You're so gay

Now it begins. Jones has this friend $4,000 who is very street. He tries in his own dorky way to keep up with him. Up until now, it's meant that he's taken to saying "ain't" a lot. But yesterday I overheard him taunting $4,000 saying "You're so gay." (Sigh) My own boy.

So, OK, teachable moment. But I was hoping that I would be able to lay these matters of sex and gender and whatnot out for him in some sort of coherent manner. I mean, the kid is still basically at the "Mommy swallowed a watermelon seed" level of birds and bees. I have busted out the graphs and charts on him, but I don't think it "took."

So, you mean to tell me that he's getting anything out of my "Gay is when a man wants to make a home with another man" lecture?

Baptism by Committee

UU's don't baptize, since, as the saying goes, the Universalist thinks that God is too good to damn him and the Unitarian thinks he is too good to be damned. What we do is a "dedication." We had our children dedicated a few Sundays ago. Some weeks prior, the minister had had the group of us parents in to personalize the ceremony and we had filled up a white board with our brainstormed blessings.

A lot of our personal baggage shone through. As many of our group are lesbian/ gay, there was a big emphasis on thinking the unthinkable and on unconditional parental love. Also, many were new parents, still in the first throes of I love you so much it hurts; and hadn't quite gotten to our stage, where it's more like, please let some of my civilizing influence sink in. We veterans were in the minority.

Well, the minister was ill and so it fell to another of the staff to distill our thoughts into something coherent for the dedication. The result was that we all stood and recited the following aloud:

We want for our children to be happy, healthy, adventuresome, and to have a reverence for life. We hope that they enjoy growing up and remember their childhoods findly. We want them to be curious, inquisitive, and always have a sense of humor. We want for our children to be strong and wise, to discover and explore boundless opportunities; and to know and never lose their sese of joy. We want them to grown up in a community that is supportive, sustaining, welcoming, and safe. We wish for them to live a life of love with a sense of enduring hope and the knowledge that no matter what they for and where they go, we will alwys look after them, and never love them any less. We hope that they will trust us and know and remember that everything and anything is possible. We want them to have the strength, wisdom, and courage to make the world a better place -- and to do it together. We wish for them to be frank, forthright and just [mine], and to model it in the world; and that we as parents and a community will provide strong examples of that. We want them to have a spirituality based in many traditions and ideals, and to know the fulfillment of work, reaching out to others, and putting forth effort [also mine]. We want them to know that they will never be lost or forsaken; and that they be able to count on themselves, each other, and the rest of us. We hope that they will find a spiritual path at an early age, but to never stop questioning; and to have a sense of meaning and purpose always, no matter what life brings. We want them to find a path and life that they choose, and always know that they are loved beyond our measure.

Yeesh.

That. Is what happens when you are blessed by committee.

They've lost their ever-lovin' minds

So, my beloved called me at work today to vent his spleen about politics. This warms my heart, as I love being that for him -- Just someone to shake your head with. They’ve lost their ever-lovin’ minds, baby. It’s just you and me.

What had his goat was this brouhaha over Bill Richardson on the Logo panel. I didn’t hear it, but apparently Richardson said something about something being a choice and then spent the rest of the panel trying to explain that he didn’t mean that homosexuality is chosen. And now, it appears that the entire gay community has written him off. This reaction is infuriating, because, given that not one Republican even accepted the invitation to a Logo panel, this should be one of those “You had me at ‘Hello’” moments, where the mere act of attending the panel at all shows you where he stands.

Not to mention that Bill Richardson’s actions speak louder than his words, because he is the only one of any of the candidates who has ever had to do any meaningful wrangling for gay rights (not counting what role Clinton had in Bill’s disastrous “Don’t ask; don’t tell” debacle). As governor, he actually fought for civil unions. In New Mexico. Sheesh. But anyway, I don’t really want to blog about politics.

The reason I bring it up is this. It makes me sad for couples who seriously disagree about politics. I don’t mean like a good knock-down drag-out every once in a while -- “How can you be such a Bolshevik?”/ “How can you be such a defender of the machine?” That’s totally fun. I mean, like disagree about deep-seeded moral commitments or even about whether politics is something to talk about at the dinner table. How do they do it?

We’re not even such big pols, but I get a lot out of living in a house where snarky comments like, “Gosh, I get such a good feeling from supporting someone as ideologically pure as Kucinich!” Or “Could Obama maybe get some foreign policy experience before he declares war on Pakistan?” are invitations to discussion. I know in a lot of households there would be this uncomfortable, “There you go again.”

Gay militants in my basement, part II

The first thing they tell parents at those college orientation things is try not to make any dramatic life changes when they first leave home. But of course that is when everybody makes their dramatic life changes, and my parents were no exception. No sooner had I stickygummed my posters, than they divorced and sold the house. They split custody of the buses, with one going to my father’s condo and one to my mother’s townhouse, which was a new build. Thus did I find myself in the awkward position of telling our busdriver I really did live here but I was not quite sure which house.

I go to check on my father and stepmother (then his girlfriend) concerned – I admit it – that they might be uncomfortable about the proposition. My first trip home – can you imagine that phone call? Yeah, college is great,… yeah, classes are hard, sure, yeah, here’s the thing…

Well, of course they were gracious, so shame on me for not giving them credit (In my defense, in the years that followed, we had quite a few discussions about matters of sexual orientation that were, to say the least, not productive. Yet, for all that, difficult to say where stepmother really stands. Cagey, that one.)

Stepmother has cooked up a storm. Dad has cornered my friend. Let’s call her Grace Jones, as she had that haircut and that righteous demeanor. He’s bought a CD player and one CD – the Star Wars soundtrack – in order best to demonstrate the surround-sound feature. When all is said and done, the only observation he will make about the whole event will be how impressive he found her. This will blow my mind. Not that she doesn’t kick *ss. She totally does. But I had to see my dad in a whole new light knowing that he got how kick *ss Grace was.

Come the day of the march, we all bus and metro into DC, in our home-made pink triangle shirts, building excitement with each new group that boards, placards and flyers in hand. Whereupon my high school bud, Turtleduck, absconds with my erstwhile boyfriend, and they spend the day museum-hopping OR WHATEVER instead of experiencing the transformative moment. There, see? It ended happy for poor Fosco. How’s that, Turtleduck?

How two busloads of gay militants got in my basement

In honor of Pride Month (which actually is celebrated in April around these parts, because June is too $%^$%&* hot), I will recount this tale of gay pride in the Reagan era. Picture, if you will, 1987. Culture Club is on MTV, "As Is" is on cable, Matthew Broderick (Ferris Bueller himself) co-stars in Harvey Fierstein's "Torch Song Trilogy." This is a long and rambling story, with something of a point, I think, if you bear with me. It's my Alice's Restaurant.

When I was in my first semester at college and I wanted very badly for everybody to love me all at once, I kept to a pattern that I had established in high school, which was this: The way into any group is to identify the most accessible boy and kiss him. While even then I would have freely admitted this was not the most progressive of social strategies, it was nonetheless indisputably effective. It’s really the same skill as picking off the weakest antelope.

It was Fosco’s misfortune that the herd I happened to be stalking was this misfit band of Illuminatus-spouting elves and wizards who dwelled in the coveted on-campus cottage we referred to simply as brown house.

I call him Fosco because “Fosco Tolkien” is the name I got just now when I put his real name in the hobbit name generator at http://www.chriswetherell.com/hobbit/. Clever thing that. Apparently, my hobbit name is Myrtle Smallburrows of Sandydowns. Stealthily, did this Sandydowns temptress come to exercise dominion over poor Fosco of brown house.

Then, to compound my fault, I not only used him for whatever I thought I would gain from the companionship of these woodland creatures, but I also made him do all of my typing. We had vax back then, and I didn’t even know how to log on and make the vax do my bidding in the first place, let alone type. Oh yes, by moonlight I did creep into brown house and shove the handwritten pages of my latest oeuvre into the face of poor Fosco, who – dutiful hobbit -- would churn them out by deadline.

But that was only the beginning of the woes that acquaintance with me would bring him.

Now my true heart’s yearning was an upperclassman who looked like Jim Morrison and dressed like James Dean, with a “Live fast; Die pretty” demeanor not at all befitting his status as my resident adviser. Chivalric was my unrequited love. That he was gay and quite militant only just made him all the more deliciously tragique, as he would allude to narrow escapes from AIDS and bashers alike.

Don’t get me wrong. It was not for him, or not for him alone, that I joined the gay student group on campus. No, I actually did share a very heartfelt kinship with its members as a fellow “invisible minority.” Plus, they were awesome – fierce and self-assured and worldly. They were Stonewall. They were ACTUP, which had only just formed. And inviting – did I mention I wanted the world to love me?

Our big project was we were going to the LGBT March on Washington – the first national march since 1979 and the first display of the AIDS quilt. I wouldn’t have missed it. Also, for me it had the added appeal of a cheap trip home. Eventually there were two busloads of us – and all of them were going to camp out in my basement. Even Fosco had been coaxed to leave the shire, thinking to charm the girlfriend’s parents.

Like-Minded People

So, I’ve been thinking about this business of “like-minded people.” Everywhere I went, my classmates, especially the young parents, were proudly announcing that they had managed to surround themselves with “like-minded people.” Now, to be absolutely fair to my beloved classmates, when they say “like-minded,” it isn’t Stepford code for the narrow exclusivity and shallow conformity of the bourgeoisie.

I have no doubt that they mean it in only the best Bo-Bo sense. A place where they can raise quirky, free-thinking, smarty-pants kids without too much lowest common denominator telling them to man up, quit dreaming, be sexy, or buy cool stuff; where the neighbors don’t gossip if they recycle their grey water and keep their grey hair; where they can return from their moderately-well-paid but purposeful jobs to do some actual living in their living rooms, shabby chic and overstuffed with books, arguing into the night over good wine and potluck.

On "Mad About You," Helen Hunt (surveying LGBT parade): "Do we have enough gay friends?"
Paul Reiser: "For what?"

Hard to scoff at that. That’s all I want in the world. I have only had a glimpse of it. A few of my parent’s friends early on were quite – what’s the word? -- intentional. I have a friend who spent some time in a commune that referred to itself as an “intentional community.” I like the sound of that.

It was like that -- intentional, full of intent. They were forever forming groups with preposterous names like The Institute for Community Development. The neighbors used to put on one-acts at each other’s houses and we would do the sound effects. We were welcome at anyone’s house and if the finger paint was going to be too messy, we would just paint naked.

Whereas, my life? Has no “intent” in it besides mine.