Pride at 250

Pride at 250

Well, not quite. "Pride" as a value descriptor for gay people is only 56 years old, credited to Craig Schoonmaker, on the first anniversary of the Stonewall riot.

As we mark the nation's 250th and its unfinished business, I had been mulling over the gay angle, and it was handed to me at a memorial service last week for Congressman Barney Frank at Boston's sacred Faneuil Hall, selected by Barney’s friends in part to demonstrate how far we have come, while fighting for our future.

The Hall, built by Peter Faneuil in 1742, became over the centuries a home for abolitionists, civil rights, and progressive policy gatherings, in addition to selling tchotchkes and funnel cakes on the ground floor.

Peter Faneuil, like I assume the majority of wealthy people in the North, made his money from trafficking in people; the transatlantic slave shipping trade — a particularly revolting business.

Barney Frank was brilliant, passionate, and tough; he changed the lives of tens of millions of Americans.

That Barney was a gay Jew means he would have been persona non grata in Faneuil's time.

That he was memorialized in Fanueil's Hall by Boston's Asian-American woman Mayor Michele Wu and Massachusetts' lesbian Governor Maura Healey was its own statement.

Pretty great.

All this juxtaposition — the savagery and greed of our colonial past and present, and the yielding yet obvious progress of inclusion — was a pretty good encapsulation of our first 250 years as a nation, and maybe a prelude to the next.

Our nation has extraordinary stains. And our nation spends a sad amount of energy resisting honesty about our past and our present. Why is for the psychologists. But, our nation has the tools in place, and the throbbing desires of a multicultural, pluralistic population, to continually make the odds of progress and advancement.

In this Pride Month, I reflect on my own experience. I remember as a child and teen in Miami, Florida, that our newspaper published the names and pictures of homosexuals who were arrested for, well, being homosexual. And in 1976, at 13, the nation's sweetheart and literal beauty queen Anita Bryant led an overwhelmingly successful effort in Miami to bar homosexuals from civil society. The advertising on television from Ms. Bryant — an official spokesperson for the state's leading industry at the time — demonizing homosexual men as pedophiles whose goal was to abuse our children was quite shocking and awful. Which was the point.

As I entered the workforce, we were barred from security clearances, much employment, the military, could not adopt, could not be sure that we could keep our biological children, and our brand as male homosexuals was that of a predator. I stayed 'in the closet' as long as I could. It felt life or death. When I see and interact with today's youngens and their pride and queerness, I am happy for them at the same time I battle my own homonegativity [or phobia].

People like Barney had the courage to walk through doors being pried open. It was straight [we think] men and women who actually started the prying — Bella Abzug, Mel Levine, Ruth Schack, Marion Barry — many of whom were Jewish or Black and well aware of the price not just to us but to society of all this bias — who gave us cover to live our lives.

And the backlash to our progress was both awful, stark, and completely predictable.

A Hawaii mid-level court opined in 1992 that marriage MIGHT be available to gays. That was enough for the conservative congressional majority to ban gay marriage in Congress, a relationship that existed nowhere.

But progress we made. Two transformational things happened that brought most of the success.

First, we were pushed pushed pushed to "come out." To tell the very personal story to our friends and family. With the premise that intimate respect would trump the abstract fear. Then, someone invented the notion of drawing into the fight friends and families — people who are not gay being enlisted to support their gay peers. Brilliant. All of a sudden, your movement is exponentially larger.

Second, the LGBTQ+ movement shifted from the traditional civil rights existential footing of "I don't care what you think of me, you can't hurt me under the law." That is the organizing principle for Hate Crimes, Employment Non-Discrimination, and lifting bans on people with HIV to travel. Activists forced movement leaders and elected officials with gay marriage to shift to an entirely different organizing principle, which is "I am worthy, love and validate me." We claimed marriage was a secular act, but nobody was fooled; we were asking Americans to acknowledge that we matter. And they did.

Note the power of "pride" as a label. February is Black History Month. March is Women’s History Month. June is Pride. It is the only descriptor I can think of that is a value. How genius, and powerful, is that?

Barney Frank forever told us that Americans were far more racist than they were willing to admit, and far less homophobic than they were socialized to proclaim.

Whether there's empiricism behind that isn't the point; rather, what undergirded his view: That people's minds aren't made up, and there's always room to move us, and that allyship was everything.

Barney, as a young [closeted] man, went to Mississippi with the Freedom Riders in 1965 because he was compelled by injustices he could not stand. Most would argue they weren't his fight. He saw the world as the opposite.

The Congressional Black Caucus, for years, had voting records far more favorable to LGBTQ+ issues than polling of their constituents would have compelled. Far more. Why? In the House Chamber, if you were Black, Latino, gay, or disabled, you could literally see a common and unified opponent. The exact same people with the exact same tropes were, in the name of conservatism, trying to keep you quiet or down or out. We lived every day in a sense that banding together we were stronger, as a moral and political matter.

That is almost always the case.

Sitting in the front row at Congressman Frank's memorial was former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, a really lovely and great man who is one of only three African Americans ever elected to that position [just think about that for a second]. Patrick was a sitting governor in 2012 when he chose to officiate at Congressman Frank's same-sex marriage to his partner Jim. My hometown newspaper would report all of this scene as news, not fantasy.

Pretty great.

I long ago accepted that in our nation, we don't advance without regression, we don't regress without fight. Rather, there are two constant forces — progressivism and conservatism — always in tension, always battling for primacy — and we each get to decide, on every issue, where we want to plant ourselves.

The professionals I work with and I are pretty clear on our choices, and are proud of the progress we help make, in the face of enormous headwinds. I keep reminding myself that conservatives fight this hard against our progress because they know, or fear, we are winning.

Here's to the next 250 and all the progress to come.