Original Publication: Midwest Times,
January 1981
If we outlast the Reagans, survive the threatened purges and Orwellian nightmare of 1984, surge up again in the Gay '90s and go beyond, what will things be like for us in the year 2001? What will it be like to be gay in 2001?
What will it be like to be anything in 2001? Young Ronnie Reagan will be 43 and probably no longer dancing. Sean Lennon will be 26 and a whole bunch of Kennedy kids will be passing through mid-life crises. Prophesy, which used to be an ancient science, and then became a modern art, will, in the next 20 years, become a growth industry. Everyone will be trying to predict the future. But what the future will be depends so much on what you think the future is. In the '50s, people thought the future was straight ahead. In the '60s, some
people thought the future was now. In the '70s, the future turned inward and became a "Me." At the start of the '80s, with Reagan, the future has become something out of the past. The man from California wants the world again to be like it was when he was a boy on a farm in Illinois. The American Gothic farmer is back in fashion again. Some even are ready to pitchfork faggots.
The future, however, is not just a part of history, but also a part of fate. And history and fate are always contradictory. History you can read in a book; it seems rational and straightforward. Fate is more likely to come from an oracle...you know it from being around things, and it's usually uncanny or perverse. History is predictable, like a friend: There when you want it to be there. Fate is more like a lover: Unpredictable, you never know when it is going to arrive, or what condition it will be in. You just know you'll be there trying to figure it out. History is tame and it seems to move, like our ego, in one direction at a time. But fate weaves in and out, like our heart, going both ways at once...forwards and backwards, and it usually leaves you bewildered.
So, if you want to tell the future you have to look at the future from two contradictory points of view...as history and as fate. As history, you can say Ronald Reagan, the old conservative, beat Jimmy Carter, the younger liberal, and that Reagan seems to have won a mandate to take us back to Death Valley and the good old days. Supposedly, people voted for the conservative Reagan because they wanted him to put a limit on government, stop inflation, be frugal, and not be a 'big spender.' But look at these men in terms of their personal fate, you see quite the opposite is true. Carter has always, in his bones, been a closet Republican; and Reagan, in his generous heart, has always been, as he says, "an easy touch." Reagan is a latent liberal. Carter, as Jody Powell informs us, is "as tight as a tick." His first year in office he spent only $1,300 of his $50,000 White House expense allowance; as president, he carried his own bags, walked in his own inauguration parade, and when his assistants would eat breakfast with him at the White House he would send them a bill for their meal. Reagan wore a morning coat and tails and he rode in a limousine at his inauguration. Reagan is a "big spender": He spent $3 million, 50 percent over budget on his transition government. And for his exclusive invitation-only inauguration balls the Republicans spent another $8 million.
Carter went back to Plains, looking very much like an old conservative farmer, and he had an everyone-welcome, bring-your-own-wife, "covered dish" party. Reagan, conservative only in his historical rhetoric, seems fated to run a glamorous "liberal" administration modeled after Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and John Kennedy's New Frontier Fate and history always seem to run impishly counter to each other. They upset the best minds and the best intentions. Fate is so wild that it will cancel even a disaster if too many people get advance wind of it. That is why 1984 and 2000 with so many easy voices predicting doom will probably be two safe years. Most fortune tellers play upon your exaggerated hopes and fears and try to induce future shock. But future shock is future cheap.
Some try to frighten and say they are going to lock up all homosexuals and put them in North Dakota. That John Lennon was killed at the Dakota was the sign. Others will try to dazzle you with new science and new technology. True. By 2001 we will have cloned mice running around the house and robots will be working in the old Chrysler factories by then-owned General Motors. By 2001 we will have electronic silicone brains that can store more than the human brain's 10 billion bits and pieces and also by then do "associative thinking." Granted, through genetic engineering or simple evolution we may be replaced someday by a higher form of intelligence. Someday we will be another extinct species. Meanwhile, in the next million years, man may become a migrant wanderer again, not staying fixed in any nation, home, land or sex. A completely mobile vagabond. We will carry all our belongings in a small Black Box, a computer that will plug us into the great cosmic nervous system. Listen to the new music of Gary Numan or Robert Fripp. Hear how man is becoming more like a machine and machines are becoming, like cars, more lovable. With your Black Box you won't need a mother or a friend.
But before you become too dazzled by science and all its possible worlds, and before you break your lease on earth and give up your bedroom for a shiny black hole in outer space, remember Vietnam. There, all our new technology was as useless as an old dinosaur. Natives with sticks with shit on them had weapons more lethal than the rockets of our new technologies. History was with us, on our side, yes, but fate was with them. So fate let the team without the uniforms win.
Back to practical matters, without exaggerating our hopes or fears, what will life in 2001 be like for gays? I think history will not be on our side even then; but fate will be with us, be on our side...for fate has always been the province of fairies. History is such a bore. That's why it always seems to repeat itself.
And that's why gay people will have to face some of the same problems in 2001 that we face today. Or have to reface problems that we thought we cured years ago. You may be 64 then, but people probably will still be asking you when are you going to get married. You may have come out to your mother and your father and your brothers and your sisters and your former girl friend, and your boss, gone through years of analysis, but still they may wonder, even in the next century, when are you going to settle down and become a responsible "adult." Psychologists and theologians, insecure in themselves and muddling through their professions, will still be debating and thinking homosexuality is some kind of sin or sickness. People still will be asking what causes homosexuality. Even then, the majority will not realize homosexuality has no cause...that it is a fact of being. It doesn't matter if your mother was cold or warm, your father present or absent, or you fell in love with your teacher in the fifth grade, or you went to an all-girls school, or you were sickly when you were young, or you had sisters and no brother as a model, or you did it because guys forced you to do it, or you did it because guys paid you to do it and then you found out you liked it. It doesn't matter if you are poor or rich, Socialist or Republican from Missouri or from New York. Homosexuals will, in 2001, as today, come out from every condition and every background.
Homosexuality is not just a fact of life, it is a fact of being: So universal it can happen anywhere to anyone. And although a lot of people will, even in the next century, place guilt on it, it comes with no fault. You can fight it in yourself, deny it in yourself. Or you can fight it like Anita Bryant did for years until finally one day you realize like she did...you have to accept it, deal with it, live and let live. Even in 2001, Republican congressmen will be thrown out of their party, lose their job and reputation if they go to court and it is alleged they have had sex with a 17-year-boy. The good people of Murdo, S.D., even in 2001, if they have a town physician who lives with a man who is studying to be a nurse, will not go to him as patients, even if he flatly denies he is gay. The historical discrimination against homosexuals will be about as strong and as visible and constant as it is today. Why? Because the non-homosexual has more of a problem with homosexuality than does the homosexual. And the non-homosexual is neither willing to recognize his problem nor deal with it. Whites when they discriminate against blacks always know in their heart that they are not black. That's why in racial discrimination whites want to dominate and separate. But in sexual discrimination you cannot dominate and you cannot separate. When you shut off your sexuality you cut yourself in half too! Ideally, I know, everyone should treat everyone like a human being. But when you are a human being you are never ideal. So in 2001 we can still expect...even though we will have become the new Jew and the new black, the new oppressed figure in their made-for-television movies...that the majority will not accept us. The majority still will be afraid of us, or more precisely, the part of us that is inside them too. To be a real man you've got to be a male-female man. Just as to be a real woman you've got to be a female-male woman. That is the fate of our sexuality and our being. Gays have to face the dual nature of their sexuality; the majority does not.
In 2001 people still will be afraid of us because they are afraid they are like us...and they are! We are just ordinary people who must, by our lot or fate in life, experience our full sexuality. They picture us as sissies or inadequate people, immature, who can't have children and raise families. But actually we are people who must confront our fate in total and we probably live lives fuller and healthier than most of them. And we have had to find ourselves by ourselves without a lot of aid from home, school, doctors, ministers or professional help. Dealing with your sexuality is like dealing with your being...it takes time, study and some smarts. Ronnie and Nancy Reagan have never confronted the depths of their sexuality or being. They were content to remain ordinary people. Consequently, they divorced their children and left them as orphans for about 20 years when they became problems. They let Patti learn about sex and life in the fast lane from the Eagles; and they let Ronnie learn about life from the Joffrey Ballet company. John Lennon spent eight of his last years learning how to be a housewife and mother to his son. Most rock stars treat their wives as stupid girls, women they can whip and keep under their thumb. John Lennon left the Beatles and submitted himself to Yoko's yoke. A courageous step. But even John Lennon had not come full circle. There would have been no Beatles if there had been no Brian Epstein. For it was Brian Epstein who found the Fab Four...those faggoty little leather boys in a German cabaret and out of his homosexual love for them turned them into the concept Beatles. John Lennon was always a little uneasy about his own homosexual origins and would have had to go miles more, past even Yoko Ono to match a David Bowie.
Ronald Reagan, like a lot of ordinary people, lives in a dream world. His friend Frank Sinatra in the '50s had Montgomery Cliff thrown out of a nightclub because he made a pass at another man. But times are changing and though history will stay far behind, fate is on our side. The word is out, and we are coming out. The word is gay and we are living up to our word and coming out gay. It was a fateful event in the '60s when we got the world to begin to call us by our name, our fate: Call us gay. It is a more comfortable word: It is easier to say "My son is gay," "My daughter is gay."
History won't be with us, even in the next 100 years. Openly gay people won't be openly running the world any more than there will be poets in state legislatures and philosophers in governor's mansions. But quietly fate is moving with us. And fate will see to it that in the year 2001, there are a lot more of us around being happy and being gay.
