THE POWER Rosie O’Donnell wields is that of public relations and publicity. There is no doubt that the well-liked — even beloved — talk-show host has a knack for bringing important issues to the fore, making people think, and even changing minds. She expertly rides our celebrity-obsessed culture. From Barbra Streisand’s anti-nuclear stance to Charlton Heston’s pro-gun activism, well-known faces and figures — especially in the entertainment industries — make great spokespeople for public and even moral issues.
But political movements are complicated, often delicately crafted structures built and maintained by carefully planned strategies — usually by groups whose visions or intentions are similar, but not identical. This is particularly true of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) movement, which has always had to tread a thin line between demanding wholesale social change and courting respectability, between (as conservatives like to say) "pushing their sexuality right in your face" and remaining everyday, normal people.
The problem with Rosie O’Donnell — or any celebrity — taking center stage and becoming, ipso facto, a movement’s major spokesperson is that such a position takes on a life of its own. Celebrity politics makes a given issue hostage to the fate, character, and decisions of one deified personality. Consider, for example, the shifting perception of O.J. Simpson from hero to murderer: his 1995 trial placed all African-American men under suspicion in ways not faced by, say, white middle-class families during the JonBenŽt Ramsey investigation. It’s all tied up with the burden of representation imposed on members of minority cultures. Whether she likes it or intends it, "Rosie" ends up speaking for — and, in the public imagination, becoming — all gay people.
Yet O’Donnell isn’t accountable to anyone. Hell, she isn’t even — by her own admission — particularly well-informed about gay-and-lesbian political issues. Gay people might want to think they can win the hearts and minds of heterosexual America with everybody’s favorite TV mom — Rosie O’Donnell as a hip Donna Reed or June Cleaver. But don’t forget, the cult of media personality cuts both ways, and it can be used for any cause. The political right could as easily promote its own version of the lesbian mom: Paula Poundstone. Drunk, abusive, sullen, and too butch, Poundstone is the media’s version of the anti-Rosie.
Unfortunately, in our People-magazine culture, the celebrity spokesperson is here to stay. But the vital question at this moment is, does the gay community — or mainstream and more-radical gay activists who have been working on these issues for decades — really want Rosie O’Donnell in this role?
Certainly there were many gay people who winced long and hard when O’Donnell held forth to Diane Sawyer about being a lesbian: "I don’t think you choose whether or not you are gay. Who would choose it? It’s a very difficult life. You get socially ostracized. You worry all the time if you are in physical danger if you show your affection to your partner. You worry that you’re an outcast with your friends and society in general." For a political movement that has protested for almost 50 years that Gay Is Good and has focused on changing the world to make it safer for gay people, O’Donnell’s "Who would choose it?" was, to say the least, retrograde. But her view on the futures of her adopted kids — Parker, six; Chelsea, four; and Blake, two — was even more disconcerting. "I think life is easier if you’re straight," she said. "I hope that they [the kids] are genuinely happy, whatever they are. But if I could pick, would I rather have my children have to go through the struggles of being gay in America, or being heterosexual? I would say heterosexual."
O’Donnell certainly breached the movement’s consensus here — most activists would say that kids grow up to be who they are, and one orientation is not preferable to another. While some might see O’Donnell’s statement as brave, and as bucking queer political correctness, try to imagine African-Americans saying that they wanted their kids to be white. Or imagine a Jewish family raising their kids to be Christian because society is anti-Semitic. The gay movement may be committed to many things, but promoting heterosexuality is certainly not one of them.
In fact, O’Donnell admits to being "fairly uninformed" about the gay movement. That may be why she felt free, during a February 25 appearance at an ovarian-cancer-research benefit at New York’s Caroline Comedy Club, to rant about gay activists who wanted her to come out sooner as "gay Nazis," as reported in USA Today. Words spoken at a comedy club cannot be taken completely at face value, but "gay Nazis," even in jest, is pretty harsh. O’Donnell might keep in mind that if it weren’t for three decades of "gay Nazis" fighting for the right to be openly queer, she could never have come out herself or published her book, and she would be living in fear of losing her job, kids, and career.
Statements like these are no help to a broader movement for gay rights. In fact, they play into the very right-wing sentiments that have been used so effectively against the movement: that it is a tragedy for kids to grow up to be gay and that the movement is run by PC dogmatists who expect people to submit their individuality and personal choices to political imperatives. But another aspect of O’Donnell’s public campaign is even more disturbing and potentially harmful. Along with positioning and over-identifying herself as the spokesperson for gay families — "I am the gay parent" — O’Donnell draws heavily on a long and dangerous tradition in both feminist and (to a lesser degree) gay politics: the tradition of maternal moral superiority.
The cult of female moral superiority — especially as endowed by motherhood — has been prominent in American life and politics since at least the middle of the last century, when it was used by women in the temperance movement, various social-purity movements, and even the campaign for women’s suffrage. It was a commonplace in these circles — and in a certain level of American intellectual life — that women had a purer nature than men and were called upon to lead men and the country to a higher standard. This sentiment is well ingrained in American culture. Think of the World War I hit "I Didn’t Raise My Son To Be a Soldier." It is still with us today, represented by groups like Mothers Supporting War Resisters in the 1960s, and, more currently, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and the Million Mom March, which has grown into a permanent pro-gun-control organization.
The trouble with this highly gendered form of political discourse is not that it isn’t, in the short run, productive — certainly MADD has managed to do to some effective lobbying on automobile-safety issues — but that it rests on what is essentially a sentimental lie. The war against Vietnam was wrong because it was genocidal, not because mothers were hurt by it and lost their sons. Drunk driving is bad because innocent people get killed — not because mothers suffer from it in particular.
The appeal to motherhood is irresistible. After all, who in America doesn’t love mothers and apple pie? But the politics of motherhood are also deeply conservative and as such are particularly limited, even disastrous, for the gay-and-lesbian movement. Let's face it: the gay movement seeks personal freedom to act outside of heterosexual norms and to establish equality under the law for a wide range of personal choices, including the right to marry and raise children, as well as the right to have a full, varied, and adventurous sexual life. Given that these are its central concerns, the gay movement should be extremely wary of the motherhood argument. It may work — to a limited degree — on the issue of gay families, but it would fall far short on most others. It would, in fact, be antithetical to many of the movement's long-standing preoccupations. Can you imagine a "Mothers United Against Sodomy Laws" group? Or "Mothers for Sex-Reassignment Surgery"? "Mothers for the Freedom To Read Gay Porn"? More likely the song today would be "I Didn’t Raise My Son To Be a Drag Queen."
O’DONNELL PLAYED the motherhood card well. She undoubtedly garnered more attention for the Florida case than the ACLU would have gotten on its own. But even now, in the earliest stages of her one-woman publicity campaign, O’Donnell is acting out the obvious limitations of her approach. While she is open about being in a four-year, committed relationship with Kelli Carpenter, she continually refers to herself as a single mother. There is never any mention of Carpenter’s relationship with the kids. (Given that O’Donnell stars in and produces a daily weekday television show and edits her own magazine, one imagines that Carpenter might actually spend more time with Parker, Chelsea, and Blake than their adoptive, working mother does.) O’Donnell knows full well that her campaign and public image might not do as well if her audience could picture the reality of what it is like to live as a lesbian couple raising kids — "Well, you know, Diane, Kelli and I were hoping for a little, you know, private time in bed last Saturday morning, but Parker had a Little League game, so we settled for a quick kiss, had some frozen waffles with the kids, and all ran out to the ball field." The motherhood card might allow for a near-phantom woman lover — rather like the "chaste" Victorian friendship between two "spinsters" in a "Boston marriage" — but not for the more immediate reality of lesbian sex or relationships, which O’Donnell’s portrayal has rendered simply invisible.
And while we’re at it, O’Donnell’s out-of-touchness with the mainstream gay movement and politics really is a problem. Last week she bought full-page advertisements in the Miami Herald, the Tallahassee Democrat, the Orlando Sentinel, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, urging the Florida state legislature to repeal the law banning gay adoption. She was caught up short, however — and admitted that she was "fairly ignorant" of the workings of the legislature — when told that nothing could be done because there were currently no bills on file calling for the law's repeal and that, in any event, the 60-day regular legislative session was over on March 22. It is, in fact, the ACLU appeal that has a far better chance of destroying the law and around which gay activists have been organizing. At best, O’Donnell’s misapprehension was embarrassing; at worst, it was publicly misleading. In the end, one has to wonder if organized gay-rights groups — as well as the ACLU, for which she is now an unofficial spokesperson — will want to be associated with O’Donnell if she continues to make such political mistakes and to commit gaffes like hoping publicly that her kids grow up straight or calling gay activists "Nazis."
There is little doubt that Rosie O’Donnell means well and has the best intentions. It is her ignorance of the gay movement’s history and politics, combined with her new position as spokesperson, that could lead to serious problems. Social discrimination against gays, laws that prevent gay people from adopting, and laws that prohibit queers from committing sodomy or looking at porn or cross-dressing are wrong because they deny GLBT people full citizenship and equality under the law. Motherhood might be good — and itself something worth fighting for when jeopardized. But in the end, it is no substitute for simple justice.
Michael Bronski can be reached as mabronski@aol.com
