It's an interesting query and one we've been puzzling on for years. But we thought it worth sitting down and trying to parse in an organized way, and this rather lengthy post is our first run at an answer.
First, it's worth noting the gay community is just that- a community, not a monolith. It is riven by generational and geographical and gender disconnects that would bewilder any outsider, and that baffle a good many members of the tribe as well.
For a long time, the "leadership" in the gay community has meant you were one, or both, of two types of people: really serious political activists, or people with lots of money. For both types, face time with politicians is a merit badge. Some earn it working up through the Democratic Party apparatus. Others buy it. In most major cities with big gay populations, there is only the Democratic Party, and the internecine struggles for place can be fierce. We suspect those who play in that league identify with Hillary because she's part of one of the teams in it.
For the well-off, or those who can leverage the funds of big companies and law firms they work for in matching gifts, the Human Rights Campaign and Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund dinners around the country are the places to see and be seen, and to make one's influence felt. HRC- the organization, not the candidate- is probably the ultimate expression of money equals proximity, and the politician it's most closely aligned with is Mrs. Clinton.
Gayness, and political activism takes different forms over time, too. As being gay becomes easier to be open about, notions of what needs doing, and how to do it, change. We remember some years ago, seeing Harry Hay, the radical gay rights activist of the 1940s and '50s, at a bookstore in Seattle. He was an icon, and his remarks were fascinating, but in terms of the times we lived in, his approach made about as much sense to us as he probably did announcing he was gay in college in the 1930s.
Here's another example: we were at a dinner put on by a Seattle gay lawyers' association a couple of years ago. The leadership, which had reconstituted the group from its moribund- and much smaller- past incarnation- had drawn in a ballroom full of lawyers who'd grown up gay in the Clinton era, not to mention politicians who'd figured out over the last decade that going to gay events is good politics and gets only a backlash from people who were going to vote against you anyway.
It was a remarkable event, boisterous and festive, and featuring a high-level gay appointee from the Clinton administration as the main speaker. A well-known lesbian judge, who had fought her way up in the old days, came over to us for a chat. We looked around us at the younger folk teeming. "Funny, isn't it?" she said, "you'd think they invented being gay."
And in a way, they did. For their generation, as each generation has reinvented it for themselves. We'll come back to this thought at the end of this post.
So with those thoughts in mind: here are several intertwining theories about why the Clintons command such support from the gay tribe. We invite your comments.
1. You shoulda been here in 1992.
1992 seems a long way off now. But at the time, it was only a decade past when AIDS burst into the public and political consciousness of the United States. Rock Hudson, who really splashed it on the map, died just seven years earlier. It was three years after the network TV show Thirtysomething ran an episode showing two men sitting in bed together after having sex, talking. Thanks to a US Supreme Court ruling in 1986, these men- in the privacy of one's home- could be sent to jail.
1992 was a watershed election for the gay tribe in America. Patrick J. Buchanan challenged President George H.W. Bush for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party and gave a prime-time convention speech any gay person who heard it will still tell you it was one of the most chilling things they'd heard up to that time.
"Like many of you last month," he started, "I watched that giant masquerade ball at Madison Square Garden--where 20,000 radicals and liberals came dressed up as moderates and centrists--in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history...
Yes, we disagreed with President Bush, but we stand with him for freedom to choose religious schools, and we stand with him against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.
The presidency is also America's bully pulpit, what Mr Truman called, "preeminently a place of moral leadership." George Bush is a defender of right-to-life, and lifelong champion of the Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which this nation was built.
Mr Clinton, however, has a different agenda... a militant leader of the homosexual rights movement could rise at that convention and exult: 'Bill Clinton and Al Gore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history.' And so they do.
...Yes, we disagreed with President Bush, but we stand with him for freedom to choice religious schools, and we stand with him against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.
..."My friends," Buchanan said, before launching into a chilling portrayal of black rioters terrorizing and killing old people in their homes, "this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war...The Hillary Project adds: "Gay men and lesbians have always had a soft spot for Hillary Clinton. In the mid-'90s, when "homosexual" was still a dirty word in much of the country, Bill Clinton and his wife socialized in the White House with a broad circle of gay friends. In the dark days of Whitewater and Monica, gays leaped to Hillary's defense, needing no convincing that a "right-wing conspiracy" was vast and real. At the annual gay-pride parade in Manhattan, drag queens and go-go boys compete for prominence with New York's political elite, but Clinton is always the star of the show."
In office, Bill Clinton was a self-serving disaster for the gay tribe, which like most of his constituencies became identified as collaborators in his excesses, but he and his wife at least went through the motions of symbolic support. They hired a lot of gay and lesbian people (HRC's press secretary for five years was a gay man from our home town). They made some relatively high-level gay and lesbian appointments.
When the choice is between someone who overpromises and doesn't deliver on the one hand, and someone who says you are a menace to the bedrock of civilization, you stick with the one who likes you. So a lot of gay people of a certain age stick with the Clintons because in 1992 they were the only game in town talking a gay-friendly line. Given that the Republican Party has chosen to be more and more emphatically anti-gay every election since, there has been little incentive to change. Where else would the tribe go?
2. She is a diva.
This theory is not quantifiable by social scientists and when we first read mention of it, we chuckled and moved on. But the sheer number of times it keeps coming up- and the number of people who bring it up with a straight face- makes us wonder if there isn't something to it. Consider, as Rod Serling would say, the evidence:
March 10, 2008 Andrew Sullivan posted this item:
I still don't get it. I can see lesbian support - on gender grounds alone and, alas, identity politics is very potent in lesbian political culture. But why gay men should seek more Clintonism escapes me. A reader proffers a theory:
"At a cocktail party this weekend I was talking to a friend and his boyfriend - both are rabid Clintonites - and I'm asking questions like Why did she attack Rick Lazio for not releasing his taxes, yet now she is doing the same? Why did Bill refuse to release his medical records when he ran even though Dole did, is this a pattern with them? If she takes credit for Bill's presidency then shouldn't she be tarred with DOMA?
"And listening to his defense I realized what it reminded me of. It wasn't the defense of a politician whom he admired, he sounded like somebody 40 years older defending Judy Garland or Liza Minelli: 'Oh, life has been so cruel to them, but didn't they come through it with fire and glamour?!'
Perhaps Hillary constantly playing the victim has worked somewhat. Apparently my gay brethern don't feel like they are defending a politics, they feel that they are sticking up for a tragic aging Diva whose life and glamour is fading but who can always count on her shrinking gay fan club to buy up every ticket to her "Comeback Concert".
It reminds me of the line out of Absolutely Fabulous, Eddie says to her gay ex husband when he comments on how fabulous Patsy's older sister is. "A bitch with a drug habit and you're anybody's aren't you."
Not that Hillary has a drug habit. If you don't count Bill."Hollywood Elsewhere wondered on April 9, 2008:
Have there been any reliable surveys that show definitively that the majority of gay guys are siding with Hillary Clinton? I've been sensing this all along but I've never seen it proved. If it turns out to be true, the easy or obvious explanation is that gay guys love tough, suffering battle-axe types (Joan Crawford, Eva Peron, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, etc.) -- women who've been around the rodeo and won't take no guff. If true, I think it's deplorable that gay men would go for Clinton because she fits the definition of a certain admired "type." It's lazy emotional thinking of the lowest order. I almost regard Gays for Hillary in the same light as Log Cabin Republicans.Shaun Jacob Harper penned an April 11, 2008 piece in Huffington Post that calls Hillary an out-and-out, over-the-top camp icon in the reinventing mode of "Judy Garland, Mae West, the Divine Miss M, Madonna, Cher, Liza, the Joans (Crawford, Collins, and Rivers), Liz, Diana, Tina, Mariah, Beyonce...":
Like all of these queen bees before her, HillDiva is continually reinventing herself. With each new hairstyle and each new outfit; with each new rhetorical strategy and each new scandal, we meet a different kind of Hillary. We have comeback Hillary; forgiving Hillary; victimized Hillary; lying Hillary; bellicose Hillary; Northern-Ireland preace-brokering Hillary; vetted Hillary; sarcastic Hillary; surivivor Hillary; tearful Hillary; experienced Hillary; Jesus-loving Hillary; vast right-wing conspiracy Hillary; sleep-deprived Hillary; 3am Hillary; feminist Hillary; cackling Hillary; patriotic Hillary; high-road Hillary; kick-him-while-he's-down (or "He wouldn't have been my pastor") Hillary; "Not some little woman standing by my man" Hillary; Bill's Hillary; Chelsea's Hillary; Obama-loving Hillary; "Not as Far as I know" Hillary; "I'm human" Hillary; McCain-loving Hillary; the Hillary I know.
From her burlesque biography to her faux-marriage; from her stylized overemotionality to her pseudo-drag admixture of male and female traits and gestures; from her synthetic stump speeches to her outrageous pronouncements and staged lies; and from her international acclaim to her most recently discovered wealth, Hillary, whether intentionally or not, embraces melodramatic excess at every turn.
Hillary, like camp, always comes back for an encore.
Jacobs then launches into a Susan Sontag-like deconstruction of Hillary's persona(s) as a wink-wink, nudge-nudge send up of the political process. That's what camp does to whatever it jabs in the ribs. The flaw in his argument, however, is that there is no evidence Hillary is at all aware that's what she's doing. She comes across more like the deadly earnest Margaret Dumont- the Marx Bros.' long-suffering foil- always earnest and upright, a pillar of the community, just trying to get her job done while all these strange men run around her and make jokes she doesn't understand.
A Talking Points Memo blogger, just the other day, raised the Diva Theory again:
...Hillary is the diva, the fabulous woman who is fabulous just because she says so. She's the woman who is abused (by her husband), ridiculed (by the press), hated (by Republican mouth-breathers), yet she's still standing. She's like from some exploitation film where the heroine is beaten and barely raped before pulling a knife out of her sock and slicing the mean guy's balls off. Her supporters have stood by her and fought her battles with her - and sometimes for her - since the 1990s. The emotional connection runs too deep. R-e-s-p-e-c-t, she shakes her finger. Find out what it means to me. And the crowd eats it up.
Never mind that Hillary Clinton hasn't ever really ever done anything for the gay community. They just like her moxie. It's the defensive/aggressive posturing of a member of an ostracized community, and they identify with that. I see it my friends who are gay who support Hillary. They say the same trite things over and over: she's a fighter, she's a strong woman, people hate strong women, people are jealous... Surprisingly, they like my Diva theory. To them, a diva is exactly what we need in the White House."Among the examples that blogger cites is this March 4, 2008, Washington Post story, where reporter Jose Antonio Vargas interviewed patrons of a working-class gay bar 50 miles south of Dallas:
"The thing is, Hillary's been a victim," says Leo Bartlett, taking a drag of his cigarette. "Hillary's a real fighter."
"She's been picked on, ridiculed, bullied. Those haircuts, that laugh, the clothes. Oh, and Monica. But she never gives up. She's got good policy positions. She bullies when she needs to. She's "a diva."
And that about sums up why gays -- not all, of course, but many -- are such ardent, longtime and downright defensive backers of Sen. Hillary Clinton."
"...It's her experience. She's been through every category of anything that could happen to an individual and has come out strong," says Bartlett, 42, who owns Friends. His partner of five years, Rick Foster, 60, helps manage the club...
"Gribben, 64, gives a short history lesson and names all of Clinton's contributions to the gay community. She was the first first lady to march in a gay pride parade. She's fought for more HIV funds. She wants to repeal "don't ask, don't tell," though it was her husband who signed the controversial military policy toward gays. She's for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and supports civil unions.
"Sen. Barack Obama, on the other hand, is seen as "untested," "too new," "too young," Bartlett says..
"He continues: "Gays have a history with the Clintons -- and when I say the Clintons, that's because I think Hillary was as much a president as Bill was -- and most of it was good."3. She is like us.
Sean Kennedy, in a long piece in The Advocate in October 2007, sums up his identification with Hillary Clinton:
Up close and personal, I experience Clinton with a kind of double vision. I have been a fan of hers since the 1992 campaign. I was just a freshman in high school, and her willful iconoclasm exerted a powerful hold on my imagination, my sense of who I could be. I felt a connection with her in the same way I did with Madonna -- as a suburban kid who already felt exceedingly different from my peers, I found their disregard for conventional wisdom thrilling to behold. Since then, Clinton has continued to inspire me with her smorgasbord of public identities: the trailblazer who taught Arkansas a thing or two about modern women and Washington about political wives. The wronged woman who, like some country and western heroine, won’t be kept down, whether by failed health care reform or adultery. A feminist who knows what it’s like to be discriminated against for simply being who you are. Finally, though her campaign is loath to talk about it, Clinton is a woman who enemies have tried more than once to caricature as “lesbian.” So she knows firsthand the stigma associated with homosexuality."4. She plays old school, identity politics.
Comparing Clinton and Obama this week in BeyondChron, Paul Hogarth comments:
It’s quite baffling why LGBT voters would strongly support Hillary Clinton – but the polls show that they largely do. Queers loudly celebrated Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 because he pledged to lift the ban on gays in the military, but turned against him after he caved on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Every progressive group can gripe that President Clinton let them down, but the LGBT community bears the distinction that he betrayed them first.
In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) – which banned federal rights like Social Security and immigration for same-sex couples, and allowed states to not recognize out-of-state gay marriages. He signed it simply to deprive Bob Dole of a campaign issue, and did so at midnight while denouncing it as gay-bashing. Days later, his re-election campaign advertised on Christian radio that he had signed it...
Due to her longer time in Washington, Clinton is closer to Beltway leaders in the LGBT community – which explains her many prominent endorsements. The running joke about the Human Rights Campaign is that HRC stands for Hillary Rodham Clinton (though I prefer the moniker “homosexuals requiring cash.”)Others have reported it's the same thing on the ground in New York:
Clinton addressed a gathering organized by the Greater Voices Coalition made up of LGBT Democratic organizations citywide. Leaders of those clubs, along with out elected officials, including Democratic district leaders and state committee members, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, state Senator Tom Duane, and Assemblymembers Deborah Glick and Daniel O'Donnell, were in attendance. The meeting, which was held at the Upper East Side home of a Clinton supporter, ran for more than an hour.
Representatives of the gay press were invited to the meeting, which was on the record.From an interview with her gay outreach chair:
Well, as a gay person I think it’s terrific when any candidate reaches out to our community in the ways that they think they should, but our approach has been very different. Hillary Clinton has taken the approach to continually speak directly to the community, to go to our organizations, to speak to the LGBT press - I’ll give you an example, one of the first things I did last year was that Hillary Clinton went to the Human Rights Campaign equality convention.
She was the only candidate for president who actually went to the group here in Washington and gave a speech and talked about LGBT equality. She has consistently given interview to the LGBT press and I think if you look at the reaction about that, it’s been very good. She’s not afraid to answer the hard questions. She was interviewed by The Advocate back in October, she was interviewed by the Washington Blade in February. She was interviewed by Logo TV in early February.A 2006 NYT story seems to underscore the point, as leading gay politicos in New York criticized Clinton's stand on same-sex marriage but always seem to add something on the lines of "but we have to keep educating her."
Last August The Hillary Project said of the '08 race:
Pragmatic activists say they don't expect a conversion from Clinton, Obama or Edwards on marriage soon; they'd simply like to see candidates talk about gays outside of fund-raisers and gay-themed debates.Politico's Ben Smith compares Hillary's old-school apporach to Obama's by considering the dust-up in the gay press about Obama not paying them enough attention:
My colleague Carrie Budoff Brown has a good story on the gay press's dissatisfaction with Obama's refusal to grant them interviews, and he responded to the controversy in an interview in the Advocate in which he made explicit a central aspect of his candidacy:
'I don’t think it’s fair to say silence on gay issues. The gay press may feel like I’m not giving them enough love. But basically, all press feels that way at all times. Obviously, when you’ve got limited amount of time, you’ve got so many outlets. We tend not to do a whole bunch of specialized press. We try to do general press for a general readership.'
Obama goes on to say that the Spanish-language and African-American press have the same gripe, and makes this central point:
'But I haven’t been silent on gay issues. What’s happened is, I speak oftentimes to gay issues to a public general audience. When I spoke at Ebenezer Church for King Day, I talked about the need to get over the homophobia in the African-American community, when I deliver my stump speeches routinely I talk about the way that antigay sentiment is used to divide the country and distract us from issues that we need to be working on, and I include gay constituencies as people that should be treated with full honor and respect as part of the American family.
So I actually have been much more vocal on gay issues to general audiences than any other presidential candidate probably in history. What I probably haven’t done as much as the press would like is to put out as many specialized interviews. But that has more to do with our focus on general press than it does on … I promise you the African-American press says the same thing.'
(There is one exception to this trend: The Jewish press, which has gotten lots of Obama love -- more today, including an interesting appreciation of Passover seders -- as he uses it to beat back rumors and speak about broader foreign policy issues.)
But Obama's disinclination to narrowcast, and to target small groups, is an area where his campaign matches his message, and it extends beyond specialty press. He got very few labor endorsements in the first stage of the campaign, for instance, because he didn't pander or focus on narrow issues when he talked to labor groups. Hillary would talk to labor groups about their specific contract conditions, or on a battle over tips, and get roaring applause. Obama would give his stump speech, and receive a tepid response. They came to him, in the end, giving them less leverage over him.
He's also lagged on the fundraising organized by ethnicity: Clinton has been successful in raising millions from specific Asian communities -- Fujianese, Indians; Obama (with the exception of the surge in big African-American money) less so. This applies to electioneering as well: Hillary occasionally sends out press releases to please the Polish, say, or Greek communities, honoring holidays or anniversaries; Obama does much less frequently.
'The result, in this case, is that the communities have had to come to him. I spoke with a prominent gay leader about this recently, and he expressed mixed feelings: He likes Obama's message and his promises; but he feels that the organized community -- and the leader himself -- can't call Obama on the phone, remind him of past favors, and demand allegiance, if he wavers once in the White House.
Still, on balance, Obama's promises to be a different White House when it comes to the relationship to the traditional power brokers. He's made fewer promises, and owes less, to labor, and to the organized civil rights communities. And he owes much less, of course -- and most important of all -- to the people who give many of those communities their clout: large donors.We noted at the top that gay people sort of reinvent the term each generation. We see that going on in the Obama/Clinton split among gays. Younger gays and lesbians don't necessarily see the local gay paper as the only conduit to the news (for one thing, the number of gay papers in America is small, and most of them are truly, wonderfully, amazingly awful, with ethical and journalistic standards you could store in a thimble with room left over for a copy of the Democratic Party platform). There's all kinds of gay news sites on the Internet, and gay rights stories make their way into television and print news all the time. Most bookshops worth their scratch have a gay and lesbian section, and if you live 500 miles from the nearest one, there's mail order from Amazon.com.
The Internet has created a venue not just for dating sites but for social organizations ranging from football clubs to dining groups. All of this has led, in recent years, to a spate of articles and commentaries on the end of gay culture, as though it was bound to stay, increasingly fossilized, in the 19somethings. Obama supporters, as the comment by his spokesman above hints, take a "post-modern" view of life and gay affairs. For Hillary Clinton supporters, the world is one of endless combat, of fighting for place and advancement, of endless debates on policy and position in the party between identity groups, and because some people just like that sort of thing ("Hillary," someone remarked on Andrew Sullivan's website, "is the sort of person who never wants the condo association board meeting to end").
Thus the discontent of various gay and lesbian leaders who are accustomed to being pandered to even if they accomplish little for anyone else than continuing to be pandered to by politicians, and gay newspaper editors and publishers, whose sloppy ethics (Philadephia Gay News' publisher, who slammed Obama for "avoiding" the gay press, has never disclosed in his own paper that he's already a Clinton supporter and contributor; of our old neighborhood paper, Seattle Gay News (where it's always 1973), suffice it to say we'd no more take political advice from its owners than we'd take fashion tips from Jabba the Hutt) should give any reader pause.
You have to figure a 46-year-old has a more comfortable- or at least differently comfortable- view of gays who exist openly and without apology in their communities than a 60-year-old who has come up through the political vineyard seeing them as another interest group to be dealt in the Democratic Party deck. As in so many aspects of their contest, Obama and Clinton- who are so similar in their policies- divide the gay community between what has been, and what could be.
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