Click to subscribe on: Apple / Spotify / Google Play/ Amazon / YouTube
President Biden received much credit this week for signing the bipartisan ”Respect for Marriage Act,” granting new federal protections for same-sex and interracial couples. But, as USC professor and LGBTQ rights activist Larry Gross suggests in this week’s Scheer Intelligence interview with host Robert Scheer, was Biden just jumping in front of the brave activists who changed the consciousness of the nation?
“There’s a way in which political figures like to step to the front of a parade,” Gross said. “Once the parade is already underway and the changes happen, they would like to step in front and take credit. This happened with Biden.” The new law voids the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, which then Sen. Biden signed, and which defined marriage exclusively as a union between a man and a woman.
Gross, a specialist in the areas of media and culture, communication, media portrayals of minorities, and a founder in the field of gay and lesbian studies, has an overall positive outlook from this new legislation. He does reserve some cynicism for Washington: “It has in some ways moved remarkably fast, but it is also up against a resurgent reaction… We’re now in a period when issues that should have been put to bed a long time ago are turning out to be very active and very dangerous,” Gross said, referring to reactionary counter movements from certain right wingers. He cited “an enormous backlash now focused once again on children and schools with a particular focus on trans people.”
If you are a domestic reader, this is your last chance to become a Patron before Dec. 25 to receive a free book from Robert Scheer while supplies last.
Credits
Host:
Producer:
Transcript
Robert Scheer:
Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests in this case, Larry Gross, a professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School, former associate dean of the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of one of the most important books on gay history, “Up From Invisibility,” published in 2001. And he has been one of the major academic figures in the consideration of gay or queer studies. And I wanted to talk to Larry, because I want to assess the significance of what the president signed into law Tuesday of this week. And so let me just start with that question. You wrote a book about when gays were invisible and up from invisibility, became public. And, you know, we’ve had, it seems to me, the most rapidly successful social revolution in American history. Does Biden’s signature put a punctuation on that, a culmination? How significant is it?
Larry Gross:
Well, it’s significant, but it’s not quite nearly as significant as the politicians or the president and his folks would like to claim. So it’s you know, it’s a punctuation mark, maybe a semicolon. I think the signing ceremony certainly well, on the bill, we could talk about the bill, it represents one of those moments which happen when a social movement brings about change. And then political figures, many of whom were not pushing for that change, many of them were resisting it…
Scheer:
Let me cut in. Biden was opposed to it.
Gross:
Well, he was. He was. And then he changed. The term they like has evolved. Yeah, but the point is, there’s a way in which political figures like to step to the front of a parade. Once the parade is already underway and the changes happen, they would like to step in front and take credit. This happened with Biden. It happened even more egregiously, I have to say, with Bill and Hillary Clinton, who were really not at all helpful and then, you know, evolved. And Obama, who, when he ran in 2008, explicitly was opposed to same-sex marriage. And so by 2012, which is really a remarkable, as you say, change in a short period of time, Obama’s calculation moved from. same-sex marriage was something that could hurt him to same-sex marriage was something that could help him. So he evolved with a little help from Biden, perhaps. But yes, this is very much an example of a social movement creating change and then political figures accepting that reality and doing their best to take credit for it.
Scheer:
Well, let’s talk about that, because it seems to me deeply cynical that Bill Clinton signed off on the Defense of Marriage Act, which was an explicit denial of the legitimacy of gay marriage and Biden did support that. And now I’m all for evolution and change. And I think you are. I personally was very excited about this. I thought this represented… Let’s make it clear what it represents. The federal government, the United States now honors gay marriage and interracial marriage.
Gross:
Let’s just back up a little bit. Up until 1996, it would have been taken for granted that the federal government would recognize a marriage that is legally performed in any state. That’s called the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution. Those states recognize legal actions by other states. I mean, you can’t have contracts and all kinds of things without full faith and credit. And the federal government would recognize legal acts such as marriage and others across state lines or nationally. This was never an issue until the Defense of Marriage Act, which was introduced and passed in 1996, in response to the beginnings of the fairly active, invisible push for same-sex marriage that began around 1994, ’95 with a court decision, a Hawaii state Supreme Court decision, that said that banning same-sex marriage was against the Hawaii Constitution. So that’s what put the issue… Moved it from a movement demand. I mean, the first the first, the push or demands by same-sex couples for the right to marry go back to the early seventies. There was one in Colorado. There was one in Minnesota. It was the very early beginnings of the post-Stonewall movement that began saying, well, we should have the right to get married. But it was always considered just so off, you know, so far beyond the legal fringe or the political fringe, that it wasn’t taken seriously as an issue. But by the time we got to the nineties, the movement, the what we would now call LGBTQ movement, wasn’t called that back then, but the movement began in the early nineties. Post-AIDS, which really was a changer and in many ways began pushing for inclusion in the sort of central institutions of American society. And the first of these, curiously enough, was the Boy Scouts. But that was kind of a really minor skirmish, and it was lost. The Supreme Court said the Boy Scouts are a private organization. They can discriminate if they want to. Turns out the Boy Scouts had other serious problems, but leaving the Boy Scouts aside, the next big one was the military and the right to serve openly in the military for the thousands of lesbian and gay service people serving in the military at the time, which was prompted in part by the first Gulf War, because this was, you know, sort of the first mass mobilization in the United States since the sort of movement had become more more effective, more powerful. And the sort of contradiction between come serve, but you have to hide you know? And if we find out, we will kick you out and dishonorably discharge you. So the first of these issues that was pushed onto the public agenda and forced on politicians was the military. And what happened there was in 1992, right after Bill Clinton was elected, immediately after just at the time when when the 1992 election happened and Clinton was the president elect, a district judge in Los Angeles ruled in favor of an Air Force officer who was claiming discrimination because he was thrown out of the Air Force for being gay. And the judge in Los Angeles said that’s unconstitutional, that’s discrimination. That shouldn’t be allowed. That happened right at the time, as I said, of the election. And when Bill Clinton faced the, had his first press conference after the election to hundreds of reporters gathered in Little Rock and no news. I mean, nothing had happened. They were doing a press conference. So this decision had just come out and Clinton was asked, during your campaign, you promised to end discrimination against gays, which he had in a private meeting with Hollywood donors, but the meeting had been taped, so it became public. So he was, Clinton was challenged. You made a promise. Here’s this court decision. What are you going to do? So Clinton was trapped and he couldn’t do anything except say, Well, I promised and I’ll do it. I will end discrimination against gays in the military. This was Clinton, you know, within a week of the election being forced into a corner. What that did was set off an opportunity for the Pentagon and the centrist Democrats, as well as Republicans, to gang up on the president before he was even in office. And they began the fight against allowing openly gay service people in the military. Colin Powell, who was then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Sam Nunn, who was the very powerful centrist Democrat from Georgia in the military and the Republicans. And they ganged up against, keep in mind, the first president who had not served in the armed forces. I mean, this was new. Clinton not only had he not served, but he’d been a draft dodger, as you might say, during Vietnam. And the entire military establishment in the Pentagon and in Congress used this issue as a way of showing Clinton who the boss was on issues of national security and the Army. You know, this was one of the first instances early in Clinton’s career presidency when he came up against opposition and as was his wants, he blinked. He backed down. He gave in and he came up with DOMA, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which he signed into law, which satisfied nobody. It didn’t really solve the problem of discrimination, but it demonstrated that Clinton was, you know, was could be pushed around. The same time, incidentally, was when he backed down and rescinded the appointment of Lani Guinier, African American law professor, as the head of civil rights in the Justice Department. And they went after Lani on ridiculous grounds, and Clinton blinked. These were very critical moments when Clinton’s cowardice up against opposition from the center and the right was demonstrated. So for the gay movement, this sort of brought together a demand for not radical change in society, but inclusion in the military, you know, the most, you know, patriotic, centrist institution. And at the same time, because of this Hawaii decision, it put marriage on the table. So here we had in the mid-nineties, gay people, LGBTQ people, saying we want to have equal participation in these central, centrist, you know, central American institutions: marriage and the military. And you could hardly be much more mainstream than that. And that became a kind of, sort of key civil rights demand for equal inclusion, not for radical change, but for inclusion in traditional institutions, whether it be in the military. I mean, plenty of longtime gay activists, myself included, had this notion of particularly those of us who were involved, as you know, about, you know, in fighting the military through the sixties and beyond, you know, around Vietnam and other issues. Oh, this is what we want is to be able to join the military and kill people in other countries. That wasn’t what we had in mind with this movement. But this was a demand for central equal belonging in these institutions. And marriage is about as central as you can get. And it was put on the agenda and it became a fight first in Hawaii and then elsewhere. And the Hawaii fight, where it went to a referendum which same-sex marriage lost. Hawaii, the referendum in Hawaii failed or succeeded, if you like, and in banning same-sex marriage, was funded by the Mormon Church. They were the primary funders of the fight against same-sex marriage in Hawaii, just as they were in 2008, the major funders of Proposition 8 in California to end same-sex marriage in California. But what happened after this initial move was that it became a state issue, because in the United States, it is states that confer, that enact marriages. Marriage is one of the powers of the state, not the federal government. Nobody gets married in the United States. You get married in a state when you stand there in this in city hall or in a religious institution, the officiant, you know, the person who is performing the marriages says by the powers vested in me by the state of California, the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, whatever, they don’t say by the United States. Marriage is a state contract. It’s a legal contract enacted by the state. So it became a state by state issue. With the beginnings of same-sex marriage legislation in a variety of states. No surprise, Massachusetts. You know, California, you know, the states you would expect, except in California, it ran into Proposition 8, which I already referred to, which was on the ballot in 2008, heavily supported major funding from the Mormon Church and incidentally, supported by Barack Obama, who said to quote, “God is in the mix.” When he answered the question of whether he supported same-sex marriage and he did not.
Scheer:
What does that mean, God is in the mix?
Gross:
Well, he means he’s invoking religion, which, as you will notice, even today, even yesterday with this new law, the debate is phrased by the right wing as an infringement on religious liberties.
Scheer:
So let me ask you a question about, you mentioned the Mormon Church a number of times, but isn’t it true that the Mormon Church has changed its position and…
Gross:
Slightly slightly, the Mormon Church also realizes that, you know, history is changing things. You know, the Mormon Church has a history of slowly changing. They abandoned polygamy in order to become a state sometime in the late fifties or sixties. You know, they had the president of the Mormon Church, who is their equivalent of the pope, you know, the one who speaks to God. The president had a revelation that African-Americans could be Mormons, which I’m sure was, came as an enormous relief to many African-Americans who wanted to be Mormons. Maybe some did. And they have basically on this case, they were all right with this law, in part because it doesn’t prevent states from not giving same-sex marriage. Utah, by the way, does not permit same-sex marriage. So the Mormons aren’t saying, you know, they’re in favor of same-sex marriage. They just didn’t, you know, fight this law, which does not prevent states from outlawing same-sex marriage and which added in, in order to get Republican votes and probably some Democrats, they put in various language about not infringing on religious liberties because religious liberties is now the horse that the right wing is riding in many of the current fights that are going on.
Scheer:
But then the question really is, is this a premature celebration in the sense…
Gross:
That it’s certainly not the end of the road.
Scheer:
And what a number of people have already written into our website, that I’ve encountered say no, because it puts it really in the realm of Roe versus Wade and all that, and the Supreme Court could easily rule that there is no increased national recognition.
Gross:
They never ruled that there was. All the Supreme Court did was invalidate DOMA. The Supreme Court never legalized same-sex marriage. What they did was invalidate the federal law and said same-sex marriage should be permitted. But, you know, it’s like Roe.
Scheer:
Well, that’s what I’m asking. I mean, what is the real change here? If states can still ban gay marriage.
Gross:
In some ways it’s like Roe, which is you can go to another state and get married if you come. So if you go, if you live in Texas and you take a trip to California and get married and go back to Texas, you can now say I’m married. The federal government will recognize that for Social Security, for anything that is under…
Scheer:
But doesn’t Texas have to recognize that you have the legal marriage from elsewhere, the same as if you were married…
Gross:
The federal government does. Texas does not.
Scheer:
Okay. So that’s what I’m trying to understand.
Gross:
I’m not entirely sure about that. I think that is the case. I strongly suspect that it’s the case. That this only… that this does not require states to recognize, but it might. DOMA only said the federal government does not have to recognize, you know, same-sex marriages. And the DOMA said no state has to recognize them. So I’m not sure about that. That’s worth clarifying. But it is not the be all and end all any more than, you know… This is the slicing and dicing of it to try and get it through. So the key thing here is the federal government, though.
Scheer:
But one big impact of it, because, you know, I also see hostile emails from people who say this is the end of morality and so forth. Is that the United States government has said to the international audience that we, the leading capitalist, democratic, whatever society we are, a beacon of freedom, on a national level, accepts the legitimacy of gay marriage. And that it strikes me, I’m not a lawyer, but it strikes me as a very big change in what we’re communicating to the world.
Gross:
Well, I would say that’s been the case for a while at the federal level, because depending I mean, if you look at Clinton and Obama, Clinton by the end, and certainly Hillary when she was running and Obama, they certainly would have been claiming that, you know, that, you know, we were we the United States, unlike whoever we’re comparing ourselves to, although, you know, on same-sex marriage, we now look worse than most of the world because they’ve moved very fast. There are plenty of, you know, Russia and China and Iran. There are plenty. Saudi Arabia, you know, the Arabian countries in general, you know, it’s a very mixed situation. And the United States always likes to portray itself as.
Scheer:
I just want to be clear, the countries you just mentioned are still repressive.
Gross:
What I’ve mentioned are countries that not only don’t they recognize same-sex marriage, you know, in many of them, you know, same-sex acts are capital offense.
Scheer:
Yeah when you’re talking about the change, we’re talking about a whole number of countries that have explicitly gone further than the United States.
Gross:
Yeah, well, pretty much all of Europe, with the exception of Hungary, Poland… I don’t know about some of the other Middle Eastern European countries or not. But Hungary, you know, like the Soviet Union, Russia…
Scheer:
The reason I wanted to talk to you is you have followed this issue for whatever it is, 50 years, and you’ve written very persuasively about how repressive our society was at the beginning. I mean, I know when you’ve lectured in my class, you mentioned The New York Times as late as the late 1960s into the early 1970s, was condemning homosexual life in Greenwich Village, of all places, a gay community, and saying this corruption has taken over and the police were right in breaking up drinking spots and eating spots that gays frequent. So really getting back to the positive news here that this is a remarkable change.
Gross:
The change is remarkable. But, you know, two things about that. One is that it is, as you say, a long process. It begins in the middle of the 20th century. It does move faster than one might have expected by comparison with other struggles for civil rights or equality and justice. You know, it has in some ways moved remarkably fast, but it is also up against a resurgent reaction just as other gains, other social gains are up against a resurgent reaction. We’re now in a period when issues that should have been put to bed a long time ago are turning out to be very active and very dangerous. So if you focus specifically on issues relating to LGBT people and their, you know, their lives, there’s an enormous backlash now focused once again on children and schools with a particular focus on trans people who have sort of, you know, the last, if you like, of the of the letters in the acronym to become the focus of both progress and reaction. I mean, in part, you get the reaction because you get the progress. It’s a pushback, but it’s also become, as it has been in the past, a very convenient vehicle for reactionary counter moves to focus on, you know, what they call identity politics and culture wars and to focus on schools, you know, using schools and school boards and teachers and curricula as the battlefield for social struggle goes back a long ways. In the 1950, there was a fight about any kind of sex education in California, and all of this was going to corrupt society. It was all a communist plot. Fights against school boards, public schools against schools and school boards on issues dealing with gender equality, dealing with racial equality and certainly dealing with issues of sexuality is an old fight. It was, incidentally, one that was very deliberately developed in the eighties into the nineties by the Christian right, in particular, Ralph Reed, who was one of the early leaders, one of the leaders then of the Christian right. They came up with this notion of what they called stealth elections, where you would have people elected to school boards who would then use that position as a way of raising issues around race and gender and sexuality on the local level. And this has been picked up enormously by the Trump right and DeSantis, of course, who’s trying to use it as his own sort of vehicle for appealing to the right.
Scheer:
And it’s interesting, if I can interrupt. I mean, the Trump right… But the fact is, Trump, when he was nominated, that Republican convention, I think was the first one that had Peter Thiel, a prominent gay person there. And what I wondered about the President Biden signing ceremony, he had basically activists from the gay community. He didn’t have Tim Cook from Apple. He didn’t have Peter Thiel. He didn’t have prominent gay people in commerce and science and so forth. Going back to your question
Gross:
Well I don’t know, it was a big crowd there who was.
Scheer:
I know.
Gross:
You know, this is a pay off… This is a way for Biden to try and shore up part of the coalition he hopes will support him when he decides to run again. He’s trying to… Let me add a point that I think you’re getting at here, which is the big change that happened in the last 20 years, you know, since the late nineties, has been to turn this issue, the gay rights issue. I mean, just call it that, you know, the gay rights issue. To turn that from an interest group, a special interest group, if you like, to an issue that all good people should support. So when I was young, when I was in my twenties, when I was a student, you know, the issue that all good people, certainly in my circle would support were civil rights. This was the early sixties. You would, you know, you would picket Woolworth’s, you know, living in Boston, you know, as a student, you would picket Woolworth’s, you would you would take a position. This was before the Vietnam War came along, which was a different kind of issue, because there, you know, for students, for young people, they were all involved because they were potentially draftable and, you know, being sent or they were avoiding the draft, you know, whenever they were fighting the war, but had a direct impact on them. But civil rights was an issue where if you were a good person, you supported civil rights, even if you weren’t black, if you weren’t directly affected by it in that in that sense, because this is what a good person did, this was an issue you took seriously that you cared about, even if it wasn’t you directly. It was part of your identity as a good person. In the last twenty years or so that’s what happened with the gay issue for thousands and thousands of young people in particular. But not only young people in America became an issue that, if you like, straight people cared about, you know, they didn’t necessarily put it at the top of their list, but they cared about it. They thought this was important because it had become a general human rights issue that they cared about. And it’s you know, the media were a prime factor in making that happen.
Scheer:
But what accelerated it goes back to the title of your book, “Up From Invisibility.”
Gross:
Yes, that’s what I mean by the media.
Scheer:
Yeah. But when gays became visible, aside from the media coverage, the fact is you learn that the president of the leading capitalist company, Apple, in the world is a gay man.
Gross:
Tim Cook is a latecomer in this, but this being America, unfortunately, celebrities and sports stars and, you know, singers, those are the people who capture attention. And, frankly, although I’m not sure it speaks well for us as a you know, as a culture, reality television has more to do with it then Tim Cook, it’s not so much, you know, the executives who, by the way, are mostly invisible to people. You know, most people don’t even know who Tim Cook is.
Scheer:
What I meant was it was difficult to marginalize people who come in every family, every color, every [inaudible] I want to end with one last question, somewhat off topic, but critical to human rights. This act that President Biden signed also said the federal government will not oppose interracial marriage.
Gross:
That’s the Clarence Thomas kicker.
Scheer:
I know. But that must be confusing to people. But the fact of the matter is that in California, interracial marriage involving, say, Chinese immigrants and so forth, that was banned until right into World War II, where an interracial marriage was banned in a lot of parts of the United States.
Gross:
1967 Loving versus Virginia was the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage in 1967. So it was.
Scheer:
Do you mean interracial?
Gross:
Interracial marriage.
Scheer:
Yeah.
Gross:
Two years before Stonewall and incidentally, in 2003, was the Lawrence decision that ended anti, you know, same-sex legislation, what they called sodomy laws that made same-sex acts, the actual sex that you know… If you remember all of this to some extent is based on sexual acts that people perform that were, you know, to some extent…
Scheer:
I want to end this on… But I so appreciate your work over the years and I don’t want to intrude on your privacy, but you come from a very interesting family, that sort of, part of what is exciting about what’s called American democracy, your father was a famous economist but had trouble because of McCarthyism and so forth. You, yourself, your family went to Israel, then you had you personally have had some criticism with Israelis and so forth. How do you feel now having in your own life been kind of a rebel, not by choice, but by who you are being a gay man, you might have been a rebel in all sorts of… Is this not a moment of, I don’t know if it’s an epiphany or whatever, but isn’t this an exciting moment where you suddenly…
Gross:
I wish I could feel more of it. I mean, I view this, as I said, as a sort of recognizing facts on the ground politically. That this is an issue that, you know, the left, which is a term here, but Democrats and their allies need to be able to take for granted. This is solidifying your base, but it is at a time when the loony, really lunatic religious right is feeling empowered, is feeling encouraged, is becoming more aggressive at a time of great crisis, you know, public health crisis that demonstrates our broken health system, which has only been made worse by the Democrats since Clinton on. The environment, which is the apocalypse that is facing us and certainly our children and grandchildren. So this is a moment of, if anything, to my mind, it’s more parallel to, you know, the twenties looking, you know, with the, you know, the locomotive of the thirties coming down the track than it does some moments of, you know, of sunrise and promise.
Scheer:
Let me sum this up, though. And I think you just raised a very interesting point. If we think of that locomotive coming down the track, we think of, say, Nazi Germany, which was the most barbaric aspect of it. In Nazi Germany, everybody forgets, things look pretty good before they really became the worst. And in Nazi Germany, Jews were more accepted than in other parts of Europe, certainly in Eastern Europe and even in France, in pre-Nazi Germany, gay people were tolerated.
Gross:
The gay movement was in Germany then. That was the first gay rights movement.
Scheer:
And then when it came to killing—genocide, killing people, Jews, gays and others, suddenly all that civility was forgotten. And, yes, Donald Trump was open on this question of gay rights to have a Peter Thiel and actually he hasn’t condemned it. But the forces that he may represent are irrationality and maybe this is a depressing point to end, but I’m drawing upon your wisdom they’re there.
Gross:
They’re there and [inaudible] and they’re energized.
Scheer:
Yeah then the progress disappears pretty quickly.
Gross:
Progress can always disappear fast. That’s the hardest lesson to keep remembering and reminding is that gaining does not mean keeping that, you know, these are not fights that end. These are fights that continue. And you have to keep at it.
Scheer:
Thank you, Larry Gross and thank you, by the way, I really want… I rely so heavily on your academic research in my own teaching and thinking. You know, you’ve been there with this issue for half a century. Don’t want to out your age here. And I do think if this is progress and I do think it is progress, you personally deserve a great deal of credit here. And so I do want to end on that note. That’s it for this edition of Sheer Intelligence. I want to thank Laura Kondourajian and Christopher Ho at KCRW for hosting the program for NPR, Joshua Scheer for being our producer and the JKW Foundation in memory of Jean Stein, who certainly was an important figure on this issue, as well as many others, for helping support these efforts. See you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.