Wanted: Civil Discourse

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From the Ithaca Journal, here is an excellent op-ed on how we might benefit from overcoming our political insularity. Janis Kelly writes that:

All around me in Ithaca I see fairly bright people talking and listening only to each other, confident of the superiority of their own ideas, openly contemptuous of those who might not agree.... This provincial, almost tribal, insularity deprives us of a certain social richness, as well as of opportunities to hone our political thinking....

Most of America is more sophisticated about political integration. There is a tradition of political generosity, of not shunning or demonizing your neighbors who hold different political views. And most people have lots of neighbors who hold different views. That basic decency has broken down in Washington and in segregationist enclaves like Ithaca.

To say the least!

For those who donated during our end-of-year drive (hint: there's still time), many, many thanks. Onward to 2006!

More: North Dallas Thirty (whose website is always worth a visit) takes on some of this site's antagonists whose consistently uncivil behavior even in response to an item about promoting political civility is distressing if unsurprising. NDT writes:

This whole article is about broadening one's experiences in the hopes of finding common understanding, because that is the basis of civility and good behavior. It is hard to hate someone with whom you share something in common.

This is why gay leftists, which seem to be the bulk of the commentors on this board, work so hard to demonize people and shunt people away from such experiences. For even daring to say one thing positive about [black conservative] LaShawn Barber, [a commenter] has been getting pounded and getting called every name in the book. Stephen is getting beaten up for even daring to link to [this article].

Both the knee-jerk gay left and the anti-gay right are victims of a rigid ideology, and both become visibly upset whenever their ideas are challanged. But the persistent comments attacking this site-by some who post repeatedly during each and every day-is the perfect testimony of why it is so important that we exist.

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Death of Socarides.

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Dr. Charles Socarides, a psychiatrist who gained notoriety for his claimed ability to "cure" homosexuals of their "disorder," has passed into the great beyond. The New York Times obit mentions he was married four times. Since Socarides was often cited by anti-gay "defense of marriage" types, one can only ponder which of his four marriages was being defended.

The most interesting thing about him, however, was that his openly gay son was Bill Clinton's liaison to the lesbian and gay community. Can you say "dysfunctional family"?

Over at Positive Liberty, Jon Rowe takes Socarides death as an opportunity to share some thoughts on the misuse of the mental health profession to enforce social norms.

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The Fall of PFLAG.

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Among the saddest developments for the gay community this past year may be the transformation of the group Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) from an organization that sought to create dialogue among straights and gays into a knee-jerk, Daily Kos-ite arm of the Democratic National Committee. I can remember several years back speaking to PFLAG's then executive director at a Republican Unity Coalition event, where she was the only representative who chose to attend from any of the supposedly nonpartisan gay lobbies. But that was then. Now, under current executive leader Jody Huckaby, PFLAG deviates no more from politically correct lesbigay leftism.

The language the group deployed to attack the Supreme Court nomination of John Roberts tells all. PFLAG's Huckaby wailed that "We cannot sit back and allow a man with a demonstrated record of hostility towards privacy and minority rights to make decisions on our nation's highest court that will affect this nation for generations to come." Say what? Could that be the John Roberts who did pro bono work on behalf of the gay attorneys arguing Romer vs. Evans, the landmark Supreme Court case which successfully struck down a 1992 Colorado amendment prohibiting localities from enforcing gay-inclusive nondiscrimination protections?

Now PFLAG is working to derail the nomination of Sam Alito, and its press statement disingenuously cites a case in which Alito ruled that a public school non-harassment policy went too far toward curtailing free speech, while ignoring another Alito ruling in favor of a harassed gay student (as I recounted most recently here).

The loss of PFLAG to the partisan left leaves us with no significant national organization that seeks to forge a broad consensus for gay equality (aside, arguably, from the religious groups like Soulforce, God bless 'em). And that's why I think it's the saddest gay development of the year.

More: Reader "Another Jim" comments:

The original mission was outreach to angry, scared, and misinformed parents who've learned that their child is gay. It was basically a self-help group, parents helping parents.

Something began to change when it went from "Parents and Families" to "Parents, Families and Friends." These "friends" seem to be standard issue gay activists, and PFLAG is now fast becoming a clone of NGLTF.

What does this mean for parents, many of whom no doubt are Republicans, who may turn to PFLAG seeking information and support? When they catch drift of the intense anti-GOP politicking, they're not likely to be receptive to the message of openess and acceptance that, once upon a time, was PFLAG's reason for being. And that's a shame.

Yes, it is.

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Another Hit from a Liberal.

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Iraq-war opposing, Republican-despising, political cartoonist Jeff Danziger (distributed by the New York Times Syndicate) compares the love between two cowboys to a sexual relationship between a cowboy and his horse.

Danziger last year portrayed Condoleezza Rice as Prissy in Gone with the Wind, to the delight of the administration's critics (that cartoon is no longer online, but here's a description). What's a little racism-or homophobia-when you're a LIBERAL?

By the way, to date I haven't seen any of the gay watchdogs criticize Maureen Dowd's hateful Brokeback column. As noted previously, liberal Bush-hater MoDo offered that "'High Plains Drifter' now sounds like a guy who might get arrested in a bus station bathroom." Remember, kiddies, no enemies on the left.

More Recent Postings
12/18/05 - 12/24/05

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Freud, Gays, and the Vatican?

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We've posted Paul Varnell's intriguing column tracing the Vatican's latest attacks on homosexuality to Freud's views. Hopefully, if we receive enough contributions-and please contribute if you haven't-we can shift to a design that incorporates a comments area for all our articles as well as for this blog (which now sits on an entirely different platform).

Anyway, I would take issue with the notion that Freud in a larger sense has been debunked (do we no longer accept the subconscious, or the meaning of dreams?), although on certain points he's been revised and expanded upon. And his "Letter to an American Mother," which gets Paul's ire up, is actually a surprisingly accepting view of homosexuals, especially given the time (there's a link to letter text in the article, so readers can judge for themselves).

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‘Brokeback Mountain’: A Dissenting View

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In a 1980 essay entitled "The Boys on the Beach," conservative writer Midge Decter described the gay men who summered at Fire Island in the 1960s:

No households of wives and children requiring security; no entailments of school bills, doctor and dentist bills; no lifetime of acquiring the goods needed for family welfare and the goods desired for family entertainment, with a margin left over for that greatest of all heterosexual entailments, the Future: no such households burdened the overwhelmingly vast majority of homosexuals.

Homosexuality, argued Decter, is a flight from adult responsibility. Heterosexual men who accept their share of the burden to raise the next generation feel "mocked," especially by gay men, because male "homosexuality paints them with the color of sheer entrapment." Being gay, she concluded, means "taking oneself out of the tides of ordinary mortal existence."

From early on in Brokeback Mountain, the Oscar-contending film by director Ang Lee, I found myself thinking about Decter's essay.

The basic story is by now familiar: two young men, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), meet and fall in love in 1963 while tending sheep in the mountains of Wyoming. Subsequently, they each get married and have kids but get together a couple of times a year to go "fishing," the euphemism they give their wives for the periodic renewal of their affair. The story ends in 1983.

There's much to admire in this film. Ennis and Jack bust stereotypes of gay men. They aren't effeminate. When they meet, they are modern "cowboys" who live on profanity, fighting, country music, beer, and hard work for low pay. Yet their masculinity is also not the posed hyper-masculinity of leather, Levi, and uniform fetish scenes.

There's no mention of Stonewall, Harvey Milk, or even San Francisco. It's a welcome corrective to the urban-centered study of gay life in America.

For the most part we do not see sensationalized homophobia. That would be too easy. Instead, we see the everyday contempt for gays that still suffuses life in much of the country. Disdain for homosexuals mostly comes to Ennis and Jack in the sneers of others and in their own shame.

Still, the film-or more precisely, the gay reaction to it-offers some support for the hoary notion that homosexuality is "taking oneself out of the tides of ordinary mortal existence." Critics have rushed to praise Brokeback Mountain as a universal love story. Perhaps that's true, but it's not the whole story.

It's almost never mentioned that their affair is juxtaposed to the consequences of neglecting life's obligations. The first time Ennis and Jack have sex they shirk their responsibility to watch the flock. That night, a sheep is killed by a wolf; the aftermath is graphically depicted. A large portion of the flock is ultimately lost while they frolic.

More importantly, in their occasional fishing retreats, Ennis and Jack leave behind families. They are adulterers. This doesn't seem so terrible in the case of Jack, whose cartoonish wife is obsessed with her career and her press-on nails. But in the case of Ennis the result is poignant. Rushing out of the house to meet Jack, Ennis bodily passes off his two daughters to his wife (Michelle Williams), who stoically bears the burden left by a homosexual fleeing his entrapment. Eventually they divorce.

The film speaks powerfully to the sense of lost love and opportunity every closeted gay person must feel. "Heartbreaking" is not too strong a word to describe the loss this film confronts us with. But it's difficult to buy the widespread idea that the love between Jack and Ennis is an unvarnished good thing made tragic only by a homophobic world.

Part of the reason is that the love story itself is a bit strained. Hollywood delights in acting of the stumbling-and-mumbling sort (think James Dean and Marlon Brando) because it is thought to convey authenticity. Ledger in particular nails this style. But the spare dialogue between Jack and Ennis puts a lot of interpretive pressure on the meaningful glances they exchange.

Their sexual intimacy seems contrived. The sex-full of wrestling and snorting-is the kind that a person who's neither gay nor a cowboy imagines gay cowboys must have.

But the deeper reason their love doesn't completely register is that every time they go off together one is left wondering, what about the kids? What Ennis and Jack experience as an exhilarating liberation from the mundane and the stifling is for their families an abandonment. Ennis at least talks about living up to his familial obligations, but in truth he's checked out of them almost from the start.

For these reasons, I couldn't quite join in the symphony of sniffles I heard in the theater at the undeniably sad end of the film.

Yes, the world around Ennis and Jack channeled them into unhappy heterosexual lives. All concerned-including their families-would have been better off if that hadn't happened. By itself, that's a powerful argument against homophobia.

I don't have good answers to the problems confronting Ennis and Jack in their time and circumstance. I only have more questions than are currently being asked. Once families have been formed, do the interests of those families count for anything at all? Do we think Ennis and Jack have no obligation except to fulfill their own deepest desires? Do we really believe that the only tragedy in the film is the thwarted love of these two men? Why is nobody in the gay community even considering the moral complexity Brokeback Mountain presents?

Which brings us back to Midge Decter. Much that's happened in the past quarter-century has thoroughly discredited her view of homosexuality as escapism. She was wrong about gays even then, and she's more wrong now. But you would not know that from the sentimental and myopic reaction to this film, which sees in a multi-layered calamity only a beautiful but doomed gay romance.

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Making It Legal.

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Congrats to the happy couple. As the NY Times reports:

The most striking thing, in fact, about the people gathered along the streets of Windsor today for Sir Elton John's civil partnership ceremony with his boyfriend, David Furnish, was how little they appeared to care, one way or the other, about the couple's sexuality....

Although the legislation stops short of calling the new arrangement marriage...it does give gay couples legal rights similar to those of married people on matters like inheritance, immigration and pensions, as well as responsibilities in areas like child-rearing.

But here in the U.S., for both advocates and opponents, all that seems to matter is keeping it about the "M" word.

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What Did They Expect?

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Two headlines from this week's Washington Blade: Gay, AIDS groups oppose Alito and Bush declines to name [openly gay D.C. Attorney General Robert] Spagnoletti for judgeship. Only in lesbigay political never-never land would gay activists think they can vehemently oppose all of the president's judicial nominees, and then expect he should reward our community by appointing a gay judge.

I sometimes think gay activists are the only people in D.C. who don't have a clue how politics works-or, more depressingly, they do know but care more about being on the left and losing (which is actually better for their fundraising efforts), then making progress.

More: From reader Curtis:

Bush doesn't owe the critics of his judicial nominations anything, that's for sure. And LCR's failure to support his re-election pretty much rules them out as effective lobbyists.

So Bush gets a free ride with all those gay Bush voters who have no institutional lobbyist in Washington.

Gay activists to Bush: We will never, ever, EVER support you. Now, here's what we want!

Exactly.

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The Brokeback Buzz

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It was the kind of film that changes lives. And it changed mine-seeing a true gay love story, playing in major theaters, with a passionate performance by a talented young actor in a role quite different from anything he had tackled before.

I'm talking, of course, about Torch Song Trilogy, which remains my favorite gay film despite my having seen Brokeback Mountain this past weekend. Don't get me wrong: Brokeback was a fine film, well deserving of the accolades piling up around it. You should see it; you should tell your friends to see it; you should hope that most of America sees it. It's a great film in terms of both its artistic quality and its political value (although both can be overstated).

But I've grown tired of people talking about Brokeback as if it's the first film ever to broach the subject of men loving men, or as if such love is a recent discovery. The 1988 film Torch Song Trilogy may be less palatable to the masses (the lead character, played by Harvey Fierstein, is a drag queen), but the love between Arnold (Fierstein) and Alan (Matthew Broderick) is palpable and moving. And unlike Brokeback, Torch Song's lead character insists on being true to himself, despite the consequences. Rent it if you haven't seen it.

The buzz surrounding Brokeback has reminded me frequently of Torch Song, not because Torch Song generated a similar buzz (it didn't) but because it did for me what Brokeback is allegedly doing for audiences: send a powerful message that same-sex love is real and worthy of respect. The scenes in Torch Song where Arnold defends himself before his mother (Anne Bancroft) made my heart race.

I recall one of those scenes being replayed on a Donohue show (remember him?) in the late 80's. The topic of the show was "coming out," and the studio audience was largely negative. Then Donohue played the clip where Arnold forcefully tells his mother,

There's one more thing you better understand. I have taught myself to sew, cook, fix plumbing. I can even pat myself on the back when necessary. So I don't have to ask anyone for anything. There's nothing I need from anyone except for love and respect. Anyone who can't give me those two things has no place in my life.

The tone of the audience suddenly changed. It was difficult for them to remain hostile in the face of such sentiment. Art can move people: Torch Song did, and Brokeback will. Indeed, it already has. I was particularly struck by a review of the film by Harry Forbes in the Catholic News Service. While Forbes mentions the Catholic Church's condemnation of homosexual sex, the mention seems ambivalent, and it is overshadowed by Forbes's sympathetic reaction to the love story:

Looked at from the point of view of the need for love which everyone feels but few people can articulate, the plight of these guys is easy to understand while their way of dealing with it is likely to surprise and shock an audience.

While the actions taken by Ennis and Jack cannot be endorsed, the universal themes of love and loss ring true.

This is coming from the director of the Office for Film & Broadcasting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops-the same church that recently banned gays from the seminary. A review in the protestant Christianity Today was similarly sympathetic.

There's no getting around it: romantic love is powerful, and beautiful, and some people experience it with persons of the same sex.

So can we expect a wave of pro-gay-marriage initiatives to sweep the country? Not a chance, for several reasons.

First, because the people who most need to watch this film won't. The ranch hands in Wyoming that it portrays are far different from the NPR listeners who are likely to go see it.

Second, because people can read different messages into this film. Some will think that the Jack and Ennis's love should be supported; others, that they should be pitied.

Third, and perhaps most important, because people are lazy, and they have short memories. I bet plenty of the people who voted for anti-gay initiatives in the last year saw Philadelphia in 1993 and wept when Antonio Banderas challenged the hospital officials who wanted him to leave Tom Hanks's bedside: "Are you telling me I am not family?" Where are these audience members now?

The lesson is that we must keep telling our stories, not just in the occasional movie but in our day-to-day lives.

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Still More on Brokeback.

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Author Annie Proulx had this to say in a recent interview with the AP:

AP: Have you gotten any response from gay organizations?
Proulx: No. When the story was first published eight years ago [in the New Yorker], I did expect that. But there was a deafening silence. What I had instead were letters from individuals, gay people, some of them absolutely heartbreaking.

Guess gay groups have been too busy honoring "Jack" from Will & Grace!

Meanwhile, the anti-gay Traditional Values Coalition quotes "ex-homosexuals" condemning the movie and encouraging closeted and married (to women) gay men to stay with their wives. Says one:

"Believe me, we can sadly expect to see a lot more men like former Governor Jim McGreevy of New Jersey not only resigning from their jobs, but from their wives, children and families."

But as I read on another list in response to the TVC, "it doesn't occur to these people that a better way to prevent cases like McGreevey's is not to pressure gay people into straight relationships in the first place, but instead to support them as they are."

No, it wouldn't occur to them. Not for a second.

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