Out in the Corporate World

So today’s news?

“Man, this is the third time I’ve spoken to these people in Mexico, and I keep telling them, ‘hey, this is a business, and I’m alone here, so I’ve gotta take care of customers. And so whatever you gotta do to get the Internet faster, you gotta do it….”

That’s Jorge, the manager of the café, and on whose shoulders many things fall. Actually, from one point of view, everything. Consider, for example, that it’s slow season, so he should be getting a break, right? But people have quit, and on one occasion have been fired, and nobody wants to hire anybody in slow season. So Jorge? He’s working harder than ever, and hasn’t had two consecutive days off for months.

“I could go home right now,” he told me, a little after ten this morning, as he was opening the shop. “But once the customers come in, I’ll get my energy back….”

It’s a curious thing, how technology has enriched and enslaved us. Last night, for example, I was watching the encore performance of Figaro, which took pace a week and a half ago on a stage in New York City, got shot up to a satellite, and then got beamed down to movie theaters in 66 different countries. For Montalvo, this is an ordinary state of affairs. For me?

My father once explained the essential workings of the internal combustion engine, which—since I am Internetless—I can only say that I think is what propels your car. And though I’ve retained absolutely none of what he said, it dawned on me at the time: he was the last generation of guys who knew how everything worked. They could fix toasters and cars and lawn mowers, and if they didn’t know how to do it? They could figure it out.

But now we have a satellite that is enjoying Mozart somewhere up there, and then willing to share it with the rest of us. And there obviously is a satellite wizard at the Met. Or maybe the wizard is in Mexico, or India, and is doing his magic from home. But when the wizard’s car breaks down? He’s probably as lost as the rest of us.

And lost is what I am, because I have just tried to get on the Internet, and the little bar that tells how the loading is going goes speedily up to the mid-point, the screen changes and obviously wants to become The New York Times, but then what happens? Well, it’s obvious what’s happening, because I am hearing 80% of a loud conversation in Russian. And the other 20%? Presumably in Russia, though it could be anywhere, since the Russians have stopped being in Russia—where they should be—and have instead been sent out to all the cafés in the Western world, expressly to soak up the Internet!

Hah—it’s clear. The Cold War never ended, and guess who won? Because while he is shouting Russian and peering computeristically at his beloved, this is what I’m seeing!

   

So I’m completely unable to tell you anything interesting: no worrying about Wisconsin, no wondering about the Japanese and their inability to acknowledge to the rest of the world that they’ve screwed up and can’t figure out what to do about their damned nuclear plant, which if it falls down  in the next earthquake will be hasta la vista, baby for pretty much everybody (one view) or absolutely no problem (the opposing view)!

Of course, if the Internet agreed to hop tables and spend some time on my screen, I could give you the full report on Tim Cook, who got outed in a TV show, and then—oh so bravely—came out publically today in Bloomberg Business.

And who is Cook? A native of Alabama, 53-years old, and the CEO of Apple. Oh—and the first CEO of a public company to come out. Where’s he been all this time? Essentially doing a Ricky Martin, by guarding his privacy and not wanting to draw attention away from all the incredible people and products of Apple.

And if memory serves, 83% of gay people do this to some extent in the work force. I should know: I did, and now feel bad about it. Because really, how many people didn’t know? And isn’t it strange  that gay people will be a distraction, but straight people won’t? Because in every office, in every cubicle, there was a picture of the husband, the wife, the girlfriend. What was there on my desk, in those receding days when I worked at Walmart? A picture of Raf, my mother, and me: he was there, yes, but my mother took the sting off. What would have happened if I had put a picture of the two of us, dressed in tuxedos, cutting our wedding cake?

Nothing, officially: Human Resources was smarter than that, and since I had come out and told the CEO that I was gay, and then written to the Senior Vice President of Human Resources that I was gay… well, they would have figured out: I was able to stand up for myself. Of course, people would have whispered; the more religious would have—perhaps—tried to proselytize. But after a week? Old news!

That’s what happened to the first CEO to get outed: John Browne, whose 23-year old rent boy turned nasty—ah, reportedly they do!—, and ratted to the tabloids about their affair. Browne was then CEO of British Petroleum and in his fifties; now he is a Member of Parliament, and chairman of the trustees of the Tate Galleries. According to the New York Times, Lee Scott, then CEO of Walmart, called Browne and rescinded the offer to be on the board of directors of Walmart. Why? Browne says that Scott told him that Arkansas wasn’t ready for a gay board member; Walmart says that Browne was being investigated by BP for misuse of corporate funds (so said—here he is again!—the rent boy, but the company checked it out and cleared Browne).

What happened to Browne? Well, all of the stuff he feared didn’t happen. Yes, he resigned, but all his friends rallied, and those who didn’t? Ahhh, the bliss of knowing who your friends are!

That’s the thing about the corporate world: the pressure to conform, not to rock the boat, is amazing. Every day, I used to see about twenty people whom everybody feared: people who could make an entire division disappear. And those twenty people? Strong, rich, powerful—emperors, but without a stitch of clothes.

So fearful were we, that things didn’t get said. And where weren’t they said? Not at the bottom—well, not always at the bottom—but more often at the top. Nobody could tell Bentonville, Arkansas, that Puerto Rico wasn’t Mexico. So the little store with the rice and beans and some cans and some personal items? That store that had no parking? Well, we had to open it, pretend it was a success, and then close it. Because people in Mexico may travel by burros down the mountain to do their shopping, but  everybody, everybody in Puerto Rico has a car! And nobody is going to walk in the tropical heat to get to a neighborhood market.

Had I Internet, I could tell you the story I read in a Malcolm Gladwell book about the program to train pilots how to communicate, since a Chinese or a Japanese copilot would obediently fly the plane into the mountain, if his pilot mistakenly ordered him to do so. Dying with decorum intact is better, apparently, than living with the disgrace of telling your superior he’s full of shit.

Unless, of course, you’re running a business, or answering to the Board of Directors who are—isn’t this the way it’s supposed to work?—answering to the investors. So why it the corporate world so screwed up?

Because for all the talk about diversity, they never got it. The females in top management had to be tougher than the males, the Puerto Ricans more gringo, and gay? Gay???

Well, it’s happened. The first Fortune 500 company to have a gay CEO.

Wait—500 companies? 500 CEO’s?

Stay tuned! 

   

Three Voices, Millions of Stories

“My story of coming out is no harder than anybody else’s,” or words to that effect, says a Manhattan lawyer. But, sorry, I’m not buying in. Why? Because Richard Socarides was coming out to Charles Socarides, and however famous the first Socarides may be now, the second Socarides was probably even more prominent. He was a well-known Upper East Side psychiatrist, a lecturer or professor at Albert Einstein University, and a specialist in treating the illness of homosexuality by “conversion therapy.”

In short, for the son, it was a true, “oh fuck” moment.

It ended happily, to a modified degree: initially angry, Dr. Socarides settled down, wrote his son a loving letter, and went right on believing that homosexuality was an illness. But family trumps some things.

I know all this because I got hooked on what is the 21^st century equivalent of Word is Out. Remember that? If not, here’s Wikipedia:

Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives is a 1977 documentary film featuring interviews with 26 gay men and women. It was directed by six people collectively known as the Mariposa Film Group. Peter Adair conceived and produced the film, and was one of the directors. The film premiered in November 1977 at the Castro Theater in San Francisco, and was released in 1978.

The interviews from the film were transcribed into a book of the same title, which was published in October 1978.

Well, that’s the official story. But I suspect that—more than the filmmakers will ever know—there are personal stories, stories that went something like this.

By the time I saw it, after it had premiered in the film festivals and been shown in art venues or wherever people saw such things, it would have been 1980, when PBS could finally muster the guts to risk a slash in public funding and air the documentary. So for days I had seen clips advertising the documentary, and I had set aside the hour to watch. My real worry was that my old TV—black and white with a 13-inch screen, and oh, it required two men to lift—would break down.

Did I have butterflies in my stomach and sweaty palms? A dry mouth? I may have, because even to watch the film, alone in my studio apartment in Madison, Wisconsin, felt radically subversive.

It was in the air, but it was never spoken. “He’s a fag,” people would whisper. “Don’t drop your soap in the shower,” people would snigger. “San Francisco” was code word for something that was so unthinkable that it couldn’t be named. It was worse than cancer.

Here’s how it was, since I—blogfully devoted to my Readers—have invested $2.51 to bring you the opening words of Consenting Adult, one of the earliest novels about a family’s coming to terms with a gay child:

She came to the end and stood as if tranced, without tears, nothing so easy as tears, stood motionless in the sensation of being smashed through every organ, through every nerve, every reasoning cell. Love for him, pity for his suffering, pride for his courage in telling her, horror at it, at the monstrous unendurable it— a savagery of feelings crushed her, feelings mutually exclusive yet gripping each other in some hot ferocity or amalgam. She read the letter again. Then only did she begin to cry, but not the ordinary crying, nor she the ordinary weeping woman; it was, rather, a roaring sobbing, of an animal gored. She heard her own sounds, and went to her bedroom door to close it, though there was no one in the apartment

Hobson, Laura Z. (2011-12-27). Consenting Adult (Kindle Locations 28-31). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Horror, monstruous, ferocity, gored, sobbing. Oh, sorry, overlooked “savagery….”

OK—Hobson may never have been accused of an excessively light touch, but she wasn’t too far off the mark, either. Because coming out meant that you had been doing laps around and through hell for months. Even to think ‘I might be gay,’ was unimaginably scary.

So yes, I probably had sweaty palms that night when I turned on the TV because that, in a way, was to invite in the possibility that yes, I might be gay. Because my lack of the famous, adolescent, raging-bull lust for girls had been dismissed as, “you’re just not ready yet…..” (Yeah? A 16-year old getting erections in Algebra, and I’m not ready?) Oh, and then there was, “You’re just waiting for the right girl to come along….” (Guys? I’ve seen short girls, tall girls, fat girls, skinny girls—in short, every sort of girl—and not one of these is the “right” girl?)

“The homosexual,” you see, was an abstraction—but seeing a guy telling the story of coming out to his father? I was in tears. So much so that I can tell you how it went:

Son: Dad, I gotta tell you something important.

Dad: OK, let me grab a cigarette…

Son: Grab the pack…

To watch the documentary was to invite lesbians and gay men into my apartment, look at them, size them up and—most importantly—size myself up. Would I look at them, be repulsed, turn off the television, and embrace my newly-discovered straight self?

Do I have to tell you?

Well, I was thinking about all this yesterday, as I came upon Socarides via a wonderful project, “I’m from Driftwood.” Hmm—and what was Driftwood?

A small town in Texas, and the hometown of the founder of the project, Nathan Manske. Manske was inspired by a sign held by Harvey Milk, reading “I’m from Woodmere, N.Y.” So Manske began to wonder—we are all from somewhere. What if we went on the road, and collected the coming-out stories of everybody, famous but mostly not, of people as they endured that most challenging moment? The fifty state tour was born!

In a way, it’s a bit like “It Gets Better,” about which I have always had problems. Why? Because too often it felt like “it gets better” was more about us—those of us who have made it to the other side—making ourselves feel better. We survived, we thrived, we are now on television, and rich, and famous, and oh—here’s my perfect life, and you can do it too!

Yeah?

I’m sixteen and have pimples and all my friends are women or fucked-up artist types, and my father knows everybody in town, and he just told me he won’t support the ERA because it was for homosexuals, and ALL HIS KIDS ARE NORMAL. So, look: I’m so happy for your perfect life, but you know what? It just makes me feel worse….

Somehow, I’m from Driftwood feels different. I might be wrong—I often am—but I know one thing.

The project should be much better known.

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.

Naïa Gets an Uncle

Contrary to the calumnies darting from the vicious tongues of asps and vipers, it was never about a slice of pizza.

Naïa, you see, the 12-year-old daughter of Lady and Nico, the owners of the café which I frequent (it’s sort of a stretch to say “where I work”), had offered me a piece of pizza, at the instigation—I later found out—of her mother. “Make sure Marc gets a piece,” said Lady, before tearing off a ten-dollar bill from the wad in her purse. Naïa, fortunately, is still a few steps away from adolescence, so rather than argue, pout, flare, or stalk away, she popped across the gift shop and into the café to offer me the pizza.

“You are now officially my niece,” I told her, on the way to the pizza. She was with Stephen, her tutor, and the two were busy cramming useless information in her head, so that she could take a test before forgetting it all. Remember that?

So I returned to writing what I was writing, and she returned to renting brain space to geography, or whatever The World and Its People is about. Then Lady arrived, and I told her I had adopted Naïa as my niece.

“Wonderful,” said Lady

“Not really,” I said. “I intend to be a completely cranky and querulous uncle. Very exigent. Oh, and she’ll have to take care of me in my declining years….”

So Lady went off to consult with Naïa about all that, and then came back with the news: I had just said what I did because of the offer of pizza.

“That is absolutely untrue,” I erupted. “Dammit, when are people going to stop assuming that random events are causal? I’ve been very seriously pondering adopting Naïa for some time now.”

At this point, Naïa was doing a spelling test—one of the words, by the way, was “serendipity” and that’s a word for a 12-year old?—so I decided to tackle it later, though I did wonder whether putative niecehood (well, computer, what’s YOUR suggestion? It’s bitch, bitch, bitch all day from you!) wasn’t more important than spelling.

I went back to considering the topic of family, since it’s been different, often, for gay people. More than most people, we’ve tended to form our own, informal families, especially in those days when coming out to parents and siblings was impossible, or very difficult.

It was a long time ago, and we’ve all gotten over it, but for some of us it’s happening still, and will never stop. But twenty-five years ago, the phone would ring, there would be silence when I answered, and then a click.

“Your mom called,” I would tell Raf. Eventually, he confronted her: “Mami, Marc knows perfectly well that it’s you…”

There were other things: Raf was barred from seeing his nephew, who was probably four or five at the time. And when we moved to Puerto Rico, I wasn’t welcome in the house.  And so, on one of those early Christmas Eves, I found myself alone in the house: Raf had gone home to his parents, and the other people living in the building were gone as well.

It was a particularly beautiful night, with a gentle fog, and the streets were deserted, hushed. Everybody, it seemed, had gone home to family; in a few hours time, everybody would rush back in to the old city, and the partying would start. But now, it was just me, alone in an empty house.

And then, far away, I heard music approaching, and realized that it was that loveliest of traditions—a group of neighbors gathering with guitars and güiros, walking the streets and singing the old-fashioned Puerto Rican carols, called villancicos or aguinaldos.

Let me explain, this was not the traditional parranda, or maybe, in fact, it was. Because the usual parranda tends to take place a 2 AM, when you are dead asleep, and your friends? Dead drunk!

They then gather outside your house and make enough noise—ostensibly called singing—to rouse you. They then shout “¡ASALTO!”—assault, which is almost literally true. You then have to start making the asopao—a rice and chicken stew, and very tasty—while your “guests” raid your liquor cabinet. The only good thing about it? You can retaliate the next night, when they’ll really be groggy.

But there was none of this about the group singing carols; it was before nine PM, the group was singing almost under their breath, and exchanging greetings with whatever passerby was on the street. Really, the carols seemed part of the fog, and the fog seemed part of a past: a gentle, sweet past that would disappear at any moment. It was spectral.

I stood by the window and listened. And felt, of course, anguishingly alone. I considered going out to join them, but couldn’t—I didn’t speak Spanish.

It feels disloyal even to remember this, much less write about it. Why? Well, I was playing my Bach suites yesterday in the café, next to Naïa; Lady and Craig joined us.

“You know, Naïa, I was utterly serious about being an uncle, which is definitely not good for you, since I’m generally wretched at the business. In fact, we should probably start right now….”

I then put on my crotchety English accent and begin the harangue:

“Naïa, fetch me my shawl. No, not THAT shawl, the other one! How many times do I have to tell you, I never use that shawl at home, only for the opera. And my tea, Naïa, where is my tea? You know that I always have tea with my shawl! Naïa, the tea is too hot. Now it’s too cold!”

Naïa, of course, is completely ignoring me, but that’s fine, because I know what to do about that.

“Naïa, are you ignoring me?”

“I think she is,” I tell her mother. “She completely doesn’t believe I’m serious in my avuncular (you knew that was coming, right?) intentions. Maybe what I should do is write about it, since this blog has an international readership, and people will want to know.”

“That would be good,” said Lady.

“Or we could have a pizza party,” I said.

So I played some Bach, and was just finishing up, when Ilia, Raf’s mother, came strolling in. Well, strolling isn’t quite the term, since both she and Quique, Raf’s father, are now using walkers. So let’s say they came walkering in….

“I can’t stay,” she told me, “because Quique doesn’t want to….”

Quique gives me the half-embrace that guys give each other in Puerto Rico and, surprisingly, sits down. I begin the G major suite and wonder when they will drift off.

They don’t.

So I finish the suite—that’s twenty minutes of Bach—and turn to Ilia.

“Wonderful,” she says, “why don’t you make a recording?”

Then I remember Naïa, still sitting next to me, still absorbed in her iPad.

“Do you know that you have a new granddaughter?” I ask Ilia.

“I had no idea,” she said.

So it was time to get Naïa’s attention, which is done by waving a hand in front of the iPad—the ear buds seem to be an essential part of Naïa’s anatomy.

“You really should meet your new grandparents,” I tell her, and Ilia responds in form.

“Ay, ¡qué linda!”

(For a boy, it’s “¡ay, que guapo!”)

My new niece smiles and waves at her grandmother and returns to the infinitely more interesting world of the iPad.

‘Family,’ I think, ‘gets more important as you get older. When you’re a kid, it’s commonplace and almost annoying. But at Ilia’s age? Wow….”

‘How long will we have them?’ I think. ‘Because it’s precious to have new people come into your life, like Naïa. But it’s ripping everybody apart, knowing that Ilia and Quique… Well, there will be a day…”

‘We’ve all moved on,’ I think. ‘Now I get in trouble if I skip going to family affairs. Can’t win, can you?’

Ah, but I have!

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!