Sacred territory

I’ve admitted many times how wrong I was about making marriage the centerpiece of the war between gay people and the heterosexuals. When the issue first surfaced, I thought it was a bad idea. Why, I wondered, must we imitate rather than invent? Why, I wondered, are we so desperate to look like everyone else? And why, I wondered, do we want any part of a tradition so riddled with fault lines? Here is my answer: because it makes a lot of publically heterosexual people with a lot of power and a lot of money really, really uncomfortable. Which I think is great.

But when it comes to the stupidness about being allowed to get a job with the military, I’m sticking, pardon the pun, to my guns. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the hearts, minds and checkbooks of homos across the land with a phrase that became, to me, as annoying as a fly buzzing around the bathroom while I’m trying to shave: gays in the military. Remember that one? That was quickly replaced with “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” the then-new president’s tactic of, by pretending to accommodate two opposing viewpoints, in the end accommodates no one but himself in service of a very short-term and short-sighted (in my opinion) goal. You homos are welcome to benefits of a gig with the military, this non-resolution said, as long as you don’t talk about it, or get caught. That line of thought was articulated and has been enforced, at a cost of $600 million so far, by allegedly heterosexual men. More interestingly, I think, is that it’s the most apt and concise articulation I’ve ever heard of how gay men are expected to behave: be sneaky, and do your business in the dark, and don’t ever, ever talk about it. Gay women, as we all know, are a different story. The puritan enforcers prefer the manifestations of their sexuality very much asked about, and told about, and written about and, if possible, shown.

Anyhow, many homos I know were outraged in 1993 when Bill Clinton took the art of degrading the language to a new level. Though laughable, I thought his post-election reversal made a lot of sense. That’s because the military has the fire power. For those of you who read this blog who are younger than others, Jesse Helms said during an interview shortly after Clinton’s swearing in that he could not guarantee the new president’s safety were he to come to North Carolina, where there are a lot of military bases and a lot of the people who run them. Seriously – the conversation was at that level in 1993, and it’s there today.

On Tuesday it was interesting to read not that a bunch of election-focused legislators “took a stand” against repealing Clinton’s double talk from the last century, but the comments that were made about it. Traitors! Where’s Obama? What about our ‘fierce advocate’? (That’s what Obama calls himself when there’s a sufficient amount of homo money in the room where he’s speaking. Being as susceptible to coercion via flattery as heterosexuals, many of us still fall for it.)

In 1993, I thought that if people insist upon sending their heterosexual (presumed) sons and daughters (though mostly sons) off to get shot up and maimed and disfigured physically and otherwise in order to have a corner on bragging rights of having “served” our country, why the hell are we arguing? And now, even though it’s 2010, I thought the same thing. You want the military? Although – as is the case with marriage – there are certainly benefits to be had in exchange for what you give up with your signature, you can have it. Besides, as far as I can tell, the military is already pretty gay as it is. Come to think of it, if the personal ads are any indication, so is marriage.