Working Together For a Better America, One Minority At A Time

The ancient Druids made a fatal mistake. They were a proud people who lived in tribal clans, and each member of each clan knew all too well that their clan was the best – more special, closer to the gods and trees, than the other clans – and so they were quite often waging war against each other. It was sort of like baseball used to be to Americans before we discovered the Middle East.

Anyway, the Druids were subsequently caught with their pants (or robes, probably, to be more specific) down when the Romans showed up. Many of the tribes capitulated to the Christian Romans because of clan leaders who didn’t want to fight them or accepted bribes for peacefully handing over their brethren and clansmen to be Roman slaves. But they did not ask the other clans for help. By the time the clans learned to set aside their differences and pride and fight the Romans together, it was far too late.

Why am I talking about the ancient Druids? Because I worry that minorities in America could be making the same mistake.

My girlfriend is on the board of Seattle Atheists, a local activist atheist nonprofit organization. They do all sorts of wonderful things, including (but certainly not limited to) fundraisers for Seattle Children’s Hospital, regular blood donations, and an educational yet silly annual celebration of Darwin’s birthday.

Recently, they decided to have an atheist coming out day and sought to share National Coming Out Day with the gay community. When Jami asked me my opinion on this, I thought it was a fantastic idea – what better way to show solidarity with their homosexual members and neighbors than by using the day to point out that we all have closets to come out of; that little controversial part of ourselves that removes us from the mainstream. Aside from this, I tend to feel like it’s past time that minorities stop feeling so damned individually special and start doing more to work with other minorities that not only often support each other, but also work toward many of the same ends for their own groups.

Unfortunately, Jami was asking my opinion because there was an uprising once word of the plan got out. Even atheist gays (gaytheists) were upset with the idea of sharing a gay day with good, supportive, LGBT-friendly folk and called the organizers thieves and accused them of devaluing and desecrating LBGTQ Coming Out Day. They ended up moving Atheist Coming Out Day to the following day. We were baffled.

Our own experiences with religion and ongoing dealings with Christian family members aside, what we see in the media every day is that the atheist cause and the gay civil rights movement are nearly inseparable. Atheists may not be dealing with overtly anti-atheist legislation (there is no Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy for atheists in the military and nobody – to my knowledge anyway – is trying to prevent atheists from marrying), but what atheists do deal with is something far more subtle: a culture that says that being an atheist means having absolutely no moral code, no divine reinforcement of good behavior or deterrent to bad behavior. It may not be reaching the evening news, but parents who come out of the atheist closet to their Christian spouses often find themselves abandoned by their spouses and families as well as lifelong friends. In the Bible Belt, it’s not uncommon for atheist parents (much like pagan parents all over the country) to lose custody and even visitation rights to their children once it is revealed to the judge that they are nonbelievers.

These sorts of situations should sound, unfortunately, all too familiar to the gay community. How many of us have lost our families and childhood friends once we came out of the closet? But I’m not sure if gays even really understand that atheists have these problems. Even where the problems aren’t as blatant as this, there are the little things that crop up, like Christians not wanting to say Merry Christmas to a known atheist, or negative reactions from new religious acquaintances who obliviously ask what church a person goes to as if it never occurred to them that a person might not go to church. I equate this with a new acquaintance offhandedly referencing my husband or boyfriend without even a second thought that I might not have one even if I were straight.

However, even aside from these blatant issues of homo- and atheist phobias, there is an even greater, unifying issue in that we are two groups working for ostensibly the same thing – social acceptance by the mainstream. Not that we necessarily want to be part of the mainstream; we just don’t want to be persecuted by it.

Additionally, there is this small, perhaps silly point: Gays have Gay Pride Month in June, and GLBT History Month in October, as well as National Coming Out Day. Do we not have enough special gay times that we can’t share one frigging day?! Are we so special that we should lay claim to the whole damn calendar in much the same manner that Christians have claimed the entire month of December for Christmas to the degree that acknowledging any of the other holidays going on during that time is considered anti-Christian?

The problem is that atheists and gays could both use a little help in fending off the Tea Partiers, the LDS church, religious fundamentalists, and corporations that are turning America into a corporate theocracy that doesn’t like anyone who thinks or lives outside of the big box. These groups have blurred the line that allegedly separated church from state so much that we often have trouble distinguishing between the two anymore. There may not be more people in these groups, as so many like to purport that they’re just small bands of crazies, but they have learned and are learning to work together, and as long as we continue to look out for our own individual special interests and disregard the opposition as passionate but lunatic, we will lose.

We will lose rights we haven’t gotten yet and rights we’ve always supposedly had. Institutionalized persecution of gays, nonbelievers, brown people (who actually aren’t a minority at all), and women will be allowed to become socially acceptable because, like the ancient Druids, we were too focused on making sure that everybody knew how special we were that we lost sight of the fact that all of our disparate groups actually form a majority that could have done something to prevent it if only we’d learned to work together first. Coming Out Day isn’t about being gay, it’s about strength in the face of adversity and the sociocultural acceptance of real people who are tired of being shoved to the edges of society. It seems to me that that’s something worth sharing a day over.

Pride

A few years ago, I found myself completely lost. In the process of coming out of the closet after thirty years of living a mostly straight life, I promised myself that I wouldn’t become one of those “happy and proud to be gay” gays; in other words, I saw no reason to march in a parade just because I happened to like girls instead of boys. My pride came from finally being able to quiet the voices of fear and doubt in my head so that I could hear what my own voice was telling me. In so doing, every day became a miniature victory parade as I marched through my life with new eyes and a better understanding of myself.

But it was lonely, and that was where I was lost. My straight friends were so supportive and made it so easy for me to just be me, but I also knew they could never quite understand what I was going through. And, never having had a shortage of gay men around me, I also had them, and they were wonderful. But what I really needed was a lesbian to talk to and I suddenly became acutely aware that I didn’t know any of those. So here I was, newly out in a big city that I’d had almost no social life in anyway, with no same-sex dating experience to speak of, the stigma of a recently ended straight marriage to deal with, no lesbian friends, and a strong desire to jump into the dating scene without being too . . . you know . . . GAY about it.

In an act of late night desperation, I posted what would be the first of many ads on Craigslist in the hopes of finding a nice girl to have dinner with – or, to be honest, at least to fuck. I decided to leave out the details of just having ejected myself from the closet; I would be honest if asked, but I really just wanted to see how conversations would go before revealing myself as the baby dyke that I was.

As fate would have it, one of the first responses I got was from a woman about my age who was just SO HAPPY TO BE GAY!!! (Insert hearts and rainbows here.) She quickly told me about how much she loved being gay, her life living with her twin sister (also gay, incidentally), and her work on the local Pride committee. Alarms went off in my head. But I wasn’t in a position to judge, so I responded to her.

The very next email contained the question I knew would come eventually – “So how long have you been out?” Needless to say, neither of us was what the other was looking for and we never met.

Three years have passed since then, but I’m still thinking about her. I’ve learned a lot since then. I wish we hadn’t judged each other so quickly – I could have learned a lot about being an out and proud lesbian from her.

In the last three years, I’ve come to learn what it means to be proud to be gay, for to be gay is to throw convention in society’s face and walk away from what is considered “normal life.” Being gay often means turning our backs on the only life we’ve ever known – and that often includes our natural families. It means, in the US and a great many countries around the world, sacrificing civil rights and protections in exchange for accepting ourselves as we are. In some places, it means putting our lives on the line just so we don’t have to lie about our very identities every moment of every day. To be proud to be gay is a privilege we earn from the hell we go through in trying to simply achieve ourselves. Being proud to be gay is a privilege some find too difficult to earn because the price is too high.

It was too high for thirteen-year-old Seth Walsh of Tehachapi, California, who killed himself in September after enduring years of teasing and bullying in the school yard.

The price of pride was too high for nineteen-year-old Rutgers University student Tyler Climenti, who suffered through having his most intimate moments exposed on the Internet by people who should be behind bars, but are instead acting like victims because of their portrayal in the media.

Nineteen-year-old Zach Harrington found the price of pride too high after listening to his neighbors decry the immoral, predatory nature of the homosexual life choice in an hours-long town hall meeting in which the committee was voting on whether or not to acknowledge GLBT History Month in their town of Norman, Oklahoma.

Fifteen-year-old Billy Lucas, 13yo Asher Brown, 19yo Raymond Chase, 19yo Aiyisha Hassan, 15yo Justin Aaberg, and 17yo Cody Barker – to name only those whose names have crossed my path most recently – all found the price of gay pride too high because they’d heard one too many times from all the wrong people how horrible gay people are.

A friend of mine recently said to me that those kids would have been picked on even if they weren’t gay – gay is just what people are talking about now; the topic du jour, as it were. That may be so – kids will mercilessly pick on anyone who’s different. But the fact is that these kids were all openly gay, and even if they weren’t, being bullied because a boy doesn’t fit into the heteronormative assumption of what a boy acts like doesn’t make it any better. It all boils down to the same thing: People who don’t fit into my idea of “normal” deserve to be punished for their very existence.

The names and ages of these kids have been running like a ticker tape through my mind. We have a very serious national problem on our hands that’s causing children – CHILDREN – to take their own lives. While I’ve never had any moral issue with suicide personally, it’s a travesty that children who have never had the chance to see that life can be so much more and so much better than it is are cutting their own lives short. Until now, the idea of children as young as thirteen committing suicide seemed like an outlandish thing, something I remember kids in my high school bragging that they’d tried to make themselves look morosely cool. But that isn’t what this is. Children and young adults who haven’t had the chance to really experience life are falling prey to the children of ignorant and fearful homophobes who don’t realize that their offhanded comments about immoral, hedonistic gays mumbled at the evening news are, to the ears of their young children, permission to suck the very lives out of their peers who are “different.”

These nine names – Cody, Aiyisha, Tyler, Asher, Seth, Billy, Zach, Raymond, and Justin – break my heart. These nine names remind me once again that no matter how difficult it was for me to finally come out, I earned the right to be proud to be gay, to be proud of finally accepting who and what I am. These kids were convinced by their peers that they weren’t good enough to earn that privilege, and sadly ended their lives. Put in this light, Craigslist Girl from three years ago is a hero who I judged far too quickly for totally selfish reasons. I hope she never stops being happy to be gay, and more importantly, I’m glad I’ve finally seen my way to helping her spread the message that it’s not only okay to be gay, it’s something to be proud of.