If you can't stand it, you gotta fix it

I have lots of reasons for feeling good about my decision many years go to make San Francisco my home.  Not the least of these is the fact that when my husband and I got married, back in 2013, we were able to do so in the rotunda of City Hall, right by the bust of and memorial to Harvey Milk. Milk and the mayor at the time, George Moscone, were assassinated in 1978 by a homophobic "all-American boy" and ex-policeman, and became martyrs to the gay cause. In time, the ugly side of the killing receded enough for the contributions of "The Mayor of Castro Street," as Harvey Milk came to be referred to, became a major source of pride for LGBT people.  I no longer get to events like today's march - it's too taxing on these old bones - but I have no doubt that many in the crowd of today's 55th annual pride parade at least uttered his name in passing.

There is icing on the cake that was being able to marry at San Francisco City Hall.  The woman who married us was the daughter of the woman who swore Harvey Milk in way back when he first entered San Francisco politics.  And I have a poster of the film, Milk, starring Sean Penn, posted on my bedroom door, a film I managed to get into as an extra, by the way.

There is an excellent article in today's Sunday New York Times by Andrew Sullivan, in the Opinion section, making the argument that we have gone too far in the LGBT movement by bending over backwards to support the trans folk among us by agreeing to cast off the distinction between male and female as biological categories. If you're "with it" these days, and you're out there marching in the streets and protesting the notion that "gender assigned at birth" needs to give way to gender as a choice, he claims, you're actually providing ammunition to the right-wingers who would "Make America Great Again" and take us back to the 1950s, where a woman's place was in the kitchen, blacks knew not to "get uppity" and gay people lived in closets.

I'm probably exaggerating Sullivan's point, but not by much.  And right on cue, there's a news item out today about how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, one of Trump's most conspicuous ass-kissers, removed the name of the navy's oil replenishment ship Harvey Milk, allegedly because it should not have been named for woke reasons in the first place. OK.  But then why did he leave intact the names of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harriet Tubman, Thurgood Marshall, Earl Warren and Robert F. Kennedy, among others in the class of ships named after John Lewis?  Maybe he just hasn't gotten around to it.  Maybe I'm being paranoid that he started with Harvey Milk.

This year also marks the twentieth anniversary of a film that lives within me as possibly the most powerful movie ever made, Brokeback Mountain.  Movie critic Matt Baume has just seen it again and compares the sadness he felt watching it for the first time with the anger he felt this time around.  Have a look at his take on this important piece of cinematic history.  Baume makes the point I wish more people would make.  Following the line the Heath Ledger character, Ennis, utters, "if you can't fix it...you gotta stand it," Baume argues Ennis has that exactly backwards; it should be: "If you can't stand it, you gotta fix it."

Fifty-five years of Gay Pride parades. Things are far better than I every imagined, twenty years ago and before. I'm married to a man and I live in a world comfortable with, even highly supportive of that fact.

But I also live in a country where, as I pointed out in my last blog entry, the president can still insult Germany's chancellor by implying he was a Nazi supporter, and his Secretary of Defense can still remove Harvey Milk's name from a naval vessel because homophobia lives on in the hearts of a critical mass of Americans and we lack the will or the skill to fix it.

Otto, hast Du Worte?

 The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, not long after I had settled into my job at Keio University in Japan. I had lived through the Cold War in Germany and had many friends and family members for whom this event was a dream come true they were never convinced could happen in their lifetimes. It was a clear indication that the Cold War was over and Germany could now hope to look forward to becoming a normal European democracy. I sat in my living room watching the crowds pour out of East Berlin, tears streaming down my face.  If only Achim were still alive.  If only Tante Frieda were still alive.  The gods are cruel, I thought, for not allowing them and countless others of their fellow Germans to live long enough to experience this longed for event and renewal of faith in the human race's chances of building a better collectivity on the European continent.

I remember an article in Der Spiegel about a survey in which Germans were asked whether the defeat of Hitler and the Nazis was a defeat or a victory for Germany.  The overwhelming response showed a majority of Germans, even those who had at one point in their lives shown support for Adolf Hitler, were now convinced that the Holocaust and the tragic killing of millions upon millions of soldiers and civilians was a national shame it would take decades to recover from, but that Hitler's defeat was an essential step toward what would now be Germany's pursuit of democracy.

Anybody who has followed the German political scene since the defeat of Hitler is aware of how well Germany, often referred to as a Wirtschaftswunder - Economic Miracle has served as a model modern egalitarian state.

But let me get back to the time when I watched the news of Berliners tearing down the Wall and fighting back tears. The next day I met colleagues from the foreign language department where I worked and ran into a brick wall.  When I shared my enthusiasm for the "Mauerfall" - the "fall of the wall," one of my French teacher colleagues took the wind out of my sails with the comment, "Not everybody is as excited as you to see Germany united, considering their history up to 1945." 

I didn't know where to begin. This was a "Treppenwitz" situation - you know, where you think of what you should have said only after you've gone down the stairs after losing an argument (Treppenwitz = "l'esprit de l'escalier" = "staircase wit").  I didn't know whether I should feel anger or surprise.  Does this guy really believe that after all these years (it was now 1989) of recognition of the evils of the Nazi years that there were still Germans yearning to go back to them?  And to make things worse, this guy was Japanese.  He had picked up the anti-German prejudice from retrograde French friends and colleagues, no doubt.  Did he have no knowledge of the wider world and of historical developments?  He wasn't a stupid man.  How could he be so ignorant?

That was over thirty years ago.  Then, just the other day, to America's profound humiliation we saw a repeat of that ignorance of history as President Trump insulted both the morality and the intelligence of the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, in the Oval Office.  Merz was trying to get Trump to realize how important America was in ending World War II and urging him to come once again to Europe's aid by stopping the war in Ukraine.  When Merz brought up June 6 as a great day to be celebrated, Trump's response was to wonder out loud: "not a great day for you?"

It's at times like this that I hear the voice of my Tante Frieda, who at moments of astonishment and outrage used to turn to her life partner, Otto, and say, "Otto, hast Du Worte?" - (Otto, do you have words?")

Revival - a review

A friend, whose opinions I tend to share, put me on to the 2017 movie Revival, available on Roku. It is the story of a Southern Baptist preacher in rural Arkansas who is torn between his conviction that homosexuality is an unforgivable sin and his attraction for a drifter who comes to his church one day looking for food and shelter.

Read no further until you've seen the film.  I can't do a decent review without revealing the ending.

Because the topic matter concerns the intersection of religion and homosexuality, it was a given that I would be strongly drawn in by the story.

And right up to the ending, I assumed, as the plot unfolded, that this would be just another tale of the imbecility of homophobic evangelical bigotry and I would be writing a critical review of the film, listing predictability as its main weakness.

When the ending turned out to be anything but predictable, I was blown away. I then had to take a bit of time to consider why it left such a bad taste in my mouth.

At first I concluded that what I expected was that the gay preacher would see the light and choose love and affection over the rigidity of evangelical homophobia. And the fact that the bad guys won this one pissed me off.

But that thought gave way to the conviction that the story simply went off the track.  The preacher had displayed nothing but decency and sincerity up to this point.  Why would he act so out of character?

And that thought then gave way to the argument in my head that his self-loathing, clearly the motivation for his actions at the end, was sufficiently intense to explain the ending after all.

Add to this act of murder the actions of the minor characters, the blood lust of Trevor, the incestuous thoughts of Jimmy, the greed and duplicity of the rival pastor in the town, and you've got, if not an actual horror film, a depiction of Christian folk filled with sin and depravity.

The weakness of Roman Catholicism, Protestants are wont to say, is that the clergy have too much power: they can forgive the worst of sins in the confessional. The weakness of Judaism, by contrast, is that there is little emphasis on doctrine or belief; what counts is going through the motions. When evangelical Protestants turn the focus on themselves, their failure to live up to the impossible demands of Sermon-on-the-Mount morality means that the overwhelming majority of them are caught in an endless cycle of sin and imperfection. And a moral code in which sexual acts are right up there with murder and deceit, if not out ahead in importance.  Add to that the fact that the church is made up of a large number of emotion-junkies, people who "feel the spirit" and confuse the thrill with religious sincerity.

Watching a community of evangelicals display these sins to an almost exaggerated degree makes you question why anyone should be attracted to religion. Was this the real goal of the filmmaker?

If so, maybe I need to give the film a much higher grade than a B-minus.  And the acting is first rate.

And if in the end I still have a bone I have to pick, it is with the book, not the movie version of the story.