Dems Go Queer, For a Night

On Thursday night, Logo (the gay network owned by Viacom) and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) sponsored a Democratic Presidential forum on gay issues. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel and Bill Richardson all participated. Columnist Margaret Carlson moderated the proceeding, joined by the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart, HRC's Joe Solmonese and lesbian rocker Melissa Etheridge. Unlike the recent contretemps at the YearlyKos convention, this affair was decidedly more civil. It had to be. The candidates showed up, one by one, to chit-chat with Carlson and friends in a rather antiseptic, faux-talk show studio. The audience was small, peppered with B-list gay celebs and mostly quiet. The candidates never crossed paths, and so, there was never any real debate.

Nonetheless, there were some interesting moments: Bill Richardson's supposed gaffe in response to the nature vs. nuture question (are you born gay or do you choose to be gay?), Etheridge's attack on Hillary Clinton's record and the general, totally gay enthusiasm of Gravel and Kucinich. I sat down to watch and discuss the forum with queer critics Lisa Duggan, Tavia Nyong'o and Alisa Solomon.

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Richard Kim: So what did you folks think? The Human Rights Campaign has been promoting this event as an "historic" forum, the first of its kind. Did it feel historic to you?

Alisa Solomon: I have mixed feelings about the forum. My attitude going in was kind of cynical, yet I found myself moved at some points. But not only is it not historic, because it happened before, but it's actually worse than the last one. [HRC hosted a similar event in 2003 on CSPAN, moderated by Sam Donaldson.] This forum was on a queer cable network. It's not even on a mainstream network. It didn't involve mainstream interviewers. It's much more ghettoized. With all of these forums and debates, it's great that supposedly there's an opportunity to ask the candidates to go into depth on specific issues, whether it's labor or African American issues or gay issues. But there's something really balkanizing about it too. It's the worst kind of niche marketing. Are candidates going to discuss LGBT issues only before a queer audience, labor issues only before an audience of union members, and so on? And are union members the only people who are supposed to care about labor issues, and so on?

Tavia Nyong'o: The forum was what I expected it to be--circling back and forth on the question of marriage equality with some minor excursions to other issues like healthcare or employment. But part of what I found moving about the event was the raw political need emanating from interviewer Melissa Etheridge. Counterbalancing the insistence on marriage was this more general hunger for public recognition. It was almost a subtext of the whole forum. Joe Solmonese and Melissa Etheridge indicated that they've had these conversations about gay issues in private, that they have this ongoing relationship with Hillary, with the Clintons, with some of the other candidates, and it was like they wanted these inside conversation acknowledged publicly.

Lisa Duggan: I felt cynical about it too. It wasn't historic, and not only was it ghettoized in terms of its circulation and broadcast, but the definitions of "gay community" and "gay issues" have become so narrow. Marriage equality has become the absolute litmus test. It's like seeing the women's movement reduced to abortion rights. It's like marriage is the only question and the other questions were raised on the side.

RK: Well, how do you think the candidates did on the question of marriage? There seemed to be two camps--Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, who support full marriage equality now, and the rest of the candidates [Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards and Bill Richardson], who want some form of civil union and perhaps marriage equality later on.

AS: I absolutely agree with Lisa that gay marriage has become a litmus test issue. But, even though it's not the major issue for me, and even though I don't share the view that marriage is the way to secure health and other benefits, when I heard the candidates dancing away from it, it pissed me off. You want them to stand morally for equal rights and then make the progressive analysis that would call for a different relationship between marriage and the state in general.

RK: What would that sound like?

LD: Well, there was no question about marriage in this forum. The only question was about gay inclusion in it. It was up or down on gay inclusion. Full inclusion now or some incremental progress to full inclusion later, but the desirability of one size fits all marriage, over and above any reworking of options, was completely unquestioned. It was only about who we let in or out. Only Obama suggested some readjustment in the landscape of possibility. The really amazing thing about his answer was the idea that civil unions should include full federal benefits, and that marriage should be considered a purely religious practice. He advocated separation of church and state; religion should be over there and federal civil unions should be over here…

AS: But only for gays and lesbians. There was no follow up question that said--Do you think that's how it should be for straight people too?

LD: Obama almost went there. He more or less said that marriage is a religious institution and that civil unions should have full federal rights. It had more of a progressive edge.

AS: Well, Edwards tried to go there when he said he wouldn't impose his faith on the nation.

LD: But his answer to the marriage question was the worst in some ways, totally self-contradictory. Clinton's answer was similar in content, but it was much more polished and practiced. She had clearly thought about how to respond and how her answer would be reported in the press. But Edwards seemed nervous, unthinking. It's like no one coached him at all. I was really sorry to see that because in some ways his positions, especially on poverty, are more progressive than the other candidates. His whole speech about homeless gay youth…

AS: That was pathetic! It's 2007, and it's like the first time he's ever heard of gay kids getting kicked out of their homes. Though I do give him credit for bringing it up --along with adoption and anti-discrimination in employment and other issues that the questioners weren't bothering to raise.

RK: What did you think about the way Obama addressed the analogy between marriage equality and the civil rights movement?

TN: I appreciated that he pointed out how gays are being scapegoated as a threat to the black family. Family values rhetoric resonates strongly in black political settings, and I'm thrilled Obama is willing to take it head on in venues like the Howard University debate, and not just in front of a gay audience. I also think he's figured out where the comparison between gay rights and civil rights falls apart and becomes unproductive. The whole tagline of "separate but equal" that the questioners kept bringing up, they kept talking about it as it if were just a tagline instead of a whole institutional structure of segregation.

LD: When the questioners asked Obama to compare marriage equality and civil rights, he first balked at the question, then he said we're not talking about Jim Crow here. We're talking about inequality, but we're not talking about Jim Crow, so he did reference the structural difference. But it's like people aren't familiar with the basic history of the civil rights movement, that there's a debate and discussion over the failure of purely formal civil rights to produce substantive equality. It's like the questioners were totally unaware of that discussion.

TN: In some ways nobody seemed to have watched the Howard debate because that was the context of the whole debate--the fact that formal quality doesn't match up to substantive equality. That's why we still need the black debate now, to address all the issues of racial inequality that are still around. That wasn't the language of the Howard debate, but that was the context.

AS: What did you think about Obama saying that if he had been counseling the civil rights movement at the time his parents got married, when they wouldn't have been able to do that in some states, that he would have advised that the more important issue was voting rights laws, not anti-miscegenation laws?

TN: I feel that he came up with that just to short circuit the comparison between anti-miscegenation laws and bans on gay marriage. He's been asked that question a lot because he makes his personal story so central to his own candidacy. He can use this personal narrative to diffuse the one-to-one analogy between marriage rights and civil rights.

LD: He's the one that gets pressured the most on that analogy. So he has to come up with a response to that analogy in a way that the other candidates just don't.

RK: There were a couple times in this debate where the Howard debate and the AFL-CIO debate were referenced. This debate could be seen as just another one in the identity politics primary. What do you think about that and the way gay issues play into identity politics? It's not clear to me that, in fact, this forum is the same as the AFL-CIO one, which has a real institutional base, or the Howard debate which had a constituency the Democrats really need.

LD: Labor politics can be translated into a kind of identity politics, as if it's a special interest politics, but it's not fundamentally. Meanwhile, the kind of sexual politics that exceeds the terms of identity politics--that wasn't represented at all tonight. The Howard debate had a lot of depth about economic issues intertwined with racial inequality issues. This one did not. The people who brought those structural issues up tonight were the candidates, not the questioners. And when the candidates were advocating employment nondiscrimination or improvements in health care, the questions would just come back to marriage.

RK: What did you all think about the way Bill Richardson answered the question, posed by Melissa Etheridge, about whether you are born gay or choose to be gay?

AS: I thought Richardson's failure to grasp that question was one of the most poignant moments of the entire forum. It honestly didn't matter to him. It just wasn't computing. Why would it matter? Why would protection from discrimination be appropriate for people who were born Jewish but not for people who converted to Judaism? It makes no logical sense whatsoever, and I think that's why it wasn't computing with him, and I found that kind of endearing and also heartening.

LD: I think it was the inadvertent best moment in the whole forum because his answer was basically so good. He said it doesn't matter, that equality isn't a matter of choice or biology. It's when he said, "I don't want to characterize people according to some standards of science that I don't understand."

AS: It was his least political, most direct answer. You could really see him processing the question and trying to think it through because for once, he didn't have a prepared answer. It was very naked and honest--and right-on.

LD: They pushed him on it over and over again. Margaret Carlson followed up and explained to him that saying you are born gay is the ground on which equality can be claimed. But he was clearly, absolutely resisting the language of choice versus biology. It's not clear to me why he was, but he was.

TN: That marks a certain political shift. I thought it was a positive sign.

RK: Do you feel like the questioners treated Clinton, Edwards and Obama differently than they treated the other candidates?

AS: I think HRC felt that with Gravel and Kucinich, they [HRC] were doing those marginal candidates a favor by letting them participate. Gravel even called Joe Solmonese on his decision to exclude him at first. But with the other candidates, the vibe was more that those front-running candidates were doing HRC a favor just by showing up--sort of feeding the tacit expression of need that Tavia mentioned earlier. Melissa Etheridge kept telling candidates how honored and grateful she was that they came, as if we don't have every right simply to expect candidates to show up.

LD: Kucinich went down the list of economic issues, peace and war issues, all the big issues in this election that matter to everyone. He went down the list of gay issues too, but he also mentioned universal healthcare. He used the words "not for profit" and "Medicare for all," and he was the only one to do so.

AS: Those were the points that got no applause. His answer to the question about health benefits for same-sex partners was that there should be healthcare for all. If he had said marriage rights, everyone would have clapped. But they didn't clap for universal healthcare. It was the same thing when he said he voted against the war. Silence.

RK: What did you think about the format of the forum? What about the audience?

TN: The audience was salted with former and current Logo talent and the cast of Noah's Ark. It's like, they didn't even go outside the building to get the audience. It was a talk show format instead of a political debate or discussion.

AS: There was no idea of collectivity or movement because of the format.

RK: Who do you think won?

LD: Substantively, I think Obama won. But in terms of positioning and media savvy, I think Hillary Clinton did.

TN: I thought Hillary was a clear winner in the Howard debate, which was surprising. She did so much better than Obama and Richardson, and she really connected with the crowd, which was huge there. Here there was no crowd, a tiny studio audience, so it was harder for her to do that. I thought she did well and was very polished, but I think the performances evened out here. She did better than Edwards. The hardest question for her to deal with was when Melissa Etheridge asked her why her husband had abandoned gay people in 1996…

AS: She said, "You threw us under a bus!"

TN: Right, it was the toughest question of the night because she has a record to stand on, when her husband was in the White House and her votes in the Senate. I think there's some kind of spell that Hillary Clinton puts us under. Because if you follow the logic of her reasoning, her narration is that we've been steadily moving along a progressive path since the ‘90s in this country, and that's totally counterfactual.

AS: I think what she said was more complicated and calculated. She said we had been in a horrifying moment, and when anti-gay politics was used cynically and viciously, and it got personal. It was ugly, and we really had to fight against that and it was a big setback for us. She used that description to define a difference between Democrats and Republicans as well as to excuse some of her questionable earlier support for such legislation as DOMA, which she characterized as a bulwark against the riled up pressure for a marriage amendment.

LD: What about when she was asked why, as a member of the Armed Services Committee, why she didn't introduce legislation to get rid of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

AS: You didn't find her answer persuasive?

LD: No.

AS: Why didn't you? Not that I did, necessarily. But where do you see the flaw in her being strategic as a legislator and asking--Why bother under a Republican Congress, under a completely hostile President?

LD: Because there are other reasons than winning to introduce legislation. If you accept her pragmatic terms, the kind of politician she is, then that's the answer. But if you were a different kind of politician, then there's another kind of answer.

TN: Bill Richardson tried to get domestic partnership rights in New Mexico. That's the one thing I really responded to in his attempt to say he has a progressive record. I found myself sympathizing with him when he said that he's been trying to get this done in a Western state, not Massachusetts, but spending political capital in this area. What irks me about Hillary's progress narrative is that it re-writes her own history. She could have actually taken a symbolic stand on a bill in the Senate to get rid of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. But she's not prepared to do that kind of thing. Richardson was willing to call a special session and lose.

LD: Going back to the progress narrative…the problem is that it frames as inevitable something which requires political will. So rather than saying we need political will, we just say we should trust in inevitability or in the goodness of the American people. So it lets everyone off the hook in terms of the risks and efforts that are required to organize political will. One of the central tricks of American liberal discourse is to frame political progress as inevitable. So you let everyone off the hook.

AS: That's one way to read it, but another way--which the candidates at the forum also invoked--is to applaud the LGBT movement, to say what you are doing is admirable. You are on the streets. And I'm right there with you. Still another way of using the progress narrative is to stir people, to say that the train is going, and you should get on, and you should help push.

RK: Kucinich and Gravel said things similar to that…

TN: Here's where I miss Al Sharpton. Al Sharpton would have said, "I support gay marriage. I've performed gay marriage." But then he would have turned it around and made the conversation much more political. And I think, even Kucinich, he kind of resorted to a kind of "I love gays" argument.

LD: I miss Sharpton and Jesse Jackson too, because they were the kind of candidates who would turn things around and challenge the questioners and challenge the audience. They would turn around and say, "Well I'm for this, but what are you for? Are you standing up for other people too?" And none of these candidates did that tonight.

Comments (10)

1. Gee, Mr. Kim, I read it about halfway and `hung up'.....I guess I had not encountered a full transcript at TN before! Fortunately, I go away with a couple of good insights on how `ghettoized' our ever-more fragmented society has allowed to ?blossom? I certainly didn't know there is a gay network, but not surprised!

   I think it's time the candidates also be `invited' to debate/speak to groups like Native Americans, Indian-Americans, Palestinian-Americans, and of course Jewish Americans, Pro-Nuclear Energy groups, eBay sellers, fisherman, seperately for commercial and recreational types, and on and on and on....

   Posted by Happy at 08/11/2007 @ 5:24pm

2. There's a reason to be disappointed, Mr Kim.

   But the Top Tier guys (non-Gravel,non-Kucinich) knew that ANYTHING "controversial" (i.e. strongly pro-gay rights) they said...would be on YouTube in an hour and every 30 second ad the GOP ran next year 5000x.

   Like almost every Dem interest group, gays will turn out regardless of what Hillary, Barack, or Edwards do or do not say (to stop Giuliani, Romney, or Thompson from picking judges in 2009)....and the candidates know it.

   Posted by Mask at 08/11/2007 @ 7:29pm

3. Interesting distinction Obama makes between marriage and civil partnerships. Clever, too. Emphasize that marriage is a religious institution, leave it for the churches to sort out and seperate it from the state completely. Let the Christians keep their sacred marriage and at the same time give equal partnership rights to all. It might make the gays happy and not piss off the Christians too much. Yes, very clever. Also, Obama's right, of course, because the only arguments against gay marriage are of a religious nature. A state which is truly seperated from religion can't discriminate against any group in society on religious grounds.

   My country was the first in the world to give gay couples full marriage rights. It didn't take a big political debate; most people realised in the mid-90's it was time for truly secular, rational law to reach its logical conclusion. It wasn't just gay marriage, it was also shops being allowed to open on Sundays. The grand design for society which Christian politicians had forced on the rest of us for so many decades, was swiftly dismantled once the Christians were voted out of office - and it wasn't just gays who reaped the benefits.

   One thing I still have difficulty understanding, though, is why so many gays would first go through so much trouble trying to be accepted by mainstream society and then try to set themselves apart from society by behaving like complete idiots. Last week, for instance, my city hosted the annual Gay Pride Canal Parade, which consists of thousands of gays and lesbians dressing up - well dressing down, actually, some to their bare asses - and parading through the canals of Amsterdam on boats with dance music at full blast (FULL blast). I don't get it. This is the gay capital of the world. If there is one place where you don't have to make a point of being gay, it's Amsterdam. We've accepted you, alright? Now turn that music down and put on some clothes. (Sorry, I still haven't recovered - this damned parade floated right past my apartment, it lasted for hours and I was trying to work.)

   Posted by Amsterdam69 at 08/11/2007 @ 7:42pm

4. The Democrats appearance in a forum sponsored by the "Human Rights Campaign" ("human rights" another great phrase co-opted and ruined by liberals, who want to make the egregious - sodomy - appear half-way palatable) just shows the length to which they'll pander to any group, no matter how illegitimate most of its goals may be. Notwithstanding personal liberties and rights (such as equal access to housing, health care, and secular education and employment, including courtesy and respect) to which all people, including gays have a right, one of these illegitimate goals is government recognition of same-sex relationships through either civil unions or marriage.

   Neither of these goals is legitimate, since same-sex behavior is not a positive activity worthy of government sanction, like heterosexual marriage. Instead, same-sex behavior is physically damaging (primarily to mails) and is highly prone to serious disease (especially AIDS, several cancers), even if it occurs in a so-called "committed" relationship, which itself is a lie, considering how same-sex "couples" (ugh!) average only about 1 1/2 years together and still have outside contacts during the so-called "relationship."

   In short, it's heartening that Democrats didn't cave in to approving the farce of gay "marriage." But for the same reasons that they should not recognize this false institution, they have no business legitimizing anything else concerning same-sex activity (including and especially serving openly in the military or civil unions) other than allowing it to occur between consenting adults.

   Posted by skeetjr at 08/11/2007 @ 8:44pm

5. Posted by SKEETJR 08/11/2007 @ 8:44pm |

   Curious SKEET, what IS the "positive" aspect of heterosexual marriage (and needing gov't sanction) that homosexual marriage lacks?

   "production of children"?...lesbian couples do it all the time.

   So what else?

   Posted by Mask at 08/11/2007 @ 9:57pm

6. I hope they didn't promise more money for AIDS research. Please take that money and put it on Cancer or heart disease or something like that.

   Posted by woodyee at 08/12/2007 @ 08:47am

7. SKEETJR:

   Your post was idiotic and littered with inaccuracies, not to mention logical fallicies. If governments aren't going to recognize the right of human beings to marry each other, to enter into a legal contract freely, so long as they are able to consent, and so long as they are not engaged in the same contract with another person at the same time, they shouldn't be in the business at all. If marriage is such a great, positive, compelling governmental interest, why are consenting adults excluded from it? Oh, right. It's not about any of the things you mentioned, it's about the fact that some people are homophobic religious phonies, who take only the McNuggets which suit the lifestyle they want to lead. Guess what? "Congress shall make no law..."

   Posted by WillJeff at 08/12/2007 @ 6:10pm

8. LD: Obama almost went there. He more or less said that marriage is a religious institution and that civil unions should have full federal rights. It had more of a progressive edge.

   This is the point! If 'all' civil unions are recognized, including gay ones, then the marriage question is for religious organizations to sort out based on their religion, not what the government needs to do to protect domestic partnerships.

   Evangelicals have done a great job of blurring the distinction between church and state, because for them, it IS a religious issue. So why not say, OK, you can keep your religious issue and work that out in your church, but civil unions have nothing to do with religion, so the issue is whether the unions should be treated equally rather than whether they should be sanctioned by some religion.

   Posted by Metteyya at 08/13/2007 @ 2:41pm

9. "So why not say, OK, you can keep your religious issue and work that out in your church, but civil unions have nothing to do with religion, so the issue is whether the unions should be treated equally rather than whether they should be sanctioned by some religion."

   Well said METTEYYA. The term 'marriage' needs to be taken out of spousal definitions as they relate to government.

   Even as a heterosexual, I'm not considered 'married' in some churches. That term only relates to one's particular belief system.

   Posted by RAGGEDSTEP at 08/13/2007 @ 5:04pm

10. Enemies of gay and lesbian equality will again use the presidential race to promote various solutions to the ‘gay question.' Democrats will propose shabby reform schemes while the Republicans and their superstitious allies will promote punishment schemes, up to and including a ‘final solution.' In the Democratic Party they've rejuvenated the strategy of making fuzzy promises followed up by backstabbing treachery. The Democrats want us to forget that it was the Democratic Party, not the superstitious right, who authored DOMA and DADT and rammed them through Congress. When baptist and catholic leaders use these measures against us they're simply following the infamous shameful path trailblazed by Democrats. Hypocrisy cannot begin to describe the Democratic pretense of being our friends. They are our enemies. Criticizing the Democrats and Republicans, as serious thoughtful activists and leaders have been doing, has encouraged the many hundreds of thousands of gays and lesbians who plan on taking a pass on the elections. Sensibly enough, they think it's a major blunder to help elect our enemies. They'll join tens of millions of other Americans who every election vote for 'none of the above' and boycott the elections. They don't believe the frauds that howl "This is a crucial election." I've heard that party line from hacks every year since 1964 when Democrat LBJ promised peace. By 1972, the Democrats war against the Vietnamese had expended the lives of 58,209 mostly young, mostly working class GI's, a further 1,948 were (are) missing and 153,303 were wounded. Those appalling numbers pale beside the near genocidal casualty rates suffered by innocent Vietnamese at the bloody hands of the Democratic/Republican war coalition. Two million plus dead, killed by ‘peace' Democrats and ‘war' Republicans united in a brutal nine year frenzy of destruction. Bush's oil piracy in Iraq is supported by ‘war' Republicans and ‘Peace' Democrats and is producing the same furious devastation. In that and other ‘Crucial Elections' we've been told that we have to vote the right way or, jeepers creepers, the bad guys are sure to win. That's entirely true, because the ‘bad guys' win no matter which party wins. Both parties whore for the ruling rich whose insane greed and willingness to pay politicians for ‘favors' guarantees the outcome of every election. If things heat up they sometimes pass ineffective cosmetic reforms, but everyone (except idiots and shills for politicians) recognizes their severe limits in the framework of a fundamentally reactionary social system run by and for the ruling rich. Abe Lincoln was the last President elected who wasn't a bad guy. Bush is devastating Iraq; Reagan was an antiworker thug; Nixon wanted to be King of the World, but, to the accompanied by thunderous applause, he slipped and fell off the throne; Truman invaded Korea and instituted the witch hunt against gays and lesbians in the armed forces and civil service (well before McCarthy got involved); Kennedy tried to invade Cuba; FDR tried to waylay union struggles and forced the Japanese into war to end the depression; LBJ was a mass murderer; Bill Clinton is the big daddy (and Hillary the Midwife) of DOMA and DADT ,etc., etc., etc. A year ago the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress, and ignoring the excuses of party hacks, look at what they have NOT done with their majorities. They didn't impeach and convict Bush and Cheney nor did they indict them and Powell, Rice, Rove etc. for treason. They haven't even discussed convening an International War Crimes Tribunal. They didn't bring the troops home or offer to arm Iraqi and Kurdish trade union militias to stabilize Iraq. They haven't passed laws guarantying first-class, affordable housing, education and health care or well paying union jobs for American working people. They haven't taxed the obscene wealth of the ruling rich to accomplish this. They haven't rescinded tax privileges or Bush's giveaways to superstitious institutions. They haven't restored constitutional liberties or repealed the Patriot Act which is Bush's equivalent of Hitler's Enabling Act. On the contrary, they recently gave away more of our rights to Bush. Lastly it's not sufficient simply to lay into the Democrats and Republicans, although no one deserves it more. Our movement needs an alternative. A ready made one consists of just ignoring the elections, but elections, when political awareness skyrockets, can be an important arena for organizing our movement. If we get in on the ground floor of the growing union sponsored US Labor Party and invest our effort in it and raise our program in it we'll simultaneously help ourselves and put the hurt on Democrats and Republicans, the parties of our enemies. What could be sweeter?

    Posted by donal1944 at 08/13/2007 @ 6:46pm