Voting Is The New Gay.

The modern gay rights movement was born on a hot May night in 1969. The patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a dive bar that served watered down and overpriced drinks, supposedly protected by the Mob, rebelled when New York City police raided the bar, to arrest people for dancing with same sex partners. Their reception was a surprise; a drag Queen bopped a cop on the head with her purse, and gay liberation was underway. The rioting that started that night, and continued for 3 nights, was fueled by gays who had simply had enough. Everyone was shocked when the crowds of rioters began to grow, and people took the subway to Greenwich Village to participate. Everyone was heard to wonder, “Who are these people?” The New York Daily News ran this headline:
“Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad” blared the headline on the front page of the New York Daily News. “Lilies of the valley” “pranced out to the street” when the cops showed up, the paper said.

Gay liberation took off with a vengence, and it really never stopped. When the marriage decision from the Supreme Court was handed down in 2015, it was the culmination of nearly 50 years of work. Gay liberation was born in New York, but exported to not just the rest of the country, but to the world. It is a complete American invention, an export that has changed the world. It was not a straight trajectory. The AIDS epidemic, that maelstrom that consumed so many, arrived in 1981, and tragedy and despair were a major stop on the way to real liberation. I am impatient with the idea that AIDS, and the gays response to it, lead to marriage equality. That this disease, and the millions of lives lost were necessary to get gays full rights is, in my opinion, outrageous. We, as gays, were citizens of a great democracy. That we had to have an epidemic to gain full rights seems to me to be absurd, and the only response one should have to this thinking is outrage. But, whatever the path, President Obama got the gays the right to marry, and gain all of the benefits that come with that. On some level how we got here is irrelevant, we are here.

How did this work? Many people fail to understand that gay liberation has its roots in the military — if you were accused of homosexuality, or caught having gay sex during World War II, you were summarily dismissed from the service, and branded with a blue discharge form, rather than a white one, and marked as “dishonorable.” This little piece of paper ruined your future, and prevented you from returning to your small town, so gays stayed in cities: San Francisco was home to the men and women who were posted to the Pacific Theater of war, and branded with a blue discharge, stayed. New York was home to the person dumped out of the European Thearter of War. These heroic men started gay liberation, by organizing, by fundraising, by producing porn that they sold to finance all of this. These people were brave, and heroic, and did the heavy lifting that got us to marriage equality. Many of them persished in the AIDS Epidemic, alas. But, as a model of social justice, of birthing a movement, it has no equal.

How then, do we get from gay liberation to voting rights? It isn’t really a straight line, but bear with me, and we shall get there. At some point, it simply became unacceptable to discriminate against gays. What was the trigger? My theories, un-scientific, but observational, are this: The Matthew Shepard murder, in 1998, was a tipping point. His murder, so brutal, so obscene, caused a trigger that pushed us over some line.

Previous to this, many commercial interests had recognized the commercial value of gay men and women, and their pursuit of these consumers, as consumers, established gays as a market that had value. Levi Straus and Company first advertised to gays in 1979. Absolute Vodka established themselves as a premium vodka by advertising, heavily, in the gay press. Subaru Cars of America, the first major car company to target gays directly with advertising, sent shockwaves up and down Madison Avenue with their multi decade campaign that advertised directly to gays. As the miracle AIDS drugs debuted in 1994 and 1995, many large pharamaceutical companies spent millions advertising their drugs in the gay press. All of this was another step towards full equality. The money that was spent allowed the gay press to survive, and to use their editorial pages, supported by advertising, to press forward with MORE gay liberation.

So, finally, my point: Gay liberation, as a model, works. What we see now is that is has suddenly become unacceptable to deny people their right to vote. As the outcry over the restrictive voting laws enacted in Georgia prove, it has suddenly become NOT okay to make it harder to vote. Commercial insterests, including Major League Baseball, have punished the state of Georgia, by moving the All Star Game from Atlanta. Companies, like Coke and Delta Airlines, headquartered in Georgia, are facing disastorous public relations debacles, being made to distance themselves from the state government of Georgia, where they are headquartered.

We, as a country, have some of the worst voting rates of the industrialized countries. It has become clear that political parties, especially the Republican Party, have benefitted greatly form suppressing voting. The stunning election of two Democratic Senators out of Georgia, and the resulting flipping of the Senate to Democratic control, proves that voting, when excerised, works. That it has provoked such a backlash from the Republican controlled state government of Georgia shows how instensely Repubicans fear more voting.

So, we are at a crossraod. Alfred P. Sloan, who grew General Motors into a powerhouse in the 1920’s, was famously quoted as saying, “The business of America is business.” That many publicly traded companies, among them JP Morgan Chase, and Apple Computer have publicly criticized the Georgia actions can only be a good thing. Commercial interests in America have influence; that they have decided, for whatever reason, that voting rights are worthy of their attention is again, like gay liberation, at a tipping point. We, those of use involved in voting rights, need to seize the moment, and push for MORE voter registration, more participation in civic life. We can do it, but it won’t be easy. We need to register the young. We need them to vote. We need to make sure that everyone who can vote has the opportunity to do so. We need to scale, and bring voter registration to the forefront, and register voters like never before.

Vote or Die.