Liberation vs. Assimilation: Can the LGBT community achieve both equality and cultural identity?

On the morning of June 28, 1969, there had been hints of what the day would come to represent, rightly or wrongly, as the birth of the modern LGBT movement. For New York City gays and lesbians, the city was at a crossroads – on one hand she was inspired by the inclusive, progressive movements of the ’60s; on the other, lesbians and gays were increasingly frustrated by a slow–to–change repressive orthodoxy and faced police raids of bars where they congregated. The tension mounted, exploding in a little gay bar known as the Stonewall Inn.

A 26-year-old New York City insurance salesman and Stonewall patron Michael Fader remembered that night’s famous riots in David Carter’s book Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution with a quote that has since been repeatedly re–shared depicting the events: “It was time to reclaim something that had always been taken from us … All kinds of people, all different reasons, but mostly it was total outrage, anger, sorrow, everything combined, and everything just kind of ran its course.”

That course ended in a powerful era of self–discovery: the launch of the Gay Liberation Movement, which adopted a more clear celebration of difference and a more open and confrontational response to oppression and discrimination than had ever risen to the forefront for most LGBT Americans. Before Stonewall, one of the most prominent national gay rights groups, the Mattachine Society, had been critiqued as increasingly assimilationist compared to the vision its founders had held. Afterward, it became clear that LGBT people could organize systems of support to shore up defenses and envision a better life for themselves regardless of whether mainstream America “accepted” them as peers – social clubs, educational gatherings, safe havens, and political meetings designed to overturn laws that criminalized their daily lives. A wider cross-section of the LGBT population turned toward each other than ever before to define the growing sense of community.

A lot has happened since 1969 – both to the LGBT community’s betterment and our detriment. But while the Stonewall incident marked the incendiary beginnings of a new age for LGBT individuals in New York, its impact also rippled across the country. Questions erupted that left the community wondering where it belonged: Should we remain distinctly defined, sacrificing none of our rituals and traditions for the sake of “belonging” to society as a whole? And what should that distinct community, perfectly envisioned, look like? Or, should we, as some wondered, strive to be assimilated into the mainstream culture – fully part of greater society and equal?

In the din of this questioning, Stonewall precipitated an emotional reaction that affected all 50 states, including Colorado.

The past four decades have been a mark of both community cohesion and, to a degree, relationship–building with greater society. And while relationship is not assimilation, it can, and has been, a stepping–stone. Still, when veteran engineer John Ferguson first came to Colorado in 1979, there wasn’t much to of that yet.

“The social circles I moved in did not have many straight folks – we just didn’t interact,” Ferguson said. “Those who were straight were congratulated on their attitude, sometimes heckled as being ‘probably gay’ themselves. We didn’t think to socialize in straight venues. We’d always look for a gay bar, a restaurant frequented by the community, or a gay hotel.”

Ferguson paints a rather dismal picture for a time 10 years removed from Stonewall – an LGBT community in Colorado with a divided identity.

“I was 37 years old when I landed here – married with two kids. Four years later I was out of the closet and beginning to scope out the scene. Most of it was in the bars, and was highly fractionalized. Sure, there were cowboys, leather guys, drag queens, lesbians, butch lesbians, religious gays, queers, those who were semi-closeted – but they denigrated each other.”

More than a decade after Stonewall, another turning point would eventually come after the AIDS epidemic hit with full vigor. Pastor Kevin Maly – then a student the University of Denver – recalls a community that was initially broken by coping mechanisms that undid the bonds they had spent years building. Not only were gay men suffering from illnesses within, but perceived as broken and diseased from the outside.

“We were, in a word, unhealthy,” he said. “There was lots of drug use, lots of alcohol, lots of gratuitous sex. It was self-medication – both to deal with being outcasts, and with the AIDS crisis that was all around us.”

It was that outward perception of self-destructiveness that wounded the community’s opportunity to find common ground with society – to reach out for help and support while AIDS was claiming the lives of gay men across the nation by the hundreds of thousands. On the other extreme, it sparked a new level of self–criticism for what some LGBT people saw as vices in their own community that led to what gay theorist Don Kilhefner once described with a melancholic resignation: “Gay men are accepted by hetero culture to the extent that they look, behave, and think just like straight men, in the process becoming dispirited people,” he said.

“I think in the ’80s, there was so much ignorance around HIV – known as ‘the gay cancer’ – that it made societal stereotypes and assumptions easy,” Maly said. “The very fact that a person was gay meant that they somehow carried or were going to get AIDS. There was not only the stigma of being gay, but automatically you had the stigma of AIDS.” Add to this new and growing stereotypes of LGBT individuals – particularly gay men – as hedonistic and unhealthy, and heterosexual society was keen on keeping its distance. We were distinctly and unquietly dubbed, once again, “the other.”

Still, Maly said, the epidemic gave us something to rally around – a purpose that no one in the community would question. “I think there was a more visible semblance of a community in the ’80s. For instance, you could get together a much bigger crowd for the AIDS Walk then than you can now.”

Christi Layne, living in the same troubled era but coming from a different corner of the community, saw examples of both acceptance and rejection. Known earlier in her life as Christopher Sloan – a husband and adopted son back in Stockton, California – he was forced to come out to his wife, throwing his life into a violent tailspin. Reaching for what he loved – the ballet – he landed in Salt Lake City with a dancing troupe. Doing drag queen shows on the side to make money, he eventually became part of a touring drag queen group that came to Denver. Over the years, he became known as Christi – the endearing, passionate energetic drag queen who not only wore the crown as an Imperial Court Empress, but drew attention to the community and to the rights we had so long lived without.

Layne found ready acceptance early on in Denver. “At the time, drag queens and drag queen culture were being assimilated quite quickly,” she said. “We were invited to gay and straight to-dos – even highly–visible political events. It was kind of the end of the ’60s transitioning into the reality of the ’80s.”

Perhaps it was the theatrical element – and the distance the drama provided – that made drag queen shows acceptable in the ’70s, but that acceptance seemed to waver when Layne worked to secure Denver’s first Pride march permit in 1976.

“We were promised the first permit without any trouble,” she recounts. “When our permit had not arrived by Gay Pride Week, we called to find out why. When we gave them information to track the permit, the Denver Manager of Safety’s office discovered that we were a gay organization. They then refused to give us permission to march. We still planned to march, of course, though no one at the municipal level would work to help us. We even called the news networks and got them to tape the event. It was nerve-wracking, waiting with bated breath for permission to move ahead with Pride.”

When the city didn’t succumb to the community’s pressure, Layne petitioned then Democratic Gov. Richard Lamm’s office, where she finally got the OK to move forward. “He said he would have the permit delivered and have police assistance ready,” Layne said with tears in her eyes. The permit was hand–delivered from his office as promised, with pictures in the Rocky Mountain News on the Monday after the march documenting the event. The headline read, “With permit in hand.”

It was a monumental victory for the community, and one Layne remembers with great fondness. As a leader who dared to reach out, Lamm led the way to greater acceptance, she affirms – even into the dark days of the AIDS epidemic.

For Layne, however, HIV wasn’t the stumbling block for the community that many claim. While it caught us unawares, it also unwittingly opened the door to new medical understanding and questioning, which extended out into the community and encouraged education instead of condemnation.

“What we’ve learned with HIV is that when we go to a doctor, they ask us about as individuals – about our lives, our relationships, our finances, our socioeconomic status. Then they ask about family health. They check in with us emotionally and ask about our state of mind. What HIV gave us as a blessing was assimilation into society – a way for society to understand what our health issues were and are.”

That understanding turned the “gay cancer” from a point of difference to a point of commonality. It was a way of recognizing vulnerability that was and is shared by society as a whole – while showing LGBT individuals to be complete persons with complex and dynamic character.

On the other hand, that education and questioning doesn’t always extend beyond the boundaries of Colorado’s most liberal cities, Denver and Boulder. As Broomfield City Council Member Bob Gaiser attests, the same kinds of violent prejudice that came to the fore with the Matthew Shepard attack – and are echoes of Stonewall – still exist today.

“Two years ago, an event happened in the county that gave me some perspective. There was a young Asian man who came to Broomfield to meet his young boyfriend in the detention center. While waiting for him to be released, he and his friend went to a nearby bar. His friend ended up leaving, and the Asian man got into a bit of an altercation with someone. There were gay slurs tossed around. Bottles were thrown. Whoever was picking the fight pulled out a knife and sliced the chest of this young gay man. He crawled across the street and died. This was very similar to what happened to me when I left a bar in the ’80s. My arm was broken, and I passed out from the pain. The Broomfield incident brought back painful memories of that. And I couldn’t report my incident because I wasn’t out.”

Gaiser’s point is strikingly clear: Prejudice still exists in ways and volumes exceeding what is experienced in core urban centers where most LGBT people live. Much of it stems from religion and tradition, Gaiser said, to which he testifies as a once-was ordained minister of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church.

“The church I grew up in was not accepting – and still does not accept us,” Gaiser said. He calls on the cut–and–dry theologies embraced in his former religious communities as signs of black–and–white worldviews. As changes are made in and through the LGBT community in Colorado, however, Gaiser is still troubled by lags in rural parts of the state. “I think there’s a real urban conflict,” he admits. “There are a lot of gay people in suburban and rural Colorado, and these populations are 10-15 years behind the urban populations.”

Emily Kazyak, a professor of sociology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, published a 2011 study of rural communities, and found that what sets these LGBT individuals apart from those in urban centers is twofold: a lack of gay community in any visible form, and a limited vocabulary. Not only do LGBT individuals process their lives without friends and peers to talk to about their sexuality, but they don’t even have the words to describe who they think they might be. In words that echo the spirit of the post–Stonewall movement, Kilhefner, the gay theorist, has long affirmed with conviction that “gay people must begin a radical new process of self–discovery that starts with what is inside of us.” But that does not happen without community and a shared culture.

Which might be where Lea Ann Purvis comes in. With a résumé stretching from early political lobbying to the leadership with The GLTB Community Center of Colorado and One Colorado, the state’s largest LGBT advocacy organization, she has been poised to give the statewide community a voice – to reach out to society as a whole and build healthy relationships.

Part of that process, however, is letting go of the need to assimilate. For Purvis, assimilation was never what we wanted. “When you assimilate, it’s on the terms of the dominant culture,” she explains. “We have too much to be proud of to assimilate. Rather, we need affirmation among ourselves, and it needs to be genuine. I don’t want to emulate the heterosexual culture.”

“I’m not sure you can erase – or want to erase – the central aspect of gay sexuality, which is what you need for true assimilation,” Maly echoes. “There are so many, many ways of being gay. Assimilationists might look at us as if we should look like everyone else, but we’re not. And we’re still learning what being gay means.”

On an activist level, Purvis is keen on finding more, well, community in our community. The work to grow and mature starts with us, she said, and erasing the divisions that have marked us for so long.

“Is it that improbable to have a community that is inclusive in itself? That we can say we have dikes on bikes and transvestites and bears? I think by demonstrating and accepting, and not being homogenized, is how we move forward. We lead by example – by being accepting among ourselves. We are not so rich in resources we can exclude members of our own community. We need each other.”

To the community’s credit, recent years have seen the growth in the community’s commitment to political, economic, and legal progress. The shift in support that Purvis has seen since her early days in Denver is truly something to be proud of: “Before One Colorado existed,” she said, “the most that was ever in the budget for legal support of equal rights was $64,000. That’s nothing.”

Today, fundraising and legal/financial support has many faces: The Center, for which Purvis assisted in the hiring of CEO Carlos Martinez; One Colorado, now headed by former One Iowa Executive Director Brad Clark; The Gay and Lesbian Fund and The Gill Foundation, both founded by Tim Gill; The Gay-Straight Alliance; and countless other organizations and groups dedicated to supporting, growing, and educating the LGBT community – and society as a whole – in Colorado.

And while conversations within the community and with society can indeed be beneficial, action must follow.

“One Colorado community forums are a good start to help us understand ourselves,” Purvis said. “I could even envision house parties and community get–togethers for this kind of dialogue – salon–style conversations about what our community is and what it needs. Things come to light in these settings. Then you take it to bigger settings and you make change. That’s how things happen. It comes from the people.”

And in 2013, the community’s most passionate and most difficult struggle as a people is the fight for marriage equality.

Maly said it well: “We are a community that is enjoying more committed long-term relationships, and we’re more used to sharing homes and family in those relationships.” But marriage isn’t just a steady relationship, he said.

“In some ways, marriage equality is a legal instrument designed to protect individuals and enforce one’s responsibility to one’s spouse. Of course, there are other cultural implications and meanings. But I would say that one of the things we need to be ready for is greater society coming back at us with criticism, pointing out how gay people have problems settling down and creating stable relationships. We have to respond with acknowledgement not only of our own brokenness and struggle, but that we’re no different than heterosexuals in our marital struggles. The divorce rate among heterosexuals is about 50-percent. That’s not an example we want to follow.”

There are manifold issues beyond marriage equality within and without that have yet to be dealt with – trans health care, employment discrimination, housing and socio-economic justice. And yet, we can celebrate some victories: We have legalized civil unions in Colorado; we have seen the birth of service agencies designed to educate and heal; and we toast a legislature where openly gay individuals like Colorado Speaker of the House Mark Ferrandino and state Sen. Pat Steadman can work not only for our benefit, but for society as a whole. The question is where we’re going. Should we press for an assimilation that threatens to strip us of our uniqueness but ensures equality under the law? Or do we affirm ourselves and our sexuality, demanding that being separate but equal is neither American nor humane, but that differences are what equality is about?

Whatever road the community trod in the 21st century, may we never find ourselves again in the haze of Stonewall – beaten, broken, and trampled. May LGBT people be one, true community, and let go of the divisiveness that has branded us from within.

“We all have gifts to give,” Pastor Maly said.

And as theorist Kilhefner encourages, “We must learn to honor, not hide, our being different; affirm and celebrate our gayness in original and playful ways; acknowledge a rich hidden heritage both within and outside of us; and find new models to explain the body of information and intuitive knowledge we have been carrying for a long time but that had no way to get out.”