The Unmentionable Odour of Death

It was written nearly thirty years ago; it was controversial then, and it’s controversial now.

Or it may be that the author, Larry Kramer, has a peculiar talent for rubbing people the wrong way; in his book Faggots, he criticized the disco-loving, druggy, superficial lifestyle of the seventies and eighties. News flash—it was a period when some of us were having a lot of sex with a lot of people, not all of whom we knew.

So when Larry Kramer wrote The Normal Heart, in 1985, he had already pissed off a substantial portion of the gay community by making a quite unequivocal statement: gay men were going to have to stop having sex.

OK—let’s back up and revisit those days. For a generation now, AIDS has been a chronic and manageable disease for—you listening, here?—those people blessed to live in developed societies and blessed to have health insurance. But it really isn’t possible to imagine the sheer terror and fear that some of us lived with for the first decade of the epidemic.

Consider the times: Stonewall, yes, had happened a decade and a half earlier, in 1969, but having gay sex was illegal in many, many states and cities. In 1998, for example, a Texas sheriff arrested two gay men who were having sex in their bedroom—the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which at long last threw out the sodomy laws in 2003. And in how many states was sodomy still a crime? Ten.

But it was hardly that being gay—or acting on it—was illegal. Being gay was treated as either the darkest sin imaginable, or as the most horrifying consequence possible of bad parenting. It was shame, dishonor, a disgrace. Oh, and did I mention that if your parents ever, ever found out, it would crush them, ruin them, flail them for every minute of their—very likely—now shortened lives?

“You must never tell the parents, it would kill them,” wrote Eric, my eldest brother, when I wrote to tell him I was gay.

It has to be said, coming out is as much an internal as an external process. Which is to say that you have to weed out a number of prejudices, assumptions, habits, ways of thinking. We had come out to everyone, or so we thought, but had we shed all those years of crushing negativity?

The other problem? We were having a lot of sex in a lot of sleazy places—parks, bathrooms, the baths, and of course, the backrooms of bars. And a lot of us didn’t feel too good about it; there was a good deal of shame and guilt left in us, which came stinging back to us those mornings after those nights of drugs and orgies.

To be fair, there were relatively few outlets besides the bars and the baths: they were virtually the only outlets for gay men, besides the gay choruses. And to come out was to put a wall between you and the straight world—yes, you had straight friends, whom you saw and with whom you hung out before…

…you headed out to the bars.

Since it was denied us, we had decided that we didn’t want it: marriage, we argued, was a heterosexist, patriarchal system enforcing submission and subjugation on women (in heterosexual relationships) or on the more compliant party in a gay or lesbian relationship. So unbridled sex was part of being “liberated,” of fighting off the repressive, heterosexual stereotypes that we had decided we were above living.

“Hey, Jorge, when did you move to San Francisco?”

“1989,” says Jorge, taking a break from mopping the floor.

“Wow—right in the worst years of the epidemic,” I say, “so what was it like.”

“Terrible, horrible. You would see deadly ill, pale, gaunt, skeletal figures everywhere. They were everywhere in San Francisco, not hidden away, but everywhere. I remember seeing this handsome guy coming out of his house, and coming down the steps to get on to his motorcycle. And then I realized—he was carrying his partner on his back, so I stopped to help. And the partner was so weak that the healthy one feared that he couldn’t hold on, so he strapped his sick lover to him, and they rode off to the hospital together.”

People were dying agonizing deaths—and very often the people who were dying were cared for, if they were cared for at all, by someone who was also infected. Friends abandoned you; family abandoned you.

Not, of course, in all cases. But a lot of gay men ended up in New York or San Francisco for a very good reason—the climate in those cities being considerably more welcoming than, say, Macon, Georgia. Not a few parents were dealing with the discovery that their son was gay at the same time that they were hearing that he had a death sentence.

“The only treatment was AZT,” said Jorge—and getting that was a struggle: any nurse who had access to the drug in the clinics was besieged with requests to steal it.

Death was everywhere, in medieval proportions; skeletons walked the streets, and had to be carried up steps. The black marks of Kaposi’s sarcoma disfigured faces; it was routine to see the bones of the lower arms under the saggy skin of the victims.

The fear was of backlash. They hated us, the thinking went, they’re terrified of this disease. The Alex Joneses of the day were saying it outright—they (for me, we) should be quarantined, for the sake of everyone, especially the children.

Hysteria time—is it safe to eat with someone who has AIDS? What about going to the beach? What happens if a mosquito bites the guy lying next to me—and he has AIDS—and then the mosquito bites me? What if a kid—often a hemophiliac—starts to bleed, and my kid comes into contact with it?

Since nobody had any idea what was going on, nobody could give answers, and so the health “experts” were issuing vague reassurances that made the situation worse.

And they knew nothing because, guess what? Nobody was funding research, because—and it was hard in the general hysteria of the time not to be paranoid—it was after all a “gay” disease, so who cared? When the Legionnaires got sick in Philadelphia, or wherever it was, how much money did they spend? But a bunch of sick faggots? Huh—they’ll let us die with smiles on their faces!

Yes, for a time, it was very much “us versus them,” and it had to be, if anything was going to change. Reagan was dozing away in the White House, the FDA was perfectly happy with a testing process that took over a decade, the mayor of New York was an unmarried gentleman—Ed Koch—whom everybody thought…well, here’s Gay City News:

He was 88 years old and died without ever publicly acknowledging his homosexuality. And his inaction during the crucial early years of the AIDS pandemic –– which emerged in 1981 on his watch –– has never been forgiven by large numbers of gay men and others who lost so many loved ones and friends to the virus.

The article, by the way, is titled “Ed Koch: Twelve Years as Mayor, A Lifetime in the Closet.”

And certainly one of the men who never forgave Koch was Larry Kramer, who cofounded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and later Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). And Kramer was never one to worry about getting into someone’s face and screaming. Which, in fact, turned out to be the right thing to do, as well as necessary. In the clips below, you see people “dying” on Wall Street, or in the office of the FDA or the New York Commissioner of Health. For all his stridency, for all his arrogance, Kramer had a part to play.

And so in 1985, Kramer came out with his play The Normal Heart, which features a man quite intentionally resembling the author. Which means that for much of the play, it’s an extended rant against, on the one hand, a bureaucracy perfectly content to watch the eradication of a generation of gay men, and those gay men themselves, who won’t stop fucking. And after years of having various people hold the film rights to the play, it’s finally been made into a movie, and will show on May 25 on HBO.

Not everyone is happy, of course. One critic, Charles O’Malley, notes that Kramer’s play is mawkish, sentimentalizing what was a decade long horror scene. And it’s all about upper-class gay men—no women, no people of color. And the message is anti-sexual and self-hating.

O’Malley fears that seeing this film will somehow assuage the liberal hearts of some viewers—that was then, this is now; O’Malley quotes Manohla Dargis: “it’s about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation.”

Yes or no? I won’t know until I see the film, since it’s been years since I’ve seen the play. But I have gone to reread September 1, 1939—the W. H. Auden poem from which Kramer took the title, “The Normal Heart.” And came across this fragment, which only hints at how terrible those days really were….

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

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!

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?

A middling Enemy

Well, I voted “no,” on the general belief that it has to stop somewhere—and for once I was on the winning side. But then I had to wonder—should the Satanic Temple perform a ritual on Fred Phelps ’s gave, in order to turn him into a gay man in the afterlife? Here’s Lucien Greaves on his promised Pink Mass:

The Satanic Temple exercised its own right to offensive Free Speech in our performance of the Pink Mass at Fred Phelps’s mother’s grave this past summer. After having two same-sex couples (one male, one female) engage in homoerotic activity at the gravesite, we declared Fred Phelps’s mother a post-mortem homosexual conversion. At the time, I predicted that Fred hadn’t too much longer till he would pass, and I stated –- in a direct tweet to the WBC -– that I would be presiding over Fred’s own Pink Mass before too long. As I have made a promise to a dying man, I fully intend to do my very best to see it through, and the pomp and circumstance of this Pink Mass will surely far, far exceed that of the original event in Meridian, Mississippi.

I would have said “no” to this one, too, before I saw the video clip below of documentary filmmaker Michael Moore confronting Phelps. Because it’s one thing to read about the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) and their odious “God hates fags” protests—it’s another thing to see and hear it. There, the emotion is visceral—the loathing and fear are as palpable as a slap in the gut.

As I contemplate the death of Phelps, I wonder if any good came out of Phelps’s life. He was, in fact, an admirable enemy to have—virtually impossible to like, completely absurd, outrageous. How much different than some of our other enemies!

There was Anita Bryant, for starters, who admittedly was no intellectual goliath, but who certainly had that Southern charm, as well as a megawatt smile. “I don’t hate homosexuals,” she said, or words to that effect, “I love them enough to tell them the truth….”

And we all knew what that was….

For all her wholesomeness, for all the cloy she exuded, the message was pretty bitter. At issue was Dade County, Florida, which in 1977 had approved a resolution that—grab ahold hard onto your seats, friends—prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation. So what did Bryant do? She started a campaign called Save our Children, and went around the country whipping up the crowds. Want a sample of the intellectual fiber of the debate? Consider these statements, from the Wiikipedia article linked with her name, above:

"As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children" and "If gays are granted rights, next we'll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail biters."

Bryant’s life went downhill rapidly—she divorced her husband and manager, which alienated her from her hardcore religious base. As well, she declared bankruptcy a couple of times, and her career languished.

Bryant was one thing—Falwell, another. Remember this one, immediately following the September 11^th attacks?

"Throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools," he said. "The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad.

"[T]he pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America," Falwell continued, "I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'"

"Well, I totally concur," responded Robertson.

Then the predictable happened:

Angel Watts, a spokeswoman for Robertson's Christian Broadcast Network, said Robertson "of course" did not blame gays or atheists for the attacks.

Right—mopping up after the damage has been done.

Then there was the pope, or the Pope Emeritus, who came out and let us know that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered” and therefore homosexuality could never be moral. 

All of this leads us very comfortingly to the smarmiest lie of all—that these people who condemn us are condemning the sin, not the sinner. Yeah? And if I said that “Christian acts are intrinsically disordered?” Would anyone believe that I didn’t have a little grudge, a little axe to grind?

For all his extremism, Phelps may have done considerably less damage than more mainstream, less visibly crazy people. Quick—who is the president of the Mormon Church, which threw more money into California’s Proposition 8 than Phelps and the Westboro Church could ever dream of?

Will Phelps be missed?

Of course not…

Was he our worst enemy?

Absolutely not.

The Vivid Air

He’s a gay guy from perhaps the most homophobic country in the world—Jamaica—and he won an award named after the slain activist from a country that could also be the most homophobic country in the world—Uganda.

Well, Jamaica is in the news lately, since a transgendered teen, Dwayne Jones, was shot, stabbed, beaten and then run over by a car last weekend. Right—that’s pretty homophobic. But what’s even worse is that Jones’ father had driven him from the family home, and joined the group of neighbors who drove him from the neighborhood.

So he was living, this 16-year old kid, with three others in a derelict house in Montego Bay. He went to a party, was dancing, and someone noticed his feet, which were abnormally large for a woman’s. He tried to run; he didn’t get away.

What’s behind the persecution? Well, there’s a law dating from 150 years back banning sodomy. There was a tradition in colonial times of sodomizing black slaves as a form of punishment. There are the usual right-wing fundamentalists who have whipped up the masses in places like Uganda—remember Scott Lively? But Jamaica has found a native ingredient to toss into the usual stew—and that’s hate-mongering reggae singers.

Things are so bad for gay people in Jamaica that a lot of them are fleeing—or trying to. That’s what Maurice Tomlinson did when a local newspaper outed him; he immediately began receiving death threats. So he escaped to Canada, where he married his soul mate, Tom Decker.

“In Canada I have a husband, in Jamaica I have a good friend,” he said recently, when he also revealed that he’s had three death threats since the local Jamaican press published the news. So he no longer goes to bars or even parties—he’s under a modified, self-imposed house arrest.

The good news is that he won in 2012 the David Kato Vision and Voice Award. And that has given him, he says, a place at the table; with that, and the support of his organization…well, let him tell the story:

I was able to be a part of the first ever legal challenge to the Jamaican anti-sodomy law before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, successfully challenged Coca-Cola for their support of homophobic murder musicians in Jamaica, launched a constitutional claim against Jamaican television stations for their refusal to air a tolerance-themed ad in which I appear, confronted the government of Trinidad about its atrocious immigration law that bans the entry of marginalized groups such as the disabled, homosexuals and sex workers, and also traveled the world to share with other LGBT advocacy groups the hard-won skills I developed as an activist. It was also AIDS-Free World that nominated me for the David Kato Vision and Voice award. I simply could not have achieved my advocacy successes without them by my side. So I publicly thank AIDS-Free World and hope my successor has an equally supportive organization or group to call 'home.'

So who, you might ask, is David Kato?

Kato was the first openly gay Ugandan, a teacher, a man who had lived for six years in South Africa, which was more liberal. Returning to Uganda, Kato made the decision to come out, did so at a press conference, and got jailed for a week because of it. This, however, didn’t stop him—he went on to become one of the founding members of SMUG—Sexual Minorities Uganda. In 2010, he gave up teaching, and worked full time as an activist.

But the year before, he had attended a UN human rights conference. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

According to a series of confidential cables written by a Kampala-based United States diplomat and later released by WikiLeaks, Kato spoke during a November 2009 United Nations-funded consultative conference on human rights. During the conference, Kato spoke on the issue of LGBT rights and the anti-LGBT atmosphere in the country, but members of the Uganda Human Rights Commission "openly joked and snickered" during the speech, and a rumor circulated that David Bahati MP, the leading proponent of the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill, had ordered the Inspector General of Police to arrest Kato, causing Kato and other attending members of SMUG to leave the conference immediately after he finished the speech. Bahati then made a "tirade against homosexuality" to the conference, resulting in massive applause and Martin Ssempa, an Evangelical Christian cleric, pounding his fist on the table in agreement.[7]

And then, a local newspaper published his name and address—as they did of a hundred other persons—in an inflammatory campaign to out gay people. (How inflammatory? If memory serves, one of the banners read, “HANG THEM!)

Kato took the newspaper to court—he won, and got a $600 settlement.

He never got to enjoy that 600 bucks; he was murdered shortly afterwards. But even after death, the insults continued. Back to Wikipedia for a description of the event:

Kato's funeral was held on January 28, 2011, in Nakawala. Present at the funeral were family, friends and co-activists, many of whom wore t-shirts bearing his photo in front, the Portuguese "la [sic] luta continua" in the back and having rainbow flag colors inscribed onto the sleeves.[19] However, the Christian preacher at the funeral preached against the gays and lesbians present, making comparisons to Sodom and Gomorrah, before the activists ran to the pulpit and grabbed the microphone from him, forcing him to retreat from the pulpit to Kato's father's house. An unidentified female activist angrily exclaimed "Who are you to judge others?" and villagers sided with the preacher as scuffles broke out during the proceedings. Villagers refused to bury Kato at his burial place; the task was then undertaken by his friends and co-workers, most of whom were gay.[20] In place of the preacher who left the scene after the fighting, excommunicated Anglican Church of Uganda bishop Christopher Ssenyonjo officiated Kato's burial in the presence of friends and cameras.

Right—that’s one you’d remember!

And who, by the way, is excommunicated Bishop Christopher Ssenyonjo, and why is he excommunicated?

Well, he’s a theologian who studied at Union Theological Seminary and was ordained at St. John the Divine. He’s an LGBT activist who got into a scrap with the archbishop, who turned around and excommunicated him.

 Homosexuality is illegal in more than 70 countries, but that’s the least of the problem. What’s truly scary is that there are places in the world—Russia, Jamaica, Uganda—where LGBT people live very realistically in fear for their lives. And there are people like David Kato and Maurice Tomlinson who—against all odds, despite the churning stomachs, the sweaty palms, the dry mouths—find the courage to stand up, speak out, tell the truth to power.

Women and men who leave the vivid air, as the poet said, signed with their honor.

Paradoxical Reaction

COURT STRIKES DOWN U.S. MARRIAGE ACT

5-4 Ruling Is a Landmark Victory for Gay Rights

‘DOMA’s principal effect is to identify and make unequal a subset of state-sanctioned marriages.’ — JUSTICE ANTHONY M. KENNEDY

I’m having a paradoxical reaction.

I should be jubilant—the Supreme Court of the United States of America has just struck down the odious Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and has ruled that the opponents of same-sex marriage in California did not have standing to sue. That, presumably, clears the way for marriage equality in California. So now it’s 13 down, 37 to go.

I should be jubilant; I’m not.

I’m pissed.

I’m pissed that four out of the nine justices are so fucking behind the times that they cannot see an elemental principle here. I’m pissed that we have to celebrate this damn victory at all. I’m pissed that there ever WAS a fucking DOMA and that we had to spend all of our time and energy and money to defeat it.

You know, I’m pissed at the amount of time and energy I have had to devote in my life to come out, to face rejection (most of it imagined, very little of it real), to deal with my own internalized homophobia, to learn how to speak out.

“You’ve had the hardest struggle,” said Eric, the week my mother died. We were talking about our lives, our three lives (my other brother included).

Damn right I did, Eric. We all flocked to your two weddings, you didn’t have the grace to congratulate me, even acknowledge mine. I got married in a city clerk’s office, and it was just Raf and I. For very good reasons, Franny and John and Jeanne weren’t there. But I was happy, in a way, that it was just the two of us. Because that’s the way it had been for so many years.

Until you live it, there’s no way to understand the insidious pressure against a gay marriage. A very nice woman has invited me to attend a party at a restaurant celebrating the 75^th birthday of her husband, whom I know, but whom Raf does not. Well, it was a quandary—I really couldn’t call her up and say, “hey, can Raf come?” I couldn’t call her and say, “I don’t go places without my husband.” So should I go, or should I invent an excuse?

I decided to go, but not before realizing that my parents would

1.     never have been in the situation

2.     never have chosen for one person to go, the other to stay home

Consider—would I have invited the woman to a dinner on Saturday night, and not invited as well her husband? Don’t think so—I would have sucked it up and paid for the extra plate or not invited her at all.

“How long have you been together,” asked a guy recently, and why did I think there was something smug, condescending about the question? Am I really that prickly?

So why wasn’t I surprised when his jaw dropped on hearing that it’s about thirty years now? He was expecting, what—two?

I made a decision years ago—I was damned if I was going to be a victim. I hate people who whine and bemoan their fate and complain. I have had incredible luck—I’m male and white and middle class. I had tremendous parents. I’ve had more luck in life than most people, and I have no right to complain.

Maybe it was this that did it to me:

“In the majority’s telling, this story is black-and-white: Hate your neighbor or come along with us,” Justice Scalia wrote in his dissent. “The truth is more complicated.”

Yeah? This is a slap in the face on two levels. We are accused of being simplistic, unable to see the more complicated truth that Justice—sorry, I’m demoting you now—justice Scalia (that cap by convention only) can see. And we are accused of saying that those justices who don’t go along with us are hateful.

You know, I think some things are pretty simple. Great, DOMA is dead, but will I get Raf’s social security, or he mine? Not unless we move to a state where my marriage is recognized. So we're going to have years of more struggle, when we should be doing other things, like helping the 2.8 million LGBT kids get off the streets.

And no, Scalia, I don’t think you hate me. You don’t know me, and guess what? If you did, you’d like me. If you spent a month in my home, you would have voted the other way.

Or maybe not, who knows?

“And so you are one of those rare men who approve of the education of women,” said a don to Lord Peter Wimsey, in one of Dorothy L. Sayer’s novels.

“You should not permit me the right to approve or not,” he returned.

Exactly—and now I get it. That’s why I’m pissed. There’s no particular joy in this—not for me, not now. I’m back fighting as I have for so many damn years a bunch of people who have the power to affect my and my husband’s lives in significant ways. What we have had to fight and struggle for they take for granted. OK—I’ll be happy later on.

Right now?

I’m pissed.

2.8 Million Kids

We’d like to think it’s easier, now, but I think it’s not. When I was a teenager, gay was nowhere; it was un-talked about, it was taboo, it surfaced maybe once every two years in an article in Time. You’d see the pictures of the backs of men lurking in dark corners of smoky bars, in the shadows of abandoned warehouses, waiting, watching. Short of vampires, nobody, apparently, got less sun than we did.

So I could hide. I wasn’t too visibly gay, I was a musician—which meant that I was instantly weird anyway—and I was tall. It was easy for me. Here was my strategy: I pushed away dealing with being gay until I was older, in college, when I was better equipped to deal with it. Even so, it’s certainly one of the five hardest things I’ve done in my life.

Now, gay is everywhere. Which means that it’s on even adolescent’s radar screen. Which also means that the first hint that a kid is gay brings on condemnation, bullying, fear of rejection.

Which is often justified—the fear, I mean, not the rejection. Because while all of us are fighting for marriage equality, an issue of equal or even greater weight is going unaddressed.

There are 2.8 million gay kids homeless on the streets. Up to 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQ. Think about it—unless 2 out of five of all of the people you know are gay, that 40% represents an enormous skew.

And why are they on the streets? Take a look at the graphic below.

One study published in the Journal Pediatrics reports that half of LGBT kids experience rejection in some form from their parents. Granted, the study was from 1987—but is the situation better or worse, now? (Remafedi, Gary. (1987). "Male Homosexuality: The Adolescent's Perspective." Pediatrics, Issue 79. pp. 326-337.)

Once kids are on the street, what happens to them? You know perfectly well—the parent’s worst nightmare. Prostitution, drug addiction, HIV and AIDS, the litany of horrors that keep parents awake at night.

There aren’t enough shelters, and those that exist have age limits. So it’s a race; how fast can you get the kid ready for an independent life? This is a kid who needs to graduate from school, learn adult skills like driving and paying your bills, learn how to cook and negotiate the health care system when sick. That’s hard enough when you have a home and loving parents.

Sadly, most parents are loving parents—one researcher went off and talked to the parents of kids who had either been kicked out or had fled the house. Only about 2% maintained their stance of rejection, especially after hearing the statistics and descriptions of LGBT youth in the streets. They were loving, they were anguished, they were confused.

There are programs, there are people trying to help. Caitlin Ryan and Rafael Diaz started the Family Acceptance Project; here’s what they say:

The project is designed to: 1) study parents’, families' and caregivers’ reactions and adjustment to an adolescent's coming out and LGBT identity; 2) develop training and assessment materials for health, mental health, and school-based providers, child welfare, juvenile justice, family service workers and community service providers on working with LGBT youth and families; 3) develop resources to strengthen families to support LGBT children and adolescents; and 4) develop a new model of family-related care to improve health and mental health outcomes for LGBT adolescents. Findings will be used to inform policy and practice and to change the way that systems of care address the needs of LGBT adolescents.

And Ryan’s done more; she got ahold of John Kerry, and together they forged the Reconnecting Youth to Prevent Homelessness Act. Here’s the description:

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.

OK—let’s strip it of jargon. We gotta figure out which kids are at risk, what stuff works to get parents to start accepting, not rejecting, and then we gotta get the tools and resources out there.

And I think that we gay people who have made it through to the other side, who have spent some time navigating the land-mined landscape of fear, rejection, self-loathing, loneliness, despair and defeat—we’ve got to go back there, cross over again, and start bringing some kids with us.

Over to the other side.