On Burnishing Our Image
Dear Reader (you know who you are): I apologize for not finishing the “Dragz” series, but things have been a little crazy. I should have finished the entire thing up front, but I don’t have the discipline to write that way, and so the quality was suffering. Sometime in the future, I plan to do a rewrite and repost the series.
But there was another reason I didn’t finish “Dragz.” Things have been happening that affect our community, and I’ve been wanting to say something about them. Over the last several months, we’ve had some good news, and some bad, and I think we’re in the enviable position of being able to get something positive out of all of it, if we take the right lessons from it.
On the marriage front, we’ve done really well. Same-sex marriage laws have either passed or are pending in most New England states, and that Iowa Supreme Court ruling was a pleasant surprise to me. I think what’s happening is this: People are looking at Massachusetts, where it’s been legal since 2004, and they’re noticing a great big steaming pile of NOTHING. No gay refugee camps in their border counties. No influx of polygamy or of people trying to marry their Pomeranians. No tsunami as Divine P unishment. None of the things that they were led to expect by opponents of same-sex marriage ever happened. The rest of New England (and the country) took notice of the fact that--gasp!--gays are just as blinded by their unchecked emotions as the rest of the population. We fall in love with the wrong people, we enter ill-advised committed relationships, and we divorce at just the same rate as the straights, and that realization on their part is a major motivating factor in these laws in New England, I think.
As long as people keep seeing that the dire predictions of gay-marriage opponents aren’t coming to pass, intellectual honesty and a sense of fair play tend to move them in our direction, and we need to do everything we can to make that happen. Except for sexuality, our lives are no different than theirs, and that’s an important message to project because it helps to make us appear less threatening, which is something else we need to work on.
We need to get past assaulting religious institutions that have legitimate doctrinal issues with our existence. I don’t care what the churches, synagogues, temple, or mosques think of me, and the religious partisans are beyond my humble ability to reach. The people I want to reach are the ones that the Pew Research Center found in a study of religion in America last year, the ones who are not particularly dogmatic in their faith. Those are the ones who can be persuaded by seei ng how we live, but they can also be dissuaded by being made to feel as if their faith is under attack. The LGBT community needs to keep putting out there, by the example of our own lives, the idea that we are human beings, with the same good and bad that comes with life on this planet.
That is what will change hearts and minds, not intransigence over semantics. Many of us are prepared to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory over one word: marriage. We’re shooting ourselves in the foot over an eight-letter word, and that’s exactly what our opponents intended when they ginned up this phony controversy in the first place. The best way to win a battle is to find out what your enemy wants and then deny it to them. We know what they want, and by fighting over the wording, we’re making sure they get it: a ready-made reason to oppose any legal recognition of our relationships and, by extension, our humanity. So take the issue away from them. If a civil union gives me the same rights as a “marriage,” then I’m fine with that. Keep your word; I’ll take the fact.
Another thing that will help us in presenting ourselves as the decent and moral people that we are is to stand up and forcefully denounce the ridiculous behavior of some of our self-appointed leaders because they are making us look bad. Why is it that I, an unremarkable-looking gay man from West Virginia, am rep resented in the national media by the likes of Perez Hilton? This insipid star-fucking pseudo-celebrity shit stain on the underwear of cyberspace is being presented as somehow speaking for the whole LGBT community when he goes on Larry King Live, whining about how Miss California hurted his wittle feewings by answering his question honestly.
Who cares what Carrie Prejean thinks about gay marriage? I wasn’t awakened by a 3 am knock on the door and hustled off to gay concentration camp, so I think I can be forgiven for not worrying too much what was said at some beauty pageant. But right after the show was over, the catty little hump makes a video blog where he says that, if Miss California had won, he would have taken the crown from her, which would have done so many positive things for the gay-rights movement. He ended his video by saying “I need a drink,” but what he really needs is for five drag queens to pull him out of his home and beat him with gravel-filled condoms until, with his last blood-choked gasps, he thanks his murderers for the service they’re doing the world.
I know that we’re fighting for change in the world around us, and that’s hard. But what’s even harder is for us to realize that we will also need to change in order to win this fight. The image of strident revolutionary is failing us; we need to realize that we can’t “take the kingdom by violence.” =2 0The outlandish tactics of old-school gay rights groups like ACTUP! And Queer Nation had their place at one time, but when the real battle is for the support of the people, pop-culture parasites like Perez Hilton just make us look like caricatures. It’s a more effective strategy to show them how we are like them instead of how we are not. I can think of no better way to do that than my two-pronged approach to adopting some of their quainter customs:
First, we need to start inviting them into our homes and our lives, so that they can see that we are families, too. They need to see that they’re being lied to when they hear how different we are, because the only differences are surface issues that don’t point to serious moral flaws. Over time, a healthy dose of the truth is all that’s needed to kill lies.
And second, we need to do like they do, and start locking our crazy-assed relatives in their rooms where they belong! Bye, Perez. I know it’s hard, but trust me when I say that it’s really for the best.