Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

I am a direct beneficiary of the most successful social movement in American history. I am a gay man. Born in 1983 when a mysterious disease was beginning to decimate an earlier generation of gay men against a backdrop of societal indifference, I now live in a country where gay people can marry, serve openly in the military, and are legally protected from discrimination. Public polling regularly indicates that a large majority of Americans are accepting of their gay and lesbian fellow citizens, a majority that, thanks to the broadmindedness of younger generations, grows larger every year. Excepting some conservative subcultural redoubts and a few professional sports leagues, openly gay people can now be found in practically every arena of American life. The presidential candidacy of Pete Buttigieg suggests that the election of an openly gay person to the highest office in the land could happen within my lifetime. This welcome state of affairs would have been unimaginable to all but the most clairvoyant of gay people (and, for that matter, straight people) born in the middle of the last century. As an historian of the gay experience who came to understand the fact of his own nature around the time that our leaders were busy passing measures aimed at stigmatizing gay people (the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and the paradoxically named Defense of Marriage Act), it was certainly unimaginable to me. For what qualifies the gay movement as more successful than any of the other campaigns for equality waged by American minority groups is both the extent of the transformation that has been achieved (in both law and public attitudes) and the rapidity with which it occurred.  It is increasingly difficult to remember today, but within living memory the homosexual was the most despised figure in the American imagination. Diagnosed as mentally ill by the medical establishment, condemned as heathens from the pulpit of every major religious denomination, their conduct deemed illegal by the state, gay men and women — commonly referred to as “perverts,” “sex deviants,” and even less pleasant epithets — once occupied a place comparable to that of the dissident in a totalitarian regime. Between 1946 and 1961, the year before Illinois became the first state to decriminalize homosexual acts between consenting adults, state and municipal governments imposed some one million criminal penalties upon gay people for offenses ranging from holding hands to dancing to sex, a legal regime approximating what Christopher Isherwood memorably described as a “heterosexual dictatorship.” Indeed, when it came to gay people, the legal system sanctioned illegality, in the form of the “gay panic” defense that enabled assailants to justify their violent, even homicidal assaults on gay men as fits of temporary insanity “provoked” by a homosexual’s “indecent advance.” The Postal Service impounded gay literary magazines and the FBI spied on gay rights organizations. Declared enemies of the state by leaders of both political parties, gay people were prohibited from working for the federal government until 1975, and barred from holding security clearances for another two decades.  Such was the revulsion that homosexuality aroused among the general public that, in the year I was born, Edwin Edwards, the notoriously corrupt governor of Louisiana, quipped that “the only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” Edwards might have intended his remark as a joke, but he expressed an important, if rarely acknowledged, axiom about American public life, which was that the only thing as bad as murdering a member of the opposite sex was loving a member of the same one.  In 2004, President George W. Bush won reelection after campaigning for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. While that effort failed, over two dozen states eventually adopted anti-gay marriage amendments to their constitutions. But hearts and minds were already beginning to change. The year Bush attempted to enshrine discrimination in our country’s founding document, sixty percent of Americans opposed same-sex marriage and only thirty-one percent supported it. Within fifteen years, those figures had reversed, representing the most dramatic shift in public opinion about a social issue in the history of polling. Today Pete Buttigieg serves