“LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ: Gay Rights Movement or Alphabet Soup?” — by Eric Marcus

December 10, 2008

Gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny branded the gay rights movement before most out gay people were born. He came up with the slogan “Gay is Good!” and carefully considered the marketing techniques that would work best in 1960’s America to challenge the status quo.

Have a look at the photograph below from one of the 1965 gay rights protests in front of the White House (that’s Frank Kameny in the middle). It was no accident that the men wore suits and ties and the women wore skirts and blouses. And the slogans were all carefully considered before the posters were drawn. Frank took the temperature of the times and responded with a precision that one would expect of the scientist he was.

So what happened on the way to the 21st century? In terms of our “brand,” we’ve progressed from “Gay is Good” to the GLBTQ rights movement. And I can’t say that I think our new brand is a good thing for any of us under the GLBTQ umbrella.

I was reminded of what I don’t like about our cumbersome moniker when I attended a GLBT (or was that LGBT?) youth conference last week in Westchester sponsored by GLSEN and PFLAG, among others. More than 600 people attended, including middle and high school students, parents, social workers, educators, and school counselors. (I was there to sell copies of my newly released book for teens, What If Someone I Know Is Gay?)

One of the young people I met had led a workshop earlier in the day called “LGBT 101.” I asked him what he talked about in his presentation and he said that he explained things like “what LGBT means.” That’s a good start. But you have to wonder if we’ve got a problem if we have to introduce ourselves and our cause by explaining that this mouthful of initials stands for the various subgroups within our movement.

We’re now so far along in the process of balkanized inclusion that we’ve been left without a simple way to explain who we are and what we’re fighting for. And it’s left some of us who don’t embrace the tongue-twisting LGBTQ label scratching our heads when asked why we aren’t more inclusive. That’s what’s happened to me on a couple of occasions in recent months because my of book’s title. (I don’t think What If Someone I Know is LGBTQ? would have had quite the same impact and, besides, it would have been false advertising because my book’s focus is on what I know best, which is same-gender sexual orientation).

I don’t have any suggestions or answers. I just have questions. Like, why do we have to enumerate every subgroup within our social/political movement? That may make some of us feel good about being inclusive in a very visible way, but what do we gain or lose as a movement by slicing and dicing ourselves into ever more categories? Why do some people say LGBT and others GLBT? (Am I risking my life by pointing out that if we were to consider the alphabet that “G” comes before “L”? And “B” comes before “G”? Although if we take into account population totals and list ourselves in descending order in terms of overall numbers, then “G”—assuming for argument’s sake that “G” stands for “gay male”—should come first because there are twice as many gay men as lesbians. Then again, there are probably more bisexuals—male and female combined—than gay men or lesbians, so maybe we should be the BGLTQ movement).

So I’m curious to hear what you think. Am I the only malcontent out on this limb? Am I just an old guy who can’t adjust to the LGBTQ new world order? If the alphabet is here to stay, what letter of the alphabet will we be adding next? And can anyone come up with a slogan for our current political and social movement that’s as straightforward, alliterative, and powerful as “Gay is Good!”?

“Crumbs” — by Eric Marcus

No doubt about it, there were breadcrumbs on my dinner companion’s chin. As we discussed the unusually mild late fall evening that made it possible for us to sit under an open sky in the garden of a New York City restaurant, I hoped the crumbs would dislodge themselves. But they didn’t. So although we had only just met, I mentioned the crumbs in the nicest way possible. Given that my dinner companion was the reason that two dozen of us had gathered together to break bread, I thought she would want to know sooner rather than later about the food on her face.

Her two attempts to discreetly wipe away the errant crumbs with her fingers failed to do the job, so I volunteered and used my napkin. “It’s the neuropathy,” she explained. “I can’t always feel things with my fingertips.”

Elizabeth Edwards mentioned her neuropathy in the same offhand way that my friend Suzy, who also suffered from stage IV breast cancer, would have referred to it. It was the same way that my friends who had AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s talked about the side effects of the various toxic AIDS treatments then used to suppress the destructiveness of the disease. It was just a fact of life.

From a distance I had long admired Elizabeth Edwards, although this was my first occasion meeting her. Given that she’s incredibly articulate, smart, and passionate about issues that are important to me, I expected to be impressed. And I was. But up close she’s also warm and artifice-free. Elizabeth seemed like one of us, except that she started her day in North Carolina with another round of chemotherapy. And when the evening ended my partner and I would walk home and Elizabeth would go to a hotel, sleep for a few hours, and fly out (on a commercial airline) early the next morning to another campaign stop, just one more in a long series scheduled through the end of the year.

Elizabeth Edwards is not running for president. But as we all know, the person we choose to spend our life with says a lot about us. Elizabeth and John chose each other decades ago and now Elizabeth is spending some of the precious time she has left working with John to see that he’s elected president. We can only hope that when the time comes for the American people to choose a new president that we choose as wisely as John Edwards did when he chose Elizabeth.