The demise of gay identity is inevitable.
When the first Gay Pride March took place in July 1972, only a thousand people – myself included – dared to come out and join the parade. Today, more than 200,000 are expected to attend the Pride celebrations on Clapham Common. What a difference 25 years makes!
Although progress towards legal equality has been painfully slow, with no major gay law reform in the last quarter of a century, the visibility of the lesbian and gay community has grown at an astonishing pace. Homophobia is well and truly on the wane, especially among young people.
These successes, and expected future gains in the realm of legal rights, look set to create a curious paradox: the process of winning homosexual human rights will, in the long term, undermine gay identity.
Defeating homophobia and securing gay acceptance is certain to make differentiating between hetero and homo much less important. Once one form of sexuality is not deemed superior to the other, the need to emphasise the difference disappears. The labels ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ lose their significance, with no one caring who’s gay and who’s straight.
When queers cease to be victimised, the importance of gay identity will decline because same-sex desire will not require defending. All that will remain is gay identification for the practical purpose of sex and socialising with people of the same orientation. The political and psychological importance of gay identity will be zero.
We can glimpse even now the beginnings of this post-gay era, with the rise of mixed clubs, where queers and straights party together and the boundaries of sexual orientation are decidedly blurred. Homophobic barriers are tumbling elsewhere too: in the Boy Scouts, the House of Commons, the Church of England and, sooner or later, in the Armed Forces and the Royal Family.
Vast areas of prejudice nevertheless remain. So, for the moment, gay identity still has great value as a defence against heterosexual supremacism. Discrimination isn’t over yet, as evidenced by the ban on gays in the military, the denial of same-sex partnership rights, and the unequal age of consent. When we are treated as second class citizens, we have to defend our right to be gay and defy those who put us down.
But we also need the foresight to recognise that gay identity is a historically-transient, culturally-specific phenomenon which has arisen in response to the needs of a persecuted queer minority in homophobic societies. It never existed, for example, in earlier eras in the many cultures where same-sex behaviour was regarded as normal and acceptable.
Once intolerance and inequality are overturned, as they eventually will be, the necessity to assert and affirm gayness will inevitably decline. The dissolution of gay identity in these circumstances would, oddly enough, be a measure of the success of the gay rights movement.
This future prospect creates a whole new ball-game for the gay community, yet few seem ready to address the challenge. The idea of erasing the antithesis between queer and straight is very threatening to many homosexuals. They have become rather too attached to their gay identity. It defines everything about them. Providing more than a mere sexual orientation, gay identity nowadays offers a complete, ready-made alternative lifestyle to those cut adrift from heterosexuality and traditional family life. This all-embracing gay identity gives them cosy reassurance, defining their sense of personhood, place and purpose – even their taste in bottled lager and designer underwear! Uncomplicated and unchallenging, it provides a convenient mental refuge from the unpredictable sexual ambiguities and vagaries of the real world, where homo and hetero desires so often coincide and intermingle.
For this fragment of the gay community, which probably comprises the majority, gay identity has become a security blanket which is clutched tight at all times. These queers cling tenaciously to their sense of gayness, with all its connotations of invariable sexual difference, certainty and exclusivity. Anything that clouds the distinctions between straight and gay is deemed suspect and dangerous, which explains the frequent irrational gay hostility to bisexuality and bisexuals.
Yet the maintenance of this gay-straight schism, by marking out homosexuals as distinct and devalued human beings, helps sustain our second class status. It is not in the interest of lesbians and gay men to perpetuate these sexual divisions. Our liberation depends on breaking down the barriers between sexualities.
There is, however, a catch. Because queerness is currently disparaged, gay people first have to assert the right to be different in order to eventually create a pluralistic culture where sexual difference ceases to matter. Normalising and legitimising the ‘otherness’ of homosexuality is the precondition for abolishing homophobia. Only when sexual difference is fully accepted and valued will it cease to be important and consequently slide into oblivion.
The long-term implications are profound. Every success in overcoming prejudice and discrimination hastens the demise of gay identity. Winning moral legitimacy and legal equality for lesbians and gay men undermines the rationale for the hetero-homo polarity, diluting the significance attributed to the differences between the two sexualities.
Without first securing the complete social validation of same-sex desire it’s impossible to forge a culture where the differences between straight and gay no longer matter. As long as there is still homophobic prejudice and discrimination, the differences will continue to matter a great deal to the lesbian, gay and bisexual people who suffer as a consequence. The differences can only begin to fade once there is genuine equality, both legally and attitudinally. Achieving gay equality sometimes requires confrontation. When attempts to negotiate an end to discrimination don’t work, the radical tactics of groups like OutRage! are necessary. This radicalism is often mistaken for separatism because it initially heightens the differences between gays and straights. In the long term, however, by challenging bigotry, it lays the foundation for transcending those differences and thereby ending the need for a gay rights movement.
Since it is the existence of homophobia that creates the antagonism between queer and straight, overturning homophobia is the precondition for defusing this conflict. Securing the full acceptance of sexual diversity abolishes the duality of heterosexual oppressors and homosexual victims; subverting the social basis of the division between straight and gay, whereby one sexual orientation is privileged over another.
The more we succeed in gaining rights and respect for queers, the sooner the differences between hetero and homo will cease to be of social consequence and no longer have to be policed. When our gayness doesn’t require defending, being gay will once again become a mere state of desire, not of consciousness. Surprise, surprise. Gay liberation ends the need for gay identity. Hurrah!
* Peter Tatchell is a member of the queer rights group, OutRage!. He is a contributor to the anthology “Anti-Gay”, and the author of “Safer Sexy – The Guide To Gay Sex Safely.”