Gay Rights And The American Elite
The cover story in the current issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine recounts the remarkable progress toward equality and acceptance that gay students have made at Yale over the past thirty years. The same is true at every prominent college or university I’m familiar with.
In the homes and workplaces of the American elite — roughly defined by a certain mix of education, wealth and social status — gays and lesbians have achieved something very close to normalcy, that is, a situation in which being straight or gay makes no more of a difference than having blue eyes or brown. Conversely, if you argue that homosexuality is perverse or disgusting, you will quickly be branded as ignorant.
Given how liberal the American elite tends to be on a broad array of social issues, this may not seem surprising. But it should be. As George Chauncey’s cover story in the Alumni Mag makes clear, things were very different very recently. Long after overt racism became unacceptable and overt sexism was on the way out, wide swaths of the elite still found it acceptable to condemn homosexuality.
In 1984, the Alumni Mag published its first-ever ad sponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Alumni Association. The response was
one of the largest outpourings of hostile letters the magazine had ever seen.
When the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed in 1987 that described Yale as a “gay school”, the president of the university rushed to assure alumni that it was no such thing.
Given how many decades it took, even for progressives, to become advocates of racial and gender equality, changing attitudes toward homosexuality are remarkable. But why have they changed so fast? Although the American elite has become more secular, I don’t see many indications that its hostility towards homosexuals had much to do with religion. Thirty years ago, homosexuality was considered at least as much of a mental illness as it was a sin. But this passage in the Alumni Mag caught my attention:
[The gay rights movement was] profoundly shaped by the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. All around them, lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men saw their heterosexual friends decisively rejecting the moral codes of their parents’ generation, which had limited sex to marriage, and forging a new moral code that linked sex to love, pleasure, freedom, self-expression, and common consent…the fact that so many young heterosexuals considered sexual freedom to be a vital marker of personal freedom made lesbians and gay men feel their quest for freedom was part of a larger movement.
I think that’s right. The American elite — and much of American society — now believes that the individual alone should decide what is ethical and what isn’t when it comes to (consensual) sex. If you believe that pre-marital sex, promiscuity, and most any strange fetish is fair game for consenting adults, how can you possibly condemn someone else for deciding that he likes men better than women?
Cross-posted at Conventional Folly
3 Responses to “Gay Rights And The American Elite”
David — Agreed. I think there are, of course, a lot of other factors, but the sexual revolution is a huge one. I think another is that the average age of marriage has gone up so much due to women (and men, to a lesser extent) wanting to get educated and get careers before starting families. It might sound unrelated, but when it's considered ok to be 19 and unmarried, 23 and unmarried, 32 and unmarried — as it really wasn't 50 years ago — it's a lot easier for young people to really understand who they are and what they want before things like spouses and children and the obligations they entail make everything so messy. I can imagine for most straight people it's a lot easier to accept someone as gay if they don't seem to be abandoning all their prior familial obligations by coming out as such.
On the other hand, the post seems to mention the “elite” a lot, which kind of jarred me each time I read it. It seems a bit out of place — while gay people don't generally have the inherent disadvantages (on average) in terms of racial prejudice or lack of access to education that most protected classes do, and while they certainly do not have the problem of accidentally getting pregnant because of lack of access to birth control like is difficult for certain minority groups, they are much more likely than their straight counterparts to experience violent crime (including murder), sexual violence, disease and lack of adequate health care services, as well as diminished rights in the workplace. This is at least doubly the case for trans people.
In the city where I live, young poor people of the alternate sexualities are much more likely to be on the streets, and are much more likely to turn to last-resort professions like drug dealing and prostitution. Of course, most of us have been more exposed to the sophisticated, well-dressed event planner, the young and flamboyant hairdresser, the *fabulous* fashion designer, the lawyer in his D&G suit. It's important to remember that these are all stereotypes. Of course, gay people are no more talented or educated or smart than anyone else (although they are less likely to shy away from certain interests because of their perceived femininity), and they face greater consequences for not being educated, or smart, or talented, than most of the rest of us.
Anyway, I guess it's a small complaint about the word “elite”, but overall, I agree with the post.
The author of this post makes reference to an article from 1984, twenty-five years ago. I suppose that on a variety of historical scales, that's not a very long time. But in the context of actual individual lives of the people you know, twenty-five years is one-third of their normal life expectancy.
Twenty-five years is a big bite out of your own life.
I'd say the last twenty-five years is remarkable for being the time-period in our history when large numbers of homosexuals have lived their lives out of the closet, in the open. It's reasonable that this would also be the period in our history when homosexuality was demystified. It's reasonable that this would be the period when homosexuals stopped being treated like freaks.
I'm also sure some attempted to impede that progress at every step.
Does the content of a post determine what adds go up next to it? Or is it purely an accident that there is an add for Atlantis All-Gay Cruises up on this page right now?