‘Militancy’ Not a Bad Word in in Pursuit of Equal Rights

They called it, officially, the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. And it was a biggie, all right.

“Huge March Seeks Gay Rights,” the banner headline boomed across the front page of The Times.

Just under that was your generic march photograph, lots of mouths caught in mid-chant, fists raised skyward, placards aloft. The crowd appeared overwhelmingly white. Change a few signs and it could have been the right-to-lifers, or the feminists, or who knows, the Temperance League.

Mainstream was the idea, as in just a (big) bunch of upstanding citizens peacefully exercising their democratic franchise to get involved.

As I was watching bits of the march broadcast on the evening news, however, I was betting that other cameras were searching for more indelible images to press on the folks back home. Read that, the weirdos. The lewd. Maybe some who show the horrifying signs of a fatal disease.

I don’t know what those other cameras might have found, but be advised that you’ll probably see this part of gay America featured in a political hit piece near you.

Because, yes, the leather crowd did show up on the Mall, and there were transvestites, and some women liberated their breasts of clothes. People of the same sex were kissing. On the lips.

This, no doubt, is a big part of the reason that Bill Clinton was out of town. He’s a politician with a conscience, perhaps, but a politician who still reads the polls.

Most Americans may agree, in principle, that gays and lesbians should have the same rights and obligations as anybody else, but they say they don’t want to see them “flaunt” who they are. In other words, go sexually orient yourself someplace else. Holding hands, for instance, is out.

Summing up the “outrage” that he says most Americans feel, one anti-gay counterdemonstrator said this: “These people are trying to enforce sodomy on the American people. They want to sodomize the American Constitution.”

Another favorite adjective of the anti-crowd was militant . Militant, of course, means in-your-face. Militant is bad.

As an oft-described militant feminist, however, I’ve come to embrace the word, in the sense that a gay man might call himself a queer. And the list goes on.

Want to be really in-your-face? Wear the ignoramuses’ epithet as a badge. Bounced off mine, baby, and stuck on yours.

But the overriding message of Sunday’s gay rights march was something else. It wasn’t “us” against “them,” but us as everybody, with mothers and fathers and kids. And the us are the drag queens, too, and the marchers who were advised that in the interest of photo ops, they should leave the fetish gear at home.

This is how democracy works, only it sometimes gets a little messy in the prime-time land of spin control. When other people are watching--i.e. outsiders, and the press--you’ve got to present a united front. Only this rarely works.

Show me a movement without its fringes, where everybody gets along--or lies about it if they don’t--and I’ll show you a cult. If the current national debate over gays in the military has done nothing else, it’s shown that even the military is lousy at mind control.

So the march’s big news was clearly that there was no real news. It was sunny. Hundreds of thousands of people marched. Their feet got tired. But they had a good time.

From a news perspective, it was a bore.

Which, of course, is what lesbian and gay “militants” have been saying for years. They say that if every homosexual were to suddenly turn purple, most of the non-purple would be astounded to find that the mailman, and the college president, the surgeon, and the soldier are gay. Even though they act just like everyone else.

Because they are everyone, and they are everywhere.

Just like us “militant” feminists who believe that women and men should have the same opportunities, that different doesn’t mean unequal and that men and women can love each other without keeping each other down.

And we’ve got our kooks too, the fringe that by comparison, flatters what is so “average” about most of our lot.

Most of us, whether we’re straight or gay, are just trying to do the best we can, improve life for ourselves and those who will follow in our place. Call this militant if you like.

Life’s too short, and too imperfect, not to be militant about equal rights.