Andrew Solomon: Being Gay in the 21st Century

is it so difficult to imagine a future where we will no longer notice a person's sexual orientation pollsters tell us sentiment is changing and tolerance is growing so let's explore this notion of a gay identity with Andrew Sullivan author of far from the tree and we welcome you back here to our studio it's great to have you here again lovely to be here let's start out by reading some research here that the Pew Research Center published I guess just earlier this year in which they wrote in the last decade 14% of all Americans and 28% of gay marriage supporters say they have changed their minds on the issue in favor of gay marriage generational differences about homosexuality largely mirror attitudes about same-sex marriage with about three-quarters of Millennials and 62% of Gen Xers now saying homosexuality should be accepted and I'm wondering just off the top what your reaction is to that well I think it's cheering news but I think we live in a world in which we're growing more tolerant to various kinds of diversity and I think we accepted the women's movement and we accepted the civil rights movement and we have accepted increasingly the idea of equality not that it ever is fully resolved not that african-americans in the u.s. or women are necessarily treated equally all the time but we at least believe that that's the concept it's generally accepted that they should be and I think we're headed that way for gay people too and it's very cheering to me to see it do you make a distinction between tolerance and acceptance yes I think tolerance I'll use the metaphor of a family a tolerant family knows the child is gay doesn't throw the child out because he's gay or willing to have him come to things with his partner but sort of wish he were straight and are sort of disappointed about the whole thing that makes the best of it an accepting family is one that doesn't feel there's any real difference and they're equally happy to have a gay child as they would have been to have a straight one in your interviews with people you have talked to over the years about this is it your genuine sense that people who say they are not just tolerant but accepting really mean it some of them really mean it and some of them don't really mean it I mean as social fashions change you had a situation in which people are attempting to conform to what they think the social reality is so if the social reality is that good-hearted people accept gay people for who they are there are a lot of people who are going to shift to manifesting that attitude even if inwardly they still feel somewhat uncomfortable you've got to push people out of this don't just I mean youyou it's not enough to say if you had a gay kid you wouldn't care right of course I wouldn't care to be fine no no really tell me what you know I'm I'm so not prejudiced I think it would be great but deep in your heart on the third question you might get somebody to itch away at the scratch a little more well I think more and more there are people who actually really deep in their heart are completely fine with it who really deep in their heart don't have any yearning to have their child be straight a lot of people who have first time out their child is gay I think it may be a more difficult life it may be harder to meet someone it may be harder to have a family they have actual practical concerns about the ways in which will make their child's life difficult but that's different from thinking that it's a great misfortune that their child is like that if you were a gay man or a lesbian today I am say no I'm not finished the exam again let's say you're 25 years old which is a few years in the rear view mirror for you I think not too many but a few versus 10 years ago how different is your life your options your notion of what's possible today versus a decade ago I'm going to start by reaching back further than that when I was growing up we had some surrogate uncles who came and spent their holidays with us they lived nearby they had a basset hound we had a basset hound and my father and Elmer would run into each other when they were walking their basset hounds and when I was growing up Willy and Elmer were part of Christmas they were part of Thanksgiving they were around at various stages and I was always kind of bewildered because Elmer had been in medical school he had gone off to World War two and when he came back he had opened up a gift shop and I always said why didn't you go on with medicine and he would say well I saw terrible things in the war and I didn't want to do it anymore it was only when I was much older and he was much older that he said nobody would go to a gay doctor and if I was going to be gay I couldn't be a doctor and if I was gonna be a doctor I couldn't be gay and I had to make a choice the idea of how to make that choice is terrifying to me and it's someone who's both professionally ambitious and quite focused on my family the idea of having to decide that I was going to completely give up one or the other of those things is horrific to me I can't imagine what it would be like my experience was a million miles away from that I grew up in a time when there was acceptance of gay people when you could certainly have almost any query wanted except possibly politics and be gay at least if you were in the right areas and now even in politics who can go a long way being gay so there has been this enormous shift that had taken place by my generation where the kids were growing up now I think they have more and more a sense of choice they have a sense that they can choose to be very out they can choose to be relatively quiet about what their life is but I think they can really have the sense that whatever the life is that they want to have it will be available to them if they want marriage and a child great if they want to actually go and have sex on the end of a dock somewhere great they can do you know there's such a broad range of what it means to be gay and when Elmer was growing up and going to medical school and dropping out of medical school if you were gay you had to be one thing and that was what you had to be and that that was tragic and I think we've steadily moved away from that just curious whoa what did you think will you know what did you think they were at the time you know I gradually caught on as I got older and that they were a couple and they lived together and we didn't really discuss it and it just because I had a great aunt who had sometimes have a little too much to drink at Christmas and start asking him personal questions and they weren't quite good at dee railing that line of conversation I think yeah but I thought that they loved each other and when Elmer died they had been together for more than 50 years so in that sense I had a kind of positive gay role model that many other people didn't but you know they were spending their holidays with us because their own families didn't want them and there was a point when I was an adolescent when I realized that and I thought well my own family want me I mean my own family had had them so I didn't think I would be rejected out and out but I thought what is that like to give up your family to or have to worry about that think about that I want to shift our conversation a bit now and see if we can get a better understanding of what it means to be gay in the 21st century and let's begin with some broad brushstrokes here my hunch is if you ask people who are heterosexual which helped me here represents what percentage of the population said oh there's endless debate about that we say yeah you want to agree on ninety okay so if you ask ninety percent of the population define yourself heterosexual is going to be fairly low on the list my hunch if you ask a gay man a gay man or a lesbian that same question where is sexual orientation on that list of identifiers so I think if you ask anyone that question the things they have in common with ninety percent of the population will be low on the list and the things they have in common with ten or less percent of the population will be high on the list I think if ninety percent of people were gay that being heterosexual would be very noteworthy but I think as it is that for people who are gay it is very central and because it is involved in so many other things that's involved in love it's involved in these issues of family it's involved in when self-regard it's sort of it it infiltrates every part of one's experience it's pervasive I guess is whether it's it's pervasive in determining you have a gay identity and you also have all of these other identities as perhaps a gay lawyer or a gay doctor or a gay father or you know it comes in there as the advocate before all of the other things you are can i play this game with you a little bit here firstly so I asked you Andrew Sullivan give me a half a dozen and adjectives that describe who you are I don't mean kind of nice you know what I mean identifying features right I mean I'm a New Yorker I'm a writer I'm a gay man I'm a father I think that would be a good start in that order I can't believe in that order you put father forth that shocks me there was the order in which they sprang into my know I think they're all equally important and father certainly is incredibly central I haven't been it for as long so it hasn't defined me over as long a period of time but it's the central fact about me now I think they're all they're all very real and they're all very much they're all very much present in my in my day to day life in my waking life in my interactions with other people they they crossed my mind all the time you know it crosses my mind if I'm out my husband and I give me kiss goodbye I mean a little kiss goodbye I'm still aware of the fact that some people will turn around and look start all day you're constantly being reminded of the fact that what you have is different we arrive at a hotel and you can only see that Hotel person saying oh okay and and the two of you were in a double room and you think yes we are in a double room you're constantly having to explain it and respond to and respond to other people's discomfort so it's it's ubiquitous it's much less than it used to be but it's still ubiquitous and so you never forget that that's part of your identity you know it's such a New York thing for somebody from New York to say that New York is a big part of their day as big a part of an identity as a parent writer gay man New York really okay American how about AmeriCorps national I'm a British American national that's pretty central too right okay as difficult as this next question would be to imagine if society existed in a completely neutral vacuum do you still think that a person's sexual orientation would be as central a feature to who they are as it is today I think that the more a society is open to tolerant of accepting of and celebrating if people who are different the more that people who have any form of difference can decide how central they want that difference to be to their identity so we live in a society which has got a much more just attitude toward racial minorities but there are still many people who choose to define themselves as African Americans and who feel that they really want to be part of African American history and are part of the vanguard of African American culture that isn't because they're still being kept as slaves that isn't even because there are Jim Crow laws that's because of their inner reality and there are other people who are African American whom that plays a smaller role and I think gay people for a long time the nature of being gay is what is it like to live with so much oppression what is it like to live in a society that wishes you were otherwise what is it like to live in a society that takes away from you the privileges and responsibilities given to other people and if we get rid of all of that as I very much hope we will in the long run then gay people will have a choice they can think a lot about the fact that they're gay and tie themselves into a history that goes back before Oscar Wilde where they another room entirely this so beautifully that answer what you're good at this answer takes me just exactly where I want us to go right now because and you are in some respects uniquely qualified to answer this question because you're a member of two not just one but two of the most hated minorities in the history of the world it humor me with this premise here some would argue and you're of a Jewish background as well some would argue that when Jews were really seriously persecuted all over the world as they once were there was something different about being Jewish you really held on to all of those traditions the rituals whatever it meant to be Jewish at the time and now you see that it's a little easier to be Jewish in a lot of the world not all over the world but a lot of the world and therefore the community is a little more lapsed in all of that and I you know it got me wondering if if the world starts being a nicer place for gays and lesbians are you gonna lose something yes is the short answer it's what's called the irony of acculturation the more that something is accepted that the less the less cohesion there is and the more in fact the people who are being acculturated have to make an effort to create that unity and create that shapeliness I've sometimes said that I feel like being Jewish was good practice for being gay and that in the same way that my family had dealt with the marginalization of being Jewish I then dealt with the marginalization of being gay and I think one of the reasons my mother was concerned about my being gay was that she didn't like the marginalization that came with being Jewish and she thought I was the next generation I wasn't gonna have to deal with that and then she thought and now you found something else to to substitute for it but I think in the same way that people who were Jewish have been more and more integrated and there are lots of people who say well I'm sort of Jewish or I'm a Jewish Buddhist or I'm you know people have all of those different you wish exactly right so I think you can then also see a society in which people say we aren't gay but I you know I'm not really into the gay thing I don't really do the gear I'm not involved in gay politics I don't all of that becomes possible in a way it never has I wonder if you thought that through though we're in the same way a lot of the Jewish community today isn't as Jewish quote-unquote as their grandparents were can you imagine what a gay community looks like that isn't quite as gay as its grandparents were I can I can imagine a community in which gay people to particularly feel that they need to be friends mostly with other gay people because those people are like them and we'll understand I imagine a society in which nobody pays very much attention to whether it's the gay parents who are on the PTA or the straight parents and nobody's feeling the balance to make sure they're the right number of everybody on it I can imagine a society in which people will give each other a kiss goodbye and won't expect that anyone's gonna pay any particular attention to it and I think that when there is that acculturation something is lost something was lost when Jews were acculturated I think there was a world that my grandparents and perhaps your grandparents belong to in which there was the presence of Yiddish there was a theater that went with it there was a sense of values that were very specific some of which were very beautiful values and it's a loss to the world not to have them so much you worry about that I do worry about it I worry about it a bit with Judaism accepted I'm the next generation so I'm post the loss and therefore maybe less awake to it but I do feel like there are there's an energy in gay culture right now which I find incredibly inspiring and which I think would be difficult to sustain if we weren't in the midst of these battles for all the things we hold dearest and I mean that's the point some of the greatest some of the greatest everything right the greatest plays the greatest theatre the greatest design the greatest architecture call it whatever you want we got because of the oppression that gays suffered you know will we still get that cultural outpouring those professional bits of excellence along the way if that doesn't happen you know something is lost and something is gained and until it's happened it's very hard to say what's gonna be lost and what's gonna be gained but I think in the same way that if you were to eliminate autism completely from the face of the world you would lose a lot of the tech people if you really lose the sense of gay identity we'll some of the creativity that has been connected to gay people be expressed less vividly than it has been in the past maybe I mean I think we should be awake to it and see whether it's happening we have a fine columnist for our national newspaper named Marcus G who writes in The Globe and Mail and here's what he had to write in the summer of 2012 on the question of a global village as young people shun the gay scene or at least reinvented on their own terms they are dispersing around the city the same thing happened with Toronto's immigrant communities insecure in their difference they at first cluster together in ghettos as they grew more confident and blend it in with the mainstream they moved further afield the gay village obviously a part of Toronto may be on its way to becoming like a Little Italy on college or Greek town on the Danforth symbolic homes to their communities but no longer the unrivaled centers they once were again playing off what we've been talking about could we see a similar dispersal in the issues and concerns not just I guess geographically but intellectually as well in gay communities in New York in Toronto wherever I think that idea of the gay ghetto is gradually beginning to break down I think there always will be something in the same way that there still are trying to town in Little Italy but I think people don't feel compelled to be in it having said that I think it's important now at least for gay people to be in a context with some other gay people at the very least if they're single and hoping to meet someone with him they can build a life or if they're hoping to meet a lot of people with whom they can have affairs or whatever it is they're doing they need to be around other gay people in some measure in some degree so I think there's still a lot of loneliness if you're the only gay person in your town in Alabama that's not such a fun musician to hold and you're likely to move to New York or San Francisco or Chicago or Toronto or someplace where there's a vital gay scene but I think the idea that that's the only safe place for gay people is really breaking down and help us out with this because nobody would be so foolish as to say the Italian community in New York believes or you know the Jewish community of Toronto believes because there are multi layers and numerous opinions and so on do you do you hear that expression as it relates to the gay community this is what the gay community believes about X Y Z you hear that expression all the time and then you hear all of the people who rage against it and say don't speak for me that's not what I think and that's not I feel there's been a kind of core of activists who have formulated what the agenda is politically for ensuring greater equality for gay people and those people have had a soapbox to stand on and I like to think in my minor way that I'm one of one of that group and I feel like we have all had certain things that we've pushed for but there are plenty of people who push for exactly the opposite and there are plenty of people who actually say we don't want to get married we don't want to be acculturated we don't want to be part of the bourgeois mainstream we want to be radical and different that's what we are that's what we set out to be that's who we want to continue to be this gets back a bit to what you wrote about in far from the tree where the deaf community particularly at Gallaudet doesn't see their issue as a disability they see themselves as being a distinctive culture that needs to survive you get the same kind of same kind of principles at play here yes I think you do and I think it's interesting to consider given how the deaf community has changed with the advent of the cochlear implant what would happen to the gay community if someone did come up with a cure I mean there's nothing so far that it's anything like that there are lots of people would say they don't want to be cured certainly I at this stage of my life I'm happily married to John and the last thing I would want is to be turned into someone else and to start over again sure when I was like the rockwork 14 I might have been up for it so what how will things change how will things change as we have advances in understanding what gayness really is because it's striking how little we really know and understand about it at the most fundamental level that's interested that now that I wonder about that analogy because it could be argued that not being able to hear is a physical disability and if there were a way presumably to mess with your genetic code to avoid that that might be something you'd want to do but I've never heard that in reference to being gay or lesbian that somehow you'd want to that it was a disability that you'd want to cure you hear that that's not remotely the way I see it but there's been a huge debate in the United States about so-called conversion therapies and California recently passed a law making them illegal therapies that are supposed to change people from gay to straight they made them illegal because they're a form of torture and they don't work but if they did work would they be made it illegal I mean I don't think that they're good I yeah I think it's depressing to think that anyone is headed in that direction but the conversion therapies there are a lot of people in them the ex-gay movement is a huge movement in the United States there are many people who are struggling all the time to be not gay hmm it it's quite striking right now I must confess I'm not big on these shows I don't watch them but I've heard that there are lots of sitcoms you know the The Ellen Show and Will & Grace and so on and so forth which portray what's modern families I don't know which portray you know gay families in a particular way does that bug you you know I'm very torn it's fantastic that gay families are being represented on television it normalizes gayness for a vast number of people it allows kids who are growing up gay to see that gayness is somehow it's part of the cultural discourse it's a funny thing it's a lovely thing it's these people are managing okay on the other hand I think that Will and Grace and even more modern family trade in cliches about what it means to be gay and I think that those cliches can be very oppressive in their own way so I think it's probably progress over there were no gay people on television but I hope it's only a stepping stone toward there are more realistic depictions of gay people though sitcoms are not known for realistic to picture the body on the family that might have been an exception but you know when Brock Obama got elected they said oh we're now in a post-racial America you know where color isn't everybody's colorblind it doesn't matter anymore do you see a possibility of a you wouldn't call it a post-racial we just call it like post sexual orientation America you see that well in the first place I don't think we really have a post-racial America I think terrible acts of racism are committed all the time and I think the terrible current American record on immigration has a great deal of racism embedded in it but I can imagine that we are moving toward a point at which we will be as must as much post sexuality as we are post-racial in other words when at least officially speaking this will not be a designation that people have to pay a lot of attention what part of America right now do you think is in a post sexual orientation mode if I can put it that way it's an interesting question I mean I think probably the obvious places I think San Francisco I think in some large degree the Silicon Valley which is the major companies have been very supportive of gay people I think lower Manhattan but I think that there are interesting but not Queens or not not the Bronx necessarily I I think that gay people have tended I mean it's back to that idea of the gay ghetto have tended to cluster in lower Manhattan and now in some areas of Brooklyn I think there are a lot of little pockets of places where people don't pay very much attention to it but I think the real place where people don't pay so much attention is in the younger generation I think it's not geography its age and I think that there is much more of a post gay reality for people who are teenagers now than there was for people or teenagers even ten years ago and I think what will happen is that those people will grow up and then it won't be a question if these little gay ghetto this will be a question if the attitude of a generation I wonder if though you know young people when they grow up and start paying taxes and have to deal with reality they do get more reactionary in some of their views when they become crusty old adults as you and I now but I wonder yet you seem fairly confident that they're not going to change their mind though on issues of sexual orientation why is that well I think in the first place issues of sexual orientation don't have very much bearing on how much tax they'll pay and so on and so forth so I don't think that there will be as much of a motive for it as there is for some other kinds of progression but I also think that these changes these are really see changes you know when I was growing up the idea that we would have a black president of the United States it was genuinely unimaginable and I feel as though my generation grew up and we were all in schools that were integrated in one way or another and most of us thought he's the best candidate why wouldn't I vote from of course I will I mean not just people like me but more than half the people in the United States of America so I think that when you really have got a society that becomes profoundly more accepting in that way it's not that they can't sort of slip backwards and that you had to have Sharia law getting introduced in societies that were liberal but I think essentially once people have recognized the full humanity of people who are different from them in some particular way they don't go back to thinking no those people aren't human after all we got about a minute and a half left Andrew and I want to just ask you about your kids how many kids have you and your husband got okay so John is the biological father of two kids with some lesbian friends and Minnie plus I have a daughter with a college friend and they live in Texas and then John and I have a son who lives with us all the time who mind the biological father and his the surrogate who carried that pregnancy is Laura the lesbian mother of John's two biological children so there are four children less daddy and Papa five parents four children three states is the shorthand and and the relationships are obviously somewhat different from one to another but there are four kids sort of in orbit how old's your son four four you have no clue I guess yet what his sexual orientation is not so far you have a view on it I hope that whoever he is he'll feel good and happy about being that person I mean he's very focused at the moment on cars and trucks which suggests the actual event sorry it's over fine I just hope that whoever I hope he'll find love and I really don't care who he finds it with that's a really good of you to spend so much time with us over the last couple of days as I mentioned off the top yesterday your interview with us on far from the tree was the most responded to interview in the history of this program and I know how busy our and so I know how grateful I am that you've spared so much time for us here at TV oh it's a wonderful program and I'm thrilled and honored to be on it again you're so kind Andrew Solomon the author of far from the tree parents children and the search for identity a true masterpiece a big book and well worth the time it takes to read it support Ontario's public television donate at TV org

Channel: The Agenda with Steve Paikin

Views: 10,642

Rating: 4.9097743 out of 5

Keywords: TVO, TVOntario, The Agenda with Steve Paikin, current affairs, analysis, debate, politics, policy, gay identity, social issues, relationships, sexuality

Id: kLD7Q_Stgas

Length: 25min 51sec (1551 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 13 2013