Remember the song in “South Pacific,” “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught?” I think that’s very true when it comes to this issue.
The first time marriage was explained to me, I was probably around four years old. Some adult, I don’t remember who, told me that marriage meant a man and a woman falling in love with each other and deciding to live together as man and wife. In my little-girl mind, the question already formed: Why couldn’t two men or two women fall in love with each other as well? Why did it always have to be a man and a woman?
The answer I received, of course, was that two men or two women couldn’t marry and have babies. Aha! There was the secret underlying purpose of marriage: not love, which could happen to anyone, but making babies.
Knowing nothing of adult love or sex, I easily accepted this more practical explanation of why same sex marriage “didn’t make sense.”
The next time the subject came up, I’d already been “carefully taught.” Not by anyone openly, but by what I observed in society. I was ten years old and my friend David was eleven. My apartment building had a superintendent, and the superintendent’s daughter was a lesbian. Those were the butch and femme days of the mid-1960’s, before the Stonewall riots, before gays and lesbians came out of the closet.
Not only was the superintendent’s daughter a lesbian, she was black, and her lover was white. The daughter was pretty and looked feminine, but her lover cut her blonde hair extremely short, bound her breasts so that she resembled a man with a muscular chest, and wore mannish shirts and pants. Unless you scrutinized her, you could barely tell she was a woman.
The couple never appeared together in public that I ever saw. Maybe they went out at night to the lesbian bars in Greenwich Village. I have no idea. David and I would sit in my bedroom and sometimes catch a glimpse of the lover passing by on the street. Then we would giggle together.
“Their parents will never approve!” I laughed, referring not just to their same-sex relationship but also to their status as an interracial couple. But in fact, at least one parent, the superintendent, either approved or tolerated their relationship and allowed them to live together in his apartment.
Back then I had another confused notion about homosexuality. I thought all lesbians wanted to be men, and gay men wanted to be women. So I thought, why couldn’t a gay man marry a lesbian, and he could be the woman while she was the man? That would take care of the baby problem, wouldn’t it? Though a pregnant man would be an unusual sight, to say the least! Back then, of course, I knew the word lesbian but there was no such word as “gay.” “Gay,” in those days, meant happy and cheerful, and at first when homosexuals began using the word, I resented their misappropriation of the term. Today, you couldn’t possibly write a book titled, “Our Hearts Were Young and Gay,” unless you meant something specific.
Homosexual men were called homosexuals by the polite, homos, faggots and queer by the less polite, and cocksuckers by the bigots. Today, the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning) community has adopted the word “queer” into its lexicon and it is no longer an epithet, just as blacks have taken over the word “nigger,” and they can use it among themselves without insult. Can a straight person call a gay person “queer” today without insult? In some cases, apparently, yes, because I just finished writing a grant to a foundation that maintains a “Queer Youth Fund.”
In the past thirty years, society’s pendulum has swung again. In the years since the Stonewall riots of 1969, first gays and lesbians came out, then bisexuals, and now the LGBTQ acronym stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and questioning. Same sex marriage has been legalized in some places and I hope it will be legal all over the United States soon, but that may have to wait until Bush and his pals are out of office.
I used to tell a gay friend, Lou, that I wanted to dance at his wedding. Today, I belong to the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture, which supports same sex marriage. Its officiants perform commitment ceremonies as same sex marriage isn’t yet legal in New York City. Last February I arranged for BSEC to have a booth at the Same Sex Wedding Expo at the Javits Convention Center, hoping to attract more LGBTQ people to the Society as well as to advertise our rental space for commitment ceremonies.
And now I write grants for the Hetrick-Martin Institute, which provides direct services to at-risk LGBTQ youth in New York City. These kids come from impoverished backgrounds and have faced verbal and physical violence because of who they are.
I’ve learned that LGBTQ teenagers drop out of school at a much higher rate than other kids and are often afraid to even show their faces at school because of the taunting and beatings they face. Some of them have run away from home, some of them were kicked out when they outed themselves to their families. They attempt suicide three times as often as other teenagers, and on the streets, they are exposed to drugs, prostitution and HIV infection.
Right now HMI is helping them to get on their feet, get educated (it’s also the home of the Harvey Milk High School, the first public alternative school for LGBTQ students who have run into rough situations at their zoned schools because of their sexuality or gender identity), participate in after-school activities that boost their academic and job readiness skills as well as their creativity, get information about HIV prevention and taking care of their health, and get counseling and crisis intervention when needed.
When these kids grow up, will they grow up with scars? Or will they be strong and smart and happy? That’s not for me to decide: I just write the grants. It’s for everyone to decide, how these youngsters with dreams and aspirations should be guided into an adulthood of meaningful careers and stable loving relationships: for instance, marriage. I hope they’ll find society more and more ready to welcome them. I hope they’ll find the things every teenager hopes will be waiting out in the real world someday.
In spirit if not in body, I’ll dance at their weddings.
