Tangled up in Pride

Pride march against Victor Orban’s anti-gay laws yesterday in Hungary: Getty Images

It’s the 56^th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. I was there on the streets for all three nights in June of 1969. I wrote the Village Voice cover story, “Gay power comes to Sheridan Square.” I have written stories commemorating that historic moment in American history many times over the years.

There. I got that out of the way.

What I want to write about this year is the need to keep writing about Stonewall, about LGBTQ rights, about the fact that Pride month and Pride marches are still an issue. This year, chiefly because Trump is once again in the White House, the stories are about corporations pulling their sponsorship of Pride month. “Big brands are pulling back on Pride merchandise and events this year,” was the June 4 headline on CNN Business, with other major media covering the same story, the same way.

Why? Instead of covering Pride month itself, or Pride day, or the Stonewall anniversary, major media outlets found it necessary to cover the pull-back by major companies of their support for Pride events, limit or cancel sales of merchandise, as well as messages of support for Pride in television ads or social media.

It’s the same old story: Fear. Corporations are afraid they’re going to get on the wrong side of Donald Trump in the way that Trump has targeted major law firms for their support of the Democratic Party, liberal causes, or lawsuits involving issues that Trump and Republicans don’t like.

Trump is doing everything he can to attack LGBTQ people and their rights. He’s got too many Supreme Court decisions that affirm gay rights to go at it in a full-on frontal way, so he signed an executive order declaring that there are only two genders, male and female, and ordered the banning of transgender people from service in the military. He’s counting on “his” Supreme Court to affirm that the Pentagon is the final arbiter of what constitutes fitness for service and military readiness, and so far, he’s succeeding, with the court lifting a stay of Trump’s transgender ban while a lawsuit challenging it makes its way through the courts. That allowed the military to begin discharging transgender service members who refused to resign.

It's outrageous, of course, which is the point. Some transgender people who are currently serving have combat records and awards such as the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. Do you think that makes any difference? Not a chance. Trump is going to do whatever he can to pander to his base supporters. He can’t resegregate the military. He can’t ban gay people from serving. So, he does the next best thing by banning transgender people using the same arguments that were used against Black people before Truman integrated the service and against gay people before Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was overturned.

I’d like to address that particularly disgusting time in our nation’s history, when gay people were banned from service in our military. There were thousands of gay Americans who served in all the uniformed services, of course. Some were drafted during World War II and afterwards in the 1950’s and 1960’s, when the draft was used to fill the ranks. The commanding general at Fort Leavenworth when my father served on the Staff and Faculty in the early 1960’s was gay and lived with a male Captain. He didn’t have to hide who he was, because he had a sterling record of heroism in World War II, and everybody knew it.

Before he took office in 1992, Bill Clinton said he would issue an executive order similar to Truman’s, integrating gay people into the uniformed services. There was immediate conservative opposition. Colin Powell, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1993 when Clinton was inaugurated, led the military chiefs of staff who headed up the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines into the Oval Office, where they basically told Clinton that if he issued his executive order allowing gays to serve openly in the military, they would resign en masse.

I was in Washington D.C. that day. The Human Rights Campaign had recruited a few straight military veterans to lobby the Congress in favor of gays in the military. That’s what it was called: “Gays in the military.” My father flew to Washington to support the Human Rights Campaign. He had written an article in favor of “gays in the military” for the Washington Post that appeared the day we all gathered at the Washington Hilton to plan our lobbying visit to Congress. The actor Troy Evans, who had appeared in “China Beach” and “Twin Peaks,” among other television series, and was a veteran of the 25^th Infantry Division in Vietnam, was with us, along with several others.

We went to the Capitol where House and Senate members, some of them newly elected, had just moved into their offices. Representatives of the Human Rights Campaign had made appointments for us to visit Congressmen and Senators, including the forgettable Speaker of the House, Tom Foley, and Majority Leader of the Senate George Mitchell.

I remember the feeling of going into the offices of these members of Congress as a nearly out of body experience. I remember Troy Evans, who would go on to fame playing the character “Barrel” on the hit TV series “Bosch,” beginning his pitch to Senator Mitchell, who had served as an officer in the Army in the 1950’s, by saying, “I shouldn’t have to tell you this, because you are a veteran, Senator, but this discrimination is just wrong.”

Troy summed it up perfectly. Why was it necessary for us to be there? We had all known gay men who served alongside us in the Army and Air Force and Navy and Marines. The members of Congress who hadn’t served, well, we were there to tell them exactly that, and to tell them that the gay people we had served with had served honorably. My father was able to tell them that one of the gay soldiers in his company in the Korean War had given his life as a machine gunner to save the lives of the rest of the men in the company – all of them – as they retreated during the Battle of The Gauntlet, a particularly savage engagement during which the Chinese army had attacked using “human waves,” directly into, in my father’s company’s case, the fire of his gay machine gunner.

Why did we even have to explain this stuff? Discriminating against gay men and women was wrong on its face. We shouldn’t have had to “prove” with our stories that gay people could serve alongside straight people. It had happened! It was a fact! It was part of our history!

But Colin Powell told Bill Clinton the same thing that General Omar Bradley had told the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1949, when conservatives in the Congress were attempting to overturn Truman’s order integrating the services racially. Powell said integrating gay people would be “harmful to good order and discipline, unit cohesion, morale, and esprit de corps.” When it was pointed out that the same thing had been said about integrating Blacks in the services, it had no effect whatsoever on Powell or anyone else. They were going to force discrimination any way they could. The result was the criminally stupid “compromise” of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which wasn’t a compromise at all, but rather a system of discrimination under another name that was used to run gay people out of the military until its repeal in 2011.

And here we are again. Another top leader at the Pentagon, this time in the person of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, telling the outright lie that transgender soldiers cannot serve honorably because they are “living a lie” or some bullshit like that, and of course, their service is inimical to “good order and discipline” and all the rest of it.

Trump’s 6-3 rubber stamp majority on the Supreme Court will shoot down the case against the transgender ban whenever it finally reaches the court. And last week it came out that Kim Davis – remember the county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples in 2015 after the right to marry was affirmed for gay people in the Obergefell decision – is filing a lawsuit to overturn that decision because of her religion, or some bullshit reason. That case will wend its way to the Supreme Court because it’s got big-time right-wing money behind it in the form of the right-wing Liberty Counsel.

Because of course it has.

They never stop, they never let up, they’ve got God on their side, they’ve got Trump in the White House, they’ve got hand puppets on the Supreme Court…pick your reason...this will go on and on. More Stonewall anniversaries will come and go, more Pride Months, more Pride Marches…

None of this repetition of all that came before should be necessary. Whoever named the Human Rights Campaign got it exactly right: The right to marry whomever you want, the right to serve openly in the military, the right to be proud of who you are – these are not special rights, they are human rights. We will keep going. We won’t shut up. Straight or gay or transgender or bi or whomever, we are tangled up in pride of who we are, and we will prevail because we are strong and we are united and we are right.