From President Obama’s twitter account.I had had a post written that I was hoping to finish during lunch today to talk about Pride from a positive viewpoint, rather than about the adversity we survive. But then, particularly seeing some of the angry reactions of the homophobes to today’s Supreme Court ruling I thought, “What is a story with a happy ending? Usually it’s a story about someone triumphing against incredible odds. Sometimes triumphing over a villain, sometimes triumping over other things, but it’s a triumph over something. I’m a storyteller. I should know this.”
And what is the nature of our triumph today? Well, it’s summed up really well in the closing paragraph of the decision:
No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.
—Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority in the historic Supreme Court decision legalizing marriage equality nation wide.
Our triumph is a love that may endure past death. Our triumph is equal dignity in the eyes of the law. Our triumph is not to be condemned to loneliness. Our triumph is a hope to find another person who we love and loves us in return, and together to become something greater than we were apart.
“Love your way through the darkness.”
—Cornel West
Our society is a collection of customs and laws. Those laws exist for the times when customs are not enough to prevent injustice. Some people still claim that love doesn’t need legal protection. The love itself may not, but the people who share it sometimes do.
Sometimes things happen. Our health fails. There is an accident. And suddenly one member of a relationship is no longer able to make decisions for themselves. The law steps in at that time, and if our relationships aren’t recognized by the law, that means that instead of a person we have loved and shared our life with for decades making decisions about our health et cetera, that person is kicked out of our hospital room by bigoted relatives. The person we have loved and shared our life with may find themselves legally barred from entering the home we shared for those years. They may find themselves, like one old friend years ago had to, trying to prove in court that his clothes, personal belongings, and his own family photo albums were his, and not the property of his partner who had died in a car accident.
So while I believe in the power of love, and believe that the best way to get through darkness is love, I also believe in the power of the law. And I and my husband deserve to enjoy the law’s protection exactly the same as anyone else.
“The opposite of injustice is love.”
—Ken Wytsma
Not everyone is happy about this, and they can say some pretty irrational things while expressing their disagreement. Others try to act as if this disagreement doesn’t matter. Well, Eleven years ago… my friend Barb, beloved wife of my other friend, Kathy, wrote this essay that says much of what I want to say on that topic. It’s a really great post.
Pride Flag carried near the front of Seattle’s Pride Parade, 2014 (photo by me).Friday Links (rainbow connections edition!)
It’s Friday! It’s not just Queer Pride Month, this is Queer Pride Weekend (at least in many places, including my home, Seattle)! Tomorrow, June 27th, is the anniversary of the Stonewall Riot, which most credit as the beginning of the modern gay right’s movement, which is why most folks in the U.S. celebrate June of Pride Month and why so many Pride Parades happen on the last weekend of the month. It’s time for every les-bi-gay, transgender, genderqueer, femme, butch, stud, stem, glittering fairy, cycle mama, leather daddy, drag king, queer nerd, gym bunny, baby dyke, cuddle pup, drag queen, bear, wolf, otter, twink, single, swinger, couple, trouple, PolyFamily, anyone I left out, and everyone who loves any of the above to step out and get down in the Pride Bash Extravaganza!
(Remember, you don’t have to be queer to celebrate it. Know someone who’s queer and want them to have a happy life? Then you can join the party!)
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
Conservatives Demanding ‘Fascist, Anti-Christian’ Gay Pride Flag Be Taken Down. Right… and exactly when, in history, did Gay people enslave non-gays, buying a selling them, ripping them from their families, and then declaring a war the resulted in the deaths of 300,000 americans to try to keep their right to enslave?
Leonard Nimoy reads Isaac Asimov’s ‘The Last Question’:
(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)
Asimov said of all the stories he wrote, this was his favorite. And he said the story had “the strangest effect on my readers. Frequently someone writes to ask me if I can give them the name of a story, which they ‘think’ I may have written, and tell them where to find it. They don’t remember the title but when they describe the story it is invariably ‘The Last Question.’”
He said people wrote and asked him so often, and the story they were trying to remember was always this one. So one time when he got a phone call that was clearly an international call on a bad connection (which we had to put up with back in those days), he could barely understand the person, but he thought he caught the phrase, “don’t remember the title.” So Isaac said, “I yelled into the phone, ‘the name of the story you can’t remember is The Last Question!'” Then he repeated it, in case the person couldn’t understand. The line was just static for a moment, he heard, “thank you” and the person hung up. “So now he probably thinks I’m psychic.”
I hear or read it at least once each year as Pride weekend approaches (or shortly afterward when people post pictures of their local Pride parade): what’s there to be proud of? Usually followed up with comments to the effect that if we are born this way, then there isn’t anything we’ve done to be gay, so why be proud? Why can’t we just be ourselves and go about our day?
The answer is quite simple: because every moment of our lives—from before we were old enough to understand—society at large (including very nearly every single person who raised us, took care of us, taught us, lived beside us, et cetera) has told us again and again that “just being ourselves” is shameful. We have been told that our very beings were wrong. Our selves are a sickness to be cured, or a sin to be despised, or a shameful secret to be hidden. We’ve been bullied, harassed, tormented, shunned, and beaten because of who we are. We have been told (and often shown violently) that our lives don’t matter. We’ve been told we can’t love. We’ve been told that those of us who do fine love deserve what happens to us when the bashers and haters decide to make an example of us.
In a world that insidiously and relentlessly drums that message into us—driving many to attempt suicide as children (and sadly for many to succeed), browbeating us into hating ourselves—just openly being our selves is no small feat.
Merely surviving all of that and managing to piece together lives of authenticity is a monumental victory over incredible odds.
That’s what we have to be proud of.
I used to react to this question by just thinking that the person was clueless. And certainly cluelessness is a factor. But I’ve also realized that it’s just another manifestation of that most basic form of homophobia. “Can’t you just be who you are and not make a big deal about it” is exactly the same as “why do you have to shove it in our faces all the time” which is the equivalent of “go back into hiding where you belong.”
The saddest part of this is that those people don’t think they are being homophobic at all. And they never think about that fact that straight people “shove their sexuality” in everyone else’s face all the time. Have pictures of your spouse, significant other, or children on your desk, wall, or phone’s home screen? Mention your wife or husband in casual conversation? Comment on how hot a particular actor or actress is? Routinely ask about family discounts? Expect that, of course, your spouse will be included in the company health insurance plan? Invite us to your wedding or your kid’s straight wedding? Show us pictures of yours or your kid’s straight wedding? Ever use the phrase “no homo”?
Since we get accused of shoving our sexuality in your face if we merely casually mention the existence of our significant other, we get to count all of those things as you shoving your sexuality in our faces. Straight pride happens 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, yet you begrudge queer people (trans, lesbian, bisexual, gay, genderqueer, polyamorous, asexual, pansexual, gender fluid, intersexed, gender neutral, and those who love and support us) a parade once a year?
Why am I proud?
I’m proud because they tried to drown us in lies, and we’ve risen above to reveal our truth. I’m proud because they have beaten and tortured us in the name of faith, and we’ve found the strength to show the world our love. I’m proud because they tried to smother us with fear, but we found hope in the most unlikely of places. I’m proud because we have endured hate, which has taught us how to love better. I’m proud because we have fled the shadows, and showed the world our light. I’m proud because no matter how many times we’ve been knocked down, we have gotten back up.
I’m proud because we’re all still here, we’re unstoppable, and we’re beautiful!
Indiana RFRA protest rally earlier this year. (WISH-TV/Howard Monroe)I stared at my iPad, flabbergasted. A writer whose work I admire, and who has always come across as thoughtful in his personal blog, stated that after carefully reviewing the blog posts and comments of another writer who has been spearheading a particular bigoted movement concluded, “I can find no solid evidence to support the frequently repeated charge of homophobia.” It took me three minutes with Google to come up with five rather blatant homophobic statements. One of which was in a post that the writer who now says he can find no evidence of homophobia had commented on. A few sentences later I found the answer: “While it’s clear he opposes marriage equality for religious reasons, there’s no evidence of blatant animosity.”
Oh, dear, not that old fallacy again!
It comes up all the time. People who consider themselves progressive and pro-gay rights, but who are themselves not queer, will turn a blind eye to homophobic statements and actions so long as the perpetrator refrains from employing obviously offensive language too frequently and claims they are doing it for religious reasons. As if, somehow, only when an oppressor is openly vicious are the actions actually oppressive…Continue reading Sincerely (up) yours,→
Just a year ago, many conservative pundits were pointing out that the number of states that had adopted marriage equality, and where a majority of the citizens of said states supported it, meant that there weren’t enough states left to ratify a constitutional amendment. Then we have polls released just this week that not only show that a majority of americans support marriage equality, but that a whopping 63% believe that marriage equality is a constitutional right and that the court should rule it so!
I have to point out that back in 1971, four years after a unanimous Supreme Court had struck down bans on interracial marriage, that a majority of americans disagreed with that decision. But no one even tried to pass a federal constitutional amendment to allow states to begin banning interracial marriage again. I don’t believe that anyone could make a credible run at an amendment to ban gay marriage now when a majority of americans support gay marriage.
I should point out, that while 63 percent said they thought the constitution protects the right, a “mere” 57% said they fully support it. Which means that about 6% are personally opposed to queers marrying each other, but also believe it should be legal. That isn’t a contradiction. Lots of us disapprove of things that we also don’t think should be illegal for other people to do if they really want.
The most interesting statistic on that, as always, is the demographic number. We’re used to, in these polls, seeing that young people are more supportive of gay rights than older people. So it is no surprise that roughly 73% of those under the age of 50 are in favor of marriage equality. But the surprise is that just over 52% of people aged 50 and older are also in favor. It’s almost evenly split, but for a long time it was a clear majority of older people who disapproved. Of course, some of that shift has been a simple matter of aging. People who were in their late 40s when polls were taken a few years ago, and were therefore at least slight more likely to be in favor of marriage equality, are now in the older cohort, and they’re brought their beliefs with them. But aging alone doesn’t account for the change. So in the last few years, some of those older people who previously opposed it or answered that they weren’t sure have changed their minds.
It’s that last piece, I know, that some of the haters hang onto. They remain convinced that somehow, if they just keep screaming about how horrible and icky gay people are, that they can start getting people to change their minds the other way.
I don’t think so. I continue to believe that our two best weapon are visibility and familiarity. The more people who know actual gay people—and specifically, the more they see their own relatives and the relatives of their friends not just be out, but stand in line for marriage licenses and have their weddings and so forth without the world coming crashing down—the more supportive they become.
The cliché is that you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. I agree that the marriage equality genie is out and isn’t going back. More importantly, none of us queers are going to allow ourselves to be chased back into the closet.
No one’s coming out goes exactly the same as any other. The fear that the guy talks about in the first video (and the anxiety you can see on the young woman’s face in the first part of the second) is very real. Even in 2015, 40% of homeless teen-agers are homeless because they have been kicked out of their homes by parents because they are gay.
I tried to come out to my best friend—a guy I loved like a brother—dozens or more times. Because we were both attending fundamentalist evangelical churches, I tried to ease us into the conversation. But every single time that even a hint of the topic of non-heterosexuality came up, he would instantly go into “Gross! Sinful! All homos go to hell!” mode with such vehemence, it’s amazing I wasn’t physically hurled from the room by the strength of his condemnation.
Ironically, when I finally did come out years later, he insisted that the reason he was ending our friendship was not because I was “an unrepentant homosexual” (his words), but rather because I told someone else before I told him. He was also one of the people who insisted emphatically that he had never, ever, ever suspected at all that I was gay before I came out.
I don’t believe that statement, either.
Several relatives and close friends from back then made equally insistent denials of ever suspecting. Of course, one of those people was my Mom. And when one of my aunts found out Mom was claiming she had never suspected, that’s when the aunt informed me that beginning when I was about 14 years old, she and my mom and several ladies from church had begun meeting once a week to pray my gay away. I also was informed by one of the former board members of the evangelical touring teen choir I had been involved with as a teen-ager that it had been explicitly known that one reason I wasn’t given solos or put into one of the small ensembles for the first many years I was active in the group was because the leadership was certain I was “struggling with the sin of homosexuality.”
They were correct in that I was struggling mightily to stop feeling attracted to other guys. But unlike a lot of the guys who they did put into leadership positions and gave solos to, I wasn’t acting on my feelings. I wrote about one of those cases, but he wasn’t the only queer boy in the group fooling around with other guys back then.
I’m glad that more people are getting reactions like the second video: “I always knew. Were you afraid to tell me?” But far too many queer people have plenty of reasons to fear rejection (and worse) from their own families and friends if they admit who they are. And that’s just wrong.
The original Pride flag designed by Gilbert Baker in 1978 has 8-stripes. Colors were removed and changed originally due to fabric availability.I don’t remember when I first learned that the Rainbow flag was a symbol for LGBTQ pride. I do remember in high school finding out that a particular representation of a labrys (double-headed symmetric ax associated with several goddesses from Greek mythology) had been adopted by some lesbians. However, since the information came first from the same sorts of church people who saw Satanic symbols everywhere, I wasn’t completely certain it was true.
The next symbol I learned about was the pink triangle. Since it was an emblem used by the Nazis to mark prisoners sent to the concentration camps with the excuse that they were sexual deviants, and since the Allies had then re-imprisoned all of the gay men who managed to survive the camps, the emblem was more of an assertion of “never again!” than a pure statement of pride.
Click to embiggen.Earlier this week I posted about how much I love fantasy and science fiction and one of the reasons why. Specifically that sf/f had been a refuge from some of the cruelties a homophobic society heaps upon queer kids while they’re growing up. Much of sf/f is about escaping oppression of one sort or another. Science fiction in particular is often about the triumph of the light of reason over the darkness of ignorance. That gave me hope, as a kid. Sometimes it was the only hope I had. Which is why it feels like a double betrayal when I encounter homophobia in sf/f circles. One phrase I used to describe the homophobes in question was, “whose ultimate goal is to erase us.”
Which led one commenter to tsk at me and insist that, while the people in question are decidedly anti-gay, there was no evidence they want to erase us.
Oh, goodie! Straightsplaining! Homophobia isn’t what I think it is, at all! How foolish of me to think that my 50+ years of surviving the slings and arrows of homophobia gave me any expertise in the meaning or aims of homophobia!
It’s possible the commenter has a reading comprehension problem and thinks that erasure must always literally imply extermination and is trying to claim that the people in question don’t want all queers dead. So, on the slight possibility that that’s the case, let me just explain that when I say “erase us” I mean “wish that we were invisible and that all or nearly all evidence of our existence was removed from stories, books, movies, television series, and society in general.”
And you know what? Every single homophobe in existence wishes that we were, in the least, invisible. It is part of the definition of being a homophobe! It’s a common lie they tell themselves and us all the time: “I don’t hate gay people, just why do they have to shove it in my face all the time?” Or “I wish they wouldn’t flaunt it all the time!” Or “I don’t want my children seeing that!”
And in the cases of the Sad Puppies, making us invisible is exactly what they’ve been talking about:
When they lament the fact that they can’t always be sure when they pick up a “book with a rocket on it” that they aren’t going to encounter gay characters inside? That’s wishing we were invisible.
When they insist (in the comments thread of the post linked in the first bullet) that it is deceptive that another book’s back cover blurb didn’t mention prominently enough that the protagonist is gay? That’s wishing we were invisible.
When they insist that in a novel about a young person’s quest for self-discovery the fact that the young person is gay isn’t revealed until nearly midway through the book (when the character finally admits it to himself) is some form of malicious deception? That’s wishing we were invisible.
And while we’re on the subject of John C. Wright: when he says that the “instinctive reaction of men” to “fags” is “beating them to death with axhandles and tire-irons,” that’s beyond wishing we were invisible, it’s an explicit statement that they wish we were exterminated.
To the commenter who kicked this off: I don’t know how you could have been paying close enough attention to the Bad Puppies to notice that they were anti-gay, yet missed the many times they have alluded to the bashing (and worse) of queers. Just as I don’t know how you could have been paying close enough attention to these guys to describe Vox Day/Theodore Beale as “vile” and have missed all the times he’s said that homosexuality is an existential threat to civilization that must be either cured or eradicated. Because all of that is also evidence that even more than wishing we were invisible, they wish we didn’t exist.
So please, don’t tell me or any other queer person that we don’t understand our own oppression. To paraphrase bunnika : when you were watching our lifestyles and checking out the homophobes’ web sites, we have been living our lives and experiencing actual homophobia that you have no right to ‘splain.
Thanks for your comment, though. And bless your heart.
Note: Comments on this entire blog have always been moderated. Specific commenters have been whitelisted, but everyone else’s comments sit in a queue until I approve them. And I don’t see any point in approving comments that are insulting, or obviously coming from sock puppets (there have been a lot of those this week) or—such as the comment alluded to here—indicate the person isn’t interested in listening.
We’re queer, we’re nerds, get used to it!I was 13 years old and had been a semi-faithful reader of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for a few years. I think I found my first copy in a magazine rack in a drug store sometime during fourth grade. I had pleaded and begged for a subscription of my own, and one of my grandparents had bought me a subscription for my twelfth birthday—except they got me a subscription to Galaxy Science Fiction instead. Which wasn’t bad, it meant I got a magazine about the size of a paperbook every month filled with short stories, novelletes, and sometimes serialized novels. But my adventures in the pages of Galaxy magazine is a story for another blog post.
It was summer, just months before my 14th birthday, when I got hold of the new copy of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and found inside it a story called “Picnic on the Nearside” written by John Varley. In it, the narrator, Fox, who was 12 years old and lived on a colony of the moon sometime in the future, had been in an epic argument with his mother, because he wanted a Change. He didn’t explain right away what the change was, but before that reveal, we learned that people in his society could easily alter their bodies (his mother exchanged her feet for peds/hands before going out to a party; and Fox mentioned a time he had assembled an eight-legged cat). Then Fox’s best friend, Halo, shows up as a nude woman, which finally explained what the change was. Fox and Halo had been best buds for years, and Fox worried that now that Halo was a woman, it would ruin their friendship.
Cover of the paperback edition of one of Varley’s anthologies which included the story in question.There are many other interesting things that happen in the story: Fox and Halo take Fox’s parents’ vehicle out on the surface without permission and get into a misadventure. But the really mind-bending part of the tale was the setting: a society where changing genders was only slightly more complicated than changing one’s clothes, and where everyone was okay with it. That was just mind-boggling!
I have to make a couple of digressions here. The first is that not all queer people are transgender, transsexual, nor transvestite. Gay boys don’t want to become women, we’re guys who are attracted to and fall in love with other guys. The proper answer to the clueless question, “Which one is the woman” is “Neither, that’s the point!” But one of the reasons young gay boys often idolize female characters in their favorite movies, books, and so forth is because the female characters are the objects of desire of the male characters. Similarly, young lesbian girls often idolize male characters in works of fiction. Young bisexuals may find themselves idolizing both, and so on.
Because there were no openly gay characters in any of movies, TV shows, books, short stories, et cetera which made up our cultural landscape growing up, one of the only ways to imagine ourselves in the worlds we longed to live in was to identify with the female characters. So on one level, “Picnic on the Nearside” offered me a more explicit way of projecting myself into that world. It was as if one of my subconscious coping mechanisms had been made manifest in the plot! Therefore, this story so intrigued me not because its imagined future would afford me an opportunity to change genders (which wasn’t what I wanted), but because it offered an escape from the expectations that boys were only allowed to do boy things, and only allowed to be friends with other boys, and only allowed to be boyfriends with girls.
The other digression is about the difference between a gender fluid milieu and a gay/lesbian culture. Varley has written a lot of stories set in the same world as “Picnic on the Nearside,” including several with the same character, Fox, as the protagonist (though the stories starring Detective Anna-Louise Bach {for example, “The Barbie Murders”} may be a bit more famous). Many of his characters change genders and have love affairs with people who have also swapped genders, but many times his imaginary gender fluid society is still very heterosexual. Fox never thinks of Halo as a potential sexual partner until they are opposite gender, for instance. Some of the couples who appear in the various stories seem to be just friends when they happen to be the same gender, then become lovers only when they happen to be opposite.
Many psychologists and sociologists now theorize that men who like to dress up as women and have sex with other men while thus dressed up are actually exploring an exaggerated heterosexuality. Having, in the online world, been sometimes emphatically propositioned by guys like that, and found myself turned off by their “flirting” that consists of trying to get me to say I will treat them the way an extremely selfish chauvinist man might treat a “slut,” I see their point. The men pursuing those scenarios are so into their fantasy of what heterosex could be that sometimes they want to experience it from the girls’ side. They aren’t turned on by the other man as a man, they are turned on by the situation of a woman submitting to a man in very specific ways.
Looking back on some of Varley’s stories, they can feel more like a mostly hetero exploration of gender roles, rather than a pan-gender exploration of sexual orientations.
There’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s a lot right with it.
A lot of the pain, fear, and bigotry directed toward LGBTQ people is grounded in very narrow and strict views of gender. It’s why homophobic men are almost always also misogynist (or at least very chauvinist). So anything that makes us question those assumptions about intrinsic differences between men and women, what roles men and women are each allowed to take in society, and the morality of those gender binaries is a good thing. And there’s no question that Varley’s tales exposed many of hypocrisies at the heart of all those assumptions.
I became a Varley fan that summer. Even more so, I became a fan of the protagonist, Fox, who went on to appear in the short story “The Phantom of Kansas” and the novel Steel Beach. Questions of gender and sexuality are at most a minor consideration in most of his stories, and I’ve come to appreciate his ability to take seemingly any speculative notion (no matter how weird) to its logical conclusion, and still tell a cracking good yarn along the way. What grabbed me that summer, while re-reading Fox and Halo’s misadventure again and again, was that there was at least one writer willing to tell stories that didn’t exclude a queer viewpoint. And there were editors who would print it, and by implication, readers other than me who wanted to read it.
And that was an amazing epiphany for a 13-year-old gay boy in the rural and very redneck Rocky Mountains.
The Supreme Court is hearing arguments today on four cases involving Marriage Equality. Over the last year, the Court has declined to hear appeals of cases where a federal court struck down a ban on same-sex marriage. These four cases are ones in which the lower courts have struck down some aspect of a state ban, and an appellate court has stayed or overruled the lower court ruling. It’s not a done deal by any means, but it seems clear that a majority of the court is at least willing to let marriage equality become the law of the land. My own worry is not that the court won’t rule that gays have a right to marry, but rather that the less enthusiastic justices will force a very narrow ruling that would ultimately allow people to get fired from their jobs if they marry, businesses to refuse to sell to gay people, and so on.
Anyway, they will hear arguments today, but the ruling is not likely to be announced until nearly the end of the term, in June. Still, people are rallying in Washington, D.C., and there are local rallies happening around the country today.
But here are two nice videos that sum up our side of things:
Font Folly 
