The Gringo the Next Island Over

OK—so all the talk of baseball didn’t work….

Or maybe it was the bad Spanish, which admit it, had to have been learned within the last months. But that’s hardly likely, since James “Wally” Brewster, Jr. only spoke two sentences (the first being, “¡HOLA, mi nombre es Wally!”)

Right—let’s get to brass tacks. What’s pissing off folks in the Dominican Republic about Wally, the new ambassador for the United States? The fact that his spouse is a guy.

Brewster, according to his account, grew up in a little Texas town; he went into business there and eventually moved to Chicago, where he started in 2010 a company called SB&K. Along the way, he raised funds for Obama, which is a nice way to get to be an ambassador. In fact, The Daily Mail reports that he raised more than a million dollars for the 2012 presidential campaign.

And he’s been active in LGBT issues as well: he’s now serving on the Board of the Human Rights Campaign Fund.

So the reaction to Brewster? Well, let’s put it this way: over 60% of the country is Catholic, so what did the cardinal, the top dog over there, have to say? Well, he referred to Brewster as a maricón (faggot) and gay people as “social trash.”

And then there’s this:

"He has not considered the particularities of our people. The United States is trying to impose on us marriage between gays and lesbians as well as adoption by these couples," said Father Luis Rosario, director of youth ministries for the church.

Then thousands of evangelicals took to the streets, and organized a “black Monday,” urging people to put black ribbons on their cars to protest. But not to worry, because the groups came out with this statement:

Expresaron que aman a los homosexuales y a los drogadictos, pero no  su actuación. “Si hoy aceptamos esa ley que nos quieren imponer, luego tenemos que aceptar una para patentizar las drogas”, señalaron.

(They expressed that the love homosexuals and drug addicts, but not their behavior. “If we accept this law that they want to impose on us, later we’ll have to accept one that patents drugs,” they said.)

Though homosexuality is legal in the Dominican Republic, there is—as you can tell—a strong cultural bias against it. Worse, the situation seems to be getting worse, and not better. Here’s what the French paper Le Monde had to say about it:

“En Haití, la República Dominicana, Jamaica y otros países de la región, los ataques contra homosexuales y transexuales han aumentado en los últimos meses. La homofobia no es nueva en la Cuenca del Caribe”, señala el reportaje.

(“In Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and other countries in the region, the attacks against homosexuals and transsexuals have increased in the last months. Homophobia is not new in the Caribbean basin,” the report indicated.)

Brewster isn’t the first gay ambassador—there have been five or six others. He is, however, the first ambassador to be named to such a homophobic country.

Good luck to him!

Olympic Hypocrisy

Wow—wonderful what this blog can do! True, I had to keep harping about it, and I do apologize to any reader who may have gone a bit crazy, hearing my rants over and over. But admit it, dear Readers: Aren’t you glad we kept up the pressure? Because now we have it from a new-found friend, no less than Vladimir Putin himself, that the Winter Olympics in Sochi will be… OK, here’s The New York Times itself:

Speaking at a meeting with leaders of Russian winter sports federations, which was also attended by Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, Mr. Putin said Sochi would be fully tolerant. 

Oh, and the name of this article? Putin Says Sochi Welcomes Gays!

Guys?

Look, I have lived over half a century, and I’m hard pressed to think of a more blatantly false and outrageously self-serving statement. And memo to Putin? Gay people, generally speaking, are not fools. So if you think this statement gets you off the hook, think again.

The question, of course, is who is more turpid—sorry, computer, but I looked it up, and Nabokov used the word too—here: Putin and his heinous laws that criminalize even talking about homosexuality, or the Olympic Committee, which sat around and watched Putin enact these laws without raising a word of protest. Then, of course, things got hot, so the Olympic guys had to go and put pressure on the Russian president to make this ridiculous statement.

Well, this was not the only news about LGBT issues in the Times, today, because Frank Bruni had a story about Paul Singer, a billionaire Republican who gave a pot of money to Mitt Romney, but who is also giving money to the Human Rights Campaign. Why? Well, Singer among other things has a gay son—and a gay son-in-law. And he thinks support for gay rights is not incompatible with the Republican Party. Here’s what Bruni has to say:

In Singer’s view, gay rights are consistent with a Republican philosophy of individual liberty, and gay marriage is “an augmenter of social stability, family stability and stability in raising kids.” In other words, it’s conservative.

Nor is Singer the only Republican to join with the HRC—there’s also Daniel S. Loeb; here’s what he has to say:

As we witnessed in its successful campaign to advance marriage equality in the United States, HRC is a uniquely effective organization that achieves what it sets out to do.

Right—so what’s the campaign about? Well, the HRC has decided it’s time to act globally and support the organizations in other countries that are struggling to advance the causes of LGBT folk. Here’s what Singer has to say about the campaign:

“Every day around the world, LGBT individuals face arrest, imprisonment, torture and even execution just for being who they are,” said Paul Singer.

And guess what? The situation is getting worse around the world, just as it’s getting better in the United States. And why is that? Because we are exporting our bigotry around the world, as evangelical Christians have given up on the domestic market. So what have people like Scott Lively done? They’ve run down to Uganda and over to Russia to stir up hate and urge draconian laws.

Which makes it all the interesting what Bruni says:

It (the campaign) intends to name and shame American religious zealots who sponsor antigay campaigns abroad. So Republican money may wind up challenging a constituency within the party. (We’re most definitely not in Kansas anymore.)

Well, it’s an interesting world presenting itself today: Republicans supporting LGBT issues, and our new buddy in the Kremlin. Is it that I have the cynical blood of journalism coursing through my veins? Because I’m back to suggesting this….

Get going, Readers: download your print-ready image here at no cost, and order your label sheets (in an appropriate printing size) here! (Suggested brand; $6.68 per 100 labels is not bad!)

Our Kids on the Street

As I write this, there are four children playing in the Poetry Space of the gift shop next door. And guess what? The kids are loud, so periodically one of the parents has to come and give a directive—quiet down! That works for ten minutes, and then the crescendo begins. At some point, the other parent can abide it no longer, and will come down and reapply the directive. I, of course, am currently not attempting to squelch the noise, since these are not my kids. But I am observing the different parenting styles, and trying to assess the efficacy of each. My conclusion—both are pretty much as effective, which is to say…not very.

These kids are lucky—their parents are loving, concerned, educated. And there’s something else as well: these parents have known a lot of gay people, and if any of these kids is gay, the parent will barely blink an eye.

Now then—time for some facts:

One in every four LGBT kids who comes out to his or her parents ends up on the streets, either because she or he was kicked out, or because the child decided to leave.

The average age for kids to come out, nowadays, is fourteen. In the seventies, most people came out much later, when they were in college and relatively more stable.

Lastly, here is a paragraph from the Human Rights Campaign:

Youth homelessness in the United States is a national crisis in urban, suburban, and rural communities affecting nearly 2.8 million youth between the ages of 12 and 24. Furthermore, consistent research finds that gay and transgender youth are over-represented among homeless youth, comprising anywhere between 20 and 39 percent of the total homeless youth population even though they make up less than 10 percent of the overall youth population.

OK—my toy computer doesn’t have the calculator that my Mac does, but my feeble math skills suggest that we may have one million gay and lesbian kids on the streets. And while marriage equality and anti-bullying efforts are important—isn’t doing something for these kids important, too?

What are the problems? Well, the first is what to do with kids who are on the streets—are there beds in the shelters for them?

Answer—no. According to the clip below, called “A Day in our Shoes,” there are 3,800 homeless youth in New York alone, and 1,500 of them are LGBT. And how many beds are there for them? Two hundred.

Shelter is just one issue. A kid on the street is at major risk for drug and alcohol abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, prostitution, and being the victim of violent crime. That kid you see sleeping after “school” on the subway? That’s the only safe—relatively—place for him to sleep. He’ll be up at five minute intervals all night, checking to make sure he’s all right.

It may be there are treatment programs which will help a kid achieve the daunting task of being an adult: paying bills on time, going to the dentist, convincing the bank to let you open a checking account even though your only ID is a high school identification card. But even those programs “age kids out,” as one of the directors in the clip “Kicked Out” put it. So at age 21 you’re supposed to be on your own—but what happens when you fall at the disco and need to go to the hospital? Ask any parent—it doesn’t stop at age 21.

Which is why Caitlin Ryan’s work at the Family Acceptance Project is so exciting. She starts with a simple premise—virtually no parent wants his or her kid on the street. No matter how terrible the parent is, or how badly drunk or addicted he or she is—no parent wants that for their kid. So the trick is to find a way to get parents to accept their gay kids.

It makes intuitive sense—families do change. Mine did, and Raf’s as well. And as you can see in the second clip below—even very macho, Hispanic families can change. And as the clip on the Family Acceptance Project website shows—the Mormons can change as well. Perhaps especially so, since the family is of huge importance in the Mormon church.

Ryan has reached out to John Kerry, who in 2011 introduced the Reconnecting Youth to Prevent Homelessness Act. Here’s what the Human Rights Commission has to say about it:

The Reconnecting Youth to Prevent Homelessness Act requires that the Secretary of Health and Human Services establish a demonstration project to develop programs that are focused on improving family relationships and reducing homelessness for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth. These programs must include research-based behavioral interventions designed to decrease rejecting behaviors and increase supportive behaviors in families with LGBT youth and research-based assessment tools to help identify LGBT youth at risk for family conflict or ejection from their homes. Additionally, the Secretary must provide educational tools and resources to help families identify behaviors that put LGBT youth at risk as well as provide multimedia educational tools and resources that are focused on helping a diverse range of families understand how their behavior affects LGBT youth.

And now a confession—I know that this legislation was not approved in 2011, and I think it has been reintroduced, though as of June of this year it hadn’t been. But after Googling frantically for 15 minutes, I can’t find who reintroduced it or when.

Normally, this would upset me, but nowadays I have more perspective. Not being able to chase down a reference is annoying. Being fifteen, gay, and on the streets?

That’s major!