Professor Bob Nowlan

SPEECH, FIRST ANNUAL NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY RALLY
10/11/00, UWEC
BOB NOWLAN

   I am proud to speak to you tonight as an openly gay member of the faculty at this university. When I first came here in the fall of 1997, not only was I told that I would be the first openly gay faculty member in the history of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, but also I was advised to consider living in Minneapolis and commuting to work here, as to do the latter would likely be safer and more comfortable for me, as an openly gay man. I am glad I decided to live here in Eau Claire, and to stay and work here at UWEC, doing what I could to help make both this campus and this community more welcoming and inclusive of openly gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. What we have accomplished TOGETHER in recent years HAS made a positive difference, even as there is much more that we yet need to do, both on this campus and beyond.

   This brings me to the focus of my remarks this evening. I want to talk about the POLITICS of “coming out,”and I want to do so from a “RADICAL” perspective. I have been a committed radical intellectual, teacher, and activist for even longer than I have been openly gay, and, in fact, it was this radical commitment and experience that made it possible for me to be publicly open about my gayness, including becoming a visible leader in a number of gay activist organizations within a few months after accepting that I was gay. What’s more, over the years I have faced just as much antagonism for being openly and actively radical as I have for being openly and actively gay. Many times, I have confronted both at once. For instance, while a graduate student at Syracuse University, I received repeated death threats that targeted me as “a commie faggot,”suggesting that this represented the worst imaginable combination, one which, as a result, richly deserved extermination. However, I don’t want to focus on that tonight; I’ve persevered, and, in fact, I have drawn enormous strength from this combination of gayness and radicalism. Tonight, I want to give you an explanation of how and why this has been so.

   I think there are two key lessons that we can learn from taking a radical approach to the history of glbt politics. First, whatever we gain results from our own struggle, as glbt people, together with our straight allies and supporters, not something that is given to us, and, what’s more, this struggle is often, of necessity, long, hard, and requiring of a great deal of pain and sacrifice. Second, we cannot overcome our own oppression and achieve our own liberation unless we fight together for the freedom of all oppressed people, and not just those who are oppressed on account of their sexual orientation or gender identification.

   In the early years of gay liberation, following directly upon the watershed moment of the Stonewall riots, many activists united efforts to achieve personal liberation, through individual acts of coming out, with a commitment, in struggle, to bring about general human emancipation through revolutionary social transformation. We don’t, today, hear so much about this latter commitment, or its connection with coming out, so allow me to cite a few key passages from a representative short article, first published in 1970 by the revolutionary gay liberationist collective The Red Butterfly:

   <QUOTE> On the matter of ‘coming out’, we agree that the phrase . . . both describes what we are about and what we are working for. However, concealed within this idea is an important tension which ought to be unpacked and examined . . . the polarity between personal head-freeing and the need for collective, social action to change institutions . . . . Emphasis on personal liberation, the experience of feeling free . . . can and often does lead to a kind of escapism or regression, to detachment from the actual conditions confronting us. It can also lead to real personal problems for people who act unthinkingly; they end up “free” in their heads but cut off in fact from access to means for changing social conditions. This problem is especially acute for our movement since so much of our oppression consists precisely in being forced to choose between a personal life in a gay ghetto or a de-personalized life in straight society – usually to the detriment of individual growth, no matter which option is taken. <END QUOTE>

   The tension the Red Butterfly identifies is one that continues to challenge we who are involved in glbt politics thirty years later. I agree with the Red Butterfly that “we must change our own consciousness to be free to change the institutions which shape our lives” and yet I also agree as well that “liberation of the head can never be more than a half-step, a transitional move, until fundamental changes are made in the institutions and cultural forms which create gay oppression.” Undoubtedly, we may at times today be inclined to think that these latter institutional and cultural changes have already been accomplished. Yet, if and when we tend to think this way, I suggest we pay heed to the inspiring words, again written in 1970, of Chicago Gay Liberation’s contribution to the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention:

   <QUOTE> As gay liberation we now take the position that, because of the rampant oppression we see – of Black[s], Third World people, Women, [and] Workers – in addition to our own; because of the corrupt values, because of the injustices, we no longer want to “make it” in Amerika. For to make it is to ACCEPT the oppression of others (in addition to our own) . . . . Our particular struggle is for sexual self-determination, the abolition of sex-role stereotypes, and the human right to the use of one’s own body without interference from the legal and social institutions of the state. Many of us have understood that our struggle cannot succeed without a fundamental change in society which will put the source of power ([the] means of production) in the hands of the people who at present have nothing. Those now in power will oppose this change by violent repression, which is in fact already in motion. Not all of our sisters and brothers in gay liberation share this view, or [they] may feel that personal solutions might work. But as the struggle grows, it will be made clear by the changing objective conditions that our liberation is inextricably bound to the liberation of ALL oppressed people. <END QUOTE>

   Today, thirty years later, the basic problem that requires glbt activism is often understood as exclusion and invisibility, and the solution thereby as inclusion and visibility. As a result, a tendency arises to treat heterosexism and homophobia as if these were ultimately atavistic aberrations, rooted entirely in ignorance or backwardness, that run counter to the basic values of American democracy, and that are doomed to pass into oblivion simply as more and more straight Americans are reeducated and enlightened. Glbt struggle for equality is reduced to struggle for mere assimilation and integration: 1. assimilation of glbt "queerity" into the mainstream of American society and culture so that this "queer difference" can be tolerated and accepted as an unthreatening part of this very same mainstream, and 2. integration of glbt people into positions of power within business and industry, government, the military, the university, and the news and entertainment media without simultaneously challenging the kinds of ends these institutions are designed to advance or the kinds of interests they are designed to serve. This means struggling for an illusory equality of representation across all levels of a fundamentally unequal society. In short, even if this scenario were to be realized, it would leave the largest mass of glbt people at the bottom of society together with the largest mass of straight people, and therefore most glbt people would be by and large still subject to a considerable degree of exploitation, alienation, and dehumanization. What’s more, until we have transformed the conditions which MAKE IT POSSIBLE for significant groups of often quite powerful people to derive substantial material advantage from discrimination, prejudice, and abuse directed against us, we must remain vigilant, because what has been won can yet be taken away.

   We must not rest content to achieve liberation for a relatively privileged minority of the world’s people while leaving the relatively disprivileged global majority ever-increasingly further behind. I challenge us to recover the spirit of revolutionary gay liberation, where people conceived of “gay” as more than simply another word for “homosexual.” “Gay” represented, instead, an open, positive, public identification with a history, a community, a culture, and a politics of collective struggle against oppression and for liberation. At its most radical, gay liberation envisioned, in the words of revolutionary gay liberationist writer David Fernbach, that gayness should aim to serve as “the thin edge of a wedge”in the struggle to transform ALL unjust and inequitable forms of sexual and gender relations. Gay liberation sought to forge revolutionary new modes of social relationality, as a progressive contribution toward, and a utopian prefiguration of, GENERAL social liberation. The aim was NOT, by any means, just the securing of “a place at the table” for the most privileged among us. It was NOT simply, moreover, to make the case that we are, already, “virtually normal,”but rather, in contrast, to challenge and critique the predominant ways in which normal and abnormal were conventionally defined. In Fernbach’s words, the goal of the revolutionary movement of gay liberation would be the creation of a new society comprised of "a unified humanity consciously determining its social institutions and its direction of development," "organized according to the principles of reason," founded upon "an equal claim to happiness, and to the material and cultural wherewithal that is a precondition for happiness." The formation of this new society, a society of unity, reason, and equality, would represent "the [social] expression of love . . . [in fact] the only way love can [truly] prevail."

   Coming out can be enormously inspiring and empowering. Yet I also believe we must ask ourselves AS and FOR WHAT are we coming out when we do so. I believe that coming out represents an immensely important first step: in coming out we seize the power to press forward with strength, confidence, determination, and resilience, as full participants within the ongoing collective struggle for human emancipation and social justice.   Let us never forget our historical oppression as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, yet let us demonstrate that we have not done so by carrying forward the struggle against ALL forms of oppression throughout our lives. Let us remember, as the Latin American revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara famously put it, “at the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is moved by great feelings of love.” We, as glbt people, who have so often been oppressed because of for whom and how we express and experience love, should take this risk of sounding ridiculous and should dare to be so loving.

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Last Updated: June 30, 2002