Badpuppy Gay Today

Monday, 17 March, 1997

Though most gay and lesbian strategists today can see no alternative to supporting the Clinton Administration, some do. Scott Tucker, writing in the Winter edition of Gay Community News, Boston's venerable, long-lived, left-leaning publication, insists that gay men and lesbians, fighting for their lives and their rights, can no longer depend upon a Democratic party that has systematically expunged the voices of its liberal left.

Even mainstream observers, such as USA Today's Carol Clurman, Myron B. Pitts and Sandra McElwaine, note that ""few expect gay rights to capture headlines in the capital this year, as President Clinton and Congress downplay divisive gay issues in favor of 'mainstream' topics such as education and balancing the budget."

Some left-leaning gay strategists, call upon celebrity thinkers for, and pridefully note a continuous outpouring of similar political criticisms by Gore Vidal, America's revered historical novelist and essayist.

"The Republicans and the Democrats are Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee," says Vidal. Reared in the nation's capital under the tutelage of his grandfather, Senator Thomas Pryor Gore of Oklahoma, Vidal has penned new polemical works that critique what he now believes is an American system mired in greed, corruption, and an alarming slide into an authoritarian, corporate-sponsored, profit-driven slavery.

"I do not accept the authority of any state--much less one founded as was ours upon the free fulfillment of each citizen--to forbid me, or anyone, the use of drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, sex with a consenting partner, or, if one is a woman, the right to an abortion," writes Vidal in his widely circulated book, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. "I take these rights," he says, "to be absolute, and should the few persist in their efforts to dominate the private lives of the many, I recommend force as a means of changing their minds."

Gay men and lesbians, writes Scott Tucker, "are political prisoners of the corporate state. The guards and wardens are the Republican and Democratic parties, and we are drilled to believe the bipartisan prison is the very house of democracy."

Tucker argues that the deliberate policy of the Democratic Party is to beat the Republicans "by joining them in attacks on health-care, welfare, and civil rights." He accuses the Democratic Leadership Council of proclaiming that liberalism is dead. "Indeed," he says, "liberal Democrats loyally play dead at every election." Many self-styled progressives, according to Tucker's analysis, are now helping President Clinton build his "bridge to the 21st century" which, charges Tucker, "has a fast lane for the rich and an exit ramp into a ditch for working people and the poor." In the meantime, a new group, "Gays for Gore in 2000" has announced its existence.