Stop Sacrificing "Fem" Boys

The following article appeared in yesterday's New York Times opinion section, written by Moroccan-French writer Abdellah Taïa.  It outlines one young man's experience of growing up in a strict Islamic society and being effeminate, yet it resonates so closely with a similar experience in our own so-called "Christian" culture.  This article can be found here.

Morocco was the most sexually complex environment I've ever been in, now 14 years ago, and only briefly. I met a young guy like Abdellah when I was there, not long after I came out in my own world. I can't say I can't imagine his fear. I think a lot of gay men and lesbian women can relate to a fundamental lack of safety, to being sacrificed to an ideal of religion or society that demanded someone had to die. 

Yet, in our own culture, the hatred by gays of "fems" is not uncommon. "If I wanted to date a girl, I'd be straight," is a line that all of us gays have heard, or said, at some point or another. 

Although bands of drunken "straight" men might not come to our houses and call us out for sex in the US (*this* is akin to sodom, not same-sex couples who want to get married), they do throw us against lockers, down stairs, and tie us to fence-posts. They do lust after us, while hating us and our "sin," mocking us, and making us at times kill ourselves, while wanting to get off on us. They make some of us *want* to sacrifice ourselves. 

But we who are gay do that to ourselves as well--we beat up each other and ourselves for some of the same reasons. We eat our own, as I've heard it said. And I'm not beyond reproach in this. Such is the price of being marinated for years in a culture of homophobia--we all come out smelling the same.

My heart breaks for all the boys who still endure this here and abroad, and for the boy that I was who ignored what other boys did to one of us who was effeminate, who couldn't "pass" as I could, the boy I was who was perhaps glad that someone else was getting the torture. 

Never again. The world, starting with me, and I hope with you as well, must support and protect them.  We must stop sacrificing them and encouraging them to sacrifice themselves.  Nothing is worth that sacrifice, certainly not ideals of behavior and religious principles.

15-for-15 III: Honesty

"It's not lying if they make you lie."
                  --Brian Kinney (Gale Harold), "Queer as Folk" (Showtime)


I.


Now, be honest.  You might not rejoice in the death of Osama bin Laden, but is there no part of you that was at least relieved to hear that he had finally been killed?  And if relieved, grateful?  A seed of inappropriate glee, perhaps, that would taint you as someone who can't quite live up to the great martyrs of peace of the past?


The last thing most of us would want is for people to know all of our true feelings all the time, because a lot of those feelings could affect our relationships, jobs, and general reputations should they be known.  So we have to be selective in what we tell others.  Honesty, true, unadulterated, 24/7/365 honesty, is nearly impossible to have within the recesses of our own minds and souls, and quite impossible to achieve in dealing with others.


But some level of honesty, with others, about ourselves and our views, is absolutely essential to who we are.  We must select what we will present, and in presenting, create the "I" that others see through their eyes.


Honesty is central in coming out of the closet, but it is not simple.  It begins with people being honest with themselves about their true feelings, and that may lead into a crisis that may or may not resolve itself with becoming honest with others.  Some may come out, at an early age, without any complications in their own minds--I've met people for whom this is the case.  But for many others who are gay or lesbian, a wide variety of complex factors and fears affects this kind of honesty with others.


II.


Foremost are the factors of one's fear of losing close relationships with people they think might not take this news well and decide to end the relationship.  And this has indeed happened with a number of people who have come out as gay or lesbian, particularly before the last two decades.  It has happened with me.


At one time, not long ago, and indeed still to this day, the economic factors of losing one's job or not being able to gain employment were key to keeping people in the closet.  I worried, and am not proud of doing so, that I would be disowned if my parents knew I was gay, and I did not see how I could pay for college if I were to come out when I was still in high school.  I sensed anyway that I would become like Stephen King's Carrie had I come out in high school, with a bucket of blood hanging over my head at every turn, ready to end forever any cool factor that I had built up.


The fear of being beaten or abused has also been central to people not coming out, for this is still a realistic fear for many who are young, and more who have moved on into their own lives, yet live within tight restrictions on their expression within those lives.


Even in a society as tolerant as ours, we are far from living in a "safe" place as openly gay and lesbian people everywhere we go.  Where we might choose to hold hands, might give in public the most innocuous signs of affection towards those for whom we feel affection, things that I would guess every heterosexual person takes for granted, is still greatly limited, in many cases only in those establishments that openly accept or cater to gays and lesbians or the neighborhoods immediately around them.


In vast parts of our country, we're still sitting in the Stonewall Inn on June 26, 1969, when the police could come in at any moment and take everything in our lives away at their whim.  Police raids have famously happened within the last few years in Fort Worth, TX, and Atlanta, GA, hardly small and conservative towns.


The fear of not being able to follow out one's calling in life, whether as a pastor, a professional athlete, a teacher, an actor or actress, musician, business person, or in many other walks of life that still carry a heavy expectation of being heterosexual for the sake of those for whom the business or organization is run, still keeps people in the closet and in relationships that begin as relationships of "convenience," though might develop into more.  


One of the hardest things to do is to be honest with oneself about the hard things within oneself, let alone to be frank with others.  But both are essential, I would say, to living other than a life of quiet desperation, in the words of Thoreau.


III.


I first was compelled to be honest with myself about being gay because of an overwhelming sexual attraction I had to someone, who although I didn't know, I knew was gay.  I saw him every day on the bus that I took from the St. Paul University of Minnesota "farm" campus to the main campus in Minneapolis, on the east bank, when I was there in the summer of 1994.


Perhaps it was his mannerisms that first tripped my nascent gaydar.  Perhaps it was the sticker on his bag that said "I fuck to come, not to conceive."  But soon I heard him talking about being gay to someone else on the bus.  That cinched it for me.


I remember getting off that bus and walking behind him, trying to come up with even a lame pick-up line.  But I was afraid of sex, and afraid of contracting HIV, which in 1994 could still be a death sentence for many who were living with it, before the arrival of most anti-retroviral drugs.  Fear of many kinds kept the lid on a boiling pot of hormones and emotions for yet another period of time when it could have come off.  The result was the journal entry that I shared in my first entry in this series.


Later, I was compelled to be honest with others about what I felt, because I learned that those feelings went beyond mere sexual attraction.  I learned that I had feelings for someone else that were just like those feelings that I had watched in most every movie ever made, and that were described in the vast majority of songs ever written.  If people could make those movies, and sing those songs, then I deserved to value and honor those feelings in myself, as imperfectly even as I expressed them at that time, as well.


I became honest with others when my heart connected, perhaps for the first time, to my head, and I could no longer deny that I, too, had a claim to my feelings and had needs that issued from them, and not only from my penis or my brain.  I still hadn't experienced anything that I longed to experience physically, but I knew what it was that I wanted, to be with another man, and what I could never have:  a Jane to my John, a Mrs. to my Mr.  


As deeply as I had tried to feel romantic attachments to girls, and then to young women, nothing could connect with my deeper reality.  No kiss with a girl could do anything more for me than leave me feeling weird, and that wasn't fair to either of us.  No amount of visual stimulation could have any effect beyond moving my retinas from one part of a page or screen to another.


For a long time, I thought there was just something wrong with me, that I needed to try harder, and I'll be honest, I never prayed to God that things were different--I didn't even think to do so.  Some have described this feeling as noticing at some point that you had boarded the wrong airplane, flying to the wrong destination, yet without any way to alter the course.


It would be a long time before I sat back and enjoyed the flight.


IV.


The quotation above, which the character Brian Kinney says several times in the TV series "Queer as Folk," resonates with me on many levels.  Lying, and the moral approbation that might be attached to it, is morally wrong only so long as you have any other option at all.  It is like the legitimate defense of killing only when one's life is in immediate danger, only in the case of outing oneself, it's everything that attaches to one's life, and in some cases, one's physical life itself.  This is a fear that some gay and lesbian people carry with themselves every day.   


I tend to judge those who have not come out most especially when I do not remember what it was like before I came out.  It's easy to cast such stones when you forget that you were once (and perhaps sometimes are still) afraid of being hit with them yourself.


If everyone who could come out would come out, in all circumstances, to all people, all the time, there would be no closets, not because there wouldn't be anyone in them, but because there would be no need for them.  That area of privacy in one's life is there almost exclusively because of the possible repercussions and fears that I stated above.


"It's nobody's business but my own" only so long as were that business to be made known, there would be negative consequences.  Inconsequential business has no need of privacy.  Otherwise, why not put up that picture of your hottie love muffin in the office, like everyone else does, or talk about your weekend, or mention your wife or husband in your sermon, or talk about that experience that changed your life and the person who was there to hold your hand when it happened?


But reality remains:  it's not safe for everyone to come out in every circumstance at all times. The closet is still a place of cold refuge for many, many people.


V.


I do carry a rather unattractive chip on my shoulder about the consequences of honesty I have faced in my own calling to being an ordained Lutheran minister, as one who is yet neither ordained, nor a Lutheran minister.  I have the same training, with the same professors and mentors, as dozens of my seminary colleagues who are now ordained and in church calls.  Yet, my last four years of waiting for even an interview for a first call in my present denomination looks like this:

• Make sure you file everything on time.
• Thank you for filing everything on time and completing your requirements.
• We approve you for ordination and think you will  be an excellent pastor.  You have wonderful gifts for ministry.
• Why did you have to put your sexual orientation in your paperwork?  Nobody else does.
• No church will give you an interview unless you "fly under the radar," "don't lead with your sexual orientation," and "feel things out as far as their attitudes go before you say anything about being gay."
• We don't have any churches for you, but your name comes up all the time in our conversations about churches looking for first calls.
• That church would be great for you, but it is not a first call church.
• We gave that church to someone as a first call even though it wasn't a first call church--it just fit them.
• There are no churches at the moment that would be open to someone like you.
• We're afraid of even recommending you to that church, so why would you want to interview there?
• Any church would be lucky to have you as its pastor.
• The bishop has said that he can do nothing for you.
• The bishop has your paperwork and will follow up with you shortly.
• You're too outspoken.
• All of the bishops admired your integrity, but they cannot do anything as long as you say you will not be in compliance with the rules.
• There are too many other candidates waiting for a first call for you to be considered in our synod.
• We gave that church to someone who wasn't in our synod because it was a good match for them, even though we have several other candidates waiting for call.
• You have demonstrated maturity, compassion, and extraordinary patience throughout this process.  We admire your consistent positive attitude.
• A lot of people are affected by the economy because pastors are not retiring since they have lost their pensions.  But we still placed 5 of 6 candidates whom we received in the Fall draft in first calls.

It goes on like this, and it is little wonder that a part of my spiritual life has atrophied.  But, to be honest, that is also my responsibility to say "enough is enough," and move on with my life.  


Honesty has not been the best policy in my dealings with the church, and something seems wrong with that.

Thankfully, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has moved into a new period of honesty in which it can value the honesty of its clergy and commissioned lay persons and stop forcing its pastors and candidates for ordination to lie about being gay or lesbian, as it did for more than 20 years.  Before August 21, 2009, a pastor could be brought up on trial for publicly admitting he or she was gay or lesbian and in a relationship, and a church could be completely removed from the ELCA in an expensive and embarrassing church trial; thankfully this is no longer the case.  


Yet the pre-change reality remains in the ELCA, and no change has happened in many other denominations.  And gay and lesbian persons are by no means the only people who are disadvantaged in the current ELCA system of approval, call, and ordination.  

VI.

Being honest, as being a bully, is not a simple issue.  It's not the picture of George Washington and the cherry tree, or of "Honest Abe," whose early business practices, though unsuccessful, were apparently unflinchingly honest.  These stereotypes of being honest are not such that any mortal can attain, just as no human besides Jesus could be sinless, and I question what that meant for Jesus.

The issue of marriage, beyond being an issue of civil rights for gay and lesbian people, is an issue of honesty:  being able to be publicly honest about who your better half indeed is, as well as being honest about the limitations and realities of any marriage.

The main argument that I would lift up in favor of same-sex marriage is not even equality, because we are equal, and to debate our equality and the equality of our relationships is an insult.  I think a better argument is to state the honest reality:  that conservative moralists are imposing unreachable expectations on those marriages that they do allow, while at the same time, by opposing same-sex marriages, they suggest that these "traditional" marriages could be blown over by the first stiff gay wind to hit them.  I want to think heterosexual relationships are stronger than this.

There are also a vast number of people who vote against same-sex marriage, and a vast number of politicians who introduce this as a wedge issue into political discourse, who are far from being honest about their motives.  


Each Minnesota legislator who has voted in favor of advancing a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, as in all 30 states that ban same-sex marriage in their constitutions, and each citizen voter, should face a crisis of honesty on their position against same-sex marriage.  Is a same-sex marriage going to "destroy" opposite-sex marriages, or are a host of factors already in place, from no-fault divorce, to economic injustice, to exceedingly high societal demands, threatening these marriages?  


Bad relationships, impossible demands of perfection, and economic adversity, among other things, destroy marriage, not gay and lesbian relationships.  


VII.


Perhaps death is the most honest thing there is.  There's no saying it is anything that it is not.  There may be many varieties of death, but when someone is stone cold dead, that's that.  Which is why it is so important to live your life while you have it.


I wonder sometimes what it would be like if honesty were more constitutionally a part of who we are.  It's not a natural human state, but must be taught by instilling a guilty conscience as constant punishment for not being honest.


Being who one is honestly should not entail being guilty.  Some things about ourselves could benefit from change.  Sexual orientation is not one of them.


What, for you, are the most difficult things to be honest about with yourself, dear reader?  And what in your life has initiated a crisis of honesty in dealing with others?  I think we all have substantial experience in debating these questions within ourselves, and some of these parts of ourselves have forced us into our own versions of the closet.  Closets are not just for people of a particular sexual orientation:  there are endless varieties of closets.  


My hope is that we might someday very soon reach a new level of honesty in our national discourse on sexual orientation, race, gender discrimination, and a host of other issues that can get better only when we start being honest with ourselves and with others about what we think and how we feel, without descending into banning people's relationships constitutionally, breaking off relationships because we disagree, and falling deeper into a pit of partisan tar.

15-for-15 II: Bully, or It Gets Better

My first crush was on a bully.  And it was probably not you.

I.

Last Fall, the nation was gripped by reports of young gay and lesbian people committing suicide.  Although this is sadly nothing new, this was the first time perhaps many people became exposed to the issue of higher rates of suicide for LGBTQ youth.  A report by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force recently profiled even higher incidences of abuse against Transgender persons.

"Bullies," such as Dharun Ravi, Tyler Clementi's roommate at Rutgers University, whose abuse helped to incite Tyler's death, have had their actions come to greater prominence and national disdain.  Some of the other prominent suicidal deaths have also focused on the actions of others who abused them.  In light of these deaths, schools have reviewed their anti-bully training and policies, and calls have gone out from all corners to end bullying as we know it.

I, too, became involved in the anti-bullying campaign supported by some parents, teachers, and students in the Anoka-Hennepin School District, which I wrote about last year in these pages.  But I did not pause to remember at that time that when I was 12, I developed a crush on a bully.

II.

He wasn't the first bully I knew, by any stretch of the imagination.  I remember one of my childhood acquaintances, a year younger than myself, gutting a living toad with a fork when I was about 5 years old.  It was one of the worst things I have ever seen in my life.  Several years later, this same fellow walked up to me in the hallway of our elementary school with a strange, big smile on his face, and proceeded to punch me, hard, in the stomach.  And what do you think he turned out to become?  A serial killer who had his start with small animals?  No.  A dentist.  Bingo.  Mind you, a few years after that, I hatched a scheme not much better, and tried to pay 2 friends a quarter each, to catch frogs so that I could cut off their legs (the frog legs, not my friends' legs) and sell them to the local grocery store.  I  doubt that I would have found any humane way to have done in the frogs.  Thankfully, they refused the money, and saved me from becoming a frog murderer.

This bully wasn't perhaps even the first boy I had a crush on.  That could conceivably have come as far back as age 3, when I had a fascination for an older boy on a dirt bike.  Once, when I was about that age, I remember going up to him and his friends, who were sitting in a grove of trees, and announcing to them that my Mother had told me I could spend 5 minutes with them.  I don't know if she had actually said that, or if it seemed to me like a convenient lie.  As soon as I sat down, I heard, "Well, time's up."  I'm sure many wouldn't think of this as a "gay crush," but there you have it.

I did have a number of crushes on girls throughout my younger years, at about the same time most boys were just interested in playing baseball and riding dirt bikes, which I enjoyed very much as well, but when the boys started to take to their bike rides with girls, I turned inward and started playing the piano, which carried me sexlessly through my teenage years.

III.

I met this particular enthralling young bully while playing baseball, probably when I was about 9 or 10.  I don't remember him being such a particularly dreadful person at that point in his development, but my memories are sketchy.  He was my age, and liked baseball too.  He also liked to beat kids up.  I hear that once he beat up someone's kid sister.

In a few years, after my hormones started going completely kerplewie with puberty, I remember watching him walking down the hallway, in a white button-down shirt, like he had been enveloped by a cloud.  I had a feeling of exhilaration, fear, and a longing that caught in my throat.  The next year, in gym class, I saw him without that shirt, or anything else, on.  I had an electric shock go through me that I have since heard described as a spontaneous orgasm.  The only time in my life.  It was literally shocking, and told me this was no ordinary feeling I was having.

Needless to say, I never said a thing about this crush, to him or to anyone else in my class.  This is the first I've put it out there, not quite "Boys in the Band" style, sitting around by a phone late at night and calling our old crushes up, but it has met your eye, dear reader.  This was a big part of my life for a few formative years.

When we were sophomores, he used to stab me with pens in my legs.  I guess I was hoping it would have been something else besides pens with which he was stabbing me.  My health teacher gave me permission to beat the shit out of him, but I didn't.  I was still somehow in his thrall, and at the same time I couldn't hurt someone to whom I was attracted like that.

IV.

How do we come to be attracted to people who treat us like shit?  At the very least, the issue of who is a "bully" and our relationship to them, is complex.  I can only think that I knew what I was, a little gay homosexual faggot, and that somehow in my complicated understanding of myself at that age, I deserved to be beat up.  This wasn't long after Boy George, one of the first gay cultural icons, released "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me."  Boy George creeped me out, and I didn't want to be anything like him.  But something resonated with me and this song, even at that age.  The names of derision for people who looked at other boy like I did, as well, resonated in me, and I sat in it all like a lobster starting to be steamed in a deadly stew.

I hear from people of all sexual orientations this inclination to fall for those who hurt them, especially from women who endure physical and emotional abuse for years, from one person or from a variety of lovers or partners who seem to be similar.  Women still often don't receive the best messages about themselves from society either, particular as sexual beings.

Reader, whatever your age, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, whatever your place in life, if this is you, nothing in you deserves to get you beat up.  Nothing.  Ever.

It wasn't as though I was never the bully myself.  I will never forget kicking a little kid, maybe 2 years younger than myself, in the gutter in front of my house.  He annoyed me, but he didn't deserve that.

I was a bully to the first boy who kissed me too.  It was such a surprise, standing at the top of the stairs of the house I grew up in.  I don't remember what I did at the time, but I did not react well.  And a few years later I beat him up in an elementary school fight.  He wasn't the only one, and I got beat myself a few times.  And elementary school isn't that last time I could be said to have bullied someone.

But, seriously, nothing, no thoughts, desires, impulses, ideas, that take place in our minds, hearts, or emotions, deserve to get us abused.  We do not bring abuse on ourselves.  We do not deserve it.  Nor do we have permission to abuse others.  Ever.  From anyone.  Not even from God.

V.

Many people are hurt at some time by other people labeled as "bullies" of all ages--random people, acquaintances, neighbors, professors, lovers & spouses, bosses, road ragers, clergy--and we are, sometimes, ourselves those who practice harassment, violence, humiliation, intimidation, and a variety of other horrible things against those we know and don't know, and sometimes even against those we love.

Is "bully" really a helpful term for those who are beating up, abusing, sexually harassing or violating, calling horrible names, stalking, embarrassing, and doing all of these things against someone in person, by text message, on Facebook, and in a number of other media in this media rich age?  Isn't "terrorist" perhaps a better title, given that what they are doing is inciting terror?

It's easy to hate these people, especially when each of us probably has a seed of being one of these people inside of us.  I know I do.

VI.

"It gets better" is an apt message--but it must go further.  It must add the word "when."  "It gets better when..." for example, when we treat ourselves with the respect, integrity, and love that we don't get from everyone else, and when, perhaps, we see that bullies are not necessarily a monolithic "other."

A recent scene in the TV series Glee's episode "Born This Way" features a reconciliation of sorts between Kurt and Dave Karofsky, whose violent abuse and threatening of death to Kurt forced Kurt's transfer to another school.  Dave, as viewers know from pervious episodes, is dealing with some sexual orientation issues himself.  But Dave can never again abuse Kurt, and must give himself some breathing space in his understanding of his own sexual orientation.  He sees that he cannot continue to do what he had done, and admitting to that and following through were key for that reconciliation to work.

In real life, the abuse of Jamie Nabozny, profiled in the recent terrific documentary "Bullied," led to a nationally-profiled court case that turned on the honesty of one of those who had tortured Jamie on a regular basis, confessing his torture in open court, which honesty came even after high-ranking members of the Ashland, Wisconsin, school system had sought to cover up their complicity in Jamie's abuse by claiming never to have heard of it.

In each case, things got better when the truth was told, or at least understood by those who committed acts of violence, and when those who were abusers had an opportunity to step out of that role, which can be as stifling and life-draining as the role of "victim" that seeks to complement "bully."  But sometimes even reconciliation cannot be possible or even desirable.  Sometimes it gets better only when we can get some distance, and peace within ourselves.

We should not be our own judges, despite the fact that we often judge ourselves far more harshly than others would, and yet we should not destroy each other with judgment either.  Yet there must be justice, for the person who is bullied, and for the bully.

Moving beyond the easy categories of "bully" and "victim" might be one way in which we can start to get that justice for both.  Admitting truth of wrongdoing and seeking reconciliation may be another.  The work of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation is central to bringing to light this kind of truth about wrongdoing towards LGBTQ people on local and national scales.  

Tomorrow I will explore the idea of honesty, admitting truth, in more detail, and how this has impacted my own journey in these last 15 years of being openly gay.