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.

"Loss" My Ass!

OK, first of all: we did not lose anything yesterday. We failed to gain something. There's a sodding great difference, isn't there?

New York State has never allowed same-sex marriage. Yesterday the New York State Senate voted on a bill intended to change that aspect of the law. The bill did not pass, so the law did not change.

Everyone focuses on the supposedly devastating 38-24 vote. The New York Times, just minutes after the results came through, published an article saying that "the vote... destroys the optimism of gay rights advocates". BULLSHIT! My optimism was not destroyed. Those numbers simply prompted me to grab a calculator and quickly figure out that 39% of New York State Senators voted for the bill. 39%! Forget for a moment that, in the current political environment, we were guaranteed an upper ceiling of 51%, the percentage of Democratic senators. Even without taking that into consideration, the enormity of those numbers is staggering. Just ten or twenty years ago the very notion of same-sex marriage was unthinkable. Yesterday 39% of New York State senators voted for it. My god, people, if that's not progress then I'm... one of those hyperbolic animals.

How the hell can progressives see that kind of progress and not wake up with a smile on their faces, feeling invigorated and ready to push that 39% to 40% and to keep pushing until we get the progress that we want? I'll tell you how. It's easy if you have an overweening sense of entitlement.

People have worked and bled and died for the progress of the last few decades. Unfortunately that progress seems to have given this generation a pathological teleology. The world should be the way we want it to be, so if the requisite changes don't happen it… breaks us. We can't accept that the world hasn't already conspired to be the way we think it should be.

Yesterday I "listened" to people on Twitter and Facebook begin the predictable chorus of "Fuck New York". Even more disheartening were the self-satisfied microscreeds against all the "stupid hicks" who live "north of the Bronx". Never mind that, of the eight Democrats who voted "No" on the bill, only two were from upstate. That's right. Of those Democrats who had the temerity not to give us what we wanted, only 25% were dumb hicks.

Twenty years ago, few would have dared dream we'd make it this far. But here we are, and we're celebrating by... treating this as a loss? Having made massive progress, can it be that all progressives can think of to do is throw a hissy fit because we didn't get everything we wanted right now?

Progress takes time and effort. A 38-24 loss is not a defeat. It is the blowing of a horn. All who hear it should take heart, and throw themselves into the battle with renewed vigor. Else we don't deserve to call ourselves progressives.

Say it with me: "We did not lose anything. We failed to gain something."

Yesterday.

But what about tomorrow?

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.

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.

The Great Nationwide Kiss-In: Update and Videos

There are 50 confirmed events for the Great Nationwide Kiss-In this Saturday, along with others that are entering the final planning stages. This is an international LGBT rights event, and has already found coverage through the AP, the Advocate, and a number of local publications. Please support it by getting the word around to everyone you know. Please see the press release, which includes a link to the national Facebook group page. This provides additional information, as well as a full list of cities and towns that are involved.

Check out the Kiss-In promotional videos from organizer David Mailloux's site.

"Kiss Me" (See David's original post.)



"This Kiss" (See David's original post.)


"I Love You" (See David's original post.)

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.

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.

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.