Gay Rights and the Chimes at Midnight

    It sometimes feels like the last of my political idealism burned out from the inside a while ago. It wasn’t the Bush Administration that did that, either — eight years in opposition served mostly to provoke a righteous rage in me.  No, it’s been the Obama years that have attacked my idealism like Dran-o going after the clogs in a pipe. His election was a geat sign of progress, it’s true. When I was born there was no way a black person could have been elected President. But his administration has brought the ugliest instincts of blinkered people to the surface, where — despite what one might have hoped — the sunlight has not killed them. There’s a perfect storm that caused this to happen, I suppose. I’m not going to be the guy to tell you about cyber cascades, to talk high and stiff about Fox News. It seems transparent to me that a lot of people don’t like Obama because he’s black, and that the noise about his religion, or his alleged leftist agenda — all of that shit is just a costume people put on their hate and contempt in order to make it seem less like what it is.

    I guess, really, the truth about this is that all this stuff was always still there. Obama’s election didn’t create it. It just brought it to the surface. And it was my luxury as a white dude to kid myself into believing it wasn’t. Perhaps it means that my political will was always weak if all it took was a few years of looking reality in the eye for it to slough away.

    And it’s not just the race stuff — not just the way that black people can be killed with near-impunity by cops and a self-righteous, mostly-white crowd will congeal in the cops’ defense — though that’s been the hardest to swallow. There’s the usual depressing littany that we’ve all pored over for years. Dysfunction on Capitol Hill. The consistent abuse of religion for political gain. The way that liberals and conservatives not only don’t but seemingly can’t talk to each other anymore. It’s bad, guys. All of this stuff is bad. And I don’t really believe there’s a solution. It sucks and it’s going to keep on sucking.

    But I was thinking about my first stirrings of political awakening this morning, waiting for the Supreme Court to hand down a decision on a gay marriage case that had all the signs of becoming a landmark in our history, like Brown v Board of Education or Loving v Virginia. This has been the one road of progress these last few years, progress so sudden and shocking that it’s left me a bit in the dust. But the discussion about it, too, had been largely depressing. One Texas man threatened to light himself on fire if gay people were allowed to marry. Another Texas man actually did light himself on fire in part because he felt he hadn’t done enough. This is the country we live in. We are literally burning for our politics.

    But the first political issue I became aware of was gay rights. I was 12 years old when Ballot Measure 9 was being duked out — often literally — in Oregon. Measure 9 was reactionary garbage that equated homosexuality with pedophelia and sought, basically, to make it as easy as possible to fire gay people from government jobs in order to prevent them from “promoting” homosexuality, whatever the fuck that meant. I’m not 100% sure why this issue resonated with me so deeply, except inasmuch as I wasn’t totally sure about my own sexuality, but I had a really visceral, negative reaction to it.

    Marriage wasn’t even on the table in those days. We weren’t far removed from a world in which homosexual acts were criminalized, in which the opinion that gay people were sick (as opposed to illegal) was seen by some as dangerously radical. A lot of people assumed they didn’t know any gay people, largely because the gay people that they did know didn’t feel safe to come out of the closet. The homosexual “agenda”, back then, was mostly about reducing anti-gay hate crimes, convincing people that not every gay man had AIDS — really, convincing straight people that queer people were, you know, actually people.

    It often seemed to me like it wasn’t ever going to work. I was a freshman in college when Matthew Shepard was murdered. That was just the most famous in what seemed like an endless array of gay bashings — literal bashings, with fists, sticks, bats, whatever — that you heard about all the time. Two men beat up and robbed outside a nightclub. A restaurant owner left in a coma. One time I was walking down the street with a couple of friends and a car came by. A guy about our age leaned out the window and screamed, “FAGGOTS!!!!!!!” at us, and then fired a glass soda bottle in our direction. I remember how the sun glinted off the glass, and I remember thinking, Oh! It spirals like a football! Thank God it was poorly aimed, or I would have just watched it zoom in until it hit me. There were so many mysterious things about that incident, not least of which was how the guy had decided that we should be the targets. It’s not like we were standing on the sidewalk shoving our tongues down each other’s throats. But that seemed minor, really, when compared to a bigger question: what was he so ANGRY about? And wondering about that made me angry in return.

    That all seems so long ago now. I want to be clear: the work isn’t finished just because two guys or two girls can go down to the courthouse and get hitched if they feel like it. It wasn’t that long ago that Jadin Bell hanged himself from a jungle gym because he couldn’t take the homophobic bullying he was receiving in school. That was right here in Oregon. But at the same time it really does feel like the soul of the country has shifted. Equality is law, if not yet reality. It feels, for once, like we’re winning.

    I was out running when I saw the news. I pulled out my phone at a crosswalk and Googled the phrase “gay marriage”, and there was a torrent of celebratory news — people hugging, crying, waving flags. And I felt good about it. But for some reason I didn’t feel elated the way I had expected to — not the way I did when I got to vote to legalize gay marriage in Minnesota, or when the court struck down sodomy laws in Lawrence v Texas (which was 12 years ago today, by the way). Was it because I was fairly sure this was going to happen, after the wave of pro-gay-rights legislation and court rulings over the last 12 years? I don’t know. Maybe it’s that.

    And maybe it’s just the way I am now. Hollowed out. Immune to good news. Or maybe I’ve just heard the chimes at midnight, as Falstaff said. So much of what I remember seems so long ago.