OK—there
are times when it’s a man or a woman, but until Rubén Sánchez of radio station WKAQ gets a sex change, there will always be
at least one guy. And today, as it so often is, it was Sánchez and another guy,
arguing in good Puerto Rican fashion: the Spanish accelerates to about 333,000
words per minute, volume crescendos to about 110 decibels, neither one is
listening to the other, and the voices are pitched at least an octave higher.
Oh, and did
I mention the interruptions?
“So whom
was Rubén arguing with today?” I asked Mr. Fernández, since being closer to the
offending radio, as well as speaking Spanish as his cradle tongue, made him
more likely to know what it was all about. I had heard the term “matrimonio
gay” (gay marriage)
screeched around, and was curious to know what today’s fuss was about…..
“With
whom,” said Mr. Fernández, a stickler for such things, who went on to say that
he had only the dimmest idea, since he was going in and out of the morning
snooze.
Well, I can
tell you what the issue was about, since today’s topic flew in on the front
page of El Nuevo Día,
the local rag. So what’s up? Our governor, Alejandro García Padilla, has nominated Maite Oronoz, an openly gay woman, to be an associate
judge on the Puerto Rico Supreme Court.
Oronoz
looks pretty credentialed to me: a BA from Villanueva, law degree from the
University of Puerto Rico, and a master’s in law from Columbia. She’s worked
with the Supreme Court as “oficial jurídico”—my guess would be law clerk—as well as
in private practice, and in the Justice Department in high-ranking positions.
She’s currently the legal director for the city of San Juan. So she’ll sail
through to the nomination, right?
Not so
fast, because all the tired old voices we’ve had to endure all these years are
saying all the tired—and tiring—things. Here—and you should hope you don’t know Spanish—is one:
Me
preocupa el ejemplo que presenta al tener una relación con una persona de su
mismo sexo. Lo segundo que me preocupa es que si es confirmada al Tribunal
Supremo va a tener en sus manos el poder para tomar decisiones que alteren los
valores del pueblo de Puerto Rico”, señaló Vázquez.
What’s the
beef, according to Vázquez? It sets a bad example, and if approved, Oronoz will
have the power to make decisions that “alter” the values of the people of
Puerto Rico.
In a recent
interview, Larry
Kramer, the gay activist
and author of The Normal Heart, told gay people to
stop patting themselves on the back, we haven’t come anywhere near where we
should be in the struggle for rights. And oddly enough, Jessye Norman,
the black opera singer, said
much the same thing about the rights of black people.
She gives
two examples: both involved being asked to prove that she was a guest when she
was using a hotel’s facilities, or even walking on their grounds. Big deal, you
may think, but here’s why I think it is.
For those
of us who are white and men, it’s hard to understand how being black or a woman
completely infuses your life. I go into a store and nobody follows me around,
five feet away. Or here’s another—when was the last time I worried about
getting raped? And I see the point of a lot of black people: a gay person has
some shelter—hint, it’s called a closet—but the black dude? He’s out
there….
And in a
certain way, it may be true that even the most out gay people consciously or
not use the closet. I learned that by trailing a transgender woman in the last
gay pride march: I was wearing shorts and a tee shirt; she was wearing a tight
dress and three-inch heels.
And
walking, for much of the way, on irregularly surfaces, iridescently blue
cobblestones, for which the old city is famous. Lovely, especially when wet—the
stones, not the woman—but three-inch heels? It was proof of how deeply
important her sexuality was to her; it was also a testament to personal
bravery. Because although she carried it off well, she was still taller than I,
with my height of six foot three. No wonder that it was the drag queens that
fought back at Stonewall.
The
computer, by the way, has not red-squiggled that word, “Stonewall;” did I teach
it to the computer or is it now in the lexicon? Or consider this anecdote,
about a US Supreme Court justice who had just upheld—years ago—a state law
criminalizing homosexuality. According to Jeffrey Toobin,
the justice remarked to his clerk that he had never met a gay person. His
clerk, who was gay, said nothing. Twenty years later? Sandra Day O’Connor was sticking her head into her office
and directing her staff to send a congratulatory tee shirt to a gay couple on
her staff who had adopted a child. (It said, “Supreme Court Kid,” or
something….)
So how far
have we come? Well, today’s front page has “Abogada Gay al Supremo” as the lead. But when will we have “Abogada
Straight al Supremo?”
Oh, and by
the way, are there openly straight people? I didn’t know, so I asked Sunshine,
the guy who makes me the espresso.
“Yeah, I’m
straight, but I have a lot of gay friends,” he says. Then he goes back to
polishing one of the windows.
Jessye
Norman grew up in a world where there were signs over the two water coolers:
“Whites Only,” “Colored Only.” I grew up in a world of Boys
Beware, a lurid educational film—à la Reefer Madness—that advised against taking a ride from strange men. Why?
“He paid
for the ride with his life,” intones the voice from the sixties (curious how
different decades have different voices—anybody looked into that?). The driver,
you see, was a known homosexual.
Wait—I
didn’t get a gasp out of you!
It may be,
in fact, that society’s coming out is just like our own coming out. It’s layer
after layer, this peeling of the onion, until all that’s left is taste, aroma,
zest. All the acridness, everything that made you cry has vanished, or rather,
been commuted, transformed, and transmogrified into something wonderful, tasty
and…
…delicious.
