After a bit of conversation last night with Java, she has asked me to set down for perusal the events I described. This I gladly do, somewhat encapsulated in a small essay on the general topic of being a gay-friendly straight guy who is stuck working with a bunch of homophobes in the Deep South.
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Sometimes I wonder whether the world
is being run by smart people who are putting us on
or by imbeciles who really mean it.
---Mark Twain
First, some context. As most of you know, the state of Maine held a referendum on same-sex marriage, and the vote was (very narrowly) lost to the haters on Tuesday. There has been much gloating over this outcome on the various conservative-and/or-religious-right web outlets that I follow. And why do I follow them, you may ask? Because I used to be one. For much of my life – having been raised by devout Southern Baptists, and having attended a very conservative Reform-doctrine church for twenty years – I held the view that homosexuality was nothing more than a choice, and a bad one at that. A college friend of mine (“Steven”) Came Out shortly after graduation, and to compress a long and painful story rather a lot, I treated him shabbily. He wanted to come by for a visit, and I said he could come by for an hour, as long as he didn’t bring his partner.
Yeah, I know. I was a real monument to Christian love. Gag.
About ten years ago events started to come together that made me think that perhaps I wasn’t quite as perfectly 100% correct in all my ways as I thought I was. I ran into Steven and his partner in a local store, we re-connected, and I started trying to do a little bit (a very little bit) to educate myself about what it really meant to be gay. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on it because I knew, waaay down deep, below the radar, that if I took an honest, unbiased look at this issue, and found my worldview wanting, that it would be the first of many dominoes. As it turned out, I was right.
In 2006 we took in a young friend of my daughter’s whose ogre – er, that is, stepfather – had kicked him to the curb when he found out he was gay. The kid was 17 and seriously bad off. He had been doing everything he could, for as long as he could remember, to “be straight”. It hadn’t worked, and he finally gave in and admitted to himself that he was gay. Java had never been as draconian in her views on homosexuality as I had, and she got the bug to find out as much as she could about the issue. Let me tell you, when that girl gets a goal, she goes for it. I got to tag along for the ride. Over the next year or so we learned just about all there was to learn* about the issue of sexual orientation. (“So tell me, when did you decide to become heterosexual?”) I realized, and internalized, the fact that my previous position on the topic was wrong, that what I’d been taught in church was wrong, and it led me to a state of extreme dissatisfaction with my religious practice. From all I was able to discern, the church missed it by a mile. That, inevitably, led me to wonder what else they got wrong. That’s where I am now. I don’t know as I’d call it a crisis of faith, but it certainly is a re-examination of everything I believe.
Anyhow, I consider myself a realist, and when presented with facts and evidence that does not fit my theories and paradigms, I change the theories rather than ignoring the evidence. So here I am.
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True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge,
but the refusal to acquire it.
---Karl Popper
On the prevalence of homophobes: they are everywhere. They are in the workforce. They are in the supermarket. They are driving next to you on the freeway. They are very sure of themselves. They are loud. And most of all, they are unaware (by and large) that they ARE homophobes. The “wrongness” of The Gay is taken so much for granted, is ingrained so deeply into the culture, that even when one explains what one means when using the term “homophobe”, one probably won’t be understood, let alone believed. I know this because I was IN that mindset for a lot of years. I didn’t “hate gays”. I didn’t even wish them ill. I just didn’t want them around me … or my kids … or my extended family … or anywhere I could see them or hear them or realize, even subconsciously, that they existed. So if someone of a more enlightened viewpoint had pointed out to me that I was, in fact, a homophobe, I would have vigorously denied it.
That’s what we are up against. And it can be exhausting. I had a conversation with a coworker a few months ago wherein I maintained that homosexuals typically do not “choose” to “become” gay, but rather are born with that orientation. I presented evidence from several compelling studies on the subject, all of which pointed rather dramatically to the salient fact that one’s sexual preference is present very, very early in the game. He simply refused to believe it. He said the studies must have been done by “gay people with an agenda”. As if gays are the only ones who have an agenda. Call me nuts, but I don’t think Karl Rove is gay, and if there was ever a man with an agenda, he’s it. But I digress. When I said that homosexuals deserved the same rights and privileges as anyone else, he got mad. He said homosexuals couldn’t be born that way, because that would mean that God made a mistake. When I tried to explain that being gay isn’t a “mistake”, he simply shut me off.
This scenario has been repeated several times, in different venues.
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He who does not bellow out the truth
when he knows the truth
makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.
---Charles Peguy
Which brings us to today … or rather, to Wednesday. A fellow came into my office, a vendor of ours (I’ll call him “Tom”) that I’ve known for years. He is generally “good folks”, honest, a hard worker, and a crackerjack machinist who has helped us out more times than I can count. We usually visit for a while when he comes in, which is about once every week or two, and this day was no different. He had given me a flash drive with over a hundred old radio programs from the 50’s and 60’s and wanted to know if I’d listened to any of them. (We are contemporaries, and are both Golden Age science-fiction buffs.) I hadn’t. In fact, the flash drive hadn’t been touched since he dropped it off. I’ve been kinda busy, as any of you who follow this blog will understand. The conversation turned to broadcast programming in general and the dearth of anything worth watching, then to the FCC and their latest assault on the First Amendment, then Our Dear Leader in Washington, who has been a monumental disappointment to me in a lot of respects, and then, oddly, to the referendum in Maine.
Tom: “I can’t stand that these people want to force their lifestyle down my throat.”
Me (seeing a golden opportunity when it smacks me on the snout): “That’s not what they want to do at all.”
Tom: “Huh?”
Me: “Your average gay guy just wants to be left alone to make his way in the world without a bunch of people getting all over his case if they find out he isn’t straight.”
Tom: “But they want all these special rights and shit.”
Me: “Like what?”
Tom: “Like in Maine, where they want to get married …”
Me: “You mean like everyone else? How’s that special?”
Tom: “……… uh ………”
Me: “Basically they’re being punished because of who they love.”
Tom: “Why don’t they just marry a girl then?”
Me: “They aren’t into girls.”
Tom: “So they do want special rights, see, because of their perver …” At this point he gets a glimmer that maybe, just possibly I don’t consider homosexuality to be a perversion. “… because of their lifestyle choice. I mean, come on. Is that fair?”
Me: “But it’s not a choice.”
Tom: “Sure it is.”
Me: “Think about it. Who in his right mind would consciously choose to participate in a lifestyle that would guarantee discrimination in most workplaces, bias in most courts, and threat to his person in a lot of areas of the country?”
Tom: “……………………Huh.”
He was very thoughtful after that and soon left. But I think the seed might have been planted.
*HA! That's far from all there is to learn. Way far. I will never know all there is to learn about sexual orientation if I studied it continuously from now until the end of my life. As with most things I find that the more I learn, the more I realize there is to learn.
