A Hotbed of Homosexuals

Note: this post was originally to be published over a month ago; for technical reasons, Mr. Fernández and I are not joining the suit. Wish we were! 
_________________

It was a message I found a little screwy, until I went onto a Facebook page entitled “Boicot contra Pedro Julio Serrano por sus comentarios de odio hacia cristianos;” the film-equivalent of the page would be that scene in The Shining when Jack Nicholson….

…you remember it, right?

The message we were receiving, last night, was that we were being brave, incredibly brave, for standing up and demanding our rights and refusing to be second-class citizens. What I was thinking, however, was what an incredibly boring group of people we were.

Confession—I have so often wished I had the life that some fundamentalist Christians think I have. Because, wow—what fun that could be: going from the orgy to the ecstasy-fueled rave to the drug-frenzied satanic rituals with the inverted crosses and the squealing newborn about to be sacrificed on the altar! Whee!

Instead it’s:

Marc: Hey, have you seen the garlic press?

Raf: Many times!

Marc: Very funny—now where the hell is that press?

Raf: How should I know? You washed it.

Marc: Dammit, do you want to eat or not?

All right—this is a rather low example of domestic life, but that’s the point. And so I found myself looking, last night, at the six gay and lesbian couples who had assembled in the law offices of LGBT activist Ada Conde and thinking how ordinary we all were: nobody was in drag, the whips and chains had decently been left at home, and there wasn’t a strand of purple hair. It was as lurid as a Tupperware party.

Not that there weren’t some serious people: two lawyers from Lambda Legal had flown in from New York, and Lambda Legal, about whom I’ve read for years, is major. Here’s what their website says:

With the generous support of thousands of friends around the country, what began in 1973 as a couple of volunteers working out of a spare room in a supporter’s apartment has now grown to an expert staff of more than 80 in five offices around the country—New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago and Los Angeles. 

What didn’t I know? Well, the organization’s bylaws were borrowed from the Puerto Rico Legal Defense and Education Fund. Nor did I know—though I may have forgotten it—that the organization had to fight for its very existence. Here’s the site again:

A panel of New York judges turned down our application to be a nonprofit organization because, in their view, our mission was "neither benevolent nor charitable." With pro bono help, Thom appealed to New York’s highest court, which finally allowed Lambda Legal to exist as a nonprofit organization.

Since then, it’s easier to list what they haven’t done than what they have, since short of bringing down DOMA and Proposition 8, they’ve done it all.   

In addition to the two lawyers from Lambda, we were joined by a constitutional lawyer from the University of Puerto Rico School of Law. Then, two more lawyers came in, from the staff of the president of the senate, Eduardo Bhatia. ‘It’s come at last,’ I thought, ‘I finally have a legal team….’

We were there to join the lawsuit brought by Conde to force the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico to recognize her marriage to her wife. And by doing so, we would become the first state / territory in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Why? Because for reasons I’ve never understood, Puerto Rico belongs to the First Circuit, which lives in Boston and comprises the New England states, all of which have sensibly adopted same-sex marriage. So it’s up to Puerto Rico to carry the torch.

And Puerto Rico, as Pedro Julio reminded us, has every reason to be proud: we are by no means backward in legislation regarding employment and hate crimes, and most of the work has been done by volunteers who have gotten out there and shouted.

And Pedro Julio should know, since he’s the founder, in Puerto Rico, of Puerto Rico para tod@s and the communications manager for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, in New York City. So Pedro Julio has a foot in both places; this weekend, he’s on the island.

“What was that thing about the death threat,” I asked Raf after the meeting. I remembered vaguely that somebody had tweeted a death threat to Pedro Julio, and that they had found the guy. But whatever happened to the guy?

Thanks to Google, I can tell you: Pedro Julio had intended to go to the march celebrating the Día Internacional contra la Homofobia y Transfobia, when some guy—whose name I know, but why give it?—tweeted that Pedro Julio could end up like some guys had in the Boston Marathon. The FBI found the guy, he was tried in federal court and sentenced to three years in prison, three years probation, and three years of being Twitterless.

In fact, Pedro Julio had warned the public, in January of last year, that he had been receiving more death threats:

“Durante mis más de 15 años de activismo, he recibido innumerables amenazas de muerte, pero nunca en la cantidad y la hostilidad de los últimos días".

(“In over 15 years of activism, I have received innumerable death threats, but never in the quantity and level of hostility as in recent days.”)

‘There are levels of “out,”’ I thought, ‘which is funny, since I thought I was pretty—sorry about this—far out. But I’m a piker next to Pedro Julio or Ada….’

And one of the things about being out is that it gets normal after a while. A man I know was once asked by his new boss, “and what’s your wife’s name?” The boss was trying to prep for the Christmas party.

“John,” said my friend, who is also named John.

“That makes it easy,” said the boss.

This is the stuff we do every day, until it becomes no big deal. So it’s easy to forget how very, very important, as well as difficult, being out can be.

“I think I was put on this earth to fight this fight,” said Yolanda, meaning the fight of the night: getting Puerto Rico to recognize same-sex marriage. The whole room inhaled.

“She’s been in tears four times this evening,” remarked Ada, “and now, it’s five.”

The night had started being somewhat routine: a meeting to go to, some people to meet, then bus back home and hit the sack. But it changed with Yolanda’s remark.

‘It is a big deal,’ I thought. ‘And there’s a reason why we drive the fundamentalists nuts, why Pedro Julio has two pages boycotting him on Facebook: we are a threat. What we’re proposing is fundamental, too. There is nothing more fundamental than the right to declare who your husband or wife will be, and have that decision respected by the state.’

I looked around the room and began to wonder—how much extra struggle had it taken each of us, and each couple, to realize that she or he was gay, to embrace it, to announce it to family and friends, to bosses and—now—to the public at large?

In the week of my mother’s death, I was sitting on a miraculously beautiful spring twilight talking with my brother John.

“You’ve had it so much harder than either Eric or I did,” he said. He meant coming out, struggling with the inner-demon of the cello, facing down my father over my being gay, moving to a foreign-in-a-domestic-sense land, learning a new language, being jobless, losing my mind, and providing the way out for my mother, when she wanted to die. So I thought about all that.

“You may be right,” I told him.

But it was also worth it….

Notes from a blubbering blogger

It took me a while, but I got it in the end. I have spent an hour quietly crying in a—thank god—mostly empty café.

It was seeing one of the defendants in the Proposition 8 case choke up, put his hand on his husband’s shoulder and say, through tears, “will you please marry me?”

I cry at everything—show me a picture of you daughter’s kindergarten graduation: I’ll cry. A picture of a boy scout helping an old lady across the street? I’ll weep. Hell, in those days when I was busy worrying about my aged mother, the very picture of an old lady would set off sobs.

So I was puzzled by my initial reaction, which—as I told Johnny, my brother—was to kill Antonin Scalia.

“You could take out the other four as well, “ he said.

What happened?

We all came out, or most of us; for most of us, love triumphed. It took some parents a long time, but they got it. It took some gay people a long time, too. But the realization of what life in the closet was like led many of us to say, “fuck it, I’m not hiding it.”

It was a message you didn’t want to give yourself. “I’m not ashamed of myself,” people in the closet would say, “but I’m just not a political person….”

Here’s another….

“It would kill my parents. They’re very religious, very conservative, very….”

Every time you went home, you went home wondering—would this be the time you’d finally have the balls to be honest with your parents? I mean look, you’re in your thirties, you have never brought a girl home, you didn’t date in high school. I mean, do I have to draw you a map?

The amount of energy it took was endless. Nothing was ever easy between you and your parents; there were no relaxed moments. What would you say if they asked? And were they hinting? What was your father saying, when he made a reference—rather forced—to two men who had lived together for years? Was he signaling?

Gary, an old lover, had a big party, to which he invited my parents. And so I met Franny, who was busy chatting with a flamboyantly gay man, a man who undressed me with his eyes, and obviously found me fetching (I may have been then).

“Marc, do you know Rocky?” (…the name being the only masculine thing about him.)

Rocky took my hand in both of his, refused to let go, and breathed, “Darling, I’ve waited all my life to meet you….”

Right—and what was that look in my mother’s eye?

The secret meant that you always had butterflies in your stomach, sweaty palms, a dry mouth. You were prepared to fight or flee—and remember, these are your parents, not your enemies.

You became hypersensitive and a master at reading faces, intonations, gestures. Your nose was always picking up the whiff of suspicion, innuendo, barbed hints. At the end of the day, after you had watched yourself pass on the thirty or forty times that you could have dropped the news, you went to bed exhausted and hating yourself. Why were you so weak?

You were also blaming them—which made no sense, but there it was. Why the hell were they so damn conservative? Why were they so old, so behind the times? A friend comes out to her mother, who pulls a bottle of champagne out to celebrate? Right, and you’re gonna give your father a coronary, and he’ll die right there on the fucking floor, his eyes locking in horror with yours, as your mother is screaming, “See what you’ve done! You’ve killed him!” Right, so that’ll be the scene that replays every damn time you close your eyes at night for the rest of your life….

This is complete nonsense, you know. It’s also now 2AM, a time of day which twists logic the way a psychokinetic twists forks. Oh, and you can’t get up and do anything, because it’s not your house. You’re visiting, your mother is sleeping in the dining room; your father is turning and snorting in the living room. It’s a strange house, and you’re prisoner in the back bedroom.

You’re in the car, they are driving you to the airport, you’ve failed this visit just as you had failed all the others. Do you blurt it out? Of course not, you can’t drop that on then, and then just take off.

You drove your friends who were farther down the road crazy.

“Why doesn’t she just come out to her father—I mean, her father has accepting her brother’s male partner. Hell, if he can do that, he can take a lesbian daughter!”

I’d say this about a friend we both knew.

But I also remembered being there—trapped in car lights of fear and rejection, unable to move, watching as the inevitable came hurtling toward me.

Afraid to make the jump to love and trust….

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.

A Tectonic Shift in the Mormon Church?

So, question of the day: is the Church of Latter Day Saints really changing?

You may know them as an easy group to hate: the Mormons. And yes, we can all laugh at their protective underwear, their beliefs that Joe Smith actually found the tablets in Palmyra, New York, (think that was where), their history of polygamy. They do, however, some things very well. They work damn hard and did make the desert bloom; they respond quickly in natural disasters; they take care of their own.

And their church is their lifeline. They are, in a sense, still living out that trek from New York to Nauvoo, Illinois, (another “think that was where”) to Salt Lake City. Yes, they have arrived, they have made a home, but they haven’t stopped clinging to one another; the desert mentality of each member being crucial in the survival of everybody still lives in their psyche. For others, church is church; for Mormons, church is their life.

Which is what made it such a compelling story in movies, plays, and fiction. There was Joe Pitt in Angels in America, there was the movie Latter Days, and now, there is an upcoming documentary about a Mormon family with a thirteen-year old gay son. And predictably, Mom goes through shock and disbelief and questioning and ends, finally, at some kind of acceptance.

Well, that seemed like something interesting, especially since the mother had gone door to door in California in 2008 campaigning for Proposition 8. And speaking of which, was there any truth to the belief that the church was backing off “defending” traditional marriage?

Having spent 45 minutes on the church’s new website, I can tell you—it’s a definite maybe. Mormons and Gays dot Org is the name, and yes, I’d call it Gays and Mormons, but that’s a quibble. And the church is quite clear in where it stands:

The experience of same-sex attraction is a complex reality for many people. The attraction itself is not a sin, but acting on it is. Even though individuals do not choose to have such attractions, they do choose how to respond to them. With love and understanding, the Church reaches out to all God’s children, including our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.   

In the Catholic Church, which teaches the same thing, this is called the “you can be a bird, but you can’t fly” doctrine. And the site bangs the drum on love, listen, have compassion, have hope, let’s have a dialogue. Just no screwing.

So then I had to listen to the Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Twelve Apostles on “What needs to change.” Oh, and prepare yourself for a jolt—the Elder is:

1.     white

2.     elder and elderly

3.     male

Hey—if you need to lie down to absorb that, it’s perfectly fine.

He looks, in fact, like the worst combination of a mix between my old high school principal and Ike Eisenhower. And his message? Here it is:

Same gender attraction presents many issues and questions in society at large. These include what causes it, whether it is subject to change in kind or degree, and whether, or the extent of which, laws like marriage should accommodate it. Our discussion is limited to two related questions we sometimes hear in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. What does our doctrine teach us about how family members and church members should treat one another when one of their members is struggling with some of these issues, and how can we help members of the church who struggle with same-gender attractions, but want to remain active and fully engaged in the church?

This same topic was discussed with all of the general authorities of the church in April of 2012. We will not discuss any of the multitude of other issues and questions. There is so much we don’t understand about this subject, that we’d do well to stay close to what we know from the revealed word of God. What we do know is that the doctrine of the church, that sexual activity should only occur between a man and a woman who are married, has not changed and is not changing. But what is changing and what needs to change is to help our own members and families understand how to deal with same gender attraction.

The church, you see, got slammed over Proposition 8; the public relations were a disaster. What had seemed like a conservative but hardworking group ended up looking like spoilers and haters. And their efforts weren’t inconsiderable: Mother Jones magazine states that at the height of the Proposition 8 campaign, there were 77 people working full time on the issue in Salt Lake City. Oh, and they kicked in 20 million bucks on it, too.

Right, now on to Ty’s story, from the video posted on the website:

Well, it wasn’t an issue for him in high school, because he still had to do his year of missionary work. But after he got home, it was time to get married, start a family. And why was it that he didn‘t want to get close, physically, to any of these girls? Was he gay? He began dating men.

He goes through several spiritual crises, always ended up with a huge and wonderful revelation: God is love. Be with Him, stay in the church, let Him into your life. He keeps struggling and struggling and decides to ask the question, being prepared not to receive a question. And the question? Is there a family in his future? Must he go alone through life alone?

Know where this is going?

We see pictures of his wife; we see pictures of their home; lastly, we see pictures of their adorable baby boy.

You’ll know my reaction. The picture I saw was of a church that had put one of its children through years of unnecessary, almost capricious, spiritual hell. And that through the message of Ty’s story—and he’s utterly sincere, by the way—will put a lot of other gay people through the same ringer.

The Huffington Post reported that the church is making connections, reaching out, rethinking. “There’s been a tectonic shift somewhere,” a church member says. The money—always a good barometer for measuring the social pressure—for defeating marriage equality bills is drying up.

I grew up in a time when homosexuality was illegal, when cops were raiding gay bars, when it was routine to talk trash about fags and queers. I now deliver food periodically to my husband’s mother; she strolls into the plaza and reads names for me. The world has changed. I understand Ty’s longing to have a family, I came to realize how much I had missed only recently, when I saw Raf’s nephew matter-of-factly dawdle his daughter on his knee. I stole away and bawled for the children I’d never known.

I chose a husband and no kids over a wife and kids. But I think all of us—the Catholic and Mormon churches as well—need to get here: you can have a husband and kids.

US News | Weird News | More ABC News Videos

Wednesday Morning Rant

What’s going on here?

Susan sent me Maureen Dowd’s column, which featured one of the creators of “Will and Grace”—which apparently was a television show—as being disgusted and heartsick at the Supreme Court. He felt—didn’t we all?—that we were all in a sort of time warp; five of the justices are all back in the fifties, the rest of us have moved on.

Well, I can see that—but only out of my right eye. My left eye went cloudy, last Thursday, just in time for the Easter weekend. Of course my ophthalmologist wasn’t working, so I spent the weekend being intermittently worried—was it an infection? Cataract? Worse, was it macular degeneration, which had robbed my mother of her vision, and really of her joy in life, those last hard years?

Well, I don’t have to worry, or rather I do. It’s a cataract, and the procedure is simple. It takes ten minutes to do the surgery, 24 hours to recuperate, and no more of those hideous eye patches. Amazing, really, the innovations in eye surgery.

Wait, did I say, “I don’t have to worry,” somewhere up there? Wrong—I do. This afternoon I will spend substantial amounts of time calling an insurance company, trying to figure out how to fund this operation. “Lucky you,” you say, “lots of people don’t have insurance.”

And indeed, I am lucky. But it may be just general irritation or an inbred tendency to see the glass as half-empty, because it does occur to me—I’m somewhere in the middle of the lucky gradient. Other people with insurance simply sail in, flash the card, and the operating room doors open by magic.

I only have insurance, you see, through Raf and his former job. Since his company closed he was allowed to retire, and qualifies for the health plan. And yes, that health plan allows him to put a same sex spouse on the plan. Raf’s current employer does not. So I have an excellent insurance plan that—since the company is located in the US—nobody on the island accepts.

And I live—a bit tangentially, but still live—in the richest nation on the planet. And that nation, currently, has no national health plan, and so throws its marginalized into a terrible position. At 56, with a college education and good people skills, I can easily figure out how to manipulate the system—rigged as it probably is against me. (“It does occur to me,” I said to John grumpily yesterday, “that the insurance industry is the only business I can think of which charges its customers an enormous amount of money so it can pay people to say ‘no’ to its customers….”)

Right, so Canada and Norway and most of the developed world have figured out how to dispense health care—we have not. And in nine states I am legally married, and in 41 states plus the territories I am not. And now, we will have to wait around until June to see what will be, in all likelihood, a half victory.

And yesterday, I read an interesting statement when looking for something to blog about. “The history of farming,” an article stated, “has been inherently open-source.”

Say whaaa…?

Translation—nobody owned, until agribusiness came along, a seed. That was the whole point—you grew whatever it was and ate 80% and saved the rest for the next year and that’s how it was for millennia. Now, farmers are the pawns of the seed / fertilizer / herbicide company, and we are suffering or about to suffer a massive jolt to our health—physically, environmentally, economically.

And the Supreme Court, in one sweeping decision that nobody much noticed, was the body that changed “open-sourced” agriculture to corporate agribusiness.

The Supreme Court, who last week worried that homosexuality was newer than cell phones. And yet these guys, so worried about making a “sea change” socially, had no problem completely shifting the foundations of what we put into our mouths?

I go back to wondering, at times, whether men should really be allowed. Yes, we do some things very well. Yes, I’m a guy myself. Yes, I have worked in almost all-female environments and yearned for a nice, testosterone-driven guy.

But maybe it’s time to recognize—agriculture was for millennia a female activity. The men were out there hunting; the women were in the field. And more than that, they were sharing information, swapping seeds, observing how plants grew and why. The essence of agriculture celebrates some traditionally feminine traits—cooperation, patience, nurturance.

Hunting is a guy thing, as is—let’s be honest—business. I worked in the biggest company in the world, and yes, it paid lip service to diversity. But any woman who was going to get seriously ahead was going to have to have bigger balls—sorry!—than the guys. It was about competition, winning, going for the kill.

You know, I don’t accept the Supreme Court being “behind the times.” Not being able to say the word “gay,” but always using “homosexual.” Asking how many states allowed gay marriages, and comparing being gay to cell phones.

That’s bullshit, and an insult. Dowd’s friend may be heartsick….

…I’m pissed.

One Judge, Parts Missing

There’s only one way to explain it. While the rest of the world—or at least the world I know—has gotten over it, there are four or five guys in Washington that still get really jittery when the topic of homosexuality and gay and lesbian issues blows in the room.

Which is why a man whom everybody grants has a fine legal mind said something incredibly stupid. And here it is, courtesy of the New York Times:

He expressed irritation that the case was before the court, saying President Obama’s approach — to enforce the law but not defend it — was a contradiction.

“I don’t see why he doesn’t have the courage of his convictions,” the chief justice said. He said Mr. Obama should have stopped enforcing a statute he viewed as unconstitutional “rather than saying, ‘Oh, we’ll wait till the Supreme Court tells us we have no choice.’ ”

The White House took umbrage at the remark and said the president was upholding his constitutional duty to execute the laws until the Supreme Court rules otherwise. “There is a responsibility that the administration has to enforce laws that are on the books,” said Josh Earnest, a deputy White House press secretary. “And we’ll do that even for laws that we disagree with, including the Defense of Marriage Act.”

Ahh, Roberts? If the president decided that the two-term limit was unconstitutional and set about running again in 2016, would that be OK? If he decided to stop payments of Social Security, would that be all right?

And by the way, isn’t that what we pay you guys the big money to do? What are you doing up there if you’re not interpreting the law and ruling on constitutionality? Playing checkers, smoking cigars?

Well, what do I know, so I called the family lawyer, and got his take. And John’s reading is that Roberts was peeved, and probably peeved from the day before. Both cases, of course, are screwy. The state of California had no interest in defending the overturning of Proposition 8, so a bunch of archconservatives got in the act. And the big question is—do they have any right to appear before the court? How have they been harmed, which is another way of establishing standing?

That’s pretty much the same deal with DOMA—which Obama and his justice department also declined to defend. But in this case, there’s somebody with standing—an 83 year-old lady who got stuck with a inheritance tax for over $300,000 because her marriage wasn’t recognized. Right, but what about the screwy Republican legislators who hired the lawyers to defend DOMA—what standing do they have?

Short of stomping on the floor and having a nice good hissy fit, Roberts could not be shouting “why me” louder and more petulantly.

At one point, in fact, Roberts suggests that he will walk away from the fight and let the politicians take the heat.

Public opinion has been shifting rapidly over the past decade in favor of gay marriage, and Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that perhaps gays and lesbians don’t need special protection from the court anymore.

“As far as I can tell, political leaders are falling all over themselves to endorse your side of the case,” Roberts told the lawyers who would like to see the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, struck down.

Special protection? Did he really say special protection? Isn’t the DOMA case simply about asking the court to rule on whether the federal government can give benefits to one group of married people but not to another group of married people? What’s special about that?

Oh, and say that I’ve been transferred to Fort Hood, and like a patriotic soldier I go. And then I head for Iraq, where I’m killed. If I’m straight, my wife Dora gets the visit from the two soldiers carrying the folded American flag. If I’m gay, my husband Donald will have to read about it in the newspapers.

You know, I don’t know about anybody else, but seeing the Supreme Court squirm and try to pass the buck is making me crazy. That, of course, is of no consequence to the Supreme Court. What should matter, however, is that a group of people is legally disenfranchised, and suffers real consequences—read harm—as a result of a bigoted piece of legislation. Yeah—I’m married in Massachusetts but not in Puerto Rico. So am I supposed to move to Massachusetts in order to collect Social Security if Raf dies before me?

And does anyone really think that places like Georgia and Mississippi are going to legislate gay marriage on their own? There are states that would still have Jim Crow if not slavery if the courts hadn’t stepped in. We need the Supreme Court to rule on DOMA and on the constitutionality of the 40 states with “defense” of marriage laws.

Put your hand in the center of your back, Chief Justice. Feel that hard thing?

It’s called a backbone.

Letter to the Nine

Let me make it very simple for the nine men and women who make up the Supreme Court.

John and Mary have a lovely wedding in a quaint, white, tall-steeple church. The parents beam, the bride cries, the groom shifts nervously at the altar. The ceremony concludes, they sign the marriage license, and drive off to their honeymoon in the Bahamas, where John will be eaten by a shark.

Are they married?

John and Mary have a lovely wedding—this is a copy / paste of the previous paragraph, so feel free to skip it—in a quaint, white, tall-steeple church. The parents beam, the bride cries, the groom shifts nervously at the altar. The ceremony concludes, they forget to sign—and here the scenario changes—the marriage license, and drive off to their honeymoon in the Bahamas, where John will be eaten by a shark.

Are they married?

Or how about this—John and Mary plan to get married in that quaint-et-cetera church, but it burns down the night before the wedding (dear me, the dramatic things that are happening in the blog this morning….). So they get hitched at City Hall, and then go off to that fateful honeymoon.

You get—I’m sure—my point. Where a couple is married has absolutely no importance; what’s important is that famous or fatal signature on a legal document called the marriage certificate. So we have a problem, a language problem. And here it is….

Screw talking about civil unions, we should be talking about religious unions.

It’s another sign of how decades of fundamentalist battering have driven us into logical and linguistic corners. Nobody, of course, can claim to be a liberal—now we have to retrench under the term “progressive.” Nobody can come right out and say that marriage is a legal institution, and that no amount of fiddling with “civil unions” can grant exactly the same rights as marriage. And even if it could, why bother?

I live across the street from a man and woman who are, I believe (since I haven’t seen their marriage certificate), married. The man and the woman live across the street from two men—do I need to tell you who they are?—who were married in the state of Massachusetts in 2008.

So Raf and Julio go off to the beach, and guess what happens? Yes, we now have a very well fed shark, swimming happily in those bloody waters. Now then, what happens to the grieving spouses?

Well, it’s a very different story. There’s Social Security, there are the tax laws, there are inheritance and probate issues.

Two very different scenarios. But oddly, the two couples—from what I can see—lead quite similar lives. Couples do—they figure out who does the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry. They figure out where they’re going to live and how to pay the bills. They have pets and arguments and—sometimes—children.

And isn’t it time, at last, to get over it, to get on to other things?

Or maybe it’s time to get pissed. Because that’s where I am, this morning, as I read about the Supreme Court weaseling around the question of whether two guys who have been together thirty years, who spent thousands of bucks to travel hundreds of miles to get married are in fact married.

Maybe it’s time to get out on the streets and start screaming at the people who have screamed at us, who have held up the “God hates fags” signs—yes, they were there yesterday, exercising their free speech in front of the Supreme Court—and shout was should be obvious to everybody.

Oh, and what’s that?

Try this….

The people defining marriage as a heterosexual union are mean-spirited, petty bigots.

No, not strong enough.

Hate-filled, fear-filled, despicable bigots.

And remind me, again—why did we allow them to take over the discourse?

A Promise Kept

For a gay blogger, there isn’t much choice about what to write about, today. Yes, I could tell you that in Puerto Rico, a federal judge has ruled that Jehovah’s Witnesses must be given access to gated communities. My reaction, of course, is whether a community has the right to restrict access to ANYBODY. Weren’t public funds used to make the road, and aren’t they used to maintain them?

Right—I’m not gonna get very far with that….

OK—then there’s Michael Samis, whose campaign to raise funds for a forgotten cello concerto ended yesterday. And he—or we—did it! Wow—and he got 140% of his goal!

But all eyes, of course, are on nine men and women who have the chance to do something remarkable—rule on what one of the parties in the case called the “last civil rights issue.”

Today, the United States Supreme Court is hearing the case of California’s Proposition 8; tomorrow the court will hear challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act.

Good news—the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is so legally flawed that the president who signed it—reluctantly—has said it’s unconstitutional. So the justices are really gonna have to work hard to find any reason to uphold it.

Proposition 8 is different. The first big question is whether the party, ProtectMarriage, appealing the district court’s ruling has the legal right—called the standing—to appear before the court. California, you remember, is not appealing the decision—it’s a group of private citizens. If the court decides that ProtectMarriage has no standing, then federal district court’s overturning of Proposition 8 will go into effect. Or will it? Doing more reading, I find some “experts” saying that if the conservatives had no standing, then they had no standing to appeal in the first place. Therefore Proposition 8 stays in effect.

Such tortuous legal niceties would be lost, I suspect, on the lady who bought us lunch yesterday. She had wanted to do something nice for another lady, a Canadian who had spent the last month as an adopted tennis mom because of a series of family emergencies. So doña Ilia, Raf’s mom, worked the phone, corralled the family, and summoned us all to lunch.

And then sat down to give a virtuoso performance—the charm never stopped flowing, the social dexterity never waned. True, doña Ilia did stumble a bit when asked—after declaring that she adored, just adored, Canada—if she had in fact ever been there. Well, she had to admit no, but then recalled having met some very nice Canadian social workers, and had enjoyed meeting them very much.

Nor was the Canadian lady going to go unfed. “You’ll have to try a mallorca,” she said animatedly to her guest, “you can’t leave without a mallorca….” Also true for the flan de queso and the arroz con pollo.

In the midst of this unceasing flow of food and charm came a denouncing: I had completely failed my task, which was to be there early and greet the guest. “Men!” cried Ilia, “they can never do anything right, socially speaking. There she was for five minutes, sitting alone, and you were in a corner with your back to the door!” It was no use to point out that the café was tiny, and that the guest had not walked the twenty feet to the end of the room. “Of course she wouldn’t do that!” exclaimed Ilia. “She’s a refined woman—walking around searching for her host, indeed!” She was holding the guest’s hand, and patting her shoulder simultaneously.

The legal minutiae perplexing the Supreme Court also may not interest Paul Katami, one of the parties challenging Proposition Eight. All he wants to do is marry his husband-emotionally-if-not-yet-legally, Jeff Zarrillo. And the two make a terrific case—it’s pretty hard to imagine better spokespeople for a cause. And Katami has quite a history himself—an actor turned fitness expert, he had a nightmarish accident that led to his elbow being completely broken. Then, he endured two surgeries—both of which were horrific botches that led eventually to the recommendation that Paul have surgery to fuse the bones, leaving him with an arm at a permanent, fixed 90 degree angle.

He opted instead to find a new doctor—smart move, Paul!—who did a third operation involving a bone graft from the hip, titanium rods and screws. This, in addition to using a device he had invented for one of his clients, did the trick. Check him out on YouTube—you’d never know.

And he’s a guy of character—he chose not to waste his time and energy pursuing a malpractice suit against what was clearly a quack. He takes a settlement—just enough to pay his medical expenses and surgery.

And the legal question of standing might not be too interesting for his partner’s father, Dominick Zarrillo, who wrote a moving op-ed piece for the New York Times entitled “A Father, a Son and a Fighting Chance.” He talks about seeing his son get bullied as a kid, and going over to protest to the father of the lead abuser. Unbelievably, the bully’s father takes the attitude—let the kids fight if out between them. Sure, says Zarrillo, one-on-one is OK, but five against one? The bully’s father shrugged and shut the door.

Jeff did what I did, came home to his parents for years with the intention—this time I’m gonna come out. What happened? The time was never right—read, I never seized the chance—and there we were at the airport, with the words burning in the gut, not blazing in the air. When Jeff finally did it, he gets the reaction so many of us got: right, we knew all along, it’s OK.

So then it was Jeff and Paul, not just Jeff. They all go to Hawaii together, and decide to take a boat ride. Not wise—the weather turns nasty, the waves are three times the size of the boat, the elder Zarrillo grabs his wife’s hand, looks over at his son, who is holding Paul’s hand. It turns out OK, and they go to celebrate at dinner. Zarrillo writes:

I realized then that I was crying instead of laughing. I couldn’t explain it except to say there is nothing more overwhelming than seeing your child experience true love.

It works both ways, Dominick. I see an eighty-year old lady navigate her walker into the café, cheerfully give me her cheek to kiss, insist I order the steak, berate me for rudeness to a guest. My parents are dead, my two brothers thousands of miles away. But another mother, doña Ilia, is a tabletop away, beaming at me, scolding me, feeding me. A lady who twenty-five years ago wouldn’t speak to me on the phone.

A columnist for the New York Times who supports marriage equality wrote this morning that it might be a good thing if the Supreme Court didn’t come out with a sweeping ruling asserting that all fifty states must allow gay marriage: it could trigger a backlash. And I can see the logic.

I also see the enormous courage of parents who struggle and then come out to their gay and lesbian children. Because it’s not just us coming out. It’s you brave and loving parents, who are being asked to do something uniquely difficult.

You made a promise when you held us, that first day of our lives in the delivery room. You kept it when you opened the door, put a beer in a stranger’s hand, and set another place at the table.

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