Tag Archives: Gay rights

July 27, 2012 · 1:09 pm

From Fear and Hate to Acceptance and Ambivalence. My Personal Evolution

How evolution works-

This is how I went through the evolutionary process.

A little essay on how my own attitudes have changed over the years towards Gay people. It’s a little personal, but since this is such a big deal in Minnesota these days.. here it is.

Fear and hate.

30 years ago I knew a Gay guy.

Ewww.  Dude was a faggot. He slept with men. Gross.

Wieners, ass, kissing men, gross.  Funny guys the homos, but wouldn’t want one in same bathroom with me. Why? Cause..  just because, if YOU don’t know why I’m not going to tell you. (Not sure I know either)

Fags were funny, but I only knew one.

Or two.

And the guy I knew from college who came out. Three.

Actually the dude who came out surprised me. “Didn’t see that coming”.

I ask now, really? I mean what did I think was coming? Gayness? Tierra’s and pink siding?

I think I knew a lesbian back then too. Lady at the temple who the grapevine said was a dyke. Grapevine is always right, right? What the heck, I didn’t care as much about lesbians. I like women, I could understand how they would like women.

You know, until they met the right guy, then I’m sure they’d go the other way…

I encountered more Homosexuals, informally of course. From afar. I moved from fear to

Lack of tolerance or understanding, and some ridicule.

Gay pride parades become a big deal in San Francisco in the late 70’s. By the mid 80’s Halloween was THE holiday in the Castro for Gays. One giant party where half the guys were dressed like Judy Garland. Except the ones who were a little more rotund, they went for Ethel Merman. In this case pardon my stereotype, but I’m not far off.

I was down there a couple times. People watching.

It was fun to watch Gays. Like going to a freak show. All that leather, weirdness, sexuality right out there. Those folks are funny. And they’re deadly serious about their rights. Because for them, it can be about life and death.

I stopped loathing and got past fear. They were just another bunch of weirdos.

I had evolved again.

Live and let live.

What the hell. Yet another bunch of oddballs in San Francisco. Let’um be. I only know one. Or two.

I stopped laughing at them at in the late 80’s. Them. Those guys. The queers. I stopped laughing because I knew a few more. I stopped laughing because they were dying. A guy at work. Another guy at work. The guy who cut my mothers hair. She’d been going to him for 10 years. He died. Just like that.

Suddenly people I knew of were coming out of the closet and seemingly dying the next day. AIDS. During the height of the epidemic, before drugs and talk about viral loads, AIDS was bringing people out of the closet for the worst possible reason. Because they were dying. And when one of my close friends in High School died in 1989, it hit me. There’s more of them around than I thought.

And they deserve more than being  joked about.

I’d moved on.

I didn’t really have any Gay friends at that point. I mean seriously, what did a fat suburban father of three have in common with fast urbanites in fabulous homes? These were all casual acquaintances, relationships that came in handy in conversations when I wanted to show off my progressive thinking, “I know a gay dude”. Cool on me.  Kinda. Not sure a Gay dude would claim to know me. Cool and Sank, not often spoken in the same breath.

Went to eat a “Gay” restaurant in the Castro for brunch once. That was fun. About 1987. Waiters in super short cut off demim, muscle shirts and Ron Jeremy mustaches. Stereotype all over the place. Food was good. I didn’t snicker.

Much.

Did afterwards. I bragged about Homo-breakfast for a long time after that. Funny, ‘cause in hindsight, there was nothing to brag about. We ate. Food was good. Waiter was nice. Coffee was excellent. Other than the Gays coulda been Whole Earth…

I even went to a Christmas party in the late 80’s put on by a couple Gay dudes who lived together. Most stylish damned party I’ve ever been to in my life. Matching everything, fancy lights, stylish music, stylish matching ties. It was kinda cool. And me? I was cool for being there. So I thought.

Still, the party was a good source of talkstory when I was back in the Hetroburbs with our straight friends, Sank’s  big adventure, the trip to a Gay guys house.

Hah.

I had evolved again: Acceptance.

In the 90’s I become actual friends with a Gay dude. I had a Gay friend. No more prejudice from me, I, had an actual Gay guy who I could call a friend. Well, let’s be honest, no more prejudice when he was around, poker night and fishing trips.. yeah..

By the mid 2000’s I had several Gay friends. Not close, but close enough. Good guys. Funny as hell. Snappy dressers. Enjoyed their company.

I met a few more Lesbians as well. Real honest to goodness Lesbians, not the stuff from behind the curtain at the video store.

Many of my homosexual friends lived together and had “partners”.  I’d put the quotation marks in the air with my fingers when needed, which was when I was talking to heterosexual friends, just in case someone didn’t “got the joke” that I was talking about  Gay people. And that “partner” for them was somehow different than it was for straight people. Straight people have partners too, but typically I’d call them husbands. Or wives.

Gay people on the other hand were playing house or something. Cute that they wanted to be a “real” couple.

A couple of my Gay friends, one man and one woman in particular, I came to think of as pretty good friends. When you have a Gay person as a “pretty good friend” and you are not Gay, and maybe even if you are Gay, they stop being my Gay friends and become just friends.

Respect

Friends, same as every other friend.

Lots of friends. Diverse company always more fun.

I like having friends; they enrich my life a TON. Matter of fact the only effective cure that I’ve found for my depression, is spending time with my friends.  Now, I have a lot of friends, and by chance some of them are Gay.

And as I became friends, The Gays became people, just plain old people with the same desire for family, children, success etc that I had. And it became impossible to single them out for discrimination because it made no sense. I can’t look a friend in the eye and tell them that they’re different and somehow less deserving of rights and privileges that I have, simply because of who they fall in love with.

And now I’ve reached what I think is the final stage of the Tolerance Evolution: Ambivalence.

I don’t care. I don’t that you’re Gay or Straight. Don’t care who you sleep with. I care that you treat people with respect, are caring and warm and that you have my back. And I’ll have yours. Come November, I’ll do my part.

By the way, I should tell you sometime about my black friend Thomas. Back in school I had me a black friend. How cool was that?… I evolved there too…

 

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January 16, 2012 · 6:47 pm

Response to a Homophobe

In the spirit of Martin Luther King day, I take a more serious note.

The following letter was in the Saturdays Opinion section in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The writer is asking for a civil debate on Minnesota’s upcoming marriage amendment. Sunday I found myself in a discussion with a friend who happens to support rewriting the State Constitution to single out homosexuals and deny them the ability to marry . More concerning to me than his views was the idea that this letter thought of as a moderate sensible approach to the discussion and not an attack on Homosexuals.. in fact it is just that. But I felt compelled to respond to the writer, as he asked, and by proxy respond to my neighbor.

The italics are my comments.

Continue reading →

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May 23, 2011 · 8:42 pm

Repairing the world, my, and your responsibility

I received an email this afternoon, regarding my posting concerning same sex marriage.

“Why do you even waste time writing about this, you’re not Gay, this is a Gay issue. Seriously why do you care?”

It was from a reader I don’t know very well.

Following is my response. In short, I am compelled too take on this issue.

In the long answer:

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught; “the opposite of good is not evil, the opposite of good is indifference.”

The older I get, the more I realize just how true this statement is.

A little background for my readers, in case you’re not familiar with the good Rabbi. He was probably the most influential Jewish theologian of the 20th century. Heschel was born in Poland in 1907, arrested by the Gestapo in Frankfurt in 1938 where he was teaching at a Jewish seminary.  He was deported to Poland, he was evacuated to London 6 weeks before the German invasion of Poland in 1939 by Julian Morgenstern, president of the Hebrew Union College, the Reform Movements primary seminary. Morgenstern, who had enough vision to see what was coming in Europe, engaged in an effort to rescue as many prominent scholars from the Nazi’s as he could. From London Heschel eventually made his way to New York and finally to Cincinnati where began teaching at the Hebrew Union College, the main seminary of the Reform Movement in the United States.

He was lucky he was rescued. His mother and three sisters were murdered by the Nazi’s. During his life Heschel never returned to Germany, Poland or Austria. “If I should go to Poland or Germany, every stone, every tree would remind me of contempt, hatred, murder, of children killed, of mothers burned alive, of human beings asphyxiated.”

Despite these personal challenges, Heschel lived and taught the ideals of Tikkun Olam, the idea that since creation, the world has been broken, and it is the responsibility of every Jew to participate in it’s repair. Literal translation is Repairing the World. For Heschel this responsibility extended to the world at large, and was implemented through his active participation in social justice, in his case marching with Dr. King during the civil rights struggles and his opposition to the Viet Nam war. One of my favorite quotes from the Rabbi, “When I marched in Selma, my legs were praying.”

This link to social justice, according the Heschel’s work, goes to back to the commandment that we Jews are to remember when we were slaves in Egypt and we are to experience of the redemption from that condition, which is recalled not only at Passover, but ever day in the liturgy of daily prayers. This experience is supposed to remind us that we, all people, are harmed when anyone group or individual is harmed.

One of the more profound teachings for me, I quoted above, and I’ll repeat it, “the opposite of good is not evil, the opposite of good is indifference.” The atrocities of the Holocaust, and atrocities of every other mass murder or genocidal murderous rampage, I would argue has been enabled by indifference.

Rabbi Heschel taught that in our lives we would be presented with “sacred moments” and that the goal of education, spiritual living etc, is not simply to amass great knowledge and live some hollow life of piety, but with out practical application. It is the goal of education and spirituality to in fact, prepare us for these moments, and to help us to understand them so we do the right thing.

It seems in every generation we find ourselves facing these choices, choices to stand up, be heard and make a difference, to call out an injustice and to make our position known in the hopes that we might influence even one other person, and in doing so, in some small way, act to correct the injustice.

Rabbi Heschel said “all it takes is one person, and another, and another, and another to start a movement.”  I believe that when we take on the cause of the weakest among us and embrace them and lend them our own strength, we are in fact, participating in the divine plan of Tikkun Olam, the repair of a world that is broken. To ignore, to come up with excuses; not my people, not my problem, is to participate that which is opposite of good and contrary to what is right.

In my life I’ve had opportunities to embrace causes, some I’ve acted right, some I’ve let my indifference rule the day. In this case, I believe the civil right of GLBT people are being attacked in what is the civil rights issue of this time. The legislators and homophobic defense of marriage crowd who are attempting to put a stop to what they don’t like will be on the wrong side of history, even if they win this battle. The youth, and I mean 30 somthings, in poll after poll don’t see same sex marriage as much of an issue. It’s the 50 and older crowd who are most against it.

These legislators, I know, will wind up much like the legislators in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi who, in the period after the Civil War and up until the Supreme Court action of 1960’s made inter-racial marriage a crime, in Florida a felony, with prison terms. The reasons were the same as those being put forward for same sex marriage, G-d’s law.

Do you really think that if the Supreme Court had not stepped in 1968 and overturned these laws, along with imposing de-segregation, and striking down Jim Crow laws that white Southerners would have come to there senses and “given” African-American’s rights? I don’t.

This is a time and place where I want to be on the right side, the side of defending those whose rights are in jeopardy. G-d forbid that my kids would remember me as a homophobe, in the way I remember my father and my grandmothers as racists. And even worse, what if one of my children or grandchildren are Gay? Why wouldn’t I want them to feel loved and accepted in their own family. How would I face them if I were to tell them I don’t think their relationship is beneficial to society?

Since I’m quoting Rabbis, I’m closing with a quote from Rabbi Tarfon who lived and taught in Israel  in the period immediately after the destruction of the second Temple, he had the following teaching regarding this noble work of Tikkun OIam:

“You are not obliged to finish this work, but neither are you free to avoid it.”

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January 28, 2010 · 10:18 pm

Garrison Keiller, who knew?

This next rant, might just get me excommunicated from the congregation of the Frozen, or those who call Minnesota, home.

I call it home, but only for the last 15 years or so, so that makes me a newcomer by local standards. Most of the folks I work with are natives.. having extended families in the area, Mom’s and Aunties and Grandma’s and lots of high school friends who they still hang around with. It’s a bit clannish to be honest, and hard for newcomers to break into. Which is probably why our closest friends, have relocated here from somewhere else.

This is in direct contradiction to my life in California where I was a native. In Cali, natives a much rarer and typically don’t have any extended family around, having left them back here in places like Minnesota where in the winter, your drivers license is the only indication many of us have to our gender when we’re going outside. Matter of fact, we Minnesotans, and by we I’m including myself because 15 years and three kids is long enough to make me one of you, regardless of you say; well we look like American’s until we dress to go outside, then we look like Canadians, a people ironically we have more culturally in common with than our fellow countrymen from place like say.. California. That is until we have to get health insurance unfortunately, but I digress.

Not that I moved here to take advantage of not having any family around, it does make life blissfully uncomplicated to not have to worry about going to Grandma’s on Saturday, but having to get back to see the  Niece on the other sides birthday party on Saturday night and then high school friends shower, or maybeee bachelorette party on Sunday.. anyway. Let’s just say for me, it’s easy to live here and I don’t really have to interact with anyone except my wife. Which BTW is more than enough.

But you do give up some things, like quality media, papers and radio here, with a few exceptions, suck. They go out of their way not offend anyone and as a result entertain no one, except the residents of old folk homes who like to think happy thoughts about times that really, weren’t all that happy.

And, there is no better example of this nostalgic bullshit on the radio than Garrison Keillor and the Prairie Home Companion. I’m not pulling punches on this.. Garrison is hypercritical old gasbag who personifies the worst about Minnesota; he is passive aggressive, keeps his prejudices close but somewhat out of view, thinks the world of himself, and finally, and this is petty, can’t sing for shit but loves to hear himself do so, often in duets with his far more talented guests thereby ruining song after song with his crappy wavering tenor voice that grates on me like cat being pulled through keyhole.

There. I’ve said it.

And they made a movie about that show? Well it bombed and what a surprise.

Because Keillor is a mainstay on PBS, the voice the liberal intellectual in this country (and don’t get me wrong, I LOVE PBS) it seems that he gets big fat pass whenever he makes a comment that’s offensive. In case you missed it, here he is.

Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that’s their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite “Silent Night.” If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism, and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write “Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah“? No, we didn’t.

Well, turns out Garrison has some opinions about Gays as well.

“The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men — sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control. Parents are supposed to stand in back and not wear chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts.”

Gay marriage will produce a whole new string of hyphenated relatives. In addition to the ex-stepson and ex-in-laws and your wife’s first husband’s second wife, there now will be Bruce and Kevin’s in-laws and Bruce’s ex, Mark, and Mark’s current partner, and I suppose we’ll get used to it.

Well apparently Keillor has apologized to Gays and their parents, but the Jews, we haven’t heard shit from him. He certainly trys to come across as a nice mid-west liberal open minded sort of guy, but turns out he’s just another bigot. Oh and BTW, Unitarians? Who the hell picks on Unitarians?

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