Tropical Koan

Susan sent me an email, having read a review of a book on the depressing topic of…depression.

“Depressing,” because, according to the article—well, here’s a quote:

At any given point, 22% of the population exhibit at least one symptom of depression and the World Health Organization projects that by 2030, depression will have led to more worldwide disability and lives lost than any other affliction, including cancer, stroke, heart disease, accidents, and even war.

Well, I turned to the review, and was stopped in my initial tracks by the first sentence:

“Depression is a disorder of the ‘I,’ failing in your own eyes relative to your goals,” legendary psychologist Martin Seligman observed in his essential treatise on learned optimism.

Yeah? So who is Martin Seligman, legendary though he may be? And what the hell does he know about depression? Has he ever been trapped in a toilet stall, has he ever had a crying jag he couldn’t stop, has he ever sat at a computer and looked at the screen and felt his mind turn to mush and realize that his thinking has slowed so far down that his thoughts can’t make it up to the surface? So that email that he has to write? He can’t concentrate, he can’t focus—all he can do is sit there numbly and mutely and hope that, in some way, the governor will sign the reprieve. Because, let’s be clear—there is no chance whatsoever that anything he does will affect in any way how he is feeling. Why? Because he is not feeling.

Or is he? Because he’s been crying, sobbing, and he’s been ruminating.

Maybe you don’t know….

Ruminating is not—not where he is—pondering a problem deeply. No, ruminating is the incessant—shouldn’t it be incesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssant?—repetition of a single thought. Today it’s “I want to die.” Yesterday it was “I can’t think.”

Sure, Styron did it better than anyone—myself included—in his book on depression Darkness Visible. But don’t think that he or I or anyone can get this one right. Why? Because, by its nature, depression defies description. It’s a black hole, where any light shone into it is lost, consumed. And when, at last, the master of the universe relents and you’re out, the very memory of it has been consumed as well.

So the legendary Martin Seligman has pronounced himself on depression—how very nice! At best, it accounts for one and only one of the many depressions. Because when I went from 10 milligrams to 20 milligrams of one drug and began to take 15 milligrams of another, guess what? I began humming to myself as I rode to work.

I’m lucky; as I understand it, the serotonin reuptake inhibitor basically floods all of the brain, and all the receptors, with serotonin. And some of those relate to mood, and some relate to other things having nothing to do with mood. Which means that some people get lots of side effects and remain depressed; the lucky ones like me get relatively few, but a blessed lift in mood.

So do I come down on the side of chemicals, medicines, physiology? No, because what you do with your life changes your brain. That I learned one afternoon as I saw a group of people wearing new clothes—and really terrible ones, at that—waiting to be photographed by a clearly professional photographer.

The “models,” however, were just-as-clearly not professionals. But who were they, I wondered, as I pondered them standing around on the beach under the palm trees? And where was I?

Lolling on my back in the water, after a day of writing and playing music and taking a walk and listening to Monteverdi. I hadn’t made a dime that day, but I was happy. And the people on the beach? They were Wal-Mart employees, who had been chosen to be the models in the newspaper advertising insert.

I had worked for seven years for Wal-Mart, and for many of them I was lethally depressed. I was laid off; I went into crisis. I got out of the crisis and put myself on a schedule, a schedule I still follow. And I was at that moment splashing in the blue Caribbean waters, watching a group of prisoners from a prison I had escaped.

“Escaped,” because merely being laid off would have been “paroled” or perhaps “released.” But the prison I had escaped from wasn’t Wal-Mart—I had escaped from a brutal, decade-long battle against myself. I had willed myself to go to the brink of madness, to stand on the precipice and grant the Gods permission to push me into it.

It wasn’t a psychiatric crisis—or perhaps it was. I had been an angry, impossible steward for a man who had been given great gifts. I had raged at myself, scolded myself, belittled myself, bitten myself….

But wait—it wasn’t “myself.” Because I had had nothing to do with it—I could no more write a book or play the cello than I could scale Mount Everest. My job was to feed him and give him as much water as he needed and exercise him and put the cello into his hands and sit him at the computer and then GET THE HELL AWAY! He’ll play perfectly well on his own.

Wrong—he’ll play infinitely better. Because you know all that criticism for all those years?

Sorry—but it was shit.

The person you see occupies a middle position. I came to know a presence, which to me was the wind. And from this presence, which I call Domine, the cellist gets his talent, and the writer as well. My job is to get him in front of computers and embracing cellos.

I take him to the dentist—just as I brush his teeth. At the end of the day, I read what he’s written, or I listen to him play. ‘Where did that come from,’ I wonder. ‘He’s so good,’ I tell him. ‘Wow!’ I say.

I had made my life a koan, which, for the benefit of my red-squiggling computer, I will define, via Wikipedia:

A kōan (公案?)/ˈkoʊ.ɑːn/; Chinese: 公案; pinyin: gōng'àn; Korean: 공안 (kong'an); Vietnamese: công án) is a story, dialogue, question, or statement, which is used in Zen-practice to provoke the "great doubt", and test a student's progress in Zen practice.

What is the music of a mute cellist?

What happens when the music goes away?

Should it matter if he plays better without the instrument than with it?

None of these fanciful statements are true. I was simply holding on to a small thread of faith, which I could only grasp by observing with agonizing detail how I went about my life. I lost the ability to use a computer, and then stared at my fingers until I could connect my right first digit with an icon that was on my dock. I looked at the icon, absorbed the blue, noted that the downward slash of the small part of the “W” is superimposed over the upward slash. But am I supposed to do a double or a single click?

How many Word documents had I opened before?

And why was I doing it?

I wanted to change something so fundamental about myself that I required a reboot. “Put the detergent on the sponge,” I told him. We were doing dishes—which he generally did by wasting water, slopping water all over the floor, and not paying attention. Now, I had to tell him how to wash the dishes—first you put the soap on the sponge; then you lather, as it were, the coffee cup; then you place the cup with soap still on it on the side of the sink; proceed to the next cup.

The important thing?

There was no abuse in it. Just patient directions—completely explicit, clear, detailed. He didn’t know how to do prosaic stuff, and had been too impatient to learn. And I had berated him for decades about the stuff he really could do.

I blew it a few times; so did he. He was holding on, too, to the thread. Perhaps more than I, he had heard the wind through the palm trees, heard the fronds stir to life, appreciated the swaying green against the constant blue, felt the hand caressing his brow, smiled, looked up, and said…

…Domine.

About What We Do….

OK—we’ll start out with the comment on Facebook that Mr. Fernández made about the video:

I must admit that I have no clue what AC/DC is or was, but I do love this! And the guys are SOOOO good-looking!

Well, they start out good-looking; they later become bestial, as does the music. But I had seen the video two days before I read the comment, since I was one of nine million to view on YouTube, and Raf was one of twelve million. And my feeling?

Complete repulsion!

I think back to two classical singers, Ian Bostridge and Joyce DiDonato. Ladies first, and here’s what she’s said:

“Stop apologising, stop trying to sell our music by dumbing it down. Sell opera on the basis that it is like nothing else on the planet, not on the basis that it’s superficially cool and hip – that is so phoney.”

“Recently I performed at the Grammy awards. I felt like a fish out of water surrounded by all these rock and jazz musicians in a huge conference hall environment. But I sang the second half of Cenerentola’s rondo, and it seemed to go down very well.”

“What really moved me was an African-American girl who might have been 15. She came running up to find me afterwards and said ‘I don’t know what you call that sort of singing, but it was the most wonderful thing I have ever heard. Where can I find more of it?’ If we do our job properly, people will listen and get it. You see, great music just works.”

Spot on, Madame DiDonato! And you know, we could make a whole new generation of opera fans in a couple of weeks, if we wanted to. Because on April 5, the Metropolitan Opera is broadcasting La bohème in movie theaters across the world. Raf and I will go, Kleenex box between us, and guess what? We will be one of about six people who are not using wheelchairs, walkers, or canes. In fact, if you piled up all the implements, it would look like that scene at Lourdes—the cured having thrown away all their crutches….

We will take—if she consents, and that’s a heavy “if”—Naïa, the twelve-year old daughter of the owner of the café. Why? Well, it seems like an appropriate uncle-like thing to do. As well, is there any adolescent girl who can resist La bohème? The music is ravishing, the story is wrenching, the setting is magical. Face it, the opera is one glorious, extended working-out of every adolescent girl’s most basic fantasy.

So in one afternoon—assuming that we could get every teenage girl into the movie theaters—we could have a vigorous, passionate new generation of opera lovers, who would desert Lady Gaga and flock to Joyce DiDonato, making her a mega-superstar earning gazillions of dollars per concert. And you know what? She’ll behave herself—because she’s a nice lady from Kansas who works hard, to the point of breaking her leg in a performance at Covent Garden, and continuing the rest of the performance on crutches. She later did the performances in a wheelchair. Brace yourselves for a shock, soon-to-be-astonished Readers…

…the British love her!

And speaking of the British, what did Ian Bostridge have to say about pop music? Well, here’s a copy / paste from The Guardian, which refers to his…:

"…somewhat bizarre animus" towards pop music and his objection to the "huge social and corporate investment in continuing to believe that rock music is countercultural and on the side of the angels, while the serious music of the past is stuffy and class-bound."

Yeah? Somewhat bizarre? Bostridge, in the first place, has a PhD in History from Oxford. In the second place, he has spent years of his life perfecting an art that has been handed down scrupulously and lovingly for decades, if not centuries. In short, this guy is serious.  And guess what? He’s a second-class citizen, musically-speaking—nor is that bad enough. Because he now has to be a second-class citizen who also is a snob, and has to feel guilty about it. Oh, and look on as other performers—note the avoidance of the word “musicians”—with little talent or education are venerated as “cool.’ In short, he gets his face ground in the dirt and then has to apologize for it.

We classical musicians have a role in this, if we’re going to be honest. We need to move music out of the concert halls and back into the cafes, the bars, the street corners. We need to talk to our audiences, communicate our passion with them, all the while taking seriously what we do.

That would imply a respect for the people who hear our music. A respect, by the way, that I didn’t feel in the AC/DC clip. In fact, I was affronted:

“It was rank anti-intellectualism,” I told Naïa, the girl who may or may not be converted to opera.

“What does that mean,” asked Naïa. I forget sometimes that she’s just 12. So her tutor explained it: it’s the difference between a gourmet meal versus fast food.

That metaphor goes part of the way, but not all. And just now, I re-watched another video that has 12 million hits—The Piano Guys doing “The Cello Song.” Would I have the same reaction as I did to the AC/DC?

Yes, though to a lesser extent. I could have included it in this post, but why? Why not include a piece of music that is just as virtuosic, just as vibrant, just as beautiful—no, sorry…

…way more beautiful.

Thunderstruck or AC/DC or whatever it is will fade into the dust; Ginastera will last as long as anyone is around to listen….

Music Awaiting a Musician

OK—there are three factors in the video, and curiously, two of the three happened at roughly the same time. So—based purely on alphabetical order—let’s start with Bach first.

‘Easier said than done,’ I think to myself as I look at the screen in front of me. How in Hell do you account for a guy who had genius matched with beaver? Because the sheer amount of what Bach produced is numbing—and guess what? Besides the two passions and the two oratorios and the Well-Tempered Clavier and the Goldberg Variations and the six Brandenburg Concerti, oh, and the don’t-forget-the-200-or-so-cantatas…

Add to this the fact that a lot of music has been lost—according to one scholar, there must have been over 100 cantatas that are unaccounted for. And here’s what Robert Newman said:

Reference is made around the time of Bach’s death to him having composed ‘many’ magnificats. There are several lost Passions. And there is the known loss of at least 15 secular cantatas, many of these written for marriages, civic functions, etc. Though it’s commonly believed these works were somehow scattered amongst Bach’s sons and later lost/destroyed there are enough clues to suggest these works may actually have survived and may one day be rediscovered. Horror stories of music being used to wrap meat, or used by house servants to light fires (as in the case of at least one stage work by Schubert) may not have been the fate of these works.

If memory serves—and it may well not—we may only have 60% of what Bach actually wrote. At any rate, Bach wrote a lot of sacred music, which he had to, being employed by various churches at different times of his life. But by a happy fact—happy at least for cellists—Bach grew tired of his position in Weimar as konzertmeister and wanted to move on. And however much he was a genius, he scored somewhat lower on the scale of emotional intelligence. Here’s Wikipedia:

In 1717, Bach eventually fell out of favour in Weimar and was, according to a translation of the court secretary's report, jailed for almost a month before being unfavourably dismissed: "On November 6, [1717], the quondam concertmaster and organist Bach was confined to the County Judge's place of detention for too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal and finally on December 2 was freed from arrest with notice of his unfavourable discharge."

Somehow this fact never got mentioned in the conservatories I went to….

Right—so Bach landed on his feet and found himself in Köthen, at Prince Leopold’s household. And fortunately, Leopold was a Calvinist, which meant that music was sparingly used in services; Bach therefore had some time to write secular pieces. And it’s from this period that we get the violin sonatas, the cello suites, the orchestra suites, and—best of all—the Brandenburg concerti.

It was a period of flux, when string instruments were shifting from the viols to our modern instruments. And any cellist today knows that intuitively—one of the suites requires retuning the instrument (the A string gets tuned down to a G), and the last suite—which, dammit, is the best—goes into the stratosphere and is a demon to play. So it’s clear: whatever instrument these pieces are meant for, it’s not our modern cello.

In fact, the most recent research indicates that the suites may have been written for a cello da spalla—which, as you can see in the second clip below, was a smaller instrument that was slung abound the neck and played somewhat like a violin.

And now the action shifts considerably south, to Cremona, Italy, where Antonio Stradivari was enjoying his “golden period,” which lasted from 1700 to 1720 or so. And one of the instruments he created was a viola—an instrument slightly larger than a violin, for which there’s shamefully little music.

There are also damn few Stradivarius violas—only ten, in fact, and the other nine are in institutions and are unlikely to come up for sale. (There are, by the way, over 500 Stradivarius violins, so the fact that this viola is going for sale is major news in the rarified world of viola players. And the price—or at least the price that Sotheby’s hopes to get for it?

45 million bucks.

Is it worth it? Well, as you can hear below, it has a glorious sound. And physically, the instrument is in remarkable shape—almost as if the instrument had been delivered yesterday: no cracks, no major repairs, the varnish intact. So if you have minimally 45 million dollars to spare….

So at roughly the same time that Bach was composing his suites, Stradivarius was creating his viola—probably the greatest viola we have. Enter David Aaron Carpenter, a 28-year old violist who is…

…undeniably proficient, technically. But both the viola and the Bach seem to be products to be used for spreading the David Aaron Carpenter brand. The “musicality” seems as learned, as artificial, as forced as the gestures of old-time opera singers.

It could be envy, of course. Look, both Carpenter and the Belgian Sigiswald Kuijken have a command of their instruments that I will never have. They both must have struggled years to attain their proficiency. But why am I left thinking…

…what for?

David Aaron Carpenter plays the Macdonald Viola

Puerto Rico Jumps on Board

Well, it had to happen, and it did, and predictably…

…not everybody is happy about it.

The “it” in question being the federal lawsuit that Ada Conde filed on Tuesday to have her marriage to her same-sex partner, Yvonne Álvarez Vélez, legally recognized in Puerto Rico.

The couple was married in 2004 in Massachusetts, the first state to allow same-sex marriages. And since Puerto Rico amended the statute on marriage in 1999 to define marriage as existing between a man and a woman—Conde and Álvarez are out in the cold (however cold it may be in Puerto Rico….)

And that last parenthesis has some degree of truth—though we occasionally think of ourselves as backwards on LGBTQ issues, we actually don’t do badly, especially when compared to the rest of the Caribbean. As proof, I commend you to an article in USA Today with the headline “Puerto Rico Slowly Warms to More Gay Rights.”

We have, for example, law 238 of 2013 that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. As well, the laws that deal with domestic violence have been expanded to include all households, including gay and lesbian ones. In addition, our hate crime legislation was amended to include sexual orientation as a protected category.

There have been setbacks. The state Supreme Court upheld the law banning gay couples from adopting kids, and last year some 200,000 people, whipped up by a pastor named Wanda Rolón, marched against same-sex marriage. But consider that, in Jamaica recently, a 26-year old gay activist was found stabbed to death; overall, Puerto Rico is doing well on LGBT issues.

Which you might not know—judging from the comments in the local newspaper about the federal lawsuit that Conde filed. Here’s a sample—by no means the most virulent:

Gracias por llamarnos retrógrados. Ahora, pregunto yo: Desde cuando el matrimonio es un derecho civil??? Dónde está eso en la Constitución como derecho garantizado? El problema es que en algún momento algún tipo entonces se vá a presentar y decir que sus derechos civiles fueron cuartados porque no lo dejan casarse con, por ejemplo, su pingüino. Es lo que llamamos el /slippery slope/...una vez que esto empieza, dónde termina? La sociedad va en decadencia. eso es todo! [Sic.]

(“Thanks for calling us retrograde. Now I wonder: since when is marriage a civil right??? Where in the constitution is it a guaranteed right? The problem is that at some moment somebody is going to stand up and say that his rights were violated because they didn’t let him marry, for example, his penguin. It’s what we call the slippery slope—once you start, where do you stop? Society is going into decadency—that’s all!”)

And even more ingenious critique comes from the perennial Jorge Raschke, an evangelical minister who brings his “Clamor a Dios” to the capitol steps every Labor Day. Here’s what he has to say:

Puerto Rico es una jurisdicción no definida de los Estados Unidos y no puede imponer sus valores culturales y sus decisiones en lo que toca a su cultura porque en esa área lo que impera es el derecho internacional”, dijo Raschke.

(“Puerto Rico is an undefined territory of the United States and the US cannot impose its cultural values and decisions as to its culture because in that area international law applies,” said Raschke.)

Hmmm—shades of the argument Ugandans raise that the West cannot impose its views on homosexuality on Africa, that somehow it’s part of African identity to be homophobic?

And so we’re left with two questions. The first is whether the commonwealth is going to defend the statute defining marriage as between a man and a woman. The current government is generally pro-gay; several voices in the ruling party are urging the Secretary of Justice not to defend the statute.

Lastly, there’s the question of whether the suit will succeed. One commentator, Eudaldo Báez Galib, calls the federal court “un ambiente bueno”—a favorable environment. But who knows?

Last weekend I met a man from Wisconsin who mentioned that he had married his partner, a young man from Russia who is in the United States on a student visa. In the course of the conversation, it developed that the young man would have to return to Russia for a period of time before being able to renew his visa.

It raised a difficult question—how could the United States morally send back a young gay man to a country with draconian anti-gay laws, and with rising hate crimes directed against gay people? And had that consideration been behind the decision for the two to get married?

It’s easy for some people to see the issue of same-sex marriage as a moral or social issue. But for many of us, it’s a profoundly practical one. If I die today, my property goes to my legal heirs, in this case my two brothers. If Raf goes into Intensive Care, I’m dependent on his parents for allowing me to visit. Social Security? Estate taxes? The list goes on and on.

As does the fight!

When Two Strads Aren't Enough

Well, it was my own damn fault, as it usually is. I had, after all, told Naïa that I was a relentless, an indefatigable, diagrammer of sentences, so I was really on the hook: I had to stop listening to some of the twentieth century’s greatest music and take a look at her three sentences.

She got them right, but couldn’t tell me why, nor what the seven parts of speech are.

“I guessed for most of them,” said Naïa, who has the open frankness of Lady, her mother.

I wanted to interfere further, but her tutor was sitting nearby, and it felt a little intrusive: would my intrusion be construed as silent criticism? But I did have to wonder—what good is doing something correctly if you have no idea why it’s correct?

What would I have done? Well, we could have started with the parts of speech, about which Naïa knew nothing.

“We haven’t gotten to that, yet,” said the tutor.

Hunh?

I didn’t say it, but it makes no sense to be diagramming sentences without knowing the parts of speech—it’s like swimming without water.

Well, it wasn’t my battle, so I went back to the question of Anne Akiko Meyers, the young American violinist who has two Strads and was recently given the use—for the rest of her life—of what’s sometimes called the “Mona Lisa” of violins: the 1741 “Vieuxtemps” Guarneri del Gesu.

The “Vieuxtemps” is unusual on several levels—it’s in fabulous shape, never having been cracked, never having had any extensive work on it. It also has a hefty price tag on it—they were asking 18 million bucks, though it was sold at auction for an undisclosed amount (though the auctioneer did note that it was the highest price ever paid for a violin). Lastly, it spent the last five decades lying under the bed of a rich London banker.

Understandably, Meyers was a happy lady, that day in January of 2013 when she was given the use of the Guarneri. Here’s what she said in her press release:

“I have never heard another violin with such a beautiful spectrum of color,” Anne said of the "Vieuxtemps” Guarneri del Gesu in a press release today. “I am honored and humbled to receive lifetime use of the instrument, and I look forward to taking the violin to audiences all over the world.”

Just as understandably, some people wondered what would be happening to the two Stradivarius violins that Meyers owns—would she be playing them, or would they be sitting at home, in their cases? And was it really fair…

It has to be said: not all in the world of classical music is quite as harmonious as the music that gets played. And though cellists are reputedly the nastiest of all instrumentalists, the violinists are no pikers, either. Here’s a sample of the comments on violinist.com:

I’m starting to think this is all a publicity stunt by Anne Meyers. I was told by a reliable source that she has a rich funder who purchased the Molitor strad for her. And now this Guarneri del Gesu too ?? If I was a private collector who owned the Vieuxtemps Guarneri del Gesu. [Sic.] Anne Meyers would NOT be the first artist that comes to my mind.

Whatever the merits of having two Strads and a Guarneri may be, there’s no question that the violin is better off than are many famous, and perhaps equally good, violins that are either in museums or—worse—being held by investors in a vault. Here’s what Time magazine had to say in 2009, at the pit of the recession:

Facing volatile equity markets, investors often look to gold and silver. But an updated study of classical-instrument valuations by Brandeis economist Kathryn Graddy shows that violins may be among the most stable of investments. Graddy's data indicate that between 1850 and April of this year, the value of professional-quality instruments rose in real terms (i.e., after inflation) about 3% annually. High-end violins have appreciated at much higher rates — particularly rare instruments made by Italian masters like Stradivari, Amati and Guarneri del Gesù.

There is, in fact, some good news in this gloomy picture. The first is that, at least in some double-blind tests (where neither player nor listener knew what they were playing or hearing), modern instruments were chosen above Strads or Guarneris for sound. So as glorious as a Strad may be, it’s not the only fiddle in the world.

Lastly, any reader out there with a million pounds lying about used might consider contacting Florian Leonhard, a London-based violin restorer who has made a specialty of authenticating old Italian instruments, advising institutions with money on the instrument, and then acting as a matchmaker between the musician and the institution. Here’s a description:

In addition to the pursuit of capital appreciation, the fund intends to loan the violins to young, up-and-coming musicians who are priced out of the market. The goal is to help exceptional musicians reach their full artistic potential and optimise the quality of classical performance at the highest level. This philanthropic enterprise will separate the fund from museums and institutions which kept fine instruments from the marketplace.

Be sure to tell them I sent you!

We've Come to Their Neighborhood

Right—time to eat crow.

I wrote yesterday something to the effect that it’s easier for gay people to come out now than it was in the 60’s and 70’s. But guess what? If the documentary Out in the Silence is correct, it’s actually much worse.

At least it was for CJ, the high school kid who was a jock on the football team until he came out as gay. Then, the bullying started, the phone calls threatening to burn down the house began coming in, the pushing and the shoving started taking place—incredibly—in front of teachers and school monitors.

CJ’s mother yanked him out of school, and did what any mother would do: she goes before the school board and protests. Their response? They didn’t even shrug their shoulders….

‘She’s gotta get a lawyer,’ I thought to myself yesterday, since I had only watched the first half of the documentary. So I was relieved when she turned to the ACLU; after a two-year struggle, anti-harassment seminars began in the high school.

So why is it so rough for gay kids today? Well, first of all, kids are coming out in high school, not in college or beyond. Second, what had been a taboo topic has become one on everyone’s lips. And third, the religious opposition has become much better organized.

It all started when the filmmaker Joe Wilson sent an announcement of his marriage to his male partner to The Derrick, his local newspaper in Oil City, Pennsylvania. The Derrick published the announcement—along with a picture—and then the letters began rolling in. One particularly painful comment—“it would have been better if you had never been born”—is enough to tell you the story.

That’s when CJ’s mother wrote, announcing that her son was being bullied, and wondering if he could help. So Wilson headed to Oil City, which had been the site of the first oil well in the States, and was now moldering away. His purpose, yes, was to look in on CJ, but also to see how the town in which he had grown up was dealing with LGBT issues.

It wasn’t pretty. Oil City was the home of the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Family Association (AFA), which is pretty much as you would imagine. Founded in 1977 as the National Foundation for Decency; headquarters in Tupelo, Mississippi; 180,00 paid subscribers; 3.3 million people receiving “action alerts.” Does that tell you the story? Oh, and here’s Wikipedia:

AFA has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as of November 2010 for the "propagation of known falsehoods" and the use of "demonizing propaganda" against LGBT people.

Think that’s extreme? Well, check out the clip below, entitled They’re Coming to Your Town; the “they” is less gay and lesbian than that dreaded “homosexual agenda.”

Who has the agenda? Is it the lesbian couple, who are renovating an old movie house as a neighborhood center? If so, their agenda is less pushing their homosexuality on people than it is about turning around a decaying city center, providing jobs, making money, improving the community. But Diane, the president of the state AFA, called around to local businesses, trying to arrange a boycott. At one point, one of the lesbians loses it, and comes out says, “Diane has done nothing for this city but stir up hate.”

There are victories: a Christian pastor who modifies his views; the father of a gay kid who won’t turn his back on his son, even though the father himself had beaten up gay people in his past.

But for all the victories, it’s the overwhelming negativity of Diane and the AFA that linger. Looking at her, you see not a woman filled with hate, but rather someone terrified.

And with good reason. If she feels that her world is threatened, well, isn’t she right? Yes, we have an agenda. We’re not going back in the closet, we’re not going to stop pressing for rights, we’re not going to accept abuse or hate anymore.

The decline of the traditional family? Is it perhaps time to suggest that there were some aspects of the traditional family that were less than ideal? For every family that mimicked Leave It to Beaver, wasn’t there one with sexual abuse, secrecy, drunkenness, lies, battered limbs?  

We are a threat—we who have been honest with ourselves, honest with others, and have fought against those who disagreed. Mostly, we’ve been a threat when we moved into communities, bought houses, started raising our families.

What’s more threatening than a new idea?

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!