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Beyond Visibility: Surviving the storm of a gay-bashing election season

Beyond Visibility is a column that explores the intersection of sexuality, politics, pop culture, faith and whatever else is on Heather Hogan’s mind every 30 days.

In September, my nephew will start kindergarten; a new world full of new friends and new books and new toys and new games and, for the first time in his life, new opinions that haven’t been filtered through or interpreted by his socially progressive parents. He had his first run-in with this reality at the public playground last week when a boy his age told him that wearing fingernail polish – especially pink fingernail polish – was “girl stuff.”

When September rolls around, it won’t be one kid talking about gender normative behavior on the playground; it will be 100 kids talking about gender normative behavior on the playground. And you know what else they’ll be talking about? The impending presidential election.

You’d think five year olds would have better things to do than rehash the political opinions they hear their parents chatting about with each other, or shouting at the TV – but the only thing children do more than soak up information is regurgitate it to anyone who will listen. My best friend teaches first grade and the kids in her class are more passionate about Obamacare than they are about Justin Bieber. (And those little guys love Justin Bieber.)

So, in addition to reading and writing and calendar time, my nephew is going to do a lot of learning about what kids in rural Georgia think about gay people. Because thanks to folks like Pat Robertson and James Dobson, right-wing homophobia has been a staple of America’s political discourse since the 1980s.

HOW WE GOT TO WHERE WE ARE

In 1979, a group of right-wing wonks decided to make a power play by convincing the evangelical community to hitch their wagon to the GOP. They recruited little known Baptist televenagelist Jerry Falwell to start sharing the message that Republicans were the party of social traditionalism. The idea spread like a win-win wildfire. If evangelical leaders would deliver their followers into the hands of the GOP, the GOP would deliver political power into the hands of evangelical leaders. It created a feedback loop not unlike hurricanes that suck up tornadoes and send them spiraling willy-nilly into innocent communities, with politicians pulling in more Christian leaders and Christian leaders pulling in more laypeople willing to vote Republican and more laypeople willing to vote Republican pulling in more politicians, until no one knew who was driving the typhoon.

Every movement needs an enemy, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, right-wingers turned their attention to America’s citizenry, looking for a group of people “other” enough to become a foil. Much of the evangelical community’s rhetoric revolves around “traditional family values,” by which they mean: a husband exerting his power over his wife and children until his sons are old enough to assume similar power and his daughters are old enough to submit to their own husbands. The gay community, by its very nature, doesn’t adhere to such a patriarchal view of society; it was a perfect target.

So evangelical leaders did what they’ve been doing for thousands of years: They created a propaganda campaign based around a couple of Biblical quotes taken out of context and convinced their followers that their very way of life was under seige by gay people. They exploited fear of the unknown, manipulated that fear into hatred (like taking candy from Joseph Goebbels), and continued to trade votes for power and power for votes until every Baptist kid under the sun was using the word “gay” like they used the words “small pox,” and wishing they could get vaccianted for both. 

With a new enemy acquired, the right-wing could keep could keep fighting their war.

ENEMIES WITH FACES

Unfortunately for right-wing traditionalists, it’s a lot harder to convince your followers to wage war against an enemy when your enemy has a face. Thanks to the tireless efforts of LGBT rights activists, it is now safe to come out almost everywhere in America, which means a lot more Americans are aware of their gay neighbors. And Americans who don’t know real-life gay people, do know TV gay people.

Throught the entire decade of the 1980s – when the Moral Majority launched itself into the middle of America’s political dialogue – there were only about 10 gay and lesbian characters on American TV. In the 2011-2012 TV season, there are are over 85 LGBT characters on American TV. But queer visibility doesn’t stop there. Where does America go for its daytime entertainment? Ellen DeGeneres. (Lesbian.) Where does America go for its nightly news? Anderson Cooper. (Gay.) Where does America go for financial advice? Suze Orman (Lesbian.) Where does America go for awards show hosting? Neil Patrick Harris. (Gay.) Where does America go for cooking tips? Cat Cora. (Lesbian.)

Thirty years ago, a person could have said, “I don’t believe gay people should have the right to get married” and all they would have been rejecting was a concept. Today when a person says that, they’re saying, “I don’t think the friendliest, funniest woman on daytime television should be able to marry the gorgeous, talented woman she’s so very in love with.” Which is one of the reasons why last year, for the first time in history, a majority of Americans (53 percent) said they believed same-sex marriage should be “recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages.”

It’s easy to demonize unknown entities; it’s a lot harder to convince people Ellen and Portia are going to kidnap their children and eat them for dinner.

WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS

Being a gay person during election season in America is not easy. Whether you like it or not, you are going to be dragged into the national spotlight. Not your ideology about the economy, not your personal principles of faith, not your beliefs about war and immigration and infrastructure and education. No, who you are, the very essence of your identity, is going to come under fire. You will not be able to turn on a televised debate, read opinion pieces in national newspapers, or even pursue Twitter without stumbling across homophobic hate speech about how you don’t deserve the same rights as everyone else because you are, at worst, an abomination to your Creator, and at best, a threat to the stability of society.

And even though times are changing, even though “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” has been overturned, even though more and more states continue to pass marriage equality legislation, even though most Americans are rushing toward the correct side of social history, the political rhetoric can be monumentally discouraging.

When that kid on the playground told my nephew his pink nail polish was “girl stuff,” my nephew rolled his eyes and said, “That’s a dumb rule. Who made it?” and went about the business of separating his most awesome toy trucks from his super lamest toy trucks. I have no doubt that he’ll show the same sense of indignant independence when his kindergarten classmates mimic the words that have been passed down from politicians to preachers to parents to kids about gay people.

But it breaks my heart a little bit that he’ll ever have to hear someone say I’m not normal.

What bolsters my hope is the knowledge that things really are getting better. The more LGBT people come out, the more LGBT television and movie and book characters we see, the more LGBT news anchors and talkshow hosts and actors and radio personalities we get acquainted with, the more impossible it will become for evangelical right-wingers to fear-monger their constituents and parishioners.  

My sister showed my nephew some music videos of Adam Lambert after the playground nail polish incident, and he fell in love. Here’s what he knows about gay people: They’re “fashionable rock stars” (Lambert), they buy the “very best toys in the world” (me), and they’re “wicked good” at soccer (my girlfriend). They’re the most awesome people on earth, basically.

Harvey Milk said that knowing a gay person “once and for all … break[s] down the myths, destroy[s] the lies and distortions.” My nephew knows a gay person. My grandmother knows a gay person. Everyone who owns a TV knows a gay person. 

Gay people won’t escape the hate tornadoes of this presidential election, and probably not the next one either. The storm is still roaring – but the tide seems to have turned. The day is coming when so many gay people will be known to so many Americans that Moral Majority propaganda won’t hold sway anymore. On that day, the country will echo my already wise nephew. Gay people can’t get married? “That’s a dumb rule. Who made it?”

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