Today In News You Probably Didn’t Know Was Old News
I am reminded of a colleague who reiterated, “all my homosexual patients
are quite sick”, to which I finally replied “so are all my heterosexual patients.”
-Ernest van den Haag, psychotherapist
There is nothing wrong with homosexuals. That is a simple statement of fact. Not opinion. Fact. Well researched, well established, scientific fact. And it has been well established fact for quite a very long time. If you were born in the 1960s or later, then this fact is older then you are.
Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin writes…
Study of 100 Homosexuals: 1957. There had been a string of high profile arrests of very prominent and well-known men in Britain in the early 1950s, including Lord Montagu, his cousin, Maj. Michael Pitt-Rivers, and journalist Peter Wildeblood, all of whom had been charged and convicted of homosexual offenses. Their arrests opened the debate over whether homosexual acts between consenting adults should remain criminalized.
So in 1954 a study was convened under the leadership of Lord Wolfenden whose name would later be attached to a report recommending the complete decriminalization of homosexual relationships among consenting adults in Britain. And how did they come to this conclusion? Well they didn’t consult the bible, and they didn’t ask the prejudices of their day. They did something positively unique for that day when it came to the subject of homosexuality.
They looked for evidence.
One problem with the published research on gay men was that virtually all of it was based on clinical or criminal populations, which Curran and Parr acknowledged would not necessarily be representative of the general population of gay men. In their report, they acknowledged that their sample would likely exhibit higher rates of psychiatric problems or criminal recidivism. But when they looked into the files of these 100 men who had been referred to their practice, the authors observed:
…[I]n spite of the probability that any group of homosexuals referred to a psychiatrist might be expected to be heavily weighted in the direction of psychiatric abnormality, no fewer than 51 % were considered to be free from gross personality disorder, neurosis, or psychosis during their adult lives. Only one was certifiably defective and none certifiably insane. They included a number of important and talented individuals of high integrity, successful, efficient, and respected members of the community. Only two had been on any criminal charge other than homosexuality. Very few showed the traditional “pansy” picture of homosexuals; indeed, only 21 were noted to have at all obvious homosexual personality traits, only one of these being a paedophiliac.
So in spite of their having difficulty recruiting a completely representative sample of gay men, in spite of their sample being weighted toward mental patents and criminals, they found less mental aberration then they would have otherwise expected. In fact slightly better then half their sample showed no signs of gross mental illness at all.
Only half the patients showed significant psychiatric abnormality other than their sexual deviation, and such associated abnormalities were often slight. Moreover, many of these abnormalities were explicable as a reaction to the difficulties of being homosexual. Symptomatic homosexuality was rare.
And then it gets down to brass tacks. Is homosexuality a disease? Is this even a problem?
If homosexuality is a disease (as has often been suggested), it is in a vast number of cases monosymptomatic, non-progressive, and compatible with subjective well-being and objective efficiency. In our series, both practicing and non-practicing homosexuals were on the whole successful and valuable members of society, quite unlike the popular conception of such persons as vicious, criminal, effete, or depraved. Only one-fifth were at all obviously ” pansy,” and we found no reason to regard most of the patients as physically, intellectually, or emotionally immature (unless the basic criterion for ” immaturity” is that of being homosexual-a circular argument).
What they’re saying here is that if homosexuality is a disease then its one that has only one symptom (homosexuality) does not get worse if untreated, and does not negatively impact the overall health and well being of the individual who has it. Really…can you even call it a disease in that case?
This is similar to what American researcher Evelyn Hooker in her 1957 paper The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual found: well adjusted homosexuals are clinically indistinguishable from well adjusted heterosexuals. From her Wiki entry…
She gathered two groups of men: one group would be exclusively homosexual, the other exclusively heterosexual. She contacted the Mattachine Society to find homosexual men. She had greater difficulty finding heterosexual men. She also had to use her home to conduct the interview to protect people’s anonymity…
Hooker realized that all extant science on homosexuality consisted of studies conducted on homosexual men who had already been committed to mental institutions or imprisoned for sexual offenses. Her experiment was simple and elegant and beautiful in the way all great science is simple and elegant and beautiful.
She recruited two groups of sexually active young men, one gay and one straight. From both groups she eliminated anyone who had ever been in therapy or trouble with the law. Then she gave each group a battery of what were then standard clinical psychiatric tests…
She used trained professionals who were skilled in administering each of the tests. The testers did not know whether they were testing a homosexual man or a heterosexual. When she got the results back she further anonymized them so nobody looking at the tests could tell who administered the test. Standard double-blind technique.
Then she did something simple and beautiful…
After a year of work, Hooker presented a team of 3 expert evaluators with 60 unmarked psychological profiles.
…she passed the results out to the experts and asked them if they could identify the homosexuals.
No one could.
First, she contacted Bruno Klopfer, an expert on Rorschach tests to see if he would be able to identify the sexual orientation of people through their results at those tests. His ability to differentiate was no better than chance.
Then Edwin Shneidman, creator of the MAPS test, also analyzed the 60 profiles. It took him six months and he too found that both groups were highly similar in their psychological make-up.
The third expert was Dr Mortimer Mayer who was so certain he would be able to tell the two groups apart that he went through the process twice.
The three evaluators agreed that in terms of adjustment, there were no differences between the members of each group
Well adjusted homosexuals are clinically indistinguishable from well adjusted heterosexuals. This was what the Wolfsden researchers also found. And this is what everyone who objectively studies gay people has found ever since.
The experiment, which other researchers subsequently repeated, demonstrates that most self-identified homosexuals are no worse in social adjustment than the general population
When you study sick homosexuals, people who have already been committed to mental institutions or sent to jail for sex crimes, then what you find are sick homosexuals. But if you did the same thing with heterosexuals, only studying those in mental institutions or jail, you would also conclude the same about heterosexuals and nobody does that. The Christianist web site Lifesite tries to downplay Hooker’s study thusly…
Despite the fact that the purpose of the study was ostensibly to examine the possibility of mental instability in homosexuals, individuals who showed signs of mental instability were removed from the groups, which further predetermined the study’s conclusion.
But that was the point. If homosexuality was the result of mental dysfunction, as NARTH and their companions in the anti-gay industrial complex insist, then removing the individuals who showed signs of mental instability would have made not a whit of difference in the outcome. The experts Hooker contacted to evaluate her test results would have still been able to identify the homosexuals because homosexuals are mentally unstable, whether they show it outwardly or not. That the experts could not identify the homosexuals with those mentally unstable individuals removed proved decisively that the old models of homosexuality were wrong.
I am reminded of a colleague who reiterated, “all my homosexual patients are quite sick”, to which I finally replied “so are all my heterosexual patients”…
“If homosexuality is a disease (as has often been suggested), it is in a vast number of cases monosymptomatic, non-progressive, and compatible with subjective well-being and objective efficiency. In our series, both practicing and non-practicing homosexuals were on the whole successful and valuable members of society, quite unlike the popular conception of such persons as vicious, criminal, effete, or depraved”…
“The three evaluators agreed that in terms of adjustment, there were no differences between the members of each group”…
Understand this if you understand nothing else about the anti-gay industrial complex: this is knowledge that is over a half century old now. There is nothing new here. Most of the people reading this post will have been born after modern science clearly and unambiguously established this fact: there is nothing wrong with homosexuals. This has been understood in the science for over half a century.
I updated my depressing blog post of yesterday to include something that strikes me as an extra added burden on late fifties gay male dating. It’s a situation that will hopefully be done with, or mostly so, beyond my generation of gay folk. It’s better now for gay people in a lot of ways and especially for gay kids, even accounting for the fact that bullying still takes a frightful toll. But millennials who reach their fifties and suddenly find themselves tossed back into the dating pool should be in one that is mostly as full as it should be of randomly available older gay singles. That isn’t the case with my generation. A lot of gay guys in the general vicinity of my age are still deeply closeted because that’s what they felt they needed to be in order to survive when they were young men back in the 70s.
Being a homosexual back when I was a gay teenager was worse then being a murderer, worse then being a rapist, worse even then being a communist. A lot of us took that to heart and never found the inner strength to live openly and honestly because the risks were just too much, the pressure was just too much. So a lot of us put on a mask of heterosexuality back then. It was a matter of survival. And as they grew older they lived that life even if it wasn’t the life their soul was meant to live.
Now some of them have wives, some have kids, and they just can’t leave that life without doing a lot of damage to a lot of people around them. And if at this late stage of that one chance for a decent life you get, they find themselves looking in a mirror and knowing it could have been different…harder, more of a struggle initially, but better, more honorable, more decent…they have to ask themselves if getting their self respect back, their honor back, is really worth the toll it is going to take on a lot of people, not just themselves. And a lot of them are simply going to choose to go to their grave wearing that mask and I can’t find it in my heart to judge them for it.
And what that means for those of us of this generation who took the risk and lived honest open lives is our dating pool is a lot smaller then it should be and if we are still single at this age we’re basically fighting against really horrible odds on top of the fact that gay males are a minority to begin with. And that can’t be helped. It just is what it is.
Millennials…don’t be looking at lonely older gay guys like me in fear that this is your future. I am not your future. I am your past. For gay guys of my generation it will always be a time before Stonewall.
This post is going to repeat a lot of verbiage from a post I made here nearly two years ago, but it’s about a recurring theme I see in our struggle. That theme raised it’s head and laughed at me this morning, while reading a post over at Box Turtle Bulletin. There, poster Rob Tisinai writes about an email he got from Maggie Gallagher…
I got a fundraising email from Maggie Gallagher the other day. It’s unbelievably long (as in, I can’t believe she expects people to read this whole thing). One sentence jumped out at me before I gave up on the piece.
Are two men pledged in a sexual union really a marriage?
Personally I’d answer, No.
Which would be the correct answer from Gallagher’s point of view. Tisinai goes on to rephrase the question in terms that acknowledge same-sex couples might actually be in love, and avers that this is something she knows she cannot admit because it undercuts her entire argument against same-sex marriage.
I don’t think her argument is about same-sex marriage. I don’t think any of them really give a good goddamn about marriage. What they’re adamant about is that homosexuals aren’t really human…that Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. It isn’t about marriage at all. What marriage represents to the homophobes is the final barrier to admitting that homosexuals are fully human and capable of experiencing all the higher emotions of love and devotion and commitment that heterosexuals do…that we are not, as Dr. Laura once famously put it, biological errors, or as you can hear thumped from pulpits all over the bible belt, demon possessed hell bound abominations in the eyes of god.
North Carolina activist Patrick Wooden has become a favorite of groups like the National Organization for Marriage, the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, and most recently joined Peter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality at a rally denouncing the Southern Poverty Law Center. On a recent appearance on LaBarbera’s radio show, Wooden called homosexuality a “wicked, deviant, immoral, self-destructive, anti-human sexual behavior” and should make people “literally gag.” Wooden added that gay men have “to wear a diaper or a butt plug just to be able to contain their bowels” by their “40s or 50s” as a result of “what happens to the male anus.”
When you hear them yap, yap, yapping about the sanctity of marriage, what they’re saying is homosexuals are some sort of sub-human…things…that copulate with just about anything handy whether it’s a person or a horse or a cell phone. To lift what homosexuals do to the level of heterosexual love and commitment then, is a profane act of defilement. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Be it with each other or…cell phones.
Which is to say, we do not love. Love is something fully human individuals experience. The homosexual experiences no such thing. That is an article of belief more central to the faith of modern fundamentalists then the resurrection.
Back in April of 2010, I read this by then newly out Christian musician Jennifer Knapp back in an interview in Christianity Today…
Q: So why come out of the closet, so to speak?
Knapp: I’m in no way capable of leading a charge for some kind of activist movement. I’m just a normal human being who’s dealing with normal everyday life scenarios. As a Christian, I’m doing that as best as I can. The heartbreaking thing to me is that we’re all hopelessly deceived if we don’t think that there are people within our churches, within our communities, who want to hold on to the person they love, whatever sex that may be, and hold on to their faith. It’s a hard notion. It will be a struggle for those who are in a spot that they have to choose between one or the other. The struggle I’ve been through—and I don’t know if I will ever be fully out of it—is feeling like I have to justify my faith or the decisions that I’ve made to choose to love who I choose to love.
[Emphasis mine…] The problem after all isn’t sex, it’s love. But asking people to acknowledge that same-sex couples love is precisely the problem. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex… People sitting in the pews side-by-side with their gay neighbors aren’t asking them to choose between their love and their faith. When they look at same-sex couples they don’t see love at all…merely sex. They are “struggling with homosexuality”. The bedrock prejudice insists, absolutely insists, that is all there is to same-sex couples. Empty, barren, transient lust.
As NOM board member Orson Scott Card once said, gay couples are just playing dress-up…
“However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be, what they are doing is not marriage. Nor does society benefit in any way from treating it as if it were…”
“They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won’t be married. They’ll just be playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes…”
However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be… There’s the problem. Look at it if you have the nerve. This isn’t about sex. That empty barren, perverted lust is not what makes them angry. What makes them angry is any suggestion that homosexuals do, in fact, experience love the same way heterosexuals do. And it makes them absolutely livid.
It’s often argued that gay couples cannot rise to the level of marriage because they don’t produce children, and marriage is mostly about family life. But this argument is a sham. And it mirrors another sham argument often heard in conservative religious communities, that being homosexual is not a sin, only engaging in homosexual acts is. If only the homosexuals just didn’t have sex, they could be welcomed into the kingdom of Heaven too…just like the rest of us. But heterosexual couples, medically incapable of having sex, are as welcome to marriage as they are the Kingdom and nobody in either group is saying that same-sex couples can marry as long as they don’t have sex.
The heterosexual couple who stick together even if they are denied a sex life are seen as vindicating the power of love. That is why sterility among heterosexuals is no barrier to marriage. But same-sex couples somehow defile the institute of marriage with their very presence, whether they bring children into it (via adoption) or not, whether they can have sex or not. And that is because homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.
It’s not about children. It’s not about family life. It’s not even about heterosexuality. What homosexuals steal from people like Orson Scott Card is the idea that only heterosexuals love. All arguments to the contrary, what this fight is about, Exactly, is love, and who can be allowed to love and be loved, and who cannot. Marriage is love’s sanctuary, a sacred place where lovers can find shelter, protection, support. Letting homosexuals, who are incapable of love, into it defiles that sanctuary, turning it from a sacred place into a brothel.
However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be… In 1983, Sharon Kowalski suffered severe brain injuries in a motorcycle accident leaving her unable to care for herself. Her lover, Karen Thompson, with whom she had exchanged wedding bands and shared a house, had to fight a long and bitter legal battle with Kowalski’s parents, who refused to allow Thompson any contact at all with their daughter. When Sharon, with difficulty, typed her wishes to go back home with Karen on a keyboard provided by a doctor, her parents took the keyboard away. At one point, Donald Kowalski, Sharon’s father, asked a reporter in exasperated frustration “What does that woman want with my daughter…she’s in diapers!” For almost nine years Thompson fought it out in court with Kowalski’s parents, refusing to let the woman she loved be condemned to life in a nursing home where she would be kept isolated from the world outside and denied any therapy that would have allowed her to communicate her wishes to be taken back home to Karen. When she finally won, Donald Kowalski called her an animal.
What does that woman want with my daughter… A same-sex couple who cannot have sex would be, if unrepentant nonetheless, ineligible for the Kingdom, let alone marriage. It’s not about the Act, if not engaging in the Act makes no difference. Their crime is that they love, and love is not permitted to homosexuals.
Antioch Bible Church pastor Ken Hutcherson didn’t sit in the same room as two gay people to debate marriage equality. But he did call into the Seattle Channel studio where gay people were present for a debate on same-sex marriage.
And of course, Pastor Hutcherson went there: “If this law is passed, what is going to happen? Now ask your guests in the studio. Do they believe that if they change the definition of marriage being between one man and one woman, what is going to stop two men one woman, two women one man, one man against a horse, one many with a boy, one man with anything?“
We must be animals. Not sinners in need of salvation, but animals. Why? So we can be their scapegoats. The right wing politician who goes hiking the Appalachian trail with his mistress while his wife and children wonder where the hell he went. The religious right preacher who gets caught visiting prostitutes. The conservative moralizer who gets caught gambling. The problem isn’t that we are moral cheats, the problem is acceptance of homosexuality. Homosexuality is destroying the family and society, not our own failures of moral character. Probably it is also responsible for earthquakes and hurricanes.
Jennifer Knapp didn’t choose love over faith, but love over fame because there was no other way. Karen Thompson fought for nine years to free her beloved because there was no other way. The gay civil rights struggle is not a fight over scripture. It has nothing to do with faith. It is not about sex. It is a fight over the right, the essential human need, to love and be loved. Because love can overcome any obstacle, endure any hardship, hold on to any hope no matter how distant and faint. Because love can move mountains. Because the one thing you never want the scapegoat to do is move mountains.
Dear Abby…What Do You Call A Friend Who Resents It When Life Sends Good Fortune Your Way?
To Whom It May Concern…
Okay…fine…whatever.
It’s always grade school all over again with us isn’t it, when one week we would be the best friends ever and the next you’re cutting me out. One week I’m one of the few people you know who can give you Intelligent Conversation. The week after that I’m not fabulous enough or I’m too nerdy or it’s why is Glenn hanging around with that queer and then I’m not someone you want to be seen with or even admit knowing.
I was the kid who wasn’t supposed to amount to anything. People in school thought so, people in my own goddamned family thought so. But I did amount to something after all. Somehow, I did. Maybe it’s because there always was more to me then everyone who kept putting me down told me there was. Maybe they didn’t want me to know I had some good stuff inside me. The scapegoat, the cheap punching bag is not allowed to think thoughts like that is he?
Some folks who used to know me back in the day are happy for me now. And some seem to just get all resentful. You for instance. Whatever. I wasn’t just handed the life I have now. Yes, I got lucky. So amazingly lucky. Yes, some people never get a break like the one I got. But when I got that break, I did something with it. So I guess I must have been able to so something with it. So I guess that Something was always inside of me after all. If I was the scrawny little looser some people kept telling me I was way back in the day, I’d have blown it. I didn’t. Maybe I should just stop letting people cut me up just for their own amusement.
I work at the Space Telescope Science Institute. We operate and administer the Hubble Space Telescope for NASA. Lately I’ve been assigned to the team that is developing a test and integration laboratory for systems to be used on the James Webb Space Telescope. A couple months ago I was sent to Boulder Colorado for a JWST Partners Conference hosted by Ball. My security clearance got me into ITAR restricted seminars to learn what the other partners are doing to get this thing launched and sending back science data from L2. Oh…and I got a glowing performance review and a nice raise. But that’s less important to me, less thrilling by far, then the fact that every day I get to work in a place that harvests light from near the dawn of time and gives it to the world to study.
I am a part of that. Every fucking day at work I am told in word and in deed that I am not simply capable of intelligent, logical, and creative thinking, but that my talents and skills are Needed. Needed. Perhaps it’s time I started believing it deep down in my gut.
I’m too old for this. We’re done. I’m 58 years old now…why has believing in myself always been so goddamned hard. Well…one reason is the family I grew up in. They hated dad, and I got static from nearly everyone on mom’s side for having his face and his name. Then there was grade school. From the moment I entered grade school, being as I was the son of a single divorced working mother, I was immediately tossed into the problem child bin and never mind that I was actually a very well behaved kid. That single divorced working mother set a good example for her son. I’m 58 years old and my police record is cleaner then your kitchen floor. But in the stifling social prejudices of the late 1950s and early 60s, single divorced women were tainted, and that meant their children could be tossed into the gutter with a clear conscience. I know Exactly how it is that a teacher’s low expectations, placed upon a kid at that age, can work their way like rust into their heart.
But here’s another reason. Friends like you. A few beautiful popular kids who took me into their circle, I guess because they thought I’d make a good sidekick. A little raggedy puppy that would wag its tail at the slightest sign of approval. So I was allowed to tag along.
Some kids from those days who made friends with me really liked me. I guess they saw something inside of me even back then that I didn’t. I remember how Bob used to keep telling me I should go into computer work because I had a good head for it. I remember thinking how nice encouragement like that was, but I just couldn’t believe that someone like me could have that kind of a job. No, no…I was meant to be a stock boy or a burger flipper for the rest of my life. I know who those friends are. They’re the ones who are happy that I’ve made good at this late stage of my life, and occasionally give me an exasperated See…we told you so!
But not you. I remember how every time I tried to show you something good in me, capable in me, creative in me, you’d always smack it down. I was a little shutter bug long before I met you, but I never thought I could go the step further and set up my own darkroom until you showed me the simple one you’d set up in your basement. You showed me step by step how to develop film and make prints. So I thought, hey…I can do that… And I gathered the things together I needed and did my first roll of film and it was one of those moments in life that you look back on as a revelation, a turning point, where something deep inside of you awakens. I wanted to thank you for that. And for the next year or so I showed you the best of what I was doing. But it just made you resentful. So after a while I just stopped showing my photography to you.
After grade school you eventually dropped out of my life, and I was sorry to see you go. But it was like that. Especially after I started coming out of the closet. I never once heard a bigoted or even slightly prejudiced word from you about gays but there were times I wondered if that wasn’t part of it. You worked your way into the sound business and let me tag along for a while as a sometimes roadie. But we would cross paths less and less, especially after I started dinking around with the first micro computers that came to the market. Did you notice how adept I suddenly became with those things? Bob did. That’s probably why he kept nagging me to pursue it more seriously for its job potential. You started dinking around with them yourself but it was another photography thing where I shot ahead and you just lost interest and we saw each other even less after that. You moved west and got yourself a nice position at a big Vegas hotel. Then something happened…I don’t know what…and you vanished from sight for about a decade.
Then you popped back into my life, told me how fine it was to have me back again because I was such an intelligent conversationalist. You’d moved back to the east coast and invited me up to see you at the theater where you were working now. Somehow your situation had changed. You were living in a room over top of that theater. I guess you expected to see the same old Bruce who couldn’t afford much more then a room in someone’s basement himself. Then you learned I had a house of my own and you were fine with that. Then you learned I was a part of the Hubble Space Telescope team and you were fine with that. Your dad after all, had been part of the Apollo Moon program team. Then I drove up in a nice Honda Accord and you were fine with that. We had a good first meeting after so long apart. The next time I came to visit I drove up in a new Mercedes-Benz and it went downhill with us pretty rapidly after that.
What did you think? That this kid who was raised by a single working mother, who wore hand-me-down clothes she would get from the church for most of his childhood, would judge Anyone by their economic circumstances, let alone a friend? What the fuck? Don’t you think my entire life has taught me better then that? All through grade school, until I got diverted to Woodward ironically enough, I was judged by the low budget single parent household I was raised in. By teachers, by the other kids. And inside my own family I was constantly being judged by the fact that I was my father’s son. A stinking rotten good for nothing Garrett just like my pap.That’s what I was always supposed to be.
Now look at me. What the fuck? You think I didn’t learn something from that life?
No. Just…no. This isn’t about that. You know damn well I am not like that. This is you. This is you being as resentful as always, whenever the sidekick showed signs of being his own person.
There have been others like you in my life from my grade school years. Relationships I held onto for way too long, because deep down inside I thought I was lucky they even knew my name, because someone like me wasn’t really worthy of their company. So…Yes…I’m a moron. In some ways. I suppose we all in some ways. But we can learn from our mistakes too, and I’ve been making this one for far too long. I’m not the worthless good for nothing destined for abject failure all his life, if not a prison cell one day, that people kept telling me I was when I was a kid.
I’m 58 years old. I work for the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University, have had a successful career as an IT professional, and that has brought me some economic freedoms I never in my wildest dreams thought I would ever have one day. I have a nice little Baltimore rowhouse within walking distance of my place of work, and close to two nice grocery stores, drugstores, and lots of other good things. I drive a little Mercedes-Benz C class, and I have plans currently to trade it in for an E class diesel. I have a regular spot in Baltimore OUTLoud as a political cartoonist and sometimes photographer, my cartoons have also appeared in Family and Friends of Memphis, and Stonewall News Northwest. This has allowed me to get membership in the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists. Professionally, I am also a member of The Association for Computing Machinery, and the Project Management Institute. I have my own web site and a running cartoon series, A Coming Out Story, that gets hits from all over the world.
They say living well is the best revenge. Sort of. It’s not about having things, it’s about doing things. It’s about letting the spirit that was always within you shine. As bright as it can. As bright as it must. That is living well. Then you don’t need revenge. Revenge is for chickenshits.
So is hanging onto toxic relationships. Never love yourself less then you love someone else.
Goodbye, good luck…have a great life of your own. I really mean that. Whatever horrible thing it was that happened to you back in Las Vegas I hope you have found your path to rise above it and have a good life. Now go away.
“Jacob, I honestly don’t know how to write it,” I said. “I know what I want to get across, but I can never find the right words.”
“Dan, you need to write it. Don’t give up. I’m telling you, it needs to be said.”
I paused. “You don’t understand. It’s too heated a subject. It’s something people are very emotional and touchy about. I’d be lynched.”
My friend hesitated. “Dan, you are the only friend I have that knows I’m gay. The only freaking one,” he said.
“What do you mean? I know you’ve told other friends.”
That’s when his voice cracked. He began crying.
“Every single person I’ve told has ditched me. They just disappear. They stop calling. They remove me on Facebook. They’re just gone,” he said. “They can’t handle knowing and being friends with a gay person.”
I didn’t know what to say. So I didn’t say anything.
“You don’t know what it’s like, man. You don’t know what it’s like to live here and be gay. You don’t know what it’s like to have freaking nobody. You don’t know what it’s like to have your own parents hate you and try and cover up your existence. I didn’t choose this. I didn’t want this. And I’m so tired of people hating me for it. I can’t take it anymore. I just can’t.”
Tonight I was going to kill myself. I had it all planned out. I had all the items to do it sitting in my bedroom. I don’t know if I would have done it but I sure was planning to. Ever since I told my parents and a few close friends that I was gay life has gotten worse and worse. My parents who go to church twice a week have tried to force me to go to this boot camp that’s made to force the gay out of you. They’ve told me more times than I can count that as long as I’m gay I’m not their son and that if I loved them or God at all I would do whatever it takes to not be gay anymore. They’ve even talked to my only friends and they all had a gay intervention for me and told me that they couldn’t be in my life if I was going to keep saying that I was gay.I’ve never been with another guy. I’ve never told anyone else. All I’ve ever done was finally get the guts to tell the people I was closest to in my life that I was gay and they’ve all turned on me. This all started about six months ago and I’ve never been so alone in my life.
Anyways I just was on Facebook trying to decide if I should write a goodbye note and somebody posted a link to your Christian/gay post. The post was super good, but the comments are what kept me on your site for hours. The love people who didn’t even know Jacob were showing gave me hope I guess, and then somebody posted a video called it gets better and I’ve never seen these videos but I watched it and then a bunch more and for the first time I have hope that maybe it will get better I just know now that it probably won’t get better for me here. But somewhere maybe.
So if you will, please tell your readers that they saved a life and tell them thank you because I didn’t really want to die I just really didn’t want to live with this anymore. I can’t wait to turn 18 and get out of this place. Pray for me. I’m going to need it.
Go read the others. Remember them the next time you hear someone say Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin…
On Towleroad today I see that James Hormel has a new book out about his time as ambassador, and he’s apparently making the TV rounds promoting it. I also see that he’s making the same mistake a lot of very well meaning people make when it comes to the nature of bigotry…
James Hormel, who was appointed United States Ambassador to Luxembourg by President Bill Clinton in 1999, and was the first openly gay ambassador ever to serve, spoke with ABC News about his new book Fit to Serve, as well as DOMA, and what he sees as the #1 problem for LGBT rights today.
Says Hormel: “The number one problem today as I see it is that people think that being gay is a matter of choice, and they somehow distinguish gay people as having made a choice to be tormented by their society.”
Hormel calls DOMA “the most heinous piece of civil rights legislation in a century.”
Yes about DOMA, no about whether people think being gay is a choice. Look…nobody questions the fact that race isn’t a choice and that has never made racists question their racism as far as I can tell. Hell…they have their own junk science industry proving that blacks are genetically inferior so prejudice against them is morally justified…
When the New Republic devoted almost an entire issue (10/31/94) to a debate with the authors of The Bell Curve, editor Andrew Sullivan justified the decision by writing, “The notion that there might be resilient ethnic differences in intelligence is not, we believe, an inherently racist belief.”
In fact, the idea that some races are inherently inferior to others is the definition of racism. What the New Republic was saying–along with other media outlets that prominently and respectfully considered the thesis of Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein’s book–is that racism is a respectable intellectual position, and has a legitimate place in the national debate on race.
When the day comes that sexual orientation is generally seen as biologically innate, the homophobes will simply shift gears and start babbling about how homosexuality is a genetic deficiency that makes us unfit for…well…everything. The nature verses nurture argument is a distraction. The reason some people are homosexual does not matter to bigots. They just hate us. That hate is what comes first. The justification for it comes later, and takes whatever shape the bigot needs it to have to justify that preexisting hate.
All everyone else needs to see about our lives is that we are as human as they. That we love, we cherish, we long and we need, just as they do. Once they see that, once they can look at a same-sex couple and see in that couple’s happiness their own, it won’t matter to them why we mate to our own instead of the opposite sex. That’s the problem. Not the Nature verses Nurture debate, but the lie that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. That is what we have to kill. And we do it by living our lives openly, by resisting the pressure hate brings to bear upon our lives to stay hidden. Bigots we will never change. But every moment we live our lives openly so that we can be seen as neighbors and not some strange alien other, we defeat hate.
The former head of one of the nation’s most prominent ex-gay ministries now says that homosexuality is something that cannot be “repented,” because “repentance from something means it has to be something you can control, like actions.” John Smid, the former director of Memphis-based Love In Action, the country’s largest ex-gay residential program, now says that homosexuality is “an intrinsic part of their being or personally, my being. One cannot repent of something that is unchangeable.” He also says that in all of his years in ex-gay ministries, he never met a gay man who became heterosexual, and that he now considers himself homosexual “and yet in a marriage to a woman.”
I don’t hate you anymore John Smid…not after I heard you speak in Morgan’s documentary. It isn’t my place to forgive you for what you did to others, but I don’t hate you anymore. And I could find it even less in my heart to hate you now that I read this. I had a conversation with A Happily Married Man just the other day. I’d have to hate him too and I can’t. We have all been wounded by this lie, even those of us who never embraced it, but especially those of us who did.
At least you also lived the life you preached once upon a time. You walked the walk, even if it didn’t lead you to where you though it would. You practiced what you preached. So many others simply wanted to make the gay kids suffer and bleed so they could be righteous, so they could pave their stepping stones to heaven with our hopes and dreams of love. The day you manage to forgive them for what they did to you, to all of us, maybe you could show the rest of us how that’s done.
Always Check The Calendar Before Scheduling A Few Hours Of Pain And Regret
Okay…now it’s making some sense. Today is National Coming Out Day. Which I guess is proceeded by National Life In The Closet Weekend. Sorta the reverse of how Mardi Gras is followed by Lent.
The Scene: A table in an upscale restaurant located in a trendy vacation resort. Two old friends are sitting across from each other. One openly gay since he was seventeen, the other a Happily Married Man having long since overcome the unwanted same-sex attractions of his youth. They are discussing Openly Gay Friend’s problems finding someone to love and settle down with. Happily Married Man is finding it hard to believe that Openly Gay Friend has been single and struggling all these years.
Happily Married Man: Don’t you have any gay friends?
Openly Gay Friend: Oh yes. About half my friends are gay. I have a regular Happy Hour crowd I try to go out with every Friday. It gets me out of the house.
Happily Married Man: How long have you known them?
Openly Gay Friend: Oh, most of them since the mid-eighties…
Happily Married Man: Wow…I can’t believe they haven’t tried to hook you up. Didn’t they ever even try?
Openly Gay Friend: Oh get me started…there was this one time…
Happily Married Man: You need to get some better friends!
Openly Gay Friend: They’re nice people. I think they just don’t get me…they just don’t get romantic types. They think I should just go get laid and that’ll make me feel better. They don’t get how random loveless sex might make someone like me feel a whole lot worse afterward, not better.
Happily Married Man: You need to get some better friends!
Openly Gay Friend: I want you to understand something…that isn’t just a gay thing. If I was straight and my happy hour group was a bunch of other straight guys I’d be getting the same advice. Just go get laid and you’ll be fine. The cure for every lonely heart is to just get laid. The popular culture pays a bunch of lip service to the idea of love and romance, but it’s all about just having sex in the straight scene too.
Happily Married Man: Sex is overrated…
Openly Gay Friend: I’m not saying that…
Happily Married Man: It’s just a bodily function.
Openly Gay Friend: Uhm…
Happily Married Man (emphatically): When you’re on your death bed it won’t be the times you had sex you’ll be remembering, but all the people you loved.
Openly Gay Friend: Yes…absolutely! That is so very true. But I would want my last memory to be the times I spent laying down with the one I loved. That one special body and soul relationship…that’s what you would be remembering. At least I would…if I’d ever had that. (looks wistfully at Happily Married Man, then looks away) But your life is what it is…
Happily Married Man (rolling his eyes): Stop whining….
Openly Gay Friend: I’m not whining…
Happily Married Man: You’re whining. You have to work with what you’ve got to work with and accept that. Stop thinking about what ifs. Sex is overrated…
Openly Gay Friend: Well yes, I agree completely that it isn’t all there is to life, but it’s still important…
Happily Married Man: It’s like a fart.
Openly Gay Friend: I’m sorry?
Happily Married Man: This may sound strange but think about it. It stinks for a little while, and then it’s gone.
(Openly Gay Friend looks blankly back at Happily Married Man)
Happily Married Man: Sex is like that.
Openly Gay Friend: Uhm…it helps if you’re having sex with a person you’re sexually attracted to. (ironically) Then it’s actually a lot of fun…more engaging…more satisfying…(looks Happily Married Man in the eyes) and it makes a whole lot more sense that way. You kinda understand then why everyone else is so into it.
Happily Married Man: You’re a piece of work…you know that? Well it’s getting late and I have to go home now. I’m a happily married man.
Openly Gay Friend (unhappily): So I see. And I’m still single and unhappy. And for gay men of our generation it will always be a time before Stonewall won’t it?
Happily Married Man: Stonewall?
(This was mostly a real conversation. Some lines were edited for brevity, and Openly Gay Friend didn’t actually say his last two lines to Happily Married Man because just then his head was spinning. But now he wishes he had.)
Stories To Definately Avoid If You Believe In Love: Scenario 2. Didn’t I Say I Warned You?
Continuing our gallery of morose, possibly horror story grade film or novel scenarios, here’s another based on the stream of thought I had contemplating the plot device in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That’s the one you may recall, where the two lovers break up and one decides to undergo a procedure which erases the other from their memory, and the other, sad to learn of it, does the same. Then they reconnect anyway which only goes to show they were really meant for each other to begin with and love isn’t always a fairy tale but a lot of hard work for both people. Yes, yes…so very romantic. Actually, I love that plot device. But somehow it always turns a tad dark in my imaginings…
I have an idea. It’s a story about a heterosexual man…
When he was a teenager he was well liked by his teachers and friends. He’s very open minded, somewhat more so then his parents who are mostly liberal, but with some hang-ups about class and gender and race. They’re not raving prejudiced, because that isn’t fashionable, and they try, really try their best, to teach their kid not to be that way.
In school he befriends a gay kid and right away they start to get along really well. He defends his gay friend from bullies and takes his part in political arguments about gay civil rights and same-sex marriage. They become very close friends. Brothers almost. But as often happens, not just in gay/straight relationships either, he finds his perfect girlfriend, and the gay kid finds a nice boyfriend, they slowly begin to drift apart.
The gay kid’s boyfriend turns out to be a real jerk, and as he grows older it becomes a pattern with him. He falls into a bitter cycle of one disastrous affair after another. Nothing seems to work for him.
The straight kid’s girlfriend on the other hand is his perfect match. They have a lovely, almost fairy tale romance that grows ever more beautiful over time. They marry, have beautiful kids, he finds the career of his dreams, they settle down in a nice suburban community with good schools and decent shopping.
Fast forward. The straight guy is in his late middle age, and he is reflecting on how happy his life has been. Especially compared to most of his classmates from way back when. Many of them have had it really hard. One day, he reconnects with his gay buddy from back in the day. His gay buddy has had it hard. Very hard. He’s still single, and bitter.
They have lunch together one day and they instantly reconnect like old and dear friends. The gay friend is happy that his old pal has had it so good and it is obviously sincere joy. Seeing how happy his old friend from high school is makes him a bit happier too, brings him out of his gloom and lifts his spirits. It makes him believe once more, after so long, that life maybe doesn’t have to suck after all. It can get better.
He decides to tell his straight friend that he’s re-considering something his parents tried very hard to talk him into back when they were teenagers. There’s a procedure…it’s frowned upon in more liberal circles, but not illegal…that can change a person’s sexual orientation from gay to straight. It’s just been so hard living my life as a gay man, he says, so lonely, so terribly terribly lonely... For all his accomplishments as a gay political activist, his private life has been completely miserable. I’m not sure I want to go on the rest of my life like this, he says. His straight friend is appalled. He urges his gay friend not to do it, it would be a sell-out, not just to the cause he’s long fought for, but to himself, to his soul. Yes, says his gay friend, but…it’s so hard being so alone. At least as a heterosexual, I’d have more of a chance at finding the kind of life you’ve had.
It is a sad conversation, but by the end of it the straight guy has mostly convinced his gay friend to hang on, and live an authentic life. Even if you change he says to his gay friend, how do you go on knowing that it isn’t really you, but something that was done to you? Then his gay friend lays one more thing on him. The procedure can be coupled with a memory wipe, so you never know you were once gay. New memories are introduced to make you believe you were always straight. That’s completely outlawed now against children, but he says, even on adults it’s a lot harder to do that to someone our age. Too many memories…the risks of complications are much higher. No…he finally says, it isn’t worth it.
They get up to go their separate ways and now it seems the gay friend has had a definite change of heart. No…it’s too late now to even think about changing. Better he had done it back when he was a teenager. But really…better still to live an authentic life. And anyway he says with a shy smile that takes his straight friend back to their school days, the worst thing would be having to forget you.
They part ways. The straight guy had always known his gay friend had a crush on him, and for his part he was always very fond of his gay friend. Back in school they were almost inseparable. Brothers almost. But it was always clear to both of them that it could never be. He is thoroughly heterosexual. He has always liked women. And now he has a wife he loves very much, and even at their age they still have a great sex life.
But now something is bothering him. He does a little digging into this ex-gay procedure. It was something he’d never really looked at before. He’d always opposed it, had always spoken out against it. There had been attempts to outlaw it completely that he had supported. But activists had only succeeded in outlawing the practice on children. Mostly he avoided the issue altogether. And now that he thinks of it, that seems a little strange. In his own low key way he is actually very politically aware and active. But his style was more behind the scenes then his gay friend’s upfront activism.
It quickly falls entirely out of his mind. Then he gets an email from his gay friend thanking him for the visit after all these years, and the encouragement. He writes that he’s redoubling his efforts to find a mate after all, and getting back into the fight for full gay equality. He would still like to see the ex-gay procedure completely outlawed, and he tells his straight friend he’s getting back into that fight now.
Oh yes…that. Now it begins to bother him how uncharacteristically he’d just put it all out of his mind. It was something that should normally still bother him about the world he lived in. His parents had raised him to be tolerant and progressive, even if they’d had their own repressed doubts and prejudices. Homosexuality wasn’t something they’d ever much discussed when he was a teen. But as an adult, often while remembering his gay schoolmate, he had always worked for the better, more inclusive world.
Now he looks more deeply into it, forcing himself at times, posting reminder notes just to make sure he follows up on things he finds out about the ex-gay process…its invention, its history of usage…the patterns of its use…the political controversy. Sometimes it’s a struggle to maintain an interest…he has so much else he’s busy with in his own life. But soon his wife, also very much the progressive and pro-gay rights person, gets involved and begins helping him with it. He has told her the story of his gay friend’s struggles and she is very sympathetic, and as disgusted by the very existence of the ex-gay clinics as he is. With her help, he maintains focus.
So he digs for information and learns more and more about the procedure that turns gay people straight and wipes their memories of ever having been gay. What he learns appalls him. He periodically writes his gay friend back and tells him about what he has uncovered…much that was never really fully aired in public. His gay friend is overjoyed to have his old pal back in the fight.
But at night the research is also causing him very unpleasant dreams…dreams about sudden violent arguments with his parents…or someone’s parents, he is not sure. He wonders if they are real memories or just his own projections of what his friend’s home life must have been like.
One morning, saying nothing to anyone of his plans, he goes to a private investigator, someone who he has read about, who has done much of the main investigation for various gay rights groups concerning the ex-gay clinics. This man has a reputation for uncovering secrets in not always legal ways, but his revelations were crucial in getting the procedure against children stopped. He asks this man to check to see if anyone in his high school class had been taken to one of the ex-gay clinics, and then had their memory of being gay wiped.
The investigator takes him into another room, stacked with filing cabinets, some bulging. Through various court cases, and a few not completely legal methods, he has acquired tens of thousands of what were once secret files, documents, recordings, some he is still not at liberty to disclose the contents of publicly. These files have proven critical in the search for victims, the investigator says, and the prosecution of some of the people who ran the clinics, as well as the outlawing of the procedure against children.
Tell me a little about the school you all went to, says the investigator. Tell me about the neighborhood, the area churches, politicians, community leaders. Certain ex-gay clinics were intimately connected to certain churches, and certain politicians. Tell me a little more about the students…and…about yourself… The whole sordid story of these clinics is in these files. Tell me what I need to know, and I can give you the information you are looking for.
He spends hours talking to the man, who all the while is entering data into a small computer. Then the investigator gets up, walks over to a filing cabinet, and after a little flipping through the files inside, pulls one out. He hands it to him. In it is a name and a case history. Somehow he is not completely shocked to learn that, yes, there was one kid from his high school that got sent to an ex-gay clinic.
Him.
He reads. The evidence in the file suggests it was done to him against his will. His memory of ever being gay, of ever even suspecting he was, was completely wiped. He checks the dates. It had to be he realizes, very soon after his parents found out about his gay friend.
And then and there in that office, reading the notes on his case for himself after all those years, he remembers it all in a sudden rush…about when his parents first learned about his gay friend. They had turned suddenly angry and suspicious. They’d had an awful argument. The next day some men had entered his bedroom in the middle of the night, and taken him to a place…somewhere…somewhere dark…
He can recall no more then that. But it is enough.
He walks back home in a daze. He loves his wife. Really deeply and truly loves her. And without a doubt she loves him. Their sex life is great, even in late middle age. They have beautiful kids, grown now and pursuing their own careers and love lives.
But…he loved his gay friend too. To his gay friend he has always been a straight buddy. Yes, his gay friend had a crush on him…that was always something they both knew, but it was always clear to both that it could never be, because he was straight. Except he wasn’t. At least, not born straight. He looks back to their teen years together and sees it clearly. They were always more then just friends. They were soul mates.
I…I loved you…
And he sees the life his gay friend had…his very lonely, bitter struggle…and sees now, clearly, the life he could have had…the life they could have had.
But…what does he do? What Can he do? Who does he tell? What good would it do to say anything to anyone at this point? His parents have both passed on…he, his wife, his gay friend, are all at the doorstep of old age. What good would it do to tell anyone? But there is more. The last words the private investigator spoke to him before he left the man’s office echo in his brain: You know don’t you, that the procedure can be reversed. You can be the man you were born to be again. If you want. Others, many others, have had the procedure reversed.
But could he really, after so much time has passed? And what would happen to his family then? What would they have? He loves them very much.
It’s not true that there is only one perfect soul mate out there for each individual. His gay friend still has a chance to find someone to love, and be loved by. They both know this. He decides to say nothing. The investigator had assured him that nothing would be said about him unless he specifically authorized it. Privacy laws forbade it. When he gets back home he finds an email from his gay friend telling him he’s dating someone new now, hoping that this time it would be different.
He agrees to meet them both for lunch somewhere, he and his wife and his gay classmate and his new boyfriend. And at that pleasantly cheerful little gathering of old friends and their lovers, he sees that this new guy is nice on the outside where it doesn’t count, but isn’t any better deep down inside where it does then any of the other guys his friend has hooked up with in the past. He can see another broken heart coming for his friend all over again. And it makes him angry, angry at the new boyfriend/creep, angry in a deep dark place inside where he had never been angry before.
His wife sees the broken heart coming for his gay friend too. He’s such a beautiful spirit, his wife says to him later. It’s so tragic he never found someone. I hate how this world treats people like him. Not just that he’s gay, but that he’s such a beautiful spirit. It’s so hard for people like that to find love. So hard for everyone really. I’m so glad I found you.
Not all horror stories have blood splashing everywhere.
“Evil enters like a needle and spreads like an oak tree.”
-Ethiopian Proverb
Stories To Definately Avoid If You Believe In Love: Scenario 1. Remember, I Warned You.
Another one of the Big Three major loves of my life finally decided to get himself a Facebook account recently…I discovered during another of my periodic name searches. I mentioned on my status update that I wished there was a Forget You pill I could take, but that I’d only take it for one of the Big Three (Hi Keith!). A friend then directed me to the film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
I was already aware of that film, although I haven’t watched it yet. But the central plot device is a beautiful one for a romance story: Two people who choose to undergo a procedure that makes them forget about each other, who then hook up again later anyway, which means they were really meant for each other to begin with. Yes, yes…a very lovely tale of true romance. And one I’d happily read myself, if it were presented to me in a gay context.
Writing it myself is another matter, and not just because I’d have to copy it outright from somebody else, a thing I regard with distaste when I see other would-be artists doing that. On the other hand, Picasso himself said a mediocre artist copies and a great artist steals. And this plot device is just brimming with possibilities.
Unfortunately for you dear reader, those possibilities always seem to take a dark and morose turn with me. I can’t imagine why that is. But in the interest of getting some of this stuff that has always been percolating in me ever since I can remember…I seem to be able to think up more ideas then I ever have time to follow through on…let me belabor you with a few scenarios for a novel or movie. Go ahead and use them. If they flop and everyone hates you for making them sit through it, you can always blame me.
Here’s Scenario 1…there isn’t much to it. Call it, The Good Life…
It’s about a gay guy who tries all his life to find his soul mate. Comes out to himself as a teen, but instead of going through fear and loathing about his sexual orientation, he accepts it, and tries extra hard to make himself worthy of a nice boyfriend. Gets good grades, graduates near the top of his class, never cheats or lies or steals. He’s no cardboard prude by any means, but he tries extra hard to be a worthy lover, so he can attract the man of his dreams. Unfortunately for him, all he ever gets are the boyfriends from hell…the ones attracted to Nice Guys because they’re easy to manipulate and fun to cheat.
That’s his life. One bad, failed romance after another after another after another. His gay friends are no help either. Oh they believe in love all right…but they think our hero is a tad childish to believe in Romance and finding that man of your dreams. Better they keep telling him, to settle for Mr. Right Away instead of Mr. Right. Who knows they say, that sexy rent boy you purchase for an evening might turn out to be a steady thing. And if not, hey, he’s affordable at least. Time and again, though he never finds out what the audience does, they fail to connect him to other guys who might actually be right for him. Romance is for daydreamers.
Eventually he’s a very old man. And one day he realizes this is all that will ever be. He sees that he will never find that love of his life after all, that he is going to die alone and loveless, never having been loved, never having had that life affirming body and soul relationship with another person, never known that quiet peaceful joy of holding, and being held in the arms of the one you love. Now, at the twilight of his life he sees, finally, the reason that there are so many beautiful love stories out there isn’t because there really are so many beautiful love stories out there, but that so terribly many people are like himself, lost and lonely and aching for a love that will never come. He wishes he had never been born.
But all is not hopeless. Modern technology has an answer for everything. He takes the last little bit of his life savings and goes to a clinic, where they replace all his bad memories of failed romances with a fake memory of meeting his soul mate when they were both teenagers and they have a happy life together and then in their shared old age his soul mate dies (peacefully of natural causes) and he morns. But then he goes on with his life because they both promised each other that they would if one of them died before the other.
He leaves the clinic knowing only that he had checked himself in for a very normal and natural case of depression after his one true love had passed away. The doctors and nurses there he remembers, were all very kind to him, and all said he’d been a very lucky man to have found such a beautiful meaningful love, and he left the clinic feeling a little sorry for them, because they were still searching for it.
He spends his last few years peacefully remembering his lover, spouse and soul mate, and dies one day a happy man, knowing he had lived life to its fullest.
You see? Even horror stories can have happy endings.
See and share the joy in their faces…and then look more closely at the stunning diversity of us. Remember it next time you hear someone speak of a gay lifestyle or a gay agenda.
In a previous post I discussed the ramifications of a bill before California governor Jerry Brown that would add the history of gay people to the textbooks and lessons of California schools. He signed it.
Brown issued a statement in which he called the legislation an “important step forward for our state.”
“History should be honest,” Brown said. “This bill revises existing laws that prohibit discrimination in education and ensures that the important contributions of Americans from all backgrounds and walks of life are included in our history books.”
As I mentioned before, that honestly, not so much about the accomplishments of gay people but more, a factual account of the witch hunts violence and political and social persecution we have endured as a people, is greatly feared by the anti-gay industrial complex. And as expected, they are already moving to do a Proposition 8 on it…
The proponent of the proposed referendum, Paulo Sibaja, filed a request for a title and summary with the attorney general’s office. Sibaja said he acted on behalf of the Capitol Resource Institute, which had officially opposed the bill throughout the legislative process before Gov. Jerry Brown signed it Thursday. Sibaja is the legislative director of that organization.
The Capitol Resource Institute is a hard-line, socially conservative organization that has long opposed efforts in California to expand rights for the LGBT population…
They’ll probably get their signatures too. Whether or not they can wage a successful campaign to erase a minority group from the pages of history in California remains to be seen, but expect more of The Homosexuals Are Coming For Your Children rhetoric in the coming months. And…more anti-gay violence for them to wash, wash their hands of before the multitudes.
One part of that history they never want told is coming to the screen. A documentary based on David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare is now in production…
The Lavender Scare is the first feature-length documentary film to tell the story of the U.S. government’s ruthless campaign in the 1950s and ’60s to hunt down and fire every Federal employee it suspected was gay.
While the McCarthy Era is remembered as the time of the Red Scare, the headline-grabbing hunt for Communists in the United States, it was the Lavender Scare, a vicious and vehement purge of homosexuals, which lasted longer and ruined many more lives.
There’s more at the documentary website, including a trailer. The book it is based on is available in cloth, paperback and ebook form from the University of Chicago Press. I also highly recommend Neil Miller’s Sex Crime Panic (Alyson Books) and David Carter’s Stonewall (St. Martin’s Press). I would also love to hear gay history book recommendations from the readers here.
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