TRANS ACTIONS

We’ve got to do better. When we say, “It gets better,” that must apply to everyone in the LGBTQ community. That includes trans. We’ve got to step up and continue the fight for queer dignity and queer rights.

 

Frankly, I knew throughout election season that, not only were trans people being demonized during the campaign, but they would then be blamed by their own side if Democrats lost the election. It’s doubly disgusting. The demonizing worked AND allies, needing to lay blame, pointed fingers at trans pronouns, athletic participation, bathroom usage and early hormone inhibitors. 

 

To be clear, blame does not belong to the trans community. Trans rights were not handled well by the left. Democrats were always playing defense or not playing at all and, in such situations, it’s pretty difficult to score. 

 

The weekend after the election, both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times published front page stories analyzing the result, clearly stating that trans rights proved to be a deciding issue. The WSJ article focused solely on the topic, the headline stating, “Transgender Rights Took Center State Late in Race.” The article’s summative point: “[A]s the campaign neared the finish line, it was the transgender debate that emerged as a powerful force that—along with..inflation and immigration—worked in Republicans’ favor and against Harris.”

 

An effective campaign conducts its research and highlights the issues and stances that will play best to its key voters and those who are undecided. According to the WSJ, “The Trump campaign spent heavily on transgender issues, accounting for roughly one in five ads it aired in the last couple of months,” costing $37 million. [Emphasis added.] The Harris campaign failed to grasp the damage caused by the ads. It did what Democrats have too often done—ignored issues and statements deemed outrageous. “Harris had an opening to address one of those ads, which focused on her support for taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for federal inmates, during her combative Fox News interview…[b]ut she ended up dismissing the importance of voters’ concerns on the issue.” Really, how many inmates would be getting trans surgeries in a year? As obscure as the issue may be, the ads caused the voter outrage Republicans sought.

 

This slogan is familiar, but I contend
it hasn't been effective enough.
Time to try a new soundbite.

Never ever let Trump statements go unchecked. Never let distortions go without a strong, soundbite-savvy response. Indeed that ad’s soundbite was “Kamala’s for They/Them. President Trump is for you.” 

 

No strong, easily grasped response from Democrats? Hello, damage. 

 

Same goes for all the fear and outrage lathered up over trans athletes. Even Representative Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) felt freaked out by the issue, telling the NYT, “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” I literally cringed from the quote. Even Democrats don’t understand trans issues or the extent to which issues have real life impact. The director of communications for the Michigan High School Athletic Association told the WSJ, “the issue of transgender girls playing girls sports was inescapable on the airwaves” despite the fact only two girls playing on high school teams in the state were trans. Two out of 170,000. A non-issue, spun hard by Republicans. 

 

Without effective pushback, all that outrage and fearmongering has caused damage to trans people and trans issues beyond election season. 

 

Yes, we failed. We weren’t there. We silently shook heads, tantamount to no response at all. I, for one, await both grassroots and well organized (non-election) campaigns to boost positivity and acceptance regarding people who are trans. 

 

*  

 

History is indeed cyclical and we only need to look at earlier LGBTQ struggles to see when things stalled and when real progress finally happened. 

 

Throughout the seventies and eighties, progress for gays and lesbians was slow. Singer Anita Bryant stepped up as a leading adversary. Senator Jesse Helms relentlessly called out gays as sinners, lumping them in with perverts and pedophiles. AIDS worsened any campaign for gay rights. While gays were in survival mode, bathrooms became a danger zone, with the false perception you could become infected from toilet seats seemingly unshakable. It was in conservatives’ best interest to allow the falsity to persist. Whatever it took to make people remain entrenched as anti-gay. Play it up enough and it meant Republican votes. 

 

Bathrooms remain big in conservative playbooks. So do families, especially children. Once, it was gay men who posed a threat. Recruiters! Abusers! Protect our kids.

 

Updated to trans hate, conservatives now perpetuate pedaling fear that their children will be harmed. “Biological boys” are invading girls’ bathrooms and taking over girls’ athletics! Again, there is little to no substance, no cases put forth as they continue to spin fear. Worse, one common Trump lie at rallies was that parents could send their child to school in the morning and that child would come home the opposite sex. 

 

Sometimes we think Trump’s statements are so outrageous and clearly untrue they don’t get enough pushback. The fact is many Republicans drink whatever Kool-Aid Trump’s serving. They may not truly believe what he spouts, but they’ll spout it too in the name of team spirit. I’ve said many times, Trump and his supporters remind me of WWE arena wrestling—all staged but totally consumed. 

 

Where gays finally made significant strides was during marriage equality campaigns.

 

Progress was not entirely linear. There were setbacks, even in California, which saw the passage of the Proposition 8 referendum, which took away the right to marriage. But the organization became stronger. 

 

One legacy from the AIDS crisis was that gays and lesbians honed advocacy skills. One of the first changes was that more gays came out. They couldn’t sit back quietly while so many gays died. They couldn’t let stand hateful rhetoric that AIDS was God’s wrath. They became politically and socially active because they had to, pushing for more AIDS funding, quicker approval of experimental drugs and protections from job and housing discrimination. Gay men were not united in what was the best approach. Some worked within the establishment while others focused beyond it. 

 

A generation of gay men became well-versed in political and social action. Their experiences then helped with marriage equality efforts. They had a sense of how to mobilize and a track record of what tactics and strategies were most effective. Marriage campaigns at the state level worked together. Each state that passed marriage equality legislation provided momentum. Bit by bit, change happened.

 

In my mind, one of the most effective aspects of the overall campaign was the creation and propagation of a positive, social media friendly sound bite: #LoveIsLove.

 

Where is the trans sound bite? 

 

It’s time for gays and lesbians to join all queers in mobilizing again. We have the experience. We have a better opportunity to affect change with greater numbers of people actively pushing for it. And let me be clear in stating that any gay man latching onto “LGB but not the T” is spinning selfish, hateful nonsense that should be left behind in the last century.

 

It would have been nice if the Democrats had a solid plan to respond to political potshots—no, attacks—regarding trans issues. Nicer if the response not only responded to fearmongering but also put a positive foot forward. If some Democrats believe trans issues hurt them, it’s on them to regroup and rethink how to effectively campaign for trans rights. It’s a no-brainer that, if Republicans found success scaring voters about trans issues, they’ll keep doing it as long as they’re given carte blanche to do so. 

 

But I think it’s incumbent on major queer organizations to strategize their own counterattacks and, more importantly “brand” trans identity as something positive. That’s right, “brand” it. This is something to sell in terms of politics. There needs to be a #LoveIsLove equivalent that people can embrace and that catches on. Keep floating them out there, see what sticks and then fly with it. Something with long legs. Gay marriage has been legal since the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision and people still #LoveIsLove all over the place, perhaps as much as they wave the Pride flag. 

 

A personal suggestion is #LetThemBe. It’s positive. It’s got the pronoun so many associate with trans, nonbinary and other queers. (I do realize many trans people go with she/her and he/him, but I think #LetThemBe gets a simple, positive message across. If a trans person does choose she/her or he/him, well that’s even easier for straight folks to go with. Less pronoun bumbling if they choose to get past archaic resistance with comments like, “You don’ sound like a woman.” (Yeah, I hick-ified it. It seems apropos.)

 

A friend of mine who is trans told me shortly after the election that many trans people are antiestablishment. They won’t get on board a united, seemingly centrist campaign that speaks to acceptance from straights. That’s not their raison d’être.

 

My response was that was fine. Historically, with gay rights, there has been more than one track. During the AIDS crisis, organizations like Gay Men’s Health Center in NYC and AIDS Project Los Angeles appealed to politicians and celebrities for support while ACT UP went with more controversial, in-your-face tactics that some gays felt were a distraction or even detrimental to the cause. I didn’t always like ACT UP’s actions, but I believe that, while traditional organizations went with diplomacy, there was also a time and place for agitation that occurred per ACT UP’s agenda, not GMHC’s.

 

Too often in politics, things take on an either-or, black-or-white dichotomy. Explore all channels. Let the pro-trans movement have diversity in the channels it pursues.

 

If we all get onboard advocating for trans rights, we can contemplate bigger actions and fund a campaign to counter that $37 million anti-trans advertising effort the Republicans put together. Yes, money matters.

 

What are the key organizations to contribute to in advocating for trans rights? A specific trans organization doesn’t come immediately to mind which underscores how much has yet to be done. During the AIDS crisis, ACT UP was known to most everyone. GLAAD and HRC are also well known, but they have broader agendas than solely advocating for trans issues. (We still need to donate to them and push them to strengthen their trans campaigns both in terms of people and resources.) What is a key trans advocacy organization? One or two need to emerge as having household recognition, spearheading campaigns, becoming prominent fund raisers, organizing a powerful national march, targeting states where change is likely to occur, building momentum off these wins and assuming an advisory role with state- and local-level organizations working to establish and/or protect particular rights.

 

If the LGBTQ community doesn’t show in bold ways how it is stepping up, how can we expect our allies to show up and grow. If we organize in bigger numbers with bigger coffers, we can also establish an expertise that can then better advise Democrat positions and responses—there MUST be responses—during the 2026 and 2028 election campaigns. Do better, yes, and do more. Let’s go!

 

 

Newspaper articles cited for this blog post:

“Democrats Sift Through Rubble, Seeking Answers: Assigning the Blame,” The New York Times, November 10, 2024.

 

“Transgender Rights Took Center Stage Late in Race,” The Wall Street Journal, November 9-10, 2024.

 

 

 

 

  

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT LARRY

It’s almost as commonly asked as “If you were a tree what kind of tree would you be?” You know, that one about having a dinner party and your ideal guest list of people, dead or alive (assuming, of course, that the dead invitees would actually be miraculously living again to enjoy cocktails leading up to an exquisitely catered affair).

I don’t know. Not in terms of tree or guests. I suppose it’s safe to say I wouldn’t want to be an alder. Too bland. And I wouldn’t want to dine with Larry Kramer. Too much the other extreme. With respect to Larry Kramer, I will always conjure up mid- to late-’80s Larry. Brash. Over the top. In your face.

To be sure, ’80s Larry would have flat out turn down my evening soiree. Even before learning the entree would be some sort of overcooked tofu-asparagus noodle dish. This is why I don’t spend much time thinking of hypothetical celebrity dinner parties. If any of them showed up, I know they’d take one sniff—“Um,...is that your cooking or is there a car tire burning in the back alley?”—and flee to Whole Foods or the McDonald’s drive-thru.

Larry Kramer made me cringe. He’d probably take that as a compliment. He wanted people to take notice. In his mind, it was his role to shake things up.

I first came across Mr. Kramer’s name when I was a deeply closeted, dateless, sexless special education teacher living in a Dallas suburb. Somehow at some point in 1988, I managed to quell just enough fear and embarrassment to walk into a bookstore and buy Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. I devoured the 620-page book, setting it aside frequently as my emotions got the better of me, the pendulum swinging back and forth from anger to inconsolable sorrow. Larry’s name first popped up on page 25 and a quote from his 1978 novel, Faggots, connected with my Texas-nurtured judginess and my worries that coming out of the closet would mean more than a lifetime of scorn; it would lead to an aching emptiness.

      Why do faggots have to fuck so fucking much? It’s as if we don’t

       have anything else to do...all we do is live in our Ghetto and

       dance and drug and fuck...there’s a whole world out there!...I’m

       tired of being a New York City-Fire Island faggot, I’m tired of

       using my body as a faceless thing to lure another faceless thing,

       I want to love a Person! I want to go out and live in a world with

       that Person, a Person who loves me, we shouldn’t have to be

       faithful!, we should want to be faithful!...No relationship in the

       world could survive the shit we lay on it.

Suffice it to say, he pissed off a lot of New York gays.

I wanted to read more about what this Larry Kramer guy had to say. But there was no way I was going to be able to trek back to another bookstore and buy a book with the word FAGGOTS blazoned across the cover. Not in Dallas. Not as my closeted, dateless, sexless self.

More than two hundred pages later in And the Band Played On, Shilts referenced “a hand grenade [thrown] into the foxhole of denial where most gay men in the United States had been sitting out the epidemic.” That grenade was Kramer’s March 1983 cover story, “1,112 and Counting,” in the now-defunct biweekly gay newspaper, New York Native. Kramer opened with:

          If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you we’re in real trouble.

          If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage and action, gay

          men may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence

          depends on just how angry you can get.

It was a take-no-prisoners essay, lambasting everyone and everything for doing too little, if anything at all: the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, Mayor Ed Koch, The New York Times, the Advocate and closeted gays—yikes, me. (“It’s 1983 already, guys, when are you going to come out? By 1984 you could be dead. Every gay man who is unable to come forward now and fight to save his own life is truly helping to kill the rest of us. There is only one thing that’s going to save some of us, and this is numbers and pressure and our being perceived as united and a threat. As more and more of my friends die, I have less and less sympathy for men who are afraid their mommies will find out or are afraid their bosses will find out...”) Larry Kramer was never one to sugarcoat anything.

These were pre-internet days so it took years before I ever got to read the full 5,000-word article. By then, I’d seen it referenced many times as the call to action. The urgency in Kramer’s writing was palpable as he referenced the rising death toll and the lack of clear understanding of how AIDS was contracted and how it should be treated—an astounding 86% mortality rate over three years. More needed to be done than following proper channels and waiting out conventional vetting periods for medical research. “I don’t want to die. I can only assume you don’t want to die. Can we fight together?”

Four years later, in March 1987, Larry Kramer helped organize ACT UP after rallying an audience at NYC’s Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, sharply criticizing a major grassroots AIDS influencer of the time, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an organization in which Kramer had been one of the founders. “Do we want to start a new organization devoted to political action?”

ACT UP did what it aimed to do, making headlines for its motto, Silence = Death and its soundbite chants, including:

“Act Up! Fight Back! Fight AIDS!”

“Black, White, Gay, Straight. AIDS Does Not Discriminate!”

“What Do We Want? Money For AIDS? When Do We Want It? Now!”

“Hey, Hey, FDA [Food and Drug Administration]. How Many People Have You Killed Today?”

“George Bush, You Can’t Hide. We Charge You With Genocide.”

Abrasive and offensive. They chained themselves in government buildings, scaled them to fly banners and interrupted church masses with die-ins. Too often I thought Larry Kramer and his brood went too far. They got on the news but I feared they were hurting the cause, giving haters more reason to hate and causing friction with people who were already on our side. (Yes, Kramer called Dr. Anthony Fauci a murderer.)

But then, to quote the only line I could ever relate to in the Paul McCartney-Michael Jackson duet, “The Girl Is Mine”: I’m a lover, not a fighter. Or, to quote Rodney King, “Can we all get along?”

Of course, back then, that was but a dream. People like Senator Jesse Helms attributed AIDS to “deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct” while other self-righteous churchgoers welcomed the disease as God’s wrath.

I had been consumed by AIDS since I was fifteen or sixteen in 1980 when I sat at home one night in the family den as my parents watched “20/20” and a segment aired about a sickness that otherwise healthy gay men were dying from. At that early stage it was called GRID or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. Struggling with my sexual orientation—back then, it was frequently called “sexual preference,” as if one could simply opt for another choice on the menu—I picked up the latest issue of Texas Monthly on the coffee table to cover my reddening face as the horror immediately registered: I could die from this. For the next fifteen years, I read every article I could get my hands on. In the process of working through my sexuality, I came to understand being gay as being inextricably interwoven with the AIDS crisis.

A few months after reading And the Band Played On, I opted for a quieter form of advocacy, signing up to be a volunteer at the AIDS Resource Center in Dallas before moving and becoming a buddy for PWAs (Persons With AIDS) at AIDS Project Los Angeles. I slapped a pink triangle on the bumper of my car, marked my American money with a “Gay Dollar” stamp and participated for several evenings marching in protest of California Governor Pete Wilson vetoing AB 101, legislation which would have prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. I stopped on the third night as protesters swarmed the car of a driver demanding to get through and he responded by putting his foot on the gas pedal and nearly running over several people.

Yep, not a fighter. The driver’s action scared me, but so did the rising anger of people I walked with. The scene teetered toward violence via mob mentality. I was too shaken to go out the next night.

In time, I came to realize Larry could be Larry and I could be me. What mattered was that we were both doing what we felt was right. We both sought to make a difference. We’d both seen too much hate and felt too much loss from one disease.

Over time, I became thankful for Larry Kramer’s passion and his action. People listened to Larry, even if at first it was only because he was yelling. He helped rally people who would never have felt comfortable or valued in more conventional advocacy streams.

I’d read in recent years that his health was in decline and I wanted him to rally once more, for his own sake. It is astounding how much has changed in the past forty years, not just in terms of HIV but with regard to LGBTQ rights. Perhaps like World War II veterans, I fret that younger LGBTQ people will fail to grasp the devastation that came from AIDS and the varied, sophisticated forms of advocacy and empowerment that arose from it. There is more to be done, but we are freer and healthier today, mentally and physically, because of thoughtful, gutsy agitation from gay and lesbian leaders who navigated through scarier times.

I wept when I read the first tweet about his death. I can’t picture him resting in peace. I’ll always see him as the fighter. Maybe I should offer Larry Kramer that hypothetical dinner invitation, after all. He could show up as ’80s Larry, contankerous even to the sweet Olivia Newton-John. I’d welcome anything to distract from the main course.