No one’s coming out goes exactly the same as any other. The fear that the guy talks about in the first video (and the anxiety you can see on the young woman’s face in the first part of the second) is very real. Even in 2015, 40% of homeless teen-agers are homeless because they have been kicked out of their homes by parents because they are gay.
I tried to come out to my best friend—a guy I loved like a brother—dozens or more times. Because we were both attending fundamentalist evangelical churches, I tried to ease us into the conversation. But every single time that even a hint of the topic of non-heterosexuality came up, he would instantly go into “Gross! Sinful! All homos go to hell!” mode with such vehemence, it’s amazing I wasn’t physically hurled from the room by the strength of his condemnation.
Ironically, when I finally did come out years later, he insisted that the reason he was ending our friendship was not because I was “an unrepentant homosexual” (his words), but rather because I told someone else before I told him. He was also one of the people who insisted emphatically that he had never, ever, ever suspected at all that I was gay before I came out.
I don’t believe that statement, either.
Several relatives and close friends from back then made equally insistent denials of ever suspecting. Of course, one of those people was my Mom. And when one of my aunts found out Mom was claiming she had never suspected, that’s when the aunt informed me that beginning when I was about 14 years old, she and my mom and several ladies from church had begun meeting once a week to pray my gay away. I also was informed by one of the former board members of the evangelical touring teen choir I had been involved with as a teen-ager that it had been explicitly known that one reason I wasn’t given solos or put into one of the small ensembles for the first many years I was active in the group was because the leadership was certain I was “struggling with the sin of homosexuality.”
They were correct in that I was struggling mightily to stop feeling attracted to other guys. But unlike a lot of the guys who they did put into leadership positions and gave solos to, I wasn’t acting on my feelings. I wrote about one of those cases, but he wasn’t the only queer boy in the group fooling around with other guys back then.
I’m glad that more people are getting reactions like the second video: “I always knew. Were you afraid to tell me?” But far too many queer people have plenty of reasons to fear rejection (and worse) from their own families and friends if they admit who they are. And that’s just wrong.
BettyBowers.Com (Click to embiggen)I missed this before Friday. InTouch magazine posted a fact-check/refutation of seven of the claims the Duggars made in the interview: DUGGAR INTERVIEW: 7 CRUCIAL FACTS THEY DIDN’T TELL YOU — THE COVER-UP CONTINUES. Contrary to one of their biggest claims, they did not cooperate with policy. They hid their son and refused to bring him in for scheduled interviews. Much more at the link. On the other hand, Dan Savage interviewed a therapist who works with juvenile sex offenders to find out how parents who find out their child has sexually abused another child ought to handle the situation: What Should the Duggars Have Done?
And the scandal surrounding former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert paying millions in extortion money is beginning to turn up names: Exclusive: Alleged Dennis Hastert Sex Abuse Victim Is Named By Family. This is not the victim Hastert was paying off because this victim died of complication of AIDS many years ago, but if the allegations of the family are true, it confirms our worst fears: when Hastert was a High School wrestling coach he was having sexual relationships with his students. Again, I ask is there any reason that we don’t just all assume that whenever a politician, pastor, or other sort of public figure is rabidly anti-gay that they are also a deeply twisted closet cases?
It’s Friday! The first Friday in June. Happy Queer Pride Month! I’m still limping around a lot thanks to some torn ligaments in my ankle and foot. But I’ve been steadily improving (elevation and ice are my new best friends)!
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
Thoughts on The Kipnis Clown Show and the Drama of University Life. “In other words, Kipnis wrote a sharp-tongued, one-dimensional caricature of university sexual assault and trigger warning activists at Northwestern. And they turned around and proved her one-dimensional caricature 100% right.”
The Real America. “Younger and/or foreign readers may not recall how big a role the alleged moral superiority of small-town America used to play in conservative politics (and still does, to some extent)…”
mad max – what is okay and what is not. “The single biggest thing I walked away with, though, was that the realisation that its philosophical assumption that women shouldn’t be sex slaves is what really caused the the misogynist/”manosphere”/return-of-kings crowd to explode.”
And while the state senate moved quickly to vote to override the veto: Gay marriage override vote in NC House pushed back again. They’ve rescheduled several times because they’ve lost some votes. Couldn’t possibly be because national media has pointed out that the anti-gay marriage measure could also be an anti-interracial marriage result, among other things…
‘Intolerant Jackass Act’ Proponents Can Begin Collecting Signatures. While the status of a “Sodomite Suppression Act” proposed state ballot initiative remains in limbo, proponents of a rival “Intolerant Jackass Act” initiative were cleared by state Secretary of State Alex Padilla to begin collecting signatures Wednesday. The rival initiative would force the filer of the Sodomite Suppression Act or any similar initiative to attend sensitivity training and donate $5,000 to a pro-gay or pro-lesbian organization. When Huntington Beach attorney Matt McLaughlin filed the Sodomite Suppression Act earlier this year, which would make homosexuality punishable by death, it set off a nationwide backlash for its evident hatred and dubious constitutionality. Attorney General Kamala Harris sought a court injunction rescinding her obligation to prepare a title and summary for the initiative, a necessary step before proponents can begin gathering the 365,880 signatures necessary to get it on the ballot.
The obligatory Sad Puppies/Hugo Awards update:
This JUST In. There is a game children play—or more often, try to play at—when they are caught doing something they know they shouldn’t. It’s called “I WAS JUST”.
Web Decay Graph. “I’ve been writing this blog since 2003 and in that time have laid down, along with way over a million words, 12,373 hyperlinks. I’ve noticed that when something leads me back to an old piece, the links are broken disappointingly often. So I made a little graph of their decay over the last 144 months.”
Rachel Lark :: Gay Man on the West Coast :: Live @ Bawdy Storytelling (NSFW, but funny as heck!) “I wanna be normal for having orgies, and radical for having kids…”:
I can’t remember the first Robert Heinlein science fiction book I ever read. My mom (who had been teased as a child because of the way she spoke) was determined that I would learn to speak correctly, and decided the best way to teach me proper grammar was to read to me from her favorite authors. So before I could talk, she would read aloud from her Agatha Christie murder mysteries and her Robert Heinlein science fiction books. Later, when I could talk, she would make me repeat back whole sentences as she read. Besides turning me into a lifelong fan of mysteries and sci fi, this project also accidentally taught me how to read long before I got to school.
The original Pride flag designed by Gilbert Baker in 1978 has 8-stripes. Colors were removed and changed originally due to fabric availability.I don’t remember when I first learned that the Rainbow flag was a symbol for LGBTQ pride. I do remember in high school finding out that a particular representation of a labrys (double-headed symmetric ax associated with several goddesses from Greek mythology) had been adopted by some lesbians. However, since the information came first from the same sorts of church people who saw Satanic symbols everywhere, I wasn’t completely certain it was true.
The next symbol I learned about was the pink triangle. Since it was an emblem used by the Nazis to mark prisoners sent to the concentration camps with the excuse that they were sexual deviants, and since the Allies had then re-imprisoned all of the gay men who managed to survive the camps, the emblem was more of an assertion of “never again!” than a pure statement of pride.
When I set my goals for this year, I pledged to continue the things I thought worked last year (which includes posting regular updates) and added some new things. It’s a new month, so here’s the next report!
We had some of my husband’s relatives in town over Memorial Day weekend, and as we were driving somewhere on Memorial Day itself, I mentioned how my Grandmother had insisted on calling it “Decoration Day” her entire life. That she had, in fact, died literally in the middle of putting silk flowers on the grave of my Great-aunt Maud on the Friday before Memorial Day, because to her the holiday had always been about putting flowers on the graves of all of your family members who had passed away, and having a family gathering to celebrate the lives of our loved ones no longer with us. To which my sister-in-law said, “That’s how I grew up celebrating it, too! Sometimes with a picnic at the cemetery.”
It was later that I saw a cartoon that talked about how every even vaguely-patriot holiday seems to be inexorably transformed into Veteran’s Day: so Memorial Day is now Veteran’s Day May, Independence Day is now Veteran’s Day July, Labor Day is sometimes Veteran’s Day September, and the actual Veteran’s Day is now merely Veteran’s Day November.
If Flag Day joins that list I’m going to start slapping people.
This lunacy must stop. I know that my own wish to keep the original (and it does predate the declaration of the first memorial day for troops issued by General Logan in 1868 by decades) meaning of the May holiday as a day to commemorate the lives of all of our loved ones who have died is probably a lost battle. But this re-defining of patriotism as supporting the troops (which has itself already very unpatriotically been re-defined as supporting the notion of sending troops to die to further political aims rather than to actually defend the nation), and therefore coopting all other commemorations of our nation’s history and principles into yet another chance to thank the troops, isn’t just annoying, it’s dangerous.
We’re currently in the middle of a war on “terror” which is being used by government officials of both parties to trample all over our civil rights and the Constitution itself. The vast transfer of completely inappropriate military hardware to police departments is a direct result of this ill-conceived and poorly-defined war. A war which is not being waged against an actual threat, but merely the idea of possible threats. And the escalating violence by police against the citizens they are supposed to protect is enabled and excused because of a myth we’ve been sold that these are people risking their lives to protect us, therefore we must support the cops, because not doing so would be the same as not supporting the troops, and we already know that all patriots always support the troops.
And let’s not forget the actual men and women in uniform who were sent to Iraq because of lies (which Bush administration officials are finally admitting they were intentional lies), far too many of whom have come home wounded, maimed, and otherwise in need of care which our congresscritters seem unwilling to pay for. I’m still one of those weirdos who thinks that the first step in supporting the troops is not to vote for politicians who authorized military action when it isn’t needed, and not to vote for those who don’t adequately fund veterans’ hospitals, et cetera.
We don’t have the funds to pay returning veterans a living wage or get them proper medical care, but we do have money to pay for things like this: US Defense Department paid 14 NFL teams $5.4M to honor soldiers. The NFL didn’t give free tickets to those soldiers, airmen, sailors, and marines. Each of those tickets was paid for by your tax dollars! And the tickets are a fraction of the amount paid to the league. But the money is well spent, according to the folks who approved the contracts, because it’s a great recruiting tool.
So we are paying a very successful business millions of tax dollars to pretend to be patriotic in order to distract us from asking questions about why those troops are being sent into harm’s way and to lure more people into volunteering to be sent into harm’s way. You can’t get more capitalist or cynical than that!
Let’s stop blurring the lines between the holidays. Let’s stop blurring the lines between supporting the troops and supporting the politicians and industries that profit from exploiting the troops. Let’s stop blurring patriotism into cynicism—while we still can!
http://www.inquistr.com (click to embiggen)I wrote (and linked to others who wrote) about why we shouldn’t give in to the schadenfreude urge in relation to the child sex abuse scandal swamping the cultish Duggar family of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting fame, and Brooke Arnold makes a powerful argument coinciding with that: I could’ve been a Duggar wife: I grew up in the same church, and the abuse scandal doesn’t shock me. The children of the cultish perversion of Christianity the Duggars practice, particularly the girl children, are raised in an environment guaranteed to create these tragedies. And should we be surprised that the man credited with founding this movement is guilty of both a sexual harassment and sexual assault?
And now there’s the indictment of former Republican speaker of the house, Dennis Hastert for paying out millions of dollars in hush money to a man who Hastert had some sort of sexual relationship (sexual misconduct) with back when Hastert was a high school wrestling coach? As I asked earlier, and the author of that story asks now, “When do we get to acknowledge that sexual hypocrisy is in fact a constant theme of conservative politics — that every single time a Republican or ‘family values’ representative speaks to the bigoted mythology of homophobia or transphobia, they are closeting skeletons like a Duggar?” (In case we’ve forgotten how often this happens, Queerty has rounded up a subset of 16 Antigay Leaders Exposed as Gay or Bi.)
Bisexual FlagOn the other hand, June is almost here, and the President has issued a proclamation for Pride Month. People are reacting as if it isn’t a big deal, but as Gabe Ortiz (an immigration rights and gay rights activist) pointed out: George W. Bush refused to issue any such proclamations for 8 years even though they had been issued annually almost pro forma for many years before.
Polyamory SymbolA few points stick out for me: “For countless young people, it is not enough to simply say it gets better; we must take action too.” and “All people deserve to live with dignity and respect, free from fear and violence, and protected against discrimination, regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation. During Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month, we celebrate the proud legacy LGBT individuals have woven into the fabric of our Nation, we honor those who have fought to perfect our Union, and we continue our work to build a society where every child grows up knowing that their country supports them, is proud of them, and has a place for them exactly as they are.” Obama reflects on progress in Pride proclamation
Genderqueer flagAlthough some people think the acronym is already long, I wish the President had used the LGBTQ version, because I like to think that the Q (for queer) includes our polyamorous, agender, genderfluid, asexual, genderqueer, pansexual, genderqueer, and allied siblings. Because we’re all part of that crazy, happy, wonderfully fabulous tribe!
Ludovic Bertron from New York City, USA (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)The world would have a lot fewer tragedies like Hastert’s inappropriate touching problem, Foley’s congressional page scandal, and the Duggar child molestation disaster if society as a whole accepted and affirmed all queer people.
by Mike Luckovich (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, click to embiggen)It’s Friday! The fifth Friday in May. Despite a number of misadventures including some really odd car issues, we have made it to our hotel room at Everfree NW and are having a lot of pony-related fun. Depending on how healed my ankle is from this week’s misadventure. I may do nothing more than hobble from our room to the bar.
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
Science Fiction’s White Male Problem. What I like most about this one is the Samuel R. Delaney anecdote. “A genre that includes the socialist H.G. Wells, the libertarian Heinlein, the Catholic conservative Gene Wolfe, the anarchist Le Guin, the feminist Margaret Atwood and the Marxist China Mieville can hardly be thought of as essentially nonpolitical entertainment.”
Cover of Daybreak 2250 A.D. (original title: Star Man’s Son) by Andre Norton. (Click to embiggen)I don’t remember which Andre Norton book was the first that I read. I do know that sometimes when we moved to a new town where the library didn’t have a clearly labeled science fiction/fantasy section, I would head to the card catalog and look up Norton to find out where to start. I do remember one of her books that I read over and over: Daybreak 2250 A.D..
I believe that I first read it in fourth grade. It was a hardback copy from the school library with the original title: Star Man’s Son. I found the copy with the blue and white cover and the alternate title in a used bookstore sometime in middle school. The novel is set in the mid-23rd Century, two hundred years after a nuclear disaster has destroyed civilization. The protagonist, Fors, is the son of a Star Man, who have been scouring the earth for old technological treasures, books, and the like that they are preserving as part of a plan to eventually rebuild a civilization. Fors is a mutant with silver hair and mild psychic powers who is ostracized by the other Star Men after his father dies. He has a series of adventures with his unnaturally intelligent cat, Lyra, eventually proving himself worth of carrying the distinctive star badge of his father’s people.
Th novel was originally written in 1952, and was intended for the young adult market, so the plot and setting don’t seem terribly original now. But she described Fors’s and Lyra’s world vividly enough to seize my imagination. Having a hero be a young person who is rejected by his own people for being a freak is something that most kids could related to, let alone a closeted gay nerd who loved science growing up with creationist fundamentalists. And what kid wouldn’t want to go on fantastic adventures with a kickass telepathic cat as a companion?
Despite the fact that I read it so many times, the specifics of the plot never stay with me. I remember the setting, the hero, and the cat. There were various encounters with less civilized tribal cultures, but I don’t remember any specifics. I don’t even remember what discovery he made at the end to earn his place with the Star Men.
But I loved that book!
Double-book of The Beast Master and Star Hunter (Click to embiggen)Then there were the pair of Norton books that were released as a double-book. These were an interesting idea: publish two different books back-to-back (one was literally upside-down compared to the other) and sell for the usual paperback price. This was one of the few I ever found where both books were by the same author. Others usually had one author I had heard of on one side, and a complete unknown on the other. This is not a scan of my copy. When I found mine for sale extra cheap at a used book store, it was missing the Beast Master cover completely, and had maybe half of the other one still intact. Someone had attempted a repair with book tape and some cardstock. I had never known what the original Beast Master cover looked like until the age of the internet.
It is important to note that this book pre-dated the movie of similar name by many years. And the movie bears almost no connection to the plot of the book. I understand that Ms. Norton received a licensing fee for the movie, but I don’t know whether it was meant to be an adaptation. Anyway, Norton’s novel is about a man of Navajo descent named Hosteen Storm who has a telepathic link to certain animals. Storm and his companions end up on a colony world after leaving the military. Star Hunter, on the hand, is about a young guy who discovers he has another person’s memories and a bunch of people are out to get him.
Just skimming the titles in the very long bibliography of Norton’s work on Wikipedia brings a fond smile to my face. Whether she was writing science fiction or fantasy (or the occasional historical novel), she created scores of imaginary worlds that I wanted to run away to, and gave me characters I wanted to be like. A recurring theme was the outsider who finds or makes their own niche in the world. Her stories made me believe that it didn’t matter if people called me a freak, or said I was irrelevant or unsuitable because of some arbitrary standard—what mattered was what I did with the hand fate dealt me.
That was an inclusive message I desperately needed to hear growing up. Fortunately, Andre Norton was there to show me the way.
Font Folly 