The Welcome Mat

It’s still sinking in.  It almost went past me, at first, this reference to Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall.   Only when I heard Obama say the sentence, “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law - for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well,” did it hit me.  “Did he say Stonewall?”  Did he really say Stonewall?

He did say Stonewall.  And he put Stonewall up against a reference to the Seneca Falls Convention, the event in 1848 we have come to see as the first great step towards women’s equality in America.  And Selma, where the world got to see what white supremacist government-sponsored racism looks like up close.  That was in 1965, when the police turned fire hoses on a peaceful march for black civil rights at the Edmund Pettis Bridge, and a critical mass of white Americans finally got it,  turned a corner and never went back.   The Stonewall Riots, similarly, are considered by most LGBT people to be the beginning of the first serious gay liberation movement in the United States, and most of the Western World, actually.   This was the first time these three iconic civil rights movements were put together in such a dramatic fashion.

Detractors are pedaling as fast as they can to downplay the occasion.   Republican Congressman Kevin Brady from Texas complained, “I did not hear the president commit to working with Republicans,” apparently oblivious to the Republican decision to oppose Obama at every turn, even when he comes around to supporting their causes.  Others complained the speech sounded more like a political campaign speech or that it was somehow just more of the same-old same-old.

It blows your mind just how completely this historical turning point went right over their boney heads.  This was a great take-back speech, when the president spoke to the nation and announced that the Reagan era was no more.  The old-boy rich men’s club is still big and strong.  But people have cottoned to the fact that governmental deregulation for the benefit of Wall Street and the notion of trickle-down is being asked to step aside.  That this may be a plutocracy, and corporations may be people, but the seeds of change have been sown.

Not to be missed was an open call for attention to environmental issues.  This was quickly labeled “environmental extremism” of course by Tim Phillips, the Koch brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity organization that speaks for the oil industry. 

Republicans snubbed Latinos in this last election and they ended up voting 71% for Obama, compared to 27% for Romney.   And we all remember the “English Only” movement, the attempts to classify illegal aliens as criminals, the cries for a Berlin wall to keep Mexicans out – ironic, now that Mexican immigration has stopped and may even have been reversed.   At the inauguration, there was Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor swearing in Joe Biden as VP.  And there was our fifth poet laureate, Richard Blanco, a gay man born in Spain and brought to the U.S. by his Cuban parents where he grew up in Miami.  Reading his poem for the occasion on the theme of national unity.   Go ahead gay America, Latino America, and a whole bunch of you others in America, I dare you not to bawl like a baby.

Incidentally, for me this gift keeps on giving.  Today I got to watch my favorite gay media person, Anderson Cooper, interview my favorite gay poet laureate, Richard Blanco, and I had to pinch myself to see if it’s the same me experiencing all this as the me who not so long ago wrote letters to Obama telling him to  “evolve already!”  The same me who also had to evolve on the topic of gay rights.  I live in my head with some awful memories, way back before Stonewall, of the time when I was in college and caused one of my two closest friends no end of grief by telling him I had overcome my gay tendencies and he could too.  He should start by telling his mother and by getting the chaplain to help him find his way.

And I can just as easily go back before that to high school, when so many of my wonderful teachers were what we then called “old maids,” including the one we called Hepzibah, after Hepzibah Pyncheon, the lonely character in The House of Seven Gables, with whom she clearly identified.  And for whom I have named my blog.   We used to laugh in terrible teenager cruelty at her loneliness, her apartness, and the fact that she took refuge in literature, because nobody thought it was worth their while to dissuade us from laughing at this group of women we can now assume consisted in very large part of lesbians too cowed by homophobia to admit, even to themselves, who and what they were.

I see in today’s paper that the British have made a move to handle the possibility that an heir to the British throne might turn out to be gay, and they want to be ready for it.     That’s progress. 

Rick Warren and other U.S. evangelicals responsible for the move in Uganda to criminalize homosexuality up to and including the death penalty, are backing off, tripping all over themselves trying to prove that was never their intention (when some sort of witch hunt clearly was).   Go to the Rachel Maddow site and click on “Uganda be kidding” in the left column for the whole story.  That’s progress, too.   It Gets Better.

It’s all still so fresh, though.  Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell was only rescinded in 2010 and we’re still nervously waiting to hear how the Supremes will pronounce on Prop. 8 and on DOMA.  Nine countries have gotten rid of all discrimination against its LGBT citizens, but we know the United States is not yet among them.

But yesterday was a day of hope and pride, a giant leap closer to a time when this accident of nature, this fork in the road in the brain, this gift of the gods,  or whatever the hell homosexuality is, is no longer defined the way the fearful religionists would have us define it, as something to be put down, wiped out, wished away.  We’ve come a long long way.

We’re not yet able to take dignity for granted.  But that skinny wonderful man from Hawaii with a Muslim hero’s name that some people believe was born in Kenya got up yesterday in front of all the world and made us feel welcome here in our own country.

Not too shabby, as days go.

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Jodie comes out

I just listened to Jodie Foster's speech at the Golden Globes.

I had been avoiding it, because the news presented it as a coming-out speech, and I thought to myself, BFD - about time!

Coming out stories are all the rage these days, I thought.  A chance for people to get weepy and touchy-feely and have the cameras measure the distance and rate of flow from the tear ducts and make us all feel warm and wonderful for thirty seconds before moving on to the next jolt of media stimulation.

But that bit of cynicism stemmed not from my generous parts, but from my “Oh, please!” parts where gay people in the public eye play coy with their gay identities, thus paying court to the homophobia in our culture which persists way way way past its actual shelf date.  Being in the closet in Hollywood in this day and age?  Like I said.  Oh, please!

But as I listened to Jodie Foster’s rambling moment in the sun, I heard her say something about being in the public eye since the age of three.  And that put her desire for a private life in perspective, and I realized I was being too hard on her by far.  After all, I’ve avowed over and again my view that, given the unpleasant consequences of coming out in some circumstances, one really needs to give people copping to gay identity some space.  Some time to assess the situation and figure out how to admit that they had been living a lie up to that point.  So it was a chance to match my behavior and my judgment with my principles, and just sit back and let Jodie go.

I’ve come a long way since growing up in New England with a Pilgrim identity, where kids were taught how to behave by looking out of the corner of their eye at the adults to see what they were sniffing and clucking at.   The Catholics went to the Magic Show.  We went to a church where the Sunday sermon was the same thing every week.  “Be nice.”  Catholics went to heaven by confessing when they touched themselves down there.  We in the Pilgrim Congregational Church went to heaven if we were nice.  And that meant collecting all the ways there were to be nice.  Nice people don’t pick their nose.  Nice people don’t make noise with their mouths when they eat.  Nice people don’t speak of other people’s infirmities to their face.

And nice people don’t talk about sex.  Really nice people don’t even have sex.

Somebody who really had my number commented to me once, when I said I had left religion behind, “Well you may have left religion behind, but you’re still carrying around the mold it came in.”  Even after I decided there were simply too many errors of fact in the Bible for it to be any kind of authority, and had read the Old Testament carefully enough to affirm that God was really an egotistical bully, I still hung on to the notion that if I said out loud that I was gay that I was somehow damned.

Don’t care what you do in your bedroom.  Keep it out of the salon.

Don’t do it in the road and scare the horses.

Don’t give me information I don’t need to know.

Fast forward half a century and I’m listening to Jodie Foster standing up on stage, all awkward and goofy and gangly, telling her world she loves her kids and she’s lonely, and my heart went out to her.  You go, girl!  You tell your story.  This is your time and your place and you tell it your way.

It’s hilarious to go on the gay websites and listen to all the chatter.  And most of them end with, “And didn’t she look faaaaabulous!”

We can be a silly bunch.  Awkward sometimes.  Tasteless sometimes.  But we’re movin’ on up at last, and soon we’ll settle down and become unremarkable.

And maybe that won’t be such a good thing.

Maybe we’ll decide it’s OK to be awkward and inarticulate, as long as you look Fabulous.

I’m for that, actually.  Provided we get a little better at looking beneath the surface.

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Body and Soul

It's only four women, but it's a start.

Four Ukrainian women took their shirts off at the Vatican today and showed their boobs to Papa Ratzinger.

A truly naughty act.  According to USA Today, the pope "appeared not to have been disturbed."  

Possibly he's seen the upper parts of the female anatomy before.  And, of course, his eyesight isn't what it used to be and he was way up there on his balcony and they were down in the crowds at St. Peter's.

The spokesperson for the protest explained that they were angry at his moves to stop the advance of same-sex marriage.

Interesting example of English as an international language.  The women had "In Gay We Trust" written in big capital letters on their backs.  Obviously a spin-off on the American credo in dollar omnipotens - "In God We Trust." 

Pernicious example of American cultural imperialism, possibly.

But that's up for interpretation.

It could also be a sign of democratization of the Vatican, for all I know.  We'll know if Benedict speaks out on their behalf and claims to disagree with them but expresses a willingness to die for their right to protest.

OK, maybe not.

Meanwhile 300,000 people marched in France to protest the move of the socialist government to legalize not only same-sex marriage but the right of LGBT couples to adopt kids.  Same arguments.  God made one père and one mère and so it follows logically that if kids in need of adoption have to wait a little longer - like till age 18, for example, for the troublesome ones that les gais et les lesbiennes tend to be more willing to adopt, well that's tough Ukrainian body parts.

300,000 is a lot of folk.  But France, unlike the Vatican, is a democracy and the majority of French people seem to be in favor of extending rights to gays and lesbians, bless their croissant loving hearts.   Stay tuned to the news from gay Paris.

And Ukrainian ladies (and others) living in Italy and fighting homophobia, more power to you.

The world loves it when you put your whole body into it.

Keep up the good work.


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