Category Archives: Gay Rights

Toxic Times

I returned to Indianapolis after a week of being blessedly unconnected to “the usual suspects”—otherwise known as the media/chattering classes/punditocracy—to find that the National Organization for Marriage had been through town. Some forty “pro-marriage” demonstrators had promoted loving relationships with signs suggesting that gay people should be murdered. One particularly nasty poster featured a picture with two nooses.

Lest the gay community feel singled out, our local Tea Party crackpots have added anti-Semitism to their toxic brew of pique and racism, handing out materials about the Jewish Bankers Who Control Obama, among other pleasantries. And I won’t even revisit the much-publicized and despicable effort by Andrew Breitbart and Fox “News” to demonize Shirley Sherrod, the African-American civil servant with the Agriculture Department by twisting her words to make a plea to get beyond racism sound like an endorsement of racism.

In short, these are not the best of times.

I know the drill: we are hurting economically, and at such times, intergroup tensions tend to be high. There is a desire to find someone to blame for what ails us, and that must be the person or persons with the different color, religion or sexual orientation. Choose your “Them.”

I have my own pop psychology take on what ails so many people these days. As I noted in last month’s column,  I think a lot of people who have fewer resources—emotional, intellectual, fiscal—find themselves a bit like Rip Van Winkle, waking up to a world that has changed while they slept. Suddenly, there is a black man in the White House. There is a woman (a strong one) running Congress, another one heading up the State Department, and it looks like there will be three women on the Supreme Court, all time-honored bastions of male privilege. Turn on a television set or go to the movies, and there are all these openly gay people acting as if they were entitled to be treated like everybody else. The local weatherman or news anchor has a name like Huang or Sanchez, and at the office, there are brown and black coworkers of various genders and orientations.

The whole world is different, and those without the ability to cope with the changes—or even understand them—are fearful and angry and confused.

What we are seeing right now is analogous to the tantrum a two-year-old throws when he is tired and frustrated and not getting his own way. That’s why the Tea Party doesn’t have a coherent complaint or policy agenda, why Fox “News” and the right wing blogosphere disapprove of anything Obama does—even when it is the same thing they approved when Bush did it—because that usurper did it!

Most of the anger and hateful behavior we are seeing is really just lashing out at a world that isn’t behaving the way it is supposed to—at least, in the reality inhabited by those who are angry and frightened. It doesn’t help that there are political actors with a personal stake in fomenting that anger and stoking those fears.

The question we are left with is: what do we do? What do those of us with a more inclusive worldview and a less apocalyptic agenda do to tamp down the ugliness and defuse the hate? I wish I had a quick and pithy answer to that question, but I don’t.

I do know one thing. Until our political landscape settles down, until cooler heads prevail, we all need to speak up: to call the hatreds out, to advocate for understanding and acceptance, and to remind the people who are still able to reason that all people are entitled to be treated as individuals and judged on their behavior, not their identities.

Beam Me Up, Scotty

I should probably be ashamed to admit it, but my TIVO is set to copy episodes of Star Trek—mostly, the “Next Generation” but also the Deep Space Nine and Voyager spinoffs. I’ve watched some of these so often, I can repeat the dialogue. Verbatim. And although I like most science fiction, I vastly prefer those that—like Star Trek—depict a future more utopian than dystopian.

Which brings me to a seemingly unrelated topic: my unsolicited correspondence file.

I rarely get hate mail from readers of the Word (although I do seem to prompt the occasional bitchy post from local gay bloggers), but my columns for the Indianapolis Star generate quite a number of nasty emails and snail mail. Some of these are one-time rants about my elitism, liberalism, lack of common sense or morality and general unworthiness to occupy the planet; others are predictable messages from persistent “pen pals” who evidently believe that the fortieth time they explain to me that God doesn’t like homosexuals, a light will finally dawn and I’ll suddenly agree with them.

One of those persistent correspondents was the man I referred to in a 2009 column titled “Dear Nutjob.”  (I know—not very civil. I was steamed.) This is the guy who keeps sending me “research” proving that my son can be “cured” of his gayness. In the previous column, I vented; after receipt of his more recent correspondence, I have taken to wondering what possesses him and people like him—what leads them to insist that difference equals less than and otherness is to be feared and/or hated (or “cured”)?

It isn’t just GLBT folks who generate this response. Look around at the “teabag” folks who are constantly proclaiming that they want “their” country back. It’s not difficult to figure out who they want it back from: African-Americans, immigrants, uppity women who no longer know our place. Look at the hysterical efforts to keep Muslim-Americans from building a Mosque in lower Manhattan, and the claims that all Muslims are terrorists. How dare all these outsiders consider themselves equally American, equally entitled to civil liberties, social status and political office?

I have my own theories about what motivates all this. (You’ve probably noticed that I’m never short on theories—how valid they are is, I know, debatable.) The world is changing, and if that change isn’t really more rapid and disconcerting than ever before, the internet and the 24-hour news-hole certainly make it seem that way.

For some of us, that change is exciting, and much of it is welcome, but for others, it is profoundly destabilizing. In a way, they are all like Rip Van Winkle, waking from a 20-year sleep to confront an alien reality. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised if experiencing change that way pushes some folks over the edge. The good news is—at least, if polls are to be believed—most of the ugliness of our current public discourse is the product of us older Americans. (As I tell my students, once my generation is dead, things should improve!)   

All of which brings me back to the Starship Enterprise.

I know it is more than fiction—it’s probably an impossible fantasy—but part of me really wants to believe that we humans will eventually learn to behave the way they do on the bridge of the Enterprise, respecting and cooperating with a wide variety of human and alien comrades, and turning our combined energies to the task of exploring and understanding the mysteries of the universe.

Oh well. A girl can dream.

Missing Hearts and Souls

I’m going to ask for the indulgence of my readers, and quote a relatively long excerpt from an article that recently appeared in the Miami New Times in the wake of revelations about George Rekers, a leading Christian Right figure. (If somehow you missed those revelations, the short version is that Dr. Holier-than-Thou visited “Rentaboy.com” and engaged the services of a male prostitute who accompanied him on a European trip. To—ahem—“carry luggage.”) Here’s the excerpt:

“In 1974, Rekers, a leading thinker in the so-called ex-gay movement, was presented with a 4-year-old “effeminate boy” named Kraig, whose parents had enrolled him in the program. Rekers put Kraig in a “play-observation room” with his mother, who was equipped with a listening device. When the boy played with girly toys, the doctors instructed her to avert her eyes from the child.

According to a 2001 account in Brain, Child Magazine, “On one such occasion, his distress was such that he began to scream, but his mother just looked away. His anxiety increased, and he did whatever he could to get her to respond to him… Kraig became so hysterical, and his mother so uncomfortable, that one of the clinicians had to enter and take Kraig, screaming, from the room.”

Rekers’s research team continued the experiment in the family’s home. Kraig received red chips for feminine behavior and blue chips for masculine behavior. The blue chips could be cashed in for candy or television time. The red chips earned him a “swat” or spanking from his father. Researchers periodically entered the family’s home to ensure proper implementation of the reward-punishment system.

After two years, the boy supposedly manned up. Over the decades, Rekers, who ran countless similar experiments, held Kraig up as “the poster boy for behavioral treatment of boyhood effeminacy.”

At age 18, shamed by his childhood diagnosis and treatment, Rekers’s poster boy attempted suicide, according to Gender Shock, a book by journalist Phyllis Burke. Rekers, whose early experiments were the first to ostensibly demonstrate a “gay cure,” resigned from the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) last week, after it was revealed the gay escort had given him nude sexual massages. NARTH, however, stands by his science.”

It is one thing to diagnose Dr. Rekers; self-hate and projection explain a lot. I have a different question. What in the world was wrong with those parents?

My husband and I have five children and four grandchildren. Believe me, I know how easy it can be to react badly to childish provocations, how hard it is to parent adequately. I’ve second-guessed my own mothering skills more times than I can remember. That said, however, I can’t imagine treating any child the way these people treated this little boy, even for behaviors that we would all see as unequivocally and objectively wrong. Here, there was no dangerous or destructive behavior; the child was simply “effeminate,” whatever that means. Where is it written that being effeminate is a trait to be scorned or an affliction to be cured? What is it about the prospect of a child growing up gay that is so terrifying that it justifies the infliction of such unbelievable emotional abuse?

In the years since he came out, my son has periodically shared heartrending stories about friends or acquaintances whose parents rejected them. Many of them came from “religious” families—families in which “bible-believing” is a euphemism for self-righteousness, rigidity and intolerance. Some of these young people were later able to overcome the damage and achieve a measure of self-acceptance; others never did. Some haven’t spoken to their parents in years. Some developed substance-abuse problems. Others engaged in risky sexual behaviors, or gave other indications of self-loathing.

I think about all the people who cannot conceive, about the couples who wait years to adopt a child, about loving adults who want nothing more than to nurture and rear a child—and then I wonder at the unfairness of a world in which fertile people procreate easily and then abandon, neglect or mistreat the human beings entrusted to their care.

I try to understand, but I never will.

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I Will Never Understand

I always thought that advanced age would bring wisdom—or if not wisdom, at least a greater understanding of the world and the human beings who populate it. I was wrong. There are things I will never, ever understand.

A month or so ago, a federal judge in Mississippi ruled that the rights of high school senior Constance McMillen were violated when her high school refused to allow her to wear a tuxedo and bring her girlfriend to the Itawamba Agricultural High School prom. The school promptly cancelled the prom rather than allow Constance to attend. Federal Judge held a trial on the matter later and reaffirmed his ruling, but stopped short of requiring the school board to reinstate the prom, as parents had already formulated their plan to hold a private prom.

As one report put it, “There was a private prom all right.” On the Wednesday before the Friday prom date, the school’s attorney announced that “the prom” would be held at the Fulton Country Club. Constance, her date and seven other kids (two with learning disabilities) showed up—only to find that the “real” prom was being held elsewhere. The parents had moved it to a secret location out of the county.

What is wrong with these people? What on earth would cause these parents, who are presumably adults, to do something this cruel and hurtful? Are they that terrified of difference? That devoid of human compassion?

All I could think of when I read the stories about this event was a photo taken at Little Rock High School, when National Guard soldiers sent by President Dwight Eisenhower escorted an obviously terrified young black woman through a crowd determined to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. In that famous picture, a young white woman of approximately the same age, her face contorted with hate, is spitting on the black girl.

And again, I ask the question for which there is no satisfactory answer: what makes people act like this?

The easy answer is fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the “other.” Fear of a world that seems increasingly unfamiliar. We can see this in the “Tea Party” gatherings, with their misspelled signs, the accusations of Nazism and Socialism (terms most of them rather clearly could not define if their lives depended on it), and the not-very-veiled racism. We’ve seen it in the American past, with the periodic emergence of groups like the Know Nothings, the Nativists, and others we’d rather forget.

The problem with the explanatory power of this theory is that we all are fearful from time to time. But we don’t all express it in such a hateful and destructive fashion. So what is the distinguishing characteristic? What makes one person decide to put her fears to use by working with others to solve our common problems, while the next person channels it into rage and recrimination?

In a related question, I have always wondered about people who engage in vandalism. Theft I can understand—you want something I have. (I don’t condone it, but I do understand it.) But wanton destruction? Smashing property just for the sake of smashing? That, I have never understood.

After five children and four grandchildren, I know firsthand how fragile all teenagers are, how easily their egos can be damaged and their hopes and aspirations dashed. I also have a gay son and a lesbian granddaughter, and I have watched their struggles to separate their self-images from the hurtful social stereotypes that are still a huge part of American society. I sometimes marvel that any gay child grows up undamaged and whole, given the often thoughtless cruelty of some of those attitudes.

I just cannot imagine purposely doing to any teen what those Mississippi parents did to this child. And I will never understand why.

Times that Try Us

It seems to be increasingly fashionable—at least among angry Teabaggers—to quote (selected) Founders. So perhaps I should begin this column with Thomas Paine’s famous “These are the times that try men’s souls…” 

Of course, Paine was writing during some of the darkest days of the Revolution, not during a sustained snit by people with a very tenuous grasp of American history. Whatever the temptation to over-react to the over-reactions all around us, those of us who haven’t yet lost all our marbles should probably exercise some restraint.

And yet…as Charles Blow recently wrote in the New York Times,

“The far-right extremists have gone into conniptions.

  The bullying, threats, and acts of violence following the passage of health care reform have been shocking, but they’re only the most recent   manifestations of an increasing sense of desperation.

 It’s an extension of a now-familiar theme: some version of “take our country back.” The problem is that the country romanticized by the far right hasn’t existed for some time, and its ability to deny that fact grows more dim every day. President Obama and what he represents has jolted extremists into the present and forced them to confront the future. And it scares them.”

 We are experiencing a perfect storm—a confluence of rapid social change, economic stress (or worse) and electronically distributed demagoguery that could easily ignite into something profoundly ugly. And lest we forget, minorities and marginalized people do not fare well at such times.

 Angry and frightened people want someone to blame. In the past, it was Catholics or Jews or blacks. To a considerable extent, those groups are still “on the line;” anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism and racism all spike upward when times get tough. But today, the targets of choice are those most in the news: immigrants and gay Americans.

 In the “old” America that these people are so nostalgic for—those better days that exist primarily in their imaginations—Americans all looked pretty much the same. Sure there were black people, but they knew their place. They certainly weren’t occupying the White House and Congress! Women were in the kitchen or nursery where God meant for us to be—we sure weren’t in charge of American foreign policy, or presiding over the House of Representatives. Gay people—out ones, anyway—weren’t chairing the House Banking Committee, or hosting popular television programs, or holding elective office. And they certainly weren’t marrying each other! And everybody who wasn’t black was white and spoke English without an accent.

 For a great many Americans, the resentments they have harbored over these signs of change have simmered below the surface, waiting for some trigger that would release them. And now, the demagogues on the Right are providing that trigger, many of them knowingly. The rhetoric that has been employed during the healthcare debate has been deliberately provocative (and the purported grievances mostly fabricated, but that is a somewhat different issue.)  As I write this, the media is reporting on an epidemic of brick-throwing, aimed at windows of Democratic party offices around the country. The instigator has shown no remorse; he is proud, he says, that he is leading a protest against a big government that is taking over responsibilities that government shouldn’t have. Ironically, he lives entirely on Social Security Disability.

 When people are this delusional—when protestors are screaming things like “keep government out of my Medicare!”—it can be a short trip to murderous dementia. And the first attacks won’t be against the “good ole’ boys.”

 They’ll be coming after you-know-who.

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