Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans

Kwame Anthony Appiah

20 Kwame Anthony Appiah It was a privilege to grow up in a peripheral place. Because in peripheral places you have to know about other places.” On the day I visit Anthony Appiah, a professor of philosophy at Princeton University, I’m instantly aware of his deep appreciation for the “peripheral.” With its typical gracious appointments, the Chelsea apartment he shares with his partner, Henry Finder, might be a typical English don’s flat but for the fact that beautiful objects from nonWestern cultures—African bronzes, miniature busts from ancient Gandhara—are on prominent display. Over coffee, Appiah and I talk for almost three hours. His conversation is reflective, precise, generous, and discursive. Frequently, he interrupts himself in midsentence to articulate another angle or offer a better example. An air of intelligent, relaxed courtesy prevails throughout our time together. Made to feel instantly at ease, I listen with invigorated attention. I suspect that’s the experience of his students as well. In addition to philosophy, Appiah has written extensively about African literature and culture. He has edited (with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, coauthored (with his mother) an annotated edition of proverbs from Ghana, and edited (again with Gates) a number of volumes in the Amisted Press series on African and African American 21 Kwame Anthony Appiah writers. He has also written three novels, including the mystery Another Death in Venice. Appiah has been the recipient of many honors, among them several honorary degrees and the first Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize for “outstanding and lasting scholarly contributions to racial, ethnic and/or religious relations.” Appiah’s early philosophical work focused on such rarefied topics as semantics and theories of meaning, but his more recent books deal with “what makes human sense, and not in some theoretical way.” In books such as Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, The Ethics of Identity, and Experiments in Ethics, he analyzes the world of human values, tackling the problems of race and racism, ethics, identity , cosmopolitanism, and homophobia. Appiah is skeptical about the ability of logic and reason alone to move people toward good behavior. Instead, he espouses developing “habits of coexistence,” an idea that found full expression in his 2006 book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, which won the Arthur Ross Award of the Council on Foreign Relations. In that work, Appiah emphasizes what he calls “conversations across boundaries of identity”—the imaginative engagement with the experience and ideas of others—as a way to help people get used to one another and thus develop more harmonious relationships and happier lives. It’s a notion that leads him to take a commonsensical approach to gay and lesbian liberation, namely, that over time and with exposure, people learn to live amicably with gay and lesbian people. Indeed, he says, because of the presence of openly gay people in the world, a “perspectival shift” occurs, one that breaks down old prejudices and barriers. Appiah’s affinity for cosmopolitanism has its roots in his childhood . Born in London of an English mother and a Ghanaian father, Appiah, whose full name is Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampim Kusi Appiah, was raised in Kumasi, Ghana, the traditional royal capital of the Ashanti Confederacy. The family lived in a large “African bungalow ” on a street within walking distance of the largest market in West Africa. It was a neighborhood populated by the new elite, the families of those who would lead the country after independence, which was achieved in 1957, three years after Appiah was born. Each of his parents came from a prominent public family. His father was a lawyer, statesman, ambassador, president of the Ghana Bar Association, an elder in the Methodist Church, and a wellknown figure in Ghana, who got into political trouble and, for a while, was imprisoned. His mother, from a privileged Gloucestershire family, was a writer active in the cultural life of Kumasi. She hobnobbed with many important people all over the world. His parents’ interracial marriage in 1953 produced “a firestorm of comment in Britain and around the world.” As a young boy, Appiah would flip through the family scrapbooks, in which were pasted clippings of the press coverage surrounding the controversy. “We went to England from time to time to see my grandmother. And the first question the British press always asked my mother was, ‘So...