First published in the Chicago Free Press, Oct. 25, 2006
Don’t look now, but there are gays and lesbians in the GOP.
That’s right, friends. Gay men and lesbians not only vote Republican, they work for Republicans, too.
Spooky, huh?
I know. Not really. We’ve known that for a while. We ourselves know that gays and lesbians are a diverse people. We don’t all look alike, talk alike, think alike. We have different perspectives, different priorities, make different choices. That’s all good. Being gay and lesbian doesn’t define everything about who we are.
And yet it seems that certain types of Republican voters are, in fact, spooked.
I guess they haven’t been paying attention on Pride, when we march down the streets of American cities, chanting things like, “We’re here, we’re queer,” and carrying signs that say, “We are everywhere.”
National Republican leaders, of course, have known that there are gay staffers and officials in the GOP. And it seems that some of them—even publicly homophobic officials—may, in fact, be supportive in private.
The Washington Post notes that when Robert Traynham, chief of staff to Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), confirmed a rumor that he was gay, Santorum responded by calling him “a trusted friendÉto me and my family.”
This from a man who had compared homosexuality to bestiality.
Certain members of the GOP, it seems, have a tangled relationship to actual, living gay people, treating individuals one way in private and talking about us as a group another way in public. That is, the GOP leadership was operating on a more viperous version of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” As long as people didn’t ask them whether they knew and liked gay people as individuals, they weren’t going to tell anyone they did.
But what I wonder is what’s going on with the conservative, Republican “values voter.” Did they really think that the only gay people in power in America were Democrats? Did they actually think that all gay people can be boxed in a container labeled “progressive”?
Maybe they did.
Maybe a significant part of anti-gay sentiment among conservatives stems from the idea that being gay automatically means we have values different from their values. Maybe they don’t quite understand that, yes, there are gays and lesbians who are pro-choice, liberal, atheist Democrats—and then there are gays and lesbians who are pro-life, conservative, church-going Republicans.
We’re on both sides of the aisle, and on both sides of many, many issues, from global warming to the Iraq war. We really are everywhere.
And so maybe the Foley scandal, awful as it was, will lead to something good.
Maybe with the Foley scandal, and the circulation of The List—a list of Congressional staffers rumored to be gay—and all the talk in the media about gay GOP staffers, maybe all those things together will lead to a values voter realization that the fact that someone is gay or lesbian tells us absolutely nothing else about them.
“Gay” doesn’t tell us what someone’s politics are. “Gay” doesn’t tell us what someone’s life is like. “Gay” doesn’t tell us how much money someone has, or how they vote, or what newspapers they read, or what clothes they wear or what they look like.
Really, “gay” tells us nothing about someone except—well, that they’re gay.
In November, voters might kick out Republican legislators partly because of Foley fallout. It will be hard to tell whether they are reacting so strongly because of the growing revelations that Foley himself and some key GOP staffers are gay, or because of the constant media connection made between the words “Republican” and “pedophile.”
But I hope there will come a time when voters won’t react negatively when they find out someone in power is gay. In fact, I hope that they won’t react at all.
I hope someday that the fact that someone—even an elected official; even a staffer—is gay will just be treated as something interesting about them, like the fact of left-handedness or of a preference for chocolate ice cream.
I hope someday that the fact that there are gays and lesbians in the GOP will be unremarkable.
I hope someday that when gays and lesbians spook others, it’s because we’re wearing fabulous Halloween costumes, not because we happen to be gay.