The Selfish Volunteer

My last day at home. This summer I'm off to Dharmasala, India to tutor English language conversation to Tibetan refugees (lhasocialwork.org).

The expenses for this trip mount: $1500 for airfare, $100 for tickets, loss of wages, room and food in-country-- in addition to still paying my rent in Indiana, plus all those little incidentals that come with traveling and ignorance of a new culture. I have to admit I am the selfish volunteer. If my sole interest were in helping Tibetan refugees, I would just write out a check for that amount and drop it in the mail.

But this trip is about me.

It's about my education: learning about another culture and people. It's about a rich, white, westerner 'slumming' while trying to deceive myself that it is about something more. But maybe all aturism is incremental. I won't spend visit to India in an air-conditioned bus with a dispenser of hand-sanitizer ready at the door.

Tomorrow Amtrak to Chicago, Sunday evening the 14 hour flight to Delhi. After that...?

Time To Change... opiates!

It’s TIME TO CHANGE
the conversation

So heads the latest Human Rights Campaign fundraising e-mail to me. To the side I can see what appears to be the peak of a house of faith, and just below that there’s a picture of Joe Solomese, and his personal appeal to join him. How do I join him? Send him $40 (or more) and I’ll get my very own “Claim your Faith” sticker!

Proselytizing? I not about to tell you to “claim your faith” with some sticker that also serves as my public receipt for the contribution of $40 (or more). I guess I'm to put it on my NPR tote-bag. (I'd hate to be accused of not being a team player!)

On this single page solicitation, Joe includes no less than five links to contribute (all major credit cards accepted). Between these many links there is no serious request for me to do anything myself. I’m assured I can leave all the actual doing in the capable hands of my HRC staff.

The idea that there can be any real campaign for human rights that badgers people to claim a faith is troublesome.

More sinister is this implicit contention that one can effect broad cultural change through hiring a professional lobby. Joe doesn't need you and I to stand up to nutty church fanatics individually, he needs us to send him money!

It's so easy! No need to leave your closet. No need to make an ugly scene ala Queer Nation. Just pay Joe and the HRC to do it. Well, OK, they aren't going to do anything so bold either. But it sure makes you feel better. Praise the Lord!

HRC: the new opium for the new gay and lesbian masses.

Citizens for Civil Rights

Last week I went to a meeting entitled “Political Participation 101.” This was in West Lafayette, Indiana. Presenting was the President of “Citizens for Civil Rights” (One of those gay groups—much like Human Rights Campaign—which is reluctant to have gay (or queer, or homosexual, or lesbian) in its name.

Indiana is in the process of amending its constitution. The amendment is as simple as it is mean-spirited: “This Constitution or any other Indiana law may not be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents of marriage be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.” Indiana requires amendments to pass in two consecutive legislative sessions, and then be voted on by the citizens. It has already passed one legislative session by a wide margin, despite all the participatory tricks suggested by the Citizens for Civil Rights: hand-written letters to our state representatives and senators, along with e-mail and phone calls, and visits to the state capital. The President of Citizens for Civil Rights is public school civics teacher, and it shows—especially in the red-white-and-blue neck-tie he occasionally wears.

I’m not writing this as a reaction to this sad, hopeless little meeting that only served to underline the fruitlessness of a despised minority playing by the majority’s rules in a modern democracy. I’m writing in response to the death of Rosa Parks. Citizens for Civil Rights would never advocate breaking the law. It would never advocate getting off your ass and sitting where they have forbid you to sit. Citizens for Civil Rights are white, professional gays and lesbians. They are not going to risk arrest, because arrests would put their upper-middle class life-styles in grave jeopardy. If jailed, who would make their suburban home mortgages and SUV payments? An arrest as “troublemakers”? What corporation or bureaucracy wants to hire troublemakers? Citizens for Civil Rights are Team Players. These Citizens for Civil Rights aren’t ready to do what Rosa Parks did, and they aren’t going to win any victories for gay marriage or much of anything else until they are. The folks “fighting” for gay marriage don’t have enough fight in them, and they never should have picked that fight in the first place.

Anyway, another thing bothered me about The president’s presentation: his open disgust at the very last word in the proposed amendment: “groups.” In past messages, and again that evening, he expressed in no uncertain terms how “groups” in marriage-like relationships disgusted and insulted him—as it should every self-respecting citizen for civil rights. Polygamy! Group sex! Citizens for civil rights are just as disgusted with it as their detractors. Of that I have little doubt. But in his open expression of disgust I could see the process beginning: the process of identity formation through exclusion: we are the good, professional, monogamous type of gays and lesbians, and we are just as disgusted-- and just as ready to oppress—the other kinds as any conservative Republican. We are actually, deep-down, so much like you we can even swap neck-ties.

I did a quick memory check to determine if I myself ever engaged in “group” sex. That’s when I remembered all that edgy, high-risk excitement when me and the neighbor boys used an old abandoned VW van in the back of the neighborhood junkyard to play repeated games like “naked hippies.” It was 1968. I was eight. My friends were six, eight, eight and ten. It was fun. It was group sex.

I can never go back to that kind of fun, and I became sad. If kids today were caught having that kind of fun, half would be labeled as sex offenders in the making, and the other half victims of unspeakable crimes scaring them for the rest of their lives. That makes me sad, because I realized that citizens for civil rights wouldn’t recognize my or my friends’ right to have that kind of raucous, unrestrained fun. Not in as boys in 1968, nor as men in 2005. Sad because I stopped focusing on what citizens for civil rights can do to our freedoms, and instead remembered what they’ve already done to them.

Faith-based initiative

“It’s time to change the conversation” according to the HRC’s latest campaign that just showed up in my e-mail. “… you and I will get nowhere if we can't start really… talking to them in the language of values and faith. Until you can do that, we won't make a difference."

Exactly how that’s going to happen, I’m not sure. What exactly is “the language of values and faith.” ACT-UP wasn’t talking values when they talk—loud—about the prejudice that was and is still attached to HIV? Values are not the point when we pressure the boy scouts to stop stigmatizing gays and lesbians in their ranks, or when we protest violence against transgender folks? I really don’t understand what HRC is saying when they tell me we haven’t been “really” speaking in the language of values.

Faith of course is another matter. “for many of us at HRC, religion has not been a source of solace but, rather, a place of rejection and anger,” admits HRC president Joe Solmonese. Here’s what Solmonese tells me he’s already doing for me:

Finding and promoting the many equality-minded faith leaders like Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, Dr. Susan Thistlethwaite of Chicago [Theological Seminary], Bishop John Selders of Hartford, CT, and Rabbi Denise Eger of Los Angeles. It's time we heard their courageous voices in the media to counteract the closed-minded sound bites of extremists like Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Fred Phelps.

What are Solmonese’ poster-pastors for HRC saying? Rabbi Eger: “This movement for gay marriages is plain and simple about helping families protect themselves, using the mechanisms our society has created to protect families and to protect partners in loving relationships, and to have them live up to the rights and responsibilities that go along with that." (http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=12243) Underneath HRC’s campaigns is this message of responsibilities. We queers need to be more responsible if we wish to get our rights, or our message heard. We should give up our flamboyant behavior-- our leather, our feather boas, and our one-night-stands. We need to settle down and simulate responsible, monogamous, hetero-values.

Yes, hetero-values. You know them well: the values of adultriholic Rep. Bob Barr, Justice Clarence “pubic hair” Thomas, and Jimmys Baker and Swagart. (We’re not supposed to do as they do, mind you, but rather do as they preach.) The HRC wishes for us to do a lot more talking up hetero-values, and a lot less exposing them for what they really are. Solmonese proposes we embrace the hypocrisy that is at the heart of this “language of faith and values” so we can better converse with our hypocritical oppressors. Only then can he help us create a new, united, hypocritical set of values for America, a set that—in all likelihood will talk abstinence until (gay) marriage, will go to (gay) church every week, and will pine for a return to the days of (gay) Father Knows Best, as if those days ever existed. What Solmonese doesn’t seem to realize is that those feelings of “rejection and anger” he felt are rooted in that very hypocrisy, and his feelings of rejection and anger are shared by many, many folks who don’t identify as gay or lesbian because of that same hypocrisy.

Emma Goldman once warned: “If I can not dance, I want no part in your revolution.” If I can’t flaunt it, Joe, I want no part in yours.