This was the question posed by Larry Kramer, the long-time gay and AIDS activist in the opening of an opinion piece for the LA Times. He cites the recent comments by Gen Pace, Clinton's and Obama's avoidence of the issue, don't ask don't tell, the potential Episcopalian schism, DOMA, and the fairly regular harassment and killing of gay men and women in the US as his examples.
And in true Kramer fashion, the gay community is not left untouched by his disdain. He criticizes gay people for continually voting for politicians who "sell gays down the river", for focusing narrowly on marriage. The language of the essay is pure and beautiful Kramer prose:
"Don't any of you wonder why heterosexuals treat gays so brutally year after year after year, as your people take away our manhood, our womanhood, our personhood? Why, even as we die you don't leave us alone. What we can leave our surviving lovers is taxed far more punitively than what you leave your (legal) surviving spouses. Why do you do this? My lover will be unable to afford to live in the house we have made for each other over our lifetime together. This does not happen to you. Taxation without representation is what led to the Revolutionary War. Gay people have paid all the taxes you have. But you have equality, and we don't."
"What do we do to you that is so awful? Why do you feel compelled to come after us with such frightful energy? Does this somehow make you feel safer and legitimate? What possible harm comes to you if we marry, or are taxed just like you, or are protected from assault by laws that say it is morally wrong to assault people out of hatred? The reasons always offered are religious ones, but certainly they are not based on the love all religions proclaim."
His rhetorical questions are those that I am often left feeling in reading about debates over gay issues. Racheline Maltise also put these issues so eloquently in her article "Tired Just Standing Here: The Everyday Exhaustion of Having Your Humanity Debated" here on Gather.
Kramer's tone has always been seen by many as abrasive, his novel "Faggots" was a very tough critique of the gay community on the cusp of the AIDS epidemic. His "Reports from the Holocaust" was a chronicle of his campaign to save lives during the early years of AIDS. He helped found the Gay Men's Health Crisis Center in New York, and, later, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT-UP), which pilloried the government, the medical community, and the pharmeceutical industry for their slow, political, and profiteering responses to AIDS.
Interestingly, gay.com is reporting that the original title of the article was "A Letter to America's Heterosexuals" and retitled by the L.A. Times "Why do straights hate gays? An aging 72-year-old man isn't hopeful about the future." Some are critical of the change, saying it is disrespectful to Kramer, who has been an activist since the 1970s. To simply call him "and aging 72-year-old man" does accurately represent his position in the gay community well at all.
He is in-your-face with his positions, but a more passionately commited gay activist, you would be hard pressed to find. He ends his essay with the following:
"You may say you don't hate us, but the people you vote for do, so what's the difference? Our own country's democratic process declares us to be unequal. Which means, in a democracy, that our enemy is you. You treat us like crumbs. You hate us. And sadly, we let you."
I'm curious what folks think of this approach? How do you react to it? Many have said of Kramer, over his career, that his venom gets in the way of his message or that it turns off the very people who might be willing to help the cause. Is this another example of that, or is it simply an accurate barometer of the current climate for gays today?
recommend this
email
print
link to this page
Comments: 23
This approach leaves no room for open discussion or debate about the issues and doesn't allow for the possibilities that I might dislike a gay person for reasons other than his or her sexuality or that I might support the policies he's opposing for reasons other than hatred. If Mr. Kramer (or anyone else) accuses me of hating gays, how can I defend myself, let alone discuss the issues? Especially with statements like "You say you don't, but you do." The debate quickly disintegrates to an "Am not!" / "Are too!" fight.
The in-your-face attitude can also create hatred for gays that wasn't there originally and, as you suggested, drive off people who might otherwise be sympathetic.
That being said, I do think that gays have gained social status more quickly than any other oppressed group of people that come to mind. In a very short time span, we went from Matthew Shepherd to the L Word. We still have a long way to go (as evidence by the recent attacks on gays cited in the op-ed) but I'm glad that it is beomcing increasingly easier for young people to come out. And hey, if it helps, I didn't know anyone gay growing up and thought gay was a bad word. Now I love gay people and fight for gay marriage.
Again, Kramer's title is provactive but he delivers with a well-written cohesive argument that bigotry persists.
I think people telling the world that straight people hate gay people isn't a good thing to be doing, no matter how well their writing is. We're all people. That's what's important, and to hate someone based on who they are attracted to, or love and to go against their rights as human beings is just wrong.
Lauren - I missed that one, it sounds disgusting. Wow.
Having lived in the Bay Area almost all my life and having worked in SF for a long time I probably have a different perspective than some straight people in other parts of the country. Here gay people exist; they're commonplace. Same sex couples hold hands and kiss on the sidewalk. People from all sexual orientations come out to watch the Pride Parade. It's been on local TV for several years. Politicians openly court gay voters. I think it's great. I'm glad I've lived to see it.
It's not paradise. There are straight people who are terrified by their existence just like everywhere else. There's just a lot fewer of them.
Not being at all familiar with Kramer's writing, but just perusing the excerpt here and the comments, I would say, what doesn't anyone understand about the concept of equality? Must it come with a softened tone and pleasing rhetoric?
Wonder what Rosa Parks would think. How long and how many times did she others have to hear, don't be impatient to sit at the front of the bus -- be satisfied with maybe the middle -- if you can get there and sit down quietly.
Equality: Ask any woman who's been told: "you'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar!" Who wants flies?
At the same time I certainly agree with those who note that there are amazing heterosexual allies out there who are fighting the good fight (to borrow from Lauren G.), and his tone might turn some of those people off. To those folks I say, know that you are appreciated. You can't know how nice it is to be in classroom and have a heterosexual peer point out a GLBT issue so that you don't have to always be the educator in the room. Or have a straight friend confront a homophobic joke so you don't have to. Know too, that Kramer has written more invectives against the gay community than he has the straight; it's perhaps more clear if you can see this work in context of his larger ouvre.
Saying, "my mother never loved me" is infinitely more effective than saying "sometimes, I think my mother never loved me."
Good rhetoric is supposed to make people angry, make peopel stand up and ask not just if they are doing what is right but if they are doing enough. OUr community needs voices likes his, if not to change the minds of those who actually think gay rights are an issue that somehow can justify debate then to remind us all to keep fighting this fight we should have never, ever have had to fight.