Sunday, March 19, 2006

Homo homophobes

Augusto at Queer Beacon found this “amazing not surprising” research from right up the road at The University of Georgia. Done in 1996, it shows up in the Know + Tell section of the April Details magazine.

It’s not available online so he provides a page scan and comments:

The quote I like: “In tests conducted by Prof. Henry E Adams of the University of Georgia, homophobic men who said they were exclusively heterosexual were shown gay sex videos. Four out of five became sexually aroused by the homoerotic imagery, as recorded by a penile circumference measuring device - a plethysmograph.  Prof. Adams says his research shows that most homophobes “demonstrate significant sexual arousal to homosexual erotic stimuli”, suggesting that homophobia is a form of “latent homosexuality where persons are either unaware of or deny their homosexual urges.”

There’s more here.  We’re both sorry to learn that Professor Adams passed away in 2000.

Saturday, March 18, 2006

Gay pride in the British military

Gays have been welcomed in the British military since 2000:

The government removed the ban after it was ruled illegal in a case brought by the gay rights pressure group Stonewall.

Attitudes in the armed forces have changed so much since then that Stonewall now rates the Royal Navy 75th in its list of gay-friendly employers.

And gay service personnel in a civil partnership enjoy the same benefits as married staff.

Vice Admiral Adrian Johns is the services head of personnel. He was speaking at a gay workplace conference:

“My policy team is currently investigating the feasibility of utilising drama-based training resources, to reach some of those whose culture and behaviour need to be brought into line with 21st Century thinking.”

Vice Admiral Johns joked that Lord Nelson may have been “ahead of his time” when he famously asked Captain Hardy to kiss him on his deathbed at the Battle of Trafalgar.

He said final approval had yet to be given for Royal Navy personnel to take part in the EuroPride festival on July 1.

But he added: “I am heartened by the fact that a significant number of Royal Navy lesbian and gay personnel are very keen to march in uniform in the main parade and share in the celebration.”

Via PageOneQ.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

On Michael Bailey and the Queen Gene

Wayne Besen weighs in on the 60 Minutes segment. Here he comments on Michael Bailey, the psychology professor at Northwestern University described as a leading researcher in the field of sexual orientation:

Whether Bailey has hit the scientific jackpot or is a crackpot is open for debate. Many people bristle, for example, when he claims that gay people walk and talk differently.

True, your gaydar does not have to be finely tuned to figure out Richard Simmons or Clay Aiken is gay.

Oh, wait, is Clay gay?

Before Bailey makes such broad assumptions, however, he should put on football pads and collide with former NFL player Esera Tuaolo. This might rattle him out of his one-dimensional mindset and lead him to expand his research to include gay men and lesbians who are not borderline transgender.

Other critics rightfully question Bailey’s potentially dark motives. He once told the New York Times that if it became possible for parents to determine sexual orientation in the womb than, “Selecting for heterosexuality seems to be morally acceptable.

He concludes “the “60 Minutes” segment, as a whole, was very helpful to the argument for gay equality. It brusquely dismissed the inane pseudo-science of our opponents.”

Monday, March 13, 2006

The “Older Brother Effect”

The headline from Lesley Stahl’s 60 Minutes report the other day on the science of sexual orientation:

“The more older brothers a man has, the greater that man’s chance of being gay,” says [Northwestern University psychology professor Michael] Bailey.

Asked if that’s true, Bailey says, “That is absolutely true.”

If this comes as a shock to you, you’re not alone. But it turns out, it’s one of the most solid findings in this field, demonstrated in study after study.

And the numbers are significant: for every older brother a man has, his chances of being gay increase by one third. Older sisters make no difference, and there’s no corresponding effect for lesbians. A first-born son has about a 2 percent chance of being gay, and the numbers rise from there. The theory is it happens in the womb. [...]

“One of the things we’ve only found out lately is that older brothers affect a boy only if the boy is right-handed,” [Michigan State University’s Dr. Marc] Breedlove said. “If the boy is left-handed, if his brain is organized in a left-handed fashion, it doesn’t matter how many older brothers he has, his probability of being gay is just like the rest of the population.

Parenthetically I note that Dr. BREED-LOVE’s studies of breeding in rats - he gave Stahl “a crash course in rat sex” - implicitly question the role of love as well. 

Names are prophetic.

Timothy Noah has a fun collection of them at Slate. My entry didn’t make the cut.

Right on Keanu!

Time was when Hollywood celebrities feared and fought accusations that they were gay.

Times have changed:

KEANU Reeves seems to draw from the Zen-like calm of his most famous character, Neo in “The Matrix,” when he’s confronted with false tabloid reports about himself. When unfounded rumors surfaced that he’d “married” mogul David Geffen, the spotlight-eschewing superstar didn’t fly into a rage and call his lawyer, as many other movie stars would. “In that case, it comes down to making a judgment about being gay or not,” Reeves, who is straight, tells Playboy. “I try not to live my life by what other people say . . . People were gossiping about what the king and queen were doing way back when. It’s just human nature. We like talking about other people.”

Ian Ayres and Jennifer Brown, authors of Straightforward: How to Mobilize Heterosexual Support for Gay Rights, would be proud. Me too.

Gays should support abortion rights

Michael Bronski writing in Bay Windows:

The attack on the constitutionality of abortion rights is an attack on the right to privacy - the same constitutional right to privacy that in 2003 won us Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court decision that abolished sodomy laws in the United States. In the language of Roe v Wade, a woman’s right to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term was predicated on a constitutional right to privacy and that this “right of privacy” was “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether to terminate her pregnancy.”

Make no mistake about it. The people - be they right-wing religious leaders, conservative politicians or far-right ideologues - who want to dismantle a woman’s right to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term would be more than happy to begin rolling back the clock on all aspects of gay rights. They are not just looking at the barely-gained right to marriage equality, but to many other aspects of civil rights for gay people - the right to adopt children, the right to be foster parents, the right not to be discriminated against, as well as the right to simply engage in same-sex relationships. The preservation of abortion rights are the new line in the sand for gay rights.

Friday, March 10, 2006

No exodus from Exodus

Wayne Besen has a letter from an ex-ex-gay:

Mr. Besen,

As a former member of Exodus I felt a need to respond to your newsletter. I recommend just for kicks you or someone you know try to join Exodus, then try and leave, good luck with that. It just doesn’t happen.

I have tried to terminate all contact with Exodus for over 3 years now. The newslestters that come more than twice a week sometimes and the more than daily phone calls persist. They persisted to he point where I had to change my number. There is no doubt in my mind that if I were closer to their personal grasp they would be at my door also.

It has been my experience those who try to become “ex-gay” stop trying soon thereafter. Usually when the initial love and welcome from the Christian community wears off, and like myself, most begin to clearly see that this community has nothing but contempt and disgust for GLBT people.

Here was the main issue for me in terminating my relationship with Exodus.... I was cut off, they told me to leave all my friends and I did. They said I had to leave my lover of 4 years and I did. I know I know. I feel as stupid as you probably think I am.

So, in conclusion to curb Exodus I feel the GLBT community must have individuals and organizations in place so that people can leave Exodus more easily. I wish I had some suggestions at this time on how I think maybe that can be accomplished. I just just inspired by your newsletter, and honestly hadn’t thought about it till this very moment.

H.J.
Louisville KY

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Married____ Single____ Widowed____ Divorced____

In Newsweekly is running a series of dispatches sent by a gay soldier who is being dispatched to Iraq. Writing under the pseudonym D.A. Donttell, last week he talked about paperwork:

I decided that at this point in my life I would rather have my partner notified in the case of emergency, and I would name him as my beneficiary in the event of my passing… A senior non-commissioned officer took my paperwork and asked, “Who is this in block 7a? Is he a relative?” I stated, “ My roommate, and no.” When I answered no, I was told I needed to put a relative down or at least a next of kin. “You should put your parents down if you aren’t married,” he stated. [...]

We finally resolved the discussion when I agreed to sign a counseling statement officially stating I was not putting my parents down in the case of an emergency, and in the event of my death, that someone other than a family member was going to be the beneficiary for my life insurance. I left the station feeling extremely disgruntled. Clearly had I had the option I would have rather stated, “Partner, Husband, or even Spouse” but those weren’t options.

This soldier’s tale has particular resonance for me these days. Regular readers know I have had quite a number of dealings with the medical establishment here recently. Their profligate use of the Social Security number aside, a distinguishing characteristic of their paperwork is the limited number of relationship options offered. They are: married, single, widowed, divorced.

The very order of these options seems laden with meaning. It honestly doesn’t occur to them that there could be any other. Then, under “who to notify in case of emergency,” they propose options: “mother, father, sister, brother...” Even “friend” doesn’t put in an appearance!

Two quick anecdotes…

In the first the nurse asks me, “Does your wife teach at the college?” Now, she had my insurance card and I work at the college, so I was baffled that she had asked this question. (Now I get it, duh! Kind, friendly small talk.)

Given that I had just had a disconcerting experience with the surgeon, I wasn’t in tip top intellectual shape. So I blurt out, and again I have no idea why beyond awkward innocence, “No, my husband does.” Fumbling to fix that took us from bad to worse.

In my second anecdote, Doug and I show up for my surgery in the dark of morning after a long drive with no eating (or coffee) in prep for surgery and the nurse asks Doug, “Would you like to accompany your father to the room.” Father???

Doug, properly feeling as awkward as I, answers, “he’s not my father he’s my lover.” Now I prefer the term “life-partner” (I’m not simply some hottie on the side) and I’m sure Doug does too but he was so nonplussed that the word lover was the one put out there. The nurse replied, “Hey that’s even better.”

These people may or may not have trouble dealing with the fact that I’m a gay man, but they give no indication of it and so it just seems to me that it would be easier all around if the form could give them that little heads up that, hey, this guy’s not married, not single, not widowed and not divorced!

Advocating the death penalty for gays in America

This guy’s not alone in his beliefs:

TOLEDO—Merrill Keiser, Jr., is a trucker by trade, and he’s hoping his next journey takes him all the way to Washington. His goal is a seat in the US Senate, but first he has to make it through the primary that will determine which Ohio Democrat will be the November ballot.

The Fremont man is causing some controversy with one of his beliefs. He tells News 11 homosexuality should be a felony, punishable by death. “Just like we have laws against murder, we have laws against stealing, we have laws against taking drugs—we should have laws against immoral conduct,” Keiser says.

Keiser has no political background. He says the only reason he’s running as a Democrat is because that’s how he was registered the last time he voted.

For a more detailed look at where this kind of thinking comes from, see Russell Shorto’s What’s Their Real Problem with Gay Marriage (It’s the Gay Part), summarized here.

Via PageOneQ.

Monday, March 06, 2006

Straight Spouse Network & the pill

I had never heard of them before, the Straight Spouse Network:

[A]n international organization that provides personal, confidential support and information to heterosexual spouses/partners, current or former, of gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender mates and mixed-orientation couples for constructively resolving coming-out problems. SSN also offers research-based information about spouse, couple, and family issues and resources to other family members, professionals, community organizations, and the public. SSN is the only support network of its kind in the world.

Via Dear Abby’s Jeanne Phillips:

Dear Abby: After 23 years of marriage, I came home and caught my husband, “Wes,” in bed having sex with my brother. That evening, they had gone to a bar and drank heavily. Someone gave them a pill of unknown origin. Wes says he doesn’t remember anything until I walked in and started slapping some sense into him.

We have stayed together. We haven’t made love, however. I can’t seem to get the picture out of my head. - Shattered

Dear Shattered: You won’t be able to “forget” until you get the whole truth about what happened that night. I find it questionable that both your husband and your brother would accept a “magic pill” from a stranger that suddenly rendered two presumably straight men bisexual. The question you should be asking is how long their affair has been going on. You need answers, and you also need to understand you are not alone.

You and your husband are overdue for marriage counseling, and for your own sanity, please contact the Straight Spouse Network. The members of this unique organization are current or former heterosexual spouses/partners of gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender mates and mixed-orientation couples. They offer, from the vantage point of experience, personal, confidential support and resource information that can help you. The Web site is http://www.straightspouse.org.

Academy afterward

I didn’t get the sweep I wanted, but I did get the words I wanted. From Ang Lee, accepting Best Director for Brokeback Mountain:

I want to thank two people who don’t even exist. Or I should say they do exist because of the imagination of Annie Proulx and the artistry of Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Their names are Ennis and Jack, and they taught all of us who made Brokeback Mountain so much about, not just all the gay men and women whose love is denied by society, but just as important, the greatness of love itself.

So though yes, I wanted that sweep, I was actually glad for all the awards spread around. Because there was a lot of quality and a lot of quality films got the recognition they deserved.

MEDIA ROUNDUP: The NYTimes, The Daily News, The WaPo, AJC, Macon Telegraph. And the story is? “The biggest upset in Academy Awards history.”

Talk about expectations! Kaus gloats. I resist calling him homophobic, but his gleeful obsession is hard to abide.

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Academy anticipation II

I passed on the opportunity to see Walk the Line last night. I am a big fan of Reese Witherspoon; I hear she deserves the award I expect she’ll receive tonight.

But it’s a struggle to be happy for her. You know I want Felicity Huffman to win for Transamerica. She is a brave woman, she took on a brave role; she’s gotten good credit for it. Still, I want that win for her. And for me.

Our friend, a transgender woman with a featured role in the film, would rather have had the role; or have any transgender person play the role. I think it’s better that it was Felicity. As with Brokeback, it is a statement of understanding empathy by the straight community. That’s important.

Recently I quoted Sir Ian McKellen asking where are America’s openly gay actors? I lived in Hollywood in 1976 and ‘77. I worked in a high profile gay club and knew many closeted actors then, some of them very well known.

The Hollywood McKellen describes is the Hollywood I remember. The Hollywood represented in this year’s Oscars - and, most particularly, the embrace of Transamerica and Brokeback Mountain - seems a prerequiste to get past that.

RELATED: The NYTimes editorial observer, “The Academy Awards have a history of avoiding politics. But this year’s lineup could be a sign that the nation’s political mood is shifting.”

I’d vote George Clooney for President.

Fear’s rupture & religious reconciliation

BBC News:

The Archbishop of Canterbury has warned that the worldwide Anglican Church faces a fundamental “rupture” on the issue of homosexuality.

Dr Rowan Williams told BBC One’s The Heaven and Earth Show he feared any split could take decades to heal.

He warned that it could take decades to re-establish some sort of relationship between the different factions in the Anglican Communion.

BBC religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott said the comments were “Dr Williams’ starkest public warning about the impending schism in the Anglican Communion over sexuality”.

Which is as good an occasion as any to recall the recent correspondence with a blogger friend, over his troubles reconciling homosexuality with his Christian faith. I sent him the 1980 NYTimes review of Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century.

My review was not persuasive. Instead he sent me an article comparing the Christian church’s former stand on divorce with its current stand on homosexuality, Like the Wideness of the Sea? by Lewis B. Smedes:

I remember the first time that I watched the General Synod of my (Christian Reformed) church in action. The Synod met back then (late 1940’s) in the reading room of the old Calvin College library and, since there was no separate gallery for visitors, some of us got to nestle close enough to the delegates to make us feel as if we were right there in the dugout with the real players. The delegates, as they looked to me, were, most of them, old, all of them male, dark suited, and with such solemn demeanors they gave me the impression that they might that day be sealing the spiritual future of the world-wide Church. I was brand new to churchly deliberations then and when I now try to recall my feelings, the word “awe” does not feel to me like a huge exaggeration. But, then, this was no ordinary Synod.

On the table that day was the church’s long standing policy of excluding a certain class of Christian people from its inner circle. These were people who confessed their love for God and their faith in Jesus as their Savior and lived exemplary Christian lives in every way. Except one. And that one exception was serious enough to disqualify them for membership. It had to do with their marriages. They had been married once, then divorced, married again to someone else, and were committed to keeping their covenant with each other this time. That was the rub. Odd as it may have seemed to an outsider, precisely because these people stayed faithful to their marriages, they were, in the church’s eyes, implicitly committed to sin and for that reason alone were excluded from the circle of grace.
The church believed that by excluding them it was simply obeying the word of the Lord. For the Lord had said, in terms that seemed as clear as mineral water, that people who stayed married to anyone other than their first spouse (if, to be sure, he or she were still living) were devoted to a life of continuous adultery.

Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another she [also] commits adultery. (Mark 10:11)

READ ON. Please. I fear that Anglican rupture will be a long one. And I have faith that reconciliation will come.

Thank you, Harry!

Torch Song Trilogy theater review

For old times’ sake, the New York Times review of Torch Song Trilogy. July 14, 1982:

CERTAINLY it is one of the most daring and anomalous plays to ever move to Broadway. A four-hour drama in three parts, Harvey Fierstein’s ‘’Torch Song Trilogy’’ recounts the story of Arnold Beckoff, a nice Jewish boy of ‘’great wit and want,’’ who also happens to be an avowed homosexual and a transvestite who makes his living by appearing on stage. [...]

Only a short time ago, of course, ‘’Torch Song Trilogy’’ itself would have been cause for shock on the part of some Broadway theatergoers. Although Mr. Fierstein says that he modulates his performance in response to audience reaction - he can let the seduction scene run anywhere from 4 to 10 minutes - the text of the play possesses a willful candor that makes such older plays as ‘’Tea and Sympathy’’ and ‘’The Boys in the Band’’ seem cautious and condescending.

Indeed, it is only in recent years that playwrights and authors have been able to deal openly with homosexual themes; in the past, such subjects were couched in metaphors and allusions, and characters who deviated from accepted norms of sexual propriety usually underwent conversion, died or were condemned to lasting unhappiness.

The homosexual was popularly portrayed as an effeminate clown, a corrupter of youth or an out-and-out villain. Given this history, ‘’Torch Song’’ clearly represents a radical achievement, although Mr. Fierstein makes it clear that he did not write the play with a polemical intent. He believes, in fact, that the anger that animates so many plays with homosexual themes frequently tends to be unfocused and that that ‘’anger is not going to open anyone’s heart up.’’

Read the rest of "Torch Song Trilogy theater review" in the extended entry.

The Academy Awards: reflection and anticipation

I don’t typically care in the least about the Academy Awards. This year I’m invested.

Since 1983 I’ve considered the Tony Awards one of the most important programs in New York. In that year, Betty Buckley and Cats won top musical honors, but what I will never forget is that Torch Song Trilogy won Best Play and Harvey Fierstein won Best Actor:

He began his theatrical career as a 270-pound teenaged transvestite specializing in impersonations of Ethel Merman at a Lower East Side club. He was a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn - his father a handkerchief manufacturer, his mother a housewife, his brother a lawyer - but he had a voice that sounded as if he gargled with drain cleaner and a tendency to write such works as a musical about seven drag queen prostitutes living in a subway men’s room. He couldn’t even manage a conventional chorus line, his chorus of singing cockroaches in an early work being an example that lingers in the mind. Harvey Fierstein seemed, at first, an unlikely prospect for widespread success and commercial acceptance, either onstage or behind it.

However, at the venerable age of 29, Mr. Fierstein has just won not one but two Tony Awards for ‘’Torch Song Trilogy,’’ his Off Broadway epic about a flamboyant drag queen that became a surprise hit when it moved to Broadway last year. As its star, Mr. Fierstein won the award for Best Actor, and as playwright he won again for Best Play. Earlier this month he left the production, in which he has been replaced by David Garrison as Arnold Beckoff, the drag queen who wants to settle down, adopt a child and be a conventional Jewish housewife and mother.

I saw the show several times (and did not like the movie). It had an improvisational quality that made its three-plus hour length pass quickly. It defined “laugh riot.” But here’s how the producer, John Glines, described the show:

Despite the exotic aspects of its subject matter, ‘’Torch Song’’ is ‘’really every conservative, in a way,’’ Mr. Glines adds. ‘’Arnold Beckoff wants what most people want. He’s very middle-class, and he wants a job he doesn’t hate too much, enough money to live comfortably, and someone to share it with. He wants a family life. He even says that, when he’s talking about how his mother doesn’t understand him; he says, ‘What I want is her life - with a few minor alterations.’ What Harvey proved was that you could use a gay context and a gay experience and speak in universal truths.’’

But what was so memorable about that Tony Awards program was that when John Glines stepped up to accept his award, he thanked him male life-partner. On national television. That was a significant marker for me. So much so that I wrote John a fan letter and would later become aquainted.

Tonight is significant to me in a different way. I still don’t accept that Brokeback Mountain is a gay movie. It is a movie by striaght people for straight people. The lead characters, who I believe would have had a different fate had they been free to choose their gay identity, certainly appeal to a gay audience, but we are not the target audience.

It represents an empathy and understanding of what is still for many of us an incredibly difficult struggle with identity and acceptance. If it wins Best Picture, I believe it will come and play iin my little town. I’ll go see it yet again, and that will be as important a political act as any I can think of.

Saturday, March 04, 2006

Smitten w/gay media

Every six months we get a story like this:

Marketers have chased this niche for years. But the trend has gained juice lately among major media companies as ventures like Brokeback attract straight consumers in a more gay-tolerant culture:

• Bravo, the cable channel owned by NBC Universal, next month is launching OutzoneTV.com, billed as the first broadband entertainment channel for gay viewers.

• Sony Music is teaming with Matt Farber, founder of MTV Networks’ gay-themed cable channel Logo, to create a label featuring singers such as Beyoncé and Melissa Etheridge popular with gays.

• Warner Books, a division of behemoth Time Warner, published a romance novel for gay men, Hot Sauce, last summer. It was written by a Boston couple: Scott Pomfret, a Securities and Exchange Commission prosecutor, and Scott Whittier, an advertising copy writer.

Companies see big dollar signs, says Karen Haus, a software analyst at WR Hambrecht who follows PlanetOut, a conglomerate of gay-focused websites and magazines that went public in 2004. “Gay people have enormous disposable income,” Haus says.

First of all, some gay people have enormous disposal income. The income curve is an inverted one. We are over-represented at both ends of the income spectrum.

Second, I’m all for going after the gay market, but not at all convinced we want to be in a media ghetto. Here’s a clip of my interview with Carl Pritzkat of Mediapolis on the gay media marketplace today.

I think an urban contemporary, hip, gay sensibility, media property would be a broadly popular attractive proposition.

Friday, March 03, 2006

Miss McBeth speaks

Lily McBeth, the 71 year old NJ substitute teacher who the school board said could return to the classroom after gender-reassignment surgery, is on GMA right now. She’s making good points; the show is doing a great job of a sensitive portrayal. I’ll post from the transcript later.

In the meantime, here’s my take from the other day.

LATER, from the transcript:

ROBIN ROBERTS (ABC NEWS)

(Off-camera) And, and the fact that they’re elementary school age, roughly five years old to 12 year olds, you’re, you’re a parent yourself. Can you understand at all their concern? Because many of these young people, kids saw you as a man and now they’re going to see you as a woman. Can you understand at all the parents’ point of view?

LILY MCBETH (HAD SEX CHANGE OPERATION)

I can understand the parents’ fear and they’re trying to project that fear onto the children because the children don’t have that fear. Okay? They learn that from adults. And if we teach children intolerance, that’s what they’re going to do.

I note the transcriber feels the need to qualify Lily’s name.

Read the rest of "Miss McBeth speaks" in the extended entry.

Hillary, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell & Same Sex Marriage

Chris Crain weighs in on the email sent by Alan Van Capelle, the head of New York State’s leading gay rights group, to his board members describing Hillary Clinton as a “disappointment” on same-sex marriage, and suggesting gays and lesbians stop giving money to her campaign. Chris says:

To date, she has perfected the minuet made famous by her husband: dance with the gays, take their money, their votes and their praise, but cut in with the next available dancer whenever the moves look too risky.

If the song is about employment protection or hate crimes or civil unions, on which there’s already overwhelming support in New York, Hillary is ready to samba. But when it comes to a wedding waltz, her dance card is full.

Clinton’s haughtiness on marriage is particularly galling given her own rocky experience with the institution. She did vote against an unprecedented amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would ban gays from marrying, but to do otherwise would have been unthinkable for her politically.

In her speech on the Senate floor, she said, “I believe marriage is not just a bond but a sacred bond between a man and a woman.” Another reality check: She’s known for decades that in her own case the institution was never so limited and in fact was a not-so-sacred bond between a man and several women, including his wife and untold Gennifers, Monicas and others.

I guess that’s fair, but her husband’s affairs are not the direction I’d like to take the argument. The merits of the argument stand on their own for me. I won’t be giving her money, and I believe gay leaders have the obligation to hammer her for it.

On the other hand, thinking back on those heady days right after the (first) Clinton presidential victory, when I really believed gays in the military could happen, Bill Clinton sure said the right words. And I surely do blame him for that failure. (I blame Collin Powell more and it’s a mystery to me why gays apparently give him a pass!) I base that blame in his political naivete. He played the politics wrong!

So, yes, I fall into the category of gays who accepts the “laughable” excuse:

“As she gears up to run for president, it’s a broader stage, and these issues matter in a way that perhaps they don’t when she’s in the Senate,” Jeff Soref, a prominent gay Democrat and co-chair of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force board, told the New York Blade.

The move towards liberalism is more important than any individiual issue, even as special an issue as this one is to me. Same-sex marriage is inevitbale - I’m guessing sooner than we think - and I can imagine it happening and even being facilitated by a Hillary Clinton administration.

So if she’s the candidate I will vote for her. I expect Van Capelle will too, just as he said he will in the Senate race in the opening line of his critical email:

“Let me begin by stating that I believe Hillary Clinton has served the people of New York well in the United States Senate and that she deserves re-election,” he writes. “My vote for Senator Clinton will come despite her regrettable statements on the issue of marriage for same-sex couples and her current support for DOMA.”

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

More on anti-gay love

Andrew Sullivan comments on the article I just quoted:

Ah, yes. The danger of the Jews/Gays spreading their disease throughout society, their enormous power despite tiny numbers, their ability to pass, their threat to children, their flaunting of their disagreement with the New Testament. It’s all so familiar. I think the arguments now made by some Christianists are replicas of the old anti-Semitism, peddled by so many Christians in the past: that Jews are to be loved, but loving them is dependent on their conversion to Christianity; that you can love individual Jews while disdaining Judaism; that Jews’ stubbornness in resisting conversion is evidence of their inherent evil; that such evil, at some point, has to be segregated from mainstream society as much as possible. Gays are not the new blacks. They’re the new Jews. And the Church, in both Catholic and Protestant variants, is dredging up its old anti-Semitism in new guises. The GOP is along for the ride.

Anti-gay action rooted in love

In light of the action in the GA Senate today, I am compelled to quote again Russell Shorto in the Times Magazine last June, What’s Their Real Problem with Gay Marriage (It’s the Gay Part):

I found no one among the people on the ground who are leading the anti-gay-marriage cause who said in essence: ‘’I have nothing against homosexuality. I just don’t believe gays should be allowed to marry.’’ Rather, their passion comes from their conviction that homosexuality is a sin, is immoral, harms children and spreads disease. Not only that, but they see homosexuality itself as a kind of disease, one that afflicts not only individuals but also society at large and that shares one of the prominent features of a disease: it seeks to spread itself. [...]

Gay rights leaders say that gay marriage has become useful for their counterparts on the religious right in part because it allows them to tap into an antipathy toward homosexuality...In this calculation, gay marriage serves as a vessel for containing opinions that many social conservatives have but which in the past they might have felt were socially unacceptable to voice.

Robert Knight, the director of the Culture and Family Institute of Concerned Women for America, conceded as much. ‘’People feel liberated,’’ he said. ‘’They feel like we don’t have to go along with this stuff anymore, the idea that we’re repressed backwater religious zealots just for wanting a decent society in which our children can thrive. It’s O.K. today to say that marriage is between a man and a woman. Saying so does not make you a hater or bigot.’’

But what’s the logical conclusion of their voting and their legal action? They are upset that the Supreme Court has said it is legal to be gay. I keep wondering if the inverse is true? If not legal do they then want us all rounded up and put in prison? Put into therapy to be cured? What is their public policy prognosis? Who knows… but their rhetoric says it’s rooted in love:

Indeed, a constant refrain among the anti-gay-marriage forces is that they are motivated not by hate but by love. Most of the activists I spoke with say that they know gay people—several said they have relatives who are gay—and that they have approached them, with love, to try to get them to change. Rick Bowers, a pastor of a nondenominational church in Columbia, Md., is the head of Defend Maryland Marriage, another activist group, which works with Focus on the Family. ‘’There are those extremists who say that if a gay person were on fire you would burn in hell if you spit on them to put out the fire,’’ he told me. ‘’But we’re not like that. We love the human being. It’s the lifestyle we disagree with.’’

I would say that neatly sums up the thinking around here, and of some in my family and in Doug’s.

At its essence, then, the Christian conservative thinking about gay marriage runs this way. Homosexuality is not an innate, biological condition but a disease in society. Marriage is the healthy root of society. To put the two together is thus willfully to introduce disease to that root. It is society willing self-destruction, which is itself a symptom of a wider societal disease, that of secularism.

And those of us on the left have to counter that argument directly, make positive arguments for a moral gay construct and the legitimacy of secularism.

Comparing the gay civil rights movement to the black civil rights movement has always seemed valid to me. Reading this article makes it ever more so. Like segregationist whites in the South, this attitude is so deeply felt and so entrenched that it is not likely to go away. But it can and it must be defeated.

Monday, February 27, 2006

Close down all groups to ban a gay group. Then cheat!

That’s what a White County High School did.

Last week the Georgia House passed a watered down Parents Permission to Participate bill widely understood to be targeting gay-straight alliances in high schools.

This week it is alleged in a lawsuit filed today by the ACLU and students that a ban has been unfarily applied in order to keep a gay-straight alliance from meetting on school grounds:

In the ongoing battle to reinstate a gay-straight alliance club at White County High School in northeast Georgia, the American Civil Liberties Union on Monday filed a lawsuit in federal court against school officials, claiming they illegally banned the club. Several students, led by The Advocate’s 2005 Person of the Year, Kerry Pacer, started the club to address rampant antigay harassment at the school.

Last year school administrators reluctantly agreed to let the club form after several months of stalling when the ACLU of Georgia stepped in and negotiated on the students’ behalf. A few days later school officials announced plans to ban all noncurricular student groups for the 2005-2006 academic year.

The GSA, called PRIDE, hasn’t been permitted to meet on campus this school year, but several other clubs-including a shooting club and a school dance team-continue meeting at the school even though they don’t participate in activities relevant to the curriculum, academic credit is not provided for participation in them, and participation in them isn’t required for any course.

But Superintendent Paul Shaw says...

...that he believed the clubs allowed at the county high school were legal and tied in some way to the school’s curriculum or athletics.

He said in June that the elimination of all noncurricular clubs had been in the works for months.

“Clubs have not lived up to what they are supposed to be doing. ... Plus, we want to focus on academics this coming school year,” he said at the time.

Yeah right.

UPDATE: The Seanate passed the Parents Permission bill.

Sunday, February 26, 2006

Has the global Christian community lost its moral bearings?

The Episcopal Bishop of Washington in todays WaPo:

It’s no secret that the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion are engaged in a bitter internal struggle over the role of gay and lesbian people within the church. But despite this struggle, the leaders of our global communion of 77 million members have consistently reiterated their pastoral concern for gays and lesbians. Meeting last February, the primates who lead our 38 member provinces issued a unanimous statement that said in part: “The victimization or diminishment of human beings whose affections happen to be ordered towards people of the same sex is anathema to us.”

We now have reason to doubt those words.

Archbishop Peter J. Akinola, primate of the Church of Nigeria and leader of the conservative wing of the communion, recently threw his prestige and resources behind a new law that criminalizes same-sex marriage in his country and denies gay citizens the freedoms to assemble and petition their government. The law also infringes upon press and religious freedom by authorizing Nigeria’s government to prosecute newspapers that publicize same-sex associations and religious organizations that permit same-sex unions. [...]

Surprisingly, few voices—Anglican or otherwise—have been raised in opposition to the archbishop. When I compare this silence with the cacophony that followed the Episcopal Church’s decision to consecrate the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson, a gay man who lives openly with his partner, as the bishop of New Hampshire, I am compelled to ask whether the global Christian community has lost not only its backbone but its moral bearings. Have we become so cowed by the periodic eruptions about the decadent West that Archbishop Akinola and his allies issue that we are no longer willing to name an injustice when we see one?

I also feel compelled to ask the archbishop’s many high-profile supporters in this country why they have not publicly dissociated themselves from his attack on the human rights of a vulnerable population. Is it because they support this sort of legislation, or because the rights of gay men and women are not worth the risk of tangling with an important alliance?

In his June NYTimes Magazine article, Russell Shorto suggests the answer, What’s Their Real Problem with Gay Marriage (It’s the Gay Part).

Thursday, February 23, 2006

The not-so-gay games

In Newsweekly broke the story about the popular online multiplayer World of Warcraft gamer cited for harassment because she recruited for a “GLBT friendly” guild in a general chat channel within the game. After some initial confusion the company issued an apology and promised to institute change.

In Newsweekly’s Alexander Sliwinski has followed up with a report about an International Game Developers Association (IGDA) survey regarding diversity behind the scenes in the video game industry:

“We are pretty homogeneous,” said Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the IGDA. “A lot of the information matched the stereotype of what a game developer is.” ... The report shows that 6 percent of individuals identified as being GLBT, with another 2.6 percent refusing to answer. The report mentions that many people stated they would not take the survey as a direct result of this particular question.

I’m struck that they even conducted such a survey in the face of these views:

There were respondents irritated that the IGDA was even looking into the issues of diversity. Many said that diversity has nothing to do with the outcome of a game - that the focus should be on talent and not diversity in the workforce.

“Please quit the PC stuff,” wrote one 37-year-old respondent, “you are a independent game developer org. Stop wasting money on diversity stuff and start doing useful stuff for independent game developers - who cares about race, sexuality or any of that stuff. This is the absolute last thing you need to waste money on - you are starting to sound like a political party - STOP IT NOW, or you won’t see any more money from me!”

Even though on average they have more industry experience and higher level of education, there is an $8,000 salary gap between GLBT workers and their non-GLBT coworkers. One game designer observes:

“The overall culture of video games is still fairly homophobic, even if most of the developers aren’t, which could have an effect on the self-confidence of LGBT industry workers. Also, many LGBT developers are closeted at work, which may keep them from forming the personal relationships that often lead to promotions and other business opportunities.”

I’m glad to see the game developers association tackling the topic, and In Newsweekly’s Sliwinski sticking with it.

RELATED: A couple thoughtsdeas that inform my thinking on the story. Here I look at how diversity matters because it makes us smarter, more creative and we make better decisions as a consequence of it. And here I look at examples that illustrate how the biases we need to become aware of and work to counteract are the subliminal biases that we can hardly even know we have.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Gay in America in 2006

Gay News Blog:

A Gay and a Lesbian are among the slate of five nominees to become the next Episcopal Bishop of California. The Very Rev. Robert Taylor and the Rev. Bonnie Perry are among the nominations advanced by the Diocesan Search Committee (see the full slate of nominees here).

On May 6th, laity and clergy will meet in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral to elect the 8th Episcopal Bishop of California. A month later, in June, the bishop-elect will be considered for ratification by lay and clergy deputies and by the House of Bishops at the General Convention of the National Episcopal Church, in Columbus, Ohio. Following ratification, a consecration is scheduled for July 22. This list of names is not necessarily complete, since there is a petition process that allows other names to be submitted from members of our local churches. Other names may be added before March 13th.

Integrity, a national Episcopal LGBT group, hailed inclusion of a gay man and a lesbian woman in the slate of nominees. “As it has in the past, Integrity expects General Convention to follow canonical procedures to the letter, giving consent to the bishop-elect if there is no justifiable impediment to his/her consecration. The canons clearly state that, “No one shall be denied rights, status or access to an equal place in the life, worship, and governance of this Church because of race, color, ethnic origin, national origin, marital status, sex, sexual orientation, disabilities or age,” the group stated.

Via PageOneQ.

LATER: But, still, there’s this:

FORT CAMPBELL, Kentucky (AP)—Wearing vests covered in military patches, a band of motorcyclists rolls around the country from one soldier’s funeral to another, cheering respectfully to overshadow jeers from church protesters.

They call themselves the Patriot Guard Riders, and they are more than 5,000 strong, forming to counter anti-gay protests held by the Rev. Fred Phelps at military funerals.

Phelps believes American deaths in Iraq are divine punishment for a country that he says harbors homosexuals. His protesters carry signs thanking God for so-called IEDs—explosives that are a major killer of soldiers in Iraq.

Gay in America in 1960

Joel Dorius died this week. I had never heard of him, but when I was in the first grade…

[S]tate troopers and local police in Northampton, Mass., searched his home as part of raids on obscenity in the mail ordered by President Eisenhower’s postmaster general.

He and another untenured [Smith College] professor, Edward Spofford, had been turned in by Newton Arvin, a tenured literature professor whose home was raided first. What they found - pictures of men in their underwear and diaries of the closeted gay life - were mild by today’s standards but considered illegal pornography then.

The three men were charged with possession of pornography. Arvin agreed to testify against the others, but he later suffered a breakdown and committed himself to a mental hospital.

The three professors were suspended from Smith. Arvin was able to retire at half pay, but the school’s contracts with Dorius and Spofford were not renewed.

Dorius and Spofford accepted a guilty verdict so they could appeal under Massachusetts law. In 1963, the state’s Supreme Court overturned all three convictions.