Category Archives: politics and culture

The Power of Words

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Election season.   The time of the year when politicians use words to shame and fear.

Illegal immigrant.  Homosexual agenda.  Socialized medicine.

The last one I actually don’t have any problem with, but it generally comes up in a pejorative sense, as though we’re on the brink of collapsing under a Stalinist regime.

To answer back the insidious rhetoric, I decided to feature some activist poetry this week.  First, on the immigration issue, I found this excellent verse on La Bloga by poet/artist Tom Sheldon. Then, a far inferior poem I wrote in response to Tea Party-approved New York State Governor candidate Carl Palladino.

If you don’t know the backstory on Palladino you can read it here.

THEY

by Tom Sheldon

~

THEY have no home,

have no family nor rights.

They have no feelings,

living on warm water and sardines.

They are from another world.

They sneek in the night,

averse to clubs and bullets.

They miss their families.

They are saddened to leave home.

They are desperate,

risking their lives.

For a dream.

~

TO CARL PALLADINO, FROM A DYSFUNCTIONAL HOMOSEXUAL

by Andrew J. Peters

~

The dysfunction, you see,

Is not about me.

~

I like watching men grind up on each other,

But drop your gay hang-ups like blaming the mother,

My enjoyment of sex is completely intact,

Like all well-adjusted adult men in fact,

I’d think you’d agree this is hardly a crime,

You like women so much, you like two at a time,

I wouldn’t call you a dysfunctional straight,

Perhaps overfunctioning would be one complaint.

~

The thing I see that’s not functioning so well,

Is the hawks and the clery who condemn gays to hell,

The same people who seem to have nothing to say,

When ten kids rape a neighbor because he is gay,

Something’s not working when a pride celebration,

Tops of the list of issues that pique moral damnation,

And the young (and not so young) need to dole out shame,

In order to feel as strong as they proclaim.

National Coming Out Day

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So I’m five days early, but I wanted to do a post about National Coming Out Day before rather than after the event.

National Coming Out Day was founded in 1988 by psychotherapist/activist Dr. Robert Eichberg and pioneer lesbian activist Jean O’Leary. The purpose is to raise awareness of the LGBT community and offer support and resources to those who are afraid to come out.  Though started in the U.S., National Coming Out Day is actually an international celebration. It’s celebrated on October 11th in most countries; NCOD is observed on November 12th in the United Kingdom.

A literary trivium: both Eichberg and O’Leary were authors. Eichberg wrote the self-help book Coming Out: An Act of Love, which was a sort of bible for me in my formative years. O’Leary was a former nun and contributed to a 1984 anthology entitled Lesbian Nuns: Breaking the Silence. The well-recognized coming out of the closet logo was designed by Keith Haring.

There are so many things to write about for NCOD 2010–the need for LGBT visibility in the aftermath of isolated, bullied teens killing themselves, the fight for marriage equality and the right to serve openly in the military, and the courageous story of Benjamin Carver who was jumped by bashers in the bathroom of NYC’s Stonewall Inn and fought off his assailants, just two days ago.

I’ve been planning for awhile to tell my own coming out story here, as is the tradition for NCOD. But there are so many other things going on, I have to take a brief detour.

So back to the bullying/suicides. There’s this amazing grassroots campaign happening in response to the recent tragedies of Tyler Clementi (New Jersey), Seth Walsh (California), Raymond Chase (Rhode Island), Billy Lucas (Indiana), and Justin Aaberg (Minnesota). It’s called It Gets Better and was created by one of my personal heroes: columnist and hottie Dan Savage. Savage’s project encourages young people and adults to videotape messages of hope to young people who may feel alone and hopeless. Youtube now hosts hundreds of inspirational videos including ones by Tim Gunn, Jake Shears and Perez Hilton.

You can watch one of the videos here:  It Gets Better Project

Allright. My coming out story. We each have so many stories – when we told a best friend, the “first time,” and the family dramas. I chose to focus on an internal event, the point when I acknowledged to myself that I was gay, because there was something indelible about that moment and it changed the trajectory of my life.

I was a 20-year-old college student. I was seeing a psychotherapist because I was having panic attacks–full on am-I-having-a-cardiac-arrest? kind of spells–that usually happened in class and a few times at social gatherings. I had no idea what was going on. Tucked deep inside my head was the knowledge that I was attracted to guys, but I didn’t connect that fact to my anxiety. It seemed to come and go without any specific provocation, those heart pounding, short of breath nervous spurts that felt like electrical surges, as though I had been wired by a faulty electrician.

I spent about six months talking to my therapist, trying to understand the triggers, exploring my insecurities and wondering what could possibly be happening to me.

One day, the therapist asked: “Do you remember telling me you were afraid that people think you’re gay?”

Had I said that? I had only a vague recollection. I nodded.

“Do you think it’s possible that you’re gay?”

Was she saying…? Did she think…? Oh my God. I think she’s right. My complexion went through shades of purple and red. I took a deep breath. “Maybe,” I ventured. My gaze wandered around all parts of the office, any place but her. When the hour was up, and I left the office and went out to the street.

The possibility stuck with me as I walked home, and I went through all fashions of emotion–childlike bashfulness, visceral relief–and most profoundly joy as I had never experienced before. Several things occurred to me at once. There was a reason for my anxiety. Now that I had found it, I was free, or at least the path for freedom was illuminated, no matter how difficult it might be.

I was gay. I said it in my head. The shame was no longer crippling. A broad grin spread across my face. I think I even laughed to myself. What had I been so afraid of? This was who I was, and I was going to be just fine. The day seemed brighter, the streets more vivid. An excited rush poured over me. I knew who I was, and I thought about the wonderful release of telling other people. I wouldn’t have to hide that part of me anymore. In being real with others, in being truly open to fall in love with someone else, I felt for the first time the possibility of happiness in my future.

Coming out to other people was a gradual process for me. Fears and doubts punctuated the next few years of my life. But that day of self-acknowledgement was a crucial turning point. I could have kept denying who I was, kept hiding. Instead I chose to face the truth and live my life as an openly gay man.

Happy National Coming Out Day!!

Why Are Gay Teens Killing Themselves?

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Over the past year, there have been a string of high profile teen suicides. Three were clustered in a Minnesota school district. The most recent suicide happened in rural Indiana. The common thread is that the victims were all being harassed because they were—or were perceived to be—gay.

Suicide is about isolation, loss of hope, feeling like the emotional pain is too much to bear. It will probably always be a reality, particularly for adolescents who feel the full force of their emotions, at times like a crushing weight. In the US, the number of teens who kill themselves each year has largely stayed the same over the past 30 years, and suicide is consistently the second or third leading cause of death among teenagers. A 1989 landmark federal study brought attention to the fact that gay teens are much more likely to commit suicide than their non-gay peers. Family rejection, ostracism at school, and loneliness can overwhelm and lead to desperate decisions.

When I was thirteen, I tied a belt around my neck and sat in my bedroom closet, contemplating. I hated my lumpy, pre-pubescent body. I was reminded about being overweight by friends and felt piercing embarrassment about having to change and shower in the locker room, back-to-school shopping for clothes that never fit and being mistaken for a girl by strangers due to my shapeless body. In a fuzzy sense, coming to terms with being gay figured in at that moment. I felt inadequate around other boys and thought I’d never fit in with my effeminate shyness and sensitivity.

Luckily, I was too afraid to try to hurt myself, and things got better as my height started catching up with my weight and I made a deal with myself to never, ever consider that I could possibly be gay.

That was 27 years ago, and I’ve since come out and worked as a social worker for LGBT youth for most of my adult career. But when I read about the recent gay teen suicides, I found myself wondering: Haven’t we made progress?

From a time when coming out in high school was near impossible, we now have gay student council presidents and homecoming kings and gay couples attending proms and Gay/Straight Alliances and high school theater productions of Rent and students organizing a National Day of Silence to protest homophobia and primetime TV shows featuring popular gay teens.

But we still have gay kids getting viciously harassed and killing themselves.

For sure, change has yet to come to many areas of the country. At the Minnesota school where three kids killed themselves, the district had a specific policy forbidding teachers from discussing gay issues even in the context of “tolerance” education or anti-bullying policies and despite student complaints of anti-gay harassment by students and even by some teachers. This is the attitude, the culture in many suburban and rural communities.

But studies show that as many as 60 percent of gay teenagers consider suicide, and they’re not all growing up in places where coming out remains strenuously taboo. Family support makes a big difference, and I think another factor is the complexity of adolescence, at times—and by its nature—resistant to outside meddling.

There’s a saying in developmental psychology. Adolescence is paradox. It’s a sky high feeling that anything is possible, and it’s the depths of futility. It’s demanding to be taken seriously as an individual but wanting more than anything to blend into the crowd. It’s protesting unequal treatment while perpetrating hateful, aggressive acts against those less powerful than you.

Gay teens find themselves in this mix, at turns encouraged and supported and at others despondent and ashamed. Their cues from the outside world are pitched at odd angles. ‘Be yourself’ is the message from the mainstream media, and ‘Don’t step too near’ is the refrain from the well-publicized political battles happening across the country. At best, public attitudes have moved from hostility to ambivalence. Polls now show just a slim majority of the general public believes gays and lesbians should be “accepted” in society.

It’s the wrong time to get complacent. I don’t think that we can expect political change or even school policy change to completely eliminate gay teen suicide, but it can make a difference. As disturbing as these stories are, it counts as progress that they have claimed attention and not been buried by the squeamishness of the past.

I Want My Rights Decided By A Gay Activist Judge

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So I made the mistake of reading the New York Post the other day.  I was on the Long Island Rail Road, no reading material in hand, and someone had left the paper on one of the seats.

I’ll admit I’m always a little curious about the Page Six gossip, but the NYP has always confused and frightened me at the same time.   There are guilty pleasures—Star Magazine for instance—but I get really worried about the thousands of people whose only access to news is sensationalized, hyper-cynical, slanted bilge like NYP.

I’m flipping through the stories, which are short, easy-to-read and tend to feature prostitute scandals and sex offenders, and I come to Rich Lowry’s editorial about the recent federal court decision on California’s Prop 8.  There’s the usual rhetoric:  an “activist” judge “defying the will of the people,” and calling gays degenerates who are destroying the “American family.”  But what really bugs me is Lowry’s contention that Judge Walker was unfit to decide the issue because he’s gay.

To be clear, Vaughn Walker is rumored to be gay but has never said anything about being gay or non-gay to the press.  But what if Walker is gay?  Isn’t that exactly the kind of person you want to weigh in on minority rights?  The whole Prop 8 issue is scary to me anyway as I get pretty uncomfortable with the idea of minorities being put up for approval by popular ballot.   That means we gay people—some two to ten percent of the population—have to get the votes of over half of our non-gay counterparts in order to earn legal protections that everyone else enjoys.

So the real question should be:  is it fair for a non-gay judge to decide the fate of gay Americans?

I’m personally a whole lot more comfortable with someone gay evaluating  whether or not my life, my partner is entitled to legal protection.  Historically, left up to non-gays, we’ve been imprisoned, institutionalized and victimized and discriminated against over and over again.  I’m not a separatist.  Some of my best friends aren’t gay.  But this crap about gay people needing to recuse themselves from legal decisions involving our own rights is outrageously absurd.

Not that the same tactics haven’t been used against other minority groups.  Remember the BS about Sonia Sotomayor being “too proud” of being a Latina woman?  She had the gall to say that her cultural background could actually be an asset as a supreme court judge.

Some people say we should live in a color-blind, sexual-orientation-blind society.   I think they miss a crucial point.  Our differences are our strengths.  Most definitely when deciding culturally-sensitive issues, including same-sex marriage.

Support Independent Book Stores!!

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Just received this e-mail from White Crane and felt compelled to post it here.  Gay Independent bookstores are going the way of the dinosaur, and it’s a real shame considering the (general) lack of depth of the big chains in regard to LGBT literature.

I remember my first time at A Different Light in NYC.  I was blown away by entire bookshelves filled with mysteries, science fiction, poetry anthologies, and tons of non-fiction on so many subjects.  Anyway, here’s the message, and while the only branch that’s left is in San Francisco, I’m going to support the appeal by ordering some books on-line.

A Different Light Bookstore and ADLBooks.Com

A Different Light Bookstore opened it’s doors in November 1979. As with all of the independent gay bookstores during that time, our stores became meeting places to promote GLBT writers, as well as gathering places for GLBT activists. And our independent gay bookstores served us well in working towards the equality we have achieved today and are working for in the future.

As you are aware, from surfing the net to reading the few newspapers and magazines that are still in print, our gay community bookstores, publishers and many other gay community small businesses are closing their doors. It is a fact that businesses are only as good as their customer and vendor bases. And as history as shown us, change is inevitable.

It is my belief that the GLBT community is the best read and highest achieving groups of people anywhere in the world. I also believe that in the future when the digital revolution has settled down that community based businesses will again serve as a place of social interaction that the human condition needs so badly.

In saying this, A Different Light Bookstore and ADLBooks.com “need your help and support” to continue to be a presence in San Francisco and online for our communities that we ship to all over the world.

If every customer in our store and online who receive our new product updates would commit to investing $10, $20 or more each month in purchasing our products, that would be an enormous step in continuing to preserve this very important part of our community.

The effect of this action is more then just keeping our business operational, but it also trickles down to our vendors. Equally important, your support will help keep and create local jobs that are so important to our community.

There are two actions that I would like you to consider. The most immediate action is of course stopping by our store or signing onto our website and buying a great book, gift, movie, magazine or DVD’s.

A more serious request, and one that I think would set a stage for preserving GLBT literature for the future is that you might consider buying 1-10 copies of each Queer Classic and “donating” it to a school, university, GLBT Center Library, local libraries or any of your favorite organizations. In addition to our GLBT archives around the world, this would put our literature in the hands of readers who might otherwise not have access or are being censored.

We are asking for your support. We sincerely appreciate and are thankful for our customers who visit and buy from us on a regular basis.

Thank you for your consideration and taking the time to read this note.

Bill Barker

A Different Light Bookstore and ADLBooks.Com