Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (6 page)

Neither of those is me, and I am Irish and proud of it. But then, both of those stereotypes have their limits. A woman was grand marshal of the parade not long ago, and the ranks are now filled with black and Latino children who attend the city’s parochial schools. The parade has changed.

But not enough.

Ethnic stereotypes are misshapen pearls, sometimes with a sandy grain of truth at their center. It is true that my forebears were the folks for whom the paddy wagon was named, because of the number of them taken away drunk and disorderly on long-ago Saturday nights. The words Tammany Hall speak for themselves.
We are storytellers, accomplished mourners, devout Catholics.

And we are none of these. Because all of them are stereotypes.

And now we are stereotyped as antediluvian bigots, because the Ancient Order of Hibernians—still Ancient—decided to deny the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization permission to march in the parade. First the organization was told there was no room, which is a familiar line to anyone who has read the Christmas story.

Then, after the mayor said that room could be made, the addition to the parade was judged “impractical,” which is familiar to anyone who has dealt with a bureaucracy and is a fancy way of saying “we don’t want to.”

Finally, the gay group was told that its members could march if they melted into other groups and did not carry their banner, which is a familiar request to all who have ever been forced to deny what they are, closeted by the will of the majority.

Ethnic stereotypes are sometimes based on observed behavior, but they ignore complexity, change, and individuality. My earliest perception of my countrymen was of people shaped by blighted potatoes and empty stomachs, people who held fast to what they had and so sometimes had a closed fist. Like many immigrant groups, they found contempt and hatred everywhere, and so they drew together, in neighborhoods, churches, fraternal organizations.

Some characteristics of the Irish I know and love have always seemed to me contradictory. Hail fellows well met, without being met at all. The unknowable extroverts. It is no accident that some have taken to professions that give the illusion of being among the people while remaining essentially separate. Newspapermen, who are of events but outside them. Politicos, who always stand apart in the crowd. Priests.

Stereotypes, of course. If you see it differently, I understand.

But understand that the stereotypes about gay people grow not from small knowledge inflated but from ignorance writ large.
“No queers in the parade,” people on Staten Island shouted at the mayor. These are the cries of those who don’t know any gay people—or, more accurately, don’t know they know any—and so create the bogeyman. Pederasts, drag queens, instead of the reality: the man at the next desk, the girl you went to high school with. Ordinary people who are gay. And Irish. And proud.

I can’t imagine why those people want to march after what has happened. The A.O.H. has made a mess of this. When it barred gay people, there was the suspicion that it was reflecting the faith of its fathers, which considers homosexual acts sinful. But when it also barred a group of kids in wheelchairs—kids! in wheelchairs!—it appeared that it had forgotten that faith entirely. Hope those guys never get a chance to run Lourdes.

This is a parade that should belong to everyone. But they turned it into something that belongs to none of us, or at least none of us who have been stung by stereotype, none of us who were raised on the memory of the signs that said
NO IRISH
because all employers were sure the Irish were lazy and unreliable.

The members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians should remember those signs. They tried to hang a variation on Fifth Avenue this year. And in doing so they tarnished not the gay community but their own. Everything they’ve done stinks of stereotype, of the small-minded Irishman. For all of us who know that stereotypes exist to reduce understanding, not to enlarge it, I say they should be ashamed of themselves.

NO CLOSET SPACE
May 27, 1992

It was twenty years ago next month that an elementary school teacher named Jeanne Manford made history. She walked down a street in New York City carrying the sort of poster paper her students sometimes used for projects, except that printed on it were these words:
PARENTS
of gays
UNITE
in
SUPPORT
for our
CHILDREN

At her side during the Gay Pride march was her son, Morty, her golden boy, the one the teacher once told her would be a senator someday. When he was in high school he said he wanted to see a psychologist, and the psychologist called the Manfords in and told them that the golden boy was gay. But it never changed his mother’s mind about his glow.

Morty’s story, and his mother’s, too, are contained in a new oral history of the gay struggle,
Making History
, by Eric Marcus. The cheering thing about the book is how far we have come since the days when newspaper editors felt free to use “homo” in headlines. The distressing thing is how far we have to go, not in
the world alone, where homophobia remains one of the last acceptable bigotries, but in our homes, where our children learn that the world is composed exclusively of love and sex between men and women. Even when Mom and Dad have gay friends and raised consciousness, there is too often a silence that surrounds other ways of life and love. And silence begets distance.

Distance between parent and child is one of the saddest things discussed in
Making History
: the parents who try to commit their gay children to mental hospitals, the ones who erect a gravestone and send an obituary to the paper when they discover their daughter is a lesbian, or the ones who were told nothing because their children considered the truth untellable.

Greg Brock, a newspaperman, describes how he came out to his parents the day before he was to appear on the
Oprah Winfrey
show. Thirty-five years old and the man had never spoken to his mother and father of his central reality. “I was about to destroy my dad’s life,” he recalled.

Is this really what we want, to obsess about ear infections and reading readiness and then discover many years too late that we were either unaware or unaccepting of who our children were? To keen “What will I tell my friends?” when our kids try to talk about their lives?

In the same borough in which Morty Manford grew up and his mother taught, a Queens school board has rejected a curriculum that encourages respect for all families, including those headed by gay and lesbian parents. Consider that decision, not in terms of gay rights, but in terms of the children.

Given statistical estimates, the board is telling one out of ten kids that the life they will eventually lead is not part of the human program. Among their students are surely boys and girls who will discover they are gay and who, from their earliest years, will have learned that there is something wrong with them. Learned it from classmates, from teachers. Worst of all, from their own mothers and fathers.

Actually, it’s probably the mothers and fathers who need that
curriculum most. All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.

All parents should know that when they consider this subject unspeakable, they may be forever alienating their own child and causing enormous pain. Paulette Goodman, president of the Federation of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, likens it to her experience as a Jew in occupied Paris. “I know what it’s like to be in the closet,” she recalled. “I know all too well.”

Jeanne Manford didn’t want a closet. Her Morty was the same golden boy after she found out he was gay as he was before. She was with him at the Gay Pride march and with him in the gay rights movement.

And she was with him when he died a little more than a week ago of AIDS, almost twenty years to the day after she wrote her unconditional love on poster paper for all the world to see. She does not reproach herself. She loved and accepted her child the way he was. In a perfect world, this would be the definition of “parent” in the dictionary. The point is not what you’ll tell your friends at the bridge table. It is what you’ll tell yourself at the end.

WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE
June 24, 1992

The story of Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer had a certain déjà-vu-all-over-again quality. It might as easily have been the story of Sergeant Leonard Matlovich or Sergeant Miriam Ben Shalom or one of several other soldiers whose job histories included decorations, promotions, excellent evaluations.

For Colonel Cammermeyer, the honors included a Bronze Star for her work as a nurse in Vietnam and recognition as the Veterans Administration Nurse of the Year. None of it made any difference when she was dismissed from the Washington State National Guard, one of thousands of Americans whose exemplary service has paled beside the military’s determination to boot gay soldiers.

Many in the service will tell you that this is a difficult issue, as is the question of women in combat and other adjustments the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines have been asked to make to the twentieth century.

It is not difficult at all. It comes down to this: Will we continue
to support one of America’s largest and best-known institutions as it, not simply by custom but by regulation, engages in the rankest forms of discrimination?

The question is particularly apt as the Navy finds itself embroiled in a sickening sexual-harassment scandal. If you were wondering where your defense dollars go, almost $200,000 of them were spent to fly naval aviators to a military frat party in Las Vegas last year at which Navy women were passed down a gauntlet of their male colleagues, grabbed and mauled in a form of hand-to-hand combat not taught in basic training. An aide to an admiral had to resort to biting one flyboy who pushed his hand inside her bra during this group grope, which apparently had become something of a Navy tradition.

There is wailing and gnashing of teeth about this by the brass, a search for blame and underlying cause. It seems never to have occurred to them that if you treat women like second-class citizens by denying them promotion to combat positions, your male personnel will get the idea that they can treat them like second-class citizens in other ways, too. And that if you make homosexuality the modern equivalent of godless Communism, then hetero conduct in even its most abusive forms may seem sanctioned, even blessed.

The Vegas incident renders almost comical the fear of allowing gay people into the military. Same-sex propositions seem sedate compared with being pushed down a long hallway of guys with nuclear hands and Cro-Magnon mores.

But that is not the underlying cause of this ban. It is the perceived comfort level of straight male soldiers. The term of art is “cohesiveness,” what we civilians might call male bonding. In other words, they may have to fight or serve beside those with whom they lack proper kinship.

This is the argument once used to keep black soldiers in segregated units, a bit of military history that seems unthinkable today. And it has also been used to oppose allowing women in combat. (There’s also the argument of the pedestal, the idea that male
soldiers will spend all their time protecting their female counter-parts. I imagine the admiral’s aide would have some choice words about that.) It’s funny to read about a new Navy training program that, for the first time in history, features sexually integrated boot camp. After all the arguments about fatal distractions, they’ve discovered that putting men and women together actually improves training and fosters the much-vaunted cohesion. “It’s more cooperative and there’s more teamwork,” said one instructor. Armed forces, meet real life.

According to the General Accounting Office, the prohibition on gay people in the military costs us at least $27 million a year, given the fact that a thousand men and women are dismissed and replaced. That’s an absurd waste of time and money.

But more important is the fact that the military continues to piously justify retaining regulations that are no more than codified prejudice. Officials sometimes say this is the will of the people; if they are keeping track, seven in ten think women should be permitted to occupy combat positions and 50 percent see no reason to keep gay people out of the military.