A Hotbed of Homosexuals

Note: this post was originally to be published over a month ago; for technical reasons, Mr. Fernández and I are not joining the suit. Wish we were! 
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It was a message I found a little screwy, until I went onto a Facebook page entitled “Boicot contra Pedro Julio Serrano por sus comentarios de odio hacia cristianos;” the film-equivalent of the page would be that scene in The Shining when Jack Nicholson….

…you remember it, right?

The message we were receiving, last night, was that we were being brave, incredibly brave, for standing up and demanding our rights and refusing to be second-class citizens. What I was thinking, however, was what an incredibly boring group of people we were.

Confession—I have so often wished I had the life that some fundamentalist Christians think I have. Because, wow—what fun that could be: going from the orgy to the ecstasy-fueled rave to the drug-frenzied satanic rituals with the inverted crosses and the squealing newborn about to be sacrificed on the altar! Whee!

Instead it’s:

Marc: Hey, have you seen the garlic press?

Raf: Many times!

Marc: Very funny—now where the hell is that press?

Raf: How should I know? You washed it.

Marc: Dammit, do you want to eat or not?

All right—this is a rather low example of domestic life, but that’s the point. And so I found myself looking, last night, at the six gay and lesbian couples who had assembled in the law offices of LGBT activist Ada Conde and thinking how ordinary we all were: nobody was in drag, the whips and chains had decently been left at home, and there wasn’t a strand of purple hair. It was as lurid as a Tupperware party.

Not that there weren’t some serious people: two lawyers from Lambda Legal had flown in from New York, and Lambda Legal, about whom I’ve read for years, is major. Here’s what their website says:

With the generous support of thousands of friends around the country, what began in 1973 as a couple of volunteers working out of a spare room in a supporter’s apartment has now grown to an expert staff of more than 80 in five offices around the country—New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago and Los Angeles. 

What didn’t I know? Well, the organization’s bylaws were borrowed from the Puerto Rico Legal Defense and Education Fund. Nor did I know—though I may have forgotten it—that the organization had to fight for its very existence. Here’s the site again:

A panel of New York judges turned down our application to be a nonprofit organization because, in their view, our mission was "neither benevolent nor charitable." With pro bono help, Thom appealed to New York’s highest court, which finally allowed Lambda Legal to exist as a nonprofit organization.

Since then, it’s easier to list what they haven’t done than what they have, since short of bringing down DOMA and Proposition 8, they’ve done it all.   

In addition to the two lawyers from Lambda, we were joined by a constitutional lawyer from the University of Puerto Rico School of Law. Then, two more lawyers came in, from the staff of the president of the senate, Eduardo Bhatia. ‘It’s come at last,’ I thought, ‘I finally have a legal team….’

We were there to join the lawsuit brought by Conde to force the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico to recognize her marriage to her wife. And by doing so, we would become the first state / territory in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Why? Because for reasons I’ve never understood, Puerto Rico belongs to the First Circuit, which lives in Boston and comprises the New England states, all of which have sensibly adopted same-sex marriage. So it’s up to Puerto Rico to carry the torch.

And Puerto Rico, as Pedro Julio reminded us, has every reason to be proud: we are by no means backward in legislation regarding employment and hate crimes, and most of the work has been done by volunteers who have gotten out there and shouted.

And Pedro Julio should know, since he’s the founder, in Puerto Rico, of Puerto Rico para tod@s and the communications manager for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, in New York City. So Pedro Julio has a foot in both places; this weekend, he’s on the island.

“What was that thing about the death threat,” I asked Raf after the meeting. I remembered vaguely that somebody had tweeted a death threat to Pedro Julio, and that they had found the guy. But whatever happened to the guy?

Thanks to Google, I can tell you: Pedro Julio had intended to go to the march celebrating the Día Internacional contra la Homofobia y Transfobia, when some guy—whose name I know, but why give it?—tweeted that Pedro Julio could end up like some guys had in the Boston Marathon. The FBI found the guy, he was tried in federal court and sentenced to three years in prison, three years probation, and three years of being Twitterless.

In fact, Pedro Julio had warned the public, in January of last year, that he had been receiving more death threats:

“Durante mis más de 15 años de activismo, he recibido innumerables amenazas de muerte, pero nunca en la cantidad y la hostilidad de los últimos días".

(“In over 15 years of activism, I have received innumerable death threats, but never in the quantity and level of hostility as in recent days.”)

‘There are levels of “out,”’ I thought, ‘which is funny, since I thought I was pretty—sorry about this—far out. But I’m a piker next to Pedro Julio or Ada….’

And one of the things about being out is that it gets normal after a while. A man I know was once asked by his new boss, “and what’s your wife’s name?” The boss was trying to prep for the Christmas party.

“John,” said my friend, who is also named John.

“That makes it easy,” said the boss.

This is the stuff we do every day, until it becomes no big deal. So it’s easy to forget how very, very important, as well as difficult, being out can be.

“I think I was put on this earth to fight this fight,” said Yolanda, meaning the fight of the night: getting Puerto Rico to recognize same-sex marriage. The whole room inhaled.

“She’s been in tears four times this evening,” remarked Ada, “and now, it’s five.”

The night had started being somewhat routine: a meeting to go to, some people to meet, then bus back home and hit the sack. But it changed with Yolanda’s remark.

‘It is a big deal,’ I thought. ‘And there’s a reason why we drive the fundamentalists nuts, why Pedro Julio has two pages boycotting him on Facebook: we are a threat. What we’re proposing is fundamental, too. There is nothing more fundamental than the right to declare who your husband or wife will be, and have that decision respected by the state.’

I looked around the room and began to wonder—how much extra struggle had it taken each of us, and each couple, to realize that she or he was gay, to embrace it, to announce it to family and friends, to bosses and—now—to the public at large?

In the week of my mother’s death, I was sitting on a miraculously beautiful spring twilight talking with my brother John.

“You’ve had it so much harder than either Eric or I did,” he said. He meant coming out, struggling with the inner-demon of the cello, facing down my father over my being gay, moving to a foreign-in-a-domestic-sense land, learning a new language, being jobless, losing my mind, and providing the way out for my mother, when she wanted to die. So I thought about all that.

“You may be right,” I told him.

But it was also worth it….

Then and Now

Hey, you guys up there—slow down! You’re making me dizzy….

Last June, by one slim vote, the Supreme Court threw out the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). At that point—as I remember it—fewer than ten states allowed gay marriages. Now? It’s 17, and may be 18 if Michigan…

…sometime after five PM last Friday, U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman issued a ruling after a two-week trial, based mostly on whether there was any evidence that kids were harmed by being raised in gay homes.

The judge—a conservative appointed by Ronald Reagan—decided no. And so he tossed out the ban on gay marriages, which had popular support a decade ago, though recently more and more people are scratching their heads, wondering what that was all about….

It was a weird time—those years when everybody was up in arms and needing to defend the sanctity of marriage. Was it that the ritual satanic abuse thing had faded? Because, remember—the fear had swept the country, starting out in a California daycare center, run by this woman Virginia McMartin? Here, Dear Readers, I present her fearsome visage—don’t look too long or too intently, lest the sulfurous stench of evil rise up and poison your eternal soul….

Look, she’s clearly not having the best day of her life, but satanic? And here, under the very appropriate heading “Bizarre Allegations,” is Wikipedia’s description of the affair.

Some of the accusations were described as "bizarre",[5] overlapping with accusations that mirrored the just-starting satanic ritual abuse panic.[4] It was alleged that, in addition to having been sexually abused, they saw witches fly, traveled in a hot-air balloon, and were taken through underground tunnels.[4] When shown a series of photographs by Danny Davis (the McMartins' lawyer), one child identified actor Chuck Norris as one of the abusers.[20]

Some of the abuse was alleged to have occurred in secret tunnels beneath the school. Several investigations turned up evidence of old buildings on the site and other debris from before the school was built, but no evidence of any secret chambers was found.[4] There were claims of orgies at car washes and airports, and of children being flushed down toilets to secret rooms where they would be abused, then cleaned up and presented back to their unsuspecting parents. Some interviewed children talked of a game called "Naked Movie Star" suggesting they were forcibly photographed nude.[1][4][21] During the trial, testimony from the children stated that the naked movie star game was actually a rhyming taunt used to tease other children—"What you say is what you are, you're a naked movie star,"—and had nothing to do with having naked pictures taken.

What happened was, according to Wikipedia, “the longest and most expensive criminal trial” as of 1990. The first allegations had arisen seven years earlier, in 1983; the case ended with charges being dropped.

Gay people are used to it—at least those of us who are of a sufficient age. Raf was told decades ago that he couldn’t see his young nephew, who now has a child of his own. Raf and I passed the child back and forth last year at a family reunion.

Oh, and remember Anita Bryant? Who can forget here explanation that gay people—not able to reproduce—had to be out “recruiting” children to keep the pink race going? Presumably, it was like a scene out of Boys Beware, a film from the 1950’s that will shock the hell out of you.

The film starts out well enough, with the cheerful—no, let’s call it peppy—music in the background as we see a police captain leaving the police department, on his way to go speak to some “young people” at the local high school. Along the way, he sees Jimmy Barnes, innocently trying to hitch a ride on the side of the road.

Alas, not all the people in the world are as innocent as Jimmy! Though the person who gave Jimmy the ride seemed nice enough—asking Jimmy questions, and giving him a pat on the shoulder as Jimmy got out of the car.

That’s when we see the driver, who until now has been only in profile. And need I say it? The face is satanic—wait, I’ll be a good blogger and figure out how to take a screen shot:

Jimmy, honey? You were riding home with that?

That, Dear Reader, is a proper 1950’s homosexual—and it’s also what we came out of, or away from. Because I was born in 1956, which meant that for the first decade of my life, this is what society was telling me I was going to grow up to be. Which meant I could repress my entire sexuality, or I could become utterly depraved, as this man was.

Nor are such types subtle—since the very next day, what happens? Yup, there the stranger is, after school, and today he decides to treat Jimmy to a Coke. And then the homosexual told a few off-color jokes—obviously testing the waters.

Look, I saw the clip a year ago, and really, I don’t need to see it again. In fact, having lived through the whole thing, and overcome it, I really prefer not to relive it. Suffice it to say that all turns out well for Jimmy, but that other boy?

“He became a statistic,” intones the 1950’s voice.

If you grew up with this garbage, it took real work to move away from it. It took therapy, group sessions, consciousness raising, activism, marching for the first time in a parade, telling your mother (guess what? It’s always mother first…) you were gay, walking three times around the block of the first gay bar you were hoping / dreading to go into, telling everybody you were gay—and now, how many years have passed? And surprise—you’re not done!

You’re not out of the closet, you see. Sure, you’ve done all of the above—you have weeded that garden as rigorously as you could, and then you get cruised by the pilot who has flown you 1600 miles to New York City. And what do you think, reflexively?

“They have gay pilots!!!”

Down on your knees, pulling more weeds!

There’s a twenty-ish gay guy two tables away talking to his friend, or his lover, or whoever he is or however they’re defining it. And his experience as a gay guy? He probably didn’t have to worry about getting kicked out of school, getting kicked out of his home, about being beaten silly when he left the bar.

But the good news? Other people have been pulling weeds, too, including conservative judges in Michigan, who got asked if he really would like to affirm a law that says that some people can get married, others cannot.  Here’s what  Friedman said:

In attempting to define this case as a challenge to “the will of the people,” state defendants lost sight of what this case is truly about: people. No court record of this proceeding could ever fully convey the personal sacrifice of these two plaintiffs who seek to ensure that the state may not longer impair the rights of their children and the thousands of others now being raised by same-sex couples.

So last Friday, Michigan had allowed gay marriages. Saturday, everybody ran down to City Hall to get hitched. Then the ax fell—the state’s attorney general asked for a stay, and so now gay marriages aren’t legal in Michigan. See?

It occurs to me—there’s something a little sad about how so many of us have done it: rushed frantically to get hitched before some hack of  a DA or AG runs off to the next court up to block it. Parents living the next state over don’t get to see the ceremony. Musicians who would have chosen Monteverdi’s Si dolce e’l tormento have to live with Whitney Houston.  The superb cooks are eating a store-bought cake and drinking champagne and grinning like fools and rubbing their eyes and calling their distant family.

One Michigan couple who got in under the wire was my old friend Geek, the celebrated chap who—having outwitted and outlasted Fred Phelps—took his lover of 27 year to the courthouse or city hall or wherever it was and brought him back as his husband.

And now, having scared the hell out of you by showing you a proper 1950’s homosexual—as well as that satanic grandmother—let me show you the updated version—considerably less menacing….

Congratulations, Geek and Martín!

Paradoxical Reaction

COURT STRIKES DOWN U.S. MARRIAGE ACT

5-4 Ruling Is a Landmark Victory for Gay Rights

‘DOMA’s principal effect is to identify and make unequal a subset of state-sanctioned marriages.’ — JUSTICE ANTHONY M. KENNEDY

I’m having a paradoxical reaction.

I should be jubilant—the Supreme Court of the United States of America has just struck down the odious Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and has ruled that the opponents of same-sex marriage in California did not have standing to sue. That, presumably, clears the way for marriage equality in California. So now it’s 13 down, 37 to go.

I should be jubilant; I’m not.

I’m pissed.

I’m pissed that four out of the nine justices are so fucking behind the times that they cannot see an elemental principle here. I’m pissed that we have to celebrate this damn victory at all. I’m pissed that there ever WAS a fucking DOMA and that we had to spend all of our time and energy and money to defeat it.

You know, I’m pissed at the amount of time and energy I have had to devote in my life to come out, to face rejection (most of it imagined, very little of it real), to deal with my own internalized homophobia, to learn how to speak out.

“You’ve had the hardest struggle,” said Eric, the week my mother died. We were talking about our lives, our three lives (my other brother included).

Damn right I did, Eric. We all flocked to your two weddings, you didn’t have the grace to congratulate me, even acknowledge mine. I got married in a city clerk’s office, and it was just Raf and I. For very good reasons, Franny and John and Jeanne weren’t there. But I was happy, in a way, that it was just the two of us. Because that’s the way it had been for so many years.

Until you live it, there’s no way to understand the insidious pressure against a gay marriage. A very nice woman has invited me to attend a party at a restaurant celebrating the 75^th birthday of her husband, whom I know, but whom Raf does not. Well, it was a quandary—I really couldn’t call her up and say, “hey, can Raf come?” I couldn’t call her and say, “I don’t go places without my husband.” So should I go, or should I invent an excuse?

I decided to go, but not before realizing that my parents would

1.     never have been in the situation

2.     never have chosen for one person to go, the other to stay home

Consider—would I have invited the woman to a dinner on Saturday night, and not invited as well her husband? Don’t think so—I would have sucked it up and paid for the extra plate or not invited her at all.

“How long have you been together,” asked a guy recently, and why did I think there was something smug, condescending about the question? Am I really that prickly?

So why wasn’t I surprised when his jaw dropped on hearing that it’s about thirty years now? He was expecting, what—two?

I made a decision years ago—I was damned if I was going to be a victim. I hate people who whine and bemoan their fate and complain. I have had incredible luck—I’m male and white and middle class. I had tremendous parents. I’ve had more luck in life than most people, and I have no right to complain.

Maybe it was this that did it to me:

“In the majority’s telling, this story is black-and-white: Hate your neighbor or come along with us,” Justice Scalia wrote in his dissent. “The truth is more complicated.”

Yeah? This is a slap in the face on two levels. We are accused of being simplistic, unable to see the more complicated truth that Justice—sorry, I’m demoting you now—justice Scalia (that cap by convention only) can see. And we are accused of saying that those justices who don’t go along with us are hateful.

You know, I think some things are pretty simple. Great, DOMA is dead, but will I get Raf’s social security, or he mine? Not unless we move to a state where my marriage is recognized. So we're going to have years of more struggle, when we should be doing other things, like helping the 2.8 million LGBT kids get off the streets.

And no, Scalia, I don’t think you hate me. You don’t know me, and guess what? If you did, you’d like me. If you spent a month in my home, you would have voted the other way.

Or maybe not, who knows?

“And so you are one of those rare men who approve of the education of women,” said a don to Lord Peter Wimsey, in one of Dorothy L. Sayer’s novels.

“You should not permit me the right to approve or not,” he returned.

Exactly—and now I get it. That’s why I’m pissed. There’s no particular joy in this—not for me, not now. I’m back fighting as I have for so many damn years a bunch of people who have the power to affect my and my husband’s lives in significant ways. What we have had to fight and struggle for they take for granted. OK—I’ll be happy later on.

Right now?

I’m pissed.

One Judge, Parts Missing

There’s only one way to explain it. While the rest of the world—or at least the world I know—has gotten over it, there are four or five guys in Washington that still get really jittery when the topic of homosexuality and gay and lesbian issues blows in the room.

Which is why a man whom everybody grants has a fine legal mind said something incredibly stupid. And here it is, courtesy of the New York Times:

He expressed irritation that the case was before the court, saying President Obama’s approach — to enforce the law but not defend it — was a contradiction.

“I don’t see why he doesn’t have the courage of his convictions,” the chief justice said. He said Mr. Obama should have stopped enforcing a statute he viewed as unconstitutional “rather than saying, ‘Oh, we’ll wait till the Supreme Court tells us we have no choice.’ ”

The White House took umbrage at the remark and said the president was upholding his constitutional duty to execute the laws until the Supreme Court rules otherwise. “There is a responsibility that the administration has to enforce laws that are on the books,” said Josh Earnest, a deputy White House press secretary. “And we’ll do that even for laws that we disagree with, including the Defense of Marriage Act.”

Ahh, Roberts? If the president decided that the two-term limit was unconstitutional and set about running again in 2016, would that be OK? If he decided to stop payments of Social Security, would that be all right?

And by the way, isn’t that what we pay you guys the big money to do? What are you doing up there if you’re not interpreting the law and ruling on constitutionality? Playing checkers, smoking cigars?

Well, what do I know, so I called the family lawyer, and got his take. And John’s reading is that Roberts was peeved, and probably peeved from the day before. Both cases, of course, are screwy. The state of California had no interest in defending the overturning of Proposition 8, so a bunch of archconservatives got in the act. And the big question is—do they have any right to appear before the court? How have they been harmed, which is another way of establishing standing?

That’s pretty much the same deal with DOMA—which Obama and his justice department also declined to defend. But in this case, there’s somebody with standing—an 83 year-old lady who got stuck with a inheritance tax for over $300,000 because her marriage wasn’t recognized. Right, but what about the screwy Republican legislators who hired the lawyers to defend DOMA—what standing do they have?

Short of stomping on the floor and having a nice good hissy fit, Roberts could not be shouting “why me” louder and more petulantly.

At one point, in fact, Roberts suggests that he will walk away from the fight and let the politicians take the heat.

Public opinion has been shifting rapidly over the past decade in favor of gay marriage, and Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that perhaps gays and lesbians don’t need special protection from the court anymore.

“As far as I can tell, political leaders are falling all over themselves to endorse your side of the case,” Roberts told the lawyers who would like to see the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, struck down.

Special protection? Did he really say special protection? Isn’t the DOMA case simply about asking the court to rule on whether the federal government can give benefits to one group of married people but not to another group of married people? What’s special about that?

Oh, and say that I’ve been transferred to Fort Hood, and like a patriotic soldier I go. And then I head for Iraq, where I’m killed. If I’m straight, my wife Dora gets the visit from the two soldiers carrying the folded American flag. If I’m gay, my husband Donald will have to read about it in the newspapers.

You know, I don’t know about anybody else, but seeing the Supreme Court squirm and try to pass the buck is making me crazy. That, of course, is of no consequence to the Supreme Court. What should matter, however, is that a group of people is legally disenfranchised, and suffers real consequences—read harm—as a result of a bigoted piece of legislation. Yeah—I’m married in Massachusetts but not in Puerto Rico. So am I supposed to move to Massachusetts in order to collect Social Security if Raf dies before me?

And does anyone really think that places like Georgia and Mississippi are going to legislate gay marriage on their own? There are states that would still have Jim Crow if not slavery if the courts hadn’t stepped in. We need the Supreme Court to rule on DOMA and on the constitutionality of the 40 states with “defense” of marriage laws.

Put your hand in the center of your back, Chief Justice. Feel that hard thing?

It’s called a backbone.

Letter to the Nine

Let me make it very simple for the nine men and women who make up the Supreme Court.

John and Mary have a lovely wedding in a quaint, white, tall-steeple church. The parents beam, the bride cries, the groom shifts nervously at the altar. The ceremony concludes, they sign the marriage license, and drive off to their honeymoon in the Bahamas, where John will be eaten by a shark.

Are they married?

John and Mary have a lovely wedding—this is a copy / paste of the previous paragraph, so feel free to skip it—in a quaint, white, tall-steeple church. The parents beam, the bride cries, the groom shifts nervously at the altar. The ceremony concludes, they forget to sign—and here the scenario changes—the marriage license, and drive off to their honeymoon in the Bahamas, where John will be eaten by a shark.

Are they married?

Or how about this—John and Mary plan to get married in that quaint-et-cetera church, but it burns down the night before the wedding (dear me, the dramatic things that are happening in the blog this morning….). So they get hitched at City Hall, and then go off to that fateful honeymoon.

You get—I’m sure—my point. Where a couple is married has absolutely no importance; what’s important is that famous or fatal signature on a legal document called the marriage certificate. So we have a problem, a language problem. And here it is….

Screw talking about civil unions, we should be talking about religious unions.

It’s another sign of how decades of fundamentalist battering have driven us into logical and linguistic corners. Nobody, of course, can claim to be a liberal—now we have to retrench under the term “progressive.” Nobody can come right out and say that marriage is a legal institution, and that no amount of fiddling with “civil unions” can grant exactly the same rights as marriage. And even if it could, why bother?

I live across the street from a man and woman who are, I believe (since I haven’t seen their marriage certificate), married. The man and the woman live across the street from two men—do I need to tell you who they are?—who were married in the state of Massachusetts in 2008.

So Raf and Julio go off to the beach, and guess what happens? Yes, we now have a very well fed shark, swimming happily in those bloody waters. Now then, what happens to the grieving spouses?

Well, it’s a very different story. There’s Social Security, there are the tax laws, there are inheritance and probate issues.

Two very different scenarios. But oddly, the two couples—from what I can see—lead quite similar lives. Couples do—they figure out who does the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry. They figure out where they’re going to live and how to pay the bills. They have pets and arguments and—sometimes—children.

And isn’t it time, at last, to get over it, to get on to other things?

Or maybe it’s time to get pissed. Because that’s where I am, this morning, as I read about the Supreme Court weaseling around the question of whether two guys who have been together thirty years, who spent thousands of bucks to travel hundreds of miles to get married are in fact married.

Maybe it’s time to get out on the streets and start screaming at the people who have screamed at us, who have held up the “God hates fags” signs—yes, they were there yesterday, exercising their free speech in front of the Supreme Court—and shout was should be obvious to everybody.

Oh, and what’s that?

Try this….

The people defining marriage as a heterosexual union are mean-spirited, petty bigots.

No, not strong enough.

Hate-filled, fear-filled, despicable bigots.

And remind me, again—why did we allow them to take over the discourse?

A Promise Kept

For a gay blogger, there isn’t much choice about what to write about, today. Yes, I could tell you that in Puerto Rico, a federal judge has ruled that Jehovah’s Witnesses must be given access to gated communities. My reaction, of course, is whether a community has the right to restrict access to ANYBODY. Weren’t public funds used to make the road, and aren’t they used to maintain them?

Right—I’m not gonna get very far with that….

OK—then there’s Michael Samis, whose campaign to raise funds for a forgotten cello concerto ended yesterday. And he—or we—did it! Wow—and he got 140% of his goal!

But all eyes, of course, are on nine men and women who have the chance to do something remarkable—rule on what one of the parties in the case called the “last civil rights issue.”

Today, the United States Supreme Court is hearing the case of California’s Proposition 8; tomorrow the court will hear challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act.

Good news—the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is so legally flawed that the president who signed it—reluctantly—has said it’s unconstitutional. So the justices are really gonna have to work hard to find any reason to uphold it.

Proposition 8 is different. The first big question is whether the party, ProtectMarriage, appealing the district court’s ruling has the legal right—called the standing—to appear before the court. California, you remember, is not appealing the decision—it’s a group of private citizens. If the court decides that ProtectMarriage has no standing, then federal district court’s overturning of Proposition 8 will go into effect. Or will it? Doing more reading, I find some “experts” saying that if the conservatives had no standing, then they had no standing to appeal in the first place. Therefore Proposition 8 stays in effect.

Such tortuous legal niceties would be lost, I suspect, on the lady who bought us lunch yesterday. She had wanted to do something nice for another lady, a Canadian who had spent the last month as an adopted tennis mom because of a series of family emergencies. So doña Ilia, Raf’s mom, worked the phone, corralled the family, and summoned us all to lunch.

And then sat down to give a virtuoso performance—the charm never stopped flowing, the social dexterity never waned. True, doña Ilia did stumble a bit when asked—after declaring that she adored, just adored, Canada—if she had in fact ever been there. Well, she had to admit no, but then recalled having met some very nice Canadian social workers, and had enjoyed meeting them very much.

Nor was the Canadian lady going to go unfed. “You’ll have to try a mallorca,” she said animatedly to her guest, “you can’t leave without a mallorca….” Also true for the flan de queso and the arroz con pollo.

In the midst of this unceasing flow of food and charm came a denouncing: I had completely failed my task, which was to be there early and greet the guest. “Men!” cried Ilia, “they can never do anything right, socially speaking. There she was for five minutes, sitting alone, and you were in a corner with your back to the door!” It was no use to point out that the café was tiny, and that the guest had not walked the twenty feet to the end of the room. “Of course she wouldn’t do that!” exclaimed Ilia. “She’s a refined woman—walking around searching for her host, indeed!” She was holding the guest’s hand, and patting her shoulder simultaneously.

The legal minutiae perplexing the Supreme Court also may not interest Paul Katami, one of the parties challenging Proposition Eight. All he wants to do is marry his husband-emotionally-if-not-yet-legally, Jeff Zarrillo. And the two make a terrific case—it’s pretty hard to imagine better spokespeople for a cause. And Katami has quite a history himself—an actor turned fitness expert, he had a nightmarish accident that led to his elbow being completely broken. Then, he endured two surgeries—both of which were horrific botches that led eventually to the recommendation that Paul have surgery to fuse the bones, leaving him with an arm at a permanent, fixed 90 degree angle.

He opted instead to find a new doctor—smart move, Paul!—who did a third operation involving a bone graft from the hip, titanium rods and screws. This, in addition to using a device he had invented for one of his clients, did the trick. Check him out on YouTube—you’d never know.

And he’s a guy of character—he chose not to waste his time and energy pursuing a malpractice suit against what was clearly a quack. He takes a settlement—just enough to pay his medical expenses and surgery.

And the legal question of standing might not be too interesting for his partner’s father, Dominick Zarrillo, who wrote a moving op-ed piece for the New York Times entitled “A Father, a Son and a Fighting Chance.” He talks about seeing his son get bullied as a kid, and going over to protest to the father of the lead abuser. Unbelievably, the bully’s father takes the attitude—let the kids fight if out between them. Sure, says Zarrillo, one-on-one is OK, but five against one? The bully’s father shrugged and shut the door.

Jeff did what I did, came home to his parents for years with the intention—this time I’m gonna come out. What happened? The time was never right—read, I never seized the chance—and there we were at the airport, with the words burning in the gut, not blazing in the air. When Jeff finally did it, he gets the reaction so many of us got: right, we knew all along, it’s OK.

So then it was Jeff and Paul, not just Jeff. They all go to Hawaii together, and decide to take a boat ride. Not wise—the weather turns nasty, the waves are three times the size of the boat, the elder Zarrillo grabs his wife’s hand, looks over at his son, who is holding Paul’s hand. It turns out OK, and they go to celebrate at dinner. Zarrillo writes:

I realized then that I was crying instead of laughing. I couldn’t explain it except to say there is nothing more overwhelming than seeing your child experience true love.

It works both ways, Dominick. I see an eighty-year old lady navigate her walker into the café, cheerfully give me her cheek to kiss, insist I order the steak, berate me for rudeness to a guest. My parents are dead, my two brothers thousands of miles away. But another mother, doña Ilia, is a tabletop away, beaming at me, scolding me, feeding me. A lady who twenty-five years ago wouldn’t speak to me on the phone.

A columnist for the New York Times who supports marriage equality wrote this morning that it might be a good thing if the Supreme Court didn’t come out with a sweeping ruling asserting that all fifty states must allow gay marriage: it could trigger a backlash. And I can see the logic.

I also see the enormous courage of parents who struggle and then come out to their gay and lesbian children. Because it’s not just us coming out. It’s you brave and loving parents, who are being asked to do something uniquely difficult.

You made a promise when you held us, that first day of our lives in the delivery room. You kept it when you opened the door, put a beer in a stranger’s hand, and set another place at the table.

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A Quiet Christmas

He’s a guy I don’t know anything about, this Rob Portman, an Ohioan and congressman and signer of the Defense of Marriage Act as well as backer of a constitutional amendment defining marriage as an institution between a man and a woman. Oh, and he’s Republican, as well.

And as you probably know, he completely reversed his stand yesterday and came out for marriage equality. Why? Because his son told him, two years ago, that he was gay. (The son, that is, not the congressman….)

So? Big deal—isn’t that how it gets done?

It did in my case—over about thirty years I dragged everybody out of the closet in my family. Some came out easily; an elder brother came around very late. A cousin’s wife, who speaks to the Lord every morning—they have a brisk, efficient relationship—was trading garden lore with Rafael two years ago, completely nonplussed to have an “admitted homosexual” in her face.

Some of the party, however, are arguing that just because a son is gay shouldn’t make any difference at all. Presumably, the principled reaction would be along the lines of “you and your relationship are unnatural and I cannot countenance either. You are welcome in the family but your partner is not. And don’t for God’s sake talk about it.”

That was what I was facing, those years when I contemplated telling my parents. It was a given—they wouldn’t reject me entirely. I wouldn’t be told, as people I knew had been told, “you’re sick and disgusting. Go, and don’t come back until you’ve changed.”

Yes, there were parents who said that.

But there were many more parents who said ‘leave your homosexuality at the door when you walk in this house,’ or words to that effect. You went to your family, your lover to his. You did the Thanksgiving / Christmas / Easter thing and watched football for the afternoon. Then you reconnected with your lover and hung out at the gay bar for the evening.

The problem coming, of course, when the lover had no family nearby, or a family nearby that had rejected him.

“Go,” I said to Raf, those decades ago when I had just landed in Puerto Rico. “Christmas Eve means nothing to me. Why not go and celebrate with your family? I’ll be fine.”

It was logical, and he went.

I was alone in the apartment, and also the building—the people in the apartment next door were off on the island with their families, and Pablo, the gay landlord who lives upstairs was out as well. I settled with a book in a chair next to the indoor patio, filled with plants that Raf had brought.

Also filled with moonlight, since Christmas had coincided with a full moon that year.

Also filled with a rare, quite heavy fog.

It wasn’t a night for reading. I put down the book and wondered—what the hell had I done? I knew no Spanish, I dreaded going out into the streets—I was an outsider, I felt the distance acutely. I did stupid things, just to avoid the language issue. I once walked four or five miles home carrying my cello from a rehearsal. I was dying of thirst, virtually hallucinating for Coca-Cola, but couldn’t enter a store to buy one. Yes, I had the money. But I didn’t want to see the clerk’s eyes dilate with fear—‘A gringo. What if he speaks to me? No hablo inglés…’ she will be thinking.

And I didn’t have a job. The one job I thought I could have vanished in five minutes, after I choked and blew the Dvorak concerto in an audition for the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra. It left me with a lot of time, time I didn’t know how to fill.

Which didn’t do the relationship any good, and we had had a fight, a couple weeks ago, and things were better but not good. It was tense—should I stay? But what about all the stuff I had moved, which included a cat that was really more Raf’s than mine. So just leave everything, cat included, and take off, cello in hand?

It was utterly quiet, utterly still, that evening of fog infused with moonlight. I looked out at the plants, moistened by the fog, lit by the moonlight. Time had slowed.

And then music, a guitar, people singing. It was a parranda, a group of friends out singing gentle Christmas carols to their friends. Later at night, it can be rowdy—“ASALTO” people will shout, “ASSAULT!” and you get out of bed and start the asopao. Oh, and get ready—no one leaves until the last drop is drunk. But this was a quiet group of five or six people singing the traditional aguinaldos, the gentle, lilting music from the mountains.

I stood at the window, listening. I wanted to go out, join them, but….

The gate clicked—Pablo had come home. I heard him bound up the steps to his apartment, saw the light in his bedroom and heard the sound of his TV. A moment later he was shouting, “hey, gorgeous, come up here!”

I did. We watched a stupid Mexican posada and ate popcorn on his bed. Raf came home and joined us.

So should Portman have acted on principle? Was it wrong to flip on an issue just because his son is gay?

I only know this.

You’re not much of a parent if you banish your child, force him or her into solitude and loneliness, force the choice—your lover or your family.

We learned, Raf’s family learned, Portman learned.

And very soon, pretty much everybody will learn.