(Dobbs) If You're Not Straight, Life Still Has Hard Turns
Public support doesn't always translate to public policy.
Americans have come to terms with LGBTQ rights. Most Americans anyway, according to polling on issues ranging from political and moral support for gay marriage, to protecting transgender citizens from discrimination, to opposing the criminalization of care for minors going through a gender transition.
But the key word here is “most” Americans. It’s certainly not “all.” There are Americans who won’t acquiesce. They are actively— sometimes angrily— trying to ignore the reality. But the reality doesn’t go away. It’s the reality that a sizable share of the American population— a sizable share of any population— isn’t straight.
Another reality doesn’t go away either. From spoken threats to bomb threats, the Anti-Defamation League documented at least 145 incidents of anti-LGBTQ hate and extremism nationwide during Pride Week back in June. At Cal State University, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism reports a 52% increase across the U.S. last year in anti-LGBTQ hate crimes.
And sometimes people die.
A year ago a gunman murdered five people at the gay bar in Colorado Springs called Club Q. In Southern California, a store owner who flew Pride flags outside her shop kept replacing them with bigger ones whenever someone would rip one down until two months ago, when a man came up yelling what the police described as “homophobic slurs” and shot her dead.
What homophobic haters like these ignore is the reality that there is a sexual spectrum. Put in simplistic terms, not everyone born male is a swashbuckling he-man. Not everyone born female is into pink lace. Not everyone born male or female is attracted to the other sex. Not everyone is even happy in what now is referred to as their “gender assigned at birth.” Some of us are comfortable in our bodies and sexual identities but some of us aren’t. It is a spectrum of sexual identities and all of us fall somewhere within it.
Whether or not everyone can get their heads around that, whether or not some think it is immoral not to be straight, these forms of sexual identity come naturally to many people and, although mostly hidden until not long ago, always have. The only thing that’s changed is that the full spectrum of sexuality now is open to public view.
In the 1990s, when gay Americans were coming out of the closet and the gay rights movement was picking up steam, I was a radio talk show host. The issue of gay rights came up a lot. Callers would tell me that homosexuality was “a choice.” I’d counter by asking, who would choose to live life with what was then still widely viewed as a shameful stigma. They would tell me that gay people were a tiny portion of the population. I would counter that they probably had someone in their workplace, someone in their church, someone in their family who was gay. They were horrified and would profess that it was impossible because they would know. Time has proven them wrong, me right.
But that hasn’t dissuaded the extremists.
A Baptist church in Spokane has put out two hateful videos. In the first one, the pastor advocates for public executions of gay Americans with either rifles or stones. In the second, he calls for executing the parents of transgender children. “They just need to be shot in the back of the head,” he says, “and then we can string them up above a bridge.” Don’t think that this sort of incendiary talk doesn’t filter down.
And there’s the political element. The new Speaker of the House, Michael Johnson, is a poster boy for anti-gay bias. He has a record not just of opposing gay rights but even of supporting the criminalization of gay sex.
The most infamous weaponization of sexual politics is Governor Ron DeSantis’s crusade against Disney in Florida because the company publicly spoke out against his legislation that came to be known by critics as “Don’t Say Gay.” In Texas they have a bill that prohibits “instruction, guidance, activities, or programming regarding sexual orientation or gender identity to students enrolled in pre-k through 12th grade.”
But it’s not just Texas and Florida. The Human Rights Campaign counts more than 525 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced since the beginning of this year in 41 states. At least 75 have been signed into law. As a result, nineteen states now restrict medical care for children and teenagers in gender transition. If doctors provide that care— which the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Psychological Association all recommend for anyone in the process— they could lose their license. Parents themselves are subject in some states to losing their children if they help them change their genders. In some states teachers assigned to cover sex-ed are forbidden from talking about gender identity. Books that even acknowledge that there is an LGBTQ community are being banned.
It’s as if the politicians behind this persecution think they can just cover their eyes and it will all go away.
Even public corporations have been assaulted for their stands on LGBTQ rights. Not just Disney, but Chick-fil-A, Kohl’s, Pizza Hut, the North Face.
Target tried to pay respect to Pride Month last summer by putting items like rainbow-colored shirts and hoodies imprinted with “Not A Phase” by its front doors. But when its own employees were threatened by right-wingers, it moved those items to the back. In what became the most visible and volatile example, Anheuser-Busch included a transgender personality in one of its ads, and suddenly faced a boycott that put its premium brand Bud Light in the sights of the haters. The boycott killed nearly 25% of Bud Light’s sales, and more than six months now after the controversy, revenue has continued to shrink.
No matter how you feel about gay and transgender Americans, the cause-and-effect of all this— from boycotts to brutality—seems obvious.
It is not just an American phenomenon.
A law in Uganda can put you in prison for promoting gay life, with a life term for actually having gay sex. In Russia, legislators passed a prohibition against “medical interventions aimed at changing the sex of a person” as well as changing your gender in official public documents. They also enacted heavy penalties for anyone promoting “non-traditional sexual relations and/or preferences,” which can mean anything they say it means. Putin signed it in July. The president of Turkey has called LGBTQ people “deviants,” referred to their lifestyle as “poison,” and accused them of spreading it “like the plague.”
If you’re not straight, as defined the old-fashioned way, life still is hard. There is progress in public opinion but when it comes to public policy, not as much. Those who stand in the way of people who live in an untraditional part of the sexual spectrum aren’t moving and, in fact, are pushing back. And in some places, winning.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
I have to wonder what some of the famous gay people of history would have to say about the situation as it stands in the world today. Alexander the Great would still love Hephaistion and Michael Angelo would still write sweet nothings to his young assistant. George Washington intimated that success in the US Revolutionary War was made possible by Baron Friedrich Von Steuben, who "wrote the book" on military conduct. Walt Whitman would surely have an opinion as would the brilliant Leonardo da Vinci. Alan Turing who broke the enigma machine code suffered the slings and arrows of the code of decency of his day. The numbers are vast and they all, in one way or another, had to deal with the inhumanity of their day. Unfortunately, the ignorant today have, through our electronic communication devices, access to a vast number like minded bigots so as to cause distress for people who they don't even know.