Opinions
Norman Lear’s legacy resonates among queer viewers
Thank you for provoking, entertaining, and inspiring us
You know we all will die.
Yet, every so often, someone dies who you thought would live forever. Even if they lived for more than a century, and you felt like they knew your family, though you and your family never knew them.
That’s how I, along with so many others, felt when we heard that TV writer and producer Norman Lear, who transformed American media and culture, died at the age of 101 on Dec. 5 at his Los Angeles home.
Lear, who produced “All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons,” “Good Times,” “One Day at a Time” and other groundbreaking TV shows in the 1970s, never slowed down.
This was fortunate for the millions of viewers who were moved, provoked, surprised, and entertained by the many memorable characters he created from Archie Bunker to Maude to George Jefferson.
Lear’s TV series were especially meaningful to queer people.
Before Lear, families and characters in TV sitcoms were sometimes funny, gentle, unintentionally camp and/or delightful: from the Ricardos in “I Love Lucy” to June and Ward Cleaver in “Leave It to Beaver” to Paul Lynde in “Bewitched” to Rob and Laura in “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”
But the families and situations on these shows were sanitized. You never heard a toilet flush. Comedy was rarely used to address anything political or provocative. Characters didn’t talk about race, the Vietnam War, or the emerging second wave of the feminist movement.
You rarely saw queers on sitcoms. Certainly not in positive ways. LGBTQ folk are still not adequately represented in movies or TV.
The movie “Happiest Season” produced a frisson of delight and discomfort when it began streaming on Hulu in November 2020. I was thrilled to finally see a lesbian couple kiss and meet the parents in a holiday movie on a mainstream streaming service (that even had an homage to “It’s a Wonderful Life”). A relative told me that she was fine with “gay people,” but she didn’t like seeing them kiss in “Christmas movies on TV.”
Yet though there’s a long way to go, things are indescribably better now than they were when Lear’s pioneering series aired in the 1970s.
Then, 50 years before “Nyad,” “Rustin,” “Bros,” “Fire Island,” “Queer as Folk” and “Fellow Travelers,” nearly all of the queers you saw on screen were sick, dead, or in jail.
That didn’t do much for your self-esteem if you were LGBTQ. Being queer was illegal in many states. You could be fired from your job for being queer. And people would have wondered what planet you were on if you’d have said you were going to marry your same-sex lover. You were lucky if you could talk at all to your family about your sexuality.
In this landscape, Lear’s shows were often an oasis. His shows never pretended that being queer would be easy – that everything would be OK. But they did provide some hope that even bigots like Archie Bunker might come to see queers in a more human light.
To honor Lear, I watched “Cousin Liz,” just one of the episodes of his shows that positively depicted queer folk.
“Cousin Liz” was an episode of “All in the Family.”
As I watched, I remembered how freeing it was when I first saw the show in the 1970s.
In the episode, Edith’s cousin Liz has died. At her funeral, Edith and Archie learn that Liz was lesbian and meet Veronica, who was her lover. At first, Archie insists that Veronica give Liz’s tea set, which was an heirloom in Edith’s family, to him and Edith. When Veronica refuses, Archie threatens to out her at her job. Edith makes Archie see that this would hurt Veronica and that he wouldn’t be “that mean.” Archie, though reluctantly, and saying Veronica needs a man, lets Veronica keep the tea set.
This may not seem radical today. But in the 1970s, it was revolutionary. The idea that a lesbian lover could not only talk openly to a family member at a funeral but ask to keep a family heirloom was breathtaking.
In 1981, to combat the religious right, Lear founded the progressive advocacy group People for the American Way.
Peter Montgomery, who is gay and based in Washington, D.C., is research director for People for the American Way.
Lear “understood the threat of [the religious right’s] divisive rhetoric and authoritarian agenda earlier than most,” Montgomery emailed me.
Lear was wholeheartedly supportive of LGBTQ equality, he added. “Norman was thrilled when Dan and I got married in 2012,” Montgomery said, “and at his invitation we spent our honeymoon at his family’s lovely farm in New England.”
Thank you for provoking, entertaining, and inspiring us. Rest in peace, Norman Lear.
Kathi Wolfe, a poet and writer, is a regular Blade contributor. Wolfe is the winner of the 2024 William Meredith Award for Poetry. Her most recent collection is ‘The Porpoise In The Pink Alcove’ (Forest Woods Media Press).
Opinions
Racism and misogyny are alive in America
Trump’s confounding victory will hurt many people who voted for him
A smart, compassionate, African-American/Asian woman, in a mixed marriage, runs for president and loses to a felon, found liable of sexual assault, twice impeached, and leader of a failed coup. What could be the reason?
I understand people are unhappy with the economy, immigrants coming into our country illegally, and many with their lives in general. But none of this can account for the huge numbers of white, African American, and Latino men, who voted for Trump. In a major shift, Trump won Latino men 54%-44% over Harris, and 50%-39% of white men according to NBC exit polls, and 20% of male Black voters nationally. We need to call that what it is and begin to have a real conversation in this country about it. They are all ending up voting for a man whose policies will hurt them. Whether it be a tax on all the goods they buy, or being anti-union, applauding Elon Musk for firing strikers, or giving tax breaks not to them, but to millionaires and billionaires. African-American men should know he refused to rent them apartments in New York. Latino men should understand he will be knocking on their doors looking for possible family members to deport. All of this overridden by their macho fear of being in a country led by a woman. We have seen this before in Hillary Clinton’s race in 2016. Unless we have an open conversation about this, it will continue to happen.
Donald Trump is a threat to all decent people around the world. He admires dictators and he will emulate them. He will override our judicial system, using the Justice Department to get back at his enemies. We know this.
On the abortion issue it appears women voted overwhelmingly to pass every ballot initiative, except the one in South Dakota, to keep abortion legal. It went down in Florida because though 57% voted for it the legislature managed to say it would only pass if it got 60% of the vote. Yet clearly, even many of the white women who voted for these initiatives, didn’t see the danger in then voting for Trump. It is very hard to rationalize. I hear all sorts of explanations on the various news/talk fests on cable TV. People pontificating on all sorts of things. Trying to determine who in the Democratic Party is to blame. In 2016 they blamed the candidate, Hillary. She didn’t do enough, went to the wrong states at the end, didn’t connect with voters. This year they are trying not to blame Harris who was thrown into a campaign only three months before the election. So, many are blaming President Biden for not announcing two years ago he wasn’t going to run again and allowing Democrats to hold a real primary. Who knows, maybe they are right. Harris could never escape the animus toward the Biden administration. She tried valiantly, and I think ran an amazing campaign. As I wrote online, we may have lost an election, but many like me ended up falling in love with Kamala Harris.
There are a few high points from Tuesday’s election, like the victories of two Democratic, African-American women senators, Lisa Blunt Rochester from Delaware, and Angela Alsobrooks from Maryland. Then Delaware had a double victory, electing Sarah McBride to Congress, where she will become the first elected transgender woman to serve in the House of Representatives. When I write this it looks as if Democrats may actually lose only three senators: Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Jon Tester in Montana, and Republicans won the open seat in West Virginia. Tammy Baldwin will keep her seat from Wisconsin, and in races still too close to call we could see Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, and Jacky Rosen in Nevada, keep their seats. Then Ruben Gallego in Arizona, and Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, have a shot at winning their races in what were open seats. All these results potentially showing the schizophrenia in the electorate in states that Trump won. They all out-performed Harris in their states. After all, a woman senator they know may be OK, but not a strong, African-American/Asian woman, as president.
We will be dissecting this election for years to come, historians will be looking at how Trump could have won. But the reality for those of us living in the United States now, those who Trump has insulted and degraded, including women, African Americans, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, the disabled, nearly everyone one can think of, we will have to live with him and fight back where we can. Hopefully joining hands to do it, as there is strength in numbers. We shall overcome!
Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.
Opinions
What’s next for the LGBTQ movement?
Trump’s win requires us to organize, focus on protecting trans community
These are frightening times for those of us on the target list of Project 2025, the blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term that he secured in landslide fashion on Tuesday.
Many of us are wondering how this could happen again. Kamala Harris is one of the most qualified presidential candidates to run in our lifetime. She ran against a 34-times convicted felon who staged an insurrection against the government and who faces a sentencing hearing in just three weeks for his crimes. A man who was twice impeached, who courts Vladimir Putin’s attention and approval, and who was found liable for sexual assault. Despite that last fact — and Trump’s bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade — 44 percent of women voters supported him, far more than the polls and pundits predicted.
Those polls turned out to be pretty accurate and Harris was brought down by lingering concerns over the economy and the toll inflation has taken on lower and middle class Americans. Sure, sexism, and racism played a role in this, but too many of us live in a bubble, insulated from the everyday concerns of disaffected blue collar Americans. While many of us crowed about last week’s Wall Street Journal lead story on the booming U.S. economy being the envy of the world, voters in the former “Blue Wall” states were struggling to put food on the table. When you can’t feed your family, you’re not going to vote for the incumbent vice president.
So what’s next? We’ve seen this movie before. Trump will appoint a series of sycophants to run the government; he will undermine the federal workforce and try to fire as many longtime civil servants as he can. He will have a compliant GOP-majority Senate to rubberstamp his Cabinet and judicial appointees. He will probably ban transgender service members from the military on day one. The list goes on.
“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” Project 2025 begins. “This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender awareness, gender-sensitive … out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contracts, grant regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
Indeed, Project 2025 seeks to send us all back to the closet. But, as Harris rightly intoned throughout her short campaign: We are not going back.
The good news — and there is some — is that voters for the first time elected two Black women to the U.S. Senate to serve at the same time, Angela Alsobrooks in Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester in Delaware. Sarah McBride becomes our nation’s first out transgender member of Congress. She’s a formidable figure and will be an important voice for trans equality in the face of Trump’s inevitable attacks. At this writing, control of the House hasn’t been decided. If the Democrats can manage to flip it, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, a capable strategist, becomes the face of our resistance.
We need our LGBTQ allies and advocacy groups more than ever. If you have the resources, donate to Lambda Legal and other legal groups gearing up for the many battles ahead, including over marriage equality. (Some more good news on that front, as California voters overwhelmingly approved Prop 3, which will enshrine marriage rights in the constitution of our largest state.) Volunteer your time with your local equality group, especially if you live in a state like Florida with draconian anti-LGBTQ laws on the books.
No one said being part of a social justice movement would be easy. Sometimes pioneers in these fights don’t live to see the end of the road. Now’s the time to double down on hard work, determination, and compassion, especially for the trans community, which sadly will take the brunt of the incoming attacks. Those of us who are a bit older need to reassure younger voters and activists that their efforts this time are not in vain. Harris’s meteoric ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket and the incredible campaign she ran will make it easier for the next woman to run. That final, ultimate glass ceiling will fall in our lifetime.
So for now, take a breath. Hug the dog. Take a walk in the woods, whatever you need to refocus. Four years is a blip and will fly by. The Democratic bench is deep. And the march toward full equality for our community is unstoppable. Setbacks are inevitable but we learned a long time ago that love wins. So fight on.
Opinions
Independent parliamentary candidate campaign fulfilled my right as a queer Motswana
Botswana’s 13th general election took place Oct. 30
I had the privilege to run as an independent candidate for parliament during Botswana’s recent and most historic election. While I was not elected, my privilege to exercise my right to stand as a citizen was fulfilled, most notably, as an out and proudly queer feminist nonbinary individual in my youth.
There are many reasons that lead to my decision to run, one of them being the anti-LGBTI developments that were occurring in my country, along with several others across Africa. Most notably, when our speaker of parliament attended a regional meeting on African sovereignty and values veiled against anything human rights related: Including reproductive and queer rights.
I could not understand how a member of parliament could question the fundamental basis of having three arms of government because of a court of appeal ruling that affirmed our rights as queer people. I could not understand how the church could protest against a constitutional review bill but not the corruption, gender based violence or poverty across the country. I could not understand how elected leaders could not publicly defend the rights of indigenous peoples that were consistently trampled on by the executive. I could not, sit with all I know and advocate for, allow for public discourse to perpetuate harmful gender norms and a lack of accountability from government. What I could do was stand for my rights in contrast to what I have done before in my activism — as a parliamentary candidate.
This is a mark of progress, from a country that previously denied LGBT registration to decriminalizing same-sex intimacy. It has been a frustrating journey of gaslighting erasure on a personal and professional level. I’ve had several undesirable encounters with law enforcement ranging from threats to be shot to having my phone confiscated. I have seen government absolve itself from accountability to its people while presenting itself as a beacon at the United Nations in Geneva and New York. These are not in isolation and neither am I special, as many queer Batswana continue to be questioned because their national identity cards present differently from who they are or how they dress in person. More importantly, how countrywide poverty, inequity disenfranchised my people are. Including those living with HIV, with disabilities, sex workers, indigenous people, ethnic minorities, and migrants among many others.
We continuously have to fight for our dignity as stigma and discrimination strip away at our personhood and humanity. Whether in convenience stores, banking halls, or government service point — identity serves as a barrier to “Setho” in Setswana or “Ubuntu” in Zulu. All these challenges aside, I have often questioned how many more sanitary pads to donate, petitions to make, and radio interviews to do to achieve meaningful change. The many theories of change and M&E frameworks I have contributed to have not done enough. The projects I have designed, campaigned through, and deemed a “success” have yet to meaningfully shift realities across the country.
It is this conundrum I have to fight with. Where my conscience has to answer whether it’s enough to raise awareness or translate human rights documents into local languages. Whether it’s enough that I have written too many reports to count or assisted too many survivors as a form of my own healing. While these questions linger at the back of my mind, I am privileged to draw from the likes of Hajiya Gambo Sawaba (Nigeria), Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela-Mandela (South Africa), Dr. Stella Nyanzi (Uganda), and many other feminists who have stood against injustice and taken up general elections candidacy in their quest for justice. I find glee in the fact that this gives opportunity to another somewhere within our challenging continent, to take up the battle for queer liberation in an era that continuously wants to deny us belonging and becoming.
Dumi Gatsha is a consultant and founder of Success Capital Organization, a grassroots NGO working in the nexus of human rights and sustainable development at grassroots, regional, and global levels.
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