173. machinate

Here’s a surprise bit of news from the FCC: it’s considering dropping current broadcast decency standards that ban explicit profanity and “non-sexual” nudity. Apparently they’ll cut their backlog of pending complaints significantly (I think by about 70 percent), and save a ton of money in the process.

Translation—we’d be hearing a lot more “shit” instead of “shoot” or “crap”; “fuck” instead of “frack” or “fudge”; and seeing more boobs and (fingers crossed everyone) cock on television. Naked breasts I could care less about. Cock, however…

Not surprisingly, the “family” councils (e.g., American Family Association, my local Minnesota Family Council) are up in arms over this “outrage.” I guess while they were focused on keeping gays and lesbians from getting hitched, the Gay Agenda snuck this one through the backdoor to finish its job of stripping the United States of its morals.

Their response: send their legions of panic-stricken Christians to the FCC website to file complaints. Some of the responses are unwittingly hilarious (taken verbatim from the FCC Electronic Comment Filing System page). Like this one:

Philippians 4:8 says – for the rest, brethren,whatever is true, whatever is worthy of reverence and is honorable and seemly, whatver is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely and lovable, whatever is kind and winsome and gracious, if there is any virte and excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think on and weigh and take account of these things (fix your minds on them). F words and nudity would cause my to discontinue television.

The old fundamentalist Christian standby—when there’s no rational argument, quote Bible verses! That one always works. Or this one:

By allowing the F word and nudity on to television you are striking very damaging harm to the already seriously wounded culture in the United States. Our sex saturated culture harms especially young people and deprives them of hope that their lives can mprove when they experience the reults of a culture which places sexual gratification as the ultimate game. When many young people realize that they have been deluded they will be tempted to increase the already alarming statistic on youth suicide.

So if the FCC broadcasts words like “fuck” and (non-sexual) images of nude women (and men!!!) … young people will commit suicide?

Some comments make wild use of punctuation to drive home their point:

Do you think more FILTH on TV is good for our country???????????????

Or this one, from a gentleman who claims that the United States will somehow be overthrown and its citizens enslaved if the FCC airs “naughty” words:

Your advocacy of nudity and profanity on public TV are the signs of the terminal moral decay of America, as this nation turns from its moral foundations to puruse its own direction free from the moral and religious standards that once made this nation great. You are part of the sweeping tide that is bringing about the destruction of our nation through the advocacy of pornagraphy and profanity; an advocacy which only 20 years ago would have been unthinkable. Freedom abused and misused wiil be freedom lost,as we lose this country to the results of moral decay – which will be our enslavement. Be forwarned.

The FCC wouldn’t be advocating nudity, profanity or pornography, any more than it currently advocates batshit crazy Evangelical theology by allowing lunatics like Pat Robertson and Bryan Fischer to air their hateful ideology on their television and radio shows.

Then there are comments like this one:

Please do not relax the FCC standards. If anything, tighten the standards and enforce them. TV and radio have gotten too filthy and violent. It’s already too indecent and repulsive and needs to be cleaned up. Our culture is in rapid decay, every little bit we can do to reverse the damage would be a step in the correct direction.

With one breath, these Christians tell the government to stay the heck out of their lives and their religion. With the next, they demand the FCC enforce some kind of moral police state. Which do they want—a small government, or a Big Brother state? (We know the answer: they want nothing short of an Evangelical Christian theocracy.)

Of course, I know plenty of Christians and other people of faith who won’t be flummoxed at all by this. They drink, swear, fuck, and enjoy a good nudie show as much as the next godless heathen. And I know plenty of atheists who are just as offended by profanity and nudity as many of these Christians (albeit for different reasons).

Point is—if you don’t like what’s on TV, don’t watch. With the exception of activities that really do harm people (e.g., cigarettes, stabbing people with knives), just because you feel offended by or don’t like something doesn’t give you the right to try and outlaw or ban it for everyone.

—

More on this from the International Business Times: http://www.ibtimes.com/fcc-may-finally-relax-draconian-bush-era-indecency-rules-parents-television-council-not-happy-about

172. leeward

Several weeks ago I discovered that a friend of mine had never seen the 1964 film version of Lerner and Lowe’s My Fair Lady, with Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. It was rather shocking because A) I grew up with it and can’t imagine anyone else not having seen it; and B) he’s gay… and, well, musicals seem the particular purview of the gays. Hell, it’s one of the qualities that all but gave me away back in the day. (My friend Emily said, “You got way too excited about Sondheim to be straight.”)

My friend and I were talking about the moment that language goes from being merely parroting to true acquisition, when words go from sounds to meaning, and I brought up this iconic scene:

He had a percipient observation about the show: namely, that it’s a picture of imperialism. Eliza Doolittle is taken from the gutter by the chauvinistic Henry Higgins, dressed in the garb of the upper class, and taught how to speak and behave “properly.” In the same way, Native American children were taken from their homes by Christian missionaries and taught how to speak, behave and dress like proper Christians (i.e., Western Caucasian culture).

The reason we were talking about this scene, and this song in particular, is that it illustrates that “light bulb” moment. My college French teacher told my class that her’s took place one semester while studying abroad. She was reading in a tree one day, she said, and all of a sudden everything just snapped into place. She didn’t have to translate from French into English anymore. The words carries meaning.

Writer David Sedaris describes a similar moment in Me Talk Pretty One Day, from the essay collection of the same name:

It was mid-October when the teacher singled me out, saying, “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.” And it struck me that, for the first time since arriving in France, I could understand every word that someone was saying.

Understanding doesn’t mean that you can suddenly speak the language. Far from it. It’s a small step, nothing more, yet its rewards are intoxicating and deceptive. The teacher continued her diatribe and I settled back, bathing in the subtle beauty of each new curse and insult. . .

The world opened up, and it was with great joy that I responded, “I know the thing that you speak exact now. Talk me more, you, plus, please, plus.”

These moments came to mind because several weeks ago I finally stopped believing in God. That’s not to say that I haven’t been an atheist these past two years. I still see no evidence or reason now to continue believing in God. The difference is that, a couple of weeks ago, I finally stopped missing God. It’s like that moment when you finally get over someone you’ve held a torch for, and one day, for whatever reason, those feelings stop. The memory of the love and the feeling is still there, but the gravitational pull doesn’t yank you out of your own orbit every time it wheels around.

Walking to work one morning a couple of weeks ago, the part of me that missed having a God to believe in went away. I’m not sure why it happened just then, but it was as if a balloon had popped, or a string were, and I wasn’t tethered to those feelings anymore. I didn’t feel the need to get angry or mean when someone talked about God or faith. I still get upset when hearing about someone being hurt by Christians, but then I get upset when anyone is hurt by anybody, for any reason.

I’m still passionate about the separation of church and state, about promoting secular and humanist values in society and throughout the world, and encouraging people to think for themselves instead of letting their thinking be done for them by those who want to fetter everyone in the world to a 2,000-year-old book. But I’m not doing it out of some revenge fixation, like a jilted lover railing against an ex.

None of us had a choice about being born in the proverbial Christian missionary school and taught the clean, holy Christian ways of the White Man. Neither did any of us have a choice about being attracted to members of the same sex. Eliza Doolittle chose to become the pupil of Henry Higgins, and accept his narrative of being a “proper lady.” But in the process she maintained her sense of self, and at the end of George Bernard Shaw’s original play, Pygmalion, she does indeed go off to marry Freddy and become a teacher of phonetics. Her final words to Higgins in the play show her to be a truly emancipated woman, unlike the chauvinistic ending of Lerner and Lowe’s musical: “Buy them yourself.”

I didn’t have a choice about being raised a Christian and saddled with all the negativity. But I’ll be damned if my parents’ choices are going to steer the course of the rest of my life.

You dear friend who talk so well: you can go to Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire.

171. tensile

Sorry it’s been a while. My nonfiction writing class started at the end of January and that’s been pretty writing, as well as emotionally, intensive. The focus of the class is on personal narrative, so (naturally) I’m writing about the experience of coming out gay and during the process of that losing my Christian faith as well. Coupled with therapy, it’s dredging up a lot of memories – some good, some painful – but already I’ve experienced quite a bit of healing. It’s going to take some time still, and it’s odd becoming your own archivist, but it’s a fascinating experience.

I’ve also been digging into my family tree the past couple of weeks and have made some really fascinating discoveries that are crying out for further investigation. (This has the strong likelihood of becoming another book after the one about my dual coming out story.) I’m contemplating a trip to England just to do some digging and maybe even find some original genealogical records.

The past couple of years I’ve attempted to trace my 3rd great grandfather, John Miller (or Mueller), my great grandmother’s grandfather. It appears that he arrived in Baltimore, Maryland at the age of 18 on June 5, 1850 with his brother (whose name I haven’t been able to uncover – yet). He embarked from Bremen, Germany about six weeks earlier on the passenger ship Adolphine. According to records from the 1850 census, he lived in Ward 5 of Baltimore, Maryland with the Wigar family. That’s where the trail runs cold.

My third great grandmother Mary Barbara Giessler (or Geissler) arrived in Baltimore, Maryland in November of 1854 on the passenger ship Minerva. She was born on September 3, 1829 in Bretzfeld, a town in the state of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. She was 25 years old when she first set foot in the United States. I’m still not sure when or where they were married.

That’s as far as I’ve been able to go with the Millers (my great grandmother’s maiden name). So last week I decided instead to trace the Norris clan, which is my great grandfather’s name. That tree was actually much easier to trace. (I’m starting with Ancestry.com. Yes, I know it’s owned by the Mormons, but who better to start with than people who have a genealogy fetish?)

The first interesting discovery was that my 8th great grandmother, Mary Norris (b. Jun 1, 1689), was murdered on Feb 1, 1760 by Cherokee Indians in an event known as the Long Cane Massacre in South Carolina. She was 71 years old when she died. All of the adults were slaughtered, and two girls were carried off, one of whom was rescued years later (think John Ford’s The Searchers).

Thomas James, first librarian of the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Second interesting discovery was that my 15th grand uncle, Thomas James (c. 1573 – 1629), was the first librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. He began his appointed duties on November 8, 1602.

As close as I can tell, the first of my grandparents to come to what was then the American Colonies was Thomas Edward Norris (1608 – 1675). He was born in Congham, England, and arrived in the Colonies in the early 1630s. There are apparently a number of interesting stories about him, some of which may be true. The gist is that he ran away from home around age 10 or 11, went to sea as a sailor, and landed in Nansemond County in Virginia around 1630 or 1631. (By the math, Thomas was at sea for about twelve years! What a badass!) He married his wife, Ann Hynson, in 1637. Curiously, their seventh child, Cuthbert, drowned at sea near Sulawesi, Tengah, Indonesia in 1668 at the age of 23. Fortunately, Thomas’ eldest son Thomas Jr. (1608 – 1675) survived long enough to spawn my 9th great grandfather, John Norris (1672-1752), along with 10 other children by two (consecutive) wives.

Note that all of these dates so far are pre-Revolutionary War! Most of my relatives were probably Loyalists to the Crown.

Next interesting fact I discovered is that Thomas Fleming, husband of my 15th great grand aunt, Mary Fleming (née James) (1554-1614), was a judge in the trial of Guy Fawkes. Yes. Guy Fawkes of the Gunpowder Plot. Mary’s grandmother was my 17th great grandfather Thomas James’ wife Alice Porter (1502-1547), the daughter of Dr. Mark James, who was personal physician to…

Elizabeth I.

QUEEN. ELIZABETH. THE FIRST.

The Virgin Queen. Gloriana. Bess. The Faerie Queen.

After that I kept expecting to hit a dead end, but the branches just kept going up. Starting from my first true English ancestor, Thomas Norris (10th great grandfather), the line continued. Geoffrey Norris (1559-1609), John Norris (1528-1572), and then to where the story starts to get more interesting, Geoffrey Noreys (1490-1572). Noreys is an earlier spelling of Norris, which we will see the origin of in a moment.

His father was Robert Noreys (1460-1572)… and then we enter the very confusing period of Everyone And His Father Is Literally Named Geoffrey. (No joke.) The interesting thing is that after 19th great grandfather Geoffrey, the surname went from “le Norreys” to just “Norey” or “Norrey.” This was around the middle of the 14th century. Plague time in England.

Skip several generations to a guy named William de Noers, which is where the story keeps getting interesting.

William de Noers was a steward to William the Conqueror. He fought at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and apparently for his loyalty was granted thirty-three manors along with lands in the areas which became known as Lancashire, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and Norfolk, making him a tenant-in-chief. His name was important enough to record in the Domesday Book of 1086, where his surname is spelled “de Noyers.” The book tells us he had charge of lands in Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Buckinghamshire for the King that had once belonged to Archbishop Stigand of Cantebury.

William’s father was Sir Gilbert de Noers (990-c.1024), a Norman knight and Baron of Missenden in what is now Buckinghamshire. Gilbert was born in Normandy, in the northern part of France (Norris means “man from the North”).

Here I thought my family was boring…

170. atavistic

So apparently two of the Phelps granddaughters, Megan and Grace, have left the Westboro clan. They even issued a public statement expressing regret for their actions as members of the family and the church. And everyone seems to be really excited and happy about that, ready to welcome these women with open arms into polite society.

And while I’m certainly glad that they’re out of that awful place and that there are two less Phelps in that clan to cause harm, I’m not entirely pleased with the reactions to this story.

Before I delve into my own feelings on this, here’s the statement they released:

We know that we’ve done and said things that hurt people. Inflicting pain on others wasn’t the goal, but it was one of the outcomes. We wish it weren’t so, and regret that hurt.

We know that we dearly love our family. They now consider us betrayers, and we are cut off from their lives, but we know they are well-intentioned. We will never not love them.

We know that we can’t undo our whole lives. We can’t even say we’d want to if we could; we are who we are because of all the experiences that brought us to this point. What we can do is try to find a better way to live from here on. That’s our focus.

Up until now, our names have been synonymous with “God Hates Fags.” Any twelve-year-old with a cell phone could find out what we did. We hope Ms. Kyle was right about the other part, too, though – that everything sticks – and that the changes we make in our lives will speak for themselves.

Okay, basic rules of public apology-making, as summarized on Billosophy:

1. Ask For Forgiveness
2. Admit What You Did
3. Do Not Excuse
4. Do Not Place Blame
5. Do Not Justify Why
6. Acknowledge The Consequences

I know as well as anyone who grew up in a fundamentalist home the regret that comes with wishing you had come to your senses earlier. The way things are is normal. You don’t know that you have a choice not to participate. But we’re not talking about just any family. This is the “God Hates Fags” family, just a step below the Manson clan in terms of notoriety. So it bothers me that not once in this statement did either Megan or Grace say, “I’m sorry.” The whole thing is essentially a non-apology.

We know that we’ve done and said things that hurt people. Inflicting pain on others wasn’t the goal, but it was one of the outcomes. We wish it weren’t so, and regret that hurt.

“Regret” is a word you use when saying that you wish things had turned out differently: that the other car hadn’t run the stop sign; that you hadn’t sunk all your money into the Ponzi scheme; that you hadn’t wasted a year of your life pining after a guy who would never return your love. However, it’s not a word you use when talking about having intentionally caused pain and misery for so many people. Because if inflicting pain on others wasn’t the goal, I’d sure as hell like to know what was.

It’s as if a rapist-murderer said at the trial: “I know that I’ve done things that hurt people. Inflicting pain on others wasn’t the goal, but it was one of the outcomes. I wish it wasn’t so, and regret that hurt.” We shouldn’t be surprised when the jury comes back with a guilty-on-all-counts verdict.

When it comes down to it, Megan broke pretty much every rule of apology making that psychology has identified as being integral to the healing process. She justifies her actions by laying the blame on her family, and on us by saying they were somehow misunderstood. She glosses over the painful consequences of those actions, and dances around the specifics of what she actually did (e.g., picketing military funerals, thanking God for AIDS, telling everyone God hates them). Then she justifies her actions by having the unbelievable gall to say that she didn’t mean to hurt anyone.

Personally, I’d have been satisfied with something like this:

I’m sincerely sorry for all of the pain and suffering I inflicted on innocent people as a leader of the Westboro Baptist Church. There’s no way that I can ever fully undo the damage I caused or unsay the things that I said, but I promise to spend the rest of my life working to heal the hurt I imposed on gay and lesbian people, on the families of the brave soldiers who gave their lives defending this great country, and on anyone else my family has directed their hatred toward.

That might have convinced some of us of her sincerity—not that we doubt that she’s not a member of the Westboro cult anymore. Rather, that she grasps the gravity of who she was and what she did. At the bare minimum, I expect some real tears here.

Some of the anger I’m feeling comes from the fact that I’ve never been offered an apology by my family, or any of the people who unwittingly taught me how to hate and view myself as a disgusting, perverted, broken faggot. And probably never will. Even after I shared those feelings, no one apologized for the pain I suffocated under all those years, terrified and unable both to articulate that pain or to share its cause. So I’m left to heal all by myself, like the victim of a psychopath with a scalpel, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I’m angry (particularly with the atheist and LGBT communities) with those who seem quick to welcome these women into the fold without so much as an apology that comes close to being adequate or forthright. I don’t expect anyone to crawl over broken glass, but I do expect them to own up to who they were and what they did. They owe us that much.

169. intemerate

It’s strange being (nearly) 30 years old and contemplating going back to school. Or at least class.

Tonight was my first time back as a student in a classroom in just over eight years. (The last time was in early December of 2004, but most of that period was a blur as it was overshadowed by the gargantuan annual Christmas concert.)

Around Thanksgiving (actually, it may have been on Thanksgiving Day) I decided to quit dancing around the issue and actually register for a creative writing course. This was shortly after attending the intro session at Hamline University for the Creative Writing master’s program, and I was afraid of losing momentum, so with my boyfriend’s encouragement and support I signed up for a creative nonfiction course.

It’s so funny that after all this time I’ve landed in nonfiction and essay. As a kid and then as a teen I was a voracious reader and writer of fiction. Then music took over my life in college. Four years later and I was well surfeited of music to the point where I couldn’t even listen to it for almost two years. This was when I discovered audiobooks and public radio, and rediscovered my love of words and language.

All last week I tried not to think about the course very much, aside from the logistics of getting there and being prepared in terms of bringing materials. I didn’t want to have any expectations going in for fear of being disappointed once there. The course itself is geared towards writers working on book-length projects that center around personal experience. The minute I read the description it seemed perfect for me!

“Hmm. Do I have a compelling experience?” I rhetorically asked Jason.

He thought it sounded like something I should definitely go for.

I tried not to think too much about my future classmates, or the instructor, who they might be, how much more experience they might have than me, and how inadequate I might feel in comparison. After all, I have limited academic writing experience, and no training in literary theory or criticism. I’m mostly self-trained, with the majority of my learning coming from having honest friends read and edit my work (that is, friends who are readers and not interested in stroking my ego).

And then there’s my competitive streak, which is a mile wide, and armed with sharp teeth, claws and a degree of selfish ambition. I often describe this part of me as almost pure Id, my primal lizard self largely dominated by fear, and concerned chiefly with beating other lizards (or at least driving them off) and getting what it wants. It’s this part of me that set out to crush my younger sisters’ desires to pursue music, or at least to play the piano. That was my purview. Claws off, thank you very much.

It comes down to my own anxiety over feeling insignificant, and my sense of self-worth being tied into what I produce and do. It’s why I settled on composition in college. I was good at it, there were many other competent pianists there to show me up for the mediocre keyboardist I was, and it was an area I could easily establish myself in and defend against challengers. It’s sad to think how much time and energy I’ve wasted and how many relationships I’ve cheated myself of worrying about that.

The class itself was delightful. Writing courses are so different from other classroom courses. It’s less about listening to a lecture as doing and sharing actual writing. Our instructor did most of the talking tonight, as is often the case with the first day of any class, but aside from going over course expectations, we talked about writing, developing and describing our book/story project proposals, and working on the writing exercises our instructor gave us.

The challenge in writing personal nonfiction, she said, was moving from personal experience to finding meaning within that. It’s one thing to tell your story. It’s another to find the deep threads in it that will resonate with and inspire your readership. Why does this story matter to me? she asked. What’s at stake in it for me?

The first exercise we did was a sensory one, asking What have I seen that no one else in this room has seen? Ditto for hearing, smell, taste, touch, then to what no one else has done, been, knows, and are. What’s the exotic landscape or object that a reader can connect with? Basically, what’s the personal connection that will tap into the passion and love that will inspire people to keep reading? It’s not enough to know your story. Why is it worth writing about?

I was fascinated and excited to discover that the guy sitting next to me was also working on a story about losing his faith. The lady next to him is working on a memoir about going back to school as a radiology technician after the last of her kids left home, and she had to figure out who she was all over again while learning to work in a largely male-dominated field. Another woman has a first draft of a manuscript about her year recovering from cancer, but is struggling to find the inner story and the meaning within the experience.

As each of went around at the end of the evening, introducing ourselves and describing the subject we’re planning to write about, it was remarkable to notice some of the common links and themes between each story. Of course, the challenge for each of us will be finding what’s compelling about each of our stories, but it reminds me yet again how interesting people really are, how vital it is to tell each other our stories, and how much experience is lost to the act of getting through the day.

I have no illusions that this will be easy. But for the first time in a while I feel like I’m heading in the right direction.

168. shattered

Apologies for the delay, all five of you who actually read this. I’ve been working a lot and writing for other sites lately, but really haven’t much felt like talking about myself.

I’ve meant to write about the holidays and the experience of getting through Thanksgiving and Christmas with a boyfriend and his family for the first time. Because while it’s certainly been an experience, it wasn’t as crazy or stressful as I expected it would be. Perhaps it was other people’s descriptions of their family holidays that put me off to the whole thing, or had my hackles raised, but there were no big meltdowns, no plate throwing, no huge blowups or fights, or anything else that ends up in movies about the holidays.

Basically, it wasn’t National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Or Home Alone. No neighbors were harmed during the month of December.

It was curious though to see how both Jay and I dealt with holiday stress. He tends to externalize more and withdraw, like most guys. If things get to be too much, he retreats to a quiet place to read or hide out. When he was forced to sit through gift opening on Christmas Eve, he sat in the corner with a book, mostly reading while people opened presents.

I sometimes deal with stress the same way, especially if I’m going through a bout of depression or am tired. But mostly I deal with stress by simply becoming someone else — or rather, I become a version of myself that can deal with that particular stressor. It’s an automatic defense mechanism, like being a personality chameleon.

This is something I’ve been exploring some in therapy the past few months. For a long time I’ve known that there are multiple versions of “me,” personas that I employ to cope with different social situations and people. My mom was one of the first people to point this out when I was a teenager, and she accused me of essentially being a hypocrite; of showing different faces to people instead of just “being myself.”

Of course, what she didn’t know then was that I was already in deep cover as a gay man; that I was desperately trying to hide who I really was from everyone for fear of being found out and things going very bad for me. In case you haven’t heard, gay teens don’t fare very well in fundamentalist Christian circles.

So during the time when most people are forming their adult identities and selves, and figuring out who they are as individuals, I was developing different masks to hide who I really was.

In one of his stories, David Sedaris recounts how his sister Amy had a penchant from an early age for adopting different characters and imitating the adults around her. She would come in for breakfast and her mother would ask, “And who are we today?” To which Amy would respond: “Who don’t you want me to be?”

Sharing that story with my therapist was rather a light bulb moment for both of us, as it brought to light the reality that this is how most of my relationships have operated for most of my life. I figure out who not to be for someone, and then become that person. The majority of my teen and adult life has been spent playing different characters, different versions of myself, for others. Like the sci-fi show Sliders, they’re slight variations of “me,” with different tastes, likes, dislikes, ways of speaking, acting, extroversion and introversion, and so forth.

So the reality is that I’ve never really developed a personality of my own. I’ve invested so much time and energy into developing characters that are socially acceptable, but haven’t put any of that into personal development. Consequently, it’s difficult to share genuine pieces of myself with others. There is a lot here on this blog that I divulge — stuff from my past, painful memories, frustrations. But doing that in writing, on the page, removed from other people is much easier. I don’t have to risk personal rejection necessarily in writing things down.

Everything really fell apart two years ago when I lost Seth and finally owned up to my total lack of belief in God, two huge things that formed the gravitational mass of the comfortable illusion that everything was okay. I’d come out gay two and a half months earlier, and was still adjusting to the notion of being out to my very conservative family. But God, my Christian faith and the church was still grounding me to the identity I’d been carefully cultivating and maintaining over the years. And I’d been painfully and pathetically pining for Seth for over a year, which provided another neat distraction from the fact that the air was quickly escaping from my spiritual life.

I didn’t realize then how deeply my world shattered the night of my birthday. I’d been running a carefully organized circus for 20 years, and all of a sudden the neat solar system I’d built to manage everything quite literally imploded. To cope with the pain I divvied up all the feelings into the different shards of my personality — parts of me that were already managing those different areas of thought and emotion. It was as though I truly became a different person after that night.

Apparently this is common amongst people who grew up in highly stressful and repressive environments as children. In order to survive we break apart to manage the stress and “pass” for acceptable to authority figures. For our child selves, it was life or death. We don’t have a choice.

So now I’m left as an almost-30-year-old with the personality equivalent of a broken mirror. I still revert to my chameleon state when things get stressful. And I still feel removed from various feelings and emotions. Memories are there, but the feelings are strangely absent. It’s an interesting place to be, going into my third decade.

More to come.

 

167. decathect

“Perhaps I have been wrong to keep so much of my mind from you,” said Mr Norrell, knotting his fingers together. “I am almost certain I have been wrong. But I decided long ago that Great Britain’s best interests were served by absolute silence on these subjects and old habits are hard to break. But surely you see the task before us, Mr Strange? Yours and mine? Magic cannot wait upon the pleasure of a King who no longer cares what happens to England. We must break English magicians of their dependence on him. We must make them forget John Uskglass as completely as he has forgotten us.”

Happy 2013 everyone! Here’s hoping this year is better for everyone than the previous one.

Second, in the past couple of days I’ve had an odd but pleasant series of encounters with old friends I haven’t seen or heard from in a while.

Friday night while picking up a game piece from a local store at one of the malls near my house, I heard someone calling my name. I looked up and saw that it was Dawn, a woman I knew from my old church, the one I’d grown up in from age 10 until leaving it at about age 24. It had been almost six years since our last meeting. She and I were in the choir there for many years, and had done some acting together too. I even directed her daughter as the White Witch in my adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe we performed one year.

We exchanged some of the usual pleasantries about the newest developments, and talked about mutual acquaintances we’d bumped into randomly while out and about, as we were doing then. Turns out she’d been following me somewhat on Facebook, so it wasn’t necessary to fill her in on the biggest developments — namely, that I’m gay and an atheist.

“You don’t exactly hide it!” she joked.

And it’s true. I explained, as I do for everyone, that I try to live my journey as publicly as possible to be an advocate for others who feel isolated or powerless. If anyone can benefit from my story and experience and not go through the same struggles, it’s worth it.

The other day, Leah, a friend of mine from London popped on Facebook and we ended up having a delightful conversation along the same lines. I met her at Northwestern College about ten years ago when she was spending a year studying abroad. Why there and not somewhere else? I don’t know, but whatever the reason I’m grateful for the friendship.

In the course of catching up she asked about my dad, and I said I hadn’t talked to him in about a year. I told her a bit about the split with my family, and the reasons, and the struggle that’s been. Though she’s a Christian, she was at a loss to understand how they could refuse to accept me. Hers is a god of love and acceptance rather than one of rules and strict regulations.

It’s funny, there are so many people from that period of my life who I haven’t talked about my sexuality or loss of faith with, either because we’ve drifted apart and lost contact, or because the occasion hasn’t arisen. I suppose, for whatever reason, there’s some hesitation to share who I am now with who I was then.

Just a few months ago, before I started going to therapy, I would’ve found the notion of either friend offering to pray for me offensive. Depending on how spiteful I felt at the moment, the offer might even be thrown back in their face. I don’t believe that there is any evidence that anyone is listening to their prayers, or that they have any tangible effect on the physical world. But the curious thing is that I’ve learned to look past the religious undertones and hear that they are thinking of me when they pray for my immortal soul. Dawn said whenever I popped up on Facebook that she would talk to God about me. How often do we really keep in mind the people we care about, take an interest in their welfare, and go out of our way to be a positive change for them?

The past week or so I’ve been listening to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Part of it is Simon Prebble’s captivating performance, but it’s such a good story. The other night while running some errands I was struck by the above-quoted passage.

“Magic cannot wait upon the pleasure of a King who no longer cares what happens to England,” says Mr Norrell. “We must break English magicians of their dependence on him. We must make them forget John Uskglass as completely as he has forgotten us.”

I realized that this has been my attitude towards God and religion since 2011. We must break people’s dependence on the supernatural. The first flash of my atheism showed itself on 9/11. In watching the towers fall, it suddenly seemed to me that no one was minding the store and that bad things happen solely because of people’s choices, not because some higher power willed anything. In the following years I began to rely more on evidence and reason for my beliefs than on the teachings of thousand-year old religions.

If evidence could be found for the existence of God, I’d gladly consider it. But the more we look at the universe, the more we see the workings of a wholly natural one, processes we’re just beginning to grasp. We don’t need a higher power, and for me that doesn’t lessen its beauty or importance. If anything, it makes every moment I’m alive that much more breathtaking for its transience and ephemeralness.

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.”

To live at all is miracle enough.

166. glissade

Happy Boxing Day, everyone!

Well, we made it through another Christmas without being swept away by some long-foretold doomsday disaster. And I made it through my first family Christmas with a significant other, which is noteworthy. This is the first year I’ve been with a guy for a major holiday like Christmas. Last year I spent it depressed, mostly holed up in my room, alone and drunk, so this was a nice change of pace and scenery.

It’s also been a full year since I told my parents that I didn’t want any further contact with them, so long as they believe what they do about homosexuality. Since being outed to them by my first ex-boyfriend in November 2010, they’ve had plenty of opportunity to reconsider their conviction that homosexuality is unnatural. They budged a little on the notion that it’s “uncurable,” which for them means that I should be living a lonely and celibate life. So there’s no real change from 2010.

Last fall they said that they would never acknowledge any romantic relationship of mine with another man, or come to any wedding or commitment ceremony of mine. This was a particular slap in the face, considering how big of a deal my younger sister’s wedding was, and knowing that I’ll never experience that kind of celebration. She has three kids now with her husband, and my family would never dream of pretending that they’re just friends or roommates. Yet that’s the life they deem appropriate and reasonable for me, all because I fancy men instead of women.

The last exchange between my dad and me took place on Christmas Day of last year. I’d stopped by to write him a check for the last of the money I owed him for car repairs, after which I told my parents that I wanted nothing more to do with them because of their beliefs about my sexuality. He made a comment about how he didn’t think my “lifestyle” was making me very happy, how Jesus could’ve helped me “be straight” if I’d let him, and how I’d “never really given Jesus a chance.” I responded that my unhappiness had to do with the fact that my entire world had been recently tipped upside-down, and on top of that my family thinks I should be content being a second-class citizen, both in society and in their company. I asked if he knew the difference between sadness and clinical depression, and he remarked that “Jesus is bigger than depression.”

To which I replied, before slamming the door behind me: “I spit on your Jesus.”

That was last Christmas.

This Christmas was spent with my boyfriend Jay and his family. I had some anxiety in the weeks leading up to it, not so much about large numbers of people but rather about gift-giving. In my family, or at least among my siblings once we were older, gift-giving always felt like an exercise in posturing. The gift had to be nice enough to show that you spent a decent amount of money on someone, but not so expensive that it looked like you were showing off. It was the thought that counted, so long as the thought was interpreted in the right way.

Add to that the fact that for me it’s so hard picking out gifts. Something has to jump out at me as being just the thing for a person. For example, Jay’s uncle has some pretty right-wing political views, and a few months ago I was at Barnes & Noble looking for another book and saw a book by David Horowitz, The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and sixties radicals seized control of the Democratic Party. I thought, “That’s perfect!”

As for the rest of his family, it’s hard to get a read sometimes. I was worried about them seeing me as rude or that I didn’t really try, and that therefore I’m a bad boyfriend and not really a part of the family. A few weeks ago a friend of Jay’s sister came over and played a game with us, and I felt like everyone liked him way more than me. My rational mind was saying that they have more of a history with him, and that’s what’s going on. My lizard brain was saying that everyone was wondering what I was even doing there.

Family is tricky for me, for many reasons. As I’m learning in therapy, I was never able to connect with my family growing up (at least during my teen years) because I was so preoccupied with trying to hide from them and everyone else the enormous fact that I was gay. And, as I feared, they are unable to accept their gay son for who he is, which means that we can’t have a relationship.

In the summer of 2011, while I was staying with my parents while finding a new place to live, my dad and I had an argument. This isn’t out of the ordinary since we’ve fought most of my life. We were on the topic of sexual orientation, and he growled, “You’ve made your whole identity now about being gay! You’re so focused on it!”

I said: “Yes. Because I am gay. Contrary to what you think, it’s not some separate thing apart from myself. It defines who I am, just like your being married to mom defines you. And someday there’s going to be a man in my life who forms the other part of that central relationship for me. And you refuse to acknowledge that part of me. So yeah, I’m kinda focused on that right now.”

I’ll never know what it’s like to have my own parents love my spouse in the way they love my sister’s husband. I’ll never know what it’s like to introduce the man I love to the people who, for better or worse, I spent most of my life with and who raised me. That’s not an easy pill to swallow.

165. algid

“We know that no matter how good our intentions, we will all stumble sometimes, in some way. We will make mistakes, we will experience hardships. And even when we’re trying to do the right thing, we know that much of our time will be spent groping through the darkness, so often unable to discern God’s heavenly plans.”

This was how President Obama addressed the people of Newtown, CT this past Sunday at an interfaith service for the victims of the shooting at Sandy Hook school. I’ll get to the appropriateness in a minute. (Hint: I’m not thrilled.)

As expected, the Christian pundits have been plying their trade, trying to remind people why they still matter. As Adam Sutler screams at his peons in the movie V for Vendetta: “I want this country to realize that we stand on the edge of oblivion. I want everyone to remember why they need us!” If you listen closely, you can hear the growing note of desperation in their voices.

Bryan Fischer of the Southern Poverty Law Center-certified hate group American Family Association was one of the first to sound off, going on his radio show to say that the shooting happened because we kicked God out of schools — meaning that the U.S. still isn’t a theocracy.

Mike Huckabee posted a diatribe on his website, blaming Liberals, gays, atheists, and feminists.

Focus on the Family founder James Dobson gave us his “honest opinion” on Monday: “Millions of people have decided that God doesn’t exist, or he’s irrelevant to me and we have killed fifty-four million babies and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition. . . we have turned our back on the Scripture and God Almighty . . . has allowed judgment to fall upon us.”

Yes, Dobson just blamed me for the deaths of 26 innocent people. Classy guy.

But it was Obama’s speech on Sunday that caught my notice. He was the first President to ever acknowledge nonbelievers in a way that didn’t amount to, “Atheist scum!” and I was impressed that he met privately with each of the families of the victims before giving the address. He spoke honestly to parents, not just as the leader of our country but as a parent.

Yet the text of the speech itself was disappointing, and even a little disturbing. Whether he was quoting from 2 Corinthians, talking about the grace of [the Christian] God, or referencing the ineffability of the Divine plan, it was entirely too religiously partisan for many.

Everyone’s favorite atheist PZ Myers thought the speech was a “slap in the face” to the parents of the murdered children. Atheist blogger Vjack of Atheist Revolution wondered if it even occurred to Obama “how [the Christianspeak in his speech] might be perceived by those who do not share his particular superstitions.” Blogger Staks Rosch was also offended, writing that “twenty kids and six adults were just murdered and the President is talking about how God is lonely and wants some company.” Of course, that’s not what Obama meant, but still, that ought to have occurred to him.

Sarah Vowell wrote: “… in September [of 2001], atheism was a lonely creed. Not because atheists have no god to turn to, but because everyone else forgot about us.” It felt like that on Sunday. Just because atheists don’t believe in life after death doesn’t mean we have nothing to contribute to the nation’s grieving process. Ron Lindsay of the Center For Inquiry wrote on their blog:

Losing a child is tragic, but that tragic loss should be recognized and not obscured. In recognizing the depth of this loss we also recognize the inestimable worth and value of the child, his or her uniqueness as an individual — not as a small part of some vast, cosmic, incomprehensible plan.

Maybe instead of giving us a mini-sermon, the President could have left religion out of his remarks and addressed the community and the nation as a parent, and as a human being. In fact, I wish he could have said something like this, which is the most moving statement I’ve read concerning the shooting. It comes from a Buddhist, Susan Piver:

Nothing can make this okay. There is no explanation that helps. Blaming lack of gun control, insufficient guns, or inadequate mental health care may be entirely reasonable and valid, but it doesn’t matter. No matter how right you are (or aren’t), it doesn’t change the grief, rage, or numbness. Using ideas to treat or metabolize feelings doesn’t work. Then what? I’m afraid that there is not much we can do other than to be absolutely, irredeemably heartbroken. It turns out that this is helpful.

The normal human response to tragedy like this is to try to fix it and make everything as it was. I think this stems from childhood, when we look to Mommy or Daddy to put things right. Our parents are our first gods and goddesses, all-powerful and capable of no wrong. We adore them. But at some point we grow up and see them for who and what they are: ordinary human beings, just like us. And that scares us. It scares some people so much they they go out and do horrible things.

Piver got it right. More gun control laws won’t bring anyone back, nor will it stop some lunatic from getting their hands on more guns, or a different weapon entirely, and killing more people. Until we understand that peace doesn’t come from legislation but from learning to let go, there will be no peace.

So maybe the answer to Newtown isn’t to rush out and try to find an answer – because in these cases there usually isn’t one, especially when the gunman robs us of a rationale – or to demand more laws before the bodies are even in the ground. Maybe it’s to do the counter-intuitive thing, to stop trying to find someone to blame, and just be sad. Because, ironically, that’s how the healing begins.

164. pontificate

Just so everyone knows, I haven’t forgotten about the shootings in Newtown, CT. My thoughts are definitely with the families and friends of the victims. However, I wanted to share a somewhat related email I sent this morning to Sue Seul, assistant to the superintendent of the Anoka-Hennepin school district.

There’s been a petition going around on Change.org to Tom Heidemann and the Anoka County School Board to have Bryan Lindquist of the Parents Action League removed from his appointment to the district’s anti-bullying task force.

In March of 2012, the Southern Poverty Law Center put the Parents Action League on their list of active anti-gay hate groups in the United States for promoting “damaging propaganda about the gay community” (see below). Incidentally, the PAL is affiliated with the Minnesota Family Council, the group that formed Minnesota for Marriage to campaign for the failed 2012 Minnesota Marriage Amendment.

ABC Newspapers, the local paper for that area, reported that Lindquist “has come under fire due to statements he’s made that indicate a belief that homosexuals can change their sexual orientation and that the district should distribute information about gay conversion or “reparative” therapy.”

On December 10, the nearly 2,500-signature petition was delivered to the District 11 school board. As recounted in an email sent last night by the petition organizer, Melissa Thompson, the board’s response was not only to reject the petition but also to “[remove] the public comment portion of the video and recorded agenda.” She also urged signers to write to Ms. Seul, which I did:

To: Sue Seul <sue.seul@anoka.k12.mn.us>
From: David Philip Norris

Ms. Suel,

I am writing to express my extreme displeasure at the decision of the Anoka-Hennepin school board to not remove Mr. Lindquist from the anti-bullying task force, and to censor the public comment portion of the meeting where supporters of his removal voiced their concerns and opinions.

As a member of the Parents Action League, a group classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as one of 27 active anti-gay hate groups in the United States, Bryan Lindquist is no ally to LGBT students in the Anoka-Hennepin district. This is a man who has been quoted calling homosexuality a “lifestyle choice” and a “sexual disorder” — a man tasked with protecting students (particularly lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students) from bullying. This is also a school district with an unusually high number of suicides and suicide attempts, the majority of which are committed by LGBT students and students merely perceived as being gay or lesbian.

Mr. Lindquist was recently quoted as saying that “discussion of sexual orientation [should] take place in the homes with parents and not with a teacher in a classroom full of impressionable kids.” There is a difference between avoiding discussion of sexual orientation in the classroom and pretending like LGBT students don’t exist and therefore aren’t being bullied for being gay or lesbian. The school board should be enacting policies to protect ALL students, not just students Mr. Lindquist believes deserve not to be bullied.

Yours,
David Philip Norris

School Boardmember Mike Sullivan stated that “it’s critical to have opposing points of view.” Yet as Thompson was quoted in a KSTP News story, appointing Lindquist to this task force “would be like asking somebody from the [Klu Klux Klan] to sit on the committee that plans black history month.”

She has a good point. While it’s not right to exclude someone because of their religious beliefs, neither does it make sense to put a man who belongs to a group that actively promotes the idea that homosexuality results from “dysfunctional family relationships, experimentation with men or boys, incest, negative body image, peer labeling and harassment, temperament, exposure to pornography, not bonding correctly with your own gender parental figure, abandonment, early trauma such as sexual victimization, and media influences” in a position to protect those very students.

The implication here is the same made by opponents of same-sex marriage and LGBT rights: Why should we give them special rights when they choose to live a perverted lifestyle? The FAQ on PAL’s website states that “to date there is no genetic link to prove they are born that way.” Ironically, on the day that the Anoka school board rejected the petition to have Lindquist removed, results of a study by international researchers were published, who found that homosexuality seems to have epigenetic (rather than genetic) causes, suggesting that we really were born this way.

The only special rights here are the ones being demanded by bigots like Lindquist, the PAL, the Minnesota Family Council and its national affiliate Focus on the Family: to abuse LGBT people under the auspices of “freedom of religion.” These groups all have close ties with the Family Research Council, which has promoted and supported the passage of Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill, further reinforcing the notion that groups like PAL and people like Lindquist are in fundamental opposition to the human rights of LGBT people.

As we put the events in Newtown in perspective and try to learn from it, we must remember that making schools safer doesn’t just mean protecting students from outside threats. It means taking a look at internal threats as well.