Tag Archives: society

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.

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…

Continue reading The boy who knew too much →

Defending your right…

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Gay rights equal gun rights poster
Personal dislikes.
Some odd posters have been popping up around Seattle.

I first read about them in a local alt-weekly’s news blog. The story has slowly been picking up steam. The QR code on the posters lead to a gun-rights web site, but the owner of the web site denies any knowledge of the posters. Reporters tracked down the photographer who took the picture for a gun rights campaign, and he says no one asked his permission to re-use the work, but as a pro-gun person, he is delighted that the image is being used. Those reports describe the photo poster as a picture of one woman holding another, but the shorter girl looks youthful enough that I think a better description of the photo might be “young woman embracing a teenage girl.”

No one has been able to locate the artist of the cartoony image on the second poster. The image is credited to a “Dale Nixon,” but that’s a pseudonym that many artists have used over the years when they don’t want their name attached to a piece of work they did for hire. It is even more clear that the cartoon was drawn for a father-son campaign, originally.

That’s one of the things that annoys me about the posters, and which makes me think these are not created by someone who is terribly sympathetic to the gay rights cause.

Annoyed isn’t the right word. First I was disturbed, and as I thought about it a little longer, deeply creeped out that someone would think that a good way to pitch a political message at gay couples would be to include images that hint at pedophilia. Really? I’ve spent decades having to explain that gay people are no more likely to be pedophiles than straight people, decades explaining that I was not sexually abused as a child and why it’s offensive the people assume that, and so on, and you think a good way to make me sympathetic to your cause is to imply that all middle-aged gay men are dating teen-agers? Look at that male couple in the poster! Tell me in all seriousness that the guy on the right isn’t a “kid.”

Marriage rights equal gun rights poster
Arm yourself, especially if your partner is 20 years younger than you!
It could be simply a case of cluelessness, of course. Someone wanted some images to go on the poster, and was just trying to find something that might pass as a same-sex couple with a gun or three. It would certainly not be the first time someone armed with some page layout software did something incredibly dumb unintentionally.

And I’ve gotten into enough discussions with certain kinds of conservative-minded (though they always describe themselves as “libertarian”) gay men who can’t understand why so many out gay people are much more sympathetic to liberal causes. No matter how many examples you give them of how anti-gay most conservative organizations, policies, and politicians are (and how steeped in unconscious bigotry and entitlement most libertarian messages and casual conversations are), they don’t get it. And they’ve been in enough of these debates that they are paranoically defensive about any of their statements. Putting up anonymous posters would not be unexpected from them.

The neighborhood where these have popped up isn’t just well-known as the “gayborhood,” it is so incredibly deep blue politically, and known to be a hot bed of liberal activism, that it’s hard to believe anyone thinks there’s a significantly number of people who haven’t already thought about the issue of the right to bear arms. These posters use very tired, old arguments that everyone who has thought about either the issue of guns or hate crimes has processed and come to an conclusion on long, long ago. Neither the posters or the web site they lead to have anything there that is going to change anyone’s mind.

Anyone at all. The only people who buy the arguments on the linked web site are people who already agree with them.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve pointed out many times that I sometimes confound my fellow liberals because I think gun control means hitting what you aim at, even though I’m in favor of universal background checks, holding gun owners responsible for what happens when they don’t secure a gun or “forget” to report a stolen gun. It’s not their opinion on the right to keep and bear arms I’m concerned with in these posters. I’m disturbed and creeped out by the use of father/son and mother/daughter images to represent gay couples. I’m annoyed at the implication that violence is an expected outcome of gaining equality. I’m annoyed and disappointed at the second poster’s implication that brandishing guns is the proper response to verbal harassment (“not going to take sh*t from the homophobes”). I’m irritated that the person drawing these false equivalencies hasn’t thought through to the obvious conclusion: marriage rights are like gun rights, and if marriage requires a license, why doesn’t gun ownership require one?

Some people think the posters are meant to scare people, to imply that hate crimes are rampant in the city. Instead of putting up anti-gay posters, such as the “no homo zone” posters in the news elsewhere last year, put up these things that on the surface seem to be pro-gay, but actually are meant to make gay couples feel less safe—a reverse-psychology form of intimidation. I don’t think that’s the most likely explanation.

As the adage says, never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Pure, and clean-minded, and manly

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Riddle me this: when is inclusion really exclusion?

So, a bit over a month after announcing they would take an internal vote on whether to modify their ban on gay members, the Boy Scouts of America decided to remove “the restriction denying membership to youth on the basis of sexual orientation alone” (emphasis mine). Which a lot of people are praising as a great step forward, while others are predicting the destruction of scouting (and the continued collapse of society and eventual destruction of the entire universe).

The anti-gay folks shouldn’t be upset. The way the BSA has worded this policy isn’t a loss for them in the least. It is, in fact, an insidious trap perfectly designed to increase the amount of self-loathing and self-delusion that can be instilled in young gay men.

A lot of people have pointed out that the ban allows gay boys into scouting until they turn 18, keeping the ban on gay scout leaders and lesbian den mothers firmly in place. They have paraphrased that policy as, “you’re welcome… for a while.” And most everyone can see that that is a half-measure, at best.

But it’s sneakier than that. A more accurate paraphrase would be, “you’re welcome now, and you can participate, make friends, learn things, and have great fun… but we’ll kick you out when you’re 18 unless, by some miracle, you cease to be gay by then.”

There is already incredible emotional and social pressure for young non-heterosexual boys to hide, obfuscate, and deny their orientation. The internal mantra of the closeted gay teen used to be “no one must know!” and if you broke that rule, your life would be ruined. This policy creates an atmosphere where you can let the secret out without facing at least one type of immediate rejection, but opens up new doors for indoctrination and oppression.

And it’s not just that “change before you’re 18” club that they have to metaphorically beat the gay boys with. The other one is that little, sneaky word in the new policy, “alone.” You can’t be kicked out for your sexual orientation alone. It’s the central tenet of the religiously-motivated rabidly anti-gay crowd: “I don’t hate gay people, I morally disapprove of their lifestyle.”

So, you won’t be kicked out for admitting you’re gay, but you might be kicked out for not acting manly enough. Or you might be kicked out for spending too much time with other openly gay teens. Or you might be kicked out for having a boyfriend.

Now, they will defend that last one by pointing out that scout law demands that all scouts be “clean in thought, word, and deed” and therefore straight scouts who engage in premarital sex would be disciplined, too. The sad thing is, a lot of otherwise gay-friendly people will nod their heads to that and say, “well, yes, that makes sense.”

But I didn’t say they would be kicked out for having sex with another guy. I said “kicked out for having a boyfriend.” Straight scouts don’t get kicked out for having a girlfriend. But I know gay scouts will face an extremely heightened scrutiny of any of their relationships. And activities that straight scouts will do with impunity will be punished, at least by some troops, when a gay scout does it.

Just go google “facebook gay kissing controversy” to see an example. Facebook is littered with pictures of straight couples kissing, of half-naked people of either gender in all sorts of compromising positions without anyone batting an eye. But if someone posts a picture of two fully clothed men kissing, some people will flag it as “graphic or sexually suggestive,” and sometimes it gets banned. It doesn’t get unbanned until other people kick up a fuss.

It’s a common double standard. Prime time TV is full of all kinds of sexually suggestive situations between opposite-gendered couples that no one reacts to, but if they show a gay couple having a fairly innocent kiss, anti-gay activists start screaming “graphic gay sex!”

It’s not just the obvious bigots who think that way. I’ve seen dozens of stories from teen-agers who were surprised when they came out to their liberal, gay-rights supporting parents, because the parents freaked out. “You’re too young! You can’t know whether you’re gay, or not!” The reason the parents have the freak-out is because while they think they’re open-minded, they actually have fully bought into the myth that being gay is about sex, only sex, and nothing but sex. Their support for gay-rights is about letting adults decide how to conduct their sex lives. So while they wouldn’t freak out if their 14-year-old daughter had a crush on a boy, or their 15-year-old son had a crush on a girl, because having crushes is a natural and innocent part of growing up and learning about love. But they go ballistic when their teen talks about being gay, because being gay must mean sex. It can’t possibly be an innocent crush.

My old scout manual explained that “Clean in thought, word, and deed” meant that a scout strove to be “pure, clean-minded, and manly.” That sounds great, until you think about all of the impure, dirty-minded, and unmanly stereotypes people have about gays. And how impure, dirty, and unmanly some people construe anything that a known gay guy says or does.

No policy is going to prevent bigoted parents from looking for (and trumping up, if necessary) reasons to kick the gay kid out of their son’s troop. No policy is going to prevent kids under the influence of such parents from misconstruing actions from the known gay troop member as some sort of sexual advance, and try to get the kid kicked out.

But this particular policy is quite clearly designed to encourage those behaviors. So, I’m one former scout who is not ready to celebrate, yet.

Just us guys

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How upset some guys get about sharing locker rooms and showers with gay guys would be funny if it didnt lead so often to harassment and assault.

I just want to ask them a simple pair of related questions: are mobs of women you don’t know throwing themselves at you, trying to jump your bones? If not, why do you assume that every gay man is going to be trying to force themselves on you?

There’s an answer, but it isn’t a very pretty one. The truth is that the kinds of straight guys who are weirded out/uncomfortable/angry1 at the thought of having to share a locker room, shower, or even a gym with gay guys know how they treat women they are attracted to. They assume that all straight men think that way about women, so they also assume that all gay men will think that way about them.

And they don’t like it2.

That’s not the only source of their discomfort. There’s also the loss of the “just us guys” environment—a space where guys are safe to be guys. A place where they can scratch where it itches, can make inappropriate jokes, and generally be uncivilized. It would be easy to point out how a little less uncivilized behavior, along with less affirmation of a lot of sexist attitudes, would be a good thing in the long run. And I think it will be a good thing over time.

But there is also some value to that safe place. Just as it is valuable for women to have safe places to talk about their issues without guys like me saying, “Hey! We’re not all like that” or other guys “man-splaining3.” And it’s valuable for gay people to have safe places to talk about our issues without other people insisting they’re “not all like that” or trying to “str8-splain.”

Guys need places where they can be guys.

Now, I’m the first to say that a lot of what currently is presumed to be “guys just being guys” is awful and needs to change. Even when I was participating in several sports back in middle school, there was a certain amount of dread that fell on me whenever it was time to go to the locker room, or go out on the field. Any time you screwed up or failed to be as good at something as another guy, you were called a faggot, or queer, or pussy.

And that was only the nicer coaches5.

The mean coaches and the other kids called you c*cksucker, bitch, and c*nt—in various combinations. One of my middle school tormenters was fond of “c*cksucking, sh*teating fag.”

Guys of all sexual orientations and abilities are harmed by those notions that equate masculinity with athleticism, sexuality, and competitiveness. This notion enforces the hierarchy that equates the amount of respect one is entitled to is determined by the degree to which one possesses those masculine traits (which means that women will automatically never be able to expect as much respect as a man). Even the guys who have found success by embracing this notion have done so by contorting their personality in various ways, cutting themselves out of a lot of what’s great about being a person along the way.

So shaking up that definition is a good thing.

But it doesn’t have to mean that all distinctions between masculine and feminine are going to go away. It doesn’t mean that those of us in the LGBT community think they should6. It just means that there are a lot of different kinds of guys—lots of different ways to be a man. And all those different kinds of guy can hang out and be one of the guys, and all of the guys can be okay with it.

At least I hope so. Because my husband hates it when I start talkin’ about football, and I just need somewhere that I can…

1. Angry in this case is just code for afraid. Guys aren’t allowed to be afraid, so our subconscious transforms the fear into anger.

2. One would hope that this discomfort would help some of them to see that maybe they should start thinking of women a little differently, no?

3. mansplaining: condescending, inaccurate explanations delivered with a rock solid confidence of rightness and that slimy certainty that of course he is right, because he is the man in this conversation4.

4. Some people define mansplaining exclusively as that sort of condescending explanation by a man to a woman, especially about topics related to women’s rights, and so on. But a lot of mansplaining is guy-on-guy. And none of us are immune. Guys are socialized to be confident and assertive, no matter what.

5. The coach who taught Sunday school and who made you put a quarter in the swearing jar on his desk if he heard you say “hell” or “damn” used “fag” so much, you began to wonder if he thought it was a punctuation mark. And don’t get me started on the teacher who was also a pastor.

6. I suspect some trans people have more to say about that than I possibly could.

Frothy!

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Ten years ago yesterday, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum gave his infamous “man on dog sex” interview.
Continue reading Frothy! →

Live your life with honesty

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My scouting career was like a patchwork quilt. I joined Cub Scouts in second grade. I don’t think I was a particularly outstanding member of the troop, but I’m also not sure how outstanding any 8-year-olds really are.

In third grade we moved twice during the school year (and once during the summer between the end of third grade and the beginning of fourth). One of towns we moved to didn’t have any scouting troops, it was just two small. Another we didn’t stay long enough to finish unpacking before Dad’s company said, “No, we need that oil rig back in Colorado. Time for y’all to pack up your families again.” That town may well have had a troop, but we weren’t there long enough to find out.

I don’t remember much about the troop I joined when we moved to Ft Morgan, Colorado. I do remember having to say good-bye again just before Thanksgiving. But what I really remember is how shocked I was, once we settled into the next town, that there was only one troop and it was associated with a church that (at the time) Southern Baptists considered a cult rather than a denomination. The feeling was more than a bit mutual. I was informed that the only way to join the troop would be for our family to convert to the other church.

That was only the beginning of a lot of bizarre experiences that most people think could never happen in America as we tried to get by in a town where more than 95% of the population belonged to the same church. Those experiences convinced me at an early age of the true value of separation of church and state.

That would come later. At that point, I was simply dumbfounded to learn that I wasn’t welcome. I hadn’t really understood, before then, how closely the Boy Scouts were tied to churches. Yes, my original troop had been sponsored by the church my family belonged to, but several of the boys in our troop weren’t members of our church. My subsequent troops had been similar. I’m not sure if it was because all of the towns were so small that each had only one troop that drew from all the churches in town, but I had never before felt that my membership as a scout had been dependent upon being a member in good standing of an “acceptable” church.

By the time we were once more living in a town that had a troop which wouldn’t exclude me because of which church I belonged to, puberty had hit and finally told me in no uncertain terms that all the bullies at each school who had called me “faggot” and “queer” had been on to something. I don’t know if the Scouts explicitly had the no gays rule at the time, but it was quite clear to me that “boys like me” weren’t going to be welcomed by “boys like them.”

A frame from the Family Research Council "Stand With Scouts" video.
A frame from the Family Research Council “Stand With Scouts” video.
So the current controversies about Boy Scouts of America polices strike close to home. I wasn’t kicked out for being gay. I wasn’t ever formally kicked out at all. But I certainly felt the sting of rejection, and can’t completely understand why there are so many people who claim to have the well-being of children in mind while they are being coldhearted and bloodyminded. It’s bad enough that people believe and repeat the lies that all gays are pedophiles, that all gay kids are predators, et cetera, but some of them seem compelled to lie about anything and everything to further their bigoted agenda.

The notorious Family Research Council has posted a video calling for people to stand firm on the Scout’s ban on gay members. The script of the video is full of all the usual lies and distortions, but also the image I’ve included here. A bunch of people in some sort of meeting room, with the Boy Scouts’ emblem on the wall, and a sign visible on the left that says “2013 Planning Meeting.”

Except it’s a lie.

U.S. District Court photo originally from LegalGeekery.com.
U.S. District Court photo originally from LegalGeekery.com.
The original photo was found, by Jeremy Hooper of the Good As You blog, to be from a 2009 story published at LegalGeekery.com, where it is identified as the federal district court for the District of Massachusetts.

It’s clear that someone swiped the original picture, cropped it a bit, then Photoshopped the BSA emblem in place of the U.S. District Court seal and the fake 2013 meeting sign on top of the closed circuit TV screen.

You can say that the stolen image is pretty trivial. Nothing they did to the image itself causes any harm to any gay scouts, but it’s still a lie. And it’s just one of many lies in the video. Why, if their cause is so just, must they lie so much?

They like to quote the part of Scout Law that calls for every scout to be “morally straight.” But when my old scout handbook explained that particular phrase, the explanation begins, “By morally straight we mean you are to live your life with honesty…”

So why does the Family Research Council—an organization that has been caught lying again and again about matters both great and (as in this case) exceedingly trivial—get to advise anyone on morality?

Not so recent

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Back in the early ’90s, when I was active with the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Chorus, we had some sort of social at a member’s house. Our host and his partner were showing us around, when someone commented on the photos hanging on the wall of an incredibly adorable kid. “Is that your nephew?”

“No,” our host said. “That’s my son. Here he is with his two moms. And here’s one of all of us.”

He proceeded to tell the story of how a friend he had known “since school” had one day asked him if he would donate the sperm so that she and her partner could have a child. “The next thing I knew, I was explaining to my boyfriend at the time about how in a couple months we’d have to go about a week or two without sex to maximum my sperm count.”

They were doing it without the help of a clinic. So, as he said, he had to “produce a sample” at the appointed time, and a friend who had been recruited for the purpose drove the container across town to where the lesbian couple were waiting. It all had to be timed around when she was most likely to be ovulating, of course. Then they had to wait for a number of weeks to see if it worked.

It didn’t.

So they tried again. And again.

“By this point I suspect we were driving all our friends crazy, because we were all paying attention to her menstrual cycle and talking about it in inappropriate places!”

Eventually, they decided that the problem was probably that the drive time was too long for the sperm to remain viable. So, he said, one night he and his boyfriend went over to their house. She and the friend who was assisting with the equipment were in one bedroom, and he and his boyfriend were in another—”He was getting a bit tired of all these bouts of no sex leading up to each try”—and the gal’s partner waited outside the door to take the specimen jar once it was ready.

“It wasn’t romantic for any of us!”

But that time it worked. And ten years later, the lesbian couple were still happily raising their son, with the occasional help of the friend who had donated the sperm.

I was reminded of this story while listening to this story on one of the local NPR stations.

It also made me think about those comments during the Supreme Court hearings a couple weeks back where a couple of the justices kept referring to gay parenting and gay-headed families as a recent development. One justice insisted that the very idea was “newer than cell phones.”

The first analog cellular network went active in 1979, but no one called the large, brick-like phones (some of them were closer to the size of a briefcase) a cellphone. The phones small enough to fit easily in a pocket came out in 1991. About nine years after the birth of the boy whose story I began this post with.

And that wasn’t when gay parenting began. The American Psychological Association published one famous peer-reviewed multi-year study on the outcomes of children raised by gay and lesbian parents in 1970, for goodness sake!

When I was first coming out of the closet, in the late ’80s, a rather large percentage of the lesbians I met had children. Some of my “lesbian aunties*” had children who were older than I was, and those children had children of their own. A slightly smaller percentage of the gay men I met at that time also had children, some of them with children of their own, as well.

Most of those gay and lesbian parents I knew back then had married young while they were still struggling with their sexual identity, and the children were the result of the marriage. Because of various inequities in child custody laws in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the majority of those children were in the physical custody of their mothers. So I knew of a lot more kids who had been raised by lesbian mothers than those who had been raised by their gay fathers.

On the other hand, one of the adults I knew back then had been raised by an actual lesbian aunt and her aunt’s partner after her own parents had died when she was a baby.

Bottom line: gay, lesbian, and bisexual people have been raising children for many generations. It isn’t a recent idea.

And as to whether gay marriage is a recent idea? Well, the Roman Emperor Constantius II issued what was probably the very first legal ban on gay marriage back in the year 324 A.D. If they decided they needed to explicitly ban it, and then later add the death penalty to the punishment, then gay marriages had to have been happening before that, right?

* Not my actual aunts. These were older lesbian women who sort of adopted me when I was coming out.

Taxes

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We once again put off doing our taxes.

I don’t mind paying taxes. Really. Unlike some people, I recognize that we’re generally safe in our homes and can count on our money being useful to purchase goods and services because of government functions ranging from the local police and fire departments all the way out to federal reserve and the armed forces. That’s not the grumble.

For most of my life (with a couple of exceptions), my taxes have been fairly simple. Unfortunately, for the last three years that hasn’t been the case. Because when voters in my state approved “everything but the name marriage” domestic partnerships a few years ago (and full-fledged marriage last year), they granted community property rights to us, but the federal Defense of Marriage Act forbids the IRS from calling it a marriage, we’re required to file as Single, but we’re also required to report each other’s income.

The first year this was true caught everyone by surprise (a lot of IRS employees didn’t understand why these strange returns were coming in, and sent back letters threatening fines for “frivolously false” filings), so none of the usual free online services (nor the paid software) knew how to handle it. It took Michael and I several hours to sort things out. And if some gay rights organizations hadn’t posted instructions and links to the correct obscure IRS documents, it would have taken a lot longer.

Last year, which was the second year this was required for citizens of a bunch of states, the software services (and some of the walk-in-and-pay-us places) still couldn’t handle it. But since we’d done it once before, and had saved copies of everything, we were able to do it ourselves with much less hassle.

This year, the third year (and with even more states qualifying), I had been pleased to read some reviews that indicated at least one of the common software solutions could handle it.

The reviews lie.

Once I did figure out what the misleading instructions actually meant (both the software interface and the instructions extremely poorly designed), the software would literally not let me back to the dialog box where I needed to change the number unless I deleted the entire form and started over.

Fortunately, they have a simple form on their website to request a refund.

If I had just set out to do it ourselves as before, I would have had a much less cranky afternoon.

The really dumb thing is that most of the reason why I would like to use the software is because both of us have atrocious handwriting. With any luck, the Defense of Marriage Act will finally be gone next year, and we’ll be able to just do the simple “Married Filing Jointly” form.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

Damage control

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A few years back a church bought a recently vacated big box retail building about 8 or 9 blocks from my house and converted it to a worship center. The church was a regional megachurch, not affiliated with an existing denomination. I had heard a little bit about it, but wasn’t terribly familiar at the time. I’ve since learned a bit more.

Although they try to wrap their message in language that sounds hip and liberal, and they clearly aim their marketing at a younger demographic, it is anti-gay, anti-women’s rights, and anti-all-the-other-usuals. The head pastor drives a couple of Mercedes-Benzes. His sermons each week are broadcast on giant screens in the neighborhood worship centers. Dissenters in the congregation are kicked out and all church members who wish to remain in good standing (included the kicked-out person’s spouse, if applicable) are instructed to shun the person.

There is a beautiful historic church building in downtown Seattle, with a gorgeous doomed main building. The building is on the eastern edge of downtown, close to Capitol Hill, which has long been known as the city’s gay neighborhood. Years ago the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Chorus (of which I was a member) was one of about a dozen community musical groups that rented space in the church for weekly rehearsals. Every year they asked all the groups that rehearsed to participate in a Christmas concert. It was wonderful to sing under that big beautiful dome. But also sad to see how small the audience was. The congregation had been shrinking for decades, finding it increasingly difficult to even keep the lights on, let alone maintain the structure. The big beautiful building is on a prime piece of downtown property, and it seemed inevitable that the building would be torn down.

A few months ago, the megachurch announced that it would be leasing the property, moving its downtown neighborhood worship center from a converted warehouse space to the building. Their announcement included the statement, “being closer to Capitol Hill is a blessing as we are serving and ministering to those who are infected with AIDS on the hill.”

There were so many things wrong with that sentence. I’m not sure where to begin.

First, it is literally not possible to be infected with AIDS; you can be infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, but not AIDS itself. AIDS is a specific constellation of symptoms which are a late-term manifestation of an HIV-infection. It is a common misperception, but no one who was actively involved in any serious program to serve or care for HIV-positive people would not be aware of the distinction.

Second, it isn’t the 1980s. AIDS has not been cured, but thanks to the various new drugs, most people in the U.S. who are infected with the HIV virus do not have AIDS. Further, thanks to the drugs, a person can live thirty or more years without experiencing any symptoms. People do still die from the disease, and being on the drugs for decades is no picnic, but there are no longer thousands of people in every gay neighborhood living in near-hospice-care situations counting down the days (and T-cells) until they move into an actual hospice. Some studies, in fact, are beginning to indicate that a person infected with the virus living in a first world country, who begins treatment early, doesn’t even have a statistically significantly shortened lifespan because of it.

Third, while a higher proportion of white people infected with HIV are gay or bisexual than are straight, it is by no means a majority of gay people who are infected. Most gay people, like most straight people, don’t have the virus. In many places in the U.S., one’s ethnicity is a better predictor of HIV infection than whether one is gay and out of the closet.

Fourth, this specific church is anti-gay. Gay members are not allowed. Anyone is welcome to attend, but gay people are not allowed to become members until they become ex-Gay. No one wants to be “ministered to” by someone who thinks you are an abomination. And in the year 2013 if you are the kind of person who thinks that a gay neighborhood is filled with AIDS patients, you are the kind of person who thinks gay people are an abomination. You may not say it aloud, and you may deny it if confronted, but that level of ignorance is only achieved by assiduous avoidance.

Fifth, the statement is in the present tense. In other words, the church claimed to already be involved in some sort of service ministry to people with the disease. The fact that they are obviously unaware of my first, second, and third points shows the statement was a lie. Furthermore, not one single news article or press release in which the church had touted its various charity activities which mentioned anything about AIDS or HIV service could be found before this one statement. Not one.

Sixth, while that building is located close to one part of Capitol Hill, to the extent that the hill remains a gay neighborhood (more on that in a bit), most of the gayborhood is centered on the Broadway business corridor, about a mile walk (most of it uphill), from the church’s location. The church is not really conveniently located close to most of the homos on the Hill. And the Hill isn’t quite the great gay village it once was. The majority of queer people living in the Seattle metropolitan area live outside the Hill. The Hill is still very queer, don’t get me wrong, but one of the reasons the Pride Parade had to move off the Hill is because the neighborhood literally can’t hold all the gay people who want to attend the parade. I don’t live on the Hill, and I almost never go there, for instance.

Seventh, during my years of observation of their worship center in my neighborhood, the attendees drive in from somewhere else, attend the events on their property, and then leave. They aren’t part of the local community. They don’t seem to make the slightest effort to even get to know the local community. This last point may not be entirely fair. I’m a flaming homo, after all, and I don’t really want to get into any meaningful conversation with them. But from what I’ve read on other neighborhood blogs, it seems to be the case there, too. So I don’t see how moving the downtown meeting place a few blocks closer to Homo Hill is going to foster much in the way of interaction, constructive or otherwise, with the locals.

When the news broke, a lot of neighborhood blogs and the snarky, ultra-liberal alternate weekly newspaper raised similar points.

When contacted to explain at least in what way the church was “serving and ministering to those infected with AIDS” the church spokesperson became flustered and said someone would have to get back to the news people. They then issued a statement that claimed they were in “beginning stages of volunteering with the Lifelong AIDS Alliance.” Except the Lifelong AIDS Alliance has policies against proselytizing, which the church stated explicitly as its intention in its answer. Also, the Lifelong AIDS Alliance had received only one phone call from the church months before with no follow-up, and a second one less than an hour after the newspeople started asking questions. Volunteer applications had never been submitted from anyone identifying themselves as a church member.

When this was pointed out, the church backtracked. They made excuses. They bobbed and weaved, saying that they intend to help and repeating that bit about being in the beginning stages.

It’s not nice to laugh, but really, the sheer transparency of the lies, let alone the ludicrous depth of ignorance, demands it. I know, they don’t think they were lying. Someone had made a phone call, right? They planned to do something, right? I bet some of their members have even donated money to the charity. Or, at least went out to dinner at one of the restaurants participating in the annual Dining Out for Life fundraiser. That’s the same thing as serving and ministering to those poor AIDS victims, right?

It has been months, now, and there has been no further talk of any such ministry by the church. I’m not sure whether they were embarrassed about the whole thing, or just realized that there was nothing to gain from any effort. I know that people will say that at least some of them had their hearts in the right place. Jesus said to take care of the sick, right? But see, when the first thing that springs to mind when you find out your church is moving closer to a gay neighborhood is AIDS, that right there says all that needs to be said about how ignorant, bigoted, and self-deluded you are. If you feel god calling you to minister to people suffering and dying from AIDS, don’t move around an affluent city on the west coast, go to Africa, or south/southeast Asia.

This megachurch isn’t the only institution having a hard time grappling with its own ignorance and bigotry, as Stephen Colbert explained in this clip (click on Stephen’s name to watch):