The Visible Vote '08: Senator Barack Obama.

Senator Obama on homophobia in the African American community:

I believe that Barack Obama understands injustice, and I believe that his personal conviction is that it must be eradicated. Still, I’m just kinda tired of people who mince lightly along when their strides ought to be registering on seismographs. I’m glad that Mr. Obama brings up the issue of homophobia in the African American community when he gets the chance to and I really do appreciate the fact that he links it to the issue of social justice in general, but I still really want him to put the message forth more forcefully. If an African American pastor of an African American church preaches bigotry, she or he should be called to task--and not indirectly either. Soft and fuzzy metaphors shouldn’t stand in for the blunt truth when the issue is hate.

Am I, a white male, presuming to tell Mr. Obama how he should speak to African Americans on this issue? Well...yes. I am. When oppressed minorities participate in the oppression of others, excusing it as the product of ignorance is unacceptable. When Mr. Obama talks to African Americans about these issues, he should remind them of the powerful opportunity they have to stand up for justice for ALL human beings. But he should also ask why such a large number of African American churchgoers are content to see hatred flowing like rivers of tainted blood from their pulpits. He should ask why so many participate in discrimination against their fellow citizens, and why so many more ignore it. He should ask why so many work so hard to perpetuate the injustices that their forebears fought against.

I’d spend some time here discussing the fact that many gay men need to examine these exact same issues, but I’m not interested in qualifying my criticism of African American bigots. Gay or straight, black or white, poor or rich, hatred needs to be exposed for what it is, and responding by pointing fingers in other directions changes exactly nothing. Take another look at your history, African American bigots. Re-learn your lessons. And fix what’s broken. You’ve ceded the moral high ground, and it’s time for you to reclaim it.

Senator Obama on gay marriage and the church's role in determining civil rights:

Obama (and later, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton) skirted around the real reason he’s against gay marriage. I understand the candidates' belief that expressing support for equal marriage opportunities makes them less electable; they may well be correct about that as long as they feel they should apologize for standing up for what's right and just. But why not attack the fundamental illogic of the whole issue? The truth is this: None of people who are fighting against equal marriage rights are self-proclaimed bigots or hatemongers. Yet refusing to apply the term “marriage” to the long-term unions of LGBT folks directly implies and bolsters the idea that there’s something fundamentally wrong with people who are not straight. And that…well, that’s bullshit. And so yeah: I have a problem with "leaders" who refuse to call same-sex marriages by their proper name. I, too, sing America; I, too, have a dream. The same exact dream that Mr. Hughes and Dr. King had. And separate-but-equal civil unions sure as hell aren't any more a part of that dream than segregated schools and whites-only water fountains. We can do better. And so can Edwards, Clinton, and Obama.

The Visible Vote '08: A Presidential Forum.

Two nights ago, I watched The Visible Vote '08: A Presidential Forum streamed live on Logo Online. The forum was a chance for presidential candidates to speak about their stance on LGBT issues like the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and the ever-popular “gay marriage." You can watch individual clips or the entire forum here. In the entries that follow, I’ll give my thoughts on each of the candidates appearing at the forum.

Once again, with feeling and coherence.

When it comes to anti-bigotry manifestos, I'm always on the lookout for that rare combination of fire and eloquence. This guy nails it, I think:

I know that critics of homosexuality do not consider themselves to be hateful. They would say they "love the sinner but hate the sin." If the shoe were on the other foot, however, and someone were attacking their families, trying to take their children away, and constantly working to pass legislation to deprive them of basic civil rights, at some point they would understand that "homophobia" is too mild a word for such harassment. "Hatred" is the only proper term.

I was raised in Dallas, Texas and had classmates who were in the Klan. I remember that they did not consider themselves to be attacking other people. They perceived themselves to be defenders of Christian America. Their "religion" consisted of an unrelenting attack on people who were black, Jewish or homosexual. If anyone challenged these views, these Klan members considered themselves under attack and believed that their right to free exercise of religion was being threatened. In other words, they felt that harassing other people was a protected expression of their own religious faith.

In the Gospel, biblical literalists and judgmental people were the negative example in many of the stories. The point of those stories was to teach us the hypocrisy of judgmental religion. When a woman was caught in adultery, the Biblical literalists lined up to protect family values. They pointed out that the Bible literally says that adulterers are to be stoned. If Jesus took the Bible seriously, they claimed, he would have to participate in the mandated biblical punishment of an adulteress.

Instead of following scripture, Jesus tells the woman to get her life together and tells everyone else to drop their stones of judgment. The only way to take this story seriously is to conclude that real Christians don't use the bible to condemn other people.

The full essay can be found here. Thank you, Rev. Rigby.

A new semester at LSU.

The beginning of a new semester is always hectic--lots of paperwork to feed the bureaucracy, lots of planning for my own academic endeavors, lots of preparation for teaching. Still, I'm done with coursework as of last fall, and I haven't yet begun to prepare for the general exams I'll be taking in a few weeks.
For right now, all I have to do at LSU is teach--something I love to do. Not only do I like teaching for all the conventional reasons, but also because it's an escape for me. When I'm doing my thing in the classroom, everything else fades into the background. I'm there, I'm focused on interacting with my students, and I'm concentrating on what my students need and what I need to do to deliver it. As those of you who've been in the classroom as a teacher know well, this often involves a lot of backtracking and sidetracking, frequent changes of plans, and quick thinking. Today, in my second Performance of Literature class, this process led me to do something I'd practically vowed not to do in the classroom.
From a pedagogical point of view, I never saw the value in revealing my sexual orientation to my students. If it doesn't create a "teachable moment," my thinking went, there's no reason to bring it into the class. Aside from that, I believe that in most of life's circumstances, a person's orientation is of negligible importance. In this case, however, I found a different reason to come out to my students--an incidental one.
I was introducing the concept of blending performance with literature to the class. As an example, I pulled Frost's "Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening" out of the air. For reference (and because I've always loved the poem):

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

I talked about the most common analytical interpretation of the poem--that it provides a metaphor for the contemplation of suicide. Then I discussed my personal interpretive preference for the poem--a literal reading built around what I think are simple, beautiful images of passing near a quiet, snowy forest at night, and the fleeting sense of Taoist solitude that I find in Frost's words. I encouraged the class to contemplate how these two interpretations might alter an individual's performance of the poem.
Several students got hung up on how one might go about performing an interpretation like the second one without using sign language or playing charades with the audience. I told them that the core of such a performance would need to be grounded in personal memory and experience. "Like....what?" one student asked, frowning.
Now, hypotheticals aren't my style. I tend to prepare extensively and then provide lecture examples on the fly, and I've grown accustomed to responding to questions that way. The first thought that came to my mind as I groped for examples of what I might use to create the physical aspects of a performance of "Woods" was...the stand of trees behind Bob's house in Massachusetts.

Behind Bob's house, there's a dell filled with beautiful trees. You can see it from his kitchen window, and I once told Bob that I would love to be there in the winter to see the snow falling through the branches. Some months later, in the winter when I was back home in Baton Rouge, Bob aimed his web cam at the dell so that I could see the snow fall. I played George Winston's December album while I watched the snow at my computer. I've still never seen snow like that in person, and I can only imagine the sound and the feeling of being in such a place with the snow. Maybe it's better in my imagination than it would be in reality, but that's beside the point--the image in my mind fits perfectly with the grandeur, melancholy, seclusion, passivity, and engagement I feel in Frost's poem.

I wanted to tell my students all this, to use it as a concrete example of a personal experience that I might use as a starting point for developing a performance. The example came to me as a narrative, and it never occurred to me to present it in any other fashion. After a quick inner debate, I mentally slapped myself on the wrist for hesitating and told the class the story. Beginning with "My ex-fiance Bob has a stand of trees just beyond his backyard...." I went on to tell them about looking at the trees while making jambalaya for our supper, and about how Bob aimed his web cam at the trees in winter for me. I talked about the significance of this memory, and about why I link it to the images in "Woods". And then, of course, I went on with the lesson. (Side note: Putting "ex-" in front of anything referencing Bob still bugs me, but I can't seem to find an accurate and workable solution to this vexation.)
Afterward I wondered what, if anything, my class thought about this whole episode. I've become accustomed to surprise and even shock as reactions when I come out, so it felt strange to do it in a situation in which the listeners might feel constrained to limit their responses.
To be honest, I'm not even sure why this feels important enough to write about. And yet, I'm fairly sure that it is important. I'm also fairly sure that now that I've done it once, I'll want to do it again--pedagogical theory be damned. I don't know why that is, either. But for right now, I'm content to just let it be.

So. About that "gay" thing.

This is gonna be long. But today's my birthday, and this is my first entry. So for both reasons, I claim immunity from long-post complaints. Additional disclaimer: Though it may well be interesting to the rest of my dear readers, this post is aimed specifically at my LSMSA comrades; other posts should be more general.

A few months ago I created a blog-city profile. Purpose: To see and comment on blogs by several friends who use the service. Then, just a couple of weeks ago, I finally discovered the mailbox that goes along with having a blog-city profile. Among other items, the mailbox contained a message from M. that read, in part: "BTW, do you know how much fuss you've created by putting 'gay' on your profile?? LOL" Nope, M., I had no idea.

Well, okay...I did have a little idea. Just a tiny one. But after all, if Jennifer (aka Fred) figured it out, I assumed that other people had as well.

FADE IN:

INT. COFFEE CALL DAY

DAVID and FRED are seated in the crowded, brightly-lit shop, eating beignets.

TITLE OVER:

Summer, 2003

DAVID

...and that's when I knew that I am gay.

FRED

(rolling her eyes and looking pained)

Ohhhhhhh--we were wondering when you'd ever figure it out. We all knew way before we ever even met you, practically. I mean, you never even showed any interest in me at all...and you still didn't know? What a maroon!

DAVID (V.O.)

At least, it went something like that. Fred's always been so...well, snotty in her alternative-ness.

INT. NISSAN TRUCK NIGHT

David drives along a residential section of Perkins Road as Fred rides shotgun. We HEAR "WIND BENEATH MY WINGS" playing on the truck's radio.

DAVID

I get the distinct feeling that something cynical is required here. Some kind of witty sardonicism.

FRED

I've found a new boyfriend to be co-dependent with. You probably won't be seeing me again. At least for a few years, until he and I break up and I need some schmuck to pour my pain out to.

DAVID

Yes! Just like that! I wouldn't have thought of that, but it contrasts so well with the music. Oh, Fred, you're the best fucked-up giftie I know!

FADE OUT:

THE END

Anyway, several people have pointed out that I shouldn't feel obliged to explain this. I understand and agree. At the same time, I feel that people who are close to me have the right to know me as I am. And besides, I want to explain. I'll get serious now, but make it as brief as possible:

I didn't really, consciously know until late December of 2000, when I had a sudden epiphany. It went pretty much exactly like this: "Oh, wow, that's what's up...I'm gay. This is gonna be really interesting--I'm gonna be a minority. Okay, well, if I am gay, then that means there have got to be a lot of other men like me walking around--there've got to be a whole lot of gay men who don't "get" that whole gay production-number thing. So where are all the other gay guys who aren't like Jack on Will & Grace?"

The question that everyone eventually has is, "How in the world could you not know?" It's probably hard to understand how one could suppress something so huge, unless you've had a reason to do so. The closest thing I can offer to an explanation is this: I was never exposed to masculine-normative gay men. Like most other people, I didn't even know that such a thing existed. Therefore, that possibility was completely closed off to me. After the epiphany, I looked back on my life, and realized that internally, I was clearly gay even before puberty. But all those thoughts, all the suspicions in the back of my head, had no place to go. If being gay meant being skinny, fashionable, and effete, then it was simply outside the realm of possibility for me.

I am very, very lucky for a number of reasons. The first is that my "coming out to myself" episode happened late. That was lucky for me because by the time I realized the truth, my response was not so much "This really sucks, how the hell am I going to deal with this?" as it was "This is going to be tough and interesting." I think it's telling that among my first thoughts was to wonder where all the other guys like me were.

I didn't have to wonder for long. I soon found the bear community--basically a large, international gay subculture that likes to fight over the very definition of "bear". For what it's worth, here's the definition from Resources for Bears--it's as good as any:

The most common definition of a "bear" is a man who is hairy, has facial hair, and a cuddly body. However, the word "Bear" means many things to different people, even within the bear movement. Many men who do not have one or all of these characteristics define themselves as bears, making the term a very loose one. Suffice it to say, "bear" is often defined as more of an attitude than anything else - a sense of comfort with our natural masculinity and bodies that is not slavish to the vogues of male attractiveness that is so common in gay circles and the culture at large.

As time has passed, I've found myself identifying less and less with bear culture--but it's been a very handy way to "break into" life as a gay man. Bear culture gave me things that I really needed at the time, and a group to belong to was not the least of those things.

Since 2000, a lot has happened. The only people in my life who still don't know that I'm gay are my mom and dad--and that will change soon. My brother and sister and their spouses know, all of my colleagues at LSU and BRCC and The Princeton Review know. I've become very up-front about it because I want it to fade into the background sooner rather than later--if that makes any sense. And if you're reading this and wondering, "Why didn't I know?" I have an answer for you: If I didn't tell you directly, it's because I never had a good chance to do so. At the time that most of you were still in Baton Rouge, I had no clue myself. Later, I was loathe to turn relaxing, enjoyable gatherings into Dave's Gay-O-Rama by bringing it up. I've now arrived at a point where I've learned how to do it in a way that keeps me comfortable, and (hopefully) reassures others if necessary.

Which brings me to that luck thing again: I am very, very lucky to have so many cool family members, friends, and colleagues. I actually had to stop the people in my department at LSU from throwing a party of sorts to celebrate when I came out to them in a Black Box performance. My brother and sister (and sister-and-brother-in-law) have been extraordinarily wonderful from the moment I told them. And my friends, down to the last gal and guy, have been exactly the same.

And now, I suppose I'll open the floor for questions and comments. I've left a lot out (for example, my 3-year relationship with a man named Bob, to whom I was engaged, and with whom I remain close friends). I hope, however, that I've provided enough of an explanation here for a beginning of some kind. If any questions come up, I'll answer them here or via private E-mail, as appropriate.