Jonathan Allen was kicked out of his house on his 18th birthday for being gay, he then was unemployed and decided to pursue his dream of singing by going on Americas Got Talent
Showing posts with label gay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gay. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Monday, June 3, 2013
Friday, May 17, 2013
The War on Gays: American Christian Zealots Promote Bigotry Abroad
from The Economist - May 4, 2013:
IT MIGHT seem only a nasty coincidence. As gay rights advance in the West—France and New Zealand are the latest countries to legalise same-sex marriage—homophobia is on the rise elsewhere. But these apparently contradictory trends may be related. Confounded at home, a crusading squad of American conservative Christians are taking the fight abroad.
In an unusual case, brought under the Alien Tort Statute, a judge in Massachusetts is pondering a claim by Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), a gay-rights group, against Scott Lively, a preacher and co-author of “The Pink Swastika” (which argues that Nazism was fuelled by homosexuality). Mr Lively visited Uganda in 2009, meeting politicians, appearing on television, and sharing his theories about homosexuals’ recruitment of youngsters.
Shortly afterwards a Ugandan MP introduced a parliamentary bill that would stiffen existing penalties for homosexual behaviour; among other drastic measures it mandated the death sentence for “aggravated” homosexuality. Amid a burst of anti-gay vitriol, and headlines such as “Hang Them, They Are After Our Kids”, a gay activist was murdered. SMUG alleges that, on this occasion and previously, Mr Lively conspired to persecute Ugandan homosexuals. He says he advocated therapy and prevention, not harsh punishments.
This episode is part of a wider campaign. Other preachers, such as Lou Engle, a fundamentalist pastor at a megachurch in Kansas, have also been to Uganda. A new documentary, “God Loves Uganda”, depicts co-ordination between the visitors, resident missionaries and American-trained Ugandan priests. Offshoots of the American Centre for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a group founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson, in Kenya and Zimbabwe, are said to have resisted gay-friendly changes to their constitutions. (The ACLJ insists it “does not export an agenda”.)
In Africa campaigners adopt the language of anti-colonialism, portraying gay rights, and even homosexuality itself, as Western impositions; opponents counter that the criminalisation of gay sex is itself largely a legacy of empire. But the rhetoric and tactics are flexible. The Americans are happy, when necessary, to co-operate with like-minded Roman Catholic and Orthodox believers, which barely count as Christian in the eyes of extreme Protestants. Hardline Islamists are tacit allies too.
In the former Soviet Union, where homosexuality has mostly been legalised, the emphasis is on preventing its “promotion”. Here, says Julie Dorf of the Council for Global Equality, a lobby group based in Washington, DC, American efforts are feeding prejudice and anti-gay legislation.
Two bills trundling through Ukraine’s parliament, for example, would criminalise gay “propaganda” (a similar bill is on the stocks in Russia’s Duma). To be sure, indigenous hostility (sometimes violent) towards homosexuality abounds. But Jim Mulcahy, a retired priest now ministering to gays in Ukraine, thinks the anti-gay lobby’s resources and multimedia techniques bespeak American involvement.
Both Paul Cameron, an American psychologist who likens homosexuality to drug use, and Mr Lively, have toured eastern Europe. Gay activists in Moldova say that outsiders’ influence helped to reduce the prominence of sexuality in a recent anti-discrimination law. In Latvia Mr Lively fraternised with a church whose members have harassed gay-pride marches.
A third front is the Caribbean and Central America. Caleb Orozco of UNIBAM, a gay-rights group in Belize, is arguing in court that its criminalisation of homosexual sex violates the constitution. According to Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, an American civil-rights watchdog, a coalition of churches resisting the move is supported by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), another American outfit. (The ADF, like Mr Engle, could not be reached for comment.) Belize’s most prominent anti-gay cleric is American; his church is affiliated to a ministry in Arizona, whose leader has urged believers to raise the dead in morgues. Mr Orozco has been threatened and attacked with a bottle.
Collateral Damage
The American fundamentalists see themselves as defending biblical values and stemming degeneracy. Abroad, the policies they advance in that cause are often more extreme than those they espouse at home (though Mr Lively would like to “re-criminalise adultery, fornication and homosexuality” in America, too, albeit as minor misdemeanours). Several would like to usher in a global theocracy.
In America exponents of such ideas are liable to be dismissed as cranks and bigots; for their part they regard their own country as morally lost. But on their travels abroad they receive a respectful hearing, addressing parliaments and appearing on mainstream television.
That sort of reception boosts morale, but can offer practical benefits, too. Influence, visibility and access, in countries where (as the faithful see it) righteousness remains unvanquished, all help with fund-raising. The activists often traverse the same circuit, in what could be seen as a kind of competition.
The arguments they deploy make the connection between the changes in the West and the pushback elsewhere explicit. Anti-discrimination laws and other liberalising reforms are evidence of a worldwide secular conspiracy, against which Africa, or eastern Europe, or the Caribbean must fortify themselves. Occasional rebukes by the American government about persecution of gays abroad only prove the conspiracy’s power. Some clues suggest that the itinerants’ real focus is elsewhere. Their sound and fury about issues such as gay marriage and adoption may resonate in America, yet have little relevance in countries where even private homosexual acts are illegal.
Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia who works for Political Research Associates, a liberal think-tank in Boston, observes that the campaigners face a powerful progressive lobby at home, but in east Africa their adversaries are isolated and weak. The suffering of homosexuals in such places, he says, is “collateral damage” in America’s culture wars.
IT MIGHT seem only a nasty coincidence. As gay rights advance in the West—France and New Zealand are the latest countries to legalise same-sex marriage—homophobia is on the rise elsewhere. But these apparently contradictory trends may be related. Confounded at home, a crusading squad of American conservative Christians are taking the fight abroad.
In an unusual case, brought under the Alien Tort Statute, a judge in Massachusetts is pondering a claim by Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), a gay-rights group, against Scott Lively, a preacher and co-author of “The Pink Swastika” (which argues that Nazism was fuelled by homosexuality). Mr Lively visited Uganda in 2009, meeting politicians, appearing on television, and sharing his theories about homosexuals’ recruitment of youngsters.
Shortly afterwards a Ugandan MP introduced a parliamentary bill that would stiffen existing penalties for homosexual behaviour; among other drastic measures it mandated the death sentence for “aggravated” homosexuality. Amid a burst of anti-gay vitriol, and headlines such as “Hang Them, They Are After Our Kids”, a gay activist was murdered. SMUG alleges that, on this occasion and previously, Mr Lively conspired to persecute Ugandan homosexuals. He says he advocated therapy and prevention, not harsh punishments.
This episode is part of a wider campaign. Other preachers, such as Lou Engle, a fundamentalist pastor at a megachurch in Kansas, have also been to Uganda. A new documentary, “God Loves Uganda”, depicts co-ordination between the visitors, resident missionaries and American-trained Ugandan priests. Offshoots of the American Centre for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a group founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson, in Kenya and Zimbabwe, are said to have resisted gay-friendly changes to their constitutions. (The ACLJ insists it “does not export an agenda”.)
In Africa campaigners adopt the language of anti-colonialism, portraying gay rights, and even homosexuality itself, as Western impositions; opponents counter that the criminalisation of gay sex is itself largely a legacy of empire. But the rhetoric and tactics are flexible. The Americans are happy, when necessary, to co-operate with like-minded Roman Catholic and Orthodox believers, which barely count as Christian in the eyes of extreme Protestants. Hardline Islamists are tacit allies too.
In the former Soviet Union, where homosexuality has mostly been legalised, the emphasis is on preventing its “promotion”. Here, says Julie Dorf of the Council for Global Equality, a lobby group based in Washington, DC, American efforts are feeding prejudice and anti-gay legislation.
Two bills trundling through Ukraine’s parliament, for example, would criminalise gay “propaganda” (a similar bill is on the stocks in Russia’s Duma). To be sure, indigenous hostility (sometimes violent) towards homosexuality abounds. But Jim Mulcahy, a retired priest now ministering to gays in Ukraine, thinks the anti-gay lobby’s resources and multimedia techniques bespeak American involvement.
Both Paul Cameron, an American psychologist who likens homosexuality to drug use, and Mr Lively, have toured eastern Europe. Gay activists in Moldova say that outsiders’ influence helped to reduce the prominence of sexuality in a recent anti-discrimination law. In Latvia Mr Lively fraternised with a church whose members have harassed gay-pride marches.
A third front is the Caribbean and Central America. Caleb Orozco of UNIBAM, a gay-rights group in Belize, is arguing in court that its criminalisation of homosexual sex violates the constitution. According to Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, an American civil-rights watchdog, a coalition of churches resisting the move is supported by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), another American outfit. (The ADF, like Mr Engle, could not be reached for comment.) Belize’s most prominent anti-gay cleric is American; his church is affiliated to a ministry in Arizona, whose leader has urged believers to raise the dead in morgues. Mr Orozco has been threatened and attacked with a bottle.
Collateral Damage
The American fundamentalists see themselves as defending biblical values and stemming degeneracy. Abroad, the policies they advance in that cause are often more extreme than those they espouse at home (though Mr Lively would like to “re-criminalise adultery, fornication and homosexuality” in America, too, albeit as minor misdemeanours). Several would like to usher in a global theocracy.
In America exponents of such ideas are liable to be dismissed as cranks and bigots; for their part they regard their own country as morally lost. But on their travels abroad they receive a respectful hearing, addressing parliaments and appearing on mainstream television.
That sort of reception boosts morale, but can offer practical benefits, too. Influence, visibility and access, in countries where (as the faithful see it) righteousness remains unvanquished, all help with fund-raising. The activists often traverse the same circuit, in what could be seen as a kind of competition.
The arguments they deploy make the connection between the changes in the West and the pushback elsewhere explicit. Anti-discrimination laws and other liberalising reforms are evidence of a worldwide secular conspiracy, against which Africa, or eastern Europe, or the Caribbean must fortify themselves. Occasional rebukes by the American government about persecution of gays abroad only prove the conspiracy’s power. Some clues suggest that the itinerants’ real focus is elsewhere. Their sound and fury about issues such as gay marriage and adoption may resonate in America, yet have little relevance in countries where even private homosexual acts are illegal.
Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia who works for Political Research Associates, a liberal think-tank in Boston, observes that the campaigners face a powerful progressive lobby at home, but in east Africa their adversaries are isolated and weak. The suffering of homosexuals in such places, he says, is “collateral damage” in America’s culture wars.
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Vince Lombardi: A Champion of Gay Rights
Vince, Whose Brother Hal Was Gay, Would've Been Proud of Jason Collins
by Ian O'Connor for ESPN - 5/4/13:
Vince Lombardi would have loved Jason Collins, and everything about him. Collins is bright, professional, respectful, team-centric, and proud to be gay. Right in Lombardi's wheelhouse.
Long before it was fashionable, Lombardi was a champion of gay athletes, if only because he was a champion of all athletes, at least those who helped him score more touchdowns than the other guy. It didn't matter if they were white or black, or if they dated men or women or both, or if they dated interracially or not.
"Like the saying goes," Susan Lombardi said by phone, "my father treated them all the same. Like dogs."
Actually, Vincent Thomas Lombardi treated his Green Bay Packers and Washington Redskins as anything but. No, winning wasn't everything, or the only thing. In Lombardi's playbook, winning placed a distant second to simple human decency.
In 1969, the year before his death, the only year he coached the Redskins, Lombardi worked with at least five gay men -- three players and two front-office executives, including David Slattery, who would come out in 1993. In his defining biography, "When Pride Still Mattered," author David Maraniss described the scene of Lombardi charging an assistant to work with one of the gay players, a struggling back named Ray McDonald. "And if I hear one of you people make reference to his manhood," Lombardi is quoted as saying, "you'll be out of here before your ass hits the ground."
This was 44 years before Collins, a 12-year NBA veteran, made history this week as the first active player among the four major American team sports to publicly reveal he is gay. This was 44 years before a basketball coach at Rutgers University was fired, in part, for degrading players with homophobic slurs, and before another coach was accused of using homophobic slurs at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Lombardi's Green Bay.
"My father was way ahead of his time," Susan Lombardi said. "He was discriminated against as a dark-skinned Italian American when he was younger, when he felt he was passed up for coaching jobs that he deserved. He felt the pain of discrimination, and so he raised his family to accept everybody, no matter what color they were or whatever their sexual orientation was.
"I think it's great what Jason Collins did, because it's going to open a lot of doors for people. Without a doubt my father would've embraced him, and would've been very proud of him for coming out."
Richard Nicholls, 75-year-old resident of Rohnert Park, Calif., agreed with the thought. For more than four decades Nicholls was partners with Harold Lombardi, Vince's gay brother, who died in 2011 knowing that he had Vince's unconditional love and support.
Nicholls and Harold met in 1970, the year Vince succumbed to cancer at 57. Ultimately Nicholls hoped to get married, but Harold was a devout Catholic, just like Vince. "He was old school," Nicholls said by phone. "He knew the church wouldn't approve."
Nicholls called his longtime partner "Hal," and said he was a private man. "He loved Vin very much, and was very proud of him even though he wasn't much of a football man," Nicholls said. "We once had a conversation where Hal said, 'I appreciate that Vin treats gays so nicely. He probably does it because of me.'"
But Nicholls believes Lombardi, a coach he'd never met, would've been just as supportive of his gay co-workers and players had his brother been straight.
"Through Hal and in what I'd read and seen, Vin was always fair in how he treated everybody," Nicholls said. "I just thought he appeared to be a great man who accepted people at face value for what they were, and didn't judge anybody. He just wanted you to do the job."
That's the way Dave Kopay remembers it, too, as a running back with Lombardi's Redskins. In a 1975 newspaper interview, three years after he retired, Kopay became the first major team-sport athlete to come out as gay.
He never discussed his sexuality with Lombardi, but remains fairly certain the coach knew. Kopay said he had a relationship with Washington's star tight end, Jerry Smith, who never came out but was widely acknowledged to be gay; Smith died of complications from AIDS in 1986.
"Lombardi protected and loved Jerry," Kopay said by phone. The retired running back said he was "absolutely, 100 percent sure" his coach knew that two Redskins executives, including Slattery, were gay "because he was so close to both of them it would've been impossible for Lombardi not to know."
Kopay said he tried to convince Smith that the two of them should come out together. "But back then gay people were almost thought of as deviant," Kopay said. "It was really terrible at the time."
But Lombardi created an atmosphere of inclusion at work, running the ultimate NFL meritocracy. He'd won his five championships in Green Bay, so he arrived as something of a rock star in D.C.
"Supreme Court justices would come out to Saturday morning practices," Kopay said, "just to be around Lombardi. He was something else."
Kopay would write a best-selling book about his experiences as a gay athlete, and he believes the public discourse about his sexuality cost him opportunities in coaching. He received some hate mail. He said the Washington Star, the paper that published his 1975 interview, received a lot more.Like Jason Collins, Kopay said he was a tough, physical athlete who never shied from contact. In fact, he recalled, "I was so aware of trying to run over people rather than run around them, to prove how tough I was, that it screwed me up and I ended up not playing as much for Lombardi as I thought I would."
And that's quite all right.
"Vince Lombardi had so much humanity, I was just lucky to have been around him," Kopay said. "He would've responded to Jason Collins just like Doc Rivers and these other coaches have. Lombardi would've really been in his corner, let me tell you."
Vince Lombardi Jr. could tell you a thing or three about that. A retired, 71-year-old motivational speaker, Lombardi is a dead ringer for his old man. One day a young Green Bay assistant named Tom Coughlin heard a knock on an office door at the Packers' facility, and looked up to find the very face of the iconic coach staring back at him through a small window.
Coughlin did a double take. It was Vince Lombardi Jr., not a ghost.
The son sounds like the father, too, especially when he speaks of treating everyone with dignity.
"My father had been discriminated against, and his faith was also a major part of his life and something that was reflected in the way he dealt with his players," Vince Jr. said. "With [Jason Collins] coming out, I think my father would've felt, 'I hope I've created an atmosphere in the locker room where this would not be an issue at all. And if you do have an issue, the problem will be yours because my locker room will tolerate nothing but acceptance.'"
Of course, the same was true of Lombardi's locker room in Green Bay, where he wouldn't let his Packers frequent any restaurant, bar or hotel that denied the same services to black players normally offered to white players. And when a black defensive end, Lionel Aldridge, revealed his plans to marry his white girlfriend, Lombardi blessed the union at a time when some around Green Bay, and around the league, were less than enthusiastic about it.
"I take a great deal of pride in the fact that, at a time when this was still cutting-edge stuff, my father was able to see through all of that and treated people as they deserved to be treated," Vince Jr. said. "He saw everyone as equals, and I think having a gay brother was a big factor in his approach."
As he has often seen on film stomping and shouting on the sideline, with spittle flying through his gap-toothed grimace, Lombardi represents the enduring symbol of NFL toughness and manliness. He was the winning coach in the Ice Bowl for a reason.
"He'd call you out in a variety of ways," Vince Jr. said. But even during his coaching prime, in less enlightened times, Vince Sr. would never run down a player with the kind of homophobic slurs still heard around some of today's playing fields.
"That's not one of the ways my father would've done it," Vince Jr. said.
His legacy should find room for his acceptance of all, right next to the titles in Titletown. Vince Lombardi would've turned 100 years old next month. Too bad he wasn't alive this week to congratulate Jason Collins.
Monday, March 18, 2013
From Harvey Milk to 58% Support for Marriage Equality
by Jonathan Capehart in the Washington Post 3/18/13:
In a powerful 1978 speech celebrating the defeat of California’s Proposition 6, banning gays from teaching in the public schools, Harvey Milk, the openly gay member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, urged other gay men and lesbians to come out. It would be an extension of a vast campaign to humanize the gay community.
"So far, a lot of people joined us and rejected Proposition 6 and now we owe them something. We owe them to continue the education campaign that took place. We must destroy the myths, once and for all, shatter them. We must continue to speak out. And, most importantly, most importantly, every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is, you must tell your immediate family. You must tell your relatives. You must tell your friends, if indeed they are your friends. You must tell your neighbors. You must tell the people you work with. You must tell the people in the stores you shop in. Once they realize that we are indeed their children, that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and for all."
Nearly 35 years later, we are seeing the incredible impact of those words.
Will Portman came out to his family two years ago. That his father is Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), a powerful establishment Republican who has anti-gay votes and rhetoric in his past, makes what Will did all the more brave. But Will’s action and his father’s reaction — coming out in favor of same-sex marriage — is one of two examples of the power of coming out in the last few days.
Today, The Post-ABC News poll reports that support for marriage equality is at 58 percent. That’s an all-time high. Republicans remain firmly against it (59 percent) and Republicans older than 65 really are against it (68 percent). But 52 percent of the GOP age 18 to 45 support same-sex marriage.
“Public attitudes toward gay marriage are a mirror image of what they were a decade ago,” writes Jon Cohen, director of polling at Capital Insight, the independent polling group of Washington Post Media, “in 2003, 37 percent favored gay nuptials, and 55 percent opposed them.” Also, “Fully 62 percent of Americans now say being gay is just the way some people are, not something people choose to be,” Cohen points out.
These are remarkable statistics because gay people like Will Portman had the courage to be honest with themselves and their families. This turnaround is also due to straight people being moved to acceptance by relatives, friends, neighbors and anyone else capable of opening their eyes to the fight for equality by gays. As Milk so poignantly said, “Once they realize that we are indeed their children, that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and for all.”
In a powerful 1978 speech celebrating the defeat of California’s Proposition 6, banning gays from teaching in the public schools, Harvey Milk, the openly gay member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, urged other gay men and lesbians to come out. It would be an extension of a vast campaign to humanize the gay community.
"So far, a lot of people joined us and rejected Proposition 6 and now we owe them something. We owe them to continue the education campaign that took place. We must destroy the myths, once and for all, shatter them. We must continue to speak out. And, most importantly, most importantly, every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is, you must tell your immediate family. You must tell your relatives. You must tell your friends, if indeed they are your friends. You must tell your neighbors. You must tell the people you work with. You must tell the people in the stores you shop in. Once they realize that we are indeed their children, that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and for all."
Nearly 35 years later, we are seeing the incredible impact of those words.
Will Portman came out to his family two years ago. That his father is Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), a powerful establishment Republican who has anti-gay votes and rhetoric in his past, makes what Will did all the more brave. But Will’s action and his father’s reaction — coming out in favor of same-sex marriage — is one of two examples of the power of coming out in the last few days.
Today, The Post-ABC News poll reports that support for marriage equality is at 58 percent. That’s an all-time high. Republicans remain firmly against it (59 percent) and Republicans older than 65 really are against it (68 percent). But 52 percent of the GOP age 18 to 45 support same-sex marriage.
“Public attitudes toward gay marriage are a mirror image of what they were a decade ago,” writes Jon Cohen, director of polling at Capital Insight, the independent polling group of Washington Post Media, “in 2003, 37 percent favored gay nuptials, and 55 percent opposed them.” Also, “Fully 62 percent of Americans now say being gay is just the way some people are, not something people choose to be,” Cohen points out.
These are remarkable statistics because gay people like Will Portman had the courage to be honest with themselves and their families. This turnaround is also due to straight people being moved to acceptance by relatives, friends, neighbors and anyone else capable of opening their eyes to the fight for equality by gays. As Milk so poignantly said, “Once they realize that we are indeed their children, that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and for all.”
Sunday, March 17, 2013
The Good, Bigoted People
By Nico Lang - The Huffington Post:
When you're a kid, you don't see difference. You're trained to see difference by a society that tells you that other people are not like you. You are told to hate that.
My parents taught me what gay people were. Before he divorced my mother, I remember watching a Richard Simmons video at home with my father and Julia, our nurse. Julia loved Richard Simmons and so did I -- for his loud costumes, wild hair and the way the screen lit up when he was on camera. Simmons didn't look like most other people I saw on TV, and his voice was unbearably shrill, but I liked that. It was how my prepubescent, pre-queer voice sounded. I thought he meant I could be myself. Instead, my father made us change the channel, because he didn't want to watch that. I asked him what "that" was. I wanted know why I wasn't allowed to sweat to the oldies. I felt like Lucy Ricardo, kept from the one thing I really wanted for reasons that weren't clear. Why couldn't I be in the show? He wouldn't say.
The next time I saw Richard Simmons on TV, I changed the channel myself.
A few years later, I was driving down the road with my mother after we went to get a soda at the store. I bought a Sprite because it had the most bubbles, and I liked the way they tickled my nose when they reached the surface. I put it between my legs so I could put my hands out the rolled-down window, trying to grab the summer air. We were listening to Elton John, as he pined in space for a home he could never return to. Elton John was my mother's favorite, and she loved him dearly. She sometimes would sway with him in the dark as she got used to a life without my father. Elton was her candle in the divorce. However, she told me that if she I found out I was "like that," she would "lock me in a closet and beat me." I got it now.
I accidentally squeezed the Sprite between my legs, and the bubbles burst everywhere. They didn't tickle this time. They were cold.
I brought this incident up to my mother almost a decade afterward, because it was a formative memory from my childhood. When I grew older and my queerness became apparent, my mother became an ally and, more importantly, someone I could talk to, and she doesn't remember a time when she was not supportive or wasn't by my side, fighting with me. But I remember things differently. I remember when I was nine and having a hard time relating to the other kids around me, not as athletic and coordinated as the other boys or socially adept enough to hang out with the girls. I felt like I would never be accepted or have someone to love me for who I was.
When I asked her if she would be my friend, my mother admitted that if she were my age, she wouldn't be. She didn't hang out with kids like me back when she was in school.
She probably thought she was being helpful by being honest. She was being a good mother, sparing me years of pain by encouraging me to just fit in and keep my difference to myself. I needed to be like other boys -- or I would always be picked on for being too short and too much of a "sissy." I would always be the kid whose backpack was thrown in the garbage can and the one nobody would sit next to on the bus. I was destined to be alone. Adolescence is much easier when you drift along with the current and stop fighting the waves. It's a lot like drowning.
You don't hate by accident. You have to be taught to hate -- in little ways that are reinforced every day, ways you might not even recognize. In my case, hating yourself takes a lifetime. It involves the help of many people around you. It takes standing in church and watching everyone talk to a God they think hates you, listening to a bunch of people silently pray that you will pay for being different, because they think it's the right thing to do. They think they are doing what God wants. I remember the nice ladies in church who hugged me when I was in the closet and hugged me differently after I came out, when I kept going to the same Baptist congregation, daring them not to accept me. They hugged me harder because they didn't want to let go of something. They just weren't sure of what.
No one thinks of themselves as a bigot. They don't look in the mirror and say, "I hate gay people. I am a homophobe." Those women didn't hate me. They loved me so much that they didn't want me to stay the way I was. They didn't want me to experience an eternity of damnation. They wanted to save me, just like my mother did. My mother didn't want me to come home crying or have to stay up late with me because I was too scared to go to school the next day. She didn't want the world to break my heart at such a young age, and it was too hard to ask everyone around me to change. So she asked me to change and broke my heart her own way. I was the one being punished again for not understanding what being different meant.
I thought about this some months ago when I read a tweet from "Morgon Freeman," a fake Twitter account that facetiously bills itself as "messages from God" -- or Black Hollywood God. In the tweet, Freeman wrote, "I hate the word homophobia. You are not scared. You are an asshole." Were those nice ladies from church assholes? Was my mother being an asshole? Is my father still an asshole? My father and I haven't had a real conversation in years, not just because I'm queer but because there's something about me he fundamentally can't relate to.
When I took Eric, my brother from my father's second marriage, to see Life of Pi, my father made a strangely big deal about it, but in a mock-genial manner. He told us it was a "girl movie," and we should go see something else instead. How about the Red Dawn remake?
My father hadn't seen Life of Pi. He didn't even know what it was about. His problem wasn't with the movie. He couldn't articulate what his problem was, the problem he can never talk about, the one we've never talked about. He was scared that I was growing up to be different than he is and that I'm going to have a life he doesn't understand. He thinks he's going to get left behind. It's the same look I saw in his eyes when I was a kid and wanted to play with Barbies or asked to try on a dress. It's the same look I saw when I told him I was going to art school. It's the same look I saw when I eventually told him that the family I create wouldn't look like his.
He already lost two sons. He was afraid of losing another.
I thought about my father when I read Ta-Nehisi Coates' piece last Thursday in the New York Times, which discussed the recent frisking of Forest Whitaker in a New York deli. This incident was yet another example of daily aggressions and microaggressions, not the capital-R racism that we're constantly told is a relic of the past but the smaller racisms that go ignored, the ones that thrive in the margins. It's about the racism that's so ingrained we don't notice, the racism of "nice" people. Coates writes,
In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist... The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion... But much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner.
We do this with homophobia. We believe homophobia to be the exclusive territory of diehards, the people who wave signs that "God Hates Fags" or broadcast their revulsion through a microphone outside Old Navy on State Street. We label them as "crazy" and quickly look away.
However, bigotry isn't so easily identifiable. It doesn't always wave signs or march on your funeral or spit in your face at a Pride parade. Bigotry might be your grandfather who turns away slightly when you hug your boyfriend or your grandmother who asks you're bringing your "friend" to Christmas. It might be your mother who gave life to you but doesn't know how to deal with this other thing inside you, who fights herself to love you better. It might live in your own heart, tucked away in one of the rooms you never go into, a room you might not know is there. It might shine in that ersatz smile you show to the trans* and queer youth of color that walk down your street, the ones you push past and learn to politely ignore when you get that late-night cocktail at Minibar. It might be the neighborhood you want to keep "nice."
When I reflect on 2011's Take Back Boystown meetings in Chicago and the people who told our youths they don't belong here, I don't think about bad people. I think about people who fear losing something. I think about my father. I think we're all not as different as we imagine.
A great filmmaker I know once interviewed Rev. Fred Phelps for a documentary. This is how I remember her story. She told me that when she turned the camera on, Phelps spewed the conservative religious dogma he is famous for, performing the intolerance we expect of him. However, after the film stopped rolling, Rev. Fred Phelps became a different person. He offered her a glass of water, because it was a hot day and he worried she wasn't properly hydrated. Phelps and his wife doted on her. They cooked for her. She met members of their family. She shook their hands. She sat on their couch and talked with them.
When she said goodbye and took her crew with her, they embraced her, hugging her differently than she expected. They hugged her like they didn't want to let go. She told me they were the nicest people she's ever met.
When you're a kid, you don't see difference. You're trained to see difference by a society that tells you that other people are not like you. You are told to hate that.
My parents taught me what gay people were. Before he divorced my mother, I remember watching a Richard Simmons video at home with my father and Julia, our nurse. Julia loved Richard Simmons and so did I -- for his loud costumes, wild hair and the way the screen lit up when he was on camera. Simmons didn't look like most other people I saw on TV, and his voice was unbearably shrill, but I liked that. It was how my prepubescent, pre-queer voice sounded. I thought he meant I could be myself. Instead, my father made us change the channel, because he didn't want to watch that. I asked him what "that" was. I wanted know why I wasn't allowed to sweat to the oldies. I felt like Lucy Ricardo, kept from the one thing I really wanted for reasons that weren't clear. Why couldn't I be in the show? He wouldn't say.
The next time I saw Richard Simmons on TV, I changed the channel myself.
A few years later, I was driving down the road with my mother after we went to get a soda at the store. I bought a Sprite because it had the most bubbles, and I liked the way they tickled my nose when they reached the surface. I put it between my legs so I could put my hands out the rolled-down window, trying to grab the summer air. We were listening to Elton John, as he pined in space for a home he could never return to. Elton John was my mother's favorite, and she loved him dearly. She sometimes would sway with him in the dark as she got used to a life without my father. Elton was her candle in the divorce. However, she told me that if she I found out I was "like that," she would "lock me in a closet and beat me." I got it now.
I accidentally squeezed the Sprite between my legs, and the bubbles burst everywhere. They didn't tickle this time. They were cold.
I brought this incident up to my mother almost a decade afterward, because it was a formative memory from my childhood. When I grew older and my queerness became apparent, my mother became an ally and, more importantly, someone I could talk to, and she doesn't remember a time when she was not supportive or wasn't by my side, fighting with me. But I remember things differently. I remember when I was nine and having a hard time relating to the other kids around me, not as athletic and coordinated as the other boys or socially adept enough to hang out with the girls. I felt like I would never be accepted or have someone to love me for who I was.
When I asked her if she would be my friend, my mother admitted that if she were my age, she wouldn't be. She didn't hang out with kids like me back when she was in school.
She probably thought she was being helpful by being honest. She was being a good mother, sparing me years of pain by encouraging me to just fit in and keep my difference to myself. I needed to be like other boys -- or I would always be picked on for being too short and too much of a "sissy." I would always be the kid whose backpack was thrown in the garbage can and the one nobody would sit next to on the bus. I was destined to be alone. Adolescence is much easier when you drift along with the current and stop fighting the waves. It's a lot like drowning.
You don't hate by accident. You have to be taught to hate -- in little ways that are reinforced every day, ways you might not even recognize. In my case, hating yourself takes a lifetime. It involves the help of many people around you. It takes standing in church and watching everyone talk to a God they think hates you, listening to a bunch of people silently pray that you will pay for being different, because they think it's the right thing to do. They think they are doing what God wants. I remember the nice ladies in church who hugged me when I was in the closet and hugged me differently after I came out, when I kept going to the same Baptist congregation, daring them not to accept me. They hugged me harder because they didn't want to let go of something. They just weren't sure of what.
No one thinks of themselves as a bigot. They don't look in the mirror and say, "I hate gay people. I am a homophobe." Those women didn't hate me. They loved me so much that they didn't want me to stay the way I was. They didn't want me to experience an eternity of damnation. They wanted to save me, just like my mother did. My mother didn't want me to come home crying or have to stay up late with me because I was too scared to go to school the next day. She didn't want the world to break my heart at such a young age, and it was too hard to ask everyone around me to change. So she asked me to change and broke my heart her own way. I was the one being punished again for not understanding what being different meant.
I thought about this some months ago when I read a tweet from "Morgon Freeman," a fake Twitter account that facetiously bills itself as "messages from God" -- or Black Hollywood God. In the tweet, Freeman wrote, "I hate the word homophobia. You are not scared. You are an asshole." Were those nice ladies from church assholes? Was my mother being an asshole? Is my father still an asshole? My father and I haven't had a real conversation in years, not just because I'm queer but because there's something about me he fundamentally can't relate to.
When I took Eric, my brother from my father's second marriage, to see Life of Pi, my father made a strangely big deal about it, but in a mock-genial manner. He told us it was a "girl movie," and we should go see something else instead. How about the Red Dawn remake?
My father hadn't seen Life of Pi. He didn't even know what it was about. His problem wasn't with the movie. He couldn't articulate what his problem was, the problem he can never talk about, the one we've never talked about. He was scared that I was growing up to be different than he is and that I'm going to have a life he doesn't understand. He thinks he's going to get left behind. It's the same look I saw in his eyes when I was a kid and wanted to play with Barbies or asked to try on a dress. It's the same look I saw when I told him I was going to art school. It's the same look I saw when I eventually told him that the family I create wouldn't look like his.
He already lost two sons. He was afraid of losing another.
I thought about my father when I read Ta-Nehisi Coates' piece last Thursday in the New York Times, which discussed the recent frisking of Forest Whitaker in a New York deli. This incident was yet another example of daily aggressions and microaggressions, not the capital-R racism that we're constantly told is a relic of the past but the smaller racisms that go ignored, the ones that thrive in the margins. It's about the racism that's so ingrained we don't notice, the racism of "nice" people. Coates writes,
In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist... The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion... But much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner.
We do this with homophobia. We believe homophobia to be the exclusive territory of diehards, the people who wave signs that "God Hates Fags" or broadcast their revulsion through a microphone outside Old Navy on State Street. We label them as "crazy" and quickly look away.
However, bigotry isn't so easily identifiable. It doesn't always wave signs or march on your funeral or spit in your face at a Pride parade. Bigotry might be your grandfather who turns away slightly when you hug your boyfriend or your grandmother who asks you're bringing your "friend" to Christmas. It might be your mother who gave life to you but doesn't know how to deal with this other thing inside you, who fights herself to love you better. It might live in your own heart, tucked away in one of the rooms you never go into, a room you might not know is there. It might shine in that ersatz smile you show to the trans* and queer youth of color that walk down your street, the ones you push past and learn to politely ignore when you get that late-night cocktail at Minibar. It might be the neighborhood you want to keep "nice."
When I reflect on 2011's Take Back Boystown meetings in Chicago and the people who told our youths they don't belong here, I don't think about bad people. I think about people who fear losing something. I think about my father. I think we're all not as different as we imagine.
A great filmmaker I know once interviewed Rev. Fred Phelps for a documentary. This is how I remember her story. She told me that when she turned the camera on, Phelps spewed the conservative religious dogma he is famous for, performing the intolerance we expect of him. However, after the film stopped rolling, Rev. Fred Phelps became a different person. He offered her a glass of water, because it was a hot day and he worried she wasn't properly hydrated. Phelps and his wife doted on her. They cooked for her. She met members of their family. She shook their hands. She sat on their couch and talked with them.
When she said goodbye and took her crew with her, they embraced her, hugging her differently than she expected. They hugged her like they didn't want to let go. She told me they were the nicest people she's ever met.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Sentenced to Prison for the Crime of Love in Cameroon - Is This What Hate Groups Want in America?
Cameroon Upholds 3-Year Term for Gay Text Message
from The Associated Press:
DOUALA, Cameroon (AP) — An appeals court on Monday upheld a three-year sentence against a man found guilty of homosexual conduct for sending a text message to another man saying: "I'm very much in love with you."
Activists said the court's ruling in Yaounde, the capital, marked yet another setback for gays and lesbians in Cameroon, widely viewed as the most repressive country in Africa when it comes to prosecuting same-sex couples.
Jean-Claude Roger Mbede, 32, had been provisionally released on bail in July after serving a year and a half in prison. His lawyer has 10 days now to file an appeal to the country's Supreme Court.
Holding back tears Monday, he said he wasn't sure whether he could withstand more jail time given the conditions he faced there.
"I am going back to the dismal conditions that got me critically ill before I was temporarily released for medical reasons," he told The Associated Press by telephone. "I am not sure I can put up with the anti-gay attacks and harassment I underwent at the hands of fellow inmates and prison authorities on account of my perceived and unproven sexual orientation. The justice system in this country is just so unfair."
Mbede's provisional release earlier this year followed pressure from rights activists over his deteriorating health aggravated by malnutrition and repeated assaults.
But even in those countries, prosecutions are rare or nonexistent, said Neela Ghoshal, a researcher in the LGBT Rights Program at Human Rights Watch.
Cameroon's penal code calls for sentences ranging from six months to five years for people found guilty of "sexual relations with a person of the same sex." And last year, 14 people were prosecuted for homosexuality and 12 were convicted, according to Justice Ministry records cited by Human Rights Watch.
"It's the country that arrests, prosecutes and convicts more people than any other country that we know of in Africa for consensual same-sex adult conduct," Ghoshal said.
"In most of these cases there is little or no evidence. Usually people are convicted on the basis of allegations or denunciations from people who have claimed to law enforcement officials that they are gay."
She said many suspects were tortured or otherwise treated poorly in custody until they gave confessions, which were then used as evidence against them.
In October, two men were convicted of homosexuality because of their "effeminate" appearance and because they were drinking Bailey's Irish Cream, which was viewed as a drink favored by gay men, according to a statement issued Nov. 16 by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Andre Banks, executive director of All Out, said Mbede had already been significantly harmed by the case against him because of pervasive anti-gay stigma in Cameroon.
"Roger said he had to leave the university where he was studying because of the attention from the case and because of the mounting threats and fear of violence that have been very concerning to him," Banks said. "He's worried that he won't be able to have a normal life in Cameroon because of the amount of attention it's brought to him."
Lawyers defending those accused of homosexuality also have faced death threats including Mbede's attorney, Alice Nkom.
A text message sent in October to Yaounde-based lawyer Michel Togue, who has also defended people accused of homosexuality, similarly threatened his children. Attached to the message were photos of the children leaving school.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
AFA Spokesman Says AIDS Is Caused by Promiscuity and Party Drugs, Not HIV
Bryan Fischer, prominent national spokesman for the Venango County-based hate group, the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, says AIDS Is Caused by Promiscuity and Party Drugs, Not HIV:
from HIVPlus Mag:
One of the leaders of the antigay movement said recently that HIV did not cause AIDS. Instead, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, claimed that high levels of sexual promiscuity and the use of alkyl nitrites, commonly known as poppers, are the cause of the virus.
In a video reposted by Right Wing Watch, the AFA's director of issue analysis for government and public policy gives unverified homosexual sex statistics involving large numbers of partners amongst gay men, as well as the use of poppers for stamina. However, according to dancesafe.org, the effects of poppers typically last from one to two minutes. The inhalant relaxes muscles around blood vessels and causes the heart to speed up.
"Now, in the homosexual community, the average homosexual has hundreds of sexual partners over the course of a lifetime," Fischer said during his Focal Point radio show on the AFA Channel.
Fischer says during his show that this promiscuity, along with the use of alkyl nitrites "causes the human immune system to break down."
Watch the video below:
from HIVPlus Mag:
One of the leaders of the antigay movement said recently that HIV did not cause AIDS. Instead, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, claimed that high levels of sexual promiscuity and the use of alkyl nitrites, commonly known as poppers, are the cause of the virus.
In a video reposted by Right Wing Watch, the AFA's director of issue analysis for government and public policy gives unverified homosexual sex statistics involving large numbers of partners amongst gay men, as well as the use of poppers for stamina. However, according to dancesafe.org, the effects of poppers typically last from one to two minutes. The inhalant relaxes muscles around blood vessels and causes the heart to speed up.
"Now, in the homosexual community, the average homosexual has hundreds of sexual partners over the course of a lifetime," Fischer said during his Focal Point radio show on the AFA Channel.
Fischer says during his show that this promiscuity, along with the use of alkyl nitrites "causes the human immune system to break down."
Watch the video below:
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Oil City Council Proclaims Day of Recognition for "Fair and Equal Treatment for All People"
© OIL CITY, PA. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2010Fairness and Equality Proclamation Signed by Oil City Council
City council members signed a proclamation Monday night that designated the day (Sept. 13) as Joe Wilson Day. The tribute refers to former Oil City resident Joe Wilson who with his partner Dean Hamer, directed and produced the award winning film “Out in the Silence.”
The film celebrates diverse lifestyles and was shot in Oil City and the surrounding area.
“Joe Wilson’s film shows Oil City to the rest of the country as a town capable of positive change and documents progress in fair and equal treatment for all people in this community,” notes the proclamation.
Council was asked in June by local resident George Cooley to adopt a formal human rights policy and to embrace Wilson’s film on tolerance in small towns. The documentary tells the story of a gay high school student and explores small-town reaction to same-sex marriage.
"Many important topics were discussed at last night's City Council meeting," said Colley, "but we were proud to see the Oil City Council sign the proclamation. This is a first step in a marketing attitude toward our city. It is also a step towards a progressive Human Rights Initiative."
"A Special Blend of People"
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
The Right's Contempt For Gay Lives
by Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish:
National Review's new editorial comes out firmly against even civil unions for gay couples, and continues to insist that society's exclusive support for straight couples is designed
to foster connections between heterosexual sex and the rearing of children within stable households.
This is an honest and revealing point, and, in a strange way, it confirms my own analysis of the theocon position. It reaffirms, for example, that infertile couples who want to marry in order to adopt children have no place within existing marriage laws, as NR sees them. Such infertile and adoptive "marriages" rest on a decoupling of actual sex and the rearing of children. The same, of course, applies much more extensively to any straight married couple that uses contraception: they too are undermining what National Review believes to be the core reason for civil marriage. Now, you could argue - and I suspect NR's editors would - that society nonetheless has a role in providing moral, social and legal support for couples with children, however those children came about, and to provide "a non-coercive way to channel (heterosexual) desire into civilized patterns of living." I agree with this, actually, which is why I do not want to alter or weaken traditional marriage in any way, and regard it as a vital social institution that deserves our support.
But what of "channeling homosexual desire into civilized patterns of living?" Ah, there's the rub.
National Review clearly believes that gays exist beyond the boundaries of civilized life, or even social life, let alone the purview of social policy. But, of course, a total absence of social policy is still a social policy. And such a social policy - leaving gay people outside of existing social institutions, while tolerating their existence - has led to some rather predictable consequences. We have, for example, lived through a period in which around 300,000 young Americans died of a terrible disease that was undoubtedly compounded by the total lack of any social incentives for stable relationships. Imagine what would happen to STD rates or legitimacy rates if heterosexual marriage were somehow not in existence. Do you think that straight men would be more or less socially responsible without the institution of civil marriage?
This is not to deny the responsibility of those of us who contracted HIV. It is to make the core conservative case that culture matters, and that in so far as we can non-coercively encourage and support committed relationships, society, which includes gay people, will be better off. But National Review, stunningly, regards the well-being, health and flourishing of gay people as unworthy of any attention at all. Here is the passage that reflects the core homophobia - and yes, I see no alternative to using that word - in that magazine:
Same-sex couples will also receive the symbolic affirmation of being treated by the state as equivalent to a traditional married couple — but this spurious equality is a cost of the new laws, not a benefit. One still sometimes hears people make the allegedly “conservative” case for same-sex marriage that it will reduce promiscuity and encourage commitment among homosexuals. This prospect seems improbable, and in any case these do not strike us as important governmental goals.
Ponder those sentences for a moment. The fact that gay Americans may feel equal because of inclusion within their own families and societies is now a cost to society, not a benefit. Encouraging commitment, fewer partners, and greater responsibility are important governmental goals with respect to heterosexuals but not with respect to homosexuals. As far as National Review is concerned, homosexuals can go to hell. Their interests and views cannot even be accorded respect. They are non-persons to National Review: means, not ends.
Flip this around and you see what the theocon right actually believes: that society has no interest in the welfare of its gay citizens, and an abiding interest in ensuring that they remain unequal, feel unequal and suffer the consequences of a culture where family and commitment and fidelity are non-existent. And they write this within living memory of an appalling and devastating plague. This is how the social right is responding to our times, and to put it personally, my life and the lives and deaths of countless others. One day, they will understand the callousness and bitterness and willful ignorance they currently represent. As civilized society leaves them increasingly behind.
National Review's new editorial comes out firmly against even civil unions for gay couples, and continues to insist that society's exclusive support for straight couples is designed
to foster connections between heterosexual sex and the rearing of children within stable households.
This is an honest and revealing point, and, in a strange way, it confirms my own analysis of the theocon position. It reaffirms, for example, that infertile couples who want to marry in order to adopt children have no place within existing marriage laws, as NR sees them. Such infertile and adoptive "marriages" rest on a decoupling of actual sex and the rearing of children. The same, of course, applies much more extensively to any straight married couple that uses contraception: they too are undermining what National Review believes to be the core reason for civil marriage. Now, you could argue - and I suspect NR's editors would - that society nonetheless has a role in providing moral, social and legal support for couples with children, however those children came about, and to provide "a non-coercive way to channel (heterosexual) desire into civilized patterns of living." I agree with this, actually, which is why I do not want to alter or weaken traditional marriage in any way, and regard it as a vital social institution that deserves our support.
But what of "channeling homosexual desire into civilized patterns of living?" Ah, there's the rub.
National Review clearly believes that gays exist beyond the boundaries of civilized life, or even social life, let alone the purview of social policy. But, of course, a total absence of social policy is still a social policy. And such a social policy - leaving gay people outside of existing social institutions, while tolerating their existence - has led to some rather predictable consequences. We have, for example, lived through a period in which around 300,000 young Americans died of a terrible disease that was undoubtedly compounded by the total lack of any social incentives for stable relationships. Imagine what would happen to STD rates or legitimacy rates if heterosexual marriage were somehow not in existence. Do you think that straight men would be more or less socially responsible without the institution of civil marriage?
This is not to deny the responsibility of those of us who contracted HIV. It is to make the core conservative case that culture matters, and that in so far as we can non-coercively encourage and support committed relationships, society, which includes gay people, will be better off. But National Review, stunningly, regards the well-being, health and flourishing of gay people as unworthy of any attention at all. Here is the passage that reflects the core homophobia - and yes, I see no alternative to using that word - in that magazine:
Same-sex couples will also receive the symbolic affirmation of being treated by the state as equivalent to a traditional married couple — but this spurious equality is a cost of the new laws, not a benefit. One still sometimes hears people make the allegedly “conservative” case for same-sex marriage that it will reduce promiscuity and encourage commitment among homosexuals. This prospect seems improbable, and in any case these do not strike us as important governmental goals.
Ponder those sentences for a moment. The fact that gay Americans may feel equal because of inclusion within their own families and societies is now a cost to society, not a benefit. Encouraging commitment, fewer partners, and greater responsibility are important governmental goals with respect to heterosexuals but not with respect to homosexuals. As far as National Review is concerned, homosexuals can go to hell. Their interests and views cannot even be accorded respect. They are non-persons to National Review: means, not ends.
Flip this around and you see what the theocon right actually believes: that society has no interest in the welfare of its gay citizens, and an abiding interest in ensuring that they remain unequal, feel unequal and suffer the consequences of a culture where family and commitment and fidelity are non-existent. And they write this within living memory of an appalling and devastating plague. This is how the social right is responding to our times, and to put it personally, my life and the lives and deaths of countless others. One day, they will understand the callousness and bitterness and willful ignorance they currently represent. As civilized society leaves them increasingly behind.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Training Rules at Penn State: No Lesbians!
by Cyd Zeigler jr. for OutSports:
“To be part of that crucial part of an individual’s life is really important to us, and those of us that coach at this age group understand that responsibility.”
It’s like a cruel joke when former Penn State women’s basketball coach Rene Portland says this 18 minutes into the new documentary, “Training Rules.” The film chronicles Portland’s reign of terror of almost 30 years at Penn State and document her routine of threatening her players, creating a deeply homophobic environment on the team and systematically kicking women off her team for being lesbians or even for being a suspected lesbian. In 2005, Portland removed standout player Jennifer Harris from the team and Harris believed it was because Portland suspected she was gay. Harris filed a lawsuit with the National Center for Lesbian Rights; That prompted former Penn State players to come out of the woodwork corroborating Harris’ story. And in that lies the crux of “Training Rules.”
When I first heard about the film, I wondered how the filmmakers would tell the story without being able to talk to Portland and Harris, both of whom are bound by court settlement to not discuss the case. The only time Harris was speaking on screen was reading a statement written by her lawyer; Portland, predictably, refused to meet the filmmakers. The filmmakers took the muzzle on its two stars as an opportunity. The point of the film isn’t to simply tell the story of Rene Portland’s homophobic reign of terror and the young women she tossed into the gutter: It’s meant to make you feel it. When former player Lisa Faloon says, “Rene explained to all of us that we weren’t to talk to a lesbian, and if we were a lesbian, she specifically said, I will take your scholarship away and you will never play basketball again,” it lays the foundation for a series of stories of heartache from women who didn’t have the strength to stand up to Portland and the juggernaut of Penn State athletics. The film focuses on a half dozen other women, straight and gay, who were victims of Portland’s intolerance. Hearing women who played for Portland from 1980 to the late 1990s talk about how Portland undermined their self-confidence, attacked them, and shattered their lifelong dreams is heart-wrenching.
For some reason, the most emotional aspect of the film for me was listening to Jennifer Harris’ parents, Lambert and Pearl, talk about what Portland did to their daughter. They share home movies of Jennifer running a race at the age of 3 and we hear from her childhood track coach about her ultimate dream: Be a world-class athlete. In high school, there was no one in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania who could beat her in hurdles or the long jump. She was called maybe the best girls’ basketball player ever from her high school district. She was named to the All-State basketball team. In her senior year, she was rated one of the top 20 basketball players in the country. She had a promising future ahead of her and her sights were set squarely on the WNBA.
Hearing her parents and coaches and sports commentators talk about her in this way makes Jennifer’s story about so much more than just her. So when later in the film we find out that Portland destroyed Jennifer’s hopes and dreams and destroyed her as a person, it’s much more than that one person we feel for: An entire community was shattered by the intolerant actions of one homophobic woman, and we’re left wondering how many others were hurt for each of the half dozen women we hear from in the film.
“Someone did die,” Lambert Harris says about the night Jennifer was kicked off the team. “Jennifer’s spirit died that night. I never seen her smile or laugh since that day. She started speaking in a whisper. There were times when we didn’t know if she was going to kill herself or not. We were frightened.”
All of this unfolds against a paradoxical atmosphere in which Rene Portland continued to be praised by her fellow coaches, lauded by sports columnists and put on a pedestal by Penn State fans. The driving force behind all of that: Win and you can do anything to anyone you want; you’ll be protected. The athletic department handed Portland the keys to her castle as she put together winning season after winning season. Portland would threaten her players and tell them that no one, not even the athletic department, could stop her from kicking lesbians off her team. Everyone, including the NCAA itself, sat by and watched while Portland exacted her homophobic attacks on these teenagers and young women.
The filmmakers do a fantastic job of establishing the power of big-time college athletics, particularly winning coaches and winning programs. But USA Today’s Christine Brennan encapsulates the real problem: “I will not recruit black people. I will not recruit Jewish people. I will not recruit Asian people. How quickly would that woman be fired?” Regardless of any coach’s win-loss record, national championships or the support of boosters, the coach that made those statements would be fired before week’s end. While the protective cocoon of big-time sports is important to the story, the bigger problem is that sexual orientation is still not protected by colleges and the NCAA as race is. Changing that dynamic is one of the potential results of Harris’ public victory and the documentary film itself.
The cruelest joke of all is that Jennifer Harris isn’t gay. Portland got it wrong. The coach sacrificed the success of her team for a hunch she had about one of her best players, and she has paid dearly since. If Portland hadn’t kicked Harris off the team, she’d still be the head coach of the Penn State women’s basketball team, and Harris would likely be in the WNBA right now. Those were heavy prices these two women had to pay for progress. After an hour of former Penn State players telling their stories and pouring their hearts out to the filmmakers, you’re left wondering if Jennifer Harris thinks her sacrifice was worth saving other women from the persecution of Rene Portland. If this film is successful in telling Harris’ story to a mass audience, she’ll likely save the lives and careers of many more men and women than she had ever thought possible.
The film is produced and directed by Award-winning documentary filmmakers Dee Mosbacher and Fawn Yacker. Running time: 61 minutes. It is appearing in special engagements over the next few months; You can find the schedule here.
“To be part of that crucial part of an individual’s life is really important to us, and those of us that coach at this age group understand that responsibility.”
It’s like a cruel joke when former Penn State women’s basketball coach Rene Portland says this 18 minutes into the new documentary, “Training Rules.” The film chronicles Portland’s reign of terror of almost 30 years at Penn State and document her routine of threatening her players, creating a deeply homophobic environment on the team and systematically kicking women off her team for being lesbians or even for being a suspected lesbian. In 2005, Portland removed standout player Jennifer Harris from the team and Harris believed it was because Portland suspected she was gay. Harris filed a lawsuit with the National Center for Lesbian Rights; That prompted former Penn State players to come out of the woodwork corroborating Harris’ story. And in that lies the crux of “Training Rules.”
When I first heard about the film, I wondered how the filmmakers would tell the story without being able to talk to Portland and Harris, both of whom are bound by court settlement to not discuss the case. The only time Harris was speaking on screen was reading a statement written by her lawyer; Portland, predictably, refused to meet the filmmakers. The filmmakers took the muzzle on its two stars as an opportunity. The point of the film isn’t to simply tell the story of Rene Portland’s homophobic reign of terror and the young women she tossed into the gutter: It’s meant to make you feel it. When former player Lisa Faloon says, “Rene explained to all of us that we weren’t to talk to a lesbian, and if we were a lesbian, she specifically said, I will take your scholarship away and you will never play basketball again,” it lays the foundation for a series of stories of heartache from women who didn’t have the strength to stand up to Portland and the juggernaut of Penn State athletics. The film focuses on a half dozen other women, straight and gay, who were victims of Portland’s intolerance. Hearing women who played for Portland from 1980 to the late 1990s talk about how Portland undermined their self-confidence, attacked them, and shattered their lifelong dreams is heart-wrenching.
For some reason, the most emotional aspect of the film for me was listening to Jennifer Harris’ parents, Lambert and Pearl, talk about what Portland did to their daughter. They share home movies of Jennifer running a race at the age of 3 and we hear from her childhood track coach about her ultimate dream: Be a world-class athlete. In high school, there was no one in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania who could beat her in hurdles or the long jump. She was called maybe the best girls’ basketball player ever from her high school district. She was named to the All-State basketball team. In her senior year, she was rated one of the top 20 basketball players in the country. She had a promising future ahead of her and her sights were set squarely on the WNBA.
Hearing her parents and coaches and sports commentators talk about her in this way makes Jennifer’s story about so much more than just her. So when later in the film we find out that Portland destroyed Jennifer’s hopes and dreams and destroyed her as a person, it’s much more than that one person we feel for: An entire community was shattered by the intolerant actions of one homophobic woman, and we’re left wondering how many others were hurt for each of the half dozen women we hear from in the film.
“Someone did die,” Lambert Harris says about the night Jennifer was kicked off the team. “Jennifer’s spirit died that night. I never seen her smile or laugh since that day. She started speaking in a whisper. There were times when we didn’t know if she was going to kill herself or not. We were frightened.”
All of this unfolds against a paradoxical atmosphere in which Rene Portland continued to be praised by her fellow coaches, lauded by sports columnists and put on a pedestal by Penn State fans. The driving force behind all of that: Win and you can do anything to anyone you want; you’ll be protected. The athletic department handed Portland the keys to her castle as she put together winning season after winning season. Portland would threaten her players and tell them that no one, not even the athletic department, could stop her from kicking lesbians off her team. Everyone, including the NCAA itself, sat by and watched while Portland exacted her homophobic attacks on these teenagers and young women.
The filmmakers do a fantastic job of establishing the power of big-time college athletics, particularly winning coaches and winning programs. But USA Today’s Christine Brennan encapsulates the real problem: “I will not recruit black people. I will not recruit Jewish people. I will not recruit Asian people. How quickly would that woman be fired?” Regardless of any coach’s win-loss record, national championships or the support of boosters, the coach that made those statements would be fired before week’s end. While the protective cocoon of big-time sports is important to the story, the bigger problem is that sexual orientation is still not protected by colleges and the NCAA as race is. Changing that dynamic is one of the potential results of Harris’ public victory and the documentary film itself.
The cruelest joke of all is that Jennifer Harris isn’t gay. Portland got it wrong. The coach sacrificed the success of her team for a hunch she had about one of her best players, and she has paid dearly since. If Portland hadn’t kicked Harris off the team, she’d still be the head coach of the Penn State women’s basketball team, and Harris would likely be in the WNBA right now. Those were heavy prices these two women had to pay for progress. After an hour of former Penn State players telling their stories and pouring their hearts out to the filmmakers, you’re left wondering if Jennifer Harris thinks her sacrifice was worth saving other women from the persecution of Rene Portland. If this film is successful in telling Harris’ story to a mass audience, she’ll likely save the lives and careers of many more men and women than she had ever thought possible.
The film is produced and directed by Award-winning documentary filmmakers Dee Mosbacher and Fawn Yacker. Running time: 61 minutes. It is appearing in special engagements over the next few months; You can find the schedule here.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Evangelical Hypocrisy a Surprise? -- NOT!
Religion and Faith Are Often Used To Promote and/or Justify Bigotry and Discrimination.
But Here's Yet Another Reminder Of The Charade.
from the Religion News Service:
Official Resigns Over Ethical Misconduct
The general secretary of the Assemblies of God, which has several congregations in Venango County, has resigned after admitting to ethical misconduct.
The resignation of John M. Palmer, who had served in the position since November 2007, was immediate.
General Superintendent George O. Wood, the denomination's chief executive, said Palmer "confessed to a one-time incident that involved ethical misconduct and an inappropriate interaction with a woman that did not involve any physical intimacy," the church's News and Information Service reported.
The executive presbyters are expected to appoint an interim replacement for Palmer to serve until the General Council, the organization's major biennial meeting, in August.
But Here's Yet Another Reminder Of The Charade.
from the Religion News Service:
Official Resigns Over Ethical Misconduct
The general secretary of the Assemblies of God, which has several congregations in Venango County, has resigned after admitting to ethical misconduct.
The resignation of John M. Palmer, who had served in the position since November 2007, was immediate.
General Superintendent George O. Wood, the denomination's chief executive, said Palmer "confessed to a one-time incident that involved ethical misconduct and an inappropriate interaction with a woman that did not involve any physical intimacy," the church's News and Information Service reported.
The executive presbyters are expected to appoint an interim replacement for Palmer to serve until the General Council, the organization's major biennial meeting, in August.
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