homophobia

It's been a long time since I was last sitting at breakfast, reading the Times and came across something that drove me to my blog. When I began my blog during a sabbatical a few years ago that's how it used to happen: Breakfast, newspaper, outrage, blog. Lately, though, I've been lucky to be able to even skim the headlines at breakfast, and as for time to sit down and blog, well, that's been nearly nonexistent. So it was refreshing to have the time this morning to casually read the paper and then stumble upon an outrageous statement, and then to have some time to blog about it.

Which makes it sound like I am happy to be outraged, which is not the case of course. I'm simply happy that given the outrage there was time to read, think and blog instead of just feeling frustrated and angry.

This morning's reaction was to an article with the headline "Pentagon Steps Up Talks On Don't Ask Don't Tell", written by Elisabeth Bumiller. It is a relatively short article with several sources of irritation.

Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington, wrote Noel Coward in 1947. Till the early twentieth actors, actresses and all things to do with theatre were considered unseemly as a career choice. Actors were often conflated with 'rogues', 'vagabonds' and 'loose women' as an underclass. The twentieth century saw a paradigm shift whereby  an acting career could bring fame and fortune, and  actresses and actors like Vanessa Redgrave and Ronald Reagan could enter politics without having their characters impugned. 

Two nights ago someone (or some group) vandalized the Long Island Gay and Lesbian Youth Center (LIGALY). The front door was shattered as were the windows on the van that LIGALY uses to help teenagers get to the Center for meetings and social events. Nothing was stolen. It was clearly an act intended to send a message rather than for any kind of personal gain.

LIGALY (pronounced "legally") is one of my favorite Long Island organizations. It was started by David Kilmnick, who I'm proud to say is a friend of mine. He began with nothing but an idea for a project as he worked toward his Masters in Social Work and built one of the most powerful and wide-reaching LGBT organizations on the Island. (He also got his Doctorate in Social Work along the way.) LIGALY now serves not only young people but also LGBT seniors, offering social, educational, and support services. Its Safe Schools Initiative helps counter homophobia in schools, and offers organizing assistance to students wanting to start or maintain Gay Straight Alliances in their schools.  

The good news is that there has been an enormous show of support for LIGALY. David reports thatthere have been phone calls, blog entries, news stories, and even a letter from Governor Paterson. Most importantly just since yesterday there have been enough donations to help get the Center's door fixed and its van back in service.

Co-optation and bureaucratization are great strategies for squashing attempts to create social change. There are some kids in South Carolina who are facing exactly that problem right now. They fought for and won the right to have a GSA in their school (the Irmo High School principal announced his resignation last month after the district ruled that the GSA must be allowed) but their victory might have some unintended and negative consequences.

The school board for District 5 of Lexington and Richmond Counties is now considering new rules regulating "student-initiated noncurricular clubs" that will "allow" GSAs but make them difficult to form and will hinder their effectiveness.

If we can thank Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and famed censor, for nothing else, there is this: much of what we know about the sexual subcultures of 19th-century New York is thanks to the efforts of Comstock. Much of the Society's intelligence on the moral depravity of the time came from the personal efforts of Comstock, who went to the fleshpots of the city himself to observe the offenses to common decency and recorded them in meticulous detail to be included in the Society's reports. For this, at least, we can thank him, and perhaps advocate that he be let out of whatever hellpit he's roasting in now, for a few seconds each millenia.

I agree with the first commenter in this post by Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars: can we please just get the fucking Rapture over with already, so that we can rid ourselves of these subliterate cretins who seem to want to Love the rest of us to death? Failing that, can we just buy all of them first-class tickets to one of the places in the Middle East that they hunger so badly to blow up?

This is a good-news/bad-news kind of story: it's good because it shows idiocy and homophobia given the trouncing that it so richly deserves, but it's bad the fact that it took place at all shows that this country persists in treating lunatics seriously when in a just world, they should be laughed at.

So, it seems that it's official. My favorite fag-bashing fratboy media figure is no more. He's not actually going to die of a fatal disease. It's even worse; Tucker Carlson has had his television series taken away.

Yes, we know that your parents sucked. They didn't let you stay out past nine, were always on your ass about your grades, the people you dated, the awful music that you were listening to, how their generation had more respect for their elders, yadda yadda yadda. And even now that you're grown up, they're still nudzhing at you, right?

Here's some consolation: You don't have Amy Contrada for your mom. Amy Contrada belongs to a Massachusetts anti-gay group called MassResistance which describes itself "the pro-family action center for Massachusetts -- and beyond!" After MassResistance organized a protest of a high-school production of the play The Laramie Project starring Amy's daughter Claudia, Claudia came out as a lesbian.

Oops.

I can't tell you how much it angers me that people who claim to care about the dangers faced by gender non-conforming teens contribute to that danger by insisting that the closet is the only source of safety and by spouting the kind of rhetoric that endangers the teens in the first place.

(Transcript here.)