All posts by fontfolly

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About fontfolly

I've loved reading for as long as I can remember. I write fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and nonfiction. For more than 20 years I edited and published an anthropomorphic sci-fi/space opera literary fanzine. I attend and work on the staff for several anthropormorphics, anime, and science fiction conventions. I live near Seattle with my wonderful husband, still completely amazed that he puts up with me at all.

I’m not the only skeptic

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My earlier post about the apology issued by Exodus International President, Alan Chambers, just hours before they officially announced they were shutting down wasn’t the only one that expressed skepticism. But there were a lot more places out their taking only a very superficial read of the apology on the first couple of days.

I don’t claim any special knowledge. All I did was read every word of the long apology as posted by Mr Chambers, and then read a live blog from the conference of the closure announcement, and then read the entire official statement published by the organization. A simple, literal reading of each entire statement reveals that, contrary to how some people reported it, they are not renouncing their condemnation of homosexuality they are not abandoning their insistence that gay people must either be celibate or enter into an opposite sex sham relationship to be “right with god,” and they are not apologizing for the harm they caused.

But don’t take my word for it:

John Shore: An open letter to Exodus International’s super-remorseful Alan Chambers. His first money quote:

And congratulations on all the press coverage your apology is receiving!… Why, it’s almost like you’ve been strategically planning your heartfelt apology for months!

But he gets bonus points for:

…you’re no different from the guy saying, “I apologize for being the leader of a group of white-hooded KKK guys who burned a cross on your lawn. That was wrong. You n—–s still need to go, of course. But we’re gonna stop with the hoods and the cross burnings. People just don’t get behind that the way they used to. So we’re gonna regroup, lose the name ‘KKK,’ and come up with a more acceptable way of promoting what we believe. Isn’t that great?!”

When I read that one to my husband, he said, “Yeah! We’re not going to wear those white hoods any more. Now we’re dressing up in blue hood. Blue’s a warm, welcoming, friendly color, right? What? You say they still look like the same old white hoods? No! They’re blue! It’s just a very, very pale blue…”

And how about Emily K- LGBTQ’s to The Organization Once Known as Exodus International: It’s Still Your Move:

An apology from an organization with a history of purging content from their website without an official redaction will always ring hollow. Closing it down and launching a new one like the last one didn’t exist won’t cut it. Let me be clear: There’s nothing shameful about admitting the terrible things you wrote and said were wrong, and taking full responsibility for them. In fact, this is an honorable and difficult thing to do. The problem is, the people who once led Exodus haven’t done this yet.

Then there’s Jane Brazell: Exodus International: harm repackaged is still harm, where it is noted:

We lost friends, family, and community; we were told that we would not inherit the Kingdom of God – that we were no longer a child of God. That’s what I wanted to hear from him. I wanted to hear that he sees LGBTQ people as holy, that our relationships are holy, that we are in fact beloved children of God and that nothing will separate us from that love. I wanted to hear that he recognizes the courage it took for us to come out and live wholly before God and the world. I didn’t hear that…

And then here’s one where the person ignores all the parts of the apology where they said, “if some people felt pain” rather than “we harmed people,” but she still isn’t giving them a pass: Rev. Dr. Cindi Love: Apologies Are Too Late When the Damage Is Already Done. Money quote:

“Unfortunately, they misled the people they claimed to want to “help.” Last year, Exodus President Alan Chambers reported that 99.9 percent of people who engaged in reparative therapy did not change their orientation.”

And, as several of us predicted, they’ve already announced the formation of a new ministry to create “mutually transforming communities” which they plan to call ReducedFear.Org. Transforming? Right, totally different than “curing” or “repairing” or “changing”—oh, wait, it isn’t.

But it is exactly the opposite of “accepting” or “affirming.”

The opposite of shoving

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I told a story earlier this week about someone freaking out at a picture of my husband on my desk many years ago. Now I want to tell you about a completely different experience.

It was some years later. The company had grown, been bought by a giant corporation, split in two, and the division I worked for was sold off to another big company that set us up to run semi-independently. They hired some new people to fill out the most decimated departments. One of the new people hired was a young computer engineer, fresh out of college from Eastern Europe.

One day shortly after he joined our company, Eduard, the young engineer, was setting up my account in the new bug tracking system, showing me how to log in, and so forth. So he was looking over my shoulder while telling me what to do next. When we finished, he pointed to the photo frame on my desk. It was in a very similar location as the previous picture had been. Many things had changed since the previous experience with another engineer. Ray had died, and I had since met, fallen in love with, and now lived with Michael. My office was in a different building, the equipment and furniture were different.

So the man in the picture, the picture frame, the desk, and so on were all different. The only thing that was the same was that I still kept the picture at a spot where I could see it, and where other people could usually ignore it.

He asked in his heavily accented voice: “Who is… Is that your, uh, husband? Partner? I don’t know the word.”

I told him it was my hubby, Michael, and that I never knew what word to use, either. Boyfriend, partner, husband all had difficulties back then.

“Does he work in computers, too?”

I explained that he did computer support for a number of clients, and also worked for a computer refurbisher.

“How did you meet?”

I briefly told him about the science fiction convention where we’d met.

“It’s good to have things in common. I met my wife in the hiking club in college. We both love climbing mountains.”

And so I asked him a few questions about her. It was a simple, brief, very human conversation.

Over the course of the next few years we worked on a lot of software products together. Eduard and his wife had a couple of sons. He started organizing snowboarding excursions for the other employees. He bought a motorcycle and started riding it in to work (and organizing long groups rides with others on summer weekends). He rose to a management position. He was one of the smartest, nicest people I’d ever worked with. One of his best traits was that he accepted everyone at face value, more concerned about getting the job done right than worrying about whether who was the “proper” person for the job.

I can’t tell you how many engineering managers I’ve met who pigeonhole non-engineers the moment they meet them. They assume all tech writers know nothing about technology (and don’t really want to know), but only worry about things such as Oxford commons, split infinitives, and making text look pretty. With that sort, any time I made intelligent comments on specifications, or suggested workable fixes to problems, they would look at me as if I’d grown and second head and ask, “How do you know about that?”

Eduard wasn’t that way. When, for instance, we had to resurrect some old functionality in one codebase that hadn’t been used in many years, and I started explaining about how we had sampled which parts of the digital signal, he just started asking questions about the technology. It wasn’t until the end of our discussion that he asked how I knew it so well. When I told him I’d been the software tester on the project when we’d first developed the functionality, he just nodded and asked if I’d be willing to explain it to the engineers who had to re-create the functionality, and was I willing to review test plans.

Then one June Monday I was in the office, busy because I had some big deadlines looming. I had heard on the news about a late season blizzard that had struck nearby Mt Rainier days earlier, and how rescuers had had to retrieve two climbers who had gotten caught in the storm. One of them hadn’t survived.

It was quite a shock when I learned the climbers were Eduard and his wife. They were very experienced climbers. It had just been one of those times when nature reminds us just how small we are. They had had to dig in to take shelter, and as the storm raged on, Eduard had wrapped himself around his wife, using his body to shield her from the worst of the cold. He saved her, but it cost his life.

And that’s how this queer middle-aged man, from a very low-church Southern evangelical background wound up standing in a very high church, orthodox funeral mass surrounded by teary-eyed co-workers in the very unchurched Northwest a week later.

He had been raised in a culture that was much less gay-friendly than ours (which still isn’t terribly), but I had never felt the slightest hint of judgement or awkwardness from him. He had treated the discovery of my husband’s picture completely matter-of-factly, and any other conversations that drifted into family or related topics remained that way. He approached the world with an open mind and an open heart.

Because of the anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and the annual commemoration in many places with a Pride Parade, I always end up writing about gay rights or people who oppose them even more often than usual during June. But for the last few years, June also makes me think about Eduard—a straight guy with a wife, kids, and a predilection for adrenaline-pumping hobbies—who had reacted exactly the opposite as that other engineer upon seeing a simple picture of a man on my desk. Whereas the other guy had taken offense and demanded that I be punished and forbidden to have the picture in my office, Eduard had asked how we’d met.

I hold out hope for the day when Eduard’s open-hearted outlook on the world is the norm from straight guys everywhere.

Hardly a first step

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So, Exodus International, the oldest of the so-called ex-gay/reparative therapy ministries announced last night that they are closing down. A few hours before the announcement, which they made at a conference full of their members, the current president of the organization, Alan Chambers, issued an apology to the gay/lesbian/bi/trans community.

Other religious conservatives are angry, calling them sell-outs and worse.

A lot of other people at the other end of the political spectrum seem to be very surprised that most of us gay people aren’t jumping up and down with joy, accepting the apology, and saying that all is forgiven because someone has said they’re sorry. They are disappointed that we don’t seem to understand that saying you’re sorry is only the first step in the type of redemption and forgiveness model that the people who work for Exodus International have been raised in.

I agree that an apology is only the first step—and it is an important step—in the process of making amends. Except, in order to be that first step, the apology has to be for the actual wrong that you have committed. This apology is not that in the slightest.

The bulk of the apology is about incidental things. He apologizes that some (many) of the counsellors used the so-called therapy as a way to gratify their own sexual desires. He apologizes because some people “found a message rather than mission”—which may qualify as the most convoluted way to say, “if people were offended” ever. He apologizes for neglecting to mention in his own personal story that the so-called cure has never actually made his own attraction to members of the same sex go away. He apologizes for “failing to acknowledge the pain some people experienced.”

It goes on and on. But he never apologizes for the actual wrong: he never apologizes for lying, living the lie, or pressuring other people to live the same lie. In fact, he explicitly says that he is not apologizing for his “deeply held biblical beliefs.” And that’s the heart of the problem. They may be deeply held beliefs, but they aren’t biblical. Don’t go quoting that tired verse from Leviticus at me unless you’re prepared for a long lecture about declensions in Hebrew, and unless you’ve been willing to stone someone to death for the abomination of wearing clothes made of more than one kind of fabric, okay?

In their long announcement at the conference of their decision to close down, one of the board members said, “We’re not negating the ways God used Exodus to positively affect thousands of people…”

Except that nothing positive has ever been accomplished by this group. Nothing. Guilting, coercing, and bullying people into denying their feelings, luring them in with the false hope (and they’ve known it was a false hope for well more than a decade or two) of a “cure,” then handing them instead a lifetime without love, affection, or intimacy are not positive things. Bullying people until they commit suicide is not a positive thing. Encouraging parents to kick their gay children who don’t change after going through the torture they call therapy out on the street is not a positive thing.

I admit that I am not impartial. While I have never been through any of these therapies, I have had friends and relatives who did give them a try. Most of them survived. One wound up killing himself outright. Another essentially drank himself to death over the course of a few years. One cousin who went through ex-gay therapy has lived his entire life since alone, never dating anyone. He’s dependent on antidepressants and some other drug he once called his “temptation dampener.” I have no idea what the second drug actually is, because among the bewildering array of rules and restrictions he has continued to live under for years is a prohibition against talking unsupervised with anyone who is openly gay or who was supportive of him when he was “in the lifestyle.”

Other relatives have refused to accept me for who I am, and/or refused to welcome my husband (either Ray when he was still alive, or now more than a decade and a half after Ray’s death, Michael), precisely because that one cousin has “been able to change.”

The god they claim to believe in promised not just life, but life abundant. Living alone, constantly afraid of talking to the wrong person, afraid that a little emotional intimacy might lead to forbidden acts, only getting through the day with the help of drugs to kill the libido, and other drugs to kill the very natural depression that comes from living alone, afraid of any intimacy, and a drug-neutralized libido is not abundant life.

The truth is that Exodus and their ilk have lost the fight on a society-wide level. All of these anti-gay organizations have seen their donor pools shrink dramatically in the last few years. Support is dropping off even among many traditional conservative religious circles. Support is practically non-existent among teen and early-twenties aged evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. Surveys indicate that a major factor in many young adults leaving the churches in which they were raised is all the anti-gay rhetoric. The writing is on the wall. These guys aren’t shutting down because they’ve had a change of heart. They are shutting down in hopes of re-grouping and finding a new way to attract donors and supporters.

And to top it all off, their deflecting, delusional, and self-serving announcement about why they are closing ended by quoting a bible verse that used to be my favorite, John 16:33. They quoted a different translation than my preferred one. I’m going to stick with mine: “In the world you will face tribulation, but be of good cheer! For I have overcome the world.”

That may be what has angered me most about their non-apology. They have not faced tribulation, they are the tribulation others have faced. They have institutionalized bigotry, and turned it into a process which does not spread love and joy and forgiveness, but rather grinds people down with shame, fear, and lies. They are the very thing that their lord came to overcome, not the other way around.

If they ever realize that, if they ever apologize for being so very, very wrong, I might be willing to consider it their first step in a process by which they may eventually earn forgiveness.

But so far, they aren’t even looking in the right direction.

Shoving

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One day at a previous place of employment, the executive assistant to one of the founders of the company motioned me to come into her office and close the door behind me. “Before I tell you the whole story, I want you to know that everything’s been taken care of and you’re fine.”

This was not an auspicious beginning to a conversation. Particularly at work.

“An official complaint was filed against you,” she said, “claiming that you were shoving your ‘lifestyle’ in your co-workers’ faces by having an ‘explicit’ picture of your partner on your desk.” She had even made air quotes when she said lifestyle and explicit.

Yep, one of my co-workers had claimed I was fostering a hostile work environment. The photo was of my late husband, Ray. He was wearing a sweater and slacks—it was a silly Christmas sweater, to be exact. I had taken the picture on a Christmas Eve, at his mother’s house while we were there with all his siblings, their spouses, and our nieces and nephews, opening Christmas presents.

Not only wasn’t there anything remotely sexual, explicit or otherwise, in the photo, but I had the picture in a frame on my desk, tucked in next to one of my computer monitors, behind a standing file-sorter. No one could see the picture on my desk unless you were sitting in my chair, or had come into my office, around behind my desk, and were looking over my shoulder.

Because an official harassment/hostile work environment complaint had been filed, and the company had adopted a fairly rigorous anti-sexual harassment policy a couple of years previously, several members of the committee responsible for investigating said complaints had found excuses to come into my office and talk to me, to try to figure out what picture the complainant had been talking about. They had only found the one inoffensive picture in my office. To confirm, they had gotten the complainant to describe the location of said picture frame.

So, the complaint was not being sustained. Someone had talked to the person to inform him that there was nothing untoward about the photo. They were telling me because the policy required notification that an investigation had happened.

I was surprised. I tried really hard not to suddenly become suspicious of all my co-workers, and put the whole thing out of my mind.

At a later point, through a series of events way too complicated to go into at this juncture, I was finally told which co-worker it was who had claimed that my one, modest photograph of my partner was “hostilely shoving” my sexuality in other people’s faces. It was an engineer who had covered an entire wall of his office with photographs of his wife and all five of their kids, including more than one photo which had been taken in a delivery room obviously only minutes after the birth, not to mention wedding pictures, and photos of himself and the wife at various beach vacations dressed in skimpy swimwear. And, of course, there was more than one picture of them embracing and/or kissing each other.

And I was the one “shoving”?

It is, of course, the most common excuse people make for their own bigotry. “I have nothing against gay people, but do they have to flaunt their sexuality all the time?” They take any public evidence we make of our relationships—holding hands in public, adopting a child together, mentioning the name of our significant other in casual conversation, listing our significant other on an insurance form, or placing a simple photograph on our desk—and label it “flaunting” or “shoving” or “explicitly sexual.”

Yet they have no qualms at all plastering their wedding announcements in newspapers, setting up gift registrations for weddings, expecting us to contribute to baby shower presents in the workplace, or going out for drinks with a male co-worker on his last work day before a wedding, or buying cookies or candy or other fundraisers for their children’s extracurricular activities at the workplace, or bringing their children to the workplace. They expect family discounts at parks and museums and public festivals, plaster the pictures of their kids on their computer screens and around their cubicles at work, not to mention expecting tax breaks, financial aid programs to help send their kids to college, and insurance benefits that cover their spouses and kids.

If none of that is flaunting their own sexuality, then neither is ours. Of course, this cartoon that my friend, Sheryl, shared with me, sums it all up better than my ramble.

Addendum: I decided I needed to balance this out with another story of a very different reaction someone had to seeing a picture of my sweetie on my desk, so I’ve posted “The opposite of shoving.”

Privatization vs Free Market

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Some years ago a friend was complaining about the cost of a particular computer accessory. Another friend said, “You just need to encourage people to buy them. As soon as demand goes up, prices will come down.”

I couldn’t quite believe what I heard, so I asked the second friend to repeat it. Then asked a couple of follow-up questions, to clarify. Yep, her understanding of the Law of Supply and Demand was: “When demand goes up, suppliers figure out how to lower prices.”

So I had to explain that the Laws of Supply and Demand describes how economic equilibrium changes in a competitive market. If demand goes up, while nothing else changes, then price will also go up, not down. One way to get to the lower prices is for demand to get high enough that more suppliers see a chance to make a profit and jump into the market, leading to supply going up, which tends to push prices down, which in turn may make some suppliers try to find ways to more cheaply produce their supply (in order to preserve their profits), et cetera. The end result may be that prices go down, but it takes a few back and forths of the seesaw before that happens.

Her response: “Well, my major was Literature, so of course I never took any Economics classes in college.”

I told her that I’d learned about supply and demand in middle school social studies. And then been taught it again in high school civics.

“Really? What does economics have to do with society or government?”

Watching how my state’s liquor privatization adventure has played out brought that flabbergasting question back to mind.

For a long time, liquor sales and distribution in Washington state were regulated by a state-appointed board. The board had been set up in response to the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which repealed Federal Prohibition and sent the regulation of the production, distribution, and sale of alcohol back to the states. Among the goals the board was tasked with were to provide uniform pricing and uniform availability throughout the state, as there was a feeling that rural residents had been gouged by suppliers in the past.

There were many other factors in play. The complex and sometimes very dysfunctional relationship society has with the use of intoxicants, the moral absolutism some people project on intoxicants, as well as a tendency to look for simple solutions to complex problems (which had led to Prohibition in the first place) insured that.

There had been many previous attempts to privatize the distribution of alcohol. Most of the legislative attempts bogged down over economic issues, rather than moral arguments. Timid legislators have increasingly turned to cigarette and alcohol tax increases to close gaps in state revenue, as it is harder to rally the public against a tax increase on substances that many feel were sinful, and which very few feel are necessities. There is also the fact that some (and sometimes most) of the costs of individual misuse of alcohol falls on the public, not just the person(s) directly involved.

Since a privatization initiative nearly passed a couple of years ago, the legislature did finally pass a law setting up a bidding process to open alcohol distribution to private companies and begin the process of disentangling the state from the process. It would have been interesting to see how that worked out.

Unfortunately, some of the larger retail corporations, who had been donors to the previous initiative, felt the state’s process was a bit too intent on encouraging competition, so they dumped money into another initiative, which included language giving existing large grocery stores a virtual monopoly on the sale of alcohol.

This time, the voters passed it.

There are a couple of provisions meant to allow some competition. People could bid on the right to take over old state liquor store franchises. And restaurants and bars could turn to other distributors, including out-of-state distributors.

Except that the large grocery store chains have used a combination of existing lease agreements or the threat of moving their stories to prevent landlords for letting the new, smaller liquor stores open. And, surprise! Surprise! Surprise! Prices have gone up while selection has gone down.

Imagine! We went from a non-profit system owned by the public and charged with selling and distributing a popular (and sometimes problematic) product to a system run by for-profit companies, and the prices went up. Who could have possibly foreseen that?

Things like the law of supply and demand only work in a free market (or one in which all sellers act on a level playing field). Privatization is not the same thing as a free market.

Now, those same grocery companies who essentially wrote the initiative and bought the election, are lobbying the legislature to repeal those few protections in the initiative intended to keep the distribution channel to restaurants and bars open. They want to be able to act as distributors, without paying for distribution licenses or taxes.

There are good reasons for some regulation and taxation to be involved. As I already mentioned, the costs of the misuse of alcohol fall disproportionately on the community rather than just the people who misuse it. Any product which is mass produced for ingesting by the people who buy it carry risks that are on a completely different scale than buying produce at a local farmer’s market. We need to have systems that can impose penalties when manufacturers or sellers negligently or recklessly cause harm to their customers.

Privatization can be made to work, but replacing a monopoly that was directly answerable to the public with several near-monopolies whose primary goal is to extract as much money from the public with as little effort as possible is not the answer.

How do you figure?

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A week or so ago a prominent anti-gay person stated in an interview that 30% of all characters on TV shows now are gay. That’s horrible, he said, in part because clearly no more than 4% of the population is gay, and the huge numbers on TV were there to desensitize normal people to the existence of gay people. He also talked about how happy and loving gay people as shown on this TV shows are a myth, and went on to assert the gay people are too busy bullying kids to be living productive lives.

Setting aside the fact that even when a Republican administration looked into the issue of kids being bullied it found that the vast majority of the bullying was from straight-identifying adults and kids, and that it was directed at kids who were perceived as being gay or were otherwise non-gender-conforming, his claim is so ludicrous, I’m surprised that even the conservative publication who conducted the interview managed to recreate it without dying of embarrassment.

Also, we’ll just ignore the 4% assertion, as that topic is worthy of a post all of its own.

There are reasons I majored in Math in college, and one of those is that I can’t just leave wrong-sounding numbers alone. I feel compelled to try to figure out just how wrong they are.

I could simply accept GLAAD’s (the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) report last year that found about 4.4% of regular characters on scripted network shows this last season were Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender. If GLAAD is correct, than the anti-gay guy’s number is nearly 7 times as high as it ought to be.

But I wanted to dig into the numbers a bit more.

So, I searched the web for listings of prime time network television shows this last season, and tried to figure out which ones should count (it seems obvious that sports and news shows shouldn’t be included, but then I noticed in the interview that the bigot seemed to be including contestants in talent shows as characters, so it wasn’t completely clear that only scripted comedies and dramas were what he was talking about). I decided that my calculations based on web searches weren’t very scientific on my own, (at one point I had a number of 4224 regular and recurring characters, and that seemed as ridiculous at the bigots numbers).

The GLAAD study has slightly more rigorous methods. They came up with 97 scripted programs on the five broadcast networks, and they only counted characters whose actors qualify (under union rules) as playing regulars. That led to a total of 701 characters, of which 31 were identified as non-heterosexual. If the bigot’s percentage was correct, that should have been 210 non-heterosexual characters.

Which next made me wonder where the bigot was getting those 179 characters from?

It’s possible, of course, that he simply made up the number in order to shock the ultra-conservative people from whom he is constantly pleading for donations. But since he’s the president of a federally registered non-profit that identifies itself as promoting morality, that can’t possibly be the case, can it?

Then I thought about what his life is like: giving all these interviews, sending out the constant emails and mailers pleading for money, leading protestors outside legislatures and such, staging press conferences in front of civil rights offices, pretending to be addressing a huge crowd of sympathizers as his employees record the speech for YouTube, and carefully hiding the fact that the number of reporters covering the event far outnumbered the crowd (and most of the crowd were his employees!), and thinking up new ways to repeat the same tired, debunked lies on cable news shows. All of that takes an enormous amount of effort. There is no way he has the time to watch TV shows!

Which led me to realize that he probably spends more time reading LGBTQ news sites and blogs than I do. And it is the case that when they cover pop culture, those sites disproportionately focus on queer characters, or actors and actresses who are either gay or allies. So if one’s primary source of information was from those, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that nearly a third of the characters in all these shows were non-heterosexual.

I hope he doesn’t ever wander into somewhere like FanFiction.Net or the like! Because if you believed all the fanfiction out there, less than 3% of any characters in any show or series in exclusively heterosexual. That possibility might give him a fatal shock!

Daddy issues

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I usually avoid writing about Father’s Day.

Lots of people have great dads. Some people have more than one awesome dad. Why should I ruin their special day to tell their awesome dad just how great he is by talking about the other kinds of dads? So the few times I have written anything about the subject of Father’s Day, I’ve instead focused on my experiences with my awesome grandfathers and my wonderful great-grandfather. Because they were great and awesome, and I consider myself extremely lucky to have had them in my life.

But I’m not the only person who did not have a great dad. I’m not the only person who cringes when certain statements or stereotypes of fatherhood are trotted out with the implication that every single father who ever existed was a shining paragon of wisdom, hard work, and sacrifice. I’m not the only one who has been chastised (sometimes by complete strangers) with statements like, “He’s your father! Can’t you at least show a little gratitude for the things he did right?”

Besides, reminding people that bad fathers exist actually makes all the great dads more remarkable. It reminds us that being a good father is not automatic, it doesn’t just naturally happen, and it isn’t easy. Being a good father takes work. Those fathers who are great, awesome, and wonderful deserve to be appreciated and loved and praised for the remarkable people they are.

Bad fathers come in many forms. When I was young, my father was verbally and physically abusive. That abuse resulted in broken bones or wounds requiring stitches on more than one occasion. The abuse was always worst when he was drunk, and he seemed to be drunk an awful lot. After my parents divorced, Mom, my sister, and I moved 1200 miles away.

Dad remarried and started a second family. A series of accidents led him to admit he had a drinking problem, so he joined AA. Certain relatives kept telling me that he had changed since getting sober. He was a completely different person, they said, and I should give him another chance. He never sounded any different on the phone, or the couple of times I saw him in person afterward, but they were around him more often than me. I don’t know whether I just wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, or if I like to believe that everyone is capable of redemption, or maybe I just prefer stories with happy endings, but for a while I told people that he’d straightened his life out and I wished him well.

I eventually learned that the abuse never stopped. The alcoholism was never the cause, it was just the excuse. There was a period of over a year where at least one of his other kids had restraining orders out on him, forbidding him from being around his own grandchildren without supervision. In the few conversations we have now, he still holds all the racist, misogynist, and generally angry opinions about everyone else, blaming everything wrong in his life on other people.

Yes, he has some good points. He kept a roof over his families’ heads, put food on the table, and helped out when certain kinds of problems arose. He is capable of the occasional gesture of affection—sometimes coming through in surprising ways. But those things don’t make up for the abusing, the controlling, the blaming and shaming, or the refusal to take responsibility for the damage he causes.

I don’t hate him. I fear becoming him. I was definitely on the road to becoming him at one point. I’m glad that I had friends who were willing to stand up to me and tell me I was turning into a verbal bully.

Counseling help. Friends who pointed out when I backslid, but remained friends, helped. Coming out of the closet helped an incredible amount. All that energy expended hiding who I was, plus the fear of being discovered, and the anger about the presumed rejection was like an over-pressurized boiler ready to explode. I seem to have avoided that path, though I still worry about it. Any times when certain tones of voice come out of my mouth, for instance.

Dad’s issues are different than mine. I know some of the sources of his anger and resentment. I’m sure there are more extenuating circumstance than the ones I’m aware of. It does give me sympathy for his situation. I sincerely hope that someday he finds a way out of them and into a place of peace. I do wish him well.

I don’t hold massive grudges against him. Truth be told, I seldom think about him at all. I think it’s sad that we don’t have the kind of relationship that we’re supposed to be thankful for on this day especially.

But I’m glad that many other people do.

Recalling

life, , ,

I was listening to a story on NPR years ago. An author had set out to write a book about his immigrant grandparents. Among other places, he traveled to the village in Northern Ireland where his grandparents had lived before immigrating.

He visited an infamous tree in a field just outside of town. It was infamous because once when his mother was a little girl, a “local boy” who was involved in one of the Irish Independence movements, had been lynched in that tree. And for many days afterward, the local British soldiers stationed guards on it round the clock, to prevent anyone from cutting the body down and giving the young man a proper burial.

The author’s mother, grandparents, and aunts and uncles had all told the story many times. His mother had a particularly moving way of describing herself as a small child, clutching her own mother’s hand as the stood in the tall grass, close enough to see, but far enough that the soldiers would ignore them. His grandmother had agreed, even explaining how she had argued with some neighbor about whether her daughter should see such things.

The author was able to verify all the particulars of the young man’s lynching, his long delayed funeral, and so forth. It was that tree, in that field where it had happened. There was only one problem with the identical story that all of this relatives who had been there told. The young man had been lynched exactly 6 days after the author’s mother was born. So, while it was possible that his grandmother had carried her new born baby out to the field to see the atrocity, there was no way his mother could have remembered it. And certainly, as a six-day-old infant, she would not have been standing on her own two feet in the tall grass, clutching her mother’s hand.

The author realized that what must have actually happened is that some years after the incident, his grandmother had taken his mother, her young daughter, out to the field in question, to look at the empty tree and hear the story of the horrible thing the soldiers had done. It’s quite possible there were several such trips, before the family left Ireland and moved to America. The description his mother had heard from her parents, other older relatives, and neighbors, of the body hanging in the tree with the soldiers standing guard, had evoked a vivid image, which his mother had interposed onto her actual memories of visiting the field.

And the grandparents and other relatives similarly modified their own memories when, over the years, they would tell the story to new acquaintances, and the author’s mother (first as a young girl), would interject her own recollection of the day. The first few times perhaps one uncle might have said, “Really? I thought you would be too young to remember,” but our memories don’t have timestamps on them, and it’s easy to lose track of exactly how long one event (the gruesome death of a neighbor) took place after another (the birth of a niece).

The author wound up talking to a lot of experts on memory, and instead of writing a book about his ancestors, wrote a book about memory, and how it grows, mutates, and reshapes itself to fit our perception of the meanings of our life.

I had my own rather dramatic experience in realizing that I had edited my own memories. I have a couple of friends, J and K, that I have known for over thirty years. When I first met them, they had recently broken up after having dated for a while, but they were trying to keep it amicable. Over the years they were both part of a large group of my friends that attending sci fi cons together and participated in related activities. For a while, J lived in California. During that time, K started dating L. K and L broke up. A few years later, J had moved back to Washington, she and K started dating, and eventually married.

Some years after that, I was telling another friend about this particularly funny event that had happened at a sci fi con, and mentioned both J and K’s parts. J didn’t remember the incident at all. I told a few more details, K chimed in with some supporting evidence. J admitted it sounded like something she would have said, and we moved on to another topic.

And then it hit me. Feeling horrified, I turned to J and said, “Oh, I am so sorry…” She started laughing, because she figured it out from the look on my face. It hadn’t been J experiencing the fiasco with us, it had been L. I apologized probably a bit too profusely, because J laughed and said that K did the same thing all the time.

I spent a while afterward trying to remember those couple of years when K had been dating L and also hanging out with our gang. I could only recall four incidents, total. All of them were ones which, from my perspective, exemplified L’s worst personality traits. I couldn’t recall one single incident in which she was not being pretentious, condescending, or disdainful.

I know that can’t be accurate. No one is awful all the time, and K would never be comfortable hanging out with someone who was, let alone nearly getting married to her. Obviously, I made the decision that K’s involvement with L had been a mistake of such proportions that I wished it hadn’t happened. And my subconscious has dutifully excised any pleasant memories of L from my memory. Any memories that have been kept, have had J substituted for L, in accordance with the other judgement I came to that J and K belong together and always have.

It was disturbing when I first realized it had happened. I still find it disturbing that I have to wrestle with my own memories when talking about events with these friends. I can make myself remember that it was L, not J, in the one story. But it makes me wonder what else in that memory has been emphasized, or obscured, or maybe borrowed from some other similar experiences.

It’s scary to realize just how unreliable one’s own recollection can be.

Telling

writing, , ,

Whenever we tell someone about something that happened to us, we’re telling a story. Humans tell stories to make sense of the world. And even when we think we are just recounting what happened, we’re actually making dozens of unconscious editorial decisions—emphasising some details, omitting others—to put a particular spin on the events in order to give them meaning.

For example, one morning I was a little early to my bus stop, and I decided to run into the drug store next to the stop to pick up one item. I thought I had enough time. But there was only one clerk working check out, and an older gentleman in front of me had a small number of items, but a huge number of coupons, and his transaction took so long that I missed the bus.

One time when I told that story, I gave a summary similar to the above paragraph, and concluded with a self-depracating comment of how silly it had been for me to risk missing my bus, when there was another drugstore close to my office where I could have stopped after getting downtown.

But the day of the incident, I was annoyed about missing the bus, so that night when I told the story, I went into great detail about how the man in front of me had argued and fussed with the cashier over every single price that rang up, and which coupons were expired, which ones applied to a slightly different item than the one he had, and particularly the long discussion he had with her about one bag of holiday-themed Hershey Kisses® that he was certain he had a new coupon for at home, and why she should let him have it at the lower price and how when she refused, which meant he berated her for a while before finally ordering her to keep the bag behind the counter because he was going to walk home, find the coupon, and come back.

And before he walked out the door he came back three times to interrupt her attempt to check my one item out to warn her about not putting that bag of candy back on the shelf.

Both accounts are absolutely true. But they sound like very different events, don’t they?

Because the day it happened, I was upset about missing my bus, and so the meaning of the events was how another person’s stubborness had messed up my day. Later, as I was walking past the second drugstore one morning after getting off the bus, I realized that the earlier incident had been my own fault for not thinking things through and planning better.

Same events, different perspective, different stories…

Why do we need that?

society, , ,

Nine out of ten Americans think that it is already illegal to fire someone just because that someone is gay.

It so happens that 21 states do include sexual orientation in their anti-discrimination laws. But that means that 29 states don’t. Of those, only 16 include sexual identity in their anti-discrimination laws. That means 34 states don’t.

A bit over a decade ago I remember when a neighboring state was considering adding sexual orientation to its anti-discrimination law, that one of the legislators on the committee considering the bill had argued rather emphatically that it wasn’t needed because, “Most gays don’t have kids, so they have a lot more disposable income and can afford to sue if they think they’ve been discriminated against.”

No matter how many of his colleagues or the experts explained that no one can sue for discrimination if the law doesn’t say its prohibited, he wouldn’t budge from his position.

In all likelihood the legislator was being disingenuous. He said he wasn’t voting for it for that reason, what he really meant is that he thought discrimination based on sexual orientation is something we need more of, not less. But he knew that he couldn’t be that blunt without alienating some voters.

There are people who genuinely think that no such laws are needed, because discrimination is already illegal. Or they think that no one really feels any animosity for gay people, except a few crazy people. Or my favorite, they think laws aren’t needed because laws don’t stop people from hating, and wouldn’t I rather work for someone who liked me?

The last one is exactly the same logic as saying, “We don’t need laws against theft, because a law won’t stop someone who is determined to steal from stealing. And wouldn’t you rather keep your property because people wanted you to keep it?”

Sure, we’d all prefer it if everyone did only good and kind things to each other, and that no one ever got robbed. But since that isn’t the world we live in, we have a system of justice by which people who commit robbery will be punished if they are caught. We have processes in place where property can be recovered and returned to its rightful owner. Not all of the time, but we make an effort. People who have been robbed can file insurance claims, and depending on what is stolen or how much the theft disrupts their lives, society has a variety of methods to assist the victim to recover.

Similarly, laws about wrongful termination don’t prevent an employer being a jerk to any employee for any reason. But we have processes by which a wrongfully discharged employee can get assistance to tide them over until they find a new job. We have processes by which people can file grievances and employers may face fines or judgements or simply higher fees.

And an anti-discrimination law that protects sexual orientation doesn’t just protect gay people. It also means that straight people have the same avenues of recourse if they believe a gay manager has discriminated against them. And however unlikely you might think that is to happen, if you agree that it would be wrong for a gay person to refuse to hire or promote or continue to employ someone simply because the person was straight, then that means you think the sexual orientation alone isn’t adequate reason to fire someone.

Which means if you don’t support the law, you’re not just enabling bigots, you’re being a hypocrite.