The Accidental Activist: A Personal and Political Memoir. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1996 by John Cloud

By Candace Gingrich with Cris Bull with Chris Bull Scribner, $23

A good way to summarize society's stunning, if almost imperceptibly slow, transformation on the question of homosexuality is this: In the 1990s, one can be famous, not infamous, for being gay.

If you think I exaggerate the shift, consider that as late as 1988, Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis turned down the offer of a $1 million lesbian and gay fund-raising campaign to be organized in part by a gay consultant and long-time left-wing activist, David Mixner. The Dukakis campaign's refusal went mostly unnoticed.

Four years later, Mixner's friend Bill Clinton would openly solicit gay and lesbian donations and would mention, for the first time ever, the word "gay" in his convention acceptance speech. And just last year, a Republican presidential campaign's refusal of a gay group's contribution became giant news, even before Robert Dole flip-flopped and personally directed his operatives to accept the money.

Before a few years ago, journalists rarely spoke of gays and lesbians who weren't "gay activists" Regular gay folks--even Hollywood moguls and members of Congress and corporate executives--remained in a closet they created and the media helped maintain.

AIDS would shove many from the closet--not just those who succumbed to it but their friends who felt guilty about remaining silent. For example, in his new memoir, openly gay Republican Rep. Steve Gunderson (Wis.) writes, "My friends and fellow gay men were dying, and here I was, a leader of the party of Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, doing too little to combat their antigay rhetoric."

Now there is another openly gay Republican in Congress, Rep. Jim Kolbe (Ariz.), along with two openly gay Democrats. The cover of a recent Entertainment Weekly announced that primetime television will feature 22 gay characters this season. Famous gay entertainers and writers and businesspeople are coming out almost every day, it seems, a torrent that continues to normalize homosexuality in the American mind.

As the carapace of silence erodes, the rhetoric of activism is growing more foreign to the gay and lesbian experience. Just as today we rarely speak of "black leaders" in civil rights-era terms, the combination of social, political, and cultural forces building erratically toward gay equality surely can no longer be ascribed to any directed "action," however vigorous, for gay "rights." It owes much more to parents discovering that their children are gay, employees learning that their bosses are gay, and voters learning that their (Republican!) members of Congress are gay. The collective national shock accompanying the revelation that Rock Hudson was gay did more to focus attention on homosexuality than a decade of activism before it. Now there is no shock when famous people come out, only the constant reminder of a truth central to the advancement of gay equality: Homosexuality is a social fact, not a political stance.

Three new memoirs illustrate these changes usefully. David Mixner's Stranger Among Friends chronicles the life of a full-fledged '60s-era activist, complete with heavy LSD use, physical scars from the 1968 Chicago convention, and an all encompassing leftist politics. Candace Gingrich's appropriately named The Accidental Activist details an entirely different experience with the gay movement. Since reporters discovered her lesbianism in 1994, Gingrich has become less an activist than a symbol. Finally, Steve Gunderson is not an activist at all--the very term is anathema to the farmraised conservative. Yet the national attention surrounding Gunderson's long-delayed disclosure of his homosexuality jostled Americans' feelings about sexual orientation more than any March on Washington could. The movement for gay equality, in short, no longer looks like a movement at all. It's beginning to look like an inevitability.

The Intentional Activist

For David Mixner, activism was salvation. Growing up in late 1950s and early 1960s rural New Jersey, Mixner longed to leave the hardscrabble, workaday farm life of his parents for the outside world and "the fight for freedom"--the incipient civil rights and New Left movements.

Mixner says in the memoir that he contemplated suicide at age 8 because he believed his homosexuality was evil. By the time he reached Arizona State University he had begun experimenting with drugs. (By the 1980s, he kept only narcotics in his freezer.)

Mixner has survived more than his share of tragedy, including a nervous breakdown and the death in a car accident of his first lover. AIDS has annihilated more than 200 of his friends. (Mixner meticulously keeps a death count.) Through it all, political activism gave him a reason to keep going. His cafeteria politics led him from civil rights to Eugene McCarthy to Vietnam War opposition to the antinuclear movement and, finally, to gay rights. Stranger Among Friends doesn't take these movements very seriously, opting instead for tedious remembrances of the internal workings of various organizations. Mixner had an important supporting role in '60s politics, but he doesn't grapple with the ideas of his era. Like many activists of his generation, Mixner sees a political solution to just about any problem. This sentiment reaches a preposterous apotheosis with Mixner's assertion that his friend Bill Clinton, should he ever become president, could "set the gay and lesbian community free."