Do Gays Unsettle You?
Same-Sex Marriage, Republican Scorn and Unfinished Work
Frank Bruni
FEB. 7, 2015
Credit Oliver Munday
I’m grateful for that. I’m stunned, really.
And yet. When we’re walking down the street after a long dinner or a sad movie and he slips his hand in mine, I tense. I look around nervously: Is anyone staring? Glaring? I feel exposed, endangered, and I’m right to, even here in New York, even near my apartment on Manhattan’s epically liberal Upper West Side. Just two years ago and two blocks from my home, an inebriated young woman who spotted us shouted: “So you’re gay? These two are gay!” She went on and on like that, for what seemed an eternity.
It was the booze talking, sure. But sometimes alcohol is a truth serum, stripping the varnish of etiquette to reveal the ugliness beneath.
A straight woman puts a photograph of herself and her beloved on her desk at work and it’s merely décor. A lesbian displays the same kind of picture and it’s an act of laudable candor or questionable boldness: a statement, either way you cut it. She knows that some people’s eyes will linger on it too long, or will turn from it abruptly. She has to decide not to care.
And a politician who says awful, hateful things about gays and lesbians can still find a warm enough reception and plenty of traction in one of our two major political parties. The Republican winner of the Iowa caucuses in 2012, Rick Santorum, has said that the marriage of two men or two women is no more like the marriage of a man and a woman than a tree is like a car or a cup of tea is like a basketball. He has also lumped homosexuality together with incest.
So has Mike Huckabee, the winner of the Iowa caucuses in 2008. Both are poised to run for the presidency again, in a field potentially including Ben Carson, who has mentioned homosexuality and bestiality in the same breath, and Ted Cruz, who urges ardent prayer against what he considers the society-threatening outrage of two men or two women tying the knot.
I don’t expect any of them to win the nomination, partly because their particular, pronounced degree of closed-mindedness won’t wash with the number of Americans whose favor they need. Hurray for that.
But I expect that on their way to defeat they’ll turn us gays into punch lines and punching bags. I expect that I’ll hear and watch large audiences cheer and egg them on. It’s a sickening spectacle, if you pay it any heed.
Sarah Kate Ellis wishes that you would.
She’s the head of Glaad, a prominent gay rights group, and she and it are doing something important right now. They’re trying to reacquaint Americans with the vast and messy landscape beyond the handful of political issues that garner the most news coverage. They’re trying to size up the territory where hard work is still necessary and to guarantee that it’s not ignored.
“We want to make sure that marriage is looked at as the benchmark and not the finish line,” she said. “Where are the hearts and minds of Americans?”
To answer that question, Glaad commissioned a Harris Poll late last year. I was given a first look at the results, which underscored how uncomfortable many Americans remain with gay, lesbian and bisexual people — and, even more so, with transgender people.
About 30 percent of the respondents who didn’t identify themselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender said that it would unsettle them to learn that their physician or child’s teacher did.
Close to 45 percent said that they would be uneasy about bringing a child to a same-sex wedding.
Thirty-six percent feel uncomfortable when they see a same-sex couple hold hands.
And those percentages probably pretty up the truth. Pollsters have learned that people often say what they think they’re supposed to rather than how they really feel.
Their feelings, in any case, are mixed and evolving. Glaad’s poll is just the latest to capture this. In a survey conducted a little over a year ago by the Public Religion Research Institute, 51 percent of respondents said that sex between two men or two women is morally wrong.
One especially interesting discovery in the Glaad poll was how much unease lingered even in respondents who formally approved of gay marriage or of civil unions with full benefits. Twenty percent of these people said they’d nonetheless feel uncomfortable attending a same-sex wedding.
What might change that, other than the passage of time?
THERE’S no definitive solution or strategy, but Ellis emphasized the importance of getting those straight people who are wholly comfortable with gays to be more forward about that — more evangelical, if you will — and to recognize that the country’s education and illumination are incomplete. Glaad is focusing its energies on that, with a new campaign called “Got Your Back.”
There’s so much hurt and madness out there, to this day: a gay couple told that their children aren’t welcome at a private school; gay and transgender people bloodied in hate crimes; teenagers who are bullied or take their own lives. Those sorts of injustices won’t be extinguished by any imminent Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage.
Nor will such a ruling change the fact that most states have never enacted laws protecting gay people from employment discrimination.
Federal legislation to that effect finally passed the Senate at the end of 2013, when the chamber was controlled by Democrats, but the Republican-led House never bothered to vote on the bill. And there’s no way that the current Congress will send something like it to President Obama for his signature.
I never lose sight of how far this country has come. My relief usually eclipses my rancor. But to celebrate or to slide into complacency is grossly premature, and it’s wrong, because I have every right to walk the streets of my neighborhood fearlessly, no matter whose fingers are interlaced with my own. Our clutch isn’t a taunt or provocation. It’s just an expression of tenderness — of basic humanity. In a world altered and advanced enough, it would be an innocuous, unnoticed part of the scenery.
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