Public speech and private chats - getting gay perspectives into the straight media - Brief Article

A new gap has emerged in our movement: It's the separation between what we speak about publicly in the political arena and what we say to each other privately. You could call it the gap between a virtual discourse and a real one or a gap between the official and the informal. There is a divergence between what we are debating on the front pages of our media and what we say to each other in the E-mails, dinner conversations, and more intimate settings that form our daily lives. Indeed, there is very little broad public debate inside our movement right now--the only honest and sustained critiques one can find of movement politics are to be found in local forums, listserves of friends, a handful of Web sites, and a small number of local gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender media outlets.

The gap between the public and private discourse is partly an outcome of the homogenizing effect of speaking to the mainstream. To overcome hostility and ignorance, it is necessary to be relatively simplistic about who we are and what our lives are like. The conversation with straight America is still a remedial project to communicate what should not have to be debated: our common humanity. It is not the free-ranging and inspired dialogue about sexuality, identity, values, and ethics that we are capable of.

The discourse gap is an outcome of the strategic choice we made to focus on civil rights, not cultural transformation. Securing civil rights involves the legislative and legal arguments that dominate our public discourse. Moving a culture to reexamine its values around sexuality and spirituality, around family structure and commitment, requires more than legalese or platitudes.

When I find myself unable to say something I believe in public, the reason is either fear or the constraints of the role I think I should play as an activist or the lack of a proper forum in which to say what I want to say. Fear of being attacked, fear of alienating someone (a funder, a member of my organization, a friend), fear of not having something to say or sounding dumb (my girl inheritance). And the issues that are hard to speak about are the ones about which we might disagree most vehemently or might feel most personally affected. For example, where are we talking about our community's social amnesia around AIDS? Where can we make an honest self-assessment of what we have gained these past seven years and what we failed to achieve and why? Who will help us understand the transformations created by the growth of parenting in our communities and its impact on our friendship and politics and sense of GLBT community itself? Where shall we discuss the lack of racial diversity in the leadership of our movement and why this gap continues despite our rhetoric?

There are two other structural reasons you do not hear these and other more complex questions discussed at the public center of our movement: the lack of national GLBT mass media in which to have such conversations and the distorting nature of straight media. The national press is increasingly celebrity-driven And shallow in its serious coverage. The standouts in the GLBT media are regional and local newspapers and some online services that deliver both content and analysis.

Meanwhile, straight media are interested in explaining the "homo" to the heterosexist society. They have no interest in community building or spotlighting the innovative voices within GLBT culture. Yet we rely more on straight media to represent us to ourselves than we do our own press.

The issues surrounding the death of discourse inside the movement are complex--they implicate our individual ability to be courageous, the difference between pragmatism and ideals, the market, changes in the national gay media, and the play-it-safer attitude of organizations intent on survival. We call it being on message. But what we have become is nothing more than medium. At its core, this growing separation between a public and private conversation reflects a lack of trust that one can speak honestly publicly without being hurt in some way by those who disagree.

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