BIGOTRY, HOMOPHOBIA AND ME

VALUES INVENTORY

When you judge me at the end of my life,

judge me,

not my associates, not my family

or by those who didn't like me.

I have written before (Legal to Have Skin Color and Hair) about my own experience of being raised in a white culture and in 1960 having a crush at the age of 11 on a negro boy at a fundamentalist Christian summer camp in northeastern Indiana. So when I read about Barack Obama's mother's experience, I have some personal perspective what it is like to do something that is not considered normal or acceptable. Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro is Barack's mother's name. And she must have been so very dynamic, individual, courageous, strong and possessing high ideals and valuable principles. A great example and a great mom.

And since I too had to let my son (who was adopted when he was 11) choose to live his high school years physically away from me, I felt another connection to the turmoil that I have experienced and know Stanley Ann had to feel. We love and that means at times we have to do what life requires of us, even though it is not what we would have wanted or chosen. To have to trust that life will take care of our children is an act of great faith.

I just went back to the first blog I started on TV Guide's website, where I wrote from the inspiration I felt by the first year of the TV show Brothers and Sisters with a gay adult sibling. What follows is part of what I wrote in one of my posts. This includes my experience with the bigotry in my own family and my broadening understanding and acceptance of gay people. Two issues that are still unresolved in the United States of America.

...Words can be used to disguise and hide what we are really thinking and feeling, and they can highlight and enhance the otherworldly experience of being human.

About this thing of gay human beings and a slice of America that thinks they are offended with gays being openly gay, two men kissing and what follows. Let’s put this in perspective. How outraged are people with men killing men, in genocide, war, whether with any kind of reasonable explanation for going into a war, OR NOT? It just doesn’t make any sense, well – to me,...that two men kissing is unpleasant or odious in any way. I didn’t know this about myself, until this show, Brothers and Sisters, put it in my face and I had to deal with it. I love it just as much as I would love seeing a man and woman kiss, who truly have feelings for one another. And in a way, I love it more, because, well, it opens up a whole new dimension to my life that I never had the opportunity to welcome into my consciousness. I don’t mean I plan to add this dimension to my own personal experiences. Not at all. I mean I can love life and the human race even more. Gaining something new to my awareness of life, human beings and diversity - just makes my life richer, broader and more dynamic.

I was raised in the Hoosier-Hysteria-Land, aka Indiana. I was raised Republican. My whole family is Republican. Only me - and well, I learned later, my Dad’s oldest brother had turned on the family tradition and was Democrat, too. My Dad was from a personality-diverse family of five siblings. Sitting at my uncle’s dinner table, after he had retired from his active physicist research, that he had done around the world, my uncle was surprised to learn that I had been raised no differently than he had been raised a generation before me.

The house where I was born is in a small Indiana town, which proudly has a sign out on the bypass for the Dan Quayle, Vice-President Museum. Very Republican. It was my second college boyfriend’s apartment-mate, who turned me into a Democrat. A memorable night in college for me was when we sat around listening to the draft numbers be called off for my boyfriend and his apartment mates. The Viet Nam War was going on. So this stuff was serious.

I was raised in a fundamentalist church. Where a lot of things are considered a sin. We couldn’t dance, swear, wear make-up, go to movies, talk back to our parents – ever!, the only sex - was married sex, ... you get the idea. When I was in second grade there were days of serious discussions about whether or not I would be allowed to go with my second grade class to see the Disney movie, Bambi. I had to tell the boy who asked me to the high school prom my junior year, that I could go with him, but I wouldn’t be allowed to dance. And we didn’t. I have been condemned to hell many times by my family members. Wearing mascara was one reason for condemnation, that I remember and another was rolling up my skirts above the knee in high school where my father was the high school basketball coach, as well as a teacher. The condemnations didn’t stop when I became an adult.

My life was pretty imposed upon. I felt smothered. But I knew what was right and what was wrong. You know, by my parents’ standards. The community I lived in was all white. I graduated high school in 1967 and entered college that fall, a commuter train ride away from Chicago. My family never said a word about Martin Luther King, Jr. or the civil rights that was on the TV every night. But it impacted me big time.

As a child, I always looked forward to going to summer church camp, which was always all white. In seventh grade, there were two black boys from Gary, Indiana, at camp. One night in the camp church service, the cutest black boy sang with this beautiful, clear voice. I still remember the song. I cried night after night when I found my two love letters from this young boy were taken from my bedroom’s desk drawer along with our picture together, which I read and looked at every night. Never a word was said where these things went. But I knew who. And I knew why.

...Betrayal of trust and the difficulty in understanding why I couldn’t “love” someone who wasn’t white - confused me when I was eleven. After all, I was always told to treat everyone as equals. Fortunately, I internalized this value, before it became apparent that they were just words. The family didn’t really believe that. But I do.

I’ve lived a diverse life. When I started my career, I moved a long distance away. Sorta had to - to find my own spirit. I am grateful for a life that has so far been very dramatic, colorful and full of graces. I have few regrets. I have traveled outside the U.S., for one. That alone is a great lesson in widening our small-mindedness. And I don’t care what the more narrow-minded might say about my chances not to go to hell. Our heaven or hell starts here on earth. And my life is heavenly to me.

In my childhood, I got religion. Jesus never said anything about sexual orientation. Jesus was gracious toward a prosititute, even. I have a problem with giving carte blanche to Old Testament’s words. The OT informs us how to treat our slaves. And the New Testament’s Paul has a great chapter, to the Corinthians (I, Chapter 13), but Paul also places females as subordinates to males. Not something I believe in.

So I don’t know - does the fact that there are some words in the Bible which people use to condemn same sex marriage and partnering - make it so off-limits to our using our brains to question the validity of the perception that God, gender-neutral, him or herself, may be just fine with gays being free to be who they are?

It takes nothing away from your life to live and let live. Really. It takes so little to be a good human being on this planet. Kindness is kindness in any language. And it is free.

In Brothers and Sisters, Scotty delivered a great line to Kevin in the episode, Date Night: “When you get home, more nights than not, you’re alone. Cause the one place you don’t feel secure and comfortable is in your own skin.” When things, such as two men kissing one another, rankle the senses, my guess is that you don’t feel comfortable in your own skin.

“…Take me down
You can hold me,
but you can’t hold what’s within.
Pull me round,
push me to the limit,
maybe I may bend,
But I know where I’m not going...
I will not be broken,
I will not be broken.

I will not be
someone other than who I am
I will fight to make my stand
Cause what is livin’
if I can’t live free,
what is freedom
if I can’t be me?"

I Will Not Be Broken
By Gordon Kennedy, Wayne Kirkpatrick &
Tommy Sims
Sung by Bonnie Raitt

From the Gettysburg Address:

......The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us --that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863, By Abraham Lincoln