This Is Not About Free Speech. It's About Taking a Moral Stand.

Cross-posted on Bilerico.com

Everyone is talking about Chick-fil-A. People can't shut up about it. That and "Call Me Maybe," which, I don't know, I like a shiny pop song as much as the next homosexual but do people really think that guy is sexy? He's like a focus group version of sexy. My G.I. Joe doll when I was 12 was sexier than that guy.

But anyway, Chick-fil-A.

And I should even preface this harangue by saying that I have very mixed feelings about these boycotts. I thought the recent Target boycott was the pinnacle of beside the point -  "I'm gonna buy my plastic sweatshop crap from Walmart instead of Target for 2 weeks. That'll show 'em." These boycotts satisfy an emotional need to express disapproval (I have to say I still feel a little ashamed of myself whenever I buy a coffee at Starbucks, but now that I'm back in New York, I find it hard to avoid), but in the end I wonder if it isn't mostly an empty protest. So you get your chicken sandwich at Wendy's this month and feel really good about yourself. You still get your chicken sandwich, and as a bonus you get a sense of having participated without even having to spend ten minutes writing a letter to your congresswoman, march in a protest rally, escort women into a Planned Parenthood clinic through throngs of anti-abortion lunatics, or get arrested for civil disobedience.

But something really coalesced for me when the mayors of Boston and Chicago told Chick-fil-A they weren't welcome in their cities, and then came the flood of liberal clucking about free speech.

This is not a culture war debate. This is not about someone's right to express his "beliefs." It's not about someone's politics or religion. It is about pushing back against someone who publicly supports, with his words and money, organizations whose mission it is to persecute a group of people.

Dan Cathy is entitled to his views on same-sex marriage, and, yes, opposition to same-sex marriage is a political view. But c'mon people. Of course he's against same-sex marriage, but he's just talking about marriage right now because that's the issue on the table. Cathy believes that homosexuals should not exist and that LGBT teenagers should be sent to camps to be shamed into believing that their deepest human feelings of desire, affection, and love are illegitimate. He believes that children should be rounded up, separated from their families, and subjected to a pseudo-scientific treatment that results in psychological and emotional damage that lasts a lifetime.

He believes in disseminating lies about sexuality in order to influence legislation - lies which the Southern Poverty Law Center says "almost certainly contribute to hate crime violence directed at the LGBT community, which is more targeted for such attacks than any other minority group in America."

Believing that a whole group of people should be beaten, imprisoned, and brainwashed - and supporting organizations whose mission it is to carry out this agenda - is not a political belief. These people are a menace. They are criminals. And - I probably shouldn't use this word, but it used to mean something besides "Muslim" - they are terrorists, and I don't see any reason why a city or state should not be allowed to say, "If you support these organizations, you are not welcome to do business here." The mayors of Chicago and Boston are not denying someone free speech, they're taking a moral stand.

Did these same so-called liberals who are now crying "free speech!" scold the many American city and state governments that divested in companies doing business with South Africa in the 1980s? Did they complain that economic pressure by a city government was an overreach then?

Calm down. I'm not saying that a fast food chain is equivalent to the South African government. I'm saying there is a difference between political and religious beliefs (I think people should have the right to believe whatever bullshit they want to believe) and actively working to do harm to a group of people. Focus on the Family, the National Organization for Marriage, Exodus Ministries, and the rest, do work that doesn't just disenfranchise LGBT people, invalidate their relationships, and attempt to eradicate their identities, it directly contributes to gay-bashing, teen homelessness, and suicide.

I don't want them or their supporters anywhere near me.

Alone Away From Home.

I’ve been a little compulsive about weather.com this summer. When it gets over 90 I’m obsessed with knowing when the heat wave will be over (“Okay,” I tell myself, “It’s only 5 more days, you can bear it”), and then I become obsessed with knowing when the next one starts (“Breathe” I tell myself, “It’s just hot weather, it could be worse, it could be hot and you could be climbing on piles of garbage all day in the sun looking for things to sell for a few pennies so you could buy some rancid, bug-infested flour to mix with dirt and make crackers to feed your family”).

Something I’ve learned on weather.com is that in New York this summer we’re having basically the same weather that they’re having in Houston. Have you been to Houston? I have. I didn’t stay.

Speaking of Houston, yesterday I flew to Seattle from New York by way of Houston. It’s not exactly on the way. It was a long travel day, and when I got to my hotel at about 7 (10 New York time, which is late for me since I’ve been on this getting up at 5 a.m. to write schedule) I was beat. I had an overdone burger in the hotel restaurant, drove a half mile up the road to Trader Joe’s for a bottle of wine and some bananas for breakfast (the wine, obviously, was not for breakfast, the wine was for ... wine), came back to my room and tried to watch a little TV but couldn’t find anything interesting, so I went to sleep at 9:30 and slept till 8 this morning.

One of many wonderful things about visiting the Seattle area (the most obvious, of course, and the most welcome, being that it seems to be one of the few places in the U.S. this summer that isn’t broiling hot) is that the little coffee packets they give you in the hotel next to the 4-cup drip coffeemaker -- because some people need a cup of coffee so badly before they can summon the strength to even open the door and push the elevator button that they’ll drink just about anything hot and vaguely brownish -- actually makes a very good cup of coffee.

I’ve blogged so little lately, maybe I haven’t mentioned that I’m in Seattle for the next two weeks for a workshop production of Lizzie (new name, dropped the “Borden”) at the Village Theater. I say Seattle, but we’re actually in Issaquah, a charming hamlet just across a bridge over some body of water from Seattle. I guess you’d call it a suburb, a bedroom community. It feels more like a small town.

I miss C already and 2 weeks is a long time to be away, but it’s nice for him to have me out of the house for the Olympics, which he’s way more interested in watching than I am, and he's flying out for the weekend of the performances. I’m here a day earlier than Tim and Alan. I don’t know where along the way I became confused -- I thought everyone was coming out here on Friday. But I didn’t mind having an evening to myself. There’s something really nice about a night alone in a hotel away from home, where I can do whatever the fuck I want and no one will care. Even if it’s just to drink half a bottle of wine and crash at 9:30.

Wah wah.

See, I knew they were working on this. I've always thought it was a bad idea to put so much emphasis on the medical benefits of marijuana, as a reason to legalize it, rather than just making the argument that people should be able to do what they want with their own bodies.

It's the same thing I've been trying to articulate about the gay rights/liberation battle. It's better in the long run to say, "Don't fucking tell us what we can and can't do if we're not hurting anyone," than to say, "We promise we'll be good," because eventually, with the latter, they'll hold you to it, and then it's too late to go back and insist on the former.

I bet there are a lot of hippies in lab coats at their "dispensaries" reading Wired and freaking out.

Happy Pride Day!

Now that possibly a little over half of Americans don't react like a bunch of insane Medieval idiots to the concept that there might actually be people in the world with a homosexual orientation, there are a lot of stories to tell. We're not just telling the stories to ourselves any more.

(Last year, during a recital at a musical theater program, a straight friend asked why so many of the guys chose to sing songs with gay themes, or more generally why there were so many songs now in musical theater with gay themes, and the answer to me was so self-evident that I was a little appalled to be asked. But I guess if you didn't grow up gay you wouldn't see how starkly different things are now compared to even 5 or 10 years ago. It's so much more satisfying now to tell a story with a gay character or subject because the gayness isn't automatically the whole story any more. A general audience might sit and listen and be relaxed (and informed!) enough to see and hear a story about a specific person in a specific situation, doing and feeling unique and interesting and human things, instead of most of the audience just immediately having the reaction, "Oh my god! He's gay!" and not taking in anything else.)

This weekend, as we celebrate the anniversary of the Stonewall riots (if you're not gay and over 40, maybe you need a little history lesson), I want to remind myself that Stonewall was important but it was the 80s when things REALLY started to change. (Okay, yes, I know that's debatable and maybe even not so important, it's not a contest after all, but those years certainly marked a watershed in Americans' ability to ignore an uncomfortable truth hoping it'll go away. People were dying and they were screaming about it and wouldn't stop.)

Once again I credit Andrew Sullivan with some of the smartest, most affecting blogging out there. Where I disagree with him is in his apology for ACT UP's disruption of religious services. He's referring to the notorious demonstration at St. Patrick's cathedral when an ACT UP member threw a communion wafer to the ground. Admittedly it's easier for me, not believing that the cracker actually turns into the flesh of the son of "God," to accept such an act as political protest, but for me the demonstration in St. Patrick's was a galvanizing moment of brilliant disobedience. I think it was brave.

Anyway, I can't wait to see this film. And happy Pride Day -- a little early: this year I'm celebrating our national homosexual holiday by going to North Carolina for a wedding shower for C's brother (who is marrying a woman in September), which is 1) ironic, and 2) nice, because C's family welcomed me so lovingly into their family this spring and now I can in turn help welcome my soon-to-be sister-in-law.

Obama Moved By Our Wedding, Evolves.

We so wanted our marriage not to be a political event -- impossible to avoid, we know, but we aspired none the less -- so it was almost comical on our honeymoon cruise in the Mediterranean to read in the “USA Times” (the 4-page news digest they tucked in our cabin door on the ship every morning) that C’s home state of North Carolina voted by a large margin to extra-double-duty outlaw and ban gay marriage (I don’t know which is the bigger sin: bigotry or redundancy) and then a day or two later that President Obama came out in favor of same-sex marriage. Big week for gay marriage.

I had been so disgusted and to be honest bored with Obama’s gay marriage dilemma that I expected to just roll my eyes when, at of course politically the perfect moment, he finally completed his evolution. But instead I was quite moved. I mean, seriously, the fucking president. I know, it's marriage, and I have all kinds of trepidation about marriage as the flagship issue of our movement. But I came of age politically in the Reagan 80s and lived through Clinton and god-help-us Bush, and now the president of the United States says that he thinks gay people should be able to marry each other.

That’s massive.

And then there’s North Carolina. Of course at our wedding there was a big contingent of North Carolinians, many of them politically conservative but most of whom expressed their dismay about Amendment One and did what they could to persuade their friends to vote against it. And they came with open hearts to celebrate our marriage, to welcome me into their family, to join mine with theirs. Being from a traditional background, they know what marriage means.

One of the most touching things all weekend was watching C’s mother and mine chatting, smiling, enjoying the happy occasion and each other’s company. It was not a political occasion for them. I’m sure they have very divergent views on current issues, but their sons were getting married and they came together, with their families, to share the joy of that.

So all these state governments (mostly Southern, but it’s dangerous to relax with the notion that bigots all live in the same place and have the same accent) and their nasty little amendments. Of course it’s disheartening when it happens, but I come near to dismissing it. I try to focus on history.

All these religious bigots talking about homosexuality as a moral issue, a Christian issue, are identical to Calhoun, etc. in the 19th century defending slavery on Christian grounds. We read that stuff in history class and thought, “Jesus, these people are lunatics, how did anyone take this seriously?” And now we have Maggie Gallagher. It’s the same bullshit. It’s the same punch in the gut when you read it. And if Gallagher is remembered at all, it will be as a horrible person who distorted Christian ideas to justify her irrational hatred of a group of people.

We’ve always had ugly, backward, hateful people among us, but we have at key moments in our history found powerful ways to put them down. The Civil War amendments and Reconstruction. The civil rights legislation of the 1960s. I don’t think it will be too long before some branch of the federal government steps in and says, “It doesn’t matter what you think. People can marry who they want. Grow up.”

I must seem crazy optimistic in light of how conservative Congress and the Supreme Court have become, but the tide has turned. Remember, I still think gay marriage is ultimately a conservative issue and “marriage equality” will be a conservative victory. The normalizing of same-sex marriage is a conservative response to the fact of homosexuality, so I don’t think it’s too much to expect in these conservative times.

Perhaps what’s changed in my view is that I think possibly a conservative response is what’s needed now, at least at first.

Keeping Us Tight and True.

Last night C was snoring so loud not even my earplugs worked, so I got up at 1 a.m. and moved to the couch which is about 1 inch too short to be truly comfortable for sleeping. I feel asleep quickly, but woke up at 5 (the alarm was set for 6), tried for half an hour to get back to sleep, failed, got up and made coffee.

We usually get up at 7, but this morning, on my “day off,” we got up extra early to get to the City Clerk’s office by 8 to be first in line at the Marriage Bureau, which opens at 8:30. Just inside the front door, we saw a line to the right and a closed door marked “Marriage Bureau” to the left. A woman in a security guard uniform with her feet planted shoulder-width barked, “What are you here for?”

I said, “Marriage license?”

She pointed to the line and said, it seemed to me gruffly, “There.”

I’d been drinking coffee since 5:30, so, after standing for a minute, I got out of line and asked the security guard if there was a bathroom I could use. She said, “8:30.”

I thought she didn't hear me, so I said, “I asked where there’s a bathroom.”

She exhaled and said, “8:30!”

I said, “Um. Do you mean the bathroom opens at 8:30?”

She looked at me like she couldn’t fathom why she had been chosen of all the people in the world to endure such unmitigated torture, pointed to the glass office doors, still locked, and said, “Eight. Thirty.”

I said, “Well, aren’t you in a good mood this morning.”

We were not first in line, but we were fourth, and by the time the doors opened there were dozens behind us. The doors opened promptly at 8:30, and we were out of there with a marriage license in our hot little hands by 8:50. To be fair, I should mention that the clerk who issued the license was sweet and polite and gave us a warm congratulations as we were leaving. On the way out, I had in my head that I was going to say to Miss Security Grouch, “Why do you have to be such a horrid witch to everyone?” but she wasn’t there any more, and I’m glad. It’s hard, but I think it’s better to leave people like that to their own nastiness. Contain it. Fire just spreads when you blow on it.

All day yesterday and still this afternoon -- I couldn’t help it -- I have the Joni Mitchell song, My Old Man, in my head: “We don’t need no piece of paper from the City Hall keeping us tight and true, no, my old man, keepin’ away my blues.” Now that I am in the thick of this, it’s clear to me how badly I have misunderstood marriage ever since I was a teenager, believing that it was somehow about a relationship between 2 people. Of course we don’t need a piece of paper to keep us faithful or committed or even just together. That’s a commitment we make to each other in our hearts. The piece of paper is about, duh, the community around us that supports our commitment in various ways.

I just finished reading a beautiful, tender novel called “Arcadia” by Lauren Groff. It’s about a hippie commune in New York State. Don’t read it on the train or in a coffee shop if you’re trying to avoid sudden, involuntary weeping in public places. It’s about many things but most directly I think it’s about freedom versus community.

I say “versus” like it’s one or the other. Maybe in some important way it is. When we gain some of one, we lose some of the other. I have all my life seen the fight for gay rights as a fight for more freedom. It’s my body and you do not have the right to tell me what to do with it, etc.

Another book I read recently is “Flagrant Conduct,” Dale Carpenter’s story of Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court case which abolished sodomy laws in 2003. He lays out the contrast between the argument made in Bowers v. Hardwick (the Supreme Court case in which sodomy laws were upheld in 1986) and the argument made in Lawrence, a contrast which reflects the general shift in the gay rights movement.

In Hardwick, the argument against sodomy laws was that people should be free to have sex with whom they choose. But the lawyers for Lawrence barely mentioned “sex,” arguing that “intimacy” is an important component of stable relationships which are necessary in order to create families and communities -- so homosexuals’ intimate lives should not be criminalized. We used to argue for sexual freedom. Now we argue for civil rights. We used to want the right to be different. Now we're asking for the right to be the same. It’s not just a rhetorical difference. It’s a fundamentally different idea: freedom or community?

Is the fact that the latter argument is so much more resonant for me now than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago, is this change of heart due to something so mundane as a fear of growing old alone?

From time to time, C and I talk, as people who are about to promise to spend the rest of their lives together might, about the future. I returned to New York feeling like this was my last move, I would grow old and die here. I’d left for a while, tried a few other places, and had come back to the city I love, my home. C on the other hand wants to, eventually, move to Vermont or Upstate, or Maine. I love those places, but I imagine being 85 or 90, stuck in a house somewhere miles from amenities, unable to drive, starving to death some snowy winter. New York City is perfect for the old and frail. You see old people hobbling around the city all the time. It might take all afternoon to get to the corner for a quart of milk, but the trip is possible. It’s not 3 miles in the snow.

I’ve lived in remote, bucolic places and I love them, but I always end up missing the city. I miss that feeling, anonymous in a crowd, that anything can happen. That feeling of possibility is transformed now, though. It used to be not only about sex, but sex was the most compelling, the most urgent of the realms of what could happen if one stayed on one’s toes. Sex was behind the frantic hyper-vigilance, gears constantly turning, trying to turn every situation into an illicit encounter. Now that that part of it is gone, I don’t crave time alone as much or anonymity.

So, maybe Vermont. But not for a long time, and I want neighbors who drop by for pie and coffee, whose kids we’ll babysit, who’ll drive us to the hospital when one of us falls on the icy sidewalk.

Chance of Showers.

Yesterday C and I had a surprise long-distance shower, which his mother and sister had organized. (Now that I think about, they called it a surprise shower but it wasn’t much of a surprise since we hung all the decorations and put out the snacks ourselves. The actual concept was somewhat of a surprise to me, since I never imagined such a thing in my life, but there’s a lot of stuff around weddings besides the wedding itself that I never imagined, like Jack and Jill parties and bow hats, for instance.)

Anyway, C’s mom and sister contacted everyone we’d sent wedding invitations to and asked them to send shower presents. Meanwhile they sent us a big box of decorations, a bottle of wine called “Menage a trios” (which I have to say is a funny choice for a wedding shower), lemon biscotti, cookies, cheese straws.

Last week my sister K and her middle son, my nephew A, who is 12, came to visit for his spring break. I can’t even remember the last time I got to spend so much time with K, my baby sister who is in her forties now, 2 marriages, 3 sons, the oldest a sophomore in high school.

K did an internship at Viacom in the late 80s when she was in college and I was living with my first long-term boyfriend in Fort Greene. She stayed with a friend a few blocks away, and I saw her frequently. Near the end of the semester, she got a job offer but decided against the entry-level-5 girls-in-an-apartment-in-a-shady-neighborhood-because-that’s-what-you-can-afford-but-it’s-New-York life, finished college, moved to Louisiana, got married. We’ve stayed very close but our lives are very different now and we don’t see each other enough.

It was a wonderful week. The weather was perfect, cool and sunny -- it was supposed to rain later in the week but never did. Broadway shows, fancy dinners out, the Empire State Building. My nephew is 12 and not easy to impress, but he fell in love with New York a little. I think Dim Sum in Chinatown kinda blew his mind.

Other wedding news: we finalized the liturgy (our minister, a Unitarian Universalist, gave us a big binder of suggested language, from which we cut and pasted what we liked), and mapped out the procession, recession, etc. Our RSVP date has come and gone. I think the number of guests is a little over 60.

We confirmed plans with the woman doing the flowers. Peonies, white lilacs, iris, grape hyacinth, tulips. Forsythia, if she can get them. Spring came so early this year.

We confirmed the menu for the cocktail hour and dinner after the ceremony.

In non-wedding news, my co-writers and I signed a new option on Lizzie Borden with a new group of producers. We’re making plans for an August production. More details soon.