Tag Archives: lgbt

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.”

The opposite of shoving

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Does he work in computers, too?”

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

“How did you meet?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hardly a first step

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shoving

society, ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I was the one “shoving”?

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

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

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

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

How do you figure?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do we need that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What men do…

society, , ,

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)

literature, movies, , , , ,

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.

The boy who knew too much

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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…

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