Radio Boston on NPR put on a program asking whether Boston was “post gay,” asking if we are so comfortable now in eastern Massachusetts that there is no reason to be concerned about gay rights and politics, more or less. The short answer is no. I gave some brief and hurried remarks as I pulled my aging Honda into a side road to make the cell call into the station.
Someone rather ignorantly once suggested that if Quincy Massachusetts is so gay unfriendly that I should move. I have several responses to this: 1)Why should I? We like Quincy: the water, affordable housing, accessibility to Boston and north Quincy is coming up with some decent restaurants 2) As a some-time activist, it seems to me that the “work” needs to be done in places like Quincy, not JP where this upper middle class gay man lives. And really, the political “work” I do on a day to day basis involves mostly daring to go to Stop N Shop and wait in line at the deli counter where generally I can count on getting the once over by someone. And not because I’m cute, I don’t think. The saddest day was when a woman dragged her son away from our front walk where we were handing out Halloween candy a couple of years ago. We don’t have rainbow flags, bumper stickers or T shirts that say “A Woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” We bring in the trash cans promptly, cut the grass and trim the hedge. Model citizens, I think.
In October (2009), Ruthie and I went to the March on Washington in DC where the numbers of participants were in the tens of thousands as opposed to the hundreds of thousands of previous marches in years past. Last October’s march was by and large political – DOMA, DODT, and other concerns carried the day as opposed to floats with bar music and drag queens. But I wondered at the attendance this past year. I went to DC in 1987 (Sing if you know it :”October Eleven, Nineteen Eighty Seven”) and the Mall that year was packed. I walked with friends around the massive AIDS quilt in my denim jacket and wondered and wept at the tragedy that in that era bound us together even as it tore friends and loved ones from us.
But even in 2010, there is still an importance to identity politics. Michael Apple writes, “For social movements to prosper, they must provide identities that constantly revivify the reasons for participating in them. They must, hence, have an emotional economy in which the costs of being ‘different’ are balanced by the intense meanings and satisfactions of acting in opposition to dominant social norms and values.” In some ways, the social norms and values are something like our gender expression or simply that we have same-sex partners. I wonder though about what will happen if gay people in this instance do not see benefits in acting in opposition to these norms, even as they do to any extent. If we are simply assimilated (can we be??) – will the LGBT community cease to use or need this currency of which Apple writes, with the result being that the movement will die out? Is that the goal? One need only attend the Pride marches in recent years to see changes occurring. Gone are the ubiquitous multi colored plastic or trendy retro red Radio Flyer wagons carrying toddlers pulled by two moms or (then rarely) two dads. The kids have grown up like kids everywhere, have their own agendas, and moms and dads aren’t at the march; they are at soccer practice with the kids. Assimilation has actually begun a process of weakening the movement. New identities as well as divisions in our community have arisen, at times separating those with kids and those without to name only one. Where is our so-called community? What does it look like? The fight for equality nationally exists; not everyone can marry, there are still hate crimes, discrimination. If those who have “successfully assimilated” simply turn to their own lives, those who are yet on the margins – and there are still countless who are – will lose valuable allies who might be said to know better.
