Eight (Presumably) and One

It happens every morning: two guys arguing at the top of their lungs—as well as their vocal range—in the middle of our bedroom.

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.