Remembering James Hormel

James Hormel

James Hormel died this year. 

Many good people died this year - Colin Powell, Desmond Tutu, Ed Asner, Olympia Dukakis, Cloris Leachman, just to name a few of those I admired and respected - and the year's not over yet. But as we exercise our annual habit of remembering the folks who went on before us this year, I want especially to remember James Hormel.

James Hormel was 88 years old and his wife Michael Peter Nguyen Araque is around 55-58 years old.

That's a headline from 101Biography.com, a site that keeps track of the lives of "trending" people, i.e., the rich and famous we mere mortals like to gawk at and trash or put on a pedestal, as the spirit moves us - a gossip site, not one to fuss over. Except that, in this case, Michael Araque is a man, and was James Hormel's husband, not his wife.

Even in death, this marvelous man, James Hormel, gets messed with or misunderstood, and we are reminded that the long hard struggle he engaged in for the rights of LGBT people isn't over yet. Even in relatively enlightened corners of the planet like the U.S., where gays like me live lives immeasurably better than we dreamed of as young people - thanks in great measure to the likes of James Hormel.

I first took notice of him not for all the contributions he made to the cause of improving the lives of LGBT people - that came later - but when President Bill Clinton appointed him as ambassador to Luxembourg and all the rats came out of the woodwork. 

When you hear "Hormel" you may find yourself thinking of spam. The meat, not the junk that invades your inbox. His grandfather made a fortune grinding up meat parts and putting them into cans, and James inherited the family fortune - which enabled him to contribute big time to Clinton and thus get rewarded with the cushiest of ambassadorial appointments - Luxembourg.

Hormel was born in 1933, a year indistinguishable from the dark ages for gay people, the year Hitler took power, the height of the depression, when a quarter of Americans were out of work, when winds were blowing the topsoil from American farmland and creating the Dust Bowl, when gangsters ran Chicago, when the gatling gun, which could fire 1000 rounds a minute and would help the slaughters that were to come in the Second World War possible, was invented.

I like to think that Hormel was a piece of the antidotes to that series of horrors, along with the building of the Golden Gate Bridge, which started that year. And the election of FDR. He would, of course, have to endure a vicious age of homophobic bigotry, seven more years than I did, in the end. And, unlike me, he went with the flow, married a woman he loved and made a happy family. When he died, he had helped create five children, fourteen grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. When he died, his former wife, Alice, shared the podium with his gay partner to remember him fondly. One can do worse than live a life that ends with that kind of display of affection. 

If I were a more generous sort, I'd stop here and comfort myself with the cliché that all's well that ends well. But I also have a great respect for history. I don't want the world to forget that while Michelle Obama is all kissy-face with George W. Bush, he is in my mind a war criminal, a man who smeared Colin Powell's sterling reputation for integrity and loyalty by pressing him into helping us lie our way into bombing Iraq and killing hundreds of thousands in a futile attempt to make the world better for imperial America. 

And I don't want the world to forget that when Hormel's ambassadorship was announced, the only way Clinton could get the appointment to go through was to do it when the Republicans in the Senate were out of town. And that Fiji was the first choice, but didn't want a gay man to come to town as ambassador. And the Catholic Church, singing out of tune, as they so often do, insisted the good catholic folk of Luxembourg would feel the same way. Fortunately, Clinton overrode those objections, Luxembourg officials welcomed his appointment, and it went through. But in the meanwhile, Hormel had to endure delay thanks to the efforts of conservative Senators Jesse Helms and John Ashcroft, and three other Republicans, James Inhofe, Tim Hutchinson, and Bob Smith. Trent Lott, the Republican Majority Leader, worked to block the vote and publicly and called homosexuality a sin, comparing it to alcoholism and kleptomania. 

Hormel was, among other things, a smart fellow. He graduated from Swarthmore and then Chicago Law School and ended up dean at Chicago, and director of admissions. He was one of the founders, in 1981, of the Human Rights Campaign. He was a member of the 1995 United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the 1996 U.S. delegation to the United Nations General Assembly, and the boards of directors of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the American Foundation for AIDS Research. He funded the creation of James C. Hormel Gay & Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library in 1995, a priceless collection of materials documenting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history and culture, with a special emphasis on the San Francisco Bay Area.

For that last bit he was criticized by the homophobes because those materials contained information about NAMBLA, the man-boy organization. Never mind that he had no say in which materials the library would choose to include, or the fact that those same materials are in the Library of Congress.

He was a big supporter of People for the American Way.  He is a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Grand Marshal Award by San Francisco Pride Board of Directors.

He broke the mold. Since his time, President Biden has appointed Chantale Wong to be the director of the Asian Development Bank - that's an ambassador-rank position if I'm not mistaken. And then there's Pete Buttigieg in the Biden cabinet.

We're getting there. Very slowly. But surely.

I hope we don't fail to remember the rungs on the ladder.

Like James Hormel.

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Covidiots

I've shared many times with friends the notion that if I were a German I would be a member of the SPD, the German Socialist Party. It's the oldest political party in Germany. I was drawn to the socialists early on not just because I think at the top of the list of America's problems is the lack of a fair distribution of wealth (on both moral and practical political grounds) but because I so admired the person of Willi Brandt and wanted to be associated with men and women of his stature.

Willi Brandt went way beyond most resistors to Hitler. He actually emigrated to Norway and joined the anti-German forces fighting the Nazis, changing his name from the original Herbert Frahm to Willi Brandt to avoid detection by Nazi agents (he made the change official in 1948 after the war.) He, like Marlene Dietrich and others who actively fought the Nazis from abroad, made many enemies among people who thought resistance to Hitler was appropriate, but still felt that joining enemy forces was unworthy, if not actual treason. (Think Jane Fonda and the Vietnam War.) Despite that resistance from the right wing, Brandt was elected chancellor of Germany in 1969. He had also been mayor of Berlin for a time.

 
What clinched it for me as a fan of his was his "Kniefall" - the time he fell on his knees when laying a wreath at the memorial to the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1970. I remember watching it on television in Japan and being moved to tears. His comment on the act later was, "At the abyss of German history and under the weight of millions of murdered people, I did what people do when language fails." A Japanese leader, I understand, copied the act years later when recognizing Japan's incursion into Korea. He got the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to bring east and west together, always with strong opposition from the right. I love it that in America right-wingers would slap the label socialist on him, and miss the irony that this time they'd be right on.

The Socialist Party in Germany ran into some hard times recently before picking themselves up and winning the chancellorship again, with Olaf Scholz, in the last election, albeit in coalition with the Green Party (good show) and the libertarians (not so good show).

I have noted before, also, my admiration for Kevin Kühnert, the young guy who dropped out of college to head up the Young Socialists (Jusos). He's at the extreme left, opposed Scholz initially for being too far right, and advocates such things as not allowing people to own more than one house. He's now a member of the Bundestag for the district of Tempelhof/Schöneberg in Berlin. And here I show my bias. I like gay people who are smart and have an active social conscience. I love it that in the U.S. we didn't stop with Barney Frank, but have now even got a gay man in the president's cabinet. Germany's previous Health Minister was also a friend of Dorothy's.

But I'm getting carried away here. And being LGBT does not always signal a social conscience, alas - consider that Alice Weidel is one of the leaders of the AfD, for example. But I just wanted to endorse young Kevin in passing.

The two actual leaders (I don't know how they divide up the work) of the Socialist Party (it's actually not "socialist" but "democratic socialist" and even Kühnert calls himself a democratic socialist) are Lars Klingbeil and Saskia Esken. I really like these two politicians, as well.

Esken got into trouble last year for referring to the anti-vaxxers and Querdenkers opposed to masking and distancing as "Covidiots" on Twitter and the Berlin Attorney General's office reviewed the charges. They then dismissed them, arguing that as a German citizen she had a right to free speech.

My pro-German sympathies continue apace as long as these people are in charge.

Tokyo recognizes same-sex unions; Chile goes one better

OK. I'll march in the parade.

Why not? I don't want to be one of those glass-half-empty types, people who see the dark side of things before begrudgingly admitting there is cause for celebration and blowing out the happy candles.

At the same time, I can't deny that "a same-sex partner system (sic)" is not something I want to jump up and down over. Much less wait another year for.

The city of Tokyo has just announced that it will recognize same-sex unions, along with five other prefectures (Tokyo is a 'city-state').

And, as if to further call attention to the johnny-come-lately feature of such legislation, Tokyo's governor, Yuriko Koike explains the rationale this way: "It will help alleviate problems in daily life and promote the understanding of gender diversity in Tokyo."

Why do I feel like somebody's offering me crumbs? Why must I stand, hat in hand, like Oliver, and beg, "Please, sir, may I have some more?"

I hear you, fellow LGBT people who have fought so long and so hard to get this far. You want me to be grateful for the progress in this fundamentally socially conservative nation. You want to sing and dance, pop the champagne corks, maybe shoot off a few firecrackers. I apologize if I'm raining on your parade.

When I went to Tokyo for the first time, in 1970, I had to go back into the closet as a gay man. Had to recognize that the (relatively) gay-friendly world I had left behind in San Francisco was not the same world I was coming into. It took a bit of adjusting before I realized Japan was not all that bad. It had, like many places colonized culturally by the Christian West, taken on a homophobia not native to the islands. I remember my minister of the church I grew up in explaining to us once that when he went to Japan with the occupation forces they had a hell of a time convincing the Japanese not to strip in the aisles and get into their pajamas before climbing into bed in the sleeper trains. "They have no shame," he explained, mournfully.

And once the occupation was over, and Japan was free to go its own way again, the homophobia lingered. Today (i.e., 1970) to be openly gay was the equivalent of shouting obscenities while walking down the public streets. Not the worst thing in the world, but certainly not the kind of thing nice people do. Here too, I was faced with being a grouch for pointing that out, though, rather than recognizing that while I was able to be more open about being gay in San Francisco, in Japan I didn't have to worry that if I found myself in the wrong place at the wrong time I might be met by a bunch of thugs insecure enough about their sexuality to want to beat the daylights out of me. In fact, the fact that viewing being gay as little more than bad taste was probably the reason Japan saw no need for what we saw as gay liberation, and the reason it has taken another half century for this day to arrive, when lesbians and gays can be granted a "system" - marriage will surely come in time - for going through life with a same-sex life-partner.

So yes, I'll march in the parade. And yes, I'll toast the progress. And yes, I'm delighted to see Japan take a step closer to Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, the United States and Uruguay in recognizing the right for same-sex couples to marry. Some of these countries have less than full equal access to the institution of marriage in some parts of them, but all of them show Japan there is more they can do to give lesbians and gays a way out of second-class status as citizens of a democracy.

In the meantime, yes, I'll march in the parade. I'll carry a sign. I'll look on the bright side and stress the fact that not only are there more ways to achieve civic equality than we are currently taking advantage of, there are indications that we're on our way to getting there. And we should not surrender (I'm obviously addressing myself here) to the temptation of snarking over what isn't to the point that we miss what is.

One day in 1861 Russia was a country made up of large numbers of serfs. The next day Tsar Alexander freed them. At one point in the history of the United States people of color were slaves. Some day in the future, legislators will stop trying to remove their right to vote. Things take time.

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and P.S., while I was focusing on these small steps in Japan, a bigger story was happening across the big blue waters in Chile: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/world/americas/chile-gay-marriage.html

The anti-vaxxer plague

One of my Bill-friends (I have several of them) just sent me a link to a Guardian article on the German and Austrian weakness for what I call homeopathic silliness, and others call thinking outside the box. It's worth a read.

The past couple of weeks I've been preoccupied with the news from Germany. The number one topic is Covid and the number two topic, what will the new government be like, usually ends up centering on Covid, as well.

In my personal life, I find myself fighting despair over all the evidence that Americans, to an alarming degree, have surrendered to fear, circus, and conspiracy theories, and I have looked to Germany to pick my spirits up. Their approach to science and truth has long been a counterbalance to American folly, for me. That is no longer the case. I now find myself reflecting over and again on how similar the two populations are.

In the midst of this struggle to juggle each new piece of insight into German and American behavior and thought, I am deeply saddened by the fact that I've lost a friend over my approach to taking things in. He insists Americans are fools, plain and simple, and there is no such thing as an honest politician. I've lost his friendship over protests that he focuses too little on the donut, too much on the hole. I persist in thinking - it's my reaction to despair - that we should live by the metaphor of the blind men and the elephant, that none of us ever see the whole picture. And I conclude from that that we can be our own worst enemies by believing we know more than we do, that we need to keep nuanced thinking at all costs, and not throw in the towel prematurely on what appears to be ingrained folly as a national characteristic.

This is a philosophical orientation, and it's based on faith, something I rail loudly against much of the time. I don't like ideological thinking, but at the same time I recognize I cannot rid myself of the notion that the insane, the Republicans, the Christian nationalists, the white supremacists - carve out whichever section of the population you will, are running the asylum. My friend's ghosting of me is ironic. I actually agree with him much of the time. We're all doomed if we go on like this!

Particularly discouraging is the fact that while I want to focus on the John Lewises and the Pete Buttigiegs and the Stacey Abramses and all the many politicians standing up to American political folly and not let the Ted Cruzes and the Rand Pauls and Ron De Santises stand in as representative, I feel the left has pulled the rug out from under me. In the U.S., our tendency to tout individual rights over collective responsibilities is a chronic disease.  A co-morbidity with the Corona virus, this anti-vaxxer ("I got my rights!") nonsense. And in Germany, particularly in Saxony and Thuringia, where they are still fighting the ghost of intrusive statism, the mistrust of government spills over into mistrust of science. Otherwise decent, smart people are ignoring what I take to be common sense medical advice. They are not listening to the clear consensus. Even as Angela Merkel is celebrated and praised for her "steady hand" and "desire to get everybody around the table" she's criticized for inaction in preparing the country for the pandemic. One can't win for losing on that front.

And what can we do other than stand by and hope we continue to survive long enough to gain even more benefit of hindsight. Those who listened to the business sector and opened things up at the earliest sign the pandemic was waning now have egg on their face. They are now justifiably criticized for failing to realize a drop in the number of Covid cases was only seasonal and would rise again, and opening up too soon would lead to disaster. We know that now from the German example. But, as Merkel is fond of reminding us, "You can't do much without a majority."

Watching the debates on German television, watching politicians and social analysts rage at each other over their different approaches to fixing things, is heartbreaking sometimes. We simply lack the ability to see the future, and we make bad policy all the time. It's not that the Germans are stupid for being anti-vaxxers, as so many of them are; it's not that Americans are stupid for not being able to see that collective responsibility is as important as individual freedom. It's that the human race is lousy at long-term thinking. The chief freedom of democracy, I've always believed, is the freedom to be stupid. We see that in that marvelous assertion, "I disagree with you totally, but I'll fight to the death for your freedom to express yourself." But at the moment, in a life-and-death situation, we see the advantage of enlightened, as opposed to democratic, rule. It's a time to be smart, not a time to be free.

Let me restate that. It's time to remind ourselves that our right to swing our fists stops at the end of your nose.