VICTORY BLINDNESS

THE DANGEROUS ILLUSION THAT WE'VE ALMOST WON

IMAGINE A GROUP OF PEOPLE who have spent decades — generations, centuries — in fear, invisibility, struggle, and silence. Imagine they find their voice, only to be decimated by an era of death and unthinkable loss made more bitter by crushing societal indifference to their predicament.

Now imagine that, in a matter of a few short years, everything seems to change. At what feels like light speed, they make momentous gains. The world begins to open its arms to them in ways they had never thought possible. The experience is powerful, exhilarating, spellbinding even. It feels like they are living in a dream. But behind that dream is a reality more treacherous than many of them may vaguely imagine.

Over the past few years, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans have been living in that dream. In 2011 the onerous "don't ask, don't tell" law banning gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military was repealed. The destructive force of the Defense of Marriage Act disintegrated in 2013 when a thunderous Supreme Court ruling in U.S. v. Windsor struck it down. In rapid succession, state after state, from the coasts well into the heartland, transformed into what appeared to be bastions of full equality as thousands of gay and lesbian couples marched down the aisle. Even deep in Mormon Utah and in Oklahoma, the "buckle of the Bible Belt," federal judges threw out hateful bans on gay marriage, and the issue worked its way back up to an apparently sympathetic Supreme Court.

We saw LGBT people represented in movies, in music, and on TV in ways we'd not experienced before. Not only were gay and transgender characters more visible than ever, but also openly gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender actors were more and more often invited to play these roles. A same-sex mass wedding occurred at the Grammy Awards. Ellen DeGeneres, a lesbian comedian, made an enormous comeback after her sitcom was canceled the year following her coming out in the 1990s, to become a daytime television sensation. Rosie O'Donnell was back on The View and more outspoken than ever. A transgender actress, Laverne Cox, stood tall on the cover of Time magazine. Apple's Tim Cook made a huge impact in the business world, becoming the most high-profile CEO — and the only one among the Fortune 500 companies — to come out, proclaiming he is "proud to be gay."

Since the mid-'90s many people with HIV were no longer suffering and dying; they were increasingly thriving and the picture of good health because of life-saving drug treatments. Gay–straight alliance groups were formed in schools across the country, and LGBT people began to come out of the closet at ever-younger ages. Even in the world of sports, visibility arrived in unprecedented ways. A midcareer NBA player, Jason Collins, came out as gay, and even the barrier of the macho world of football broke when Michael Sam became the first openly gay player drafted to the NFL and shared his happiness by expressing his love, kissing his boyfriend for all of America to see.

In seductive ways, it started to feel as if we had almost finally "made it," that we were just about equal in the eyes of most of the American people. The media reported on dizzying poll results that seemed to point to acceptance. We heard cheering and huge sighs of relief as many soaked up the success that now seemed so evident. Like many people, I even noticed my Facebook feed regularly erupting with posts expressing congratulations or disbelief about seeing these great strides in our lifetime.

Yet it was — and is — a dangerous moment. It's a moment in which all of us, LGBT and straight, who support equality risk falling prey to what I've come to call victory blindness. We're overcome by the heady whirl of a narrative of victory, a kind of bedtime story that tells us we've reached the promised land, that can make everything else seem like a blur. Even with the enormously positive developments — and, as this book will show, sometimes perhaps as a reaction to them — homophobia rages on in America, as sports stars are practically rewarded after spouting hate, as TV sitcoms still make gay and transgender people the insulting punch line, as the media respects and airs bigoted views of the "other side," as businesses now brazenly flaunt a "no gays allowed" policy, as many workers fear coming out on the job more than ever, as federal civil rights protections seem further away than before, and as we are often not well served by a gay establishment that apologizes for and lauds political leaders rather than demanding action. Maybe it's time to get rid of the bedtime story and wake up from the dream.

I say it's a "dangerous" moment because at the same time that all the great strides have occurred, discrimination, violence, and tragic horror stories — in addition to the daily slights that all of us who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender have experienced for years — have not only continued, they've sometimes become more blatant. Rather than dissipating, reports of violence against LGBT people have surged, even in the most liberal, gay-accepting cities, spiking 27% in New York City alone from 2013 to 2014, according to the Anti-Violence Project. In Seattle, where an increase in hate crimes had also been seen since 2013, a man pleaded guilty in 2014 to setting a gay bar on fire on New Year's Eve, saying in a statement that homosexuals should be "exterminated." And nationally, homicides motivated by hatred against gay, lesbian, and bisexual people are themselves outnumbered by hate-motivated killings of transgender women by a factor of almost 3 to 1. These attacks, the vast majority of which have been perpetrated against transgender women of color, have reached what one advocate called "epidemic" levels.

In Philadelphia, in September 2014, onlookers were stunned when, according to several reports, a group of between eight and twelve "well-dressed" men and women in their twenties hurled what witnesses described as homophobic slurs — "dirty faggot" and "fucking faggot" — at a gay male couple walking by. One of the gay men was knocked unconscious, sustaining severe damage to his face, requiring surgery and the wiring of his jaw. Three people were later arrested and charged with assault, but, outrageously, they couldn't be charged with a hate crime because Pennsylvania lacked a hate-crimes law protecting LGBT people. In Georgia a twenty-year-old man captured video on his phone of a scene that could have taken place in the '80s or '90s: his family tried to perform an "intervention" to take him to an "ex-gay" program. The video shows family members beating him and his father calling him a "queer." This took place in August 2014.

Wrenching reports about suicides of gay and transgender teens, which exploded in the media beginning several years ago, only escalated. It could be that these stories are being reported more rather than actually rising in number. Perhaps it's both. Either way, LGBT teens, who are believed to make up fewer than 10% of all teens, still account for between 30% and 40% of teen suicides, according to several studies. As shocking as they are, these statistics fail to capture the very real pain and suffering. In December 2014, an Ohio transgender teen, Leelah Alcorn, took her own life after posting a suicide note online in which she described torment and despair because her parents and "Christian therapists" refused to accept her. In August 2014, another story came to light of a bullied gay teen, Alexander Betts Jr. in Iowa, who'd taken his own life; even after his death, he was bullied by our federal health establishment. The sixteen-year-old's eyes were rejected for donation to a fourteen-year-old boy, because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in a policy that harks back to the '80s and AIDS hysteria, banned for life "men who have sex with men" from donating blood and certain organs. After thirty-one years, in December 2014 the FDA announced a partial change, to allow those who've been sexually abstinent for a full year to donate (a rule to which heterosexuals aren't held). Given advanced testing, the policy should be based on science and sexual risk no matter an individual's sexual orientation. Why was this kind of double standard still evident if we were almost near victory?

Every day we read stories of people losing their jobs, or being tossed out of a restaurant or a shop, or losing their homes. A Texas gay couple I interviewed in the spring of 2014 were denied parental rights of their own biological twin boys, born with the help of a surrogate. Only the surrogate's name appeared on the birth certificate, though she has no biological connection to the children — all because judges in Texas have had the discretion to deny parental rights in such cases. (I was proud to help attract media attention to the couple's case when an interview I conducted with them about this injustice went viral. They finally got parental rights to their own children after re-petitioning.) Again, perhaps these stories are being reported more often and not necessarily increasing in occurrence. But the fact that they are happening in such great number at all reveals that we're far from true victory.

And these kinds of stories are just the clearest points in a much larger constellation of homophobia, transphobia, and bigotry that continues to permeate this country, and that every gay or transgender person recognizes intuitively. It's that daily slog of slights and injustices I mentioned — a bigoted joke by a comedian, an insulting comment by a stranger on the street, an invitation not sent by a relative — that can seem small and banal when looked at individually but that, together, add up to a lifetime's worth of assault and self-doubt. It's easy to become blind to this persistent physical and psychological violence, focusing on the big wins, telling ourselves it's getting better — it's gotten better — almost as a salve to that daily, cumulative barrage of continued injustice.

But while this salve might feel soothing in the moment, it also has some real, long-term consequences. Ironically, it actually makes us fearful of further and bigger wins, and of taking on that deeply embedded homophobia, because it makes us think we've achieved so much and that we shouldn't rock the boat. We feel we're asking for too much, when actually we've not gotten nearly enough. It makes us lose our gumption, fearful of taking risks when really we've got nothing to lose. Worst of all, it not only keeps us back, it also allows our enemies to advance a backlash, which could then chip away at rights already won.

This landscape, in fact, resembles the one laid out by Susan Faludi in her 1991 classic, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, in which she argued that the victories for women's rights in the '80s were undermined by a powerful backlash against equality — a backlash that has led to setbacks on abortion rights and on many other gains right up to this day. The backlash to gender equality, Faludi noted in the 2006 edition of her book, benefited from apathy among "much of female America," reflecting the postfeminist belief that the battle was over. And what is the title of one of the prominent recent histories of the gay rights movement? Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution, for which author Linda Hirshman received a great deal of media attention in 2012, perhaps the most blatant example of how victory blindness began taking hold.

A Story of Victory Blindness

This was the mood in the spring of 2014 when a remarkable story out of Silicon Valley revealed the tensions inherent in the victory narrative in spectacular fashion. Over a series of days that grew into weeks, we saw, with crystalline focus, how much LGBT people had yet to win in this country and how fierce the opposition would be. We saw that the way forward was paved with an unabashed grassroots conviction, among progressive gays and straights alike, that nothing short of full equality was acceptable. And we saw that the greatest obstacle standing in our way would be our own complacency and a timidity that made us reluctant to fight.

In March 2014, a man named Brendan Eich was appointed CEO of Mozilla, the Internet company that developed the free and open-source web browser Firefox, which is used by five hundred million people worldwide. In some respects, Eich seemed a natural fit for the role. Exceptionally talented, he had created the widely used programming language JavaScript and was a cofounder of Mozilla itself. In 2008 Eich donated $1,000 to the campaign supporting Proposition 8, the ballot measure that wrote a same-sex-marriage ban into California's state constitution and, famously, sparked a legal battle that led all the way to the Supreme Court. This fact ignited a firestorm on Twitter when it came to light, in 2012, but the controversy soon died down, and two years later it didn't stop Mozilla's board of directors from naming Eich CEO of the company.

The events that followed were distorted in later tellings, so it's worth examining them in detail. Upon Eich's promotion, as some employees and Mozilla users again began to speak out on social media about their concern regarding Eich's 2008 donation, three Mozilla board members resigned. Reportedly, this wasn't an act of protest against Eich's having supported Prop 8; the Wall Street Journal quoted sources saying that the board members wanted someone from outside the company brought in to run it. Still, their stepping down focused more attention on Eich's Prop 8 donation and the discontent it inspired. Journalists covering the tech industry began to take notice of criticisms coming from Mozilla employees, users, and outside developers who worked with the company. In another company this discontent might have remained at the level of grumbling, but Mozilla's particular structure and qualities amplified and intensified the effects. As The New Yorker's James Surowiecki explained it, Mozilla is a subsidiary of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which encompasses a global community of open-source software developers and others who volunteer their time. These people are vital to Mozilla. They do much of the hard work behind the products, donating their knowledge and skills, because they endorse Mozilla's commitment to keeping the web transparent and open. In this values-driven environment, dissatisfaction with the company's social and political philosophies — or even with one of its executives' beliefs — could inspire many volunteers to stop donating their efforts. In progressive Silicon Valley, with a company answerable to a network of socially liberal (and even libertarian) programmers, an apparently antigay political record couldn't just be swept under the rug.

And then the marketplace, as economists like to say, responded. The high-tech company Rarebit, founded by two married gay men, removed its app from the Firefox Marketplace. One of Rarebit's founders, Hampton Catlin, said in a blog post that he had met with Eich and asked him to apologize for the discrimination he'd supported, but Eich refused. "People think we were upset about his past vote," Catlin wrote. "Instead we were more upset with his current and continued unwillingness to discuss the issue with empathy. Seriously, we assumed that he would reconsider his thoughts on the impact of the law (not his personal beliefs), issue an apology, and then he'd go on to be a great CEO."

Next, CREDO Mobile, a nonprofit mobile-phone company that uses its politically active customer base to advocate for change, launched a petition urging Eich to resign. And then people navigating to the dating site OkCupid via the Firefox browser found themselves greeted with a message they hadn't seen before: "Mozilla's new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid." The company's stand brought further media attention to the story.

At first Mozilla defended the decision by clarifying the company's "official support of equality and inclusion for LGBT people" as well as its history in supporting equality. It was true that there had not been reports in the past that Eich was hostile to gay people in the company. In the media, Eich was adamant that he would stay on as CEO and called OkCupid's actions "rash." "I don't want to talk about my personal beliefs because I kept them out of Mozilla all these 15 years we've been going," he told The Guardian in an interview published on April 2, 2014. "I don't believe they're relevant." Yet in the same interview Eich implied that opposing LGBT equality might be justifiable for business reasons. Mozilla is a global company, he said, operating in countries such as Indonesia that have "different opinions" on homosexuality. Gay marriage was "not considered universal human rights yet, and maybe they will be, but that's in the future, right now we're in a world where we have to be global to have effect." Eich implied that any antigay opinions he might have were a personal matter and were irrelevant to his life as a businessman — except, obviously, when they aligned with his company's strategic goal of making inroads into antigay countries.