Exploring the frontiers of gay consciousness with don kilhefner

Setting them straight

The title certainly got my attention: “Gay—the new straight.” It was on an op-ed article written by columnist Gregory Rodriguez in the Los Angeles Times (Nov. 5, 2007). Rodriguez goes on to make all kinds of melodramatic but largely unfounded claims about gay people. His conclusions were drawn from an important new research study done by the Williams Institute at UCLA, titled “Geographic Trends Among Same-Sex Couples In The U.S. Census and the American Community Survey,” written by research/ demographer Gary Gates. While the rest of you were watching Project Runway, I sat down and studied the UCLA report — page by page of statistics. I recommend it only to the masochists among you.

First flaw: Rodriguez/Gates make several major generalizations about gay people — for example, the devolution of the gay community, the declining need for gay identity, the heteroization of gay culture—based solely on one study of same-sex couples. Let’s do a bit of simple math. The number of gay couples on which the study was made was about 800,000. If there were two people in each couple, approximately 1.6 million gay people were included in the study. Generally, gay people are estimated to be somewhere between 8% and 10% of the population. The population of the U.S. is 300 million, and let’s say 9% are gay people. This means there are approximately 27 million of your kind in the U.S. Thus, gay couples in the study represent approximately 6% of the gay population.

It’s a great statistical sample. The only problem is that one cannot make sweeping generalizations about gay people, identity, and community based solely on a single study of same-sex couples. No way! Not to mention the lack of differentiation between lesbian and gay male couples—they are not the same. Also missing was critically important stratified demographic information such as the age, race, and socio-economic status of the subjects.

Based on my more than four decades of working in the Los Angeles gay community, I would speculate that the majority of gay men are not in coupled relationships, albeit many are desperately trying either to get into one or out of one. And I would speculate further that those who are in coupled relationships tend to be generally more conventional, bourgeois, and conservative—gay assimilationist—than those who are not. Thus, generalizing about the gay community based on same-sex couples, as Rodriguez/Gates do, is fraught with gross oversimplification, error, and, in their case, the spinning of a socio-political agenda. Rodriguez was foaming at the mouth in his stereotyped denunciation of gay liberationists. Rodriguez/Gates are gay assimilationists.

Second flaw: To understand the gay assimilation ideology that Rodriguez/Gates are trying to spin, one must understand something about gay history and the struggle between two polarities in our development as a people—gay enspiritment vs. gay assimilation. One can trace this debate back to a dinner Walt Whitman (gay enspiritment) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (gay assimilation) had in Boston prior to the publication of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.

Emerson wanted Whitman to tone down and make respectable what is usually considered the most famous gay poetry ever written. Whitman refused.

Listen! It’s important you get this! Right now you are living in a period where gay assimilation is the dominant ideology of the gay community. It has not always been so. There have been four major periods in our history as gay people here in Los Angeles, and nationally:

1) 1951-53: Radical beginnings (enspiritment). Harry Hay and the other politically progressive men who founded the Mattachine Society in Echo Park made a radical statement about homosexuals being a minority group. By organizing a network of secret discussion groups in Los Angeles and elsewhere, they called us to work toward creating “a highly ethical homosexual culture” and a “homosexual ethic—disciplined, moral, and socially responsible.”

2) 1954-68: Homophile assimilation. At a fateful 1953 meeting of the Mattachine Society at the old Unitarian Church on Crenshaw, the conservative homophile assimilationists took over the organization and the radical founders were largely exiled. The homophile assimilations put emphasis on the idea that we are just like everyone else, except for what we did in bed (or Griffith Park). Respectability and acceptance by the dominant heterosexual society became panaceas. A major move to the right took place.

3) 1969-85: Gay Liberation (enspiritment). Author Mark Thompson called the year 1969 the “Big Bang” for gay people. A new consciousness emerged among us. A second radical push forward took place—gay self-respect replaced acting respectable. For the first time in American history, a gay community and virtually all of our community institutions were created. Gay oppression was battled openly and fiercely. Just as people of color and their white allies were overthrowing white supremacy, and women and their male allies were dethroning male supremacy—now gay people and their straight allies were engaged in a struggle to dismantle heterosexual supremacy. There was no begging for acceptance.

4) 1985-present: Gay assimilation. Except for ACT UP and AIDS activism in general, with the Reagan Revolution the gay community again moves to the right with gay assimilation supplanting gay liberation. Again, the ideology is that gay people are no different from straight people as reflected in the Rodriguez/Gates writings. Civil rights becomes a panacea with same-sex marriage becoming almost the sole item on the assimilationists’ agenda. The gay assimilation poster boys would be a married gay couple owning a home with white picket fence, a child or two, PTA meetings, a dog, a parrot, a few goldfish, and tickets to a fundraising dinner at the Beverly Hilton. Inherent in assimilation ideology is the disappearance of the gay community and gay identity. I think gay people in general have more intelligence than to mindlessly let that happen.

Third flaw: A third major flaw in the Rodriguiz/Gates gay assimilationist spin is their use of a conventional immigration-minority group historiography to interpret developments in the evolution of gay people. It goes like this. They (fill in the blank) came to the United States, the Great Melting Pot, and after two generations they were absorbed into the mainstream (except for Africans who came involuntarily and were enslaved).

I would suggest Rodriguez/Gates pay attention to Albert Einstein when he said, “The significant problems of our day cannot be solved with the same consciousness that created them.” A different consciousness is needed to understand the present evolution of gay people. The creation and demonization of the “homosexual” was done by our hetero oppressors. Our so-called “homosexual identity,” whether negative or positive, is largely hetero-male derived and defined. It represents the old consciousness.

A new way of understanding gay people is that being “gay” and being “heterosexual” are radically different—like yin and yang—two separate and different parts of the whole, the human species. As gay people, our function in human evolution is different from the evolutionary function of heterosexuals (reproductive survival). This new understanding says that not only is being gay important and substantial, it has a significant evolutionary and social purpose, and provides gay people with innate purpose that guides our behavior, our lives, and our many contributions to society. I will write extensively on this topic in future issues.

For a long time, gays have been trying to minimize our differences from heteros as an act of survival. But now, for the first time, the forward-moving force of history compels us to maximize our differences from straights as an act of love to ourselves and to them—the emergence of a new gay consciousness. In deep and profound ways, none of us has really come out yet.

Don Kilhefner, Ph.D., is a Jungian psychologist in West Hollywood. He can be reached at: donkilhefner@sbcglobal.net.