Bill James’ freakout: A strange sign of progress?

By the time you read this, the County Commission may have sorta-censured Bill James for his venomous homophobic rants last week. (In reference to the role N.C. members of Congress played in the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, James said he is against “endorsing immorality and allowing military recruits to be preyed on by homosexuals.”) They could have passed a resolution against “inflammatory speech” and anti-gay discrimination. Or maybe not. James, ever the backward badass, says the Commission might as well come out in support of prostitution and pedophilia. So much for calming the inflammatory speech.

Gay rights supporters, however, needn’t get overly excited about either censure or James’ rants. The Commission resolution has as much to do with keeping Charlotte on track to host the 2012 Democratic convention as it does supporting equality for gays and lesbians. And — hear me out on this — James’ cranked-up hate speech, as repugnant as it is, is also sign of progress for equality. I’ll explain in a second.

This particular column isn’t exclusively about Bill James, but a couple of things need to be said. James, as those who have followed his long career know, has a genuinely bizarre obsession with homosexuality. The fixation on gays is embedded enough that last week, James e-mailed a Monty Python video of gay, dancing soldiers as a rebuke of the DADT repeal. James’ website once featured a rather lengthy list of gay male sexual activities; he asked fellow Commissioner Vilma Leake if it was true that her late son “was a homo”; and many Charlotteans remember when he led the Commission’s infamous “Gang of Five” during the 1990s battles over homosexuality in a Charlotte production of the Tony-winning play Angels In America.

His vivid, repeated interest in the details of homosexual behavior has led many in Charlotte to wonder openly whether James is himself a self-loathing homosexual, in the Republican tradition of Roy Cohn, chief aide to the late Sen. Joe McCarthy (and, ironically, a character in Angels in America). I don’t know the answer to that question, and it doesn’t really matter, as James’ sexuality isn’t the issue. In any case, while some fervent homophobes are indeed deep in the closet, most are simply hateful and ignorant.

Conservative opposition to the DADT repeal has now coalesced into wailing about the horrors of straight soldiers having to shower with openly gay ones. It’s an argument that makes little sense, even from a homophobic standpoint. As the BlueNC site summed up the argument, under DADT, it is OK for homosexuals to shower with heterosexuals, as long as those homosexuals haven’t told someone openly that they are gay. But if everyone knows that the homosexuals are gay, then the military of the U.S. is in danger and may no longer be able to protect our country.

Personally, I like the view of Gen. David Petraeus’ senior aide Marvin Hill, who told the press that if there are troops who can’t deal with the repeal of DADT, they should leave the service. In other words, if you can’t serve in the military without discriminating against other troops, then get the hell out.

Some Republican leaders are starting to chafe at their party being so closely aligned with this country’s backward, reactionary elements — such as the folks who are freaking out because homosexuality is more accepted these days. These people are the heirs of fearful conservatives who have consistently been on the losing side of modern history, fighting progress every step of the way. They didn’t want women to vote. They lost. They didn’t want blacks to sit at white lunch counters. They lost. They didn’t want blacks to vote. They lost. They didn’t want women to be independent. They lost. And now, as former CL writer Frye Gaillard put it, “homophobia is the new cutting edge of bigotry.” And the ass-backward crowd is losing there, too.

With that history in mind, I propose that James’ freakout last week was, in a strange way, a sign of progress. This latest flare-up of gay-bashing makes it more obvious than ever that homophobic bigots are on the defensive these days. They may never give up, but nonetheless, they’re becoming increasingly irrelevant, as modern life, and generational progress, passes them by. Let them wallow in their archaic Ozzie & Harriet fantasy world; the rest of us will be busy getting on with life in the 21st century.

John Grooms writes the Boomer With Attitude column, news features and book reviews, and contributes to www.theclogblog.com.

This article appears in Jan 4-10, 2011.