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anti-gay bigotry
Monday, October 12 1998
The was fog in San Diego this morning, and unusually, it lasted all day. As I pedalled beneath the power poles they crackled in the imperfect dielectric.
There was a rather terse email from Jessika's mother waiting for me at the workplace computer. She basically called me a jerk for posting her daughter's phone number on the web and said she was now neither a reader nor a fan. Throughout the day I allowed this issue to bother me far more than I should have. In retrospect, of course, publishing a phone number on the web is a mean thing to do. But you have to understand the factors that led me to do it anyway:
- It's difficult for me to imagine that there is still an East Coast with tall oaks, thunderstorms, cows grazing in green fields and real live people. It all seems so long ago, like another life, or even a dream. I have trouble thinking I can affect anything back there from here. It's an irrational attitude of course, but I'm only human.
- Jessika & friends are all vaguely exhibitionistic and genuinely enjoy weird life experiences, if only in the form of phone calls (though Steve Weiner did push the envelope here back when he was alive). In a part of my mind I imagined I was doing them a service (failing, of course, to realize both the size and the completely deranged nature of my readership).
In Wyoming the other day, a young gay man was lured from a bar, abducted, driven to a remote area, tied to a fence and beaten to death by a couple of young men obviously insecure about the nature of their own heterosexuality. The attackers' girlfriends are being charged with being accessories after the fact; one of them is named "Chastity." Bill Clinton, our embattled President, has expressed his personal feelings of being shocked by this incident, and he has called for the speedy passage of national anti-hate crime legislation. Every time someone does something heinous in this country, there's always a call for more laws, expanded prison terms, and things of this sort. No one in politics, certainly not the President, is willing to say what needs to be said about what's going on here. This would be a perfect opportunity for Bill Clinton to take charge and be a leader. In the world of morality, he has nothing to lose at this point anyway, and taking a stand on something, anything, would pleasantly surprise even those who disagree with him. What he should do is get on national television and make the following speech:
My fellow Americans, the savage beating death of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming is the ugly extreme of something pervasive and sinister in this nation. Homophobia, the hatred of people simply because of their sexual preference, is tearing us as a people apart. Whenever people, and I don't care who they are: religious leaders, teachers, politicians, or any other citizens, say that gay people are going to burn in Hell or that they should be the denied rights accorded to other Americans, they are providing the murderers of future Matthew Shepards the moral justification for their actions. I'm saying this has to stop and it has to stop now. We have to live together in this country and history has shown us that this sort of bigotry weakens and divides us.
Some day we'll look back on these times and realize how primitive we were with regard to the equal treatment of gay people. If Bill Clinton would make the above speech, it would do much for his place in history.
After a long but fairly successful day of work, I returned home to find Kim eager to have me join her in walking the dog on a mission to pick up a pizza. I was weary, my gut was acting up and I just wanted to sit down and unwind, but I came along anyway. But my attitude was such that conflict gradually accumulated between us.
The crisis came when she wanted me to send a fax from her computer and it (along with all the ridiculous freeware fax software) was being stubborn & idiotic. I'd worked all day and suddenly I found myself working again at an extremely frustrating project. I just wanted to smash all the technology around me and cry.
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But then Kim's Mother called. As bad as things ever get between Kim and myself, we're still unified against the depredations of Mother. Her depredations are frequently of the most absurd nature you can imagine. Tonight it all began when Kim happened to mention that her lead professor in her masters program is gay. Mother heard that and launched into a long series of irrational, preposterous, bigoted fears. She was suddenly concerned that Kim was participating in orgies and drug abuse right in the middle of her lectures. Overhearing this conversation lifted me directly out of my funk. It was just too damn funny.
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