May 1993, a debate raged for three days in the U.S. Senate chamber, marking what its participants proclaimed a “historic” event. With Bill Clinton’s choice of Roberta Achtenberg for the position of assistant secretary for Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Achtenberg became the first “out” lesbian in history to be nominated for a United States cabinet post. During the nomination hearing held before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on April 291 and the subsequent Senate filibuster that continued for nine and a half hours on May 19 and 20 and concluded with more discussion and a vote on May 24, Achtenberg’s professional qualifications for the post became intimately tied in debate to her identification as a lesbian, despite the efforts of her supporters to keep her sexual orientation in the background. In its candid discussion of the relevance of Achtenberg’s “homosexual lifestyle” to her personal and political competence, the Senate debate offers a rare glimpse of the political and social construction of homosexuality in general, and lesbianism in particular, in process.
As the first openly gay or lesbian person ever nominated for the president’s cabinet, Achtenberg faced hostility and severe censure from conservative members of the Senate, most notably Senator Jesse Helms and other conservative Republicans. During the acrimonious debate on the Senate floor over Achtenberg’s nomination, Helms and others expressed their opposition to confirming someone whom Helms had referred to in a newspaper interview as a “damn lesbian.”2 Thus the issue of sexual orientation and its relationship to politics was raised even before the official debate began, setting the tone and framework for the discussion and positioning the “lesbian issue” at the forefront of the debate. The language and meanings that shaped the debate, as well as the outcome of the confirmation proceedings, reflect existing cultural meanings of lesbianism and produce new ones.
In this way, Achtenberg’s ultimate confirmation tells only part of the story. The discussion surrounding a presidential nomination, while ostensibly centering on the nominee herself, also conveys the senators’ approval or disapproval of broader policy matters. “Without a doubt, the Senate interprets its role in the confirmation process as not simply screening the personal qualities of the nominees but is instead using the confirmation process to highlight its policy differences with the administration” (King and Riddlesperger 1991, 197).3 Indeed, an article in the New York Times relates that “Republican strategists have noted that President Clinton has suffered political damage from his support for gay rights, and the campaign to defeat Ms. Achtenberg appeared to be part of a strategy to underscore differences between the two parties” (Krauss 1993, A12). Such observations are particularly meaningful in light of the fact that Achtenberg’s nomination was announced during the controversy over lifting the ban on gays in the military, at a time when Clinton was faced with “fierce resistance” from both “top military officers and some lawmakers” (Reuters 1993). At the time of the Achtenberg confirmation proceedings, the Senate Armed Services Committee was in the process of holding hearings on lifting the military ban.4 Because “the confirmation process provides the Senate with a forum to express its opinions on the president’s policies” (King and Riddlesperger 1991, 192), the Achtenberg debate must be viewed in the context of a larger struggle for political control.
In this understanding of the political process, the Achtenberg confirmation proceedings, like the nomination itself, were at once remarkable and quite predictable in their reassertion of heterosexuality as the unmarked norm, in relation to which homosexuality exists only as a deviant “Other.” What bear examination here are the somewhat surprising ways in which Achtenberg’s supporters, as much as or more than her opponents, attempted to limit the understanding of lesbianism to its narrowest possible definition, all the while congratulating themselves for their progressiveness. In framing her sexual orientation as a private and (therefore) irrelevant matter, Achtenberg’s supporters de-emphasized or erased implications of challenge and change that her nomination presented to the deeply ingrained heterosexism and homophobia of politics as usual. At the same time, her most vitriolic opponent, Jesse Helms, was the first, and seemingly the only, member of the Senate to acknowledge (and often, indeed, to exaggerate) the extent of the challenge her confirmation posed.
The discourse of the Achtenberg debate presents a persuasive and appealing, but at times contradictory and self-defeating, argument in support of gay and lesbian rights. The predominant strategy of Achtenberg’s Senate supporters employs a civil rights perspective, calling on the familiar argument of liberal tolerance that often takes center stage in the rhetoric of lesbian and gay rights. A gay and lesbian civil rights argument implicitly draws on, at the same time that it creates, an essentialized understanding of gays and lesbians as constituting a distinct and identifiable class of people. It then deploys this understanding as a means of seeking “suspect class” status and of gaining legal protections for gays and lesbians based on equal protection laws.
Within this argument lies an ambiguous and often troubling relationship between “identity” and “behavior.” One goal of civil rights appeals is precisely to establish homosexuality as an identity. Such appeals seek to gain suspect class status for gays and lesbians in order to associate them with other, more “established” minority groups based on identity features such as race.5 Being gay or lesbian, this argument runs, is much like being Asian or African American. It is a distinct, apparently “biological” characteristic that designates one decisively as a member of a particular group. From this perspective, being gay or lesbian is a characteristic that refers to a state of being, describing “who one is” apart from any particular actions one might take.
However, civil rights initiatives also seek protection for behaviors, in this case sexual behaviors, under the right-to-privacy laws. Such an argument was made unsuccessfully in the infamous Supreme Court case of Bowers v. Hardwick.6 As this case made clear, the government is unwilling to extend the right to privacy to gay or lesbian sexual acts, just as it is unwilling, as yet, to endow homosexuals with suspect class status. Despite this hostile context, arguments for gay and lesbian civil rights have continued to proceed on both the identity and the behavior fronts simultaneously. The result is an oddly ambivalent and, at times, indecipherable relationship between identity and behavior, in which the two are presented as neither clearly connected to nor decisively separable from each other. Nor, therefore, is either framing of the issue clearly predominant during the debate on the Senate floor.
Achtenberg’s most ardent and vocal Senate supporters employ such civil rights strategies to insist that her political experience and qualifications are the only appropriate matters for discussion at her confirmation hearing. They argue not only that sexual orientation is irrelevant in judging a candidate’s ability to perform a job well but also that the addition of Achtenberg and other out gays and lesbians to the political system makes no difference, that ultimately it neither challenges nor changes that system. This argument reassures skeptical senators that only “good” gays and lesbians, that is, those who will not agitate for change, will be considered acceptable candidates for government posts. It thus establishes early the limits of tolerance, not only for Achtenberg but for gays and lesbians generally: public participation comes at a cost, and that cost, ironically, is the inability to advocate for change for a broader constituency. Although the senators ultimately confirmed Achtenberg, their discussion reveals that the admission of a lesbian into the president’s cabinet marks the beginning and the end of the changes they are willing to contemplate. Responding to these limits, Achtenberg supporters hasten to reassure their colleagues that this apparent change is really no change at all.
At the same time, and perhaps paradoxically, supporters frame Achtenberg’s nomination as an occasion for celebration. “This is a nomination that is heroic … this nomination is important, because it really is a challenge,” asserts Senator Carol Moseley-Braun (S6214).7 Supporters portray the nomination as a significant change in policy that marks the beginning of a new political era of equality and the end of a long history of intolerance and discrimination. Such a framework is particularly resonant in the context of this particular nomination, because the position Achtenberg has been nominated for, assistant secretary of HUD,
