In the fall of 1955, the citizens of Boise, Idaho were told there was a menace in their midst. On Halloween, three men were arrested — accused of being part of a giant "sex ring" preying on teenage boys. There was no such ring, but the result was a widespread investigation which some people now call a witch hunt.
By the time the investigation ended, 16 men were charged with sex crimes — including men accused of having relations with other consenting adults. But countless other lives were also touched. In some cases, men implicated fled the area. At least one family actually left the country.
The investigation attracted the attention of "Time Magazine" and newspapers across America. In 1966, the book "The Boys of Boise" once again brought the cases to the nation’s attention. The "morals drive" — and the subsequent publicity — left scars which remain to this day.
When people scratch their heads over the behavior of men like Larry Craig, it helps to look back at the world they grew up in. I was lucky enough to have entered adolescence in the late 60s, just as the modern gay rights movement was taking shape, and so I was spared a lot of what those men had to live through. But I was close enough to it to have felt some of the venom, the relentless pathologizing of homosexuals by the culture of the 50s. When I was a kid, it was routine for newspapers, TV shows and movies to portray homosexuals in the ugliest, most psychotic ways possible. In films and on TV, the homosexual characters usually met violent ends, as Vito Russo documented in his landmark book, The Celluloid Closet.
What happened in Boise surely isn’t the only homosexual panic that occurred during the 1950s, that resulted in a witch hunt of gay men. The book, Sex Crime Panic, documents another one that happened, also in 1955, this time in Soux City Iowa. In that one 20 men were rounded up and committed for an indefinite period to a mental institution as "criminal sexual psychopaths", housed in a ward created especially to house homosexual men. Their only crime was being homosexuals, and having affairs with other consenting adults. Not one man incarcerated in that mental ward was there for the crime that originally set off the panic…the abduction and murder of two children. Those killers were never found and brought to justice. But nobody questioned the logic of rounding up a bunch of homosexuals and locking them away as a public safety measure.
It was most likely viewed back then, as the more humane alternative…
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. It ain’t goin a be that way. We can’t. I’m stuck with what I got, caught in my own loop. Can’t get out of it. Jack, I don’t want a be like them guys you see around sometimes. And I don’t want a be dead. There was these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich…Dad would pass a remark when he seen them. They was a joke even though they was pretty tough old birds. I was what, nine years old, and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They’d took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel."
"You seen that?"
"Dad made sure I seen it. Took me to see it. Me and K.E. Dad laughed about it. Hell, for all I know he done the job. If he was alive and was to put his head in that door right now you bet he’d go get his tire iron…"
-Annie Proulx – Brokeback Mountain
Larry Craig, born in Council, Idaho in July of 1945, would have been 10 when the 1955 Boise homosexual panic happened.
Phillips: And tell me about the type of people that you arrested. I mean, give – can you tell me – well, first of all, let me ask you, have you arrested anyone that is well known like a politician or someone of famous stature?
Tolleson: No, I wouldn’t say that. But we have arrested certainly some high-profile people. It ranged from CEOs, bank presidents…
Phillips: Oh, my gosh.
Tolleson: …professors, college professors. So, it really runs the gamut as far as who we actually apprehend and who has been involved in this in the past.
Phillips: Are they gay? Are all of them gay?
Tolleson: I can’t say. I can only tell you that a good majority of these men do have families. And that’s been a little bit shocking to us. You would think that it would be more of a gay issue. But overwhelmingly more and more we’re seeing that these are people with families.
(Emphasis mine) This is pretty much what a friend of mine, Jon Larimore who once ran the Gay And Lesbian Information Bureau BBS System back in the mid 80s to late 90s experienced. I did volunteer work on the BBS, which was created to be a news and information resource for the local gay community. It was funded by the non-profit Community Educational Services Foundation. Jon told me many times that he would get calls on the GLIB support phone line, late at night usually, from men who had just been arrested in a cruising zone, usually a men’s room that had been staked out by the cops, and were franticly looking for legal advice and support. Jon told me that almost without exception these were deeply closeted men who were terrified of their wives and/or families finding out.
It didn’t surprise me then, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone now. Even back in the 80s, before the Internet came along (and wiped out all the BBS systems), many of us who were out and comfortable with our sexual selves had already lived lives where we never felt compelled to journey into that pit. We had a burgeoning social scene, at least in the D.C. area, that was better then the seedy mafia run bars that were all gay folk had back in the early 60s, where we could meet other out and about gay folk. If all you wanted was sex, there was the bar scene where you could cruise to your hearts content, and sex clubs you could go to if you just wanted to dispense with the formalities. Even back then the tea room scene was almost exclusively populated by deeply closeted types who couldn’t imagine themselves being seen in going into a gay bar…and the kind who are turned on by the thrill of risk.
For those of us with a more Disney-esq yearning for romance and finding that soulmate to put your arms around, it wasn’t exactly the best of times, but it was light years away from the worst. And you could see a better place coming down the road as long as gay people kept fighting for the right to just be ourselves, openly, proudly. I stayed well away from the sex clubs, visited the bars infrequently, and mostly socialized online, and at parties and G.L.I.B. happy hours downtown with my fellow gay geeks. But I knew from hearing the stories, what was going on with the guys who frequented mens rooms. At least one vice cop is willing to acknowledge what his own experience is telling him. Which I guess is a good thing. But they should all know this by now.
If Only You Didn’t Hate Us So Much…If Only You Could Just Not Hate Us Quite So Very Much…
Well you had to know this was coming. ABC News, the network that whitewashed the murder of Matthew Shepard, smearing a murdered gay kid as a meth addict who probably had sex with at least one of his killers, ABC News now tells us that the problem with Larry Craig isn’t so much that he was cruising for sex in toilets all the while promoting himself as a Family Values man, but that he was gay…and That’s What Gays Do…
Dig the headlines here. It’s the 1950s all over again as far as how ABC views the gay community. We’re all sex crazed perverts sulking around public toilets…
Public places like men’s restrooms, in airports and train stations, truck stops, university libraries and parks, have long been places where gay and bisexual men, particularly those in the closet, congregate in order to meet for anonymous sex.
Over time, people familiar with cruising told ABCNEWS.com, gay men began using a codified system of signals to indicate to others that they were interested in sex. In an effort to curb lewd acts in public — or as some gays argue, in an effort to persecute gay men — undercover police began sting operations in places known for sex soliciting and employed the same codes.
You have to read to the very end of the article before you get to this, sorta-kinda acknowledgment that this is a behavior characteristic more of the closet, then of gay people as a whole…
With many other options available for gay men to meet each other, Gershen Kaufman, a professor emeritus of psychology at Michigan State University and author of the book "Coming Out of Shame," said public cruising is practiced mainly by deeply closeted men.
"Cruisers are not sex offenders. They are deeply, deeply closeted. There is a lot of self-hatred and shame and they can’t allow themselves to come to terms with their sexuality.
The fact is that anonymous cruising areas are an artifact of the persecution gay people faced daily before Stonewall, when gay bars were routinely raided by the police, their customers rounded up like cattle and herded into paddy wagons, their names and addresses printed in the newspapers the following day. Back in those days you could loose your job, the roof over your head, be expelled from college or dismissed from a jobs program, be denied or have a professional license revoked, and be put on a sex offenders registry and be required to report any change of residence to the police…simply for being gay. This is why back then, many gay people gravitated to places where they could have sex anonymously: because being identified as a homosexual could have devastating consequences. Anonymous sex was seen as a safe outlet.
Back in the 50s, heterosexual sexuality had to conform to the nuclear family ideal, and gay sexuality was forced by fear and prejudice into a pattern of brief barren encounters. When the sexual revolution came along, heterosexuals broke free of the stifling conformity of the 50s, and felt free to explore their sexuality and find their own places of sexual joy and fulfillment on their own terms. I think a lot of gay people, seeing heterosexuals suddenly discovering the joys of sex for its own sake, mistook the culture of anonymous sex they’d been forced into for generations for a kind of liberation too. Well look at us…we were sexual pioneers all along and we didn’t even know it… No…we were outcasts, driven into the gutter by prejudice and hate.
While it may have seemed superficially back in the brutal 1950s that gays were having sex for its own sake, the fact was that we were a people whose sexuality was being brutally stifled. Gay people had sex in back alleys and parks and toilets back then, not because we were sexual pioneers way before the swinging 60s, but because the sex drive isn’t something that you can stifle in a mammal, let alone a primate, let alone a human being, for very long. It had to come out somewhere, and if that wasn’t in the normal human course of dating and mating, then it was going to be in quick, desperate assignations, because an instinct older then the fish was going to drive us, some how, some way, toward some sort of sexual joining, no matter how much fear and self loathing the culture managed to cram into our heads…and our hearts.
Sexual freedom was good for heterosexuals, and it was good for us too. But I think, especially in the years right after Stonewall, that a lot of gay people mistook the tea rooms for a liberation that we already had. No. It was repression. We are not a free people, if anonymous random hooking up is the only choice we are allowed. I get…trust me I get the fact…that there are gay people who feel that cruising for anonymous sex is liberation and getting married and settling down is a kind of sexual selling out. It’s bullshit. Anonymous sex is fine, whether you’re gay or straight, if that’s your sexual temperament. Not everyone is emotionally equipped for relationships, let alone monogamy. Fine. What was good about the sexual revolution, was that it gave our bodies and our libidos back to us. As long as people are decent to one another, to paraphrase Jefferson, it neither picks my pockets nor breaks my legs if the sex they’re having is not the sort of sex I would want to have myself. But we’re not all into that by any means, and if sexual freedom for heterosexuals meant that they could have all the casual sex they want, then it has to also mean that gay people can do the dating and mating thing if that’s what they want.
And that’s what’s been happening for the past couple decades, although you’d never know it to listen to ABC News. Gay couples have in a sense, and literally, been moving into the suburbs. They’ve been getting married. They’ve been settling down. Gay kids are playing the dating and mating game now, just like their heterosexual peers. Gay neighborhoods have coffee shops, grocery stores, boutiques, same sex couples walking their dogs, chatting about the weather, bellyaching about taxes and city services. The cruising zones have given way to online dating services.
I can see, in a really perverse way, how some gay men might think that holding on to toilet stall sex amounts to preserving some kind of gay cultural legacy. But it’s a legacy of repression and persecution, the verdict of bigots, not merely on our sexuality, but on our very hearts and souls. Homosexuals are filth… No. We are human beings. The men having toilet stall sex these days are almost exclusively deeply closeted people who are full of the fear and self loathing nearly everyone had back before Stonewall…back before Hooker’s study, and the APA removing homosexuality from its list of mental diseases…back when we almost all believed that we were sick, like everyone said we were…back when we hated ourselves.
"If only we didn’t hate ourselves so much…if only we could just not hate ourselves quite so very much…"
-Michael, The Boys In The Band
The fact that this kind of thing is still going on is proof that as far as we’ve come as a people, we still have a long way to go before we’re truly free. And if the likes of the republican party and their mouthpieces like ABC News have their way of course, we never will be. The problem wasn’t that we hated ourselves. The problem was never that we hated ourselves. To hate yourself is not the human condition. We were taught to hate ourselves. Because so many others hated us, and could never endure seeing us happy, contented, proud, and least of all…loved. What ABC News is trying to do here, is rekindle that hatred. So the day can come again when we can be taught to hate ourselves once more. So that one day we may once again come to believe that our sexuality, that our love lives, that we, belong in the sewer.
It took only a few hours after news circulated that entertainer and entrepreneur Merv Griffin had died (at 82, Sunday, in Los Angeles) for a drumbeat of wrath—yes, wrath—to begin on some of the Internet’s fringe Web sites, where Griffin was assailed by various contributors for allegedly having been a "closeted" homosexual who should have announced he was gay to the world—though at which stage of his career he should have made the declaration was not specified.
Well…actually one place he could have done it was spelled out. And as it turns out…Shales knows damn well where and when it was, that Griffin could have made a difference…
Whatever, the vehemence and fury in the attacks was disheartening. "A bloated pig like that should burn in hell," wrote one anonymous assailant. Michelangelo Signorile, who runs a Web site called The Gist, wrote that Griffin could have helped prevent the AIDS epidemic if only he had spoken to his friends Ronald and Nancy Reagan about it, but that "it is highly unlikely" he ever did, preferring to remain "shockingly silent" even as "his own people were dying."
The Reagan administration’s reaction to AIDS is complex and goes far beyond Reagan’s refusal to speak out about the epidemic. A great deal of his power base was born-again Christian Republican conservatives who embraced a reactionary social agenda that included a virulent, demonizing homophobia. In the media, people like Reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell portrayed gay people as diseased sinners and promoted the idea that AIDS was a punishment from God and that the gay rights movement had to be stopped. In the Republican Party, zealous right-wingers, such as Representative William Dannenmeyer (CA) and Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), hammered home this same message. In the Reagan White House, people such as Secretary of Education William Bennett and Gary Bauer, his chief domestic advisor, worked to enact it in the Adminis- tration’s policies.
In practical terms this meant AIDS research was chronically underfunded. When doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute for Health asked for more funding for their work on AIDS, they were routinely denied it. Between June 1981 and May 1982, the CDC spent less than $1 million on AIDS, but $9 million on Legionnaire’s Disease. At that point over 1,000 of the 2,000 AIDS cases reported resulted in death; there were fewer than 50 deaths from Legionnaire’s Disease. This drastic lack of funding would continue through the Reagan years.
When health and support groups in the gay community instigated education and prevention programs, they were denied federal funding. In October 1987 Jesse Helms amended a federal appropriation bill that prohibited AIDS education efforts that “encourage or promoted homosexual activity”(that is, tell gay men how to have safe sex).
When almost all medical opinion spoke out against mandatory HIV testing (since it would drive those at risk away from being tested) and the ACLU and Lambda Legal Defense were fighting discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS, Republicans such as Vice President George Bush in 1987 and William Dannenmeyer (in a California state referendum in 1988) called for mandatory HIV testing.
Throughout all of this Ronald Reagan did nothing. When Rock Hudson, a friend and colleague of the Reagan’s, was diagnosed and died in 1985 (one of the 20,740 cases reported that year), Reagan still did not speak out. When family friend William F. Buckley, in a March 18, 1986 New York Times article, called for mandatory testing of HIV and said that HIV+ gay men should have this information forcibly tattooed on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their arms), Reagan said nothing. In 1986 (after five years of complete silence) when Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released a report calling for AIDS education in schools, Bennett and Bauer did everything possible to undercut and prevent funding for Koop’s too-little too-late initiative. By the end of 1986, 37,061 AIDS cases had been reported; 16,301 people had died.
The most memorable Reagan AIDS moment was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagan’s were there sitting next to the French Prime Minister and his wife, Francois and Danielle Mitterrand. Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners, Hope quipped, “I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS, but she doesn’t know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.” As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterrands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States—more then 70,000 of them had died.
Emphasis mine. If the Reagans epitomized Truman Capote’s remark that "a faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room", Shales epitomizes the person who looks the other way when they see it. But Griffin had a chance to put a human face on that joke, and he ether didn’t, or he allowed the illusion of friendship persist, let himself be the "some" in "some of my best friends are…"
One commenter on the TV Week site avers that Griffin, "…was under no obligation to share his sexual preference" and "the GLBT community must realize that, just as they have a right to "come out," they have no right to "out" anyone else- unless that person says one thing and does another." True enough, generally. The struggling gay teen…the poor working stiff who’s just barely making ends meet…the closeted solider torn between the needs of their heart and the needs of their country…the closeted middle manager, struggling to hold on to their career dreams…most all of us need to be left alone to deal with the closet on our own terms, in our own way. But with power comes responsibility. In the face of social indifference to a staggering death toll that many then (and even now still) were saying was nothing more then what homosexuals were due, closeted celebrities like Griffin, people whom pop culture fame had blessed with status and wealth had an obligation, not only to their own people, but to their country, and to humanity, to raise their voices. And Griffin didn’t.
You can’t take it with you…not even your closet. But something that remains behind, long after we’re gone from this good earth, are the things we did to make a difference, that made our world better for our having walked in it. Those remain, long after our names are forgotten. And also, the things we didn’t, that we could have.
Lifted from Peterson’s comment to his own blog post Here…
Peterson now wants to help others that are referred to the clutches of Exodus. He invited all ex-gay survivors, as they call themselves, to a conference in opposition to the ex-gay movement. They can learn how one can be gay and nevertheless lead a godly life. Michael Bussee co-founded Exodus 30 years ago but came back out of it because he found the methods of the organization questionable. Today he participates in the ‘counter’-conference: “One day a young man came to me. He explained that he’d had anonymous sex and felt so guilty afterward that he mutilated himself. At that point I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t preach against homosexuality anymore if it causes such damage.”
Emphasis mine. You folks who say "love the sinner, hate the sin"…? There’s your love.
If Only They Had PSAs Like This For Gay Teens Back When I Was One Myself…
I might have actually done something like this…
This touching little video is from a TV commercial for the Norwegian Lesbian and Gay Rights movement (LLH). The text at the end, according to one commenter on YouTube (who presumably reads Norwegian) says “You don’t have to be THAT brave.” The number is for a information hotline for gay youth.
And before you ask…I did a lot of digging around for the background song on this. Apparently a lot of other people besides me would love to have a copy of it. But don’t go looking around on iTunes because it’s not there, or anywhere else. It was recorded especially for this PSA, and so for as I can determine, has not ever been released for purchase by the general public. Here are the lyrics…
Were dancing you and me its our destiny
Baby you and me
Make up your mind
Like I told you a 1000 times
Everything will be just fine
If I can’t see you tonight
I know my love will grow stronger
(chorus)
I’ll be dreaming of you
Like everything is bright and blue
And I’ll be here waiting
But not for so long (so long)
If I could have one song for my comic series A Coming Out Story, this would be it. I doesn’t become an obvious match though, until the last half of the series, and I’m only still in the beginning of the first half.
Historically and linguistically, being left-handed has long been associated with the mark of the devil. In Latin, the word "sinister" means "left." In French, it is "gauche" – a far worse sin in France than being sinister, no doubt.
There is the left-handed compliment, which is no compliment at all; the bad guy was made to sit at the left hand of God; and there has been a higher than average number of left-handed, insane villains like Jack the Ripper and the Boston Strangler.
-Beth Quinn – Good News From The Left-Handed Liberation Front
Sin. Sinister. Left-Handed. We don’t have to imagine a religion that regards left handedness as a mark of the devil, because it existed. Perhaps in some corners of the human world, it still exists. And some of us of my generation don’t have to imagine what reparative therapy for left-handedness would look like, because we have seen it with our own eyes.
The myths and superstitions surrounding left handedness were almost completely dead, at least in the United States, when I entered grade school back in 1959. But they hadn’t died out completely. I’m old enough to remember watching two teachers tie a classmate’s left arm to his side after he was caught writing something with his left hand.
They did it at the kid’s parent’s request, and they were not brutal about it. It wasn’t like they were binding him tightly or anything. The thinking was that if you just train a kid to use their right hand early enough, it would take and they wouldn’t be left handed anymore. It was a bit like putting something bitter on the thumb of a small child that won’t stop sucking their thumb. They just lightly tied a small strap around the kid’s waste and left arm, to prevent him from reflexively using his left hand to write with. The kid did not resist, he just sat there crying, humiliated, because he knew he’d done something wrong.
Except…he hadn’t. Put aside for a moment that their model of how handedness works was all wrong. That it was something like a bad habit which, if caught early enough, you could correct. Even if handedness was a completely chosen thing, there is nothing wrong or evil or harmful about using your left hand over your right. Unless that is, you believe that it’s a sin. Left-handed. Sinister. Sin. Or you believed the few remaining mental health professionals of the day who said that left-handedness leads to a host of mental and psychological problems. Didn’t you know that a higher then average number of serial killers are left handed?
It isn’t hard to picture how an ex-leftie ministry might work to suck the pride and joy and love of life out of a young guy, a kid maybe who keeps having these…urges…to use their left hand. Every time he gets that urge he believes he is being unfaithful to God. He believes this, because his church is telling him this. The Devil baptizes his followers with his left hand… His peers either ridicule him, or bath him in suffocating patronization. He has this…condition. He can’t help himself. There is something tragically wrong with him. His parents are profoundly ashamed that their son uses his left hand. The kid is deeply ashamed of himself. And every time he feels the urge to use his left hand, the shame deepens.
But there is one final hope. Reparative therapy. Thousands have found freedom from left-handedness. Question left-handedness. There are stories of hope and redemption. This one has been living as a right handed man for over a decade, and is now a successful painter who, he says, never feels the urge to use his left hand to pick up a brush. That one has been in a successful relationship with another ex-leftie and they are raising a healthy, godly family of right handed children. This one has been freed from left-handedness through the power of faith. That one abandoned the left-handed lifestyle, and all its self destructiveness, the drugs, the booze, the litany of health problems, and has been living a clean and sober life ever since.
So he checks himself in for a round of ex-leftie therapy. Perhaps he misses the fine print on the form that says he will never be completely cured of this left-handed urges. Perhaps it is not in the fine print. Perhaps, full of all the stories of hope and cure and…redemption…he decides not to notice.
So he spends months…then years…and thousands of dollars in the ex-leftie world. He abandons school, career, the life he had, the life he could have had, on his quest to rid himself of his urge to use his left hand. But he can’t. He’s left handed. After a long struggle he eventually becomes adept at using his right hand to do simple chores. He can write…sort of. An accomplishment he’s proud of. Now he can write with a fountain pen and not smear the ink. He can use scissors with his right hand. He can pitch a ball with his right hand…sort of. But the urges never go away, and maddeningly after years of adapting to a right handed life, he…falls…again and again.
Sometimes its unexpected, like when his neighbor’s kid playfully tosses a ball at him and he catches it in his left hand. Sometimes it happens when he lets his guard down, and he catches himself doodling something with the pen in his left land. It seems the devil won’t let go of him. But it’s not the devil. It’s just his biology. The model of handedness he’s been fed is all wrong, and no amount of sincerely held religious belief can change that any more then it could change the fact hundreds of years ago, that Galileo and Copernicus were right. And yet, it moves.
All his life this left handed man has been fighting his nature. And…for what? To please a lot of right handed people who have bought into, for whatever reason, a model of handedness that is not true, and which…surely only coincidentally…elevates them above their left handed neighbors. His own nature has been used against him since childhood, to implant shame, self loathing, disgust. To make him accept his lowly status. He has been denied a wholesome and nurturing spiritual life, being made to feel himself alienated from God Every Time He Gets An Urge To Use His Left Hand. Which he keeps getting, Because He’s Left Handed.
He is either condemned, or at best, patronizingly offered help for his…condition. When he is not being told that his sin is the worst sin of all, he’s being patronizingly told that well…we’re all sinners in the eyes of the Lord. But this sin seems woven into his very being, like a taint on his very soul. He just can’t stop the urges. His body fights him every time he picks up a pencil or pen. It reminds him constantly that, somehow, he is fundamentally wicked, in a way no one else seems to be. No one else except other devil marked lefties.
He has been denied wholesome and nurturing relationships with his peers, with his community, with his family, because every time he catches himself using his left hand for something, or even feeling the urge to, he is ashamed, and so he withdraws, feeling ashamed, unclean, unworthy. He has been denied the career he might have had, the friends he might have made, and all the joy and fulfillment they might have brought.
Who knows…perhaps he was even denied the love of his life, because he was taught from such an early age, that there was something innately unclean about him. A feeling of shame and despair that was reenforced, again and again within him, every time he had that perfectly natural urge to use his left hand. Sin. Sinister. Left-handed.
The devil baptizes his own with his left hand… He sees himself as someone profoundly, horribly tainted. Unworthy. He gets on his knees nightly and begs God, tearfully, to take the urges away from him. But they don’t go away. He’s Left Handed. It isn’t something you can pray away.
He pays therapists thousands of dollars to talk him into being right handed. Perhaps it was an overly dominant mother. Perhaps when a boy uses his left hand to write with, he is subconsciously rebelling against his manhood. Left is associated with the feminine isn’t it? Whereas right is associated with the masculine. Perhaps his father was too distant. Perhaps he isn’t getting enough masculine activity. But therapy doesn’t work either. He’s Left Handed. You can’t psychoanalyze it away. It wasn’t his mother. It wasn’t his father. It’s his biology. It’s perfectly normal. Not average. Not common. But nonetheless, normal.
But he is never told that. There are nights when he wonders why God even allowed him to be born.
There is nothing wrong with him. Nothing. He’s just left-handed. It neither harms him, nor his neighbors, that he uses his left hand. And it doesn’t separate him from God, because if God is the creator then God made him that way. If anything, it is trying not to be what he so clearly is, that is separating him from God. It is also separating him from his family, and from his community. It has separated him from the whole life he could have had.
Reality matters. Existence exists. When the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird. You would think that someone of a deeply religious nature, wishing to be faithful and devoted to God almighty would instinctively grasp how the hand of the creator has the final, absolute say over all our human pretensions. However we might wish reality to be, reality is what it is. There is a lesson on standing humbly before the Creator in that, which you’d think the religious conservative would find completely agreeable. You’d think. But if that were so, then there wouldn’t be a movement to teach creationism to school kids, let alone a movement to teach homosexuals to hate themselves, and to teach their peers, their neighbors, their country, to treat them with contempt. The problem with standing humbly before the creator, is that its…well…humbling.
How About We Discuss Our Differences Over A Nice Glass Of Get The Fuck Off My Back?
I have this love/hate relationship to the books of Robert Heinlein. When he’s good he’s pure gold. But there are times he makes me want to hit the roof. And I suppose he’d be delighted to hear this. He always said he wanted first to make a living as a writer, second to be entertaining, and third, to make you think.
Anyway…there’s this passage in Stranger In A Strange Land which I could forgive Heinlein anything for writing. It’s the scene where Jubal Harshaw introduces a friend to Anne, who is a "fair witness". I’m doing this from memory here, but as I recall it, Jubal and his friend are by the pool with some others, and the friend remarks that he’d never met a fair witness before and Jubal says of course you have, Anne is one. Oh really, asks the friend. And Jubal calls over the Anne "Anne, what color is that house on the hill over there?" And Anne takes a look and immediately replies, "The side that’s facing me is white."
That’s not only a beautiful illustration of what it means to tell the truth, but also how telling the truth has to work in the human context. We are not gods. We do not have the god’s eye view of reality. So we have to be careful to understand, really understand, what it is that we know, and what it is that we don’t.
I’ve heard religious fundamentalists say that the most important question facing us is where will we spend eternity. No. There is another question that is more important then that one, more important then any other question you can ask. Because it’s the question you have to know the answer to, before you can answer any other question: What do I know, and how do I know it?
I suppose a fundamentalist would reply with some form of "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it." But that’s still not answering the question. How do we know that the Bible is an authoritative source? How do we know what the Bible says? At some point, we all have to make judgments, and those judgments are always personal. It helps to make them honestly and sincerely. But it also helps to do that with a little humility. You only know the side that’s facing you. And it goes without saying, that its helpful not to misrepresent the facts that we do know, to kind of…nudge people…in the right direction. For their own good.
We should always behave such that what is true, can be verified to be so. -Jacob Bronowski.
But that’s been something of a problem for the ex-gay world, hasn’t it?
So I’m reading the back and forth between the ex-gay blogs and the survivor’s blogs in the wake of the Survivor’s Conference. Seems the very word ‘Survivor’ is controversial. One writer in the comments on Peterson’s blog says that using the term survivor is provocative. As provocative as a million dollar billboard campaign designed to make people think that their homosexual neighbors’ most intimate sense of self is something akin to a blackboard that they could just wipe clean and redo for the pleasure of their heterosexual neighbors whenever they wanted to, if they weren’t so selfish, or so…trapped…in homosexuality…I’m not so sure. How would a heterosexual be expected to feel upon laying eyes on a billboard that featured a handsome, happy gay man asking them to "Question Heterosexuality"? Ah…but it’s not provocative to assert that there is no such thing as a homosexual…only people trapped in homosexuality.
An anonymous ex-gay blogger asks if the ex-ex-gays are survivors, does that mean she’s a mortally wounded victim, or a corpse, or a zombie. Well let me just answer as a gay man, who keeps hearing homophobic jackasses bellyaching about how we stole the word ‘gay’ away from decent society, that what other people call themselves doesn’t make you anything. As a gay man who has heard himself labeled a symptom of social decay, if not a walking signpost of impending Armageddon, ever since he was a teenager, let me say that how other people live their lives doesn’t make You anything. As a gay man who has walked among my fellow gay folk in many places and many scenes, from the sublime to the ridiculous, let me say that even when other people assert their identity with you, in ways you may find completely nonsensical if not utterly bewildering, That does not make you anything. It’s your own experience in this life that makes you something. It’s the fact that you lived it, or are still living it, that gives you the right to name it.
But of course, this isn’t about what people call themselves, it’s about what they call others. And I can appreciate how the ex-gay movement can take the use of the word ‘survivor’ in this context as an attack, considering that the religious right has made an art out of applying labels to themselves, as a way of back handedly pasting labels onto others. So they say they’re pro-life, as a way of saying the other side is pro-death. So they say they’re pro-family, as a way of saying the other side is anti-family. So they say many thousands have found freedom from homosexuality, as a way of saying that homosexuality is a prison, or an addiction. But that’s not what’s going on here, and if the word ‘survivor’ has any meaning, then just reading the stories on Beyond Ex-Gay is all that’s necessary to see how the word applies to these people.
Of course, those stories are pretty damming, whether the survivors intend that or not. Mortally wounded? How about, Part Of The Problem. A name on the knife in someone’s heart? Someone you may have never even laid eyes on. Perhaps some helpless teenager. Delivered with love. Yes, it would be nice if we could all just get along, regardless of what we call ourselves. Yes, it would be wonderful, peaceful, happy tranquility if we could all just live our fucking lives, find our happiness in this life, make our way for ourselves in this world, reach for the dream within our hearts, to the best of our ability, to the best within us. But that’s, let’s face it, just not in the cards. Righteousness forbids it.
The answer to how we all manage to get along despite our differences, is simple, in the way all impossible answers are simple. You let leave us alone and let us live our lives, and we leave you alone and let you live yours. But that is just not to be. You are called to save us from ourselves, because you have the ultimate truth, and we are all merely trapped in sin, and never mind that you only see the side of the house that’s facing you. Salvation has given you the God’s eye view. So you’ll keep twisting that knife marked Salvation into people’s hearts and those of us trying to find and have and hold that someone to love in this poor, angry world, that intimate other, that soul mate, or as you might say, Trapped In Homosexuality will keep trying to get you The Fuck Off Our Backs, even if that means we have to be rude about it. Because, you are taking what should be one of our life’s most perfect joys, and making it your offering to God and our hearts are not yours to offer.
I was content to ignore the ex-gay movement until the day I watched it try to drive a knife into the heart of a gay teenager who was perfectly content with who he was. And then I took a closer look at what was being done to many other innocent hearts in the name of God, and even more obscenely…in the name of Love. Most of them adults, some of them just kids. I listened to one gay teenager talk about being forced through Love In Action against his will, and then how his own mother beat the living crap out of him because he was still as gay when he came out as when he went in, because the religious right had taught her to loath her own flesh and blood, and the ex-gay movement taught her that he didn’t have to be gay if he didn’t want to be, that his sexuality was an addiction, a false image, a renunciation of manhood, proof that she was not a good mother, and I don’t think the day will ever come when remembering his words and the look on his face as he told the story of the day his own mother started pounding her fists into him won’t make me want to put my fist through a wall. It could make a stone cry. But not the righteous.
So…I’m all about dialogue. Considerate and transparent dialogue is a Good Thing. But it’s a bit like dialogue between Israel and the Arab states surrounding it: A prerequisite to talks is that you recognize my right to exist. And see…that’s the problem. Because there is just no way I can ask you to do that, ask you to get off our backs, ask you let us live in our communities, in our country, as full and equal citizens, no way I can even suggest it, that you will not hear me demanding of you that you renounce your faith. We have to bleed, so you can be righteous.
So…maybe instead of calling ourselves gay, or ex-ex-gay, we all should just cut to the bottom line, and call ourselves Scapegoats.
Elizabeth Edwards said Saturday she is troubled by the suspected anti-gay beating death of a Sacramento man, and said the killing of Satender Singh demands renewed condemnations of hate speech in America.
Singh, a 26-year-old Fijian immigrant, died four days after he was attacked July 1 at Lake Natoma by an angry group hurling explicit gay slurs and racial remarks.
Edwards, campaigning in Sacramento for her husband, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards of North Carolina, said she was so affected by news of Singh’s death that she rewrote a speech on human rights she was due to deliver later Saturday in San Francisco.
“I thought we learned some lessons from Laramie and Matthew Shepard,” Edwards said in an interview, referring to the fatal 1998 beating of a gay college student in Wyoming that triggered an uproar over anti-gay violence.
Oh you did, did you? Well I was just in Laramie lady, and I can tell you for a fact that they are busy trying to forget it ever happened. Learn something? Oh my goodness. How to bury their fucking heads in the sand deeper maybe.
The first time I visited Laramie since the murder, I was driving through on my way back home to Baltimore. I thought I’d swing through the town and see if I could find the place where Shepard was killed and pay my respects. But without knowing exactly where it was, other then a general description of the site, it was hopeless and I had to give up. So I drove through town looking for any sign, any acknowledgment, of what had happened. Maybe a little poster in some window somewhere. Maybe a little plaque. Some notice somewhere, anywhere, that gay folks would be coming here to morn and pay their respects. I found exactly nothing.
Okay, thinks I…next time I come, I’ll know the location beforehand. So I did a small amount of poking around and found the spot where Shepard’s dying body was found and looked it up on a map. Shepard was driven from The Fireside bar near the edge of the downtown part of Laramie, out to Snowy View Road. I’d already read that the property owner had torn down the deer fence that Shepard had been tied too, out of pique that so many people were leaving flowers and tributes there. But I figured I could still stand at the spot for a moment or two and morn.
It was not to be…
The road leading to the site is now marked with signs warning you that it is a private drive, not a public road, and that everyone should keep out. That entire area is now off limits to the public. You can’t get anywhere near the place where Shepard’s dying body was found anymore.
I suppose at some point, they’ll do something like build a condo right on top of the spot where it happened. Or maybe a nice tennis court.
Over and over again in this struggle for our freedom and human dignity, I am put in mind of the words of Malcolm X. He was not anything near the peacemaker that Martin Luther King Jr. was, but he knew what progress meant…
If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn’t even begun to pull out the knife.
Progress is healing the wound… Hate crime legislation, anti discrimination laws, same sex marriage…these are all good things, necessary things. But real progress toward gay equality, toward that day when gay people can live side-by side with our heterosexual neighbors in peace and good will, won’t happen, won’t even begin to happen, until straight America is willing to begin healing the wound. And not only are they not pulling out the knife, in Laramie, they’re still trying to make people forget it’s even there.
And this is why gay people are still being murdered every year in America, for no other reason then that they are gay. Too many people hate us enough to kill us, to think of killing us as some kind of sport, or a rite of passage into manhood. And too many other people don’t give a shit. Hate, and it’s lover, Contempt, just keep doing their dance on our lives, their dance over our bodies.
That was why Matthew Shepard was killed, make no mistake. ABC News can get away with helping the religious right whitewash that basic fact of the killing, because few people outside of the gay community will bother making the trip to Laramie to see the place where it all happened for themselves. But last night I drove from about where Shepard was kidnapped to the place where his killers tied him to a fence, put their cigarettes out on his skin, and beat his skull open with the butt of a pistol.
You go out of the downtown section…you drive for blocks…past the university…past the outlying convenience stores…a few fast food joints…some liquor stores…out to the edge of town and beyond. Into the rolling sage. Into the darkness. I know why they turned off onto Pilot Peak Road now. Pilot Peak was their last turn off before the Interstate. They had to make that left, or they would have been on the Interstate and from there it was either drive back toward town or drive for miles to Happy Jack Road. So they took the left onto Pilot Peak Road and drove back into that sub division as far as they could. Into the darkness. Where no one would see. Where their handiwork wouldn’t be discovered for a long time.
You take that drive…out of town…far away from the town lights…into the night…and you start thinking to yourself…This was a robbery? No way. Just. No. Way. There were two of them against one small, 112 pound boy and they passed plenty of nice, quiet, dark places where they could have taken Shepard, robbed him, dumped him, and driven off. Hell…they passed plenty of places where they could have just shot him dead and driven off without being seen. You don’t drive that far out of town, into the middle of nowhere, just to rob a 112 pound kid. You drive him there because you intend to spend a while enjoying yourself beating a faggot to death while he begs for his life and nobody can hear him scream for help, and you don’t want the body discovered before you’ve had a chance to clean up and get rid of the evidence.
That was always the plan, from the moment they got him into the truck. If you doubt that, take the drive yourself some night, from downtown Laramie to Snowy View Road, and try to convince yourself that they only intended to rob him.
Lessons? Lessons? There is no memorial to Matthew Shepard anywhere in Laramie that I could find, the site of this beating is off limits to the public now, and thanks to ABC News, people are calling Matthew Shepard a Meth addict who knew his killers, and maybe even had sex with them once or twice. And the killing goes on. They’re learning how to live with the increasing stench of their own prejudices is what they’re learning. Because that is still preferable to treating homosexuals as their neighbors.
[Edited a tad…]
[Update…] The Good People of Laramie eventually did decide to erect a memorial after all. Ladies and Gentlemen, I hereby present you with the Matthew Shepard Memorial…bench.
We Are Always Open To Considerate And Transparent Dialogue. Not That We’ll Engage In It…
Dialogue anyone?
PRESS STATEMENT
July 17, 2007
Love In Action received no formal notice of Mr. Toscano’s arrival, not did he invite us to participate in today’s proceedings, though it is apparent he did take the time to invite media sources…
Blah, blah, woof woof… And you took the time to prepare a statement for the press and have a bunch of them printed up with with your logo and web site address and attach a tasteful little business card with your Communications Coordinator‘s name on it to every one. So you knew it was happening, and in fact, Peterson has been talking to you John Smid.
But then…you knew that. The wall is yellow John.
More on the Survivor’s Initiative at Love In Action last Tuesday, and Peterson’s response to the LIA press statement Here. In the meantime, I have some photos…
David Christie (right) and Brandon Tidwell display the collages of their
life journeys they would later present to the Love In Action staff.
At their request I’ve blurred out the details in the artwork.
Some of the local folks who came out to support the survivors…
Brandon and David return from delivering their collages
to the LIA staff. The only point at which anyone from LIA
came out to talk to anyone was to deliver copies of their
press statement. I’ve no idea what was said at the door to
LIA, but the meeting was short.
Brandon gets some artwork to take back home with him.
One of the protesters gave Brandon her poster and I’m
a tad jealous because that was a real good one. I’d watched
them making it and a bunch of other good ones just before
the first anniversary protest last year.
LIA’s Press Statement
Someone had put them there, to keep them from blowing
away I guess, and I thought it made a good shot. I think
that’s one of Morgan’s tripods.
It’ll be lite posting for a while here because as of…er…Right Now…I’m heading out to the big highways to visit some friends, attend the Open Source Developer’s Conference in Portland, and do some exploring along the way. I’ll be on the road most of the day today, but I’m heading for Memphis and I’ll stay there for a while to see some friends, and…stand with Soul Force in front of Love In Action. Via Peterson Toscano…
Ex-Gay Survivor Initiative Heads to Memphis
What: Gay men visit Love in Action to tell of the psychological and spiritual harm that they experienced there and in other "ex-gay" ministries. Three survivors of the controversial residential program will present Love in Action with personal artwork depicting the damage caused by the message that gays and lesbians can and should change their sexual orientation.
When: Tuesday, July 17, at 10:30 a.m.
Where: Love in Action, 4780 Yale Road, Memphis, Tennessee
Who: David Christie is a former Love in Action client who spent 13 years in ex-gay therapy before accepting himself as a gay man at the age of 28.
Brandon Tidwell completed Love in Action’s adult residential program in 2002, but ultimately rejected the organization’s theology and reconciled his sexual orientation with his Christian faith.
Other participants: Jeffrey Harwood, Lance Carroll
Why: Love in Action (LIA) is a Christian residential program that claims to help clients "break out" of "homosexual attraction and behavior" at a cost of $7000 for 3 months. In 2005, the facility was under investigation by the state of Tennessee for operating a mental health facility without a license. LIA has since changed its operating procedures to avoid state regulation. Most recently, LIA closed its controversial Refuge program for teenagers and replaced it with "Family Freedom Intensives," a 4-day, $600 per person. The program is for parents of gay or questioning teenagers.
Love in Action is part of a larger "ex-gay" movement, which continues to thrive in spite of Americans’ growing conviction that sexual orientation is not subject to change and despite a growing willingness on the part of faith communities to accept gays and lesbians as whole and valuable members.
This event is part of the Survivor’s Initiative, a national campaign to share the stories of "Ex-gay Survivors"-men and women who feel that ex-gay messages and programs did them more harm than good.
If you are in or near Memphis, come and show your solidarity. Also, spread the word. It’s been two years since the summer protests sparked by Zach Stark’s blog entries. No matter how LIA words it, Refuge is no more. Even so, the voices of their former LIA clients need to be heard as a witness and a warning.
If you can be there to stand peacefully in witness and solidarity with the survivors, please come. The ex-gay movement cynically pleads tolerance for religious diversity and freedom of choice but they have none to offer themselves for gay people. They instill shame where there should be joy. They teach fear where there should be love. They build walls of shame and fear and mistrust between parents and their children. All so that our hearts may bleed, so that they can feel righteous. If there is such a thing as Sin in this world, Capital S, then to put a dagger of shame into a person’s heart and take away the possibility of finding that intimate other and building a life together, must surely be a big one. For years the ex-gay ministries have claimed that thousands have changed. Now another voice is making itself heard: that of the ones who tried, and who learned after great hardship and pain that to finally become whole persons, they first had to accept themselves, in the words of the old spiritual, "Just As I Am."
Come, stand with us if you can, in witness and in solidarity. Just as you are. Just as we are.
While you all claim in websites, protests, in organizations, or coalitions, to want to help people who are “trapped in homosexuality,” you seem to be more concerned with sticking your nose in my business, and telling me the way you think I should live, along with who I am.
Whoops! Sorry. What this guy actually wrote was…
While you all claim in websites, protests, in organizations, or coalitions, to want to help people who are “trapped in the ex-gay movement,” you seem to be more concerned with sticking your nose in my business, and telling me the way you think I should live, along with who I am.
Sorry about that. Really. Meanwhile (again via Ex-Gay Watch…), PFOX is still battling the Montgomery County Maryland Board Of Education to insure that the only things taught in sex education classes about homosexuals and homosexuality are what the ex-gay movement wants taught. Not that they want to be telling anyone how they think they should live mind you…
So the San Diego Padres, in a gesture of good will to the gay community, hosted a pride night at yesterday’s game. Given that many gay couples go to the games are families with kids, the Padres cheerfully offered to give their kids 14 and younger free Padres floppy hats. Of course you just know this made the kook pews go nuclear…
What began as a few angry parents in San Diego, has now turned into a major blunder on the part of the political powerbrokers within the Padres administrative offices. However, the Padres are not backing down. They are choosing the side of homosexuality over the protection of kids, as well as the rights of parents to choose when they teach their kids about sexuality. Parents at the July 8th game will be forced to explain homosexuality, lesbianism and transsexuality to their little boys and little girls because of the celebration of gay pride during the Braves-Padres game.
Rally organizer James Hartline hopes that educational flyers being distributed to families coming to the ballpark will discourage parents from bringing their children inside of the stadium where they will be exposed to radical elements of the homosexual movement. Rally sponsor Scott Lively, President of Defend the Family International, hopes that the Christian response to the gay pride celebration at Petco Park will serve as a catalyst for awakening parental responsibility in a very sexualized culture.
…"We will not abandon these kids to the destruction of homosexuality," says Dennis Martinez, a former national skateboard champion. A committed Christian and well-respected minister among America’s troubled youth, Martinez decided that he could not allow his ministry or its employees to compromise their commitment to Christ.
As boycotts go, yesterday’s protest at Petco Park flopped – like the hats.
Objecting to the confluence of two promotions at last night’s Padres game – “Pride Night,” a group event for local gays and lesbians, and a team giveaway of floppy hats to children 14 and younger – several Christian and conservative groups called for a public protest and boycott of the game.
Roughly 75 protesters showed up outside Petco Park’s front gate dressed in red T-shirts emblazoned with the message “Save Our Kids.” They handed out fliers. A few attempted to talk with Padre fans as they arrived for the 5:05 p.m. game that was nationally televised on ESPN.
“We’re here to inform parents, to warn them about what’s happening inside (the ballpark),” said James Hartline, a self-described Christian activist who directed the protest. “Bringing together homosexuals with baseball and kids is beyond bounds. We’re trying to get people to turn around, not go to the game, and we’re succeeding.”
If so, it wasn’t readily apparent. Official attendance for the game was 41,026, just short of a capacity crowd for the 42,685-seat ballpark.
And…oh look James…it wasn’t just the gay fans who were ignoring you…
“Values start and are taught in the home. Just because you see a bum on the street doesn’t turn you into a bum,” said Robert Davila of El Cajon before walking through the gates with his wife and two young children.
Not that gay people are bums…but you get the idea. Gay isn’t something you catch like a cold. But the subtext here, as always, isn’t that simply seeing gay people would turn the kids gay, but that gay people are predators that children should be taught to be afraid of. The better to make them fear and loath their gay classmates as they get older. The better to make them fear and loath themselves if they are gay. That’s what the Save Our Children slogan has always been about, ever since Antia Bryant used it back in 1977.
You can see why the bigots were bursting a vein over this. If gay and straight can sit down together with their families and enjoy a baseball game together, what next?
So the morning after our Forth of July party, Jon and I are out getting a bite to eat at Panera Bread, a nearby sandwich shop. Jon is still playing with his new iPhone, and he wants to see how well it works with the free wireless hotspot at Panera Bread.
We sit down to a light breakfast (really light for me because I’m still feeling a tad hungover from the previous night…), and Jon calls up a few items on the Safari browser built into the iPhone. Then for kicks and grins he tries to call up my web site. But the wireless at Panera Bread blocks it, with a message that my site is being blocked because its content is pornographic.
WTF??? The most risqué this site gets is on the cartoon prologue to my cartoon series A Coming Out Story, where I talk about the time my straight high school pals dragged me to see my first X-rated movie. I’d give the content of that one an R rating at best. I just don’t do X. X is obvious. I don’t do obvious, I don’t feel comfortable treating sex that way. It isn’t me. (There’s a reason why the character of my Libido in A Coming Out Story is always wearing a fig leaf…) I figure some blue nosed jackass took a look at my site and saw that it was full of unashamedly gay content and complained to the filtering software company.
The blocking message provides a link to where you can complain if you think you’re being blocked unfairly, and I give it some thought. I’m not entirely happy about being accused of being a pornographer. But on the other hand, I’m certain this isn’t about any suggestive content in my cartoons, so much as the political content of the blog, and perhaps the political cartoons. I’m gay, and I’m fine with that, and as far as some people are concerned, that makes me X-rated. Which makes this blocking notice I’m looking at a political statement.
Jon helpfully tells me that there are rating services I can subscribe to which will rate my website and help keep it unblocked, and I instantly have images of something like the old Comics Code Authority plastered on the top of my cartoons and I hate it. No. No. That is not going to happen. The only rating my cartoons, or anything else on my web site that I publish will ever have stamped on them, is the only one that matters: My name.
I may still request a little clarification from the filtering company that Panera Bread is using. In the meantime, if you have trouble accessing my website from some public place send me an email and I’ll tell you a few ways to get past it. Jon and I eventually brought my website up at Panera Bread’s anyway. And in the context of Kultar Kampf, being censored is more like a badge of honor then a stain on your reputation.
Yesterday, on the way to our weekly happy hour gathering, I tell Joe about having my web site censored for pornographic content. He congratulates me.
"The Internet treats censorship as damage, and it routes around it."
-John Gilmore
[Edited a Tad…] In the comments Jon tells me it was Panera Bread not Cosi as I’d originally said…
Theory and experiment alike become meaningless unless the scientist brings to them, and his fellows can assume in him, the respect of a lucid honesty with himself. The mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford said this forcibly at the end of his short life, nearly a hundred years ago.
If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done by the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or it may even prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest. What hurts society is not that it should loose it’s property, but that it should become a den of thieves; for then it must cease to be a society. This is why we ought not to do evil that good may come; for at any rate this great evil has come, that we have done evil and are made wicked thereby.
This is the scientist’s moral: that there is no distinction between ends and means. Clifford goes on to put this in terms of the scientist’s practice:
In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous.
And the passion in Clifford’s tone shows that to him the word credulous had the same emotional force as ‘a den of thieves’
The fulcrum of Clifford’s ethic here, and mine, is the phrase ‘it may be true after all.’ Others may allow this to justify their conduct; the practice of science wholly rejects it. It does not admit the word ‘true’ can have this meaning. The test of truth is the known factual evidence, and no glib expediency nor reason of state can justify the smallest self-deception in that. Our work is of a piece, in the large and in the detail; so that if we silence one scruple about our means, we infect ourselves and our ends together.
-Jacob Bronowski “Science and Human Values” 1956
Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin and Mike Airhart over at Ex-Gay Watch react positively to a blog post by Exodus affiliated minister Karen Keen, about her experience attending some of the events at the Ex-Gay Survivor’s Conference. Jim calls it “…a very lovely and grace-filled post.” Mike says of it that it is an “…accurate, balanced and thoughtful account.” Allow me to be the grouch here. Accurate it may well have been. Balanced, perhaps. Graceful…well it depends. It was certainly polite. But I wouldn’t go so far even as to say it was respectful. What it was, was patronizing. There is a spiritual sense of the word ‘grace’ that speaks to unconditional loving and caring and unless you think that looking for better ways to put innocent people through unmitigated hell out of a thoughtless devotion to dogma amounts to grace I’d have to say grace filled, along with thoughtful it was not. When people say things like this you need to take it seriously for what it is…
As we munch on bok choy and shrimp, Scott, Sonia and I listen to stories and concerns regarding ex-gay ministry. Our goal is not to criticize or argue, but to take the concerns seriously and learn how ex-gay groups can improve their ministries.
Emphasis mine. She was there to observe the broken ones, and try to figure out some better ways of fixing them. To take the concerns of the people she sat down to dinner with seriously is a mutually exclusive proposition to learning how ex-gay groups can improve their ministries, because if going into it the assumption was that the people she was sitting down to eat with were broken and needed fixing, then the degree to which their concerns needed to be listened to was limited from the get-go. Clearly, the only thought she was willing to entertain throughout the course of her interaction with the people at the Survivor’s Conference was how to fix the fixing process. But that the fixing process could not not itself be fixed because it was based on a flawed and disastrous premise was never, Could Never be considered…er…Seriously. Which meant that she wasn’t so much listening to her dinner companions, as filtering what they were saying to her through the main preconception she brought to that dinner with her. This isn’t somebody who came to listen. But then she couldn’t.
When she says that the raw expressions she witnessed during the survivor’s chalk talk moved her more then she expected, I’m sure that was genuine. But that’s not to say it moved her very much, because what it should have made her was ashamed. Deeply, gravely, severely ashamed. There, right before her eyes, were the raw, anguished torn from the gut expressions of the suffering those people needlessly endured at the hands of the likes of her, simply for being homosexual. And even that was not enough to make her question change. But it couldn’t have. In the end, she writes…
I realize I was drawn to the Survivor Conference because I love these people. In some impossible way, I long for camaraderie and unity with ex-ex-gays with whom I have shared so many of the same life struggles and pain. Yet, at the end of the day our roads lead us apart, and I wish it wasn’t so. I leave the Survivor Conference knowing it will be my last ex-ex-gay conference. I feel an ache in my heart—the kind of sadness that comes when breaking up with a lover. Even when irreconcilable differences are clear, and parting is the most honest thing to do, the loss is still felt. I want to take my friend by the hand and walk her down the same life path I am traveling, but I know I can’t.
And in the comments at Ex-Gay Watch she elaborates…
Another clarification–when I talk about how the two groups (ex gay and ex-ex gay) are on separate roads that lead apart, I did not mean to infer that I will not engage in dialogue anymore. I am always open to hearing people’s thoughts and stories. I comment on this a bit in response to someone’s comment on my blog. What I was describing is that the two movements have different goals that cannot be reconciled. I am all for church unity, but there are some things that cannot be unified without comprising our own personal integrity.
Integrity. I happen to believe that the so called “clobber passages” of the bible don’t actually say what a lot of homophobes think they say. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that they do. So what. In addition to calling on the faithful to put homosexuals to death, the bible also insists that the faithful not suffer witches to live. Innocent people died once upon a time in Salem Massachusetts because of those passages, and you best believe that the people who put them to death did so in good conscience, and prayed afterwards for God to have mercy on the immortal souls of those poor devil possessed witches. But it is not integrity to put theology above the observable and knowable humanity of the old woman whose head your are putting into a noose. The word for that is fanaticism.
It is not at the end of the day that Karen Keen’s road diverged from that of the survivors. It was at the beginning, at that point along the way where we all decide whether we will walk down the path before us with our eyes wide open or not. That the survivors eventually came to the conclusion that their treatment at the hands of the ex-gay ministries was not only not working, but could not be made to work, and then that it was unnecessary to begin with, doesn’t mean that they had fallen back into “the lifestyle” but that at least after some horrific measure of pain and suffering they were willing, finally, to let the evidence speak for itself. When you embrace a religious faith that insists its written dogmas have to count for more then the observable facts, more even, then your own first hand experience, more then the witnessing of pain and suffering, your personal integrity is the first thing you give up.
As Jacob Bronowski wrote in Science and Human Values…
The state of mind, the state of society, is of a piece. When we discard the test of fact in what a star is, we discard in it what a man is.
Likewise, when we discard the test of fact in what a homosexual is, we also discard in it the human being that they, and you, are. Integrity.
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