When Morris Kaplan began writing about lesbian and gay rights
in the early 1990s, it seemed like a natural topic for him to address. He was,
after all, a lawyer and a political/social philosopher who also happened to be a
gay man. When he had last taught in the academy, nearly two decades earlier,
though, "it was really inconceivable that gay rights would provide the subject
for my academic work," he recalled over brunch one sunny Saturday
afternoon in San Francisco's Castro district. But while I was away, feminism
arrived, lesbian and gay tudies arrived, so I was in a position to be able to
address these terribly important ethical and political issues as part of my
scholarship."
For the last few years, he's been teaching an introductory course on lesbian
and gay studies at SUNY Purchase, and he's noticed a marked difference
between his young queer students and his own youthful experiences. "There's
a sense of a group where it's just a matter of fact that you're queer," he
explained, "and you start from there, instead of having to apologize and
explain yourself. When I was in college, at an all-men's school in New
England, plenty of us knew that we fell in love with other guys, and every
once in a while, but less often than we'd like, we had sex with other guys--but
we had no idea what that meant. And if we feared it meant something about
our whole life, we got depressed and feared that we might be ruined by our
perverse desires. Most of us didn't know any adult gay men; our image of the
homosexual was somebody who hangs around men's rooms and molests little
boys. Now, most campuses are likely to to have a number of queer faculty, and
if they're in urban settings, students are likely to know other queer adults as
well, people who are proudly out. That's a big difference. It's more than just
some notion of role model. It's about discovering that you can be a queer adult,
that there are lots of ways to do it."
In Sexual Justice, Kaplan explores what it means to be a queer adult from
several different perspectives, initially focusing on the legal issues but soon
taking on much broader questions about how any individual forms his or her
sense of identity in contrast to the social majority.
RH: Sexual Politics goes beyond a simple assertion of
rights that queers should have. It's a much more complex
interrogation about what it is to be a citizen.
MK: The original project was conceived in terms of privacy rights and
democratic theory, and the more I got into it, the more two things became
clear to me. One was that although there was a lot of piecemeal theorizing
about things like the sodomy laws and the anti-discrimination legislation,
nobody had tried to bring it together around the question of what it is for us,
being gay citizens, to be equal to every other citizen. Nobody had tried to
articulate what one ought, in a modern democracy, to take for granted as a full
citizen.
The other thing, which took me even farther afield, was that you can't talk
about lesbian and gay rights, queer rights, the rights of other sexual
minorities, without having to pay attention to the question of the role desire
plays in the making of individual selves and the role it plays in their ethical
and political life. I think I've come increasingly to the conclusion that what
we make of our desires, how we shape them, is at the very core of who we are--
and if democracy takes freedom seriously, it has to allow a variety of ways to
think about and express desire.
RH: Our legislatures have said, "Well, these desires are normal,
so they're legal. These desires are an abominable crime, so
they're not legal."
MK: And there's no thought to how deeply in conflict it is to say
everybody ought to desire the way the majority does. That's deeply in conflict
with the notion of individual rights, the democratic commitment that each of
us has the right to work out our own destiny.
Another thing that people don't reflect on very much, although it's perfectly
apparent if you follow the news, is how much of the condemnation of
homosexuality is essentially a religious position. The U.S. Constitution
prohibits establishing a state church, and it's committed to free exercise of
religion. That means lots of different ways of organizing your religious life,
and it seems to me that once you acknowledge that sex isn't some dirty little
secret, that it's something absolutely crucial to who we are, then you have to
say that people also ought to be free to love the way they will, as long as they
don't hurt other people.
RH: Those questions of desire as a cornerstone of identity also
lead you into very interesting contemplations such as the chapter
on Thoreau, where you suggest the possibilities of a much more
expansive meaning of "queerness."
MK: I hope it comes through that I'm deeply skeptical of fixed ideas of
identity. That doesn't mean I don't see myself very much as a gay man; I
wouldn't be on my vacation in the Castro if I didn't. (smiles) But I also
think things are different in different historical settings, and they change for
individuals throughout their lives. I don't think identities are fixed; I don't
think that groups are fixed. Boundaries are soft and permeable, and they shift.
What I like about queerness is the idea that the queer is somebody who doesn't
conform. Of course, what you don't conform to depends on the circumstances
you're in and the culture you're in, so there are lots of different ways of being
queer. And while I don't want to drain the sexual meaning from it, I think
what we need to hang onto, what ultimately needs to be defended, is
idiosyncracy, difference, weirdness--the ability of people to cultivate their
differences and to develop them in a way that provides them with a satisfying
relationship.
In the end I'm not really interested in the question of who Thoreau slept with,
or who he wanted to sleep with--I suspect he didn't sleep with anybody--but
what he believed, which was that who you were really depended on what you
did with your own desires, how you shaped them in relationship to a world that
for the most part would thwart those desires, whatever they are.
RH: You point out that even if someone identifies as a rebel
against the state, he or she is still contained within the state.
That's a marked contrast to, say, Andrew Sullivan's position in
Virtually Normal, which is that the state and our private
lives simply don't mix...
MK: ...and if the state would just leave us alone, everything'll be alright.
Some of the great conservative philosophers would emphasize how much we're
shaped by our social context, but Sullivan is a funny kind of conservative, he
really seems to deny that. He also denies the importance of social power in
dealing with, for example large corporations. Organizations that have the
power to hire and fire you have an even greater impact on most people's lives
than the government. Especially when we're not at war, the government
pretty much just taxes. So much else about your life is shaped by large,
corporate entities. Sullivan is opposed to insisting that such entities not
discriminate any more than the government can, and I think he's just dead
wrong about that.
RH: Among other things you disagree with him on, including
what the point of sexual desire is for gay people.
MK: We can't procreate. Well, then, according to Sullivan, it's for
lifetime companionship and emotional commitment. The idea that sex can be
good in and of itself and that freedom in sexual matters is a value worth
defending is really alien to him.
But for all my disagreements with him, Sullivan is important, simply by being
self-identified as a conservative and also as an out, gay man making
arguments, some of which are quite radical. I only get distressed at the view
that he will somehow become "straight America's official gay spokesman." In
that case, we're in big trouble, because of the limitations of his views.
RH: As gays and lesbians become more visible to the
mainstream, I notice more and more when they actively choose to
resist politicizing their sexuality. Like in Ellen DeGeneres's
"official" coming out interview, when she essentially begged not
to be asked any political questions.
MK: I did an interview a day or two after [the coming out episode] aired,
so naturally it was the first question, and I said something fairly banal about
how, well, yeah, it's got to be important to people. They admire this figure,
they're used to having her in their homes, and discovering that she's a lesbian
may change some of their attitudes. But the guy went on and suggested that
this was the most important event since Stonewall, perhaps even more
important. At which point I suggested that it was unwise to exaggerate the
political consequences. I mean, it's a good thing, but it's only one show.
In our culture, to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or otherwise queer is
a political situation. We're in it whether we like it or not. And anybody who
struggles to be accepted on one's own terms is involved in politics whether she
likes it or not! One can overdo the business of coming out as a political act, but
it is a political act, and it does help in a way that very few other things may.
RH: That's why I felt that your comparison with the Jewish
question intriguing, as another case in which simply by being
who you are, you are a political creature.
MK: There is, however, another piece of the lesson from the Jewish
question, which is that although it's not enough, political equality is crucial.
The problem for the Jews in Europe up until the very end of the 18th century
is not that they were second-class citizens; they weren't citizens at all in the
Christian countries of Europe. And when Hitler was revving up the killing
machinery, the first step he took was to demote Jews to second-class citizens,
then finally to strip them of citizenship altogether.
It's interesting--when the Supreme Court overturned the Colorado initiative
that rescinded the civil rights protections for gays and forbade any others,
they began their opinion with a quote taken from a nineteenth-century case
that said the Constitution can't tolerate two classes of citizenship. That opinion,
written by the most conservative of the six justices in the majority, Justice
Kennedy, stressed that the whole point of the Colorado constitutional
amendment seemed to be to subordinate lesbians and gays and bisexuals to
second-class citizenship.
What of course the Court didn't notice was there are all sorts of other ways in
which we alreadyare second-class citizens. Still, the idea that there's no
basis for somehow consigning us to second-class citizenship has now received
the support of the Supreme Court, and the idea of thinking about these issues
in terms not of individual rights, but full citizenship, seems to me vindicated
by that. At least the Supreme Court seems to like our way of thinking about
things.
RH: Which is important given the general conservative makeup
of the Court.
MK: Oh, absolutely! That's what's astonishing! I think that a lot of people
expected the Colorado initiative to be overturned, but people thought it would
be closer than it turned out. I don't know of anybody who anticipated such a
strong decision. Law professors criticize it for being inadequately reasoned
and not careful enough, but it says two incredibly powerful things. One is that
there's no rational relationship between singling out homosexuals for special
treatment and any legitimate aim of the state, so that the very use of the class
has to be seen as an expression of animus. The second thing it says is that civil
rights laws are not about special rights; all that protection against
discrimination gives is what everybody else in the society already has and
doesn't need. These are two very strong, strong statements!
This ruling may help in other cases. But more important, the justices's
statements are so fundamental that they have a kind of moral weight. I'm
happy to quote them as expressing the views of the highest interpreters of the
Constitution about what constitutional morality is.
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