TV

Roll Up Your Damn Sleeves: An Interview with LGBT Activist and Fox News Commenter Sally Kohn

Progressive community organizer and LGBT activist Sally Kohn is smart, outspoken, and instantly likable. She’s also clearly not afraid of a challenge, having signed on as a commenter with the right-wing Fox News Network early this year. Kohn was kind enough to take some time to talk with us about activism, the future of the LGBT movement, and what progressives may not understand about conservatives. AfterEllen.com: So you’ve been working as a community organizer since you were 12, is that right? Sally Kohn: [Laughs] You know, gee, if you do that math. No, since college. Since college, actually. And I can credit my community organizing career to the infamous political lesbian Urvashi Vaid. Suffice it to say I think it goes toward sisterhood and mentorship.

I was in college, and I was interning — first I actually interned for The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), where I had some fantastic mentors there as well, but literally I was interning at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and Urvashi Vaid — her phenomenal book (which, if people haven’t read it, they should) Virtual Equality had just been published. And she had left her luggage in one of my coworker’s cars. And I was dispatched with Urvashi Vaid to go get her luggage.

And I thought I’d just hit the jackpot. I was like, “Really? This is the big time for me.” I was just — I was gushing, I was speechless for the first and only time in my life. I was falling over myself with excitement. And I went and I got her luggage and she made an offhand remark about how this colleague, who I won’t mention lest she be embarrassed, had the messiest office of any human being on the planet. It was abysmal. And Urvashi sort of offhandedly put this challenge to me to organize her office, and, of course you know, Urvashi Vaid told me to do it, so of course I’m going to do it!

So I then make it my life’s mission to organize this woman’s mess of an office over the summer. I think I made a modest dent, but that’s not the point. Somehow Urvashi was impressed. Somehow she translated my “awesome office organizing skills” to political organizing skills, and that was that. She proposed a project for us to work on together, and she has remained my primary mentor and colleague and one of my closest friends since then – who got me into all this.

It goes to show, I think, what a difference it can make when you pass on your inspiration and power and encouragement to someone else.

AE: What did your community organizing work involve? SK: The essence of community organizing, and especially the groups that I worked with, groups like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, was to build the capacity of grassroots organizations around the country to be more than the sum of their parts. To be better individual groups and then to work together to achieve state and national, sometimes international, change. I had the privilege of getting to spend almost 15 years helping those groups do a better job of knocking on doors and turning out volunteers, to do a better job of framing and messaging their ideas in ways that would resonate, to do a better job of honing their short-term goals into a long-term political vision for change. So that was sort of the nut of the piece that I did. And the metaphor is it’s all a small piece of a larger whole.

AE: It seems like your career was always heading in that direction — you have a joint degree in legal studies and public administration and you’ve worked with the Center for Community Change and the Third Wave Foundation — how did you slide into commentary and punditry? SK: I’ve got to look up the etymology of “pundit.” It’s a great word.

AE: It is. SK: So those who know me would say that I was never far away from – I’m not sure. Is punditry pontificating? But certainly they’re in the same family. They’re both “p” words. And anyone who knows me would never have been surprised that I would end up pontificating. At first glance, there are fundamental differences between the world of community organizing and the world of media insofar as if you’re an organizer, you’re very much behind the scenes. Your whole work is about bringing voice and visibility to others — helping them find their voices, helping them speak out and pontificate about their own lives and their own opinions. And when I took a step away from my last role in the organizing support world, I was – it was completely random, Ali.

I was giving a speech at a conference, and, again, another woman who became a very important mentor, Geraldine Laybourne, came up to me after the speech and said “We have to get you on television.” And I was completely taken aback and shocked and blew her off. And to her credit, she was tenacious and had a vision and she pursued me, and said “No, you’re going to get training, you’re going to do this, you’re going to do that. You’re going to be good at this.”

And what she also did was help me understand that there really wasn’t that big a difference. I mean on the face of it, it seemed like organizing and being a pundit were worlds apart, but at the end of the day, you’re fundamentally doing the same thing: You’re bringing information to people. Helping people be informed so that they can take action in their lives.

AE: I would think being able to think on your feet would be a skill you need in both. SK: Exactly. But more fundamentally than that, more than the actual skills translating, it’s about what you’re achieving in the world. Once I realized that being in media is like community organizing but with a bigger room, then it became instantly apparent why Gerry and others had thought this was such a good idea. At the time, it felt like a really big switch and it kind of a bumpy transition, but now I look back and it makes utter sense to me. And it actually makes me wonder why we don’t have more organizers and community activists, people who are skilled at translating their ideas to their neighbors, in the media. It seems like a perfect fit. AE: And what kind of training did you get for transitioning into television? SK: I commend, especially the folks reading AfterEllen, who think, “Hey, I have something that I want to say, and I’d love to be writing more. I’d love to be on television, I’d love to be on radio, helping put ideas out there, helping to frame ideas and be a more public voice for justice and equality.” I couldn’t recommend the Women’s Media Center more.

The Women’s Media Center was founded by Robin Morgan, Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda with the sole purpose of training women and girls to be voices in the media. And that’s everything from the really silly stuff that you think is silly until you do it, and then you’re like, “Oh, my! Look at how I flap my hands like a chicken!” Or whatever. Do chickens flap their hands? You know what I mean? So it’s everything from “Oh, I look silly when I do that,” to learning how to respond to hard questions — when you get asked a question you weren’t expecting to get asked, or a question that tries to pin you into a corner and you want to figure out how to get out of that corner and keep your cool. Those are learnable skills that you add on top of your ideas, your opinions, whatever you want to bring to bear, that help you get them out better. The Women’s Media Center is outstanding at doing this.

AE: There were some awesomely crazy responses to you becoming a presence on Fox News. Do you feel welcome at Fox? How do you feel about that extreme slice of their audience that doesn’t even want to see you on the air as a debating partner? SK: I wouldn’t characterize it like that. First of all, I’m on the opinion side of Fox News. On the opinion side, Fox has many liberals, Fox has many conservatives, Fox has many centrists. Maybe I’m the only organizer, perhaps, and I may lean more to the left than some of the others, but it’s actually really – I find a lot of people who ask questions like that in general, Ali, are people who don’t watch Fox a lot. And if you were to turn on Fox, you would be surprised to see that there’s rich debate. And one of the things that made people point at me and say, “Oh, you’d be good at this,” is I like to debate and I like to argue. And who wants to just argue with yourself? And I actually find that Fox is a really rich environment where I can not only express my own views, but I can learn more about what folks who disagree with me think and have very thoughtful conversations that I think raise everybody’s game, inform everyone, make everyone think harder. I love that. The pure intellectual geek in me loves that, number one.

Number two, the political pragmatist in me knows that going on Fox for five minutes, I reach more people, period. Frankly, more Democrats. Frankly, more independent voters. And, yes, more conservatives as well, than on any of the other networks combined. That’s pretty powerful. And I have to say, in general, having been on the political left, having been a progressive organizer and activist for so long where we so often were beating our heads against the wall of self-marginalization.

I mean, sometimes we were being marginalized, but sometimes we were accepting our own marginalization and screaming into a small paper cup. Being able to have an actual megaphone is valuable.

And I don’t think you’re really part of the political discourse of you’re only talking to yourself. You think you are. You see yourself, and, “Oh, look, I’m part of a political discourse.” But discourse is really a two-way street. It involves being heard, and that includes being heard by a broad cross-section of the country. And for me, one of the things I hope I can do well, and one of the things I hope I can contribute to the progressive movement more broadly is thinking about how do we talk about what we believe in a way that the largest number of people can hear it without selling out our core values and our core beliefs? I think we need to crack that.

And unfortunately, most of what we’ve seen, certainly from Democrats, but unfortunately from a lot of Washington establishment organizations, is “Oh, well if you want to be heard as broadly as possible, you can’t be honest. You can’t say everything you believe. You can’t speak to your core values and your true vision.” I don’t think that’s true. That’s a false doctrine we’ve been put into. So I feel incredibly privileged to have the opportunity to have truly progressive conversations with such a wide cross-section of America. That’s what our country is. Not all of these people agree with me. Boo-hoo. Get over it and now try and do something about it.

AE: Do you have a favorite show to appear on? SK: Oh, whose feelings am I going to hurt? [Laughs] You know what? I have to say — and I’m not going to name names on the progressive side — but I will just say that people have these ideas and part of is it that I think the more that we can break down our ideas of each other. Look, I am devastated to see the level of political discourse in general in this country lowered. And the name-calling and the nastiness, and the hate mail, and the vitriol on Twitter, and everybody gets it, left, right, and center. And as a queer woman, you really get it. And it’s disgusting. The more we can see each other as human, it doesn’t erase the political differences, but at least we can be civil. At least we can talk about what we disagree with and learn from each other and understand where the disagreements are, as opposed to just being reduced to the most base elements. I challenge people on all sides. I think we can all do a better job of reaching toward that goal and finding the positives in those we often resort to considering our enemies.

So let me just say that, in that sense, what people are always shocked to hear, Ali, is that Sean Hannity is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet. Sean Hannity is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet. I mean, he has – we don’t agree, but he’s a sweetheart. I think that Bill O’Reilly is one of the smartest people I’ve ever talked to. I have so much fun on Megyn Kelly‘s set. I don’t think there’s been a single appearance I’ve done on her show that hasn’t begun before the cameras are rolling with one or both of us singing for some reason. You know, some of my Fox colleagues – I could go on and on and on. They’re thoughtful, kind people. They’re people. You know, just because you don’t agree with every single thing that every single person thinks doesn’t mean you have to… I think we can find that and celebrate that.

AE: That brings up an interesting area. I watched a clip of you in which you were discussing gay marriage with Mike Huckabee, and he clearly thought of himself as one of the bigger victims in the situation. That seems like a delicate dance you have to do. What goes through your head when you’re having that kind of conversation? SK: This an extension of the previous question in a way. I think especially with being gay… The more visible gay, bisexual, lesbian, transgender people we have in the media the better, period. You know, we know this from all the studies. I try not to base my life on research, but we know that the more gay people [straight] people come into contact with, the better. The more open-minded they are, the less homophobic they are, etc., etc. The more supportive they are of gay rights.

Visibility isn’t everything. I’ve never thought that politically, like, “Ooh, you came out! You’re done!” I don’t think that. No, now roll up your damn sleeves! There’s work to be done! But we still shouldn’t overlook how tremendously powerful it is. I always take great hope, however defeated I’m feeling politically about the world around us and what’s happening, I get great hope from the fact that among the top shows on television are Modern Family and Glee. The world can’t be that bad right now, at least with respect to gay rights. That’s huge! That’s worth celebrating. There’s still way more to be done, but that actually does matter, number one.

Number two, I can’t say that I’ve always lived up to my own aspirations for myself. But my aspiration for myself is to always believe that other people believe themselves to be good. So I don’t believe that someone who doesn’t want gay people to get married — and I’m sure there are a few examples we could probably name that are actually truly evil people, the Fred Phelps of the world, right?

But most people – I try to find it in my heart to be equal parts impatient, because I think that a moral outrage and impatience at the often slow pace of progress is what in fact moves progress forward in the world and always has. And so not just sort of accepting things permanently for the way they are. But there’s an adage in organizing: You meet people where they’re at. And I trust that where people are at is honest, is heartfelt, is honorable. They want the best for themselves, for their family, and their country. Now, we may disagree about where the political answers fall in relation to that goal. But I don’t think I’m going to get anywhere by insulting people’s beliefs, insulting where people are. My job is to meet people where they’re at and then take them somewhere. I think that’s what a good organizer does. I think that’s what a good change agent does.  

AE: As I’ve been watching your Fox News clips, I see you get interrupted a lot. SK: [Laughs]

AE: That drives me crazy. How do you deal with that? You seem to like to get in there and throw an elbow when you need to, but still, how do you deal with it? SK: It’s two things. First of all, there’s a cultural piece to it. I’m very much an East Coast Jew: I don’t mind being interrupted, and I don’t mind interrupting. That helps. I am a product of my upbringing. Nobody can finish a sentence at Thanksgiving dinner in my family. So there’s that.

And then also, I think this translates to a larger movement psychology, if you will, about how do you sustain yourself if you’re doing this work? Which is, on the one hand, you have to realize that this is serious. We’re talking about… It’s one thing for me to get dressed up and go sit in a TV studio and talk about the suicide rates of queer kids or the jobless rates across the country, and of course these are real problems. These are real issues. They’re serious — they’re life-or-death issues in a lot of ways. And so you have to keep that in your heart, and keep that element of fight, because you’re fighting for something. While at the same time, of course, realizing that you’re not actually – that it is television, you know what I mean?

Let me think about this for a second. You have to keep it in perspective. In a sense, every fight is a fight, and in a sense, you have to bear in mind that it’s all a part of something larger, and that you can’t take it all too seriously when you’re just sitting in a room with a TV camera. In a sense, I have to keep my perspective.

And yet, bear in mind why you want to win the game. The thing at stake is in fact the future of our country, how we treat one another. It’s – I just gave you a very muddy answer to a deeply complicated question. It’s the question we all walk around with. I mean in a way, it’s like the question a lot of people have when they face their families, right? How do you deal with people who love you, and yet they don’t accept this part of you. We embrace these contradictions all the time.

And we’re angry. I’m constantly brokenhearted at all the injustices I see around me in the world, and I don’t walk around screaming all the time in the street. You find a way to exist in that contradiction and try to be productive.

That was a very Hegelian answer to your very simple question. Sorry about that.

AE: No, I love that. I’m not going to pretend that this next question is simple, then: I watched another clip in which you were on Megyn Kelly’s show with [radio host] Monica Crowley, and Crowley was using this debate technique — almost a propaganda technique — where before she answered any question, she kept saying “Well, of course we all know that the media is slanted liberal. We all know that the media has a liberal tilt,” and then she would say her piece. I’ve seen that tactic before: I’m going to work this lie in up top, so that you can either deal with that or with my central point, but you can’t deal with both. How do you deal with that when it comes up? SK: [Laughs] It makes you miss the world of rhetoric, right? People used to study rhetoric. I will say — and Monica is frequently guilty of this, but there are these interesting rhetorical tactics. It’s a rhetorical tactic. And what’s interesting is, the right thinks we do them too. The right thinks that the media is in fact slanted liberal. I happen to not agree with that. They think we have a whole host of rhetorical devices and cheats and whatnot to go with that.

I think for my part, the way I sort of encapsulate that and other dynamics – more recently, I think this is a surging tactic on the part of the right, is what I call — it’s actually something that I just wrote and posted on my blog: Is the right creating crises so they can be the heroes of the problems they create? And so the “liberal media” is sort of an example of that: We’re going to say that the media is liberal so that we can become the heroes of combating the liberal media. I think one of the examples I give in the piece is the idea that gay marriage is going to lead to people marrying their goats. No! But you make people afraid of that, which the right has done in their sort of anti-marriage campaign, and now, oh, my gosh! Let’s vote for the right so they will save us from man-goat marriage!

The latest example is the [deceptively edited] sting video attack on Planned Parenthood, which makes the preposterous argument that this historic organization that champions gender rights and gender equality is in fact propagating sex-selective abortion. It’s a made-up crisis. It is a manufactured crisis. But it sort of makes it hard, because if even one human being hears this critique and has this outraged reaction, sort of this knee-jerk “Oh, my gosh! Who’s going to solve this? Who’s going to solve this?” And of course, the right has already set themselves up to be the saviors.

And that emotional reaction almost can’t be tamped down by anything that comes after. Including facts. It’s very effective. It’s immensely effective. It’s one of the things that – again, I think it’s better to know what’s happening than to turn a blind eye to, because you have to be able to effectively respond. AE: There have been a few studies suggesting that people who only watch Fox News are actually less well informed than people who don’t watch news at all. Does that concern you at all? SK: You know, look: I have my quiver of what I do. So I don’t concern myself with the larger politics at all, because, again, you can parse that, you can parse the ratings of the channels, and you know, who wins that game? Who wins this game? Here’s the thing: If there’s going to be a debate in the media about fundamental issues of fairness, equality, and the future of our country, I’d rather be in that debate than not in that debate. I’d rather be responding than looking the other way and pretending it’s not happening. So to me, that’s why it matters to be in the mix, to be there, to be as strong an advocate as I can.

What I will say is hard for me is that sometimes I think a lot of really fierce and sort of politically progressive voices and advocates won’t go on Fox because they have a certain idea about what Fox is and what Fox isn’t. And to me, it’s almost like, I don’t run the place, I don’t know — it doesn’t concern me. What concerns me is conversation that I’m in. And can I make a difference in that conversation? I’d actually like to see more of us… Like I said, I’m not concerned about whether the media is liberal or conservative or whatever. I’m concerned about is it inclusive? Is it including a wide enough range of voices? And to me, there aren’t enough people who are politically far to the left of center, who are not just shills for big business, but are really standing up for people’s interests, who are gay, who are people of color, who represent the full spectrum of America. I feel like that’s where I can make a difference.

AE: Let’s talk about your YouTube videos a little bit. I’m a fan of your “F**k-You Economics” video. SK: Oh, thank you very much. Wow, you really did your homework!  

AE: I’m the dork at AfterEllen.com. I have to. SK: Fair point, fair point. I think you’ve now seen more of my stuff than my partner has. I just want you to know that, Ali. I’m just letting you know.

AE: It’s not a competition. SK: No, just making a statement of fact. It’s fine. Go ahead.

AE: Talk to me about what you’re doing with those and what you’d like to achieve with them. SK: Everybody go watch them and see for yourself! I don’t know. I’d love to give you some very well and deeply thought-out answer, but the truth of the matter is it seems to me everyone I talk to in the sort of Media Realm writ large has no idea what’s coming around the corner. Are we going to be tweeting tomorrow, or are we going to be using retinal scanners to send messages to Planet Phaeton? I don’t know. And I’m new at this, right, so I know the least. To me, there seems to be many platforms to try and get ideas across. And I’m lucky to be involved with some more high-profile platforms. But I think what everybody should realize even if they have no platform whatsoever is what’s great about the Internets is that you can tweet and you can post YouTube videos.  

And I will tell you: I can vouch that it’s far more of a meritocracy than you’d think, because my videos don’t always do so well if they stink. [Laughs] And it’s great! For me, even, it’s great to be able to put out ideas without having to get them through an editor at a magazine or something. It’s amazing to be able to have a thought and put it up in a video the minute I want to, regardless of whether any TV stations are covering it.

To me, it’s about both experimentation, which the activist side of me. If you stop experimenting as an activist, I think you stop being effective. And on the media side, it really is about learning and testing and trying and being in multiple media. Which is valuable. And as long as the actual platforms available stay under 100, I think maybe I can stay on top of it.

AE: I’m about to ask you a horrible question and I’m sorry. SK: Oh, my gosh, because the others were so un-horrible! I’m kidding. No, really, you’re going to ask a horrible question? All right.

AE: I did some very basic phone banking and knocking on doors in 2008 when Prop 8 was on the line, and I started writing for a website called 365Gay at the same time, and I was shocked to discover what was to me a surprising amount of racism in the LGBT community. And there’s a small population of white, affluent members of the LGBT community who are like, “I got mine.” SK: [Laughs] Yes, ma’am.

AE: …Or there’s the stuff we’ve learned about some high-level gay members of the Bush administration who were willing to stir up fear about the LGBT community to win elections. How do we move forward with LGBT rights without people dropping out and forgetting where we’ve come from and getting apathetic about other kinds of social justice? SK: Yeah. Is that a horrible question? Really it’s an awesome question. If you could answer that, you’d be the key to the future. Boy, I can’t promise to give you an immediate answer on this one, but let’s try. Look, early on in my activism, in my involvement with gay rights groups, there was an article — I think it might have even have been written by the editor — of Out magazine at the time, which sort of introduced the concept of being post-gay. And this was in the late ’90s, so at the time, it was a shocking conversation. Now it’s less so, in part based on the things you’re revealing in your question. But at the time, it sort if introduced this idea that there were gay people, particularly gay men, who were mostly white, who were mostly incredibly wealthy, professionally successful, to a point where, but for a few legal equality issues here and there, were arguing that they were in effect post-gay. That the world was no longer treating them as gay, that they weren’t being seen as gay in their professional and social circles. They had, in effect, eclipsed their identity.

And I remember being shocked at the time for a whole bunch of reasons. No different, probably, than I am now when female leaders, especially female leaders on the right, eschew feminism. It’s like, “Why, you ungrateful blankety-blanks!” You know? I mean, come on! Whether or not you even accept the premise — because, again, look at the way Hustler just attacked the conservative commentator S. E. Cupp. I’ll spare you the details – you can look that one up on your own but women, left, right, and center, are still subject to sexism. People of color, left, right, and center — are still subject to racism. Anti-gay stigma, homophobia, it attaches itself to you whether you think you have moved past it or not. Not to mention the fact that there’s this, not just lack of gratitude, but – what is it, some sort of sickness you’ve grown out of?

But to me, there’s another point to it, which is my political aspiration isn’t sameness. While I support gay marriage, marriage equality — I think it’s great, everybody should be able to get married if they want to — I personally have no interest in marrying. I personally haven’t worked all this time so I could be the same as straight couples. I thought I was working this hard so that I could be different from straight couples and yet be treated equally. To be able to preserve that difference. Women in order to be successful executives shouldn’t have to act like men, right? That’s not the standard we hold up.

I will say in general that the challenge – no, I don’t think anyone’s hands are clean. I think that we have to learn as a nation and then specifically the left of that nation, progressives, to learn how to have conversations in which we publicly and institutionally evolve. That we should be able to point out something and ask questions about implicit racial bias, whether it’s in interpersonal dealings, whether it’s the way an organization handles a situation, whether it’s in our criminal justice system. We should be able to have those conversations without our patriotism being questioned on the one hand, or on the other hand being accused of being divisive and causing trouble.

The notion, in other words, that if we don’t pay attention to these issues, that we don’t pay attention to our differences, that that is what is meant by equality, that that’s the goal, is not only wrong, it’s actually dangerous. It stops us from having the kinds of conversations that help us all evolve.

That is not a horrible question. It’s a horrible world if you can’t ask that kind of question. AE: Where do you see your career going next? SK: I don’t know. It’s way too soon for me to know. I have two goals: One is I’d like to find more and more ways to — again, it really is like organizing, but through the media — and, you know, organizing gets this bum rap if you just listen to the right. But organizing is what gave rise to the civil rights movement and to the women’s movement. It’s what gave rise to the abolition of slavery. Organizing is what gave rise to our country. The Founding Fathers were organizers. They didn’t like the way the world was around them and they worked together to change it. And part of organizing, part of helping ordinary people do extraordinary things together, is bringing information to people. Helping people see the world in a different way. Helping people understand what’s happening around them. And that’s what I hope to do personally as much as possible, through more and more platforms, through larger platforms, whatever form that takes.

And I think the second part of that is supporting and finding ways for more and more people to do the same. Especially people who want to use media in all its forms as a vehicle for lighting the path to justice.

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button