Gay writer saw path to progress

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Updated: January 13, 2012 8:14AM

Back in the 1980s, when newspapers wouldn’t identify the companions of homosexuals in their obituaries, since it was against our style rules, I knew exactly one gay man in Chicago: Paul Varnell.

We met in a church on Belmont Avenue. The Town Hall cops were holding a meeting — outreach to the gay community — and a smirking night editor thought it might yield a good story. C’mon, he said — big burly cops and gays. See what you can do with it!

So I headed to Boystown. The grim reality of the meeting was a jarring contrast to how it had been presented. The police had actually brought along a sex crimes speaker, who dryly delivered a 1950s talk on rape — I guess in their mind they equated gays with sex crime. The audience was unruly and aghast, and when the time came for comments, they lambasted the officers.

“I’ve been mugged and I’ve been arrested,” said Varnell. “And I’d rather be mugged.”

That’s a great quote, clearly expressing the situation — our big problem isn’t crime, our big problem is you. But that’s what Varnell did, for years, as an activist and columnist for Chicago’s gay publications.

“Think about being a gay columnist,” I wrote in 2009, when he was let go from his last paper due to budget cuts. “Many gay men can’t bear to tell their family, their closest friends, about their orientation, still, even to this day, and not without reason given the various fears and hatreds they expose themselves to. And here’s Paul, parsing the details of his personal life, his HIV-positive status, the issues facing the community.

“And not in a doctrinaire way — it’s easy to serve a minority group by pandering to it, by defending its every step and misstep. Paul is too smart for that, and often wondered whether it was a false generalization to even speak of a gay community at all.”

“I am not sure that sexual orientation makes us a community,” Varnell wrote in 2008. “I think I have more in common with the thoughtful heterosexual man who likes music and art and literature than I do with a gay man who loves drag queens, ‘divas,’ and hip-hop. As hostility to gays lessens and gay people’s defensive clannishness declines, other factors than sexuality will become more important in our lives.” One hopes.

That was his constant theme: the path of gays leads to assimilation within society, not living apart in radicalized gay ghettos.

It seems fitting that he would die — of pneumonia Dec. 9, at age 70 — just as the nation was reacting to a loathsome campaign commercial that Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, aired in a desperate attempt to boost his sinking presidential bid.

“I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian,” Perry says, “But you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas in school.”

“The bad news,” Varnell wrote in 1994, “is that these people seem to hate and fear us. The good news is that they seem to be a bunch of raving loonies, without a clear grasp of what to do or what they are up against.”

He was referring to an anti-gay conference in Colorado.

“Almost touchingly, they all seem to agree, as one speaker put it, that homosexuality, ‘destroy[s] the souls and the lives of those who embrace it.’ And somehow they fail to realize that the ordinary lives of millions of happy, productive gays and lesbians daily undermine those perceptions in the minds of most people. They really do not understand why we have made the political, social, and cultural progress we have. Lacking an explanatory model for our progress — or indeed for the last thirty years of social change — they floundered around for a way to reverse it.”

“This suggests,” Varnell continued, “that what would work best for us is an approach that emphasizes sharing our common humanity rather than attacking the mainstream and portraying ourselves as an aggrieved, victimized and petulant minority. It is, after all, the homophobes who are the sad, isolated, troubled little clot of obscurantists.”

True then, truer now, more so each day.