"My heart breaks for the pain and torment you went through, Billy Lucas," a reader wrote after I posted about Billy Lucas to my blog. "I wish I could have told you that things get better." I had the same reaction: 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. I've launched a channel on YouTube to host these videos. My normally camera-shy husband and I already posted one.
But there is a more profound reason still for the fascination Caravaggio exerts over the 21st century: he carried out one of the most startling revolutions in the history of art, and one that still seems strangely modern. The visceral violence and eroticism of his work are only an aspect of the extraordinary realism he achieved. His painting was utterly different from that of his predecessors and contemporaries. It looks, to put it in modern terms, like a film noir. As David Hockney has put it: “He invented a black world that had not existed before, certainly not in Florence or Rome. Caravaggio invented Hollywood lighting.” And that resemblance may be no accident.
Personally, I think out gay educators offer students wonderful opportunities to learn not just about diversity but also the critical thinking it fosters. There are obvious political challenges, which stretch past sexual orientation. Teachers from all walks of life are too often discouraged from bringing their full selves to the classroom, to my mind. But I won’t wade too deeply into education policy, lest I show how little I know.
More broadly, I’ll say that adults working with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth consistently report their greatest challenge is people power: There just aren’t enough adults willing to enter into what are by any measure challenging relationships. The cross-generational communication challenges are enormous and filled with assumptions and misunderstandings on both sides. There’s just not a lot of trust between gay youth and adults, in part because there is so little contact between them.
In addition, the significant baggage many gay adults have with their own youth (who wants to go back there?) can make it difficult for some to step up to the challenge.
It’s not so much that being gay offers an advantage, but it opens doors to meet other remarkable, dynamic gay young people who are building healthy, exciting lives that never make it into the headlines or broadcasts.
I do believe there is something positive that, while not unique to gay youth, is at least a quintessential part of the gay experience: having to step forward and make an active choice about building the life you want rather than the one you’ve been told you should lead. The debate over whether sexual orientation is a choice makes this a delicate point, but it’s an important one nonetheless. You do, in fact, have a choice as a gay person, of any age. It’s the choice between living honestly versus trying to suppress or conceal your sexuality. In my opinion, society pushes hard against making the former choice, particularly if you’re a young person who is still materially (and emotionally) dependent on family. Even before getting to the external barriers, there are many internal ones: the fear of being singled out, of being alone, of taking a step with no idea about what comes next. Someone who nonetheless chooses to build the life that feels true to them has been through a remarkable rite of passage.
For a demographic that was once so twined with mortality, the gays have gotten good (or have they always been good?) at focusing on the now, the young, the ephemeral. Today’s gays — the gays of my generation, the millennials, the 20-somethings — are post-gay, or New Gay, loosed from the closet, free of the diving bell of AIDS-as-executioner, left to skirmish over (or ignore) petty legislative battles on a state-by-state or school-by-school basis. The “end of gay culture” has been journaled for nearly a generation now. What about gay history? Is that ending too? From Sappho to Prop 8, and then what? Now what? Yearly parades celebrating outrageousness, tempered by the tired yammerings of marriage defenders?
Destinie and I spent our days in Borders and on Amazon.com looking for gay characters. The only ones we could find were the ones in the adult section (not that we were complaining! Have you read those steamy, passionate sex scenes? *Sigh*). I found one that seemed like what we were looking for. What They Always Tell Us by Martin Wilson. I read it. Then Destinie read it. We talked about. And cried about it. People really write about this stuff? I thought. It felt . . . great. Imagine that you are an alien on your own planet. And imagine you find out that there are more aliens, just like you, on your planet. And imagine what it would be like–to know that someone knows what it’s like. What you’re going through.
How did it make you feel when your middle school librarian told you LGBT novels were inappropriate?
Can I cuss in this interview? I felt disgusted. And pissed at her.
Here's your chance to get it off your chest. Say something to her.
Get over it. Get over your prejudice. It doesn't matter. It's not your place to judge what kids should read based on your prejudices.
Maybe McChrystal is unique in the special forces (SOF) community, but I tend to think not. In fact, having spent quite a bit of time recently with current and former special forces soldiers, I find that McChrystal's views on gays seem to be the rule rather than the exception. Given the traditional outline of the gays-in-the-military debate, one might think that the special forces soldiers, guys from traditional military families who spend unusual amounts of time in close quarters, would be the most opposed to having gays serve openly. My admittedly limited experience suggests that this is not the case. As one former member of a special missions unit put it to me recently, "It's really about competence. If you're competent, it doesn't matter who you are." And then, switching instantly from an analytical posture to a machismo mode, he said, "If a guy saves my ass, he sure as hell can look at it."
