By Perry Deane Young
It was one of those extraordinary moments when a historic event touched me personally. And I could not hold back the tears.
Never in my lifetime did I ever expect to hear a president deliver the kind of courageous and compassionate speech President Obama gave recently to the Human Rights Campaign.
For way too long, our political leaders have been bullied into silence on the subject of human rights for homosexuals by hate mongers such as Jesse Helms and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. It was a chilling moment for me when President Jimmy Carter, the most overtly religious president in history, refused to meet with a delegation seeking gay rights. One of those Georgia frat boys he surrounded himself with dismissed the issue with the words, “We have more important things to do with our time.†We should never forget the unspeakable cruelty involved in Helms’ letter to a Raleigh mother whose son had died of AIDS: “I’m sorry your son chose to play Russian roulette with his life.â€
How many times have political candidates pulled me aside over the years and said, “Look, personally, I’m for gay rights, but you know it would kill me at the polls.†Barack Obama, almost alone, saw the issue as one of human rights for all people. He is not the first to recognize that so long as one of us is not free, none of us is free. And Obama has consistently had the courage to speak out about it. He also saw that the people who now oppose human rights for gays and lesbians are the very same people who opposed equal rights for women and African-Americans in the past.
Many of us have felt that the president was not carrying through on his pledge to end the ludicrous “don’t ask, don’t tell†policy in the military. But the president has now assured us that he will
do away with this ridiculous law that rewards lying. “I am with you,†he said to the cheering crowd in Washington.
Those of us who have actually served in the military are fully aware that thousands of homosexuals now serve proudly and well, as they always have. We have had to sit quietly by while those who never got near a military uniform, much less the dangers of war, expounded on the threat to our security if gays were “allowed†in the military. The point is, we’re already there. The only question is whether we have to live in fear of being “found out.â€
A wise old survivor of the death camps in Germany said it best: “Freedom is not having to lie about who you are.â€
I am haunted by the vast number of good and decent men and women who simply could not deal with the societal prejudice against homosexuals and chose suicide as the only way out. Even now, the suicide rate among gay teenagers is several times that of heterosexuals.
For decades, whole categories of jobs were denied to people known to be homosexual. During the McCarthy witch hunts, the words “homosexual†and “subversive†were used interchangeably – even though Mc-Carthy’s chief instigator, Roy Cohn, was himself actively homosexual. Frank Kameny worked in astronomy for the government in the 1950s, but he was fired for being gay. Nobody at that time dared to wonder how his private sex life had anything to do with studying the stars, much less how that made him a communist sympathizer. Until very recently, we had no choice but to slink away quietly, lest the public outcry further destroy our careers. But we have always had certain heroes
among us, like Frank Kameny, who had the courage to speak out for what was right.
Now, at long last, we have a champion in the White House. He is a man who understands that like the prejudice against African-Americans, the prejudice against gays harms our whole society. It isn’t just that “don’t ask, don’t tell†is unjust to gays in the military, it creates a cloud of distrust among everybody in the military.
After former Washington Redskins running back David Kopay publicly discussed his homosexuality, he got a letter from a young secretly gay man in Maryland, who wrote: “Man, when I think what a long cruel hoax it’s been, I just want to go out and cream somebody.†Long after the book I wrote with Kopay was published, we heard the very heartening story of Esera Tuaolo, who played with the San Diego Chargers. He was so bitterly distraught over his homosexuality, he would never play to his full potential because he feared the attention would expose his dark secret. He was seriously considering suicide when a friend gave him a copy of The David Kopay Story – and he realized he was not alone, no different from millions of others who were born gay.
There are those who say that our president did not deserve the Nobel Prize because he is a man of words, not deeds. In truth, words are deeds. Long after they were spoken or written, the words of Jefferson and Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. continue to inspire us to change and better our lives.
We are privileged to have a president now who understands the importance of words in the ongoing struggle for the rights of all people. His courage and his eloquence may help us all to overcome “the last respectable prejudice†against homosexuals. I never thought I’d live to see the day.
Perry Deane Young is the author of The David Kopay Story (with Kopay) and God’s Bullies/Power Politics and Religious Tyranny and Gays and Lesbians in Sports. He lives in Chapel Hill.
Calling Senator Helms a hate monger is more than a little misleading. For the truth about Helms visit http://www.jessehelms.com.