Bestiality! Tapped Out? — By Eric Marcus

November 13, 2007

From the first e-mail query that came in from my publisher, I knew that last week’s KNUS radio interview in Denver was not going to be about my new question and answer book for teens, What If Someone I Know Is Gay? It was going to be an old-fashioned talk-radio brawl, something that’s become increasingly rare for me in recent years.

The show’s conservative host, Trevor Carey, wrote: “I think it’s only fair to allow Mr. Marcus to know I am setting up a debate format with another author who feels the opposite. His name is Dr. David Berman. He is a Pastor, Speaker and Author. He is not a hateful man, and I feel he would be fair and respectful of Mr. Marcus’ views.”

Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but I love debating the right-wingers. And not the reasonable ones. I much prefer the unreconstructed nut jobs who think the only choice for people like us is to embrace wholesome heterosexuality through repentance and prayer—and who also believe that by letting gay people marry, society will find itself on the slippery slope toward man-on-pet sex.

So in my heart of hearts I was hoping that Dr. Berman would not be fair and respectful. After nearly twenty years in the business of writing about and defending the gay agenda, being fair and respectful doesn’t interest me, except possibly as one weapon in my arsenal of verbal WMDs.

Dr. Berman didn’t disappoint. Within minutes he was warning of the dangers America faced if we granted “special rights” based on sexual orientation. If we passed laws to protect homosexuals, he cautioned, we’d have to grant legal protections for “all kinds of sexual orientations,” including people who wanted to have sex with animals. With that, we were off and running and kept running until the first commercial break. And despite my faux plea to the show’s host after the break that we move on to another topic, he came right back to bestiality.

One thing I’ve come to expect with these kinds of radio shows is that you can always count on the show’s host and the phone-in callers to come to the defense of someone like Dr. Berman (or they one-up him with threats of physical violence or express their concern for me along the lines of, “I’ll pray for your soul”). But that didn’t happen.

While the show’s host was eager to fan the flames of our roiling debate, he didn’t actually defend Dr. Berman’s most outrageous claims and the two callers who made it on the air were surprisingly reasonable despite their professed conservative religious beliefs. One of them even chided Dr. Berman, suggesting it was time to come up with a better argument against gay rights laws and gay marriage than bestiality.

From the KNUS interview and the fact that my opportunities to engage in these extreme on-air debates has dwindled in recent years, I sense that something has changed. During last week’s show, both callers made clear that they personally knew gay people and that the gay people they knew were no different from anyone else. And while the callers didn’t support gay marriage and don’t think schools should teach kids about homosexuals, they were very far from the flaming bigots of yore.

For decades now gay rights leaders have said that our visibility is key if we’re going to win full and equal rights. I think that’s true now more than ever. You can’t demonize us if you know us. And as we all know, when people get to know us they learn that we’re far more interested in marrying each other than having sex with our pets.

THAT’S NUTS! The Fight for Our Sanity: By Eric Marcus

To mark the end of Gay History Month, I’ve decided to dip into my archives and write about a transformational event and some of the remarkable people who led the way.

Sometimes I think I’m crazy. I’m often anxious, occasionally hypochondriacal. And a deep sense of foreboding flows through my veins as it did through the veins of my great-grandparents, who fled Eastern Europe ahead of pogroms and the Nazis because they knew at a cellular level that bad things were going to happen (there are advantages to expecting the worst when it gets you out of harm’s way).

If this were 1967 instead of 2007, my suspicions about my sanity (or lack of it) could have easily been confirmed in the pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Right there in black and white the American Psychiatric Association (APA) said unequivocally that as a homosexual I was by nature mentally ill.

Kidding aside, I know that the kind of crazy I sometimes feel is no different from what a lot of perfectly normal people experience and it has nothing to do with the fact I’m gay. And by 1973 the APA came around to this idea, voting in that year to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. As one local Philadelphia newspaper archly proclaimed on its front page following the official change of heart: “20 Million Homosexuals Gain Instant Cure.”

It’s a little hard to imagine today the heavy burden of the “sickness” diagnosis. You could be fired from your job or not hired in the first place. After all, you couldn’t possibly employ someone who is mentally ill to teach children, care for the sick, or prepare your taxes. And pity the gay parent trying to hang on to her or his kids in a divorce proceeding.

The sickness diagnosis also meant there was something to cure, which gave rise to a whole industry whose purpose was to help homosexuals recover from their disorder. So in the name of science and the medical and mental health professions, untold numbers of gay men and women were subjected to everything from endless years of fruitless psychoanalysis and devastating electro-convulsive therapy to hormone treatments, aversion therapy (“Now why don’t you sit back and relax and watch this hot man-on-man porn film while I attach electrodes to your genitals and/or give you this liquid to drink that will induce vomiting…”), and on rare occasion, castration.

The majority of gay women and men were lucky enough to escape the clutches of the mostly well-intentioned professionals, but they were still condemned to the mental torture of living with the knowledge and stigma that they were classified as mentally ill. And for those who tried to cure themselves, the futile pursuit of banishing same-sex attraction was enough to drive even the most grounded gay person over the edge.

While the 1973 de-listing might in retrospect look like a common sense and easy decision, it was in reality a very contentious process and it was years in the making. The seeds of our sanity conversion were, in fact, planted more than six decades ago by a gay, part-time college student, named Sam Fromm. And it was nurtured by a small group of persistent, mostly straight, psychologists and psychiatrists.

Sam Fromm got the ball rolling in 1945 when, after befriending his UCLA psychology professor, Dr. Evelyn Hooker, he urged her to make a study of “people like us.” As Dr. Hooker explained to me in a 1989 interview for my book, Making History, “This bright young man, somewhere in his early thirties, had obviously been thinking about this for a long time. And by ‘people like us’ he meant, ‘We’re homosexual, but we don’t need psychiatrists. We don’t need psychologists. We’re not insane. We’re not any of those things they say we are.’”

Realizing that no one had ever thought to question the homosexual sickness label, Dr. Hooker decided to take up Sam’s challenge and began her pioneering— and for the time—extremely bold and professionally dangerous research.

When Dr. Hooker presented the results of her work at the 1956 American Psychological Association convention in Chicago, the hotel ballroom was filled to overflowing. She recalled, “The title of the paper was ‘The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual.’ In my paper I presented the evidence that gay men can be as well adjusted as straight men and that some are even better adjusted than some straight men…so far as the evidence was concerned, there was no difference between the two groups of [straight and gay] men in the study.”

Dr. Hooker’s conclusions set off a firestorm within the mental health profession and inspired others to continue her research in the years that followed. Then, beginning in 1970, veteran gay rights activists Dr. Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings started pushing for change from the outside (often coordinating with their allies within the American Psychiatric Association, including Dr. Judd Marmor, a leading psychiatrist who was very familiar with Dr. Hooker’s work).

Frank and Barbara’s campaign to banish the sickness label combined direct action protests with sophisticated marketing and targeted education. Their efforts culminated with a now legendary panel discussion at the 1972 American Psychiatric Association convention, entitled “Psychiatry, Friend or Foe to Homosexuals? A Dialogue.” Joining Barbara and Frank (and documented in photographs by Barbara’s partner Kay Lahusen), was a gay psychiatrist, “Dr. Henry Anonymous,” who spoke of his experience of having to live in the closet because of his fear of ruining his career.

“It went off marvelously!” Barbara recalled. “The house was packed. Naturally, I think the anonymous psychiatrist [who wore a mask to disguise his identity] was the main reason the house was packed… He made a very eloquent presentation. Than I read statements [we had gathered] from other [gay] psychiatrists, and that clinched it.” The official vote to remove homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses came just one year later.

Barbara recalled in a 1989 interview the impact that the de-listing had on the gay rights movement: “From 1967, when I made my first public lecture to a straight audience, I had to deal with people’s conviction that we were sick simply because they had heard some psychiatrist say so. The APA action took an enormous burden off our backs. We could stop throwing so many resources into fighting the sickness label and begin to devote some of that energy and money to other issues.”

So all these years later, the only ones who still need to have their heads examined are the few remaining mental health professionals, (and more than a few religious zealots) who continue to insist that our sexual orientation is curable (through therapy and/or prayer, among other discredited and less benign methods). I like what Dear Abby had to say about the unreconstructed counselors some years ago: “Any therapist who would take a gay person and try to change him or her should be in jail.” Amen.

As for the men and women who risked their careers and livelihoods to make the world safe and sane for us homosexuals, I say it’s time to erect a few statues in the public square honoring their courageous efforts. And let’s start where it began, with the young gay man who proclaimed his own sanity and the psychologist who proved he was right.

For a more complete account of how we gained our sanity, please read the excerpted interviews from my book, Making History, with Dr. Evelyn Hooker, Dr. Judd Marmor, and Barbara Gittings & Kaye Lahusen, which I’ve posted on my web site. Here’s a direct link: www.ericmarcus.com/content/bookdetail.php?recordID=3

“Oh, Grow Up!” — By Eric Marcus

October 16, 2007

Barney Frank has been championing federal gay rights legislation for more years than a lot of gay activists have been alive. Now, with the prospect of ENDA’s (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) passage in the House threatened by those representatives who don’t support the same employment protections for transgender people, Frank has split the legislation in two in order to save it. Gay people get one bill. Transgender people get the other. It’s no secret that the second bill won’t be acted on this year, but the first bill stands a very good chance of passing in what would be a landmark vote.

So why would leaders of 280+ gay rights organizations line up like members of Putin’s parliament and urge Frank to go back to the original bill and embrace virtually certain defeat? Because they seem to have learned nothing from past experience about how the political system works, even when there are examples in our own movement of how things get done in the real world.

Here in New York City more than three decades ago, Jean O’Leary (the powerhouse gay rights leader who rose through the ranks to take the reins at the National Gay Task Force in 1974) faced the challenge of structuring a gay rights bill that would pass. As she told me when I interviewed her for my book, Making History, “Early on, the transvestites wanted to be included in the bill as a protected group. Politically, we had to say, “This doesn’t work. We are never going to get the bill through the City Council… What it came down to was pragmatism: doing what you had to do to keep the issue moving ahead…” (I realize that transvestites and transgender people are not the same, but we’re still talking about gender identity.)

As we all know, it was years before the gay rights bill passed in New York City and years more before the protections were extended to include gender identity. But it happened over time. The important lesson to take from that experience, something Jean knew and practiced, is that with all or nothing politics you get nothing.

Was it painful to take the incremental approach? For Jean and lots of other people it was, but Jean was right. And now, all these years later, when our allies in Congress need us on their side, lots of gay rights leaders are dead wrong. They may argue that the fate of the current federal legislation is irrelevant because the vote on ENDA is largely symbolic—even if the Senate joined the House there’s no way the president would sign such a bill—but symbolism is important in the long term.

As Barney Frank told The New York Times, “An announcement that this new Democratic Congress led by a woman who has been as committed to full rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in every aspect of her career, that she had to kill a gay rights bill and couldn’t do anything at all would, I think, be the most negative message we could send.”

So the message we send when a coalition of gay groups goes after Barney Frank is that we don’t understand the system, that we don’t have the maturity to work with Congress, and that we don’t know how to support the people who have worked against all odds to keep our agenda moving forward.

It’s taken a long time and a lot of effort for public support for gay people to reach the point where a majority of House members could even come close to voting in favor of an anti-discrimination bill. What is wrong with accepting the fact that the public isn’t there yet when it comes to supporting a bill that addresses the rights of transgender people? Their fight is comparatively new and a lot more effort has to go into educating Americans about transgender people before there’s any hope of passing legislation that addresses discrimination based on gender identity. Their time will come.

Compromise is not abandonment, it is not defeat, it is not criminal. It’s the way things work. And the gay rights leaders who are taking Barney Frank to task for doing the best he can at this moment in time are squandering political capital that we can ill afford to waste and betraying a steadfast ally who deserves better.

Not everyone will agree with me on this, but for those who do, there’s something you can do: write to Barney Frank and voice your support for his compromise bill. Barney Frank doesn’t have direct e-mail, but I spoke with Marisa Greenwald at his office and she said she would print your e-mails and give them to him. So here’s her address: marisa.greenwald@mail.house.gov.

“What Kind of Jewish Name is Devon?”: By Eric Marcus

October 2, 2007

In the thick of the Jewish holidays, I’ve found myself thinking even more than I usually do about my recently departed Grandma May. Not because she was herself so Jewish—think more Grace Kelly than Sophie Tucker—but because of how she managed to navigate the terrain of her Jewish identity throughout a life that began in Warsaw, Poland, and lasted more than a century.

This was never more evident than in how Grandma stretched to embrace the non-Jewish spouses of her grandchildren, including my first partner who was Methodist (although, at the time, his religion was far less the issue than his gender). So it came as something of a surprise to me, following the breakup of my nine-year relationship, when my grandmother said, apropos of nothing, “Maybe this time you’ll find a Jewish one.”

Grandma wasn’t the kind of grandma who pushed her grandchildren to marry Jews. She knew the world had changed dramatically from the days when it would have been unthinkable for her two sons to marry goyim (which they didn’t). Still, her preference was that we marry within the faith out of a sense of tradition and her stated belief that cultural differences were often the cause of marital discord and divorce.

So my grandmother’s wish that I find “a Jewish one” was more about her hope that I’d stand a better chance of finding lifelong happiness if I chose someone with a similar religious background. (She wasn’t picturing the High Holy Days escorted to synagogue by her gay grandsons—she generally couldn’t stand going to synagogue). Grandma wanted me to be happy. And for her, happiness meant getting married and staying married. Marrying a Jew, she believed, could improve the odds.

While I saw the merit of my grandmother’s beliefs, I knew that finding a Jewish one could be a problem for me. I’d never dated a Jewish one beyond a few dates and I was generally attracted to guys who were culturally and physically very different from me, so the odds of finding a new long-term partner who was Jewish seemed remote.

But before long Grandma got her wish. A nice Jewish boy asked me out and we started dating. A few months into the relationship, which seemed to have a future, I decided it was time to introduce Devon to Grandma, which I did over dinner at an Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side.

The dinner went well, although I worried that Devon had assumed a familiarity with my grandmother that while appropriate for most Brooklyn-based ninety-one-year-old Jewish grandmothers, came close to crossing the line with a woman who much preferred to be called Mrs. Marcus than “Grandma,” at least on the first date.

After dinner, Devon walked us back to my building and then headed home. Grandma and I sat in the lobby and waited for the car service to arrive. I was curious to know what she thought, but decided to let her initiate the conversation, which after a few moments of silence, she did. “What kind of Jewish name is Devon?” she asked. Of all the things she could have asked about, that seemed like a strange and less than promising way to begin. “Grandma,” I explained, “in my generation a lot of parents gave their kids names that aren’t exactly Jewish.” I pointed out that she had been the one to name me and I wasn’t Scandinavian.

I was already feeling a vague sense of dread when she asked the second question, “Does he always drag his feet?” “Grandma,” I said, with more than a hint of exasperation, “he was wearing boots tonight—maybe he’s not used to wearing boots.” She wasn’t buying. “A schlepidich!” she exclaimed, and added for good measure, “I don’t know how you can stand it.” (For my non-Jewish readers, that essentially means a foot-dragger, but not nearly that nice.) It was rare that my grandmother ever said or did anything that hurt my feelings, but she’d hurt my feelings and I got defensive and said, with some hope that I could still turn things around, “Well, at least he’s Jewish.” Without a smile and looking directly at me she said, “Yes, but did he have to look so Jewish?” (“But, Grandma,” I thought, “he’s so straight-acting! Don’t I get any credit for that?”)

I’d somehow forgotten that I wasn’t the only one in the family with self-loathing tendencies. Being Jewish was good. Looking Jewish was bad. There was nowhere for this conversation to go, except to places where we were both going to feel bad and I already felt bad enough. It didn’t matter that I was thirty-four -years-old. What my grandmother thought and said mattered. So it was a relief that the car service had arrived and I could buckle her into the back seat and send her home.

The relationship with Devon didn’t last—and not because of anything my grandmother said—and soon I was dating a Midwestern Catholic. We were a great match, and I thought he’d be a great match for my grandmother as well, especially because he had an Austrian-born grandmother with whom he was very close. I knew he’d know how to navigate the fine line between respectful formality and warm familiarity, but this time I wasn’t going to risk a one-on-one dinner. I had something a little less intimate in mind.

A few months after Barney and I started seeing each other I invited him to join me for Family Beach Day at my aunt and uncle’s cabana at the Malibu Beach Club on Long Island. There would be thirteen of us in all, including my brother’s family and his two young sons. Barney is the oldest of eight and he loves kids, so I knew my nephews would adore him, which they did.

It was impossible to know how my grandmother would respond to him, but I knew she’d love his Irish-Austrian good looks. His fine, small features were right up her alley, and his mane of prematurely silver hair proved irresistible (she had a decades-long crush on John Forsythe). On our annual walk from the cabana down to the ocean so she could dip her feet in the surf, Grandma had me on one arm and Barney on the other. The two of them never stopped talking the whole way there and back.

After the evening barbecue, we drove Grandma home and I walked her upstairs to her apartment. While I was getting her settled I couldn’t resist asking what she thought of Barney. She said, “He’s a very nice boy,” which for her was high praise. But there was more. She furrowed her brow and asked, “Does he always wear such a small bathing suit?” Grandma was a great believer in personal modesty and I’d failed to warn Barney that family beach day was not a Speedo kind of outing. Still he looked great in a Speedo, which Grandma had clearly noticed. “What were you doing looking at his bathing suit?” I asked.

There was nothing more delicious than when my grandmother started to giggle. Because her innate modesty demanded the suppression of all outsized emotion, it was an internal battle from the moment a smile began to play on her lips. And then the little shoulders started to shake, and soon she had her face in one hand and was holding on to the kitchen table with the other, all in a final desperate attempt to hide the laughter that defied her best efforts at control.

When we both stopped giggling and Grandma was wiping away her tears, I said, “Okay, we can do something about the little bathing suit.” During the eleven years she knew and loved him, Grandma never said a word about the fact that Barney wasn’t Jewish.

A Wide Stance — By Eric Marcus

September 18, 2007

I committed a sin this week that made me think of Senator Larry Craig. I lied about something that embarrassed me. Well, not exactly lied, but I felt cornered into allowing for a misperception of the truth regarding an incident involving a sexual organ.

Here’s what happened: I had a minor medical emergency (that didn’t seem so minor at the time) that began last Monday following a routine three-mile run. After a night of excruciating pain I spent several hours in my doctor’s office and then an additional hour on my back, legs spread, undergoing a seemingly endless sonogram examination.

When I finally made it back onto the street, I was still in pain and was pretty loopy from the Vicodin, so I decided to cancel a podcast recording with my publisher scheduled for an hour later (Simon & Schuster is publishing a new edition of my Q&A book for teens, What If Someone I Know is Gay?).

I called Kelly, the marketing person at S&S, whom I know mostly via e-mail and had only met in person once, to explain that I’d had an accident. I knew there was no way I was going to tell Kelly exactly what the problem was, but I also knew that I didn’t want to lie. Mostly I hoped she wouldn’t ask, but Kelly is a caring person and said, “What happened?” That’s when I suddenly pictured Larry Craig having to explain how his foot came to butt up against the cute cop’s foot in the Minneapolis airport bathroom. Like Craig, I passed up the opportunity to spell out the full truth and said, “I had a running accident.” When Kelly said, “Oh, that’s terrible,” I felt like even more of a heel.

Technically, I wasn’t lying, but I know that Kelly assumed I’d had a sprained ankle or other injury that involved bones, ligaments and/or muscles. I was too embarrassed to tell her that the diagnosis was, colloquially speaking, a torqued nut. I could have said, as my late Grandma May almost certainly would have, that I had a problem “down there,” but men don’t generally refer to “down there” as “down there.” And, unfortunately, men don’t have the option of using the inverse of the catchall descriptive term “female problems” to describe conditions affecting our reproductive and sexual organs because no one refers to male problems as “male problems.”

I felt bad about shading the truth, but I felt embarrassed about my injury, not because I’d caught the nut in a bathroom stall door or anything, but because any discussion of testicles with anyone other than one’s doctor, husband, and/or a close friend, feels embarrassing. At least to me.

So I’m left feeling sorry for Larry Craig. I have a medical condition, and while it was likely caused by failing to wear appropriately supportive running shorts (middle age is getting to be a real drag), it’s still something I wouldn’t want to talk about in front of the cameras. Senator Craig, however, was beyond embarrassed and had to deal with layers of shame, which all conspired to keep him from coming even close to telling the truth about why he was tapping and waving to a stranger in a place where one’s actions are usually focused on oneself. And without coming clean about what he was doing, there was no way he could defend himself against the outrageous entrapment perpetrated by the Minneapolis airport police.

Even if Senator Craig had been an out, unattached gay man, it’s hard to imagine that he could have overcome his embarrassment and stood before the cameras and explained what he’d been up to, although adopting the “wide stance” excuse must have, in and of itself, caused his cheeks to flush (forgive me, but the puns write themselves).

I had the chance to come clean about my semi-fib when I showed up for my rescheduled recording session this past Friday. Kelly met me in the reception hall and as I stepped off the elevator and walked toward her she glanced at my ankle and asked how I was feeling (okay, I was walking with a wide stance that could have been interpreted as a limp, but I was just trying to protect my still aching, now un-torqued nut). I thought for a second about telling the truth, but felt almost instantaneous embarrassment at the nature of the injury and shame over my earlier misdirection, and simply said, “Thanks for asking. The ice and painkillers helped a lot.”

I have been humbled by my experience this past week and promise never to make fun of Senator Larry Craig’s predicament again (at least until my next blog entry).

•

All kidding aside, a torqued testicle (twisted within the scrotum, cutting off the blood supply) is a very dangerous condition that requires immediate medical attention. I was lucky because my testicle un-torqued itself. But, in general, unless attended to within hours (usually surgery), the testicle can become necrotic (i.e., dead).

I had no idea that such a thing could happen, and because I didn’t know the danger I was in I didn’t seek medical help until the next day and instead used Vicodin and ice to help deal with the pain for as long as I could stand it. And while I do indeed find talking about whole thing more than a little embarrassing, I though it was important to write about my experience in the hope that, as my friend Leslie put it, I could help “save nuts all over the nation.”

Bathroom Habits: By Eric Marcus

September 6, 2007

I woke up Wednesday morning to the news that Idaho Senator Larry Craig had decided to fight back and may not resign after all. Much to my surprise, I found myself cheering him on. And not only because that means he’ll remain a pain in the ass to the reflexively anti-gay Republican Party, but because it’s the right thing to do in the face of vicious Senate gay-bashing.

How Senator Craig explains himself to himself is between him and whomever he chooses to confide in (and I hope for his sake that there’s someone he can talk to about what’s buried deep beneath that façade of self-righteous respectability). But that has nothing to do with the trap that was set for him and the dozens of other men at the Minneapolis airport. (Just for the record, my partner and I were in the Craig bathroom at the Minneapolis airport just a few weeks ago between flights and noticed no untoward activity, although we were so desperate to do what one typically does in a bathroom that I’m not sure we would have noticed unless we had to use a stall and they were all occupied.)

Entrapment is wrong, especially as a tool to discourage public restroom sex. As Arianna Huffington so powerfully wrote on her blog this week, it’s an incredible waste of police resources at a time when the airport police have far more pressing security issues to worry about. And besides, it’s completely unnecessary when a simple sign would do the trick, such as: “This bathroom is under police surveillance.”

So as an out, proud gay man I say to Senator “I’m not gay” Craig, for the sake of yourself and all the gay people you were perfectly comfortable denying rights to, fight the charges to which you plead guilty. Challenge your colleagues and their institutional homophobia. Stay in the Senate and think about running for another term. And for God’s sake, find yourself a good therapist who can help you untangle the web of your own making that’s just about destroyed the life you’ve so painstakingly constructed to hide your shame. Being gay is nothing to be ashamed of. Allowing yourself to be bullied by your homophobic colleagues is.

• Please note that I’ve just posted four video clips on YouTube from various TV interviews I’ve done over the years, including a 2000 head-to-head with Bill O’Reilly.

Do You Wanna’ Dance?: By Eric Marcus

We went to a lovely wedding last weekend—a “regular” wedding, as my late grandmother came to call weddings between a boy and a girl. Two hundred people in a beautifully decorated hotel ballroom on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, all gathered to celebrate the happy occasion. Not that it should matter, but I was glad to see that we weren’t the only gay couple among the two hundred guests, although we were the oldest of the three male couples by about a decade.

During the reception, when the twelve-piece band tore into one of our favorite seventies classics, my partner of thirteen years asked me to dance. We both love to dance and we love dancing together. I won’t pretend that we dance at straight weddings without hesitation, but over the years as gay people have become more visible and we’ve grown more comfortable, we’ve gotten less hesitant and less concerned with what people might think. So at last weekend’s wedding, which was hosted by a liberal, warm, and embracing family we didn’t think twice.

Still, there were some surprised looks as the two middle-aged gay guys took to the crowded dance floor. Most of the looks were of happy surprise (there were smiles and I didn’t stop to ask). But there were also a couple of scowls from people a decade or more older than us. It’s not like we were surprised by the smiles or disappointed by the scowls. Our place in society is still a work in progress and it will be a long time before our open presence is a total non-event.

But there was one thing that did surprise and disappoint us. Neither of the other two couples danced a single dance. One couple sat out the whole evening. And while the other couple never left the dance floor, they never danced with each other and their partners were always women.

I’m the first person to say—and I’ve said this for a long time—that gay people need to move at their own speed when it comes to how public they choose to be about the fact they’re gay. Coming out is a very personal thing and we all have different comfort levels. That said, I wish we hadn’t been the only boy-boy couple on the dance floor. And I wish this for a couple of reasons.

First, it would have been nice to have a little company. For one thing, if there had been another same-sex couple on the dance floor, the attention paid to us would have been diluted. Second, we gay people still have work to do when it comes to our visibility. And while I don’t think that everything we do has to be a political statement, being ourselves in a public setting sets an example. The more we’re all out there, the more people will grow accustomed to seeing same-sex couples, and, one hopes, the more comfortable they’ll be when we do normal things in public, like dancing at weddings, greeting each other at airports, or shopping together at the grocery. And we know from past experience that as people get to know us they support the legislation that’s important to us, from employment protections to domestic partnership and gay marriage.

Dancing at a wedding isn’t quite as heroic as the public demonstrations of past decades when the early gay pioneers fought for our basic rights, but it’s still an opportunity to make a difference, however incremental. Besides, it’s fun. And we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that not dancing sends a message, too.
Eric Marcus is the author of Making Gay History and the forthcoming book for teens, What if Someone I Know is Gay? www.ericmarcus.com

“Who Plays the Husband and Who Plays the Wife?”: By Eric Marcus

August 7, 2007

We spent this past weekend at a lovely resort in the Berkshires with our straight couple friends, Bob and Debbie. It was all so totally normal that you could almost forget that being a gay couple was ever an issue anywhere (although I’m well aware that it remains a plenty big issue in many ways and in many places). But there were a number of reminders that we still live in a world that assumes couples come in bi-gender pairs. And not everyone has comfortably adjusted to the fact of our existence.

Like a lot of places we’ve traveled to, there was a welcome note from the manager waiting for us in the room when we arrived. We’ve kept a collection of these notes from over the years because it’s fun to look back to see how they’ve been addressed: Mr. & Mrs. Marcus or Mr. & Mrs. Karpfinger. Or the notes are addressed to the two of us by name or, as was the case this past weekend, the note was addressed only to my partner, presumably because it was his credit card under which the reservation was made (although they knew that the two of us would be occupying the room).

The real fun came at dinner the first night when the four of us were scanning our menus and discussing our choices. I commented on the cost of the various tasting menus and Barney asked where on the menu I was looking. “The bottom of every page,” I said, trying desperately to hide my impatience, because it was plain as day where the prices were listed. Then Debbie said, “I don’t see them either.” It seems that someone on the wait staff had decided that Bob and I were the husbands, hence the menus with the prices (the resort is a little old fashioned when it comes to its menus), and that Barney and Debbie were the wives who needed to be kept in the dark about what the meal was costing. We had a good laugh over that one, wondering what the conversation must have been like in the kitchen as they tried to figure out our marital roles. How did they decide? Was it my manly swagger? The way we took our seats (I let Barney choose where to sit and sat down after he did)? Or was it just our overall demeanor?

With Bob and Debbie it was fairly evident who wore the pants in the family (Debbie was wearing a lovely summer dress and Bob was in coat and tie), but the waiter had no idea whether it was Bob or Debbie who was the primary wage earner. In any event, the whole thing was way confusing and totally unnecessary. They could have simply asked us about our chosen roles or they could have made things easy for themselves and given us all menus that included the prices. (The idea of priceless menus seems a little silly anyway.)

If we really wanted to have some fun, we might have asked the waiter how they came to decide who got which menu. And maybe that would have been a good thing to do—a teaching moment, perhaps, so they could think about how to handle things differently the next time they encountered a same-sex couple. Or if we’d really wanted to have some fun we could have informed the manager that we were new age, post-feminist Mormans and that Debbie was the matriarch of our happy band. Debbie liked that idea best.

Vitter’s Values or Crime & Punishment: By Eric Marcus

June 24, 2007

David Vitter, the Republican Senator from Louisiana, is not your average John. He’s a family values John. No mere defender of traditional marriage, he declared, as Frank Rich wrote in his July 22 New York Times column, “that there is no ‘more important’ issue facing America than altering the constitution to defend marriage.”

And just because he was caught up in the DC Madam scandal and was forced to acknowledge his transgressions before the cameras while holding his wife’s hand (she had once threatened to use that hand to Bobbitt him if she caught him doing what he’s now admitted he’s done, so I’m surprised he wasn’t holding both her hands) that doesn’t make him any less a believer in the sanctity of marriage. It does, however, make him a hypocrite and a law-breaker. And for these crimes he must be punished.

I propose a two-part punishment: removal from the Senate and restitution to the women whose services he paid for. If Vitter had the values most of us value, he would have used his recent press conference to announce his resignation. But he doesn’t and he didn’t, so the Senator’s Republican colleagues, at least the righteous ones among them, should persuade him to resign. Failing that, the full Senate should vote to expel him.

Regarding restitution, some might argue that this was a victimless crime and that Vitter doesn’t owe the women with whom he sex anything more than he’s already paid. I disagree. So I propose that Vitter pay for first-class health insurance—like the plan that all members of Congress have voted to give themselves—for all of the women he slept with. And their children. For life. (Family values Republicans are no fans of condoms, so we can only speculate what the good Senator might have exposed these women to.)

Maybe good Christians can find it in their hearts to forgive this serial sinner and let him work out his public shame in private. But I’m no Christian and I have no doubt that this hard-charging, upstanding straight guy who campaigned to screw us gay folks out of the legal right to marry—while he paid to screw someone other than his wife—must be punished. Let’s put old-fashioned American values to work. Send him home. Make him pay.

Ban Straight Marriage: by Eric Marcus

July 10, 2007

I think it’s great that Elizabeth Edwards has gone public with her support for gay marriage. But I really don’t care. I like Elizabeth Edwards, admire her, and even support her husband in his quest for the White House (although I wish he’d just not say anything about gay marriage rather than torture us with his overly-earnest explanation of how his views on gay marriage are colored by his religious upbringing and blah, blah, blah).

Unfortunately, no matter what Elizabeth Edwards thinks—or what any of the other candidates, both Democrats and Republicans have to say—nothing major is going to change when it comes to our legal right to marry in the foreseeable future. Sure there’ll be some progress on a state-by-state basis, but given the still politically toxic nature of this issue and a Supreme Court that’s unlikely to overturn Bill Clinton’s Defense of Marriage Act, it’s going to take a generational shift before we catch up with Canada, Europe, and South Africa.

In the mean time, while we wait for the youngsters who support gay marriage to get older and the oldsters who don’t to die, we need to take a closer look at straight marriage and the terrible harm it’s doing to children. As we’ve often been told by opponents of gay marriage, children and their wellbeing are the principal reason for marriage in the first place. So it seems only reasonable to reconsider the right of straight people to marry in light of the murder, abuse, neglect, and emotional harm inflicted on the nation’s children by mixed-gender married couples.

Consider the recent case of the professional wrestler who injected his child with growth hormones and then murdered him (and his wife and killed himself). Perhaps an extreme example, but you have to wonder why more wasn’t done to protect this child from heterosexual marriage.

While this horrific case is more the exception than the rule, as I look around at the straight married couples I know, I have to wonder how same-sex married couples could do any worse if we tried. (I feel the need to state here that some of my best friends are straight and my questioning of mixed-gender marriage is not an indication of any prejudice or bias on my part, just a rational response to what I’ve witnessed among my friends and in my own family.)

It’s impressive to me that all of the leading presidential candidates on both sides are in agreement that marriage should be between a man and a woman, especially since there isn’t much the two sides can agree on these days. But I want to know how they plan to protect the children who result from these sacred unions. When are they going to consider the lifelong physical and emotional scars inflicted on America’s children by straight marriage? And when are they going to have the courage to stand up and say what is already abundantly clear? It’s time to consider banning straight marriage. For the sake of the children.