OUT/ED: ON THE POLITICS OF SHAME, SURVIVAL, AND INCLUSIVITY

The Equality Act is once again under consideration in the U.S. Congress, where it once again faces an uphill partisan battle. The passage of this desperately needed piece of civil rights legislation by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, where it enjoys broad support, seems all but assured. This of course leaves its fate in the hands of the Senate, and in particular two men, Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Going wisdom holds that the likelihood of the bill’s making it to the Senate floor for a vote, or even making it out of committee, is very much in doubt given how strongly and consistently both senators have opposed LGBTQ+ rights legislation in the past. Indeed, McConnell has refused to allow floor votes on the bill in the past two congressional sessions. The irony of this bottleneck is that both men have long been dogged by rumors about their own sexuality.

The rumors about Graham seem to be mainly if not wholly circumstantial: he’s an LGBTQ-phobe and a lifelong bachelor, therefore, as a 2007 piece in the Charleston, SC, City Paper put it, he must be a “closet-clinging self-hater.” These rumors surfaced again last fall in remarks by comedians Bill Maher (who has his own history of anti-LGBTQ+ nastiness) and Chelsea Handler, and more recently in a tweet by Democratic Coalition chairman Jon Cooper, which alleged “some pretty serious sexual kink” in lieu of mere homosexuality. When he has chosen to address them at all, Graham has of course denied them.

The allegations against McConnell have been less high profile, but are similarly longstanding and (mostly) circumstantial. They revolve around his military service, so called, in 1967, when he enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve but was discharged after four months, purportedly for an eye disorder that was minor and (then as now) treatable. A 2004 post on The Left Coaster site (seemingly no longer accessible there) related the story of a Lexington, KY, postal clerk who while working for a major in McConnell’s unit in 1967 heard tell that the soldier with this eye disorder had been “arrested in the barracks for sodomy.” This story resurfaced in a 2013 exposé in Daily Kos, and was recently alluded to by McConnell’s 2020 Democratic challenger, Steven Cox, in a tweet. McConnell’s military records have long been sealed, and no mention of the senator’s military experience appears in the bio on his Facebook page.

Beyond the irony (admittedly mild by Trump-era standards), these rumors are interesting not merely because they highlight how regressive attitudes about the LGBTQ+ community linger among allies and even queer folks as well as bigots. More significantly, they provide us with a point of departure for considering how we can move beyond “outing” towards a more positive portrayal of queer lives in the political arena, and how doing so might lift up both the struggle for queer rights and our national political discourse generally.

Let’s consider the arguments surrounding the outing of public figures. Those opposed to the practice commonly decry it as an invasion of privacy, and point to the psychological harm that it can inflict. Executive director of the LGBTQ+ group Log Cabin Republicans Jerri Ann Henry recently observed that “there’s always factors involved that we on the outside may not know,” and asserted that as a “political tool,” outing is simply a “form of bullying.” Arguments in favor of doing so tend to distinguish between indiscriminate infringements on people’s personal space and targeted exposure of the toxic hypocrisy of those seeking to harm the LGBTQ+ community. Michael Rogers has been an unapologetic high-profile advocate for this line of reasoning. Rogers started the BlogActive site in 2004 as a vehicle for outing closeted congressmen and influential staffers who were pushing “homophobic causes.” In a 2014 piece for Politico, he dismissed the privacy objection by pointing out that the targeted public figures who were raising it were at the same time “making my private life — and the lives of millions of other LGBT Americans — a very public political issue.”

Presuming the rumors about Graham and McConnell to have some foundation, the argument for exposure is strong, in particular with McConnell given the hijacking of the federal judiciary that he is almost single-handedly engineering. There are, however, other, more compelling arguments besides privacy concerns against outing even this level of hypocritical bigotry. Outing as a political weapon uses shame as its ammo. As such, even if the stated aim of outing someone is to shine a light on their hypocrisy rather than their sexual orientation or gender identity, the act of outing itself draws on — and in so doing, reinforces — the same negative feelings around being gay or bi or trans or non-binary as the bigotry itself does. It reduces sexual orientation and gender identity from rich expressions of our humanity to tools for ridicule, and in the process turns queer folks into mere “punchlines.” By linking being out to punishment, moreover, it perversely runs the risk of strengthening the rationale for staying in the closet.

If outing as a practice is counterproductive, the shame and other negative emotions that it preys on remain deeply and powerfully embedded in the lives of many queer folks, and will surely stay in play for some time in the political battles over our rights. The question then becomes, can the power of these emotions be harnessed and used in a way that’s not weaponized? Can that power be turned into an asset? 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg’s keynote address at the Victory Fund’s annual Champagne Brunch a week ago provides one template for doing so.

Mayor Pete’s address has received a lot of attention for its passionate, eloquent rebuke of Vice President Mike Pence (“Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator”). It was at least as notable, though, for its positive, deeply personal but also relatable description of coming out. Buttigieg decided to come out, he said, for “a very simple and private purpose” that most will be able to relate to: “I wanted to start dating.” He cast his experience of dating in millennial terms (“I wasn’t sure how to get started, so I did what people my age do: use the internet”), and likened himself to other, less verbal husbands by referring to his marriage as “this thing I can’t even describe without going into clichés.” Buttigieg also translated his personal experience of liberty into political terms. Lamenting that Democrats had “allowed conservatives to monopolize the language of freedom,” he asserted that freedom “isn’t just about…freedom from regulation,” it’s also about “freedom to live a life of your choosing.” Offering marriage equality as one “freedom-to” issue, he then moved to health care and reproductive rights, thereby emphasizing a basic commonality between LGBTQ+ rights and the rights of others.

The most emotionally charged part of Mayor Pete’s address, though, was his stark description of being closeted. “When I was younger,” he admitted, “I would have done anything to not be gay…[W]hen I was 15, or 20, or frankly even 25,…if you had offered me a pill to make me straight, I would have swallowed it before you had time to give me a sip of water….[T]here were times in my life when if you had shown me exactly what it was inside me that made me gay, I would have cut it out with a knife.” This is the sort of self-loathing that most if not all queer folks internalize in at least some measure. The images Buttigieg used to characterize it, moreover, not only evoke the forms of self-harm that those feelings cause so many of us engage in (which he alluded to in passing), they also forcefully upend the rationale for not coming out. Staying in the closet won’t keep us safe from violence, indeed, it puts us at far greater risk of it.

Needless to say, such frank avowals of youthful self-hatred are not the usual stuff of stump speeches by viable major party candidates for president. From a queer perspective, this frankness is what made the story not just effective, but revelatory. Here was a gay candidate on the highest national stage not trying to paper over a set of embarrassing revelations about him, but seizing agency around his shame. Here was a gay candidate declaring that that shame is his to avow, not others’ to inflict. As importantly, in owning this part of his past he clearly and unequivocally relocated the source of the shame he felt about it: he was not ashamed of being gay, but on the contrary of having hated that part of himself for so long. The positive press that his address received in the MSM as well as on the left indicates that such frankness also plays well outside a room of LGBTQ+ activists, and thus recommends it as one strategy for destigmatizing queer lives in a political context.

Buttigieg’s ability to balance the somber with the uplifting, to cast his life as both a survivor’s tale and a very American success story, is additionally an important source of his viability as a presidential candidate. The acute pain that he described in his survivor’s tale connects to the suffering that so many Americans continue to experience, while his success story presents them with a picture of what life on the other side of struggle might look like. Woven together, these twin strands offer an uplifting narrative that stands in stark contrast to the deep cynicism of GOP power brokers like Pence and McConnell, and more strikingly still to the modus operandi of our current president. As has been frequently observed, Trump’s 2016 run depended in large part on his ability to tap into the suffering of a particular constituency. Instead of working to lift this constituency up, though, he has elevated “American carnage” to a governing philosophy, and attempted to perpetuate his followers’ primal screams of rage and pain with act after gratuitous act of pettiness and outright cruelty — a two-bit Caesar offering circuses but no bread. Where Mayor Pete owns his shame, Trump displays a shamelessness devoid of humility or seemingly any sort of self-awareness outside of a narrow, myopic set of tactical instincts, while at the same time desperately trying to hide his myriad failures (and dirty dealings) from view.

These contrasts show how a queer politics of inclusivity could help move us beyond the current toxic climate of demonization and demographic exceptionalism. An inclusive politics that balances success with shame and survival doesn’t traffic in assertions of privilege based on race, gender, or religion, and things like the mere mass of your bling. It subordinates our differences to the ties that bind all of us, and powerfully reminds us that we are, and deserve, better than this.