Anti-Semitism vs. homophobia.

Two numbers furnished by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force jumped out at me when I was reading the recent Newsweek cover story on gay life in America: In 1998, 4.2% of voters identified themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, while just 2.6% said they're Jewish. Which made me wonder, as a gay person who leads a Passover Seder myself: Why do Jews have more clout in Washington than gay people do?

Gays and Jews have traveled remarkably similar paths in America. At the beginning of the last century, anti-Semitism was even more virulent than homophobia was at the end of it. Before World War I, many Jews believed they had to disguise their origins (or become Episcopalians) to get ahead--just as gay people had to pretend to be straight if they hoped to succeed in almost any profession. It was less than 60 years ago that Lionel Trilling became the first tenured Jewish faculty member at Columbia University. And when Barney Frank graduated from high school in 1957, he thought he had no future as an elected politician--not because he's gay but because he's Jewish.

The big change for Jewish Americans began after World War II, when horror over the Holocaust finally began to make anti-Semitism unacceptable. It also forced thousands of American Jews out of the closet and galvanized them into becoming a fiercely organized political lobby. Nevertheless, progress came slowly: Just 30 years ago there were still only two Jewish U.S. senators--versus 11 today.

Progress for gay people in America started much later, after the Stonewall riots in 1969. But once gays began to get our act together, we actually improved our status much more quickly than the Jews. In many ways the AIDS epidemic affected gay people the same way the Holocaust affected Jews--by forcing millions of us to declare who we are. By the early '90s gays and lesbians were finally sufficiently organized to wield the kind of clout we should have had a decade earlier--a reality confirmed by Bill Clinton's victory in 1992. For the first time gay dollars and gay votes were perceived as a possibly decisive advantage in a national contest instead of a debilitating handicap.

People like me, who are both gay and Jewish, have benefited from both of these trends--as of last month a Reform rabbi could even preside at my wedding. But it's clear I'm still much more likely to be denigrated because of my orientation than because of my religion. If Dick Armey had called Barney Frank "Barney Kike," nearly every Republican congressman would have been forced to repudiate him. But "Barney Fag"? All that produced was an echo three years later--from Senate majority leader Trent Lott, who compared gay people to alcoholics and kleptomaniacs. As Derrick Z. Jackson pointed out then in The Boston Globe, "Lott and his like-minded colleagues ... have yet to pay a political price for their homophobia."

As a gay Jewish congressman, Frank seems like the logical person to explain the lag in gay influence. "First of all, your influence is not simply your number but your number minus your opponent's," Frank says. "And there are virtually no anti-Semites left, except for Pat Buchanan. It's the net and not the gross; so even though our gross number is higher, the net number is lower because we still have [the antigay vote]." Second, he says, "Jews have been more willing to self-identify publicly. I figure in my case I outed myself with a bar mitzvah in 1953, and it wasn't until 1987 that I came out sexually. Those would be the two big ones. The third one, though, is probably the most important. The Jewish agenda is a much easier agenda than gay people's agenda; winning the right of Jewish people to marry is a lot easier than it is for gay people."

I suggested a fourth factor: Despite all our recent organizational gains, the Jewish community remains much more tightly organized than our own. If gay people were as politically conscious as Jews, we would be that much more powerful. "We would do better," Frank agrees, noting that gay people still tend to be less organized than Jews. "There would still be a lag because there's still more homophobia than anti-Semitism in the culture, but we would do better."

The Advocate welcomes columnist Charles Kaiser, author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America.