Positive Liberty

Here is a fascinating article about déjà vu via Arts & Letters Daily.

The article gives more information on the phenomenon than I’ve ever seen in one place before. Based on new research, psychologists are asking themselves some intriguing questions:

Why does déjà vu become less common as people grow older? Why do political liberals report more frequent déjà vu experiences than conservatives do? And why do the majority of déjà vu experiences seem to occur when people are in mundane settings?

The difference between young and old might well be chemical, although I’m certainly not qualified to say. Come to think of it, liberals may be more prone to déjà vu for chemical reasons as well, albeit induced from the outside.

Or perhaps there is something more to it.

I often experience déjà vu firsthand, and I was struck by what seems to me a glaring ommission in this otherwise thorough article: I have always identified two very distinct types of déjà vu. Both are uncanny feelings of familiarity, but otherwise these two experiences are as different from one another as a grin is from a fit of convulsive laughter.

In the first type of déjà vu, I am simply but vaguely drawn to the idea that I recognize a place that ought to be unfamiliar. I cannot say how, but I feel like I know the place already. Then the feeling fades; the experience ends, and on the whole it merits not the slightest consideration.

The second type of déjà vu represents the closest thing I have ever had to a genuine paranormal experience. It goes something like this:

I am doing something ordinary. I may be in a familar location or a new one. Suddenly, I remember having done precisely that same ordinary thing at some previous time. Unfortunately, I cannot place it with any precision. Next, I recall that in that previous time, I also experienced precisely the same sense of déjà vu. I remember remembering, and I remember that I remembered it, and remember remembering that I remembered it.

Then something truly uncanny happens: I remember that this action will happen again in the future! The ordinary action that I have just performed suddenly ripples off toward infinity, connecting the purely mundane with the infinite dimensions of past and present. I feel an almost physical bouncing sensation, as my consciousness–for want of a better word–shifts forward and back again in time.

This second type of déjà vu gives me a sense, however fleeting, of the eternal recurrence, the Nietzschean and Hindu belief that at the end of time Somebody resets the celestial odometer, and we find ourselves once more at the first morning of creation.

Back in the present, the experience only lasts a few seconds–twenty or thirty at most. Then the feeling fades, and an overwhelming sense of loss replaces it. I have been severed from the cosmos, condemned to plod along in ordinary time once more.

I know from conversations with my friends that I am not the only one to have had this feeling. I can remember it from early childhood, and it happened very often during adolescence. Since then, it’s happened more rarely. Within the past year, for example, I’ve only had this feeling twice.

Interestingly, this second type of déjà vu also squares quite poorly with Christianity, and this may be the reason why conservatives report less déjà vu in general: Such experiences say one of two very difficult things to us. Either the eternal recurrence is real, and we live in just one of an infinite number of lifetimes–Or else the brain is a machine, a complex and marvelous machine, but one which, true to its type, is capable of complex and marvelous failures. Every so often, the gears of this great machine lock up. For a time, our soul doesn’t work in quite the way that it should, but then things go back to normal. This second type of déjà vu is seemingly either pagan or mechanist, but whatever it is, I’m fascinated.

Dispatches from the Culture Wars has a well-considered post on the so-called “free speech zones” that are now common around political conventions and other high-profile meetings. This opinion piece is definitely not for the faint of heart, but here are a couple of selections anyway:

…And now you see why so many of us libertarian-minded folks don’t see much difference between the two major parties. They each relentlessly attempt to censor the other side when it serves their purposes. All of the talk from Republicans about “smaller government” and being a beacon of freedom and liberty to the world is simply bullshit, empty words that mean nothing to them. And all of the talk from Democrats about their passionate support of individual rights? Also bullshit. Don’t believe anything either one says about civil liberties. They will sell you out in a heartbeat.

…So frankly, I don’t care which party it is, when they start talking about the glories of free speech, I start loading my gun. They will take it away in a heartbeat if they can, and in times of war, officially declared or not, both the courts and the public will roll over and play dead rather than stand up to such intrusions on the bill of rights. So when John Kerry gets up there tonight and reads eloquent words from the teleprompter about how America is a shining beacon of freedom to the world, remind yourself that his party and his convention has stifled free speech and penned up protestors in a cage surrounded by razor wire a half a mile down the road. And when Bush does the same thing in New York, remind yourself that he’s been doing the same thing for 4 years now.

Who gets my vote in the upcoming election? Frankly, I’ve never been less motivated to decide. The pundits who are by turns applauding and condemning the Democrats’ convention have failed to impress me in either direction. None of them merits so much as a link as far as I’m concerned.

In the interests of honesty, I have to admit that I’ve given money to the Kerry campaign, if only because he might defeat the worst president we have had in a very, very long time. But to take the step of actually voting for Kerry… Well… I suspect I’ll have to agonize a little further. There is a difference, however slight, between giving money and giving a vote.

To decide how I vote–and indeed how I think on most issues–I follow one simple rule: I absolutely never watch conventions, debates, or major speeches on television. I read them, with a good hot cup of non-partisan coffee as my only companion. Just as I would not attempt doing calculus in my head, I would not want to try the even more difficult work of political thought without resorting to the written word. To decide what to think, I read; then I write.

I have to say, though, after reading the speeches from the Democratic convention so far, I am thoroughly unimpressed. Barack Obama started well–I’ve never seen a Democrat so critical of government and so favorable toward individual enterprise–but then he blew it with this line:

It is that fundamental belief, it is that fundamental belief, I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper, that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family.

Sadly, Biblical references are still de rigeur if you want to win an election. But why did he have to pick this particular one? (Incidentally, I think we all knew that Howard Dean was doomed when he couldn’t name his favorite book of the Bible… As it happens, mine is the Book of Esther. But I digress.)

The story of Cain and Abel–where a vicious murderer becomes a strawman for individualism–has done more to slander individualism than anything else in Western culture. Were I to rewrite the Bible, Cain and Abel would be the very first thing to go.

We tend to forget it, but if Cain had only let his brother alone, then he would have been perfectly justified in asking what he did. The true individualist is not his brother’s keeper, but nor is he a killer. Neither murder nor enforced servitude is a proper picture of what individuals owe to one another. In virtually all cases, the right to be let alone is enough. Benevolence is welcome, of course, but turning benevolence into a life-destroying duty–and positing murder as the only alternative–This makes a sham out of benevolence itself, a gift that is only sincere when it is free, and never so when it comes from the compulsion of a State or a God. The day that any political party appreciates this, it will win my permanent support. Until then, it’s always going to be a choice among evils.

I guess this is my problem with politics in general: It’s hard for me to feel very strongly about any candidates or mainstream policy positions because I start from premises that are so far removed from the mainstream itself. In the mainstream, we have freedom of speech–but our opponents can always be restricted. In the mainstream, we may soon have the right to take someone else’s money for health care–but the right to bear arms is steadily disappearing, even if we buy them with our own money. In the mainstream, merely slowing the growth of the welfare state is “paleoconservative.” That is, when the paleoconservatives are not in fact increasing it at a rate undreamed of by the liberals. We now lack even a term for someone who would shrink the growth of government.

But then, in the mainstream, individualism is murder. Just look at Cain and Abel, and you’ll know why I can’t stand mainstream politics: We all have to pretend to like a story that offers nothing redeeming at all to the present day, a story that gives even theologians headaches as they try to salvage the goodness of their God, a story that is perfectly irrelevant to governance of a modern, technological, and frequently non-Christian republic–a story that at its heart is implacably against the very individualist spirit that makes America great. Pretend to like all of that, and welcome to the mainstream.

My home state of Maryland is certain to go to Kerry, and I imagine that on balance there will be some slight improvement if he wins. If nothing else, redividing the government between the two major parties will probably slow its rate of growth more than continued Republican control. And at any rate, it can’t be much worse. The only people who would seriously reduce the size of government are the Libertarians, and even in the astronomically improbable event of a Libertarian victory, I simply don’t trust them to restrain their own lunatic fringe.

Where, oh where, is the party for pluralist, capitalist, small-government, secular, civil libertarian voters? Why is it that these positions, which to my mind seem so naturally dependent upon one another, are set against one another so implacably by the political powers that be?

At the Johns Hopkins University Krieger Computing Lab, a longtime policy had it that food and drinks were not allowed in the lab itself. A convention developed whereby the students left these messy items on the counter near the entrance to the lab.

In the old days, whenever you visited the lab you would always be greeted by a row of water bottles and lunch bags, all of them stashed neatly away from the fragile computers. This was a reasonable development, but one which has sadly been curtailed of late. At the entrance to the lab, a new sign now informs us that food and drink are forbidden “ON THE COUNTER or IN THE LAB.”

So now we’ve all stopped drinking water. But strangely, there seem to be a lot more backpacks being brought in the computer lab, all of them zipped firmly shut against the administrators’ prying eyes…

Bleh.

Posting pictures is a lot of work, particularly with the primitive photo software I’m using. What’s more, Dave Jansing has already posted a great photo essay on the GALA Choruses Montreal festival over at Temperantia.

But a promise is a promise, so here are some pictures of Scott, me, and the two of us at our anniversary.

First, Scott. This one was taken at Montreal’s enormous botanical garden. The car in the background is a VW Beetle covered entirely in violets. You know, flower power and all.

The flowery bug was actually one of the sillier exhibits at the gardens; on a more serious note, they also have the largest bonsai collection outside of Asia, which was fantastic:

And here I am at the waterfront in downtown Montreal:

I never take good pictures, which brings me to…

…the two of us at our anniversary dinner. On the left, you can see Dave and his friend Larry, who is closer to the camera. I figure it’s the least I can do for someone who has spared me the trouble of posting my other Montreal pictures.

Scott is holding a glass of the same mead that we first drank at our wedding one year earlier. The plan is to open one or two bottles every year for our anniversary–but never to touch it otherwise. I wrote about this mead in “The Life of the Party,” where I noted that last year it still hadn’t aged quite enough. Now it’s over a year and a half old, making it much, much better.

This time around it had surprising but very pleasant notes of vanilla and bitter chocolate; the earlier harshness had entirely disappeared. In theory, this beverage could just keep on getting better for as long as a decade, making it yet another reason to look forward to the years ahead.

Oh, and if we look a little tipsy, it’s probably because we were.

Note: This is the last post of what’s proved to be a trilogy. Here are parts one and two. With any luck, I will post pictures from the GALA festival tonight, giving many of you your first glimpse of what I actually look like. And then I will promptly change the subject.

Waters is the Oscar Wilde of our time: He perfectly skewers every cultural myth we hold dear, and yet there’s virtually no bitterness. All is levity; all is sick, twisted fun. Much like Oscar Wilde, appreciating John Waters is like eating a giant puff pastry–decadent, sinful, apparently devoid of value–and then feeling afterward that you’ve had a good, wholesome meal, much to your own surprise.

No fewer than eight different choruses did selections from Hairspray, with nearly all of them performing the musical’s irrepressibly cheerful finale, “You Can’t Stop the Beat.”

You can’t stop an avalanche
As it races down the hill
You can try to stop the seasons, girl
But ya know you never will
And you can try to stop my dancin’ feet

But I just cannot stand still
‘Cause the world keeps spinning
‘Round and ’round
And my heart’s keeping time
To the speed of sound
I was lost til I heard the drums
Then I found my way

‘Cause you can’t stop the beat

Ever since this old world began
A woman found out if she shook it
She could shake up a man
And so I’m gonna shake and shimmy it
The best that I can today

‘Cause you cant stop
The motion of the ocean
Or the sun in the sky
You can wonder if you wanna
But I never ask why

And if you try to hold me down
I’m gonna spit in your eye and say
That you cant stop the beat!

[…]

Ever since we first saw the light
A man and woman liked to shake it
On a Saturday night
And so I’m gonna shake and shimmy it
With all my might today
‘Cause you cant stop
The motion of the ocean
Or the rain from above
They can try to stop the paradise
We’re dreaming of
But they cannot stop the rhythm
Of two hearts in love to stay
‘Cause you cant stop the beat!

[And, still more improbably,]

You can’t stop my happiness
‘Cause I like the way I am
And you just can’t stop my knife and fork
When I see a Christmas ham
So if you don’t like the way I look
Well, I just don’t give a damn!

[Fill with choruses. Shake well. Serve.]

Even in Montreal, the New Wave Singers of Baltimore had the home-team advantage. Their act included a number of great character solos, with period costumes to match. But the Columbus Gay Men’s Chorus stole the show. They turned “You Can’t Stop the Beat” into a swing extravaganza that had to be seen to be believed. With some 150 performers on stage, not a single one of them missed a step.

My friend Kyle Jordan did a solo and a dance routine that made the audience scream like they’d just seen the Beatles. Kyle is wonderfully talented, almost done with his Ph.D., and he’s drop-dead gorgeous. (Memo to the Columbus guys: Why on earth is he still single?)

By halfway through the week, “You Can’t Stop the Beat” had become the unofficial theme song of the festival. Every morning I sang “You Can’t Stop the Beat” in the shower. Badly, because I’m just on stage crew and not an actual singer. Every evening, “You Can’t Stop the Beat” helped dance me back to sleep, whether I wanted it to or not. I got so sick of hearing it in my head that I started referring to it as “THAT SONG.”

“You know,” said Scott in one of his usual bursts of insight, “‘that song’ is SO heterosexual.”

It is. It’s straight, idealistic, and one of the most utterly normal parts of the entire John Waters oeuvre–even counting the part about the Christmas ham, it’s on the whole pretty normal. It’s about first love, and when a boy meets… a girl, and when a girl falls for… a boy. It’s about the way things are supposed to be, and how natural they all are.

And remarkably, we feel all those things too, in our own way.

Our performances of that song–and indeed, the original song itself–These things were emphatically not parodies. They were not subversions. Much like our re-appropriation of gospel, these songs were entirely real, entirely sincere. They weren’t a plea for legitimacy so much as they were simply a natural expression of legitimacy itself.

So it was with the lesbians singing about their children, and with the gay men singing about their parents, and with practically everyone singing about God, and family, and patriotism. But no, I’ll spare you the patriotism…

It was not to say, “See how normal we are.” Instead it was, “Welcome to our lives.”

“Welcome to our lives” was also the theme of Diverse Harmony’s introductory multimedia presentation. Diverse Harmony is more than just a gay chorus: Based in Seattle, they are a group of young people, aged 14-22, who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender–plus their friends and family. As if that weren’t enough, they also happen to sing.

Diverse Harmony not only sang well, but they showed us the future. They did so not merely in their youth, but in the very fact of gay youth itself: For far too long, others–and even we ourselves–have identified the gay community as a group of adults, detached, rootless, childless, estranged even from our parents. Diverse Harmony challenges all of that–And more power to them.

In our case, integration isn’t about crossing a color line. It’s about returning to our families–the families that, truth be told, we never really wanted to leave in the first place.

Two themes emerged unmistakably from the GALA choruses festival: religion and family.

No, really.

It’s not parody. It’s not subversion. It’s real. The gay community has got religion, and may God help us all.

It showed in the ubiquitous gospel music. Gospel is different from the classical religious music that many GALA Choruses also sing, because gospel is Good Old American Church. It’s the church that so many of us grew up in; it’s also the church down the street whose politics make us increasingly uncomfortable. Classical music is Latin, and German, and abstract mathematical ratios.

Like it or not, gospel is the here and now, the participatory, and the emotive. We can love or even hate classical music from afar–but gospel cuts to the bone.

There was the Lavender Light Gospel Choir, the Transcendence Gospel Choir; and the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, who performed a set of gospel and gospel-inspired music. Other choruses liberally peppered their own sets with gospel, too.

The performances ranged from incredible to inaudible. Transcendence was among the former: An all-transgender choir, they delivered a set that has won them a permanent place in the heart of the GLB–and T–chorus movement. We’ll not soon forget their presence.

Lavender Light fell into the second category: They were inaudible, at least for those of us in the balconies. Someone really should have turned down the amplifiers on their electric backup band. The error is particularly inexcusable given that the band had monitors right there with them on stage. Between the guitars and the handclaps, many of us could barely hear the singers.

And then there was the Montreal Jubilation Gospel Choir. This last apparently isn’t gay, but they dropped by anyway, just in case we hadn’t gotten enough gospel.

In theory we’re a secular movement, but you might never have guessed it from last week’s festival, which danced all over the line between the sacred and the profane.

“Are you ready for some Church?” asked one choral director before her toe-tapping set.

Frankly, I wasn’t. But I’m a tolerant soul, and I can play along. I understand the value of this music, even if I don’t subscribe to the mysticism at its heart. I put that mysticism in brackets, and I never fail to point out that while I may believe in the GLBT choral movement, I do not happen to believe in God.

Still, I understand gospel’s appeal. It’s a music by, for, and about the oppressed. It speaks of liberation like nothing else. Whenever someone spouts off about jazz being the only original American art form, you need merely remind them of gospel to prove him wrong. At its best, it’s inspiring, and participatory, and patriotic in the grandest sense of the word. I make room for gospel.

I wish it were always so simple. One man sitting next to us grumbled his way through half of San Francisco’s performance–then got up and left in the middle of a song. It was an unparalleled insult to the granddaddy of the movement.

I frankly enjoyed San Francisco’s set, and yet I understand the man who walked out, and I know why he did what he did.

Mainstream religions have lately done to gay people all those nasty things that they used to save for, well, other mainstream religions. In a larger sense, organized religion has almost never championed a tolerant, open, or diverse society, and heaven knows they haven’t done it in our case. While there have been a few bright spots along the way–like gospel music–still, the overall record has been abysmal, and nowhere has it been worse than for us.

When gay people sing the songs of mainstream religion, the untrained ear hears nothing but surrender. The man who walked out didn’t see himself in all that religious music coming from the stage: Instead, he saw the face of his oppressors. He saw a smiling, jubilant, hand-clapping bigotry. And he walked out, bless his heart.

No doubt he wanted a clean break with religion and with all the intolerance that religion so often brings. I agree with him, and if I’d had my way, I’d make a clean break as well. Trouble is, deciding what constitutes “a clean break” just isn’t that easy.

There’s an awful lot I’d like to keep. Surrounded by religion, both in my work and among my friends, I’ve gradually become a mellow atheist, one who picks his battles and only fights the ones that he can win. My atheism does not make me such a philistine that I cannot abide religious art. Anyone who felt nothing but dread at such art would occupy a small cultural universe indeed.

I’d no more walk out of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus than I would paint over the Sistine Chapel. The considered, thoughtful secularist will recognize the achievements of religion throughout history, make his peace with it, and move on. Intolerance is unbecoming, and emulating our enemies gives the intolerant far more credit than they deserve.

Family, too, got a lot of credit at the GALA festival. In this case, it was unquestionably well-deserved. But family will be the subject of another essay.

“They have the power of description. And we succumb.” — Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

Post-GALA posting: I’m home now from the Gay And Lesbian Association of Choruses festival just held in Montreal, Quebec. It was a week of great food, sightseeing, shopping, friendship, and–of course–music. I promise I’ll cover each of these eventually, but I can’t say how soon: I’m backed up on blogging material for at least a month now. In other words, it was amazing.

In a Word: But first things first; I’ve got to talk about the word. Yeah, that word. Gay.

As in gay marriages, Gay Choruses, gay neighborhoods, gay bars, ad infinitum.

When I mention that I’m in a gay men’s chorus, I often get a question: Why do you need a gay chorus anyway?

Or: Why not just be gay, and happen to sing in a chorus?

Or, with rising hostility: Why do you have to pin your sexual identity on everything?

For starters, it proves the homophobes so deliciously wrong: Again and again, we are told that gay people are undisciplined, and ugly, and shameful. We are told that gay people contribute nothing to society, and that we are creatures of passion, dissolution, and decadence. We are told that all we care about is sex.

We hear again and again that the bonds of society itself will be destroyed if homosexuality is given too great a presence.

And when nearly six thousand of us come together, from seven countries, to perform such exacting and difficult music as we have done–to say nothing of the awe-inspiring logistics behind the scenes–we know that the homophobes are lying. We know that we possess a creative and productive force in society just like anyone else, and that we are not any of the bad things they say about us.

We know that we possess discipline, and beauty, and even temperance. And we show it to the world.

But the question is still reasonable: “Why do you need a gay chorus?” It gets all the more reasonable in a place like Montreal, which is arguably the most gay-friendly city in North America.

Vincent–our gracious host at Montreal’s charming Castel Durocher Bed and Breakfast–asked my husband Scott about it, and Scott gave the best reply I’ve ever heard:

“It’s a social group. We like hanging out with other gay people.”

Fundamentally, it’s not political. It’s not even sexual. It’s social.

Sure, everyone understands gay politics, or at least they think they do. Everyone understands gay sex, even if they wish they didn’t. But virtually no one understands gay culture. Gay culture remains the great mystery of gayness, an undiscovered country even to those outsiders–like Vincent–who are entirely gay-friendly. Increasingly, gay culture consists not of the cultural icons of the past, but of the less visible and more useful cultural networks of the present, the ones that ordinary gay people themselves are forming with ever-greater candor and enthusiasm.

It’s probably quite hard for straight people to imagine being completely cut off from other straight people. I suspect that most of them would balk at living in an almost perfectly homosexual society, where straights were rare and often furtive about who they were.

I also suspect that most straight people would stage an open rebellion if they could only meet their own kind in dark, smoky, alcohol-soaked nightclubs. And right now, the gay community is staging precisely such a revolt. Quite often we want to meet in the fresh air, in the daylight, and sober.

Yes, many of us want to meet romantic partners under such favorable conditions, and that’s a laudable goal. But even those of us who are partnered take great pleasure in sharing our lives with people who have had similar experiences. Hence the gay choruses, the gay gun clubs, and those patriarchs of the non-bar culture, the Metropolitan Community Churches, a Christian denomination that welcomes and embraces the gay community.

Perhaps one day the unfolding of gay culture will be seen as the true core of the gay-rights movement. Indeed, our culture is becoming steadily more important than our politics. You might never guess from watching the news networks, but take my word for it: For many and possibly for most of us, the political is purely a consequence of something much, much more real, the everyday contacts we have with one another in innumerable social organizations.

I was two years old when the first-of-its-kind San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus was formed. Some of the earliest members of my own group, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC (GMCW), can still recall San Francisco’s first American tour. The night of their concert in Washington, a group of people came together from the audience and determined to make a group of their own.

Some of them are still with us, and I still hear it from them again and again: “The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus changed my life.”

And they did–and they have. San Francisco’s tour spawned dozens of imitators; now there are hundreds of gay choruses all over the world. Some groups are big; GMCW now has around 200 members. Some are small, like New Mexico, whose chorus sent just thirteen singers to Montreal.

There are gay groups, lesbian groups, and mixed groups. There is even the Transcendence Gospel Choir, made up of transgender singers from the San Francisco bay area. I will have more to say about them–and about several other choruses–in future posts.

Above all, these groups strive to be as welcoming and inclusive as possible, often going so far as to dispense with auditions entirely. Most of these groups would probably welcome straight members–and quite a few already have.

So… Why are we still “gay” choruses?

It’s because when we perform, we’ve got two things on our minds: Our purpose is to create great music, and here anyone may join us.

But our reason for being is to create a community. Putting “gay” in our name helps ensure that the gay and lesbian choral movement will always do both.

It says that whatever things may be like in the rest of the world, in our choruses, gay people will be welcomed, nurtured, and supported. It’s nice to have a reminder like that, and it makes a great foundation for the real work of our community.

In a name: Here is where things get difficult, though, because some of our choruses don’t call themselves gay.

A case in point is the Turtle Creek Chorale of Dallas, Texas. Turtle Creek is popular–and very, very good. Although it’s a member of GALA choruses, Turtle Creek’s official persona is gay-vague at best. The institutional closeting of Turtle Creek Chorale doesn’t end with its non-gay name:

So are they gay? Um… Yeah. They’re really, really gay. I’ve met them. I know.

What makes all of this timidity so puzzling is that in person, anyone will tell you that the Turtle Creek Chorale is a gay-identified chorus. No one denies it, and their failure to use the “g” word isn’t just because they welcome straight people. We all do that already.

I’ve heard it rumored that some advertisers and donors to the Chorale would be upset if that dreadful word ever appeared in the group’s name. This is Texas, after all. And yet where else would an explicitly gay chorus do the greatest good? Who needs more to be reminded that gay people are capable of forming open, supportive, and effective social organizations? If you ask me, the loss of advertising just doesn’t compare.

A little history is instructive: When the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus was formed, it was in a class by itself; no one had ever heard of such a thing. Best of all, they put “gay” in their name. The founding members of GMCW never fail to mention it: Saying that they were gay was the very key to the project.

It stunned people how open these men could be, and when they were done singing, the world had changed–a little, to be sure, but certainly for the better. Anything less than “gay” would have been a total disaster. If they’d been merely the San Francisco Men’s Chorus, we’d all have known instantly what they were about, but in a quiet, shameful sort of way.

“You know what men from San Francisco are like,” people would have whispered. Depriving the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus of this one syllable would have turned a revolutionary social movement into a shameful joke. They’d have none of it back then, and I will have none of it now.

It’s an open question, though, how much of this shame must fall on Turtle Creek. It would be easy–probably too easy–to attack them for making the mistake that San Francisco avoided so many years ago. The name game isn’t that simple for a number of reasons.

First, a name is often a remarkable exercise of power, whether that name is said or unsaid. And the power of “gay” cuts both ways.

Consider a man who says “I am gay,” and who thereby comes out to his family.

Now consider a boy who says “You are gay,” and who thereby heaps abuse on his peers.

The name is the same, but there is a world of difference. Only in one has the power been used affirmingly.

To refrain from naming is also an exercise of social power. To insist that one never hear about gay people, and that gay people not be named, is just as much an act of homophobia as it is to deploy the word “gay” for abuse.

Quite often, the two go together. Homophobia would call gay people “straight,” so long as it constrained them–and it would call us be “gay” so long as it hurt. Not fair? Such is life.

Turtle Creek–and many other organizations like it–can perhaps be understood as seeking a way out of that double bind. They are gay whenever they can be–and not-gay whenever they have to be. If homophobes can exercise an arbitrary and fundamentally unfair power over us by calling us gay only when it hurts–then why can’t we do just the inverse?

Turtle Creek isn’t the only one playing this game; there’s also the Cincinnati Men’s Chorus and the the Indianapolis Men’s Chorus–both of which have a slightly higher web-based gay visibility–and quite a few others along a fairly wide spectrum.

Are these quieter choruses glomming onto the success of more open groups like San Francisco or Washington? You bet. Am I going to criticize them for failing to be gay enough? Well… yes. But only gently.

Blogging will be light to non-existent until July 25. Scott and I are going to Montreal to sing in the GALA Choruses Festival. I’ve never been before, but I understand that it’s something like the Gay Games, but with singers instead of athletes. (Yeah, yeah… You can’t always get what you want).

It should be a great time. And the trip coincides with the first anniversary of our legal marriage on July 18. I’ll post pictures and comments when I return, but until then I can’t make any promises.

Go read Reason online’s Ten Reasons to Fire George W. Bush.

I agree with every single word of it. Reason #10 is a little weak, but I’d gladly substitute Bush’s aggressive support for the war on drugs as yet another point against him.

It isn’t easy being a professional historian. In part, this is because history isn’t a glamorous subject for most people. No one comes to it voluntarily; it’s not like learning a foreign language or getting an expert yoga trainer. It’s not even compulsory, like an accountant or a lawyer can be. For the great unwashed masses, history is both tedious and optional. Why would anyone pay for that?

I wish it weren’t so, but it is. Sadly, the historical profession itself is partly to blame. We talk mostly to ourselves and assume that the average person–who may not even recall what the Edict of Nantes was about–is hopelessly unable to grasp the significance of what we are doing. Some historians have even been known to sneer at those of their profession who deign to reach the public with simple, accessible history. Thus a feedback loop has arisen, where both historians and the general public mistrust one another, and where each are convinced, whether secretly or openly, that the other has nothing good to offer them.

At just about every cocktail party I’ve ever attended with non-historians, I get…. The Question:

“So, what do you do?”

“I’m a historian,” I say.

They make a face. It could hardly be worse if I’d said I was a dentist.

“I hated history so much in high school. And you know? I didn’t have to take history at all in college.”

They give me a look of triumph. Who would dare say something so completely rude to any other professional? Even a dentist, on being told that the interlocutor had no cavities, could at least congratulate him. But I get this kind of abuse all the time. I’ve got a ready reply, too.

“Well, I didn’t have to take any math in college.”

They snicker.

“But that didn’t stop me; I took it anyway.”

‘Nuff said.

I know how to deal with The Question, but still I don’t like it. If I’d been working on a Ph.D. in philosophy or literature, they’d at least give me some respect. But for most people, historians are the ultimate pedants of the academic world; if we’re not precisely dentists, then we’re probably just a few steps up from professors of home economics.

It shouldn’t have to be this way. Not so long ago, no educated person would dare confess an ignorance of history–much less boast about it. What has happened in the meantime? No, I’m serious. I really want to know, because I need to figure out how to stop it…

I know, I know, the Federal Marriage Amendment essentially came and went yesterday, and there I was, doddering on about suburban transvestites. I never said I was a journalist. After writing about the FMA so often in the past, I’d moved on to something that at least remotely interested me.

Fortunately, those who actually get paid to write have been covering the demise of the FMA in detail. Here is Rick Santorum as quoted in the New York Times:

“You can say I’m a hater… But I would argue I’m a lover. I’m a lover of traditional families and children who deserve the right to have a mother and father.”

It’s interesting, because I’m not aware of anyone who sees hatred in traditional marriage. But I do know plenty of people who see hatred in the gay-baiting that passes for the defense of marriage these days. To equate traditional marriage with the malicious and cynical FMA is an insult to traditional marriage.

The overwhelming majority of gay people have no problem at all with traditional families. For the most part, we came from them. We are in them; we are of them. We have mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers like anyone else.

Our friends, our neighbors, and our relatives are all busy with traditional families of their own, traditional families whom we love both deeply and sincerely. We even love traditional marriage so much that we are now trying to create a new institution that will do for gay people exactly what traditional marriage has done for straight people.

There is no reason that we can’t both profit from marriage at the same time; family isn’t a zero-sum game, where one side must lose for another to gain. Picture this: It’s 1920, and a new style of music has appeared. It’s called jazz, and everyone is afraid. “We’ve got to protect traditional music. It’s in danger of disappearing,” say the conservatives. “Let’s pass an amendment outlawing jazz.”

Arguably, jazz would stand to lose a great deal from such an amendment–but would traditional music gain anything at all? Perhaps a number of would-be jazz musicians might grudgingly turn away from their first love and take up that godawful pop music we listened to before jazz existed. You can bet they wouldn’t be good at it. Let’s remember, too, that while tastes in music may change, one’s sexual and romantic proclivities virtually never do.

If traditional music–or traditional marriage–really are worthwhile institutions, then they won’t need to prohibit their competition in order to succeed. If traditional marriage is natural, and just, and proper, then it will succeed with or without the FMA. And if it has to attack all other families just to survive, then we should be asking ourselves what we get out of traditional marriage in the first place.

And then there are the children. Whenever anyone needs to push an obnoxious piece of rotten legislation on the American people, they inevitably invoke the children, who are for the most part conveniently unable to extract themselves from this brand of chicanery. If all children deserve the right to one mother and one father, then the proper social policies are obvious, and they have nothing to do with gay marriage. If every child has the “right” to a mother and a father, then it is gay adoption, not gay marriage, that must be forbidden. Further, Congress must pass an amendment outlawing divorce. Then they must take all the children away from single parents and relocate them in two-parent households. After all, they’ve got a right. Finally, Congress must force widows with children to remarry as soon as possible. Perhaps they could be forced to marry their brothers-in-law as the Old Testament requires.

To protect children from the horror of anything greater or less than one mother and one father, all of these steps would be necessary. Outlawing gay marriage would not.

Now, in a perfect world, no one would ever get divorced. In a perfect world, every child would be wanted. In a perfect world, every child would be raised by their biological parents, who would love that child no matter what.

We do not live in a perfect world. Making it harder for gay people to establish a family isn’t going to make it any easier for heterosexuals to do it. Those who support the FMA say that they support families–but that’s only true for some families, and they punish all the rest.

Now consider this piece from Daddy, Papa, and Me, responding to Maggie Gallagher. Gallagher, a self-proclaimed family expert, has apparently only once heard from a child of gay parents who regrets her upbringing. Her explanation is not the obvious one–that gay parents generally do a decent job. Instead, Gallagher concludes that almost all gay parents have frightened their children into falsely saying that they’re happy.

Here’s a quote from the above-mentioned blog, responding to Gallagher’s charges. If you ask me, Trey is being awfully kind:

So, a couple questions I would pose to Ms. Gallagher (I don’t expect an answer. I am just a small voice in a huge conversation.. just rhetorically):

Isn’t that telling? There are entire organizations set up and books written by children of gay parents lauding and praising and supporting their parents. And she has NEVER heard one story in print from a child who had a miserable life with gay parents?

The thing is, I too believe there are many other children with similar stories to the one she ‘gave a voice’. I have heard a couple. But for the couple, I’ve heard hundreds more with a different, very different, view. Why does she not find it telling that given the decade of discussion she only found one story, yet THOUSANDS of other children have told opposite stories?

If you are in favor of families, then you will support them as they currently exist–including the gay ones. If you are just using children as political pawns, or to frighten those who scare easily, then maybe you’ll have no problem with demonizing happy, stable families like these. And isn’t their daughter adorable?

So demonize all you want. But really, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

One summer I was stranded in Dayton, Ohio and had to work selling clothes at Eddie Bauer. It’s a job designed to build character in the younger set, although by that point in my life I didn’t want any more character, thanks very much. It was a job, and it was money, and that was quite enough.

I worked with people ten years my junior and counted myself fortunate to make a dollar more an hour than they did. Usually the days were perfectly empty. They zeroed out almost completely from the bank account of my life; even my college education seemed daily to atrophy.

What’s worse, every shopping mall has exactly the same weather: The winters are hot and dry; the summers are cold and dry. One day is exactly like the next. Depressingly, I suspect that a lot of people would be perfectly happy if the weather were always just the same on the outside, too.

Then one day he walked into the store, middle-aged, tall, balding, chubby. He brushed off our greetings (”Is there anything we can help you with?”), hesitated, looked around, and went straight for the women’s clothing. He wore a wide hat and wrap-around sunglasses that he never took off.

We gave him a few minutes on his own before I approached him again.

“Are you looking for anything in particular?”

“No no… I’m… just shopping…. for my wife.” He looked away uncomfortably.

He had picked out a full armload of clothing already, all in the biggest sizes we carried. I’ve seen men shop for their wives before, and they don’t do it like this.

I looked him over, searching for extra bags, stuff hidden under his clothes, or anything else that might look suspicious. Nothing. Besides, I reasoned, if he were a shoplifter, he wouldn’t call attention to himself by rummaging through the women’s clothes…

Back at the registers, the other salespeople raised their eyebrows.

“He’s not lifting anything. Um… I think he might be a transvestite.”

“We get them once in a while.”

“At Eddie Bauer?“

“Yeah.”

“It’s not like we’re Victoria’s Secret.”

“No, but they come here anyway. No one suspects a guy carrying an Eddie Bauer bag.”

“Guys shop at Victoria’s Secret too.”

“Eddie Bauer is a lot less obvious.”

“I’m guessing he doesn’t want any help.”

“Not on your life,” said Pat. She was an older sales rep who had taken it upon herself to teach me the business. The man was still looking nervously over his shoulder as he came to the registers. He paid in cash and left in a hurry.

Of course, politeness happened to agree with my boss: I absolutely couldn’t ask if he were buying for himself, and it was precisely this politeness that he was counting on. If I’d asked, his secret would be ruined. Most likely he’d have left the store and never come back.

In the house of gender there are many mansions. We move among them for reasons every bit as complex, every bit as inscrutable, as the reasons that attract us to one another.

Think there are only two genders? Then answer me this: What kind of man (or woman) are you? Masculinity and femininity come in many, many flavors.

American men often find the French effeminate; Frenchmen find Americans boorish–and I’m not talking about foreign policy.

American women often find Frenchmen unattractive. American gay men find Frenchmen… hot.

There’s the masculinity of the octogenarian and the masculinity of the teenager. And there’s everything in between. If anything, women’s gender expression varies even more with age.

Women and men express their genders differently depending on religion, class, race, and–my favorite–historical era. Today we’d find the upper-class men of the eighteenth century a lot nellier than most of our women; all walks of life in the eighteenth century would have been revolted by our butch, jeans-wearing, smoking, no-makeup, lawyer, doctor, professor, athlete, novelist, journalist, banker, scientist women. And they vote.

No matter how they change, all these little differences add up to something incalculable. It has a different meaning in each of us.

In a sense, nothing could be more voluntary. You can pick up or put aside so many of the differences with just a little hard work and some eyeliner. And yet there’s an aura of mystery to it that simply won’t go away. I suspect we’ve built that aura ourselves, but that doesn’t make it any less real or any less powerful.

As usual, any one individual can only give partial answers. I’m male, gay, sure of it, and comfortable. I look at all things female with a benign neutrality, wanting neither to possess, nor wear, nor be.

Others have it otherwise. The man at Eddie Bauer probably wanted to feel like he was getting away with something dreadfully naughty. He wanted to feel that his completely innocuous purchase was somehow crossing a line that men aren’t supposed to cross. For him, that line might well be the single most salient fact of his sexuality. For me, it’s an afterthought. Both are for reasons I can’t explain.

It’s a pity, too. I and my three female co-workers could easily have decked him out far better than he could manage on his own. We’d have been thrilled to do it; after all, sales commissions don’t have a gender. But for him, what mattered was the secret, the anxiety, the pretense. I’m envious in a way, because I wish I understood, and I could hardly begrudge him his mysterious, utterly harmless pleasure.

I’ve bought clothes with drag queens, too, and nothing could be more different. Drag isn’t about some furtive thrill. Drag is about doing gender purely for art’s sake. It’s about facing the eternal question of style versus substance–—and going for style. Like all true art forms, drag is a public study in the limits of the possible.

Shopping with a drag queen is innocent as can be: You go into a store, you try things on, and you buy them. It’s like any other clothing, just more fabulous. And if you have a question, you ask the sales rep.

“Could you get me one of those bracelets?”

“Should I wear green mascara?”

“Do you have those in a size 13?”

Now there’s a difference I can understand.

“et postquam venerunt in locum qui vocatur Calvariae ibi crucifixerunt eum et latrones unum a dextris et alterum a sinistris” — Luke 23:33

The following story comes from the Evansville Courrier & Press, which requires a lengthy registration. Sincere thanks to my spies in the heartland; I’ve excerpted the good stuff for everyone else:

Fifteen Evansville-area Lutheran missionaries were kidnapped and robbed at gunpoint in Guatemala last week, but they say they are already planning a return trip. Their faiths, after all, saved them from harm or worse during their last mission trip, they say.[…]

I’ve got to hand it to them: It’s rare indeed to see someone genuinely turn the other cheek.

It was the missionaries’ first full day in the Central American country…

“There was no one out there,” said missionary Don Haury.

Then, a red Toyota pickup truck pulled in front of them about 9:20 a.m.

“I thought we were going to be in an accident,” Jossa said.

But four men in the back of the truck and the driver jumped out and pried their way into the missionaries’ driver-side door.

They were screaming in Spanish and brandishing pistols.

“Get your heads down,” they shouted in Spanish at the missionaries. The group put their heads down and closed their eyes. Then they prayed.

“We all went to God in prayer. We were nervous, but we went to God in prayer,” Brown said.

The group drove in silence a half mile off the road, down into a dry, uninhabited ravine.

One by one, they were ordered off the bus and searched. The attackers took their cash…

The robbers left the identification and passports and all but one credit card. They took Cruz’s credit card and used it to buy a $45 dinner and about $20 in fuel.

So far, it’s dog-bites-man. But here’s where the story really gets good:

The missionaries’ driver, a Guatemalan who would alternate between Spanish and English in the same conversation, began reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish. One of the attackers joined the prayer. And another.

When rummaging through their belongings, another found a Bible, kissed it, and continued picking through the missionaries’ belongings.

The attackers did stop screaming and apologized - in English - for using the missionaries’ shoelaces to tie them face down in the dust. They placed the missionaries’ quilts under their chins to reduce the discomfort.

“All we want is your money,” Jossa remembers them saying to her in English.

Didn’t Monty Python do a skit like this once? It would be easy–far too easy–to use this story as an example of Christian hypocrisy. I’m above all that, or at least I try to be. But wait, there’s more:

After the robbery, the attackers untied the missionaries and told them not to leave for 90 minutes. After 10 minutes of silent waiting, the group formed a circle amid their strewn belongings and prayed.

Then, they called the police. While their group leaders spent two hours offering statements inside, the others witnessed outside in the parking lot.

“Any kid likes stickers,” said missionary June Schwengel. “We started putting stickers on their heads.”

Police escorted the now-broke group the three hours to the Lutheran Center in the resort area of Antigua.

The missionaries didn’t call their families until the next day. It was midnight in Evansville by the time they had dinner and settled for the night.

“We were a little light on the details,” Brown said. They worked last week around the Lutheran Center. They did laundry, plastered walls, mowed lawns and shared their story with a visiting conference that week. Its theme: Do Miracles Still Happen?

The missionaries said their experience was a miracle and they are called to share its message.

It’s a miracle! If getting robbed is a miracle, then what do you call not getting robbed? And you know, in the old days, miracles were things like, oh, walking on water, multiplying the loaves and fishes, curing leprosy…

Positive Liberty has had a couple of new inbound linkers in the last few days, and I thought I’d pause to introduce them to you all.

First is Dispatches from the Culture Wars, a blog of which I’d been dimly aware for perhaps the last couple of months. The trouble is, I didn’t bother to read much of it because–for reasons that now escape me–I’d somehow convinced myself that the Dispatches were coming from, well, the other side of the culture wars, the side that does nothing but sneer at academics and repeat the same tired old horror stories about this or that adjunct professor who supposedly did this or that awful thing at some unspecified university in the mid-1980s. Nothing could be more dull, and, frankly, I ignored it.

But I was wrong. These Dispatches come from the other other side of the culture wars; they’re all about civil liberties, Church and State, evolution, and… well, a lot of the same stuff I write about. It’s a fair bet that if you like PL, you’ll also like Dispatches from the Culture Wars, damn them.

The second new inbound linker is A Journey Through Time, whose tagline promises “A Look at Yesterday’s History with Today’s spin - odd and unusual history that’s often neglected in the history books.” When I first started blogging, I pictured Positive Liberty looking something like A Journey Through Time. I ended up spending a lot less time on history, a lot more time on philosophy, and even more time on, um, dispatches from the culture wars. But I’m very glad to have found A Journey Through Time, and I plan to make it a regular read.

I wish these two bloggers nothing but success.

…banned from commenting at the appropriately-titled blog “i am always right: the musings of a despot.”

I suspect I was banned because the blogger didn’t want his readers to see the following exchange. Tony began by quoting this paragraph:

“It seems that an unexpectedly large fraction of stars in big galaxies were already in place early in the universe’s formation, and that challenges what we’ve believed.” – Karl Glazebrook, associate professor of physics and astronomy in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

To which he commented, “Oh? Really? Tell me again why I never buy into “scientific fact.”

If memory serves, I suggested the following rationale:

Perhaps you don’t believe in “scientific fact” because…

–Scientific fact is able to correct itself when it’s mistaken.

–Scientific fact is flexible enough to incorporate new discoveries.

–Scientific fact, even when mistaken, is still able to produce interesting areas of research.

–Scientific fact has cured polio, smallpox, cholera, syphilis….

–These cures all work even if you don’t believe in them.

–Scientific fact has created the Internet–which gives you a forum to badmouth scientific fact.

Science supports everything you do, AND you get the luxury of trashing it. Seems like a fair trade to me.

Hard hitting? You’re damn right. But abusive? I really don’t think so. I know that I would welcome someone who disagreed with me in terms that were just as strong. Now might also be a good time to review Positive Liberty’s very simple comment policy:

–If you are merely insulting, I will delete your comment. Otherwise I will leave it up to sink or swim on its own.

–If I find your comment interesting, I may reply to it.

–I like comments. Please leave more of them, even if you disagree with me.

Update: Apparently I was mistaken. A spammer who happens also to be named “Jason” had just hit this site, and the siteowner reacted by deleting all comments from anyone named “Jason.” Unfortunately there was some friendly fire as well–Hence my inability to post, which disappears if I identify myself as “J. Kuznicki.” Tony has hinted that he’s also considering a possible reply to my points above… (Meta-update: I should note that I did NOT e-mail him complaining about censorship or his failure to link to me… That was apparently someone else.)