Anger and the Mindful Response

At a talk at the local Zen Center this past weekend, a guest teacher spoke on the concept of "skillful means" - depending on who you ask, this is either the Buddhist response to a radical view that every context merits a unique response reflecting the Reality of the Moment, or a way of explaining the often contradictory advice of the Buddha 2600 years into a religion with >1000 early years of text reporting quotes attributed to the historical Buddha. At many points the topic shifted to anger, and its role in responding to injustice; the guest teacher pointed out that it was never appropriate, but I personally was a little disappointed in the level of discourse and the examples given (i.e., "..look at the Dalai Lama who has refrained from building an army to combat the Chinese" - I'll be honest, I'm not *that* sympathetic to the despotic regimes of any old feudal, theocratic dictator, and if I remember correctly, Tibet had a small standing army that failed to fight off the Chinese at the time of the invasion. A general without an army is not equal to a pacifist). What resonated with me was a post I read on Dogo Barry Graham's blog on my return home, titled "No Righteous Anger":

A Zen student asked me if anger is always self-centered. I answered, "Yes."

Anger is always a cover for pain or fear. I see an animal being abused, and feel an awful sadness - for about a second. Then anger appears, and I want to hurt the person who hurt the animal - because it is easier to feel that way than to just be with the sadness. The anger gives a sense of escape and a sense of control.

Someone says or does something that hurts me. For about a second, there is just the hurt, the sadness. Then anger appears, and I want to retaliate. The sense of escape, the sense of control, of being able to do something about it.

Anger can only exist when there is a self-centered desire for things to be other than they are. When I see that I don't have to do anything about the sadness or the hurt, and relax into the sadness or hurt, without clinging and without pushing away, there is no anger. Drop the self-centered story, and what's there is just life as it is. And with that acceptance comes the clarity necessary to take care of what needs to be taken care of, to treat the source of the pain and fear.

This grabbed me; anger is definitely my intense response to acts of injustice and bigotry, and the overwhelming intensity of the anger increases to the degree it matches the sources of my own experiences of injustice - homophobia, or injustice justified by religious beliefs. Note the ending of Graham's post, though. Dropping the self-centered story, seeing what's there as it is, and not being afraid to simply feel and live through pain or sadness are great outcomes in and of themselves, but the fruit of that effort is in being able to treat the source. A response built out of feeling the full brunt of the pain and, without letting anger cloud your judgment, either taking action to live with or treat the source of that pain is the great outcome. As the blogosphere still roils with updates on the spread of anti-gay violence through Latin America and anti-gay legislation through Africa, many governments have chosen to limit their investment or withdraw support from those nations, particularly Uganda with it's notorious "Kill Gays" Bill on the docket. I've only seen one mainstream news report that has halted the near global knee-jerk reaction of attributing this problem to the people and culture of Uganda and Africa: Rachel Maddow.



It is rare that a journalist is so well prepared. I'll remind any readers at this point of Richard Cohen's polished spot on CNN that presented him in a favorable light, a week before the Daily Show spoofed CNN's interview and cost Cohen most his supporters simply by letting him speak for himself, not using serious sounding reporters and the trick of voice-over to make a quack sound more reasonable.

I've been shocked and frightened by the events in Uganda, but not just because such suffering occurs elsewhere in the world. As Maddow's story above highlights, and as sites on the blogosphere have intensely followed, the situation in Uganda is the product of homegrown anti-gay sentiment here in the United States, fueled by conferences, speaking tours, and books paid for by US citizens. I'm not frightened about the bill in Uganda on behalf of Ugandans alone. I'm frightened because this is the successful accomplishment of a decade of Bush's Bible-based, abstinence-only programs combined with the well-funded effort of the religious right here in my own country.

I think the response of countries like Sweden are reasonable: without a large, homegrown, anti-gay movement, they have vowed to withdraw support to Uganda because, from their vantage point, this is an inhumane bill. The U.S. vowing to do the same is hypocritical, however. It is emotionally satisfying in the short run to hear that Obama's administration is considering withdrawing aid to Uganda, but when the existence and rationale of this bill is based upon U.S. anti-gay activists, with U.S. currency, where is the attention to the source of the pain and sorrow in this case? How, and in what way, does the U.S. government or do concerned U.S. citizens respond to the blood on our own hands if this bill passes? Shedding light on the true source, as Maddow is attempting, is a start.

What did I do?

I realize that many of my blogs in the past half year have revolved around my mother's severing contact over an unwillingness to refrain from preaching her view that god hates homosexuality and that it's a lifestyle choice she merely "disagrees" with. Many conservatives now argue that they're not bigots, but merely hold a difference of opinion (though last I checked, the definition of a bigot involved differences in opinion over the value, worth, and range of autonomy of types of beings you dislike? C'est la meme chose?).

A few years back, my mother visited me, and while I was at work began reading my back issues of Mother Jones magazine. I was pretty ecstatic about this... though I hear this wasn't always so, for the time I've read Mother Jones this past decade I've perceived it as a philosophically left, but empirically balanced sort of news magazine that strives toward reflecting reality without obsessing over political labels (although, Stephen Colbert often lamented during the Bush Administration, reality does have a liberal bias). I bought my mother a subscription, and she has enjoyed it since... it seemed to soften her more knee jerk moments of conservatism, and she seemed a little less hateful of those different from herself. With the exception of gays and lesbians.

I learned today through a link-back to an older article that Mother Jones hasn't exactly helped me on this one. In what was likely a column in her first subscription to MoJo, an article by psychologist Greg Greenberg argued, in that same balanced-seeming, resource-citing way, that sexuality was likely more a choice than fate. As I believe I've commented before, belief that non-heterosexual orientations are a choice are highly correlated with anti-gay social and political views (and vice versa) - though there's good evidence that the prejudice comes first and this may be the most popular justification for it. My criticism is not that an article appeared I disagreed with, however, but that one appeared that mis-cited data, presented contrary opinions as political talking points, and implied that a fairly radical anti-gay group was, perhaps, worth listening to more closely.

Unskeptical Swallowing of Information

Greenberg opened with a story of a man, labeled "Aaron," who had disliked his sexual orientation and pursued "treatment" to change it. Though unsuccessful in his attempts at sex with women, he had maintained celibacy from men and avoided intimacy. The author describes him nervously flinching from inadvertent physical contact, but hedges on whether this "ex-gay" is merely suppressing his sexual attraction to men. Greenberg prints, without refutation (all of these theories of the etiology of homosexuality have failed empirical scrutiny) Aaron's recollection of his therapy:

"It turns out that I didn't have the faintest idea what love was," he says. That's not all he didn't know. He also didn't know that his same-sex attraction, far from being inborn and inescapable, was a thirst for the love that he had not received from his father, a cold and distant man prone to angry outbursts, coupled with a fear of women kindled by his intrusive and overbearing mother, all of which added up to a man who wanted to have sex with other men just so he could get some male attention. He didn't understand any of this, he tells me, until he found a reparative therapist whom he consulted by phone for nearly 10 years, attended weekend workshops, and learned how to "be a man."

I don't question Greenberg's choice as a journalist that this account and the therapy are interesting and should be reported. Greenberg has made a point of self-identifying as a clinical psychologist versed in the current research, however - leaving these statements standing without question implies that they haven't been researched and failed, both as interventions and as causes of homosexuality. Additionally, when Greenberg claims that "It wasn't a matter of ignorance—he has an advanced degree—and it really wasn't a psychopathological thing—he rejects the idea that he's ever suffered from internalized homophobia. He just didn't want to be gay, and, like millions of Americans dissatisfied with their lives, he sought professional help and reinvented himself," he should have been skeptical. First, regardless of the source of the advanced degree, it obviously included no information on sexuality or gender. Additionally, just not wanting to be gay, and seeking professional help, actually are hallmarks (and frequently, requirements) for considering whether an individual possesses internalized homophobia. When John Martin and Laura Dean at Columbia University began studying internalized homophobia in the 1980s, they actually were careful to include a desire to no longer be homosexual as central to their measure (Martin & Dean, 1987). Nungesser's (1988) popular internalized homophobia scale went further, asking if a person had ever sought treatment to change his sexuality (acknowledging yes was considered evidence of internalized homophobia). Greenberg doesn't provide this information, and leaves it up to the reader; he appears to accept this answer as good enough, however.

Later, Greenberg describes attending the annual NARTH conference. NARTH (the National Association for the Research and Treatment of Homosexuality) was formed by psychoanalytically-inclined psychiatrists angry over the removal of homosexuality as a mental disorder from the DSM-III (despite research going back to the 1950s that challenged its role as a neurotic disorder). They parrot similar views to that stated above, conflating gender and sexuality, and promoting a view that being a real man or woman and quenching same-sex desires for affection that your parents neglected to fulfill will eliminate same-sex attraction (again, all of this has failed in nearly an entire century to find support in the research).

Untruths and Half Truths

Worse than eating the propaganda of anti-gay groups and failed ex-gays whole, however, is Greenberg's sophomoric revisionism of cutting edge sexuality research, and dismissal of that research that he disagrees with. I actually agree with his contention that there are bigger and better fish to fry in the struggle for queer rights than perseverating too obsessively on defending non-heterosexual orientations as the result of biological precursors we don't fully understand. In fact, the only reference to a large body of research on biological (specifically, neo-natal) effects on the development of sexuality are presented as political talking points of the HRC's Wayne Beson. Greenberg doesn't weigh in on the biological arguments, and forgets to mention that Wayne Beson isn't just a random man on the street, but photographed John Paulk - the ex-gay featured in a Newsweek article that Aaron, interviewed above, says inspired him to seek treatment - leaving a gay bar in D.C. This formed the basis of Beson's book, Anything But Straight, which documented the near universal history of the founders of ex-gay organizations to come back out of the closet, backslide, or admit to no personal change.

Greenberg also describes the excitement of NARTH conference attendees at the publication of an article by Dr. Spitzer supporting conversion therapies. He doesn't go into the extensive caveats Spitzer put in the article, the politics behind it (Exodus International, the ex-gay ministry recently linked to the Kill Gays Bill in Uganda, had hand-picked the interviewees), and even Dr. Spitzer had quickly distanced himself from the results of the brief phone survey after realizing he had been duped into being a pawn in a game he was unfamiliar with.

He extensively abused his quotations and interviews with Dr. Lisa Diamond, a psychologist and researcher of women's sexuality whose work I'm familiar with and fond of. While noting Diamond's comment that there's a difference between sexuality being fluid or changing over the lifespan and the concept of "choice," Greenberg moves on to the peanut gallery at NARTH to reinterpret this, adding his own perception that their views aren't "all that different." The proof is in the pudding, however. Diamond's work, as she frequently points out, outlines differences in womens' sexuality that set it apart from mens'; the point of highlighting sexual fluidity and changing attraction over the lifespan in women is that research on men doesn't support this, and seems instead to favor older models of one's sexuality as set early (or inborn), stable, and unresponsive to willful efforts to change. When NARTH glosses over this, Greenberg joins them, and a unique experience of some women is stretched to breaking in its application to all humans.

Greenberg should also be aware of the limits and rules around peer-reviewed publications. He sympathetically reports the claim of a NARTH conference attendee, Elan Karten, that, no really, he does have data that proves gays can change - his dissertation proved it! Those evil forces in charge of the research journals are blocking him from publication, however. This seems like a cute story, and getting published is tough - I can tell you from my own poor submission history that sometimes a board will agree that you have great data, interesting results, but in some way it doesn't fit their vision of what's appropriate for their journal. Good data on such a controversial topic, however, seems more, rather than less, likely to be published, despite Greenberg's frequent and bizarre claim that it's the result of an APA ban.

Shame on Mother Jones

I'm a long-time fan of Mother Jones; I realized thinking over the dates I was moving cross-country to my post-doc when this article was published, and likely had no time to read recent issues. This story is still linked back to, however (which is why I came across it today), still stands alone as the only coverage I could find Mother Jones has committed to this topic, and it takes a professional to know the above facts that Greenberg isn't sharing. Spitzer and Diamond's work doesn't support change or the possibility of change for unhappy gays, Aaron's life sounds tragic and I would go so far as to say he was unethically mistreated by his therapists, and NARTH is still an organization of anti-gay villains with a chip on their shoulder and lies in their mouth. When will that be worthy of coverage?

The Queer Psychologist Returns...

I realize it has been about 2 months since my last post - in large part due to travel! First, I presented some of my work on sexual minority stress as part of a panel at the annual conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. With barely a week back, my boyfriend and I packed our bags and head out for a whirlwind trip of India - Delhi, Agra, Allahabad, Varanasi, Bodh Gaya, Kolkata, Bhubaneswar, Puri, and even a few hours about town in Mumbai. While there I managed to stumble across a talk R. Raj Rao was giving at the Delhi branch of Oxford Books (a big city, gay-friendly chain I was to come across in each major Indian city). Rao is a professor of English at the University of Pune, and author of one of India's few gay novels, The Boyfriend. He was doing a reading at a release party for his new book, Whistling in the Dark, a series of interviews with queer South Asians discussing their experiences - interviewees spanned other out academics, those under trial from police entrapment schemes in cruising grounds, and working collar married men (though marriage is ubiquitous in India, and difficult for many gay-identified men to safely avoid in a nation that only recently, kind of, decriminalized gay relationships).

Most surprising in that talk, in a nation with total queer invisibility in most of the country, the descriptions of those lives that were discussed in the talk sounded remarkably similar to lives I observed living in the Midwest - that is, the justifications and descriptions of why couples marry, and the rationales they use for entering marriages, are surprisingly common between a Hindu in Orissa or a fundamentalist Christian in Missouri. One interesting addition, though I think many of us can spot the parallels, are the role of men in India termed khotis - effeminate men, always the "passive" partner/bottom, who are further stereotyped among the gay community in India as socially and religiously conservative - khotis are depicted as the most strongly opposed to a public space for gayness, encourage marriage and "traditional" lives, and build strong communal ties to the hijras - eunuchs who live as women. The commonality seems to be in the respect both groups hold for reifying and supporting traditional roles of gender and marriage, and, allegedly, conspiring to supress public styles of queer life that don't fit those boxes of either secrecy or exclusion from society. That is, many masculine-identified, relationship minded gay men that would rather not marry or lie to their wives or families exist in India, but complain that even the gay organizations have difficulty making room for them. This makes space for the same sort of inversion-inspired pontificating about sexuality by some academics and religious groups in India that has largely been marginalized in Western countries. Is there an Indian homosexual that differs in cause, agency, and ability to choose one's sexual orientation that differs from the LGB folk in the West? That seems unlikely to me, not the least due to the unparsimonious assumptions it makes about human sexuality, but has some large representation in academic debates there, even by Indian luminaries such as Hoshang Merchant (though I've only heard glossed over references to his views, so no offense to Professor Merchant or his fans if this is a misrepresentation).

Since my trip to India, which I hope to write more on, I've spent most the last week with Dr. Ilan Meyer, a sort of research hero of mine in that his work on the minority stress model has inspired my thesis and dissertation research, and is the source of a grant application I'm currently working on with my colleagues. This is a model grounded in sociological and social psychological theories that describes how differential levels of substance use and mental illness among gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals (though research is ongoing with women and ethnic minority groups) are accounted for by a mixture of discriminatory events, internalized homophobia, and the expectation of stigma (i.e., the fear that you'll be responded to in a prejudicial manner - all minority group members tend to carry this around to some degree, and the greater the salience, the worse the impact). I'll write more about Meyer and my current work soon! It's good to be home after my month out of the country, though.

Bicentric Goggles

There's a topic that I've encountered many times in therapy, the classroom, and in trainings. Despite some sexologists' belief that human sexuality might fit a bell curve (which is compelling, and I've argued this in some lectures and guest talks), most surveys yield somewhat J shaped distributions - a clear spike of gay and lesbian identified persons, with extremely few willing to self-identify as bisexual. Surveys of fantasy, behavior, and physiological arousal explain this dip somewhat; many of those that consider themselves gay, and possibly many more who consider themselves straight, are probably somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. A talk I saw at the recent annual convention of the APA highlighted the role of comfort with paradox found among self-identified bisexuals.

Those individuals on the edge of gay or straight, who are truly more bisexual in emotional and sexual potential, in my experience, often overgeneralize. They assume that there's an element of choice that everyone experiences in their sexual lives, and despite possessing a non-normative sexuality themselves, they rarely make the connection that there's something unique about that experience.

A major facet of the conflicts I've noted in past blogs about my mother is her bisexuality. My father had commented in the past, and my mother confirmed to me when I came out to her, that she had a relationship with a woman after divorcing my father. She felt we "needed a father" and so left her girlfriend for a man. At the time, I interpreted this to be an attempt to show empathy. In the years since, I've come to realize that this was her attempt to share that she decided to ignore her attraction to women and, probably from her view, "choose" to be straight. This is actually very similar to the "ex-lesbian" narratives of the major ex-gay/conversion ministries out there. For instance, Anne Paulk, who once appeared with her "ex-gay" husband John Paulk of Exodus Ministries/Focus on the Family, claimed to be an "ex-lesbian"... without ever actually having had a relationship with a woman. In her case, she had some close friends during a brief period in college and flirted with the notion of same-sex intimacy without ever acting on it. As psychologist Lisa Diamond has noted in her new book Sexual Fluidity, the range of attraction and fluidity some women experience is much broader than that noted in research with men.

This takes us back to the unstudied phenomena of bicentrism - individuals with bisexual experiences, even when just fantasy and attraction without behavior, often tend to generalize these experiences to others. There are distinct differences in sexual presentation, however. While the ex-gay community is rife with women who had a single fling or merely a flirtation with having a same-sex relationship, "ex-gay" men tend to have been in predominantly male relationships, and as demonstrated by some high profile cases like Ted Haggard, they tend to "relapse" to relationships with men. Recent research has even argued that bisexual-identified men are fairly far in the same-sex oriented region of the Kinsey scale, but this makes sense without undermining male bisexuality or fluidity. Male acculturation in our society is pretty powerful in its conflation of heterosexuality and masculinity.. and there's some data re: fantasy and attraction in men that implies they have to be fairly close to totally gay before even admitting to bisexuality. For this reason, even fewer men, though some, consider their sexuality to have any component of choice to it.

There are a number of reasons that this experience of "choice" matters. First, one of the greatest predictors of anti-gay beliefs is the myth that homosexuality is a choice (in the thinking of social conservatives, bisexuality is rarely acknowledged to exist). It creates an unusual folk theory of sexuality, in which everyone is defined as fully bisexually capable, yet needing to "choose" heterosexuality. I've mostly just met "out" bisexuals who are a thorn in the side of the gay and lesbian identified persons, insisting in a base bisexuality that we're denying as much as straight folk. Not so. My experience with my mother has brought me in contact with the realization, for the first time, that she considers herself an "ex-gay" - she interprets her bisexuality as a sign that bisexuality is universal, but in turn considers it to mean that her choice of her current monogamous partner, a male, is equivalent to a "choice" of her sexual orientation.

It creates an impasse. How do you convince someone, even someone fully aware of her bisexual past, that her experience of her sexuality, likely one never fully discussed with anyone else and not one that she has ever questioned or compared against other experiences, that it's not a universal experience? I think for us Kinsey 6 sorts, it's easy... we live in a world that reflects an extreme type of sexuality practically opposite our internal experience. Bisexual individuals live in a world that strongly demonstrates the "norm," and for those who choose it, it reinforces the view of choice through a conservative dialectic that emphasizes "choice" from the pulpit. I think straight individuals exposed to a gay world that lacks any resonance in their own subjective sexual experience actually have a significantly easier time understanding that their sexuality is not universal.

The Social Side of Prejudice

Over the past few years, particularly in discussion with heterosexual friends and family, I've realized that there's one major divide in which many of my straight friends are not yet willing to join the cause of LGBT equality. This is in the realm of social acceptability. I've heard it said before, and it makes sense on a number of levels, that what the Civil Rights movement eventually did to white society was to plant the seeds of smaller change through raising awareness that bigotry was not okay. Now, the prospect of a person using racist language or telling a racist joke at a workplace without prior knowledge of the views of his/her co-workers is difficult to imagine. It was when white America became nervous and ashamed about voicing racist views to other white Americans that the climate really began to change.... and it figures, as children would either stop hearing racist tropes repeated, or would see the discomfort or embarrassment that surrounded those expressions.

This topic came to mind after reading a blog posted at the Enemy Combatant Trailmix Appreciation Club titled "On religion, rights and Ref 71":

There are times in everyone’s life when they find that a principle or belief is being challenged. The things that challenge us may seem tiny and casual, but they turn out to be anything but. It’s easy to shake your fist and make proclamations when there is nothing to lose, when it costs you nothing. It’s only when there is something at stake that you find out how often you’re just talking to hear your own voice.



Today, someone I considered a friend told another friend, who happens to be a lesbian, that he wasn’t sure how we was going to vote on Ref. 71 . For those of you who don’t know, Ref. 71 is a ballot measure in Washington State to expand the rights provided to same sex couples in domestic partnerships.



Anyone who has read anything here likely knows my views on same sex couples, but let me make them clear one more time: Love is love. People are people. There is absolutely no relationship between the gender of the people you have sex with, and being a good person. None. Further, it is my firmly held and often stated belief that if you fall anything short of fully supporting completely equal rights for all people, regardless of their race or sexual orientation, you cannot truly be a good person. It has in my mind always been that simple.



Now, this friend who said he didn’t know how he would vote on Ref. 71 is someone I have considered a very good person. He is kind, caring, thoughtful and always comforting people. I’ve been surprised by our friendship, because he is religious, and I frequently have a hard time being friends with people who are religious. However, I’ve always found this person to be thoughtful on issues, open and smart. He’s been one of the few people who made me think it was possible to really be friends with the deeply religious. Honestly, I was absolutely stunned to hear that he had said this thing. I would never for an instant have thought that he would fall so short on such an important issue.



As I walked downtown after finding out about this, I found myself making excuses for him. Telling myself that he’s not really a bad person, he’s just confused. His church and his church friends have him confused, but really, he’s a good person who is simply not right on this issue, and we can still be friends, of course we can.



Then my brain kicked my emotions in the balls, and woke me up. We can’t be friends. Of course we can’t. It doesn’t matter if he’s confused. It doesn’t matter if his religious friends tell him to vote against it, to “protect” traditional marriage. It doesn’t matter that he is kind to me, that we share interests and laughs. None of that can matter, when someone is undecided on whether they think other people deserve equal rights. None of it can matter when someone can look at one of their friends and say “I’m not sure if I’m going to vote for you to have the same rights and privileges I do”.



It hurts me to lose a friend over a conversation I didn’t even hear. But it would hurt me more to bury my head in the sand and pretend that the rules are different when we’re talking about someone I personally know and care about.

Everything we do, say and think matters. Everything has consequences, positive or negative, intended or unintended.



In closing, all I can say is: Please go out and vote to approve Ref. 71 if you are in Washington State. It’s not enough, because it’s still separate but not quite equal, but at least it’s one more step in the right direction. Please remember that what you say matters, but what you do matters more. Stand up for equal rights for all. Stand up whether you’re gay or straight. Stand up even more if you are straight, because the minority needs members of the majority to stand with them and stop them being treated as second class citizens.

How many of my straight friends or family would have this courage? In fact, I doubt all of my gay ones would make this tough call. I don't think the LGBT movement will be considered successful until we hit a point when straight Americans, speaking privately at home or work with other straight Americans, become nervous about sharing their bias. When fear occurs that what they're about to say impacts the friends, family, and loved ones of the audience, even if only speaking to other straight folk, and that they are jeopardising their own relationships by voicing their prejudice. When individuals who pride themselves on their faith, compassion, or decency realize that those same values will be judged wanting if they argue that bigotry is a preferred outcome. Reading this blog today brought many thoughts to mind, not the least of which is that I've probably been too lenient in letting some of my straight friends off the hook when they admit that they don't challenge others, or that they feel that religion is a cop out that makes anti-gay bigotry okay. People did, and do, blame Jesus for their hatred of other races, and it is treated as a fringe belief and considered a distasteful excuse. What will get us to the place when the same is considered so for homophobia?

I'm not completely sure. I feel that there's a large obstacle in that many gays and lesbians have their own internalized homophobia they're still working on, or avoiding thinking about, which gets in the way (for every straight person who has heard an anti-gay tirade and not commented afterward, there are queer persons who have done the same). It also teeters on using shame, the weapon so commonly employed against us, against our enemies, and while I'm not opposed to that, there's a fine line of doing so ethically and without becoming overly aggressive. Shame, after all, is guilt imposed by others - the awareness of committing a social wrong. In these early days, particularly when anti-gay activists hold such sway in some parts of the country, shame can easily and frustratingly be rejected when a lone gay person is the only one to be offended. This is where our straight allies come in. The LGBT project of the ACLU has been doing a "Tell Three" initiative, asking that gays and lesbians talk about their lives and issues with three of their friends as a way of promoting rights. I would go further. Tell three of your nearest and dearest straight friends WHY it's not okay for them to excuse homophobia among their straight friends, the ways that it hurts you, and the importance of them speaking up for you when you're not there to defend yourself.

Wedding Bells...

My younger brother was married today to his girlfriend and the mother of my niece in a ceremony back East earlier today. Congratulations! Due to some late schedule changes to the wedding date in recent months, I was unable to attend, but my warmest wishes go out. I have some ambivalence as I write about this.... it's a very concrete reminder of the fact that my mother (see posts below) severed contact, in large part, through her perception couched as religious belief that my own discussions of my ability to marry were offensive. We, as a queer community, still very much live in a world in which our abilities to guide our own lives and shape the courses of our future are dependent upon a heterosexual majority that varies in its views from dislike to outright hostility. I spent the evening having dinner with an old acquaintance of my boyfriend - ethnically French, this man currently lives in Madrid. A good part of our discussion touched on his experiences with a boyfriend who still struggles with his sexual identity, having been raised in a small, rural village in Spain. Again I'm reminded of the urban/rural split. It's most unfortunate because, as I think I've touched on before, not all gays and lesbians are comfortable or at home in cities. There's no true progress for the queer community until a person is just as capable and able to freely and comfortably live an open life in the tiny rural town of his/her upbringing as s/he is in a large urban center. That said, we also spent a lot of time discussing the various ways that our friends treat sexuality around their children. As both I and my peer set enter our 30s, an increasing percentage of our friends are having children. It is disturbing to see the differences in their attitudes and to compare notes... friends that seemed indistinguishable in their openness before having children are suddenly at polar opposites in either being open to our lives, or suffering misguided beliefs that somehow the existence of gays and lesbians is a helpful or necessary part of their child's upbringing. Many of my closest straight friends have not yet had children. As my dinner company shared his experiences, I found myself wondering where they would land on that spectrum. I'm actually not sure where my brothers are on that - both my fully biological brothers now have children, but I've not been in a major relationship since they have had their daughters. To be honest, unfortunately, I'm not hopeful, and I'm not sure either of them have seriously considered or thought about how they would present any husband of mine to their family. While some of my friends are willing to include their family by making whatever concession is necessary, I find myself growing ever more stubborn - I've no interest in being complicit with lies, and if they want to give their children fictional accounts about Uncle Matthew and his life, let them do so in my absence.

I'm traveling to a wedding with my boyfriend in a month. It's in a conservative state, and I'll only be a few hours from where my mother lives, who still refuses to speak to me after I gave the ultimatum that she at least discuss her anti-gay views before she can be a part of my life. My friend I'll see wed and I often don't see eye to eye... she often leans toward concessions for the sake of keeping conversations open and engaged with those who harbor bigoted views that they base upon their spiritual understanding. I'm not sure that I'm right, though my view is grounded in the simple belief that only social norms change the acceptability of views. So long as moderate or middle of the road sorts keep silent or maintain an unspoken sense that, while they may disagree, it is certainly understandable that a person might be virulently anti-gay, then it creates an air of acceptability that actually allows those folk to cling to the reasonability of their beliefs. When both our queer and straight allies begin to make clear, or at a minimum, voice their concern, that it is indecent and immoral to be bigoted in that way, that is when people will begin to change. As social scientists witnessed during the civil rights struggle, as soon as it became popular/conventional wisdom that it was not okay to judge others based on race, then relatively quickly overt statements about these views began to fade from public life, followed by a more gradual disappearance of covert statements to this effect. Once a prejudiced person stops talking about it, and accepts that it is a social reality that their views are unwelcome in polite company, it begins to chisel away at that self-righteous sense of moral authority that pervades a lot of current hate speech. Once you buy into the idea that your hateful views might be points of shame, you must seriously consider that they might be wrong. In my case, it is unfortunate, because not only is my mother in a rural environment where anti-gay bias is fairly well accepted, and a member of a denomination that is increasingly defining itself as the anti-gay alternative, but no one in the family, including other LGBT members, is willing to voice or discuss with her either her views or even comment on their awareness that she has severed contact. Worse yet, she has chosen my teenage stepbrothers as her confidents in this, choosing to use it as a teaching moment in which to illustrate her faith in Christ and the importance of maintaining "virtue" in the face of adversity.

I find myself reflecting increasingly on the elderly gay men I have seen clinically in the past, and their obsessions with parental rejection, particularly maternal rejection, that have haunted them throughout their life. Will I become one of these? Will this become an increasingly consuming wound that I am unable to recover from? On the inverse, it gives me limited options.... there are essentially two ways in which I can resume contact: grovel and pretend to be as ashamed of myself, particularly my sexuality, as she would like me to be; or be a thorn in her side, and reinitiate contact focused on maintaining constant pressure regarding her bigotry, serving to remind her in the midst of her consolations and silent family that somewhere, sometime, other people are aware and judge her views differently. Which would most likely effect change? Which would most likely bring peace and resolution to myself? I suppose a part of my worry is that, as the dispensable middle child I've always been treated as in my family, without being a thorn in her side she already views severing ties with me as peace and resolution, and this is an option that, for obvious selfish reasons, I would like to deny her.

Defining Sangha

I'm going to pick up on a similar thread to my last blog regarding definitions of community and the urban/rural divide. Yesterday I attended a session of the San Francisco Zen Center's Queer Dharma group, and the theme of the day was Sangha. Sangha is an old Sanskrit term used in the Buddhist tradition to refer to either a) the community of ascetics, b) all followers of Buddhism, including laypersons, or c) all sentient beings, as we're all bound up in this intersubjective/interbeing Universe. The question posed to the group for discussion, though, was what it means to be a part of a queer sangha. Many straight residents of the zen center apparently have asked, out of honest curiosity, what the role is and why it is important.

A variety of responses were shared: a common identity, a relaxation of the guardedness that comes of practicing in straight spaces, etc. My thoughts were that, in being given the opportunity to explore our minds in the safety of queer spaces, we are able to bolster ourselves and come in contact with reality without the baggage and implications of a world that constantly delegates our lives and relationships to secondhand status. For those of us in the Bay Area, most of us transplants, contact with family and friends in other parts of the country, we are implicitly expected to share their reality, and assist them in subjugating our own experiences. This occurs when family members speak openly and excitedly of upcoming heterosexual weddings in the family, yet feign offense (or are truly offended.... doesn't matter, really) by discussion of same-sex marriages - either those planned, or obstacles planning them. Historically, in the gay community, and this is often reflected in the attitudes of older members of the LGBT community, topics that offended heterosexual family members or friends were avoided or apologized for. Now, the LGBT community is increasingly claiming the right to acknowledge the fundamental lack of difference in these topics, and to expect that those heterosexuals we are closest to will share an equal view of the world.

The value of queer sangha? In this case, it would be to provide safety in exploring the layers of that baggage we carry with us (the internalized homopohbia and heterocentrism we were all raised with that says are lives really are judged by a different ruler, and are not merely equal), exploring the expectations of stigma we bring (it is difficult to live openly and form true relationships with others when we are hyper-aware or over-concerned that they might reject us), and finally, in a community of those with like experiences, we can discuss and explore the pain of violence done against us in the past. Many in the LGBT community suffer physical, sexual, or emotional mistreatment as either children or adults. That minority that suffered sexual abuse are often targeted and further exploited by "ex-gay ministries" and "conversion" therapists who claim that those experiences caused their non-heterosexual orientation (in fact, a dear friend of mine participated in a group at a church based in Akron, Ohio; they would screen potential group members for those with abuse, then after presenting their abuse->homosexuality theory at the first therapy group would ask those with histories of sexual abuse raise their hands. This was a powerful, manipulative way to create false consensus and the illusion that all gay men and lesbians were molested as children). Heterosexuals aren't aware of these spiritual abuses, or the forms of discrimination that the queer community faces.

One of the difficulties of living both at home, as an adolescent, and in the Midwest during college (to a limited extent) and graduate school (to, sadly, a larger extent) was that I was immersed in an environment that assumed heteronormativity, with very few who shared a view of basic human equality across sexualities (and, truth be told, genders, race, class, ethnicities, faith perspectives, etc.). Here in San Francisco, and with the luxury of a queer sangha (in this sense, meaning Buddhist practice group), none of that baggage needs to be dragged onto the cushion - and it's often too overwhelming to even see through in those contexts. Historically, I've always been the "token" gay at my zen groups. This varies as something of appreciated diversity, to novelty, to a point for genuine curiosity among other group members. Some of that is a reflection of the teachers I have had. The first, in Kent, OH, treated my sexuality not only as very matter of fact and mundane, but through his own experience as a somewhat persecuted youth for not being "butch" enough, identified strongly. The all straight sangha took his lead - while I sometimes felt left out when hetero themes dominated discussion, there was a tone set that there was something fundamentally right and, in the sense that all hetero men are challenged and pushed as children based on their adherence to gender norms, I was almost held up as a source of learning. I had some passing teachers, one that wasn't the most comfortable.... that's the one in which I was held up as a novelty, typically.... and then my last regular teacher was in Long Beach. He was a butch veteran, couldn't identify at all with most aspects of the queer experience, but was always fundamentally curious, interested, and open to his ignorance re: my life. I loaned him and his girlfriend a number of very queer films... The Living End, Shortbus, and Tarnation.... they loved them, enjoying both the meaning, common emotion, brought to their viewing profound depths of empathy, and interest. Again, their sangha viewed my sexuality as either normative, or a gift to the community. Watching how they set the tone.... well, it's difficult, at what's still, essentially, an early stage of my practice, to not want to continue with both only the Queer Dharma group, as well as practice at the essentially all-gay Hartford Street Zen Center. I realize the distance that having a strong practice group, as well as my current relationship, has truly helped me stay grounded in my own humanity, and my own dignity - this is what gave me the strength to cut off family members whose interactions were devolving to regular verbal gaybashings. Sangha is important. Queer sangha, moreso.