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.
They say that fundamentalism springs from fear of the unknown. They say it’s a retreat from reality into the comfort of dogma: a mental padded cell where no doubt ever disturbs the peaceful tranquility. It is a place they say, where there are no questions, no doubts, only comfortable certainties. A place where you don’t have to think for yourself, and most importantly, where you are not responsible, only forgiven.
I disagree. Fundamentalism I believe, springs not from fear of the unknown, but from fear of the people next door. Fear that they can cope with the world as it is, better then you can. Resentment of their courage in facing a world that you cannot. Envy that turns into hate. Fundamentalism doesn’t so much give you a place to hide from the world that the rest of us manage, somehow, to go on living in, as give you permission to put your thumb into our eyes.
Here, Mara Schiavocampo captures Peterson Toscano in a couple all-too-brief passages from his one man play, Doing Time In The Homo No-Mo Halfway House. She intercuts excerpts from Peterson’s play, and an interview with him, with an interview of John Smid inside his little ex-Episcopalian church, turned conversion therapy camp. There’s a moment in the video with that’s telling, and it comes when Peterson explains how he finally had to ask himself one day, what he was doing to himself, and John he insists that The Truth…The Truth…The Truth…has set him free…
The Truth…The Truth…The Truth… Jacob Bronowski in his magnificent book and BBC series on the history of science, The Ascent of Man, devoted an entire episode to the difference between truth and dogma, titled Knowledge or Certainty. He begins with the face of his friend, Stephan Borgrajewicz who, like himself, was born in Poland. And he asks us, how well, how precisely, can we describe this man’s face? He asks a painter to render it, and says…
We are aware the these pictures do not fix the face so much as explore it; that the artist is tracing the detail almost as if by touch; and that each line that is added strengthens picture but never makes it final. We accept that as the method of the artist. But what physics has now done is to show that that is the only method to knowledge. There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. That is the human condition; and that is what quantum physics says. I mean that literally.
This episode is the heart of the entire series. In it, Bronowski calmly and methodically rips to bits the view that science is only about dry facts and figures. It is a method of knowledge he insists…a very human one. We are not Gods, we do not have the perfect God’s eye view of reality. So we must approach what we know with humility, and question it, and test it, and verify it, because we do not have that perfect absolute knowledge of Gods. We can be right, we can be wrong, but when we do not test our knowledge against reality, when we set ourselves apart from that need to test our understandings and let nature speak its truths for itself, we open the door to the worst that is possible within us. And that worst has no bottom. Bronowski ends the episode on one of public television’s most powerful, most moving moments, and it ends as it began, with the face of Stephan Borgrajewicz, many years younger, taken when he was imprisoned in a concentration camp…
We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people. The truth John, is that you won’t stop forcing gay teens through your program against their will, because it’s the ones that are comfortable with who they are that you need to force your cheapshit cowardly self loathings into the most. The truth John, is that you sold out every moment of pure and honest happiness you could ever have had, for the sake of pleasing a world that Still thinks you’re a pervert. The truth John, is that now you can’t bear to see a happy, well adjusted gay kid, because they remind you of everything you could have been, everything you could have had. The truth is the wall is yellow John. Take a look at it someday god damn you. An honestly lived life isn’t necessarily an easier one, but it’s…you know…Authentic and Real.
While the vast majority of Hillcrest’s gay population rejects the Bible, it may prove useful to them to at least consider what the Bible has to say about the self-destructive choices they are making. The Book of Deuteronomy reveals the high cost to a community or group of people who reject God’s commandments and laws:
"But if you refuse to listen to the Lord your God and do not obey all the commands and laws I am giving you today, all of these curses will come and overwhelm you: You will be cursed with confusion and disillusionment in everything you do, until at last you are completely destroyed for doing evil and forsaking me. The Lord will send diseases among you until none of you are left in the land you are about to enter and occupy. The Lord will strike you with wasting disease, fever, and inflammation. These devastations will pursue you until you die. The Lord will cause you to be defeated by your enemies. You will be oppressed and robbed continually, and no one will come to save you."
…and so on. Ever get the feeling when you hear people reciting those verses that they’re not so much warning their neighbors about God’s wrath, as cheering it on…? Anyway, Hartline’s post is pretty long and rant-rambling as you might expect from a babbling bible thumper, but here’s a couple passages from it that I think get to the meat of it. First, Hartline recounts his crusade against the annual San Diego (his hometown) Pride Day festival, and how the defiant San Diego gays just kept listening to Satan rather then the prophet Hartline…
During the San Diego City Council hearing on July 25, 2006, over 90 gay activists and their supporters showed up to influence the council’s decision to issue a proclamation to honor the San Diego Gay Pride organization and its annual events. Rather than acknowledge the terrible decisions that the group had made the previous year when San Diego Gay Pride had hired the network of sex offenders, the multitude of gay activists used the city council hearing to lambast Christians opposed to the pornographic gay pride events. In speech after speech, gay and lesbian gay pride promoters attacked Christians and their beliefs. It had now become perfectly clear that there would be no repentence on the part of those gay leaders who have been so determined to continue their rabid quest to indoctrinate San Diego’s youth into their crusade of sexual anarchy.
Well of course they only have themselves to blame for what happened next…
Several days later, the San Diego Gay Pride Festival turned from a celebration of homosexuality and pornography into a tragic blood bath as several gay males were severely beaten outside of the gay pride festival grounds (www.gaylesbiantimes.com/?id=8193&issue=979). The assaults were so severe that one of the victims, Oscar Foster, remained in intensive care for two weeks due to a fractured skull and mutilple facial injuries. Baseball bats and a knife were used in the horrific attacks. James Allen Carroll received eleven years in prison for attempted murder on the victims after accepting a plea bargain with prosecutors. Two other adult attackers also received lengthy prison terms for their roles in the heinous attacks.
Yes…he’s saying their that God sent those thugs to beat the living crap out of the homosexuals to punish them. A little further down Hartline makes it specifically and abundantly clear:
While there may not be any apparent moral conviction for embracing such anti-christian discrimination, is it possible that these same gay leaders will ever consider that their actions are reaping a judgment from God on their community? Is it actually possible that God is angry with their mockery of the Bible that has become a cornerstone of the gay community in San Diego? If so, will there be any reconsideration by San Diego’s gay community for their anti-god, anti-christian behaviors? Is Hillcrest being warned by God? What will happen if they don’t heed such warnings?
Although leaders of the San Diego homosexual movement have rejected any Biblical references to homosexuality and lesbianism as being a sin, perhaps it is time for them to rethink their conclusions. The Bible teaches a premise that the wages for sin include death. While most in the gay community reject that premise, is it possible, that in doing so, they could be wrong? Is it possible that God does judge those that harm children? Is it possible that God is now judging San Diego’s homosexual community for its continued promotion of rebellion against the Bible?
The wages of sin are death… But it wasn’t God striking down peaceful festival goers that day, it was a gang of gay hating thugs acting out in an atmosphere that had been charged for months with Hartline’s venomous accusations that San Diego Pride was facilitating pedophilia, and indoctrinating children into homosexuality. Hartline stoked a climate of hate in San Diego in which violence toward homosexuals attending Pride Day became practically inevitable. And now that it’s happened, he’s telling gay bashers yet waiting in the wings that they’re not responsible. Even if the blood of gay people is literally on their hands, Hartline says as far as God is concerned, that blood is upon the gays themselves. That club isn’t in your hands…it’s in God’s hands…so swing away because you’re only doing God’s will…God smites them through you… Black market arms dealers selling explosives to terrorists for money probably give more thought to the human lives they’re putting at risk then Hartline does.
This is how the game is played below the radar of the mainstream news media, that accepts at face value the protestations of the main religious right celebrities, that they love the sinner, and only hate the sin. It isn’t true. To a man, they all believe what Hartline so blatantly shouts there in that blog post: that violent attacks on homosexuals represents God’s judgment upon them…that violent attacks on homosexuals fulfill the will of God.
For those of you who have been following it (which is likely only those of you who read the gay news sites), the 72 year old gay man who was beaten with a pipe the other day, by a man on his bus who asked him if he was gay, has died…
Andrew Anthos died Friday of injuries sustained during an attack last week outside his downtown Detroit apartment building. Family members said he was a victim of an anti-gay hate crime.
Anthos was on a city bus Feb. 13 when a man asked him if he was gay. The man followed Anthos off the bus at the stop in front of his building and beat him with a metal pipe.
Anthos, whose family said he was gay, was taken to a hospital and later fell into a coma.
Local and national gay rights groups condemned the attack. Police told The Detroit News in story published Friday that the department was investigating whether the attack was a hate crime.
This is what Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin, looks like in practice, or as one of Bill Donohue’s nemesis, Shakespear’s Sister, points out…
This shit doesn’t happen in a void. Like the sexualization and objectification of women in the media being psychologically damaging to girls, the constant drumbeat of negative stereotypes and exploitative hatred issued by the GOP and social/religious conservative leaders is dangerous for members of the LGBT community. And the hatemongers’ faux-naïveté at the reality that you can’t continually put a target on someone’s back but expect no one to shoot at it is growing really goddamned old. The hate-the-gays schtick isn’t just infuriating and spiteful and wrong; it’s irresponsible.
But it’s effective. It keeps winning them elections. It keeps the cash flowing in. And it keeps the gays fearful. A fearful homosexual is a good homosexual. Not perhaps, as good as a dead one, but it will do.
The reference to "Dome Man" comes from Anthos’ campaign to light the Michigan Statehouse dome in red, white and blue colors one night a year…
Photo by Lansing State Journal file photo
So he loved his country, and he loved his state. Too bad they couldn’t have loved him back.
Couldn’t You At Least Have Offered A Moneyback Guarantee?
…and…a blender?
Here’s Peterson Toscano and Lance Carroll on the Montel Williams show, briefly discussing how they came to find themselves in reparative therapy. Two things are worth noting here: Peterson went in of his own free will, while Lance was forced into it by his parents. Peterson left of his own accord, finally accepting himself just as he was, and remained very close to both his parents. Lance is now estranged from both of his.
This conversation is all too brief, but I guess that’s the format of the Montel Williams show, to flit from one topic to another to another during the course of an hour. Someone should sit those two down together for a long talk on camera where they can talk about their experiences in more depth, how it felt, what it did to them, what their lives are like now: the one who went in of his own accord out of devotion to God, and the one who was forced in against his will.
And here’s a clip from a Boston Legal episode about a man suing his ex-gay ministry. Great line at the end…
John…are you reading this? Have you given Lance’s parents back their money yet? Bring families together do you? Ever tell Lance you’re sorry? Ever find where you buried your conscience? You had one once…didn’t you? Do you remember what it was like…way back then…to have a conscience…?
Kevin-Douglas Olive responds to this post and to all your comments and mine, and he implores us all not to hate the Groffs. Quakers are some of the most decent people I’ve ever met in my life.
I’ll post my own response later…I want to take some time to think over what he wrote. But in the meantime you should go read his comment, and remember that a Christian wrote it, the next time you hear the kook pews hollering out for war and vengence and hate in the name of Christ.
Friends who betrayed me with their votes for George Bush while the republicans were busy waging one of the most vicious anti-gay campaigns in American history. Family members who love the sinner while hating the sin. They smile in your face, and they stab you in the heart. In the wake of Tim Hardaway’s very public bellyaching about much he hates gay people, Arthur Silber posts a first-rate fire and brimstone sermon up on his blog titled, We Are Not Freaks. It’s addressed to all the ersatz liberals and progressives out there that Truman Capote was talking about when he said that "A faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room", but he could just as well have been speaking for me on the day after I watched a gay teenager being shoveled into an ex-gay program simply for liking himself just as he was. That day I turned my back on all the people in my life who graciously extended their tolerance to me, but not, not really, their friendship and love.
My emailers agreed with my outrage, and they understood, at least in general terms, the source of my anger. Still, they wondered: "But, Arthur, why are you so angry? Do you think expressing that kind of anger will help to change anyone’s mind, or encourage others to try to look at these issues from a different perspective?" To explain my answer in part, I reposted yesterday an essay from two years ago: Living on the Inside…and Living on the Outside. In that piece, I detailed how and why it is undeniably true that those who enjoy the most privileged position in our culture — those who are white, heterosexual and male — cannot possibly understand, not completely, what it is like to be one of those who is shut out in different ways, and to varying degrees.
But even that essay is written from a perspective of some distance. It doesn’t fully capture the emotional reality of being marginalized, being excluded, and very often being ridiculed, and even demonized. This realization hit me once again with great force as I read a comment recently added to that lengthy thread at TAPPED. Here it is:
oh this is tedious, yet as mortally debilitating as any of the thousand cuts. what i feel, down to the core, is that i have again been brought to the fore of the class, denuded, so that the students can point and discuss the freakish example that i am, as if this were the anatomy class of In Human Bondage. except you are the freaking freak, pal. it makes me sick to hear you confess your elastic confusions, because i suffer them daily, but the primary sickness is your entitlement, your entitlement to be a jiving idiot, to muse in public about me, that I am expected to stand here as you cheerfully enumerate the social failings you participate in, do not regret, and therefore have no intention of changing. do you imagine that i live in any state of happiness because you have found room for me in your untested world view, or that I don’t know, every day of my life, that when push comes to shove you and your joshing buddies would shove me? do you somehow think, because a gay man describes your haircut, it somehow balances the force with which an entire being is declared revolting, and violently threatened, beginning with his very first memories? For your information you have not described me in any respect that is insightful, you have simply corralled me into a cage, whereby rudely pointing at me you demonstrate your limited understanding of the human heart and mind: I promise you that you are far from original in that enterprise. In fact, by so doing, you have described yourself. It is one thing to be ignorant, as we all are when it comes to fully understanding the prejudice that minorities we are not members of endure, but it is another to brag of it, which is the essence of your tone.
When you strip away all the verbiage, all the intellectual tap dancing, and all the efforts to "understand" and be "tolerant," that is the inescapable, the terrible bottom line: many of you think we are Freaks. Speaking for myself with regard to these issues, I don’t want you to "understand" me or to be "tolerant" of me. I don’t want you to "study" me, and try to graph all the various points of similarity and difference between us: I want you to recognize that I am completely and entirely a human being, just as you are. And I want you to understand fully what that means, and to genuinely mean it.
It is one thing to be openly hated and despised, as gays and lesbians are by many on the right. We’re used to that, and we got used to it a long time ago. As was required, we manufactured intellectual and emotional armor to protect ourselves. In the current climate, we have to put it on every single damned day. It weighs a great deal, and it exacts an awful price. But without it, we would suffer injuries too grievous to be borne.
But how much worse it is to be cajoled into taking off that armor — to hear you tell us that you understand we’re "just like you" in all the ways that matter, and that we’re really "just the same" — and then to read or hear about "how easy" you think it is to "make fun" of us, especially when our status as Freaks is too obvious. How much worse it is when we believe you, when you tell us you think we’re all equal — except that you can get married, while almost every leading Democrat will say, well, no, we can’t get married. But we can have "civil unions." Because, you see, Freaks don’t get married.
But we had believed you, so we took off the armor — and then you plunged the sword deep into our guts. You revealed that many of you actually do think we’re Freaks. Many of you don’t believe we’re really "just like you."
If you want to know exactly where I’m coming from these days, go on and read the whole thing. We are not freaks. We are human beings. What should have been the most wonderful, magical, life affirming moments of our lives…falling in love…finding that soulmate…making a life together…has been turned into a brutal nightmare for some of us, and a difficult, heartbreakingly painful experience for most of us, and I’m beyond asking why. The promise of love has been systematically ripped away from us for generations, and there are those who would take it away from us still, when we’ve only just begun to take it back for ourselves. We can cut your hair. We can decorate your house. We can be the butt of TV jokes. We can even have sex now. But we can’t love.
We can’t so much as kiss or hold hands in public without danger to our lives. This from a New York Times article on the controversy following the Snicker’s Superbowl ad…A Kiss Too Far?
Yet gay-bashing still occurs routinely, Mr. Patton of the Anti-Violence Project said, even in neighborhoods like Chelsea in Manhattan, where the sight of two men kissing on the street can hardly be considered a frighten-the-horses proposition. “In January some men were leaving a bar in Chelsea,” saying goodbye with a kiss, Mr. Patton said. “One friend got into a taxi and then a car behind the taxi stopped and some guys jumped out and beat up the other two.” One victim of the attack, which is under investigation by the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, was bruised and shaken. The second had a broken jaw.
“The last time I was called a faggot was on Eighth Avenue,” said Joe Windish, a longtime New Yorker who now lives in Milledgeville, Ga., with his partner of many years. “I don’t have that here, and I’m an out gay man,” said Mr. Windish, whose neighbors in what he termed “the reddest of the red states” may be fundamentalist Christians who oppose gay marriages and even civil unions, but “who all like me personally.”
Tolerance has its limits, though, as Mr. Windish found when he and his partner took a vacation on a sleepy island off the coast of Georgia. “I became aware that if I held my partner’s hand, or kissed him in public, the friendliness would stop,” he said.
Imagine living in a world where you could not so much as hold the hand of the one you love without being attacked.
(Scottsdale, Arizona) The reward for information leading to the arrest of a gang of men who attacked a gay couple outside a Scottsdale restaurant last December has been raised to $12,000 thanks to a donation from PFLAG.
Andrew Frost and Jean Rolland were set upon by as many as seven men as the couple walked out of the restaurant hand-in-hand.
Frost, 19, needed more than a dozen stitches to close wounds on his head and face. Rolland, 28, suffered many bumps and bruises.
Frost said that as he and Rolland exited the restaurant he heard someone yell "fag". He said he turned and saw two men.
Frost said that he replied to the slur and one of the men punched him. He said that at least five others rushed from the restaurant and joined the attack.
Frost and Rolland have filed a police report, but no one at the restaurant seems to have seen anything. The couple said they had never seen their attackers before.
…but no one at the restaurant seems to have seen anything. And that’s why I am not speaking now to a lot of people in my life that I used to speak to on an almost daily basis. Lovers are viciously attacked for daring to love openly and joyfully and as a warning to the rest of us not to even attempt it. It happens on the streets, it happens in the courtrooms, it happens behind the pulpit and in the pews, it happens on the campaign trail, it happens on the floor of congress and in the Oval Office and you don’t seem to have seen anything. May you be dammed.
This Is Either Good News For Gay Listeners, Or Very Bad News…
My first thought upon hearing this was, Okay…what happens to OutQ…?
To: SIRIUS Subscribers
Today is a very exciting day for SIRIUS customers. As you may have heard, SIRIUS Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio are merging to form the nation’s premier audio entertainment provider.
This combination of our two offerings will benefit you – our loyal listeners. As a single company, we’ll provide superior programming to you every day with the best of both SIRIUS and XM. Currently, XM and SIRIUS broadcast a wide range of commercial-free music channels, exclusive sports coverage, news, talk, and entertainment programming. Howard Stern. Oprah and Friends. The NFL. MLB. NBA. ESPN. CNBC. Fox News. Additionally, the combined company will be able to improve existing services such as real-time traffic information and rear-seat video as well as introduce new ones.
You see what’s missing from that list. No, no… Not just OutQ, but any indication that they’ve been providing something for people to listen to, who are sick and tired of all the right wing pap being broadcast out there, posturing as non-partisan news and information. Fox News? They tell us about Fox News (sic) and not Talk Left? But Clear Channel owns a major stake in XM.
I have a Honda Accord, and since it came with a factory installed XM radio, the first thing I did was bellyache to XM about their lack of a gay channel like Sirius had. I could have been shouting my complaints up at one of their satellites for all it mattered. So shortly after I bought the Accord I yanked the factory radio out and spent $180 plus the cost of a new radio plus the cost of installation so I could listen to OutQ on Sirius.
At the time Sirius had two other channels going for it that XM didn’t: Swing Street and Air America. But then Air America defected to XM and Sirius dropped Swing Street when they picked up Howard Stern, merging it’s programming into the god awful American Standards channel, which I think they call the Old Fart’s Channel internally. Now it’s a sickening combination of big band swing and 1950s lounge music and I hate it.
The Trance channel is now more a electro-pop channel except some evenings when it gets back to being hard core trance. The only thing that hasn’t changed for the worse since I subscribed to Sirius is OutQ. Well…and the 60s channel and the New Age channel (elevator music for my generation). Basically I’m paying their subscription fees now just to listen to Michelangelo Signorile and Sunset Cruse and a couple other channels I wouldn’t have yanked the old radio out for since XM carried them too. Actually, XM’s 40s channel is much better then Sirius’ god awful American Standards channel.
For me the promise satellite radio wasn’t so much that you could drive from one end of the country to the other without having to constantly retune your radio all the way, but that niche content that wasn’t profitable regionally, could work on a national scale. Radio that actually spoke to gay audiences only happened in some large cities, and then only for a few hours at week at most. But with the ability to reach the entire country from a satellite, my hope was that we’d finally have something that regarded us as its primary target audience, instead of "oh…yeah…and you gays too."
Ironically, there’s not a lot I actually like on OutQ. Derek & Romaine are way too crude for my liking. I just won’t listen to that. OutQ in the Morning is almost as bad sometimes. But I can forgive any gay channel that kind of crap that broadcasts Signorile and Sunset Cruse. Especially Sunset Cruse…which is a lovely gay dedicate-a-song-to-your-sweetheart program. I just love it. After a long week of reading about one goddamned attack on the gay community after another in the news, Sunset Cruse is just the thing I need to remind me that love still has a chance in this world.
My fear right now in this proposed merger is that all that will simply vanish just like my Swing Channel did when either the bean counters decide it isn’t pulling in enough listeners, or the stock block that belongs to Clear Channel (they own a major stake in XM), decides they don’t want any of that faggot stuff on their airwaves. The reason competition is a good thing isn’t to drive down prices, but to encourage producers to exploit markets their competition isn’t, and to keep the top dogs responsive to All their customers.
A gay Baltimore man who’s fighting to keep his late partner buried in rural Tennessee may have to sell his car and home to fund the legal battle.
Kevin-Douglas Olive said the parents of his late partner, Russell Groff, have appealed a court ruling that granted Olive an early win in the case. The appeal effectively restarts the case, making progress a costly proposition.
Olive said he’s committed to continuing a case in which he’s already invested $8,000 — but fears his legal bills may demand another $20,000.
"I’ll do what I gotta do," he said, "but they’re telling me to expect to spend a lot more than I spent before."
Read more at the Washington Blade’s site Here. The article references the comments from the Groffs to this post on my blog that I’m pretty certain are genuine, and which if they are they show just how far into the gutter hate has led them. They’ve lied through their teeth pretty consistently throughout about the condition of Russell’s gravesite and the events that led to their lawsuit, claiming that it was neglect when it was the removal of their cheapshit insults to the man Russell loved that provoked them into going to court.
Olive said Groff became so weak that he couldn’t leave his bed to urinate. To best help the man he loved, Olive would hold the bedpan for him.
“This is my soul mate, so I just did it,” he said. “You don’t even think about it. You just do it.”
Eventually, a staph infection that originated in Groff’s gall bladder spread throughout his body, and on Nov. 23, 2004, he died.
"I just collapsed on the floor of the hospital, face down and shrieking," Olive said. "Part of me knew that was entirely inappropriate, but part of me didn’t care.”
And how does an all-American God fearing family treat the man who cared for their son in his last hours. Well…like dogshit of course…
In keeping with the burial instructions signed Nov. 18, Groff was interred in the West Knoxville Friends Cemetery outside Knoxville, Tenn.
Olive said the grave, located about 30 minutes from Groff’s childhood home, was to remain simple and clean. But Groff’s mother, Carolyn, made changes.
"She made it into this shrine that really offended the sensibilities of the Quakers," he said, "because we’re all about simplicity."
Olive said Carolyn routinely decorated the grave. At one point, she posted a picture of Groff with his female prom date, plus a poem Carolyn wrote wherein her son essentially apologized for being gay.
"I was so insulted by seeing this,” Olive said. "She was trying to paint him as this repentive person who was heterosexual, really."
After seeing that picture and poem, Olive said he could tolerate no more and cleaned his husband’s gravesite.
"When I cleared the grave, that was the final straw for her,” he said. “She filed the caveat and challenged the will."
Without a doubt Russell knew what was coming after he died, and that was why he had that will drawn up. He loved Kevin, and he didn’t want him to go through the kind of hell he knew his parents were going to bring down on him. And without a doubt, the reason why the homophobes want to deny same sex couples not just the right to marry, but Any legal rights whatsoever, is Precisely so they can twist the knife in our guts, just like the Groffs are twisting the knife in Kevin’s. There is no other plausible reason for the all-out assault on any and every possible legal status for a same sex couple, other then to facilitate this kind of grotesque scorched earth warfare where even our lover’s graves aren’t safe. None. When they talk about fighting to preserve the sacred institution of marriage, what they mean is they’re fighting to preserve the right to dig up your spouse’s grave.
A Maryland judge upheld the will, on the staringly obvious grounds that Russell knew what he was doing when he made it. Russell saw it coming. He did the only thing the law in Maryland allows a gay man do, to to protect the man he loved from it. But the Groffs are bound and determined to bleed Kevin as much as they can because now all they have in their lives is how much they hate him. He’s having to sell off possessions now, and perhaps even his house in order to pay the legal bills over this continuing fight.
I want to ask everyone reading this blog to help him out in any way they can, however much. Do you believe in love? Did it make a difference in your life? Do you remember the first time someone you loved took you into their arms? Do you remember that first kiss? Does it make you angry that some people feel as though they have a god-given right to spit in your face whenever moments like those bring you joy and peace and contentment? Kevin-Douglas Olive watched the man he loved and was loved by die, and now he’s having to fight over the ground he laid his body to rest, and I think even more then money to pay the legal bills, it would help him now to know that there are people out here who Care.
Donations can be sent via mail to the Kevin Olive Defense Fund, c/o C.W. Hardy, 715 Park Ave., Apt. B, Baltimore, MD, 21201.
As a point of interest, it looks like Kevin’s lawyer is Mark Scurti. In fact some years ago I had his law firm, Scurti and Gulling do my own will, and Medical Directives document. They’re good people, known and respected in Baltimore’s gay community for their work fighting for our legal rights.
What emerged from the gay adoption business is that the issue of homosexuality is terribly dangerous to the Roman Catholic church. It comes away from such a debate with its public image damaged. And of course this is true of the Anglican Church too. Indeed, it seems to me that the debate about homosexuality poses such a serious threat to organised religion in this country that it is not absurd to compare it to the reformation of the 16th century.
Some will reply that the churches have always faced difficult moral issues, and they have muddled through: the gay issue is nothing unusual. Until quite recently I would have agreed. But it becomes ever clearer that the issue of homosexuality really is different. It has managed to tie the finest Anglican theologian of his generation in knots, effectively disabling him from leadership. And more widely and more seriously it is undermining the churches’ claim to the moral high ground.
…
Firstly, this is an issue that shuns compromise. It has a stark "either/or" quality. Either homosexuality is a fully valid alternative to heterosexuality or it is not. There is no room for compromise, no third way: poor Rowan Williams is trying to make himself a perch on a barbed-wire fence. You don’t find such absoluteness in other moral debates, such a complete absence of shared assumptions and aims.
I think you do, and the obvious example of it is the fight over abortion. But here’s the critical difference, even with that bitter struggle:
The public change in attitudes towards homosexuality is not just the waning of a taboo. It is not just a case of a practice losing its aura of immorality (as with premarital sex or illegitimacy). Instead, the case for homosexual equality takes the form of a moral crusade. Those who want to uphold the old attitude are not just dated moralists (as is the case with those who want to uphold the old attitude to premarital sex or illegitimacy). They are accused of moral deficiency. The old taboo surrounding this practice does not disappear but "bounces back" at those who seek to uphold it. Such a sharp turn-around is, I think, without parallel in moral history.
These factors have combined to make the gay issue the church’s perfect storm, perhaps even its nemesis. Because previous shifts in public morality have been slower, and more amenable to compromise, the Church has been able to move its clunky stone feet, and keep standing. This shift has floored it. By resisting the new moral orthodoxy on homosexuality, and hardening against it, the church is fast losing the aura of moral authority it has more or less retained all this time. When a bishop defends discrimination against homosexuals he is, in the eyes of most of the population, displaying a lamentable moral deficiency.
So the issue of homosexuality has the strange power to turn the moral tables. The traditional moralist is subject to accusations of immorality. And this inversion is doing terrible damage to the Christian churches.
(Emphasis mine) And there it is. At least in the abortion fight, there are two plausibly moral sides to it, that of concern for the life of the unborn, verses concern for the lives of women. And there is a more general question of who decides how your own body is to be used. But in arguments over homosexuality, there is only the judgment that same sex relationships are either damaging in some way, damaging enough to justify acting against them, or they are not. You can take a stand for the rights of women to decide for themselves how and when to give birth, and still be forced to concede that the other side in the fight may well feel compelled to fight for the lives of the unborn, even against the lives of the living. You can disagree with it, you can disagree profoundly with it, but there it is. But in the case of homosexuality, there is only the damage that is done to gay people. Either homosexuality is destructive or it is not. And if it is not, then what have you been doing all this time to homosexual people? Every same sex relationship torn asunder is either two souls saved, or two loving hearts cut to ribbons.
One side in this fight, has a lot of human misery and grief to answer for. And the time is long past for claiming that you couldn’t have known the damage you were doing. Back in the 1950s, when gay people were still living their lives in the shadows, and at least plausibly throughout the 60s and much of the 70s, when gay people were just beginning to step forward in society and demand their place at the table, you could argue that you didn’t really know any gay people, nor much about their lives other then what you heard in the newspapers and from the guy thumping his pulpit in church. But there is no excuse from ignorance today.
And yet you see otherwise decent and intelligent people digging in their heels over it, to ridiculous lengths nowadays, and in the face of overwhelming evidence that not only there is nothing necessarily damaging about homosexuality, but that same sex romantic love and intimacy is just as necessary and life affirming for gay people, as it is for heterosexuals. It’s startling to look at sometimes. The opposition to this is essentially boxing itself in the same coffin made of junk science and religious dogma that the creationists have. Why? For some I’m sure it’s fear of loosing their brittle faith, the only thing keeping them afloat in a rapidly changing world. But for others, the ones who are otherwise more flexible in their spirituality, more able to cope with change, it’s something far more disturbing then the loss of one’s inner bearings. They can feel a mountain of guilt hanging just over their heads.
What have we been doing to these people all this time? What have we done? What have I done?
NEWS ITEM: Michigan Court Of Appeals Says No To Benefits For Same Sex Couples.
The judges said that a the ban on same sex marriage, voted into the state constitution back in 2004, applies to domestic partner benefits. "The marriage amendment’s plain language prohibits public employers from recognizing same-sex unions for any purpose," the court said.
This wasn’t exactly what the voters were being told would happen back in 2004. Marlene Elwell, campaign director for the Amendment was emphatic, stating that "This has nothing to do with taking benefits away. This is about marriage between a man and a woman." But that was double talk. The clear intent of the groups working to pass the amendment, was to insure that same sex couples could only be legal strangers in the eyes of the law, and the language of the amendment reflected that intent precisely. When they told the voters that their intent wasn’t to take benefits away, they were only telling a half truth, if that. Their intent, was to take everything away from same sex couples that the law might legally provide…not benefits specifically.
Their rhetoric during the campaign was tactical and dishonest and it worked. And the proof of that is their silence now, as the rights they kept insisting would not be taken from same sex couples are now being stripped relentlessly away by the courts, who are only following the plain and unambiguous language of the amendment.
A January news article in The Christian Science Monitor quotes Ian Douglas, professor of Mission and World Christianity at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., on the troubles now facing the Episcopal church as it continues to schism over homosexuality. Observing that the Anglican Communion’s tradition of inclusion is being put to the test, Douglas goes on to say, "Part of the problem with the Anglican community today is that the different constituencies are so convinced of their own truth, that they say they have no need of others – and that goes against Anglican tradition."
In other words, the blame for the hostility toward homosexuals now raging through the Episcopalian Church is at least partly the fault of gay people, who are too convinced of their own truth to listen to others. On the other hand, you could argue that gay people have been beaten over the head with the viewpoint of people like the Archbishop of Nigeria Peter Akinola (who supports a proposed Nigerian law which would ban gay people in that country from so much as sitting down together in a public restaurant) for generations. What part of their own truth, should gay people renounce in order to accommodate others like Akinola?
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