'Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution' review

VICTORY: The Triumphant Gay Revolution, by Linda Hirshman. Harper, 443 pp., $27.99.

Linda Hirshman's "Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution" is harder-headed than its giddy title suggests.

Most Americans over 40 have experienced the forward march of gay rights as the product of a gradual change in the social air. Hirshman, a retired professor and labor lawyer with a PhD in philosophy, is more interested in the movement's legislative and judicial ups and downs, and she's got an opinion about every one of them.

She flays the obvious villains (Lewis Powell, Sam Nunn) and a few surprising ones (Tom Hayden). She goes after some of the heroes, too, for making strategic decisions she considers inept.

Her style is breezy (sometimes gratingly so), but her research is solid; most of her best material comes from the more than 100 interviews she conducted.

Hirshman, who is straight, doesn't insult the reader by "defending" homosexuality or making an argument for equal rights; the day for that kind of pleading, her approach implies, is over. Anyway, she doesn't have time. She's writing for a general audience, not an academic one, and she refuses to plod, covering a century of struggle in less than 350 pages of text.

As a lawyer, Hirshman is especially lucid on the Supreme Court -- more lucid, sometimes, than the court itself. In the notorious 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick, it upheld Georgia's right to criminalize sodomy, dismissing gay claims to equal protection as "facetious."

The decision had the paradoxical but predictable effect of electrifying a movement dispirited at that point by thousands of AIDS deaths and the Reagan Administration's indifference to them. A year later, the furiously inventive AIDS protest group ACT UP initiated a new phase in the fight for rights.

The anti-gay forces eventually went too far. In the 1996 Romer v. Evans, the court overturned an outrageous initiative that Colorado voters had passed depriving homosexuals of a whole gamut of legal protections that, it held, were "taken for granted by most people . . . in a free society."

That decision led the way to the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas, in which the court finally (if belatedly) overturned the repulsive Bowers v. Hardwick.

Hirshman chronicles the gloomy origins of Don't Ask Don't Tell early in the Clinton administration and the tortuous path to its abolition last year.

She shows how the Defense of Marriage Act, restricting marriage to opposite-sex partners, "sailed through Congress" in 1996 and was signed into law by a cowardly Bill Clinton during "full campaign season."

After considerable squirming, the Obama administration backed away from the law; at the end of May, a federal appeals court ruled it unconstitutional.

Although Hirshman acknowledges that "Victory" is a title open to misinterpretation, her rationale for using it is clear. Her book demonstrates that the reversal in social attitudes toward gay men and lesbians, despite various (but always temporary) political and judicial setbacks, is itself irreversible.