Tag Archives: culture

Why marriage (for some or all) isn’t enough

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Although the Supreme Court’s decision to declare section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional is a victory for us, it is a partial victory, only. People outside the 12 states and the District of Columbia which currently recognize marriage equality, are still denied the protection that marriage brings.

It’s sad that the five justices who ruled on this didn’t see through to the logical conclusion of one of their statements about the families of same sex couples in their ruling: “The law in question makes it even more difficult for the children to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family and its concord with other families in their community and in their daily lives.”

That statement doesn’t just apply to the children in the 12 states that currently recognize marriage equality. It applies to all of the two million children the census bureau recently said are being raised by gay or lesbian parents in throughout all the states.

Even if the extremely unlikely outcome had happened, if the court had ruled on the more fundamental constitutional question, it wouldn’t mean our fight for equality is over. In 29 states there is no law against firing someone simply because he or she is gay, or because an employer thinks he or she is. Laws don’t prevent someone from being a jerk and finding another excuse to get rid of someone they don’t like, but non-discrimination laws give you options in the most egregious cases. They also encourage employers, large and small, to create policies that reduce the occurrence of the less egregious cases.

When it becomes legally unacceptable to openly fire, refuse to promote, or otherwise materially penalize employees simply because they are gay, it starts becoming socially unacceptable to joke or negatively comment about it. And studies have shown in other areas of discrimination, that just turning down the heat of acceptability of open discrimination starts changing private attitudes. Not for everyone, but enough to make life a bit more bearable on a day-to-day basis.

In 33 states there is no law against firing or otherwise penalizing an employee for being transgender. Heck, it’s nearly impossible for a person who is either undergoing gender reassignment therapy or has completed it to use a restroom without people throwing hissy fits and wailing and gnashing their teeth about some of the strangest and most far-fetched “consequences” of that.

Even when the transgender person is a six-year-old child.

And don’t get me started on the people who don’t understand that it is not just a matter of someone deciding they want to dress in the other gender’s clothes. So-called natural physical gender is nowhere near as well-defined and clearcut in some cases as most people think.

While 49 states have some form of anti-bullying laws on the books, seven of those states either explicitly exclude harassment due to sexual orientation and gender identity from the definition of bullying, or severely restrict what schools and school employees can do when the bullying occurs in those areas. Another fifteen states don’t specifically exclude harassment because of sexual orientation, but leave the wording vague enough as to make it unenforceable. And then the extent to which gender identity is or isn’t included varies so widely, I get confused whenever I try to read all the charts about it at places such as Bully Police USA or the Trevor Project.

When the elder George Bush was President, the Surgeon General’s office determined that teen suicides could be reduced by two-thirds if we initiated prevention programs targeted toward GLBT youth that attempted to reduce the stigma and fear of rejection. Many other studies conducted by organizations ranging from the federal department of Health and Human Services, to the association of State Attorneys General have reached similar conclusions.

Even in states considered very liberal, with anti-discrimination laws and the whole works, gay and lesbian employees consistently make less money then their straight colleagues with similar education, experience, and job performance evaluations.

So, even if we had received marriage nationwide, there’s still a journey ahead before we’ll be at full equality.

Why marriage matters

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Bill was a medical laboratory technician. Scott was an architect.

Bill said he was walking with friends one night on their way to have drinks when he saw a really sexy guy on a motorcycle waiting for the light to change. A bit later they saw the motorcycle parked in front of a bar. It wasn’t the one they were heading toward, but Bill wanted to meet the guy on the ‘cycle, so he convinced his friends to go in. Bill found Scott inside, tried to strike up a conversation. Scott didn’t seem interested, but wasn’t completely unfriendly, either. Eventually another guy that Scott had been waiting for arrived, and it seemed obvious that they were together. Bill’s friends didn’t want to stick around, so he and his friends went to the place they had originally been headed to.

Hours later, Bill was still with the friends at the other bar when suddenly a voice asked if he could buy Bill a drink.

Scott had heard Bill’s friends say where they were going, and once he had concluded some unfinished business with his ex, had come looking for him.

Less than a year later they were living together. They bought a house together. Scott’s family all lived in or near the city, and over time came to accept Bill into the family. Years later, Bill’s still got teary-eyed telling about the first time Scott’s brother’s daughter called him Uncle Bill. “This was the 70s,” he explained. “It was far more common for families to refuse to even meet your brother’s gay lover.”

The house they’d bought was something of a fixer-upper. They worked on it together for years. Even with Scott’s connections in the real estate industry, they hadn’t been able to get a bank to give them a mortgage in both their names. Scott had insisted, then, on drawing up a contract so that the money Bill put into a special account they had set up for house expenses would be recorded as equity in the house. Scott had also insisted on drawing up wills. “He didn’t like to leave things to chance,” Bill told me.

One day at work, Bill got a phone call from one of Scott’s co-workers. Scott had been in some kind of highway accident. Bill hurried to the emergency room. Arriving at about the same time as Scott’s mother.

It was too late. Scott had been pronounced dead on arrival.

Over the next few days, Bill was busy with funeral arrangements. It was all a bit of a blur, of course. All those tedious details seem unimportant in the face of the enormous sense of loss.

“I should have known something was up from the way Scott’s father and brother were acting,” Bill said. “I didn’t really notice until the wake, when I noticed they were both absent.”

When Bill arrived home after the funeral and wake, he found the father and brother along with a lawyer. They had a court order, barring Bill from removing any property from the house until an inventory had been completed by a court appointed agent. Scott’s father was contesting the will, on the grounds that Bill had coerced him into signing it.

Bill couldn’t afford to put up much of a legal fight. The will was thrown out, though the equity contract was not. I don’t know all the the legal details, but the upshot was that Bill had to move out, and was only allowed to take items that he could prove he had paid for himself. The family did have to pay him the equity, thanks to one of the precautions that Scott had set up, but they seized nearly every piece of furniture and nearly every personal item in the house.

Bill wasn’t allowed to take even any book, photograph, or paper that he could not show was his personal property. Because the mortgage was in Scott’s name, the presumption was that the house and all property within was Scott’s. Bill, as far as the law was concerned, was just a roommate. “At one point,” Bill said, “I thought I was going to have to produce receipts for my own underwear. As it was, more than half of my own family photos went to them, because I got tired of arguing over every page in every photo album.”

As part of the equity settlement, he was also forced to sign an agreement he would never try to contact any of Scott’s family members again. Even though at that point Bill really needed the money, he balked at that, until Scott’s brother informed him that if he didn’t, the brother was going to say to the police that he overheard Bill making lewd comments to one of the nepews. It was a lie, but as the brother said, “Who do you think they’ll believe?”

Some time after the last legal document had been filed, Bill received an unmarked envelope in the mail. Inside were some polaroid photographs. Someone had piled all of Scott’s sketchbooks from his years of art classes and beyond, made a bonfire, the took pictures of the fire. “Of course they took all his sketchbooks, and of course they burned them. Half of Scott’s sketches were of men.”

Even when there is a will that specifically names one’s unmarried partner, the law stil considers said partner a stranger, for legal purposes. Blood relatives can contest wills on all sorts of grounds, and any non-relative has a disadvantage in regards to burden of proof.

Marriage, as opposed to civil unions or any other arrangement, changes that. In both formal law and common law principles, a spouse is not just counted as a blood relative, but is automatically the nearest relative. If other family members contest a will, it is considered an intra-familial dispute, and the burden of proof switches.

Yes, Scott died in the early 80s. This may lead you to think that in our more enlightened times this sort of thing can’t happen.

You’d be wrong. There’s the case of the two young men who had been together for several years, until one died in an accident just last year. His family were able to legally prevent his surviving partner from even getting a look at the full police report about how the young man died. The surviving partner was told not to try to attend the funeral, or else.

Or two older men, both retired, had been living together for decades. They’d had a ceremony together years ago and exchanged rings, but their state doesn’t even recognize civil unions. One of the men, as his health has deteriorated with age, began to exhibit dementia. His sister had herself appointed guardian and kicked the other partner out. When the story broke just a few months ago, the partner who had been kicked out had had to sell his wedding ring to get enough money to travel to relatives of his own who would let him live with them.

There will always be people who disapprove of the people their grown children or siblings choose to share their life with. But if the law recognizes our marriages the same as it does any heterosexual couple’s, there are thousands of legal protections and safeguards available to protect us and the ones we love from such people.

Marriage is how we say, both socially, culturally, and legally, “this person is family.”

It’s a right that every adult should be able to exercise.

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.”

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.

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.

What men do…

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I was on my third date with Glenn when I made some comment about something in the news being particularly disturbing for gay guys like us.

“Hey, man, I’m not gay,” Glenn said, with a grin and a chuckle.

I was dumbstruck for a moment. This was our third date, and me being (at the time) a very recently out guy, and it being the nineties, we had had sex with each other more than once by this point. His night job was bouncer at a gay bar, where he was a well-known flirt. (That wasn’t where we met, btw; he had seen me sitting in a coffee shop reading a book, and had chatted me up in part because he didn’t recognize me as a regular from the bar and he had a thing for “brainy shy guys.”)

Then I realized what he must have meant, and I said something like, “Oh, sorry! I didn’t realize you were bi. Sorry for jumping to conclusions.”

All signs of a sense of humor left his face. “I’m not bi, either,” he growled. “I’m straight.”

I apologized, and then asked him to explain, since we had had sex several times, and there isn’t any part of my hairy body that anyone in their right mind would describe as feminine. I did not add that he had a rather large number of stereotypical gay mannerisms and speech patterns, so no stranger who met him would have described him as straight-acting.

He explained. There was one certain sex act he didn’t do, because only gay guys did that. He did all sorts of things with men, including a few acts whose crude names are common insults thrown at non-gender-conforming men. But this one thing he did not do. So even though he had sex with men, specifically had sex with gay men, he wasn’t gay.

That was another part of his self-definition: he didn’t have sex with men that fit his description of “straight,” he only had sex with men who met his definition of gay. Not obviously effeminate men (in fact, having met a couple of exs, and being friends with a guy who he dated after me, I know he had a particular thing for hairy chested guys with beards), but men who did the thing he wouldn’t do.

I tried to circle back to the bisexual topic, and he dismissed that because he didn’t like having sex with women. He had dated a few girls in high school, and had had sex with two of them on an on-going basis. But he hadn’t enjoyed it. He did it, he said, because it was expected. He tried, when things started getting serious, to convince them he was a good Christian boy who didn’t want to pressure them, because of course being good girls they wanted to wait. But they didn’t want to wait, and he was afraid they might start rumors that he was gay, so he had sex with them.

He knew he wouldn’t enjoy it—just as he hadn’t really enjoyed dating the girls—because he’d been having sex with other guys his age as early as junior high.

“So, you don’t like dating or having sex with women, the only people you’ve had sex with or dated since high school have been men—a lot of men—and the only people you enjoy having sex with are men,” I summed up, “But you’re not gay?”

“No, I’m not, obviously,” he replied, “I’m a man. I do what men do.”

“So what you’re saying is,” I replied slowly, “that I’m not a man?”

The conversation just went downhill from there. Need I mention that it was also our last date?

I was reminded of this conversation by the comments a couple weeks ago by a particularly slimy television preacher in which he told a woman whose husband was cheating that it was her fault. “Men wander,” he said, “that’s what men do.” And then he told her it was her job to make the home and herself so appealing that her husband would rather not wander.

“What men do” is used as an excuse for everything from denying husbands equal child custody in divorce proceedings to excusing infidelities, verbal bullying, and violence. Its inverse, “things men don’t do” is the rationalization for bullying boys and young men who fail to act manly enough, as well as bashing gays or suspected gays of all ages.

It’s crazy, and it’s wrong.

It’s not that men wander—people wander. You can quote studies that say men report more sexual partners than women, and that more men admit to infidelity on confidential surveys than women. But you’re ignoring more recent studies, where respondents were hooked up to what they were told were lie detectors, which show that there is almost no gap at all between the number of men and women who admit to cheating on a spouse or significant other. The numbers of partners reported are more equal, as well.

Monogamy isn’t natural, that’s just a fact. That doesn’t mean that people can’t strive for it and achieve it, it just means that it’s hard work. Perhaps if more people understood that, instead of believing the myth that if you really love someone you will never be tempted to wander, a lot of relationships would be healthier and happier.

Some extremely masculine men date, have sex with, and fall in love with men. Some not terribly masculine men date, have sex with, and fall in love with women.

One of the men with the most masculine personality I ever knew is someone I met when he was a woman, a few years before identifying as transgender and entering into transition.

A straight friend I’ve known for more than twenty years exhibits a lot of stereotypical conservative masculine personality traits—but he’s not afraid to sit with his five-year-old daughter and play with her dolls when she asks. And he’ll tell strangers when he takes said daughter to My Little Pony conferences that it’s for her, but that only explains the third day of last summer’s convention, not the two days before while he was there by himself.

What men do… is whatever a man does. If it would be wrong when someone other than a man does it, then it’s just as wrong when it’s a man doing it. And, if it is all right when a man does it, than there’s nothing wrong when anyone doing it.

Because we’re all people.

Presence (stage, screen, or otherwise)

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I’ve recently read two different proposals for a gay version of the Bechdel Test. The Bechdel Test is described in a comic strip by Allison Bechdel back in 1985. It is usually described as a simple way to gauge the active presence of female characters in Hollywood films and just how well rounded and complete those roles are. The test is in three steps, 1) There must be at least two named women, who 2) talk to each other, about 3) something besides a man.

It is frightening how many movies and TV shows fail the test. Having just watched, over the course of a month, the first five seasons of Supernatural, for instance, I can report that not a single episode out of those 65 episodes passes the test. To be fair, since I’ve also watched a few later episodes out of order, I can report that one recent episode in which Felicia Day reprises the role of a lesbian hacker played in an earlier season very nearly passes the test. Nearly.

While the results of applying the Bechdel Test to your favorite shows can be depressing, it is even worse if you try to apply a similar test about gay characters. If you transliterate the Bechdel Test into a test of how gays are treated in storytelling, it might look like this proposal:

  1. Are there at least two gay/lesbian/transgender people?
  2. Do they talk to each other? Or even do more than shock horror kiss?
  3. Do they talk about anything other than sex/being gay/shopping/cats?

With extremely rare exceptions, only movies made by queer writers/directors and explicitly aimed at a gay audience pass the test. Most fail at item number one. And most of the few who pass would fail if you changed it to say “is there one out gay/lesbian/transgender character.”

I insist on the “out” part because, I’m sorry, characters such as Dumbledore in the Harry Potter stories don’t count. He is never identified within the books or the movie as being gay. It isn’t even really hinted at in a meaningful way within the story. Having the author tell people during a book tour (and then only after having been confronted umpteen million times about the lack of gay characters), that one character who is portrayed as completely asexual throughout the books doesn’t count. Because this is about recognizing the existence of gay people, not compounding the closet.

Of course, Brokeback Mountain fails this test, because the only gay characters who appear are all deeply and tragically closeted. Which was true to the historical period, but also integral to the fundamental point of the story. Because of that historical reality, I find this other version I found a bit more useful:

  1. The movie includes two gay characters who interact in some way,
  2. Do not offer sassy advice to the protagonist,
  3. And are not dead by the end credits

At least with this test, Brokeback Mountain doesn’t fail until the third bullet.

The point of the original Bechdel Test wasn’t to assess whether a movie treats female characters equally, or whether there are stereotypes, or even whether or not it is misogynist. All it does is establish a baseline that the writers have actually imagined the women in the story as being full-fledged human beings, with lives and feelings and interests of their own. It’s useful not so much as a way to judge a specific movie or story, but to make us think about the presumptions of story telling.

Movies and books and stories are full of a variety of fully realized male characters, who range from good to nasty, from important to silly. And even most of the throw-away male characters have hints of a life and personality of their own that isn’t defined by the protagonists or their family. Where as the default position for female characters are to be the sister, wife, ex-girlfriend, or mother of one of the characters who is actually doing something in the story.

And let me just say, it’s disturbing, as a writer, to go apply the Bechdel Test to your own work and discover just how many of your own stories fail it!

So, the two versions of the Gay Bechdel Test aren’t quite the same as the original. Both have at least one step that focuses solely on clichés rather than just establishing whether the writer has actually developed a personality and backstory for the characters. So I think I prefer this version:

  1. The movie/story contains one identified gay, lesbian, or transgender character,
  2. Who has a conversation with any other character,
  3. About something other than sexuality*.

With the corollary that under sexuality we include topics that are typically (and lazily) considered a subset of “queerness.” So if all they talk about is gay rights legislation, or AIDS prevention, or who uses which bathroom, those count as a failure, too.

Not that we need to be the stars, or that we need to appear in every story, but we’re part of reality, and there are far more of us than there are people capable of dodging dozens of machine gun bullets while driving a car at very high speed through a crowded place without hurting anything other than a single vegetable cart, while reloading their gun and explaining the intricacies of a multinational conspiracy.

And we see thousands of them in movies all the time.

All in the (video) family

life, ,

My dad didn’t like All in the Family. I think he and Archie had way too much in common, and seeing his own opinions laughed at rubbed him the wrong way. So we only watched it occasionally in the first season, or so. Usually when Dad wasn’t around.

I had mixed feelings about the show overall, and about some of the characters. Except, of course, Edith. As portrayed by Jean Stapleton, Edith Bunker was the sweet, ditzy, long-suffering wife of the unapologetic racist, conservative, and working class Archie. Edith was adorable. She was the favorite aunt everyone wished they had in their family.

By the time my folks divorced, All in the Family had been the highest rated network show for a few seasons, and the network had started broadcasting reruns of early seasons on weekday afternoons (it didn’t enter syndication for a few more years). I was able to see a lot more of the show, sometimes watching episodes with my grandmother, who loved Edith as much as I did.

Although the show was a licensed Americanization of the British series, Til Death Do Us Part, Stapleton played Edith much more naive and happy than the character from the British series. I’ve heard some people disparage the show in comparison to the British original, referring to Edith as an example of “typical American dumbing-down.”

They may be right about the show over all, but they’re wrong about Edith. Edith was ditzy, naïve, gullible, and clearly not a rocket scientist, but she wasn’t stupid. Ms Stapleton played her as warm, loving, and trusting. She was gullible because she saw the best in people, assuming that they were trustworthy until shown otherwise.

This was probably best demonstrated in an episode that a lot of people hate, “Edith’s 50th Birthday,” in which Edith is taken captive in her own home, and nearly raped in front of the audience. Edith eventually fights off the attack with a flaming birthday cake (seriously, and it wasn’t in a funny way). All the ways Edith tried to talk her attacker out of it, how she reacted to his threats, his gun, and finally, as the the birthday cake in the oven burns and fills the house with smoke, convincing the rapist to let her pull the cake from the oven, which allows her the smash the thing into his face and chase him out.

I saw the actor who played the rapist, David Dukes, on a talk show some years later, where he described the episode. The show was filmed before a live studio audience, at the time, and he said that the audience was clearly shocked when his character took Edith hostage, but they were still thinking that, since the show was a comedy, things were going to turn to slapstick at any moment. There was a point, when he had Edith up against a piece of furniture and he was pulling some of his clothes off, that the audience realized that this was serious. “There was a collective gasp,” he said, “which immediately changed into a growling. And I thought they might storm the stage and try to kill me.”

The birthday cake smoke appeared at that point, and moments later the audience was cheering very wildly as Edith scalded his face. He said he hadn’t really understood that Edith Bunker was “everyone’s favorite aunt” in the collective imagination before that moment.

And the problem was, he said, that because they filmed before a live audience, they also recorded every episode twice, each time in front of a different audience. “So, after genuinely fearing for my life, I had to turn around and do it again.”

He said he still occasionally received hate mail, “some of it with rather serious-sounding threats” years afterward.

After portraying “everyone’s favorite aunt” for over 200 episodes spanning nine seasons of All in the Family and one season of the spin-off, Archie Bunker’s Place, winning three Emmys and two Golden Globes, Stapleton thought Edith’s potential had been reached, and felt there was no story left to tell of her. When Stapleton asked Norman Lear, the creator and producer of the series, to kill Edith off, Lear was noticeably upset. Stapleton is said to have said, “Norm, she’s just a fictional character.” Lear responded, it is said with a tear in his eye, “No, she’s not.”

Before playing Edith, Stapleton played numerous roles in Broadway musicals and plays, appeared in several movies, and play dozens of guest starring roles in television. She continued to appear on TV and in movies for years afterward. But for many of us, she will always be Edith, the person we all wished we knew.

After news of Jean Stapleton’s death at the age of 90 on Friday, I noticed a sudden spike of traffic on this blog, all going to a post from last August called, “Maybe it was the heavy syrup?” I was referencing an episode of the series. I suspect people were looking for a clip. So, here’s one from the episode in question, “Edith’s Accident”:

The boy who knew too much

society, , , , , ,

Yesterday, a bunch of people linked to this article about Daniel Dobson, the son of a prominent fundamentalist preacher, talking about being a gay Christian. One of the places that linked to it also linked to this blog post by Ryan Barnhart, which sort of goes off on a tangent. But I understand why, because Dobson’s interview sent me on an even more meandering trip down memory lane.

During high school, I joined an interdenominational evangelical teen touring choir. I’d been raised in evangelical churches in several much smaller towns. Moving halfway across the continent to a bigger town had me feeling more adrift and out of place than before, so an organized religious musical activity was a welcome refuge.

I’d also spent my middle school years discovering beyond a doubt that I wasn’t straight, while experiencing entirely new levels of bullying. I was desperate to get rid of those feelings, so being confronted with a way to do “god’s work” seemed like the solution to all of my problems. Here were a bunch of people more or less my age who had a common background and a holy purpose—plus it combined aspects of music, theatre, sound, and light production…

Continue reading The boy who knew too much →

Douche-dar

people,

You know how sometimes the moment you meet some one you just know, before they say a single word, that you’re just not going to get along? Usually you can’t put your finger on it. It’s just a gut feeling. Something about the other person just puts you off right away.

The term “gaydar” has been around for a long time, referring originally to the ability of some gay men to identify closeted gay men through casual interaction. It’s been broadened over the years to refer more generically to the ability (or inability) of people to intuitively guess another person’s sexual orientation through a variety of non-verbal cues. A humorous discussion of occurs in the lyrics of the Ari Gold & Kendra Ross duet, “He’s on My Team”:

For a long time people explained the phenomenon away as being about looking for stereotypical behaviors, hair styles, and so on. But there have been numerous studies that show that people can guess a person’s sexual orientation correctly at a rate significantly above pure chance from very incomplete information. My personal favorite was the one that showed test subjects photos cropped down to a rectangle that showed only the person’s eyes, not even the entire eyebrow, so just the bridge of the nose and two eyes, nothing else.

On the other hand, some studies have shown that things people assume would be a giveaway aren’t. A study of whether the way a person walked could identify orientation showed that people did only slightly better than a coin toss at guessing correctly. Others have shown that even though watching extremely brief, silent video of a person’s mouth (other parts of the face not shown) while talking was enough to let people guess the sexual orientation of a person correctly, listening to recordings of a person talking is not.

My personal gaydar’s accuracy is spotty. I have a few amusing stories of not only not realizing another guy was gay, but completely misinterpreting his attempts to flirt. On the other hand, there have been a few guys I was certain were gay or bi, who friends insisted couldn’t possibly be, that I eventually learned were.

But while my gaydar can’t be relied upon, my douche-dar is a finely honed instrument. I can spot that arrogant jerk who blends an inflated sense of self-worth with a complete ignorance of how unpleasant others find him, compounded by a lack of manners. He’s the sort of person who uses “I’m just being honest” as an excuse to be rude, cruel, and nasty. He thinks he’s the life of the party because people are frequently laughing around him, because he doesn’t realize that sometimes they are laughing at him instead of with, but even more importantly, he doesn’t understand that laughing is often a self-defense mechanism. People laugh when someone is being mean to them as a way to communicate that they aren’t a threat. It’s a nonverbal way of saying, “Please, don’t hurt me!”

They aren’t completely lacking in social skills, they just lean very heavily on the manipulation and coercion end of the scale. So they have “friends” but this crowd generally falls into three categories:

  • Other douchebags—though usually minor or wannabe douchebags. Like scavengers following a big predator to live off the scraps.
  • Codependent victims. These people have very low self-esteem or suffer from some other emotional baggage that makes being a punching bag or the butt of the douche’s jokes seem like better than being lonely. The group includes the douche’s boyfriend/girlfriend.
  • People who have some social obligation to spend time and be civil to this person, as much as they’d rather not. Includes relatives of people in the first two categories.

I don’t know what cues I pick up on with these guys. I have correctly assessed the personality traits from a single photograph seen before meeting the person. I’ve even correctly guessed it from watching them play a completely different character in a dramatic production. And so far as I know, I’ve never been wrong.

Seriously. So I wasn’t surprised when the star of a long running TV show which has a very active fan following that writes lots of slash-fic lashed out at a question about gay subtext at a recent convention, ending his spiel by yelling that, “Normal people aren’t gay!”

Guess I’m glad I disliked the show when I watched the pilot eight years ago, huh?