From The London Sunday Times
Palin leads the right into a reality TV vortex
The Alaska governor’s resignation shows how shallow Republicans have become
Andrew Sullivan

Writing about Sarah Palin always presents a quandary. Does one operate under the usual assumption that this is a rational figure, a serious politician, a rising Republican star . . . or do you acknowledge the copious evidence that she cannot tell the truth, has delusions of grandeur, has no policy record to speak of and quit her job as Alaska governor halfway through her first term because she is, in her own explanation, “not a quitter”? I think that you have to proceed under the assumption that this is a joke of a candidate and a symptom of a political party in the middle of a mental breakdown.
Mind you, I love the idea of Sarah Palin: a brassy, no-nonsense enemy of bloated government and corruption. That was probably John McCain’s rough idea of who she was in the five minutes his staff vetted her, and on the one occasion he’d met her, before offering her a chance to be leader of the free world. The idea of Sarah Palin, though, is sadly not the reality of Sarah Palin.
The reality of Sarah Palin is that politics is a means to her higher goal: celebrity. Every action she takes is designed to make sense . . . if you believe that government is really a version of a reality show. The remote, David Lynch-style location, the family often in trouble with the law, the pregnant teenage daughter and her impossibly handsome redneck boyfriend, the boyfriend’s angry sister, an ornery Alaskan trooper, a few moose and mysterious pregnancies . . . and, well, the mini-series never ends. The best guess I’ve heard of the real reason for her abrupt departure is: “I’m a celebrity . . . get me out of here!”
No one yet understands the real reason for a first-term governor just quitting on Friday, July 3, with no advance notice. If it were planned, why did her husband have to travel 300 miles to be there? Why do it all on a federal holiday before the Fourth of July? As Bubble from Absolutely Fabulous might note: “Who can say?”
A blog reader scanned every single governor of all the states for the past century to find precedents. There are plenty of examples of governors being arrested, being impeached or dying. But only two others in American history have just up and quit: Eliot Spitzer, New York governor, involved in a professional escort service after he had vowed to clean up the state; and Jim McGreevey, whose gay lover blackmailed him. Palin has quit for no apparent reason.
If it were to spend time with her family, it would be understandable, but she insists that’s not the case — and if you’re prepared to run for national office months after giving birth to an infant with Down’s syndrome, it’s a little odd to quit the governorship of a state when you have only a year and a half to go. It doesn’t make sense politically since it implies she could do the same thing at any moment in any future office. Why should anyone vote for someone who could quit for no good reason at any time?
But trying to makes sense of Sarah Palin is a fool’s errand. I spent a lot of time last year trying to figure out how her bizarre pregnancy story could make any sense at all — it doesn’t — and came up with nothing but a suspicion that large parts of it were made up. If you present the facts to Palin spokespeople, they seem offended and regard you as some liberal hater. But the facts reveal she lies all the time about almost everything and so is probably improvising about her reasons for resigning.
I’ve now compiled 32 incontrovertibly untrue statements of fact that she has uttered in the public record and never retracted. They are not the usual political lies — spinning or shading the truth; they are demonstrably, empirically untrue in the public record. Some are trivial: Palin said on television that she asked her daughters to vote on whether she should accept the vice-presidency offer; but that story contradicts details given by Palin herself, who said she accepted the offer on the spot.
Others are more serious: Palin lied when she said the dismissal of Walt Monegan, her public safety commissioner, had nothing to do with his refusal to fire Mike Wooten (her former brother-in-law, who was at war with her family) from his job as a state trooper; in fact, the Branchflower report concluded she repeatedly abused her power when dealing with both men.
Palin lied when she repeatedly claimed to have said, “Thanks, but no thanks,” to the famous “bridge to nowhere”, an expensive, pork-barrel government project; in fact, she openly campaigned for the federal project when running for governor. I could go on. But the truth is, she’s a reality-show star vaulted to national prominence by a Republican party now so devoid of talent and desperate for some kind of support that it gambled on the political equivalent of Susan Boyle. One who couldn’t even sing.
My own bet is that there is another scandal out there that would have forced her resignation if she hadn’t pre-empted it. Yet as plausible is the simple notion uttered by the only person in the melodrama who seems halfway sane: Levi Johnston, the teenage father of Palin’s grandson: “I think the big deal was the book. That was millions of dollars.” With a multi-million-dollar book deal, Palin can now become the darling of the right-wing media in America without the tedious duties of actually, you know, governing something. If the book contains scandals we have not yet learnt about, it could be explosively big in the mainstream; if it’s a hagiography, it could sell well with an adoring religious base.
And this helps explain the broader problem with American conservatism right now. It is less a movement than an industry. From Fox News to talk radio to conservative publishing houses, it has created an alternate and lucrative media reality that is worth a fortune to those able to exploit it. Alas, these alternative media thrive on paranoia, hatred of liberal elites and growing extremist rhetoric made worse by a hermetically sealed echo chamber of true believers. Anyone criticised by the left or even by the establishment right is a martyr in this world. In America, martyrdom sells. And Palin is a product worth lots of money.
She wants some of it; and she has no actual interest in governing America (even though she’d love the title of president). She referred to giving up her “title” as governor, not her “office”. In this, she is the ultimate Republican of this degenerate moment: all culture war, no policy; all identity politics, no engagement with practical answers to difficult public problems; and all hysterical opposition to Barack Obama, no actual alternatives offered.
Since even epic scandals heighten celebrity rather than diminish it, Palin’s future is secure. Her party’s? Getting bleaker by the day.
www.andrewsullivan.com

From The Sunday London Times
Barack Obama keeps his cool in hothead Washington
Both left and right want more radical action, but the president is playing a long game
Andrew Sullivan

The instinctive conservatism and constitutionalism of Barack Obama were core reasons for his election. He was a liberal in policy but a conservative in temperament: cautious, consensus-seeking, empirical. After the wild swings of the Bush administration, this seemed like balm with an Eisenhower vibe. Obama even started golfing during foreign policy crises.
Decisions were made after deliberation and study, not impetuously. Strategy was stuck to, even at the cost of a few tactical setbacks. There was no big emotional breast-beating on the international stage; all options were kept open — even as we watched the brutal repression in Iran.
The new president also understood the real role of his office — not the decider, but the presider; one branch of three co-equal branches of government, subject to the rule of law and the constitution.
So the president resisted the temptation to jump in and nationalise the banks; he picked Wall Street-friendly Tim Geithner for the Treasury; he postponed any big early withdrawal from Iraq; he added troops in Afghanistan; he gave up his tax hikes because the recession was so steep. While he banned torture, he moved towards careful compromise on rendition and preventive detention and state secrets.
As he had once written when describing his strategy as a black man in a white world: no sudden moves. And we have seen none. Obama likes the system; he just wants to make it work for more people.
Obama is also, at his core, a community organiser. Community organisers do not jump into a situation and start bossing people around. They begin by listening, debating, cajoling, inspiring and delegating. Less deciders than ralliers, community organisers explain the options, inspire self-confidence and try to empower others, not themselves. If you think of Obama even on a global stage, this is his mojo. And those community organisers do not tell you to expect instant results. It takes time when you try to build real change from below. But the change is stronger, deeper and more real when it comes.
The question buzzing around Washington’s chattering classes is the following: is the actual historical moment that Obama inherited — unforeseen in its scope and danger this time last year — the right moment for these instincts? Are his caution and delegation a liability in a period of a dysfunctional Congress, a near-psychotic Republican party and a potentially lethal global depression?
After a period in which the American executive claimed vast powers and institutionalised torture and abuse of suspected terrorists, is it enough simply to forget and forgive the past and try to glue onto the existing system more checks and balances and decency? Is the conservatism we sought, in other words, adequate to the radicalism that may now be required?
And is the president being too deferential to Congress in seizing the reins?
This critique is echoed on both left and right. The right, in its dominant neoconservative vein, is frustrated with his disdain for classic American moralising and sabre-rattling at a moment such as Iran’s stymied green revolution. The left wishes he had been more radical in taking on Wall Street, insisting on a single-payer healthcare reform and a full-bore carbon tax. Harper’s Magazine has even labelled him Barack Hoover Obama: personally brilliant, humane and pragmatic but simply not daring enough for the moment he is facing.
The Obama brigade would counter with some strong arguments. It would point out that he won a huge stimulus package from Congress very swiftly precisely because he did defer to the Hill. It would point to the first real carbon reduction legislation to be passed in the House. It would note the swift rebalancing of America’s alliances and the catalytic effect of the Cairo speech in Iran. It would note that Obama was not so indecisive in a legitimate case of purely executive decision making — as three Somali pirates shot on his orders found out.
It would also rightly argue that alternative methods of dealing with Congress — remember the Clinton White House’s presidential-driven healthcare debacle? — don’t work so well. Better an imperfect Barack victory than another Hillary nosedive. As for foreign policy toughness and clarity, Obama’s insistence that Israel cease and desist its settlement programme on the West Bank is not exactly passive-aggressive. Besides, he always said this would take time.
But what if the economic stimulus was too geared for long-term rather than short-term impact, as Friday’s jobs report — showing a bigger jump in unemployment than expected — suggested. By deciding to adopt George W Bush’s Iraq withdrawal strategy, has Obama wed himself to the fortunes of an occupation he was elected to end? And the attempt to co-opt the moderate wing of the Republican party — which Obama has done among many voters, officials, pundits and governors — nonetheless falters in a Congress where there are no moderate Republicans left.
My own brilliant contribution to this debate is that it’s too soon to tell, but I learnt long ago not to underestimate Obama’s strategic skills and persistence. The drawn-out stimulus spending might actually help to prop up the economy in the coming months — and it’s utopian to believe that any Congress would have borrowed even more money this winter after Bush’s $700 billion banking bailout and the vast projected deficits of the future.
The sheer complexity and volatility of the war on jihadism make instant solutions impossible. In so far as Obama can make a purely executive call — as in the commander he picked for Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal — he has opted for the most imaginative and daring option. He remains highly popular as a person and has imbibed the presidency so well that it’s now hard to conceive of it without him.
Healthcare reform is an immensely delicate task that may well pass this summer or early autumn. Even if the healthcare plan is insufficient and the climate change bill too anaemic, they will both put down infrastructure that can be built on in the years ahead. That’s better than anyone in a very, very long time.
The more you observe, the clearer it is that Obama is working on an eight-year time cycle. He wants deep structural change, not swift superficial grandstanding and conflict. He is taking his time and keeping his cool. The question is whether a volatile electorate in a terrible economic time will be patient enough to wait.

www.andrewsullivan.com

Leading Clerics Defy Ayatollah on Disputed Iran Election

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN and NAZILA FATHI
CAIRO — The most important group of religious leaders in Iran called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate on Saturday, an act of defiance against the country’s supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country’s clerical establishment.
A statement by the group, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, represents a significant, if so far symbolic, setback for the government and especially the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is supposed to be final. The government has tried to paint the opposition and its top presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, as criminals and traitors, a strategy that now becomes more difficult — if not impossible.
“This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. “Remember, they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.”
The announcement came on a day when Mr. Moussavi released documents detailing a campaign of fraud by the current president’s supporters, and as a close associate of the supreme leader called Mr. Moussavi and former President Mohammad Khatami “foreign agents,” saying they should be treated as criminals.
The documents, published on Mr. Moussavi’s Web site, accused supporters of the president of printing more than 20 million extra ballots before the vote and handing out cash bonuses to voters.
Since the election, the bulk of the clerical establishment in the holy city of Qum, an important religious and political center of power, has remained largely silent, leaving many to wonder when, or if, the nation’s most senior religious leaders would jump into the controversy that has posed the most significant challenge to the country’s leadership since the Islamic Revolution.
With its statement Saturday, the association of clerics — formed under the leadership of the revolution’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — came down squarely on the side of the reform movement.
The association includes reformists, but Iranian political analysts describe it as independent, and it did not support any candidate in the recent election.
The group had earlier asked for the election to be nullified because so many Iranians objected to the results, but it never directly challenged the legitimacy of the government and, by extension, the supreme leader.
The earlier statement also came before the election was certified by the country’s religious leaders, who have since said that opposition to the results must cease.
The clerics’ decision to speak up again is not itself a turning point and could fizzle under pressure from the state, which has continued to threaten its critics. Some seminaries in Qum rely on the government for funds, and Ayatollah Khamenei and the man he has declared the winner of the election, incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have powerful backers there.
They also retain the support of the powerful security forces and the elite Revolutionary Guards. In addition, the country’s highest-ranking clerics have yet to speak out individually against the election results.
But the association’s latest statement does help Mr. Moussavi, Mr. Khatami and a former speaker of Parliament, Mehdi Karroubi, who have been the most vocal in calling the election illegitimate and who, in their attempts to force change, have been hindered by the jailing of influential backers.
“The significance is that even within the clergy, there are many who refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the election results as announced by the supreme leader,” said an Iranian political analyst who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
While the government could continue vilifying the three opposition leaders, analysts say it was highly unlikely that the leadership would use the same tactic against the clerical establishment in Qum.
The backing also came at a sensitive time for Mr. Moussavi, because the accusations that he is a foreign agent ran in a newspaper, Kayhan, that has often been used to build cases against critics of the government.
The editorial was written by Hossein Shariatmadari, who was picked by the supreme leader to run the newspaper.
The clerics’ statement chastised the leadership for failing to adequately study complaints of vote rigging and lashed out at the use of force in crushing huge public protests.
It even directly criticized the Guardian Council, the powerful group of clerics charged with certifying elections.
“Is it possible to consider the results of the election as legitimate by merely the validation of the Guardian Council?” the association said.
Perhaps more threatening to the supreme leader, the committee called on other clerics to join the fight against the government’s refusal to adequately reconsider the charges of voter fraud. The committee invoked powerful imagery, comparing the 20 protesters killed during demonstrations with the martyrs who died in the early days of the revolution and the war with Iraq, asking other clerics to save what it called “the dignity that was earned with the blood of tens of thousands of martyrs.”
The statement was posted on the association’s Web site late Saturday and carried on many other sites, including the Persian BBC, but it was impossible to reach senior clerics in the group to independently confirm its veracity.
The statement was issued after a meeting Mr. Moussavi had with the committee 10 days ago and a decision by the Guardian Council to certify the election and declare that all matters concerning the vote were closed.
But the defiance has not ended.
With heavy security on the streets, there is a forced calm. But each day, slowly, another link falls from the chain of government control. Last week, in what appeared a coordinated thrust, Mr. Moussavi, Mr. Karroubi and Mr. Khatami all called the new government illegitimate. On Saturday, Mr. Milani of Stanford said, former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani met with families of those who had been arrested, another sign that he was working behind the scenes to keep the issue alive.
“I don’t ever remember in the 20 years of Khamenei’s rule where he was clearly and categorically on one side and so many clergy were on the other side,” Mr. Milani said. “This might embolden other clergy to come forward.”
The committee of clergy was formed in the 1960s. Mr. Milani said that for years, Ayatollah Khamenei also belonged to the group, and that it had developed some political clout by backing successful candidates for national office.
Many of the accusations of fraud posted on Mr. Moussavi’s Web site Saturday had been published before, but the report did give some more specific charges.
For instance, although the government had announced that two of the losing presidential contenders had received relatively few votes in their hometowns, the documents stated that some ballot boxes in those towns contained no votes for the two men.
Michael Slackman reported from Cairo, and Nazila Fathi from Toronto.

From History News Network
The Last Integrationist: A Note on Michael Jackson
By Jim Cullen
Mr. Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York

As we all know, Michael Jackson has and will be remembered in many ways: pop star, freak, business mogul, et. al. What I fear, amid all all the grief, cacophony, and distaste of these and coming days, is that we will lose sight of the truth that he was, whatever else he might have been, a great artist. Like his predecessor, Elvis Presley, Jackson was a distillation -- and extension -- of all that had come before him, in his particular case a tradition that runs from ring shouts to James Brown. And like Presley, a major component of Jackson's claim on immortality will be his status as a great American artist. And like Presley too, the heart of that claim is that like Jackson's quintessential generational embodiment of the grand drama of our history: the saga of integration.
Michael Jackson first burst into public consciousness as part of the final flowering of Motown Records, a label founded in the 1950s in large measure to make black music that would be commercially appealing to white people. But by the time of its heyday in the mid-1960s, Motown had achieved its cultural pre-eminence as great American music. African American music, yes, and thus ineluctably somehow not quite pure (i.e. white). But set against the social and political drama of the sixties this was precisely what legitimated it. At the time and ever since, there have been those who have denigrated Motown as pop that pandered. But this has always been a minority position, even among African Americans themselves. The paradoxical essence of American identity is its mongrel character (or, if you prefer, its hybrid character). That's as true of the Anglo-American Benjamin Franklin, the escaped slave Frederick Douglass, and the Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin as it was of Jackson.
By the late 1960s, the times were a changin,' even at Motown. The Temptations, Marvin Gaye -- even marvelously bright-spirited Stevie Wonder -- were realigning themselves on a landscape where Memphis, not Detroit, was central. Literally and figuratively, the national mood was a good deal darker, especially for African Americans. By the early 1970s it was no longer considered appropriate for anyone (with the possible exception of a child star) to uncritically embrace the paled appeal of racial integration. Popular music largely re-segregated, reflecting a society in which a seemingly permanent black underclass took shape and residential patterns that stubbornly resisted legal mandates for multi-racial schools. Overt racism was no longer permissible. But by the early 1980s, the music executives at MTV would make what seemed to be a rational assertion that white audiences would simply not be interested in seeing videos for a song like "Billie Jean."
Like Marian Anderson and Louis Armstrong, Michael Jackson in his heyday almost entirely sidestepped racial conflict, and like them this was a big part of his appeal -- even as the inescapability of his racial identity was also part of his appeal. With Off the Wall in 1979 and Thriller in 1982, he staked a fully formed adult claim to the center of American life and miraculously straddled musical cultures, as well as the transition from album-oriented radio to music video. That he could not remain in the center says less about his tragically deformed personality than it does the ineluctable shifting of what constitutes the center at any given time. The rise of hip-hop pushed Jackson to the musical margins, even on hit radio. By the early 1990s, the Sidney Pointier of his generation, Denzel Washington, was playing Malcolm X in a Spike Lee film.
We of the early 21st century have another honor roll that lists names like Oprah Winfrey, Sonia Sotomayor, and Barack Obama. We no more wish these people to deny the particularities of their heritage any more than we would Abraham Lincoln to deny his poverty or F. Scott Fitzgerald his Irish Catholicism. Far from a barrier, such distinctions have become a veritable asset. There's a word we often use to describe this state of affairs: Progress. But progress always has a price. The death of Michael Jackson serves as a pointed reminder of its cost, who pays, and what a society loses when we become who we are.

From The London Times
Working-class Hollywood hero Karl Malden dies
James Bone in New York (AP)
Karl Malden, the Oscar-winning actor with a bulbous nose who parlayed his immigrant roots into gritty roles in some of Hollywood's classic films, died yesterday at the age of 97.
His agent said the actor, who had been in failing health in recent years, died of natural causes in his sleep at his home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles.
Malden, the son of a Czech mother and Serbian father, worked for a time in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana — the same industrial town where Michael Jackson was later born.
Often playing working class characters, he went on to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1951 for his role as Blanche DuBois’ naive suitor in A Streetcar Named Desire, alongside Marlon Brando.
He was nominated for an Oscar again three years later for his performance as Father Corrigan, the fearless priest in another Brando film, On the Waterfront.
Malden's more than 50 films included Patton, in which he played Gen Omar Bradley, One-Eyed Jacks, The Cincinnati Kid and the Birdman of Alcatraz.
He became embroiled in controversy for Baby Doll, a Tennessee Williams story about a husband who allows his child bride to be exploited by a businessman. The film was condemned by the Catholic Legion for Decency for its "carnal suggestiveness".
Malden became well known to another generation for his role as a detective opposite younger partner Michael Douglas in the TV series The Streets of San Francisco from 1972 to 1976.
"He's my mentor," Douglas later said. "You know why Marlon Brando loved to work with him? Because he was so giving as an actor."
Also at that time, Malden began a 21-year stint moonlighting as a pitch-man for American Express travellers cheques. He earned himself a place in popular culture with the tag line: "Don't leave home without them."
Malden's trademark was his bulbous nose, which he had broken twice while playing sport at school.
He was keenly aware he lacked the matinee idol looks of a Hollywood leading man.
"There were times when certain leads would come along, and I'd say, 'Gee, I could do that,'" he once said. "But ... you've got to have a great nose. You've got to have great eyes. Everything that an actor has to have to be that leading man, I don't have. So I made the best with what I had."
Malden wrote an autobiography, When Do I Start?, that was acclaimed as one of the best by an actor. But he seldom appeared before the camera in recent years, although he did appear in a small role on the TV political drama West Wing in 2000.
He took an often-unpopular stance in Hollywood by standing by his friend, On the Waterfront director Elia Kazan, who had named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era.
In 1999, he nominated Kazan for a controversial lifetime achievement Oscar, which was awarded over the protests of many Hollywood luminaries angry at Kazan’s betrayal.
Malden was born Mladen Sekulovich in Chicago on March 22, 1912 and did not speak English until he went to nursery school. He said he later regretted that he had to change his name to become an actor. To honour his heritage, he insisted that Fred Gwynne's character in On the Waterfront be named Sekulovich.
His family moved to Gary when he was small and he remained there until he quit his steel mill job in 1934 to try acting.
"When I told my father, he said, 'Are you crazy? You want to give up a good job in the middle of the Depression?' Thank God for my mother. She said to give it a try," he once recalled.

The Birth, and Death, of the Asian Babe
The sordid history of the sexually exotic East.
By Johann Hari (Slate)
The porn of the Western world is saturated with the belief that Eastern women are more sexy and sultry and slutty. The most googled brand in the porn world is "Asian Babes." The very phrase evokes legions of solitary sweaty teenage boys in basements across America and Europe. But this stereotype did not emerge with the World Wide Web. It originated with worldwide empires. Suppressed beneath these casual flicks of the wrist, there are five centuries of colonial exploitation screaming to be heard.
In his strange new book about how two different sexual worlds met—and transformed each other in ways that continue to this day—veteran journalist Richard Bernstein distills decades' worth of research into succinct stories. But only a hundred or so pages in, the scent of testosterone and spent semen soaked into its pages becomes bewildering.
The story is fascinating. In the 16th century, Portuguese seamen began leaving a Christian fundamentalist Europe to sail the seas in search of resources and spices to pillage. But as soon as they arrived in Goa, Malacca, Sumatra, and Japan, they also discovered an alternative sexual world where all their repressed longing could roam free. "On one side," Bernstein writes, "was Christian monogamy in which sex was shrouded in religious meaning and prohibition, and regarded as sinful when enjoyed out of marriage. On the other side was an Eastern culture wherein sex was strictly organized, especially when it came to women, but where it was disassociated from both sin and love."
Where the West tied sex to the marriage bed and felt ashamed when it broke free, the East unleashed its libido in the harem, the brothel, and a smorgasbord of sexual options. "In the East," as Bernstein puts it in gushing terms, "it was taken for granted there would always be a certain reserve of women, often supreme models of beauty, cultivation and charm, whose assigned role in life was to provide sexual pleasure for men." The Asian babe as dream-object was born. Rudyard Kipling wrote one of the first rhapsodies to her: "I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!/ On the road to Mandalay."
Since the 1970s—when Edward Said wrote his classic Orientalism, exposing the myriad ways in which the West had patronized and stereotyped the East—such fawning has been dismissed as exploitative, racist distortion. Western merchants depicted the East as a den of sin and depravity, according to Said, in order to justify colonizing the land and taking whatever else suited them, from spices to resources to women. But Bernstein argues that "the eroticized vision of the East carries a hard kernel of truth, which the followers of Said are loath to acknowledge."
In the East—a diffuse term that Bernstein uses to describe Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—Western colonists really did find a different sexual culture. Prostitution really was out in the open, stripped of the silence and shame that coated it in Europe. Political leaders really did have vast harems of young women to pluck from. Men really weren't expected to be monogamous. While Westerners could be condescending and racist in their descriptions of this culture, they were seeing something real.
The white colonists reacted to this discovery in two conflicting ways. Half stripped off and joined in, and half reached for their Bibles and began to call down the Lord. Bernstein is better at describing the first group, in long swooping paragraphs; I could have lived without the endless references to "plum-sized breasts" and "tiny hips." Europe became obsessed with the sultan's harems of nubile young virgins, buying "exposes" of this "filth" by the shipload. When you read excerpts now, they are comic Freudian projections of Europe's suppressed sexuality. Beneath the moral clucking, there is a frenzied longing in the descriptions of how teen virgins would turn to lesbianism as they waited for the sultan to pick them out. Europe indulged in a collective wet dream over free love in unfree lands.
Bernstein focuses on two examples of Western men who dived into this new freedom, believing it superior to the muffling back home: Gustave Flaubert, the extraordinary French novelist, and Richard Burton, the British explorer. They considered the East to be filled with sexual artists who had perfected one of life's great pleasures. Flaubert enjoyed this new freedom in private, while Burton became an evangelist. He wrote home about whole new sexual practices, reporting with awe that a female partner "can sit astraddle upon a man and can provoke the venereal orgasm, not by wriggling or moving but by tightening and loosening the male member with the muscles of her privities." Burton provided the British with the first English translation of the Kama Sutra and campaigned for sex education back home.
But Burton was unusual. Most of those who went east tried to keep their sexual exploration discreet—until, that is, the Americans joined in the European pastime as the 20th century approached. Their arrival was heralded in neon lights. The story of American penetration of the East was first captured—and stored—by Puccini in his opera Madame Butterfly. The story is stark. A typical American military officer named Pinkerton, stationed in Nagasaki in the late 19th century, arranges to buy the hand of Cio-Cio-San, a 15-year-old local girl. She gives birth to his child after he has left, and she pines for three terrible years. When he finally returns, his American wife at his side, he insists he will take his child. Cio-Cio-San cuts her own throat, leaving an American flag flapping silently in her baby's hand.
A million Pinkertons flooded into Vietnam, and few bothered with sham marriages. They were plunged from the Puritan heartlands into a place where sex was guilt-free, and American culture was transformed forever. Half the U.S. servicemen in Nam lost their virginity there, and half a million mixed-race babies were left behind, treated as outcasts. In a strange twist of history, the advance of free love may have owed as much to LBJ and Nixon's war as to the hippies and libertines.
Bernstein deserves credit for raising a tortured subject from which it is easy to avert our gaze. And yet, and yet … there is something deeply uncomfortable about a book that seems at times so complicit in the very exploitation it aims to scrutinize. It's not just the tone, though Bernstein's oblique confession to having his first sexual experiences in an Asian brothel is creepy. It is the fetid attitude toward women.
Bernstein's view of the role of women in his story of cultural and sexual collision is nuanced to the point of being myopic. He is describing men who went to foreign places, toppled their leaders, stole their resources, and then tossed their women a few pennies to spread their legs. Yet he writes: "From the standpoint of the currently fashionable political morality, [this behavior] appears very bad, an illustration of the unfairness of colonial rule. … But let's try to see the erotic history of the West and the East as part of a great human pageant, one in which the women, the girls and the boys involved were not necessarily passive."
Wait, why should we try? Bernstein's own attempts to claim that the women were involved in choosing their fate are extraordinarily feeble. He tells a story about an Arab queen choosing to have sex with a Western traveler, but how typical was she? He concedes that "much of the sexual opportunity presented by the East has always been, and still is, based on exploitation and injustice." But he goes on to defend the men who took part in that exploitation. Of Burton and Flaubert, he says, "They used no force; they abused no children; they did what they were invited to."
But this is not true, even on the evidence he offers. They could act as they did only because their governments had terrorized the population into acquiescence with massive violence. Flaubert talked about "the terror" that "everyone displays" in the presence of white men, and when a prepubescent boy offered him his mother "to fuck" for a fee, Flaubert assessed the situation as "excellent." Burton described the sexual habits of slave girls, almost certainly from personal experience. How is having sex with slaves or people who are terrorized by your countrymen, or who are sunk in poverty created by a long colonial rape, simply doing "what they were invited to"? How could these women have said no?
This newfound sexual freedom was freedom for men alone. The women involved were often literally enslaved or imprisoned against their will in harems and brothels or kept down by systematic violence if they tried to reject their role as sex toys for men. When I reported on sex trafficking in Bangladesh, I went to one of the "harems" Bernstein turns moist and sweaty over. The brothel on the border with India was a mess of rusty tin huts with sticky mattresses. The women there had mostly been stolen from their families as young teenagers and imprisoned ever since, drugged, and forced to pleasure men for a pittance. The woman who is most deeply scarred onto my memory is Beauty, then a 34-year-old. Sold to the brothel at 13, she is still there now; she will die there.
It is hard to escape the feeling that Bernstein has written this book in part to stem a guilty conscience about his own past. Every admission that this system was built on suppressing women seems to be wrung out of him in passing; every experience of male liberation is described with approving ejaculations.
This is, in the end, a darker and bleaker story than the one Bernstein wants to tell. European and American men really did find sexual liberation in the East. Some returned home and helped to sexually liberate their own countries in ways we all benefit from today. But the freedom came at the cost of exploiting an extreme form of patriarchy in the countries they went to, and to imply that the beaten-down, deeply deprived women wanted it is revolting.
Bernstein's story—and ours—ends with a strange irony. With the sole and ongoing exception of Southeast Asia, in this sexual conflict East and West have swapped sides—suddenly and definitively. "The very places where Western men in the past sought pleasures and excitements are today amongst the most sexually conservative places on the planet." Burton saw the Arab Middle East as a font of sexual freedom; today, he would be beheaded there for acting as he did.
In most of the East—in Africa, China, India, and the Middle East—this flip happened very fast. In the mid-19th century, "most of the world still subscribed to the harem culture, and in only the few small countries of the West, the small peninsular domain of Christendom, did a different attitude prevail." By the end of the century, it was the other way around.
How did this happen? Frustratingly, Bernstein doesn't offer many convincing explanations, but he does note that the colonial East attracted more missionaries than Burtons in the end. In Somerset Maugham's novel Rain, a missionary complains, "I think [it] was the most difficult part of my work, to instill in the natives a sense of sin." But they did. They succeeded. They soaked the East in a Western sense of sin, and saw it freeze up into a new frigidity.
So the Whore of Babylon has long since hitched up her skirts and moved to Amsterdam. The long colonial dream of the Eastern girl who won't—or can't—say no is losing its remaining links to reality, one country at a time. Somebody needs to tell the world's masturbators: The days of the Asian babe splayed on the road to Mandalay are over.
Johann Hari is a columnist for the Independent newspaper in London. He was recently named newspaper journalist of the year by Amnesty International.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

President Obama's address to Stonewall Aniversary at White House

(Andrew Sullivan)

It's good to see so many friends and familiar faces, and I deeply appreciate the support I've received from so many of you. Michelle appreciates it and I want you to know that you have our support, as well. (Applause.) And you have my thanks for the work you do every day in pursuit of equality on behalf of the millions of people in this country who work hard and care about their communities -- and who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. (Applause.)
Now this struggle, I don't need to tell you, is incredibly difficult, although I think it's important to consider the extraordinary progress that we have made. There are unjust laws to overturn and unfair practices to stop. And though we've made progress, there are still fellow citizens, perhaps neighbors or even family members and loved ones, who still hold fast to worn arguments and old attitudes; who fail to see your families like their families; and who would deny you the rights that most Americans take for granted. And I know this is painful and I know it can be heartbreaking.
And yet all of you continue, leading by the force of the arguments you make but also by the power of the example that you set in your own lives -- as parents and friends, as PTA members and leaders in the community. And that's important, and I'm glad that so many LGBT families could join us today. (Applause.) For we know that progress depends not only on changing laws but also changing hearts. And that real, transformative change never begins in Washington.
(Cell phone "quacks.")
Whose duck is back there? (Laughter.)
MRS. OBAMA: It's a duck.
THE PRESIDENT: There's a duck quacking in there somewhere. (Laughter.) Where do you guys get these ring tones, by the way? (Laughter.) I'm just curious. (Laughter.)
Indeed, that's the story of the movement for fairness and equality -- not just for those who are gay, but for all those in our history who've been denied the rights and responsibilities of citizenship; who've been told that the full blessings and opportunities of this country were closed to them. It's the story of progress sought by those who started off with little influence or power; by men and women who brought about change through quiet, personal acts of compassion and courage and sometimes defiance wherever and whenever they could.
That's the story of a civil rights pioneer who's here today, Frank Kameny, who was fired -- (applause.) Frank was fired from his job as an astronomer for the federal government simply because he was gay. And in 1965, he led a protest outside the White House, which was at the time both an act of conscience but also an act of extraordinary courage. And so we are proud of you, Frank, and we are grateful to you for your leadership. (Applause.)
It's the story of the Stonewall protests, which took place 40 years ago this week, when a group of citizens -- with few options, and fewer supporters -- decided they'd had enough and refused to accept a policy of wanton discrimination. And two men who were at those protests are here today. Imagine the journey that they've travelled.
It's the story of an epidemic that decimated a community -- and the gay men and women who came to support one another and save one another; and who continue to fight this scourge; and who demonstrated before the world that different kinds of families can show the same compassion and support in a time of need -- that we all share the capacity to love.
So this story, this struggle, continues today -- for even as we face extraordinary challenges as a nation, we cannot -- and will not -- put aside issues of basic equality. (Applause.) We seek an America in which no one feels the pain of discrimination based on who you are or who you love.
And I know that many in this room don't believe that progress has come fast enough, and I understand that. It's not for me to tell you to be patient, any more than it was for others to counsel patience to African Americans who were petitioning for equal rights a half century ago.
But I say this: We have made progress and we will make more. And I want you to know that I expect and hope to be judged not by words, not by promises I've made, but by the promises that my administration keeps. And by the time you receive -- (applause.) We've been in office six months now. I suspect that by the time this administration is over, I think you guys will have pretty good feelings about the Obama administration. (Applause.)
Now, while there is much more work to do, we can point to important changes we've already put in place since coming into office. I've signed a memorandum requiring all agencies to extend as many federal benefits as possible to LGBT families as current law allows. And these are benefits that will make a real difference for federal employees and Foreign Service Officers, who are so often treated as if their families don't exist. And I'd like to note that one of the key voices in helping us develop this policy is John Berry, our director of the Office of Personnel Management, who is here today. And I want to thank John Berry. (Applause.)
I've called on Congress to repeal the so-called Defense of Marriage Act to help end discrimination -- (applause) -- to help end discrimination against same-sex couples in this country. Now, I want to add we have a duty to uphold existing law, but I believe we must do so in a way that does not exacerbate old divides. And fulfilling this duty in upholding the law in no way lessens my commitment to reversing this law. I've made that clear.
I'm also urging Congress to pass the Domestic Partners Benefits and Obligations Act, which will guarantee the full range of benefits, including health care, to LGBT couples and their children. (Applause.) My administration is also working hard to pass an employee non-discrimination bill and hate crimes bill, and we're making progress on both fronts. (Applause.) Judy and Dennis Shepard, as well as their son Logan, are here today. I met with Judy in the Oval Office in May -- (applause) -- and I assured her and I assured all of you that we are going to pass an inclusive hate crimes bill into law, a bill named for their son Matthew. (Applause.)
In addition, my administration is committed to rescinding the discriminatory ban on entry to the United States based on HIV status. (Applause.) The Office of Management and Budget just concluded a review of a proposal to repeal this entry ban, which is a first and very big step towards ending this policy. And we all know that HIV/AIDS continues to be a public health threat in many communities, including right here in the District of Columbia. And that's why this past Saturday, on National HIV Testing Day, I was proud once again to encourage all Americans to know their status and get tested the way Michelle and I know our status and got tested. (Applause.)
And finally, I want to say a word about "don't ask, don't tell." As I said before -- I'll say it again -- I believe "don't ask, don't tell" doesn't contribute to our national security. (Applause.) In fact, I believe preventing patriotic Americans from serving their country weakens our national security. (Applause.)
Now, my administration is already working with the Pentagon and members of the House and the Senate on how we'll go about ending this policy, which will require an act of Congress.
Someday, I'm confident, we'll look back at this transition and ask why it generated such angst, but as Commander-in-Chief, in a time of war, I do have a responsibility to see that this change is administered in a practical way and a way that takes over the long term. That's why I've asked the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop a plan for how to thoroughly implement a repeal.
I know that every day that passes without a resolution is a deep disappointment to those men and women who continue to be discharged under this policy -- patriots who often possess critical language skills and years of training and who've served this country well. But what I hope is that these cases underscore the urgency of reversing this policy not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it is essential for our national security.
Now, even as we take these steps, we must recognize that real progress depends not only on the laws we change but, as I said before, on the hearts we open. For if we're honest with ourselves, we'll acknowledge that there are good and decent people in this country who don't yet fully embrace their gay brothers and sisters -- not yet.
That's why I've spoken about these issues not just in front of you, but in front of unlikely audiences -- in front of African American church members, in front of other audiences that have traditionally resisted these changes. And that's what I'll continue to do so. That's how we'll shift attitudes. That's how we'll honor the legacy of leaders like Frank and many others who have refused to accept anything less than full and equal citizenship.
Now, 40 years ago, in the heart of New York City at a place called the Stonewall Inn, a group of citizens, including a few who are here today, as I said, defied an unjust policy and awakened a nascent movement.
It was the middle of the night. The police stormed the bar, which was known for being one of the few spots where it was safe to be gay in New York. Now, raids like this were entirely ordinary. Because it was considered obscene and illegal to be gay, no establishments for gays and lesbians could get licenses to operate. The nature of these businesses, combined with the vulnerability of the gay community itself, meant places like Stonewall, and the patrons inside, were often the victims of corruption and blackmail.
Now, ordinarily, the raid would come and the customers would disperse. But on this night, something was different. There are many accounts of what happened, and much has been lost to history, but what we do know is this: People didn't leave. They stood their ground. And over the course of several nights they declared that they had seen enough injustice in their time. This was an outpouring against not just what they experienced that night, but what they had experienced their whole lives. And as with so many movements, it was also something more: It was at this defining moment that these folks who had been marginalized rose up to challenge not just how the world saw them, but also how they saw themselves.
As we've seen so many times in history, once that spirit takes hold there is little that can stand in its way. (Applause.) And the riots at Stonewall gave way to protests, and protests gave way to a movement, and the movement gave way to a transformation that continues to this day. It continues when a partner fights for her right to sit at the hospital bedside of a woman she loves. It continues when a teenager is called a name for being different and says, "So what if I am?" It continues in your work and in your activism, in your fight to freely live your lives to the fullest.
In one year after the protests, a few hundred gays and lesbians and their supporters gathered at the Stonewall Inn to lead a historic march for equality. But when they reached Central Park, the few hundred that began the march had swelled to 5,000. Something had changed, and it would never change back.
The truth is when these folks protested at Stonewall 40 years ago no one could have imagined that you -- or, for that matter, I -- (laughter) -- would be standing here today. (Applause.) So we are all witnesses to monumental changes in this country. That should give us hope, but we cannot rest. We must continue to do our part to make progress -- step by step, law by law, mind by changing mind. And I want you to know that in this task I will not only be your friend, I will continue to be an ally and a champion and a President who fights with you and for you.

40 Years Later, Still Second-Class Americans

By FRANK RICH (NY TIMES)
LIKE all students caught up in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, I was riveted by the violent confrontations between the police and protestors in Selma, 1965, and Chicago, 1968. But I never heard about the several days of riots that rocked Greenwich Village after the police raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in the wee hours of June 28, 1969 — 40 years ago today.
Then again, I didn’t know a single person, student or teacher, male or female, in my entire Ivy League university who was openly identified as gay. And though my friends and I were obsessed with every iteration of the era’s political tumult, we somehow missed the Stonewall story. Not hard to do, really. The Times — which would not even permit the use of the word gay until 1987 — covered the riots in tiny, bowdlerized articles, one of them but three paragraphs long, buried successively on pages 33, 22 and 19.
But if we had read them, would we have cared? It was typical of my generation, like others before and after, that the issue of gay civil rights wasn’t on our radar screen. Not least because gay people, fearful of harassment, violence and arrest, were often forced into the shadows. As David Carter writes in his book “Stonewall,” at the end of the 1960s homosexual sex was still illegal in every state but Illinois. It was a crime punishable by castration in seven states. No laws — federal, state or local — protected gay people from being denied jobs or housing. If a homosexual character appeared in a movie, his life ended with either murder or suicide.
The younger gay men — and scattered women — who acted up at the Stonewall on those early summer nights in 1969 had little in common with their contemporaries in the front-page political movements of the time. They often lived on the streets, having been thrown out of their blue-collar homes by their families before they finished high school. They migrated to the Village because they’d heard it was one American neighborhood where it was safe to be who they were.
Stonewall “wasn’t a 1960s student riot,” wrote one of them, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, in a poignant handwritten flier on display at the New York Public Library in the exhibition “1969: The Year of Gay Liberation.” They had “no nice dorms for sleeping,” “no school cafeteria for certain food” and “no affluent parents” to send checks. They had no powerful allies of any kind, no rights, no future. But they were brave. They risked their necks to prove, as Lanigan-Schmidt put it, that “the mystery of history” could happen “in the least likely of places.”
After the gay liberation movement was born at Stonewall, this strand of history advanced haltingly until the 1980s. It took AIDS and the new wave of gay activism it engendered to fully awaken many, including me, to the gay people all around them. But that tardy and still embryonic national awareness did not save the lives of those whose abridged rights made them even more vulnerable during a rampaging plague.
On Monday, President Obama will commemorate Stonewall with an East Room reception for gay leaders. Some of the invitees have been fiercely critical of what they see as his failure, thus far, to redeem his promise to be a “fierce advocate” for their still unfulfilled cause. The rancor increased this month, after the Department of Justice filed a brief defending the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the most ignominious civil rights betrayal under the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton.
The Obama White House has said that the Justice Department action was merely a bureaucratic speed bump on the way to repealing DOMA — which hardly mitigates the brief’s denigration of same-sex marriage, now legal in six states after many hard-fought battles. The White House has also asserted that its Stonewall ceremony was “long planned” — even though it sure looks like damage control. News of the event trickled out publicly only last Monday, after dozens of aggrieved, heavy-hitting gay donors dropped out of a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser with a top ticket of $30,400.
In conversations with gay activists on both coasts last week, I heard several theories as to why Obama has seemed alternately clumsy and foot-dragging in honoring his campaign commitments to dismantle DOMA and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. The most charitable take had it that he was following a deliberate strategy, given his habit of pursuing his goals through long-term game plans. After all, he’s only five months into his term and must first juggle two wars, the cratered economy, health care and Iran. Some speculated that the president is fearful of crossing preachers, especially black preachers, who are adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage. Still others said that the president was tone-deaf on the issue because his inner White House circle lacks any known gay people.
But the most prevalent theory is that Obama, surrounded by Clinton White House alumni with painful memories, doesn’t want to risk gay issues upending his presidency, as they did his predecessor’s in 1993. After having promised to lift the ban on gays in the military, Clinton beat a hasty retreat into Don’t Ask once Congress and the Pentagon rebelled. This early pratfall became a lasting symbol of his chaotic management style — and a precursor to another fiasco, Hillarycare, that Obama is also working hard not to emulate.
But 2009 is not then, and if the current administration really is worried that it could repeat Clinton’s history on Don’t Ask, that’s ludicrous. Clinton failed less because of the policy’s substance than his fumbling of the politics. Even in 1992 a majority of the country (57 percent) supported an end to the military ban on gays. But Clinton blundered into the issue with no strategy at all and little or no advance consultation with the Joint Chiefs and Congress. That’s never been Obama’s way.
The cultural climate is far different today, besides. Now, roughly 75 percent of Americans support an end to Don’t Ask, and gay issues are no longer a third rail in American politics. Gay civil rights history is moving faster in the country, including on the once-theoretical front of same-sex marriage, than it is in Washington. If the country needs any Defense of Marriage Act at this point, it would be to defend heterosexual marriage from the right-wing “family values” trinity of Sanford, Ensign and Vitter.
But full gay citizenship is far from complete. “There’s a perception in Washington that you can throw little bits of partial equality to gay people and that gay people will be satisfied with that,” said Dustin Lance Black, the screenwriter who won an Oscar for “Milk,” last year’s movie about Harvey Milk, the pioneering gay civil rights politician of the 1970s. Such “crumbs,” Black added, cannot substitute for “full and equal rights in all matters of civil law in all 50 states.”

As anger at White House missteps boiled over this month, the president abruptly staged a ceremony to offer some crumbs. The pretext was the signing of an executive memorandum bestowing benefits to the domestic partners of federal employees. But some of those benefits were already in force, and the most important of them all, health care, was not included because it is forbidden by DOMA.
One gay leader invited to the Oval Office that day was Jennifer Chrisler of the Family Equality Council, an advocacy organization for gay families based in Massachusetts. She showed a photo of her 7-year-old twin sons, Tom and Tim, to Obama. The president cooed. “I told him they’re following in Sasha’s footsteps, entering the second grade,” she recounted to me last week. “It was a very human exchange between two parents.”
Chrisler seized the moment to appeal to the president on behalf of her boys. “The worst thing you can experience as parents is to feel your children are discriminated against,” she told him. “Imagine if you have to explain every day who your parents are and that they’re as real as every family is.” Chrisler said that she and her children “want a president who will make that go away,” adding, “I believe in his heart he wants that to happen, his political mistakes notwithstanding.”
No president possesses that magic wand, but Obama’s inaction on gay civil rights is striking. So is his utterly uncharacteristic inarticulateness. The Justice Department brief defending DOMA has spoken louder for this president than any of his own words on the subject. Chrisler noted that he has given major speeches on race, on abortion and to the Muslim world. “People are waiting for that passionate speech from him on equal rights,” she said, “and the time is now.”
Action would be even better. It’s a press cliché that “gay supporters” are disappointed with Obama, but we should all be. Gay Americans aren’t just another political special interest group. They are Americans who are actively discriminated against by federal laws. If the president is to properly honor the memory of Stonewall, he should get up to speed on what happened there 40 years ago, when courageous kids who had nothing, not even a public acknowledgment of their existence, stood up to make history happen in the least likely of places.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

The Gay Generation Gap
Forty years after Stonewall, the gay movement has never been more united. So why do older gay men and younger ones often seem so far apart?
By Mark Harris (New York Magazine)

This week, tens of thousands of gay people will converge on New York City for Pride Week, and tens of thousands of residents will come out to play as well. Some of us will indulge in clubbing and dancing, and some of us will bond over our ineptitude at both. Some of us will be in drag and some of us will roll our eyes at drag. We will rehash arguments so old that they’ve become a Pride Week staple; for instance, is the parade a joyous expression of liberation, or a counterproductive freak show dominated by needy exhibitionists and gawking news cameras? Other debates will be more freshly minted: Is President Obama’s procrastinatory approach to gay-rights issues an all-out betrayal, or just pragmatic incrementalism? We’ll have a good, long, energizing intra-family bull session about same-sex marriage and the New York State Senate, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, Project Runway and Adam Lambert.
And at some point, a group of gay men in their forties or fifties will find themselves occupying the same bar or park or restaurant or subway car or patch of pavement as a group of gay men in their twenties. We will look at them. They will look at us. We will realize that we have absolutely nothing to say to one another.
And the gay generation gap will widen.
You hear the tone of brusque dismissiveness in private conversations, often fueled by a couple of drinks, and you see the irritation become combustible when it’s protected by Internet anonymity. On the well-trafficked chat site DataLounge, a self-described repository of �gay gossip, news, and pointless bitchery,� there’s no topic, from politics to locker-room etiquette to the proper locations for wearing cargo pants and flip-flops, that cannot quickly devolve into �What are you, 17?���What are you, some Stonewall-era relic?� sniping. And some not entirely dissimilar rhetoric is showing up in loftier media. In April, a 25-year-old right-of-center gay journalist argued in a Washington Post op-ed that many gay-rights groups are starting to outlive their purpose, and chided older activists for being stuck in �a mind-set that sees the plight of gay people as one of perpetual struggle � their life’s work depends on the notion that we are always and everywhere oppressed.� The scathing message-board replies pounded him at least as hard for his age as for his politics. �You twentysomething gays seem to think being out equals acceptance � Don’t be so quick to dissolve the organizations that made it possible for you to be so naïve,� wrote one reader. Another, blunter response: �Forgive me for not falling all over myself to do exactly what an inexperienced 25-year-old decrees � Don’t waltz in and start barking orders, little boy.�
Public infighting is a big minority-group taboo�it’s called taking your business out in the street. And it may seem strange to note this phenomenon at a juncture that, largely because of the fight for gay marriage, has been marked by impressive solidarity. But let’s have a look. Here’s the awful stuff, the deeply unfair (but maybe a little true) things that many middle-aged gay men say about their younger counterparts: They’re shallow. They’re silly. They reek of entitlement. They haven’t had to work for anything and therefore aren’t interested in anything that takes work. They’re profoundly ungrateful for the political and social gains we spent our own youth striving to obtain for them. They’re so sexually careless that you’d think a deadly worldwide epidemic was just an abstraction. They think old-fashioned What do we want! When do we want it! activism is icky and noisy. They toss around terms like �post-gay� without caring how hard we fought just to get all the way to �gay.�
And here’s the awful stuff they throw back at us�at 45, I write the word �us� from the graying side of the divide�a completely vicious slander (except that some of us are a little like this): We’re terminally depressed. We’re horrible scolds. We gas on about AIDS the way our parents or grandparents couldn’t stop talking about World War II. We act like we invented political action, and think the only way to accomplish something is by expressions of fury. We say we want change, but really what we want is to get off on our own victimhood. We’re made uncomfortable, or even jealous, by their easygoing confidence. We’re grim, prim, strident, self-ghettoizing, doctrinaire bores who think that if you’re not gloomy, you’re not worth taking seriously. Also, we’re probably cruising them.
To some extent, a generation gap in any subgroup with a history of struggle is good news, because it’s a sign of arrival. If you have to spend every minute fighting against social opprobrium, religious hatred, and governmental indifference, taking the time to grumble about generational issues would be a ridiculously off-mission luxury; there are no ageists in foxholes. But today, with the tide of history and public opinion finally (albeit fitfully) moving our way, we can afford to step back and exercise the same disrespect for our elders (or our juniors) as heterosexuals do. That’s progress, of a kind.
Next: How the generation gap is evident in activism.
These unnuanced generalizations, as everyone who makes them quickly notes, do a gross injustice to both groups. The gay community�or more accurately, communities�is hardly monolithic, and its divisions, not just of age but of race, gender, region, and income, are too complex to paint with a broad brush. And Pride Week�which this year falls on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Inn riots�is a reminder that we have always been able to unite when faced with either a common cause or a common enemy. It’s when we’re not on the front lines that tensions flare. �On its simplest level,� says Jon Barrett, 40, the editor-in-chief of the 42-year-old gay magazine The Advocate, �we think they’re naïve. And they think we’re old.�
Even on those front lines, it’s a complex moment. Last November, eight days after the election, I found myself marching with thousands of gay men, lesbians, and friends of the cause from Lincoln Center to Columbus Circle to protest the passage of Proposition 8 in California. The air was charged; many of us were eager to call out the enemy�a well-organized, well-financed coalition of conservatives who were using churches as political-action bases designed to roll back civil rights for gay Americans. And our response was anger. We held up signs with slogans like TAX THIS CHURCH! We yelled ourselves hoarse.
But the demeanor of many of the young attendees felt unfamiliar to older protesters. They were smiling more than seething, and I noticed that many of their picket signs�LET ME GET MARRIED, LOVE ISN’T PREJUDICED, NYC LOVES GAY MARRIAGE�were more like let-the-sunshine-in expressions than clenched fists. Shouting did not come as naturally to them.
Activism is an unlikely realm in which to spot a generation gap; by definition, a rally attracts people who identify themselves by a shared goal. But it’s sometimes an uneasy union; the march marked an encounter between age groups that, although part of the same community, had previously spent little time together. And a difference in outlook was unmistakable. �After Prop 8 passed, a tremendous number of young people who had never been to a protest before wanted to release that energy,� says Corey Johnson, the event’s 27-year-old organizer. �And that night was a great example of the two generations being bridged in a productive way. But my impression is that there is a difference. Young people are, I think, upset, but it’s not with the level of anger that a lot of older folks feel, and perhaps there’s more hopefulness involved.�
To many young gay people, the passage of Prop 8 was shocking but not alarming; it has jolted them into action, but one suspects it’s out of a Milk-fed belief that identity-politics activism can be ennobling and cool. What doesn’t seem to be driving them is fear; their cheerful conviction that history is going their way seems unshakable compared to ours. That can lead to callousness on both sides; we patronizingly warn them that their optimism is dangerous; they patronizingly tell us that we’re too embittered by our own past struggles to see the big picture.
The notion that anger no longer has a primary place in the gay-rights movement can feel awfully uninformed to anyone raised on the protests of the late eighties, when say-it-loud outrage was one of the movement’s only effective weapons. To some of those whose identities as both homosexuals and activists were forged in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, this new aura of serenity is way too �Kumbaya.� It’s hard to overstate the centrality of the AIDS crisis in any gay generation gap (the divide between those who are currently 45 and their elders once yawned at least as wide). If you want to know where you stand in gay history, ask yourself where you were in 1982, when the disease took hold in public consciousness. If you were already sexually active by then and you’re still here to read this, you are someone who surely knows that fury has its uses. If you were in your teens, wondering how to take even your first steps into life as a gay man in a world in which a single encounter could become a death sentence, you understand fear, and its warping effects down through the decades. And if you were a kid, you grew up seeing AIDS as an unhappy fact of life.
But what about the ever-growing cohort of gay men who weren’t even born in 1982? For most of them, AIDS is not their past but the past. No wonder some of us feel frustrated; when we complain that young gay men don’t know their history, what we’re really saying is that they don’t know our history�that once again, we feel invisible, this time within our own ranks.
Next: Why connecting to a subculture was important 25 years ago.
Were we that uninterested when we were that young? Actually, no, we weren’t; we were thirsty to acquire the vast range of knowledge, tastes, and encoded references that seemed to derive from some mysterious User’s Guide to Homosexuality, because even if we then rejected them, they still constituted a lingua franca (in an era well before LGBT studies programs or even many books on gay history made that kind of information easily accessible). Now, a familiarity with those movies, those plays, and those books will likely get you branded an �old queen� by people for whom �old� is by far the worse of those two epithets (unfortunately, a morbid fear of aging is one of the few ideas we seem to have done a good job instilling in the young).
For gay men who came of age 25 years ago in a tougher environment, knowing your (sub)cultural iconography was not only a way of connecting to past generations but a means of defiantly reorganizing the world, of asserting your right to literally see, hear, and perceive things differently. The need to hide yourself was thus transformed into the privilege of joining a private club with a private language. But to many younger gay men who grew up with gay public figures, fictional characters, and references, it’s a dead language�a calcified gallery of Judy Garland references and All About Eve bon mots that excludes them as much as it does the straight world.
So they react, as they react to many things, with a pose of bored indifference. Which is, of course, infuriating: There’s nothing duller than a young gay man who ornaments his ignorance with attitude and whose curiosity about the world doesn’t appear to extend past his iPod, certain that anything not already within his firsthand experience is by definition antiquated. But once we start blaming gay twentysomethings for not having gone through what we did, we turn into sour old reactionaries telling ourselves self-flattering lies about how misery builds character. Worse, we may in fact be doing damage. According to a 2005 report by the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, our �emphasis on suffering reflects not the current reality of many LGBT adolescents so much as recollections of previous generations’ own �horror’ � LGBT adults’ residual fears and pain may be acting to magnify the real difficulties of LGBT teens.� Put simply, we talk too much, telling nightmare stories about AIDS and the Reagan administration when we should be listening�and then we get angry that they’re not listening to us.
�We’re just like our parents,� says a colleague of mine who came out right after college, in the mid-eighties. �We fought really hard so that our children would have things easier than we did, and now we resent them for it and sit around complaining that they lack character because they had everything too easy.�
That parent-child analogy also points to a larger cultural change, one that helped breed the hurt feelings that created the gay generation gap, which is that young gay men are, by and large, not our kids, even symbolically. The last twenty years�thanks to political progress, activism, education, the dying-off of a lot of homophobes, the Internet, and the mighty guiding arm of popular entertainment�have brought about a remarkable growth in straight America’s acceptance of homosexuality. Without forgetting that for too many gay kids, coming out is still hell, we’re also witnessing the rise of a parallel generation of gay kids with unflinchingly supportive parents, buddies who cheer their comings-out on Facebook, high schools with gay-straight alliances�in other words, kids who have grown up in a world that’s finally beginning, in a few places, to look like the one we wanted to create for them, or for ourselves.
And it would be dishonest to suggest that those kids�brash, at ease in their own skin, exuberant, happy�are being greeted by older gay men with nothing but uncomplicated joy. We can’t help but wonder how our lives might have been different if things had been easier for us, too. Some envy, some wistfulness, even some resentment is only human. And to add one further injury: Those kids don’t seem to need us anymore. For decades, gay men functioned as unofficial surrogate parents to the newly out and/or newly outcast. They’d offer reassurance that being gay didn’t mean being lonely. It was a bond that linked many generations of gay men across the age spectrum and created a real emotional connection, even if what necessitated it was pervasive prejudice. Today, though, the notion of quasi-parental gay mentorship feels ancient, a trope out of Tales of the City.
Unlike heterosexuals, most gay kids don’t grow up around adults who are like them, and gay adults in their forties, fifties, and sixties don’t have many occasions for routine, ordinary contact with a younger group of gay people. One of the benefits of Pride Week is that, however artificially, it breaks that barrier down and restarts the conversation. That’s appropriate for an occasion that’s meant to be steeped not just in optimism but in an awareness of history�a history that, by the way, includes a generation gap of its own. As author David Carter reminds us in his excellent 2004 book Stonewall, back in 1969, gay New York was deeply factionalized. Gay older men �passing� in coat-and-tie jobs on Madison and Park Avenues and then discreetly meeting each other in Turtle Bay bars had contempt for long-haired, sideburned Village hippies, and the reverse was also rudely, robustly the case. Even though gay Americans seem to have lived a century of tumult and progress since then, it’s good to know we still have something in common with our ancestral brothers-in-arms.