“With out killing them out there’s no way to fix it,” wrote Mark Chambers, the mayor of Carbon Hill, Ala., a town of about 2,000 just about smack in the middle of nowhere off Interstate 22. He was replying to a Facebook friend’s comment last week about the need for revolution to stop gays on a post he’d shared reading: “We live in a society where homosexuals lecture us on morals, transvestites lecture us on human biology, baby killers lecture us on human rights and socialists lecture us on economics.” He has issued an apology saying that while he believes “my comment was taken out of context and was not targeting the LGBTQ community, I know it was wrong to say anyone should be killed.”
Predictably, Chambers has been accused of “inciting” violence. This is jurisprudentially illiterate and tiresome. But he is guilty of being an example that gays’ position is probably more precarious than some think. The sense many have in cities with big Pride parades going on this month is that the work for gay equality is largely over and activism needs to move on to other related issues, such as trans rights. I suspect many young lefties don’t remember or choose not to remember that in 2008 Barack Obama ran on marriage being between one man and one woman. The gay white man running for the Democratic nomination in 2020 has received none of the extra credit Democrats usually get for representing “diversity.” “Is Pete Buttigieg just another white male candidate, or does his gayness count as diversity?” asked Christina Cauterucci a few months ago in Slate. This made my skin crawl already. My skin practically got up and ran away when I read in the LA Review of Books an article titled the single worst abuse of language I’ve come across: “Heterosexuality Without Women.” In it, Yale American studies professor Greta LaFleur analyzes a Time cover photo depicting Mayor Pete and his husband Chasten:
“If certain forms of structural power such as whiteness have become detachable from white people, perhaps this is true of other forms of structural power as well. … The argument I am making, of course, is that this photo is about a lot of things, but one of its defining features is its heterosexuality. It’s offering us the promise that our first gay first family might actually be a straight one.”
Beware of professors bearing “abouts.”
I really don’t know what to make of woke homophobia except to say that I hope I am dead wrong in my intuition that somehow educated culture is turning on gay men as deserving of political and cultural solidarity. I note the advancing instances of it with dread. I hope one day gayness can be a matter of mere apathy, but it’s too soon after the culture shifted to stop feeling protective of what is still a fragile cultural consensus. For now, though it doesn’t matter in the largest moral sense whether somebody is gay or straight, being gay is not something people have the luxury of not caring about. It is something for which they must fight, and unfortunately fight on all sides. And to have the energy to do that, they must be proud. Happy Pride Month.
