What, you're not gay?

Ian Ayres, who is guest-blogging at Larry Lessig's blog with his partner and co-author, Jennifer Gerarda Brown, is also cross-posting at Balkinization about their new (and what seems to be quite interesting) book, Straightforward: How to mobilize heterosexual support for gay rights.  His most recent post (linked to above) discusses the virtues of a strategy of ambiguation. Ambiguation is designed to create ambiguity about the sexual orientation of a person. 

Under this strategy, straights are encouraged to use terms like "partner" instead of wife or husband or girlfriend/boyfriend so that more people in the public are unable to discern the sexual orientation of the speaker.  He likens this ambiguation strategy to the heroic Danes who, during World War II, adopted wearing yellow Stars of David so that Nazis would have a harder time distinguishing Jews from non-Jewish Danes.

Ayres is careful enough to provide a handful of limits on the strategy of ambiguation.  He (and his coauthor) state that one must ask the following questions:

Am I trivializing sexual orientation? Do I predict that my audience will think less of me if they perceive me to be gay, lesbian, or bisexual? Should sexual orientation be irrelevant to the discussion or transaction at issue?  Can I entertain some internal ambiguity about my own sexual orientation? Would Lambda Approve?

Interestingly, Ayres and Brown also talk about this strategy in the context of AALS professors who identify as LGBT in order to either create illusions of solidarity or to subvert the artifice of sexual categorization. 

The ambiguation strategy of course is not without risks, though perhaps that is precisely what people like about it.  I remember hearing a story about a female professor who, all through the hiring process with a law school, referred to her significant other as her "partner."  The school, which was trying to diversify its ranks in the faculty in terms of gender and sexual orientation, hired her, with many thinking quite explicitly that their hiring goals were being addressed.  When the rookie professor showed up to a faculty social event with her male partner, various faculty had felt deceived and/or cheated.   

I wonder whether, to use Ayres and Brown's criteria, Lambda would approve of this because of the social message (of confounding reliance on heterosexist language) or disapprove because it has the effect of decreasing jobs for gay people...and encouraging straights to "go in" the closet on the margins.  The key issue it seems in answering this is what one's position is on the question of whether the truth of the matter is actually relevant to the transaction at issue.  If you believe that hiring should be related to someone's sexual orientation, then you want to avoid encouraging ambiguation.  If you feel that they are separate spheres, then you want to encourage it.  But the analysis of whether ambiguation is good in this context cannot be made more granular than that, I fear.  And so, I suppose liberals will probably divide over that issue.

Of course, all this hearkens back to SNL's great skits ("It's Pat!") about Pat Riley, the person of undetermined gender, and Pat's friends: Robin, Cary, Frances, Terry, and Kris. 

A lot of people say, "What's that?" It's Pat!
A lot of people ask, "Who's he? Or she?"
A ma'am or a sir, accept him or her
or whatever it might be.
It's time for androgyny.
Here comes Pat!