In the past few weeks, it has been easy to forget that Americans are becoming more accepting of gays and lesbians and of their rights to equal citizenship. This month, we heard about Tyler Clementi, an eighteen-year-old Rutgers University freshman who threw himself off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate used a Webcam to broadcast, live online, Clementi making out with a male date. His suicide followed those of Billy Lucas, aged fifteen, of Greensburg, Indiana, and Seth Walsh, thirteen, of Tehachapi, California, both in September, and preceded by a day that of Asher Brown, thirteen, of Houston, Texas. All three boys had reportedly been victims of anti-gay bullying. On Saturday, October 9th, readers of the Times woke up to a front-page story about the abduction of three men in the Bronx and their subsequent torture at the hands of members of a gang called the Latin King Goonies. The Goonies appear to have targeted the three, two of whom were seventeen, because they had pegged them for gay.
And then we had the remarks of Carl Paladino, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in New York, who said in a speech before Orthodox Jewish rabbis that children should not be “brainwashed” into thinking that homosexuality is “an equally valid and successful option.” Given an opportunity to elaborate on “Good Morning America” and the “Today” show, Paladino described gay-pride parades as “disgusting”; denounced his rival, Andrew Cuomo, for taking his children, aged twelve and fifteen, to the gay-pride parade in New York City; and declared his hostility to same-sex marriage. You don’t have to argue for any kind of equivalency between, say, the lynching of three gay men and the intemperate remarks of a politician to acknowledge that, in the use of a word like “disgusting,” something ugly and fundamental is being revealed, the id in the ideology.And yet there is plenty of evidence that Paladino-like sentiments are in eclipse. Partly, this is a function of generational replacement. People now in their teens and twenties are far more likely to endorse same-sex marriage than are older cohorts. And partly it’s a function of the direction in which people tend to move on gay-rights issues: when they change their minds, they most often change them from opposition to support. A recent study conducted by Robert P. Jones, of the Public Religion Research Institute, shows that one in four Californians has become more supportive of gay rights in the past five years. (Only eight per cent have become more opposed.) A slim majority, fifty-one per cent, say that they would vote to allow gays and lesbians to marry. (In 2008, Proposition 8, the California referendum that banned gay marriage in the state, passed with fifty-two per cent of the vote.) Polls show that Americans have also become steadily more critical of the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted earlier this year, seventy-five per cent of Americans think that gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly. (The same poll showed sixty-two per cent in favor in 2001, and forty-four per cent in 1993.)
Sympathy for the right to marry and other civil rights tends to go along with a growing acceptance of the proposition that homosexuality is not a choice but something close to inborn, making it more like race or gender and less like the breezy life-style “option” that Paladino’s remarks suggest. And the connections between religiousness and views on gay rights are becoming less predictable. Younger evangelicals are more open to gay rights than older evangelicals are, and the Jones poll shows that a solid majority of Latino Catholics in California now support the right of gays and lesbians to marry, while only twenty-two per cent of Latino Protestants do.
But the more that acceptance wins—and it is winning—the more angry obstructionism we’ll see from people who still can’t accept it. Clearly, tolerance has hit a few snags, some more serious than others. According to some data, hate crimes targeting gays have increased in the past two years. Certain opponents of same-sex marriage feel emboldened to unleash harsh rhetoric. On October 3rd, Boyd K. Packer, who, at eighty-six, is the second-highest leader in the Mormon Church, proclaimed, “Some suppose that they were born preset and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure and unnatural.” (Beware the hatred-licensing power of words like “impure” and “unnatural.”) And the Senate still hasn’t repealed the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell law, despite a ruling in September by a federal judge, Virginia A. Phillips, declaring it unconstitutional, and her injunction last week ordering the military to stop enforcing it. (The Obama Administration chose to appeal last week’s decision, preferring to have Congress, not the courts, rescind the law.)
But one snag has nothing to do with homosexuality itself, and that is the comprehensive undermining of privacy. This is the trap into which Clementi, and perhaps some of the other teen-age suicides, fell. Clementi lived in a world where filming your roommate in his most intimate moments and broadcasting the results without his knowledge represents a difference in degree, if not in kind, from a lot of online behavior. The roommate does seem to have been motivated in part by the fact that Clementi was gay. (He tweeted that he had “turned on my Webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”) But what he did, with the help of a female freshman friend, would not have been any more defensible if he had been broadcasting Clementi in an intimate moment with a girl.
The problem is a culture of exposure that is far more advanced than any efforts to combat online cruelty. Bullying feeds on weakness, anger, and, lately, the systematic undervaluing of privacy. (Paladino, by the way, has had his own problems with boundaries. He has admitted to forwarding e-mails depicting bestiality and recounting racist jokes that some people find as disgusting as he finds gay-pride parades.) Young people discovering their identity and their desires need a zone of privacy where they can be who they are, perhaps in the company of another human being, without feeling that somebody else might be tweeting it, filming it, or blogging about it, or that maybe they themselves ought to be—there’s such a thing as violating your own privacy, too. The unobserved life is so totally worth living. ♦
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