Quilted logic - Quilt Weekend in Washington 1996; AIDS memorial and gathering of gays and ex-gays

National Review, Nov 11, 1996 by James Bowman

"YOU ARE gone but your guilt remains behind." Taken aback, I paused for a moment in reading the message scrawled on one of the panels of the AIDS quilt. For just a moment in my perusal of this acreage of brightly colored memorial displayed on the national Mall, I thought that someone had broken with the relentlessly political spirit of the occasion. But no, it turned out it was not a "g" but a "q" --his quilt not his guilt which remained behind.

The one letter's difference seemed typical of the delicate ambiguities occasionally to be met with during Quilt Weekend in Washington. Another came on Friday evening at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington, when the outgoing president of PFLAG, the support group for parents, friends, and families of lesbians and gays, announced the arrival of the famous daughter of Sonny and Cher. "I'd like," she said, "to introduce Chastity."

A forlorn hope, I fear. Chastity, the active lesbian, was the hit of the evening (together with her mama); chastity the Christian virtue was an embarrassing relation the very mention of whose name would have spoiled the feast. Cher, it should be said, looked terrific when she arrived in a fetching black bib overall, black high heels, white top, and black Mexican-style vest to "complete her coming-out process." Confessing that she had been surprised, at first, by her own "unCherlike" (i.e., uncool) attitude to her daughter's homosexuality, Cher went on to say that she was glad to have had the chance to become "a little more tolerant person." Besides, she told the PFLAG members, "so many of you are older and that's so cool!" --because "when people see you, it's not like they're seeing guys in drag on Christopher Street."

What a comfort to her that they could be dowdy and suburban without being like the "good Republican" next door. They loved it. Cher discovered that she couldn't go wrong bashing Republicans. Likewise, at the AIDS Candlelight March the following evening, one of the most popular slogans was an assurance that the dead would be remembered "with our votes."

Somehow I don't think those who cheered lustily at this were Dole voters. Some of them, indeed, must have been among the ACT UP members who had demonstrated at the Dole - Kemp headquarters earlier in the day by chanting: "Dole, Kemp, you can't hide/We charge you with genocide." Yet to many, pointing out that such language is perhaps a bit exaggerated would seem insensitive to the plight of those whose political voice depends on waving the bloody quilt of their victimhood.

Mind you, it is hard not to sympathize. The military language of "victories" and "losses" seems almost inescapable in the context of the memorialization of so many young men (for the victims are overwhelmingly male), so much loved, and so fondly remembered. It was not a line of metaphor neglected by the quiltmakers either. One of their publicity logos pictured a needle and thread with the slogan: "Not all battles are fought with a sword." Among the military allusions on the quilt panels themselves I even found quoted the last two stanzas of Lt. Col. John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields," with their famous exhortation to "Take up our quarrel with the foe." It seems almost churlish to point out that the heroes of hedonism have been killed not by their putative enemies but by each other.

Just as moving as the tributes to the dead, however, was a sort of revival meeting called the Second Annual National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day, sponsored by Gary Bauer's Family Research Council. As part of this effort, an opposition group to PFLAG called PFOX (Parents, Family, and Friends of Ex-Gays) convened on the West Front steps of the Capitol. This small group of ex-homosexuals and their supporters spoke to an even smaller group of journalists (one of whom turned out to be a heckler from Lesbian and Gay New York), offering up their testimony about years spent "in the lifestyle" and more years spent painfully trying to get themselves out of it. It was heart rending. For a while, even the heckler was silenced. Two of the testimonials came from men living with HIV or AIDS. Two more, one male and one female, had even had sex change operations and then had had themselves changed back. At the end of his testimony, the pudgy, crew cut, bespectacled ex-woman held up a photo of his former self and invited us to contrast the glamorous bombshell of his youth with the dreary middle age before our eyes.

As Jane Boyer, a pretty but delicate-looking woman, was explaining how she had been delivered from lesbianism by learning that "Jesus was a man I could trust," the heckler finally piped up and loudly explained to this gathering of converted homosexuals that it was impossible for them to have been converted, since homosexuality was genetic. A brief scientific discussion ensued which demonstrated only that the politicization of homosexuality has left us with no middle ground, no chance to feel both for the dead and for the converted, and definitely no chance to hate the sin while loving the sinner. Anyone who harbors the smallest doubt that some people are required by the laws of God and nature to engage in acts of coital stimulation with members of their own sex might as well be out there with that tiny band of counter-demonstrators I saw during the Candlelight March, who held up signs reading: "God Hates Fags" and "Save the Gerbils."