal, and about issues of life and death. At times Almodóvar seems to be taking Bob Dylan’s line, “He not busy being born is busy dying,” literally in his script. It takes much of its inspiration from where it takes place: a particularly impoverished part of Spain called La Mancha, where Almodóvar was born and raised and whose high winds, in a popular Spanish superstition, are supposed to drive its people crazy. La Mancha is most famous in literature as the setting for Don Quixote, Cervantes’ famous tale about the wanna-be knight who fought windmills thinking they were dragons — and windmills, albeit the modern, high-tech kind, feature prominently in Volver as well.
Volver is a difficult film to review, not only because its plot is complex — “My films are becoming more and more difficult to tell and summarize in a few lines,” Almodóvar admits — but because so much of its appeal is based on wrenching surprises in its plot line that a reviewer doesn’t want to give away to potential audience members. Indeed, the biggest twist of all has so far been kept secret not only by the publicity department at Sony Pictures Classics, which released the film, but by everyone who’s written about it. The central character is Raimonda (a surprisingly restrained Pénelope Cruz), who grew up as an orphan when both her parents died in a fire. She lives in La Mancha, works in a failing restaurant, is married to a boor named Paco (Antonio de la Torre) and has a teenage daughter, Paula (Yohana Cobo), who’s just coming into her own sexually. Indeed, Paula has attracted pedophiliac and incestuous attentions from Paco, and when he finally makes a move on her she kills him with a kitchen knife, leaving her mom the task of cleaning up the mess and getting rid of the body.
The rest of Raimonda’s family is almost as dysfunctional. Her aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave), after whom she named her daughter, is living at home with such a bad case of Alzheimer’s that when Raimonda visits, Paula asks her why she’s no longer pregnant and when she had the baby. (The “baby” is a teenager already!) No sooner does Aunt Paula die than Raimonda’s long-dead mother, Irene (Carmen Maura), makes a reappearance, spending most of her time at the home of Raimonda’s sister Sole (Lola Dueñas). When she’s not hiding from Raimonda under Sole’s bed, Irene is hanging out in Sole’s living room, which doubles as the beauty salon that makes Sole her living, being passed off as a “Russian” and told not to open her mouth for fear her perfect Spanish will “out” her as a native. Also in the cast is Raimonda’s friend Agustina (Blanca Portillo), a short-haired, thin woman who’s ill with cancer. Thanks to Irene’s presence, Raimonda is confronted with some stark truths about her life that have been withheld from her for years, even as she discovers an amazing reservoir of inner strength symbolized by her ability to keep the restaurant open even though its formal owner walked away from it and just wanted to sell it.
Like most of Almodóvar’s films, Volver changes tone frequently. It opens with a scene of the women characters polishing graves — indeed, the film’s title and Almodóvar’s name are made to look as if they have been chiseled into monuments. Some of the graves are their ancestors’; some are their own, having been purchased and decorated with elaborate memorials in what the funeral industry euphemistically calls “pre-need buying.” Much of the byplay around Paco’s corpse evokes memories of Alfred Hitchcock’s mordant black comedy The Trouble with Harry (1955), and the music by frequent Almodóvar collaborator Alberto Iglesias strikingly resembles the scores Bernard Herrmann wrote for Hitchcock in the 1950’s. With Irene’s reappearance, the film becomes more intensely dramatic, with only Almodóvar’s astringent story sense keeping it from soap-opera sentimentality.
Much of the appeal of Volver comes from the natural, unforced performances Almodóvar gets from his actresses. Pénelope Cruz, who has generally looked out of place in American films, triumphs playing a woman of her own nationality and speaking in her native language; she even gets to sing the title song — a Spanish flamenco adaptation of an Argentinian tango — though her voice is dubbed by Estrella Morente. Carmen Maura has surprisingly little to do but does it well. Blanca Portillo is excellent as the family friend and cancer patient who refuses any hint of sympathy and offers a striking display of integrity towards the end of the film. Yohana Cobo is a striking-looking teenager who offers hints of great things to come; the film throws revelations at her and forces her to mature quite rapidly, and she handles a challenging role expertly. José Luis Alcaine’s cinematography is also welcome; how nice it is to see a movie in which the wide-screen shape is actually filled out and used creatively. How nice, too, it is to see color which actually serves the story instead of just being there because modern audiences expect it, and which encompasses more of the visible spectrum than just dirty browns and dank greens!
After the vivid brilliance of Talk to Her and Bad Education, the relatively softer, gentler Volver comes off a bit as Almodóvar Lite. Even its typically Almodóvaran plot twists come off this time as more mellow than wrenching, more a slow journey to understanding than the psychological roller-coaster rides of some of his earlier movies. But Almodóvar is so talented a filmmaker that even working below the peak of his powers, he’s still more talented than most other modern directors working at full steam. If you’ve liked Almodóvar’s previous films, or if you give a damn about the art of cinema and want more from a movie than spectacular computer-generated imagery and cardboard characters, you’ll enjoy Volver.
Volver is playing at the Landmark Cinemas, 3965 Fifth Avenue in Hillcrest. Please call (619) 299-2100 for showtimes and other information.
Friday, October 27, 2006
The Game, Not the Name
How the New Jersey Supreme Court Decision Offers the Queer Community a Way Out of the Marriage Trap — If We’re Willing to Take It
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine
Noncommercial reproduction encouraged if complete and with attribution, (The first three pages, up to the subheading “Marriage’s Heterosexual History,” may be reproduced without the rest if a shorter version is desired.)
On October 25, 2006 the Supreme Court of the state of New Jersey handed down a decision in a same-sex marriage lawsuit that provides the Queer community a potential way out of the political and social trap its leaders have dug themselves into by insisting not only that our relationships be recognized legally but that they be given the name “marriage.” The court ruled unanimously that Gay and Lesbian couples in New Jersey have a right under the state’s constitution to exactly the same legal rights, benefits and responsibilities as married heterosexual couples. The only thing that divided the justices was whether the relationships should be called “marriages.” By a 4-3 vote, the court ruled that Gay and Lesbian couples in New Jersey did not have a constitutional right to the word “marriage” as a legal definition, but they DO have a right to the same legal benefits as married couples.
At first glance, this may seem like a defeat — or at best a qualified victory — for the Queer community. But coming after a long losing streak for the same-sex marriage movement both at the ballot box — where every, repeat EVERY, state whose people have had a chance to vote on whether the term “marriage” should be extended to same-sex couples has overwhelmingly voted it down — and in other courts, it seemed like a breath of fresh air even though it essentially put the marriage equality movement back where it was in 1999, when the Supreme Court of Vermont made the same sort of ruling and the Vermont legislature and then-Governor Howard Dean responded by passing the first civil union law in the United States.
I would argue that the New Jersey court majority has offered the Queer community a compromise position we should eagerly accept. I think Justice Barry Albin, who wrote the majority opinion, is absolutely right when he says that “the traditions, history and conscience of the people of this state” — and, I would add, of the United States in general — preclude any acceptance of the idea that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to the term “marriage.” The entire worldwide history of marriage as an institution, despite the many ways in which it has altered and evolved over the centuries, has been that of a union of opposite-gender partners. The traditions and mores of the United States regarding marriage have also defined it exclusively as a recognition of a relationship between opposite-gender partners. Certain factors built into the social understanding of what “marriage” means in the U.S., including the expectation that the partners will have sex exclusively with each other and that they have at least the physical possibility of bearing a child without outside help, render “marriage” an inaccurate term to apply to same-gender relationships, especially between males.
What’s more, even if it were theoretically possible to imagine a redefinition of “marriage” sufficiently sweeping to render the term applicable to same-sex couples, only a tiny minority of Americans would support such a redefinition. Virtually every poll taken in the U.S. on the same-sex marriage issue shows similar results to these (from the Time/CNN poll taken shortly before the 2004 election): only 25 percent of all Americans support the right of same-sex partners to marry; 37 percent oppose any legal recognition of same-sex relationships at all; and 35 percent oppose same-sex marriage but are willing to support an alternative way of legally recognizing same-sex relationships (domestic partnerships or civil unions) and giving same-sex partners all or some of the rights of married people.
Queer political strategists like to refer to that 35 percent as the “movable middle” in hopes that they can be “moved” into broadening their support for recognizing same-gender relationships into an endorsement of same-sex marriage. Instead, the Queer community’s insistence on using the M-word has moved that “movable middle” solidly into the same camp as the religious Right. The history of so-called “defense of marriage” initiatives on state ballots proves that. EVERY time U.S. voters have been asked to amend their state constitutions to ban legal recognition of same-sex marriages, they have done so by landslide margins. (The closest margin for such a vote was in Oregon in 2004, where the ban on same-sex marriage passed by “only” 12 points, 56 to 44 percent.)
Same-sex marriage has been consistently defeated at the polls regardless of whether or not the overall politics of the state voting on it were “red” or “blue,” regardless of whether it went for a Democrat or a Republican for president or governor, regardless of its reputation for cultural liberalism or traditional values — and, most ominously for the same-sex marriage movement, the initiatives passed whether or not they banned domestic partnership and civil union laws for same-sex couples as well as marriage. This suggests that for that 35 percent in the so-called “movable middle,” preserving marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution is more important than granting Gay and Lesbian couples any legal recognition at all.
It is time for the Queer community to face political and social realities and recognize that in the United States at the dawn of the 21st century same-sex marriage is a political impossibility, and the continued pursuit of it can only do harm to the overall Queer movement in general and provoke backlashes that will leave us with even fewer rights than we have now. It is time for us to acknowledge that the compromise the New Jersey court majority made — the one I call “the game, not the name,” i.e., all the rights, benefits and responsibilities of marriage without the actual word — represents the outermost limit of political possibility for the legal recognition of Queer relationships in the United States today. To that end, I would recommend the following as a long-term strategy for relationship rights:
1) The Queer community in the United States must firmly, flatly, finally and irrevocably renounce any demand or aspiration to the legal recognition of its relationships under the name “marriage.”
2) To make that renunciation firm, flat, final and irrevocable, the Queer community should cease opposing the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would write into the U.S. Constitution a definition of marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman. Instead, we should lobby to amend the amendment to make sure it allows state legislatures to pass domestic partnership or civil union laws, and allows state courts to construe their own state constitutions to require their legislatures to grant rights to same-sex couples comparable to those of married couples.
3) The Queer community should work with legislators in states likely to be sympathetic to craft domestic-partner and civil-union laws that acknowledge both the important ways in which same-sex relationships resemble heterosexual marriages and the important ways in which they differ. The idea is to craft a parallel institution that would be, not “separate but equal” — as marriage advocates within the Queer community often sneeringly characterize civil unions — but “equal but unique.”
4) As a long-term lobbying strategy, once a critical mass of states has domestic-partner or civil-union laws, the Queer community should begin a campaign to persuade Congress to amend the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act to provide that couples whose relationships are legally recognized under domestic-partnership or civil-union laws in their home states should be treated identically to married couples for purposes of federal rights and benefits. Once achieved, this would give functional equality between same-sex and opposite-sex couples under federal law, which absent such a change at the federal level state domestic-partner and civil-union laws cannot do (one of the points same-sex marriage advocates make ad infinitum).
5) The Congressional lobbying campaign should also include a proposal along the lines of the current Permanent Partners Immigration Act, which would allow U.S. citizens residing in a state that has a domestic-partner or civil-union law the right to sponsor a foreign partner on the same basis as a binational married heterosexual couple.
What this strategy seeks to do is offer the American people in general and the “movable middle” (which, despite that term, is IMMOVABLE in its opposition to same-sex marriage by that name) in particular a sort of grand compromise. We give up any claim on the institution of marriage and in return we receive a hunting license to build our relationship rights through the political process (and, where applicable, in state courts) towards the long-term goal of FUNCTIONAL equality through parallel “equal but unique” institutions specifically crafted to recognize our relationships.
Marriage’s Heterosexual History
As Friedrich Engels noted in his 19th century classic The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, marriage as an institution was the product of the change from matrilineal to patrilineal lines of inheritance. Its origins were inherently bound up with the establishment of the patriarchy and the need for a patriarchial society to know with certainty who a particular child’s father is. Since it is women who get pregnant and give birth, it’s obvious who a particular child’s mother is — but, absent some enforcing institution that limits women’s ability to express their sexuality and essentially makes a woman’s body the sexual property of one and only one man, there is no way to be sure enough of the identity of the father to create a system of male-to-male inheritance.
Marriage was created to fulfill that function. From the outset, the defining characteristic of marriage has been that the woman belongs to the man. Her body belongs exclusively to her husband, and she may neither refuse him sexually nor have sex with anyone else. As marriage was originally defined, a woman could only marry one man but a man might marry as many women as he could support financially — which a) in practice made polygamy a luxury for rich males, and b) was indicative of the sexist assumption at the root of marriage as an institution: that it was the responsibility of the husband to support his wife (or wives) financially and the idea of a woman, especially a married woman, living an independent economic existence was unthinkable.
Under marriage as originally defined, upon marriage a woman’s property automatically became her husband’s, to do with as he saw fit. A married woman had no civil or legal rights except those her husband chose to give her. In traditional cultures, women frequently even did not have the choice of whether or not to get married, or to whom; their marital futures were either sold outright or negotiated between their own and their husband’s families. In these and many other ways, traditional marriage strongly resembled human slavery.
One of the ironies of the debate over same-sex marriage is the oft-made claim by same-sex marriage opponents that “the Bible defines marriage as between one man and one woman.” Leaving aside the question of whether, and why, the holy book of one specific religious tradition should determine U.S. public policy, the fact is that the Bible does NOT define marriage as between one man and one woman. The Bible defines marriage the way it was traditionally defined in the early “civilizations” that emerged with the rise of patriarchy: as the union of one man and as many women as he could support financially.
The idea that marriage should be MUTUALLY monogamous is a relatively recent change, stemming from 1,600 years ago when Christianity was established as the official state religion in the latter days of the Roman Empire. It was later adopted by Judaism but, significantly, NOT by the third great religion derived from the Abrahamic tradition, Islam. In some Muslim countries, men are still allowed to marry as many women as they can support financially; in others, men are limited to four wives and have to divorce one if they wish to take a fifth. The irony here is that, despite the oft-expressed fear of same-sex marriage opponents that if we allow same-sex couples to marry we will be opening the door to polygamists, in fact the polygamists have a far better claim to marriage on traditional, historical, religious and cultural grounds than we do.
Obviously, marriage as it exists today bears little or no relation to the “traditional” variety described above. Yet what is staggering is how recent most of the reforms are. It was not until the 19th century that the right of people to select their own partners for marriage instead of having those decisions made for them was generally accepted. It was not until the early 20th century that married women finally were allowed to own property in their own names. (Interestingly, Muhammad called for women to have this right 1,400 years before it became standard practice in Christendom, but the Muslim world today lags well behind the Judeo-Christian West on this one.) It was not until the 1940’s that American employers, largely to meet their personpower needs during World War II, started dropping their formal policies of refusing to hire married women. And, most shockingly of all, it was not until the late 1970’s that California’s rape laws were amended so that a married woman no longer had to have sex with her husband any time he wanted to, whether she wanted to or not.
Yet for all the changes in marriage as an institution over the centuries, one aspect has remained constant: it has always been heterosexual. Despite the efforts of Queer historians (most notably the late John Boswell), no one has ever unearthed a society or a major religion that had a long-term tradition of marrying same-gender partners. Nor is there any particular reason why there should be. Until 1865, when the term “homosexual” was coined to describe a mental illness, humans regarded opposite-sex partners as the default position for human sexuality. Same-sex sexual expression was regarded as something one DID, not something one was. Homosexual activity in humans is no doubt as old as the human race itself, but the idea of a homosexual IDENTITY is a relatively new social construct, and one I would regard as irreconcilable with marriage as centuries of history and tradition, albeit reformed, have defined it.
Procreation DOES Matter
One of the most common arguments against the legal recognition of same-sex marriage has to do with procreation. Basic mammalian biology requires the involvement of both male and female to produce offspring. Therefore, a same-sex couple, no matter how emotionally committed they are to each other and no matter how good they may be, potentially or actually, as parents, cannot create children without outside help. Same-sex marriage opponents frequently argue that, because it takes a man and a woman to create a child, that serves as a logical reason to restrict marriage to heterosexual couples only.
Supporters of same-sex marriage reply to this argument in various ways. Sometimes they point out that the law allows any opposite-sex couple who fall within the other basic qualifications (i.e., neither is currently married to someone else, they are not impermissibly closely related by blood, etc.) to marry even though they may be unable, due to age, physical disability or any other biological reason, to procreate. Indeed, since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), U.S. law has protected the right of married heterosexuals to choose NOT to procreate and to have access to drugs, barriers and other devices to allow them to have an active sex life while reducing their likelihood of procreating to nearly zero. But the most common argument made by same-sex marriage advocates against the idea that procreation is a rational reason to restrict marriage to heterosexuals is to point out that same-sex couples are already raising children.
There are three ways in which a same-sex couple can be parents. First, they can adopt. Second, if they are both women, either or both of them can be artificially inseminated with sperm from a male donor. Third, and probably the most common, one or both of them can bring to the relationship a child they had already conceived and (if female) born through normal heterosexual means in a previous relationship with an opposite-sex partner before they definitively identified themselves as Gay or Lesbian. Interestingly, all three of these means are represented among the 14 plaintiffs — five Lesbian couples and two Gay male couples — in the New Jersey lawsuit.
But those three means all have one thing in common: they all require outside help for the child actually to exist. The same-sex couple who adopt (in states enlightened enough to permit them to) are dependent for their child’s existence on the unrelated pair of heterosexuals who conceived him or her in the first place and the female half of this pair who carried the pregnancy to term and then gave up the baby, voluntarily or otherwise. The Lesbians who use artificial insemination are dependent on the male sperm donor, and the same-sex partners who bring children into their relationship from former heterosexual pairings are dependent on their opposite-sex former partners, not only to have helped bring their child into existence but (often) for permission to raise the child in a household headed by a same-sex couple.
None of this necessarily makes a difference in terms of parenting outcomes. As the New Jersey court correctly recognized, the consensus in social science is that children do best when they are raised in a home with two adults — but it doesn’t matter whether either or both of the adults are the child’s biological parents or whether they are of opposite or the same gender. It DOES, however, make the internal environment of the home distinctly different — and in a society still largely accepting of anti-Queer prejudice, it renders the children vulnerable to being teased, ostracized and abused by their peers for something over which they have no control. The fact that a child being raised in a same-sex household cannot possibly be the biological offspring of BOTH partners (though both partners can be what New Jersey law awkwardly calls “psychological parents”) and the additional strains on a child being raised in a same-sex household over an opposite-sex one both make the term “marriage” rather dubious in describing the relationship between the adult same-sex partners raising a child this way.
Men Are Different
One of the not-so-dirty little secrets of the same-sex marriage movement is it is primarily a Lesbian phenomenon. As noted above, of the seven couples who participated as plaintiffs in the New Jersey lawsuit, five are women and only two are men. Of the over 4,000 couples who got married in San Francisco during the one-month “window” from February to March 2004, when Mayor Gavin Newsom illegally ordered his city’s registry to issue marriage licenses to same-gender applicants, two-thirds of them were Lesbian couples. This imbalance is even more striking when laid next to decades of survey data showing that there are twice as many men who self-identify as Gay as women who self-identify as Lesbian.
As a Gay man, I feel qualified to discuss the marriage issue as it impacts and is impacted by Gay male sexuality but not as it impacts and is impacted by Lesbian sexuality. I accept the broad outlines of the “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” theory that men and women are fundamentally different in terms of how they manage their sexuality and the psychological fulfillments they get from it. Basically, this theory holds that men are more likely than women to detach sex from emotion, more likely to seek sexual outlets outside of their primary relationship, less likely to insist on “love” as a criterion for whether or not to have sex with a particular person and more likely to live the lifestyle envisioned by the (male) singer-songwriter Stephen Stills when he sang, “If you can’t be with the one you love/Love the one you’re with.”
Obviously, like all sweeping generalizations about human behavior, this one has many exceptions — but I think it’s basically true, and the experience of Gay men in particular proves it. One classic scientific technique is called “isolating the variable” — studying a phenomenon by looking at it in the absence of other aspects of reality that might get in the way. One obvious way to test the theory that men are more detached from emotion in their sexual expression than women would be to look at communities of men who don’t have to worry about the sexual and emotional demands of women, and women who don’t have to worry about the sexual and emotional demands of men — in other words, totally Gay men and totally Lesbian women.
In the case of men, at least, I think the overall ways Gay men express and manage their sexuality confirm the theory. Gay men are more likely than heterosexuals or Lesbians to have sex outside a committed relationship, to have multiple sex partners, to have sex with other partners besides their primary one, and — most relevantly for the same-sex marriage issue — to build into their relationships ways of acknowledging that they will have other sex partners and managing these extrarelational activities to minimize their potential for harming the primary relationship. The expectation of mutual monogamy that is at the heart of modern heterosexual marriage (though often honored more in the breach than the observance) simply doesn’t apply to many — I daresay most — Gay male couples.
The ascendancy of same-sex marriage as an issue of paramount importance to the political leadership of the Queer community is a trailing indicator of a far-reaching change in that leadership that began in the 1980’s, Before then, the Queer leadership was almost exclusively male — and often openly and offensively sexist towards women who tried to gain admittance — and it tended to focus on issues of primary importance to men: the protection of Gay bars, bathhouses and other cruising spaces; confronting police entrapment of Gay men cruising each other for casual sex; protection against Gay-bashing (not just to preserve the overall physical safety of Queers but specifically to protect Gay men in public cruising areas from being targeted and beaten or killed); as well as issues like antidiscrimination protection that affected Gay men and Lesbians equally. Issues of specific concern to Lesbians, such as maintaining custody of their children after they ended straight marriages or relationships and came out, tended to be ignored or sloughed off.
That all changed in the 1980’s, when the AIDS epidemic virtually wiped out a generation of Gay male leaders. In the 1970’s, the most prominent Gay male leaders had also tended to be the most flamboyant, the most obviously “out,” and the ones most likely to involve themselves in the riskiest behaviors for AIDS: casual unprotected sex with multiple partners, use of recreational drugs, frequent sexually-transmitted infections and antibiotic treatments for them and involvement in the so-called “fast-lane” lifestyle. As they began dying en masse, Lesbians managed to win community leadership positions because they were largely unscathed by the AIDS epidemic and therefore they were the ones able to continue the movement.
Long after the AIDS epidemic peaked and the syndrome became endemic — not epidemic — among Queer men, Lesbians remained in charge of many community organizations. In cities like San Diego, which fell behind more progressive cities with larger Queer populations, Lesbians, not Gay men, were the first Queers to win elective office. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force had seven women executive directors in a row from the 1980’s through the 1990’s before finally hiring a man for that position in the early 2000’s. I would argue that this shift from male to female Queer community leadership, brought apart by the decimation of the male leadership due to AIDS and the need for the remaining men to confront their own sexism and admit women to leadership positions to maintain the movement at all, helped bring about the change in Queer issue priorities so that women’s issues moved to the forefront of the agenda — and marriage, an issue of greater relevance to Lesbians than to Gay men, became a principal community demand for this reason.
Equal but Unique
My argument here is that not only is the realization of same-sex marriage, so-called, impossible in the United States under current and likely future political conditions, but even if it were, “marriage” as traditionally defined would be an awkward fit for many same-sex couples, particularly male ones. Marriage comes with the expectation that the partners will procreate with each other; same-sex couples can’t do that without help from outside. Modern marriage comes with the expectation of mutual monogamy; Gay male couples in particular frequently structure their relationships in ways that allow for outside sexual experiences. Marriage, from the get-go, has been built on the expectation that one partner, the woman, is inferior to the man; same-sex relationships are based on mutual equality.
One of the ironies of the same-sex marriage movement is that all those 1,200-plus government and private-sector benefits same-sex marriage advocates rattle off as the reason they need marriage rights were created on the basis of assumptions that NEVER applied to how most same-sex couples live and are increasingly at variance with the way most opposite-sex couples live. The benefits were based on the idea that government should support relationships likely to produce children: giving the parents more money to raise their children by granting them income-tax deductions and allowing employers to deduct the costs of providing them and their children health care. The marriage benefits were also designed around the assumption that the man would be the breadwinner and the woman the stay-at-home parent; most same-sex couples have always assumed that both parties would work, and with the steady decline in U.S. wages since 1973 most married heterosexuals today find that they too must both work.
If anything, a broader look at the marriage issue reveals the utter absurdity of a society that insists on allocating tax advantages and access to health care based on whether people are in a committed relationship and whether they are raising children. The ascendancy of marriage as an issue for the Queer leadership shows how far it has drifted from the progressive roots of the Queer movement. A truly progressive Queer community would be fighting for universal access to health care, not for admission to the class of people given health coverage through their employers while more and more Americans lose coverage altogether. It would be fighting against the blatant giveaways to corporate America represented by so-called “free trade” agreements and the attack on the U.S. middle class through outsourcing. A truly progressive Queer movement would also seek to broaden the kinds of family structures offered legal recognition instead of attempting to fit all Queers into the Procrustean bed of a two-person partnership modeled on a heterosexually defined institution — marriage — built on assumptions and protocols of dubious applicability to many Queers.
If the Queer community does not cut its losses on the marriage issue — if it continues to insist on chasing the M-word with all the self-destructive fervor of Captain Ahab chasing Moby Dick — those losses will be cut for us. George W. Bush, who owed his first term as President to the gun owners in Tennessee who rejected their state’s native son, Al Gore, over their right to keep and bear arms, owed his second term to the Republican leadership’s ability to mobilize African-American clergy in Ohio to bolt from the Democrats to the Republicans over the same-sex marriage issue. The Queer leadership’s continued advocacy of same-sex marriage threatens not only its own civil rights but the overall progressive movement in U.S. politics — and that’s yet another reason we need to abandon this unwinnable issue.
Cutting our losses and accepting defeat on the same-sex marriage issue does not mean consigning ourselves to an eternity of “separate but equal” status. As I have argued above, there are plenty of reasons NOT to seek a structure for our families that copies heterosexual marriage, but instead to build our own EQUAL BUT UNIQUE institutions to safeguard our rights as individuals, as couples, as extended adoptive families, as romantic, emotional and sexual beings in ourselves and in relation to each other. The American people have told us again and again that they will not accept the term “marriage” as a description of our relationships, but enough of them WILL accept legal protections for our rights if we call them by another name. It’s up to us to abandon a fight we cannot win and be creative and committed to winning the fights we can.
APPENDIX: A Draft of a Compromise Federal Marriage Amendment
Section 1: Marriage shall be defined in the United States and in the several States exclusively as the union of one man and one woman.
Section 2: Nothing in this section shall deny to the Congress, the legislature of a State or the people of a State the power to create reciprocal rights, benefits and responsibilities for voluntary associations of adult persons ineligible for marriage as herein defined.
How the New Jersey Supreme Court Decision Offers the Queer Community a Way Out of the Marriage Trap — If We’re Willing to Take It
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine
Noncommercial reproduction encouraged if complete and with attribution, (The first three pages, up to the subheading “Marriage’s Heterosexual History,” may be reproduced without the rest if a shorter version is desired.)
On October 25, 2006 the Supreme Court of the state of New Jersey handed down a decision in a same-sex marriage lawsuit that provides the Queer community a potential way out of the political and social trap its leaders have dug themselves into by insisting not only that our relationships be recognized legally but that they be given the name “marriage.” The court ruled unanimously that Gay and Lesbian couples in New Jersey have a right under the state’s constitution to exactly the same legal rights, benefits and responsibilities as married heterosexual couples. The only thing that divided the justices was whether the relationships should be called “marriages.” By a 4-3 vote, the court ruled that Gay and Lesbian couples in New Jersey did not have a constitutional right to the word “marriage” as a legal definition, but they DO have a right to the same legal benefits as married couples.
At first glance, this may seem like a defeat — or at best a qualified victory — for the Queer community. But coming after a long losing streak for the same-sex marriage movement both at the ballot box — where every, repeat EVERY, state whose people have had a chance to vote on whether the term “marriage” should be extended to same-sex couples has overwhelmingly voted it down — and in other courts, it seemed like a breath of fresh air even though it essentially put the marriage equality movement back where it was in 1999, when the Supreme Court of Vermont made the same sort of ruling and the Vermont legislature and then-Governor Howard Dean responded by passing the first civil union law in the United States.
I would argue that the New Jersey court majority has offered the Queer community a compromise position we should eagerly accept. I think Justice Barry Albin, who wrote the majority opinion, is absolutely right when he says that “the traditions, history and conscience of the people of this state” — and, I would add, of the United States in general — preclude any acceptance of the idea that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to the term “marriage.” The entire worldwide history of marriage as an institution, despite the many ways in which it has altered and evolved over the centuries, has been that of a union of opposite-gender partners. The traditions and mores of the United States regarding marriage have also defined it exclusively as a recognition of a relationship between opposite-gender partners. Certain factors built into the social understanding of what “marriage” means in the U.S., including the expectation that the partners will have sex exclusively with each other and that they have at least the physical possibility of bearing a child without outside help, render “marriage” an inaccurate term to apply to same-gender relationships, especially between males.
What’s more, even if it were theoretically possible to imagine a redefinition of “marriage” sufficiently sweeping to render the term applicable to same-sex couples, only a tiny minority of Americans would support such a redefinition. Virtually every poll taken in the U.S. on the same-sex marriage issue shows similar results to these (from the Time/CNN poll taken shortly before the 2004 election): only 25 percent of all Americans support the right of same-sex partners to marry; 37 percent oppose any legal recognition of same-sex relationships at all; and 35 percent oppose same-sex marriage but are willing to support an alternative way of legally recognizing same-sex relationships (domestic partnerships or civil unions) and giving same-sex partners all or some of the rights of married people.
Queer political strategists like to refer to that 35 percent as the “movable middle” in hopes that they can be “moved” into broadening their support for recognizing same-gender relationships into an endorsement of same-sex marriage. Instead, the Queer community’s insistence on using the M-word has moved that “movable middle” solidly into the same camp as the religious Right. The history of so-called “defense of marriage” initiatives on state ballots proves that. EVERY time U.S. voters have been asked to amend their state constitutions to ban legal recognition of same-sex marriages, they have done so by landslide margins. (The closest margin for such a vote was in Oregon in 2004, where the ban on same-sex marriage passed by “only” 12 points, 56 to 44 percent.)
Same-sex marriage has been consistently defeated at the polls regardless of whether or not the overall politics of the state voting on it were “red” or “blue,” regardless of whether it went for a Democrat or a Republican for president or governor, regardless of its reputation for cultural liberalism or traditional values — and, most ominously for the same-sex marriage movement, the initiatives passed whether or not they banned domestic partnership and civil union laws for same-sex couples as well as marriage. This suggests that for that 35 percent in the so-called “movable middle,” preserving marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution is more important than granting Gay and Lesbian couples any legal recognition at all.
It is time for the Queer community to face political and social realities and recognize that in the United States at the dawn of the 21st century same-sex marriage is a political impossibility, and the continued pursuit of it can only do harm to the overall Queer movement in general and provoke backlashes that will leave us with even fewer rights than we have now. It is time for us to acknowledge that the compromise the New Jersey court majority made — the one I call “the game, not the name,” i.e., all the rights, benefits and responsibilities of marriage without the actual word — represents the outermost limit of political possibility for the legal recognition of Queer relationships in the United States today. To that end, I would recommend the following as a long-term strategy for relationship rights:
1) The Queer community in the United States must firmly, flatly, finally and irrevocably renounce any demand or aspiration to the legal recognition of its relationships under the name “marriage.”
2) To make that renunciation firm, flat, final and irrevocable, the Queer community should cease opposing the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would write into the U.S. Constitution a definition of marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman. Instead, we should lobby to amend the amendment to make sure it allows state legislatures to pass domestic partnership or civil union laws, and allows state courts to construe their own state constitutions to require their legislatures to grant rights to same-sex couples comparable to those of married couples.
3) The Queer community should work with legislators in states likely to be sympathetic to craft domestic-partner and civil-union laws that acknowledge both the important ways in which same-sex relationships resemble heterosexual marriages and the important ways in which they differ. The idea is to craft a parallel institution that would be, not “separate but equal” — as marriage advocates within the Queer community often sneeringly characterize civil unions — but “equal but unique.”
4) As a long-term lobbying strategy, once a critical mass of states has domestic-partner or civil-union laws, the Queer community should begin a campaign to persuade Congress to amend the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act to provide that couples whose relationships are legally recognized under domestic-partnership or civil-union laws in their home states should be treated identically to married couples for purposes of federal rights and benefits. Once achieved, this would give functional equality between same-sex and opposite-sex couples under federal law, which absent such a change at the federal level state domestic-partner and civil-union laws cannot do (one of the points same-sex marriage advocates make ad infinitum).
5) The Congressional lobbying campaign should also include a proposal along the lines of the current Permanent Partners Immigration Act, which would allow U.S. citizens residing in a state that has a domestic-partner or civil-union law the right to sponsor a foreign partner on the same basis as a binational married heterosexual couple.
What this strategy seeks to do is offer the American people in general and the “movable middle” (which, despite that term, is IMMOVABLE in its opposition to same-sex marriage by that name) in particular a sort of grand compromise. We give up any claim on the institution of marriage and in return we receive a hunting license to build our relationship rights through the political process (and, where applicable, in state courts) towards the long-term goal of FUNCTIONAL equality through parallel “equal but unique” institutions specifically crafted to recognize our relationships.
Marriage’s Heterosexual History
As Friedrich Engels noted in his 19th century classic The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, marriage as an institution was the product of the change from matrilineal to patrilineal lines of inheritance. Its origins were inherently bound up with the establishment of the patriarchy and the need for a patriarchial society to know with certainty who a particular child’s father is. Since it is women who get pregnant and give birth, it’s obvious who a particular child’s mother is — but, absent some enforcing institution that limits women’s ability to express their sexuality and essentially makes a woman’s body the sexual property of one and only one man, there is no way to be sure enough of the identity of the father to create a system of male-to-male inheritance.
Marriage was created to fulfill that function. From the outset, the defining characteristic of marriage has been that the woman belongs to the man. Her body belongs exclusively to her husband, and she may neither refuse him sexually nor have sex with anyone else. As marriage was originally defined, a woman could only marry one man but a man might marry as many women as he could support financially — which a) in practice made polygamy a luxury for rich males, and b) was indicative of the sexist assumption at the root of marriage as an institution: that it was the responsibility of the husband to support his wife (or wives) financially and the idea of a woman, especially a married woman, living an independent economic existence was unthinkable.
Under marriage as originally defined, upon marriage a woman’s property automatically became her husband’s, to do with as he saw fit. A married woman had no civil or legal rights except those her husband chose to give her. In traditional cultures, women frequently even did not have the choice of whether or not to get married, or to whom; their marital futures were either sold outright or negotiated between their own and their husband’s families. In these and many other ways, traditional marriage strongly resembled human slavery.
One of the ironies of the debate over same-sex marriage is the oft-made claim by same-sex marriage opponents that “the Bible defines marriage as between one man and one woman.” Leaving aside the question of whether, and why, the holy book of one specific religious tradition should determine U.S. public policy, the fact is that the Bible does NOT define marriage as between one man and one woman. The Bible defines marriage the way it was traditionally defined in the early “civilizations” that emerged with the rise of patriarchy: as the union of one man and as many women as he could support financially.
The idea that marriage should be MUTUALLY monogamous is a relatively recent change, stemming from 1,600 years ago when Christianity was established as the official state religion in the latter days of the Roman Empire. It was later adopted by Judaism but, significantly, NOT by the third great religion derived from the Abrahamic tradition, Islam. In some Muslim countries, men are still allowed to marry as many women as they can support financially; in others, men are limited to four wives and have to divorce one if they wish to take a fifth. The irony here is that, despite the oft-expressed fear of same-sex marriage opponents that if we allow same-sex couples to marry we will be opening the door to polygamists, in fact the polygamists have a far better claim to marriage on traditional, historical, religious and cultural grounds than we do.
Obviously, marriage as it exists today bears little or no relation to the “traditional” variety described above. Yet what is staggering is how recent most of the reforms are. It was not until the 19th century that the right of people to select their own partners for marriage instead of having those decisions made for them was generally accepted. It was not until the early 20th century that married women finally were allowed to own property in their own names. (Interestingly, Muhammad called for women to have this right 1,400 years before it became standard practice in Christendom, but the Muslim world today lags well behind the Judeo-Christian West on this one.) It was not until the 1940’s that American employers, largely to meet their personpower needs during World War II, started dropping their formal policies of refusing to hire married women. And, most shockingly of all, it was not until the late 1970’s that California’s rape laws were amended so that a married woman no longer had to have sex with her husband any time he wanted to, whether she wanted to or not.
Yet for all the changes in marriage as an institution over the centuries, one aspect has remained constant: it has always been heterosexual. Despite the efforts of Queer historians (most notably the late John Boswell), no one has ever unearthed a society or a major religion that had a long-term tradition of marrying same-gender partners. Nor is there any particular reason why there should be. Until 1865, when the term “homosexual” was coined to describe a mental illness, humans regarded opposite-sex partners as the default position for human sexuality. Same-sex sexual expression was regarded as something one DID, not something one was. Homosexual activity in humans is no doubt as old as the human race itself, but the idea of a homosexual IDENTITY is a relatively new social construct, and one I would regard as irreconcilable with marriage as centuries of history and tradition, albeit reformed, have defined it.
Procreation DOES Matter
One of the most common arguments against the legal recognition of same-sex marriage has to do with procreation. Basic mammalian biology requires the involvement of both male and female to produce offspring. Therefore, a same-sex couple, no matter how emotionally committed they are to each other and no matter how good they may be, potentially or actually, as parents, cannot create children without outside help. Same-sex marriage opponents frequently argue that, because it takes a man and a woman to create a child, that serves as a logical reason to restrict marriage to heterosexual couples only.
Supporters of same-sex marriage reply to this argument in various ways. Sometimes they point out that the law allows any opposite-sex couple who fall within the other basic qualifications (i.e., neither is currently married to someone else, they are not impermissibly closely related by blood, etc.) to marry even though they may be unable, due to age, physical disability or any other biological reason, to procreate. Indeed, since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), U.S. law has protected the right of married heterosexuals to choose NOT to procreate and to have access to drugs, barriers and other devices to allow them to have an active sex life while reducing their likelihood of procreating to nearly zero. But the most common argument made by same-sex marriage advocates against the idea that procreation is a rational reason to restrict marriage to heterosexuals is to point out that same-sex couples are already raising children.
There are three ways in which a same-sex couple can be parents. First, they can adopt. Second, if they are both women, either or both of them can be artificially inseminated with sperm from a male donor. Third, and probably the most common, one or both of them can bring to the relationship a child they had already conceived and (if female) born through normal heterosexual means in a previous relationship with an opposite-sex partner before they definitively identified themselves as Gay or Lesbian. Interestingly, all three of these means are represented among the 14 plaintiffs — five Lesbian couples and two Gay male couples — in the New Jersey lawsuit.
But those three means all have one thing in common: they all require outside help for the child actually to exist. The same-sex couple who adopt (in states enlightened enough to permit them to) are dependent for their child’s existence on the unrelated pair of heterosexuals who conceived him or her in the first place and the female half of this pair who carried the pregnancy to term and then gave up the baby, voluntarily or otherwise. The Lesbians who use artificial insemination are dependent on the male sperm donor, and the same-sex partners who bring children into their relationship from former heterosexual pairings are dependent on their opposite-sex former partners, not only to have helped bring their child into existence but (often) for permission to raise the child in a household headed by a same-sex couple.
None of this necessarily makes a difference in terms of parenting outcomes. As the New Jersey court correctly recognized, the consensus in social science is that children do best when they are raised in a home with two adults — but it doesn’t matter whether either or both of the adults are the child’s biological parents or whether they are of opposite or the same gender. It DOES, however, make the internal environment of the home distinctly different — and in a society still largely accepting of anti-Queer prejudice, it renders the children vulnerable to being teased, ostracized and abused by their peers for something over which they have no control. The fact that a child being raised in a same-sex household cannot possibly be the biological offspring of BOTH partners (though both partners can be what New Jersey law awkwardly calls “psychological parents”) and the additional strains on a child being raised in a same-sex household over an opposite-sex one both make the term “marriage” rather dubious in describing the relationship between the adult same-sex partners raising a child this way.
Men Are Different
One of the not-so-dirty little secrets of the same-sex marriage movement is it is primarily a Lesbian phenomenon. As noted above, of the seven couples who participated as plaintiffs in the New Jersey lawsuit, five are women and only two are men. Of the over 4,000 couples who got married in San Francisco during the one-month “window” from February to March 2004, when Mayor Gavin Newsom illegally ordered his city’s registry to issue marriage licenses to same-gender applicants, two-thirds of them were Lesbian couples. This imbalance is even more striking when laid next to decades of survey data showing that there are twice as many men who self-identify as Gay as women who self-identify as Lesbian.
As a Gay man, I feel qualified to discuss the marriage issue as it impacts and is impacted by Gay male sexuality but not as it impacts and is impacted by Lesbian sexuality. I accept the broad outlines of the “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” theory that men and women are fundamentally different in terms of how they manage their sexuality and the psychological fulfillments they get from it. Basically, this theory holds that men are more likely than women to detach sex from emotion, more likely to seek sexual outlets outside of their primary relationship, less likely to insist on “love” as a criterion for whether or not to have sex with a particular person and more likely to live the lifestyle envisioned by the (male) singer-songwriter Stephen Stills when he sang, “If you can’t be with the one you love/Love the one you’re with.”
Obviously, like all sweeping generalizations about human behavior, this one has many exceptions — but I think it’s basically true, and the experience of Gay men in particular proves it. One classic scientific technique is called “isolating the variable” — studying a phenomenon by looking at it in the absence of other aspects of reality that might get in the way. One obvious way to test the theory that men are more detached from emotion in their sexual expression than women would be to look at communities of men who don’t have to worry about the sexual and emotional demands of women, and women who don’t have to worry about the sexual and emotional demands of men — in other words, totally Gay men and totally Lesbian women.
In the case of men, at least, I think the overall ways Gay men express and manage their sexuality confirm the theory. Gay men are more likely than heterosexuals or Lesbians to have sex outside a committed relationship, to have multiple sex partners, to have sex with other partners besides their primary one, and — most relevantly for the same-sex marriage issue — to build into their relationships ways of acknowledging that they will have other sex partners and managing these extrarelational activities to minimize their potential for harming the primary relationship. The expectation of mutual monogamy that is at the heart of modern heterosexual marriage (though often honored more in the breach than the observance) simply doesn’t apply to many — I daresay most — Gay male couples.
The ascendancy of same-sex marriage as an issue of paramount importance to the political leadership of the Queer community is a trailing indicator of a far-reaching change in that leadership that began in the 1980’s, Before then, the Queer leadership was almost exclusively male — and often openly and offensively sexist towards women who tried to gain admittance — and it tended to focus on issues of primary importance to men: the protection of Gay bars, bathhouses and other cruising spaces; confronting police entrapment of Gay men cruising each other for casual sex; protection against Gay-bashing (not just to preserve the overall physical safety of Queers but specifically to protect Gay men in public cruising areas from being targeted and beaten or killed); as well as issues like antidiscrimination protection that affected Gay men and Lesbians equally. Issues of specific concern to Lesbians, such as maintaining custody of their children after they ended straight marriages or relationships and came out, tended to be ignored or sloughed off.
That all changed in the 1980’s, when the AIDS epidemic virtually wiped out a generation of Gay male leaders. In the 1970’s, the most prominent Gay male leaders had also tended to be the most flamboyant, the most obviously “out,” and the ones most likely to involve themselves in the riskiest behaviors for AIDS: casual unprotected sex with multiple partners, use of recreational drugs, frequent sexually-transmitted infections and antibiotic treatments for them and involvement in the so-called “fast-lane” lifestyle. As they began dying en masse, Lesbians managed to win community leadership positions because they were largely unscathed by the AIDS epidemic and therefore they were the ones able to continue the movement.
Long after the AIDS epidemic peaked and the syndrome became endemic — not epidemic — among Queer men, Lesbians remained in charge of many community organizations. In cities like San Diego, which fell behind more progressive cities with larger Queer populations, Lesbians, not Gay men, were the first Queers to win elective office. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force had seven women executive directors in a row from the 1980’s through the 1990’s before finally hiring a man for that position in the early 2000’s. I would argue that this shift from male to female Queer community leadership, brought apart by the decimation of the male leadership due to AIDS and the need for the remaining men to confront their own sexism and admit women to leadership positions to maintain the movement at all, helped bring about the change in Queer issue priorities so that women’s issues moved to the forefront of the agenda — and marriage, an issue of greater relevance to Lesbians than to Gay men, became a principal community demand for this reason.
Equal but Unique
My argument here is that not only is the realization of same-sex marriage, so-called, impossible in the United States under current and likely future political conditions, but even if it were, “marriage” as traditionally defined would be an awkward fit for many same-sex couples, particularly male ones. Marriage comes with the expectation that the partners will procreate with each other; same-sex couples can’t do that without help from outside. Modern marriage comes with the expectation of mutual monogamy; Gay male couples in particular frequently structure their relationships in ways that allow for outside sexual experiences. Marriage, from the get-go, has been built on the expectation that one partner, the woman, is inferior to the man; same-sex relationships are based on mutual equality.
One of the ironies of the same-sex marriage movement is that all those 1,200-plus government and private-sector benefits same-sex marriage advocates rattle off as the reason they need marriage rights were created on the basis of assumptions that NEVER applied to how most same-sex couples live and are increasingly at variance with the way most opposite-sex couples live. The benefits were based on the idea that government should support relationships likely to produce children: giving the parents more money to raise their children by granting them income-tax deductions and allowing employers to deduct the costs of providing them and their children health care. The marriage benefits were also designed around the assumption that the man would be the breadwinner and the woman the stay-at-home parent; most same-sex couples have always assumed that both parties would work, and with the steady decline in U.S. wages since 1973 most married heterosexuals today find that they too must both work.
If anything, a broader look at the marriage issue reveals the utter absurdity of a society that insists on allocating tax advantages and access to health care based on whether people are in a committed relationship and whether they are raising children. The ascendancy of marriage as an issue for the Queer leadership shows how far it has drifted from the progressive roots of the Queer movement. A truly progressive Queer community would be fighting for universal access to health care, not for admission to the class of people given health coverage through their employers while more and more Americans lose coverage altogether. It would be fighting against the blatant giveaways to corporate America represented by so-called “free trade” agreements and the attack on the U.S. middle class through outsourcing. A truly progressive Queer movement would also seek to broaden the kinds of family structures offered legal recognition instead of attempting to fit all Queers into the Procrustean bed of a two-person partnership modeled on a heterosexually defined institution — marriage — built on assumptions and protocols of dubious applicability to many Queers.
If the Queer community does not cut its losses on the marriage issue — if it continues to insist on chasing the M-word with all the self-destructive fervor of Captain Ahab chasing Moby Dick — those losses will be cut for us. George W. Bush, who owed his first term as President to the gun owners in Tennessee who rejected their state’s native son, Al Gore, over their right to keep and bear arms, owed his second term to the Republican leadership’s ability to mobilize African-American clergy in Ohio to bolt from the Democrats to the Republicans over the same-sex marriage issue. The Queer leadership’s continued advocacy of same-sex marriage threatens not only its own civil rights but the overall progressive movement in U.S. politics — and that’s yet another reason we need to abandon this unwinnable issue.
Cutting our losses and accepting defeat on the same-sex marriage issue does not mean consigning ourselves to an eternity of “separate but equal” status. As I have argued above, there are plenty of reasons NOT to seek a structure for our families that copies heterosexual marriage, but instead to build our own EQUAL BUT UNIQUE institutions to safeguard our rights as individuals, as couples, as extended adoptive families, as romantic, emotional and sexual beings in ourselves and in relation to each other. The American people have told us again and again that they will not accept the term “marriage” as a description of our relationships, but enough of them WILL accept legal protections for our rights if we call them by another name. It’s up to us to abandon a fight we cannot win and be creative and committed to winning the fights we can.
APPENDIX: A Draft of a Compromise Federal Marriage Amendment
Section 1: Marriage shall be defined in the United States and in the several States exclusively as the union of one man and one woman.
Section 2: Nothing in this section shall deny to the Congress, the legislature of a State or the people of a State the power to create reciprocal rights, benefits and responsibilities for voluntary associations of adult persons ineligible for marriage as herein defined.
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