Voulez-vous_ & _Tigger_Too

WHY WE SUPPORT THE GAY AGENDA

2012-02-07T19:23:00.007-06:00

And into whatsoever city or town ye shall enter,
inquire who in it is worthy; and there abide till ye go thence.
And when ye come into a house, salute it. And if the house be worthy,
let your peace come upon it: but if it be not worthy, let your peace
return to you. And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words,
when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.
Matthew 10: 11-14

We are a rag-tag band, we who make up this project called “the gay agenda.” We have no permanent offices, no funding from any large organizations, no employees, no infrastructure of any kind. We are bound by an idea, and this idea is enough to sustain us. We will be in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, for three consecutive days to present this idea to you and then we will leave. Following the writer’s dictum of “show, don’t tell,” we make no demands, no proscriptions, no bold statements. We are simply asking you to look at us in a way you may have never looked before. What you do with this new perspective is out of our hands.

We are possessed with good news and yet we do not beg you to hear it; we only ask you to watch as we live out our lives.

Our lives, like yours, consist of simple pleasures. On the weekends, we can be seen drinking coffee in the morning. Eating breakfast. Reading a paper curled up on the sofa with the cat. Raking the leaves in the front yard, pruning the fruit tree in the back. Watching tv. Working a puzzle. Making a grocery list. Paying the bills. Choosing a movie to watch and then sitting together on the couch, perhaps with an arm around each other. If it is cold, we find a blanket. We get sleepy. We yawn. We decide it’s time for bed.

Our lives outside the home, like yours, are too varied to capture. Even so, our lives inside the home follow similar rhythms, similar dictates. For some of us, there are children to get ready for school, homework to help with, papers to sign for the teacher. For others, there is mother to care for; maybe she is sick and cannot leave her chair. Some of us live alone, maybe we have a dog or a cat; maybe we sing our favorite song in the shower as loud as we can because there is no one to disturb with our unpolished voices.

We are each, like you, different in our own way, and yet when we walk in the door and put down our grocery bags, when we take off our coat and put the keys on the table, when we take off our shoes, we look just like you.

There has been a lot of talk the last few years of a secret agenda, a gay agenda, a sinister plan to circumvent natural law and destroy society as we know it. We are asking for special rights, they say. We are asking for special protections, some say.

It is true that we have an agenda. It is true that we ask for rights. It is even true that we ask for equal protection under the law. In the world outside these United States, it is also true that these rights are special. Inalienable. Self-evident, even.

In all this talk, some have built a wall and made an “us” and a “them,” and we have continually asked that this wall be torn down. A very great man once said:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down

and we’re not sure what that something is, but we feel it too – we feel that this wall has not made us good neighbors. This wall makes no sense. We are just like you. We live next door.

Come, and see.

Fatherhood

2012-01-28T18:28:00.001-06:00

If the new American father feels bewildered and even defeated, let him take comfort from the fact that whatever he does in any fathering situation has a fifty percent chance of being right. ~Bill Cosby

Working on writing a piece tonight for an anthology about Fathers and our relationship with them; this song is one of those that, for me anyway, is a bit like church, a meditation on what it is to be a son, what it is to be a father. I'm both these days, with a son who's 11 and recently informed me that he no longer needs me to read to him at night --"but you can if you want to, I mean, I don't mind" -- and a father I haven't had a real conversation with in a long, long time. This song is, just maybe, about all that, and much more.

And then there's this song which, every single time, completely blows me away. We all have a father like this, whether we know it or not -- a person, an idea, a community, a place, a presence in our life that we look to for guidance. I have one too but when I try to put that presence into words, I fail. Completely. Maybe, just maybe, that's the point -- the effort itself, the attempt to be thankful for those things that keep us going, it's enough, in and of itself. Mostly, this song just rocks.

New promo video for "the gay agenda"

2012-01-24T06:58:00.001-06:00

If you're curious to know what The Gay Agenda is all about, it now has a promo video . . . we are taking this project on tour through the Bible Belt this year --

As with any project, this project can't survive on bread alone -- if you are able to contribute, even $5, please follow the link and put "gay agenda" in the note. How often can you tell your friends and family that you financially support the gay agenda??? :)

Click the link to donate!

Details magazine covers The Gay Agenda . . .

2012-01-21T15:56:00.001-06:00

(photo by Andrew Heatherington, Details)

Details magazine contacted me last September and freelance writer Jonny Miles ended up coming out to Dallas to see the dress rehearsal of The Gay Agenda project and interview me. Read on if you'd like to hear more about this project and how I got from where I started to where I am now, an advocate of sorts for equal rights, not a preacher by any means but definitely someone with some pretty strong convictions . . .

"The Amazing Story of the Televangelist and his Gay Grandson"

It Gets Better Even In Smalltown, North Dakota.

2012-01-17T09:21:00.002-06:00

Wow.

This letter was written for a church council in a small town in North Dakota that is in the process of deciding whether or not to become a "gay-affirming" church. A young gay man who began emailing me while in high school in response to my "It Gets Better" video is now in college and working with this church in his hometown on a project that, even one year ago, he could never have imagined. How far we've come in only one year. I've changed names because this is an ongoing discussion, but suffice to say that "Jonas" is far braver than I was at 19 years old. He is part of the change that is sweeping the Bible Belt, the last bastion of openly anti-gay bigotry. I am honored to know him, and wish I could be by his side as he reads this beautifully-written letter out loud to the council:

Attn: Church Council, North Dakota

As a gay student growing up in North Dakota, you feel different from others. I know that sounds cliché but it’s true. I felt like a defective human being, I was a man attracted to other men. My Dad disowned me and my Mom has a very hard time with it. Here are the facts: I was severely depressed for most of my High School career due to the fact that I hated myself for being a homosexual. I felt alone, and for the longest time I felt like I was the only person that felt this way; I didn’t know that there were other gay people out there. I didn’t feel welcome, really anywhere.
I would see and still do see signs on churches, whether they are Baptist, Lutheran, or Episcopalian, that say “All are welcome here.” I would always think, “No, not everyone.” I would also think things like “they wouldn’t be my friend if they knew I am gay” or “My parents wouldn’t love me if they knew.” For my father this is especially true. He doesn’t want me around since I am the family blemish. Because I am gay, he doesn’t want me to come home and run the ranch when I am done with college, which as crazy as it sounds is something I would love to do. Just because I am gay doesn’t mean I prance around in rainbow clothing wearing leather thongs at pride fest. I keep my private life to myself. It’s hard, but now that I have gotten out of my hometown, I have friends who know that I am gay and they still love and care about me. The fact that I made it alive this far shocks me.
I tried committing suicide 5 different times while I was growing up in my hometown. I hated myself. As far as I knew, I was the only gay person in the town and no one would look at me if they knew. Around town, being gay is this voodoo thing like being a member of a cult or a murderer. I am none of those things; I am a normal guy who just happens to be attracted to men.
The fact that the council is now voting on whether to allow your pastor to openly declare during communion that all are welcome “regardless of denomination or sexual orientation” at St. John’s Lutheran church in my own hometown almost shocks me. Pastor L. has done a great job welcoming me and accepting me to the community of St. Johns. This is also true for the individuals that attended the mission trip this summer. For the first time, I felt like I could be myself and not worry about what they were thinking of me. The trip changed my outlook on life as a human being but also as a Christian member of the Gay community, and the St. Johns community. I feel like, it really does get better now. I hope that you do allow your pastor to verbalize that all are welcome no matter what religion or sexual orientation. This statement of “regardless of sexual orientation” needs to be said explicitly otherwise those in attendance who are gay will assume, as I previously said, that the “all” who are “welcome” does not include those who are gay or lesbian. I go to mass anyway, but in my church, the Catholic church, if the priest knew I am gay he wouldn’t allow me to take communion.
Everyone should feel welcome somewhere. Everyone should feel loved. And if the statistic that “One in every Ten” men or women will experience same sex attraction at some point in their life is true, then there are others who are gay in my hometown in North Dakota, and they need to feel loved and accepted somewhere so they don’t try to hurt or kill themselves. It hurts when you lose a loved member of a community, especially a child. Don’t make the mistake of not allowing this verbalization of equality as part of your communion service. The consequences could be catastrophic. Just because you are allowing homosexuals who are God’s people at God’s table does not mean you necessarily condone homosexuality or approve of it. It means that you love them regardless.

Jonas, Class of 2011

Strong Response

2011-12-15T11:46:00.000-06:00

The recent Rick Perry ad was a watershed moment in American politics and the quintessential "gay card."

Timothy Egan chronicles it here in the New York Times article called "Goodbye to 'Gays, Guns, and God," the title, incidentally, of my Twitter profile, @randyrpotts. A quick look at the differences between Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin, seemingly two sides of the same coin, reveals one HUGE anomaly -- while Bachmann mentions the dastardly "gay agenda" in almost every breath and slides daily into more and more irrelevance, Sarah rarely says a word about the gays. For better or worse, Sarah is the (much more clever) sister to Michelle, and has been holding her finger up to the wind.

Rick Perry's ad Strong has received 3 and 1/2 million hits, but after HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of "dislikes," all comments and "likes" were turned off.

"His & His"

Living in Texas and having grown up in the Evangelical community, nothing about Perry's ad shocks me -- it's what I heard daily growing up, that there was a consistent war on Christians, God, School Prayer, Christmas -- you name it -- if it was a good thing then the big bad liberals out there were hell bent on destroying it. Nope, I'm not shocked at Rick's ad in the slightest, but I AM shocked at the response. All of a sudden, the bigotry that Republicans have taken for granted as an easy vote grab is suddenly failing. Things are changing. The "gay card" just isn't working anymore.

THAT'S shocking.

The True Spirit of Christmas

2011-12-12T15:47:00.002-06:00

World Vision bloggers are linking up to spread the true spirit of Christmas. Our 12 blogs of Christmas represent the creativity, love, joy, hope, memories, and family holiday traditions that keep us connected to the true reason for the season.

* * *

When I was a kid, the most exciting thing about Thanksgiving was not eating turkey or pumpkin pie.

With hushed awe, all of us grandchildren would stand around the kitchen after the meal was over and wait as my grandmother boiled the carcass and my aunts helped wash and put away the dishes.
It took a whole hour to boil those turkey bones, enough time for a lot of grubby kid hands to lift the lid and peep into the boiling pot hoping to see Santa.

“Is it done yet?”
“No, honey, Santa doesn’t want to sit on a greasy sleigh.”

This made sense, but it didn’t make those 216,000 seconds go by any faster. Yes, we calculated how many seconds it took.

“Is it done yet?”

My grandmother grew up in the 1930s, when times were hard, kind of like now but about ten times harder, at least judging by the stories she told me and the pictures I’ve seen. My other grandmother, Munna, told me that my grandfather would shoot “swamp” rabbits and bring them home for her to clean and then take to the communal freezer downtown, but even Munna didn’t boil turkey carcasses for Christmas decorations. Grandma did though.

“Is it done yet?”

Eventually, the carcass would be done and Grandma would carefully pour the water out of the pot into the sink, all us kids watching from behind, holding our breath.
Taking tongs and carefully pushing past the stray bits of meat, she would triumphantly lift the clean carcass out of the pot.

“Oooooh!”
“Aaaaaah!”
“Where’s Santa? Will he really fit?”

Waiting in the living room near the fireplace was a box full of cotton balls, red yarn, reindeer, an overstuffed piece of red cloth tied up with twine, and a Santa who fit perfectly in the palm of your hand.

Now I’m thirty-seven with children of my own, and as we boil the carcass and I watch my own kids lay out the “snow” and arrange the “sleigh” with its team of tiny reindeer, just so, I wonder.

Again.

At all of this.

The miracle of Christmas, it seems to me, is the wonder that children feel when turkey bones fresh from Thanksgiving dinner become the seat of so much joy and expectation --
so much, from so little.

One way each of us can celebrate the true spirit of Christmas is by helping World Vision help children and families all over the world. While you may not be able to afford to sponsor a child (or maybe you do already), the World Vision Gift Catalog is a wonderful way to give something of value (something that’s sustainable) to a family in need!

The Gift Catalog is filled with a wide variety of gift ideas that people all over the world need — things that often help a family become healthy, live sustainably, and experience some hope in their situations…

Give a family three ducks!
Give a family a goat and two chicks!
Give the gift of clean water!
Give a family a donkey! Or, you can share in giving a family a donkey!
My favorite thing to give is animals.

But there are hundreds of other gift ideas…

You can even help children and families here in the United States.

Over the next few weeks, as you engage, share, search for, and/or experience the True Spirit of Christmas, take a moment to blog about what that means to you and consider giving the spirit of Christmas to somebody in need from around the world…

Here’s to a happy, healthy, and hopeful holiday season for all of us…

* * *

.

__And, On The Good News Front . . .

2011-11-30T22:14:00.000-06:00

So there's this kid, this young gay kid. He's been writing me since last winter, maybe a month or two after I put up my IGB video. He lives deep in the heart of a very red state. He's from a small town. He comes from a long line of ranchers -- deeply-conservative, Catholic people who are much more home on the range than somewhere like New York. And he's gay.

He was 17 when he started writing me, living at home; it was his senior year of high school. Over the years, he'd tried to tell his parents he was gay, but they wanted none of it. His dad spent a lot of time fuming, stomping and storming around the house. "No son of mine is gay!" "That kid is going to Hell, I'm telling you!" "He's fucked up in the head." All the usual kind of rot that parents sometimes spout, not always on purpose. Usually, it's a drama going on inside their own head, a battle they're trying to win, and their kid becomes the casualty.

So, this same kid, let's call him Jonas, he writes me one day to tell me that he just turned 18 and I don't have to feel pervy anymore by writing him (I, um, never felt that way Jonas, but, now that you mention it, thanks for turning 18!) He tells me, months later, about all the different times he cut himself, or tried to kill himself. And he's worried because, yes, he's going to college in the Fall, and yes, he's heard that it gets better, but he's not so sure. He's going to a small Catholic school, where a lot of kids in his high school go, and he's just not so sure how things will turn out. Neither was I. I'm just an ear; I just listen. It's about all I can do.

Today, he sent me this photo, said, "guess what a priest gave me today?" He'd decided to wear a t-shirt of his that has a rainbow on it and says "be yourself," and it just so happens that there is a group of younger priests on campus who are gay affirming. Quietly, cautiously, quasi-secretly, but gay affirming all the same. One of them pulls Jonas aside and asks him if he's gay. He nods yes. He returns with this.

~~~

Last July, my boyfriend and I went out to Montana where his mother is from (I wrote another blog about his mother here) and stayed on the family ranch with my boyfriend's Uncle and Aunt and a whole gaggle of cousins, all of whom are Mormon, and not just sort of Mormon -- one of them, in fact, is very high up in the priesthood. My boyfriend and I stayed in a room together, and we were a couple the whole time we were there, and we were treated like everyone else. We rode horses, went to the rodeo, held babies and helped kids with fireworks and shot clay pigeons. They made a lot of gay jokes just because they would make them anytime, and I made a few myself. I used to teach middle school . . . I can do tame sexual innuendo all day. None of it was anything but light and fun; I made plenty of straight jokes back, no worries there.

So the other night when I was on the Joy Behar show one of the cousins was flipping channels and saw me on CNN, and texted the others, and they all ended up seeing it. Several of them made a point the next day to call my boyfriend and tell him they love him and that they love me too, and that I'm family if I want to be.

~~~

These days, it really is getting better. Mormons, Catholics, even, believe it or not, many young Christian Evangelicals are becoming gay affirming (see recent study, HERE). They're not waving rainbow flags, not yet. They're changing quietly, and cautiously, like people do, giving a gay college kid an IGB book, or telling their gay cousin they love and accept him, period, no exceptions. After the Behar show a family friend I've known my whole life, a very devout, Evangelical Christian, told me that she and her MOTHER watched me on the Behar show, and they were both, suddenly, rooting for me. Her mother has gone back and forth, wanting to be a good Christian, sometimes thinking that was supporting gay men and women, sometimes less so, but she's really getting there. She's what I used to think of as the "unreachable" generation, the people over 60 who were taught since birth that all gays were pedophiles and thus might not ever change. But, in fact, they are. A few of them. Slowly. It's real.

It's happening.

It's happening.

Some days, I have a hard time believing it, but it really is.

At the risk of being SUPER cheesy, here's a Beatles clip for you :)

And another song, on the way less obvious side, by Bon Iver, called "Calgary," with lines like this --

"Joy, it's all founded"

"Sold, I’m Ever
Open ears and open eyes
Wake up to your starboard bride
Who goes in and then stays inside
Oh the demons come, they can subside"

"There’s a fire going out,
But there’s really nothing to the south"

__Interview on NBC with Page Hopkins

2011-10-31T20:48:00.002-05:00

__Hold On

2011-10-19T06:36:00.001-05:00

Well, it seems we've lost another young gay kid to bullying. I heard about it this afternoon; it was all over Twitter, Facebook, the gay blogosphere. Anger, sadness, frustration -- I felt all these things, and I know many of you have as well. Immediately you wonder if there was something somebody could have done. You wonder if there isn't some way to, tonight, right now, shut down bullying, but there isn't. What we call bullying is how kids measure each other, and it's always been around, and it always will be. What can change is our adult public discourse. What can change is our tone of voice. What can change is our decision, daily, to stop making nasty remarks about liberals or conservatives, about Evangelicals or gays, blacks or whites -- the kids don't just pull these things out of thin air. It starts with us. It's a slow start, it's a daily decision, and it's a long-term goal to bring back more civility into our daily lives. It's a possible thing, but it's not a tomorrow thing. And thank God for that, because if it were, then it would be just as easy to dismantle. We can get there, and we can keep it, for as long as we're willing. And, in our determination and persistence, we teach others, by example, how to hold on when times are hard. Sometimes, holding on is all you can do. Sometimes, holding on is enough. So hold on, brothers and sisters, hold on.

__The Gay Agenda . . . a romantic little video :)

2011-10-14T19:56:00.004-05:00

I don't know about you all, but I think this is a pretty romantic video.

We took all the stills from a recent photo shoot (340 to be exact) and pushed the arrow key on the computer with a camera phone held up to it. Pretty much the way they used to make movies about 100 years ago.

Me and Keaton, fooling around in Big D . . . :)

Shame

2011-09-29T13:18:00.000-05:00

a long time you waited
you thought it had abated
shame of it all
the harm that it causes
pours down like a faucet
shame of it all

-Low

Most of the time, I'm alright. Just about every day, I wake up like everybody else does. I get up, I shower, I brush my teeth, all the usual stuff. I go to work, I complain about some things, I'm happy about other things. Most of the time, life is normal. Most of the time, being an out-of-the-closet gay man raised in a Pentecostal compound is something I can deal with just fine. It's like a cowlick you just learn to work with; it's there, but you don't worry about it anymore.

Except for those times when that past eats you up and consumes you. Moments when you feel dirty, ashamed, wrong. Not for something you've done. Not shame the way you would feel if you hurt your best friend, or stole something, or did something wrong you can apologize for. No, it's deeper-seated than that. It's a shame you can't even really describe to anybody who's never felt it before. It's like that shame you feel when you're a kid and you have that dream where you show up to school on the first day and you're wearing your pajamas and everybody points and laughs. It doesn't matter that you didn't do anything wrong. All that matters is that you feel like everyone is pointing and laughing and waiting for you to fail, that all the people surrounding you are saying nasty things about you and hating you not for any good reason or for anything you can change, but just because.

It's what the majority of gay kids feel like at some point in their teenage years. A feeling that, yeh, I'M THAT PERSON THE PREACHER IS TALKING ABOUT. I'M THAT PERSON MY PARENTS ARE TALKING ABOUT. I'M THAT PERSON MY FRIENDS ARE TALKING ABOUT.

Most days, I don't feel it anymore. Out of 365 days a year, I bet 364 go by when I feel, these days, at 37 years old, pretty normal. But then there are those moments here and there that just knock you flat.

Somebody says something, maybe your parents leave you a nasty voicemail, or your ex-wife tells you she'll take you to court to take the kids away if you ever marry a man, or maybe it's smaller, maybe you hear some song from your high school days or see a picture or hear a remark you haven't heard in a long time. Whatever the trigger, it doesn't really matter, because what happens next is so familiar, and so completely horrible that the best you can do is let that feeling have some room, acknowledge it, allow yourself to feel it, and hold on to the nearest hand of the nearest person who loves you. Pray, meditate, call a friend, ask for more hugs than usual -- you have to be pro-active with this shit. You have to tell the people who care that you're hurting and not allow yourself to do what you feel impelled to do, which is crawl into a hole and just shake and shiver and feel overwhelmed.

And, next thing you know, lo and behold, you've made it. It's over. That feeling does die down. It does go away. It might come back a year or two later, who knows. You're going to get knocked around in life. You're going to break a leg sometimes and be laid up and have to wear a cast and hobble around a bit. It'll happen. But it's not the end of the world. And when that leg heals, you'll be stronger than ever.

If you're lucky, you can even be an inspiration to others, you can even be like Mama Charlie here, a Kansas City lady who has taken in countless gay kids over the years and made sure they had food and shelter and, most importantly, a sense of self-worth. You can be the hero you wished had been around when you were a kid. And, in doing so, you can let that shame go exactly where it deserves to go -- out to the curb for the trash truck.

KARL ULRICHS, 1870 --

‎"Until my dying day I will look back with pride that I found the courage to come face to face in battle against the spectre which for time immemorial has been injecting poison into me and into men of my nature. Many have been driven to suicide because all their happiness in life was tainted. Indeed, I am proud that I found the courage to deal the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt."

__September 11th

2011-09-10T12:34:00.011-05:00

Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this
tidewater ebbs to the sea.
Daughter, believe me,
when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

Phillip Roth, "First Lesson"

I was teaching that day; it was my first year teaching 7th grade English in Oklahoma City. We were in the computer lab, my students and I, when the receptionist told me, quietly, in my ear, that a plane just flew into the World Trade Center. I remembered how when the Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed they cried "Arab" and "Muslim terrorist" and it was just a couple rednecks. So I thought, somehow, that it was a mistake. And then the second plane hit.

I had only been teaching a couple weeks, and we had just started a novel that I chose for the first novel my first ever students were going to read, Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a children's book similar to The Phantom Tollbooth in its plays on language. Similar in some respects, and very different in that Rushdie's book has a serious story to tell. He wrote it while on the run from the Islamic fundamentalists who had declared a 'fatwa' against him for writing The Satanic Verses, and the British secret service had been protecting him for several years. At that time, he still had to change residences several times a week -- one bookseller selling The Satanic Verses had already been bombed and killed. He obviously couldn't endanger his son, Zafar, by visiting him, so he wrote Haroun for him, so Zafar could feel closer to his father.

Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu:
All our dream-worlds may come true.
Fairy lands are fearsome too.
As I wander far from view
Read, and bring me home to you.

Here I was teaching my first crop of 7th graders and the first book I chose to teach was Rushdie's polemic against Islamic extremism, and then the planes hit the World Trade Center, and all hell broke loose. A book that was academic became pretty fucking personal; some parents wanted us to stop reading it as a class. I said no.

This poem is the dedication in the first few pages of Haroun; if you look at the first letter of each sentence, it spells Rushdie's son's name.

Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu:
All our dream-worlds may come true.
Fairy lands are fearsome too.
As I wander far from view
Read, and bring me home to you.

I had been, finally, facing up to the fact that I was gay for the first time in my life. I was 26-years-old, with a past I didn't like to think about, including sexual abuse and growing up in a Pentecostal compound 20 yards away from the most famous faith healer on Earth, and I was married, with two beautiful children, and I simply DID NOT WANT TO BE GAY. I wanted what everybody seems to want, the whole nine yards -- the children, the picket fence, the dog and the garden and the wife and the job teaching school -- I wanted, essentially, to be normal, to walk away from my past, to just, finally fit in. I had it, too, and as soon as I had it those planes hit and it all started to fall apart.

The planes hit the World Trade Center and suddenly, inside, the dam broke. Every time I turned on NPR or watched the news they were doing body counts; when a plane flew overhead I winced. When I stood up in class talking about Islam and we debated whether or not it was, as a religion, violent by nature, the image of the airplane disappearing into the World Trade Center haunted our discussions. It was a crazy time for me; while the country mourned our loss of innocence and this seemingly senseless attack on our virginity, I mourned the memories of the nightly visits from a male relative as a 7th grader, and his attacks on my own virgin body. It was all a jumble, it was all confused, and I couldn't tell half the time if I was mourning my country or my life or both, and, more than anything, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Every time a September 11th story was on the radio it became my story, and tears would slip down my face as I drove home from work with my infant children in the back of the car. I didn't understand any of it; for me, it was a sad thing, and I knew about sad things, and it was time to mourn these sad things that I'd never let myself think about before.

I didn't, as George W. Bush cynically suggested, go shopping. Instead I taught school, raised my children, fought with my wife (when she was home, which was seldom as we began to separate physically, emotionally, and intimately) and sat in front of the television listening to reports on Afghanistan, and New York, and Ground Zero, and cried.

The first friend I made in NYC, years later, a friend still very dear to me, lived across the Hudson with a dramatic view of downtown Manhattan. Our first morning together after a long night connecting we were standing on his balcony drinking coffee in robes, freezing in the March early-morning cold, and he pointed out where the towers used to stand, and how, the day they were hit, he was home, and watched the smoke envelop half of Manhattan. Even then, years later and with no direct connection to the victims of September 11th, I shed a tear or two, thinking back on that time.

Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu:
All our dream-worlds may come true.
Fairy lands are fearsome too.
As I wander far from view
Read, and bring me home to you.

September 11th will always be connected, for me, with that time in my life when I had finally achieved everything I thought I had ever wanted, and watched as it suddenly, dramatically, in flames, began to drift away. We try so hard to hold onto the things we think we need, only to wake up one day years after those things are long gone and realize that they were never very real in the first place. What he have, all we have ever had, is our life here, today, in the present, and those people around us who we love and who love us back. We can cling to that, because no matter how many bombs explode in our lives those things will always be there, even if the names and the addresses and the phone numbers sometimes change.

After the bombs are reduced to hissing shells and the smoke finally clears and we find ourselves still alive and floating, inexplicably, on the open sea, all that's left is a time to smile, and rejoice, and be thankful for the breaths we are still able to take, the new loves we are sure to find, and the old, faithful loved ones waiting on the shore.

__Dear U.S. of A.

2011-09-03T10:05:00.004-05:00

~~~

Dear United States of America,

We thought when we were born that you would love us even though we're gay. You didn't. But, if it's true that you have 50 unique hearts, it's also true that some of those hearts are warming up, and deciding to love us equally and the unions we make.

Thank you for making things better, even though you've done it (really, really) slowly. We'll keep hoping on our end; please keep making things better on yours.

Sincerely,

All of us queer folk.

~~~

__Dreaming Is Free

2011-08-21T06:55:00.000-05:00

I wrote this over a year ago while being purposefully celibate. I took time off from dating, and looking, and wanting. Spent time hanging out with friends, watching movies, playing with my kids, and thinking about, when I did start dating again, what it would be like. These days, I do have a boyfriend, and he's pretty great. So, maybe, this letter is for him. But I really think it's for me. I've always heard that to learn to love someone else, you have to learn to love yourself. It just took me a long time to figure out what that meant.

______________________________________

"Letter to my boyfriend, who I (probably) have not even met:"

Dear Boyfriend,

It will be so nice to lie with you in bed, my arms wrapped around your body. I want to lie awake listening to you breathe. I am hoping you will snore. I am hoping you will bore me to tears.

I used to hope that you would provide me with a lifetime of mind-blowing sex, but I don't hope that anymore. I will not provide you with a lifetime of mind-blowing sex. I have my limits. I might give you an entire night, here and there, but a lifetime, no.

What I can offer is devotion; once I am in I am in, like few other men. I stayed with my wife for 13 years, probably 7 too long. But I stayed. And if we make a union then I will stay with you, too, and probably forever. I do not know what forever is, but more and more, I think I can imagine it. It means I will take you for granted.

I want you to take me for granted, to go a whole month with hardly noticing me, and then a whole month wrapped up in me. And vice versa. I want this to be an exchange.

I am already in love with you, whoever you are. It doesn't take me long. I don't know why, but it doesn't. It also doesn't happen often, so you are a lucky man if I choose that. And a cursed one too, I'm sure. I am sure I will break your heart, and I am sure you will break mine, and after each breaking I am hopeful we will lie down in bed naked and scared and hold each other. Isn't that what forever means? To start over, and over, and over, and over again?

______________________________________

no. 2__"Miracles and Mendacity": Speech Delivered At All Souls Unitarian

2011-08-20T18:52:00.000-05:00

SUNDAY, JULY 17TH, 2011 in Tulsa, Oklahoma

In the movie Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the main character, Brick, says this – “Mendacity is a system we live in – liquour’s one way out, and death’s the other.” If you remember the film at all, you’ll remember Brick’s father, Big Daddy, the fat, loud-mouthed, belligerent Southern father figure, used to getting what he wanted. Brick’s mother was no slight Southern belle either – she was “Big Mama,” a wiry Southern woman who told her daughter-in-law that when “marriage is on the rocks, the rocks are there, right there –“ the rocks, in a pinch, are your only comfort.

And then there’s Brick, the main character, the man who all gay men and women watching at the time knew, instinctively, that he was one of them. Brick rails during the whole movie against the poker face he’s required to wear, the woman he’s required to marry, the whole fake system that keeps a gay man locked into a situation that's slowly killing him.

My uncle, like Brick, like myself, married young, had children, and in his late thirties drove himself out to a country road and shot himself in the heart. For Brick, liquor was the escape, and for my uncle, it was a .25 calibre pistol.

Mendacity. According to the dictionary, mendacity is a word that means deceit, bluffing, sleight of hand, camouflage, concealment, but it comes from a Latin root, mendac, which means to put right. To make amends.

How can mendacity be an attempt to make things right?

Because even in mendacity, and even, perhaps, especially in mendacity, there is a belief that things can be better. Liars are optimists, not pessimists, and want so fervently to believe in their values and their world view that they will lie and deceive to prop things up. Big Daddy and Big Mama were true believers. Oral Roberts – another true believer. They fervently believed that if they pushed on past the rough times in life, and lied a bit along the way, things would eventually get better. They held on by the skin of their teeth.

Even so, there is a way out of mendacity, a way to make things right without lying, without camouflage, without hiding in closets, or the liquor cabinet, or behind a gun. Brick was wrong – death, and liquor, are not the only ways out.

Watch this if you'd like to hear the rest:

__no. 1: Christopher Street, NY, NY

2011-08-13T11:07:00.004-05:00

"WHY DOESN'T SOMEBODY . . . launch a national advertising campaign to push gay rights legislation on a national level? . . . start a national gallery where works that are explicitly gay could be shown? . . . start a natinonal gay health department which would work on eliminating VD from the gay community as well as dealing with problems of tropical diseases and hepatitis? . . . Why doesn't somebody . . .?" - full page editorial in the Feb. 1977 issue of the magazine Christopher Street, 6 months after its debut.

Christopher Street, New York, is, according to Wikipedia, the continuation of 9th street in the West Village in New York City. If you search "Christopher Street" in Wikipedia you'll find 9 separate entries, some of them simple descriptions of its place in mass transit but most describing, in one way or another, its connection to gay history. Christopher Street, running from the Stonewall Inn, through the West Village, and finally to the Hudson River piers which still serve as a gay preening ground on warm summer days, intersects on its eastern edge with Gay Street. If Stonewall can be considered the gay "9/11," the day that changed everything for gay men and women in the U.S., then Christopher Street is Ground Zero.

40 years later things have changed, and the center of gay bars has slowly migrated north, first to Chelsea and currently toward Hell's Kitchen; however, last June, on that balmy Friday night when the New York State Legislature passed a law cementing the right of gay men and women to marry, it was back to Christopher Street and the Stonewall Inn and the piano bar The Monster that gay men and women went to celebrate.

Like an old shoe, or grandmother's house, Christopher Street still fits.

Ever heard of the gay magazine Christopher Street? I hadn't until recently, and suddenly I'm really fascinated by THE seminal gay magazine, the New Yorker of gay magazines in a sense, which ran from July 1976 until December of 1995. There were gay magazines before, and there are a few that are still out there in print form, but there was really nothing quite like this particular magazine. It was sexy, without depending on gay classifieds or risqué advertisements. It was political, without allowing itself to be reduced to one long editorial. It was funny, it was literature, it a sort of one-size-fits-all magazine that for subscribers outside New York and San Francisco gave a taste of gay culture they could only dream of having at home in Birmingham, or Duluth.

Cartoon from Christopher Street

Articles from the issue on my desk include "New Lesbian Fiction," an "Excerpt from the David Kopay Story," and "Gay Couples: Who Does the Cooking?" David Kopay was the first professional athlete to come out as gay, in 1975 -- there have only been TWO since. The article on cooking is one of my favorites, ending with this line -- "When the question arises, as it often does with gay couples, and presumably, determinedly liberated straight ones, as to 'who does the cooking?,' instead of blushing prettily and allowing as how I 'just follow recipes,' the answer's going to be 'He does!'"

My boyfriend made me some pretty amazing food yesterday and tonight it's my turn to cook, and I REALLY wish I had one of these robes to cook in. $60 in 1977 -- that's what, about $200 these days? That must have been one soft, sexy robe! I'm not sure it would really work without the moustache . . .

Here's a YouTube I found the other day with a little history from Christopher Street and Stonewall . . . I love the sign that says "There Are Dykes In Oklahoma Too!" :)

__Carlton Pearson and the Gospel of Inclusion

2011-08-01T23:51:00.006-05:00

"Tolerance is the ugliest word in the English language . . . if people are no good, they should not be tolerated, and if they are good, they should be accepted." - a gay social worker, in 1950, talking to gay-civil-rights pioneer Donald Webster Cory

I was invited (and very honored) to speak in Chicago last weekend as a part of the Inclusion 2011 Conference, the brainchild of Carlton Pearson. In some circles, Carlton is one of the most famous modern day heretics; in others, Carlton is known as one of the kindest, most honest and genuine people out there. To me, he's simply "Unc."

How many straight black men do you know personally who go out of their way to not only accept gay men and women, but to convince others to do the same? One? If you're not familiar with Carlton, or you've been prejudiced against him, please, dear reader, read on.

He's mentioned in this Wikipedia article if you want a longer version of his story, but the short version is this. At one time, Carlton was the leader of one of the largest Evangelical Christian churches. He is a black man, and his church in Tulsa, Oklahoma attracted an almost 50/50 mixture of black and white attendees. My grandfather, Oral Roberts, mentored him closely beginning in the early 1970s, and would sometimes refer to Carlton as his "black son." Then, a little less than ten years ago, Carlton was watching television in his living room and, in his heart, all Hell broke loose. Literally.

He was watching one of those programs about Rwanda, or Somalia, or Ethiopia, the kind we have all grown (mostly) immune to, with half-naked women and children standing in dried-up fields, their bellies bloated from malnutrition and their arms as thick as pencils. He said to himself, "dear God, how is it right that these people, if they never hear the name of Jesus, how is that you would send these people to Hell?" It was an honest, off-the-cuff question, and Carlton says he immediately felt that God was replying to him in his heart saying, simply, "It's not right, and whoever told you I would do that is wrong. Those people are already in Hell." Carlton was stunned -- whether it was God or his conscience talking, or both, he knew he believed it, 100%, and he also knew that it was 100% against what he had been taught his whole life.

How many of us in that moment when we finally, fully, completely, in words, realized we were not just attracted to the same sex but were 100% gay, felt the same way? I, for one, can relate to the moment Carlton describes. It's a heady, joyful, wonderful moment, and then reality comes crashing down on you -- the reality that the truth you have just realized and cannot deny any longer is not popular with most of the people you know. A love that dare not speak its name is, according to many Evangelicals, a love that Jesus himself does not honor.

So Carlton, like me, like many of you out there, was faced with this dilemma. He had learned a truth he could never un-learn, and, because it was an unpopular truth, it was immediately a secret. Carlton, unlike me, told it anyway, announcing to his congregation that he no longer believed in a God who sent people who had never heard of Jesus to Hell. He didn't believe God sent anybody to Hell. Soon thereafter, as many Evangelicals predicted, the flood gates had opened and Carlton began to realize a lot more things, and another was that gay men and women do not choose who they love, and no God worth believing in would send them to Hell.

This is the man I was a guest speaker for last weekend in Chicago. We had a very mixed crowd when I got up to speak Saturday morning -- around, maybe, 60% straight (mostly) black men and women, most of them raised in the Pentecostal tradition, and maybe 40% gay men and women, most of whom were white. How many times have you seen a crowd like that? And what kind of message would apply to both?

Well, I spoke about gay issues, because they are closest to my heart and what I am most familiar with, but the larger theme in my message was that we ALL have parts of our selves that will never change but that we hate and want to change. Parts that we tolerate but do not accept. I talked about how all of us have to find a way to move past shame and accept and embrace fully who we are. I'll post more about that later, and there will be a link to a YouTube video of that talk as well. More on that later.

For me, the weekend was a little awkward -- I am still getting used to the idea that there are religious people out there -- liberal Christians, Jews, Buddhists etc. that embrace gays, and here I was at a conference filled with people who were not simply liberal, inclusive Christians, or liberal, inclusive Jews. These people were inclusive, period, and trying to figure out what that means. Where are the boundaries? What does this group have in common? It's a tricky balance, and one Carlton is still trying to find. Like the pioneers in the gay rights movement found, simple orientation alone does not mean we are all alike or feel comfortable in the same room with each other. In the same way, what does an Inclusion 2011 Conference look like? The people in the conference were all really loving, great, great people, and any awkwardness was completely on my side. I am sure I still fight feelings of rejection sometimes, especially from any one with even remotely religious trappings.

Carlton has written a book about the gospel of inclusion, about reaching beyond religious fundamentalism to a broader, more inclusive spirituality. Whatever your views on religion are, we can all agree that this is one brave, selfless man who is trying his best to honor his truth each and every day. That alone makes him dangerous, and listed as a heretic (NPR interview re his "heretic" label here)by many organizations. Gallileo was also a heretic, for about 400 years, so, if you ask me, Carlton Pearson is in some pretty good company.

*photography by Mike Williams, photographer extraordinaire

The Joy of Fatherhooding

2011-07-26T11:33:00.002-05:00

So last night it was about 30 minutes after bedtime and my son comes in the living room -- "Daddy, I can't sleep." I'm a little strict about bedtimes (they're much later in the summer, of course) so I couldn't invite him to sit down and watch an old Lost episode with me; instead I said he could turn his light on next to his bed and read if he wanted.

About an hour later, once the laundry was done and the kitchen cleaned up I'm walking to my bedroom and pass his, and stop. There he was, on his back, covers pulled up to his chin, and a book spread on his tummy. The little Ikea desk light was on, shining a little halo over his face. The book rose, and fell, up, and down, while he slept.

I'd been a little grumpy; I've gone from being an intensely private person who abandoned Facebook every few months to a semi-public figure, in the space of about 9 months, and some days the change drives me completely bonkers. And then, I saw my 10-year-old son lying there in bed, and I melted.

Going in to his bedroom and putting his book on his desk, turning off the light, and lightly kissing his forehead . . . I felt like the luckiest man on Earth, and probably am.

Did Nancy Ever Stand a Chance?

2011-07-25T17:27:00.001-05:00

Meet Nancy, the family dog, otherwise known around these parts as Nancy Pants. Nancy was a rescue dog (just like me, as a matter of fact,) passed around from shelter to shelter, backyard to backyard, until she finally landed with me and the kids one year ago. She doesn't get along well with other dogs (unless they bow down immediately,) and when she came to us she had plenty of scrapes and scabs from fights with other dogs she'd been asked to live with peacefully.

Nancy is a diva, in a lesbian, butch bulldyke kind of way -- permanent eyeliner and that puppy-ish, Jack-Russell-ish facade one sees from afar gives way, under closer inspection, to the pitt-bull-hair-raising-animal-killing beast that lives within. I've had plenty of dogs, and all of them chased squirrels, but none of them ever had any success. And Nancy? She's already downed two squirrels, one bird, and (almost, almost) one cotton-tailed bunny rabbit. And I don't live in the country.

While she is not the best around other dogs, she is GREAT around my kids, and even other people too! She only discriminates against her own kind . . .

If there were ever any doubt about Nancy's preferences, she makes it clear when her best friend Tripp is around, my boyfriend's male mutt, by mounting him repeatedly about every ten minutes or so. Tripp doesn't seem to mind. Poor Nancy. Apparently she has a microchip and when a vet, about a year ago, called the family she was traced to, they didn't want her back. She does like to "wander" and is a master escape artist, but she always comes back, usually in an hour or so (this summer, with it being over 100 degrees for the last few weeks, I've noticed the heat brings her back within 10 minutes, begging and pleading at the door to be let in. If we lived in the desert, we wouldn't even need a fence.)

Seems to me like she was just waiting to find a gay guy raising three kids before she settled down. Who knows. For our part, we're always pretty happy when she comes back.

I had a dog a long time ago, in college, named Jasper, and my girlfriend and I were raising him together. Since we weren't married, we joked he was our "love dog," and we used to sing the song below to him all the time. Seeing as we gays can't get married in this wonderful state of Texas, Rick Perry ought to admit that he's responsible for a whole lot of love dogs out there. I wonder if he'll add that to his prayer list for his ultra-right ultra-Christian meet up next month? God only knows . . .

__The Plymouth Rock Continuum

2011-07-24T09:39:00.000-05:00

"Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man." Thomas Paine

I read this article last night by one of my favorite columnists these days, Andrew Sullivan. Called "The Christianist Takeover," it points out that the two front-runners of the Republican party today are Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, two sides of the very same coin -- religious bigots trying to attain positions of power. This is a coin that has been spending, and will continue to spend, since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. They were burning witches then, and they will continue to light fires and tie today's bogeyman to the stake.

Independent women living outside the colony. Women who would like to vote. African-Americans who would like to live freely and, 100 years later, African-Americans who would like to further their freedoms by being allowed to vote, to eat at any restaurant, to marry outside their "race." And, today, gay men and women who would like to love each other openly.

There will always be a bogeyman, and, in America, there will always be those who will tie said bogeyman to the stake and offer prayers to God while the flames rise high to the sky. They will look to the sky because, like the rest of us, they are not bloodthirsty people. They are not evil. They are scared. And scared people, when scared badly enough, will do almost anything to make things right, to make amends. Lie, cheat, steal, burn -- whatever it takes. Like the man who stole bread in Les Mis, you put a burden on someone that is unbearable and they will do what they feel they need to do to get that monkey off their back.

Today's Pilgrims feel confident that God is angry because they are angry. The world is pretty scary these days. The economy looks pretty bad, and Bob Dylan, a long time ago, reminded us of what Woody Guthrie said, who came of age during the Great Depression -- "Now a very great man once said that some people can rob you with a fountain pen; it don't take too long to find out, just what people are talkin about. A lot of people got no food on the table; but they got a lot of forks and knives...and they gotta cut somethin."

Plenty of forks and knives to go around, and if there's not any meat on the table, there's always Matthew Shepard. There's always some kid who looks and acts kind of funny, or some old woman who lives out in the forest, or some guy with darker skin and funny looking hair.

And yet. Even so.

DD

If this is a given in American society, there's another, and here I'm going to lean on Morrissey a bit, and say that "if it's not love, then it's the bombs that will bring us together." Because, the thing is, every time they round us up and tie us to the stake and light the fires and pray to God, there is a silent majority standing, and watching, and taking notes. And, after one too many fires, there is a majority that is no longer silent. A sudden majority that begins to take over the public debate, crying "shame!"

It's happening now, but it's still difficult to see, to measure. There are young gay kids coming out on Evangelical campuses around the country to their friends and family, their Evangelical friends and family, and they are not being turned in to the administration. There are young, straight pastors sitting in Evangelical positions of leadership just itching for their turn to make things right, and those in charge know it. They are biding their time, and wincing as each new person takes their turn at the stake, and they, too, are getting angry.

This, too, shall pass.

Rick Perry may or may not win the Presidency. Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum -- these people may be at the zenith of their careers, their voices louder than they have ever been before, and, after they are gone, there will be others to take over where they left off.

And yet, for every minister on a rampage and every judge shoring up that minister's fear there is a man like Thomas Paine whose voice lasts longer. Nobody reads Jonathan Edwards anymore (unless they're made to in school,) but a lot of us still read the words of Thomas Jefferson, like these --

"All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression."

DD

The shrill screaming and burning at the stake makes a lot of noise and takes a lot of lives, but like all fires, it always fizzles out. Our job is to nudge the young kids standing around with buckets of water in their hands to go ahead and toss it on the flames and make things right. Our job is to galvanize the silent majority on the Right, not the Left, to take matters into their hands, and say "enough!". If we are only talking to the Left then we are preaching to the choir. And, if fear is what's lighting these fires, we have to combat this fear with hope.

Who, on the Left or Right these days, is offering hope? There is plenty of hope to be had, but in the darkest of times it's often scarier to hope than it is to cower in fear. There are plenty of good signs that amazing things are happening for gay men and women if we can be brave enough to keep our eyes open -- there is New York, in June (I like it), there are articles like this one that document love between two men like any other love, straight or gay. In our daily conversations, do we sound like our own liberal version of Michele Bachmann, shrill and fierce, or are we standing out from the crowd and shining a light to those who need it?

Fine and Dandy, Dolly Parton-style

2011-07-23T09:55:00.008-05:00

"After the Dolly concert last Tuesday night, somebody came up behind my boyfriend and I and knocked my feet out from under me, then shoved him down and started kicking us with boots on, calling us faggots. Since I'm still not 100% from my hip surgery, I went down on my wrist. My wrist was crushed, so I was in surgery today. Now I have a cast on it... and my boyfriend's eye was cut and cornea scratched. God bless Texas."

This was a letter I just got from my ex-boyfriend on Facebook, a great man and someone I'm still close to. I had several friends at that Dolly concert . . . all of them gay . . . and you just don't expect this stuff to happen anymore, even in Texas. This is 2011, not 1965. This is after Harvey Milk, and Brokeback Mountain, and the It Gets Better campaign and still, still, some people just don't get it. Some people look at two men holding hands at a country music concert and take it upon themselves to be the wrath of whatever God it is they say they believe in. Because, we all know the bully was no atheist. We all know the source of this hate.

On one side, you have a lot of people, a majority among gay men and women, who have left religion forever. You have a lot of gay men and women who were so embittered by their experience with religion that they spit on it and never looked back, and who can blame them? And then you have the family members and the small towns they left behind, little towns continually drained of their gay men and women and much the worse for it. You have churches and mosques and temples and synagogues with empty seats because they thought it was their duty to chase the "faggots" away.

How do we bridge this divide?

We bridge this divide by looking at what we all share in common -- fear. We gay men and women, by necessity, have to be careful. We have to know that if we go to a concert and hold hands with the person we love, we might be attacked. But on the opposite end, people attending conservative churches, mosques, temples, etc. also, by necessity, feel they have to be careful. They're afraid that if they voice support for their gay nephew, gay son, gay mom, they'll be bullied, and their fears are justified. We don't HAVE to go to concerts and hold hands, and people don't HAVE to go to attend their local mosque or synagogue, but on both sides, we all have the RIGHT to do so.

There is fear on both sides, and both fears come from experience. How do we bridge this gap? My cousin on my father's side, when she got married, refused to allow her own mother to be present at the wedding because her mother is lesbian. I strongly doubt she did that because she hates her mother -- she likely did it because she was afraid of being bullied by the rest of her family and community, and her fears are justified. Obviously, she could have chosen to ignore her entire family and everyone she'd ever known, and have her mom at her wedding, but how many of us are that brave? Are you?

A very great man once said that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," and his truth still resonates, even in 2011. His approach to fighting fear were weekly "fireside chats" on the radio, and programs in every community in America offering jobs, programs he had to support week after week after week while Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court fought him tooth and nail.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to fighting fear other than this -- keep trying. Keep putting a hopeful message out there, over and over and over and over and over again, day after day after day. Keep trying to bridge those gaps. In your own family, in your own community, there are homophobic people -- literally, people scared of homosexuals. Reach out to them. Offer to meet with them. Befriend them, without judgement. Walk beside them, if they'll walk beside you, while you hold your boyfriend or girlfriend's hands.

We have to be an example, day after day after day. And, hearing that we're not even safe at a Dolly Parton concert where it can seem like every other man is gay, it's not easy. But then again, is there anything truly worth doing that is?

*Get better, K. and G. -- y'all are a beautiful couple, and I'm pretty thankful for you.

no. 3__"Miracles and Mendacity," or, There and Back Again

2011-07-22T15:48:00.001-05:00

Just got back home to Dallas yesterday . . . drove the 4 hour drive through the rolling hills, forests, and lakes of Eastern Oklahoma. People imagine Oklahoma looks like Amarillo, flat and brown with tumbleweeds blowing in the wind, and it does, in the western half, but the part where I spent half my childhood looks quite a bit like Pennsylvania.

Going to Tulsa, and speaking openly about being gay in Oral Roberts country, I can tell you that THAT is something I NEVER thought I would find myself doing. The article they wrote about me in the Tulsa World was pretty fair, and it was #1 AND #2 online, not because of me, but because of how much resonance the name Oral Roberts still carries in those parts. Unfortunately, most of the article comments were either 100% pro or 100% con, and me, I like to find the middle ground, and I'm going to keep trying.

"Miracles and Mendacity" was a speech that tried to walk that tightrope, that balancing act, trying to deal with a tense situation openly and honestly and forcefully and humbly, all at the same time. I can't compare myself in any way to MLK or Ghandhi, but they are heroes of mine, and I've been reading their writings lately. One thing they both stress is that you have to go into these situations spiritually and mentally prepared. You have to be both strong and willing to bend, kind and forceful, and keep in front of you at all times what the goal is.

My goal was simple -- to try to find a way to move past the hatred and fear and step into a future full of hope. For me, that meant forgiving the people in my past who caused the fear that dominated so much of my life. Forgiving a debt in banking terms means that the debt disappears, forever. So I had to let go those debts I used to think I was owed, and move on. The hardest thing to forgive is not the effect of homophobia and intolerance on me, but what it did to my uncle.

Going to Oklahoma meant, for me, driving those same country roads he did the last day he was alive. It meant visiting the apartment he lived in while separated from his wife and trying to figure out how to have a boyfriend, how to be gay, as Oral's oldest son in Tulsa in 1982. It meant visiting his graveside, something I'd never done, and sit down and cry with him, and forgive his parents, whose graves lie several feet away.

I did it. I let go. I forgave the debt. And I'm moving on. I am piecing together my uncle's story for him now, not for myself, because for me, I'm finally at peace.

I used to imagine my Uncle Ronnie being like Hamlet's ghost, out there in those hills and trees, shaking his chains, angry, hurt, unable to move on. Maybe he is, or maybe he isn't; it's impossible to say. But me, I'm at peace. Things got better. Life is moving on. I am now the same age he was when he passed, and I have children of the same ages, and I'm out of the closet, and have never been happier. I made it.

And for that, I am very, very, very, very grateful.

__no. 1: "Miracles and Mendacity": re my visit to Tulsa

2011-07-13T13:09:00.082-05:00

I was born in a big pink hospital perched on a hill in South Tulsa, but shortly thereafter my parents had a "disagreement" with Oral and were asked to leave ORU. We moved to Colorado and didn't return until I was 9, and I can't thank Oral enough, because those 9 years in Colorado are probably what saved me from being sucked in completely to the Evangelical world I faced for the first time as a 9 year old, going from public school in Denver to a private Christian school in Tulsa where we were told we were all part of the "army of the Lord," where military discipline and stiff, polyester uniforms were strictly enforced.

Those first few years were quite a shock, as I found myself transformed from just a regular kid in a regular house in Colorado into a member of the Evangelical royal family, flying here and there on my grandfather's private jet for family vacations (my brother and I ALWAYS chewed his entire stash of Juicy-Fruit gum and drank all the Dr. Pepper and Canada Dry on board.) I spent nine years, half of my childhood in Tulsa, but never really got used to it, and I left home at 18 and have rarely been back. I've spent fewer nights in Tulsa since I left in 1992 than there are fingers on my hand. So, going back there to speak this Sunday at All Souls, the largest Unitarian church in the country and also where my Uncle Ronnie used to bring his children, is something I can safely say I NEVER imagined myself doing.

I'm going to Tulsa this Sunday for one reason, and one reason only -- to spread the news to young (and old) gay and straight kids alike that they will not go to Hell for falling in love.

I'll be sharing a little bit of my story about coming out, both as a homosexual and as someone who has escaped the fear of Hell I felt as a young Evangelical, the constant, nagging fear of the Rapture and eternal damnation etc. that ministers often use to scare their flocks into conformity. Part of my story will include this truth also, that my grandfather, although full of faults like any other human being, did not use the fear of Hell to motivate his flock. He insisted on focusing on the positive, promising his followers that miracles would follow if they believed. Granted, in my lifetime the tail began to wag the dog in Oral's ministry, and he spent a lot more air time asking for money than he did anything else, and his career effectively ended with the stunt he pulled in the Prayer Tower. But he was not a fear-mongerer, even then.

Even so, my grandfather is famous for an anti-gay rant that 40 years later lives on on YouTube (below) but he really didn't spend a lot of time talking about gays. On the civil rights front, Oral was actually a pioneer -- his tent services throughout the South were mixed-race and his 1970s programs featured mixed race choirs, the FIRST mixed-race choirs this country had ever seen.

Oral, needless to say, was a complex man, a human being, not a devil or a saint.

When I left home at 18, I walked away from all of it -- the Roberts family, the Evangelical church, all of it, and it's only in my late twenties and early thirties that I've been trying to deal with my past more maturely. There is a time to run away, when the dragon is too big to fight. But the dragon never goes away and, if you're lucky, there will be a day when you are finally old enough to return to the scene of the crime and face the dragon of your youth.

I'm going to Tulsa to proudly declare that my uncle was gay, which his closest family and friends have confirmed privately but refuse to speak about openly. I'm going to Tulsa to declare loudly, and openly, that I am gay, and not only gay but happy, and a father of three, and, all things considered, a pretty normal guy. My hope is that there will be gay kids in Tulsa (and older gay kids too) who will see me speak, or hear about it, and realize the game is up. The days when Oral could confidently declare that homosexuals are all perverted, sick, Satanic members of society are over. My life is a testimony that you can be a good father, a good partner, a hard worker, and a happy person with strong moral values, and be gay.

The Evangelicals today have been cornered. National, "normal" society no longer sees them as bona fide leaders, and no longer buys into their fear of gays. And, when someone is in a corner, they are liable to lash out, and bite, out of fear. I expect some lashing out, and some fear, and it's understandable.

The next challenge for the gay community is not winning. That is already in the cards. It is happening, at a pace that is quickening every day. No, the next challenge for the gay community is humility, and decency, and respect. WE are the leaders now. WE are the examples. If we can't walk in love then we're not worth following. I may be met with jeers and anger and metaphorical torches this weekend in Tulsa, but I am intent on using the Evangelicals own words against them.

We have the power now, and it's our turn to set the tone.

"Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly, and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love – for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment is it perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you from misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world."
-- Max Ehrmann

__A Blackfoot Soul, And A Cowboy Hat

2011-07-09T08:48:00.018-05:00

"In the beet fields of Montana
She's always coming on dead rails
to break the plow and whisper "Honey,
bound to live is bound to fail"

And in a park in San Francisco
her momma shrieks about the Lord
And down the dead rails there's an echo
The wind is whistling all-aboard"
-- "Fear of Trains," by Stephin Merrit/The Magnetic Fields

My boyfriend and I just spent a week in the wilds of Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho with family and friends, and while we were there I met a lady with a story I'll never forget. These days, she's a strikingly-beautiful, highly-successful entrepreneur who makes business deals with the likes of Warren Buffet and Ross Perot, and meeting her in town you'd have a hard time imagining her wearing a pair of boots and a cowboy hat. But she grew up on a ranch in Montana in the high prairie where winter temperatures can reach 30 below, and the tale she told of a little girl who left home at 14 to make it on her own, well, it sounds cliché to say it but her story chilled me to the bone.

She drove us to the Island Park Lodge, pictured above; she said it doesn't look much different than it did 40 years ago -- flashing neon sign to bring in stray tourists, small bay windows looking out over a pine forest, American flags attached to the porch beams and waving in the wind -- she drove us there, we went inside to eat, and she told us this story while a painting of John Wayne stared us down from the wall.

Her father was abusive -- physically, emotionally -- yelling and cursing and never even half-satisfied with her efforts to please him. He inspected, and disapproved, of everything, down to the way she made her bed, and one day the ranch hands came to her and said they'd been saving, and pooled their money, and, well, they'd like her to take it and run away. They were risking their livelihood and offering their hard-earned money to a fourteen-year-old girl and telling her she had better leave, because the next time her Papa laid a hand on her, well, they didn't know if she'd survive it.

She was 14 years old and it was 1969, and there were no cell phones, no neighbors, no family nearby. So she waited until it got dark enough for Papa to not see her walking down the 200 yard path leading to the main road, and turned West into the setting sun, and stuck out her thumb. Twice she got in a car with a man and twice a voice inside her told her it wasn't safe, and she got out, and hid in the woods, and twice came back to the highway and stuck out her thumb again. Finally she made it to the Island Park Lodge as dinner service at the little diner/lodge was ending, and asked for a job. She didn't ask for pay, just room and board and tips, and said she was 18, and a hard worker, and would make it worth their while. It's hard to say what the owners thought, or what they knew, or if they had heard of a runaway 14 year old girl, but they hired her, gave her a room above the diner (the little window in the picture was hers) and told her if she worked out they'd pay her wages after the first week.

She stayed there all summer and waited tables and sat in her little room upstairs and gazed out the window, and one day the rodeo set up across the way, the same rodeo her family worked with every summer. "You think you're the center of the world when you're 14," she told me, "but you're not, and when I looked out the window, and watched the rodeo set up, and watched my dad and mom pull up with the horse trailer, and start leading out the horses, and just, you know, leading their lives like they always had, I finally realized, life didn't stop without me. Things just carried on." She didn't run across the field to the rodeo to greet her family; she hid in her room for the next few days until the rodeo moved on. But that fall, she finally went home.

"I walked in the house, said hello to my dad, and ran upstairs where my mom was sitting in front of the sewing machine, and threw my arms around her, and said 'I'm sorry,' and we both cried, and to this day I still feel guilty for hurting my mom like that. I went downstairs and told my dad I had to go to school, and I needed a job, so he leased me a string of horses, and I went back to the Island Park Lodge, and set up my own little business, offering trail-guided horseback rides, because that was all I knew." She spent some time living with friends, and for the rest of high school she worked and supported herself and never moved back in with her parents.

As she talked, I couldn't help but think of this song; it's been one of my favorites for the last 20 years, about a girl who grew up in Montana, scared of trains. I've always thought of the girl in the song as a little lesbian girl because the songwriter is gay and often writes about gay men and women, but she doesn't have to be; either way she's just another girl who had a hard life on the plains and ran from place to place looking for home. And, in the song, there's never really a resolution. "The world's too cold, for a girl like that" the song says, and maybe, in a way, it was. But for this particular lady, who ran away at 14, the world isn't too cold anymore, and these days she finds herself successful, and surrounded by family, and people who love her.

I had met her before, but you don't really know someone until you hear their story, so I didn't really meet her until last week staying with her on this same ranch she grew up on in Western Montana. She happens to be my boyfriend's mother, and suddenly one of my favorite people in the world. I see a lot of her strength, and wit, and independence in my boyfriend, and getting to know her was like getting to know another side of a man I'm very much in love with, and I'm honored to have had such a life-changing opportunity. We stayed with my boyfriend's entire family -- her brother, her nieces and nephews, and their children, all of whom are Mormon, and also some of the sweetest people I've ever met.

The Mormon Church gets a bad rap for its dealings with gays, and deservedly so after their involvement with Proposition 8, but for every Mormon who stands up and talks about how bad gay people are, there is another Mormon who's just a human being like the rest of us, willing to embrace a gay man or woman if they're someone they already love. My boyfriend and I were treated like kings and completely accepted, and, I admit, I wish my own family could so easily and freely accept me for who I am, and who I love. But sometimes you have to leave, and strike out on your own, and set up your own string of horses, and move on. I'm not even a tenth as brave as my boyfriend's mother, but I was able to relate to her story all the same.

We are all, in our own way, this brave, and we can all, in our own way, find love, if we're brave enough to set out and look for it.

On the 4th of July, we rode our horses in the Independence Day Parade in a tiny town in Montana, my boyfriend and I and his family, and we went back to the ranch and it suddenly began pouring rain and just as suddenly cleared up, just in time for fireworks, and, just before it got dark, there was a rainbow across the sky, the first I'd ever seen that took up the whole eastern sky and was complete from left to right. When I was a kid I was taught that the rainbow was a promise that God would never destroy the earth again. These days, I don't really believe there was an ark, and a flood, and animals walking two by two. But I still believe in promises, and I still believe that if you march off into the world looking for love, you'll find it.

___...___

__Holy Moses!

2011-07-08T14:47:00.000-05:00

A few years ago I read Homosexuality and Christian Community a collection of thoughts on homosexuality by some of the "top" Christian theologians of the day, many of them coming out of the Princeton Seminary. Clearly they are liberal, thinking human beings who are also Christian and realize that there is this great cultural shift going on. Gays are slowly becoming accepted while, at the same time, Sarah Palin's "real" "pro-America" Americans are digging in their heels and funding things like Prop 8 (see Wikipedia, Church of Latter Day Saints.) So in this book, these very intelligent Christian theologians are trying, in good faith, to figure out what to do with the queers.

And what, pray tell, shall we do with the queers?

As I was reading I began to get more and more disgusted, and thought "why are intelligent, logical men seriously poring through 2,000+-year-old texts to find out whether or not we should treat homosexual couples with respect and dignity?" Is this the definition of lunacy? Really?

Two people who are hurting no one have fallen in love. They ask the state to bless their union and allow them to own property together, pay taxes together, visit each other in the hospital, etc, and we have to consult the several-times-translated supposedly accurate texts written by grumpy asexual old men (see Wikipedia, Paul nee Saul of Tarsus) to see if this is the right thing to do? We used to tell couples composed of a black man and a white woman that they couldn't marry, and we used books like the Bible to provide our reasons for doing so. In fact, we used to keep this black man's ancestors as slaves, and used these ancient texts to provide our reasons to do so. Non-Christian women were raped and killed for hundreds of years during the Crusades and the Bible was used to justify it.

Abraham Lincoln once said "When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion." I've read several of these books now, these books where faithful Christians are trying to find a way to show that the Bible is either for, against, or neutral when it comes to gays, and I'm done. It's ridiculous.

It's either the right thing to do, or it isn't. People are either going to respect a couple who profess to be in love and ask for the right to marry, or they're not. Whatever bullshit comes out of their mouth, whether it's illiterate hate from the South or words straight from the Bible, it doesn't really matter. It comes down to respect and human decency and I'm tired of these Christian apologists who just don't get it.

One of my fundamentalist Christian mother's favorite movies is Ben-Hur. It's a very powerful movie and if you haven't seen it, you ought to, for a lot of reasons, but the one most compelling to me stems from the picture directly above, of Judah Ben-Hur and Messala. In the film, Judah, a well-off Jew in the Roman prefect of Palestine and a well-off Roman, Messala, grow up together and form a close friendship. An odd couple of course; the oppressor and the oppressed, like it might have been if Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee had spent their youth together, or like the story of Huckleberry Finn and Tom. My mother loves this movie because it's in some ways the penultimate "Christian" flick -- at the end, Jesus's blood dripping from the cross literally changes the world. Judah, an angry, vengeful Jew, watches as Jesus carries the cross along the Via Dolorosa and is struck by his humility and his kindness. Judah, who has spent half his life plotting revenge and filled with hatred and anger, after watching Jesus die on the cross says this to Esther, a woman he's fallen in love with:

Judah Ben-Hur: Almost at the moment He died, I heard Him say, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do."
Esther: Even then.
Judah Ben-Hur: Even then. And I felt His voice take the sword out of my hand.

Jesus' example of love and humility and refusal to hate takes the metaphorical "sword" out of Ben-Hur's hand and heals the pain he's carried in his heart during most of the film.

I watched an interview of Gore Vidal (the out-of-the-closet gay man who wrote most of the script for Ben-Hur) a few years ago and Vidal was talking about the scene in the picture above, of Judah and Messala greeting one another after Messala had been away for several years in Rome. The two boys had grown up together and Messala finally returns as a man, maybe 20 years old, and Vidal talked about how the director was searching for how to portray the gravity of this scene. The whole film revolves around the fact that these two men were best friends and then politics and religion and society made them bitter enemies, and this was to be the last scene just before that great rift. This scene had to show the audience just how great their friendship had been so they could feel the pain when the friendship ended. And Vidal said "let me handle it."

He told the actors, Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd, to act like an estranged couple, a homosexual couple. He told them "you loved each other in your youth, you were madly in love and then one of you had to leave for a few years and this is the first time you've seen each other in person. You've waited years to hold this man again, to feel his breath against your neck, to hear his voice and see his smile. You enter that door, and you stand, across the hall, and then, do it, just do whatever it is this couple would do." And they did. In this 1959 film, right during the middle of the McCarthy witch hunts which purged gay men from all government positions, two men in a blockbuster movie embraced as past lovers would embrace, and it worked. It worked. You watch the scene and you know that these two men loved each other, and when their friendship turns to dust your stomach turns, not once, but several times, throughout the rest of this 3 hour and 30 minute film.

Charlton Heston, 2 years later in 1961 carried a sign saying "All men are created equal -- Jefferson" in front of a whites-only restaurant in Oklahoma. He was a controversial figure, and also said:

"As long as gay and lesbian Americans are as productive, law-abiding and private as the rest of us, I think America owes them absolute tolerance. It's the right thing to do.
But on the other hand," Heston continued. "I find my blood pressure rising when Clinton's cultural shock troops participate in homosexual-rights fund-raisers but boycott gun-rights fund-raisers... and then claim it's time to place homosexual men in tents with Boy Scouts, and suggest that sperm donor babies born into lesbian relationships are somehow better served and more loved."

This man was a hero of my mother's and embodied many of the things she believes in most dearly. Dignity, respect for others, gun rights, and the Bible. In the same sentence she can crusade against segregation and talk about how terrible it used to be, and then declare that HIV is in the water in San Francisco because the accursed gays took over the whole city.

You can't argue logically with these people. You can't use the Bible to prove that gay men and women and their relationships deserve respect. It won't work. Prejudice is a visceral thing, a skin-crawling thing, and I think people like my mother are probably just going to have to die out before things will change. Because times will change. For the average American, what Lincoln said about religion holds true -- they know what's right and wrong without having to be told. They can see the two gay men living down the street now and watering their flowers in their bath robe, and the two gay cowboys falling in love on the big screen, and they are beginning to sense that it's just the wrong thing to do to deny homosexuals the same freedoms that heterosexuals enjoy, the right to declare their love openly and honestly.

We just need to keep holding hands on the subway and kissing in the restaurant and marrying each other in Massachusetts and slowly, eventually, there's going to be a day when 50.1 percent just "get it," and it's all over from there. Rick Warren and the Mormons and even the Pope some day are going to either have to shut up and disappear into the backwoods or finally begin marrying us. Not because the Bible tells them so but because their gut tells them it's the right thing to do. It's time for them to take swords like Proposition 8 and let them fall to the gutter where most politics belong.

__Whose T-Shirt Do You Wear?

2011-06-28T10:48:00.000-05:00

Ma and God

God gave us fingers--Ma says, "Use your fork."
God gave us voices--Ma says, "Don't scream."
Ma says eat broccoli, cereal and carrots.
But God gave us tasteys for maple ice cream.

God gave us fingers--Ma says, "Use your hanky."
God gave us puddles--Ma says, "Don't splash."
Ma says, "Be quiet, your father is sleeping."
But God gave us garbage can covers to crash.

God gave us fingers--Ma says, "Put your gloves on."
God gave us raindrops--Ma says, "Don't get wet."
Ma says be careful, and don't get too near to
Thoses strange lovely dogs that God gave us to pet.

God gave us fingers--Ma says, "Go wash 'em."
But God gave us coal bins and nice dirty bodies.
And I ain't too smart, but there's one thing for certain--
Either Ma's wrong or else God is."
— Shel Silverstein

What's the quickest, easiest, best way to Heaven, and can somebody show me please?

I'm asked, all the time, what my religious beliefs are and, continually, I refuse to answer specifically. I have strong beliefs regarding religion. I have the same values I have had my whole life, and I was raised as a Pentecostal Christian, and I hope very much that the next generation of gay kids growing up like me in the Pentecostal Christian church will feel free to keep the faith of their family and still be gay. However, I also have that same hope for the young gay Muslim teens growing up today, the young lesbian Buddhist from a Thai family, the gay Orthodox Jewish kid attending a synagogue in Brooklyn.

The world would be a better place if gay men and women are accepted, period.

The world would be a better place if we all stopped wearing our religion on our sleeves. The Red Cross, when it operates in the Middle East, is called The Red Crescent. The U.N., when it intervenes around the world, intervenes as the U.N., not as the U.S., the U.K., or the U.A.E.

I am standing up for religious and non-religious gay kids, for their right to be who they are, to be gay atheists, gay Buddhists, gay Mormons, gay Catholic kids. There is no good reason that they should have to jettison the faith (or non-faith) of their family and culture just because they are gay.

There is no reason for me to declare my own faith and suggest, by default, that the religion I happened to be raised in is the only one that is correct. I still have amazing, deeply-spiritual memories of growing up in a Pentecostal church where there was a lot of hootin' and hollerin' and people crying and dancing and weird stuff like that. I loved it, but it's not my belief that the world would be a better place if we were all Pentecostal Christians. Not all of us have that much verve. :)

What's the quickest, easiest, best way to Heaven, and can somebody show me please?

As far as I can tell, there are many, and they look a lot different. I recently spent an evening having dinner with some close atheist friends, and the conversation all night revolved around the work they do in Uganda building schools, hiring teachers, working with Ugandan politicians and, also, fighting the infamous "kill the gays" bill. Are they going to Heaven?

I have some really close Christian friends who are crazy great people, good, honest, loving people who pray for people they're concerned about, heroic people like Jay Bakker of Revolution Church, and Kathy Baldock of CanyonWalkerConnections.com who are doing amazing things in terms of preventing suicide among gay Christians. Are they going to Heaven?

Are these two dudes going to Heaven?

I have Jewish friends, both from the Reformed and, yes, the Orthodox stripe. I spent a year attending a Buddhist temple and met some really wonderful people -- this particular temple did not take any sort of tithe, and instead of, say, hiring someone to clean the temple space, templegoers signed up for shifts when they would come in and be the janitor, cleaning bathrooms, mopping the floor, etc. Some of them were heavily involved in free tutoring programs for Hispanic men and women trying to better their English at the local library. Are they going to Heaven?

C.S. Lewis, the great Christian apologist of the 20th century, was, before his conversion, a devout Atheist, and these days the Evangelical right has adopted him as their spokesperson, and yet even C.S. Lewis in his Narnia chronicles suggested that someone serving the God of their family faithfully and earnestly would end up in the same place as everyone else serving God. Even C.S. Lewis allowed for space in Heaven for all people who did their best to serve their "God" in good faith, whether they were Muslims, Buddhist, Christians, or even Atheists doing good deeds in Uganda.

Ma doesn't have a monopoly on God, and neither does Shel Silverstein.

__Hey Jude

2011-06-20T22:31:00.006-05:00

"We believe, under the influence of homosexuality, that lust is not just acceptable, but a virtue. But there is no homosexual "desire" that is apart from lust." Michael Glatze, formerly-prominent gay activist

...

I guess I first had my heart broken in middle school; it's hard to say. It's a little bit fuzzy but what I remember is this -- longing for this boy, then that one, and, oh, wait, there's another one. The longing was intense, and filtered through songs by the Beatles and The Beach Boys, as early rock music was the only rock music allowed in our Pentecostal household.

"Little surfer,
little one,
made my heart come all undone,
do you love me, do you,
surfer girl . . ."

These songs would play in my head as I walked down the crowded middle school hallways, jostling this kid and that with my books clutched tightly to my side when he would come into view. Sigh. "He" changed several times that year, at least five different boys that I can remember, but each time it was the same. Attraction, intense longing, hours spent in my bedroom listening to 1950s and 1960s rock & roll, and dreaming. The hours it took to get up the courage to call him, and ask him over . . . were intense. As were the nights when he actually slept over, two feet away from me, in his underwear, in my bed -- so intense, in fact that I finally gave them up in frustration.

Contrary to what many Evangelical leaders will tell you, this little seventh grade boy wasn't dreaming about having sex with other boys. He wasn't hoping to violate God's natural order, or bring about the destruction of civilization or the second coming of Christ. All I wanted, when it came down to it, was someone to hold my hand.

Reading about Michael Glatze in the New York Times last week resonated with me very deeply. Here's a man who came out, fought for gay rights and, then, after a bout with serious illness, renounced homosexuality and

enrolled as a student in a Wyoming Bible school. He was the founder of "Young Gay America Magazine" whose mission was to be the first gay publication that reached out specifically to gay teens. Today, he says, all that was in violation of the natural order of things.

Michael said this, in the far right blog WorldNetDaily:

"people are supposed to feel like homosexuality is gross, because such a feeling prevents them from wanting to do it. And people are supposed to not want to do it, because doing it is something that prevents them from having babies, and having babies is something that we – naturally – are supposed to want to do, for human beings to survive. And, so, it's obvious why people should feel gross about homosexuality." LINK

Reading this, I didn't feel angry, I just felt sad.

Here is an articulate man of my generation saying that the reason homosexual intercourse is wrong is because it doesn't produce offspring. Really Michael? My former middle school students could shred this argument, as well as your others. What do we tell the 85-year-old straight couple who, after losing their spouses and meeting in the nursing home, want to get married? Do we tell them that imagining an older, wrinkly, non-reproductive couple having sex is just too gross and therefore they have no right to marry? The fact is, Michael, we're not "supposed" to really think about other people having sex or, if we do, we don't usually talk about it in polite company. I know plenty of couples, gay and straight, who I NEVER want to imagine having sex, but I respect their relationship none the less.

Michael, you miss the point here: sex is first about the search for love, and only remotely about intercourse. Most couples are thinking more about lying in bed at night holding hands and having someone to talk to when they wake up in the morning than about all the hot and heavy times awaiting them. Most couples, in fact, gay, straight, or otherwise, spend the majority of their time together being pretty mundane. The expression "making love" to someone originally was as innocent as batting eyes at someone, or caressing them lightly on the forearm.

I'm sorry, Michael, if it's true that for you there were, as you say, "no homosexual desires outside of lust," and I'm even more sorry for your boyfriend of ten years.

I wish I could say that I hope you find peace, but gay kids (young and old) are dying because of words like yours. We all struggle with sexuality, with lust, with desire. All of us, gay or straight, know what it's like to be in a relationship, and how hard it is sometimes to be sexually faithful. We all understand attraction, and do our best to master it daily, while also being true to the innocent, love-oriented desires in our hearts. Nobody understands sexuality, and none of us fit perfectly into any label, and you and I both know there are people on both sides of the debate who go too far in condemning the other side. You are clearly in the same boat as the rest of us, and are more than entitled to choose any path which presents the best hope for peace.

And yet. And yet. To speak on a national platform, being interviewed by everyone from right-wing bloggers to New York Times journalists, and tell young kids struggling to figure things out that it does not get better -- this is too much.

This cannot stand, and I cannot wish that a man in your position finds peace while you allow these words to remain in effect.

As we speak, there are seventh grade gay kids out there dreaming of some boy or girl they saw in class, and sighing. There are gay teenagers being kicked out on the street by fundamentalist parents inspired by words like yours. There may even, some day, be a little boy or little girl you call your own who, by some mixture of chance and genes, feels the same way you do about the same sex.

For them, you can do better.

__A Feel Like Thing

2011-06-13T14:52:00.012-05:00

"This is a 'feel like thing,' so do what you feel like."
Gil Scott-Heron

Many people, come to find out, live in a world in which their highest aim in life is to do what they want. This is news to me. I've never lived in that world, and probably never will. I've always felt safer playing at Sisyphus with a boulder on top of my head, sweating and grunting and pushing while all the pretty ladies walk by with lolly-pops in their hand. There they go.

Taken from that perspective, how a gay man is able to get married and have three kids and spend 11 years with a woman starts to make sense if the rock he's given is one called The Protestant Burden, and the load is more or less tolerable. And it was. How bad can it really be, anyway, to live with a woman, to sleep with her at night, to find your way into the picket fence dream, complete with garden and rosy-cheeked children? How bad can all that really be? It's more than some people ever have. I don't regret my past.

I was raised by two people who "died" long before I was ever born, and, as far as I can tell, they were raised by the same kind of folk. My mother told me when I was fifteen that she was ready for the Lord to take her; what she looked forward to in this life was Heaven. Here she was, in her early forties, healthy, with two almost-grown boys, a husband, and a career, and what she was looking forward to was Heaven. The thing is, she didn't start at age forty to think about Heaven. I'm guessing she started at least 35 years earlier, in Sunday school.

The whole catch to Christianity, as far as I could see it as a young adult, is that it promises a lot to its followers -- a lot, that is, if you discount the fact that it promises you very little while you are alive. Eternity, riches in Heaven, eternal love, all this is yours once you die. What it DOES offer is community -- a place to go where, presumably, everyone is trying to be a better person, and build a better world. But if that community is the very thing destroying your sense of self? Since my twenties I have matured in my perspective, and realized that completely throwing out Christianity is akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. There ARE some great, redeeming values I learned as a young Christian, values I still rely on today. Even so, calling myself "Christian" was not something I wanted to do.

It was in this framework that I was raised, and I'm a product of that philosophy and can only sometimes, and rarely at that, see into a world beyond. I know that there is a world where people live in the present, where "the pursuit of Happiness" is in such high regard that it's enshrined in the birth of our nation as an inalienable right. And yet The Protestant Burden doesn't allow for this brand of foolishness.

Jesus may have said "Consider the lillies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin . . . take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself," but Paul, the architect of Christianity, was not interested in that sort of folly. For Paul, life was serious, and if you sat around in the fields waiting for God to throw rain at you, well, you get the picture. Jesus was a grasshopper with a curious, reflective, and almost playful worldview, but the religion founded in his name was founded, like all monuments are founded, by an ant.

I knew I was attracted to men as soon as I knew what attraction was. I knew when I watched The Dukes of Hazzard that all the boys were watching Daisy while I was trying to decide between Beau and Luke (both were SO cute, but the blond one was always my favorite, because of that smile, and those curls that would hang over his eyes, and, and, and.) There was never any confusion for me about where my attention was drawn. But in seventh grade, after falling in love with a string of five different boys, and each time, after they spent the night, when I was so painfully close but farther away from them than ever, well, I figured out that what I felt wasn't natural, it wasn't part of my Burden, so I let it go. Just like that. It took a long, painful year to figure it out. But once I knew that part of my Burden was denying myself any sort of sexual indulgence, gee, I was a pretty happy camper. After all, I'd finally figured out what my sin, if I were to sin, would be, and how to avoid it early on in life. I didn't have many close male friends for the next 20 years.

For me, coming out and dating men and kissing them etc etc etc isn't just about accepting that I like men; I did that a long time ago. It's a much bigger thing. It's turning my back on the culture I came from and every piece of accepted wisdom that that culture holds dear. To give myself the freedom to seek a relationship with men, I had to give myself the freedom to live, and I could only do this after begging and pleading for death year, after year, after year, with no answer.

A few years ago I went to church here in Dallas, a big, obnoxiously gay, happy, singing, Christian church. The whole idea of it sounded horrible from day one, and I'm not sure what force got me to go there, but sitting there in the sanctuary among 1,500 homosexuals singing songs I'd grown up with, using words like "Rejoice!" and "Hallelujah," well, it brought some tears to my eye and choked me up a bit. I think I finally, for the first time, was able to let every piece of that Burden down and just relax. Christianity is not a religion for me, it's a visceral, physical culture and worldview, and to be suddenly welcomed by the same culture that I always imagined spitting on me? Wow.

These days, my spiritual path is very personal, and it doesn't fit the variety of religion I was raised on. I don't label myself Christian, but I have not tossed out the Christian values I grew up with either, and I am still inspired by many of the words of Jesus I heard as a child and still look to his example in much of my daily walk.

On the one hand, it's embarrassing to admit the kind of hold the Christian culture I was raised in has on me, as I won't pretend that I have or ever will completely escape it. At the same time, it's a good feeling to acknowledge where I come from while simultaneously choosing, for myself, where I'm going.

I'm hoping to give my children a father who looks forward to tomorrow rather than Heaven.

__Something Good

2011-06-13T13:07:00.005-05:00

"Something Good Is Going To Happen To You" (the "gay" version) --

This is a slightly different version than the piece published in This Land Press HERE. . . my editor and I felt like the parts about middle school erections and Rocky from "Rocky Horror Picture Show" were probably a little too risqué for the general Tulsa audience, and I still agree with our decision to take them out. If you haven't read this, it's a very short synopsis of my story, the longer (book) version of which I am still working on . . .

__________________..._______________________

SOMETHING GOOD IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU!

I was twelve years old when it happened, in the 7th grade, attending Victory Christian School on 71st street in South Tulsa. Wearing uniforms every day (and ties on chapel days, usually Tuesdays and Thursdays), uniforms consisting of a light blue button-down shirt of itchy polyester and flat-fronted pants of the same cloth, pants so tight they failed to hide our little-boy-becoming-a-big-man erections all us guys nervously sported every thirty minutes or so. I was twelve years old and the world didn’t quite make sense, but I didn’t really realize that yet. As far as I could tell, there was a rhyme and reason to everything in God’s world – if you had a question there was always The Bible to turn to. One visiting preacher even told us in chapel that when he had a problem he couldn’t solve, he opened his Bible blindly and, wherever his hand fell, read the verses as if they were the voice of God speaking directly to him. In most cultures this is called divination (and widely discredited), but every time I randomly opened the Bible my fingers always landed on a passage from one of the prophets (usually Isaiah), and I heard the voice of God telling me things like this –

Behold, I have given him for a witness to the people, a leader
and commander to the people. Behold, thou shalt call a nation
that thou knowest not, and nations that knew not thee shall run
unto thee because of the Lord thy God, and for the Holy One of
Israel; for he hath glorified thee.

This is the passage I read from the 55th chapter of Isaiah the day my grandfather climbed up into a tower, telling the world on national television that God commanded him to bring in 8 million dollars to further his work on Earth – if Oral didn’t come up with the cash, the Lord, my grandfather said, would take him home.

I was twelve years old, and this tower business didn’t really make sense, but then again, there was that passage from Isaiah, with God speaking directly to me, reassuring me that Oral was following the path of righteousness.

At night I had dreams that the 8 million dollars in donations wouldn’t come in, and my grandfather would be taken up to Heaven in a fiery chariot like Ezekiel, another Old Testament favorite of mine. Once at school I overheard two teachers talking about how Oral was a Cherokee Indian, and how it was a longstanding tradition among Indian chiefs to declare the day of their death as a way to get the tribe to do something drastic it didn’t want to do, and the teachers said that if the tribe didn’t cooperate, the chief literally fell over and died on the promised day. Turns out there is no such tradition, but even so, I imagined my grandfather, who at 60 years of age, with his long-hanging ears and bulbous, impressive nose really did look the part of an Indian chief, sitting up there in the Prayer Tower one day and suddenly expiring on his prayer rug. I imagined a lot of things, and none of them made very much sense, but then, at the same time, there was a certain rhyme and reason to them.

Oral reached his prime in the 1970s, when he pioneered the “electric church” by becoming the first tv evangelist. His television programs came out of the finest studios in Burbank, California, and his message was simple – contrary to what priests and preachers had been telling us for thousands of years, God, according to Oral, wasn’t very interested in punishing us, in fact, God was just aching to heal us. All we needed to do was stretch out our hands in faith and believe, and God would bring healing. Healing to our bodies, healing to our marriage, healing to our loved ones and, yes, healing to our pocketbooks. It was a revolutionary message and one that hadn’t really been heard before in quite the same way –“God is a GOOD God,” Oral intoned on national television. “Something GOOD is GOING to HAPPEN to YOU!” In 1987, after the fall of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, revenue was falling off, and Oral’s efforts to bring in the money became more and more, well, silly, but he continued to use that feel-good phrase, “Something GOOD is GOING to HAPPEN to YOU!”

Even now, as a thirty-five-year old gay man whose church and family has rejected him, I can see the appeal in those words. “Hope is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson once wrote, “that perches in the soul, and sings the tune – without the words, and never stops at all.” Hope springs eternal, it seems, even for spinsters living in an attic in chilly Amherst, Massachusetts. These days selling hope is a well-known path, and Barack Obama, who my grandfather voted for, inspired the nation by blanketing the walls and subway stations and billboards with this one powerful word. It’s surprising, I’m sure, that Oral would have voted for Obama, but given a choice between a man selling fear -- fear of nuclear weapons, fear of the black man, fear of change, fear of muslims, fear of a bright, sunny future – and a man who simply said “Yes, We Can,” it must have been an easy choice for Granville Oral Roberts, who grew up in a shotgun shack and ended up building a 500-acre kingdom on the banks of the Arkansas River, a kingdom funded by faith, and faith alone. “Something GOOD is GOING to HAPPEN to YOU!”

But I digress. I’m not thirty-five, an out-of-the-closet gay writer happily raising his kids in Dallas, Texas; nope, I’m just twelve years old, and my grandfather just climbed into a 200-foot-tall tower, and the whole city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the Evangelical reaches of the entire world (which numbers, perhaps, in the hundreds of millions) were holding their collective breath awaiting the outcome. And me? I wasn’t so worried about Oral. I figured either he would get the money and come down, or he wouldn’t and God would take him to Heaven – either way, if you believed the hype, it was a win-win situation. When you’re twelve, you buy just about everything your family tells you, so I really didn’t worry much at all. About Oral that is. What I did worry about, and continued to worry about for at least the next 18 years, was the condition of my soul. While everybody else was worrying about Oral, I was worried that Jesus would come down, perched on a cloud in the sky, and whisk all the Christians up to Heaven in “the twinkling of an eye,” as the Good Book says. Like the title of the popular Evangelical novel blares loudly from its cover, I was worried about being Left Behind.

Why choose 1987 to start worrying about the rapture? It wasn’t, after all, until 1989 that Oral first said Jesus was coming back and the world was going to end, when I was in 9th grade attending Jenks High School. 1987 made sense because Oral was up in that tower, and that tower, for me, was a symbol of the Second Coming of Christ, and this is exactly how Oral planned it. The Prayer Tower was built, along with most of the other buildings on the Oral Roberts University campus, in the 1960s. At that time, on college campuses across the nation, students were sitting in groups by the thousands, smoking pot, drinking, swearing, having sex, wearing their hair long, and spending a lot of time saying “No!” to The Man. Parents were scared, and Oral had an idea – why not build his own Evangelical university, where the students keep their hair short, their faces shaved, and their skirts long, and rather than saying “No!” all day are instead taught day and night to say “Yes!” to the calling of God on their hearts? And in the middle of this campus, why not build a tower, constructed in such a way that, from any angle, it represents the image of the cross? In this tower he installed two things widely publicized, the first being a phone bank manned by faithful, little old ladies who would answer your call, day or night, and pray with you, on a toll-free number. And the second thing was a gas flame, installed on the top of the tower, manned at all times, day and night, by a born-again Christian whose heart was right with God.

This is where my fears of the rapture came in. In 1987 I had a dog, a scruffy old wiry-haired monstrously-huge Irish Wolfhound, the kind of dog you see in movies about medieval England sitting calmly at the foot of the king in his castle. His name was Samson, and because he was such a big dog, I had to take him on a long walk every day or he would go stir crazy and eat the cushions off our couch. We were living on the Oral Roberts compound off of 75th street, in South Tulsa, just north of Lewis Avenue, a 3-acre piece of land surrounded by an 8-foot stockade fence and a chain-link topped with barbed wire and both were electrified. I would walk down my 50-yard-long driveway, out the first gate, and out the second gate (always waving to the security guard in his little hut) and across 75th street to the campus of ORU. There was another gate, or course, and as soon as Samson and I went through, there was the Prayer Tower in the distance, that gas flame shining brightly on the top.

Or, at least, I always hoped it was. On bright, sunny days it was almost impossible to tell, and that’s where the fear crept in. The whole point of having that gas flame manned by a born-again Christian whose heart was right with God was this – if Jesus were to come down, perched on a cloud, and whisk away all the born-again Christians (the Catholics, and probably even the Episcopalians, were not really included in this group), that gas-flame operator would also be whisked away, and the flame would go out. That flame, perched on top of a 200-foot tower at the center of campus was both a promise and a threat – Jesus is coming back, but he’s not here yet, so if you’ve sinned, get your heart right with God, because he might come at any moment. Well, how do you know if your heart is right with God? Even at thirty-five, I still haven’t figured that one out.

So while everyone else was worried about Oral in that tower, I was worried about the gas-flame operator, and looking every day to see if that flame was still there. On weekends, the campus could be awfully still and quiet, and if the sun were at just the right angle and I couldn’t quite tell if the flame was still lit, chills would go down my spine. In fact, sitting here writing this, they still do. Some things just don’t go away. I’m not scared of the rapture anymore, or the boogie man, or going to Hell because I’m gay, but some nights when my children are with their mother and the house is too quiet I almost wish there were a tower across the street to remind me that whoever comes to get gay men has not come yet. I’m not exactly sure who comes to get gay men, but it’s probably a He, and He probably has a twinkle in his eye. Kind of reminds me of that last scene in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, when that sweet transvestite from Transexual Transylvania sings the last refrains of “I’m Going Home” –

Everywhere it's been the same... feeling...
Like I'm outside in the rain... wheeling...
Free, to try and find a game... dealing...
Cards for sorrow, cards for pain

Cause I've seen blue skies through the tears
In my eyes
And I realise.. I'm going home.

Or, as my grandfather would say, “Something GOOD is GOING to HAPPEN to YOU!”

So I was twelve, my grandfather was in a tower, and I was worried about the rapture. But I was also a gay kid in an Evangelical Christian middle school, trying my best to develop crushes on girls. There was one girl I asked out every single day for a month and she said no every time, until it became a sort of joke and I asked her the way I scratched my nose, that is, quickly and sharply. And why did I ask her every day? Because my best friend at the time, a boy I haven’t seen since 1988 but still remember his full name and telephone number (918-528-0897), had kissed this girl. I think I was hoping that, if I kissed her too, I would somehow get some of his germs. Or something like that. None of this was conscious, but looking back it’s the only way I can make sense of it. Because, looking back, while I romanced the girls so much I ended up being nothing but a pest, stealing their lunch bags, undoing their bra as a joke, etc, all I was really interested in were boys.

In seventh grade I went through a series of crushes on boys, five of them to be exact, each one more painful than the one before. I would fall for them, spend a lot of time around them, and then, realizing eventually that they would never love me the way I wanted them to love me, would suddenly stop talking to them. The last of the five, in April of 1987, called me up, mad as a hornet, asking why I wouldn’t talk to him anymore. “You just go through boys like Kleenex, you blow your nose on them and throw them away.” Neither of us understood what the hell he was talking about, not literally, but we both knew he was right. I swallowed, hard, and quickly hung up. I swore off boys then and there, and didn’t really have close friends (other than girls) for a long, long time.

When I was 18, I met a girl the first week I arrived at the University of Oklahoma, and she reminded me of my grandmother Evelyn – graceful, witty, intelligent, and always free to say exactly what was on her mind. I told her I liked men, but that I didn’t want to be with one, which was exactly how I felt about things at the time, and 2 years later we were married. 6 years later we had our first daughter on Father’s Day, and five years after that, after having three kids and trying our best to build the perfect little picket-fence family, we were divorced after 11 years of marriage. I cried, for at least a year and a half, at this great, great loss. There was nothing I wanted more on earth than to give my children a loving, happy, stable home comprised of a Mommy and a Daddy and a dog and a garden and the whole nine yards. But like in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, sometimes in a relationship between two people a ghost from the past can intervene and start shaking things up, and sometimes in the aftermath there’s nothing left but a wrecked marriage and a chance to start all over again. It’s not always what you were hoping for, but sometimes the best you can do is just hope, or, as my grandfather would say, have faith.

There were several ghosts that wrecked our marriage, things that happened in the Pentecostal compound I grew up in that came back to haunt me, and one of them was the ghost of a man who shot himself in 1983. That ghost would be the presence, in my mind, of my uncle, Ronald David Roberts, Oral’s eldest son and at one time the man Oral hoped would inherit his kingdom. “Ronnie” to the family, he was, by all accounts, one of the most brilliant men anyone who came across his path had ever met. Growing up, I always wanted to be him, and it’s difficult to explain why since he died when I was only seven. Every time my mother mentioned him I noted two things – one, that she had loved him more than she had ever loved anybody else, and two, that the memory of his path brought more pain to her than any other memory.

I suppose it makes sense I wanted to be like him. I didn’t know, when I was a kid, that the “path” my mother said brought him down consisted of being gay, intellectual, and godless. All I knew was, I wanted my mother’s eyes to light up like that when she talked about me. Having ended up on this same path, gay, intellectual, and godless, her eyes don’t light up anymore, and haven’t in years. And that’s a shame, because I really do think if she got along with Uncle Ronnie she could find a way to get along with me. But we were talking about ghosts; I digress. The first time the ghost of my Uncle Ronnie entered my life was in the Spring of 2002, at Mayflower United Church of Christ in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

My wife and I were in transition – having both rejected our Evangelical past, we were trying to find a way to still be Christian but also true to our intellect, and we found ourselves attending Robin Meyers’ church Mayflower. We found ourselves there when Carlton Pearson, founder of Higher Dimensions (which was at one time one of the largest Evangelical churches) came to speak to our liberal, almost-unitarian Christian church. My family and I attended Carlton’s church in middle school and high school and in fact my parents went to ORU with him in the early 1970s, so you might say he felt like an uncle to me, even though I hadn’t seen him in years. He preached an amazing sermon that day, one that brought me to tears – hearing him was like hearing my grandfather all over again – here was a man who, instead of preaching that God was sending gays, and communists, and Catholics to Hell, said there was no Hell. He might as well have said “GOD is a GOOD GOD” or “Something GOOD is GOING to HAPPEN to YOU!” Here it was again, that message of hope, to a new generation.

After the sermon, my wife and I waited in line to get a chance to talk to Carlton. It had been a long time since we’d seen each other – I probably hadn’t been to his church since I was fifteen or sixteen, and here I was a full-grown man of 28 with his own children in tow. I wore glasses at the time, and had a big scruffy beard, and a thrift-store button down and grey Dickies slacks that was my uniform at the time. We waited about ten minutes as Carlton greeted each person who wanted to tell him how much his sermon moved him, and finally there we were, my wife and I, standing about three feet directly in front of Carlton. I smiled, big, and moved as if to hug him, but his face darkened immediately, and I hung back, and a chill passed through my spine. We might have only stood there for 20 seconds, but it felt like an hour – me looking at Carlton with a silly grin pasted on my face, and him looking back at me like he’d seen a ghost. By the look on his face, if he had been a gun-toting Texan he might have reached for his holster, but as a former Pentecostal minister he clutched his Bible tightly and his face went white, as white, anyway, as a black man’s face can go.

“Which one are you?” he finally asked, barely breathing, still looking scared. After another long pause, he said “You’re Ron and Roberta’s son, aren’t you?” and I nodded, “I’m Randy,” I said.” He nodded back. “I thought you were Ronnie,” he said. And we both stared at each other, and then, finally, embraced in a big bear hug.

Sometimes, a particular mantle is thrust upon you, whether you like it or not. My grandfather, with all his faults, and they were many, was at heart a man who wanted to spread a message of hope. He liked being rich, and he liked all the things that being rich brings you, and it’s likely that many of the decisions he made, especially later in life, were motivated more and more by money or at least the desire to keep his empire afloat – it’s not uncommon for ambitious men to end up in a situation where the tail begins to wag the dog. It’s not my impression that he was thinking, however, when he was 20, 21, 22 years old and standing in healing lines and touching, for hours upon hours, people with tuberculosis and cerebral palsy and cancer and, later, HIV – it’s not my impression that he started out to make a quick buck. He started out as a preacher, in tiny towns in southeastern Oklahoma, convinced that the mantle thrust upon him was to bring a message of hope to his people, to encourage the poor Pentecostals around him that God was a good God, that God did not want them to be poor, that God did not bring on diseases as some Evangelicals have suggested God brought HIV to kill off gay men. Oral’s mantle was one he felt thrust upon him, and his message of hope transformed the Evangelical church.

A year ago I took my children to Los Angeles for Spring Break; for them it was a chance to go to Disney World, to Universal Studios, and to see movie stars, but for me it was a chance to pay my last respects to a man who had overshadowed almost every memory from my childhood. Oral spent the last 20 years of his life living in a home on a golf course in Newport Beach, California, and while this sounds ostentatious, his home was fairly simple, a 1,000 square-foot condominium, the dining room table covered in water rings, the living room small and cramped, and the sixty-year-old home smelling vaguely of mold. I hadn’t spent more than five minutes with him in the previous ten years, and a man changes a lot from 81 to 91. I felt sorry for him. Without my grandmother by his side, he seemed lonely.

Oral never could remember my name when I was growing up; even though I lived just down the hill from him and ran up to see my grandmother several times a week, “boy” and “son” were the only things he ever called me, if he called me at all. But in the Spring of 2009 he eagerly played at great-grandfather, showing off that he had done his homework by greeting each of my three children by name, and, because he was no longer the scary grandfather I remembered but, instead, a 91-year-old man barely able to hear and completely unable to leave his chair without assistance, I gladly played along. Although we never spoke of it, Oral knew I was gay, and yet that day, it didn’t seem to matter–he signed a copy of his newest book for my children and gave them each a twenty dollar bill, and our hour-long visit passed quickly.

I’m grateful for that afternoon with my grandfather because, frankly, the man I grew up with in the compound was not a kind, warm grandfather. He was a driven man, one who slept four hours a night and the other twenty working. Even while “relaxing” on the golf course, Oral would be processing his next sermon in his mind or networking with business partners who might be able to help keep his ministry alive. There was always another tower to build, or another tower to climb up into; that mantle burdened his soul and there was never any time for children. But this day was different. Oral seemed at peace, happy to sit in his armchair and play great-grandfather.

He looked at me several times during that visit and sighed, and I almost felt that he was looking right through me. Before we left he asked me to come over to his chair; the children were watching a cartoon in the spare bedroom and the living room was quiet as I knelt down beside him and held his hand. Oral had large hands–the 60-foot bronze sculpture of hands clasped in prayer which stands at the entrance to the university are modeled after his–and I noticed that day that they also looked a lot like mine. I was a little shaken up–we both knew this was likely to be our last visit. As I stood up to leave, he held my hand tightly, looked up from his chair with that characteristic twinkle in his eye, and said “Son, something GOOD is GOING to HAPPEN to YOU!”

*all photos by randy roberts potts

"Dear Uncle Ronnie, It Gets Better"

2011-06-07T11:02:00.011-05:00

Below is the second letter to my Uncle Ronnie, the letter that made it into the "It Gets Better" book, but before we get to that, please read this:

*If you haven't bought a copy of the "It Gets Better" book, please, please do. ALL proceeds go to programs that support gay youth. We are on a mission to get this book into EVERY high school library, and you can be part of that effort by buying an extra copy and donating it to a library near you that doesn't have it yet. Buy a copy for yourself, your mother, your nephew, your dentist's office . . . you get the picture. Although I think the video project will reach more gay teens, the book project that came out of it will reach some kids who don't know about the videos. There are also entries that did not come from videos -- David Sedaris, for example, wrote one of the best pieces in there (of course) even though he didn't make a video.*

Here's a link to the book on Amazon:
IT GETS BETTER book

Ok, had to say all that. This mission is pretty important to me.

A lot of you have seen the "It Gets Better" video I made last fall. I remember well sitting in my living room watching the first ones on my laptop, and pretty much bawling through at least the first ten. Joel Burns (who lives near me in Ft. Worth), Dan and Terry, the Google employees, etc. etc. etc. I couldn't help thinking how much I wished that these things had been out there when I was a teenager, and then my mind went further, wishing that they'd been there when my uncle was still around, and finally, I decided to make a video using a letter I'd written to him when I came out. It's a pretty stark, sad, angry letter, but it was exactly how I felt about things when I came out. But sometimes I wonder if it was really the best "it gets better" message, since, in that letter, things had really not gotten any better yet.

Turns out that Dan Savage agreed -- when they contacted me to ask if they could put a transcript of my video in the IGB book, they asked if I could write a version that explained the second half of the story -- how it actually got better. So, I wrote what follows, a sort of updated version to my Uncle of how, after my divorce, things finally did get better. Because, they did. I'm an extremely happy father of 3 amazing children living in Dallas, Texas these days, and even though it did take 5 years, give or take, things really did get better. Here's what went into the IGB book, hope it speaks to someone out there.

________..._________

My uncle, Ronald David Roberts, was born in 1945, the oldest son of the late televangelist, Oral Roberts, my grandfather. My Uncle Ronnie, like me, was gay. He wrote in letters, published after his death, that he “came out” in high school, but only to close friends and family, including his father. His father, Oral Roberts, was the first televangelist, and likely the most famous faith-healer since Jesus Christ, with a worldwide audience in the hundreds of millions. He did not want a gay son. Oral’s anti-homosexual rants were so vehement that they can still be found on YouTube, forty years later. In his thirties, six months after getting divorced and coming out, my Uncle Ronnie died, on June 10th, 1982, by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the heart.
I’m gay too. And my mother, like her father, does not want a gay son. My mother made a point to tell me, only a year ago, at my grandfather’s funeral, in front of 4,000 people, that Hell does exist and I’m going there. My uncle and I were raised in a world dominated by Evangelicals who taught, and still teach, that the fires of Hell await all gay men and women. This is the Evangelical “Christian” legacy for gays like my uncle and me: Threats. Bullying. Damnation. Death.
But for me, and many others, the story doesn’t end here. Five years ago, when I was divorced and came out, I found myself, like my Uncle Ronnie, in Oklahoma, in my thirties, and terrified of losing my children because I was gay. I was regularly called a faggot, both by strangers and by my ex-wife, and, like my uncle before me, reached a point of despair. Suicide among gay men and women in Evangelical communities is still prevalent. Evangelicals may not be killing gays outright—the police report suggests my uncle killed himself. However, while the Evangelical community might not pull the trigger when one of their gay members commits suicide, they provide the ammunition.
When I came out, I started writing a letter to my Uncle Ronnie, a letter meant for me, for my uncle, and for friends I have who are still closeted—terrified their family will reject them. Five years later, I’m still writing this letter—it’s become a way for me to record this experience.
It all started for me one summer afternoon when I was twenty-seven years old and I stood in my kitchen and said to myself, out loud, that I was gay. It was the most liberating feeling I’ve ever had, and for the next three days I was on top of the world. But then reality came crashing down on me—I was married, with children, and I didn’t know what being gay would mean in terms of my family, my wife, my children. It was a horrible place to be. It took a few more years of being scared to death, and going to two different therapists, before I finally decided that the best thing for everyone involved was for me to get divorced and come out. I had been suicidal for years, and I eventually realized that my children needed a father who wanted to live, who looked forward to tomorrow, and the only way I could be that man was to start over.
That’s when I started writing my letter to my uncle because I felt like he was the only one who would understand. My parents didn’t understand, most of my friends didn’t understand—it was something I didn’t know how to explain, so I started writing.
Coming out was TERRIFYING. I remember going to gay bars and standing against the wall like a thirteen-year-old kid at a middle school dance. I was awkward and shy and didn’t have a clue how to talk to people. I drank a lot; it would take two or three drinks just to get the courage to step away from the wall and actually talk to people. And the feeling of talking to a guy who seemed to like me was great, and scary, and nerve-wracking, and amazing, all at the same time. I’d spent my whole life aching to find a nice guy who wanted to hold my hand so the first time I went on a date and held a guy’s hand was AMAZING. I’d never felt happier.
But I was living in Oklahoma at the time, and someone driving by yelled “faggots!” at us. A couple weeks later I was in line at a bar with my boyfriend and two tough guys in front of us said they hoped “no fucking fags” came into their bar tonight. My boyfriend and I were both over six feet tall so I tapped one of the guys on the shoulder and said, “Hey, you’re looking at two fags right now. What do you want to do about it?”
I had never been in a fight in my whole life, but I was ready. I wanted a black eye. I wanted everybody to know I was out, that I was a fag, that I was ready to fight for the right to be who I was. The owner, Edna, leaned over the bar and said “Nobody’s gonna fight about something that stupid in my bar! Free round for the four of you as soon as you hug each other. Do it! Now!” And so we all awkwardly hugged each other and drank Tequila together.
Even a year after coming out, I can’t say things had really gotten better. My ex-wife was still calling me a fag in front of my children, and screaming all the time. So, I eventually took her to court for that and other custody violations, spending $50,000 I didn’t have. But it was worth it—she hasn’t called me a faggot since, and my children haven’t heard their mother or new step-father talk disparagingly of gays in their presence either. My ex-wife and I share our children equally, and the kids are doing great.
And me, I’m doing great. Finally. I’ve had a lot of different boyfriends. I’ve fallen in love a couple times. I’ve felt that wonderful, giddy feeling you get when someone you like likes you back, and the gut-crushing feeling you get when that same someone lets you go. I’m finally not desperate anymore. I’m just me, happy, and gay, but not defined by my sexuality. The best thing about coming out has been to watch myself go from someone terrified of being gay, to someone willing to fight for my right to be openly gay, to, finally, just another guy living his life who happens to be gay. That’s the best thing of all. I had to fight hard for it, but it finally happened—the freedom to just be myself, no apologies, no fighting, no drama. The day I thought would never come, finally snuck up on me and surprised me. My grandfather was famous for telling people, “Something good is going to happen to you!” And, it’s strange to admit it, but he was right.
That’s what I’d like to tell my Uncle Ronnie today: It really does get better.

_______...__________

Once again, here's the link to Amazon for the IGB book, for which 100% of the proceeds go to programs helping gay youth: IT GETS BETTER book

And finally, a great cover of this great song, "Oooh Child" :)

"Petit Mort": Gay Love, Orgasm, and Death in the '40s

2011-06-04T11:18:00.001-05:00

Songs like the one in the video below were pretty common in the 1950s, and I'm sure countless feminists have written their dissertations on them, songs involving a teenage date, death, a car, and, in this example, the sea . . . always a metaphor for what the French so glibly call "le petit mort", the "little death," aka sex and the orgasm. I love these songs.

What is new to me are books like the one I just finished reading on the plane coming home from New York-- Charles Jackson's "The Fall of Valor." Apparently there were a lot of books like this written in the '50s, and Jackson set the bar, coming out with his in 1946, just two years after The War ended, when all the GIs were coming back home and moving out to the suburbs and having babies, taking women out of the factories and insisting they remain barefoot and pregnant for the next ten years. In the midst of all this, Jackson came out with this gem, as well as another, "The Lost Weekend," and people were shocked and appalled. "The Lost Weekend" is a sort of "Leaving Las Vegas" tale documenting a minute by minute account of an alcoholic in a fictional novel, and it was the first time this sort of thing had been published. "The Fall of Valor," on the other hand, wasn't about an alcoholic, but a man on vacation with his wife in Cape Cod, tempted by the wiles of a sexy GI.

Reading it now, in 2011, the first 2/3 of the novel are about as shocking as Adam Lambert coming out -- if your eyes tear up at all it's simply because you're laughing so hard at the high drama surrounding what seems so tame nowadays, a man (God forbid) attracted to another man. I kept wanting to give up, but I was bored, and even accidentally spilled my soda on the man sitting next to me, so I was shamed into keeping my face hidden behind a book and forced to finish Jackson's tale.

Here you have a 40 year old man with a younger, beautiful wife; he is a writer in New York; they have two boys, Allan and Ted, and have been married for about 10 years. Set during the war, John, the protagonist, is ashamed of the fact that he's too old for the draft and, also, because he very rarely likes to have sex with his wife. His manhood is being questioned at every turn and he and his wife decide to take a time out, sending the kids to stay with her parents in Maine while the couple takes the train out to the Cape to rekindle their love.

This is the first 2/3 of the book, with maybe two conversations between the couple involved, and lots of landscape description and hints, very vague, subliminal hints at the coming struggle -- once, watching shirtless young men playing tennis, John recoils from the scene in horror, thinking to himself that the new relaxed dress codes ought to be abolished because young men should not be allowed to walk around half-naked like that. From this one scene we are supposed to read between the lines and realize that the real reason he recoils in horror is because he quite likes watching the muscular, shirtless men lunging around on a tennis court.

Finally, enter Cliff, a young GI due to go back to the Pacific theater once his injuries heal. Cliff is an enormous man, 6'2 and 250 pounds, built like Hercules, with shocking blonde curls and a winning smile. Cliff and his wife Billie are on their honeymoon and still strangers, so it's natural for Cliff to bond with John and begin to pal around with him.

I won't spoil the rest of the story for you -- but from this point, the drama really heats up. An older couple on the beach realize that John and Cliff are falling in love; John and his wife finally discuss it when she sees Cliff's Navy cap tucked gently in a pocket in John's suitcase. She leaves abruptly for Maine and John returns to New York with nary a kiss or embrace from Cliff. Until, near the end of the book, Cliff comes to visit John in his apartment. I didn't know what to expect, but having listened to so many songs from this time, I should have known it would end violently. And it did. It wasn't a teenage romance, and there was no car, and no ocean, but there was most certainly a "petit mort," or what could even be described as a "grand mal," a big, bad thing.

It's the generation that read books like this when they were in their young adulthood who are today the biggest impediment to gay marriage. They are the people who may very well go to their death thinking that any sort of attraction involving two men should end violently, if not in death then at least in prison. Today, a novel with the same theme would never have a title like "The Fall of Valor;" if anything, its protagonist might be celebrated for finally coming to terms with his true desires. What I did like about the book, however, was that it was, more than anything, a book about love and marriage and the tensions that build up between two people who have been together for ten years.

It makes for boring reading, but it's real life all the same. I have to admit I almost think sometimes that we've come too far; a title like "The Fall of Valor" overstates the case, but celebrating this theme as many gay rights activists surely would today is also taking things out of context. I think it's why many people are still reluctant to give gays the right to marry, because of this sense that gays don't respect marriage itself. These people, however, miss the point, which is that gay AND straight couples no longer see marriage as a lifelong, unalterable contract but instead a social declaration of love that might, half of the time, result in divorce. Me, I'm pretty much ecstatic we have the right to have no-fault divorces these days, and even gay marriage in places like Vermont and Iowa, but I also kind of wish sometimes that people stayed together longer. Gay or straight, marriage is pretty tough, and adultery, whether emotionally or physically, is some pretty violent stuff.