Freedom to Differ

Front matter

DIANE HELENE MILLER

THE SHAPING OF THE GAY AND LESBIAN STRUGGLE FOR

CIVIL RIGHTS

Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Preface xv

1. Constructions and Deconstructions Gay Politics, Lesbian Feminism, and Civil Rights

Preface

I am the child from down the street.

Now I’ve grown into someone you might never meet. —Tret Fure, “Something Blue”

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a well-known scholar in the field of gay and lesbian studies, opened her book Tendencies by writing, “I think everyone who does gay and lesbian studies is haunted by the suicides of adolescents” (1993, 1). The statistics on suicide among gay and lesbian teens are dramatic and horrifying.’ They are also far too close to home to have a purely academic ring to them. Only a few years ago, these statistics touched my own university community when a lesbian undergraduate committed suicide, apparently for reasons connected with the oppression she faced or expected to face due to her sexual orientation. In her memory, her family endowed a lecture series at the university to bring in speakers in the field of gay and lesbian studies. They hoped that educating young lesbians and gay men would help them find alternatives to a final escape from a society that makes them feel reyected and unwanted.

This book is not about suicide, nor about adolescence, so perhaps the relevance of this preface will not immediately be apparent. Yet Sedgwick’s observation, the life of the young woman who committed suicide in my own community, and the subsequent actions of her family bring home the motivation and the impulse for this kind of work with a clarity and an urgency that no theoretical justification can capture. Obviously, there are academic motives for undertaking such a study. Yet there is also something more: a faith that language plays a central role in shaping our internal and external worlds; a belief that scholarly pursuits are intimately connected to

XV xi = PREFACE the achievement of social change; and a hope that the visibility of the written word has the potential to reach people within and beyond academia in a way that appeals to more than detached intellectual interest, a way that actualizes “humanistic” study in its profoundest sense.

Any inquiry into issues of gay or lesbian representations must be circumscribed by the recognition of real lives in peril, by the urgency of achieving social change that ensures the safety of those lives and makes them livable. Human beings are constantly subject to powerful, if constructed, categories, and those categories have concrete consequences that affect happiness, health, opportunity, safety, even life and death. In reality, most of these outcomes remain untouched by even the most dazzling of our theoretical insights. There are obvious limitations to approaching social change through academic means, undeniable drawbacks to the slow timetable and the indirect effects of scholarly pursuits. Arguably, such writing may never save an adolescent life, may never arrive in time, may never reach those whose lives we dream of changing. The specter of adolescent suicide, and of other physical and emotional violence inflicted on lesbians and gay men by themselves and others, is a constant reminder of how many lives have been and remain beyond our reach.

Yet there are also possibilities here, opportunities for reaching out in the hope that our work will mean something to someone, with the belief that it can make a difference. Scholarship of this sort, like the inauguration of a lecture series, is not simply a memorial to what has been, not only a means of recognizing what is past. It is also a statement of hope, a belief that despite the tragedies we have not been able to prevent, there are some that perhaps we can. It is, above all, a commitment to creating another kind of future. In a sense, this may be what all of us—as scholars, writers, and simply human beings—in our highest aspirations seek to achieve.

elf CONSTRUCTIONS AND DECONSTRUCTIONS Gay Politics, Lesbian Feminism, and Civil Rights

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language—this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable. —Adrienne Rich (1979, 199)

Prologue

In the winter of 1993, shortly after his inauguration, President Bill Clinton nominated longtime supporter Roberta Achtenberg for the position of assistant director of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Achtenberg, an openly lesbian lawyer and lesbian rights advocate, had served on the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco from 1991 to 1993. Her selection to a position in the president’s cabinet required the approval of the Senate, making her the first openly gay or lesbian nominee ever to face the Senate confirmation process. Because she made no secret of her sexual orientation, Achtenberg and her supporters anticipated some resistance to her candidacy from conservative senators. However, the battle began sooner and more brutally than expected, with Senator Jesse Helms’s statement to the Washington Post that the Senate should refuse to confirm “a damn lesbian.” Many of Helms’s colleagues condemned his outright bigotry, yet the issue of Achtenberg’s sexual orientation became a key point of attack for her mostly Republican opponents.

Colonel Margarethe (Grethe) Cammermeyer had been a highly re-

2 YW CONSTRUCTIONS AND DECONSTRUCTIONS spected nurse in the United States National Guard for twenty-seven years when she began preparing to apply for the War College to enable her to compete for the position of chief nurse of the National Guard in 1989. During the routine questioning required for top secret security clearance, Cammermeyer revealed that she was a lesbian. As a result of the military board hearing that followed, and despite a flawless record of service, in 1992 she was not only refused the promotion but was also separated from the National Guard, stripped of her rank, and denied a number of the benefits of her long tenure. Cammermeyer subsequently filed a civil discrimination suit against the military and was reinstated by a district court judge in 1994.’ Nevertheless, the battle left its scars. Cammermeyer was denied her lifelong dream of attaining the rank of general, serving as chief nurse of the National Guard, and retiring with full military honors. Instead, she spent the culminating years of her distinguished career embroiled in legal battles against the institution to which she had dedicated her life, fighting against the people and the country she had defended and loved.

Introduction

Since the 1970s, the feminist and lesbian/gay rights movements have made substantial progress in advancing their struggles for equality.* At times, the two movements’ goals have coincided, and they have joined together to pursue mutually beneficial ends. These include challenging gender stereotypes, broadening narrow gender roles for women and men, and affirming the right of all individuals to control their own bodies. On other occasions, the two groups have worked with a complete disregard for each other or even at cross-purposes. At such moments, each has been insensitive to the oppression experienced by the other and to the ways in which each has participated in and benefited from the other’s oppression. Caught in the middle are those women who belong in, yet are frequently marginalized by, both movements: gay women, or lesbians, whose existence has often been disregarded or concealed by the leaders of both social movements.

To examine the status of lesbians within and between these movements is to engage feminist theory, gay studies, and public discourse at a powerful and controversial crosscurrent. The feminist movement continues to raise many of the major ongoing debates of our time, forcing public confrontation of issues as broad-ranging as rape, domestic violence, abortion, sexual harassment, and the feminization of poverty. Anyone who doubts the dissent that still rages around feminism need only observe the broad-based support for the current conservative Republican Congress or the vast radio and television audiences who avidly follow Rush Limbaugh’s diatribes. As the right-wing backlash continues to spread, the perceived feminist attack on “family values” is overshadowed by a group seen as even more threatening: gays and lesbians. The gay and lesbian claim to equal rights has produced one of the most explosive public debates in progress today.

The arguments surrounding gay and lesbian rights constitute crucial public debates, not only because they are conducted through public channels and institutions but also because they directly engage questions about the relationship between public discourse and minority identities. As the military’s current “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy attests, the very formation of identities is based in part on their assertion: who we are depends in part on how we represent ourselves, and on how others represent us, through language and visual images (Shotter and Gergen 1989, ix). The point is not simply that giving the name to gay or lesbian individuals and communities affirms our existence. More broadly, by highlighting certain facets of gay and lesbian lives and obscuring others, the discussions produced by gay and lesbian rights controversies help constitute identities. They do so by providing particular frameworks within which gays and lesbians may be seen and understood, by ourselves and by others.

In relation to these frameworks, lesbians occupy a tenuous position that places us both within and outside the feminist and lesbian/gay rights movements. We are multiply silenced, our existence doubly erased. First, we are negated by a dominant culture for whom we are emphatically “Other” by virtue of being neither men nor heterosexual. Second, we are often forgotten or ignored by groups of gay men and heterosexual women, for whom we are neither wholly insiders nor outsiders. For lesbians who are also marginalized with respect to race, class, age, physical ability, or other elements of identity, experiences of exclusion are further intensified through a dynamic that has been called “multiple jeopardy” (King 1988).° Perhaps because of this multiple marginality, even those scholars who specifically set out to reclaim silenced or “lost” public voices have frequently neglected the study of lesbians.

Among scholars who study communication, for example, attention to women’s speech or “women’s issues” has gradually grown more prevalent and more accepted, although this change has occurred at a painfully slow pace. Nonetheless, these scholars by and large continue to ignore the prodigious public discourse on gay and lesbian rights generated in this country in recent years. While the American public and the mass media in particular widely debate the implications of gay and lesbian rights struggles, those who study public discourse have remained unusually silent on the subject.* Such neglect is striking in relation to an issue that currently constitutes one of the most widespread topics of public debate in this country and is likely to become even more contentious in the coming years.

If communication scholars have been reluctant to address gay issues generally, however, they have been hesitant to the point of nearly unbroken silence to broach the specific issues of lesbian speech or lesbian rights struggles. Those wishing to research any facet of communication about lesbians often find themselves scanning the indexes of books with gay, feminist, or women in the title, hoping to find an entry for lesbians. Frequently, they find none. In fact, those wishing to do lesbian scholarship are immediately confronted with a number of obstacles. First is the fear of discrimination and prejudice against one’s work or oneself when one pursues a research project about lesbians, regardless of one’s own sexual orientation. Second, materials are often not easily accessible, as much of the writing that does exist is published by alternative presses or small journals that are unavailable even in the libraries of large research institutions. Finally, the considerations of publishing and academic job security discourage scholars from writing about lesbians. As both a marginalized and a stigmatized minority, lesbians are considered at best a “special interest group” and at worst a threat to family values and the American social fabric.

The neglect of lesbian issues within speech communication has persisted despite growing bodies of lesbian feminist work in related areas such as literary studies, cultural studies, history, and psychology.’ Because these fields have led the way in developing lesbian studies, their disciplinary perspectives predominate in this emerging field. The result has been a relative flourishing of scholarship that focuses on fictional accounts, personal narratives, and other artistic and cultural endeavors, highlighting self-expression and the sharing of personal experience. Still needed, however, is another framework, crucial to any movement for social change: a method for examining public expression as Communication, representations as political strategies, and messages in terms of their effects.

Such a framework would highlight self-identification as a distinct mode of communication. Declarations of identity serve several functions: they are at once powerful individual expressions, reinforcing one’s sense of belonging to a particular group; communicative messages, conveying that identification to others; and representations, offering particular portrayals of the individual and his or her group to the public. Statements of self-identity can modify public understandings and portrayals of a group, while a group’s public representations can influence individual and collective self-identities. This mutual interaction of language and identity may either extend or abridge the available range of identities for a given group (Shotter and Gergen 1989, 1x). Such consequences may be particularly striking for lesbians and gays, who are, as a group, “consciously involved in creating [their] own identity and purpose,” and whose public representations remain hotly contested (Fejes and Petrich 1993, 397).

To understand how various uses of language expand or restrict gay and lesbian identities, access to rhetorical approaches becomes vital. The word rhetoric is often used disparagingly to refer to language that is all ornament and little substance (Foss 1996). However, the term also refers to the art of using language effectively and persuasively. More broadly, rhetoric refers to the use of symbols, such as language and visual images, for the purpose of communication. Those who study rhetoric examine how speakers and writers use such symbols not only to represent reality but to create it. “Rhetoric is not simply the translation of some knowledge that we acquired somewhere else into a communicable form. It is the process by which our reality or our world comes into being; reality or knowledge of what is in the world is the result of communicating about it” (Foss 1996, 6).

From a rhetorical perspective, investigating the effects of language is a crucial form of inquiry because “what we count as ‘real’ or as ‘knowledge’ about the world depends on how we choose to label and talk about things” (Foss 1996, 6). The term rhetorical criticism describes the process of analyzing persuasive symbols and their effects in a given situation or context. Rhetorical critics analyze how persuasive appeals are constructed to create particular understandings of the world and to affect a given audience in a specific way. Such critics are therefore able to suggest how certain kinds of “knowledge” and versions of “reality” come to be widely accepted, and how others come to be devalued or erased, through the strategic use of symbols. Rhetorical approaches focus on how language and images function in concrete situations. They thereby enhance our ability to become more thoughtful, discerning, and critical consumers of public discourse.

Although those who study rhetoric have not granted the issue of gay and lesbian rights the attention it deserves, given its social significance, a rhetorical approach does have a valuable and needed perspective to add to those that are contributed by other disciplinary and interdisciplinary standpoints. Rhetorical perspectives can make a dual contribution to the analysis of lesbian and gay rights initiatives. First, they take as their texts persuasive, non-

6 Y CONSTRUCTIONS AND DECONSTRUCTIONS fictional public discourse, which enables them to analyze representations that proliferate in some of today’s most widespread and influential discussions. Second, they illuminate not only the intentions that motivate such discourse but also the consequences of particular uses of language for various audiences. Rhetorical analysis allows us to set aside questions of “positive” or “negative” images. It allows us to examine, instead, how particular language and images function in a given context and for a designated audience.

This book investigates the representations of lesbians produced in two primary arenas of civil rights struggle: the United States political and military systems. It focuses on two case studies of discrimination against lesbians, examining how the language and images employed by advocates and opponents in each case shape available understandings of lesbian (and often gay) lives. More specifically, it examines how a focus on equal rights arguments, also referred to as civil rights strategies, constrains lesbian and gay identities and self-definitions; how such an approach regulates future liberatory endeavors; and how it prescribes a particular set of lesbian and gay public images that excludes certain individuals and communities. This book identifies those possibilities we create and those we exclude through an emphasis on civil rights strategies. It examines, finally, the role rhetoric can play in illuminating the heterosexual nature of institutions, both military and political, and in revealing the inherent inequalities on which such institutions are founded.

More broadly, this book points to the ways in which all categories of sexuality are shaped and delimited by language and in which sexual and other minority classifications may be produced by the very discourses that seek to regulate or protect them. These discourses at once assume the existence of such categories and create their parameters. In the process of constructing minority identities, dominant identities are also established and legitimated. Their boundaries are strengthened by the force of the binary opposition at work, and by the marginalization of the out-group. This process of group definition and differentiation solidifies distinctions between heterosexuality and homosexuality. The dividing line between categories is thereby strengthened, and sexual self-definition 1s limited on both sides. This process is thoroughly rhetorical and of the utmost importance. It influences at an intimate level the ways in which we are able to conceive of ourselves and others, touching on our most deeply held convictions about our own identities and the identities of those around us.

I begin this book by highlighting the exclusion of lesbians from much of feminist scholarship and gay studies. I offer a brief introduction to the

CONSTRUCTIONS AND DECONSTRUCTIONS W 7 mainstream lesbian/gay rights movement and its guiding civil rights agenda, examining how the specific oppression of lesbians challenges a number of this movement’s goals. A lesbian feminist analysis of lesbian/gay rights discourse enables us to consider both the advantages and the risks of two of the movement’s guiding objectives: voice and visibility. Voice refers to political participation and cultural influence, while visibility represents the right to acknowledge openly a gay or lesbian identity. To explore the complexity that is introduced into these concepts when lesbian specificity is taken into account, I examine the cases of Roberta Achtenberg and Grethe Cammermeyer. Their stories illustrate some of the ways in which lesbians have been represented in recent years through particular institutional discourses. I focus on the language and images used to characterize these women and to establish their relationship to the category “lesbian.” I also suggest how these representations might influence broader public understandings of lesbians as individuals and as a group.

I argue that when some level of lesbian and gay voice or visibility is achieved, as in these high-profile cases, another level of institutional oppression is imposed to maintain the dominant culture’s control over the images and language that proliferate around a controversial issue.° Images and language are continually subject to the threat of misinterpretation or assimilation, and the gains associated with greater visibility are balanced with some attendant losses. Rhetorical criticism examines not only the value of expressing one’s identity but also the consequences of public discussions of identity. In this book, I analyze such discussions for their potential to extend or limit opportunities for self-definition and the formation of individual and group identities. Metaphors of visibility and voice convey the importance of self-expression as a form of individual empowerment, independent of its public consequences. However, social movements must concern themselves not only with individual self-realization but also with identifying broadly effective political strategies and creating coherent visions for liberation. These imperatives call for a rhetorical perspective, grounded in textual analysis, to examine how various discursive strategies produce particular outcomes. Rhetorical analysis, drawing on the theoretical insights of feminist, gay, and lesbian studies, can bring these insights to bear on the concrete circumstances that directly affect the lives of millions of gays and lesbians every day.

As I begin this investigation, a few qualifications will help clarify my terminology, my intentions, and the scope of my analysis. Throughout this book I refer to a “dominant” American culture, an identifiable ‘“‘main-

8 YW CONSTRUCTIONS AND DECONSTRUCTIONS stream,” and “dominant” groups of people whose views have shaped traditional institutions. Yet it is important to recognize that such references are inevitably problematic and oversimplified. Our identification as insiders or outsiders in relation to a “dominant” culture is constantly shifting, so that nearly all of us feel included based on some elements of identity and excluded based on others. We may be privileged by our gender, race, age, education, physical ability, religion, or social class, to name but a few variables; we may also be excluded based on any of these characteristics. Very few of us can identify consistently as either mainstream or marginalized, when all social stratifications are accounted for.

Thus, while I want to account for the effects of oppression on marginalized individuals and groups, I do not want to perpetuate the fiction that we can identify a single, powerful group of individuals who constitute a societal mainstream (Clausen 1997). I am not suggesting that a particular individual or group can be identified either as omnipotent or as entirely without power. Nor do I wish to homogenize individuals based on their group identification, and so fail to acknowledge, for example, feminist men, antiracist whites, gay- and lesbian-friendly heterosexuals, and others for whom privilege has not blunted social consciousness.

Likewise, by identifying the political strategies favored by a powerful or “dominant” group of mostly white, middle-class or affluent gay men within the lesbian/gay rights movement, I do not wish to deny or discount the presence of more radical gay men. Groups of gay men such as the Radical Faeries or Black and White Men Together are often denied the publicity granted to those in the movement who present more mainstream or “‘acceptable” media images. I do not wish to minimize, either, the presence and influence of outspoken lesbian feminists throughout the history of the movement. Even my use of the phrase “lesbian and gay rights movement” represents a distortion. Rather than having one cohesive political center, the movement has always been a divided, contested site. Conflicts have occurred within the movement both historically and currently. Thus, although the themes of assimilation and equality have predominated, they have never been exclusive themes. My use of this phrase, while necessary, nevertheless obscures and artificially unifies a multitude of perspectives, priorities, identities, and strategies for the purposes of clarity and convenience. At the same time, it obscures the vital contributions of numerous bisexual, transsexual, and transgender men and women to the movement. I use this distortion consciously, although reluctantly, because of the danger of portraying the movement as monolithic and obscuring the rich diversity that is one of its

CONSTRUCTIONS AND DECONSTRUCTIONS ķ 9 greatest strengths. I hesitate, moreover, to represent our movement as a straw person that is easily attacked, wishing instead to provide a thoughtful and nuanced critique of the movement in all its complexity.’

Finally, I acknowledge the limitations of choosing to focus on these particular case studies. Both Roberta Achtenberg and Grethe Cammermeyer are white, professional lesbians, privileged by race and class (although Achtenberg is Jewish, another marginalizing factor). Because they are members of the dominant race and class, these features of their identities go unmarked, and unremarked upon, in the context of these debates. As a result, within their struggles “questions of discrimination based on race or class, and the interconnectedness of these forms of oppression with homophobia, are bracketed” (Phelan 1994, 117). The hiddenness of race and class in these discussions may tempt us to neglect or discount their impact. Nevertheless, such factors are always implicitly present, interwoven throughout these debates with conceptions of gender and sexual orientation.

Even the movement’s focus on silencing as a hallmark of lesbian oppression is deficient when it fails to account for the varying configurations of silence and voice available to women in different ethnic communities. Thus, whereas lesbians are silenced in the wider societal context “‘as lesbians,” this silencing may vary in form and intensity among different groups of lesbians. For example, in contrast to the historical division of public and private spheres that has denied white, middle-class women a public voice, “the distinct division between male and female spheres of activity ...has never been prevalent in black speech communities.” Perhaps as a result, “black women have been described as generally outspoken and self-assertive speakers. . . . There is a fundamental tendency toward male-female communicative parity in black culture which starkly contrasts to the tendency toward communicative asymmetry which scholars emphasize for white women and men” (Stanback 1985, 181, 182; see also Collins 1991). The constraints on African American women’s speech must therefore be distinguished from those that affect white women. “In black communities (and diverse ethnic communities), women have not been silent. Their voices can be heard. Certainly for black women, our struggle has not been to emerge from silence into speech but to change the nature and direction of our speech, to make a speech that compels listeners, one that is heard” (hooks 1989, 6).

In light of such differences, I am mindful of the ways in which choosing to focus on the cases of two white, professional women risks homogenizing gays and lesbians by portraying “a false unity among what 1s in fact a tremendously diverse collectivity” (Phelan 1994, 117). Examining the stories of such women is an indispensable part of assessing the overall consequences of civil rights-based approaches. However, these women should not be viewed as representative of gays or lesbians as a group, nor should the importance of their relative privilege be overlooked. Their stories are significant, provocative, and inspiring. Yet they must also serve as a constant reminder of the vast number and endless variety of stories we have yet to hear. This book is only a beginning.

BACKGROUND AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BOOK

On June 28, 1969, in an event that had become commonplace in New York’s Greenwich Village, police raided a popular gay bar known as the Stonewall Inn. What distinguished this raid from hundreds of other raids of gay bars was that on this night the patrons responded not only with resistance but with confrontation, turning a routine police action into a two-day riot. Gay men, lesbians, and transvestites, some patrons of the bar and others who came to support their fight, battled physically and psychologically with police to defend their right to the same freedom of assembly enjoyed by heterosexuals. While these men and women were not the first to argue for their right to fair and equal treatment, what has come to be known as the Stonewall Rebellion remains a landmark event in the fight for lesbian and gay liberation. This event is often identified as the official beginning of the social movement for gay and lesbian rights.°

The Stonewall Rebellion marked a new kind of visibility for gays and lesbians, whose everyday lives were otherwise defined by a careful monitoring of self-expression. What erupted during the riots at Stonewall was, certainly, a claim for equal rights. However, it was also something more: the beginning of a movement not just for equality but also for liberation and social change. The participants in this movement aimed to intervene not only in police procedure and the legal system but also in the public and private discourses that regulated their identities and circumscribed their lives. On that night, and through the days and nights that followed, many gays and lesbians refused to remain hidden any longer in deference to these constraints, insisting on being seen and heard in ways they had not previously demanded. Rather than disguise who they were to avoid social ostracism and police persecution, they “came out’—out of their individual and collective “closets” as well as literally out of the bar and into the streets—to demand acknowledgment of their existence and humanity. In their move from private to public space, this small group stood up for itself and, in the process,

CONSTRUCTIONS AND DECONSTRUCTIONS ğ 11 spoke out for many others who had lived for too long behind shrouds of invisibility, silence, and shame.

The contemporary lesbian and gay rights movement has come a long way in the nearly thirty years since Stonewall, bringing about political change and social acceptance for gays and lesbians that was unimagined, and unimaginable, just a short time ago. Gay men and lesbians are, as both our supporters and opponents are eager to note, more visible than ever before. “Out” gays and lesbians occupy positions of power in a variety of fields, including the entertainment industry, journalism, sports, politics, and even religion. Debates over gay and lesbian rights consume many pages of local and national publications, appearing on the covers of magazines with widespread circulation and popular appeal, such as Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and the New Republic. In addition, a burgeoning industry of gay- and lesbian-produced mass media has emerged, with a proliferation of local and national newsletters, newspapers, magazines, journals, films, and television programs produced specifically by and for gay and lesbian audiences.

Within the legal realm, domestic partner benefits for cohabiting gay and lesbian couples have become available in some cities. Such benefits are also offered by an increasing number of businesses, including universities such as Emory and Northwestern and major corporations such as IBM, Apple Computer, Microsoft, Bank of America, Walt Disney, and the San Francisco 49ers. The legalization of same-sex marriage is being pursued in Hawaii’s courts, with some signs of success. The Supreme Court overturned Colorado’s Amendment 2, an anti-gay rights initiative passed by state voters, stemming the tide of anti-gay initiatives on ballots across the country. The Clinton presidency, though fraught with disappointments for lesbian and gay rights activists, has nonetheless brought questions of gay and lesbian rights to the forefront of American consciousness, as the hotly debated “Don't Ask, Don’t Tell” policy forced military personnel and civilians of all sexual orientations to examine their views on a formerly taboo subject.