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.

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.

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.

By now you’ve all heard the arguments the Yes on 8 or Yes on 102 or Yes on Amendment 2 folks have made for why gay couples shouldn’t be allowed to marry. And you’ve also heard that the Mormon church has once again entered the fray in California, pouring thousands of dollars and thousands of volunteer hours into the Yes on 8 campaign and preaching against gay marriage at every possibility.

Here is why Mormons shouldn’t care about gay marriage, and here also is why they really do.

Reasons Mormons Shouldn’t Care about Gay Marriage

Reason #1: Mormons believe the only real marriages are called “sealings” and are contracted in Mormon temples between a worthy Mormon man and a worthy Mormon woman. According to Mormon doctrine, sealings were instituted by god in the Garden of Eden, when he married Adam and Eve “for time and all eternity.” So every single other marriage in the world—civil or religious—is a “redefinition” of marriage, from the Mormon viewpoint. And yet Mormons aren’t campaigning to take away non-Mormon straight marriage.

Reason #2: Mormons have totally been on the other side of this issue. Remember polygamy? Remember how today the Mormon church totally tries to distance itself from polygamy in every way, but how they were totally all about it until, like, 1910? And how the Republican Party was founded on the twin-plank platform of getting rid of slavery… and polygamy? And how an army invaded Utah when the Mormon church wouldn’t capitulate? Yeah.

Reason #3: Mormons believe in religious freedom and in the separation of church and state. Or at least they should, according to their own scriptures, penned by Mormonism founder Joseph Smith. Read Doctrine and Covenants Section 102 of you don’t believe me. Also the Eleventh Article of Faith.

We believe that religion is instituted of God, and that men are amenable to him and to him only for the exercise of it, unless their religious opinion opinions prompts them to infringe upon the rights and liberties of others; but we do not believe that human law has a right to interfere in prescribing rules of worship to bind the consciences of men, nor dictate forms for public or private devotion; that the civil magistrate should restrain crime, but never control conscience; should punish guilt, but never suppress the freedom of the soul. . . .

We do not believe it just to mingle religious influence with civil Government, whereby one religious society is fostered and another proscribed in its spiritual privileges, and the individual rights of its members, as citizens, denied.
(D&C 102:4,9)

We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let the worship how, where, or what they may.
(11th Article of Faith)

Why Mormons REALLY Care about Gay Marriage

Because their church has told them to care. Also, for many of them, because they find the idea of gay sex icky. Per Green Dads:

The next time you hear anyone speak in opposition to gay marriage, take every word that comes out of their mouth and replace it with “penis, penis, penis” or “vagina, vagina, vagina” because that is exactly what they are really thinking. We all know it and so do they; and sooner or later we’re all going to have to admit the truth of what’s really going on here. Opponents of gay marriage should be ashamed of themselves; they are the real perverts here. (full article)

Why does the Mormon church care? Well… it doesn’t. It couldn’t care less about gays getting married, per se. What the Mormon church cares about is gays being fully accepted in society.

And why does the Mormon church care about social acceptance of gays and their relationships? Because, as a patriarchy, it is so deeply invested in the idea of “traditional” ’50s-style gender roles that it has no choice but to be homophobic. Gays and their relationships threaten the Cleaver-family model by their very existence.

And why does the Mormon church care about the acceptance of gays in California, when it hasn’t intervened on this scale in Massachusetts or Connecticut or anywhere else? Because California has something those other places doesn’t: masses and masses of Mormons, which means masses and masses of relatives and friends of Utahns. And if there’s one thing that scares and mobilizes the Mormon church, it’s the idea of gays gaining any kind of traction in Utah.

Oppose homophobia, even if it’s wrapped up in lies about “protecting the family.” If you are in a state with an anti-gay-marriage measure on the ballot, VOTE AGAINST IT. If you live elsewhere, or can’t vote, add your voice to those speaking out against such measures.

But most importantly, whatever your beliefs (but especially if you agree with me), get out and vote.

When I was growing up I was often called names. It kind of comes with the territory—I was effeminate, geeky, introverted, awkward, unattractive and unpopular, and terribly insecure about it all to boot. I was an easy target, so I was often targeted.

That was years ago, and I thought I was totally over it. This turns out not to be the case!

Yesterday a well-dressed, clean-cut man approached the reference desk and (in accented English) asked for books on Balzac in Spanish. From the first moment, his attitude was hostile, condescending, even contemptuous, and as I searched our database and failed to find any of the Spanish-language materials he was looking for, first on Balzac and then on the Marquis de Sade, his behavior descended to open mocking. When I asked him to please be more civil he (in an even worse tone) asked to see my manager. As I got up to find someone to talk to him, he continued to openly mock and ridicule me, so I informed him I would simply be calling security.

His response: “Yeah! Call them! Fucking maricón de mierda.”

Then, instead of waiting to speak with security, he got on the elevator, leaving me shaking, speechless and on the verge of tears.

This is the first time I’ve been called an actual nasty name at the library. Patrons have been rude, irrational, unreasonable, profane, angry and loud, but in the three years I’ve worked here, this is the first time anyone has descended to name-calling. And it really threw me. This is a complete cliché, but in the few minutes I had to deal with that patron it felt like I was suddenly that awkward, oily-faced fifteen-year-old again, and I was stammering and flushing and trembling and completely falling apart. Just like I used to.

In case you don’t know how to insult people in Spanish, “maricón” is (among other things) a homosexual slur. And once he used it, his earlier unexplained antipathy suddenly seemed very clear: He was rude to me because he realized I was gay. In fact, apparently he felt my being gay gave him license to be the most completely over-the-top asshole I’ve ever dealt with as an adult.

I’m feeling very off-balance right now. Since that encounter, I’ve been intensely aware at all times that I am a gay man and—while I’m not what I think of as flamboyant—it’s usually pretty obvious to people (even over the phone). When I interact with patrons now, I constantly wonder if they’ve figured it out, what they think, and whether they are going to take it as license to be rude or disrespectful. I haven’t felt this raw and vulnerable in a long time—again, probably not since I was a teenager.

Ugh. If I wanted to re-live my youth I would do what Dooce has done and post angsty teen-era journal entries for all the world to see.