Acts of God Certain voices on the far Right—Pat Robertson comes to mind—are fond of attributing calamities like floods and tornados to the march of GLBT rights, as if the Old Testament God were still at work smiting sinners all these millennia later. Of course, if disaster hits in the form of an earthquake or a hurricane, you can always find a roughly proximate event—a pride march, gay days at Disneyland—that could have provoked God’s wrath. The odd thing is, in the latter-day formulation the people who get smited are rarely the ones who were supposedly responsible for the tragedy, which kind of misses the Old Testament point about God punishing sinners. What’s more, this form of casuistry invites counter-examples from skeptics who wonder why other “acts of God” go unreported. How do they explain, for example, the seemingly disproportionate number of fatal accidents involving buses filled with church groups en route to Las Vegas or Atlantic City? or the propensity of churches to be struck by lightning and set ablaze? (Could it be the tall steeples?) Then there’s the case of a recent speech in Madrid by Pope Benedict XVI. Just as the Pope was embarking upon a rant against same-sex marriage before a large crowd, “powerful winds and sheets of rain struck at a vast air base, whipping off his skullcap, shaking the stage, and knocking over at least one tent,” according to Agence France Presse (8/21/11). The Pope was forced to stop his speech and never got to deliver his anti-gay punchline. Now if that’s not a sign of God’s wrath, what is?
Muppets in Love A recent op-ed piece in The Washington Post addressed a somewhat unusual topic for that page when Jonathan Capehart zeroed in on the marital status of Bert and Ernie of the children’s show Sesame Street. “Come on, admit it,” urged Capehart, “you’ve always wondered what was up with cozy roommates Bert and Ernie.” They’ve been the subject of tongue-in-sock speculation for years, he pointed out, so why not continue the program’s tradition of tackling controversial topics by having them seal the deal on national TV? The show’s producers released a statement to the effect that Muppets don’t have a sexual orientation and thus any speculation about Bert and Ernie is ill-founded. Fair enough; but no one’s saying that the show should delve into the sex lives of the two roommates, one of whom (Bert) has the voice of a mature man. And yet… if Muppets lack any soupçon of sexuality, what exactly is going on with Miss Piggy’s relentless amorous pursuit of Kermit the Frog? The fact that the flirtation—which implies not just an inter-species but an inter-class (mammal and amphibian) hookup—doesn’t raise eyebrows can only be because the two characters are gender-typed as male and female. Still, when you stop and think about it, the prospect of what Rick Santorum might call “frog on pig” action seems a lot stranger than Bert and Ernie tying the knot.
Lavender Militias There are gay activists who are also political conservatives, and while some may wonder what keeps their heads from exploding, the fact is that the Log Cabin Republicans (LCR) is a venerable organization that has joined the struggle around “traditional” institutions such as marriage and the military. But there’s an even more conservative gay group called GOProud that has adopted some of the more extreme positions of the far Right and its newest avatar, the Tea Party. Thus, for example, GOProud members are just as in love with guns as is, say, Governor Rick Perry of Texas, who apparently owns a coyote gun and doesn’t leave home to jog without it. But, you ask, how does widespread gun ownership connect to gay rights? GOProud has an answer: we need to be armed because there are gay bashers out there, and we’ve gotta be ready for ’em. Cofounder Jimmy LaSalvia argued that the GLBT community needs to “focus our efforts on preventing hate crimes by advocating for stronger Second Amendment rights.” It’s a quirky idea: in the spirit of the Second Amendment, we can now conjure the image of gay militias training in church basements and holding weekend simulations of gay-versus-basher battles. And why not?—this is America!
The Banality of Progress Largely unnoticed last July was the U.S. Senate’s confirmation of Paul Oetken as a federal judge, noteworthy because Oetken is openly gay but remarkable because it happened with so little fanfare. There were no histrionics, no threats of filibuster, and it occurred against the backdrop of a bitterly divided Congress that seems unable to agree on even the most necessary legislation. Oetken sailed through on a lopsided 80–13 vote, with even such right-wing stalwarts as Tom Coburn (R–OK) and Chuck Grassley (R–IA) voting in favor. What’s more, Oetken did nothing to conceal his sexual orientation during the confirmation process but instead enlisted the support of Lambda Legal and other GLBT groups—and made a point of introducing his partner at the Judiciary Committee hearing. (A lesbian, Deborah Batts, was confirmed as a federal judge in 1994, but her sexual orientation was never mentioned at confirmation hearings.) The appointment received little media attention because it was so low-key—a paradox of modern journalism, since in this case the big story was precisely that nothing much happened. Still, this is what true progress looks like: not noisy struggle followed by victory laps but the routine confirmation of a gay judge as if his sexual orientation didn’t matter, because, of course, it doesn’t.
Down for the Count Just how many gay people there are in the world has often been a fraught proposition. Recently Gary J. Gates of the Williams Institute used the available U.S. Census data to estimate the number of gay Americans, arriving at 3.8 percent, or about nine million adults. His report was met by a rather ferocious attack from Larry Kramer (among others), who couldn’t understand why Gates “wants to punish us so” by promulgating such a low estimate. Didn’t Kinsey establish a figure much closer to ten percent many years ago? In a response in The Advocate (“The Day Larry Kramer Dissed Me”), Gates pointed out that the 3.8 figure is the percentage of self-identified GLBT people, as distinct from those reporting some same-sex sexual encounters (eight percent) and those acknowledging same-sex desires (twelve percent). Kinsey, after all, was concerned only with behavior and not with self-identifying labels (which scarcely existed in his day). In any case, Gates’ number closely matches the four percent that routinely identifies as gay in exit polls after voting. These are people who are willing to reveal this fact to a perfect stranger in a very public setting. Doubtless many more people are in the closet, questioning, not yet out, in denial, or unwilling to confide in a pollster or Census taker. In short, they’re not talking, so trying to count them is like trying to count angels dancing on the heads of pins. Depending upon your point of view, they may or may not exist.
