Abstract

Straight, Not Narrow

The author argues that same-sex marriage is a defining issue for straight progressives, as well as for gays. I got tired of hearing straight progressives call the struggle for my civil rights "identity politics" when the truth was that their own identity as members of the heterosexual majority was being mustered and manipulated to drive American politics to the right. When Ronald Reagan held his arm aloft with the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Reagan, a divorced man, hadn't suddenly got religion; he was consolidating Republican power and making his handlers from GE a mint. So my straight progressive married friends demonstrated against the contras while I did my "identity politics" with my gay and lesbian allies. The straight progressives could not see that the contra war was intimately linked to the culture war; that the culture war was what was drawing the foot soldiers whose votes and organizational zeal emboldened the right to do pretty much whatever it wanted anywhere in the world; and that so long as straight progressives were afraid to stand up against the real political dynamics that fed this growing monster in America, they would continue to lose. It was "identity politics" (the calculated appeal to fear of homosexuals, fear of women's emancipation, fear of blacks, period) that gave the Republicans their electoral victories and put Bush I and II into the White House.