Meandering Manifesto, Part 4: Stability

This is part four of my Meandering Manifesto series.

Last year, Grace and I went to a second wedding in Michigan. It was much more pleasant than the first one. This time the priest didn't say anything that made me apoplectic with rage. But he did say something that got me thinking.

He began with a statistic that something like one in two marriages end in divorce, then worked his way down a line of increasing religious context of the marriage. I don't remember the following numbers exactly, but that's not the point.

• Of the couples who were married in a church ceremony, about one in fifty get divorced.
  
• Of the couples who were married in a church ceremony and who attend church regularly, one in several hundred get divorced.
  
• Of the couples who were married in a church ceremony, who attend church regularly, and who pray together at home, one in about twelve hundred get divorced.
  

As a left-leaning agnostic this made me squirm a bit. Those numbers made me uncomfortable. I found myself wanting to read up on the research to see if they were skewed.

Later, I realized that the degree of accuracy didn't matter. Because whether those numbers were spot on, or off by an order of magnitude, there's no doubt in my mind that he's right.

He's right.

A religiously involved marriage brings stability to the married couple and to their society.

Just stop for a minute. Don't react. Just breathe.

Now. Hear what I'm saying. We are adults. Not only can we hold contradictory ideas in our heads, we can also parse wildly disparate ideas that at first seem as inseparable as the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water.

We can admit that folks on the other side of the political divide are right to call the bathwater dirty. That admission in no way implies that we favor throwing out the baby.

I admit that religion, marriage, and the potent combination thereof bring stability to our society. I do not, however, agree that the stable structure that we gain is worth the cost. I believe that the foundation stones of that structure rest on the backs of my gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends.

Stability always demands unity. Unity always eschews variance. People don't like what is different. Communities and societies and countries develop a collective animus against the unusual. This animus may well have served a vital purpose in primitive marginal communities which could have gone extinct if members had strayed from the norm. But today we are no longer primitive, or so we flatter ourselves. Today our hard-wired animus against sex and gender variance is out of all proportion to any conceivable harm that such variance could cause.

Traditional religious marriages bring valuable stability to my country, my community, and my life. I admit that freely.

And I don't care.

I don't want that much stability. I don't want stability at the cost of hatred. I don't want a life so stable that, while I'm hiking with my good friend Mel, we have to worry that someone might overhear her talking about her girlfriend. I'm not so ravening after peace and quiet that I want Vikrant to be anything less than himself, because I find Vikrant's himself to be quite a delightful one. And I sure as hell ain't willing to pretend that another person's sex life is any of my damned business, let alone that it could somehow threaten my wobbly-ass secular marriage.

Keep your stability. It's covered in blood and lies. My hands ain't the cleanest, but I'll be damned if I'll dip 'em in shit.

Meandering Manifesto, Part 3: The Prisoner

Continuing from Meandering Manifesto, Part 2: Moral Turpitude...

Grace and I were watching "Strong Poison", one of our old favorites. It's a marvelous BBC dramatization of the Dorothy Sayers mystery. At the outset of the story Harriet Vane stands accused of murdering her former lover. As I watched the first trial scene my gears started to turn.

In his preliminary speech the Judge warned the jury not to take the defendant's lifestyle too much into consideration in their deliberations. His condescending tone spoke volumes about his society. The following comes from the book.

"At any rate, in March of 1928, the prisoner, worn out, as she tells us, by his unceasing importunities, gave in, and consented to live on terms of intimacy with him, outside the bonds of marriage.

"Now you may feel, and quite properly, that this was a very wrong thing to do. You may, after making all allowances for this young woman's unprotected position, still feel that she was a person of unstable moral character. You will not be led away by the false glamour which certain writers contrive to throw about 'free love,' into thinking that this was anything but an ordinary, vulgar act of misbehavior. Sir Impey Biggs, very rightly using all his great eloquence on behalf of his client, has painted this action of Harriet Vane's in very rosy colours; he has spoken of unselfish sacrifice and self-immolation, and has reminded you that, in such a situation, the woman always has to pay more heavily than the man. You will not, I am sure, pay too much attention to this. You know quite well the difference between right and wrong in such matters, and you may think that, if Harriet Vane had not become to a certain extent corrupted by the unwholesome influences among which she lived, she would have shown a truer heroism by dismissing Philip Boyes from her society.

"But, on the other hand, you must be careful not to attach the wrong kind of importance to this lapse. It is one thing for a man or woman to live an immoral life, and quite another thing to commit murder. You may perhaps think that one step into the path of wrongdoing makes the next one easier, but you must not give too much weight to that conclusion. You are entitled to take it into account, but you must not be too much prejudiced."

The judge's disapprobation was palpable, yet his concern was genuine: he had to remind the jury that they were not to let their opinion of Harriet Vane's scandalous behavior dictate their judgment of the murder case.

This scene resonates because we've all heard about local and national scandals that have shaken our certainty that "that doesn't happen here" or "people of that class just don't behave that way". Well it does and they do. Yet folks go right back to believing otherwise, don't they?

Humans need to believe in things that are demonstrably untrue. In the case of sexual scandals, a community brings its collective hand to its mouth and gasps at one of their own having done something so shocking - so unheard of!

The first reason for this reaction is simple: it provides a way for a person to feel superior. She could be genuinely free of vice and fooling herself into thinking that sexual improprieties are rare. Maybe she has her own juicy skeletons but finds ways to rationalize them. Or perhaps she simply enjoys her cynical triumph in covering up her own liaisons better than that sap on the front page. Whatever the specifics, everyone in the community gets to feel superior.

Methinks there's also a potent genetic reason why folks doth protest too much. Let's assume that I'm hard-wired to spread my genes around while keeping my neighbor from doing so. How would I go about it? Well, fulminating about sexual improprieties wouldn't cost me anything but could yield two benefits: it could draw attention away from my own dalliances, and make any guilt-prone people within earshot that much more likely to keep it in their pants. It's a two-for-one deal: cover and sucker-bait! For that kind of reward I could see myself getting very noisy in my hypocrisy.

So people maintain their illusions of propriety by casting stones at those who violate them. And I believe that bendy people make a very convenient target. That's why straight people love to pretend that gay people don't exist, and why they freak out so much when gayness happens. It is in their best interests to play out both acts of the charade.

OK, so I guess this would be "The Abyss".

My five-year-old nephew was sitting on my knee as I prepared the pizza. My three-year-old niece was sitting across the table from me, and my sister was standing at the stove over near the kitchen wall. I thought it was as good a time as any to bond with my sister a bit. Plus, I felt like I had it coming. She'd bent my ear plenty over the last year with all her woes, so I figured that telling her about an emotional experience I had would not only be a nice bonding experience, but also a way to show her that I had... stuff... too.

So I started telling her about my reaction to "Brokeback Mountain". I started to say something like...

I've cried at three movies in my life: "Star Trek II", when Spock died; "The English Patient", which doesn't even really count as crying because my eyes got wet but never welled over with tears; and "Schindler's List". If you put the three of them together, they still wouldn't equal a third of how much "Brokeback Mountain" made me cry.

The thing is, it was a sucker punch. If you'd stopped the movie three seconds before I started crying, I would have told you that I'd make it through the whole thing dry-eyed. But it turned out not to be about these two guys and their gay relationship. It was about one man's relationship with his daughter. It was about how we are incapable of articulating our inner landscapes, and how much that messes us up. Ennis had all these things happening inside him that he couldn't even begin to understand, and even if he had been able to understand them he wouldn't have been able to express them. So he did what people do when your feelings are incomprehensible and dangerous: he did what everyone expected him to do. And that not only messed him up, it hurt all the people around him.

When Ennis said to his daughter "This Kurt fella... does he love you?" there was so much channeled through Ledger's whole performance that came out in those words. He wanted what any father wants: for his daughter to have it better than he had it. He wanted her to have the thing that he was unable to have, or didn't allow himself to have. It was probably the only time he'd ever said the word "love" in his life. And this simple question was the closest he'd ever come to expressing all his pain and regret and enfeeblement and longing and love. I put my head on Grace's shoulder and just lost it. I was a wreck for the rest of the night.

But I didn't say all that. I never got past the words "gay relationship".

My sister immediately shushed me, pointing to my nephew on my lap. I gaped in incredulity as she said in a loud whisper "Don't say that in front of him." I came over to where she was preparing the pizza toppings and sputtered a bit, and she whispered "We don't tell them about that stuff!" I gaped some more and she said "Are you surprised?" and I said quite honestly "I'm shocked."

And I sat back down. And the gears turned in my head.

I thought back to the conversation I'd had with her in July. And I realized something: I'm a fucking chump.

Right around the beginning of that conversation my sister said something like "I don't think you're right [for doing the blog] because they may not want your help." My response was "Yes, that's a valid concern. As a matter of fact, it was my first serious concern with the whole idea, before I even started it. And it still is." And I proceeded to tell her all the ways in which I've thought about, read about, and talked to people about that concern. I gave her a laundry list of ways in which I had already addressed that concern.

And it didn't matter. She just kept saying "Well I don't agree with you."

Well, now I know why.

I am a fucking dumbass. I was arguing from a place of clear surety - both that I was honestly addressing her concern, and that her concern honestly represented what was on her mind. I should have known better. Because my family never says what is on our minds. If we did that, we would run the risk of having a productive conversation. And we cannot have that. We cannot let go of our anger. So we bitch at person B about how much person C pissed us off, and the next day cry to person C about how person B hurt us. And if we ever bitch at person B about something that actually has anything to do with person B, you'd better believe that the thing we're bitching about has little if anything to do with what we really feel. That would be sane. That would be productive. And we cannot abide that.

She said that she believed that I was wrong to help gay people because gay people may not want my help. If that had been what she truly felt, then the news that I had already spent a great deal of time, thought and effort in addressing that concern in several different ways would have had some influence on her assertion. But it didn't.

I think that the truth is that she doesn't like gay people, and she doesn't want me helping them.

So, as I baked and served the pizza, my skull went from simmer to a rolling boil to one of those old boilers that's starting to creak and emit gouts of steam around the rivets because the janitor has fallen asleep in the rocking chair in the corner with the ol' bottle of hooch lolling on his breastbone.

And I made another pizza, and I went to hang out with my friend Dennis and his son. Dennis lives about a mile and a half down the road from the house where I grew up. I've been hanging out there since way back around '97 when I was going on walks by the house and Dennis would say "Hi" and we'd strike up a conversation. Over the years I got close to him, his three sons and his daughter. I've been a part of the family for some time. When my father was dying, and my family was tearing itself apart from the strain, his place was my cave. Being able to escape there meant the world to me.

But it seems like this year has been different. Our arguing - about politics, about anything and everything - has developed more and more of an edge. Lately it seems more and more like we're fighting. Well, that night something really changed.

I needed to blow off some steam about the conversation with my sister, and what it implied about what was really going on during that conversation in July. Hell, I sure had it coming to me. I'd listened with a sympathetic ear to him enough times as he'd come back enraged after a particularly upsetting conversation with his own control-freak sister. Unfortunately it turned out that he wasn't so much prepared to listen as to slap me down.

I'd barely begun telling the story before he interrupted, saying "Well, I can see her point." He proceeded to say that, right or wrong, she gets to say what people say around her kid. Then he dropped the bomb that I had been saying controversial things around his own kids, by way of illustrating how he agreed with her. He pointed out that I had told Nathan, his sixteen-year-old son, about this blog before I'd told him. Which was true. I had.

I avoided telling Dennis about this blog because Dennis... Dennis is a nut, at least from my left-of-center viewpoint. Dennis voted for Bush because Bush was a Christian, while I think that calling Bush a Christian is like calling shit caviar. We have our differences. Another one is that Dennis loves to argue, because it gives him a chance to "win". It gives him a chance to puff himself up and be right. So I knew that if I told him about this blog he would just leap at the chance to deride me for it and start an argument that he could then "win". He doesn't understand that I'm not looking to argue. I'm looking for dialogue and dialectic. Those are very different things. So I skipped over him and told his son about it before I told him. Maybe I was wrong to do that. But if that was bugging him, he should have damned well said something at the time. You don't wait until your friend is hurting and, in the middle of them confiding in you, say "not only do I agree with the person who's hurting you, but let me give you an example of how you pissed me off." You listen. That's what I did for him.

So we got into a loud argument - one of those arguments that's funny and zany but, oh yeah, it's actually not. Like so many of the arguments that we've had this year. But this time, after I walked away, I realized we'd gone too far. He'd gone too far, I'd gone too far, I'd allowed him to go too far, whatever. I had to change something. I was hurting because of my relationship with my sister, and now I was hurting because of my relationship with him. It took me a few days, but I worked up the nerve to talk to him about it. I figured that I couldn't talk to my sister because it's just not what we do in our family, but I can talk to him. Really talk to him. So I should. Right?

Well, apparently not so much. Because when I called him, it didn't work out so well.

I started talking about my sister again, trying to lead in to talking about me and him. Of course this backfired, because again he interrupted with "explaining" to me how parents need to be able to control their kids' environment, right or wrong. I finally broke in and said "I didn't want to talk about this." And I told him how I was angry at him because I had been in pain and, instead of listening to me, he had chosen that time to attack me. He kept cutting in with "Well, no, I wasn't doing that, I was just pointing out that..." and I kept going back to other times when he'd failed to listen, or to be supportive. I pointed out some of the times dating back to January that he'd cut me off and looked for ways to tell me what to do or win an argument rather than just listening to me. I told him that when I'm upset I don't want anyone to tell me what to do - I just want them to listen.

He kept denying, and I kept getting more frustrated. At some point, as he was circling back to the politics that were not the point of the conversation, he said "Well, I have my own opinions on the matter. If you want to make a website to help gay people, that's fine. I think that there are better uses for your time, because those people have a choice. I think you'd be better off helping people who really need it..."

Now here's where I need to stop and tell you a little about Dennis. He's a Viet Nam vet who's been on disability for many years. I don't know how many because I never asked. All I know is that he has panic attacks which prevent him from having a job, and he's lived off a small monthly government check for a long time. He gets all his knowledge and all his politics from the television. For months now he's never missed a chance to talk about how angry he is at the new per-cigar tax in New York State, how it unfairly taxes poor people, and... how this has something to do with George Washington for some reason. Dennis loves to be right. About everything. The man doesn't eat a green vegetable. Ever. But he'll tell you how you're eating wrong and exercising wrong and how you are wrong about pretty much everything, and incidentally if you just do what he tells you everything will be perfect.

So at some point during our conversation I said that he thinks he knows more about any subject than anyone else - more medicine than a doctor, more science than a scientist... and then he dropped the big one. He said "You know that a lot of people think you're a know-it-all?"

Anyone who knows me - anyone who loves me - would have known how much that would hurt me. Throughout the conversation I had refrained from saying anything about what anyone else had said. I was just trying to tell him how I felt - how I was angry and hurt because of how he had acted toward me. He apparently disliked what I was saying enough to want to deflect it at all costs. Well, he succeeded. He succeeded beyond his wildest imaginings.

Because now I've had it. The spell is broken. For a long time I've treated Dennis with kid gloves because of his situation. When I quit drinking in January, I made a special exception for him because I knew how much he likes to have someone to drink with. So I've been drinking wine with him. I've been violating my own promise to myself. And this is just one of the things I've done for the sake of his feelings and his... specialness. Well, no more. Because now I don't think he's special. My image of him is blown. Now I want to go over there and tell him "You know what, Dennis? You're right. Gay people do have a choice. It's ridiculous for me to waste time helping them. (beat) By the way, when are you going to get a fucking job, you lazy bastard? You have a choice. If you wanted to, you could just suck it up and get over your stupid panic attacks. So why don't you do it?"

He expects everyone to have compassion for him in his situation. He has to pay a tax on his cigars and it's an insult to George Fucking Washington. But when it comes to gay people having the same rights as everyone else, well, that's different. I see now that he can't give the same compassion to others that he wants for himself. And that means he's not much of a Christian.

So you can see why I need to stay away from Dennis for a while. I love him. He's my friend. But the scales have fallen from my eyes. I see him differently.

I've been lucky and cautious enough never to have broken a bone. I haven't dropped a kidney stone. The most serious injury I've ever had was a gouge in my arm that required seven stitches. So it may be hyperbole for me to say that I would rather stick knives into my flesh than to continue feeling this emotional pain, but that's honestly how I feel. If you told me that the blades would make it all go away, I'd hold them over the burner for a minute to sterilize them, plunge them in, pull them out, and walk happily to the hospital.

My relationship with my sister has changed. My relationship with my friend has changed. I didn't mean for them to change. It doesn't feel accurate to say that the changes resulted from me becoming an advocate for gay rights, because there's lots of other stuff mixed in there. But my newfound advocacy runs through the whole thing like a persimmon thread in an otherwise earth-tone scarf.

What the fuck did I expect? Did I think I was a hero a la Joseph Campbell? No. I'll give myself that much credit. I'm no hero. I didn't think I was going to change them. When I think back to what I expected, I draw a blank, so I guess I never really thought about what I expected. I suppose that if you'd asked me to articulate it, I would have said that I expected them to at least... see me true. I expected them to see what I'd brought back. I expected them to recognize that this thing that I was passionate about was a real thing - a thing worth being passionate about. I expected them to respect me and respect this new thing that I'd seen.

I looked up Campbell's Hero Journey and saw an accurate if whimsical chart of the prototypical journey. At the bottom, in the middle of the journey, I saw "The Abyss". A wry smile crossed my brain. The Abyss is the point of the journey where the hero experiences some sort of death and rebirth. In Campbell's words, it's the belly of the whale. Either one sounds about right. I feel like I'm losing my goddamn family. If that's not an abyss, I don't know what is.

I swear to god, I never used to be this much of a fucking drama queen.

Meandering Manifesto, Part 2: Moral Turpitude

Continuing from Meandering Manifesto, Part 1: Tintinnabulation...

I've been thinking a lot about society's relationship with bendy people. Of the disparate sources that contributed to my musings, the most unexpected was Skylark of Space. It was written between 1915 and 1921 and first published in 1928. It's considered by many to be the first space opera, and man, it's quite a ride. I highly recommend it. You can read the full text on Project Gutenberg.

One of the reasons the book is such a gas is that it's breathtakingly foreign to modern sensibilities. For example, late in the book there's about to be a double wedding on the planet Osnome between two Earth couples: The good guys and the damsels they've rescued from the bad guy. The leader of Kondal, the nation they've befriended, is holding forth on Kondalian customs.

     "I have called in our most expert weavers and tailors, to make the gowns. Before they arrive, let us discuss the ceremony and decide what it will be. You are all somewhat familiar with our customs, but on this I make very sure. Each couple is married twice. The first marriage is symbolized by the exchange of plain bracelets. This marriage lasts two years, during which period either may divorce the other by announcing the fact."
     "Hmmm..." Crane said. "Some such system of trial marriage is advocated among us every few years, but they all so surely degenerate into free love that none has found a foothold."
     "We have no such trouble. You see, before the first marriage each couple, from lowest to highest, is given a mental examination. Any person whose graphs show moral turpitude is shot."

Whu... buh... WHAT???  That was my initial reaction, and it still hasn't faded. The thought of exterminating people who don't live up to a standard has been anathema to most folks ever since Hitler's Final Solution. Obviously the idea wasn't so abhorrent in 1921.

Speaking of extermination, the second most breathtaking thing about the book is that the Earth people give the Kondalians the technological knowledge that will allow them to annihilate their Mardonalian enemies. Just a few pages after the wedding, we find a justification for this action.

     "You do not understand?" he went on, with a deep light shining in his eyes. "It is inevitable that two peoples inhabiting worlds so widely separated as are our two should be possessed of widely-varying knowledge and abilities, and these strangers have already made it possible for us to construct engines of destruction which shall obliterate Mardonale completely...." A fierce shout of joy interrupted the speaker and the nobles sprang to their feet, saluting the visitors with upraised weapons. As soon as they had reseated themselves, the Karbix continued:
     "That is the boon. The vindication of our system of evolution is easily explained. The strangers landed first upon Mardonale. Had Nalboon met them in honor, he would have gained the boon. But he, with the savagery characteristic of his evolution, attempted to kill his guests and steal their treasures, with what results you already know. We, on our part, in exchange for the few and trifling services we have been able to render them, have received even more than Nalboon would have obtained, had his plans not been nullified by their vastly superior state of evolution."

Wow. Now I see Star Trek's Prime Directive in the context of the late twentieth century. The contrast between E.E. "Doc" Smith and Gene Roddenberry is blinding: at the beginning of the twentieth century, there were clearly some lessons yet to learn about stepping into a foreign civil war and handing over weapons to "our guys". And there's that pesky genocide issue again.

World War II gave people in the United States a powerfully negative association with racial sanctions. I think that this stigma favors inclusiveness, so it helps progressive movements. On the other hand, World War II also made socialism into a Brobdingnagian boogeyman by associating it with both National Socialism and Communism. Just glance at today's headlines and you'll see that that one's still got legs.

There are plenty of people alive today who, as children, ran laughing past newsstands stocked with the issues of Amazing Stories that brought Doc Smith's unapologetically genocidal and eugenics-happy vision to the general public. They liked it well enough for it to blossom into a series of books, so apparently folks had no problem with an absolutist, conformist vision of their society. Think of the changes that have been wrought in a single lifetime. Think of the assumptions and certainties that have shattered. Be grateful for the opportunities that the twentieth century afforded for progressives, and understand how fragile the circumstances are in which progressive thought can fluorish. And be aware that the bubble could pop at any moment. We have to be smart about how we maintain and reinforce it.

Musings of a Novitiate Ally, Part 5: What's a Word Between Jonahs?

In my entries So You Think Gay Sex Is Weird? and Shower Thoughts I used the word "unusual" in reference to gay sex. From a purely annotative standpoint it was an apt descriptor. I know that, all too often, connotations carry the day, but that's not my problem. People who want to fight about semantics will find a way to do so. I'm not going to hold my breath for the sake of their hypersensitive feathers. On the contrary, I rather enjoy the thought of ruffling them.

And yet.

Y'see, I talk a good game. But the thought of conflict, of offending people, still bothers me. So, although I had no intention of changing my wording, I kept worrying that I'd lose readers who took offense at my use of the word "unusual". This came to a head during a morning walk. My more demure self was once again insisting "But people do have negative associations with words like 'unusual'!"... and then I stopped, dumbfounded.

People have negative associations with the word "unusual".

We are insane creatures.

The word "unusual" should have no more potential for negative connotations than words like "lateral" or "clockwise" or "rectangular". It should be clinical in its descriptiveness. But we're not clinical, are we? We are meat. We dance to the tune of blood and hormones while singing of our rationality. We act on our emotional reactions and retroactively construct logical frameworks to support those acts. If you face it square on, though, no construct can disguise our irrationality. Any race that snarls at the unusual is a race of animals.

And this is what stopped me in my tracks. I already saw arguing over semantics as a waste of time. After that thought hit me, I saw it as an absurdity of cosmic proportions. It brings to my mind the picture of two lost hikers taking shelter in a cave. While starting a fire they notice a nasty smell. Then the firelight reveals two remarkably uniform and pointed rows of white stones edging the top and bottom of the cave entrance. Our hikers look closely and find that the stench is coming from bits of rotting meat stuck between the stones. They proceed to argue about whether they should just go to sleep, or take the trouble to remove the source of the offending smell.

Stand outside that "cave". Look at the two bickering buffoons. If we waste time arguing over semantics, we are them. We are progressives standing in the steel-trap jaws of an intrinsically irrational human society. Any second it's liable to snap closed and swallow us in a wave of conservatism. We need to stop messing around and focus on the presence of the jaws.

Words, words, words.

I wrote the following in response to Ben Finzel's article in Echelon, "Say What? - Eight Words and Phrases to Avoid in LGBT Communications". But I'm not picking on Ben, nor do I disagree with most of the points he made. His post simply acted as an attractor around which thoughts coalesced that I've been wanting to blog about anyway.

The only real problem I have with the article is this point:

Homosexual – as I’ve written before, the term “homosexual” is often used by anti-gay people and organizations to refer to our community with an “accepted” term. In fact, the term has been so abused that its usage now seems more clinical than contemporary and it is, to most people, a way to slyly denigrate our community. By referring to “the homosexual community” or the “homosexual agenda,” anti-gay people and organizations attempt to make LGBT people sound like some odd/strange/uncomfortable “other” that is neither good nor acceptable.

I don't like the idea of allowing our opponents to dictate our behavior simply by their use of a word. It seems to me untenably (not to mention embarrassingly) sycophantic to run around with a magic marker, striking a term from our Allowed Word List just because the other side used it.

Beyond that, I have a problem that's more a reflection of my own experiences than of Ben's intent: I worry about how this list will be used. I worry about self-righteous LGBT activists waving their approved wording list in the faces of middle America and, in doing so, harming the cause. Here's why.

I already wrote about the unpleasantly truncated conversation I had about abortion in the Cornell dorm. To summarize: I expressed an opinion that deviated from the liberal talking points du jour, and the obstreperous feminist with whom I was speaking verbally squashed me before I could even get to the point that I agreed with her. Here are some other examples along the same lines.

For a while I was in a group called Racial Awareness Pilot Project. I'm not sure that I have the perspective to say why RAPP fizzled, but from my point of view it had a lot to do with the unfortunate combination of angry black people and guilty white people. I had to have been the guiltiest white person there, and I swallowed the party line that was fed to me. I'd start a sentence about black men's complexion, and the angriest black person would say "Dont say that!" I'd start a sentence about girls and she'd cut me off with the admonition "women!". And I stood corrected, chastened like a good little PC white boy. I didn't have the wherewithal to shout "Can we stop arguing about fucking semantics and talk about something relevant?!" I wish I had.

After college I dated a woman whose feminist fulminations were just part of her broad arsenal of techniques for browbeating anyone within reach. Once we were watching "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and I made a joke about the gratuitous spandex boob shot. Well, I didn't hear the end of that one for a while. Somehow I was now responsible for girls growing up with low self-esteem. Never mind that my joke was actually poking fun at the very objectification that she disliked. I had noticed a woman's breasts, so I had to be verbally subdued.

Once I was reading in bed with this same woman. I was making my way through the first issue of Dirty Pair: Fatal But Not Serious, a fantastic American-manga comic by Adam Warren. In it, an anti-genetic-upgrade terrorist calls our genetically upgraded protagonist a "miscegenated whore". My bedmate saw this and began berating me, doing her level best to force me to stop reading with the force of her invective. Never mind that the character was a bad guy who was clearly saying bad things. I was looking at a word she didn't like, so I had to be verbally subdued.

I'm not as stupid and gullible as I used to be. I don't parrot back every bit of PC lingo I hear. On the contrary, the pleasure I take in being politically incorrect arises directly from my anger at myself for being stupid enough to let those self-satisfied PC mind-controllers get away with their bullshit. But it's all relative. I'm still somewhat of a pushover. If you're strident enough you'll probably get me to toe your party line - at least until I get a chance to think it through, at which point you've lost me. But even if you don't lose me, ask yourself what you've gained. Aside from the sense of self-righteous satisfaction you got from lording it over some lefty white guy with an overdeveloped guilt complex, you've blunted your purpose by one-upping a person who probably agreed with you in the first place. And not for nothin', you've pulled the emergency brake on the conversation before it could move past semantics. Congratulations.

We often ask questions like "Why do religious zealots focus on the bits of Leviticus that condemn homosexuals, while ignoring the bits about shellfish and menstruating women?". These are rhetorical questions designed to puff ourselves up with our own moral immaculateness. To that question, the obvious answer is "They're not truly concerned about carrying out scriptural doctrines; they're using the Bible to justify a preexisting hatred." I submit that the answer to the following question is just as obvious.

Why do liberals constantly tell people what words they should and shouldn't use?

I think that the equally obvious answer is "Because they like feeling morally superior. They like winning arguments. They like feeling the surge of power that comes from getting someone to go along with what they say."

Note that "things that help the cause at all" appears nowhere in the preceding list. That is because browbeating folks about the words they choose is counter-productive. It represents the exercise of vital powers not along lines of excellence, but along paths of least resistance, and such a life will not afford you scope. I say this from firsthand experience. All that browbeating ever did to me was make me give up the attempt to engage. Every time, I walked away muttering "Well fuck it, if I can't say a goddamn word right then what's the point?"

Please, please, please let's not argue semantics. When we do that, we never reach the dialectical main course. Instead we're stuck forever at onanistic brain salad surgery.

Shower thoughts

Yesterday morning some thoughts came together as I was sleepily getting into the shower. That seems to happen a lot.

This hasn't been a fun week, mainly because of a certain young man I love who is flushing his life down the toilet with alcohol. I'm very close to his whole family, and he's sort of like a younger brother to me. For years I've fretted and worried about him, and now I'm coming to terms with the fact that I can't stop what's happening to him. I can't fix it. I can't control it. In accepting that, I've felt the full pain of it, and it's almost enough to double me over. I said to Grace, "Is this pain what makes people become control freaks?" and she said "Hell yeah!" I can well imagine going to any lengths not to admit that there's nothing I can do.

Two nights ago I wrote that we're hard-wired to be uncomfortable with that which is unusual, such as homosexuality. The next morning, as those shower thoughts were coalescing, I remembered that I wrote those words just a few hours after picking up Invincible Iron Man #16 at the comic shop. That's when it all clicked into place. I realized that it's all about control.

In the comic book, protagonist Maria Hill flashes back to when the supervillain Controller sunk his electronic control device into the back of her neck. As he was doing so he intoned the word "Control". And it seemed to me that the writing carried a psychological dimension that wouldn't have been present in the halcyon days of moustache-twirling super-villains. The writer seemed to be presenting The Controller as the ultimate control freak: someone who controls people not just as a means to an end, but as a sick end in itself.

Why would a writer add that sense of perversion to an established character? Well, obviously the darker the better these days. But beyond that generality I think that it taps into a specific fixation with control. I think that, as the twentieth century's chickens came home to roost, people in the U.S. started to realize how little control they had over the world, and it fractured us even more than before. September 11 shone as the new pole star in our constellation of uncontrol. President Bush helped us turn away from that light and toward fractionation. He told us the great lie that we could be safe, and many swallowed it gladly. Anything to believe that someone had the world under control - that someone ever could.

So this week seems to be all about control for me. I'm thinking of how much it hurts not to have control, and the response to that pain: to try to gain contol, or at least the feeling of it. I want to kidnap that young man I love and lock him in a cage until he detoxes. But even if I did that, it wouldn't fix him.

You may want to put a cage around the lives and rights of people whose sexuality you don't like, but there are even more problems with that. First of all, they ain't broken, so you shouldn't be trying to fix them. Believe me. Just three nights ago I spent an hour talking to a gay reverend, and there was absolutely nothing out of place with this guy. He was kind and articulate and funny, and a pleasure to talk to. He was a whole human being, with no need or desire to be fixed. If you want to help him, to fix him... well, that's got nothing to do with him. It's about your need for control.

Bananasmacking

Last Wednesday I noticed two very similar local stories on a Syracuse, NY news website. The first was about some kids who rigged a playground with razor blades, and the second was about a group of kids who set fire to a playground.

The thought of concealed razor blades sinking into small hands made me shudder. But I wasn't particularly surprised. This is par for the course for our species. We're not going to hell. We've always been there. This is what we are: vicious, sadistic little monkeys.

Years ago I came up with a theory about why people seem hard-wired to engage in vandalism. I think that it's a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics. In attempting to gain a reproductive advantage over its peers, an organism has two basic choices: work to build up its own resources, or work to destroy the resources of others. Since the entropy of any system always increases, it's always far easier to reduce order than to increase it by the same amount; tearing something down is much easier than building it up. It seems clear to me that an evolutionary process could select for vandalism, disturbing though the results may be.

It's useful to make those kids' behavior explicable because the alternative is to throw our hands up and start that letter to the editor about the kids today with the hair, and the music, and how our society is going down the tubes. But if instead we understand the behavior as symptomatic of humanity, I think a pattern emerges.

For the most part, I don't think that people grow up. They just get better and better at presenting their childhood behavior as rational. If you peel back that thick, shiny veneer of logic and rationality, you'll expose a small, mean core that contains the same posturing, bullying and one-upsmanship that you can see on any playground.

Believe it or not, this post is not an exercise in cynicism and nihilism. It's a call for empathy. Just because we're vicious little monkeys doesn't mean we don't have nobler selves. We can choose to aspire to our better natures. And we can occasionally bootstrap ourselves into being what we think we are, rather than just what we are.

But while we're yanking furiously on those bootstraps, let's not forget our baser selves, and how much we share with those kids who could not abide an untainted playground. Were you really that surprised? Methinks thou dost protest too much. Look at your own childhood. Look at most of the adults you know. Look at people in any time, and any place, throughout human history. On a good day we think that smacking the banana out of the other monkey's hand is the definition of a Good Idea. So don't waste your time being surprised at Proposition 8 or the myriad examples of bananasmacking that limn the daily headlines. We can instead choose to respond with a clarity and determination that will be more effective for being suffused with love.

Straight Ally Seeks Christian Ally For Friendship, Activism

I've been obsessing over my blog to the detriment of the rest of my life, including my health. So during the last few days I've made a conscious effort to return to my historical pursuits. I've spent some pleasant hikes listening to The History of Rome podcasts, picking up where I left off with Marius and Sulla. This morning I picked up another dropped thread: an actual honest-to-goodness paper book about my favorite subject, the Spanish Armada of 1588. I hadn't gotten three pages when, on the train this evening, I found something that practically screamed "Meet Adam and Steve!" Here's the excerpt, from pages 60-62 of Felipe Fernández-Armesto's The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588.

Not every army chaplain exhaled pure Counter-Reformation spirit. The Franciscan Fray Antonio de Granata, for instance, who had done six years in the job by 1588, was an unregenerate pre-Tridentine figure, who sang profane songs to the sound of his lute, conducted bogus and prurient visitations of convents, extorted gifts, wore furs and gold chains, and battered his denouncers. He claimed at his trial for these offences to be a martyr who spoke the truth and converted sinners. His persecution, he suggested, was 'to force me out, and my Franciscan brothers with me and replace us with Jesuits. But St Francis will punish the persecutors of his order.' He may have been voicing a genuine Franciscan anxiety. Certainly, the Jesuit mission in the army was growing more important, as the need for a more active evangelization of the men became increasingly felt among their commanders. The new, evangelically aware orders of the Counter-Reformation, of whom the Jesuits were the most conspicuous and dynamic, were attracted to the army for the same reason as they felt drawn to the slum-ringed boom towns like Seville and to the dense, servile native populations of the New World. Rootless masses were at once an easy and urgent target for their ministry. Commanders interested in the spiritual welfare--or, at least, concerned for the dogmatic instruction--of their men seem to have recognized the Jesuits' special gifts. In 1587, Parma's call for a central Jesuit mission to the Army of Flanders was answered by his personal confessor, Thomas Sailly. Within a generation, the Jesuits could claim to have enhanced the morals and galvanized the strength of the corps of chaplains as a whole.

Reminded of how the Jesuits were successful because they focused on the "rootless masses", anxiety welled up in me at the thought of all the evangelical Christians currently peddling hatred to folks full of fear and despair and anger. That's a high-yield operation; how can I ever compete with that? Answer: I can't--at least not just by blogging. I need to keep my eye on my ultimate goal: to move on to outreach. That scares the crap out of me for several reasons: I have no idea how to do it; I'm not great at confrontation; and I'm an agnostic!

Speaking of despair, I felt my mind inclining in that direction as I made my way west through Manhattan for a walk along the Hudson. But as my feet got going, my mind got going too. (I love how that works.) I thought of the websites that Grace found for me when I was looking for Biblical quotes about nature for my letter to the editor about the Link Trail. In particular, Fund for Christian Ecology came to mind. I'd been impressed with their expressed goal of "...reaching the Evangelical and Conservative Christian churches with a scriptural message of environmental stewardship." That sort of outreach can't be easy, and I admire anyone with the courage to do it. When I thought of this in the context of Meet Adam and Steve, I realized that these are the type of people I need to be talking to! After all, I doubt I'll be very effective at outreach by myself; can you imagine me walking into a church and saying "Well, you should know I don't believe in God, but listen, I still think... where are you going?" To do Christian outreach, I'd better enlist the help of Christians. To be an ally, I need... allies!

So I called and left a message with Bernard Daley Zaleha, President of the Fund for Christian Ecology. A long, rambling message. Bugger. I need to get better at dealing with answering machines. That's OK, though; it felt good to make a start. and it got me rolling. Now that I'd recognized my need for Christian advice and Christian allies, a plan started to coalesce. I thought back to some potential resources I'd skipped right past in my frenzy to get daily faces, such as The Church of St. Luke in the Fields and the Society for Ethical Culture. Then there are the gay and gay-friendly Christian bloggers I've met through Twitter such as @Tahlib and @strt_notnarrow. And let's not forget Steve, who is a Triangle Speaker. I need to talk to all these people to get advice and help in strategizing.

I can't pursue all these contacts in one night, but I did get started: I left a message with the Reverend Caroline Stacey, Rector of St. Luke's. This message was a bit less rambling than the previous one, I'm happy to say. Then I sent her an e-mail. So hopefully I can get rolling with the Christian connection soon, so that I can hit the ground running on the day when I feel ready to start outreach.

Musings of a Novitiate Ally, Part 4: In Praise of Silliness

So there was this BBC show called "The Making of Me" about John Barrowman trying to determine why he's gay. I think it's fantastic; I liked it so much that I wanted to put all six of the YouTube segments right here for your viewing pleasure, but unfortunately the embedding for those particular videos is disabled. Here are the links, though.

The Making of Me, Part 1
The Making of Me, Part 2
The Making of Me, Part 3
The Making of Me, Part 4
The Making of Me, Part 5
The Making of Me, Part 6

If I remember correctly it was HomoPolitico who linked to the YouTube videos above. I went to the first one, and beneath the video I noticed this comment.

Lastly the truth is that sexuality is an infinitely more complex & varied phenomenon that this glib 'tabloid' type nonsense provides us with.Sexuality exists on a continuum ; often shifts back & forth in quantity & ratio ; some people are 80/20% some 65/35% etc.etc.etc. & even THAT can change ; some folk feel theyre gay since they can remember & some say they felt it first in their 20s, 30s, even later.Granted many people feel COMLETELY straight or COMPLETELY gay & NEVER change so bla bla bla

I'm just enough of a wannabe intellectual snob that this derisive and dismissive statement swayed me a bit; it sounded like the type of thing I wouldn't want to watch. But I gave it a try, and ended up watching all six parts and loving them all.

The funny thing is that I don't disagree with most of what the reviewer says. Sure, it's ham-fisted. Sure, it's overly simplified. But you know what? Sometimes we need things to be oversimplified, because let's face it, at one point or another each one of us is a dumbass.

Sometime around 1999 I sat in the Barnes & Noble in Syracuse and read Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization. I loved it. I was proud of myself for having read it, because I'd never had a head for history; it was a real effort to broaden my horizons.

A few years ago I took a hard look at my own ignorance and decided to change it. I committed to reading only history. At first it was like slogging uphill through molasses. Then I read Garrett Mattingly's The Armada and the scales fell from my eyes; it was the first time I'd realized that history could be exciting. Since then I've developed a passion for history as I've read books and listened to various history podcasts and Teaching Company lectures.

One day I was hiking along listening to one of Professor Kenneth Harl's lectures, and my ears perked up as he mentioned How the Irish Saved Civilization. He dismissed it as a silly book, and I felt a wave of embarrassment at having enjoyed it. But the more I thought about it, the more I came back around to my old opinion. I no longer think of it as a great piece of historical research, but I do think it's a great book - because it got me interested. It was what I was ready for at the time.

I've come to see history as a fractal; formulating a historical truth is like trying to measure the length of a coastline. If you take a satellite photo, trace the coast with a piece of string, and measure the string, you'll get one number. Paddle along every bay and estuary measuring with rods, though, and you'll get another, much larger number. Walk the coastline with a ruler and the number increases again. Walk the coastline with a caliper, sticking it into every crevice in every rock, and the number increases still more. Eventually you're down to measuring the average (and very much theoretical) distance between quarks and your number is expressed in terms of astronomical distances. It's not that the zoomed-out view is incorrect, but rather that, no matter at what level you look at a fractal, you end up making approximations. As you zoom in, the scale of the approximations change, but it seems like there's always more zooming to be done.

There are a whole lot of people out there with a whole lot of misconceptions about LGBT folks. They need an entry-level vehicle to the subject: they're not ready for Simon Schama; they need a story on the level of How the Irish Saved Civilization. I don't think "The Making of Me" is inaccurate, so much as it shows a satellite view of the gay coastline. People need that view.

Something by Vivaldi

Brian's love of Dublin reminded me of my favorite poem. When I heard Garrison Keillor read it on Writer's Almanac it became the first poem to make me cry.

Something By Vivaldi
by Richard Tillinghast

There's a word—there has to be, there always is,
But today I can't locate it—for how the quotidian
Errand-running self gives legs to the leafy
Glistening part of us that now and again surfaces,
Transporting that breezelike something with a pen
And notebook from a snug seat at the Norseman
One street back from the rain-bothered Liffey,
To a caneback rocker on the porch at Sewanee

Where oakleaf and birdsong stipple down breeze-blown
Onto the page you fill—to a sunwarmed rock beside
The Big Lost River where you set your fly rod down
And write. Or your improvised niche is this brick arcade
In Seattle, discovered not by design
And not exactly by chance, where a classical busker
Rosins up and tunes up and delights the air
With a dazzle of sixteenth notes under arches of rain.

The music scaffolds its ascent up an invisible
Peak, bouncing on swells like a yacht, cloud-bound—
Elaborating story-lines around an allegorical
Citadel, sky-blue roads cutting up a spiral
Up the angle of Paradise, like an apple
Being peeled by an exacting and pleasure-loving hand,
By a hand that is itself no more than smoke.
Then it swings and plunges, and barrels along like a truck.

And all of us gasp and hum and sway
To this lightness that builds a room beyond
The bricks of the arcade, the fire in the pub grate,
The masonry, timber and commerce that build a street,
The force that cut the Big Lost River into granite
Or that puts a chair out on the porch in Tennessee.
All of us: lunching merchants, students, a blonde
Hippie in a Disneyland T-shirt, two out-of-whiskey
Greybeards on a bench; and your reporter,
Brought here for no other purpose than to get it on paper
And get it right—Tennessee sunlight,
Something by Vivaldi, rain on a Dublin street.
All these, and the self that carries the other around
And situates him for the work of his transported hand.
Let us sing, let us sing in Latin, let us stand
Up on elated feet and sing "Magnificat!"

The more I thought about the poem, the more appropriate it seemed for this blog. After all, what's more representative of the "quotidian, errand-running self" than driving thirteen hours to Michigan to attend the wedding of my fiancée's friend and classmate? And, as I mentioned on Tuesday, it certainly did seem like circumstances situated me for the work of my transported hand. And this does feel like the leafy Glistening part of me.

Musings of a Novitiate Ally, Part 3: Pointing Out Hypocrisy

On the day after the argument with my sister, Grace and I were driving back from my family's place. As you can imagine, the LGBT movement was on my mind; when the Ensign affair came up, I thought of the recent Dan Savage column. A reader had written that we should all "deflate the drama on extramarital affairs a little". Dan agreed, and took it further: he called for honesty in recognizing that humans aren't wired for complete monogamy. He showed our culture, which wags its collective finger at a form of hypocrisy that's as common as dirt, to be hypocritical in its own right.

I've been thinking about how people on the left expend their energy. It seems to me like a whole lot of it gets dumped into the sink beyond the point of diminishing returns. We Twitter and blog and Facebook the hell out of events like the announcement of Ensign's infidelity. And it makes us feel good. But, as I asked Grace, what's the point? Sure, we get to squirm as that warm fuzzy of righteous indignation crawls up and down our spines. We get a bunch of cohorts agreeing with us. We've proven that those who denounce us are just as flawed as we. But what's the point?

Grace said "Well isn't it a good thing to point out hypocrisy?" Sure, I said, but what does it do? Have we convinced any of the folks on the other side who liked that guy before his hypocrisy was pointed out? I don't know, but I doubt it. I think that, like anyone else, they tend to forgive their guy, explaining away the few of his transgressions that remain after their pundits have painted him as a victim.

At the end of the day, what have we accomplished?

And then it hit me: I don't need to speculate. Just days before, I'd spoken on the phone with someone who's supremely well-qualified to answer the question "Does pointing out hypocrisy do any good?" It's somebody big - somebody who asked me if there was any way he could help me with the blog.

Oh boy. I hope he'll agree to a Q&A. Stay tuned.

Musings of a Novitiate Ally, Part 2: In which certain words are said

OK, so I got defensive. Of course I got defensive. This is my sister we're talking about.

She had that tone in her voice. Most people with siblings probably know the one I'm talking about: the one like a hot wind of disapproval that makes your skin tighten, and before you know it you've shifted into a fighting stance because that's the only alternative to hanging your head in shame at whatever they're about to tell you you did wrong.

Essentially she told me that, since I'm straight, this isn't my fight; and that anyway, gay people may not want my help. It wasn't just the disapproval in her voice that got me, either. She seemed sure I'd never thought of this concept, when in fact it was one of the first concerns I had about the blog, and the one I'd spent the most hours thinking about.

So I told her how, since the very first, I've kept in mind the black civil rights leaders who said that their communities must accomplish their own goals without the help of white people. I told her about the article "Gays are the new niggers". I said that, so far, I'd gotten the impression that there was little of that "no help from outsiders" stance in the GLBT community, and that I think there are two main reasons for this: first, there are gay people of every ethnic, religious and political stripe, so exclusionist attitudes would seem contradictory; and second, gays only represent ten percent of the population -- they need our help! I told her that I was keenly aware of this question and would continue to keep it in mind as I learn how to be an effective ally.

I got more frustrated a few minutes later when the conversation resumed, and my sister said "I still don't agree with you." It seemed like she had already reached her conclusion, and all my logical refutations were bouncing off her emotional blast doors.

At some point I used the word "Helpless". Yeah, I know, poor choice of words, right? When I get defensive I tend to overstate my case. Anyway, Grace then jumped into the fray; in retrospect it's not fair to say that she was on my sister's side, but it sure felt at that moment like they were ganging up on me. I got more and more defensive, and more and more strident. I felt like I was being called to task for doing something that seemed to carry an a priori morality - never mind the fact that we're talking about defending the rights of people I know and love. Here's a hint, gentle reader: you know it's on when I start invoking the Battle of Cannae.

In 316 B.C. Hannibal achieved what's usually though of as one of the most tactically brilliant and overwhelmingly odds-defying victories in history when his army, outnumbered three to two, suckered the Romans into a full envelopment. Think of a cow being attacked by a constricting ring of meat grinders. Polybius writes that of the Roman and allied infantry, 70,000 were killed, 10,000 captured, and "perhaps" 3,000 survived. Historians have been pissing themselves over the thought of this victory for over two millennia. Don't believe me? Just wait until a historian friend of yours is distracted, then sneak up behind him and whisper in his ear "...316 B.C.... Cannae... double envelopment..." and watch his crotchal region for a dark, spreading stain.

As far as sheer numbers go, there are lots of victories more impressive than Hannibal's at Cannae. Consider the Battle of Issus where "the invading troops led by the young Alexander of Macedonia, outnumbered more than 2:1, defeated the army personally led by Darius III of Achaemenid Persia in the second great battle for primacy in Asia." Or look at the Battle of Marathon, where around 9,000 Athenians defeated a Persian force somewhere around 25,000 strong. These are some of most anomalous battles in recorded history. And we're only talking about 5:2 odds at the outside.

Homosexuals compose about ten percent of the population. That's 9:1 odds. And that, my friends, is why I think it's important to be an ally. But. I need to work on not going all defensively hyperbolic. Grace is right: nobody would take kindly to being called "helpless".

Hope from a single face?

Since the wedding I've thought many times of how that weekend was a perfect storm. My sinus infection was peaking, making me about as miserable as I could possibly be while still standing up. And then the minister came out with that golden oldie "It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve". If I believed in God I'd say that this blog was part of His plan; after all, it's unlikely that I'd be doing it if circumstances hadn't come together just so.

I got angry. And I got angrier. And I went back to the motel and spent the whole night alternating between soaking the bed with sweat in the midst of a quasi-sleeping delirium, and getting up to pee six times. I had nothing to think on but rage; my mind was like a dog gnashing, furiously and impotently, at everything beyond its chain. Clearly my body went to redline to burn out the infection. Eventually my mind, seeking to burn out the anger, went to redline as well.

Twelve years before, I'd taken hate into my heart because I'd felt like it was all I had to hold onto. It scored, pitted, and blackened my insides. Eventually it became clear that I hated myself for embracing hate. Later that year I forgave myself, and let go of it. For a week it felt like I was dying and being reborn. Since then I'd been working to divest myself of stupid, useless anger. No way in hell was I going to swallow this new bolus.

So I moved in the only direction I could go: back. I went to my childhood and found something useful. I found a way to understand that horse's ass of a minister just a bit, and hopefully understand his congregation better. I found empathy. And I came up with an idea for a way to transform my anger into something loving and constructive.

And my idea was...

A blog?

A blog where I show the face of a non-straight person every day?

And I said to myself, "Self... let me get this straight. In order to show people that gays and lesbians and whatnot are just like everyone else, you're going to single them out?? All that mental effort, with the grand emotional hero's journey, and that's what you have to show for it???"

"Dipshit."

Well, I bulled ahead anyway. For the first time in my life I cared about an idea enough to go forward regardless of whether it succeeded or failed. I figured it had already been done a hundred times. I figured I'd never get it off the ground, even if I did manage to sell the idea. But I didn't give a shit. And I still don't. It's my ball, and I'm going to run with it. I have to. I have to transform this.

Of course, it's always nice to have a bit of serendipitous encouragement. Last Thursday I ran across a New York Times article about how people seem hard-wired to empathize with a single person much more than with several people, or millions of people. It made me think of my core concept for this blog: a single human face that people can connect with. And I smiled, thinking this wasn't such a bad idea after all.

Musings of a Novitiate Ally, Part 1: In Praise of Discomfort

Two weeks ago I was hanging out at Blind Tiger waxing enthusiastic about my new blog. Seth took a look at my flier, saw the words "GAY / LESBIAN / BISEXUAL / TRANSGENDER" and said "I'm not comfortable with transgender people." I shot back "Well, who would be?"

This was an exaggeration. I know that many people are comfortable with transsexuals. The point I was trying to make was "Dude. You get to be uncomfortable." This assertion was high in my constellation of mental talking points for several reasons.

Just a few nights previously I'd hung out at the Ramrod, and you'd damned well better believe I was uncomfortable. Why? Not because I was in a room full of gay guys on the gayest street in the gayest neighborhood I knew of. I was uncomfortable because the bartender was being a big drama queen, loudly telling the customer next to me about his sexual exploits. But I was beginning to realize something else: that I would have been just as uncomfortable with a straight woman saying the same things. Or a straight man - heck, that probably would have made me more uncomfortable because of the misogyny with which such exhortations are almost inevitably marbled. It wasn't that he was gay; it was that he was airing his musky laundry, and that bugs the shit out of me.

So you see, I learned that I'm never really uncomfortable with LGBT folks; I'm uncomfortable with behaviors that I may associate with them, but are actually found throughout humanity. And if I can shed my false discomfort, so can everyone else.

No. Fuck that.

I'm not that much of a happy-happy marginalizing Kumbaya-singin' Pollyanna. That ain't me, babe. Y'know why? Because I believe that we are, as a species, psychotic about discomfort. I mean, for gosh sake, does no one remember the land of the Lotus Eaters? There's a reason why Homer thought that those lazy fuckers missed the existential boat, and it's the same reason James T. Kirk would puke in his mouth at the thought of shunning discomfort. Our discomfort is made of our demons, and facing our demons makes us mighty. Our discomfort is exactly that which does not kill us, and we all know what that does.

Why is discomfort so important to me? Well..

I went to Cornell from the fall of 1988 until the spring of 1992. During those four years I grew to loathe knee-jerk political correctness, which I later came to see as Nazi mind control. The best way to describe the atmosphere is to recount a short conversation in the dorm lounge. Folks were talking about abortion, and I was trying to articulate my view that the whole question of when a fetus becomes a baby seemed pointless to me: the point was that it was a potential human life, and the thought of cutting that off saddened me, even though I was pro-choice. I never got to that last bit, though. The girl arguing the feminist talking points cut me off with the big liberal conversation-ender du jour: she dismissed me as a man who would never have to make the decision. That I was on her side didn't matter. I wasn't toeing the party line, so I had to be shut up and shut down.

I thought about this for the umpteenth time. Then I thought of the 2004 elections, when some people voted for Bush because their religious leaders said that the liberals wanted to force people into gay marriages. And for the first time, I saw the small kernel of plausibility in those stories. I still say that the people who believed them were gullible fools, but when I think back to the PC mind-control attempts of the early ninetes it becomes understandable.

We are complicit in the backlashes that hurt our movement. We have to own that. We have to be smart: learn from our mistakes, choose our battles, and not try to control peoples' minds! People get to be uncomfortable with abortion. People get to be uncomfortable with homosexuals. I get to be uncomfortable with transsexuals, and if you disagree, then let's reframe this. Here's a short list of people who make me uncomfortable, in no particular order. If I were to sort the list and put transsexuals in, I doubt they would be near the top.

• Football players and gym rats
  
• People with lots of piercings
  
• Really fat people (I was really fat)
  
• Orange ladies who are supposed to look tanned
  
• Women with lots of makeup
  
• Young girls trying to look sexy
  
• Inconsiderate people, e.g. cell shouters and people who talk in movies or don't make room for others on the train
  
• People who disguise hate or a desire to win an argument as logic
  
• Ignorant people
  
• Myself, when I see my own ignorance
  

Being uncomfortable with other humans, not to mention our own inner workings, is part of the design specs of a human. We get to be uncomfortable. So to all you conservatives and religious folks out there: if anyone tells you that you're not allowed to be uncomfortable with homosexuals, you tell them from me - a liberal, fag-loving unbeliever - that they can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. No one gets to control your mind.

Last year, when I was going through some bad times, a good friend told me something that his mother had told him as a child: "If someone has a problem with you, it's their problem." This stuck with me, because I know that I worry way too much about what other people think of me. I wouldn't want to go too far in the opposite direction, because I find people who spend their lives proudly exclaiming "I don't give a shit what anyone thinks of me" to be particularly odious. But I could stand a good, heaping dose of "It's their problem." And it works both ways.

If I am uncomfortable with transsexuals it's my problem. If you're uncomfortable with the thought of homosexuality, it's your problem. I ain't a victim by a damn sight, and neither are you; they didn't make us uncomfortable; we just are uncomfortable. And our state of being gives us no more right to reduce another person to a second-class citizen than would an aversion to russet tones justify us in taking a razor to every redhead we saw on the street.

So. You get to be uncomfortable, and the operative word here is "be". Discomfort is a state if being - your being. You get to have your reactions. What you don't get to do is abrogate another person's rights because of your discomfort. You have an immensely powerful processor squelching about in your skull. You are capable of parsing your inner discomforts from your outer sanctions. Figure it out.

Bullying: In My Past and In Our Schools

This morning on twitter I found out from nyclu about an eleven o'clock press conference at Tweed Hall about "bias-based harassment and bullying". This is right up by City Hall, about a ten minute walk from where I work in the financial district, but work was too busy for me to get away. Argh. I wanted to be there because I'm particularly interested in this topic.

The first reason is that I was obese as a kid. I broke the two hundred pound mark by the time I was in sixth grade, and the three hundred pound mark by the time I was in eleventh. School was hell - or at least so I thought. I grew up in a quiet town that was small enough so that, while not everyone knew everyone else, parents were never removed by more than one degree of separation. I never had to deal with the sort of physical violence that some of the kids mentioned below.

The second reason is connected to the first. Whenever I get swept up in something, like I'm swept up in this blog, I remind myself of Maslow's hammer.

When the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.

I tend to see things in terms of bullying because I was bullied. One of the reasons why I react strongly to discrimination and bigotry against gay people is that I see it as bullying behavior. Proposition 8? Classic bully move: The bully isn't satisfied having what he has; he's not satisfied until he takes away what you have.

Is this thought model my hammer? Am I limited by thinking of everything in terms of bullying? I suspect that once I start my volunteer work with Garden State Equality, I'll be better able to answer that question.

But for now, on to the event. It makes for interesting reading, especially the white paper. I have some mixed feelings about DASA, especially when I read things like this.

Ashanta Woodley, 15, sees classmates being harassed everyday. Often the bullies aim their barbs at her. “They call me a lot of names, like fat or fat ass,” said Ashanta, a 10th grade student at a Prospect Heights High School in Brooklyn. The taunts hurt and distract Ashanta from her schoolwork. “It’s like everybody is judging you either by your skin or by how you look, they find something to bother you with, and it’s annoying,” she said. “Sometimes when I keep focusing on it, I slip away from my schoolwork so I get low grades.”

I got called "fat ass", and much worse, all the time. I never let it affect my grades. As a matter of fact, it probably helped my grades. I came to identify myself as the socially inept fat kid who gets good grades. I was the opposite of those who made my life miserable, and my anger at them fueled me.

I don't expect my messed-up little psychological construct to apply to all children. What I do expect, though, is school regulation that is enforceable and doesn't reek of mind-control. The police aren't going to swoop in every time an adult calls another adult "faggot". Should we teach our children that they can be protected from words, and that our government should clamp down on everything that comes out of our mouths? Aha! Apparently not.

Finally, DASA includes a definition of bias-based harassment that appropriately balanced the proscription of bias-based harassment with freedom of student speech and expression protected under the First Amendment. DASA prohibits conduct or verbal threats, taunting, intimidation or abuse that “unreasonably and substantially” interfere with a student’s educational performance or opportunity. By contrast, the Chancellor’s Regulation prohibits written, verbal or physical acts that create a “hostile, offensive or intimidating school environment” or “otherwise adversely affect[] a student’s educational opportunities.” This definition of harassment is overbroad and could infringe on First Amendment speech, with the potential effect of punishing the same students that the regulation seeks to protect, such as students who express an unpopular point of view.

OK, that I like. I think we are capable of drawing a line between intimidating behavior and one student calling another "fat ass", and hopefully the words "unreasonably and substantially" compose that line. In any event, it sounds like DASA is more of an accountability tool for what the DOE should be doing already, and it smacks less of mind-control than the existing Chancellor's Regulation. Sounds good to me.

Go in peace.

Last Sunday I attended the 10:00 AM worship at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in my town of Millburn, NJ. I'm an agnostic, and I have no plans to change that. But, since St. Stephen's was on the list of gay-friendly churches in New Jersey that I'm contacting in hopes of getting faces for this blog, I figured the least I could do was hear what they had to say. The notion of coming over after the service and saying "Hey, wanna hear about my blog?" seemed disrespectful.

I happened to come on an auspicious day for the church: the Bishop of the Diocese of Newark was visiting, and delivering the sermon. He had a warm, amenable and disarming nature, and the sermon he gave actually choked me up. Man, what is happening to me? I'm so emotional lately.

The Bishop preached about Mark 4:35-41, in which Jesus and his disciples are in a boat, a terrible storm whips up while Jesus is asleep in the stern, Jesus calms the storm and rebukes his disciples for their fear, and they're duly impressed. What impressed me was how close the Bishop was coming to presenting this passage as a parable. As an agnostic I expect that from my own brain, but coming from a pulpit I expect more or less a literal (excuse me while I go find a shoehorn, because I really want to squeeze in that word that I had to look up this morning) hermeneutics. (Um. Doesn't quite work, does it? All right, all right.) I expect a more or less literal interpretation.

The Bishop went from talking about the actual storms in Mark to the metaphorical storms inside us. And this is what got me choked up, because boy do I have storms in me. I am so damned angry. Ever since that wedding I've been railing in my head against that minister.

Ever since my teens when I "came out" as an agnostic, I've struggled to own a sense of spirituality. If I hadn't had good friends who saw the spiritual in me despite my unbelief in conventional religion, I think I'd still not have the wherewithal to think of myself as a spiritual being. And here I was, in my thirty-ninth year, contributing my spirit to a consecration of love.

And that miserable shitheel turned the ceremony into a political forum. He couldn't have cheapened it more if he'd slapped Pennzoil stickers on the bridesmaid's dresses. And since that moment, when I think of that minister, a single thought fills my being: "Oh, it's on now, bitch." I didn't have a political bone in my body, but he made me a part of something I consider unclean. He picked up one of those brass measuring weights and put it on one side of a metaphorical scale. And by god, I will put a cinderblock on the other side. Because he brought me into it.

These thoughts were coalescing in my mind as the Bishop spoke. And tears were welling in my eyes because, for the first time, I was acknowledging the force and the weight of my anger. I've worked for fifteen years to divest myself of anger, and there are all too many moments when I feel like I have depressingly little to show for all that work. I get so self-righteously angry at inconsequential things, such as people not respecting my personal space on the commuter train, that it makes me feel small, and terribly unworthy of all my blessings. I don't want this anger. I have to transform it. I have to. That's what this blog is about.

Sunday was also Father's Day, and the church was giving out carnations to fathers and father figures. Proud of the source of stability I've been to my daughter, I took one and wore it. I don't know if the following thoughts were influenced by this or not.

My Dad died last year, and I miss him a lot. He wouldn’t know what to make of this gay advocacy blog; he’s probably snort disdainfully and shrug his shoulders. I’ve started to wonder if part of my passion for this project stems from my feeling that, if I can’t do something my father would agree with, I can at least do something he’d respect just by virtue of the sheer effort and dedication I’m putting into it.

All this was going through my head, and then came the passing of the peace. It was the most sincere and thorough such ritual that I've ever witnessed. It felt great. These folks have a good thing goin' on. And in the middle of it, I met Reverend Cornelius C. Tarplee, the Rector of the church. I'd left him a message about this blog the previous week, so I told him who I was and that I was a bit apprehensive because I wasn't sure if it was appropriate for me to be there. He responded warmly, saying "I'm glad you're here" and promising that we would talk sometime soon. So I'm hopeful that there will be some synergy between this, the project of an unbeliever, and the wishes of his congregation.

After the service, there was a coffee hour. The spread was top-notch; one of the congregants told me that, owing to the Bishop's visit, it was superior to their usual fare. As people were eating, the Bishop gave a talk about four tenets of being a good Episcopal witness. I don't remember them, but what I do remember is his exhortation to tell others "Go in peace." Not only that, but do it when it seems least possible, e.g. when someone cuts you off in traffic. Again, this struck very close to home. I've got a lot of anger where there should be purpose, a lot of self-righteousness where there should be righteousness. Gotta work on that.

We must love our enemies.

Squee!

I am nearly positive that today was the first time I even considered typing the word "squee", or making the noise it represents. But, see, this afternoon I got a lovely e-mail from my favorite poet, Julia Kasdorf, in response to a message I sent her this morning. Squee!

I wrote to her for two reasons: one old, and one new. I'd been trying for years to find the words to tell her how she had affected me: how I heard her poetry for the first time when Garrison Keillor's reading of "Mennonites" made me cry, and how the rest of her book Sleeping Preacher affected me similarly. I put all that into this morning's message to her because now I had a request: I wanted to ask if I could use "Mennonites" on this blog.

Ms. Kasdorf's response was thoughtful, kind and gracious. God, I'm such a groupie, but... SQUEE!!

I regret the necessity of beginning this post in such an undignified way. But the point is that I have the author's permission to reprint this beautiful poem.

Mennonites
by Julia Kasdorf

We keep our quilts in closets and do not dance.
We hoe thistles along fence rows for fear
we may not be perfect as our Heavenly Father.
We clean up his disasters. No one has to
call; we just show up in the wake of tornadoes
with hammers, after floods with buckets.
Like Jesus, the servant, we wash each other's feet
twice a year and eat the Lord's Supper,
afraid of sins hidden so deep in our organs
they could damn us unawares,
swallowing this bread, his body, this juice.
Growing up, we love the engravings in Martyrs Mirror:
men drowned like cats in burlap sacks,
the Catholic inquisitors,
the woman who handed a pear to her son,
her tongue screwed to the roof of her mouth
to keep her from singing hymns while she burned.
We love Catherine the Great and the rich tracts
she gave us in the Ukraine, bright green winter wheat,
the Cossacks who torched it, and Stalin,
who starved our cousins while wheat rotted
in granaries. We must love our enemies.
We must forgive as our sins are forgiven,
our great-uncle tells us, showing the chain
and ball in a cage whittled from one block of wood
while he was in prison for refusing to shoulder
a gun. He shows the clipping from 1916:
Mennonites are German milksops, too yellow to fight.
We love those Nazi soldiers who, like Moses,
led the last cattle cars rocking out of the Ukraine,
crammed with our parents—children then—
learning the names of Kansas, Saskatchewan, Paraguay.
This is why we cannot leave the beliefs
or what else would we be? why we eat
'til we're drunk on shoofly and moon pies and borscht.
We do not drink; we sing. Unaccompanied on Sundays,
those hymns in four parts, our voices lift with such force
that we lift, as chaff lifts toward God.

This poem gets me every time because I have a lot of useless anger that I can't seem to get rid of, and when I think of people like Ms. Kasdorf's uncle forgiving his enemies, it makes me feel awash in a pool of emotion of which "humble and small" form only the barest beginning.

I can't think of a better emotional core for this blog than this poem, and it ties into something I realized last week: If I'm telling people that GLBT folks are normal people just like them, then it has to work both ways: I also have to be telling GLBT folks that those who harbor prejudices and discriminate against them are normal people just like them. If circumstances had been different, each might be just like the other. No one is The Other. The Other is us.

Yeah, that one is going to be hard for me too. Believe me.

Timely as Today's Headlines

I could hardly look on the internets today without seeing something that reminded me of Meet Adam and Steve. First came The Onion, with its beautiful way of sparing no egos: New Hampshire Passes Law Forcing Old People To Watch Gays Marry. I love the punchline:

Gay marriage advocates are already protesting the new statute, which they say unlawfully forces homosexuals to have gross old people at their weddings.

Then along comes Dan Savage with a column very near and dear to this blog. Dan's last reader submission was from a straight couple who plan to ask guests at their wedding to make charitable donations in lieu of gifts. They asked Dan to suggest nonprofit groups that advocate for marriage equality, and Dan responded thus.

Thanks for thinking of us, STBM, which is more than President Obama is willing to do: I would recommend that you put Lambda Legal (they’re lawyers, they sue) and Freedom To Marry (they’re advocates, they woo) on your list. Unlike most national gay organizations, Lambda Legal and Freedom to Marry do good work and get results. Thanks and congratulations!

I immediately added these to my list of churches and organizations to contact in order to get input on, and faces for, my blog. Then I reminded myself that it's early days yet, and I need to consider carefully before throwing myself behind organizations that look good. I'm not a political animal, and I don't like lobbyists or litigiousness. Hmmm... how could I make that last sentence more alliterative? Bah. Too late to think about it now. Where was I? Oh, litigiousness and thinking.

See, the thing is, I don't want to preach to the choir. It's all well and good to get a bunch of GLBT and liberal folks following this blog, but if that's all I get then I'll consider it a big, popular failure. I want to reach people who are like I would have been if I hadn't gone to Cornell: those who are living in small towns across the country and who've never knowingly met a homosexual. And I think I can say with authority that most of those folks not only dislike big government and political power brokerage, but they feel like their voices are never heard beneath the roaring of slick-talking politicians who listen only to the other slick voices coming out of places like New York City and Albany. Right or wrong, associating myself with groups like Lambda Legal and Freedom to Marry will ensure that I lose lots of the very people I'm trying to reach with the first page load.

What do you think? I'd appreciate the advice of anyone who has worked with these groups.

Now, on to an article that I found while googling "gay [something or other] in millburn nj". I'm not sure what the something or other was, because I've been doing a lot of googling like this lately. Anyway, I found an article in maplewood.blogs.nytimes.com that was published just hours earlier. It seems that...

the Maplewood Township Committee meeting last night ... voted unanimously to pass a resolution calling on state legislators to sanction same-sex marriage. It is believed to be the first of its kind in New Jersey.

Maplewood is a town within walking distance of where I live in Millburn, and is known for being gay-friendly.

I'm psyched about the Maplewood Township Committee resolution. I'm psyched to have found out from this article about Garden State Equality, "a New Jersey advocacy organization for marriage equality based in Montclair". I'm much more psyched, though, that the article also led me to tonight's daily face. See above.

The Wedding

Gooseflesh. That’s what I thought when I looked at the shoulders of the woman two seats to my left. Despite the bright sun, the cool breeze off Spring Lake had turned her bare shoulders to gooseflesh. I thought of how appropriate that expression was – how much her skin looked like the skin of those chickens I remembered from childhood. After their decapitated bodies had taken a turn in the scalding pot, the feathers had been easy to pull out. I remembered how the texture of their bared skin had seemed both grotesque and compelling. I looked forward at the gathering bridesmaids and saw that their shoulders were also bare. Did they all have gooseflesh?

The minister was a friend of the bride’s family, so at first I was sanguine about his avuncular style. Pretty soon, though, he started to seem needlessly puerile, as though he were plying a group of children for cheap laughs. It got worse when he made a joke about how God made Adam from dirt, and how that goes to show man's status. I was embarrassed and saddened because I saw in his comment the exploitation of hurtfulness.

Since college I've noticed that arguments between men and women tend to boil down to a very simple exchange: an adolescent boy screaming "You're ugly!" and an adolescent girl screaming back "You can't get it up!" Vitriol runs between the genders like a brackish river, and men like that minister are just smart enough to stick in a water wheel and draw some power from the flow. It's much easier to convince a woman that she should willingly stay behind her man if you smile and wink and say "Men are just big and dumb and we need someone to take care of us, am I right, ladies?" It was a morally bankrupt and intellectually slipshod disgrace, made worse by his simpering obviousness. It was also just a warm-up.

I wanted to believe it was the cold medication making me hallucinate but no, these words had actually just came out of his mouth: "It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." It had never occurred to me that anyone would actually speak those words out loud. Sure, maybe you'd give in to temptation and type that saying in an e-mail because you thought it was cute, but it beggars my imagination to think that someone would actually give breath to words that idiotic.

Now I can articulate my stupefaction at the thought that anyone would truly want to win people over with a silly rhyme. As rhetorical devices go, that's a... that's not even a pointed stick. It's a stick with an awkward bend in it that's not even good for poking. But at the time I wasn't full of ironic commentary. I was angry that someone had taken what should have been a hallowed ceremony and cheapened it by turning it into a political forum. I was angry that I'd been made a part of it. I was angry at myself for being naive enough to be surprised when I heard those words that, until then, had been nothing more than a silly joke.

After the ceremony I went back to the car and tried to sleep. I was sick as a dog from a sinus infection, so I had a good excuse to stay away from the reception. I kept toying with the idea of going back in there and starting up conversations in which people would ask me what I do and I would say "These days I spend a lot of time praying that, someday soon, homosexual marriage will be made legal in every state of this fine land of ours." Since I didn't want to make a scene, I thought that staying away was a good idea. Then again, I wanted to be with my fiancee at her friend's wedding reception. I fretted, failed to sleep, and eventually came up with a way to reconcile it.

To my mind, the minister had taken something precious and cheapened it unimaginably; what should have been a ceremony about love and commitment had become a whore's bauble. But that's no skin off my nose, right? Whore's baubles can be nice enough to look at from time to time. It wouldn't kill me to spend the evening in the presence of paste nestled between perfumed breasts.

So I went back in and danced with my honey and ate dinner. Then, being so sick that I was no good to anyone, I went back to the motel for about ten hours of miserable semi-delirium. My rage at having been made a part of a political statement with which I disagreed wholeheartedly became the cannon fire in my 1812 Overture of chills, sweats, and despising humankind.

There was something unavoidably familiar about my anger. My father had a robust disdain for bullshit, and my mother's side of the family had an overdeveloped disdain for outsiders. Both had more than a hint of a snarl and a sneer. And that's how I felt: disdainful, snarling and sneering. The idea of handing down hatred from one generation to the next like an heirloom is anathema to me. Yet there are parts of my father's disdain for bullshit that I heartily admire. I went round and round in my head, wondering how I could divorce myself from anger and, once that was done, do something useful with what was left.

I spent Monday helping to drive the twelve hours back from Michigan, almost completely failing to sleep, and mulling it over. I fell asleep as soon as we got home. The next morning, during that lucid state before waking, something useful came to me. As usual, it involved empathy.

When I was a kid, the word "nigger" was not that uncommon in my family. I vividly remember an incident during my teens when my uncle, sitting in the car with the rest of the family, pointed at a young boy running by and said "Look at that little nigger!" He smiled and laughed as he said it, and his need was immediately clear: the boy had to be obviously funny, with no explanation asked or given. At least I had the wherewithal to challenge him on that one: I asked “What about him?”, he said “Well look at him!”, I said “What about him??”, and he said “Never mind” and backed off. Of course he couldn’t explain the simple truth that the boy was not of our tribe, our pack, our particular little group of naked apes.

I wish I could say that that ugly word never made it past my uncle’s generation, but back in elementary school I used it on a girl in my class a few times, to her face. She was the only dark-skinned girl in town. I said it because it was easy - because it made me feel superior.

I remember listening to Eddie Murphy's breakout comedy routine on cassette during my early teens - it was the one that was later named "Delirious" when it was put on video. In it, he said the word "faggot" a lot, even employing the highly memorable epithet of “faggot-ass faggot!” I got quite a kick out of that. I don't remember whether I actually used the word out loud much, if at all, but it wouldn't surprise me if I used it as a generalized insult to other children.

What's the connection? Ease. It was easy for that minister to say "It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." I understand this. I wish I didn't, but I do. Because I know how easy it is to say "nigger" or "faggot". All you need is sufficient ignorance to think of another human being as The Other.

I thought about all this, and about the moment during my early years at Cornell when, for the first time, I saw two girls holding hands. I could take you back to within thirty feet of where I was standing. I thought of what an important moment that was for me, and thought of the millions of people who haven’t knowingly met a homosexual. That’s when I got the idea for this blog: Put a face on The Other so that they're no longer The Other.

Each day I'll post the picture of a non-straight person and a short autobiographical passage. This is a very simplistic idea that (hopefully) most people nowadays don't need, and the truly hateful will ignore. But people who are capable of changing their minds when confronted with the evidence may look at this parade of faces on the screen and realize… they’re just people. My goal is to put a human face on what people like that minister try to turn into a punchline.