And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.
Exodus 2:22, KJV
Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for this one.
Ta-Nehisi Coates:
We've been talking, these past few days, about the courting rituals of the young. A lot of that conversation has focused on our own awkward dalliances. As it happens "our" has a particular meaning.
Here's majeff:
I dunno if this is the appropriate spot, but this post, along with the stuff on scents, reminds me how much of these experiences I missed out on as a gay teen. Never had the opportunity to do the dating thing, or get caught up in trying to impress folks. It just struck me how foreign all of these concepts are to my own history and experience. I'm a tourist in heteroland.
Many years ago, in his book Virtually Normal, Sullivan opined that even in the most accepting of societies, gay youth would feel a sense of dislocation. They would sell be a minority within the community and would feel that minority-ness. That so many glbt youth today feel safe being open about their sexual orientation is a a huge step forward, but it's far from even and in many places around the country, gay youth face the most vicious forms of intolerance in schools, churches and family.
TNC:
The right to, as a young person, to openly court, to craft rituals around that courting, to have touch-stones, to publicly reminisce over them, all without the threat of violence--explicit or implicit--strikes me as a rather powerful privilege. Surely there must be caveats for, class, geography and social groupings, here, but I think it's fair to say, at my high school, the space for gay kids to publicly talk about what cologne they were wearing to woo the objects of their affection was nonexistent.
From EJ Graff at The American Prospect:
I saw this item on a California lesbian couple at Patrick Henry high school, where the crowd cheered insanely as they crowned the pair homecoming king and queen. Neither one appears especially butch, but those titles were the only ones available. They're absolutely adorable, just too cute to live; they make me want to channel my great-aunts and squeeze their little faces. It's lovely to come across such a thing when the Georgia Baptists are still pushing their homos out—or rather, in. What a vast and varied country we are!
And what is it, you might ask, are those Georgia Baptists are doing? They've required employees of a school to sign a document which requires, among other things, makes it mandatory to be active in a local church, to not drink alcohol in front of students and to not be gay. The American Taliban in action, my friends.
There's something deeper going on. Those Georgia Baptists are just the latest example of America's religious conservatives doing their damnedest to make sure that their gay children are strangers in a strange land, to be born foreigners in a foreign land, to be exiles and exiled within their own nation.
At its simplest, they are a drawing a line of exclusion - determining who can and cannot be considered a Christian and an American because in their minds, those things are one and the same. To be a good American is to be a Christian.
I've argued before that today's conservative values are descended directly from the 1950s McCarthyite values - when witch hunts were conducted to ferret out homosexuals from the State Department and communists from everywhere. The fear of pluralism as a threat to American identity is a deep seated fear.
In an interview, an employee of Shorter University had this to say about the provision employees were asked to sign:
d. I will reject as acceptable all sexual activity not in agreement with the Bible, including, but not limited to, premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality.
This is interesting to me because the statement could have been less offensive if the examples were not included. Why key in on any of them if all sexual activity that isn't in agreement with the Bible is prohibited? To me, this hints at an anti-gay stance. When taken in context with the very vague comments made by current Board Chairman Dr. Nelson Price in the Rome News Tribune, I would say that doing these things will get you fired.
It also seems to place homosexuality in a different category. By that, I mean that adultery and pre-marital sex are, in fact, choices. Homosexuality is not. I know this point is up for debate in the fundamental Christian world, but to the rest of the world, we know that it isn't a choice. Without getting in to that whole debate, it does seem anti-gay to hone in on something that is not a choice and that has so few references in the Bible when compared to the myriad heterosexual "thou shall nots."
But of course, that is the point - within the Fundamental Christian world, gay people are a people apart, a suspect and possibly dangerous class of persons who willfully and knowingly act to damage the community and themselves. I'm reminded of the constant statements from conservative Mormons who tell parents of gay children that their children are going to "act out" and they must be reprimanded for that when they in fact mean having crushes or going on dates - behavior that parents wouldn't think twice about from straight children is considered suspect from their gay children.
Reparative therapy and ex-gay ministries (from Exodus international to Mormondom's embarrassingly bad Evergreen) use lies to sell the frantic hope that somehow a gay person can be straight and therefore no longer an exile. In the way that these Christians love Jews so much they want them to become Christians, they love gay people so much they want them to become straight. When the SPLC identified a number of right wing groups as hate groups they did so because those groups knowingly use, repeat and disseminate disproven information about glbt persons (i.e. that gay people are also child molesters). Those groups have responded with crocodile tears but at least among their average supporters confusion - after all they are quoting experts aren't they? That those experts have been disproven by people outside the fundamental Christian is never known within the world of fundamentalist Christians. Since they believe gay people can change and become straight, refusal to do so is treated as a special kind of intransigent misbehavior, one that places the gay person outside the circle of the acceptable. Gay people are exiles from God, but exiles who have chosen to exile themselves.
To be gay in conservative America, in much of small town American, is to be, a Ta-Nehisi Coates' commenter said, a tourist in hetero-land, an outsider looking in, never part of the community. Sure lots of gay people live in small towns but lots more get the hell away from the small towns of their childhood at the first opportunity. It's one thing to go someplace and know you are a tourist, it's entirely something else to be born and raised a tourist; to be born and raised in a place and still be a stranger in that place, to be exiled by your family and friends from your family and friends is a uniquely disorienting experience.
To be 13 and to realize that you would prefer to date the quarterback not the cheerleader is to discover that you are a foreigner in a foreign land. It sounds so simple when you say it, but the core of gay rights is the simple right to not be pathologized for being gay, to be treated the same as one's straight brothers and sisters are treated. When one is a teenager and makes those first painful fumbling attempts to tell the person you are attracted to you are attracted to them, to attract the person you want to attract, you are vulnerable but you learn. Straight kids - even the socially awkward ones - see their peers doing what they want to do. But for gay kids there are too few places where that it safe. And our socially conservative Christian friends want to make those few places even fewer, they want to make sure that gay kids don't get a chance to practice those social skills. They want to make sure that forever gay people know that they will be strangers in this strange land, that they will never have a place in society.
I've heard of families in which parents voted against gay marriage even though they had out gay children. I've heard of families in which parents kicked gay teens out of the house "for their own good." I've heard of families in which parents don't think twice about straight teens dating but refuse to even allow gay teens to have a friend over to the house. Gay kids are taught - in far too many houses and far too many churches and far too many communities - that they are shameful and must live in the shadows, must hide who they are from the world. Gay kids learn to live two lives - the good student, the good athlete, the good kid and the shameful gay person.
At the center of the Bible story are stories of exile - first the exile in Egypt and later the Babylonian exile. The ancient Hebrews, exiled to Babylon, wondered if God would hear them. "By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down, where we wept, while we remembered Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" For gay people in too much of America, the whole of their world is Babylon, a strange land in which they can only weep - they don't remember Zion because they've never been there.
Crossposted at OneUtah.