“Why Isn’t It Better Yet?”: How the LGBT Movement Failed Queer Existence

• In Event: Pluralizing Political Theory: Contemporary Queer Contributions (Pre-Recorded)

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand the persistent truth of a claim made over 30 years ago, at a time when the LGBT rights movement had far fewer successes: we live in a world where the number of people “by whom the existence of gay people is treated as a precious desideratum” (Sedgwick). LGBT people have gained significant rights (particularly marriage) and acceptance over the last 50 years. Even so, persistent antagonism to gays, lesbians, and trans people persists. That antagonism is clearest in the regular death by murder or suicide of LGBT persons. But the hostility faced by queer people also appears in the narratives of contemporary public figures. For example, former candidate for the Democratic nomination, Pete Buttigieg, did not come out publicly until 2015, fearing for the impact it would have on a political career. He recently stated he had wished in the past that he could have taken a pill to make himself straight if he could have. Celebrities like Ellen have made similar claims. If their stories, where their youth is marked by the wish to be anything other than gay, seem startling, they should not. The LGBT rights movement has spent the last 50 years largely holding that no one has chosen to be gay and no one would. That position is often credited for the success of gay rights: opinon polls suggests public support for gay rights is linked to the belief that people are born gay and many litigation strategies have sought to show that gays and lesbians deserve protection on the basis of possessing immutable traits.

I want to explore the costs of that position: it’s failure to counter antagonism towards LGBT people. I begin by contenting the modern incarnation of the “born this way” position began in the 1970s to counter political hostility. Those born gay could not “recruit” children in order to “reproduce”—the incendiary charge anti-gay crusader Anita Bryant popularized. The self-presentation of gays and lesbians as a discrete and limited minority served to counter straight fears that gays and lesbians were child molesters or seducers.
The claim that gays and lesbians were “born this way” echoed as well the argument that has been coeval with the emergence of modern homosexuality in the 19th century: gays and lesbians should not be punished for something beyond their control. Both positions—that homosexuality is not contagious and that it is blameless because unchosen—may have made the homosexuality of some more palatable to some of the straight population. But as queer theorists like Lisa Duggan and Jasbar Puar have shown, that acceptability has been limited to a small subset of LGBT people: those who are white, gender conforming, consumer oriented, sexually discreet, and increasingly, married.

Ongoing violence against LGBT people makes the failure of the born this way argument, which essentially disavows the desirability and value of queer being, clear. To make this point, I examine the trial about the murder of Latisha King. King’s death in 2008 was treated at the time as a case of a gay boy being murdered by a class mate offended by his overtures. Later details suggested that the Latisha King was in fact a trans girl.Her gender presentation, read by students, teachers, and jury members as a sign of homosexuality, was seen as provoking her own murder. This case illustrates the way the gay and lesbian movements effort to gain acceptance by disavowing gender variance failed to gain traction with much of the public, and the extent to which efforts to defend gay and lesbian life by presenting as unchosen and unwilled have, in fact, failed to protect queer life. By failing to present queer life as valuable, by presenting queer existence as in need of deferrals, defenses, and denials, the LGBT movement has gained legal protections. But it has yet to call for a world in which there would be more gay people.

Author

• Anne I. Caldwell, University of Louisville