July 3, 1999
JOURNAL / By FRANK RICH
Summer of Matthew Shepard
The love that dare not speak its name now won't shut up," says Tom Ammiano, the gay San Francisco politician who may be his city's next mayor. Even a continent away, that's no joke. The homophobic epidemic of '98, which spiked with the October murder of Matthew Shepard, has turned into the homophilic explosion of '99.
Just look at the past week:
On Monday, the day after New York's Republican Mayor (alas, not in drag) enlisted in the placid gay pride parade, a couple in Rockefeller Center surprised the "Today" show's schmoozing weatherman, Al Roker, by treating the nation to its first on-camera, man-to-man network kiss on the lips. (The nation shrugged.) That afternoon, Bill Clinton, having already declared June to be "Gay and Lesbian Pride Month," took the stage of Broadway's "Iceman Cometh" to salute the 30th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the Bunker Hill of the modern gay civil rights movement. (The gesture might actually have been moving had his audience not been limited to Kevin Spacey, Tony Danza and fat cats paying $1,000 each.) The next afternoon, the first openly gay American Ambassador, James Hormel, was sworn in as our envoy to Luxembourg, with his partner, Timothy Wu, holding the Bible. Madeleine Albright, administering the oath at the State Department, used the ceremony to "send a message" of inclusiveness.
She and her boss weren't the only ones sending messages this week. Spike Lee's "Summer of Sam," its faux advance controversy notwithstanding, turns out to have less to do with race or David Berkowitz and his victims than with an attempted gay bashing by vigilantes seeking a scapegoat in that addled New York summer of '77. "Bash," the bill of one-act plays by Neil LaBute that has just brought Calista Flockhart back from "Ally McBeal" to a New York stage, finds its dramatic climax in gruesome homophobic violence carried out by a college student citing scripture to justify his hatred. "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut," the hilarious animated movie every 15-year-old will be sneaking into this weekend, features unexpurgated on-screen coupling between Satan and, of all boy toys, Saddam Hussein.
What larger drift can be discerned from this tidal wave of gayness, promulgated by homo- and heterosexuals alike, may be as ambiguous as the sexuality of Ricky Martin. But on the mass-culture front, the sum total of the latest gay frenzy may be the start of a shift in the mainstream depiction of gay people away from the cuddly, guppie-next-door coming-out phase exemplified by ABC's canceled "Ellen." However inadvertently (and heavy-handedly), "Summer of Sam" and "Bash" do take on the pathology of anti-gay violence -- a mass-audience subject in the wake of the murder of Matthew Shepard much as AIDS became one in the aftermath of the death of Rock Hudson.
If the fallout from the Shepard murder is only just beginning to resonate in pop culture, its impact on the political culture in retrospect appears to have been profound. It was only weeks after this student was tortured that the religious right's collapse accelerated, with the surprise defeat of many of its more bigoted standard-bearers on election day.
The rout has continued ever since. Jerry Falwell's dumb outing of the kiddies' TV character Tinky Winky, trivial as it was, backfired disproportionately because it came in the aftermath of Shepard's death and the election. Within days of the reverend's Teletubbies witch hunt, Mary Matalin, the former George Bush political director, was on TV declaring that "if we don't get off of that, we don't deserve to be a majority party." The first-tier candidates for the 2000 G.O.P. Presidential nomination now forsake gay-baiting entirely, leaving such ugliness to the increasingly marginalized Gary Bauer and to Steve Forbes, whose latent embrace of Christian Coalition dogma may have more to do with distancing himself from his late, outed father than whatever it is he actually believes.
Nowhere is the decline of overt homophobia in the political marketplace more apparent than in the saga of Mr. Hormel's rocky 20-month path to Luxembourg. In the pre-Shepard phase of the Hormel debate, Trent Lott wouldn't think twice about labeling gay people sick and sinful, in sync with a full-throttle religious-right ad campaign promoting conversion therapy. No more. The majority leader remained mum when Mr. Clinton finally did an end run around the Senate by giving Mr. Hormel a recess appointment. As for the three G.O.P. family-values Senators who decried the nominee to the bitter end, one has now been muted by an office pornography scandal (James Inhofe of Oklahoma) and another by a hypocritical divorce (Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas), while the third (Robert Smith of New Hampshire) threatens to bolt the Republicans for the far-right U.S. Taxpayer Party.
This doesn't mean that the lives of all gay Americans are out of harm's way. While the top G.O.P. Presidential candidates eschew bigotry, neither are they inclined to lead the way in countering anti-gay violence and job discrimination. As the conservative Weekly Standard put it when surveying the oblique finessing of the Hormel nomination by the George W. Bush and Elizabeth Dole campaigns, "Nothing turns Republicans into awkward, tongue-tied bumblers quite the way the issue of homosexuality does." My request to the Bush campaign this week for the simplest statement of its positions (if any) on gay civil rights issues was met with silence.
The Gore campaign did respond, with vague intimations that one of the Clinton-Gore Administration's biggest policy disasters (don't ask, don't tell) might be tempered by (what else?) "compassion" post-2000. But if the real advances in gay civil rights under Clinton-Gore dwarf even the G.O.P.'s best efforts, they are still only a beginning in a country where the Shepard murder has been followed by such heinous crimes as the savage killing of Billy Jack Gaither, a 39-year-old textile worker, in rural Alabama, and the brutal beating of 17-year-old Adam Colton, who had tried to start a gay-straight alliance in a high school 30 miles north of San Francisco.
The gay boogeyman or woman can still be exploited by demagogues with impunity. Witness the rising number of anti-gay bills before state legislatures and, in unconscious mimicry of the plot of "Summer of Sam," the efforts by both Mr. Falwell (via TV) and Matt Drudge (via the Internet) to whip up hysteria by spreading unsubstantiated rumors that the Columbine killers were gay. And it's not just those on the right who succumb to ignorance and fear on this subject: only a few weeks ago my wife and I were lectured by a prominent figure in Manhattan's liberal literary establishment about a conspiracy to recruit our children into homosexuality at college.
A James Hormel is irrelevant to this equation, for his "breakthrough" is at most symbolic. Even so, on his way to what should have been routine approval to a largely ceremonial post, Mr. Hormel, a 66-year-old father of five, philanthropist, businessman and former University of Chicago Law School dean, was smeared as everything from a pederast to a promoter of deadly sex to a religious bigot.
His partner, the 36-year-old Mr. Wu, was himself "a first" once -- one of the first two Asian-Americans to serve as trustees of Princeton University. Reflecting this week on his recent trial by innuendo and insult, he was upbeat. Though startled to find out that he too was subjected to caricature -- "Am I the trophy wife?" he joked -- he took solace in the fact that neither he nor Mr. Hormel ever "changed the way we presented ourselves and our relationship during the whole nomination process."
As that process continued, Mr. Wu realized that there was not much of a benchmark for the suspicious and fearful to judge their relationship by. For all the cultural representations of gay people, he notes, "there are not that many openly gay couples in the media or the political scene" -- and certainly none of truly national prominence.
Nor is there now, sad to say, despite Mr. Hormel's swearing in. Luxembourg isn't the closet, but it's just as small and discreetly out of view. Famous heretofore as the duchy where Harry Truman parked the "hostess with the mostess," Perle Mesta, in 1949 -- and where L.B.J. sent the first black woman envoy, Patricia Harris, in 1965 -- it may not be heard from again until a President appoints our first transgender ambassador, circa 2033.