IGF CultureWatch

Originally appeared Feb. 27, 2002, in the Chicago Free Press.

Gay rights activists and national editorial writers are calling for Alabama's Chief Justice Roy Moore to be removed from the bench.

That's exactly what they should do. But in some ways, we are lucky that Justice Moore spoke up.

Two weeks ago, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the heterosexual father of three teenagers (ages 15, 17 and 18) should be granted custody over their lesbian mother, who lives with her partner in California. The mother petitioned for custody in 2000, because the father, she said, was abusive.

Custody decisions are made for all sorts of reasons, including financial status and ability to care for a child. Eight of the justices, overturning a decision of an appellate court, seemed to have made their ruling based on legal principles. But Justice Moore made it clear in a concurring opinion that when he voted with the court, he wasn't just thinking about mundane legal details.

Instead, in his mind, custody was awarded to the father on moral principles - the mother, he believes, is an unfit parent simply because she is a lesbian. And he evidently felt the need to expound on this in detail, because his concurring opinion, which quotes the Bible and legal statutes, takes great pains to pronounce his views.

He writes, "... the homosexual conduct of a parent ... creates a strong presumption of unfitness that is alone sufficient justification for denying that parent custody of his or her own children or prohibiting the adoption of children of others."

He continues, "Homosexual conduct is, and has been, considered abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature and a violation of the laws of nature. ... Such conduct violates both the criminal and civil laws of this State and is destructive to a basic building block of society - the family. ... [Such behavior] is an inherent evil against which children must be protected."

These are heartbreaking words, but we should be grateful that he said something this explicit about how he views gays and lesbians.

Yes, it is horrific that a state's Chief Justice would declare homosexuality to be "an inherent evil." Yes, it is unfortunate that his words are now entered into law as unbinding precedent.

But just think - he was on the bench a month ago, a year ago, and this was his position. He thought these things before - worse, he probably has acted on these things before, to the detriment of those in our community. The public just didn't know.

We could have guessed, perhaps. We already knew that Moore is no liberal. As a trial judge, he tried to keep a plaque of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom. Last year, when he became Chief Justice he made national news by placing monuments of Ten Commandments (AP called them "washing-machine sized") in the state judicial building.

But his words now give us something to point to. Even if he isn't ousted from the bench (and will he be, in conservative Alabama?) at least lawyers for gays and lesbians know what they are dealing with when they enter his courtroom. His homophobia is officially confirmed.

And the homophobes we know about are slightly less dangerous than the ones in hiding. Because it is not Moore, now, who is a wild card - it is the canny jurist who thinks that gays and lesbians are evil but is too savvy to say it; the jurist who denies a lesbian adoption rights because he thinks all lesbians are unfit parents, but couches his opinions in innocuous legal rigmarole; the jurist who sets low bail for a gay-basher because he secretly believes the victim got what he deserved.

After all, now we know how Moore thinks about gays and lesbians. We know that gays and lesbians can't get a fair trial in his courtroom. And the rest of the country knows that, too - which may mean that gays and lesbians who aren't given their full rights in the Supreme Court of Alabama may find refuge in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Also, his words give an edge to gay activists, who have something they can rally around that will help them raise funds and change minds as they battle homophobia in Alabama and elsewhere. Who can deny that homophobia still exists, when the chief justice of a state supreme court, who is supposed to be impartial, says that gays and lesbians are 'abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature and a violation of the laws of nature'?

So yes, the words of Chief Justice Roy Moore are horrifying. But we knew that there were people in power who felt that way. It is no surprise to us.

We just don't always know exactly who they are. So let us call for his removal. But let us also be relieved that at least we know that the snake is there on the bench in Alabama, ready to bite. At least we can protect ourselves accordingly, the best we can.

Originally appeared February 13, 2002, in the Chicago Free Press.

FOR SOME AMERICANS, gays and lesbians are still the dark shadow that hovers at the edge of polite society, waiting to swallow their children.

Maybe they've never articulated their fear, even to themselves; or maybe they still think that we will molest their children or entice them (gasp!) to be like us. They are afraid that being raised by lesbians or gay men will make children unacceptably different - that it will masculinize girls, femininize boys, or simply make them unlike other children and so worse off. They believe that it is one of their sacred duties as parents or potential parents to keep the most vulnerable members of society from swaying under our influence.

But what they forget is that many of us are parents or potential parents already. Between one and 10 million children have at least one gay or lesbian parent. They have come from our bodies or from the bodies of our partners - or we have planned for them, searched for them, waited and hoped and prayed. We have walked the floors with sick children at night, we have helped them with math homework, we have driven them to soccer games. And it is this fact that the American Academy of Pediatrics was honoring this month when it announced that it supported the rights of gays and lesbians to adopt their partner's children.

"Children who are born to or adopted by one member of a same-sex couple deserve the security of two legally recognized parents," the academy said in Pediatrics, its scientific journal.

This is important, because only six states (Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Vermont) and Washington, D.C., currently allow second-parent adoptions outright. Three ban them. And in the rest of the 41 states, the laws are murky, making parents unsure of what their rights actually are until they test them out.

Adoption protects the rights of children, as well as parents. If one parent dies or is incapacitated, adoption permits children to stay in the security of their home with their other parent. It offers them Social Security survivor benefits. It gives children access to health benefits and provides them with a second parent who can consent to medical care. It creates legal ties between a child and each of her parents in the event the adults separate. Basically, it establishes the right for gay and lesbian couples and their children to be families under the law.

Of course this frightens some people. Why wouldn't it? It threatens their very notion of the building blocks of society. Because if the law declares that a lesbian couple and their children are a family, entitled to the legal rights that a family has, then it begins to seem absurd that the couple isn't entitled to the legal benefits of marriage.

Either mother can be her child's next of kin if the child lands in the hospital-�but in most states, neither parent can be the automatic next of kin for each other. The surviving partner doesn't receive Social Security benefits. If the employer of one spouse isn't generous or isn't required to provide benefits by their local state or municipality, the other partner might not have access to health benefits while helping raise their child. The family circle is left with a ragged, gaping tear.

For us, first comes children - but never comes marriage, or at least legal unions in 49 states.

Even so, the American Academy for Pediatrics ruling brings us a step closer to having our families recognized. The widely-respected 55,000 member institution recognizes that we raise healthy, well-adjusted kids-or at least as healthy and well-adjusted as the kids heterosexuals raise. We are just as loving, just as supportive. And our children are just about as likely to be gay, though one study has said they are more likely to be tolerant of gays and lesbians.

But most of all, it recognizes that we have already created and are already creating families. We already have children in our homes, our hearts and our lives. Now we simply need laws in the other 43 states to catch up with the reality.

What the Academy recognizes is that we are like every other family in America except for one thing - our children are not guaranteed the protection of their second parent in places where they cannot be adopted.

The new policy statement doesn't change anything, of course. The laws are still as they were. But hopefully these pediatricians will influence the changing of the laws, both through their collective and individual weight. Hopefully courts will point to this policy statement and decide in favor of America's children, agreeing that since America's pediatricians have declared that it is healthiest for children to be adopted by their second parent, the court will not stand in the way of that adoption.

Until then, we still have work to do. Parents or not, we need to stand together and support through letters to our newspapers and public officials the right of gays and lesbians to adopt their own children. Because the fact is that our families are no different than America's other families - only the laws remain to be changed.

Originally appeared Nov. 14, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.

I USED TO LIKE Richard Goldstein, the executive editor of New York's Village Voice.

Actually, I liked him a lot. I liked the arguments he used to support gay marriage. I liked how he remembered to be lesbian-inclusive. I thought he had thoughtful, interesting perspectives on the social and political issues relevant to gays and lesbians.

But I only read his articles occasionally, when they happened to come across my desk. And it seems I missed something. Because this past weekend, I heard him speak at a plenary session of Creating Change, the NLGTF's annual convention for progressive GLBT activists.

I came away shaking mad.

The plenary was called "Terrorism, War and Democracy - What Does it Mean for GLBT People?" As might be expected, three of the panelists spoke about their response to the attack and to the war and how these events might play out in our community. Richard Goldstein, however, took it upon himself to attack what he called "the gay right" - especially writers Andrew Sullivan, Norah Vincent and Jonathan Rauch, among others.

Why? Well, several reasons. First, because he said that they are guilty of infighting. That is, they criticize our national organizations and the general GLBT orthodoxy (this is an argument he's made before, in print).

My response to that is: Good. Thinkers think. They criticize. I wouldn't want to be part of a movement that wasn't constantly challenging and checking itself. And, for heaven's sake, Goldstein is a journalist. He, if anyone, should understand that the expression of diverse opinions is what keeps us from being sheep - and what keeps us free. He didn't say which ideas he disagreed with, but in general, I think that an opinion within a movement that differs from the orthodoxy leads people to question what they believe. And sometimes we realize that values we used to hold were wrong.

Second, Goldstein decried the so-called "gay right" because he says that they bring the issues of gay marriage and gays in the military to the forefront, making them more prominent, while they should be arguing for an end to workplace, housing and public accommodation discrimination. "They believe in civil equality, not equal opportunity," he said.

I'm not sure this is fair. Yes, the writers he mentioned likely have advocated at one point or another for gay marriage and for the right for gays and lesbians to serve in the military (an issue that's especially important now.) But I can't imagine that there is a single gay or lesbian writer in America who does not want to see the end to discrimination in all its forms. Does Goldstein honestly think that Jonathan Rauch would advocate for someone to be fired from her job because she's a lesbian?

I don't think so.

Finally, Goldstein said we should revile the gay right because they are "a masculinist group of gay writers." They are men and women who worship and aspire to traditional masculinity and "cannot see beyond their privilege." He then equated masculinism with marriage-and-military advocates: "In times of war, masculinist values come to the forefront and feminist values recede." (As a feminist, this made me especially angry - because we should never assume that just because a person is a woman she holds a certain set of ideas. "Nurturing" ideas aren't female; "Aggressive" ideas aren't male. This sort of thinking is sexist and outmoded.)

"If these people prevail," he continued, "the masculinist version of homosexuality will come to dominate the movement. ... It is the most dangerous thing we face today, I believe."

The "most dangerous thing"? Think about that. Our country was attacked by fundamentalists, our movement is regularly stormed by the Christian right, yet Goldstein believes that the most dangerous thing our movement faces is Andrew Sullivan?

Please.

Andrew Sullivan doesn't head an anti-gay organization. Norah Vincent isn't running for office. Jonathan Rauch isn't secretly plotting to firebomb NLGTF headquarters.

But Goldstein persisted, doing his best to sic the NLGTF activists on these and other "gay right" writers, saying, "Take these people seriously, speak out against them, combat their ideas."

Instead, how about encouraging the activists to think for themselves? Because we are not a monolithic movement - or rather we are not just a movement. We are a culture, a people, with diverse ideas, beliefs and opinions. We don't share one way of looking at politics or religion or society. And in order to win our rights, we shouldn't need to.

Perhaps what Goldstein meant to say - what he has said before, in the Village Voice - is that the mainstream media needs to give space to many different gay voices, not only the ones that seem to push harder against accepted GLBT orthodoxy.

Bully. I agree.

But that is not what he said at Creating Change. What he said was that, in the gay movement, there is an "us" and a "them." And the "us" holds one set of ideas, progressive ideas, and the "them" holds another, conservative, evil set. So evil that we must take our resources of time and energy and battle them instead of our true enemies, those who dispute our very right to exist. This is unfair and untrue.

This, in fact, is the kind of infighting we should battle against. Not the expression of ideas - but the exhortation for us to silence ideas within our community that we disagree with. Everyone, after all, has the right to her or his opinion. Even if they're gay.

Originally appeared August 8, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.

WHEN A LEAKED MEMO about the 2002 Gay Games in Sydney indicated that the event might be cancelled because of mismanagement and a financial shortfall, there were headlines but not much surprise.

And why should we be surprised? We've seen this before.

We need to think back only as far as last year, when the controversial Millennium March on Washington hovered on the brink of cancellation. To save it, organizers had to scurry to secure an extra $600,000 in last-minute loans from corporate sponsors and individuals.

Most of us also remember when money from the affiliated Millennium Festival went missing - did an insider stuff $500,000 into his or her pockets before he or she left for the night? Or was attendance not as high as organizers thought?

Then there was the 1990 Vancouver games and the 1994 New York games, both of which ended up with deficits. The 1998 Amsterdam games turned out to be a financial disaster, requiring the local government to pony up $2 million so that they could continue.

So now it's Sydney. The gay money curse strikes again.

Trouble is, the curse seems to strike so frequently that many of us have stopped noticing. Who cares if newspapers fold because they lose ad revenue, if vendors are forced to take loans to keep their businesses afloat, or if sports teams are stranded on the other side of the world?

What does it matter if a local government has to bail us out, as long as we get to bask in the gay pride glow we get whenever thousands of us converge together. As long as people have a good time, as long as the community is burnished with an extra polishing of fellow feeling, an event is successful, right?

Wrong.

It is shameful that we refuse to take fiscal responsibility for ourselves, especially now that we are a maturing movement. Perhaps in our movement's childhood and adolescence it was forgivable to live the dream and damn the consequences, but 26 years after Stonewall, we need to think a little first.

If we want to throw a party or put on a competition, we need to pay for it ourselves and not expect others to bail us out. They don't owe us money; they don't owe us in kind donations. The world owes us nothing but rights and respect.

This is important, because the numbers we throw around - $2 million to bail out the Amsterdam games! - represents real money that has an impact on real people. That $2 million could have gone to public transportation, or housing, or health care, or even stayed in tax payers' pockets. Instead, it paid off businesses that would have suffered had they not gotten their expected return. After the Millennium March fiasco, one festival vendor described how he was forced to sell his jeep to pay salaries. Food vendors, it seems, were collectively owed $300,000.

When our special events organizations are not financially responsible, we hurt our supporters - generous individuals, gay and lesbian owned businesses, supportive legislators, friendly corporate sponsors. And when we hurt our supporters, we hurt ourselves.

Why is this happening? Perhaps because our organizations are built on the shoulders of visionaries who dream a world independent of real costs. We depend on people like that; without them, we could never have broken through the brick wall that sealed our closets.

But it is time to silence our inner children who demand extravaganzas and instead cultivate our inner grown-ups, scaling events back to what can be accomplished responsibly. We must hire people who have the experience to manage mammoth, complex events. More, we must take a close look at the events we take for granted and re-evaluate their purpose.

For example, as the world, country by country, is becoming more open to gays and lesbians, we should think about whether we need a Gay Games modeled on the Olympics. Since the Games are more about brotherhood than about international competition (everyone gets a medal, after all), perhaps we should model the Games on the AIDS ride instead, requesting that athletes who wish to participate raise their own funds through local support. Or maybe we should simply have smaller global competitions for sports that are not in the Olympics - like same-sex couple ice skating.

But we also need to ask how necessary it is that we have any national or international gathering that doesn't pay its own way. Once, these events served as proof to the world - and ourselves - that we existed in large numbers. Now they are just places to spend our disposable incomes acquiring rainbow-themed merchandise. Is it possible that these events are financial failures because not enough of us are interested in attending?

It's true that for those newly out or for those living in conservative areas, these gatherings serve to reassure and strengthen. But our local pride events serve the same purpose. Doesn't it make more sense for someone in conservative southern Illinois to seek out a gay presence in Chicago or St. Louis than to travel to Sydney, half a world away?

We must ward off the gay event money curse with fiscal responsibility, experienced management and honest evaluation. We need to play fair with our supporters and sponsors and prove to them that it is worth investing in our movement. It's only sporting.

Originally appeared May 9, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.

Most of us can recall anti-gay taunts during childhood, whether or not they were directed toward us. I remember the first time I heard someone taunt someone else with "homo"--I didn't know what it meant, but it sounded bad.

In the back of my elementary school bus, large sixth graders would make vicious chants using faggot and fag and homo and 'mo. I heard these slurs bounced around the hallways almost playfully, and spit out by boys who were about to fight. I heard them in quiet corners of the playground, during social events in front of parents and in the middle of the classroom with teachers present.

I never heard any adult insist that the slurs stop.

Bullying playground insults are sometimes dismissed as a harmless rite of passage, but words have power. I knew being gay was bad before I knew what being gay was. Cathy Renna, GLAAD's news media director, explained the power of taunting in The Gay & Lesbian Review: "We learn the emotional content of a word before we learn its definition. As the meaning becomes better understood by us, we often get another surge of emotion--one of power. By using this word or that in the presence of someone else, we can assume the mantle of privilege, for example, or the power to put someone else down. Now if just using a word can be an easy ticket to status and power, the seduction of its use can be irresistible."

Renna was talking about Eminem's use of faggot - but the same can be said of the pervasive use of homophobic slurs on the playground and in the classroom.

Up until now, childhood homophobia may have seemed like it was only a gay issue. But late last month, researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that 30 percent of children in sixth through 10th grades reported either bullying other children, being bullied or both.

Let's say that again. Thirty percent of American children have been affected by bullying. Yet an editorial in the same issue of JAMA points out, "These issues have not been as prominent a part of the last two decades of public health efforts to prevent violence as they should."

Bullying, the JAMA study makes clear, has deleterious effects on all involved. Bullies have higher rates of alcohol and tobacco use and are four times more likely to be convicted of criminal behavior by their 20s than those who don't bully. The majority of bullies had at least one conviction--more than a third had more. As for the victims of bullies, they have higher rates of anxiety disorders, depression and low self-esteem. They report troubled relationships with classmates and a high degree of loneliness. Both bullies and victims were more likely than other children to get into fights.

Interestingly, anti-bullying networks in the United Kingdom (where the problem of bullying has been taken much more seriously much earlier than in the U.S.) note that homophobic bullying is the hardest type of bullying to stop. Not because it's more venomous than other types of bullying, but because teachers feel like their hands are tied.

Education and intervention turn out to be the keys to stopping childhood bullying - schools with intervention programs report up to a 50 percent decrease in bullying. But because many teachers are forbidden to "promote" homosexuality, they are afraid to educate students about the realities of gay and lesbian life in order to stop homophobic bullying - in case their actions are seen as being too pro-gay.

Even after the bullying study was released, teachers and activists in the United States continue to fight that same battle. Just last week in Olympia, Wash., state legislators blocked an anti-bullying bill because Christian right constituents protested that it could lead to homosexual sensitivity training in schools.

This is ridiculous, because the children who are targeted, the children who are hurt, aren't necessarily gay children - they are all children. They are children who are being labeled as faggots before they reach puberty; before they even know that their sexual orientation is; in fact, before many of them know what sexual orientation means.

So bullying will be permitted to continue, simply because school districts are afraid of gays and lesbians. Thirty percent of American children will continue to suffer now, simply because school districts are worried that positive images of gays and lesbian might be harmful sometime in the future.

This would be food for satire if it weren't so disastrous. Though the authors of the study didn't link bullies or victims to violence, it seems clear there must be some effect. Gay bashers, after all, are nothing more than bullies with bats. And some of the school shootings, such as the one at Columbine, seem to have bullies' victims - especially victims of homophobic bullying - at their tragic hearts.

Homophobic bullying is more than just a gay and lesbian issue. It is a national public health issue that leads to dangerous social consequences. We know how to stop it. It is irresponsible and inhumane that we do not.

Originally appeared in slightly different form May 2, 2001, in the Chicago Free Press.

Our own fear is not the only thing that keeps us closeted. Sometimes the fear of others can affect us more powerfully - especially the dark fears of our families.

When we come out, our families have a rainbow of reactions. Some of us are lucky enough to have families - or at least family members - who welcome the news of our sexual orientation with open arms. Others hold such anti-gay positions themselves that they can't reconcile their love for us with their hatred of gays and lesbians, and so they kick us out of their houses and shut us out of their hearts.

But the majority of families fall in the messy middle. They love us, but don't know how to handle the idea of us being gay, lesbian or bisexual. Stereotypes may be all they know about our new community and they are afraid for us. Will we contract AIDS and die? Will we be lonely and beaten and isolated? Will we be fired from our jobs and denied housing?

But perhaps more importantly - and more invidiously - they are afraid for themselves.

Particularly if they don't already live in diverse communities. They look around and think that they are the only ones like them with a gay family member. They don't see the gay uncles and lesbian aunts tucked away in the closets of other families. They don't see the prodigal bisexual daughters and the queer transgender cousins who have moved to cities far away. They only see themselves and know they are different.

And so they worry. Our parents may be concerned that others will think they are bad parents, that they raised us wrong. Our grandparents may worry that others will think they have an immoral family or that they will lose their social standing; our siblings may fret that others may think they have gay tendencies, too. And the one gay, lesbian or bisexual relative that even we don't know about may shake with fear, thinking that his or her closet is about to be burst open before he or she is ready.

This leads to a strange disconnect with our families. They may like our significant others, but be unable to talk to us about gay issues. They may love us and continue to treat us like a valued family member, but refuse to acknowledge our sexual orientation in public, even to close friends. They may buy us the occasional rainbow-themed gift, but ask us not to tell other people they know - our fathers, our grandparents, our siblings, our grandchildren, the neighbors - because those are people "who wouldn't be able to handle it."

What they are really saying is that they themselves can't handle other people knowing - because they are afraid.

Most of us have been conditioned by society to believe that homosexuality is something less than normal. But those of us who are gay, lesbian or bisexual are driven to overcome our fear of abnormality and isolation because before we are out, we already feel abnormal and isolated in our home communities. We already know we don't belong - or that there is a part of us that doesn't belong. We come out because we want to find someone to love, or someone to have sex with, or simply someone - or a community of someones - who understand what we feel. We come out because we cannot do otherwise.

But our families don't have that same motivation. Our families, most of them, have communities that they are happy with already, communities chosen because they share similar values, interests, worries. They don't want to lose their place in a society that they feel safe in.

They can't possibly understand that by coming out as a family with a gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender member that they will become part of another community, the GLBT community, which will value them for their support. They do not yet know that they are only one family amid dozens in their communities who are hiding gay family members - and that, by coming out, they create room for other families to come out as well.

That's where we have to help. We need to show our families that there are many places in the world where being GLBT is both accepted and celebrated. It is not enough for our families to just know us--because then we become the exception. They need to know our friends and our extended families. They need to come home with us and see other gays and lesbians holding hands on the street. They need to meet the straight people who love us and the children we babysit and the softball teams we play for. They need to be assured that we live happy lives much like theirs. They need to learn that being accepted as gay is not an exception at all. In many communities, it is the rule.

Originally appeared in slightly different form June 10, 2000, in the Chicago Free Press.

"THE LOVE THAT DARED NOT Speak Its Name," says Hank Stuever in The Washington Post, "now yawns and checks its watch."

Stuever was griping about the Millennium March and the gay movement in general (and I mean gay male; in 3,000 words there was a quick reference to lesbians and Home Depot, and that's about it).

The movement, he says, is dull. These days, we're all about kids, and serving our country, and Crate and Barrel. Hip young straight things may want to be like us, because they have the mistaken belief that we are edgy; but how on the edge can we be, when the largest March contingent was comprised of parents, when March organizers installed a playground for young ones?

"Being gay is boring," Stuever sighs.

Hallelujah.

I like boring. Boring is comfortable. Boring is the bulwark behind our endless trill that we are just like straight people, only with same-sex loves.

Boring will get us our rights faster than outrageous - at least, it will get us white, middle-class rights. The freedom to marry. The freedom to adopt. The legal ability to keep our jobs and our apartments. And once we get those, perhaps we can focus on other rights vital to our community, like equal pay for women, racial justice, protection against perceived-gender bias and education and job training for the poor.

I, too, was struck by the dullness of the March. This was not like a Pride parade, with its aura of community bonding. We were not celebrating our diversity or our spirit.

Instead, this was a virtuoso performance for straight people. Rally speakers were genial celebrities, politicians and other bland figures. Most came to the podium happily supporting the March, the crowd, the movement. There was little divisiveness. There were no radicals. No one threatened violence or insurrection or even civil disobedience.

As for the actual parade from the Washington Monument to the glitzy stage, I saw few bare-chested men or women, fewer leatherpeople in full dress, and no giant penises or Wizard of Oz costumes.

In fact, very little about this March was playful. People took themselves and the March seriously, wearing their politics on their T-shirts instead of embodied in their persons. It was as if 700,000 members of our community had come together to say, "You see, all of you C-SPAN viewers? You see our strollers and our Abercrombie & Fitch hats? We are not frightening perverts. If we had equal rights, your world would not look so very different. You're safe with us."

The WTO protests in Seattle and Washington wound up on the front pages of newspapers all over the country, because protesters were angry, focused and disruptive. We wound up with a story on page A14 of the New York Times.

Why? Happy gay, lesbian bisexual and transgender people aren't news. And our March was more of a festival than a call to action. The most radical thing we were asked to do was vote in November.

All of which makes sense, because, for the most part, our movement is doing well. We have corporate sponsorship. Presidential support. Large, well-endowed organizations. Recognizable celebrities. Our setbacks are inevitably accompanied by gains. We are making steady if slow progress on a variety of issues all over the country. Our anger has been diffused by affluence, our sedition by success.

Thus, we are boring. We are boring to the public, and a little boring to ourselves. And we are proud of it.

Perhaps because, for the first time in our lives, we are able to be boring, when and where we want to. We are able to be our full, awkward selves, instead of the selves pigeonholed by our sexual identities. Boring is beautiful because boring is rebellion. Even now, it's unexpected by homophobics, many of whom seem to think we hide pointed tails under our Gap jeans.

Who would have expected 25 years ago that our fiercest - and perhaps most successful - fight would be simply to be regarded as ordinary?

The best advice of the March came from Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, who encapsulated how it was possible to be radical and boring at the same time.

"If you want to live in a world where you can put a picture of your partner on your desk, then put that picture on your desk, and you will live in such a world," she said, her tones ringing through the crowd as if she had said, "I have a dream."

"Blah is bliss," says Stuever.

What could be more ordinary than having a picture of the wife and kids on the desk? The March was full of such moments. It was a plaintive cry for blah; a plea for boring. The theme came, over and over again: We are just like everyone else. We wear the same clothes (if a bit more fashionably), go to the same schools, attend the same churches, raise our children next to yours. We are tired of going to marches, tired of listening to speakers say what we already know, pleading for rights you already have. We applaud politely, yawn and look at our watches.

We are just like you, more concerned with getting the kids to daycare than with changing the world.

And that is why the world is changing.

Originally ran June 7, 2000, in the Chicago Free Press.

If you ever start feeling jaded about Pride parades or what the gay movement has accomplished, wait for the sea of marchers from P-FLAG, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. What makes their role and their message so powerful? Maybe it's love.

---

I THOUGHT I WAS TOO - JADED, I guess. Too jaded to be moved by something as commercial as the Millennium March.

And for a while I wasn't. I watched our people go by, delegation after delegation smiling and waving flags and carrying signs. I snapped pictures. I applauded. But I wasn't moved.

And then they came. PFLAG.

In a sea of red shirts, men and women - parents, most of them - tossed kisses to the crowd and made the American Sign Language hand sign for "I love you." And they said the words, too; over and over, catching the eyes of people in the crowd, catching my eye, they said, "We love you. I'm a mother, I love you. I'm a father, I love you."

I began to cry.

Love is powerful, we all know that. Love is transformative. We say these things enough that they become cliches. But I don't know if I understood exactly how powerful are the words "I love you" until that moment. These were strangers using "I love you" to heal a million hurts and help thousands of hearts.

By saying "I love you," they weren't just saying, "You are our children; we love you because we have to."

They were saying, "We recognize that you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender. We recognize your sexual and gender orientation to be an integral part of who you are. And we love that whole person. And we're proud of you for being yourself and being out."

Imagine that. Imagine your parents saying "I love you" to you in that context. Maybe they do that already. Maybe you're one of the lucky ones. Maybe you have parents who can look through their dreams of you and their hopes for you and see the actual you standing before them But maybe, because of your sexual orientation, they won't see you at all.

I thought that I was resigned to the way my parents ignore my sexual orientation. I thought it didn't matter anymore, that I was past caring. But hearing these parents say what my own would not - and hearing them say it directly to me, as if they knew my heart - left me shaken. Left me moved.

These are the kind of moments that draw us together into a family. This is the magic of Pride.

We throw around familial words all the time. We say, "She's a sister," or "He's family." And we mean it, kind of. At least we mean that we recognize in someone else that they share our sexual orientation and so most likely share some of our experiences. We mean that we feel comfortable with other GLBT folk, that we can relax around them in ways we might not be able to relax in straight company.

We use family-type words as synonyms for "community." We mean "they're like us." But in the GLBT context we don't usually use them to mean that we would act as if strangers were actually family. We usually don't hug strangers, or ask intimate questions about their lives, or worry about them, or express our care for them.

But something about Pride, and Pride-like events such as the Millennium March, lets us open up to each other in new ways. Something about Pride fills us with such joy that we are able to let go of our every day petty grievances and be the full and expansive people we are.

Maybe it's love.

During this one month, our community turns inward. We care less about pushing our way out into the world and more about nurturing our own fragile selves. We celebrate the lives that, for too long, were not celebrated by anyone else.

For one month, we let go of the fight, at least a little. We let down the barriers that protect us from regular injustice, from daily name-calling, from small, biting attacks and large, organized threats.

For one month, we unguard our hearts.

And so we become different people. We do hug strangers. We do listen more carefully to people we've just met. We do look out over the crowd, catch someone's arm, and say, "I love you."

I rode on a Pride float once. I did it out of a sense of obligation and support. I wasn't expecting to enjoy the endless, hot ride; I was worried about the threat of supersoakers and catcalls.

But our community gave me a gift. Gave a gift to all of us who rode or marched or strutted down the parade route. People in the crowd, strangers, shouted out to us, "We love you." And from the joy on their faces, the ecstasy in their bodies, we could tell they meant it. They were proud of us for marching. And we were proud of them for being there.

This is the rare, sacred gift we can continue to give each other on Pride. We can love each other in the way we need to be loved: recognizing that our sexual orientations are a vital part of our personhood, understanding that it takes courage, even now, to admit that we're proud to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.

We can tell each other, "I'm a sister, I love you. I'm a brother, I love you."

Or, most moving of all, "I'm a parent. I love you."

Originally appeared May 3, 2000, in the Chicago Free Press.

I WANTED TO BE A BOY SCOUT when I was a girl. I was a sash-wearing Girl Scout for years, but despite my love of its campfire camaraderie, there was something about the Boy Scouts that always seemed cooler.

Maybe it was those balsa wood cars they raced in the pinewood derby. Or the national parks they hiked in winter. Or the white water rafting, or bottle-rocket projects, or focus on service that actually meant something.

Whatever it was, boy scouting seemed to open up a world of adventure and possibilities. Girl Scouts was kinder, gentler and boring. Activities vary from troop to troop of course, but the only camping I did was in a plush site in the Catskills, where the tents had hardwood floors and beds. And my troop's annual service project entailed planting tulips in front of our suburban branch of the U.S. Post Office.

Times have changed, perhaps (a friend of mine is leading her Girl Scout troop on a trip to Hawaii), but Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts were not equivalent then, and I doubt they are today. It is in response to this, after all, that the Boy Scouts started Venturing, a co-ed subdivision of the scouts for 14- to 20-year olds.

But the Boy Scouts keeps girls out and they keep gay boys and men out, too. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed this, hearing arguments in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale.

Most likely you've heard of the case. James Dale was an Eagle Scout assistant scoutmaster when a newspaper article profiled him as co-president of the gay organization at Rutgers University. When the Boy Scouts responded by kicking him out, Dale sued under New Jersey's anti-discrimination law, which includes sexual orientation.

Last year, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled for Dale, saying that the Boy Scouts were a public accommodation like the Rotary Club and the JayCees, and therefore not covered by the First Amendment's right of free association.

Now the High Court must decide what sorts of organizations can choose who can belong and what sorts can't. Does merely being gay connote political advocacy? If so, then the Boy Scouts may have the right to exclude gays, because Dale's membership would send a political message that is directly opposite to the message the Boy Scouts want to send.

But Evan Wolfson, the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund attorney representing Dale, told The New York Times, "A human being is not speech, other than 'I am who I am.'"

Yet, I'm not sure it really matters if we win this one. Of course it would be wonderful if gays were allowed to openly lead Boy Scout troops. They would introduce generations of boys to the idea that being gay is not a moral failure. They would become role models for manhood.

After all, isn't it better to have men leading the troop, no matter what their sexual orientation, than women, since the boys are supposed to strive to emulate their leaders? I can't imagine a man leading a Girl Scout troop, but because of the shortage of volunteers, I know many women who have taken on leadership of their son's pack.

If the Boy Scouts recognized this on their own, more power to them. But I worry about the ramifications should they be forced to admit gay men and boys. Would they then also need to admit girls to full membership? (After all, as I've said, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts really aren't equivalent organizations). Would the Girl Scouts need to admit men? Would gay and lesbian organizations be forced to accept straight folks in leadership roles? There is a place for the supportive atmosphere of homogeneous organizations. A place for all-girl groups. A place for all-boy groups. A place for all-gay groups.

And, yes, even a place for all-straight groups.

The government shouldn't have the right to decide the membership of private organizations.

The Boy Scouts, however, should do its part, and take responsibility for its homophobia by explicitly saying in its rules that the Boy Scouts is limited to straight boys (right now they just say members must be "clean" and "morally straight." That language is offensive if used to exclude gays).

Perhaps the BSA should have the boys sign an agreement, like the military once required. If parents are made uncomfortable by such a thing, maybe the Boy Scouts will make an accommodation, as they did with girls, and start a special mixed troop.

Or maybe it won't. But then we must do our part. If gay boys and gay men aren't let into the Boy Scouts of America, then we must start our own troops. We must teach leadership to our own children, gay and straight, in our own way. Many minority groups have such a thing on large and small scales. We don't, but we should.

This issue is not simply one of discrimination, but of raising children of character, courage and spirit. Why would we want to hand this important job over to a right-wing organization? Far better for us to step in and do the job ourselves.

Originally appeared Oct. 20, 1999, in the Chicago Free Press.

NOW THAT THE LAST National Coming Out Day of the 1990s has come and gone, let us reflect for a moment on a phenomenon that happens twice a year-on October 11 and every Pride.

I will call it Queer Dominance Syndrome (QDS).

During the rest of the year, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders live our common lives. We come out in large and small ways - yes, we are constantly coming out - but we come out and we fall in love and we basically continue on being a lot like people everywhere. Being lesbian, gay, transgender or bisexual might be a central part of our existence, but it is only one part. We are also musicians, academics, ball players, janitors, students, housewives, store clerks. We are ordinary.

QDS changes all that, especially on college campuses.

On QDS days, everyone who is gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender is instantaneously queer. We are invited to become radicals. Suddenly, those of us who aren't shy about our sexuality, but who don't advertise it, either, are exhorted to march, wear ribbons, kiss a same-sex person in a high-traffic public area. That is, be someone who you aren't usually. Just to make a point.

(And what that point may be is not clear. GLBTs are more sexual than straight people? We create more explicit signs? We party harder? That we exist is certainly no longer up for debate.)

Unfortunately, those who are more comfortable with these ways of expressing sexual orientation often receive more attention (notoriety?) than those who don't.

Which makes sense, since those who possess a queer sensibility tend to co-opt the movement on QDS days. They prance naked through city streets. They deface property. They are outrageous, rebellious and insensitive. They decide that coming out is ultimately a political act, not a personal one.

Take, for example, what happened on Harvard University's campus this past National Coming Out Day.

Students in Harvard's Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporter's Alliance wallpapered Harvard Yard with signs saying things like, "I praise the good Lord with my wet, quivering clitoris" and "Have more sex. Join BGLTSA." There were signs portraying lesbian sex that read, "We don't enjoy cock at all."

Offended members of BGLTSA responded by posting flyers advocating for a new gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender group. These read: "I don't like the BGLTSA posters. Is there a group I can join with different values?"

Hooray.

The response, I believe, was exactly right.

Those of us who are anti-QDS are not necessarily assimilationist, conservative, or interested in renouncing GLBT identities or freedoms. I stand with columnist Amy Pagnozzi when she says, "Gay rights, civil rights, women's rights, it doesn't matter what issue you pick, the truth is, movements don't get very far if there aren't a fair number of hotheads to goose them along."

But at this point in our movement - and especially on college campuses - we need to ask ourselves: What does it accomplish when we are offensive? Whom are we winning?

More importantly - whom are we losing?

Recently, a new friend told me about the one time those in our community had made her uncomfortable. She was in college and, on National Coming Out Day, needed to go by the kiss-in gauntlet to get to class.

We all have a different tolerance level for public displays of affection, but this wasn't just kissing. It was groping, making out, practically having sex on the sidewalk. It made her angry, she said. She didn't know what this was proving.

It would have made me angry, too, and it does make me angry when I come across it. Kiss-ins aren't expressing love for a partner - they're expressing anger at society for not accepting all sexual orientations. But all that energy could be put to better use by lobbying for employment rights for GLBTs, or asking an employer to supply domestic partnership benefits.

Yet I've found that the people who make the most noise on QDS days are often the least likely to commit to making a real difference. Do I think we should silence those who want to be in our faces about their sexuality? No, of course not. But we can't let the straight world - or our closeted friends - -think that you have to be out there to be out.

There are other ways. Support groups for less outrageous members of the GLBT community is one solution, especially on college campuses, when the choice is often, "Be radical, or be closeted."

"Be-ins" is another answer. Some colleges have started replacing kiss-ins by these "homosexual acts," which often include such radical activity as reading a book, typing a paper, playing with a dog, etc.

The majority of GLBTs aren't queer. We are people who happen to be gay or lesbian, bisexual or transgender. But we have been lax about making our presence felt. We allow those with more radical sensibilities to take center stage.

We need to go back and mentor college students, helping them to understand that the GLBT universe is a much more diverse place than they know. We need to show up at rallies and put a rainbow sticker on our computer if we're not comfortable wearing one on our person. We must speak up on our issues, we must vote, we must write letters and make phone calls. We must remember to never, ever deny our sexual orientations unless we are in physical danger.

So, yes, if you didn't come out on National Coming Out Day, come out now. But do it in a way you're comfortable with, a way that deepens an understanding of who you are. In the end, that is the most radical act.