Summary: on National Coming Out Day, we may be thankful for our ability to be out in an America where our participation as out people in the American body politic is a lot more possible and a lot less perilous than it used to be, but we’d be fools not to realize that we have enemies, enemies who hate us, think us evil, consider our expressions of love to be infamous crimes against nature, and who would happily compass our vanishing under color of a proscription contained in the 18th chapter of Leviticus. We should remember how well integrated and domesticated Germany’s Jews were in 1933, and how quickly they were marginalized and reduced to pariah status. If it could happen in the country of Beethoven, of Goethe, of Schiller, it can happen here, too. The American right pursues a propaganda of fear against us, because it knows that fear leads to hate, hate leads to the Dark Side, and it is only by appealing to the darkest, most fundamentally warped, aspects of the American mind that the American right can ever hope to capture and retain political power.
Today is National Coming Out Day. It’s a time for those of us who are queer to be forthright about our queerness and to welcome to the ranks of out queer people other queer folk who have finally come round to acknowledging that they aren’t necessarily like the other girls or the other boys in the neighborhood.
It’s a time for honesty, and for having the hardihood to acknowledge a reality that still makes an awful lot of straight people’s heads explode.
But today, at the acknowledged risk of being flamed to a well done crisp by the quick-to-judge and the psychologically needy, I do need to take a bit of a dump in the punch bowl.
First, let’s stipulate that we have come astonishingly far, astonishingly fast. In my own lifetime, the queer nation has advanced from the status of an unspeakably perverse and presumptively criminal subculture (tinged about with a generous dash of the exotic)) to constituting a “Footnote Four” minority, bourgeois, legal, thoroughly domesticated, and essentially endotic.
To all intents and purposes, we queerfolk have come to occupy a structural position in American society not dissimilar to that of the Jewish community. It is a not infelicitous observation, and one that has been made by a number of queer, and Jewish, commentators over the years.
But let’s get a little more specific about the analogy. It’s not just that we occupy the kind of position that can give rise to screaming diatribes from the likes of anti-Semitic, homophobic louts like Mel Gibson, who tends to echo of not uncommon trope about “Hollywood” ostensibly being controlled by a dangerous group of illuminati composed of Jews and homosexuals. (Full disclosure: I remember several very pleasurable nights spent in the company of a Jewish homosexual intellectual (Horrors!), to whom I am indebted for some of the thinking behind these remarks.)
In fact, we may analogize the position of queerfolk in early 21st century American society to the position of Jews in early 20th century, Wilhelmine Imperial Germany. At the time, Imperial Germany’s Jews were, for the most part, tolerably well integrated and assimilated into German society. Most of the grosser and cruder forms of invidious anti-Semitic discrimination had largely been done away with. While Germany’s Imperial Navy still held out against admitting Jewish officers, the armies of the various German states had largely abrogated such prohibitions.
German Jews could be found in almost every level of society, from such hofjuden (Court Jews) as Albert Ballin, the great impresario of the Hamburg-America shipping line, down to provincial doctors, lawyers, and industrial workers. For the average German Gentile, the presence of Jews in German society was simply not strange.
Yet, anti-Semitism continued to be a powerful subterranean force in German and Austro-Hungarian politics. It still remained perfectly respectable in some quarters for political rabble-rousers to throw their base the red meat of appeals to hatred against “the Jew.” Vienna Mayor Karl Lueger, who has been credited with the transformation of the Austrian capital into a modern city, nonetheless espoused a politics compounded in equal measure of populism and a kind of “gemütlich anti-Semitism.” Lueger’s anti-Semitism has been credited, if you will, with informing the anti-Semitic views of a sometime Vienna resident who went on to pursue a more profitable political career in Germany, Adolf Hitler.
Nonetheless, anti-Semitism notwithstanding, the Jews of Germany and Austria, integrated as they were, prospered under the Imperial regimes of Hohenzollern and Habsburg. Indeed, in addition to such hofjuden as Albert Ballin, both Germany and Austria produced a bumper crop of Jews whose work has enlarged the frontiers of the human mind and elevated the tone of the human intellect. Names such as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, along with less well-known personages such as Austro-Hungarian naval architect Siegfried Popper, attest to the vibrancy of Jewish intellectual life in the German-speaking countries at the turn of the 20th century.
But after the Great War, and during the Weimarzeit, the crazies began to mainstream themselves into the body politic of the Weimar Republic. Tragically, far too many Germans, both Jewish and Gentile, wrote off Hitler and his National Socialist movement as nothing more than a group of fringe whack jobs, composed of the dregs of German society.
The appalling complacency of much of German society, cultured, educated, civilized, Christian in the best sense of that office-maligned word, in the face of the emergent Nazi terror is an historical phenomenon that may never be adequately explained. German society was either swept up or swept away by the Nazis.
“It cannot possibly happen here in Germany,” the so-called good Germans said to themselves. “This is a civilized country, the country of Beethoven, of Goethe, of Schiller. Hitler and his guttersnipes will never prevail against the basic decency of the German people.”
But Hitler and his guttersnipes did prevail.
The country of Beethoven, of Goethe, of Schiller, became the country of Dachau, of Auschwitz-Birkenau, of the Warsaw ghetto and the Totenkopf killing teams. The country of Beethoven, of Goethe, of Schiller, became the country the civilized world had to put down. To borrow the words of a Franquista officer commenting on the bombing of Guernica, “Germany was bombed. We bombed it and bombed it and bombed it, ¿y si por qué no?”
So, you ask, why take time to obsess over the tragic fate of Germany’s Jews? The answer could not be more simple. We queerfolk are in a position so closely analogous to that of Germany’s Jews in 1914 that it deprives this queer man of sleep at night.
What keeps me awake in the darkness is my consideration of the fact that while we are relatively well integrated into society, while we, like our neighbors in the Jewish community, are often seen as exerting an influence on the culture disproportionate to and incommensurate with our numbers, and, while we, like our Jewish neighbors, tend to feel safer here than in other, more retrograde societies, our status in the American body politic is still highly contingent, highly iffy.
I’ll concede that we have come quite a way from being on more or less perpetual probation, as we were just two decades ago. We don’t see our local Gannett newspaper clutching its institutional pearls over the idea of a “drag queen night” at our local minor-league ballpark, the way it did back in 1997, when it openly agonized about whether children should be “exposed to such conduct.” We don’t see an awful lot of people in our Pleasant Desert getting themselves into knicker-knotting swivets over the prospect of Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David getting themselves hitched over at the Palm Springs Courthouse.
But while the Coachella Valley, or at least parts of it, may be a queer-friendly oasis, all one needs to do is fire up the Internet to see that the same kind of poisonous hatred which once fueled the wicked mind of Adolf Hitler and his fellow anti-Semites continues to bubble away. While naked and unapologetic anti-Semitism has come to be regarded in this country as unacceptable and un-American, no such constraints exist with respect to the nastiest and most unapologetic homophobia.
When the official position of one of our major political parties is that queerfolk should not enjoy the full panoply of rights and protections that are the natural birthright of every American, when politicians of that party routinely throw anti-queer red meat to their far right base, and when screamers like Brian Brown of the so-called National Organization for Marriage, Matthew Staver of the so-called Alliance Defending Freedom, and outright eliminationists such as Scott Lively (father of the Uganda “Kill the Gays” Bill) and right-wing radio blowhard Brian Fischer of the so-called American Family Association, and when Princes of the Roman church such as Raymond Cardinal Burke describe us as intrinsically disordered and evil, we may justifiably conclude that complacency is not a luxury in which we have any justifiable reason to traffic.
Because as long as it is ever considered respectable or even permissible to traffic in the kind of rhetoric that is routinely deployed against queerfolk by the Republican Party and its fellow travelers, we are in the most exquisite danger. For this is the same kind of rhetoric that was used in Germany to whip up the hatred of the population against “The Jew.”
And in the country of Beethoven, of Goethe, of Schiller, it took less than three years following Hitler’s rise to power in January, 1933 for the Nazi party to put into force the so-called Nuremberg Laws which were designed to eliminate Jews from German society. Our own recent history should tell us that electorates throughout the United States are perfectly capable of adopting their own Nuremberg Laws.
It happened here in California with Proposition 22 and again with Proposition 8. In state after state, right-wing operatives were able to convince electorates to write marriage bans into their state constitutions, all to make sure the uppity queers fled back into the closet or, failing that, were reduced to huddling at the back of the metaphorical bus.
And if it took Germany only three years to reduce an integral component of her population from first-class status to pariahs, can we seriously imagine that it can’t happen here? Of course it can happen here. Sinclair Lewis once famously observed that fascism would come to America wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. Actually, fascism will come to America wrapped in a do-rag and wearing a T-shirt (made in a Chinese or Bangladeshi sweatshop) emblazoned with the American flag and inscribed “Straight Pride.”
Memory is the custodian of all our horrors, and we queerfolk need to remember the horrors of 20th century German history a lot more than we have done. Because if it happened in the country of Beethoven, of Goethe, of Schiller, it sure as hell can happen in the country of Jefferson, of Lincoln, of the Roosevelts and Harry Truman, of the Kennedys, and even of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Our straight neighbors have demonstrated how easily they can be bamboozled, and how easily their unease about we who love differently can be turned into ravening hatred. We should never fool ourselves that there is not a dark side of the American mind that can easily be led to enthusiastic adoption of all the eliminationist horrors we have seen in the Old World.
It may seem trite to quote a Jedi Master who exists only as pixels, but Yoda was right: fear leads to hate, and hate leads to the Dark Side.
Queerfolk, “be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. 1 Peter 5:8.
Happy National Coming Out Day.
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