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.

Forgotten or Unknown?

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Our collective memory can be frightfully shallow.

Take, for instance, an on-line discussion I was in recently where there were people who weren’t aware that not that many years ago it was illegal to be gay. By which I don’t just mean that the notion of gay marriage didn’t exist, but that if the authorities found out you were gay, they could send you to prison. I had to tell them of an acquaintance who had been arrested for indecency back in 1970 for kissing his boyfriend in the wrong neighborhood. That meant that he didn’t just have a criminal record, but a sexual offense (albeit a misdemeanor).

Note that he was not arrested for rape, attempted rape, or anything like that. Chris was 21 years old, his boyfriend was 24, they were consenting adults who had just left a gay bar together. It was late at night, and they were making out in the boyfriend’s car near Chris’s dorm at the University of Washington. Yes, they were here in a city with a reputation as being ultra liberal. But they were two men kissing, and that was something society could not abide in 1970!

If I recall correctly, Chris said his boyfriend lost his job because of the arrest, and had a difficult time finding a new one. Chris didn’t begin to run into problems getting hired himself until a few years later, after he graduated and started looking for more substantial jobs than the starving-student-type of employment he’d had before.

He wound up working as a hair stylist, saved up his pennies, and eventually opened his own shop. It hadn’t been what he’d meant his career to be, but he made do.

Contrast that with something I witnessed during my own college days (some years later): one of my dormmates convinced a bunch of us to go with him one night to a park that was near the school. I have completely forgotten what the purpose of the excursion was, now, but we got a bit lost and stumbled upon a guy and a gal who were having sex under a tree.

It was long after dark, they were off of any paths, behind some bushes, and they were clearly trying not to be seen or heard.

We hurried away before the angry guy could do more than yell at us.

Not much further, we encountered a cop, who stopped us and asked us what we were doing in the park after dark. There was a point where I thought we were all going to be showing him our student IDs or something, but something one of the guys said made the cop grin and ask us if we had run into anyone doing something they oughtn’t. And then he made a reference to the size of the girl’s breasts.

It was clear he had seen them, as well, but had decided not to do anything about it. I think he implied that he had been sent to the park because of complaints about such activity, and he thought it was a waste of time, since no one was being hurt.

I suspect the cops reaction would have been very different if it had been two guys.

I’ve been running into a lot of people, when discussing issues such as marriage equality, the Violence Against Women Act, or wage disparity, who are completely unaware of just how recently things that they currently think of as mere fruatrations were either mandated or at least aided and abetted by the law.

For instance, up until the mid 70s, a married women did not have a legal right to withhold sex from her husband. Even if they were living separated, in the midst of divorce proceedings, and he had been witnessed physically abusing her many times, if he forced her to have sex she couldn’t get him convicted of rape. Heck, most of the time she couldn’t get him charged. Finally, a woman who had attempted to get the rape included in the assault charges against her husband (ex-husband by the time it went to trial), managed to appeal the decision not to include the charges up to a federal judge who agreed: if she says “no,” it’s rape.

That didn’t cause a sudden change in the law or practice in this regard, but it was the very first recognition that in the U.S. legal system that a wife’s body wasn’t literally and entirely the property of her husband to do with as he pleased. And that only happened a mere 36 years ago.

There are still laws on the books related to that notion. My favorite are the “alienation of affection” laws. If you look up the topic online now, all you will find are articles that refer to the versions of the laws as they have been altered in response to legal challenges. So wikipedia, for example, says that the laws allow a spouse to file a lawsuit against a third party alleged to be responsible for the failure of the marriage.

The original laws allowed only the husband to file a lawsuit against another person for “malicious conduct that contributed to or caused the loss of affection.” The most common malicious conduct was, of course, seducing her into having an affair. For a long time a wife could not file a similar lawsuit against someone she believed she could prove had acted to alienate her husband’s affections. In the last several decades, most of these laws that have remained on the books have been revised to be gender-neutral, which I suppose is an improvement.

The problem is that while the original justification of the laws was assumption that a wife’s body (and affection, et cetera) were the property of the husband and he could expect the legal system to protect his property rights, the gender-neutral versions still assume a property rights relationship. If you need the law the force your partner to love you, that is not love. Okay, successful lawsuits under these laws don’t end up with orders to anyone to go back to loving their spouse, but when the law is able to inflict punishment because someone has fallen out of love, the principle is the same.

There’s going to be a lot of talk on the news and around the web this week where people are emphatically insisting the marriage has been an unchanging institution for all of human history, and that’s pure nonsense. In the last five decades alone in this country we have redefined marriage in several ways:

  • so that it includes interracial couples,
  • so that it includes persons previously considered less than full citizens because of certain mental and medical conditions,
  • so that even prisoners on death row must be allowed into the institution if they want, and,
  • so that a wife’s body is not treated as the legal property of her husband.

Over the course of five decades before that we have legally redefined it so that a couple who have realized the marriage was a mistake could end it without having to prove that one spouse was abusive, or go through other legal hoops to satisfy society that the marriage was over.

In the century before that we have legally redefined it so that people didn’t have to get the approval of a church (and before that, the official state church) in order to get married, allowing people who were raised in different faiths to get married, as well as allowing those of no faith at all in.

In the last few centuries we’ve redefined marriage in a way that almost no one realizes was never an integral part of the institution: we made marriage about love. For most of human history marriage has been a matter of creating/reinforcing family alliances, securing the orderly inheritance of property, and/or politics. The notion that two people would meet, fall in love, and decide all on their own to get married has only been around for a few centuries.

So any so-called defenders of traditional marriage who mention a relationship of mutual love and respect is not talking about a very old tradition, at all.

Yes, the notion that two people of the same gender might be the ones who fall in love is new for a lot of people, but when looked at in comparison to all the other ways that marriage has changed, it’s actually only a very minor refinement.

A real pink-neck sensibility

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It happens to the best of us: trying to write is a complete bust, and when you try to read your brain just can’t seem to hold the thought from the beginning of a paragraph to the end. You can’t concentrate, but you’re not sleepy, and so you wind up either surfing the internet or surfing channels.

A few years ago I was doing that one late weekend night and I came across a comedian doing standup. He was a big guy with a shaved head and wearing a football jersey telling a joke about why he loves the series, Cops. Cops happens to be one of my least favorite shows, for exactly the reasons he was joking about it, but he made me laugh, so I kept watching.

A few minutes later he mentions that he’s gay, and then makes a bunch of self-depracating jokes about how difficult it is for a gay guy who looks like him to get a date. Which made me laugh a bit more—and not just because my equally non-stereotypical look had made dating unpleasant back in the day. He made some more jokes about growing up in Texas in a Baptist family, then summed up the routine with a comment, “Folks look at me and think I’m a real redneck, but I’m really a pinkneck, which isn’t all that different.”

I had to do a little on-line sleuthing to find out who he was, since I had missed his introduction, and the show went to a commercial break and moved on to the next comedian without repeating his name. Scott Kennedy, it was a name I hoped I would remember.

Sometime after that I read a story online somewhere about how Scott had formed a group to entertain troops. He had worked with the USO a few times, being the son of a veteran and a military school graduate himself, he felt strongly about supporting the men and women serving their country. He called it, “Giving them a piece of home.”

But the USO organizers didn’t like to take the entertainers into dangerous places. Scott thought those were the troops that needed it most, so working with some officers he’d met during his USO tours and some comedians back home, he formed Comics Ready to Entertain (CR2E) in 2007, and started doing tours.

The last time I’d heard anything about CR2E was a short video interview after his (I think it was) 47th tour, talking about how he’d gotten his father to go along with him on the tour, which included some comments from his 70-some-year-old dad talking about what it was like to see his son entertaining troops from the same unit he had served in (back in the 50s), now somewhere deep in Afghanistan.

I’ve caught Scott’s act a few times since on cable. It wasn’t that he made me laugh so hard my sides hurt—maybe I watch too many comedians, because that seldom happens any more—but his act reassured me that it was okay that I was a gay man who occasionally watches football, likes some country music (in between the glam pop, dance, musicals, and all my other weird music tastes), doesn’t like RuPaul’s Drag Race, and will never, ever look like a gym bunny.

Scott Kennedy died a bit over a week ago. I’d seen no mention of it on any of the many gay-related news blogs I read before one blog post today. I would have rather been reading tributes to him than some of the news I did read (and amplified and ranted about on my own blog).

Scott was a funny man who did what he could to make people laugh. We need more laughter. And we need to spend more time recognizing heroes such as Scott:

That isn’t what irony means

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The words “irony” and “ironic” get thrown around a lot in places that they shouldn’t.

This is not a pedantic rant asserting that words can only be used in the way prescribed in my favorite dictionary, or that the meanings of words never change. Words change over time as people use them in new and different ways. And what’s most important is whether or not the listeners understood what was meant, rather than whether a particular utterance followed someone’s notions about proper grammar and usage.

We will talk some other time about usage and the misuse of language (and about people who think they are correcting other people’s misuse when, in fact, they are the ones who don’t understand usage). No, today I want to talk about the abuse of the word irony.

My biggest dictionary with the magnifier
Checking with the Compact Oxford English Dictionary.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a post by me if it weren’t at least a bit pedantic: the very oldest instance of the use of irony in the English language, according to the Oxford Dictionary, was in the year 1502. In that instance, it was describing a debate tactic by which a person pretended to believe one thing in order to engage a person in conversation and argue him around to the opposite belief. This is sometimes called Socratic Irony because it resembles a method Socrates used to teach and persuade.

Through the five hundred and eleven years since, irony’s meaning has expanded to include any situation in which someone says or acts the exact opposite of what is actually meant or expected. Similar to sarcasm, though sarcasm more often has a malicious intent. In a play or other work of fiction when the audience is made to see an incongruity between the situation and the words or actions of the characters and the characters are unaware of the incongruity we call that dramatic irony. Irony is usually poignant, rather than mocking.

In the last few decades the types of incongruences that have been described as ironic have become broader, to the point where virtually any incongruity at all gets called ironic.

But there have to be lines. Otherwise why do we need the word irony at all? I believe, in order for an action to be ironic that the incongruity has to have something to do with either the intention of the person performing the act or the expectation of the people who will see it. Preferably both.

So while it might be ironic to name an enormous dog Tiny, it is not ironic for someone who considers themself a sophisticated intellectual to name their dog Cat. One can argue the second one a couple of ways, but the main reason it isn’t ironic is that anyone who literally thinks of oneself as a sophisticated intellectual is exactly the sort of pretentious prat to do something like name a dog Cat and think he’s being clever.

A beard can’t be ironic. No matter how much that pretentious young man you met at the coffee shop insists that it is. His facial hair can be sexy, ugly, well-trimmed, embarrassing, or a number of other adjectives, but it can’t be ironic. People don’t have sufficiently specific expectations about the facial hair of strangers for any beard incongruity to qualify as ironic.

If you’re talking about something, and then that thing happens, that is not ironic. It’s a coincidence, which is a form of congruity. Irony is about incongruities, not congruities.

If you say something stupidly offensive and then:

  • people react with more hostility and scorn than you expected, you insist that you were right,
  • but then when that doesn’t work you insist you were misquoted,
  • but evidence to the contrary arrives, so you insist you were joking,
  • then when no one finds it funny but rather even more scorn you for it,

…you can’t claim that you were being ironic. Sorry, if you had originally meant the opposite of your actual words, that would have been your first excuse, not your fourth.

Finally, if you are an entertainer who does that, and then your career takes a nosedive? That’s not irony. That’s called just desserts. And we’re not talking about pie and ice cream

Part and parcel

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A pop musician or movie star gets arrested for driving under the influence and being in possession of an illegal controlled substance. When he or she is sentenced to nothing more than some hours of community service, there may be a bit of an outcry from the public, but thousands still attend the concerts, buy the music, see the movies.

If questioned, the fans might claim that you have to separate the art from the artist. They’re more likely to simply say, “Yeah, but I love the music/movie.” But it’s the same argument. Things that an artist does in their real life has nothing to do with the quality of product itself. Just as it would be inappropriate to claim that a painting is less than worthy of appreciation because the artist happens to be a member of a race other than the majority, a particular piece of art should stand upon its own merits, alone.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t argue that the celebrity doesn’t deserve special treatment before the law. We can compare the punishment given to the celebrity to those typically given to non-celebrities charged with the same crime. We can point out that this prominent person was given a punishment at the very lowest end of the first-offenders sentencing range, even though this is their fifth or sixth or twentieth run-in with the law over substance abuse issues.

We can demand that the special treatment stop. Yes, maybe that movie we’ve been waiting for will have to be delayed (or more likely, made with a different actor), but crimes and irresponsible actions should have consequences, and sometimes those consequences impact people other than the perpetrator.

The aforementioned situation is pretty clear, and not likely to draw a lot of argument on the principles.

It gets less black and white if the actor, musician, or artist is arrested for assault, or worse. How much that changes our perception of his or her work depends upon the nature of the crimes and the nature of their work. It may become difficult to listen to a singer crooning love songs when you know he has been convicted multiple times of domestic abuse against multiple partners, for instance.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.—Salvador Dali

So far our hypotheticals have been about what an artist does during aspects of their lives that would otherwise be private. What happens when it happens on the stage? Say, for instance, that you’re a C- or D-list singer-songwriter who, early in your career, made statements indicating you were lesbian, and for a couple of decades your fanbase has been predominately lesbian, and you’ve continued to cater to that fanbase even though in your private life you’ve married a conservation fundamentalist Christian man and joined an evangelical church.

And then one night, on stage in a city that most of the world equates with gay people, in between songs you start going on a long, screaming rant about how gay marriage is going to destroy the world, how decriminalizing abortion is the signal of the collapse of civilization, and screaming at the audience members who start walking out that “God hates fags!”

I don’t think anybody would argue that other venues you were scheduled to appear at are within their rights to cancel your shows. Politics aside, no one wants to deal with all those angry customers.

Issuing statements afterward that it was meant to be ironic (yet another assault on that poor, abused, misunderstood word), or taken out of context, afterward isn’t going to undo the damage. Particularly with the full video available on the internet and it is quite clear the the context is only hate, hate, more hate, and crazy.

And you can insist you have freedom of speech all you want. Freedom of speech means that you can say what you want without intrference from the government. It doesn’t mean freedom from people being so offended that they choose to stop listening to and buying your music. It doesn’t mean freedom from being criticized. It doesn’t mean freedom from being seen to be a hateful hypocrit whose career is based almost entirely on milking an ambiguous statement that you might be a member of a group of people you despise. Nor does it mean freedom from being labeled a self-loathing closet case in addition to the hypocrit charge.

Assaulting your audience and essentially admitting that you’ve been scamming them for years is another case where things are pretty black and white. There is no reason to separate the art from the artist, because the art is an inherent part of the crime the artist committed.

While I think that Ms Shocked’s tirade was deplorable and revealed that she is a reprehensible, malicious, vulgar louse deserving of our scorn, that wasn’t her biggest crime.

The most awful thing she has done is to produce all that disingenuous music. It is a sin to be a hateful bigot. It is a bigger sin to intentionally produce crap that you don’t believe and call in art.

The dust of daily life

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A number of years ago a reader wrote in to tell how much they had enjoyed a specific story I’d written, which was very flattering. Unfortunately, he also said he was happy that I had returned to writing something “more realistic.”

Now, since the story he was praising was a science fiction murder mystery set 1500 years in the future, and my detective was a genetically engineered lioness, I was more than a bit curious about what, exactly, he thought was so much more realistic about it than anything else I had written. And so, perhaps foolishly, I wrote back to ask.

His reply was a long, polite, and extremely thoughtful email. The first story of mine that he recalled reading had been co-written with two of my friends. It was an epic action adventure tale about the crew of a cargo ship who discover that the containers of farming equipment they have brought into port are actually full of weapons intended for a local revolutionary army. The crew is soon running from both the law and the terrorists. Not surprisingly there is more than one gunfight and a lot of people die. The story includes a lot of grim moments.

He loved it.

Then he cited several more things I had written, all of which he categorized as “light and fluffy,” which he didn’t like. Since one of the stories involved an astronomical disaster in which an entire inhabited planet is destroyed, and another one was a murder mystery, I was a little confused as to why he considered them light and fluffy. Fortunately, the rest of his email explained it.

All of those stories, he wrote, had an unmistakeable air of optimism about them. They generally had happy endings, for instance. He disliked such stories because in reality, he said, nothing good ever lasts, people fail far more often than they succeed, and bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it.

I had more than a few quibbles with what he said, but there was one thing I knew he was right about: my stories probably do all have an underlying thread of hope. I realized a long time ago that a fundamental part of my temperament is an unshakeable certainty that there is no problem that can’t be solved. Worse than that, there’s no problem that I couldn’t solve if only I had the time and the resources. However much I may know, intellectually, that lots of problems are unresolvable, at a deep, emotional level I seem to be incapable of accepting that.

It’s not that I set out to prove that with any of my stories. The dichotomy between optimism and pessimism is usually the furthest thing from my mind when I’m working on any given tale. However, since a hopefully arrogant perspective is a fundamental part of my personality, it will always color things I write. Because, no matter what the goal of a particular story, painting, song, or other piece of art is, no matter what topic the artist is tackling, no matter what things he or she may have the characters say or do in the story, some aspects of the artist’s core beliefs will manifest in the art.

It’s a not that it’s a conscious decision on an artist’s part. These core beliefs are seldom significant plot points, for instance. We are certainly capable of writing stories (or songs or movies or plays or comics) that seem to argue persuasively against our core beliefs. The specific story which started this conversation with this reader has prompted other readers to write me to argue about completely different things which they felt were “the message” of the story simply because one of the main characters espouses a particular belief or philosophy in the dialog, for instance.

The type of core belief I’m talking about informs how an artist sees the world. In some works these things manifest most prominently in minor aspects of the work rather than the major theme. I suspect that is why my story about the disaster which kills one billion people came across as light and fluffy to this guy, even though I thought it ended on an ominous, rather than hopeful, note. There are probably aspects of the ways some of the characters go about trying to figure out what happened that provided some hint of a glimmer of hope. I’m guessing.

Because these core beliefs inform and color the way a creative person sees everything, it is impossible to completely separate a work of art from the artist who created it.

A work of art is more than the person who made it. And in an ideal world, a work of art should be judged on its own merits, without regard to who made it, or to other things which that person made. All humans, artists and audience alike, fall short of our ideals.

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. —Pablo Picasso

I thanked the reader for explaining. I said I was sorry he didn’t enjoy some of my stories, and that I hoped he would occasionally enjoy more of my stories in the future. But I suspected he wouldn’t, because I could see that we had diametrically opposed perspectives on the world. And even though I have written plenty of tales since then which have included things I think are far grimmer than anything that was in the two stories he liked, I also know that the glimmer of hope I always believe will be there is bound to continue cropping up in my work.

I myself had found writers and artists whose work, while technically good, even excellent, just rubbed me the wrong way. Sometimes I was able to put my finger on why they did so, but many times not.

Art should move us. Art should also challenge us. I don’t think that we should always agree with everything a piece of art appears to be saying, any more than we should demand that an artist agrees with all of our opinions. But challenging art should engage us in a re-examination of our beliefs, or prompt us to see things from a new perspective. It should act as a lantern illuminating different paths which we may or may not choose to follow.

Sometimes the way that a particular piece of art challenges us does not wash the dust of daily life from our souls; it hammers us down and grinds our souls into the dust. And no one should feel obligated to submit to such hammering.

End of year one

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One year ago I started this blog to:

…see if having another place—a new place, without the history and other issues inherent to those other blogs—to do that personal kind of long-form blogging that I miss, whether I actually use it. And more importantly, does it do that vital de-cluttering.

I don’t know how much the mental de-cluttering has helped with my productivity in other writing pursuits, but I have definitely been blogging more, including finishing more of the essay-style postings.

I have made progress on my novels, and I have managed to finish a few old stories that have been languishing for years. So I’m going to declare that this has at least improved things. Now that I’ve finally realized the power of scheduled posts, the fact that I often have bursts of several topics occur to me at the same time is no longer an annoyance.

I still have a lot of essays in the half-finished stage, but more of them are getting finished, posted here, and cross-posted to my writing site.

I’m willing to declare this first year a success. Not a resounding one, but definitely a success.

Let’s see if I can do even better in year two!

I’ve known…

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On the subject of coming out to one’s parents, I’ve always remembered the story one acquaintance told: “When I finally came out to my mom, she said, ‘I’ve known you were gay since you were two.’ And I thought, ‘Gee, thanks, Mom, why didn’t you tell me? It would have made my teens a lot less confusing!'”

Growing up gay, particularly before the 90s, the best you could hope for if your parents learned you were gay was a reaction like his mother’s. Truth be told, since we had no positive role models, and what little we knew about the family members of gay people were that they were all ashamed or hostile to their gay child, we didn’t even hope for that.

In my early teens I recall whispers about someone’s cousins being kicked out by his parents, for instance. In my later teens I knew one classmate who was accused of being gay whose parents sent him to “reform school.” Another who was actually caught having sex with another guy was kicked out by his parents and wound up living with relatives in another city (how the quarterback of the football team who he was having sex with was able, somehow, to convince everyone in authority that the much smaller, skinnier kid had somehow forced him into the situation is a tale for another post).

When I did come out to my own parents in the early nineties (I was a gainfully employed adult living in my own place in another city, by then), their reaction could best be characterized as, “I never had any clue, I don’t accept it, and someone must have done something to you to make you think this way.”

Even today, we are surprised to hear of anything as loving and accepting from a parent as this letter that a teen-ager in Michigan received this week from his Dad:

Michigan dad put his son's fears about coming out to rest with this loving letter.
Michigan dad put his son’s fears about coming out to rest with this loving letter.

You can read the story of a teen named Nate, from Michigan, and the note from his Dad in this story.

Note: since apparently I wasn’t being clear: I am not Nate. That isn’t my letter. My father’s reaction was, as noted above, pretty much the opposite of this in every way.

Abyss gazing

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It was 1986 and I was twenty-six years old, attending a regional science fiction convention with a bunch of my friends. One of the guests of honor was an author (we’ll call him Mr. C) that two of my friends were very fond of. I had read a couple of his short stories and thought they were good, but he hadn’t really wowed me.

But hearing Mr. C talk about the writing process, his influences, and so forth, made me much more intrigued. It didn’t hurt that when another panelist made a disparaging joke about my favorite science fiction author (who was not in attendance), Mr. C rather emphatically jumped to the defense of my favorite author.

After that panel, one of my friends commented that Mr. C’s takedown of the other panelist had been mean. It was true. Mr. C had ended the rebuttal with something along the lines, “…and it infuriates me when writers who don’t have a fraction of his understanding of how to write or a sliver of his talent make thoughtless critiques.” But, she had called my favorite author a fossil, I pointed out. Once one makes an ad hominem attack, you invite something similar in return. Since it was my favorite author being defended, I was more than a bit prejudiced.

So I wound up standing in line with one of my friends, clutching a pair of just-purchased books of Mr. C’s work, waiting for his autograph. That is the one and only time I have met Mr. C in person. He was pleasant enough, despite having had to smile, listen, and sign however hundreds of times.

After the convention, I tried to read one of the books. It was a collection of his short stories, which included the couple I had read before. They weren’t bad by any means, but after reading a few in a row, an unsatisfying feeling was developing. I sat the book down, not quite sure why I wasn’t enjoying the reading.

A few weeks later, I picked it up again and started on the next story. Again, the story itself was well written and interesting. I read another, then started on the next after that and, well, a few paragraphs in I realized that same feeling of wrongness was building up.

I did eventually finish the collection, but it took a few months, reading only a few stories at a time. And by the end I couldn’t really say that I’d enjoyed them all, but I also couldn’t put my finger on their shortcomings.

The other book was a novel. A novel for which he had won a lot of awards. It was based on one of the short stories in the previous collection. And the short story in question had been one of those I had enjoyed more than the others. Plus, I had friends who swore this book was a masterpiece. And it had garnered all those awards, so it had to be good, right?

I couldn’t finish it. I don’t think I’d even gotten a quarter of the way through before I found myself intensely disliking it.

I tried explaining what I didn’t like about it to one of my friends who loved it. As we were talking, I kept finding myself talking about abstract concepts, rather than actual events in the story. My friend said it sounded more like my baggage than the story. So I started explaining how a similar philosophical assumption underpinned one of the short stories. And that’s when I finally managed to connect the dots and say what was bothering me about all of the stories.

There was a fundamental notion forming the foundation of all the tales: if you don’t know your place and stay in it, horrible things will happen to you. A corrollary was that if you prevented someone else from achieving what was “rightfully” theirs, even more horrible things would happen to you.

When I articulated that, my friend began to argue. That wasn’t what was going on at all, he said. So then I made a guess at how the book I hadn’t finished would end. Specifically what would happen to certain characters.

My friend blinked. “How did you know?”

“Because, if you don’t know your place and stay there, forces, whether they be social, cultural, or fate, will strike you down. And if you stand in the way of someone else’s destiny—”

My friend grinned and interrupted. “Oh, wow! You’re right! That’s so messed up, because it’s like the opposite of what the main character says, but it’s really what happens!”

“Mr. C believes in hierarchical, patriarchic societies in which you behave according to societal expectations, and people who have the temerity to want to choose their own way of living are evil,” I said.

My friend shrugged and said, “You’re probably right. But I still love the stories.”

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Just a few years later, a controversy erupted in a forum dedicated to Mr C on the (now long defunct) Prodigy network. The controversy was about a protagonist in another of Mr. C’s novels who experimented with gay sex midway through the book. Some people were angry Mr. C had included an “abomination” as a sympathetic character. Others thought people who thought gay people were abominations were bigots.

As the arguments raged, Mr. C waded in with a rather long discussion about the sin of homosexuality, why he felt he had to include it in the book (his reasoning, as I recall, was that in any community where people amass power there will be people who must dominate, possess, and destroy others, and of course homosexuality is all about dominating and destroying each other), and then had the gall to claim that anyone who called him homophobic were themselves bigots. Because he didn’t hate any gay people. They were just sinners, and if they refused to repent and stop being gay, well, they would face consequences.

His comments were quoted far and wide. And he got angrier and angrier as people “mischaracterized” his comments. He repeated, again and again, that he didn’t hate gay people. He wound up writing (in 1990) a long essay and getting it published in a magazine that catered to the members of the church Mr. C had been raised in, in order to explain his side in context.

While the essay repeatedly said that he did not condone violence against sinful people, it talked about how just as children must be punished in order to learn right from wrong, then adults will face greater penalties when they continue to act outside the bounds of propriety. He talked abstractly about the “day of grief” that each homosexual would eventually experience if they did not repent. He talked about the horrible consequences homosexuals face if they refuse to adhere to propriety. But he was not advocating violence even then, he said. If the faithful, such as himself, had been compassionate but firm in condemning the sin, they would “keep ourselves unspotted by the blood of this generation.”

It’s an old lie that bigots of a religious persuasion tell themselves all the time. They don’t advocate or condone violence, it’s just that god’s law causes these things. And when it happens, they pretend that the people who did resort to violence never took all the words of condemnation as permission to commit violence.

Think about it: if it’s god’s will that homosexuals should experience a “day of grief”; if god’s law demands that “blood of this generation” must be shed, then the person who inflicts the violence is doing god’s will. They are a special tool of god!

Heck, it isn’t just permission to commit violence: it’s encouragement!

I had already guessed most of this about Mr. C before he began writing publicly about his reasons for opposing the decriminalization of gay sex and other topics back in 1990. And so I had already made my decision not to buy any more of his books. I didn’t post rants about him, nor try to organize boycotts of his work. If I was asked, I would say that I disagreed with what I perceived to be the underlying philosophy espoused by his work.

Once he did make his very public statements, I felt it was appropriate to go a step further and point out that Mr. C was a hypocrite and a bigot who advocated against the rights of myself and others. I would suggest that perhaps there were other writers whose works were more deserving of people’s money, but wouldn’t go further.

In the years since, he has continued to write and speak out against gay rights of all sorts, eventually becoming an officer for a large organization that says it is out to protect “traditional marriage.” They try to portray themselves as narrowly focused on marriage, but anyone paying attention to their rhetoric and some of the other causes they support, can see that they want to roll back the few rights gay people have won. He donates his own money to the cause, he has organized efforts that have raised millions of dollars for the cause. He has claimed victory for every anti-gay amendment, law, proposition, or initiative that has been passed in the last ten years.

He has, now, gone far beyond the point of simply stating his opinion and trying to persuade others to it. He has gone beyond that disingenuous tactic of saying he was opposed to violence while providing double-speak that actually encouraged it. He has helped spread distortions and outright lies about all gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons. His organization has refused to obey public disclosure laws regarding their election activities in several states. He continues to fight to prevent gays, lesbians, trans people, and bisexuals full equality before the law. He continues to put forward arguments to take away what rights have been extended.

So, for that reason, yes, I agree with the people who have been disappointed that DC Comics hired him to write a prominent new Superman series. Yes, I support the comic book shop owners who have said they will not sell comics written by him. I support the artist who decided not to illustrate his stories after learning of Mr C’s views and activities. I urge everyone I know not to buy things he writes, not to go see the movie that is being made of his most famous novel.

I re-iterate: this isn’t just about a difference of opinion regarding marriage equality. For over 20 years he has advocated for restoring laws that made it a crime for consenting adults to have gay sex in the privacy of their own homes, and against laws that protect people from being fired, evicted, or denied medical care just because they are gay. And he has done more than just advocate those things, he has taken action to make them happen. It is not hypocritical of us to advocate a voluntary boycott of his work, it is hypocritical of him and his apologists to decry a voluntary boycott while they are campaigning for laws that will take away jobs, housing, health care, and more from entire classes of people.

Orson Scott Card is a hypocrite and a bigot who uses distortions and outright lies to hurt innocent people. Those are the facts.

Things out of our control, part 2

life,

I was just laying down to take a nap last night when the phone rang. The name on the screen was a friend who very seldom calls, but when he does, it’s important. So instead of letting it go to voice mail and laying back down, I answered.

He was at a hospital, outside a room where his dad lay unconscious and not expected to recover.

I didn’t know my friend’s dad well. I had met him a few times. I had admired his father’s artwork many times before I met him, because he’s kinda famous. So when my friend introduced me, I made the mistake of calling him “Mr. J——.” He shook his head and told me, “No! I’m Bud.”

It was fun getting a tour of Bud’s studio from the man himself, complete with a few amusing stories about his son, my friend. Some years later I had the privilege of hearing him play fiddle at his son’s wedding.

My favorite moment with Bud occurred during a barbecue one Fourth of July. My friend was setting up some fireworks. Some bottle rockets and the like. Bud came over and told his son to aim them up at one particular tall tree. “There’s a wasp’s nest up there I’d like to get rid of.”

What followed was a debate about the pros and cons of firing fireworks into a tree that loomed over the house, and happened to be infested with wasps. Bud almost talked his son into it. Almost.

All of that flashed through my mind as his son told me, “We’re taking turns saying good-bye.” I asked him what I could do. He said that he just needed someone to talk to. Someone who wasn’t there and crying.

I managed to gulp back the tears and tried to be someone who wasn’t crying.

There’s nothing we can do in times like that, other than be there for each other.

This year has been a bit of a challenge. My last grandparent died a month and a half ago. If the doctors are right, this will be the fourth parent of someone I know who has left us since I lost Grandma B.

They’re not connected. I know that. Because of my age, and because many of my friends are of a similar age, our parents are “getting up there,” as one friend put it.

But it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t take anything and especially anyone for granted. Make sure you tell people you care about how you feel. Now. Because we never know which conversation with them will be our last.

Tilting at windmills

life, , , ,

For some reason this year the time change is messing with me more than usual.

I’ve been going to bed early, falling asleep, and so far as I know sleeping soundly through the night. Yet when the alarm goes off in the morning, either I just lay there unconcious until Michael gets up and turns it off, or I stumble over, turn it off, and collapse back into bed for another hour.

I keep my alarm clock at the far side of the room precisely so that I have to get out of bed to turn it off. If I keep it on the bedside, I will just hit snooze again and again and again some days. I also have the clock radio portion set to turn on news about an hour before the alarm. Ordinarily, this nudges me toward wakefulness before the alarm goes off.

We used to have Michael’s alarm clock set to go off about a half hour after mine, just in case. Maybe we should go back to doing that, at least until we both stop feeling so dead in the mornings.

Neither of us are morning people, can you tell?

I’ve always felt a little guilty that I don’t hate Daylight Saving Time as much as some of my friends do. It’s the kind of thing you would expect me to rant about: the supposed energy-saving practice that actually decreases productivity, causes measurable increases in injuy-causing accidents, measurable increases in illness (usually attributed to stress), and so on.

If I keep feeling this crappy every morning for much longer, I’m going to to stop being so resigned and equanimical about Daylight Saving Time.

Not that anyone else’s rantings about it have had any effect. I’m feeling like that version of Rimmer from the first Emohawk encounter on Red Dwarf, wanting to organize a committee and bring out the big guns: a full on leafletting campaign.

Who’s with me?