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.

Conversion Therapy Minus One

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When Religion Gets it Right

Alan Chambers said he was sorry in a lengthy apology; here’s part of what he said.

Please know that I am deeply sorry. I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced. I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change. I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents. I am sorry that there were times I didn’t stand up to people publicly “on my side” who called you names like sodomite—or worse. I am sorry that I, knowing some of you so well, failed to share publicly that the gay and lesbian people I know were every bit as capable of being amazing parents as the straight people that I know. I am sorry that when I celebrated a person coming to Christ and surrendering their sexuality to Him that I callously celebrated the end of relationships that broke your heart. I am sorry that I have communicated that you and your families are less than me and mine. 

Chambers was head of the largest “ex-gay” group, Exodus International, which promulgated the theory that gay people could change their sexual orientation through a deep personal relationship with God. That, coupled with “reparative therapy” would be enough. And if didn’t work? You weren’t trying hard enough, or the demon was too strongly attached to your soul.

To call it “reparative therapy,” however, is to legitimize barbarity.

So Chambers has apologized, and gone further: he has shut Exodus International down. And that leads to the question: how to forgive?

“Sorry is the cheapest coin in the vocabulary,” said a character in one of my favorite books, and I knew immediately what she meant. The amount of damage that the ex-gay movement has done is enormous; people exposed to reparative therapy are eight times more likely to attempt suicide; six times more likely to be severely depressed; three times more likely to use illegal drugs.

So sorry is not enough. What has to be done?

Two things.

I heard a TED talk recently by a South African who discussed what happened after apartheid. How was the nation to heal? How do you get over wounds like that?

The solution was a nation-wide series of reconciliation meetings, where blacks and whites, abusers and abused, came together, shared their stories and pain, listened to each other. Chambers started that process three months ago, when he sat with the people he had harmed in a church basement in Los Angeles. The event was filmed, and will be aired tonight on Lisa Ling’s “Our Americas.”

The question in my mind is whether that’s enough. For many, many years I refused to go into a church—making one exception only for St. John the Divine in New York City. Now, after years of movement, effort, and work by the Episcopalian Church, I could enter their places of worship. But I can’t think of any other church I could say that about.

Nor was I particularly harmed by the church—my parents were only nominally religious, I never took the thing seriously enough to care what they taught about homosexuality. But I had many friends who did, and who suffered gravely at the hands of organized religion. And if coming out was one of the five hardest things I’ve done in my life, I place some of the blame on the church. So yeah, I was affected; we all were.

So Chambers, you’re gonna have to do much more. You’re going to have to apologize, decry reparative therapy, travel the country giving speeches welcoming LGBT people into your church, stand up for marriage equality, start organizations, raise money for victims—in short, do a lot of actions that tell gay people, yeah, you’ve changed. We can trust you.

That was number one.

Number two?

There are people in religion who get it, and whom we should support. On of them is an Episcopalian priest, the Reverend Albert Ogle. Gay himself, he spent a lot of time advocating for marriage equality in California, where he lives, when the thought struck him: all the work he was doing in a developed country was simply making it more difficult for people in undeveloped countries.

There are 76 countries where homosexuality is still a crime. And increasingly, those countries are becoming more repressive, not less so. Why? Ogle likens it to big tobacco: as the market declines in the developing world, businesses look to new markets.

Remember the family, the super-secret organization that organizes the National Prayer Breakfast? Remember Scott Lively, the guy who went down to Uganda and spoke to members of parliament, giving them the news that the Nazi and Rwanda genocides were caused by gay people?

In addition, there’s been a flood of money given to religious groups under George W. Bush’s “faith based initiative” program.

So Ogle makes the point—is this simply a stunt, shutting down Exodus International? There’s still Exodus Global, and that’s where the real work is going on.

Ogle has set up a foundation, the St. Paul’s Foundation for International Reconciliation; here’s what he has to say:

 The Foundation was created in 2010 as an IRS 501 (c) 3 non-profit corporation and is a registered California charity.

Our focus has been on the intersection of human rights, health, education and faith, by providing resources for emerging grass roots organizations and leaders in the Global South. Local organizations are given assistance to create innovative HIV education and prevention programs, women’s development and self employment programs and providing training and education projects to build sustainable communities. Educational programs in Europe and North America seek partner congregations, foundations and donors to provide funds, technical assistance and advocacy, so that marginalized groups can be included more deliberately in their own larger communities.

In addition to the foundation, Ogle has created a website, 76crimes.org, which focuses attention on repressive countries around the world. I didn’t know that Jamaica—two islands away—is scheduled to have a mass protest against repealing the anti-buggery law on Sunday, and that the event was organized by the island’s churches.

So yes, we have to keep up the fight. And yes, we have to reach out and help the millions of people who have it worse.

From Aversion to Conversion

For those of you who don’t know, the cause of LGBT has come along way in recent years. In nine states plus Washington DC, folks who can wear each other’s clothes (barring differences in size, of course) can marry. That is, I think, big news.

Some of us, however, have been content to stay behind. In fact, burrow just a bit deeper into the past. No, let’s be honest. There are folks who are so intensely threatened by gay people that they would do anything up to a public stoning to be rid of us.

In the 1970’s, when I first began to deal with being gay (I had known since childhood) a crucial event had just taken place. Drag queens in a bar in New York got raided. Did they run? Nope—they stayed and fought.

Stonewall—the first glimmer of light into what was hitherto an utterly dark picture.

So I didn’t do what I would have done a decade earlier. I didn’t find a shrink, pay him or her 100 bucks an hour, and embark on the question of what my smothering mother Franny (many good qualities she had, that mother of mine, but smothering? Nah!) or my distant father (closer to the mark!) had done.

I went to the library and read.

Any book published in the previous five years had a message—it’s OK, you’re OK, hang on. Anything older than ten years was completely the opposite—you’re sick, seek help.

So I came out, dragging a lot of other people out as well. No, not other gay people, but other people who came to understand—being gay was no big deal.

On the day of my mother’s memorial service, I found myself at a table with the wife of my cousin, who was busily chatting with Raf. They were getting along like a house afire—virtually calling each other sister!—talking gardening, recipes, fashion. Having a wonderful time!

The same woman who homeschooled her children to keep the filth of evolution out of their innocent ears. Whose daughter had once written in the Christmas letter, “Mom is having some health issues but she and the Lord are resolving them.”

One felt a bit sorry for the Lord.

So we’re all in a better place, right? Thirty years ago, I would say to Raf, “hey, your Mom called today….”

“She say anything this time?”

“Nope, complete silence again….”

She would call every half hour, not say a word, and then, when Raf picked up, would speak.

“Mami, Marc said you called,” said Raf one day, tired of it all….

Right. Last week I cashed the birthday check she had written out and given me, with many kisses and endearments.

Well, I’m sorry to report that the progress has been less than 100% pervasive. And a federal judge in the state of California has upheld temporary injunction on a ban on conversion therapy.

Conversion therapy?

Yes, it’s still going on, still practiced, and no—nobody respectable believes in it. Here’s a choice description of the therapeutic methods, drawn from a lawsuit in November in New Jersey.

The therapy techniques described in that lawsuit included having participants strip naked in group sessions, cuddling and intimate holding of others of the same sex, violently beating an effigy of their mothers with a tennis racket, visiting bath houses "in order to be nude with father figures," and being "subjected to ridicule as 'faggots' and 'homos' in mock locker room scenarios."

It’s almost impossible to know which is greater—the ridiculousness of the techniques, or the sadness of men who would willingly consent to them, so horrified are they of their sexuality.

But wait—it’s not people willingly choosing to undergo this “therapy.”

The California ban applies only to minors under the age of eighteen.

Kids.

Dragged to the camp or the counselor’s office by their parents.

Here’s the judge’s reasoning:

U.S. District Judge William Shubb ruled Monday that the ban Gov. Jerry Brown signed earlier this year could offend the First Amendment rights of therapists to express their opinions about homosexuality.

And here’s mine:

The guy who cuts my hair has a license. The person who sprays perfume on ladies in Macy’s has a license. The person who drives me in his taxi has a license. When in God’s name are we gonna get rid of quacks who are messing around with the most vital thing any of us possess—the mind? 

Fifty years ago, it was aversion therapy—people looking at homoerotic images and receiving electrical shocks in the nether regions. Or being given emetics, so as to associate looking at men with puking.

It’s as wrong as it is vicious. Don’t believe me? Here’s the big boy himself, Sigmund Freud, on the subject:

"I gather from your letter that your son is a homosexual...it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. By asking me if I can help [your son], you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place. The answer is, in a general way we cannot promise to achieve it. In a certain number of cases we succeed in developing the blighted germs of heterosexual tendencies, which are present in every homosexual; in the majority of cases it is no more possible. It is a question of the quality and the age of the individual. The result of treatment cannot be predicted."