Small Cuts

When I was getting my BS I was working in a lab around heavy machinery. My lab partner knew I was gay but didn't seem to have a problem with it.

One day I was tightening a nut and slipped and cut my knuckle. This lab partner was viably upset, but to me it seemed not so much by the fact that I was hurt but that I was bleeding. She was stand-offish the rest of the day. I specifically remember, even after I cleaned and bandaged myself up, she wouldn't even take my pen when I asked her to write down a measurement while I couldn't.

Let me add, of course, with anyone, you should not be touching their blood with bare hands, but that was not the case here. It was just my knuckle, I washed up with soap and water, it never touched my pen, and I was bandaged up completely. It was not like I was handing her a bio-hazard, but she acted like I was.

I didn't ask why; I assumed I knew. I assumed she thought I had some horrible infection because I was gay, and I just took it as a lesson on how I, for being gay, can put fear in even the hearts of people who are ostensibly without prejudice. Maybe I was being prejudiced but it seemed she was okay with gay people, just not when she, in her mind, had to risk something for her tolerance.

Also while getting my BS I first learned that homosexuality was associated in some people's minds with harming children. I related that story here, but the point is the same lesson held true there.

No matter who you are, how strongly you adhere to your ethics, how chaste you are, or your utter disgust with some actions, being gay alone will cause unreasonable fear in some minds. When the stakes are high, even allies may take precautions against fears they know to be irrational; they may just think it worth while to walk 10 yards to get their own pen... you know, just in case.

I don't think this is uncommon and it really doesn't bother me much. When the stakes are high all people will fall back on reflex and prejudice. It's hard to blame them; it's something I dare saw we all do. The purpose of prejudice is, in fact, to make a snap judgment when you don't have all the information. It can be wholly unfair and immoral when applied to people, such as the prejudice that was fought by King (happy MLK Day!). Or it can be quite useful when applied to various objects and situations.

As long as a person wants my family to have equal rights to theirs, I can more than forgive some exorcise of irrational fear. It'll diminish in time, with experience. But the odd thing, the thing that caused me to post this is that I find that I'm still quite sensitive to those fears. They affect how I behave today.

E.g. yesterday, sledding, it was so warm I took off my gloves and coat. While racing down the hill, about to beat a 5 year-old :-), I fell and skidded along the icy snow. I was careful to wear my gloves the rest of the day to cover my ice-rashed knuckles, even while plenty warm and fumbling with my hot chocolate. It got me thinking back to that incident in that lab years and years ago, and made me realize, even among gay people, I still reflexively worry they would worry and I try to make sure they don't.

These are little things and they don't much matter to me in the big picture. But I'd like to know. If you are gay, do you find yourself particularly sensitive to such fears in others? Is this a generational thing? A scot-irrational thing?

If you are straight with gay friends, or even gay with gay friends, do you hold such fears? Would you consider taking a pen from a straight friend with a band aid on his hand differently than a gay friend? Please, have no worry of saying so; comment anonymously if you like. I just want to know how much of this is in my head. As long as the actions and the rational part of a person's mind is with us, I don't care about the reflexive fears we cannot control. I just want to know if they really are there, or if it's just my prejudice coming through.

To Me, the Most Annoying Anti-Gay Bigot Has to be..

...Myself.

A couple days ago our paper published this editorial.

The guy basically cherry-picked one country and presented some misleading information. As I just looked over a lot of this data for a recently updated article at isocrat.org, here, I knew he was full of it in his claims of doom in Europe.

But I read this line: "In one study, married Dutch gays had, on average, eight casual sexual partners." and I just let it slide in my mind. I, to my shame, actually wasn't sure if the author was being honest here. Do Dutch married gay men really have an average of 8 partners? (and where do they find the time?)

I search for the source of the "fact" and came across numerous anti-gay sites claiming the same thing, along with a claim that the same research showed these marriages (or "marriages", sheesh) lasted an average of 1.5 years. I considered it. Could that be right?

Yesterday, I was at the University and decided to see if I could find the research for myself, and I did:

Xiridou, M.; Geskus, R.; de Wit, J.; Coutinho, R.; Kretzschmar, M.. The contribution of steady and casual partnerships to the incidence of HIV infection among homosexual men in Amsterdam. AIDS. vol. 17 (7), pp. 1029-1038, (2003).

Turns out the Amsterdam Cohort Study on HIV and AIDS was the source of the data used in this research; it was meant to study AIDS, not marriage. As such, over the life of this study the admittance requirements changed. At one point only men with 2 or more sexual partners in the last 6 month were allowed to participate (monogamous men were effectively excluded!). At another point participants were directed to the study because they were found to be HIV+. Furthermore, this study began in the 80's, in the peak of the western world's gay sexual adolescence, almost two decades before the first same-sex marriage in the Netherlands, and it only looked at gay men living in one of the most permissive cities in the world, Amsterdam. Finally, this study threw out all men over the age of 30, only looking at the most sexually active gay men in their teens and twenties.

In short, the research group rightly searched out high sexual activity in order to study their model of AIDS transmission, and what they term a "steady partner" in their study was not a marriage. It was a self-assessed classification of the regularity with which a participant had a sexual relationship with a particular partner; they did not even need to live together.

Yes, gay men in research seem to be, on average, more sexually active with more partners, for some understandable reasons (I've outlined the research I've found on the topic so far here; gay monogamy is not, of course, in nearly as bad of shape as many anti-gay activists seem to hope, though). But to use that data as this John Williams did to make such shocking conclusions about married gay men is ridiculous, if not outright deceptive, and I've seen anti-gay rights activists use the same tactic before... yet I kind of bought it here, just a bit, just enough to make me take a closer look at myself.

Somewhere in me I do hold a bit of a negative stereotype too.

Hi, my name is Scot, [gulp] and I sometimes reflexively assume gay men are promiscuous.

Okay, though I am trying to deflect it, this really is serious and difficult for me to admit.

I regret that I have that reflex. I know where it started. It began in my teens with my experience with only a handful of people that seemed to play right into the stereotypes of my conservative culture, stereotypes based a good deal on the kind of deception presented in that editorial. I mentioned it, here and here, for example. Over the years I know I have, at times, wondered why I have to put up with my gay bothers tarnishing my family in the minds of others. I have thought it was true that they were, in the back of my mind, but were they?

Heck, I, a gay man for all intents and purposes, have only ever wanted or had monogamy; maybe I'm doubly an oddity, right? Or maybe I'm a self righteous bigot, right?

It's something I have to watch out for. I know, even if it's true gay men are more sexually promiscuous, on average, it's unfair to hold the bias against any individual, and most all the gay men we know personally are monogamous family men. I feel horrible for the gay men I may have maligned, if only in my mind, by extrapolating on that old bit of bigotry. I am sorry, for what it's worth.

Or maybe I have a problem with the Dutch? Yeah, that's it. Why can't those crazy, lecherous Dutch keep it in their pants?

Is There an Elephant in This Room?

...and if so, how do I kill it?

As an undergrad I took a couple women studies courses to fulfill the “well rounded” requirement of the university; you know, so that mathematicians may be tortured with art history and poets with chemistry.

One day the topic of gender stereotypes was brought up and I outed myself as a gay man in order to address what I’d experienced. At that a discussion broke out during which one girl became notably hostile to the “homosexual agenda.” The teacher eventually asked her how her perception of me had changed, and one question she asked the girl was if she’d be worried if I and her brother became friends now.

At the time I thought it was a really bizarre question for the teacher to ask. Worried? About what? The conclusion I jumped to was that her fear may be that her brother may want to switch teams in order to date me (I was quite handsome at 19 ;-)). With that error in mind, I said she need not worry a bit; I was faithful to my boyfriend (and always have been :-)).

But, as the conversation progressed it became clear this teacher personally knew this particular girl, and knew her brother wasn’t some bi-curious college student, one gay friend away from forsaking football for Musical Theater, as I’d assumed. He was just a child in his early teens. As impossible as it sounds to me now, the teacher was actually asking, in class, one student if she’d be afraid another student would violate, in such a terrible way, a child, and the answer was yes!

This was the first time I’d ever got wind of the notion that, to a substantial number of people, being gay is associated with pedophilia. Heck, this was one of the first times I even heard of the notion of pedophilia. Today it seems it’s all too often mentioned in the news, but back then I was somehow able to remain blissfully ignorant.

And my response in this situation was: “Oh don’t worry about me, I’m taken”…

Ugg, I still cringe. I was both shocked and mortified once I realized the age of her brother and how I must have just enforced that bigoted girl’s bias. I never got a chance to explain, but how would I? I’m still really hesitant to even address this topic here.

Anyway, I was happily naive about many of the horrors of this world well into my teens, and here I was being associated with one of the worst. It left a lasting impression.

I started to wonder: this girl was from the LDS culture and that clearly misinformed her views on homosexuality… most of my siblings are LDS… Do my siblings make the same association? Do they now see me as a threat to my nephews and nieces? How many people in my world think like that? It made me sick to realize this possibility, that any person might now wonder about, let alone do, such a horrible thing.

To this day I’ve no answer to those questions. It’s nothing to bring up or clear up in most any situation (and yet here I am asking). It’s just a horrible lingering question now. On anti-gay sites I see the association between homosexuality and pedophilia made often; I know it’s still out there, but how common is it? How close is it to our home? Is it in my cousins? In our neighbors? Is it going to hurt our children, when the age comes for stuff like sleepovers?

If so, how to I protect them and insulate them from it? How do I fix it?

Anti-gay folks are clever. To even breach such a disgusting topic is disturbing. The elephant they’ve placed in this room is hardly ever going to be mentioned by the person holding the prejudice; it’s just a silent fear on both sides, pushing both sides apart.

I mean, I directly know being gay has nothing to do with that desire to harm children in such an unmentionable way, but I also know most parents, just like me, would not gamble with such a thing, even when they know they're being unreasonable (e.g. the fort post…). So what if this girl, from that women’s studies course, now has a child in our boy’s school. How can I keep her bias from hurting our children, when it seems impossible to now know if its even still there, and, if it is, bringing it up could make it even worse?

I'd also like to know if I'm being paranoid from such experiences and reading so much anti-gay literature? Does this bias still exist in substantial numbers? Does the younger gay generation encounter such views in as casual of settings as a classroom? Do they now experience more subtle displays than what I experienced?

I know it's an ugly topic, but how does the unspeakable get resolved? How would you even know if it already has been?

Common Fetid Ground

It seems our favorite Baptist Pastor will be protesting at the funeral of LDS President Gordon B. Hinckley.

If you’ve not steeled yourself up to such antics you should probably not read this link (and you’re probably a healthier man than I for the sensitivity :-)):

Here (I decided not to link to the worst of it, on the ghf site. I linked to an article that talks about it and links there but I don't want to directly boost his hits...)

It’s basically the same old screed that gays have faced for centuries. The LDS are going to burn in hell for all eternity with us gays, wishing we had only listened to their wisdom… But it’s not their wisdom, right? They’re not cruel, heartless, unloving, right? They love gays and the LDS and are only telling us the truth of God’s plan, one they follow in complete humility…

Sad. Hate may harden a heart, but that emotion which feels like love and isn’t will completely solidify it. Indulgence in such feelings is the sin that should send people hiding in the mountains at the thought of eternal judgment. But it won’t. Such mind games are made to please both the dark and light side of our human nature; love the sinner and treat him like an enemy. The ironic self-righteousness of the self-admitted vile sinner feels too good. The infinite ego found in submitting to your idea of God is too potent. What to do?

It just gets so old.

I suppose one could try to find a silver lining and imagine that common ground, no matter how fetid, is a place on which two groups can build. Maybe sharing such a shocking foe will go some way to making the gay community in Utah less willing to demonize their LDS opponents. Maybe it will make the LDS less willing to degrade our families and relationships or call for our legal inequality. Regardless, that’d be a thin lining on one large dark cloud of tomorrow's planned action.

I hope it snows like mad :-).

To those attending the funeral, I’d say just acknowledge the sadness in this guy and his family, let it quench your temper, and walk by silently; I’m sure a quiet prayer for them wouldn’t hurt either. And for goodness sake, don’t touch them. They’re all lawyers.

Tragedy

A local and very prominent anti-gay rights activist lost her son a while ago. Many in the gay community knew how at the time, but the official police report only came out last week. It even took up a portion of the news, but I'd rather keep this nameless and not link to a story. Plainly, he overdosed on a mixture of heroin and a couple other drugs. Those are the dry facts of an event, an unmitigated tragedy.

I’ve been wondering if there’s anything to say about this and how or if one should. I held off to see how it would settle. Anything I can write will balance precariously near misusing someone’s tragedy to try to mitigate another’s and I don’t want that. Nevertheless, it’s too clear that there is something to say here. There are a lot of emotions and conflicting feelings, and maybe a moral for all parents.

I was on a panel with this lady at one point. I was very much a novice at politics, but she is a professional. The whole time I talked she took notes. When it was her turn she was brutal, to my perspective, calling our love for our children selfish and debasing our family. She made all sorts of dire predictions for our handicapped children, in their non-ideal home, based on research that was either unpublishable in any reputable journal or focused on children in single-parents homes.

One of the things she claimed was that our children were likely to become sexually promiscuous and drug addicts. The daughter of one of our lesbian friends in the audience began to cry at her assault. I’ll not forget the look on that girl's face when she finally got up in tears and tried to defend herself and her family from this lady. But this anti-gay rights activist was unmoved; she just kept that serene look on her face, so seemingly self-assured that what she was doing was right, giving us and our families her “tough love.” It’s difficult for me to understand how, but she felt good keeping us away from the rights she enjoyed in her family; she was fine taking our tax dollars under such circumstances and you could see it on her face. It all made me angry.

One charge she leveled against us was how horrible it was that our children may get teased in school, apparently never making the connection that whether that happens or not is in her hands, and in the hands of parents like herself. She also complained that we were using our children for politics, by merely speaking up in public! We were instead supposed to keep hidden and quiet and let the insults and lies about our families go unchallenged. That was the lesson we should, I guess, teach our children in her mind (though she was in the press all the time). How couldn’t she understand, as a parent herself, that we had to speak up? We were never even involved in politics until we became parents and then it became very important, but, to her mind, gays are such people that she couldn’t comprehend that it wasn’t dastardly political hopes spurring gays into having children.

Why? I suspect it's because she had, in her mind, dehumanized our families through the lense of her religious beliefs. But many in the gay community, myself included, have made the a similar mistake in response.

Okay, clearly, I think she has a warped outlook, and maybe working off old steam from that day at this point is wrong. I don’t know. I can’t help, though, but feel something profound is in this waiting to be unearthed for both this lady and the gay community for which she has long been the bogyman. I can so clearly see the distressed face of that 14-year-old girl of our lesbian friends, a great girl (class president at her school at the time). I can clearly hear her sob “I am not a drug addict,” and speak of her love for her family bravely in the face of such opposition. I can also so clearly see this lady’s serene face at the time, and hear her confident pronouncements about her idea of “ideal families.”

But now I know, at that very moment, she already knew her son was, sadly, an addict; that serenity and look of “I know what’s best for you and your children, and what God wants” was merely a thin veneer. In fact, now the whole memory has been turned upside down. It's one of those plot twists that can reach back and change even the past, what you thought you saw. That memory of her serene, self-assured face once triggered anger; in a blink of new information it's become a portrait of indescribable human sadness, one I’m terrified to ever know.

There must be a lesson in this tragedy for both sides. For my side, I hope the gay community pauses before we take her harsh attitude and allow it to anger us again; we should look deeper at what might be beyond the political persona. Sure, we must counter her attacks, but the demonizing should end. Eventually we'll have to find some common ground, and, while we wait, it will do us all some good to focus on the people behind those veneers. I personally don’t imagine her slings and arrows will ever sting like they once did, even if she starts it all up again; there is a place now where what we share in our humanity is too apparent, disarming. It's unfortunate that tragedy brought it to mind.

I wish that I could personally give my condolences without the baggage of history and politics trailing behind them, but I’m pretty sure that’s too much to hope for. This will have to do.

Fred Tries for a Grammy?

Speaking of music, you see this?



Yeah, I hate to give the guy what he wants like this, but whatever harm is done has to be offset by the fact that the lower he goes the less people want to be associated anywhere near his cause.

It's also always nice to remember what can be out there in the wide world; keeps a guy from getting lazy.

Moral Orientation

After over a year of looking at the variety in gay Mormon blogs, one thing sticks out: “gay” can mean a lot of things. Some experience their orientation as merely a defective response to physical cues, some see it as a psychological scar from bad parenting, and some, of course, don’t care from whence love springs :-). I’ve posted on how important these differences are (here). But I think I missed one and am having a sort of epiphany (bear with me; sometimes my epiphanies just fizzle out). There seems to be an ingrained moral component to only some people’s experience of being “gay.”

A long while ago I posted on research that has begun to tease apart the mechanics of our moral reasoning (here and here). To sum up and simplify, the research basically seems to show two main moral reasoning centers in the human mind: a so-called emotional moral processor and a more logical moral processor. For example, when people are given the option of killing one man to save five the emotional center only knows to shout “Don’t kill him” while the other does the math and says “5-1=4. Kill him!” (Read more in this post). Furthermore, if you physically damage the emotional moral processor, people begin to make very different moral decisions (Read more in this post).

Okay, now add to that a fact I just posted as a bit of a joke (at the end of this post): there seems to be a significant genetic component to homophobia. Looking back at those posts in the light of this idea of a moral component to sexual orientation, I’m struck by a couple things.

When I was coming out, homophobia was something to which I paid great attention. Some of my friends were simply not bothered at all by my being gay. My best friend, a very manly, 100% heterosexual guy, had and has no problems seeing Rob and I be affectionate. He should have a problem, by stereotypes: a guy from South Carolina with a conservative Baptist background in a hyper-masculine profession (firefighter). I know by experience, though, many straight men do reflexively gag at the idea of two men kissing. While all my friends were great, I did have some, even among the more liberal of them, who had a visceral negative response to homosexuality, and they basically learned to stifle this response when it came to Rob and me. I don't care a bit about such homophobia and greatly respect them for muting it. For themselves, though, I’m sure they never could.

So, I’m beginning to wonder if such gut reaction homophobia may be an inherited part of the emotional moral reasoning center of some human minds? 28% hereditable, in fact :-)? To me, that could make sense and would explain a couple things.

It would make sense in that we need to be preprogrammed to develop wills to do stuff like eat, keep warm and so on. While there may be a benefit to there being a small portion of homosexuality in a species, in humans (though certainly not in some other species), it’s most efficient for the majority to be oriented towards producing new offspring. Just as we’re programmed to not find, say, rocks attractive and suitable for pair bonding (well, most of them ;-)), and because the male and female human can be somewhat similar, perhaps some come programmed with a strong “no homosexuality” gut reaction in that particular moral reasoning region and some do not.

This would explain the difference I’ve experienced in homophobia in straight men. Though, logically, two straight men may have no moral problem with homosexuality, one may have this gut aversion and the other will not.

Such a preprogrammed gut aversion could explain the persistence of homophobia. It’s too easy to mistake disgust with moral disgust, and even easier to call something “immoral for everybody” when your gut moral reaction is “immoral for me.” It is clear why many organizations haven’t been fans of homosexuality; it hurt group numbers and when groups fight, physically or ideologically, numbers matter a lot. Today, some of that is certainly still a reason to pose homosexuality as immoral, but I think this gut personal reaction in some heterosexuals regarding a gay relationship may be a comparable player.

Finally, this would explain the differences I see in the gay men around here. Personally, when I think of heterosexual sex and intimacy, I feel a gut reaction of being repelled. I don’t want to say disgust, as I’m so used to seeing it in media and in my life that I’m effectively comfortable with seeing heterosexual behavior in others, but, for me, it strikes me as wrong to the core. I’m supposed to pair up with a man (Well, one in particular ;-)), and, as odd as it may sound to some, to think of doing the same with a woman strikes me as deviant, against some law of life. It's as though that logical part of my moral processor knows there’s nothing wrong with it, and in fact knows it’s a great thing for many, but there’s still this emotional moral sense in me that says it’s somehow wrong. I fear, if raised in gay bizzarro world, where I wasn’t conditioned to accept heterosexual behavior, I may have became a heterophobe :-). In all seriousness, I regret that I can see that potential in myself, as a one-time fan of conservative orthodoxy, and I fear, if I were a straight male in this culture and had the same gut aversion to relations with a man for myself as I do now for relations with a woman, I’d tend to homophobia. I can understand why some so easily become homophobic with little cultural prodding (thanks goodness I’m gay :-)).

Nevertheless, it seems some gay men may be oriented towards men in many ways, but not similarly morally oriented (away from women or towards men). This could be the same as the difference between the straight guy who can watch two men kiss without squirming and one who cannot, though both may be great allies to the gay community. This could also explain why so often it seems people around here may be talking about what it means to be “gay” or “ssa” or whatever, and totally miss the mark in the eyes of others.

I have to admit, though I knew there was much diversity, I came here more so thinking that my “gay” was what being gay means, particularly in this regards. I was wrong and there are clearly many aspects to orientation. Among them, the moral orientation may be amongst the most important factor for LDS gays, above the physical and emotional. As I guess, again, I already knew :-).

Anyway, I’d love to see the results of similar research on gay and straight men when shown images of various couples or asked about sexual hypotheticals, not to mention how those with the VMPC lesions in their emotional moral processor respond and how they express homophobia. If only I went into that area of study; too late now :-).

Atoll

Of the experiences I’ve had with anti gay bias, only a few have been with people I personally know. I described one in which I committed a physical assault ;-), here. But another actually came from my childhood dentist. He was a friend of the family, of sorts, and always expressed a great deal of respect for me and my accomplishments and so on. I liked him too; I though he was a very smart, friendly, and admirable man. When I was LDS, he was one of the main examples to me of what an LDS man should be.

About a year after I came out to my parents my mom was there getting a checkup. After it was over they started talking about the new sanitary measures he was using in his practice. The topic turned to AIDS. It then turned to gays, at which point my dentist told her that he thought gays should all be shipped off to an island or shot. This was just casual conversation. He had no idea I was gay, and my mom could only chide him without telling him I was, as, at the time, I’d made it very clear I wanted to decide how to come out.

When explaining why we should all change dentists, this is what came out in response to my questions. It had to, else I’d never have understood; I couldn’t remember this dentist not being my dentist and I liked him a great deal. I’d not have believed he’d have said such a thing, if not for the fact that it was my mother’s testimony. So we left, and found a great new dentist. Eventually my old dentist found out I was gay through family friends, figured out why he’d lost our family’s business, and called to apologize and try to get us back. While I appreciated the apology, we certainly couldn’t go back.

Now, just like the other instance I mentioned, I’ve come to find out the guy has been arrested for sexual assault (of the heterosexual sort again). While I know the allegations certainly may not be true or stand up in court (as they did with the other guy), and I know two anecdotes do not count as data, it’s just bizarre this has happened twice now. I’ve only known two people every arrested for sexual assault, and these two men are them. Nevertheless, it’s certainly a tragedy all around.