However, to address the actual claims of early demise, I asked Morten Frisch, Danish epidemiologist, to review the Cameron’s paper “Federal Distortion Of Homosexual Footprint (Ignoring Early Gay Death?). Morten is the lead author of a recent report on environmental influences on marriages decisions among heterosexuals and homosexuals. I wrote about this study here and blogged about it here. He very kindly agreed to do so and replied earlier today. As I suspected, he did not find their arguments compelling, or use of data appropriate. Here is his brief analysis:
Cameron and Cameron’s report on ’life expectancy’ in homosexuals vs heterosexuals is severely methodologically flawed
It is no wonder why this pseudo-scientific report claiming a drastically shorter life expectancy in homosexuals compared with heterosexuals has been published on the internet without preceding scientific peer-review (http://www.earnedmedia.org/frireport.htm). The authors should know, and as PhD’s they presumably do, that this report has little to do with science. It is hard to escape the idea that non-scientific motifs have driven the authors to make this report public. The methodological flaws are of such a grave nature that no decent peer-reviewed scientific journal should let it pass for publication.
As a measure of gay individuals’ average ‘life expectancy at birth’, Cameron and Cameron gathered information about age at death from obituaries for homosexual people in the U.S., and they obtained Scandinavian data regarding the average age at death among homosexually partnered persons who died within a period of up to 14 years after the introduction of laws on homosexual partnerships.
Due in part to reports like the present homosexual persons remain subject to stigmatization. The majority of homosexual people, even in comparatively liberal countries like Denmark, are not open about their sexuality in public. Particularly older homosexuals who grew up in periods when their sexuality was either a crime or a psychiatric diagnosis tend to remain silent about their homosexuality in public. Therefore, the higher prevalence of self-reported homo/bisexual experiences and feelings in younger than older age groups most likely reflects that young gays and bisexuals are less hesitant than older ones to provide honest answers in sex surveys.
The majority of homosexual individuals in the report by Cameron and Cameron were presumably open about their same-sex preferences. The groups studied comprised homosexuals who had entered registered partnerships in Denmark or Norway, and homosexuals in the U.S. whose relatives considered homosexuality to be such an integrated part of their deceased loved ones’ personalities that they felt it natural to mention in the publicly available obituary. Since, as noted, age is a strong determinant of openness about homosexuality, the study groups of deceased homosexuals in Cameron and Cameron’s report were severely skewed towards younger people. Consequently, the much younger average age at death of these openly homosexual people as compared with the average age at death in the unselected general population tells nothing about possible differences between life expectancies in gays and non-gays in general. All it reflects is the skewed age distribution towards younger people among those who are openly homosexual.
To further illustrate Cameron and Cameron’s methodological blunder, imagine a country that sets up a new register to record all cases of sexual harassment against women. After 14 years of operation the register is contacted by an advocacy group who gets access to the data to examine how sexual harassment influences women’s life expectancy. Among those women who died during the maximum of 14 years of follow-up, few women will have died after the age of 50, simply because most sexual harassment cases occurred among young women. Using the same logic and methods as Cameron and Cameron, this advocacy group could arrive at the conclusion that sexual harassment reduces women’s ‘life expectancy’ by 30 years or more. Needless to say, this would be as pure nonsense as the conclusion reached by Cameron and Cameron that heterosexuals outlive gays by 22-25 years.
(Emphasis mine) Throckmorton, to his everlasting credit, denounced forcing gay teens into reparative therapy when the Love In Action protests hit the news during the summer of 2005. He has moderated his stance on ex-gay therapy since then, retired I Do Exist, split with PFOX and the Ex-Gay movement, and now says his work "…does not emphasize changing sexual orientation as much as it does achieving congruence with chosen beliefs and values (which may or may not lead to change of attractions)." So I guess he’s not in a playing along mood.
The spiritual leader of the world’s Anglicans said Monday he has agreed to an urgent request for a meeting with U.S. church leaders as the Anglican fellowship nears a split over the Bible and sexuality.
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, visiting Canada for a spiritual retreat with the country’s Anglican bishops, said he would meet with U.S. Episcopal leaders in the fall.
"My aim is to try and keep people around the table for as long as possible on this, to understand one another," Williams said at a news conference at the Anglican Church of Canada headquarters.
Some mornings, by the time I’ve finished breakfast and read the first news reports of the day, I feel exhaustion for no other reason than the fact that I’m a gay American. I wonder if my fellow citizens who spend their days campaigning and crusading to limit my civil rights – the civil rights that they themselves take for granted – ever consider the inhumanity and irrationality of what they do? And I wonder if the millions of Americans who stand by apathetically and allow this travesty to play out with each passing day ever consider the emotional anguish they are deliberately or carelessly causing to millions of children, teenagers and adults?
This weekend KETV Omaha has provided live coverage of the "Love Won Out," Focus on the Family conference intended to "curb homosexuality" and promote "the truth that change is possible for those who experience same-sex attractions," At the same time, Don Imus is fired for making a horribly tasteless and grossly inappropriate joke about a group of black women. Oh well, who cares about a bunch of fags? Obviously not any of our prominent civil rights crusaders.
No kidding. Or about the welfare and safety of gay kids either…
In what is clearly an orchestrated strategy, students and parents across the nation are suing public school systems to force them to allow professional bigots to advocate gay bashing and self-loathing on school premises.
Yup…
I wonder how many straight Americans wonder what it’s like to live with the fear and reality that in most parts of this nation you can be legally fired from your job, denied housing, refused a room in a hotel or barred from public facilities simply because of your sexual orientation. I wonder if they wonder how a gay child feels when he or she is called an abomination, prevented from attending a prom with his or her high school sweetheart, or beaten up in the schoolyard while homophobic teachers look on with contempt.
If one assumes – and I do – that given the right information most people will do the right thing, it is very difficult to understand the degree of homophobia and outright hatred that manifests itself in this great nation. Why are we, as Americans, so out of synch with other Western democracies? Why are civil rights more widely protected and honored in the EU, in South African and in Canada then in the land of Jefferson, Madison and Lincoln?
I think it has something to do with that old joke about how Australia got all of England’s criminals and America got all of England’s religious fanatics and between the two countries America got the worst of the bargain. Seriously…I don’t think the rest of the civilized world really appreciates how dangerously nuts religion here in America has become. And in these times, gay people have become to the religious right, as the Jews once were to the Nazis. If you think that is hyperbole, you are not paying attention.
Time was they could demonize Jews as Christ killers. But after the Holocaust, antisemitism stopped being a winning proposition. Just ask Mel Gibson. Then Antia Bryant showed them what playing the gay card can do for the bottom line and suddenly they had a scapegoat they could demonize all they wanted and and they didn’t even have to call us Christ killers to do it. But, per the androgynous and almost certainly gay Satan in Passion Of The Christ, which almost nobody outside the gay community remarked on during the din of offense over Gibson’s waving around the blood liable, you can see the day coming when the passion plays will have replaced The Eternal Jew with The Eternal Faggot as the villain responsible for nailing Our Savior to the cross. Maybe they’ll start playing Judas as a homosexual too. Then every Christmas break can be followed by a rash of January school yard gay bashings, followed by James Dobson’s annual washing of his hands before the advocates for abused children, at Focus On The Family HQ…
I caught a reference to a 2005 article in the Boston Globe about the propaganda machines of the religious right. It was one I’d read before, but I don’t think I’d managed to blog about it then. It’s a good one…well worth reading still. These are religious right front organizations that take on the trappings of legitimate science and then inject themselves into the news stream as opposing viewpoints to well established institutions. They’re completely fake, but the mainstream news media, and in particular the TV networks, all give them a platform to spread their lies under a bogus effort at "balance", and because it suits the money at the top of the media corporations to keep republicans in power…
President Bush had a ready answer when asked in January for his view of adoption by same-sex couples: ”Studies have shown that the ideal is where a child is raised in a married family with a man and a woman," the president said.
Bush’s assertion raised eyebrows among specialists. The American Academy of Pediatrics, composed of leaders in the field, had found no meaningful difference between children raised by same-sex and heterosexual couples, based on a 2002 report written largely by a Boston pediatrician, Dr. Ellen C. Perrin.
But Bush’s statement was celebrated at a tiny think tank called the Family Research Institute, where the founder, Dr. Paul Cameron, believes Bush was referring to studies he has published in academic journals that are critical of gays and lesbians as parents. Cameron has published numerous studies with titles such as ”Gay Foster Parents More Apt to Molest" — a conclusion disputed by many other researchers.
The president’s statement was also welcomed at a small organization with an august-sounding name, the American College of Pediatricians. The college, which has a small membership, says on its website that it would be ”dangerously irresponsible" to allow same-sex couples to adopt children. The college was formed just three years ago, after the 75-year-old American Academy of Pediatrics issued its paper.
That pediatric study asserted a ”considerable body of professional evidence" that there is no difference between children of same-sex and heterosexual parents.
The Family Research Institute and the American College of Pediatrics are part of a rapidly growing trend in which small think tanks, researchers, and publicists who are open about their personal beliefs are providing what they portray as medical information on some of the most controversial issues of the day.
Created as counterpoints to large, well-established medical organizations whose work is subject to rigorous review and who assert no political agenda, the tiny think tanks with names often mimicking those of established medical authorities have sought to dispute the notion of a medical consensus on social issues such as gay rights, the right to die, abortion, and birth control.
For example, Cameron’s Family Research Institute, with an annual budget of less than $200,000, tries to counter the views of the 150,000-member American Psychological Association, which has an annual budget of $98 million. The tiny American College of Pediatricians has a single employee, yet it has been quoted as a counterpoint to the 60,000-member American Academy of Pediatrics.
(emphasis mine) The quickest way to deflate the propaganda of these religious right front groups is to shine a light on them. More often then not you find their bogus studies and stats getting injected into the political conversation without acknowledgment of where it came from. That’s because these outfits are well understood to be propaganda mills and not real scientific institutions, whatever their names make them sound like. So whenever politicians like president Nice Job Brownie start quoting their numbers, reporters need to ask where those numbers came from.
Senior Bush aides, asked for the basis of the comment about adoption, now say they are unaware of any studies comparing heterosexual and same-sex adoptions — by Cameron or by any pediatric association. The president, they say, was probably referring to studies that show children are better off living with both biological parents — though those studies have nothing to do with adoption by same-sex couples.
Duck and weave, duck and weave. You may remember the time Mr. Book Of Virtue Bill Bennett got caught on ABC’s This Weekquoting Paul Cameron’s bogus figure for the average lifespan of homosexuals. He first denied he got it from Cameron, then he said there were other researchers who got the same figures. And so there were. The other researcher Bennett pointed to, Jeffrey Satinover, had in fact, gotten his figures from Cameron too. When that was pointed out to him, Bennett retracted the claim, only to make it again some years later.
In June, the Rev. Bill Banuchi, executive director of the New York chapter of the Christian Coalition, said in a speech protesting Gay Pride Day that gays should be legally required to wear warning labels, not unlike Jewish stars under the Nazis.
"We put warning labels on cigarette packs because we know that smoking takes one or two years off the average life span, yet we celebrate a lifestyle that we know spreads every kind of sexually transmitted disease and takes at least 20 years off the average life span, according to the 2005 issue of the revered [sic] scientific journal Psychological Reports."
One month later, Dr. John Whiffen, chairman of the board of the National Physicians Center for Family Resources, a faith-basped advocacy group that was contracted by Bush Administration federal health officials to develop an abstinence education curriculum, said that, "There are obvious effects for male homosexuals from a health standpoint. Parents should discuss those with their child." Then he added: "It’s fairly well-accepted that smoking is not a good idea. It takes seven years off your life. It appears that male homosexuality takes more than that off your life. Naturally you should warn them about that."
You notice that none of these people said anything about where they got their information about homosexuality. That’s because they know full well that it comes from a completely untrustworthy source. And yet even knowing that, they continue to cite it, and all those other bogus groups with names that mimick actual institutions of science. All the while posturing as defenders of virtue and morality and godliness…that pesky ninth commandment exempted.
So…Andrew Sullivan would like us to know that Don Imus isn’t really all that bad…inexcusable though his bigotry is…
The Imus Ranch
It does amazing things for some very sick and needy children. It does not excuse Imus’ bigotry, but it’s worth noting nonetheless. It’s more than I’ve ever done for sick kids. And probably more than you have either.
That’s really swell Andrew. Yes…let’s think of the children. How many gay kids you suppose have had their faces slammed into their lockers after one of their peers spent the morning bellylaughing at the fag jokes on Imus In The Morning?
When Imus appeared on Sharpton’s radio show, he talked about how he helps “restore the self-esteem and dignity” of children with cancer and other medical conditions through a boot-camp-style program at his ranch in New Mexico. But that’s not what Nobile heard about the ranch when he tuned into a March 1999 show:
VOICE IMITATING GENERAL GEORGE PATTON: … and what is the stated Imus ranch mission? You in the back. PRIVATE: To give sick kids hands-on experiences of the great American cowboy from the rough and rugged all West. VOICE IMITATING GENERAL GEORGE PATTON: And that is defined as? PRIVATE: Sir, that’s defined as where men were men and sheep were sheep and Billy the Kid knew with whom to sleep. VOICE IMITATING GENERAL GEORGE PATTON: Precisely, and that sleeping, boys, was not accomplished with the help of a damn down-filled, double-stitched, quilted, puffed-up, panty-waist, tofu-sucking sleeping bag you’d find rolled up in the back of Martha Stewart’s Land Rover tucked in beside the damned Nordstrom picnic basket. Boys, when we go out to that ranch we will give the troop that cowboy experience. Whether Corporal Imus knows it or not, even though we’ll be bivouacked in the vicinity of Santa Fe, we will not be conducting experiments in the lifestyles of the gay caballero. Gear we employ will not originate at L.L. Bean. It will be obtained from the quartermaster of our beloved United States Army. OD in color, standard regulation issue. Do I make myself clear? PRIVATE: Sir, yes sir, sir. No Judy Garland gear, sir. VOICE IMITATING GENERAL GEORGE PATTON: I can’t hear you. PRIVATE: [louder] Sir, no Judy Garland gear, sir. VOICE IMITATING GENERAL GEORGE PATTON: Sound off like you had a pair, maggot. PRIVATE: [shouting] Sir, all steers, no queers, sir.
Right. Self-esteem and dignity. Bought the usual way those things are bought among Don Imus’ kind…by stripping the self-esteem and dignity away from someone else. I’m sure many gay kids have had a simply wonderful time in the closets at the Imus Ranch. You know how it is…play along to get along? Self-esteem. Dignity. Kids. Needy Kids.
A 15-year-old gay Centennial High School student was taunted and attacked by six classmates last week because of his sexual orientation.
The victim was undergoing surgery for a broken nose and facial injuries today, according to the Gay, Lesbian and Gay Alliance.
The incident happened last Thursday afternoon, when Anthony Hergesheimer was walking home from Centennial High School along Denver Boulevard, the organization said. Six male students, ages 15 and 16, in a vehicle apparently passed by Hergesheimer several times before they stopped and hurled anti-gay insults at him.
One of the students also got out of the vehicle and threw a can of Lysol at Hergesheimer, who suffered a broken nose and severe facial injuries.
Lysol. Like they were cleansing the street of some kind of human garbage…
The six male Centennial students, who were not identified, were suspended Monday until a decision is made about possible expulsion. The district usually has 25 days to make a recommendation on whether to expel a student.
Pueblo police is also investigating the attack and possible criminal charges may be filed against the youths.
But it’s not the teenagers who attacked the gay kid who need to be ashamed of themselves, according to The Alliance Defense Fund…
God has condemned them. They should live in shame. What was I saying the other day? You can’t paint a bulls-eye on a group of kids, tell their peers that those kids are condemned by god, and not expect that every now and then one of them will get the shit beaten out of them. But…that’s the intent isn’t it? A fearful homosexual is a good homosexual. You have to beat the pride out of them young. Christianity has come to this in the Land Of The Free And The Home Of The Brave: Accepting Jesus Christ as your lord and savior means you can set kids loose on other kids, and still look at yourself in a mirror. Who would Jesus throw the first can of Lysol at?
Another “homosexual lifespan" study has hit the news. According to a flurry of press releases making rounds, married gays in Scandinavia die 24 years younger than everyone else:
Once more, Burroway completely destroys Cameron’s propaganda (even calling it junk science ennobles it, really) by way of the simple trick of actually looking at the data. This is Cameron’s essential technique…one he has perfected over the decades he’s been generating bogus statistics on homosexuality for the religious right: first gerrymander the data, then analyze it as though you hadn’t. His classic study which is still being used today as proof that the lifespan of gay people is significantly shorter then that of heterosexuals, was conducted on data Cameron pulled from the obituary pages of two gay newspapers. At the height of the first wave of AIDS deaths. He averaged the age of death in those obituaries and compared it with that of the average lifespan of the population as a whole. His supporters have argued since that you can compare the average age at death in mainstream news papers and even in small ethnic ones and get a figure that is comparable to the average lifespan figures of the population as a whole. But this still makes the same essential mistake of assuming that the social and cultural context gay community papers exist in isn’t different enough that it would skew the data you’re pulling out of the obituary notices. In fact it is. Staringly obviously so.
The local gay paper was then, and is now, a fairly new phenomena in a nation that only until the latter part of the twentieth century was even disposed to admit that homosexuals existed, much less allow them to print their own newspapers. In fact, until the hated Warren Court decided that homosexuals could in fact, distribute their own magazines and newspapers through the mail in 1958 in One v Olesen, it was pretty much impossible. So you have the fact that local gay papers are a recent phenomena. You have the fact that older gay people grew up in a climate of repression that marked most of them for life. You have the fact that even by the time Cameron started collecting gay obituaries the out and proud part of the gay community was decidedly skewed toward younger generations. You have the fact that obituaries are generally not placed in newspapers by the person who died but by their families, many of whom even today are reluctant to acknowledge the homosexuality of a dead relative (a number of obituaries in the mainstream press back then were written so as to conceal the fact that the deceased had succumbed to an AIDS related illness). They would be unlikely then to even consider placing an obit in a gay paper. You have the fact that the readership of gay papers then, as now, played to a largely urban and younger and more sexually active slice of the community as a whole. And on top of that you have the fact that Cameron was collecting his data while the death toll from AIDS was just coming off its peak. This is what Cameron was comparing to the average lifespan in the nation as a whole.
That’s his trademark: not so much falsifying the data, although he won’t shrink from doing that either whenever he thinks he can get away with it…but skewing the initial dataset, so right from the get-go any conclusions drawn from it will break in the direction he wants them to.
And his latest artwork may be his masterpiece:
Statistics Denmark and Statistics Norway publish official population cross-tabulations of marital status by age for each sex in their annual statistical yearbooks. Since 1994 in Denmark and 1995 in Norway, these tables have included separate categories for homosexual-partnered individuals…
Cameron is comparing the ages at death of married heterosexuals with same sex couples in registered partnerships. At first glance it seems shocking that the average age at death is so much lower for the same sex couples. But in reality it’s nothing more then a brilliant slight-of-hand…maybe his best yet. The problem, as Burroway notes, is that the statistics for married couples have been gathering for an entire century, but for the same sex couples, only for as long as there had been domestic partnerships in Denmark…just since 1989. There was no rush of older gay couples to register. So as Burroway put’s it…
Why is this important? The heterosexual sample has been accumulating under-forties for an entire century.(In 2005, the average age of the groom was 37.4 years; for the bride, 34.7 years) But registered same-sex partnerships have only been available in Denmark since 1989, which means the gay sample got a late start. And if the typical age of someone entering into a same-sex partnership is around forty, then it stands to reason that the typical age at death of someone who has died so far would be similarly young.
If I have a flock of mostly young sheep, and in one year five are eaten by wolves and two more die of disease I can’t look at that and say what the average lifespan of a sheep is. The age of my flock is skewed young to start with. I’d need to keep collecting lifespan data on my flock for a period of many years before I could assume I was getting a handle on the average lifespan of my sheep. What Cameron does is use data that only amounts to snapshots, and he is very careful to get just the right snapshots he wants, to end up with the results he wants:
Cameron’s Danish and Norwegian statistics show an average age at death in the fifties for registered partners simply because there aren’t many older partners in those samples to begin with. And the reason they aren’t in that sample is because for whatever reason, they haven’t registered their partnerships.
Now what might the reason for that be? Once again, you have the generational differences between those of us who grew up before Stonewall, and those of us who grew up after…
Cameron dismisses the idea that homophobia is a major factor in Scandinavia because “Canada, Norway, and Denmark are far more accepting of homosexual practitioners than the United States (where homosexuals are still barred from the military and ‘gay rights’ laws do not exist in most states).” But saying that homophobia is lower in Scandinavia isn’t the same as saying it doesn’t exist. For example, it is still illegal in Denmark for gay couples to adopt children except for the children of their registered partners. And homosexuality is still not acceptable among many Danes and Norwegians, particularly among those living in rural areas and among the older generations — precisely the populations that haven’t availed themselves of registered partnerships.
This generational difference in the willingness of people to be open about their homosexuality, or that of their family members, is something every honest scientific investigation of the gay community must acknowledge and deal with somehow. But for Paul Cameron its a handy way to filter out the old people, when he wants to prove that there aren’t any. Cameron’s trademark is to pull from pools of data that are intrinsically skewed strongly towards a young, urban, and sexually active slice of the gay community and then analyze that data as if it were a random sample that was representative of the whole. Wherever possible, he finds snapshots of those data pools…timeframes…that he knows will skew the results even further in the direction he wants them skewed.
We software engineers have long had a saying for it: Garbage In – Garbage Out. Give the man his due…Paul Cameron is a master at selecting just the right garbage to put in, to get the garbage he wants back out. And he’s getting better at it. In this latest propaganda missive of his he displays an impressively deft hand. Thank goodness for people like Jim Barroway.
Go read the rest of his report: Paul Cameron’s Footprint. And if you haven’t already, go read some of his other magnificent takedowns of this man’s propaganda. If you are someone who is gay, or knows someone who is, you will likely have some of Paul Cameron’s claptrap waved in your face at one time or another. He is, as he likes to call himself, the wellspring of all the anti-gay statistics religious right groups use to demonize homosexual people. He gets away with it because so few people bother to actually look closely at his work and see where he’s pulling his numbers from. Do the one thing they’re counting on you not to do: look behind the curtain.
Daniel Gonzales, formerly of ExGay Watch has created a little video about the anti-gay counter attack on the Day of Silence. Cynically named “Day Of Truth”, it seeks to legitimize harassment of GLBT kids in school by their classmates, in the name of freedom of religion. The problem is, as always, that the religious right isn’t on speaking terms with Truth, or anything even remotely resembling it. Their website, as the video shows, helpfully provides kids with cards printed up with informational resources on homosexuality that all link back to Ex Gay ministries and their usual myths, lies and superstitions. The party line is that this is all supposed to give gay kids “the other side” of the story. But as always this “other side” is actually a message directed not at gay youth, but to their heterosexual peers. The resources handed out to school kids are nothing less then a collection of handy excuses for them to treat their GLBT peers with disrespect, if not outright contempt.
We see in the video the t-shirt their poster child got tossed out of class for wearing on a previous Day of Silence, which tells gay kids to “Be Ashamed” and that God condemns them. On its face then, this is not a message of love directed toward gay youth, but an exhortation to their peers to treat them like human garbage. It is incitement that at some point is certain to result in outright physical assaults. And when that happens you can bet that like Pilot the grown adults who are instigating this will wash, wash their hands of the consequences. But you don’t paint a bulls-eye on children, tell everyone that those children are condemned by God, and not expect violence to result.
Another good song, for those days when old friends tell you to go back into the closet. This is The Travelling Wilburys version…
I’ve discovered that YouTube is a pretty good place to find all those good songs that iTunes still isn’t selling. I wonder how long That’s going to last…
Well I know whats right, I got just one life…In a world that keeps on pushin me around…But Ill stand my ground and I wont back down
So you’re a 53 year old gay man. You remember coming out to yourself in the early 1970s, when the only places you could go to buy a copy of The Advocate or the Washington Blade were seedy adult bookstores. You remember Antia Bryant. You remember when you heard Dan White had shot and killed Harvey Milk. You remember the first time you saw The Quilt. You remember making your first panel for it. You remember all the friends you lost. You remember the first March on Washington. And the Second. And the Third. You remember the day the Warren Court upheld the sodomy laws. You remember Rush Limbaugh bellyaching that Bill Clinton had allowed “human garbage” into his inaugural parade because the Gay Men’s Choral was in it. You remember Sam Nunn posing in a submarine bunk while congress debated Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. You remember the Hawaiian Supreme Court saying we could marry, and then 70 percent of Hawaiians passing a constitutional amendment saying we could not. You remember when Matthew Shepard was murdered. You remember Justice Kennedy’s words, overturning Hardwick v. Bowers…
And one Easter Sunday evening you find yourself writing a Go To Hell letter to that old friend, that once close friend, that once upon a time best friend you loved so very, very dearly, and who just sent you Yet Another EMail insisting that you need to stay discreetly closeted, and respect other folk’s cheapshit prejudices (cheapshit prejudices he’d never tolerate if they were racist ones directed at him) in order to get by in this world…and I should really shut up about my issues and stop being such a self-centered bore…
…what better song to compose that letter to then…
This One….
(This video alas does Not do the song justice…but you can stillDance to it…)
Okay…I have a temper. I admit it. But…swear to God…if some (x) friends of mine are going to keep acting like it’s still the late 70s and the only goddamn thing they know about gay people is what they learned in gym class or when they watched Richard Burton and Rex Harrison act like a couple of faggots in Staircase…well then…(ahem) I’m Not The Fucking One With A Listening Problem!
I never thought of myself as a Disco queen. There’s maybe four or five songs from the period I like at all. Thing is…music won’t make your heartaches go away, but sometimes it lets you dance over them…
We were born…born…Born to be Alive! (Born to be Alive) Yes we were born…born…born… Born to be Alive!
A shot taken in the library at Casa del Garrett. Well…actually, it’s my bedroom too. That’s my "Gay Studies" bookcase. I’ve got about five other bookcases in the bedroom. About a dozen more scattered throughout the house. Yes…I own many of the books the religious right likes to lie about….
Next time you hear one of these clowns yap, yap, yapping about how "a study" "proves" that homosexuality is this, or homosexuals are that…go look it up for yourself and give it a read. If it’s one of their own "studies" then go look up any legitimate science that it cites (if any). If nothing else, it will drive it home to you that these people are not on speaking terms with morality at all.
The Faggot Always Has It Coming…Just Ask Elizabeth Vargas
So…here’s the scenario. A young gay man is found brutally murdered. The murder scene shows the classic evidence of overkill. The killers, leaving behind not only a host of physical evidence, but statements to friends about how they’d just "killed a faggot", are quickly apprehended. Then as news of the vicious murder percolates, first through the gay community news channels, and then, somehow, manages to find its way into the consciousness of the nation at large, and people recoil at the senseless brutality of it, we begin to hear that the gay victim of the crime had been out cruising for sex, or was looking for drugs, or some sort of criminal activity, had gone willingly with his killers, who by then look in their newspaper perp walk photos like they had "I Kill Faggots" tattooed on their foreheads…and you can almost hear the sigh of relief from one end of the country to the other…because now we know it wasn’t really hate that killed the victim, there is no hate in America, and especially not any systematic hatred directed at homosexuals…it’s their own stupidity after all, that keeps getting them killed…
Typical faggot…out cruising for anonymous sex…or drugs…gets himself killed by a couple of street punks…nothing here for the rest of us to worry about…
One of the saddest aspects about the aftermath of Ryan Skipper’s murder is that no one outside his friends and family seems to care about the heinous manner in which he was killed.
Neither the governor nor the attorney general in Florida — both of whom are Republicans — has expressed concern about the fact that Skipper’s murder has been labeled a hate crime. National gay organizations have been largely mute, and coverage in the local and national gay press has been very slim, especially considering the brutality of his murder.
Sheriff’s Assertions Were Based on Killers’ Statements
It is likely that the lack of outrage stems from a series of misstatements to the media at the outset of the investigation that have been attributed to Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd and others in his office. One the face of it, the motivation for making these statements appears to be bigotry toward gay people.
On Friday, March 16, two days after Skipper’s body was discovered, the local newspaper, The Ledger, reported:
Skipper, 25, was driving around Eloise late Tuesday night looking to pick up someone when he met [his all edged killer, Joseph] Bearden, whom he took back to his home in Winter Haven, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
The next day, the paper ran a quote from Sheriff Judd that sounded like it could have been the basis of the earlier reporting:
“What we do know is that Ryan was out looking to pick up someone that evening,” Judd said.
“What we do know is that Ryan was looking for someone to pick up that evening. And unfortunately for Ryan, he picked up the wrong person.” [Emphasis added.]
In fact — and as we have said in other coverage of this story — Sheriff Judd did not “know” this. It was immediately obvious to my colleague Trish, who reported the story here on March 18, that, since the victim was dead and could not speak for himself, the only source for this information had to have been the alleged killers.
But the slander against Ryan Skipper did not stop there. In its coverage on March 17, The Ledger published the trawling-for-sex allegation as well as three additional completely unsubstantiated statements:
[1] Skipper was driving around Wahneta on Tuesday night when he found [murder suspect Joe] Bearden walking along Sixth Street in Eloise about 11 p.m. Tuesday, and offered him a ride. [2] The two went back to Skipper’s house, where they [3] smoked marijuana and [4] discussed using Skipper’s [laptop] computer to copy checks, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
Three weeks later all four of these statements are in dispute:
No one who knew Ryan Skipper believes he had a propensity for trawling for anonymous sex.
The other alleged murderers, William Brown, was an acquaintance of Skipper’s. We have seen a statement from one of Ryan’s roommates that Ryan got a call after he got home from work at 10:30 that night, which appeared to have prompted him to go back out. It seems more likely that Brown phoned Ryan and asked for help in the form of giving him ride somewhere, and that the call was part of premeditated ambush plot by Brown and Bearden against Ryan.
No evidence has been produced that Ryan was involved with these chuckleheads in a check forgery scheme — and no one who knew him believes he would do anything of the sort.
Ryan’s roommate has said that after Ryan received the phone call, he left and never came back. She denies that he brought anyone home with him that night.
Ryan’s friends and family all confirm that he had a desktop computer but did not own a laptop. And yet, early reports stated that Brown and Bearden were charged with stealing a laptop from Ryan after they murdered him..
No one who knew him believes Ryan smoked pot.
That the "trawling for sex" story is so reaily accepted by the mainstream news media when it comes to gay victims of violent crime, Even When The Source Of The Story Is The Victim’s Own Killers, is all the proof you need that there is a climate of contempt toward gays right here in America, that is relentlessly fueling that violence. No climate of hate in America? Compare and contrast…a white jogger is raped and nearly killed in New York’s Central Park and the focus slams immediately on a gaggle of black teenagers who were said to be out "wilding" that night. Nobody suggests the woman was out looking for rough sex. Had that woman been a gay man instead, does anyone seriously believe that the Very First Thing out the gate in the mainstream press wouldn’t be that he was probably there looking for sex.
Ryan Skipper walks out the door to his apartment and is found dead hours later with 20 stab wounds in his body, and his car is found later with the insides soaked in his blood. The killers are arrested, claim their victim was hitting them up for sex and anyway he was helping them forge checks. It’s just their word at that point, but guess what the Accepted Narrative is the following day…
“What we do know is that Ryan was looking for someone to pick up that evening. And unfortunately for Ryan, he picked up the wrong person.”
And we know that how precisely? We know it, because his killers said so, and because he was a gay man, and gay men always do something stupid to cause their own deaths…just ask Elizabeth Vargas and ABC News …
O’Malley was a detective with the Laramie Police when 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered six years ago.
He was one of several people interviewed for ABC’s 20/20 that aired Nov. 26. He said that the interview and the way the show was ultimately put together has left him angry.
O’Malley was notified about a week in advance of the ABC crew’s arrival for the interview. He invited them into his home and they stayed for “maybe three to four hours.”
He did not see the tape until the night the show aired.
The people interviewed for the show did not surprise him. He was, however, surprised that “a production as popular as 20/20 would hinge all of their support for their theory on meth addicts, Doc O’Connor and two convicted murderers … it did not surprise me the way the thing came out.”
O’Malley said that he did find out what the focus of the show was shortly after the interview was over and the crew left Laramie. Someone with the crew had left copies of e-mails on his dining room table — 10 pages of information discussing the overall focus of the program and “their pre-conceived focus that this was not a hate crime. This was a drug crime. That’s what they went with,” he said.
When he was approached by the producers of this particular segment, O’Malley said he had a weird feeling. “After 30 years, you learn to trust your gut instinct. I asked them specifically if they were coming to do something from a particular angle … I wanted to be able to answer intelligently, think things out.”
In the conversation with the producers, O’Malley was assured that the report would be objective, six years after the actual event.
Sucker.
Prior to the arrival of the 20/20 crew, he had heard that the show might be more about the methamphetamine issue. When they arrived at his home, O’Malley asked a few questions of his own.
“I was trying to be comfortable … and I felt comfortable. But when Elizabeth Vargas got into the methamphetamine portion of it, it surprised me,” he said. “Actually, it made me extremely angry and, in my opinion, these guys lied to me.”
During the segment of the 20/20 program, O’Malley said that he believed that Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, the two Laramie men convicted in Shepard’s death, intended to rob the University of Wyoming student. But, for reasons only McKinney and Henderson know, something happened and the killing became a hate crime based on Shepard’s sexual orientation.
“My feelings have been that the initial contact was probably motivated by robbery because they needed money,” O’Malley said. “What they got was $20 and a pair of shoes. … then something changed and changed profoundly.”
But whatever that was, it couldn’t be hate. No. Never.
20/20 did not discuss the expertise of the arresting officer.
“Flint Waters is a trained narcotics officer. … in controlled substances,” O’Malley said.
Waters reported that Henderson exhibited no signs of being under the influence of meth, just an odor of alcohol.
O’Malley said that 20/20 failed to report on the jailhouse letters that McKinney had written — letters that added information that this could have been a gay-hate crime.
The 20/20 segment with McKinney indicated that he, along with his lawyers, had concocted this gay panic issue, but, according to O’Malley, police interviews with McKinney showed that he had already started that (the gay panic issue) without the benefit of council.
“The statements he made, the fact that after he was sentenced he was high-fiving other inmates and signing autographs in the jail — if it wasn’t motivated by bias, he was sure eating that up.” O’Malley said.
Shepard was struck between 19 and 21 times, all to the face and head area.
“It was a concentrated effort to destroy somebody,” O’Malley said. “I believe it was triggered because Matt was gay. I’ll go to my grave believing that.”
O’Malley said that “It is abysmal that they (20/20) don’t present the other side of the issue … to be objective in their reporting.”
But they had a job to do…not merely to whitewash the murder of Matthew Shepard, but more importantly, to undermine the fight against anti-gay hate. The problem for ABC New and other Bush/Republican Friendly mainstream news media outlets, is that for the nation to finally begin to combat the kind of hate that killed Matthew Shepard means taking away one of the republicans better vote getting tools…
So Matthew Shepard’s murder, against all the evidence to the contrary, had to be a drug deal gone bad, and Shepard a druggy, or trawling for sex, or something. And the payoff wasn’t just hope that his killers might be paroled, but breathing life into the cultural indifference to anti-gay violence, which at that moment in time was seriously in jeopardy of, finally, being taken seriously for the unmitigated horror that it is. It’s not so much about the gay panic defense, as the gay panic vote. You can’t drive voters to the polls with the gay bogeyman, without getting some gay people killed in the process. It has to be their own damn fault they got themselves killed, not the climate of hate. Never the climate of hate.
Typical faggot…out cruising for anonymous sex…or drugs…gets himself killed by a couple of street punks…nothing here for the rest of us to worry about…
“What we do know is that Ryan was looking for someone to pick up that evening. And unfortunately for Ryan, he picked up the wrong person.”
So ABC and Vargas’ did their job and you can see the results of it now, in the case of Ryan Skipper with sickening clarity. The meme that gay victims of violent crime always, somehow, bring it on themselves, were idiots who should have seen it coming, went cruising for guys who have "I Kill Faggots" tattooed on their foreheads, fell prey to a kind of crime that the rest of us need not worry about, because We’re Smart And We Don’t Do Things Like That, will probably live on for quite some time to come. Hate crime laws are unnecessary, because the victims of these kinds of crimes are always stupid. There is no epidemic of violence against gay people, just an epidemic of stupidity. You are now free to look the other way. Pay no attention to that blood on the floor…it doesn’t concern you…
I’m splitting this into two parts because it’s becoming a tad longish and I’m sorry. Also, you may have to endure some of my efforts at writing fiction, which I don’t normally shove out onto my blog because I know my tastes in fiction aren’t everyone’s. But something struck me as I read this story this morning, from Pam’s House Blend …
I have the names of the four women, and while some of them held some sort of Wisconsin Department of Administration position while Thompson was governor, they tend not to be public figures today; one was a Milwaukee-area state representative, one a county campaign manager, one a member of the gaming commission, one a staffer at the state Division of Health, one a Portage resident. While Thompson was governor, many of the liaisons allegedly occurred at Madison’s Concourse Hotel. One of my correspondents wrote, "After he moved into the [Governor’s] Mansion, Tommy quit the practice of logging in the names of guests and visitors. Can be verified by Mansion officers." — reporter Jay Rath, about 2008 GOP prez candidate (and married man) Tommy Thompson’s colorful love life while Governor of Wisconsin. Apparently a lot of other reporters weren’t asking or telling about it back in the day.
It apparently gets better…
"Tommy had an apartment in Madison before he was elected governor," read the June 22, 1994, letter. "He kept the apartment after he was elected [to the state legislature]. Supposedly there were several women who joined him there."
In fact, there allegedly were as many as four long-term affairs before Tommy Thompson finally left for Washington, D.C., to become secretary of Health and Human Services.
These are old notes in my files that suddenly are current again. Now that his hat is in the presidential ring, it’s time for journalists to finally look at the alleged extramarital affairs of the latest presidential candidate of the family-values party.
Reporters are a clubby bunch, and the problem in getting the story while Tommy was governor was that statehouse journalists — the ones who could most easily have reported on the allegations — historically tended to be part of an old boys network; everyone was pals, and so everyone looked the other way. The rumors were a "secret" that many working reporters knew about.
So…lessee… To quote Pam, We have "Sen. John McCain (affair, divorce), former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (affair, divorce, affair, divorce), and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (divorce, affair, nasty divorce)…" And then there’s Rush Limbaugh, who was caught not that long ago taking a trip to the Dominican Republic, an island that I’m told had an active sex tourist trade going, with Viagra he hadn’t been legally prescribed. Swell. Okay…now I know why my sex life is so tame. I’m not a right wing Family Values republican…
Anyway… I want to begin making my point, with a passage I wrote some years ago for my Skywatcher’s Of Aden fantasy series. (I’ve had it offline for some time now for major re-writes.) This particular passage is part of a still evolving backstory for one of my main characters, Daniel Tanner. The scene is the room of Joshua Putnum, a student of theology at the Wallensden Seminary. Daniel was sent there as a young boy by his father to insure he would never follow in his mother’s wickedness. Daniel is being groomed to become a minister of his faith. He is not a reluctant student. His religiosity is real, deeply felt and part of his bedrock. But at this point in the story, at 16, he is having a crisis of faith over his sexual orientation. To further complicate matters, the older boy, Joshua, has been trying to take him as a lover, though he too is having his own crisis of faith and sexuality.
Daniel has thoughts of suicide when his sexual orientation becomes apparent to him. But instead of going through with it, he becomes determined to understand why this curse had happened to him. He begins devouring material in the seminary and town library…anything he thinks can help him understand why this is happening to him. In the course of this research he meets Joshua, and falls in love with the bookish older student.
The critical inner difference I am trying to illustrate between the two in this passage of Daniel’s story, is that at this point, when he actually falls in love, Daniel begins to realize that his sexuality isn’t a curse at all, but a blessing. But Joshua, having rigorously conditioned himself to think of sex only in terms of lust, is still full of shame, even as he coaxes Daniel into bed with him. I was thinking as I wrote this, of the difference between someone whose spirituality is, as I like to think of it, "faith with eyes wide open" and that fundamentalism that constantly flinches away from the world like a frightened animal, and into the safety of ritual and dogma.
Understand that this all takes place in a fantasy world that’s vaguely similar to New England colonial America, but not as technologically advanced. The various religious sects in this world, including Daniel’s and Joshua’s, are not ours, but merely akin to ours in certain aspects.
In the morning of his third year at Wallensden Seminary, in the sixteenth year of his life, Daniel Tanner awakened, and saw the earth anew, as though for the first time.
He lay on his side looking across Joshua’s room. Sunlight streamed though the room’s only window, bathing room in a vibrant morning glow. Beside him, Joshua breathed steadily, still asleep, one arm flung possessively around Daniel. Daniel sighed, luxuriating in Joshua’s embrace, while his eyes took in every detail of Joshua’s room.
His eyes strayed over to the open window. A restless desire to see the world outside also awakening stirred in him. Gently, Daniel rolled out from under Joshua’s arm. He rose from the bed, and wrapped one of the light cotton sheets around him, not to hide his nakedness, but to feel himself still embraced by something from Joshua’s bed. He stepped barefoot over the room’s only rug, felt the nap of it between his toes, and stopped to look down at it.
It was a common household rug. The trader’s son in him identified it at once as a local product, made not far from where it rested now. Leeward Hills, second grade wool and remnant blend, northern single cross weave. It’s market value fixed to the penny, he knelt down and ran a hand lightly over its surface, allowing his fingers to make their own assay. First with, then against the weave, his fingertips delivered to him their own understanding of the rug, while he marveled at how carelessly he had dismissed so much of the richness of the world around him.
He rose and walked to the window. The morning sun embraced him with golden light and warmth. Outside, the main road leading into Wallensden was already busy with traffic. The sounds and smells of the street below, annoying distractions to him before, arrived at his ears like a new music, and danced with his other senses like playful children. There was a knife grinder rolling his stone up the street, gesturing to the butcher across the way with a simple, timeless hand sign that asked if there were any knifes to grind that day. A local farmer carried a stick of tobacco hands from his wagon into a tobacco shop. A man gave a penny to the paperboy on the corner, for one of his single-sheet newspapers. Like a chorus to the scene he now beheld, came the smells from the baker’s shop across the street. He breathed them in deeply, felt his body respond almost at once to their promise of nourishment.
Lord…my life is full beyond measure… For an instant, he found himself trembling again, as at his lover’s first touch. So this is what it’s all about…
There existed no word in his language for ‘homosexual’. Not until the far distant future, when clinical terms would be invented, would the idea of it as a state of being, and not a perverse habit, enter into his culture’s consciousness. For generations to come, his kind would invent and borrow words from other languages and cultures to identify themselves. Many in his and later ages, who shared his deep religious faith, would endure years of self hatred and torment, before finally achieving a small measure of self acceptance, if any. But he had already grown up with the knowledge that he would never be good enough, because he was his mother’s son.
Only hours before, his steadfast faith told him that to love another male in this way was wrong, dissolute, a grievous offense to the eyes of God. Now that same unwavering faith lifted him to heights of spirit he had never known before. So different from the warm and wonderful childhood feeling he’d had during prayer, when he felt that God was near. So breathtaking, like the electric pleasure that ran through him when he saw Joshua smile.
It was beyond questioning in him that the pleasures brought to humanity by the Jackal, the Despiser, the father of lies, to tempt humankind, were both transient and tawdry. The drunkard’s bliss. The gambler’s spoils. The lecher’s thrill. Deep in the bedrock of his nature was the certainty that only God could create a thing of beauty. He thought of Joshua’s body, of the sensation of Joshua’s hands on him, and his own body shivered in remembrance, and in that moment he knew that no amount of thanks or praise to his creator could ever be enough.
He heard a rustling in the bed behind him, and knew that Joshua was awake.
Daniel is in love. But Joshua is merely in lust, and now he’s made a night of it with another boy and like clockwork his crisis of faith starts tapping him on the shoulder.
[Joshua] saw the boy standing there wrapped in the blanket, looking like an apparition from Pagan times, the sunlight shimmering over his pale blond hair like a halo. His eyes darted away from the sight. As a young humanities student, he once beheld a nude statue of Aster, the lost son of the Prophet Thomas, created by the legendary Mary Stephan. It was Aster at the moment he realizes his father has abandoned him in the wilderness. In the figure’s quiet courage in the face of sorrow, and its sensual beauty, Joshua saw everything within himself that he was struggling desperately to renounce. He vowed never again to lay eyes on the work of Mary Stephan. Now its living embodiment was in his bedroom, looking at him.
He took a breath, fixed a smile on his face, and blandly said, "Good morning sleepyhead."
They are both deeply religious, both passionately devoted to their God. Their feelings about what happened the night before are inextricably wound up in that faith. And yet their reactions to it could not be more different…
The theologian distrusted reason. Daniel distrusted his emotions. Reason offered Joshua no sanctuary from the fact of his sexual orientation, and so it was to his religion he turned, time and again, for solace, for forgiveness, for absolution. He had become so successful at keeping his intellect away from his emotions, that now even the mildest of passions would always threaten to overwhelm him. Guilt regarding his sexual nature, had long since become a secret humiliation that he could not control himself. Daniel, when his emotions threatened his balance and self control, would flee them time and again, into a dispassionate monastery of reason and logic. Emotions were, irrational, specious, misleading. Reason was truth and light. Daniel could endure anything but doubt. Joshua, anything but certainty.
In the fire the metals behaved differently. The theologian, confronted by love, shrank away, utterly unable to distinguish it from debauchery. Daniel, pulled by an ancient tide so certain and sure he could not rationally deny it, walked finally, with eyes wide open, into its embrace. All the rest of it would have to be reasoned out later; it’s ethics and morality, what it meant to his faith, to his future, to the kind of life he would have to live. That he would only know this depth of feeling for another male was a thing he had already acknowledged. What changed matters irrevocably now, was that he knew it was good. To act as if he believed otherwise would be self deceit, a thing his intellect would not permit and his conscience could not endure.
Years later, Daniel would remember it, as akin to the moment he accepted God into his heart, and its spirit flowed immediately into every corner of his being, transforming and lifting him. Joshua would remember only how completely he had misread the boy he had held in his arms. But love’s ancient and arcane logic would remain a mystery to him throughout his life.
Tentatively, Joshua placed his hands on Daniel’s shoulder’s. He half expected, half secretly hoped, that the boy would turn away with revulsion. Instead Daniel looked right into his eyes with the straight faced expression he had become known by in the seminary, save that now his lips bore a faint smile that Joshua had never seen before. For an instant he was certain no one else had ever seen it either.
"Joshua." said Daniel, as if his name were a prayer.
Joshua gently drew Daniel close and embraced him, disturbed; he did not want to be looked at that way, did not want his name to be spoken that way. He took a moment to catch his breath. "Are you all right with it, then?"
"Yes."
It was so simply stated, that for a moment Joshua doubted Daniel was being honest. But Daniel’s embrace was firm and unequivocal, and after a moment he allowed himself a sigh of relief, hearing only the boy’s acceptance of their mutual need. But Daniel was addressing another, giving it joyful thanks for the wondrous gift of his life of flesh and blood; a gift that had delivered him into an almost perfect exaltation of spirit which had brought him not to his knees, but to his feet.
The first person you come out to, is yourself…
For years I thought of this "coming out to self" process along with the institution of the closet and all its self loathing and self destructiveness, as pretty much unique to gay people. But now…in the light of all these recent right wing sex scandals I’m seeing it a little differently. What I’m starting to see is a lot of this self destructive denial of one’s sexual nature, the shame and self loathing you see in someone like Joshua in my story, in heterosexuals too. How many heterosexual men and women I wonder, comfortable with their human sexuality, have found themselves in relationships with partners who when the lights went out, treated sex like it was either a dirty joke, or a thing of shame, a sign of humanity’s brokeness and alienation from God, not a joyful, playful, delightful physical affirmation of the spiritual bond between them.
There’s a classic sort of compartmentalization that goes on in the lives and the inner world of closeted gay people, where their sex lives and their personal lives almost sometimes seem to be living on different planets. You know the story…the all-american family man/woman god fearing sexual puritan by day who becomes the slut puppy by night. Well…I think I’m seeing that now in the likes of thoroughly heterosexual people like Newt, and Rush, and Rudy and Tommy Thompson. They rail against gays and sex and pop culture sexuality, even as their own sex lives are going down the toilet. It’s the same sort of denial and compartmentalization I once saw constantly, and ruinously, in the lives of gay people, until something blows open their closet doors and there they are standing naked in the spotlight like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. Who? Me? Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain…
As H.L. Mencken once said, "The most costly of all follies is to believe what is palpably untrue". It is also pretty goddammed faithless. For untold generations gay people have been taught to believe pure unmitigated crap about themselves. But as it happens, so have heterosexuals. About sex. About human sexuality. About their own inner nature. Looks to me like there are a lot of heterosexuals in the closet too…living in a state of denial about their inner selves and their own sexuality that looks more and more like the one gay people have been struggling to come out of for generations. And it’s making them act out self destructively, and lash out at anyone comfortable with their sexuality, in a kind of transference of shame.
Anyway… Give it some thought…while I gather my mind a tad more for Part II of this…
It is 1983. I’m sitting with mom in her hospital room. She’s in for a gall bladder operation and I’m chatting with her and her roommate, a lady about her age, but definitely not the sort mom would be seen with in church. A nice lady, decent, smart…really smart…and very worldly. She has a lady friend with her. The four of us are chatting about the upcoming mid-term election. I had picked up the mail before coming to the hospital, and in it was a campaign flier address to me from the Republican party. It was in the form of a letter from Ronald Reagan. "I need you to help win this election…", says Ron. "I need you…" The lady and her friend suddenly burst into gales of laughter… "Ronald Reagan sent this…" She gasps out, "I NEED YOU…to a homosexual!"
Their bright carefree laughter goes on and on. It is a rich joke. Eventually they notice that mom and I aren’t saying anything. We’re both sitting there blank faced, not daring to so much as glance at each other…
(Uh…mom…just what have you been saying to this nice lady…?)
They calm down a bit, and tactfully get up to go get something from the hospital cafeteria. On the way out of the room, as she passes by me, mom’s roommate gives me a look of quiet understanding and…places a gentle hand on my shoulder, as if to say "Hang in there kid…it’ll be all right…"
The door closes behind them. Mom and I both immediately change the subject…
What was so heartwarming about his story, is how accepting his family was, and is. Just look at those faces in that picture. There is the kind of family every gay kid should have.
By sixth grade, he knew what “gay” meant, but didn’t associate it with himself. That year, he says: “I had a crush on one particular eighth-grade boy, a very straight jock. I knew whatever I was feeling I shouldn’t talk about it.” He considered himself a broken version of a human being. “I did think about suicide,” he says.
Then, for reasons he can’t wholly explain beyond pure desperation, a month after his Valentine “date” — “We never actually went out, just walked around school together” — in the midst of math class, he told a female friend. By day’s end it was all over school. The psychologist called him in. “I burst into tears,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Yes, it’s true.’ Every piece of depression came pouring out. It was such a mess.”
That night, when his mother got home from work, she stuck her head in his room to say hi. “I said, ‘Ma, I need to talk to you about something, I’m gay.’ She said, ‘O.K., anything else?’ ‘No, but I just told you I’m gay.’ ‘O.K., that’s fine, we still love you.’ I said, ‘That’s it?’ I was preparing for this really dramatic moment.”
Ms. O’Connor recalls, “He said, ‘Mom, aren’t you going to freak out?’ I said: ‘It’s up to you to decide who to love. I have your father, and you have to figure out what’s best for you.’ He said, ‘Don’t tell Dad.’ ”
“Of course I told him,” Ms. O’Connor says.
“With all our faults,” Mr. O’Connor says, “we’re in this together.”
This is what family is all about. I am so happy for this kid. And yet, still so sad in a way, for another one.
And that would be the kid I once was. Me.
This paragraph in Zach’s story really struck me hard…
Cindy and Dan O’Connor were very worried about Zach. Though bright, he was doing poorly at school. At home, he would pick fights, slam doors, explode for no reason. They wondered how their two children could be so different; Matt, a year and a half younger, was easygoing and happy. Zach was miserable.
Now…I came out to myself at the relatively late age of 17. But had I lived in today’s climate it would probably have been at about his age, looking back. I saw it all, and yet I had a zillion ways of avoiding it. And to be fair to myself, I was taught a lot of outrageous lies about homosexuals, and that had the effect not of making me hate myself, so much as convincing me I wasn’t that. All through my adolescence I figured my crushes on the other boys amounted to nothing more then that pat phrase of the times, "going through a phase". Whatever that was.
But by the time I’d finished high school I knew perfectly well how it was with me. And then came the big problem. Not accepting myself, but getting mom (dad had passed away shortly after I graduated) to accept it. She finally did…sort of…but literally only months before she too passed away. And even then she just didn’t want me to talk about it. When I was a young man freshly out of high school, she all but insisted on a kind of "don’t ask, don’t tell" rule. Whenever I ventured anywhere near the subject, she would grow cold and icy, which if you’d ever met her, you could guess how shocking it was for me to face it. Mom was sunshine and light everywhere she went. Everyone knew her as this cheerful, sparkly kind of person, the kind of person who could brighten the spirits in a gathering of misanthropes. And she was. It wasn’t an act like it is for some people. I know, I lived with it. She always had a good word for everyone, was always kind to everyone, even people who were mean to her. Her religiosity was never dire and miserable like her Yankee Baptist mother’s. She was sweetness and light. Except when it came to that.
I couldn’t talk about my life to her. I couldn’t talk about the things other kids can talk with their parents about. She never browbeat me about it, never demanded I start dating girls, never once said any of the mean and hateful things to me I’ve heard other parents have said to their gay kids. But we couldn’t talk. And having no parent to confide in, at that critical stage of my life, I just had to hold it all in. And it made me miserable. I began having what they call these days, "anger management issues".
At home, he would pick fights, slam doors, explode for no reason. They wondered how their two children could be so different; Matt, a year and a half younger, was easygoing and happy. Zach was miserable.
That was so me. And looking back on it after mom retired, I never really appreciated how bad I was. Then when mom passed away, I inherited her diaries. And I saw it all then. It was very painful reading…
Bruce came home in a very bad mood. Stomped into the bedroom… So I called up J*** & went over to her place for the rest of the evening. He had my stomach just tied up in knots…Oh how I wish he would turn back to the Lord & become like the little boy I once knew, kind, thoughtful, & love for all…
But I wasn’t her little boy anymore, let alone bloody likely to walk back into a church where I would be demonized as an abomination in the sight of God. I was a young man with a young man’s needs and doubts and heartbreaks, all the more confusing and difficult to deal with not so much because I was gay, as that I couldn’t talk to the one person in my life who by all rights should have known me better then anyone, and who might have been able to give me some guidance, but mostly just love, when I needed it most. And love she Did give me…but it had, or so I felt, strings attached. Strings I was terrified to break.
She absolutely positively didn’t want me to come out to her. Every time I even went near the subject of my sexual orientation she would get cold and angry herself and throw up a wall. So I just accepted the fact that we could never talk about it, and I always had to keep that part of me inside when I was in the house. So when my first love left me, and then my second try went very bad on me, and then my third, and I was a miserable desolate wreak inside, I had to keep it inside. I grew increasingly sullen and angry.
Even my friends back then, who were mostly straight, saw it. It was a time before the Internet, and easy access to information about the greater gay community beyond my doorstep. I only knew of a few seedy bars downtown, where I really didn’t want to be. To get my weekly copy of the Washington D.C. gay paper, The Blade, or the Advocate, I had to venture down to this really squalid adult bookstore in nearby Wheaton. Gay kids nowadays will, thankfully, never know how alone and isolated it felt to be gay back then. Most of my friends were straight kids I knew from my high school days, and I really couldn’t talk much to them either, as counter-cultural tolerant as they were (though some of them not so much really). But none of them could have given me what mom might have been able to, had we both lived in a different world.
If only I’d had a chance to open up to her about what was going on in my life, if only I’d had her to talk to then, I might have been a lot less angry, a lot less miserable. My temper was always flaring. I would storm into my room and sulk for hours. I knew I was having "anger management" issues back then, but in retrospect I never thought I was as bad as I was, until I read her diaries. She was a lot more upset then she let on back then. But even in her diaries, she never spoke about what she knew my sexual orientation to be (her friends would later tell me things she told them). She knew, she just didn’t want me to say it. The really sad thing about it all is that she’d have had a much easier son to live with back then, if I could have been open with her about it.
After she retired and moved south I was able to strike out finally on my own and get some of it all worked out. When the first computer BBS systems came along, I was finally able to connect to the gay community at large, and make gay friends, and talk about all the things in my life I never could with mom. By then mom and I would talk weekly on the phone, sometimes for hours. But we never talked about that part of my life right up to the day she died. My visits with her were seldom and short.
As close as she ever got to acknowledging my sexual orientation, and voicing a little motherly support, was one day on the phone, just a few months before she started having the heart trouble that would kill her. It was August 2000. She asked if I was coming down to the annual flea market and I told her then that it was hard to enjoy it, hard to really enjoy any vacation really, without someone to share it with. And she sighed like she always did when I brought that up, and after a moment, finally said, "I know…I know you’re so lonely. I wish you weren’t. I hope you find someone of your own…(pause)…it doesn’t have to be a girl…" I was a bit stunned. Before I could say anything she changed the subject.
So I know a little about what that poor kid was going through. It’s so good he was able to get it out, so wonderful that his parents are so supportive. And…look at what it did for him.
The O’Connors say middle-school officials were terrific, and by eighth grade the tide turned. Zach was let out 15 minutes early and walked across the football field to Daniel Hand High School to attend the gay-straight club. Knowing who he was, he could envision a future and felt a sense of purpose. His grades went up. He had friends. For an assignment about heroes, a girl in his class wrote about him, and Zach used her paper to come out to his Aunt Kathy.
He still wasn’t athletic, but to the family’s surprise, coming out let out a beautiful voice. He won the middle school’s top vocal award.
There’s a lesson there for all parents. A big one.
Peterson Toscano, Ex-Gay therapy survivor himself, has teamed up with Christine Bakke and SoulForce to create a set of resources for other ex-gay therapy survivors. There is a new website he’s co-hosting with Christine, BeyondExGay.com. And there will be a gathering of survivors, The Survivor’s Conference–Beyond Ex-Gay which will be in Irvine, California from June 29 to July 1 this year. I’ll let the SoulForce press release take it from here…but this is good. This is great. People who have been through that horrible wringer should be able to find safe spaces here on the net, and offline, where they can talk to each other.
SOULFORCE PRESS RELEASE: April 2, 2007
For Immediate Release
Contact: Paige Schilt, Media Director
Cell: 512-659-1771 paige@soulforce.org
Peterson Toscano, Beyondexgay.com
Cell: 860.680.0639
email: peterson@petersontoscano.com
(Austin, TX)-Survivors of ex-gay programs can take advantage of two new resources this week. Beyondexgay.com, an online community for those who are healing from ex-gay experiences, will go live today. Simultaneously, online registration will begin for The Survivor’s Conference: Beyond Ex-gay, a face-to-face event scheduled for June 29-July 1, and sponsored by beyondexgay.com and Soulforce.
Online registration is now available for The Survivor’s Conference: Beyond Ex-gay, a face-to-face event scheduled for June 29th through July 1st, sponsored by beyondexgay.com and Soulforce.
Recent events have brought national attention to the existence of programs intended to modify same-sex desires. While much of that attention has focused on whether sexual orientation is subject to change, beyondexgay.com and The Survivor’s Conference are the first efforts to move beyond that debate in order to focus on the community of "survivors"-people who feel they have experienced more harm than benefits from ex-gay programs.
"We use the term ‘survivor’ because we want to emphasize the very real psychological trauma that these programs can cause, and also because we want to highlight the strength of the men and women who, in spite of enormous pressures, come to accept themselves as they are," says Jeff Lutes, a practicing psychotherapist and Executive Director of Soulforce (www.soulforce.org).
The creators of beyondexgay.com (www.beyondexgay.com), Peterson Toscano and Christine Bakke, talked to hundreds of fellow ex-gay survivors. What they heard, again and again, was that ex-gay experiences brought inner turmoil, confusion and shame.
Many survivors acknowledge that some good came of their ex-gay journey. "We grew to understand our sexuality better and in some cases even overcame life-controlling problems," says Toscano, but he is quick to point out that the harm most survivors experience far outweighs the help they receive. The consensus of the major medical and mental health organizations is that homosexuality is not a disorder and, therefore, does not need to be cured. The American Psychological Association identifies "depression, anxiety, and self-destructive behavior" among the possible risks associated with ex-gay therapies.
Toscano spent 17 years and over $30,000 on three continents attempting to change or at least contain his unwanted same-sex attractions. He ultimately endured two years at the Love in Action residential ex-gay program in Memphis, TN.
"In the end I was still very gay, but also depressed, isolated and nearly faithless," he says.
Toscano, now a Christian Quaker, has since created a one-person comedy about his ex-gay experiences and has presented Doin’ Time in the Homo No Mo Halfway House and his other work throughout North America, Europe, West Africa and the Caribbean. In spring 2005, Bakke contacted Toscano after attending one of his performances.
Christine Bakke herself spent more than 4 years trying to change her orientation. She moved to Denver in 1998 to become ex-gay and participated in a program affiliated with Exodus International, the largest network of ex-gay ministries. In 2003 she realized that while she had changed in many areas, her sexual orientation remained the same. Bakke’s story will be featured in the May issue of Glamour, which hit newsstands April 10. Toscano will appear as a guest on the Tyra Banks Show on April 12.
Bakke and Toscano continued to dialogue, and last spring they decided it was time to reach out to more ex-gay survivors through the Internet. Together with assistance from their friend, Steve Boese, they form the perfect team: Bakke-a graphic designer, Toscano-a writer, and Boese-a web guru and founder of MyOrgHost (www.myorghost.net).
Beyondexgay.com currently features diverse narratives from ex-gay survivors. It also provides an array of resources, including original articles and art by survivors, as well as links to other sites. Soon survivors will have the option to join the community and create a profile. Through an on-line form, they will document and share their own ex-gay experiences. Their responses will then be added to a database that will track the variety and scope of ex-gay experiences endured by survivors.
"The ex-gay experience is unique in many ways. No one understands it better than those of us who have been through it. Creating a communal space for ex-gay survivors to tell their stories allows us to share what led us into an ex-gay lifestyle and ways we have been able to recover from it," says Bakke.
Creating a space for survivors to come together and share their stories was also the impetus behind The Survivor’s Conference: Beyond Ex-Gay. The conference, which will take place June 29th through July 1st at the University of California-Irvine, is co-sponsored by the LGBT Resource Center at UC Irvine.
"We chose Irvine because the annual Exodus Freedom Conference is coming to Irvine that week," says Lutes. "For Soulforce, beyondexgay.com, and the LGBT Resource Center at UC Irvine, it is very important to provide a positive response to the Exodus message that gay men and lesbians are sinful and disordered."
If you want to stand in peaceful solidarity to lovingly confront the damaging consequences of the ex-gay movement – this conference is for you. If you have ever been through an ex-gay experience or been damaged by the message that God does not love and affirm you – this conference is for you. If you are confused about the Bible and homosexuality, currently in an ex-gay program, or thinking about trying to change who you are – this conference is for you.
Schedule of Events
Friday, June 29, 2007, 7pm – 9pm, Crystal Cove Auditorium (free and open to the public): Doing time in the Homo No Mo Halfway House: How I survived the Ex-gay Movement – a performance by Peterson Toscano, www.homonomo.com
Jason and deMarcoSaturday, June 30, 2007, 9am – 5pm. Registration online is highly recommended. Registrations at the door will be accepted as space allows.
7pm – Crystal Cove Auditorium (free and open to the public) Jason & deMarco in Concert! www.jasonanddemarco.com
Sunday, July 1, 2007 – Optional worship at a local welcoming & affirming church.
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