Full Circle, with Tears and Joy

"By and by, when the morning comes,
When the Saints of God are gathered home,
We'll tell the story of how we've overcome,
and we'll understand it better by and by."

I began this blog 4 years ago, in the aftermath of the passage of Prop 8 in California, when the country took a turn towards equality in its election of Barack Obama as our president, while some of our states took a sharp turn away.

On Tuesday, my home state of Minnesota took a turn towards equality when we voted down a similar amendment to our constitution by a margin of 52-48%, the first time any state in the union overturned an effort to dehumanize LGBT people in its state constitution. We shouted and laughed and wept tears of joy.

But underneath it all, for me at least and I think for many others, were another kind of tears. These are tears for those who didn't make it to see this day, who died of AIDS and suicide, those young people who didn't make it to see their high school graduations like Justin Aaberg, whose death pierced my heart as it pierced the hearts of many. The following is my reflection on this experience:

TEARS. 

What I hear and feel most deeply around the defeat of the anti-gay marriage amendment in Minnesota is how deep it has hit so many of us in our souls, and how that power has come out of our eyes through those gentle drops of soul-rain. 

Having to prove one's humanity again, and again, and again to those who deny it is not only tiring, not only demeaning, not only frustrating. It is also deeply sad. It is sad for me and it is sad for those who cannot be moved, whose binders and blinders are so thick that they cannot see what is in front of them: LOVE. 

And that makes me sob like a baby.

And I think, man, I've been at this for 25 years, what about those who have hit this soul-draining homophobia for 35, 45, 55, 65, 75 years, those who died who never had a moment like we had on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning when this cursed proposed amendment took a header down the stairs of history?

What about those who deal with multiple stigma being put on them from the outside of their beautiful bodies and souls that grows inside them like a mold that grows out of control, about those throughout the world who do not have time to worry about their sexual orientation oppression because that is too much of a first-world problem, about those who have scarce dared to tell another soul what is most on their heart? 

What about those who suffered in silence or out loud, those young people who were made to feel like villains for being who they were, who were physically, spiritually, and sexually abused, who took their lives rather than living another day in a world that they felt could do nothing but hate them?

And then I see them: The Saints of God.

Those who are streaming in from all times and from all places, who have been washed in the tears that Jesus has for those who have undergone torment not only *in* his name, but *under* his name. Those whose faith has been kicked down the stairs along with their bodies, spirits, and souls, all the while those who are doing the kicking are repeating: JESUS, JESUS, JESUS, seized with anger or laughter or just plain blank-slate horror in the name of the Lord.

And the Saints stream in from all times and from all places, singing in the name of LOVE. 

And they know. 

They understand. 

They in glory shine. 

They have seen what there is to see. 

And they have overcome.

By and by, when the morning comes. When the saints of God are gathered home. We'll tell the stories of how we've overcome. And we'll understand it better by and by. 

"Festival of Lights," © 2000 John August Swanson

My NOH8 Story on a Day of Silence or Meditation on my Namesake

Back in February, I had the chance to attend one of the most wonderful gatherings of LGBTQ people I've ever had the chance to attend: the Creating Change Conference, in Minneapolis. What made this gathering so great was that it best represented the whole "tent" of queerdom: young and old, men, women, and people who didn't cling to one binary gender, gay, lesbian, bi, and a rainbow of transgender persons, genderqueer, poly, allies, intersex persons, you name it, and persons from the group were beautifully, wonderfully represented.

Among the activities that weekend was the opportunity to become part of the "NOH8" campaign, the brainchild of young gay celebrity photographer Adam Bouska, originally in response to the Prop 8 campaign (which likewise spawned this blog), but now reaching far beyond California and the issue of anti-gay prejudice.

For a mere contribution of $40 (far from a pittance for many people, and an unfortunate bar to the full representation of people who would best represent this campaign), anyone could feel like a supermodel for justice for a few seconds, and come out with a professional portrait of their own activist selves.

At first, I didn't think I could justify this price and this indulgence, as cool as it was. But then I looked at my special shelf, and saw on it my clerical collar, gathering dust, and my Great-Grandfather's watch, a prized heirloom that my Father has let me take care of. Both of these items are very special to me, the one a signature part of my vocation to the Lutheran ministry, and the other, a prized possession of one after whom I was named. The combination of the two inspired me to have that photo taken, and to represent fully who I am to this cause for freedom and equality.

What follows is the description that I provided Adam in helping to understand the meaning behind this pose. I don't know that it will gain any kind of wider audience, and so I share it here for the few of you for whom it might be of interest. I love my vocation, and I love my Great-Grandfather, even though we could never have met. I respect his hard work and dedication to his profession, which the watch honors after 30 years of service. And I am proud of his name, Elsworth, which is my middle name and my Father's middle name, as I am of the man who gave it to me.

Love should never keep one from being honest about love; yet that is what Prop 8 does. May that proposition, in time, fall to the ground as an embarrassment to those who supported it, as much as the pride I feel in opposing it with my whole being.

"My pose for the NOH8 campaign was filled with symbolism both personal and of wider-reach. This pose represents family, time, tradition, my personal and our communal struggle for equality and justice. I wore around my neck my Great-Grandfather's watch given to him for 30 years of service in 1953. I also wore one of my clerical collars.

My calling is to the ordained ministry of Word and sacrament in the Lutheran church, the faith into which my Great-Grandfather was baptized on his deathbed. Yet being openly gay has prevented me from getting a church and being able to wear the collar as an ordained person.

Time, literally entangled around my neck, is therefore represented on at least 3 planes in this image: 1. The time of tradition, weighing physically and metaphorically on my vocation (as it has on many others); 2. The time (4 years) I have been waiting to become a pastor; 3. The duration of our movement for Gay and Lesbian rights, which began in America around the time that this watch was presented to my Great-Grandfather.

I never knew my Great-Grandfather, but am proud of his work and love him. I am, along with my Father, his namesake. Our middle name, Elsworth, was his only given name. Yet past, present, and future meeting in one place on this point is bittersweet. I have encapsulated this experience in the following poem:

Time Entangles Our Necks

Time entangles our necks,

breathing life and death

past years of pressured peace and silenced dreams.

Great our Grandfathers'

wishes, ambitions for

Their Unseen, a gleam

of semen stretched

through several faltered

beams of forced omission.

Faith of our fathers,

stopping still

cockblocking their sons,

frockboxing their daughters

behind a god who pressed in law

what certain ancient lawyers saw.

Faith remains, lifeglue,

more than a living,

or escape from dying,

shining too from the

eyes of the future who

know what the sins

of the past could do:

a lasting screw.

If our great grandfathers only knew.

A Repost Riff on "Bless Me Anyway"

Recently, I had the chance to watch the HBO production of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” for the first time. It made me recall our Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus experience with some of Kushner’s most powerful words. This is a reposting from 2009, which also seems apt in these days that are hopefully gathering steam to overrule all of the divisive marriage laws, after Judge Vaughn Walker's masterly decision overturning Prop 8. Here it is:

So we in the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus have been singing a wonderful new setting by Michael Shaieb of some words by Tony Kushner from his play "Angels in America," centered around the phrase "bless me anyway." This phrase has affected me since we began singing it. It makes me think about those plucky figures in the Bible, Jacob and the Syrophoenecian woman, one in the Old Testament and one in the New, one going up against Godself, and the other against Jesus himself, who demand blessing in their beings from the deity who in some way created them, yet who have been told that they do not deserve such a blessing, or must fight to get it.

My life has been one in which I have both been the grateful and lucky recipient of unconditional love, from family and friends, as well as the need for years and years and years to defend my own being, sensitive, gay, or otherwise, against various people and institutions who have told me that I am deeply and existentially wrong. But, you know, bless me anyway, right?

The following are some words that came out after thinking about this phrase, "bless me anyway." This is yet a work in progress.

To the totality of the world's rejections:

The minor rejections of saying 'no' to liver and eggs;

the major rejections, hearing you say 'no' to me.

To the 'yous' who have told me who I am,

rather than letting me figure me out for myself.

Bless me anyway.

Even if you don't consider me worth it.

Even if my skin says "liar" to you.

Even if you think my dick should not go there.

Even if the folds of my skin obliterate

the smooth straight line

that you suppose would make me beautiful.

Bless me anyway.

What does a blessing cost you?

Does a blessing cost you your life?

Your job?

Your wife?

Does a blessing cost you your country?

Your place in the world?

Bless me anyway.

For I will have worth without it,

but with it,

we can love those we were meant to love,

in the open.

We can bless the skin that contains

our bones

our life

our blood,

if not our souls.

Bless me anyway.

It costs less than a tower,

less than a bomb,

less than a college education,

less even than an egg

from which life can come.

Bless me anyway.

But blessing is powerful.

Yes, blessing costs more than money,

more than position, power,

and all the water in the world.

Bless me anyway.

Bless the water that makes me more

than a pile of dust, more

than a pile of crap, more

than a pile of me that makes you weary,

that you wish would go away

sometimes.

Bless that shit machine

that embarrasses you.

Bless that $22.95 in basic elements,

not quite enough to buy Manhattan

four hundred and fifty years ago,

but enough to pay off the sum total

of a pile of humanity.

Bless me anyway.

More than the sum total,

more than the blue of my eyes,

more than the gnarled toenails,

the middling nipples,

the less-than-perfect hairline,

the zit on my left temple.

Bless me anyway.

The Jewish part of my heritage,

obscured by name-changes.

The happy sodomite that would do me, maybe.

The D-student wannabe.

Bless me anyway,

and I will bless you too.

I will bless your assumptions,

your experiences,

your attempts to reach out,

that get caught in your throat.

I will bless your struggle to live

in a world that kills us all,

that resolves as we do,

into a pile of minerals.

However it turns out,

Anyway,

I will bless you.

CA Supreme Court's Real Message on Prop 8

"Please hold: your marriage is important to us. All of our justices are currently assisting the disgruntled majority."

Blast Some God-forsaken Closets

"If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door."

--Harvey Milk

I.

Prophetic words only become so when experience proves them. Sometimes that experience comes soon, and sometimes it takes lifetimes, deathtimes, and a lot of mundanity and action in between.

Tonight, Gus Van Sant's biopic of Harvey Milk premiered across much of the nation, including at the art deco landmark theater, the Uptown, which is 3 blocks from where I live in Minneapolis. It's a fabulous movie, and I hope it wins wide crossover support, like Milk himself did. Go see it if you can!

But it reminds me that there's been a movement for equal gay rights for many, many years now. It is growing closer to winning certain inalienable rights, those rights which cannot be "alienated, surrendered, or transferred," according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

Alienated. A word that stands alone to describe the condition of a human being without community, whose community has been taken away, or has cast her out.

Human beings are alienated when their rights are abbreviated, rescinded, withheld, or just plain laughed at, particularly when these rights are supposedly inalienable.

One might say there's a big difference between rights being surrendered and rescinded, voted down, taken away, trampled on by the big wheels of popularity. Since when are rights open to a popular vote?

Prop 8 passed. Prop 6 was defeated *thirty (30) years ago*. What's wrong with this picture? The same tactics were used then as now, only then they didn't work. Why now?

II.

Milk's words were prophetic. He was assassinated. And yet the bullet did not shatter all closet doors.

It was in carefully-crafted closets that Prop 8 developed its power, because the authentic voices of faithful gay and lesbian people that opposed it were too few, unheard, or just plain silenced.

"Milk" helped to make the point that the "leaders" of the movement at the time considered Milk's unabashed faggotry too much, too out, too embarrassing and provocative to change minds and win people over. They were wrong, and 30 years later, they are forgotten. What about the people who are our leaders today? Who even are they? And where are they in the church? God’s forsaken some closet doors, so let’s hear about it.

My church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, supposedly prides itself on inclusivity and living the words of Christ, but instead supports closets more than it supports gay and lesbian people living openly, unafraid, and completely mundane lives.

It was these closets that helped pass Prop 8.

Church closets passed Prop 8. And I don't mean closets where the communion plates and candles are kept, the choir robes and the acolytes' torches, the stale wafers and banners, the vestments and other finery that helps make church what church is to people, no matter their traditions.

I mean those closets that "well-meaning" persons of power and privilege throughout the church put their pastors in in order to "not disturb the waters."

I mean those closets that bishops put their pastors into when they make them choose between being pastors or being people.

I mean those closets that suffocate the very people who wish to serve Jesus and his people, who love their people and would lay down their lives for them, but who are given the command by their church to sacrifice their humanity instead of their lives, to bury themselves in their service, and to make themselves less than 3/5 human.

III.

Church closets passed Prop 8, because without the enforced silence of great numbers of gay and lesbian people of faith, the lie would stand revealed, and this is the lie used against us: that we are out *en masse* to harm children and families, that we hate God, and that our families and relationships are not of equal worth. Once this lie is shot to the ground as it should be, the case against full, equal civil rights for gay and lesbian people would fall to the floor and only a handful of people would vote against equality for us and our families.

It is clear that we need a voice around which to unite, like Harvey Milk’s. Such voices exist, and some of them are calling out with similar words of anger, hope, and kindness. Milk said, "You gotta give 'em hope," and he was right.

Hope comes from realistically dealing with anger, meeting it with love, and directing loving anger into constructive paths of action.

Anger can drive hope in a way that nothing else can. Because anger points out the space between the words that elevate and the actions that denigrate.

Anger can drive hope 12 blocks down Market Street to City Hall and blow open closet doors without bullets. It can fill those 12 blocks with thousands and thousands of people to grieve and remember when bullets are brought to bear. And it can turn apathetic hearts to action that makes certain dignity doesn't go down without a great fight.

IV.

It almost seems like movements are most effective when they are small but well-organized, when a thousand people can be called together in fifteen minutes (as was said in “Milk” the movie), when the soapbox is just a foot off the street.

So what is our organization to be? What our voices? And what is impeding them? How can we organize to blast those closet doors off and find the liberation that just about any of us can struggle to achieve, hope that a boring financial worker can transform into a brilliant political career, and hope that any couple may have the same mundane respect for their relationship as any other couple?

What shape will this movement take, that will give hope to millions of gay and lesbian people who are still told that their relationships, that their lives together and their individual lives, are at best second-class, and at worst worth destroying?

That hope is out there, and it lies in the prophetic future that will prove the dreams of thousands of people and hundreds of years, to be free, to live in a state of basic, human respect, in which you don't have to choose between your work and your husband, your calling and your family, your integrity and your willingness to make this world a better place.

You gotta give 'em hope. You gotta love your people, too. Let's do it. Tell me your ideas for this movement, for finding voices, for channeling loving anger, for acting in ways that are not just a blip on the nightly news, but change hearts and minds, and finally, change laws.

The Times that Try...

"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value."

--Thomas Paine, The Crisis, December 23, 1776

I.

Crisis, as my esteemed Greek professor used to say, is a moment of judgment. Some like to judge; indeed, maybe all of us do. But some like to judge excessively, and they judge that which they have no business judging: the humanity of other women and men.

Others loathe judgment, wishing only that others will choose for them, and pray, whether the proxy choice be wise or foolish, the stress of ambiguity might be ended.

Now is the time for true patriots to stand up and plead for the rights of all their people, the validity of the Constitution of the United States, and the protection of body and soul of all citizens of our nation.

For 7 years, we have heard that true patriots are those who fight the war on terror by any means necessary, even by vitiating and violating those very rights that at least 4193 American service persons in Iraq and at least 626 American service persons in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) have died to protect and defend with their very lives. But true patriots do not fight to limit, vanquish, or deny freedoms guaranteed by their fellow Americans. True patriots do not ACT like such "patriots" as those who destroy the rights that took 200 years and more than 1.2 million lives to build and defend.

II.

Last week, in a moment of civic judgment, 53% of the American electorate chose between two men of intellect and integrity the one who will lead this country into a very uncertain and shaky future. And it was a judgment that shortened the arc of justice, though race relations are only at a beginning, not a point of completion.

Last week, similarly, after a particularly ugly and distorted campaign of alarmist fear and bigotry, 52% of the electorate of California voted to take away Constitutionally guaranteed rights from gay and lesbian persons with the passage of Proposition 8. Citing the California equivalent of the landmark Supreme Court case of Loving v Virginia (1967), the California Supreme Court decided in favor of marriage as being a fundamental civil right for all citizens. Hardly "activist judges," these four judges, in a "crisis" moment, landed on the side of equal rights, and also shortened the long arc of justice.

Equal rights. Not special rights, not calling for rights that others did not have. Equal, civil rights.

And now the aftermath, the foremath, the beginning of a period in which second-class citizenship no longer belongs only to those who have historically been, and still are often treated as, second-class citizens. Many still ride in the steerage of the ship of state.

The angry reactions of many whose rights were taken away, against those whom they thought took them--Mormons, Blacks, Catholics, and others--have caused much anger in return. Some have been called "terrorists" for expressing such anger, and some of this anger has been inefficiently directed.

Throwing around terms like "terrorism," "rights," "patriot," and the like, do not necessarily lead to civil conversation. Civility is often a lost art, but may not have been such a reality in times past as we think they were. But I pine for civility like the return of love that may not have ever been there.

And I pray that, as I wish my own humanity to be realized and respected by those who oppose it in word and in deed, I might respect their humanity, their fears, and their rights to oppose me in speech, if not by opposing me in the murder of my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, the denigrating of our primary relationships, and the uncivil labelling of us as terrorists.

III.

Our country is in a pivotal, critical moment: will we fight for the rights of all citizens, Black, White, Gay, Straight, Muslim, Christian, Atheist, Intersex, American Indian, elderly, and young? Or will we limit our regard to the people whose characteristics we judge to be appropriate based on our traditions, tastes, and plain prejudices?

These are the times that try men's and women's souls. But...

These are also the times that prove the promises of 230 years and 1.2 million lives not to be empty, but ripe for the picking.

Come, pick with me, but may our rites be civil.