A Matter of Moment

by George Fraziek

There are occasions when one must pray the indulgence of reiteration, when the embers of an all-but-burnt-out case can be fanned into flame only by repeating oneself. Such an occasion is the observation of Gay American’s Day at the State House beginning at 9 this morning. You would think, would you not, that by this time the Legislature, for all its self-serving viciousness, its bigotry, and its submissiveness to such appalling persons as one Bartley and one Harrington you would think, would you not, that by now even the Massachusetts Legislature would have accepted the fact that homosexuals are human beings, too? But no. Incredibly, bills to give the gay community protection against discrimination! in employment, housing and public accommodations were soundly defeated in the last legislative session. Incredible! Absolutely unbelievable.

One could visualize the psalm-singing members raising their eye brows and echoing the observation of George V of England when informed that an acquaintance of his in Parliament was homosexual. “I thought fellows like that committed suicide,” he said, either precisely that or something quite like it. And he, no less, kin to good Queen Victoria, who, it has been charged with a certain substantiation, had carried on with Florence Nightingale! The Lady of the Lamp indeed! And yet I suppose it wasn’t all that astonishing that so many of our legislators acted as they did. The obvious explanation is that those who dissented from the proposed legislation did so out of fear of reprisals from their constituents perhaps correctly, but, then again, perhaps not. Still, this concern should have had no bearing on their votes.

But the profiles of politicians are ones more often of cowardice than of courage. What is so rare as the politician who, though he knew that it would mean his never being returned to office, had the honor bright to stand and be counted in behalf of his deep conviction that New York State’s anti-abortion laws constituted discrimination against the poor? We think that, with each new day, we become a little more enlightened, pointing to this and that further step toward decency. And in many respects we are, but not in our attitude toward homosexuals. By and large, the policy is to keep them in the closet. It’s preposterous. Nor has the press been much help either. Yet what seems passing strange is that such a philosophy should still pertain in a commonwealth that had the grace and vision to abstain from the beer halls of the 1972 Presidential putsch.

But this is an odd place, which, while it endorsed George McGovern, gave, on the other hand, a certain dispensation to Herself. In a way, in fact, the reluctance of our legislators to recognize the dignity of homosexuals is in character. Self-preservation remains the order of the day on every agenda. Self-preservation and, along with it, a cravenness that can be equated with evil. Certainly, homosexuals can be a burden, and never more so than, when, to use mine own now-classic phrase, they can’t come out of the closet without slamming the door. But legislation should be in the interests of the best, not the worst, of any given group. The fact that I can’t stand the sight of women in babushkas or hair curlers doesn’t mean I’m against women. So it seems unbelievable that, in Massachusetts in the Seventies, homosexuals should be treated as third-class citizens. Deep Southerners have the compassion at least to regard field hands with a certain affection.

Still, the blame should not be confined to the Legislature, for gays themselves or, rather, a great many of them sow the seeds of their own destruction. For one thing, no other people in our society aid and abet organized crime any more than do certain homosexuals who are the raison d’etre for the Mafia-controlled gay bars. Arthur Bell, The Village Voice’s resident gay, pointed this out a year or so ago, and his thesis still holds true. This is that by protesting the incursions of the police upon gay bars, the Gay Liberation movement joins forces with organized crime. It is to be hoped that out of today’s homosexual lobbying at the State House a little common sense will emerge.

It is time for a long, hard look at the plight of the gay world, a look that will neither exonerate nor exalt, but will see the situation as it is. There must not be any shouting of which there has already been far more than enough. And again I beg indulgence for citing one of my own lines (mine, damn it, and not Mike Nichols’s, as some careless columnist alleged.) This is that the love that once dared not speak its name now can’t keep its mouth shut. The sexual preferences of consenting adults (provided, of course, that they are not imposed upon those of different dispositions and that -they do no harm to the innocent), are a private matter. Just as long as a man goes about his business, neither frightening the horses, buying little boys, nor tiresomely trying to persuade the straight world that it is in error.

Obviously, what our Legislature needs is more members on the order of Barney Frank. Far above and beyond the fact that his championship of decency toward gays may be motivated by the large number of homosexuals in his constituency. Frank has behaved with a compassion that is alien to most of his colleagues. We’re not talking here about the “Black Diaries’ of a queen named Roger Casement, but about those oppressed men who ask only common courtesy. Frank understands this. There is a kinship between him and Franklin Roosevelt, who, when informed by prissy Cordell Hull that an assistant secretary of state was a practicing homosexual, mused a moment and then nodded. “Oh, well he said, “just as long as he doesn’t practice on State Department time.”