Some of my Rumination posts grow out of speeches I give at the Olympic Club, a speakers’ luncheon club. These thoughts on my
journey from teenage homophobe to a bewildered old guy encountering LGBTQ persons were
warmly received by my fellow Olympic Club members, some of whom encouraged me
to publish the talk herein.
LGBTQ+ (who the hell is a Plus?)
When it comes to this ever-changing world of LGBTQ, I think of Robert Browning’s dark and foreboding poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. It seems apt -- Child Fletcher to the LGBTQ Tower Comes – it’s how I feel confronting this turbulent world of sexuality and gender-identity that challenges and discomforts our traditions, our habits, our beliefs, and is equally mysterious about how it might end.
Keep
in mind the times that produced me: I entered high school in 1948. I was a typical American male teen; a
hormone-addled, sexually innocent, all-American-Boy homophobe.
In college, grad school, and the army, sexuality was hidden away, or else I was blithely inattentive. My first encounter with any of that homosexual stuff was in 1961. An associate of mine, a General Mills engineer, on a business trip to our Buffalo plant, was murdered in his hotel room by a man he had picked up in a “homo” bar (the term gay hadn’t yet come into play.) This was stunning: a homosexual!? He wasn’t any weird poet or artist; just a normal guy with a wife and family, a respected teammate.
Later, I became friends with a fellow widely reputed to be gay. He eventually propositioned me after a fishing outing; I told him thanks, but that wasn’t my thing. And we stayed friends. Amazing! I had a homosexual friend.
Later still, at Marriott, I announced Ed G. as my Marketing Director for the Travel Trade. Fred Malek, he of West Point, of Nam and the green berets, of the Nixon White House, said “Well, uh, er, well, he’s a bit effeminate, isn’t he?” I answered without thinking “Well Ed’s gay of course, but I don’t find him effeminate.” Fred and Bill Marriott almost fell out of their chairs. To Bill’s credit, good Mormon that he is, he came to rely on Ed and wouldn’t go to a travel industry event without Ed at his elbow. Fred proved not so adaptable, neither to Ed nor me.
My first encounter with Lesbianism came not unlike that with the gay engineer: the lovely wife of another associate left him and their child to run off with a woman. Who knew Lesbians could be nice, normal people living in nice suburban houses with social lives not unlike our own? Another notch in my education.
LG-B . . . bi-sexual. I’ve not had direct experience with bi-sexual people, but I don’t suppose they look any different from you and me. (After delivering my talk, I received a surprising confirmation.)
LGB-T . . . trans.
When I ran for Port Commissioner in 1999, I and five others of us primary candidates were lined up like birds on a wire in a Capitol Hill church basement awaiting our endorsement interview with the Seattle Gay and Lesbian Coalition. My interviewer asked me to explain the difference between trans-sexual and trans-gender. Well, I knew what a transvestite was but that’s as far as it went. I didn’t get their endorsement.
I knew “transvestite” in part because a friend of ours had come home early from a meeting and found her husband dressed in her underwear and trying on things from her closet. We still see each of them from time to time, separately. Once he, she is now a she and a highly respected professional here in town.
It wasn’t until this past Thanksgiving that I finally got the difference between trans-sexual and trans-gender. My granddaughter’s partner told me that the one is about real sex change, about “how and with whom you sleep”; the other, he said is about gender, about how you feel and express yourself. She and he, my granddaughter and her partner, by the way, are not trans anything.
But as some of you know, I had another granddaughter who has now become my brand new, fully bearded, un-breasted, 26-year-old grandson. He (or they) has kept the name Liza, which gives us qualms about imagined encounters like that of which Johnny Cash sings in A Boy Named Sue. But Liza it is; he doesn’t have a partner yet.
In the meantime, a son of my niece is helping his partner of twelve years go through the process of becoming a man. He is very supportive at this point; sexual-bending for both of them, I’m sure. As his mother, my niece Alice, has said “our children are teaching us new things about gender.”
LBGT-Q: Queer. Another word, like gay, that has been jarringly re-fashioned to mean searching, questioning, strangely at odds with norms. We recently attended a memorial service for a dear friend whose 49-year-old daughter who came home from Honolulu, when our friend was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, to become her mother's caregiver. She is wonderful – skilled, thoughtful, compassionate, companionable – and tattooed from head to toe, pierced and studded everywhere, and sporting a four-inch high mohawk dyed neon pink. I don't know if she would buy "queer", but whatever, she is a wonderful person.
A couple of years ago, after George Floyd’s murder, the President of my college, Hamilton in upstate New York, made some dumb remarks which set campus radicals’ hair afire. Protests, demonstrations, and calls for his resignation broke out among black and Latinx student groups; even among some hot-headed faculty. A couple of us classmates explored with college staff how our ancient experiences with prejudice, discrimination, and otherness from back in the fifties might help today’s students gain some perspective on their fraught times. We Zoomed with student activists, with professors, with the President and various staff. The Dean of Students positioned the race issue as limited to a slice of the student body. “Gender” she said “was the issue that was embroiling the whole campus.”
And today, of course, gender issues are embroiling wide swaths of our society -- traditionalists in both parties, those imperious pronouns, North Carolina’s bathroom law, transgender sports competitors, religion and creed, Idaho’s ban on drag shows, the lamentable attacks on Vers, Club Q, The Otherside Lounge, Backstreet Cafe, Pulse, and more -- it goes on and on. All of these all cause real angst, real pain, real conflict, real deaths. This is no minor matter.
All I have learned so far is not to judge. One can’t restrict, dictate, or control by law or sanctions or sermons from the pulpit how people feel, what people think about themselves, how they choose to express their identities. There’s no going back; it all will continue to change and evolve.
LGBTQ+
Who knows what will come next? What's in that plus? Twenty years ago, Edward Albee won a Pulitzer for his play The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? about a man who becomes infatuated with a goat. We saw it at ACT. Is that yet to come?
Whatever is next: how will you react – with love and tolerance and empathy and a good-hearted effort to understand? That’s my intent. I certainly hope I do. I know I can if I will it . . . goats notwithstanding.
