I wanted to be so wrong in predicting the future on LGBTQ rights
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I wanted to be so wrong in predicting the future on LGBTQ rights
It not only is "Not Over." It's much, much worse. And GOP politicians are simply sloughing it off when their own sexual and gender hypocrisy is blatantly exposed.
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Earlier this week the New York Times columnist Charles Blow interviewed me for an incisive column he wrote about Tennessee’s anti-drag queen bill, and he referenced my 2015 book, “It’s Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia and Winning True Equality,” calling it “prescient.” But believe me, this was a case in which I would have been happy to have gotten it all wrong.
A major thrust of the book was that an ugly, powerful response to the gains made on LGBTQ rights by 2015 was being hatched in the far-right laboratories of hate, and most queer people and many progressives weren’t prepared, overcome by what I called “victory blindness,” celebrating the marriage equality win and other wins of that time, thinking all the work was done. This created mass complacency in the culture, I noted, and was the number one mistake of the queer rights movement: You never fully win, and always have to fight, as they will always try to take it away.
But that aside, there was much I didn’t predict about this moment. The reality we’re seeing now — particularly with regard to the velocity of the bile coming at us — is far worse than I thought. I didn’t have any idea at that time that a messianic figure would arise within the GOP just a year later, an authoritarian who would supercharge the Christian nationalist movement, which had been planning and plotting. Nor did I have a clue that that person would become president of the United States, radically stripping rights.
The contours were all there: the 2014 Hobby Lobby decision which gave religious extremists a foot in the door at the Supreme Court; a Republican Party in which public opinion could easily be manipulated, which I noted made polls of the time on marriage or LGBTQ rights useless; and the emergence of what Brown University-affiliated scholar Jay Michelson had called the “victim-opressor dynamic,” in which those stripping others of their rights framed themselves as the victims.
But as I stated, I hadn’t banked on a radical, lying racist, misogynistic president putting in place a far-right theocratic Supreme Court. Nor did I foresee the GOP, prodded by that president, so swiftly put in place a white supremacist leadership — nationally but also in states across the country.
I also didn’t zero in on how much these GOP leaders would just slough off hypocrisy. A couple of cases in point are the Governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, being revealed as having done drag in high school even as he now signed a bill into law last week banning drag queens and drag performances anywhere in Tennessee in public where children might see them.
Or the lieutenant governor of Tennessee, Rand McNally, who was revealed this week to have been liking and responding — including with heart emojis — to racy photos of a gay man on Instagram who celebrated himself as a “slut” and a “prostitute” and as “giving head.”
Nothing wrong with any of that — or with anyone “liking” it. But the hypocrisy is what should be disqualifying, with McNally voting against the very people he’s “encouraging” — to use his excuse for why he was liking posts — on social media with his likes.
And yet, McNally, though he was asked in an interview in which he said he was “really sorry” if he will resign (he reserved judgement to the legislature), is unlikely to go anywhere. And even if he did, it would be a pyrrhic victory since so many others who’ve done even more horrendous things and engaged in far greater hypocrisy are still in office in the GOP. Or they’re running again — like Donald Trump.
Tennessee leads the way with 26 anti-LGBTQ bills being pushed, but it is not alone: In 2023 there are over 385 anti-LGBTQ bills filed in the states. That is astounding, and, again, while I certainly predicted the movement against equality was mounting a fierce and devastating counter-offensive in 2015, it’s much worse than I imagined.
LGBTQ people — and their allies, including Democratic leaders who are too often running scared of issues like drag queens and transgender youth — needs to organize fiercely. We also need to understand, with bills in Tennessee and elsewhere that are also aiming to undo marriage equality, that attacks on drag queens and transgender people are attacks on all of us. No one will be spared.
We’re dealing with a fully-fueled white supremacist movement in power — in the House of Representatives and in many states. Unless we understand the scope of that, and don’t fool ourselves into a false sense of security and tell ourselves that the rest of America will save us, we’re bound to repeat mistakes of the past.
I wanted to be so wrong in predicting the future on LGBTQ rights
Remember when the "brilliant" gay mind of Andrew Sullivan told our community is was time, after marriage equality, to close up shop, declare victory, and move on?!! And now he's on Bill Maher supporting the idea of keeping the knowledge of the existence of LGBT out of schools, and "save those issues for later," as if there is something so nasty about being LGBT that young kids shouldn't learn that a minority of boys like boys, and girls can like girls, and a minority of people with penises don't have boy brains, and a minority of people with vaginas don't necessarily have girl brains, and that's all normal and OK and fine.
Well Andrew, why is it when you're wrong, you are so spectacularly wrong? We have to start calling the anti-LGBT laws (and more subtle racism and anti-Semitism on the right), by its name, which is fascism. And HRC or GLAAD, or somebody needs to get on the phone with the U.S. Holocaust Museum and have them release a statement of condemnation, now, because in Florida, they're talking about taking trans children away from supportive parents, and that is fascism, and that is why the US Holocaust Museum exists - to remind us that fascism doesn't end well, ever!
As the mother of two adult children who happen to be gay, I am very concerned about the nasty verbiage spewed by the GOP. Stonewall was in 1969. Why do LGBTQ continually need to fight for their rights as human beings? Drag is entertainment. Since when is this censored? The Christian right fanatics are not forced to attend a drag show; they have no sense of humor and wouldn't get it anyway. If they want to live dour, miserable, regulated lives, let them, but they need to be stopped from legislating their prejudices and their idiotic religious beliefs. We can't stop fighting these authoritarian morons.