In the bars and cafes of Dupont Circle, the centre of Washington DC’s gay scene, the mood is funereal. The American gay community, already reeling from a ”broad and widespread assault” under a Bush presidency, now feels under siege from the country itself.
A week before polling day Washington hosted its annual High Heels Race, a sprint by drag queens that drew large and noisy crowds, both gay and straight. It was a moment of celebration, alive with the optimistic anticipation of a Kerry victory. This weekend, after 11 states voted strongly against gay marriage and civil unions and elected Republicans who had run ”gay-baiting” campaigns, gay advocates are talking about their worst crisis since the Reagan administration or even the Stonewall riots of 1969.
Some are talking about leaving America for good. Performance artist Tim Miller fought a high-profile funding battle with the National Endowment for the Arts that went to the Supreme Court. After travelling to Britain on Monday for a series of shows, he says he may not return. The Californian, like thousands of gay Americans, is caught in a double bind: he is in a country he feels is rejecting him, and in a relationship with a partner who the authorities will not allow to live in America without the protection of marriage or civil union, which it is not prepared to give. ”My partner has a UK passport,” said Miller. ”We are never sure whether he can stay. What little political hope we had for change has been wiped out. On Monday there were limits on Bush’s power. On Tuesday night we had to have a serious conversation about whether we wanted to carry on struggling and feeling like third-class citizens.
”We have this overblown idea here that we live in the freest country in the world. But in reality we are scraping the barrel with our rights. When I pack to travel to London tomorrow it is going to have a real poignancy. We are used to setbacks, but this time it has hit people hard. It is just despair.”
That sentiment seems to be reflected across the United States, despite figures suggesting a significant minority of 23% of gay voters — almost a million — voted for Bush, a fact causing bafflement on gay websites.
”Eyes are not just on the next four years,” says Jonathan Katz, a professor of gay history at Yale University, ”but on the composition of the Supreme Court which, if it swings to the right, has the potential to wreak havoc for gay rights. It is the worst moment since Reaganism. I only console myself that this has been largely about gay marriage, which was not even an issue 10 years ago.”
Katz worries that anti-gay political rhetoric will lead to a resurgence of homophobic violence. ”The culture now is like it was in the early 1980s, and I fear we will start seeing what we saw then.”
Some campaign speeches verged on tub-thumping hatred. In Oklahoma Tom Coburn warned of lesbians invading school bathrooms. In South Carolina Jim Demint said openly gay teachers should be banned from schools. In Florida Mel Martinez, the former Bush housing secretary, called his opponent, in reality unsupportive of gay rights, a ”darling of the homosexual extremists”.
Some blame activists who pushed gay marriage so hard for giving Christian Republicans an issue to frighten the electorate. James Driscoll, a homosexual Republican from Virginia, claims he was purged from his advisory position to the Bush administration on HIV/Aids and replaced with a ”straight, white guy”.
”This election shows that the gay community must reassess its strategy,” he told the Washington Blade, a local gay publication, blaming the ”gay marriage issue” for contributing to Kerry’s defeat and creating a rift between gay and straight Republicans. ”We have seriously marginalised ourselves on the gay marriage issue,” he said.
This is rejected by Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force which, after the Republican convention, named Bush as the most anti-gay President in modern history. ”For me, the most potentially damaging result of last week is the make-up of the Supreme Court. The most important thing is who will be on the Supreme Court when the issue on gay marriage is finally referred to it. The right will keep bringing up the gay issue, as it did in this election, but every year I believe its impact will diminish. What is important is that for every gay person who voted against the anti-gay marriage amendments, five straight people voted with them. This is something that 10 years ago was an entirely radical concept.”
But his optimism is limited: ”The Bush administration has already been the most hostile we have known in 35 years of this organisation, opposing hate crime laws, anti-discrimination measures, fact-based HIV prevention. If the Supreme Court swings to the right, which is likely, I know I am not going to have equality in my lifetime. We can either fight or we can go dancing. And that is not a choice.” – Guardian Unlimited Â