Malcom Gregory Scott
Malcom Gregory Scott also known as Greg Scott, is an American writer, activist, and AIDS survivor. In 1987, the United States Navy discharged him for homosexuality, after which Scott worked to overturn the Department of Defense directive prohibiting the military service of lesbian and gay Americans. Upon his discharge, Scott also learned he had tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus, the virus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. He was active in the Washington, D.C., chapters of ACT UP and Queer Nation. Scott was an advocate for legal access to medical marijuana, a critic of early HIV prevention education strategies, and a proponent for expanded academic research to support the public policy goals of queer communities. American journalist Michelangelo Signorile once called Scott "the proudest queer in America." Scott worked as a writer for Fox Television's America's Most Wanted, and his writing has appeared in several newspapers and magazines. Scott nearly died of Stage IV AIDS in 1995 and credited marijuana with his survival until effective anti-retroviral therapies became available.
Early years, Navy discharge, and television
Scott's family is from the Southern United States, and he grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, where he attended the Episcopal Church. Although too young to remember the Stonewall riots, Scott would later say he grew up "under the influence of its legacy." In high school, Scott associated with theater students from the University of Mississippi, visited gay bars in nearby Memphis, Tennessee, and was sexually active with other men. He dropped out of college after being harassed for being gay, and in 1985 he joined the United States Navy. He was enrolled in Naval Nuclear Power School in Orlando, Florida. Scott had completed all but a few weeks of the two-year training program when, as he recalls, an agent from the Naval Investigative Service informed him that the agency had evidence he was a homosexual and would use that evidence to prosecute him under the Uniform Code of Military Justice unless he voluntarily admitted he was a homosexual. While Scott was being discharged for homosexuality, he learned he had tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus, the virus that causes AIDS. After his discharge, Scott returned to Washington, D.C., where he was hired as the first writer at FOX Television's America's Most Wanted in February 1989. From July 1989 until March 1991, he was credited as the program's chief writer. In Washington, Scott also "threw himself into years of furious activism."Queer activism in Washington, D.C.
On October 12, 1991, Scott appeared onstage at the Washington, D.C., Alternatives Festival as a member of Queer Nation and declared three "Queer Truths": that "Stonewall was a riot," that "Silence equals death," and that "The revolution has begun." The speech distinguished the emerging queer movement from the "old gay movement" as one seeking public and legal acknowledgment rather than a right to privacy. The queer agenda Scott outlined included repealing state sodomy laws, legally acknowledging queer relationships, permitting queer members of the United States Armed Forces to serve openly, providing legal protections for sexual minorities, and the use of outing as a political tool. Scott would later defend the use of the word "queer" against local critics and question whether "gay" was an appropriate label for a plague-stricken, politically embattled community.To protest the District of Columbia's sodomy law in December, 1991, Scott and fellow Queer Nation member Stephen Smith, along with two other same-sex couples, turned themselves in to the Third District Headquarters of the Metropolitan Police for violating the statute. The action was held in conjunction with a demonstration at the office of D.C. Council member Wilhelmina Rolark, who had obstructed previous repeal efforts in the Judiciary Committee she chaired. Scott was among a group of eleven activists who confronted Rolark at a meeting of the Judiciary Committee on February 20, 1992, prompting anger from council member Hilda Mason who shouted, "Get out of my face. Your issue cannot be discussed because it's not on the agenda." Scott shouted back, "We're never going to leave you alone until you move that bill."
On January 22, 1992, during a week of demonstrations marking the nineteenth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, D.C. Metropolitan Police arrested Scott and seven other members of Queer Nation outside the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception at Catholic University during a Queer Nation protest of Cardinal John O'Connor's "Mass for the Unborn". Queer Nation organized the action to protest the anti-abortion and anti-gay teachings of O'Connor and the Roman Catholic Church.
After undercover officers from the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department's Narcotics and Special Investigations Division raided the Follies, an adult theater frequented by gay men, on February 9, 1992, and arrested fourteen patrons on charges of sodomy and other sex-related offenses, Scott asserted that the complaints about reportedly unprotected sex that triggered the raid should have instead led to a visit from a public health worker. Scott subsequently wrote a newspaper column urging diverse queer communities to find "common ground" in their opposition to the sodomy law and rallying them to protest the raids at a demonstration in front of the theater the following Sunday, one week after the raids. More than a hundred protesters attended the demonstration, which began with a rally outside the Follies, where Scott was among the speakers, to decry the city's enforcement of the sodomy law against consenting adults. The peaceful protesters, escorted by a police cruiser, then marched fifteen blocks to the Metropolitan Police Department's headquarters on Indiana Avenue, where they demanded the resignation of District Police Chief Isaac Fulwood.
After author Andrew Sullivan criticized ACT UP as "brash and pushy" and condemned the use of outing as a political tactic, Scott responded by calling Sullivan "the gay antichrist" and defended outing as the queer movement's "most powerful weapon." Sullivan said Scott threw a drink at him in a D.C. nightclub and followed him around calling him a collaborator. Sullivan later recalled Scott was "so over the top it was hard to get too upset. He was almost campy in his anger."
By the end of 1993, Scott was described as "one of a growing number of mostly young, hard-core activists" who had lost faith in the leadership of the "national gay rights organizations."
Fighting to lift the military's ban on homosexuals
In November, 1991, Scott appeared at a news briefing, held as part of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's Creating Change Conference, to predict that the Department of Defense would soon be pressured to change its policy stating homosexuality to be incompatible with military service. On Veterans Day, November 11, 1991, Scott organized a Queer Nation demonstration to protest the policy, the first event of its kind. The peaceful demonstration, dubbed "Operation Queer Storm," began with a rally at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove, where Scott and other veterans addressed the crowd, and ended at the Pentagon, where a handful of activists tried but failed to get arrested by pushing through the police line at the top of the Pentagon steps. After presidential candidate Bill Clinton pledged to reverse the Department of Defense' policy on lesbian and gay service members, Scott worked with videographer Tim McCarthy to develop a campaign aimed at getting lesbian and gay voters to the polls.In April 1993, Scott attended that year's March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, brandishing a tattoo commemorating his discharge for homosexuality, and distributed a broadsheet called "Homos in the Military: The Queer Truth." He was among twenty current and former lesbian and gay service members to address a rally of two hundred demonstrators outside the Pentagon calling on the military to reverse its policy on homosexuality.
As details of the Don't Ask Don't Tell compromise emerged in July, Scott denounced the proposed policy as a broken promise, writing that it "codifies the closet and institutionalizes the military's sexual naivete," and that homophobia was a greater threat to good order and discipline than homosexuality. Scott argued that LGBTQ people were less willing to hide in the age of AIDS, changing the emphasis of the gay and lesbian movement from a fight for the right to privacy to a fight for the right of public acknowledgement. Years later, Scott would argue that the policy was an offense to "our victory over the closet" and posit that the movement's "exaggerated appreciation for privacy" may have contributed to the outcome.
Upon the military's implementation of the DADT policy in the fall of 1993, Scott organized an effort to send copies of the gay publication Out to every ship in the Navy's fleet. The Military Reading Project sought to test the new policy's promised leniency on possessing and reading homosexual material, previously a sufficient justification to initiate an investigation into a service member's sexuality.
Scott was also among the founding directors of the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, a public policy think tank that sought to better inform public policy debates like the one that ended in the DADT compromise. The endeavor, originating in a meeting held at the 1993 Creating Change Conference, attempted to bring together academic scholars and LGBTQ activists in one organization as never before.
After IGLSS joined efforts with economist Lee Badgett in 1994, Scott continued to participate in the organization's efforts, alongside Ann Northrop and Walter L. Williams.