It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia & Winning True Equality by Michelangelo Signorile (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27)
Before we pop the cork on the champagne bottle to celebrate the likely countrywide Supreme Court legalization of same-sex marriage in late June, muckraker journalist Michelangelo Signorile cautions us in his new book It's Not Over that parties trumpeting the ascendancy of LGBT equality are premature. The gay and lesbian community is suffering from victory blindness, a refusal to see the ongoing discrimination and violence hiding in plain sight, the dangerous illusion that we've won the war and are being precipitously magnanimous to our enemies.
Signorile is all too eager to provide the heartbreaking evidence: 29 states with no laws protecting LGBT people from discrimination, rising reports of anti-gay violence, more people still entrenched in the closet (especially in intolerant states like Mississippi, upwards of 80% of gay men), 30-40% of all teen suicides are LGBT-related, not to mention rampant school bullying. Overt homophobia still thrives, such as lesbian Jennifer Tipton not being allowed to enter Dollywood, a Dolly Parton-themed amusement park, because she was wearing a pro-gay-marriage T-shirt. Signorile also predicts a serious backlash once same-sex marriage is legalized in all 50 states.
Famous as one of the first proponents of outing in the early 1990s in his OutWeek columns and in his book Queer in America, Signorile is no wallflower when it comes to reminding readers that all the stories, case histories, and research he documents in his book have already been broadcast on his Sirius XM Progress radio show or published in a blurb on Huffington Post Gay Voices, of which he is editor-at-large. He borrows Kenji Yoshino's 2006 concept of covering, or "a toning down of a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream," to describe why so many queers have jumped on the assimilation bandwagon by downplaying differences to make themselves palatable or inoffensive by never stepping on establishment toes. Signorile makes the case that many straight people who are accepting of LGBTs do not want to know what they do sexually. Hollywood is inclined to make sure they don't, by creating gay characters (mostly in supporting roles) who are witty but largely nonsexual. Both Hollywood and the media enforce the glass closet by protecting celebrities and politicians who live openly gay lives yet don't acknowledge themselves publicly. When such sensitivities are not honored, such as NFL player Michael Sam kissing his boyfriend in front of the ESPN TV cameras, all hell breaks loose.
Signorile is incisive on skewering the gay conservative incrementalist approach, which he rightfully exposes as a kind of legislative covering, with a prime example being HRC trying to push an ENDA bill which initially cut out any protections for transgender individuals. Up until this past December, HRC supported a broad religious exemption enabling right-wing homophobes to discriminate against LGBTs under cover of religious liberty arguments. This topic is now in the news with new religious freedom laws enacted in Indiana and Arkansas. Signorile highlights recent psychology research revealing that while explicit public bias against LGBT people has declined, implicit bias, meaning privately held attitudes, have changed little. Finally, Signorile is excellent on chastising the media for providing a platform for anti-gay bigots to spew hateful comments to provide more "balanced" arguments, arguing that the media would never tolerate white supremacist proponents to counterattack pro-black positions.
Though he is current in his victory blindness examples, such as the Brendan Eich, resigned Mozilla CEO, brouhaha of last year, and how some gay activists sought refuge under the false premise that the LGBT mainstream was intimidating Eich's free speech, Signorile's basic thesis of overhasty equality is not new. A year ago, sociology professor Suzanna Walters in her book The Tolerance Trap presented many of the same concepts in similar areas (such as Hollywood and media) in a less alarmist manner, with a sophisticated cultural criticism absent in It's Not Over.
While Signorile tends to adopt a pessimistic approach to continued discrimination and backlash, he does suggest a series of steps to help win true equality, such as teaching LGBT history in schools, teaching LGBT youth self-defense to encourage self-empowerment, and scrapping the victory narrative so we can win the long war against bigotry, reject covering, and demand full civil rights through grass roots empowerment. These are worthwhile moves in a battle plan to fight still powerful and well-entrenched attitudes and opponents. All this evidence renders It's Not Over a trenchant critique of Washington-media-Hollywood bias and gay establishment triumphalism, coupled with provocative advice we ignore at our own peril.