“History is who we are and why we are the way we are.”
–David McCullough
In California bill, SB48, hopefully to be signed by Governor Jerry Brown, seeks to help correct a longstanding and bitter historical wrong. No…not the absence of gay history in the classroom…
School textbooks evolve, just like the society the pages describe. The contributions of African Americans, Latinos, Asians and women – all missing or minimized in decades past – are now more fully and accurately portrayed in textbooks and other instructional materials. The role of gays and lesbians also deserves fair treatment in lessons about the development of this state and nation.
That’s the simple and forceful premise behind a bill, SB48, now on Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk. But the idea of highlighting gay people’s contributions still draws controversy in a state where same-sex marriage remains illegal and a political wedge issue. In this case, the opposition is misguided about what’s at stake.
Ostensibly the bill is intended to improve awareness of the contributions of gay people to history. That’s a worthwhile goal in and of itself and as the second paragraph above notes, the usual suspects are raising a ruckus about it. But positive images of gay people are not what the opposition is afraid of. Here, in the Catholic Reporter, the real problem is daintily addressed…
William May, chairman of a California-based group called Catholics for the Common Good, said in a June 16 letter to the head of the state Assembly’s Education Committee, that problems around bullying are not going to be solved by “cosmetically sexualizing social studies” in the state’s public schools.
He said unjust discrimination against gays and lesbians “is an important fact that must be taught and not forgotten, but this bill will not affect that.” He also said the bill’s language was “so vague, and subject to such broad interpretation, that it can only lead to confusion, conflict and the potential for complaints and litigation.”
Note the formulation “unjust discrimination”. There’s the problem. Here’s the naked fear of this bill:
The U.S. Justice Department has dropped its opposition to joint bankruptcy petitions filed by same-sex married couples in a victory for supporters of gay marriage.
The policy change is the latest setback for the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which has come under increasing pressure since the Obama administration said in February that it would no longer defend its constitutionality.
The filing by the Obama Department of Justice goes beyond simply bowing out of the case…it makes a dazzlingly clear cut case that DOMA is an unconstitutional attack on a suspect minority that has suffered a long history of legal and social persecution:
LGBT rights supporters are heralding a recently filed legal brief against the Defense of Marriage Act – the first of its kind against the anti-gay law from the Obama administration – as a landmark document that will aid in bringing about the end of DOMA.
…
Notably, the brief recalls the U.S. government’s role in discriminating against LGBT people in its description of the ways in which LGBT people have received different treatment over the course of history. The Justice Department recalls that former President Eisenhower signed an executive order adding “sexual perversion” as grounds for dismissal for federal employees.
“The federal government enforced Executive Order 10450 zealously, engaging various agencies in intrusive investigatory techniques to purge gays and lesbians from the civilian workforce,” the brief states. “The State Department, for example, charged ‘”skilled” investigators’ with ‘interrogating every potential male applicant to discover if they had any effeminate tendencies or mannerisms,’ used polygraphs on individuals accused of homosexuality who denied it, and sent inspectors to ‘every embassy, consulate and mission’ to uncover homosexuality.’”
The full text of the brief is Here (PDF). It also reads in part:
In order to identify gays and lesbians in the civil service, the FBI “sought out state and local police officers to supply arrest records on morals charges, regardless of whether there were convictions; data on gay bars; lists of other places frequented by homosexuals; and press articles on the largely subterranean gay world”
The United States Postal Service (“USPS”), for its part, aided the FBI by establishing “a watch list on the recipients of physique magazines, subscrib[ing] to pen pal clubs, and initiat[ing] correspondence with men whom [it] believed might be homosexual.” The mail of individuals concluded to be homosexual would then be traced “in order to locate other homosexuals.”
Now consider this, and ask yourself how many times you have heard comparisons of the struggles of gay Americans and black Americans denounced because gays never were sold into slavery, never had to ride the back of the bus, never were denied the right to vote. Or comparisons with antisemitism denounced because gays were never herded into extermination camps. How many times have you heard the struggle for gay equality dismissed as the pastime of privileged rich white men. How often have we heard, and still hear, that laws protecting gay people from discrimination are unnecessary, are really just about seeking social approval.
Below is how Mad Magazine looked at our struggle back in 1971. I include this to show what the popular view of our struggle was so shortly after Stonewall, not to be pointing a finger specifically at Mad. This was how our struggle was commonly viewed back then and Mad like a lot of publications is way, way nicer to their gay readers nowadays.
Mad #145, Sept ‘71, from “Greeting Cards For The
Sexual Revolution” – “To A Gay Liberationist”
Forgive us if we’re more concerned with Indians and Blacks… So easy to say, when the shear brutality of anti-gay persecution was so completely unknown to most Americans. But of course to know that history they would have only had to look…
…my mind went back to starting as a reporter at the daily Long Island Press in the 1960s covering police and courts when a Suffolk County custom was the annual police raid on the gay communities of Fire Island, a barrier beach on the Atlantic and a diverse summertime haven for New Yorkers.
Boatloads of Suffolk police would make a night-time assault on Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines. Prisoners were dragged off in manacles and charged with morals violations. All would plead guilty, most being from the city and frightened about casting their lot with Long Island locals. And, no question, this was a variant of a witch hunt. Police stressed, in notifying the press about the arrestees, where they worked and what they did. They wanted to get these guys in trouble.
But looking at what was happening to us was exactly the problem. There was no news footage back then of gays being dragged off in manacles because we were considered too disgusting to even talk about in family newspapers, let alone on TV. And when we were talked about, it always had to be in the most reassuringly scary and disgusted terms…
We had to fight just to be seen, before we could fight to have our stories told.
Some years ago I watched a documentary on Logo about the gay history of Fire Island. During a time when same-sex couples risked arrest for dancing together the police would patrol the streets around a club called the Botel and arrest random young men as they left. On those nights the bartenders would get the word somehow and warn people not to leave the club alone, but go out in large groups. Typically the police would arrest at least twenty gays. There was a large telephone pole near the Botel, that had a chain fastened to it, and as the police would randomly arrest gay men as they left the Botel they would cuff them to the chain…one by one…until they had their twenty for that night.
No, we never rode the back of the bus. We rode the boat back to the mainland and to jail. We sat in the cells of all the 50 states where sodomy laws put us. As Neil Miller documented in his book, Sex-Crime Panic in sentences of indefinite length in special wings in mental hospitals created specifically for homosexuals. As David Carter documented in his book Stonewall, bars and restaurants could have their licenses revoked if they served us. And as David K. Johnson documented in his book The Lavender Scare, we were relentlessly witch hunted in the 1950s because even more then the communist threat we were viewed by the republican party as a useful tool to play wedge politics against the democrats with. And as the Obama Justice Department brief states…
State and local law also has been used to prevent gay and lesbian people from associating freely. Liquor licensing laws, both on their face and through discriminatory enforcement, were long used to harass and shut down establishments patronized by gays and lesbians…State and local police also relied on laws prohibiting lewdness, vagrancy, and disorderly conduct to harass gays and lesbians, often when gay and lesbian people congregated in public… Similar practices persist to this day…
Ten Atlanta police officers lied about events surrounding a controversial 2009 raid at a Midtown gay bar, according to an investigative report released this week, and the department on Thursday demoted a commander and placed seven others on administrative duty. Two officers previously were fired.
…
The 343-page report confirmed complaints raised in the lawsuit that officers had deleted call logs, photographs and cell phone text messages, which a federal judge had ordered turned over to the lawyers for men who had filed suit. The report said the officers lied when asked about people being shoved to the floor, city ordinance violations that were witnessed and phone use that night.
Decades since Stonewall and it’s still going on. But at least now there can’t be an expectation that we will endure it quietly. And that has consequences. Bigotry no longer has the free reign it use to have over us. Sometimes we win a few. The closet as it turned out, not only kept us hidden, it kept the crimes against us hidden.
It is the prospect of that history of anti-gay persecution becoming commonly known and understood that terrifies the anti-gay industrial complex. Because then the need for laws protecting us from discrimination becomes crystal clear. Because then the hatred at the root of groups like NOM and the Family Research Council becomes sickeningly obvious. Because then it becomes hard, obscene even, to argue as Maryland Delegate Jay Walker did that,
“I cannot fathom a day in which I will be told which water fountain I can use but at the same time the gay and lesbian community had so many more things that they could participate in that African Americans and immigrants couldn’t.”
We sure did…
Across the country there was an alarming vagueness in legal definitions as to who might be classified as a sexual psychopath. State laws defined a sexual psychopath as someone who had a “propensity” to commit sex offenses (Michigan and Missouri) or who “lacked the power to control his sexual impulses” (Massachusetts and Nebraska). In most states, however, authorities couldn’t just pluck such a person off the street and label him a sexual psychopath. In Alabama, for instance, the suspect had to be convicted of a sex crime first. Under the proposed Iowa legislation, such a person had to be charged with – but not necessarily convicted of – a “public offense.” In Nebraska, on the other hand, a suspect didn’t have to be charged; all that was needed were certain facts showing “good cause” and the process of classification as a sexual psychopath could begin. And in Minnesota, the only requirements were a petition by a county attorney and an examination by “two duly licensed doctors of medicine.”
Whatever their individual wordings, such laws were intended to bring about the indefinite detention of dangerous or socially undesirable people. In all these states, a sexual psychopath could not be released from detention until psychiatrists ruled that he was “cured” or at the very least no longer posed a threat to society.
Despite their good intentions, sexual psychopath laws invariably took a catch-all approach to sexual offenses. The intended targets may have been rapists and murderers, but in almost every state with a sexual psychopath law, little or no distinction was made between violent and non-violent offenses, between consensual and nonconsensual behavior, or between harmless “sexual deviates” and dangerous sex criminals. An adult homosexual man who had sex with his lover in the privacy of his bedroom was as deviant as a child murderer. A person who had a pornographic book or photograph hidden in a night table faced the same punishment as a rapist. All these people were lumped into one category – that of the sexual psychopath – and could be incarcerated in a state hospital indefinitely.
New York lawyer and judge Morris Ploscowe, one of the most prominent critics of sexual psychopath laws at the time, found that these were most often used to punish and isolate minor offenders rather then dangerous predators. In Minnesota, which enacted its sexual psychopath law in the ’30s, some 200 people were committed to state hospitals in the first ten years of the law’s existence, according to Ploscowe. Most were detained for homosexual activity, not for being hard-core sex criminals.
-Neal Miller: Sex-Crime Panic
So many more things we could participate in…
Like the federal government, state and local governments have long discriminated against gays and lesbians in public employment. By the 1950s, may state and local governments had banned gay and lesbian employees, as well as gay and lesbian “employees of state funded schools and colleges, and private individuals in professions requiring state licenses.” … Many states and localities began aggressive campaigns to purge gay and lesbian employees from government services as early as the 1940s.
This employment discrimination was interrelated with longstanding state law prohibitions on sodomy; the discrimination was frequently justified by the assumption that gays and lesbians had engaged in criminalized and immoral sexual conduct…
–Defendant’s Brief In Opposition To Motions To Dismiss, Golinski v. Office Of Personnel Management.
At one time all fifty states had sodomy laws but never mind that, homosexuals were never really a persecuted minority. At one time bars and restaurants were forbidden from serving known homosexuals but never mind that, homosexuals were never really a persecuted minority. At one time the Post Office with help from the FBI tracked down suspected homosexuals for government witch hunters but never mind that, homosexuals were never really a persecuted minority. At one time homosexuals were rounded up and held indefinitely in mental hospitals, could have their children taken away from them, could loose their jobs, their homes, their professional licenses, their freedom, but never mind that, homosexuals were never really a persecuted minority.
1777 – A committee works on a revised set of criminal law for Virginia. Thomas Jefferson and other liberals attempt to have the death penalty for sodomy replaced by castration for men and boring a hole through the nose of a woman. The committee rejects their suggestion and retains the death penalty.
Nothing to see here…move along…
That is why our history must never be taught. As long as this history, which is still being uncovered and documented, remains hidden the haters can keep right on posturing as the aggrieved parties whenever we compare our struggle to that of other hated minorities, and their bar stool prejudices toward us to their bar stool prejudices toward others. They can keep insisting that we do not need the protection of the courts because we are not a suspect class and were never really persecuted to begin with. That we are merely a small group of privileged mostly rich white men who are seeking special rights at everyone else’s expense. That they are not bigots whose concern was never about anything more then that their hatreds always have free reign over the lives of those they hate. Forgive us if we’re more concerned with Indians and Blacks. That is why our history must never be taught.
In case you missed it, yesterday was Harvey Milk Day in California…
The Catholic Daily goes on to note the proclamation of Harvey Milk Day issued by Governor Jerry Brown. Of course they couldn’t let all this pass without denouncements of “sexual brainwashing” from the usual gang of bigots and political thugs posing as “Pro-Family” advocates. I’m putting scare quotes around pro-family because…seriously…you really can’t claim to be pro-family while at the same time trying your damnedest to rip to shreds families that don’t conform to the model that’s actually in the minority of family types these days. It’s like saying you love the human race except for all those people who aren’t straight, white and male.
Among those participating in the news conference…were [SaveCalifornia.com] president, Randy Thomasson, several parents and retired teachers, and Dr. Benjamin Kaufman, co-founder of NARTH…[who] called on “mothers and fathers to warn their children’s public school teachers not to honor” Milk.
I see. Randy Thomasson and NARTH want mothers and fathers to warn their children’s teachers about…what was it again…?
“Children are being led down a wrong road by the glorification of Harvey Milk,” Thomasson said in a statement following Gov. Brown’s proclamation. “An official ‘Harvey Milk Day’ promotes the unnatural and unhealthy homosexual, bisexual, and transsexual lifestyle to minors. Just as Harvey Milk ignored the health risks of homosexual behavior, his legacy will be to pull even more young people into this disease-prone lifestyle. Just as he advocated for openly homosexual teachers as role models, ‘Harvey Milk Day’ will train boys and girls to follow a worse role model — Milk, a predator of teens who knew no sexual boundaries or sexual danger.”
Okay…I have a question. Is the Catholic Church really going to go after Harvey Milk day on the basis that he preyed sexually on teenagers? That the game plan?
Sexual boundaries. Yes. Do let us know when you’ve found some.
I just have one comment to make on the unfolding story of Kirk Murphy. This can’t be shouted out loudly enough: The subject of this study, which formed much of the basis for the ex-gay movement’s claim to scientific legitimacy, killed himself and his therapy so deeply wounded his family they are still, decades later, suffering from it.
The Ex-Gay movement was born in the blood of innocents. In his book, Anything But Straight, Wayne talks about the formation of the very first ex-gay ministry, Love In Action, its first clients, and how one of them, Jack McIntyre, chose to end his life rather then keep failing at becoming heterosexual.
In 1973 John Evans, who is gay, and Rev. Kent Philpott, who is heterosexual, co-founded the original “ex-gay” ministry, Love In Action on the outskirts of San Francisco. Philpott soon wrote The Third Sex?, the first ever “ex-gay” book which touted six people who supposedly converted to heterosexuality through prayer.
Although time eventually revealed no one in his book actually had changed, the people reading it had no idea the stories were fallacious. As far as they knew, there was a magical place in California that had figured out the secret for making gays into straights. Inspired by his book, a few enthusiastic individuals spontaneously began their own “ex-gay” ministries.
Evans, however, denounced the program he co-founded after his best friend Jack McIntyre committed suicide in despair over not being able to “change”…
McIntyre wrote a suicide note. If the ex-gay movement could be said to have a heart and soul, here it is:
TO: Those left with the question, why did he do it?
I loved life and all that it had to offer to me each day.
I loved my job and my clients.
I loved my friends and thank God for each one of them.
I loved my little house and would not have wanted to live anywhere else.
All this looks like the perfect life. Yet, I must not let this shadow the problem that I have in my life. At one time, not to long ago, that was all that really mattered in my life. What pleased me and how it affected me. Now that I have turned my life over to the Lord and the changes came one by one, the above statements mean much more to me. I am pleased that I can say those statements with all the truth and honesty that is within me.
However, to make this short, I must confess that there were things in my life that I could not gain control, no matter how much I prayed and tried to avoid the temptation, I continually failed.
It is this constant failure that has made me make the decision to terminate my life here on earth. I do this with the complete understanding that life is not mine to take. I know that it is against the teachings of our Creator. No man is without sin, this I realise. I will cleanse myself of all sin as taught to me by His word. Yet, I must face my Lord with the sin of murder. I believe that Jesus died and paid the price for that sin too. I know that I shall have everlasting life with Him by departing this world now, no matter how much I love it, my friends, my family. If I remain it could possibly allow the devil the opportunity to lead me away from the Lord. I love life, but my love for the Lord is so much greater, the choice is simple.
I am not asking you to sanction my actions. That is not the purpose of my writing this at all. It is for the express purpose of allowing each one who will read this to know how I weighed things in my own mind. I don’t want you to think that, ‘I alone,’ should have been the perfect person, without sin. That would be ridiculous! It is the continuing lack of strength and/or obedience and/or will power to cast aside certain sins. To continually go before God and ask forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and all He stands for in my life.
Please know that I am extremely happy to be going to the Lord. He knows my heart and knows how much I love life and and all that it has to offer. But, He knows that I love Him more. That is why I believe that I will be with Him in Paradise.
I regret if I bring sorrow to those that are left behind. If you get your hearts in tune with the word of God you will be as happy about my ‘transfer’ as I am. I also hope that this answers sufficiently the question, why?
May God Have Mercy On My Soul.
A Brother & A Friend.
And as Wayne writes…
Still, Love in Action survived because many people who read The Third Sex? came to California in hopes of changing.
And George Rekers was still citing his success at fixing Kirk years after Kirk had taken his own life. When reporters caught up with him recently Rekers dismissed the idea that Kirk’s suicide could have had anything to do with the experimental gender identity therapy he’d inflicted upon the child. Oh no…that was years ago…
“That’s a long time ago, and to hypothesize, you have a hypothesis that positive treatment back in the 1970s has something to do with something happening decades later. That would, that hypothesis would need a lot of scientific investigation to see if it’s valid…”
More apparently, then the initial therapy got according to Jim Burroway who writes of his surprise that there was little to no independent verification of Reker’s claims. But according to his family Kirk was a troubled soul the rest of his life, though he had moments when it seemed he had made peace with himself. And it bears noting that the therapy deeply disturbed then, and continues to this day to disturb, his mother and his straight older brother, his sister being too young at the time to remember any of what happened.
“I do grieve for the parents now that you’ve told me that news. I think that’s very sad.” – George Rekers
Look carefully at this: Kirk was the patient who made Rekers’ career and he only just now learns of his suicide when CNN reporter tracked him down? Yes. Of course. He never stayed in touch, clearly and sickeningly never felt the slightest curiosity about how his most famous patient was doing. This is not science, it is politics. The client is not important. The client’s family is not important. It’s the message, that that there is no such thing as a homosexual only broken heterosexuals, that is important. Because inside that message is another: that homosexuals bring their own persecution upon themselves, since they can choose whenever they want to not be homosexual.
…no matter how much I prayed and tried to avoid the temptation, I continually failed… The Ex-Gay movement was born in the blood of innocents. It continues to destroy lives and wreak families with no more tangible regard from its leadership for the human toll now then in the moment of its birth. Their allegiance is to a higher agency. No…not God. The culture war. Failure is not a bug, it’s a feature. The scapegoat must hate themselves too.
Who Knew The Wedding Altar Was Also A Sacrificial One…(continued)
Joe Jervis over at Joe.My.God posts what looks like the cover of NOM’s current mailer…
So it looks like NOM is doubling-down on their The Homosexuals Are After Your Children card that worked for them so well in California. How…unsurprising…
When you have reduced your neighbor to the status of a scarecrow that drives voters to the polls, or a scapegoat for every failure of moral character you would rather not be held accountable for, when you cannot see the people for the homosexuals, then threats to their lives become meaningless abstractions. They’re not your neighbors, they’re not people, they’re things…and the safety of things isn’t something that often crosses the mind. It’s not hate exactly…it’s what hate does to the heart eventually. That may look like a photo of a cute little boy with his daddy’s glasses on, reading a book about two kings who fall in love, but look closer. That is a photo of human souls in free fall. To win elections, to prevent loving same-sex couples from having access to marriage, NOM is belly flopping into the gutter, and they know it, and they don’t care. Not honor, not morality, not any shred of basic human decency left within them matters to them any more. All that matters is striking out at the Homosexual Menace. This is what hate does to the heart, eventually.
The Homosexuals Are After Your Children!!! It’s a message that gets attention and, for now, wins elections. The trump card you can play when it looks like too many voters are starting to view the homosexual as their neighbor. It also gets people killed. But for that to weigh on your conscience, you have to see gays as people, not things. You have to be able to see the people for the homosexuals. Bigots can’t.
Atlanta-based law firm King & Spalding won plaudits Monday from gay activists for backing out of an agreement to argue to uphold the federal ban on gay marriage. But a day later the reviews were a bit more bruising in the legal community.
Top lawyers and law professors, with some notable exceptions, called it an embarrassing blunder by the prestigious firm or a betrayal of a client and legal principles. Others think King & Spalding, whose clients include General Electric and Coca-Cola, may have backed out because the firm fears the fallout from leading an anti-gay legal fight.
You say that like it’s a bad thing…
King & Spalding’s announcement it would not represent congressional House Republicans in their quest to defend court challenges to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the subsequent decision of Paul Clement, the lawyer in the case, to quit the firm and take it elsewhere was the talk Tuesday among Yale University Law School faculty, said Lawrence Fox, a Yale professor and expert in legal ethics. DOMA defines marriage “for federal tax, Social Security and other purposes” as only a union between a man and a woman.
“We really go down a bad road if we say law firms can’t take on (controversial) matters or people will assume you have those views,” said Fox. “I’m going to walk into my class today and I’m going to use this. I’m tearing up my lesson plan … to talk about this case.”
The nice thing about working in an ivory tower is what you do doesn’t have to have any relationship to the world outside. Tenure. It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who have to live there, in the world of the commoners, it’s only they who remember the panic that set in back in 1993 when the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples could not constitutionally be denied the right to marry. It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who remember how the party of Lincoln and Fred Phelps pushed through congress the Defense Of Marriage Act to protect American heterosexuals from the damaging effects of having to live in a world where the sordid, brief and barren sexual assignations of homosexuals had the same legal standing as their noble unions of male and female. It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who remember how the man who stood in front of them and said “I have a vision for America and you’re part of it” signed that bill into law in the dead of night, somewhat less then three years after he folded on his promise to let gay servicemen serve openly and with dignity. It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who watched as the new republican majority in congress, elected on campaign pledges of jobs, set about immediately to work reassuring their base that the meager gains gay Americans had made while the democrats were in control would not stand, and that they would be steadfast in opposing president Obama’s plan to impose The Gay Agenda on America.
It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who read the steady stream of news reports of same-sex couples beaten down and destroyed by this nation’s abject capitulation to bigotry, month after month, year after year.
A gay Long Island couple who have played by the immigration rules for more than a decade are stuck in a Catch-22 that could tear them apart just when they need each other most.
New Yorker Edwin Blesch, 70 and his South African husband, Tim Smulian, 65, have been spending six months on Long Island and six months abroad to comply with Smulian’s tourist visa.
But Blesch, who has HIV, suffered several mini-strokes and other complications and is now unable to travel safely.
Smulian is his primary caregiver – but has no way to stay here permanently.
It’s unclear what will happen to the couples already profiled by major news sources, like Monica Alcota and Cristina Ojeda. The one thing that is clear is that this is a sad day for binational same-sex couples, and for everyone who values America’s tradition of being a place where people can come from anywhere in the world to make a home. Like so many other things, that seems to be a privilege reserved for straight people.
It’s only those tiresome homosexuals who remember their names…names like Laurel Hester. Not law professors in ivory towers.
Here is a law firm that proudly touted its support for gay Americans in their struggle for equality. Suddenly it is, in a very high profile way, part of the republican party’s DOMA circus. Suddenly every attorney, every clerk, every secretary, every intern working for this law firm is under a gag order…not simply to refrain from speaking about the case, but never to breath so much as a word against DOMA. Imagine that instead of Teh Gay this case was about defending a congressional ban on Jewish ownership of businesses. How many eyebrows would be raised when a law firm that touted its opposition to antisemitism, suddenly took on the congressional defense of that law, and gagged its partners and staff from ever speaking a word against the segregation of Jews? Who would complain when the law firm withdrew and the jackass antisemitic partner who dragged them into that despicable case left to pursue it on his own, that the Jews had gone too far?
But conscience, and a sense of basic human decency wanders in a lot of people, even now, when it comes to the persecution of gay Americans. Suddenly persecuting minorities becomes some abstract thing, less important, less real, then the right of republicans to conduct a great circus show of defending marriage against the forces of Obama and Satan, and demonize a segment of America for votes. The constant rain of gay blood on the streets isn’t even on their moral radar…
HRC is right to fight vigorously to overturn DOMA, which deprives gays and lesbians of many of the rights enjoyed by their heterosexual counterparts. But it sullies itself and its cause by resorting to bullying tactics.
On February 22, around 11:00 p.m., Shortell was walking home to his apartment on Kent Avenue and North Fourth Street, a walk that never felt unsafe to him before, when he was brutally attacked by a group of four teenagers. The details were fuzzy after that and as a result of the incident, Shortell suffered a fractured chin and nose; eye sockets and cheekbones, requiring ten hours of immediate surgery, several days in the hospital, and a month of recovery since.
Bullying tactics? Bullying tactics? Here’s the problem: the scapegoats aren’t taking it anymore. They’re fighting back. Where is the outrage in the corporate news media…the comfortable McMansion in the rich white suburbs corporate news media? Once again, it’s directed at gay Americans. For standing up for their human dignity. For defending themselves against hate. For fighting back. Republicans inciting hatred for votes is just Business As Usual. Gays asking businesses to walk the walk not just talk the talk on civil rights is front page news! How dare they. Don’t they know their place anymore? What is this world coming to, when even homosexuals demand to be treated with respect? Who told the them they had a right not to be bullied? It certainly wasn’t us.
Considering the state of the economy, it should come as no surprise that the ranks of the child-free are exploding. The Department of Agriculture reports that the average cost for a middle-income two-parent family to support a kid through high school is $286,050 (it’s nearly half a million dollars for couples in higher tax brackets). Want him or her to get a college education? The number jumps to nearly $350,000 for a public university, and more than $400,000 for private. Though if your kid’s planning to major in Male Sterilization, it could wind up being a good investment: The vasectomy business seems to be one of the few in America that is booming. In the past year, the Associates in Urology clinic in West Orange, New Jersey, has seen a 50 percent jump in the procedure. So you could stress over starting a college fund, or you could consider that you can get a vasectomy at Planned Parenthood for less than the cost of a Bugaboo Cameleon stroller. Unless you’re among the less than 2 percent of Americans who farm for a living and might conceivably rely on offspring for free labor, children have gone from being an economic asset to an economic liability.
But for the child-free, the benefits go beyond dollars and cents. There’s less guilt, less worry, less responsibility, more sleep, more free time, more disposable income, no awkward conversations about Teen Mom, no forced relationships with people just because your kids like their kids, no chauffeuring other people’s kids in your minivan to soccer games you find less appealing than televised chess.
In his best-seller Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert writes, “Couples generally start out quite happy in their marriages and then become progressively less satisfied over the course of their lives together, getting close to their original levels of satisfaction only when their children leave home.” No wonder so many are choosing to spend their entire marriages as empty-nesters. A 2009 University of Denver study found that 90 percent of couples experienced a decrease in marital bliss after the birth of their first child. And in a 2007 Pew survey, just 41 percent of adults stated that children were very important for a successful marriage, down from 65 percent in 1990. Meanwhile, nearly one in five American women now ends her reproductive years without children, up from one in ten in the 1970s.
Growing up I used to get odd looks from people, friends and adults both, whenever I expressed my utter disinterest in raising a family. It marked me as weird as far back as elementary school, probably long before anyone began to get a clue that Bruce wasn’t the sort you’d ever see holding hands with a girl to begin with. But it wasn’t that I thought the married life wasn’t for me, or that I harbored some deep seated disgust at the thought of having children around. I would hate to live in one of those adults only communities where everyone is just old and tired. As you get older especially, you really appreciate the cheerful anarchy that happens around kids. It keeps you thinking. I just never saw any personal need within me to do the parent thing and I reckoned early on that if you were going to raise a kid right, you needed to really want to have kids. I knew almost right from the start that I didn’t.
To a lot of people apparently, that makes me defective somehow. I guess the thinking is it doesn’t matter what you do for your community or your country or the good of humanity if you don’t also produce children. But…that’s bullshit. And I’m happy to say that finally some heterosexuals are standing up for their life choices here.
For Heather McGhinnis, a married 35-year-old marketing specialist in Elgin, Illinois, motherhood is simply a lifestyle choice that’s not for her. “The job of being a parent doesn’t interest me,” she explains. “Just like I don’t want to be an accountant, I don’t want to be a parent.”
This is the case for nearly all of my straight friends, who were all theoretically lead to believe growing up that being parents was their natural destiny. They didn’t go there for the same reasons I, a gay man who could nevertheless adopt if I really wanted to, didn’t either. No interest.
That’s not to say I have no interest in the welfare of kids. I care very much care about their welfare, about the world they must grow up in. I care they all get a good education. I care that they grow up safe and sound and healthy and strong. I care about that very much. That’s a natural adult thing, whether you have any of your own or not. If you need to have kids of your own to care about the welfare of kids then there is something wrong with you, not me.
Now at last folks like us are finding our voices. And for once I am so very, very glad to see heterosexuals taking the lead here because a gay guy like me can’t plausibly be standing up for the virtues of childlessness with any sort of credibility. Of course you’re childless, you’re a fucking homo and homos don’t reproduce, they recruit… It’s sad but there it is. Not that childless couples are going to get a break from the culture warriors simply because they’re heterosexual. Oh no…they’re easily as much the Enemy as we are, if not more so. If you think the culture wars are only about homosexuality you really need to look more carefully at what right wing lunatics think of contraception. And no, it’s not about sex being only for having children either.
According to Laura S. Scott, who surveyed 171 subjects for her book Two Is Enough: A Couple’s Guide to Living Childless by Choice, that kind of attitude is linked to a specific personality component. “A lot of introverts, thinkers, judgers—these are people who think before they act,” she says. “They’re planners, and they’re not the kind of people who can be easily led into a conventional life just because everyone else is doing it.”
[Emphasis mine…] How unsurprising that it’s mostly my fellow introverts who are going the childless route. No doubt the culture warriors will say this is all the fault of Teh Gay. We’re setting a bad example.
Well…yes. We are. And happy to be of service! We’re showing heterosexual couples that you can have a happy and contented love life without kids if you are not really into the parent thing. That you can contribute to your community and your country and to the future of humanity in many ways besides childbearing. That you don’t have to follow orders.
Especially orders from louts who are waiting with bated breath for the end of the world.
Yes, yes…blame Teh Gay. We showed our heterosexual brothers and sisters what you never wanted them to know: that you can make the world a better place for everyone…kids included…and that’s fine, you’ve done your part, you’ve left your mark, you’ve borne your share of the burden of civilization more nobly then anyone who ever added souls to a world they didn’t give a good goddamn about.
Chambers: We’re being portrayed as group of people making judgments on peoples’ lives whereas I and thousands of others like me, who experienced same-sex attraction, are trying to live out our lives through the filter of our faith, not through the filter of our sexuality…
…he said, making a judgment not just on gay people (they live their lives through the filter of their sexuality), but also on gay Christians (they place a higher value on sex then they do their faith). Yes, yes…it’s all about sex with homosexuals, isn’t it, Alan.
You manipulated Cooper so deftly there. I’m impressed. That what years of talking parents into throwing their gay kids into your soul grinder has done for you?
All Together Mouseketeers…You Too Tommy…You’re One Of Us Too…
This was a part of my childhood. Not a huge one, but an important one…
I never became a member…even at that tender age I wasn’t much of a joiner…but I watched what Walt Disney put on my TV screen regularly. Mostly it was for this…
And this…
His vision of the future was a big part of my kidhood dreams. I wanted to be there, to grow up into that world where a great big beautiful tomorrow was shining at the end of every day. Somewhere along the line I stopped dreaming it. Somewhere past adolescence, somewhere after the country as a whole, tired of the war in Vietnam, tired of the race riots, fatigued by so much inter generational conflict, lost interest in the frontier of space, so terribly soon after we’d just put our footsteps on the moon.
Though I never stopped dreaming about it, I stopped believing in Disney’s great big beautiful tomorrow. I put it down to fantasy…a beautiful story I was told as a kid that I wanted to believe in, but would never happen. The world just didn’t work that way. But I think there was something else that was missing from that dream. Something that, had I seen it, might have made me hold onto it for a little longer…maybe even leave childhood behind with a vow to work a little harder to make it real.
That something, was me. I was missing from that future. And so were a lot of other kids just like me.
In the original ‘The Flintstones’ series, the only characters of color to appear were natives of Africa who participated in a cave scout jamboree. Worse yet, far off into the distant future, on ‘The Jetsons,’ the universe seemed completely dominated by white people as well.
These were just signs of the times and while toon tones began changing in the 1970s, it’s almost blasphemous nowadays to have a television show that doesn’t include diversity, often to a point where it almost just seems forced.
So at four decades post-Stonewall and more than a decade into the age of ‘After Ellen,’ it wouldn’t be unnatural for one to wonder just where The Walt Disney Company draws the line at diversity. In all fairness, the company has teetered on the issue, having both progressive human resources policies for same-sex couples (which incited the infamous and rather seemingly innocuous Southern Baptist boycott) as well as just recently relenting on allowing same-sex commitment ceremonies at the theme park resorts under public pressure.
So where exactly does Disney draw the line when it comes to acceptance of gays in ‘everyday life’?
Well you already know the answer. Yes, Disney has been very progressive when compared to other media and entertainment companies. Behind the stage. On it…well we’re all still in the closet. And if we’re invisible on stage, we’re also invisible in the audience. To each other. To ourselves.
That’s a shame. Disney wholesomeness isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and in fact it’s only mine provisionally. I like it to be there, but a steady diet of it would suffocate me. And it would have when I was a teenager too. But that Disney-esq sensibility about life is more me then not. I like my visits to Key West, they relax and de-stress me nicely. But my visits to Walt Disney World rekindle something inside of me that I had thought long dead. That, it’s a small world after all attitude. That idealized Main Street USA. That Tomorrowland, where we would all live someday in a world where science and the pursuit of knowledge weren’t just good things, but a great adventure. Sniff at it if you like, but there are worse visions to have become attached to as a kid, to keep close to your heart as an adult, to hand down now to the kids among us.
I should have been a part of that vision when I was a kid. All of us gay kids should have. We were there in the audience, but invisible…even to ourselves. So instead of Disney’s future, we got told we were mentally ill. Instead of Disney wholesomeness we were taught that our desires were a sickness best kept hidden away from decent people, and especially children. Our friends got the happily ever after. We got the gutter. The great big beautiful tomorrow we could all look forward too would be a better place because we would not be in it. You can’t tell me that didn’t make a difference in the adults we all eventually became.
One of these kids will later come out of the closet…
I like to think that if Disney was alive today (yeah…he’d be 110 now…But if…), we Would be a part of that vision of the future. Walt Disney was a pioneer, who revered the old days and idealized them in his Disneyland. But he also never let the past keep him from moving forward. The caretakers of his vision today alas, aren’t the visionaries he was. But this world doesn’t get very many of those…
So according to [Disney Channel Worldwide President of Entertainment, Gary Marsh], if a character hasn’t had a crush on someone, it’s okay for the viewer to assume they character is implicitly gay and that should simply be enough. At least until the character develops an attraction for the opposite sex anyway.
Perhaps the correct answer is “we just aren’t ready yet.”
“A man should never neglect his family for business.”
-Walt Disney
Gay kids need to be brought into the Disney “family” audience too because they are part of the family too and there are worse examples out there to set for them then Disney. “Someday” should come sooner rather then later.
“All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.”
-Walt Disney
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality conducted the largest survey of transgender discrimination. Among its findings were one quarter of transgender people lost a job for being transgender and high rates of housing instability and homelessness. The survey also revealed double the rates of poverty for transgender people compared to the general population. The data indicate that transgender people have higher vulnerability to violence. It also found that more than half of transgender and gender non-conforming people who were bullied, harassed or assaulted in school because of their gender identity have attempted suicide.
Gender non-conforming people… A lot of people fall into that category who might mistakenly assume that violence toward transgendered persons isn’t any of their concern. But the gay man casually holding the hand of the man he loves, the uppity straight woman, the insufficiently masculine and aggressive boy, all are regarded as fair prey by thugs, and for exactly the same reason.
“I suggest, indeed, letting children who wish go to school in clothes of the opposite sex – but not counseling other children to not tease them or hurt their feelings. On the contrary, don’t interfere, and let the other children ridicule the child who has lost that clear boundary between play-acting at home and the reality needs of the outside world. Maybe, in this way, the child will re-establish that necessary boundary. It is a mistake for various interfering, ignorant, and biased busybodies to try to “counsel” the other children into accepting the abnormal. It is very healthy to be able to draw the line between what is healthy and what is sick.”
-Joseph Berger, NARTH Scientific Advisory Committee
Many people who read that when it first hit the blogstream were appalled. What kind of man actually advocates bullying a child? But it is a vanishingly short distance between aggression toward adults perceived as weak, and children who are by nature vulnerable. The mindset of the adult who would excuse the one, is unlikely to shrink from the other, or even understand that it is wrong.
There are two parts to the gay rights struggle. There is the freedom to love and be loved in return. There is the freedom from the closet, to live our lives openly, honestly, as the persons we actually are. No decent society denies these to its own. Our struggle then, and those of our transgendered neighbors, are one and the same. Against gender conformity. Against hatred of difference. But understand also, that the struggle of transgendered people in the broader sense reminds us that the American dream of liberty and justice for all is still very much an unfinished business.
But We Must Consider The Feelings Of The Bullies Too…
The problem with directly confronting and dealing with anti-gay bullying is apparently we have to do it in a way that doesn’t make the bullies feel like they’re doing anything wrong…
A spate of teen suicides linked to anti-gay harassment is prompting school officials nationwide to rethink their efforts against bullying – and in the process, risk entanglement in a bitter ideological debate.The conflict: Gay-rights supporters insist that any effective anti-bullying program must include specific components addressing harassment of gay youth. But religious conservatives condemn that approach as an unnecessary and manipulative tactic to sway young people’s views of homosexuality.
It’s a highly emotional topic. Witness the hate mail – from the left and right – directed at Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District while it reviews its anti-bullying strategies in the aftermath of a gay student’s suicide…
What leaps out at you first here is the rote equivocation on the part of this mainstream reporter. Instead of stating what is simply a fact here that religious conservatives insist young people’s views of homosexuals must remain negative, its religious conservatives condemn that approach as an unnecessary and manipulative tactic to sway young people’s views of homosexuality. Never mind that. Note that its hate mail when it comes both from the homophobes and people outraged at what homophobes are doing to helpless children.
Reporters can’t be taking sides after all. Just imagine the national outrage and loathing if the news media was as carefully neutral toward Al Qaeda. We can’t call them terrorists after all, that would be taking sides…
This in a nutshell, is why gay kids are dying. The religious right has successfully convinced everyone that brutalizing gays is an essential part of their religious freedom. Hating Jews might raise a few eyebrows. Hating people of color might get them some frowns of disapproval. But to even question that they are and have been for decades now engaged in a systematic campaign of hate mongering, let alone question their need to hate their gay neighbor is apparently a step too far. And the consequence is that gay kids feel as though they have no friends in the adult world. Their need for love and acceptance in this world is of no more importance then the need of bigots to spit in their faces and look the other way while their kids kick them in the stomach. They are alone.
But if we act aggressively to protect gay kids from bullying we’re taking sides and that just wouldn’t be fair…
But at least four younger teens have killed themselves since July after being targeted by anti-gay bullying, including Justin Aaberg, 15, of Andover, Minn., who hanged himself in his room in July. His friends told his mother he’d been a frequent target of bullies mocking his sexual orientation.Five other students in his Anoka-Hennepin school district have killed themselves in the past year, and gay-rights advocates say bullying may have played a role in two of these cases as well.
Carlson, the district superintendent, lost a teenage daughter of his own in a car crash, and says he shares the anguish of the parents bereaved by suicide. He acknowledges that a controversial district policy calling for “neutrality” in classroom discussions of sexual orientation may have created an impression among some teachers, students and outsiders that school staff wouldn’t intervene aggressively to combat anti-gay bullying.
As we software engineers say, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature…
It was posted at Suicide.org, and it’s from a gay teen, aged 16, named Steven, who attempted suicide. He survived.
It’s brutal, and I would rather no gay kid reads it. Seriously, if you’re a gay teen go look at some of the videos over at Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project. Because it Does get better. You don’t need to be dealing with what I’m about to post here. You have resources. The Trevor Hotline is a 24-hour toll-free suicide prevention line for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning youth. Call them at 1-866-4-U-Trevor (866-488-7386). But seriously…go see It Gets Better. And…I love you. Hang in there. There are adventures waiting for you live them. There are people waiting in your future for you to come into their lives and make them smile and feel like they will always be loved and never be lonely again. Your dreams are waiting for you. Walk proudly into them.
Images From A Sideshow Running Away With The Circus…(continued)
Here’s some shots of the counter-demonstrators…
As I said previously, the main contingent of the counter-demonstrators came in two waves shortly after the NOM rally began. But even as NOM was setting up there were a handful of individuals there on the sidewalk near them, quietly speaking their truths. And among these was Mel White and his companions from Soulforce. I saw Mel occasionally walk over to some of the NOM folks and chat with them for a while. What was said between them I have no idea: much as I would have like to have snapped some photos of those conversations, I kept my distance. At 56 going on 57, I have a very negative opinion of the possibility of changing minds, let alone hearts of any of these True Believers. But I deeply respect anyone who still believes in their heart that it can be done. So I stay out of it. This is why I am not a professional news photographer. The spirit of Weegee laughs at my deference to the better angels.
More and more I am seeing at these demonstrations, young heterosexual couples who see this struggle as their own too. And it is. Only on its face is this a fight about homosexuality. Look closer. It’s a fight over the right to love and be loved, waged by the power hungry war mongering human gutter, that throughout history has viewed the power of love as the essential enemy to be smashed wherever it exists. The gay rights struggle is the lover’s struggle.
There were also lots of individual folks bearing simple statements in support of the right to love. Sometimes you thought you saw another lonely heart, determined to stand up for what in their own lives is yet to be…
As I said, the main force of counter-demonstrators came in two waves. The first was peaceful and positive. The second wave were a tad angrier. And…louder. They were quickly asked/ordered to move further down the plaza, away from the NOM event.
I understand this anger perfectly well. And I am not going to sit here and pontificate that this sort of demonstration is counter-productive. The other side turns us into scarecrows they can safely fear at a distance, and defeat with bar stool valor and junk food religion. They need to see that we are as human as they; and there is nothing less surprising on this earth then the sight of humans who have been attacked getting angry, and fighting back. When people are denied the dream of love, when that ability to love another, and accept their love in return is gutted out of them, what is left?
I have have said often, that the one who fights this fight and doesn’t put their head down on the pillow every night, just a little bit angrier then the night before, just a little more angry then they thought it was humanly possible to be angry, isn’t really paying attention. But it is oh-so easy for anger to become hate. And hate will kill your soul.
This is the lover’s struggle. When all you have left in it is anger, you are done for. It is for love that we fight. Every moment you can put anger aside and remember that, you defeat hate.
They say men don’t change, they reveal themselves. I suppose that’s possibly true of the man to himself. There are things within us we will never get over. For some of us, it’s a set of prejudices. For others, it’s matters of the heart. I am (I realize this) a sentimentalist. Once upon a time I thought it was just a little thing about me. But no…it’s not just a little thing. I have to be careful.
I’m going through photos of friends from back in the day for posting in a Facebook album. And I am looking at one of a friend I haven’t spoken to in a long time. In it, he is smiling at something just off camera. It is a perfectly happy, carefree smile. The smile I used to see more of, once upon a time. It puts me into a dangerous state. I am remembering how much I liked him. I am remembering how well we got along together. Left shoe-right shoe. Peas in a pod. One starts the sentence, the other completes it. Just about as close as two guys can be and not be lovers.
I stopped talking to him when he took that detour into Rush Limbaugh land. I was being more open about my sexual orientation, getting damn tired of always having to tread lightly around the prejudices of the people around me, the prejudices we’d all had drilled into us ever since we were kids. I was in my 40s, and beginning to realize I wasn’t going to have a life completely free of the closet, if I didn’t start living one now. My friends had enough time by then to get over it. But the more open I was, the more static I got from this particular one.
So one day, I just gave up and stopped speaking to him. He would call from time to time, and I would not answer. Just leave me alone…
He is in very poor health these days. His situation is not good. He lives on disability, and his knack for trading. Cigarettes are slowly killing him. The last time I saw him, he was practically a skeleton of his former self. And I’m looking at this photograph, and his smile, and I’m wondering now what kind of asshole I’ve been all this time.
He’s your friend…he’s down on his luck…he may be dying…and you’re being a jerk Bruce Garrett…
So I call and hear his voice for the first time in a long while, and with that image of him from back in the 70s in mind I am almost in tears. Hey guy…how are you these days…everything okay…? And we chat for a while, and…
…and it doesn’t take long for him to remind me why I stopped speaking to him.
He: (talking about the lady he’s been seeing…his on again off again girlfriend. He’s complaining about her sudden mood swings. One moment its all good, the next its Stressville…)
Me: I know the feeling. I was down in Florida a couple weeks ago, and got a chance to see my high school crush for a while. He’s got a really nice place down there and he invited me…
He: (changing the subject) Did I tell you about the Smith & Wesson Airweight I got…
Ah yes… I get to hear about your love life but don’t I dare tell you about mine. And it gets better…
Me: So you have a computer again? You doing anything besides the eBay thing? Facebook?
He: Yeah I’m on Facebook…
Me: (remembering) Oh…right…
He: Yeah, and I defriended you because I didn’t want all that gay stuff showing up on my page. I didn’t want my other friends seeing it. You can be offended now for a couple minutes and then get over it…
Me: Ah…right. You’re still a little fuzzy about how all this stuff works aren’t you? Your friends see your wall, not your news page. The news page shows you stuff your friends are doing. Their notes and links and status messages don’t all show up on your wall unless you choose to share them. The news page you see when you sign in isn’t your wall.
He: (changing the subject) I don’t do eBay anymore. I am on Gun Traders now…
…and so on. Of course the problem wasn’t your friends might see All That Gay Stuff on your page, but that you kept seeing it. That was always the problem. If I have to get over anything I suppose it’s you guy. You will never get over my being gay will you? Never. Won’t happen.
Right. I have to keep that old photograph of you in its context whenever I look at it. That was a different time. A different universe practically. We were so close back then. Best friends practically. But you took a detour into Rush Limbaugh land and we can’t talk anymore. I suppose we’re not the only friends who have been separated by the culture war. But…really…it wasn’t Rush who got between us, it was your cheapshit prejudices. You want to think you like me as a friend, but you don’t like Me. It was that name on the closet door you made a friend of. There is nothing behind that door anymore.
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