Gaga and GOProud Are Here to Stay
It’s not just a happy coincidence that Lady Gaga released her most popular song on the same weekend that gay conservatives burst onto the CPAC stage.
Last weekend, homosexuality dominated the agenda. The giants of a movement pushed a gay-rights message into the spotlight, so publicly and blatantly and loudly that the only proper response was high drama and massive media attention. The assertion: that sexual identity does not define political identity. The liberty-minded embraced it. The morally righteous condemned it.
And the rest of us just danced to it.
That’s right. Lady Gaga dropped her first new single in months.
Oh, yeah, that GOProud-sponsored CPAC controversy thing happened, too.
Gaga, the latest pop icon to wield the disco stick of equality, released a song entitled “Born This Way,” an anthemic club hit that championed everyone from “gay, straight, or bi” to “lesbian, transgendered life”, even my personal racial category of “Orient.” (Woo! Lady Gaga loves the Orientals. I sure ruv Rady Gaga, too. I ruv her so much I do her raundry, but it hard to dry-crean meat dress.) Whatever you think of the song itself, though, “Born This Way” is the first chart-topping song in the mainstream media—possibly the biggest public cultural expression yet—that acknowledges, and even celebrates, the immutability of sexual identity.
It’s not just a happy coincidence that Gaga released her most politicized and popular song yet on the same weekend that gay conservatives burst out of a hermetically sealed egg onto the CPAC stage. Granted, it’s a coincidence in the sense that the Gay Mafia did not plan for both of these events to occur at the same time, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn a lesson from it. There’s a connection between the state of the gay rights movement now and the future of the conservative movement. And when I say “connection,” I’m talking about a real sociological link, not Bill Buckley’s fist connecting with Gore Vidal’s face.
Fast forward fifty years from a time when “queer” was a legitimate pejorative and look at the vitally youthful half of CPAC attendees: the 18-to-twentysomething-year-olds who “roma-roma-ma” at parties, were the same people who came up to GOProud’s booth throughout the conference, thanking them for simply making their presence known. To them, both Gaga and GOProud represent an attack on the epistemic closure (or should I say “closet”) that defined the treatment of homosexuality in their respective industries - namely, music and conservatism.
This dramatic shift in perception both of politicized morality and sexuality could only have occurred against the backdrop of the rise of the millennial generation, for which Gaga is increasingly becoming a symbol. For them, the generation that overwhelmingly supports same-sex unions and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, there is nothing intrinsically wrong about being gay, because there is nothing those who are gay can do about it.
Unfortunately, this level of acceptance has yet to alter the mechanics of the political system. While it might be okay to be gay both at CPAC and at the Haus of Gaga, try telling the LGBT activists that gays can be conservative, or even have conservative allies. Even Ann Coulter, “as born again as they come,” declared that she was a “friend of the gays” in her CPAC speech. In contrast, gay Leftists like Tony Kushner will often openly fantasize in print about conservatives dying of AIDS. The head of the Human Rights Campaign went apoplectic when 30% of gay voters went Republican in the 2010 election, accusing the apostates of expecting too much from poor Obama. And according to GOProud’s Chris Barron, 95% of the group’s hate mail and criticism comes from leftists shocked that gay people could be more than one-issue voters. It’s no accident that radical anti-gay writers like Ryan Sorba quote radical gay activists favorably - they both agree that under no circumstances should gay people be allowed to have anything resembling political self-determination.
This narrow-mindedness on the part of LGBT activists is not just an affront to the personal freedom championed by Gaga, it’s also a toxic form of oppression. Despite gay and lesbian voters increasingly voting Republican, Democrats insist that the LGBT community is theirs and theirs alone, unwilling to recognize that maybe, just maybe, that 30% of LGBT voters in 2010 decided that the economy was a more pressing issue. With the highly publicized drama over DADT’s repeal and DOMA’s sidelining last year, they likely saw that Democrats don’t mind bluffing with their muffins of promised gay civil rights. Behind the DNC’s poker face is a monster playing a love game with their voters, willing to throw its sexual minority constituencies off a balcony for political purposes. (It took our beloved Gaga three months of lobbying the Senate Dems to get DADT repealed—and that’s after donning the Meat Dress.)
Given that Democrats won’t stop telephoning them to support policy ideas that leave them speechless, the time is soon coming for gays to end their bad romance with the left, and just dance with whatever party supports their own personal positions. After all, claiming that gays can only incubate within the giant egg of progressivism is as counterproductive, selfish and close-minded as people complaining about gays threatening the three legged stool of conservatism.
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