The Politics of Pride

CAMBRIDGE—I wasn’t there, across the Charles, when the yearly Gay Pride Parade descended on Boston on June 15.  I was here in Cambridge—queer, but sleeping in.

It was only the next day, upon reading coverage of Pride, that I put the various parts together and realized the special importance of the events this year:  In July, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is expected to announce its decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, a case that could grant legal unions to same-sex couples in the Commonwealth.  Pride 2003 was, the Boston Globe reported, “a reminder to thousands of onlookers that a battle is being waged right in court right now over same sex marriages.”

Like many undergraduates, I do a poor job of keeping up on local news, even when it impacts issues that affect me; I make the admittedly lazy decision to put my trust in student activist groups to keep me informed via posters, e-mails and op-eds.

But the potential imminence of same-sex unions in Massachusetts did not get much air time during Gaypril, Harvard’s academic-calendar-friendly version of June’s Gay Pride Month.  What the Harvard public saw, instead, was quarrelling between student groups.

The Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian and Transgendered Supporters Alliance’s (BLGTSA), Harvard’s main LGBT group and the overseers of Gaypril, ran just one opinion piece in The Crimson during the month: a preemptive defense of the group’s highly-debated “Kiss-in.”  A month or so later, three students representing the “recently reformed” Queer Resistance Front responded on this page by eviscerating nearly everything the BGLTSA had done in April.  They called Gaypril events “decontextualized performances of politics,” but didn’t offer a hint of what their own—presumably “real”—politics might have looked like, or what good they might have done.

Similarly, Building on Diversity (BOND), a group oriented toward social activities for gays, used April as an attempt to raise its campus profile, hanging eye-catching, full-color posters that featured a set of attractive blond-haired, blue-eyed twins.  A guerrilla stickering campaign, presumably orchestrated by other LGBT students on campus, quickly targeted these posters, calling them evidence that BOND was a sexist, racist and classist movement toward gay normalization.

Amidst this April squabbling, we—those in the Harvard LGBT community as well as Harvard students more broadly—heard little or nothing from BGLTSA, BOND or even the nascent QRF about Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, and only a bit more than that about Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark case decided yesterday by the U.S. Supreme Court.  That opinion, in overturning sodomy laws in the 13 states in which they remain, could pave the way for equal rights for gays on a national scale.  We didn’t hear about various pieces of legislation before Congress and state legislatures which, as queers, we might have an interest in either supporting or opposing.  We didn’t even hear the outrage that should have attended the remarks by U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn., that compared homosexuality to polygamy and bestiality.

Indeed, the politics of homosexuality seemed big news everywhere but at Harvard. But what we heard in April, instead, was information about sex toys and transgender issues, about drag and dances—all admittedly important, but there was much more to be said.

The various organizations that serve the Harvard LGBT community seem to teeter on a precipice, at risk of falling into a kind of effective irrelevancy.   Valuable opportunities for socializing expand, and intellectually-interesting experimentation with radical queerness grows, yet the space at Harvard College for LGBT students and supporters to participate in non-radical political activism seems to be shrinking.  We engage in petty internecine turf wars while real battles rage in the world beyond the gates, beyond the protection of a largely-liberal environment and generous non-discrimination regulations.  Our rights ride on the outcome of these battles.  Our help, or our inaction, could help to turn the tide.  But it seems we are being led away from the battlefield.

Yesterday’s favorable decision in Lawrence v. Texas is certain to spark a firestorm in the political world.  This year has seen gay marriage legalized in Belgium and the province of Ontario, and legalization on its way in the rest of Canada. Democratic presidential candidates are furiously courting gay audiences, while conservative groups are grumbling forebodingly that they might look elsewhere in 2004 if President Bush seems too friendly to gays.  Already, these groups have been successful in their efforts to force U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to call off the Justice Department’s office-wide Pride celebration.

I will not deny the difficulty of the task before those groups that serve the LGBT community here.  They must juggle multiple roles that often demand different and even conflicting actions.  They must attempt to create comfortable social spaces, to aid individuals coming to terms with their sexuality and to mediate spirited theoretical debates among students who feel themselves newly-empowered, intellectually, by recent course offerings in queer studies.  To do all this while also attempting traditional issues-based awareness-raising and activism in the political realm is admittedly a formidable challenge.  But the task cannot be forfeited: too much lies in the balance.

It’s time, at this unique moment, for “politics” not only in theory but also in the old-fashioned sense of the word: the information-spreading, pavement- pounding, call-making, rally-attending sense.  It’s time to dust off those classic political tools that might expand our attention, for a while, beyond in-house debates over what’s subversive, and beyond the gym, the clubs and the parties.  The LGBT community, and its supporters, can’t afford to sleep in.

Brian J. Distelberg ’05, a History and Literature concentrator in Winthrop House, is associate design chair of The Crimson.  He will be setting his alarm clock a little earlier during the rest of this summer.