GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

In the last few weeks, a number of gay activists (Timothy Kincaid, Emily Kesselman, Wayne Besen, and others) have been blogging and campaigning to try to convince the LGBT newspapers who have run my columns to discontinue doing so. They have lied (one editor said she was told I was “ex-gay,” a preposterous accusation) and pressured and threatened and been pretty successful. Now that I have no regular gay-press subscribers (though I have been invited by one of the largest gay newspapers in the country to occasionally write pieces specifically for them), I have stopped writing more installments. But the four installments I had written but not yet published are not going away. I plan to eventually place them all in mainstream newspapers. I just began distributing the first of them to mainstream publications, and a few hours ago I made a deal with one of the dozen largest metropolitan dailies (with a circulation significantly higher than the San Francisco Chronicle) to run the column probably Wednesday, or if not, soon thereafter. They are paying me far more than I would have received in the gay press.

For me, it’s a win-win. I make more money, I get far, far more readers, and I can focus on actually convincing people (my goal in the mainstream press) rather than just making them think (my goal in the gay press).

How this is a win for Kincaid et. al. is beyond me. Presumably they support “marriage equality,” which means it’s in their best interest to have my stuff run in places where the fewest people could be convinced to oppose gay marriage. Nobody intelligent would think my column in the gay press would have any such effect on more than a handful of people. But in a publication with a circulation of more than 300,000, I could potentially change the minds of hundreds if not thousands of undecided Americans.

The only way to understand this silly activism is with something I’ve been saying for a long time. Gays and lesbians are far more focused on symbolic goals (like getting their first-choice term for the exact same rights in California or keeping an anti-gay-marriage voice out of the gay press) than on actually getting something done (like fighting lesbian alcoholism, prison rape, or the FDA’s gay blood ban, or like refocusing the energies of someone like me away from the forum where they can hurt their cause the most).

In this case, my cause has clearly triumphed absolutely. But most of the time, this selfish symbolism-over-results attitude hurts lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans who are really in need. In those cases, it’s not silly. It’s just sad.