And though I agree with their sentiment, it’s a gloopy business when a company celebrates the election of a president with the flavour ‘Yes Pecan’. In an age when ice cream companies are melting away and reforming as purveyors of frozen yoghurt, is this dinky piece of homespun cheeriness really the best focus of the company’s efforts?
Ah, yes…the old Don’t We Have Better Things To Worry About sigh. Followed up like night after day with…
That gay people should be able to get married seems to me a basic human right, and I admit that in a completely partisan way I was tempted to justify B&J’s action as part of the ongoing struggle against ignorance and fear. But what would I be thinking if a contrary point of view was being aired? I’d be first in line to denounce them as squalid influence peddlers, shamelessly meddlesome, shiveringly undemocratic tricksters.
Ice cream should be a relief from side-taking…
Yes. And so should getting married. So should taking your kids to the pool. So should having lunch at the local diner. So should a nice quiet stroll along the beach. Life’s simple beautiful pleasures. And next time you’re wondering why so many of life’s simple beautiful little pleasures have been turned into a scorched earth battleground, ask yourself what happens to any neighborhood, any community, any nation, when its people turn a blind eye to crime.
Because that’s what this is. A bunch of low brow back alley, knuckle-dragging thugs are stealing all those beautiful simple life pleasures away from some of your neighbors. In some ways it’s far more wounding then even those acts of outright violence against us. Imagine how it is, to not even be able to walk down the street hand in hand with the one you love, without fear. Life’s simple beautiful pleasures.
Ben & Jerry’s is, in their own hippy-dippy little way, giving it back to us. Yes, it’s corporate marketing. But also…love, marriage and ice cream. Happiness. There are worse things corporations can do to market their wares. Yes, this is taking sides. It is always a matter of taking sides. Every time you pause for a moment to take in the simple beautiful joy of life, you are taking sides against the pain and heartbreak and unmitigated horror that seems sometimes to make life utterly pointless. Your gay and lesbian neighbors struggle to hold onto those moments every day.
Bishop Desmond Tutu, who knows a few things about life under the jackboot of hate, said "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality." Why does the right to marry seem like such a basic human right to you, one that same-sex couples should enjoy too, if not that giving that promise to love, honor and cherish, and receiving it, and keeping it in all those endlessly simple day-to-day ways spouses do together, is one of this life’s great joys. If you believe that gay people are people too, then taking sides shouldn’t even be in question. Especially when it comes to the simple things. Especially those.
There are people in this world who wish your gay and lesbian neighbors to never know those joys…great or small. But it seems sometimes, especially the small. Because in their world, if we can love and laugh and live in peace and happiness, and find simple quiet contentment in the arms of the one we love, even for a moment, even for an instant, then they’re not hating us enough. Are you tired of it all? Trust me, you will never be tired of it as much as any of us are. And…trust me…to the extent you can find your own moments of simple perfect joy too, then they hate you too. You don’t have to be homosexual for them to hate you. Just happy and content and in love with life. Even for a just moment. That is enough. That is all it takes for them to hate you. And all it takes for you to defeat them is to reach for one simple beautiful joy and let it remind you that life is good.
At The Center Of It All: The Right To Kiss The One You Love
I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating again and again because it really says it all. An old high school friend of mine told me once about taking a college course on human sexuality. The course, he said, included a number of films which you might easily expect to find in an Adult Entertainment store then in a university classroom. Most of the kids who signed up for that course did so, according to my friend who probably did also, just to see those films.
What they didn’t bargain for was also having to watch a bunch of sex they didn’t much like. In addition to the hot young babes there was also footage of folks old enough to be their own parents having sex. This was after all, a course on human sexuality, not pornography. My friend said the sections on geriatric sex generally grossed out the audience. But not as much as the section on gay male sex. But it wasn’t just watching two guys having sex specifically, that bothered the audience. Some of them.
Which was what my friend was telling me about, in wide eyed wonder, since he was one of the few heterosexuals I knew back then who were really and truly unfazed by my sexual orientation. We were all in college then and I was in the process of slowly coming out to my friends, one at a time. He was one of the first I’d come out to and that afternoon he was telling me in wonder about his human sexuality class and the gay sex film they’d seen. I remember it well, because in retrospect it was one of those rare moments where I could actually see someone getting it. He said when the gay male sex scenes came on screen, the ignorant jock types in the class burst out laughing and mocked the couple. But then images of them being affectionate with each other came on screen and the atmosphere changed. Those scenes completely offended the jocks he said…far more, far, Far more, then watching them have sex did.
That was 1973 or ’74 as I remember it. Back in those days if you wanted to watch pornography you either got some grainy 8mm stag films from some shady character or you went to an X-rated movie somewhere in the really bad part of town (or Viers Mill Road across from the Zayres if you lived in Rockville, Maryland…). Nowadays you download it off the Internet and teens as young as 13 are way more sexually confidant and secure then my generation ever was. The cultural scolds are bellyaching that the nation is swimming in sexually charged images and that it’s dragging our morals into the gutter. But notice that one of their biggest bugaboos, their deepest fear, their prime target in the culture war isn’t the proliferation of pornography…it’s same-sex marriage. This, this above all else, is their evidence that the culture is sinking into a bottomless pit: homosexuals couples are getting married.
Try this experiment. Open a gay bath house somewhere in the Bible Belt, and nearby, open a same-sex wedding chapel, and see which one gets the most protests. Trust me it won’t even be close. It will be as though the bath house isn’t even there, as long as the chapel is.
The lightning rod, the flash point in homophobic bigotry has always been same-sex love, not same-sex sex. It isn’t that we have sex that bothers the bigots. If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard that "I don’t care what you people do in the privacy of your bedrooms…" bullshit I’d be rich. It’s when we Flaunt It that they start screaming about militant homosexuals. And what, exactly, is flaunting it? Well I can tell you what it isn’t: having sex.
The tectonics of attitude are shifting in subtle ways that are geographic, psychic and also generational, suggested Katherine M. Franke, a lesbian who teaches law and is a director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia University. “I’ve been attacked on the street and called all sorts of names” for kissing a female partner in public, Professor Franke said. “The reception our affection used to generate was violence and hatred,” she added. “What I’ve found in the last five years is that my girlfriend and I get smiles from straight couples, especially younger people. Now there’s almost this aggressive sense of ‘Let me tell you how terrific we think that is.’ ”
Yet gay-bashing still occurs routinely, Mr. Patton of the Anti-Violence Project said, even in neighborhoods like Chelsea in Manhattan, where the sight of two men kissing on the street can hardly be considered a frighten-the-horses proposition. “In January some men were leaving a bar in Chelsea,” saying goodbye with a kiss, Mr. Patton said. “One friend got into a taxi and then a car behind the taxi stopped and some guys jumped out and beat up the other two.” One victim of the attack, which is under investigation by the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, was bruised and shaken. The second had a broken jaw.
That Times article begins with a story about how a candy commercial featuring an accidental same-sex kiss generated enough controversy that it had to be withdrawn. The article noted that the incident, "had the inadvertent effect of revealing how a simple display of affection grows in complexity as soon as one considers who gets to demonstrate it in public, and who, very often, does not."
And so it goes. A same-sex couple is brutally beaten in front of a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona simply for holding hands inside. So security guards at a fast food joint throw a same-sex couple out for sharing a kiss and then call the police on them. So a same-sex couple, strolling too close to the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City, get handcuffed and arrested for kissing. That arrest for kissing in front of the Mormon Temple, so soon after it became apparent that Proposition 8 was funded by massive amounts of Mormon money and labor, made headlines all over the world. The response of the Mormon hierarchy was to smear the kissers with accusations that they were groping each other in public. Not a shred of evidence exists, apart from Mormon propaganda to support that charge, but look at it for what it says about the thinking here. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…
When they talk about their "deeply held religious beliefs", this is what they mean. Not the belief in God Almighty. Not the belief in Christ the redeemer. Not the belief in the literal truth of the Bible. This is the deeply held religious belief that they will not suffer doubt in. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. A kiss in public between a same-sex couple isn’t a gesture of affection, it’s a sex act.
One denomination after another is stressed — possibly to a breaking point for some believers — by furious battles over the roles of openly gay people in church life and ministry. Can they be clergy or bishops? Can their relationships be blessed?
And the newest protest symbol by gay activists is a kiss…
But this has always been the battle. Not to have sex, but to be allowed to love. The difference between the thugs who beat up Jean Rolland and Andrew Frost in front of the Frasher’s Steak House in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the Mormon church, isn’t so much one of degree as clarity of purpose. It came to this: When Mormon security guards saw a same-sex couple share a kiss, they had to detain them and call the police. When that arrest became a headline all over the world, the Mormon church immediately sought to replace the image of a kiss in the public mind with an image of two men groping each other. You hear the anti-gay warriors say time and again that there is no such thing as a homosexual, there is only homosexual behavior. But look at their attitudes toward marriage generally. Men are the God ordained head of the household. Women must submit gracefully to their husbands. Their union isn’t validated by their joy in one another, but by the blessing of the church. It isn’t something that exists for its own sake, but to further God’s plan for humanity. It is not simply that there can be no homosexuals. There is no such thing as love. There is only authority. There is only power. And a kiss embodies everything that power hates and wants to exterminate from the human spirit.
Jones And Yarhouse: We Will Report The Outcome No Matter How Embarrassing Our Badly Skewed Data Is To The Folks Who Are Paying Us For It
Last week the APA released its report on ex-gay therapy, to a somewhat muted response from the charlatans of the ex-gay political machine. Oh yes…we’re so very happy that the APA acknowledges that a patient’s religious needs must be taken into account, they said, politely skimming over the overwhelming evidence that trying to force gay people into straight jackets harms them deeply. You had to expect they wouldn’t leave it at that.
Now comes the "final" release of the Jones and Yarhouse "study" of ex-gay "therapy"…touted in that well known scientific peer reviewed publication, the Baptist Press…
Sure it does. You read through the brief article for a while and, of course, you see little nuggets like this one pop out at you:
Jones expressed frustration that the APA task force didn’t take their 2007 study seriously.
"They selectively apply rigorous scientific standards," he said…
Yes. Of course. It’s all a consperacy of the scientists to further the militant homosexual agenda. Oh…have I meantioned that Exodus paid Jones and Yarhouse for their labors? Naturally that didn’t affect their scientific rigorousity I’m sure.
Or…not…
While Jones and Yarhouse’s study appears to be very well designed, it quickly falls apart on execution. The sample size was disappointingly small, too small for an effective retrospective study. They told a reporter from Christianity Today that they had hoped to recruit some three hundred participants, but they found “many Exodus ministries mysteriously uncooperative.” They only wound up with 98 at the beginning of the study (72 men and 26 women), a population they describe as “respectably large.” Yet it is half the size of Spitzer’s 2003 study.
Jones and Yarhouse wanted to limit their study’s participants to those who were in their first year of ex-gay ministry. But when they found that they were having trouble getting enough people to participate (they only found 57 subject who met this criteria), they expanded their study to include 41 subjects who had been involved in ex-gay ministries for between one to three years. The participants who had been in ex-gay ministries for less than a year are referred to as “Phase 1″ subpopulation, and the 41 who were added to increase the sample size were labeled the “Phase 2″ subpopulation.
This poses two critically important problems. First, we just saw Jones and Yarhouse explain that the whole reason they did a prospective study was to reduce the faulty memories of “change experiences that happened in their pasts” — errors which can occur when asking people to go back as far as three years to assess their beginning points on the Kinsey and Shively-DeCecco scales. This was the very problem that Jones and Yarhouse hoped to avoid in designing a prospective longitudinal study, but in the end nearly half of their results ended up being based on retrospective responses.
[Emphasis mine] So basically their data was corrupted by the same half-assed sloppiness of the Spitzer study. Oh but wait…it gets better. Again from Burroway…
Whenever a longitudinal study is being conducted over a period of several years, there are always dropouts along the way. This is common and to be expected. That makes it all the more important to begin the study with a large population. Unfortunately, this one wasn’t terribly large to begin with; it started out at less than half the size of Spitzer’s 2003 study. Jones and Yarhouse report that:
Over time, our sample eroded from 98 subjects at our initial Time 1 assessment to 85 at Time 2 and 73 at Time 3, which is a Time 1 to Time 3 retention rate of 74.5%. This retention rate compares favorable to that of the best “gold standard” longitudinal studies. For example, the widely respected and amply funded National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (or Add Health study reported a retention rate from Time 1 to Time 3 of 73% for their enormous sample.
The Add Health Study Jones and Yarhouse cite began with 20,745 in 1996, ending with 15,170 during Wave 3 in 2001-2002. But this retention rate of 73% was spread over some 5-6 years, not the three to four years of Jones and Yarhouse’s study.
What’s more, the Add Health study undertook a rigorous investigation of their dropouts (PDF: 228KB/17 pages) and concluded that the dropouts affected their results by less than 1 percent. Jones and Yarhouse didn’t assess the impact of their dropouts, but they did say this:
We know from direct conversation that a few subjects decided to accept gay identity and did not believe that we would honestly report data on their experience. On the other hand, we know from direct conversations that we lost other subjects who believed themselves healed of all homosexual inclinations and who withdrew from the study because continued participation reminded them of the very negative experiences they had had as homosexuals. Generally speaking, as is typical, we lost subjects for unknown reasons.
Remember, Jones and Yarhouse described those “experiencing difficulty with change would be likely to get frustrated or discouraged early on and drop out of the change process.” And so assessing the dropouts becomes critically important, because unlike the Add Health study, the very reason for dropping out of this study may have direct bearing on both questions the study was designed to address: Do people change, and are they harmed by the process? With as much as a quarter of the initial population dropping out potentially for reasons directly related to the study’s questions, this missing analysis represents a likely critical failure, one which could potentially invalidate the study’s conclusions.
[Emphasis mine] Harm…what harm? We didn’t speak to anyone who was harmed…
But look a tad more closely at what Jones and Yarhouse "know"…
On the other hand, we know from direct conversations that we lost other subjects who believed themselves healed of all homosexual inclinations and who withdrew from the study because continued participation reminded them of the very negative experiences they had had as homosexuals.
Healed. Healed. They believed themselves healed. Not cured. Not changed. But…healed. This is the language of religion, not science. And now you know where Jones and Yarhouse were coming from, and why they were good with allowing data into their study that could only weaken it from a scientific point of view.
It didn’t matter. They needed bodies to get a big enough sample size that they could plausibly go on with it and give the kook pews something they could wave around and claim that scientists were conspiring against them on behalf of the godless homosexual menace. They would have known going into it, that the APA would regard their study as flawed because they engineered the flaws into it themselves. Anyone who was serious about it would have gone back to their funding and told them they couldn’t do it without more first year subjects (a lot more), and more participation from the drop-outs. But they kept on with it anyway. Because knowing whether or not ex-gay therapy works wasn’t the point. Knowing whether or not it harms the very people it purports to help wasn’t the point. Having something to wave back at the APA was the point. That promise that they would report the results whether or not they embarrassed Exodus was as empty as the promise that "change is possible". Neither one had a money back guarantee.
[Update…] Yarhouse is identified Here, as an evangelical psychologist and graduate of Regent University. Regent is Pat Robertson’s baby. This man is as likely to be objective about ex-gay therapy as he is to be a flying pig. Jones is of Wheaton College, which is described by The Princeton Review’s Best 351 Colleges thusly: "If the integration of faith and learning is what you want out of a college, Wheaton is arguably the best school in the nation with a Christ-based worldview." Well this team really looks like a couple of objective researchers to me…
[Update again…] Timothy Kincaid at Box Turtle Bulletin goes another round with this "study"…finds it not too much different from the previous round…
In short, the Jones and Yarhouse study was funded and fully supported by Exodus and conducted by two researchers who were avid supporters of ex-gay ministries. They wanted to study 300 participants, but after more than a year, they could only find 57 willing to participate. They then changed the rules for acceptance in order to increase the total to 98. After following this sample for 4 years, 25 dropped out. Of the remainder, only 11 reported “satisfactory, if not uncomplicated, heterosexual adjustment.” Another 17 decided that a lifetime of celibacy was good enough.
Gay Americans…Republican’s Cynical Weapon Against Democrats Since Truman
You hear some folks bellyache about those "Gay Studies" curriculums in various colleges and universities. If they’re not complaining that they’re utterly worthless exercises in pointless "diversity", they’re insinuating that the courses couldn’t be about anything but how to have gay sex.
I’ve never gone through one of these curriculums myself, but if the vast treasure trove of gay history that’s out there is any measure, a Gay Studies course isn’t just a nice idea for promoting diversity, it’s an important part of the human story. Particularly here in America, where gay citizens have been a punching bag, a handy scarecrow, for every hysteria that’s ever swept through the country. Case in point, the red scare of the 1950s.
I’m only part way into David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare, and already its challenging some of my bedrock views of what happened to my country during the so-called McCarthy era. Far from being merely a sideshow to the communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the purges of gay Americans were central to it. And…surprise, surprise, the engine for it all was republican hunger for political power.
Right at the beginning of the book, Johnson describes, using newspaper accounts of the time, interviews, and newly declassified documents, how the republicans in the late 1940s, out of power since Hoover brought on the great depression, saw the issue of homosexuals in government as a useful weapon against the party in power.
They orchestrated a hearing in which they pressed the secretary of state for information about communists in the state department. But it was a game of tag. In the process of defending themselves against the republican charge that they had allowed communists to get and hold jobs in the state department, the democrats described how they were diligently ferreting out "security risks". Far from being lax said the democrats, they’d uncovered and removed 91 "security risks" from the state department.
Which gave the republicans an opening to press them for details. How many of those were communists? It was a question the republicans already knew the answer to, because they’d had all the details in a closed door hearing previously. What they wanted was to get it out in the open. And the democrats, backed into a corner and not wanting to leave it hanging out there that they’d let so many communists into the state department when they hadn’t actually, said, that in fact none of them were communists, nobody had been let go from the state department for disloyalty. The 91 people fired were not accused of being traitors. Just…you know…security risks. Pressed further they admitted that these people had all been fired because they were homosexuals.
That was what the republicans wanted to hear, and get into the papers. Not a communist threat, but a lavender one. Why? Because it was felt that the moral issue played even better against the democrat’s base…working class and poor Americans, then the communist threat did. In other words, it made a great wedge issue against the democrats. And right from the beginning, when Joe McCarthy began waving around his baseless claims of a vast communist conspiracy lurking in the federal government, some republicans…even in his own state…were counseling him to downplay the communist thing and play up the morals charges more, because for one thing they actually were finding homosexuals working in government agencies, but mostly because it made the voters in the democrat’s base even angrier.
McCarthy of course, didn’t take that advise. He pressed on with his communist bogyman and the question echoed in the committee chambers of capital hill, are you now, or have you ever been a communist? But while McCarthy was busy stirring up the Communist Menace and getting headlines, the republican party was busy stirring up the Homosexual Menace and a great purge began which…ironically…led to the formation of the first gay rights groups as gay people began to get tired of being kicked around and started pushing back.
Later, during the black civil rights movement, the republicans would go on to exploit white working class racial fears against the democrats in exactly the same way. But here, even as far back as the late 1940s, you can see them using the Homosexual Menace as a tool to divide and weaken the democrats. Because accusing the democrats of tolerating homosexuality worked even better then nearly anything else the republicans could throw at them…even communism. And it wouldn’t stop working, until we gay Americans, having had enough of it, took to the streets in defense of our lives.
You want to know why it’s so damn important that we make a big deal out of our sexual orientation? Why we don’t just quietly "leave it in the bedroom where it belongs"…? This is why. Because our lives were turned into cannon fodder for the power dreams of politicians and that needs to stop. This country needs to look…really look…at the character of those loud voices bearing moral crusades, waving around scarecrows that have their neighbor’s faces on them.
The moral rot that is on plain view every night on Fox News and in the many health care "town halls" going on all across the country…in the "birthers" and the "deathers"…it isn’t new. Not at all. What’s different now is the gutter that all those country club republicans began playing to back in the Truman years has taken over, and they have their own voice now in the national news media. And you need to understand this: those country club republicans would be fine, even with that, if it could keep them in power.
Perhaps you could see this just as clearly from looking at the history of race relations in America, and republican party race baiting. But the history of the struggle of gay Americans for equality and justice is American history too, and you really see what the republican crusade for "morality" and "family values" is made of when you study it.
You Can Fool Some Of The People Some Of The Time, And All Of The People Some Of The Time, But You Can Fool Yourself All Of The Time
If the anti-gay petition drive in Washington State fails due to too many invalid signatures, the sweet justice of it might be that their own anti-gay base believed the same signature gathering lies they were telling everyone else. This from The Seattle PI blog:
The numbers for Thursday’s count showed 6,483 checked and 935 rejected, for a cumulative daily error rate of 14.42 percent, said secretary of state spokesman Dave Ammons.
…and this from the comments:
I think the lying on the part of supporters may have hurt them with the error rate.
Imagine someone in Kent waddling up to the Walmart and encountering someone with a petition to "repeal domestic partnerships for gays." They sign it and go in for a triple pounder with cheese before buying lead-filled Chinese crap for their kids.
Then 5 weeks later, they role out of their SUV at the Olive Garden and see someone with a petition to "ban same sex marriage." They go ahead and sign it, not realizing that it’s the same one they signed 5 weeks ago because the paid petition gatherer lied to them.
Brüno is, in more than one sense, beyond gay. Is any viewer really going to think that this hyperbolically crass and ridiculous narcissist—who wears mesh tops and eye-searing lederhosen, refers to his adopted African baby as a "dick magnet," and drops faux-Teutonic vulgarities about his waxed arschenhaller—represents "the mainstream of the gay community," as one troubled Hollywood "gay insider" put it?
Okay…I have a question for you. How many top grossing box office movies can you name that honestly represented that mainstream of gay people you speak of? How many? No…not just a walk-on token gay character, but a movie About gay people that wasn’t full of the same stupid ignorant stereotypes that are propelling Sacha Baron Cohen’s gayface act to number one? How many?
That one about the gay cowboys? The one that couldn’t win an academy award because John Wayne was rolling in his grave? The one academy members openly said they’d never vote for. The one they made Bruno-esq jokes about at the award ceremony? The one that got practically no cable channel airplay after it left the theaters, even though it was nominated for best picture? That one?
Editing As I Read…How To Cope With Living In A Heterosexual World…
Once upon a time my diet of fiction was huge. In grade school I was a voracious reader of it, much to the annoyance of my teachers who often caught me at it in class when I should have been paying attention to them. Once a dour old history teacher of mine, a man who could make World War II seem boring, caught me reading a western behind my text book and berated me for a good ten minutes in front of the whole class. He demanded to know if my copy of Louis L’amour’s Flint was more important then history class. It was all I could do to keep from telling him no, just his history class.
But as I have grown older my diet of fiction has dropped severely off. Where I used to go through one or two fiction books a week, now I’m doing good if I read one or two a year. It isn’t that I’ve stopped reading altogether. Far from it. I read constantly. Between the web and the few magazines I still subscribe to, my eyes are constantly scanning words. And I always have a book I am digesting, sometimes several, on the side table in my office with bookmarks carefully inserted. But these are non-fiction titles. A history of German-English relations, Death of the German Cousin, by Peter Edgerly Firchow. A history of Walt Disney Word, Since The World Began, by Jeff Kurtti. A history of the anti-gay witch hunts of the 1950s, The Lavender Scare, by David K. Johnson. These are the sorts of books I read now.
I think I know why, and it’s why I don’t like watching movies all that much anymore, or TV shows that, once again, aren’t non-fictional. I can watch The Science Channel and The Discovery Channel and The History Channel for hours. But very little else. Fiction mostly bores me anymore.
At work, there is a little bookshelf in one corner of the cafeteria where staff can leave books they are finished with, for others to pick up and take home and read. It’s a kind of informal book exchange. When I first joined the Institute ten years ago (has it been that long?), it was just a small stack of books on a window ledge. One day someone had left a few there with a note saying anyone who wanted one could have it. Over the next few months some books disappeared and others were deposited to take their place. Eventually the stack outgrew its window ledge and a small bookshelf was installed.
I check it daily, and have even fed from it a time or two. But as I hardly read any fiction anymore my interest was mostly curiosity as to what my co-workers were reading. As you might expect, the mix is largely science-fiction and computer technology. There is an old Word Perfect manual there, and a Turbo-C manual, that have been waiting for a hand to lift them off the shelf and take them home now for almost as long as the exchange has been going. About half of it cycles quickly and the rest just sits and waits for the recycling bin to come along. But they’re like me there…loath to toss out a book that might possibly still be useful.
The other day someone left a small collection of science-fiction hardbacks, their dust covers looking almost like new. But it was older stuff…stuff from my kidhood, when I read it voraciously. I sorted through them and saw an interesting cover. It was of an older man sitting in a rocking chair his front porch, reading a book to a companion who stood nearby with a coffee cup in one hand. The man in the rocking chair seemed to be a farmer of some sort…you could see fields of wheat going off into the distance just off the porch. His companion was a grey skinned, pointy eared bug-eyed alien. The two of them were enjoying a restful moment looking over the book the farmer was reading.
I picked it up…it was by Clifford D. Simak titled, Way Station…I’ve never read him…and on a lark brought it home thinking I could always take it back if I got a few pages in and lost interest.
That’s been my pattern lately with fiction and I know why. Even back in my kidhood, most of what I read was very light on the romantic interest. My favorite authors, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Clement, and others, seldom spoke of that baffling dating and mating game, which suited me fine then, and ironically enough still would, although for a very different reason. Action writer Alistair MacLean (of Ice Station Zebra and Guns of Navarone fame), whose books I devoured, once averred that the love interest just slowed down the action. I wondered since if he wasn’t simply, as Clarke was, a gay man who couldn’t bring himself to write about love as he knew it, and simply left it out of his writing altogether, but I read now that he was married twice and had three kids.
Clarke, let it be said, wrote one of the most touching same-sex love stories in science-fiction in Imperial Earth. But even then he had to make his main character bisexual, not gay and there is a female love interest too. I pretty much just glossed over those scenes, which were gratefully few. The scenes between the two male characters had real emotion to them. Or at least, they did for me.
That’s been my pattern. I pick up a book that looks interesting and as soon as it gets to the love interest I put it down. Okay…I get that I’m living in a heterosexual world. But it is the rare straight writer who can hold my interest while I’m reading about it. And come to think of it, those writers have all been women. And as more and more science-fiction writers became comfortable, insisting even, with writing about sex too, I just lost interest. I suppose I can appreciate that heterosexuals probably don’t want to read about gay sex either. But it would be nice if their gay neighbors had the same kind of depth to their fiction shelves. Mary Renault is dead. Mercedes Lackey only wrote one set of stories featuring a gay male lead. It was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. But then there was no more. The various gay authors I’ve read have been mostly one hit wonders, and there is no good gay science fiction to speak of. None. Most of what I read these days that is fiction, are yaoi manga from Japan. I have a bookshelf practically filled with those damn things.
So I picked up this Clifford D. Simak novel hoping that at least it was representative enough of its time that its love interest was minimal. I got about thirty pages into it when I stumbled upon The Mute Free Spirit Girl In The Woods and thought…yeah…here it comes. But then I did something, probably out of shear frustration, that I’ve always done when listening to pop music. I mentally switched around a few pronouns and read it as The Mute Free Spirit Guy In The Woods and kept on reading. What I found was I could empathize with the main character’s feelings once more, and my interest in the story perked up considerably. And thus the pages kept turning.
I do this all the time with pop music. It’s not always easy, particularly with rock songs that are über masculine male meets über feminine female. But it is do-able. Sometimes I need to substitute genderless pronouns to make the song make sense. But in years of doing this, it comes to me almost as second-nature now…
You are all the woman I need
And baby you know it
You can make this beggar a king
A clown or a poet
…runs through my mind as…
You are all the lover I need
And baby you know it
You can make this beggar a king
A clown or a poet
…so easily now I hardly think about it. This is how I cope with living in a world where 99 44/100 percent of the songs about love are songs about heterosexuals in love. Sometimes I wonder if this is why my imagination is so potent. I’m constantly re-imagining my pop culture environment to suit myself. But no…I’ve been a day dreamer since well before puberty. The imagination has kept me sane all these years. Or at least, pleasant company.
So I try this out on Way Station and find myself not putting the book down after all. It’s more difficult then with rock songs, as I have to buffer the images in my mind as the words create them, then re-build them with the new pronouns, before actually looking at them. I’m editing it on the fly and taking it in as I’m editing it.
It’s…do-able, but hard. With music it’s more the direct emotional content and the words are poetry and their images are meant to free-associate in your mind anyway. You’re not building any specific image in your mind. With a novel you are and re-casting an opposite sex love interest as a same-sex one is more mental gymnastics. And I don’t have the genderless pronoun out I do with rock songs, when explicitly switching gender won’t make any sense. On the other hand I don’t have to worry about how the words scan to a beat either.
It is not that much harder, really, then what I do for a living when I’m trying to visualize program flow from computer code. And I don’t have to do it everywhere in the novel, just when the love interest shows its face. It’s work…I think it’s cutting my reading speed in half…but as time goes on I’ll probably get mentally faster at it. As long as it doesn’t involve any actual sex scenes.
I have a confession to make. I do this all the time with favorite movies. Not in real time though…that’s more then even my hyperactive imagination can handle. But there are titles I could tell you about, some blockbusters, some just little niche films I happen to have liked a lot, that I have recast in my mind, mentally changing a pronoun as it were when the love interest appears, sometimes mentally re-writing huge sections of the plot, to satisfy my need for some reflection of my life and my own romantic desires in the pop culture. I daydream these rewrites constantly, refining them a little every time I replay them in my head. With the iPod, I can even daydream them to their actual background scores too. These are favorite movies, but if you look on my video shelves you won’t see any of them there because I have them all stored inside my head, just the way I want them.
They say gay folk are more creative. I think that’s more myth then fact, but if there is some truth to it, it’s because we need to be to survive. We live in a world that is hostile at worst, and uncaring at best. I wish there was more gay fiction out there. There are probably tons of good gay writers out there…but it isn’t gay folk who run most of the publishing houses, let alone the Hollywood film studios.
If You Understand Nothing Else Understand This: Those Days Are Over
Dan Savage puts his finger on what’s so utterly dumbfounding about the Rainbow Lounge raid…
…The police burst into that bar as if it were still 1968, the year before the NYPD’s raid on the Stonewall Inn, as if the old rules were still in force. They assumed that the other men at Rainbow Lounge that night—the men who witnessed four officers assaulting Chad Gibson—would disappear into the night, grateful that they got out of the Rainbow Lounge without getting assaulted and arrested too. The police didn’t expect the other gay men men at the Rainbow Lounge to talk to the media—or to organize a protest outside Fort Worth’s city hall. The police didn’t even seem to realize that there were men taking pictures with their cell phones during the raid. It’s as if the police in Fort Worth didn’t know what decade this is.
Message From A Stonewall Adult, To A Post-Stonewall Kid…
The day after the homos rioted in Greenwich Village, the New York newspapers barely mentioned it. But that was par for the course back in the 60s. I was a fifteen year old kid when it happened, growing up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C., and didn’t hear about the riots until I was well into my own coming out to myself process in 1971. By then, the scruffy, angry, younger gay liberation front was rudely elbowing aside an older generation of more genteel suit and tie activists, who had tried with painfully little to show for it, to work within the system for change.
You’d have thought the gay civil rights movement had begun on the street in front of the Stonewall Inn. It didn’t. In the lightning flash of the Stonewall riots we lost sight for a while of how much courage it would have taken to picket for gay rights in front of the White House, as activist Frank Kameny and members of the Mattachine Society of Washington did on April 17, 1965. Kameny was rightfully honored recently at a White House ceremony, and received an official apology for being fired in 1957 from his position as an astronomer for the Army map service. People think the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s were all about ferreting out communists in government and industy. But homosexuals were just as much, if not more of a target then. We need to remember the staggering courage it took for those early pioneers in the struggle to come forward, and push back against the hate. But we also need to remember this…
A prominent Stonewall myth holds that the riots were an uprising by the gay community against decades of oppression. This would be true if the “gay community” consisted of Stonewall patrons. The bar’s regulars, though, were mostly teenagers from Queens, Long Island and New Jersey, with a few young drag queens and homeless youths who squatted in abandoned tenements on the Lower East Side.
I was there on the Saturday and Sunday nights when the Village’s established gay community, having heard about the incidents of Friday night, rushed back from vacation rentals on Fire Island and elsewhere. Although several older activists participated in the riots, most stood on the edges and watched.
Many told me they were put off by the way the younger gays were taunting the police — forming chorus lines and singing, “We are the Stonewall girls, we wear our hair in curls!” Many of the older gay men lived largely closeted lives, had careers to protect and years of experience with discrimination. They believed the younger generation’s behavior would lead to even more oppression…
And thus the phrase "militant homosexuals" entered the vernacular. But all it takes to become a Militant Homosexual is to simply believe there is nothing wrong with you and behave accordingly. There is nothing unusual about people getting angry when they are mistreated. There is nothing remarkable about people fighting back when their basic human rights are denied them. There is nothing less surprising then to witness lovers protecting and defending the sacred ground between them. Especially young lovers. When someone utters the phrase "militant homosexuals", what you should be hearing is: I Can’t See The People For The Homosexuals.
The older generation had grown up in a time when homosexuality was almost universally regarded as a dirty secret, a filthy perversion, the less spoken of the better. As new studies began to show that we were a natural part of the human family after all, that generation began, very courageously, to take that message to the public. See…we’re just like you after all… And so we are, the ordinary among us and the exotic both. But you can’t reason someone out of something they didn’t reason themselves into.
As long as the rest of society could look the other way while our lives were drowned in a sea of prejudice and hate, we would never make any progress. As long as the rest of society could ignore the toll prejudice was taking on our lives, that prejudice would keep doing its work on us. That night in June of 1969, the frustration of the young and outcast simply boiled over. And the rest of us saw something we had never seen before: gay people, angry gay people, fighting back. And it lit a fire in us. And we would never be the same. Because a few street kids and drag queens simply had enough, that one night, that one time.
There are times when it’s wise to listen to what the older generation has to say. We’ve been there…we took the hits…we saw it all with our own eyes. But never…Never…let someone old enough to have achieved some measure of success, and made a good and comfortable life for themselves, tell You what you have to put up with.
While reading the extract below, keep in mind that the author is talking about a time in this country, the 1950s, when every state in the union outlawed same sex relations among consenting adults. No prostitution or public sexual conduct was necessary to be convicted of "the crime against nature". Gay men and women, caught up in police witch hunts, often had to denounce others. And in addition to being locked up in jail, people’s names, and sometimes photographs were published, and homes and jobs would be lost…
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 of dangerous or socially undesirable people. In all these states, a sexual psychopath could not be released from detention until psychiatrists rule 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
This may be difficult for some of my heterosexual readers to grasp here…but back in those days, mere possession of pornography was enough to get you lumped in with rapists, murderers…and homosexuals. What may be difficult for some of my younger gay readers to grasp, is that a heterosexual charged with possession of pornography back then would likely be more appalled to to find themselves being compared to homosexuals then to rapists and murderers. The stigma of being homosexual really was that profound. You were more despicable then even rapists and murderers. More despicable even, then a communist.
When the U.S. Supreme Court abolished the sodomy laws in 2003, fourteen states still had some form of sodomy law on the books…four of them applying only to conduct between members of the same sex. In Idaho and Michigan you could get life for it. That was only six years ago.
If you’re curious, Miller’s book, Sex Crime Panic is a good place to begin developing an understanding of what Stonewall means to your gay and lesbian neighbors. Miller details events that took place in Iowa in 1955, following the rape and murder of two children. To address a growing public anti-gay hysteria, authorities arrested 20 gay men who they never even claimed had anything to do with the murders, had them declared "sexual psychopaths" and locked them up in a state mental hospital indefinitely. The only thing unique about Miller’s story, is that someone actually went to the trouble to document it all, finally.
Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committe held the first-ever hearing on the Uniting American Families Act, which would equalize the status of foreign-born same-sex partners of American citizens. Heterosexual Americans can earn citizenship for their foreign partners by marrying them. Gays, obviously, cannot do that, effectively making a gay American and his or her foreign spouse legal strangers.
Testifying was Shirley Tan, a Fillipino woman who has been with her American partner for 23 years. Together, they are raising twelve-year-old twin boys…
…one of Tan’s children started crying within seconds of the start of her testimony. At the sight of this, Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy stopped the hearing and asked Tan if her son might want to sit in another room, where presumably a Senate staffer would console him for the duration of what was clearly an emotionally fraught experience. For most people, the sight of a 12-year-old boy in tears at the prospect of his mother being deported halfway around the world would invoke some sympathy. Unmoved, however, was Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions, ranking minority member of the Committee and the only Republican to bother to attend the hearing. At the sight of the weeping boy, according to a Senate staffer who was at the hearing, Sessions leaned towards one of his aides and sighed, "Enough with the histrionics."
Take Note:
Sessions opposes the bill, stating that it would amount to a federal recognition of same-sex marriage.
I keep drumming on this but it’s a simple fact: Everything we have ever asked for in this fight, from hospital visitation to the repeal of the sodomy laws amounts to recognition of same-sex marriage if you listen to our enemies. This has always been their trump card in Every Fucking battle over any and everything: turn it into a fight over same sex marriage.
So it makes no sense to say that we are wasting energy fighting over same-sex marriage when we could be putting our resources into fighting for anti-discrimination and hate crime laws. Everything is a fight over same-sex marriage. Which is to say, everything is a fight over the legitimacy of our emotional lives. The pieces make up a whole at the center of which is a simple question: do gay people experience life the same way heterosexuals do, or do we, as Orson Scott Card would say, merely play house in hollow mimicry of genuine emotions that heterosexuals feel?
Look at Sessions’ gut level knee jerk response to that kid’s tears again. Histronics. He doesn’t believe they are real. They can’t possibly be. Because that family is only playing house. It isn’t a real family. They don’t have real feelings. It’s just an act they have convinced themselves of. Even the kids. This is the enemy your gay and lesbian neighbors have been facing for decades now.
At a hearing earlier this year on one of the stalled bills to allow same-sex marriage, Mark S. Goldberg told a Senate committee about his months-long battle last fall to persuade state authorities to release to him the body of his partner of 17 years, Ron Hanby, so he could grant Hanby’s wish for cremation — only to have that request rejected too because “we were not legally married or blood relatives.”
After struggling for years with depression, he said, Hanby took his own life.
Try to picture Goldberg’s state of mind right then. The death of the one you love is hard enough, but this was a suicide. He must have been absolutely devastated. But then, homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. So now is just the right time to twist the knife in his heart…to make sure he knows how much he is hated.
Goldberg said he tried to show the police and the state medical examiner’s office “our wills, living wills, power of attorney and marriage certificate” from Connecticut, but “no one was willing to see these documents.”
He said he was told the medical examiner’s office was required to conduct a two-week search for next of kin, but the medical examiner’s office waited a full week before placing the required ad in a newspaper. And then when no one responded, he said, they “waited another week” to notify another state agency of an unclaimed body.
After four weeks, he said, a Department of Human Services employee “took pity on me and my plight … reviewed our documentation and was able to get all parties concerned to release Ron’s body to me,” but then the cremation society refused to cremate Ron’s body.
“On the same day, I contacted the Massachusetts Cremation Society and they were more than willing to work with me and cremate Ron’s body,” and so, “on November 6, 2008, I was able to finally pick up Ron’s remains and put this tragedy to rest.”
They treated this man, this grieving lover, like so much human garbage. And without a doubt they all did it, every single mother fucking one of them in this chain of events, with a sense of moral righteousness.
The right to bury the one you loved, and shared a life together with, is just one out of the great plenty of rights heterosexual couples take for granted every single day. It is a safe bet, none safer, that a lot of folks in Rhode Island think extending even that one to gay people is far too much. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…
So you’re calling again now. And I’m actually picking up the phone and talking to you again. Wow. It’s been a while hasn’t it? A while since I stopped returning your calls. Because you voted one too many times for George Bush. Because you didn’t seem to give a good goddamn how much slime the republicans threw into your gay friend’s face. Because you didn’t seem to care one whit how hard they tried to make everyone hate people like me. Hey…look at us. We’re talking again! So nice. When we talk nowadays, it’s almost like old times. But that’s the problem.
So once again I get to hear about your life. What you’re up to. All your successes. All your disappointments. That’s what friends do. We share our lives with each other, the good times and the bad. The highs and the lows. Well…wait…except I’m suppose to hide a part of my life from you aren’t I? And not a small part either. Not judging from how often you talk about that part of yours. Your love life that is. Still single are we? Yeah. I know the feeling. I know a lot about being single, and lonely that you will never know. But then, you don’t want to know.
That was always the bargain wasn’t it old friend? I get to hear about your girlfriend problems. I get to hear about the latest cute new girl you’re seeing nowadays. I get to hear about how the two of you got it on. I get to hear about how great you felt afterward. Hey, I know the feeling! But you’d rather I didn’t tell you that I suppose. Feels great at our age doesn’t it though. We’re both getting old now aren’t we? Not quite the sexy young guys we used to be back in the day. Except I was never allowed to think of myself that way, even back then. Even back when I was young and cute and could have made something of it. I wasn’t allowed to be that. Cute. Sexy. Desirable. I had to keep it under wraps. I had to play it low key. You didn’t want to hear about my struggles with the dating and mating game. You didn’t even want to know I was interested in any of that. Because that meant bringing up the fact of my sexuality. Yeah…yeah…I know… You’re Not Gay. I got that then. I get it now. What I didn’t really get back then was that I wasn’t allowed to be gay either.
Oh I could be gay…Theoretically. I could be gay as some abstract concept you could put in some safe place in the back of your mind. I could be the oddball artistic little nerd nobody expected to date girls for some unspoken reason. I could be that. I could be out of the closet, so long as I kept being out of the closet in the closet. That was always how our friendship worked.
And I went along with it. Because you didn’t have anti-gay prejudices. You were just…misinformed. Like I was. I knew how that worked. They taught me the same lies about homosexuals they taught you. I knew this. I knew from firsthand experience how it was to live with all the stereotypes in my head that you have in yours. The mincing faggot. The swishing queer. The lurking child molester. The dangerous sexual pervert, waiting in the men’s rooms…in the bushes. Cocksuckers. Ass fuckers. I laughed at all the same fag jokes you did all through grade school. They were fairies. They were queers. They were homos. I understood this the same as the rest of you guys. And then puberty came along and tapped me on the shoulder. It took a while…you can appreciate why…but one day I finally came to understand that I was gay myself. Kinda gave me a whole new perspective on the subject, that.
I came out to myself when I was 17. That was back in 1971. And because the guy I fell in love with was so decent and good hearted, because I saw that what I had fallen in love with was the person, not just any random male body, I realized that there was nothing wrong with me. In that rush of first love I learned that what I had been taught about homosexuals was a load of horseshit. The fact of my homosexuality was there, staring me in the face, every time I laid eyes on the guy I was in love with. Making my heart beat. Making my knees tremble. Putting knots in my stomach and sweat on my brow. It was terrifying. It was wonderful. First love is like that. And there I was, feeling that for another guy. Yet I knew I was none of the things I had been taught that homosexuals were. And because of that, I was able to accept it. I am a homosexual. But I’m still me. I knew both of those things were true. So I never hated myself. Because of him. Because of how it hit me in just that way. I was in love, and it was wonderful. And nobody was happy for me.
Mom would have cried her heart out. The preacher in our church would have warned me direly that God considered homosexuality an abomination and I was going to hell. Maybe everyone in my life would turn against me. I could go to jail. That’s not what usually happens to a young guy, who wakes up one day to find he’s in love. But I grew up in a world where the radios played rock and roll love songs about young guys and girls in love, and locker rooms echoed with jokes about homos who suck cock.
It’s a pure miracle I didn’t hate myself, but I didn’t. I was in love. But looking back I never really felt good about myself either. How could I, when I still heard all the fag jokes I used to laugh at? How could I, when could still hear our gym teachers telling us in Sex Ed that homosexuals were dangerous, deranged, sexual psychopaths who raped children and killed the people they had sex with? How could I feel good about myself, when from Every…Fucking…Direction…I was being told that homosexuals were ridiculous, pathetic, repulsive, and that same-sex love was a sick parody of the real thing.
Oh…I had pride. I was chock full of gay pride. I felt good about myself In Theory. But you don’t come of age in a world that is constantly screaming in your face that you’re a sick, twisted pervert without being wounded somehow, somewhere. I remember sitting in a movie theater watching "Something For Everyone" with my straight friends, and when the evil homosexual villain at the center of the story embraced and kissed the naive countess’s son, the entire theater erupted in a collective Ewwwwwwww! That character was an evil murdering, blackmailing manipulating bastard, but it was that kiss that made the audience’s gorge rise. I can still hear it to this day. Ewwwwwwwwwwww! It was spontaneous. It filled the theater. That was the world I grew up in. How was I supposed to see my love life as anything but completely disgusting to everyone?
How then, was I supposed to see myself as desirable?
How especially, when I had so many straight friends, male and female, who kept signaling to me…tactfully of course…that they shared the audience’s disgust at my sexuality. It took a while, and a lot of sweating…but I finally began to come out to my friends shortly after that first high school crush. Do you remember when I came out to you? I have a question: Have you ever sat down and pictured your friend Bruce sitting in one of those Sex Ed classes…the ones we all had back then…while his teachers taught him and everyone sitting in that class around him, that homosexuals were sick, sexually twisted, mentally ill deviants who raped children, lurked around public toilets and killed the people they had sex with? Picture it now then, because that’s what happened to me. I sat through it all only to discover years later that I was one of the people they were talking about. Now recall again that moment when I came out to you. Maybe you noticed how white my knuckles were.
But it seemed to go well. You said it was okay. You said it didn’t matter. I was still your friend. I was so relieved…so happy. My friends were cool!
Er…as long as I kept it low key. But that was okay. I had to know reconciling your mental image of me with the stereotypes we were all fed wasn’t going to happen overnight. I could be patient. I had to be. You were my friend. I came out to you and you didn’t walk off in disgust. I figured I was the luckiest guy in the world to have friends like you. Of course you were a little nervous about the whole thing. Good god I was terrified! I could cut you some slack. Jeeze. I figured once you saw that I wasn’t any of that crap we were all taught that homosexuals were, you’d treat me just like anyone else.
But that never happened did it? At least not with you. And let it be said you weren’t the only straight friend of mine who never got over it. Some did. But only some. And for the rest who didn’t, I ended up doing something no one should ever have to do: I stifled my human need for love and companionship, so you wouldn’t have to deal with it. I put a pillow over it and suffocated it. I did that because I thought it was for the best while I tried to coax you out of your…well…your cheapshit prejudices.
So there we are…two young men in the prime of our lives…and you’re talking about how messed up it is that your new girlfriend broke up with you. And I nod my head and start talking about how much I miss the guy I fell in love with back in high school. WHOOPS! Can’t talk about that because it reminds you that Bruce likes having sex with guys. So let’s change the subject. So how about that movie we saw last week? Great flick wasn’t it? And…damn…the lead actress was smokin hot! I guess…but I kinda liked that cute guy who played the part of… WHOOPS! Can’t talk about that because it reminds you that Bruce likes to look at guy’s bodies the way you like to look at girl’s. So let’s change the subject. How about we get something to eat and listen to some tunes? I have some OJ in the fridge… None for me thanks…I’m boycotting Orange Juice. Huh? Orange Juice? What for? Well Anita Bryant… WHOOPS!
Damn boy…why is it that gays always want to talk about sex?
But Forcing the issue would just be too hardassed of me, too demanding. We were all victims of the same homophobic crap we were taught. Those were the excuses I kept making for you, whenever you signaled to me in some unspoken way that the thought of Bruce having a boyfriend of his own was a tad…repellent. A bit Disgusting. Uhm…Gross. All that time I kept being patent with you, and all that time you were teaching me to accept the fact that I was disgusting. Friend.
So I went out into the world back then, and tried to find a lover, knowing deep down inside that the sight of two males in love was a repulsive thing to…well…to just about everyone…Ewwwwwwwww! Most of my friends included. So I went into the world looking for love, understanding that same-sex love was utterly gross to most people. Disgusting. Sick. Ugly. Had you told me that in so many words I’d have walked away from you. Instead, you fed me the poison slowly, one drop at a time, one sour look at a time, one change of the subject at a time. I had to be careful. I had to be respectful of your sensitivities. And every time I approached a beautiful guy, someone who attracted me, someone decent, and smart, and good-hearted, someone who made my heart skip a beat, I approached them not as a potential lover, but the way I’d been conditioned to behave. By my friends. By you. Carefully. Trying hard not to shock and offend.
And now I’m 55 years old, and still single.
In my 30s, when the fear began to creep into my heart that I might not find someone to love after all, I began to pour myself into a series of charcoal and ink drawings, and a couple oil paintings, of young male couples in love. I put everything I had, everything I wanted to say at that point in my life, about love and desire and finding your heart’s desire in another’s smile, into those drawings and paintings. Nothing even vaguely pornographic, they were about love, but also about being in love body and soul. All my unfulfilled yearnings, all my hopes and dreams. I put them down on paper and canvas. I showed a couple of them to you…or tried to…once. You took one look and I could see in your eyes that it was as if I’d shown you gay pornography. No…worse then that. Pornography you might have just laughed at. But this was two guys in love and that completely squicked you out. So I didn’t show you the rest.
I had one drawing…I titled it "Moment of Recognition"…of two young guys sharing a look…that was all, just a look, as they briefly, lightly, touched hands while having a quiet moment alone. They weren’t even actually holding hands…just fingers lightly touching…eyes looking into eyes…a slightly astonished look on their faces…the moment before the smile… I wanted to capture that look in their faces, that hushed sudden timeless moment in time, when they both realize that they’re in love. I remember that moment. By then I’d had it more then once. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world. It’s the most wonderful part of being alive. And I was really happy with what I was able to get on the artboard. I thought I’d captured it. And I guess I did, because it sure got a reaction. I showed it to another straight friend and I could swear I saw the hair on the back of his neck stand up. "What’s that about?" he asked, in a very perturbed voice. But he knew damn well what it was about.
So I told myself to be patient, and in the process let the wound dig itself deeper and deeper into me. I knew the beauty and sacredness of love wasn’t denied to same-sex lovers too. I knew that. Intellectually. Rationally. But your disgust was like a ball and chain around my heart, allowing it to soar only so far. I eventually stopped drawing. For nearly a decade and a half I did not pick up my tools again. I put down my cameras too. I just didn’t want to deal with my feelings anymore. I stopped creating artwork altogether. That’s another landscape of my life that should have more in it then it does. Friend.
So now you’re calling again. So now I’m picking up the phone again and talking to you. It’s almost like old times isn’t it? But that’s the problem, and I am over being the "some" in "some of my best friends are…".
The other day you phoned and shortly into the conversation you told me about that cute next door neighbor. The one who made mad love to you one night, and then the next didn’t want you calling her. The one who you later found out was playing you against her old boyfriend that she’s still mad at, but still seeing. I got the whole story, listened supportively, fell back into the old routine of being a friend. Yes, says I…I know how it is to be jerked around by a young cutie. There is this really cute guy guy who moved in just a few doors down from me, who gives me this hot and cold routine…one moment he’s all flirty, the next he’s treating me like an old troll… But you didn’t want to hear about that, and quickly changed the subject.
You wonder why I don’t call? I am 55 years old now, single, alone, and sick with loneliness, and one thing I bitterly regret is spending so many of the precious moments of the prime of my life with people who thought there was something wrong with me.
I came out to myself back in 1971 and actually managed to feel good about myself afterward. Looking back, that was a miracle. That was three years before the APA removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. But I was stupid. I trusted in some of the people in my life, just a tad too much. The kind of friendship you offered me was the one poison I didn’t know any better not to drink. I came of age in a world that thought I was the most disgusting thing ever. I didn’t need friends telling me to accept that. I needed friends to tell me that I was beautiful, desirable, and just as deserving of love as anyone else. I look at the pictures taken of me back then and I cannot believe that really cute gay kid never found a boyfriend. But he never did. And that was okay with you. My friend.
You want to know why I don’t call anymore? There’s a vast and empty wasteland in my heart where love should have been, and one of the signposts pointing to it has your name on it.
I’m not laying it entirely at your doorstep. There were larger forces in the culture we both lived in, grew up in, working hard to insure that no gay person ever knew what it was to be loved. But you said I was your friend. So I stifled that part of me. Not just for you, but for the others too. The others who couldn’t handle it. And now…I’m 55 years old and I don’t know how to set it free. That was something I was supposed to learn decades ago, and I never did. And now here I am. Alone in my little Baltimore rowhouse. Talking to you on the phone. Listening while you tell me about your latest heartache. Old friend.
Andrew Sullivan noted a few days ago, a letter Stephen Fry addressed to his 16-year-old self…
Oh, lord love you, Stephen. How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence. How filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on to my keyboard now. I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognize that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul.
Sullivan adds his own reaction to the film, History Boys…
A line it from the lonely gay schoolboy was almost too much to hear: "I’m Jewish. I’m homosexual. And I’m in Sheffield … I’m fucked." Somewhere in my mind in those teenage years was a similar refrain: "I’m Catholic. I’m homosexual. And I’m in East Grinstead … I’m fucked."
But I wasn’t fucked, of course. And not-to-be-fucked, not to turn into the tragic homosexual figure, memorizing "Brief Encounter," constantly chasing unrequited love, seeking refuge in the great worlds of Hardy or Larkin or Auden as a substitute for life: that was my goal.
See…I didn’t make that my goal. I just assumed it wouldn’t happen to me, because I didn’t buy into all the crap I was told about homosexuality.
That was a mistake. It was nearly impossible to grow up in that world, and no absorb some of its contempt for gay people. And it did its work on me all the same I realize now. Which is what makes it a good idea for gay folk to write these sorts of things…these bear your soul to the world letters. It seems very self absorbed, but it isn’t necessarily. It can be useful, not just for making peace with your own past, but also as a kind of message in a bottle to other generations in other times.
Gay kids have very little to no blood connection to past generations. You kind-of pop up in your family as gay, and everyone else isn’t. Maybe if you’re lucky you have a kind gay older uncle or aunt who can tell you a thing or two about what it was like for them, how to protect yourself from the tribulations they faced, and work toward the better world for us all. But more likely if you do have older gay relatives they are terrified to be seen as being too interested in you, lest they be accused of pedophilia. So you find yourself disconnected from the past, other then as history. And that history is still mostly being taught to each new generation of gay kids, by heterosexuals. Some gay-friendly, some not. We need to tell each other our own stories, in our own words.
So a letter to your younger gay self can be useful, not just to you, but to others who need to know what it was like for those of us in the previous generation. So that, hopefully, no gay kid will have to grow up in a world ever again, where everywhere you turn, literally, someone is putting a knife into your heart…telling you that you are pathetic…ridiculous…grotesque…sick.
I’ve had a letter to my younger self percolating somewhere inside of me for quite a long time now, so it’s probably time to get it out of me. But I have a few other letters to post before I get around to The Kid I Was. I’m going to start, with a Letter To A Straight Friend. I have some others that need writing too. And then I’ll write to Bruce. There’s a lot I’d have liked to tell him.
The domestic partner of a man who appeared to be near death was reportedly ordered to leave the room when it was time to make some major decisions about the patient.
This all started with a hospital visit. The patient, who only wanted to go by his first name of Christopher, was having trouble breathing. So his partner, Patrick took him to OHSU.
As Christopher was laying close to death, Patrick was told he had to leave the room and couldn’t believe what the nurse was telling him.
"The nurse said, ‘Christopher is very ill. There are some life and death decisions that have to be made and now is not the time for friends to be in the room.’ I’m like, ‘we don’t have any friends in the room,’" recalled Patrick.
Under Oregon law, Patrick had the right to stay in the room because the pair had been legal domestic partners for nine months. Patrick found a lawyer who made a call to the hospital and after two and a half hours, he was allowed back inside.
This commenter on Derbyshire’s post sums it up pretty well…
This is from a week ago. A woman in Florida, carrying documents, was kept out of the room while her partner of 18 years died. While their children stood by, no less. Why do people continually bury their heads in the sands about these things? “Oh, I can’t believe that people are so cruel!” It happens. We know it happens. We have documentation that it does. You know what stops it? The universally-understood bond of marriage.
The other major flaw with your argument is you never explain why extending marriage rights to gay couples will “mess” (with), “redefine” “overturn” or “overhaul” marriage. You simply assume your argument throughout.
When marriage changed from a property arrangement between a father a prospective husband, when women were changed from essentially chattel to equal partners, when marriage was changed from multiple wives to one – all of these did far more to change marriage then changing the gender of the two people involved in today’s civil marriage laws.
Last – "people who want to marry their ponies, their sisters, or their soccer team?" I thought equating homosexuality with bestiality and incest was limited to the religiously motivated. Disgusting. As for polygamy – marriage used to be that way in many cultures. Perhaps you had better ask historians why we changed away from it rather than ask the gays why they should have to preemptively defend against something for which they’re not asking.
Emphasis mine. A case against same-sex marriage is not made by making a case against something else. That said, you have to believe as Orson Scott Card does, that the bond between a same-sex couple simply does not exist…or that ripping it asunder is no crime against their humanity.
Why do people continually bury their heads in the sand? They’re not. Not at this stage of it. The one’s doing that now aren’t burying their heads in the sand, they’re looking the other way.
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