Alone and Unobserved

When we see a man kissing another man, the preconceived associations in the hidden brain tell most Americans that this is not what men do. Of course, we can quickly shush our hidden brain and act blasé. But when we are juggling many things, when we are under pressure, or when we are simply busy doing something else, it becomes difficult to suppress the automatic associations of the hidden brain. At such times, the hidden brain’s rapid conclusions about the world become especially powerful. If we are asked to make a judgment about these men in some other context—their job performance, for example—we may get the feeling they are not quite right for the job without knowing how we leaped to that conclusion.

When I say “we” have automatic biases about gay people, I really do mean everyone—straight people and gay people. Just as black children tend to have positive associations with white faces rather than black faces, gay people can unconsciously harbor the same associations as straight people. This should not be cause for surprise: Gays usually see many more straight families than gay families in real life, on TV, and in books. If the hidden brain learns through repetition, why would the unconscious associations of gay people be much different from the unconscious associations of straight people?
(Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives, p. 74)

We have a long, long way to go.

As you may or may not know, I use Goodreads to keep track of the books I read, and to rate and review them when I have the inclination. I recently read a book of poetry that completely blew me away, and my reaction to it turned out more like a blog entry than a review. So I thought I would cross-post it here.

The First Risk by Charles Jensen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don’t remember finding out about Matthew Shepard’s slaying. I was seventeen when it happened, a self-hating closeted gay Mormon, halfway through my first semester at Brigham Young University. Did I think he deserved it, the way I thought gays deserved to die of AIDS for their sins? I hope not, but I’m afraid to remember too well.

I am the failure of the body to remain a boy,
I am the remains of a boy, the body of his failure. (“I Am the Boy Who Is Tied Down”, p. 7)

The first section—”Safe”—interweaves various viewpoints on Matthew Shepard’s last moments with three poems describing Venus’s grief at the death of Adonis. The language is brutal, visceral, and the tone moves from cold and dissociated to immediate and passionate. Reading this section, it was like I was hearing about the killing for the first time. And this time, at least, I know I didn’t think he deserved it.

When I finally came out to myself as a gay man, and began to accept myself and to stop blaming myself for who and what I was, I took an entire summer to watch what I saw as the “gay canon,” films I had been too afraid to watch until that point. One of the first of these was Almodóvar’s masterpiece, All About My Mother.

I tell you, chica,

If you want something done,
Do it with a knife. (“La Agrado Explains Plastic Surgery”, p. 25)

The second section—”City of the Sad Divas”—is a collection of poems associated with All About My Mother and its characters: Manuela, who has lost her son; La Agrado and the other transsexual hookers; Huma Rojo and her heroin-addicted lover, Nina; and the city of Barcelona itself, where much of the action takes place. In these poems, the reader does not relive the film; rather, the violence and passion and filth of the film are held at arms length, looked over with a dark and dubious eye, considered, and then let go.

I’ve always hated Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, although it is often gorgeous to watch, because I never believed for a minute that any of it was happening. All of the characters annoy me, the plot annoys me, and Scottie’s obsession and eventual unraveling annoy me.

To be golden-haired means
you are destined to be idolized;

brunettes have less fun
but keep better secrets. (“Hair and Make-Up Notes, Scene 92″, p. 50)

The fourth section—”The Double Bind: A Critical Text”—presents a critical analysis of Vertigo, and includes all kind of tantalizing details about the cast, director and the narrative and directorial choices in the film. I have no idea if any of these details are true; that is not the point: they are simply too delicious to resist. Each snippet, naturally, is accompanied by an associated poem. One thing that must be said in Vertigo’s favor is that it is beautifully shot, composed and scored. Unlike the previous collection, these silky little poems do much more to evoke the actual feel of parts of the film.One result of reading this section is that I have the sudden desire to see Vera Miles play the Kim Novak role (and, really, anyone else play the Jimmy Stewart role).

I’ve already reviewed the fourth section, “The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon,” on Goodreads. I have nothing to add to that review except this:

This is good poetry.

View all my reviews on Goodreads >>

When I was fifteen, my older sister and I went to work for a couple weeks detasseling corn in a series of massive South Dakota seed-corn fields. The work was grueling—we got up long before dawn, received few breaks, and tramped up and down the rows in sweltering midwestern heat, continually slashed by sharp corn leaves that cut our hands to ribbons, finally finishing in the late afternoon—but the worst part was dealing with other workers. They were mostly thirteen- and fourteen-year-old mouthbreathers kids, and a few of them were wretched little monsters who thought nothing was funnier or more interesting than making fun of me. The taunts weren’t very inventive, but they were relentless.

“Faggot!”
“I bet you like taking it up the ass, don’t you?”
“Homo.”
“How many guys’ dicks have you sucked? It’s your favorite thing ever, isn’t it?”

Responding only made it worse, because then they would shriek with laughter and mimic my shrill, effeminate tones. Sometimes there were slaps or shoves, which I was always too slow to avoid. Even though they were almost all younger than I was, most of them were bigger, and all of them were meaner.

When it was time for our lunch break, we would pile back onto the big yellow school bus that hauled us from town out to the fields and back every day, and they would surround me as I tried to eat the lunch I had packed the night before, usually a PB&J sandwich that was now soggy and half-boiled.

“Homo.”
*slap*
“Faggot.”
*shove*
“Ass bandit.”

Up front, the crew leader—a (gorgeous) gung-ho blond male college student—ate his own lunch and pretended he didn’t hear.

All in all, I’ve probably gotten off easily when it comes to bullying, seeing how I was homeschooled from the time I was seven until I was fifteen. There were a lot of reasons my mom made that decision, some of which I agree with, some of which I definitely don’t. (You are correct if you assume that those motives had to do with religion.) But on the whole, looking back, I’ve always thought that I did better—from a strictly scholastic point of view—studying what interested me at my own pace at home than I would’ve done studying the approved curriculum at an artificial pace in public school.

When Mom pulled us out of school, my sister and I were in second grade. I already knew I was a little different from the other kids, but I had a few friends, and the teasing wasn’t that bad. I generally liked school, except when the pace of the lessons was too slow. (I also hated the fact that second-graders weren’t allowed in the chapter-book section of the school library. Thus my absolute opposition to ageism in libraries. But that’s a different story.)

After my mom started homeschooling us, my main social contact was with other Mormon kids in the area—at church, at youth activities, in the local congregation’s Scout troop. As we got older and my acquaintances entered middle school (sixth grade, or eleven to twelve years old), suddenly they stopped being nice. Teasing became namecalling and constant mocking, and I was frequently the target. They had always been “church friends,” never actually my friends—although I don’t think I realized that until later—but now they weren’t any kind of friends at all.

Things got slightly better when we turned fourteen and they all entered high school. I still felt like a complete outsider, but this time there seemed to be an identifiable cause: they were in high school, and I wasn’t. Their conversations revolved around which teachers they liked and which they hated, which extracurricular activities they were a part of, which scene they were into.

I, in contrast, was homeschooled. I only had one teacher, and then only in the loosest sense of the term. I had no extracurriculars—except church; how cool—and I had no scene. The solution seemed simple: Ditch home school! Enroll in high school! Try out for a team! Join a club! Make friends! Enjoy life!

Things didn’t exactly work out that way. My sister and I begged Mom to put us back in public school, and she finally gave in and went to talk to Mrs. Rose, the school district superintendent. She had been our principal in second grade, and Mom had approached her back then as well for advice on the transition to home school. Mrs. Rose had been only too supportive at the time, but now she was less positive.

She explained that re-enrolling us in public school would be difficult. There would be placement tests to take, and given our nonstandard homeschool curriculum, and notwithstanding how bright and studious we were, we might be forced to do remedial coursework in any number of subjects. Also, Mrs. Rose said, knowing us and our situation, she thought the social adjustment would be especially onerous. Not impossible, but perhaps not worth the effort. Why didn’t we consider enrolling in the local community college instead? All we’d have to do was take the CHSPE (California High School droPout Exam, the easiest standardized test known to humanity) and we could be college freshmen.

College was 1000 times more alluring than high school, so my sister and I didn’t take much convincing. Who needed dumb teenage friends when we could hang out with cosmopolitan twentysomethings at a podunk junior college in Nowheresville, CA? We scheduled our CHSPE test date and began reading SAT prep books. And of course we also needed to earn some money, for tuition and books . . . which led us eventually to a yellow school bus in an enormous cornfield in South Dakota.

My story had a fairly happy ending. After a week of lunchtime heckling, the bus driver—a fun, down-to-earth lady in her late thirties—invited me and my sister to come up to the front of the bus and sit behind her. The bullying petered out, and few days later the detasseling season was over. We went back home and enrolled in the community college, where virtually everyone else was an adult and acted like it.

I sometimes wonder whether attending public school would have prepared me better for the insults and the taunting I experienced on that big yellow school bus. Would I have had more armor? More weapons? Would I have been more used to it, not cared as much? I would almost certainly have experienced more frequent, more sustained, even possibly violent bullying in school. Would I have been one of those bullied gay kids who gives up, drops out . . . commits suicide?

U.S. President Barack Obama just signed an inclusive hate crimes bill into law (eleven years after Matthew Shepard’s torture and murder in October 1998), but something needs to be done to combat the wave of anti-gay bullying and hazing in public schools. That summer detasseling corn is still one of my most nightmarish memories. The thought of any kid having to endure the same—or worse—for years, with no support or recourse, is horrifying to me. It’s time for every school district to have an anti-bullying policy that specifically addresses bullying against LGBT students. It’s time for every school to have anti-bullying and gay-tolerance training and activities. There are thousands of gay-straight alliances in schools across the country, but there are not enough. It’s time to create a new culture of tolerance and acceptance in our public schools.

Resources:

• GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network)
• ThinkB4YouSpeak.com
• National Day of Silence
• No Name-Calling Week

I’ve featured Mormon ‘apostle’ Dallin Oaks and his, er, peculiar take on sexuality and family relations on this blog before ([1], [2]). In some ways, Oaks has become the go-to guy when the Mormon church needs a ponderous, intolerant statement about the homosexuals, perhaps because of his talent for sounding authoritative and paternal even when he’s at his most insane. Such as in a speech he plans on giving at BYU-Idaho (formerly Ricks College), a Mormon-owned school in Rexburg, Idaho. In the speech (according to a copy obtained by the AP), Oaks “refers to gay marriage as an ‘alleged civil right’” and says “[t]he anti-Mormon backlash after California voters overturned gay marriage last fall is similar to the intimidation of Southern blacks during the civil rights movement.”

W. T. F. He did not just go there. But OH YES HE DID. And he’s standing by it, too!

In an interview Monday before the speech, Oaks said he did not consider it provocative to compare the treatment of Mormons in the election’s aftermath to that of blacks in the civil rights era, and said he stands by the analogy.

“It may be offensive to some—maybe because it hadn’t occurred to them that they were putting themselves in the same category as people we deplore from that bygone era,” he said.

The “anti-Mormon backlash” is exactly what the Mormon church deserved for spending so much time, money and effort taking rights away from an already-oppressed segment of the population. This is a democracy; free speech—including free speech you don’t like!—is everyone’s right. Including Dallin Oaks’s right to stick his foot so far in his mouth it comes out his ass.

EDITED (23:18): Somehow the SL Trib article I linked to in the body of the post changed from the AP story to a related one; I’ve changed the link to the AP story on Fox 13 News Channel’s website.
[SL Trib article] [AP article (on Fox News)]

You’ve probably already heard about the gay couple who was confronted, thrown to the ground, handcuffed and ejected from Mormon-owned Main Street Plaza in downtown Salt Lake City with a trespassing citation—for a kiss on the cheek. Per the couple, they were also told by disgusted Mormon security guards that their behavior was gross and unnatural.

Here is the Mormon church’s response, via ksl.com (website of the Mormon-owned KSL television channel):

Two individuals came on Church property and were politely asked to stop engaging in inappropriate behavior—just as any other couple would have been. They became argumentative and used profanity and refused to leave the property. They were arrested and then given a citation for criminal trespass by SLPD.
—Mormon spokesperson Kim Farah

“Any other couple,” Mormon spokesperson Kim Farah? So when a heterosexual couple walks across Main Street Plaza holding hands, and one happens to give the other a peck on the cheek, they are routinely confronted by security guards and kicked off Mormon property? What about the heterosexual couples who take engagement or wedding photos on the plaza, photos in which many of them are caught on film kissing and hugging on your church’s property? Do you send your minions to round them up as well for engaging in “inappropriate behavior”?

No, you don’t, and you know you don’t. This couple was approached and kicked out because they were gay and had the audacity to show affection on Mormon church property.

Now, the Mormon church does own Main Street Plaza, and they have the right to refuse entrance to or to eject whomever they please. And maybe this unpleasantness really comes down to a handful of bigoted security guards, and is not official Mormon church policy. But the Mormon church wants to have it both ways: it wants to campaign openly and fiercely against gay rights on a national level, and still pretend to love the gays. Don’t believe them for a second. If an organization that really loved the gays were involved in a situation like this one, they would immediately clarify the behavior policy governing their property (something Farah reportedly has refused to do), apologize for the actions of a few security guards in singling out a gay couple, and announce that those security guards have now either been fired or are undergoing training on how to deal with homosexual couples.

The Mormon church is homophobic. Homophobia is behind all of its anti-gay actions—not love, not tolerance, not high-mindedness, but hate and bigotry. Don’t let them get away with sugar-coating it any longer.

“Why not just shut the he!! up about your sexual proclivity and become productive members of society.” (online comment on a recent news article about marriage equality)

Gays and gay-rights activists hear it all the time. “Why do you talk about your sexual preference all the time? You guys are sex-obsessed. You don’t hear us [heterosexuals] talking about that stuff!”

There are two responses to that: heterosexuals exhibit their sexual preference constantly, all the time, but don’t notice it; and in other cases, heterosexuals don’t need to make their sexual preference clear because theirs is the default/assumed orientation. American society (like most/all societies the world over) is deeply, fundamentally heteronormative. As with other kinds of privilege and bias, it is invisible to the majority, and may even be invisible to many in the homosexual minority. But think about it for a minute.

If you are heterosexual, you may have had to make a decision about when to tell people you are married/seeing someone. But if you are homosexual, talking about your significant other to people who don’t know you are gay is coming out. (In some places, such as the wonderful state I live in, it can get you fired or evicted. For instance.) Ditto to putting photos of your family on your desk at work or bringing your significant other to social functions.

If you are heterosexual, you grew up listening to stories and music that reaffirmed your sexual orientation again and again. If you are homosexual, you almost certainly did not. Love songs are overwhelmingly about heterosexual love. So are fairy tales. So are romance novels, and the love stories in films, and the love stories/marriages in religious texts.

If you are heterosexual, you have never worried about whether it’s safe to hold hands with your significant other in public because of his/her gender. If you are homosexual, that may be all you could think about the first time you went out on a date.

If you are heterosexual, your parents probably have the same sexual orientation you do. In fact, almost everyone you’ve known since you were a baby has had that same sexual orientation. If you are homosexual, this is almost certainly not the case.

If you are heterosexual, you probably have never been asked when you chose to be that way, or been told/had it implied that your sexual orientation is a choice and/or a sin. (If you have, it was probably a gay person ironically turning the tables on you.)

If you are heterosexual, you’ve probably never had to “come out” about your sexual orientation. If you have, those situation are probably few and far between (say, at a predominately gay party). If you are homosexual and you want to be out, you must constantly come out.

Gay people will always be a minority, wild-eyed religious/conservative rhetoric notwithstanding, which means that society will always be mostly heterosexual. But that doesn’t mean society needs to be heteronormative and heterosexist. And the way to try to achieve a mostly-heterosexual-but-not-heteronormative society is if gay people and gay allies make themselves known and make themselves heard.

Happy LGBT Pride Month. Come out as gay or as a gay ally today. Speak out. Make a difference.

Mormon sci-fi/fantasy author Orson Scott Card has made absolutely no secret of three things:

1. He opposes the gay rights movement (claiming that “by and large homosexuals already have” civil rights), supports criminalization of homosexual activity and opposes gay marriage.
2. He advocates overthrowing any government that institutes gay marriage.
3. He does not consider himself a homophobe.

And now he has joined the board of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), the group behind the campy “coming storm/rainbow coalition” ad and the hilarious 2M4M.org misfire. NOM claims not to be homophobic as well, but are they willing to embrace Card’s extremist, “non-homophobic” philosophy?

Read more about Orson Scott Card’s non-homophobia and his position on the NOM board in this People For the American Way press release.

The Colbert Coalition’s Anti-Gay Marriage Ad

I’m sure you’ve all heard about Utah State Senator Chris Buttars’s interview for an upcoming Prop 8 documentary, in which he said all sorts of kind things about The Gays:

They’re mean. They want to talk about being nice. They’re the meanest buggers I have ever seen.

What is the morals of a gay person? You can’t answer that because anything goes.

And this gem, about the gay movement:

It’s just like the Muslims. Muslims are good people and their religion is anti-war. But it’s been taken over by the radical side… They’re probably the greatest threat to America going down I know of.

The best part is that he made these statements to documentarist/anchor Reed Cowan—AN OPENLY GAY MAN. Real smooth, Buttars. Real smooth.

Of course, Utah Senate President Michael Waddoups is defending Buttars and trying to portray this as a “vendetta” Cowan is waging against Buttars. “It’s just unfortunate in my mind that someone wants to continue to [hurt] someone by virtue of a person’s position on the issues,” Waddoups is quoted as saying in this Salt Lake Tribune article.

Yeah, right, Waddoups. Sure, we all hate Buttars, but he’s the one who continually makes himself look like a ridiculous bigot, not us. I can’t believe this man was RE-ELECTED after last year’s debacle, and after the continuing spectacle he’s made of himself his entire time in office. Utah—and especially Utah Senate District 10—ought to be ashamed and embarrassed.

UPDATE (2-19-09, 11:36 pm)
The Utah Senate will be holding a press conference tomorrow (Friday) morning, and there are strong indications that he will at least be stripped of his committee chair–potentially leaving the way open for a slightly more gay-friendly face in the Utah Senate Judiciary Committee. Will update again after the press conference!

UPDATE (2-20-09, 10:34 am)
Well, Buttars has not resigned, but he has lost his place on the Judiciary and Judicial Confirmation Committees. More info at the Deseret News site and the Salt Lake Tribune site. Read both articles—each brings up points the other does not.

I just got word from a friend on the Hill that the anti-gay hordes have been pummeling the Governor’s Office with phone calls ever since he came out as supporting the Common Ground Initiatives and civil unions for gay couples. We need to let him know that he has supporters here in Utah—not all of us are crazy-eyed gay-hating nutjobs like Buttars & Ruzicka!

Call the Governor’s Office at 801-538-1000 and tell him you support his pro-gay positions, and thank him for being an ally.

Get out the word—chief anti-gay harpy Gayle Ruzicka has phone trees on her side, but we have the internets!