Category Archives: queer

Voices of GLBT scientists

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For a broader perspective on being gay and being a scientist, check out some great pieces on BoingBoing, posted for National Coming Out Day—Steve Silberman interviews endocrinologist Neena Schwartz about her decision to come out after a career in the closet; then Maggie Koerth-Baker rounds up personal stories from an array of LGBT scientists, including evolutionary biologist Douglas Futuyma. As Maggie puts it in the introduction to both articles,

Together, we realized that we’d never seen a Coming Out Day feature dedicated to the experiences of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered persons in the sciences and engineering. Science journalist powers: Activate! We hope today’s two-part celebration will add to the diversity of stories and help science-minded young queer folks everywhere know that it does, indeed, get better—both through the course of history, and the course of an individual’s life.

Other queer scientists are invited to contribute stories in the comments of Maggie’s piece. (Maggie asked me to help contact people to share their stories, and I put her in touch with Dr. Futuyma; and Steve was kind enough to give me a nod at the end of the cross-post of his interview with Neena Schwartz.)

Photo by bensonkua.

Why I’m out online

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ResearchBlogging.orgExactly a year ago today, I came out of the online closet. Now it’s another National Coming Out Day, and it seems like as good a time as any to think out loud about why I made that decision.

Image borrowed from Wikipedia under fair use rationale.

My reasons aren’t going to surprise anyone who has even a passing familiarity with gay rights history:

  • Familiarity breeds acceptance. This is mainly a political argument. It’s widely accepted (and supported by ongoing public opinion surveying) that people who personally know GLBT folks are overwhelmingly more likely to support treating GLBT people like full citizens. The psychology isn’t hard to understand—it’s easy to hate the nebulous, faceless, unknown Gays; it’s rather harder to hate your son, or your niece, the nice neighbors who let you borrow their lawnmower, or (I hope) the guy who writes that one not-entirely-terrible science blog you check every so often.
  • Gotta give’em hope. And an example. This is more personal. I grew up without knowing any out gay people, which was, to put it mildly, not helpful. I was, to paraphrase the Onion headline, The Only Homosexual in the World; I didn’t have any of the support, or visible examples, that would’ve helped me think critically about my sexual orientation or imagine a future in which I was out, and happy about it. (Which I very much am, these days.) By being open about my orientation, maybe I can help someone else figure out his (or hers) in a way I couldn’t, and even show that, as confusing and frequently miserable as growing up gay is, it gets better.

And if there’s one impression I hope to give a confused, lonely (and presumably nerdy) gay kid reading D&T, it’s that it did get better for this formerly confused, lonely (and unquestionably nerdy) gay kid. And a large part of how it got better, for me, has to do with going into science.

Evolutionary biology has turned out to be a good field for me, in this personal respect. When I started my first genuine biology-related internship, I was surrounded for the first time by people who didn’t talk about gays in the hushed, scandalized tones I’d heard through a lot of my childhood and schooling. Biologists are as human as the next ape descendent, but they’re also a generally open-minded bunch who tend to be more interested in the quality of your work than what you do after you leave the lab. And, for what are probably obvious reasons, evolutionary biology doesn’t attract the sort of people who hold doctrinaire conservative religious positions on any subject.

Evolutionary biology is also a pretty good academic discipline for me because evolutionary biology has something to say about sexual minorities, just as it has something to say about humans in general. Humans are biological beings, and we’re part of an animal kingdom that exhibits a wide array of sexual behaviors, as elaborately documented by the evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden in her book Evolution’s Rainbow. Exactly how to explain this diversity, particularly in the case of humans, is still quite controversial [$a]—but it’s a question for which I have some expertise, and one I’d like to weave into the writing I do for D&T in the future.

References

Futuyma, D. (2005). Celebrating diversity in sexuality and gender. Evolution, 59 (5), 1156-9 DOI: 10.1111/j.0014-3820.2005.tb01052.x

Roughgarden, J. (2004). Evolution’s Rainbow. Berkeley: University of California Press. Preview on Google Books.

It gets better

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So, I know I’m on hiatus for a little, but this is pretty important. Following news of yet another gay teen bullied into committing suicide, Dan Savage had a revelation:

… I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes. I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.

But gay adults aren’t allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don’t bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.

Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don’t have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids.

So here’s what you can do, GBVWS: Make a video. Tell them it gets better.

So Dan launched the It Gets Better Project over on YouTube, starting with a video in which he and his husband describe how it got better for them. The project is looking for more submissions.

Barack Obama’s (lack of) moral leadership

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My Sunday morning reading includes a trenchant essay by Jacob Weisberg at Slate, which gathers together President Obama’s disappointing performances on immigration, freedom of religion, and gay marriage under the rubric of moral cowardice:

Obama has had numerous occasions to assert leadership on values issues this summer: Arizona’s crude anti-immigrant law, the battle over Prop 8 and gay marriage, and the backlash against what Fox News persists in calling the “Ground Zero mosque.” These battles raise fundamental questions of national identity, liberty, and individual rights. When Lindsey Graham argues for rewriting the Constitution to eliminate the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, or Newt Gingrich proposes a Saudi standard for the free exercise of religion, they’re taking positions at odds with America’s basic ideals. But Obama’s instinctive caution has steered him away from casting these questions as moral or civil rights issues. On none of them has he shown anything resembling courage. [links sic]

To Weisberg’s list, I’d also add the need for comprehensive, carbon-limiting energy legislation. Treating undocumented immigrants like human beings, Muslim and gay Americans like citizens, climate change as a genuine impending human-created disaster—these are all inherently moral positions. Liberals have long been sick of watching that morality overruled by the weird, selfish, other-hating morality of contemporary American conservatism. I voted for Barack Obama (and I think lots of us did) because he seemed likely to articulate liberal beliefs in explicitly moral language, and do it with conviction.

Remember his campaign speech on race? With his feet to the media fire over his apparently scandalous association with Jeremiah Wright, Obama acknowledged the subtleties and complications of our national racial history, without losing sight of basic principles of right and wrong:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country—a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old—is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.

That’s the Barack Obama I wanted to be President. I could’ve sworn I voted for that one. But it doesn’t seem to be the guy who ended up in office.

Candidate Obama at a rally in Pittsburgh, 21 April 2008. Photo by BarackObama.com.

Unquiet in Lake Wobegon

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So this is ancient by internet standards (vintage 2007!), but I just discovered it this morning, via a link-in-passing from Dan Savage. Garrison Keillor is Not Cool with the gays:

And now gay marriage will produce a whole new string of hyphenated relatives. In addition to the ex-stepson and ex-in-laws and your wife’s first husband’s second wife, there now will be Bruce and Kevin’s in-laws and Bruce’s ex, Mark, and Mark’s current partner, and I suppose we’ll get used to it.

The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men — sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control. Parents are supposed to stand in back and not wear chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts. That’s for the kids. It’s their show.

Also back in 2007, Dan Savaged Keillor’s totally unnecessary swipe at gay parents far more effectively than I could.


Et tu, Garrison? Photo by L-T-L.

So why am I writing about this at all? Because, to be frank, it hurts. I’ve been listening to Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion since I was too young to understand most of the jokes – the storytelling and quirky musical taste and commonsense Midwestern liberalism was one of the predominant flavors of the Public Radio marinade in which I grew up. The “fussy” boy who woke up to Morning Edition on school days and went to bed after PHC on the weekends grew into a closet case who loved This American Life in spite of* the troubling feelings aroused by contributions from David Sedaris, David Rakoff, and, yep, Dan Savage (how’s that for coming full circle?); and finally into an out and moderately well-adjusted gay man who owes his outness and moderate well-adjustedness to Public Radio more than any other cultural institution.

But so my point is that learning that the man whose voice is the bass note of the entire Public Radio mindset is capable of saying things like “… the flamboyance may have to be brought under control,” is like learning that Mr. Rogers made his puppets from the skins of strangled kittens, or that LeVar Burton wrapped up production of every Reading Rainbow episode with a book burning.** It’s like learning that hot cocoa causes cancer. It feels like betrayal.

Maybe I’m being melodramatic, but apparently that’s what Keillor expects of me anyway.

——
* Or because of?
** Yeah, I know – illustrating a point about a Public Radio figure with Public Television figures is pretty weak. But I really don’t hold many institutions in the same esteem I do Public Broadcasting. Not even hot cocoa.

Sins of omission

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I can’t help but think this is going to strain Rick Warren’s warm, personal friendship with Melissa Ethridge.

Via Slog. Yesterday’s Fresh Air also had a great (by which I mean alternately appalling and rage-inducing) interview with Jeff Sharlet. My reaction: more or less as before. Also, thank God (or whoever) for Fred Clark.

The brood of vipers

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NY Times:

Citing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to civil disobedience, 145 evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders have signed a declaration saying they will not cooperate with laws that they say could be used to compel their institutions to participate in abortions, or to bless or in any way recognize same-sex couples.
…
They say they also want to speak to younger Christians who have become engaged in issues like climate change and global poverty, and who are more accepting of homosexuality than their elders. They say they want to remind them that abortion, homosexuality and religious freedom are still paramount issues.

This, of course, is on the heels of the threat by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. to discontinue charitable work if the city council passes a law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.


Photo by jikido-san.

Christianity was founded on stories of a man who preached sacrifice of self to the needs of others, went drinking with prostitutes and other social outcasts, and was executed as a common criminal by the government. The figure of Jesus as described in the Christian scriptures is, to me, an ideal I can only hope to emulate. Yet many of the people who take his name for their moral identity — and the loudest, most vehement and visible of those who do — would evidently react with disgust if they met their Lord on the street, and condemn his teachings as un-American if they actually understood them.

I wanted to write something more scathing than that. But I’m just tired. I’m going to hand the mic over to that guy they keep claiming to follow.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.
…
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices — mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law — justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.
…
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.
…
You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?
(Matthew, chaper 23, New International Version.)

Oh, and by the way …

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I’m gay.

I came out of the closet just a few months ago — but that’s a story I probably won’t recount in any detail on D&T, which has never included much detail about my personal life, and probably never will. I debated whether to write even a brief post like this, and finally decided to do so only because this is a part of my personal experience that colors what I discuss here. And, what the heck, today is National Coming Out Day. Cheers.

PS: For blogging on the politics and personal issues of gay identity, see Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan, in that order. They’ve strongly shaped my own views in my journey so far, and are much more eloquent and authoritative than I could hope to be. For discussion of homosexuality in an explicitly Mennonite context, see PinkMenno.

Update, added 9 November 2010: Further explanation for my decision to come out online may be found here.

Mennonites in pink

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Pink Menno Campaign is organizing people to support broader (and officially-sanctioned) inclusion of LGBTQ people in the Mennonite Church by wearing pink at the upcoming biennial convention of Mennonite Church USA.

Mennonites are in a slightly unusual position w/r/t sexual orientation — the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective accepts only heterosexual marriage — but the CoF is more a descriptive than a prescriptive document, and because MCUSA lacks some sort of centralized doctrinal enforcement, a few individual congregations do welcome LGBTQ folks and even perform same-sex marriage ceremonies. Sometimes such congregations and/or their pastors are “disciplined” in various ways by the local-level church authorities that can do such things, and the results are never happy.

I thought it was a big deal when, as a delegate at the last MCUSA conference, I was involved in preparing a statement on behalf of young Mennos that included a very brief nod to broader inclusion; much more recently, a group of Mennonite pastors signed an open letter to the church calling for an end to the exclusion of LGBTQ folks. (An article in Mennonite Weekly Review covers both the letter and its context.) Progress? Hard to say. A Delegate Assembly full of pink t-shirts is a mighty appealing image, though.