Thursday, August 31, 2017

On Strength and Weakness.

To say that I have a complicated relationship with religion is the underiest of understatements. It is, and has been, and will ever remain such a Big and Complex Thing in my life that I’m writing an extensive and involved piece on it and on my experience with it right now.

That piece is why I’ve been absent from this space for a bit. Much of what I would want to be saying here is attached to what I am trying to say there.

But I can’t hold onto this one. Take that as whatever degree of conceit you wish, here we are, and here I go.

I was raised as a person of faith – that specific faith being Roman Catholic. From kindergarten until the end of college, I was educated in religious institutions. From age 4 until 21, I took religion classes alongside standard academic fare. Church history, scripture study, liberation theology, comparative religions, right on down to “Women in the Hebrew Bible.” Expert I am not, I can’t name chapters and verses, but I feel no discomfort in saying that I am very educated in the religion that I practiced for much of my life.

That entire time, I was also a queer person. But I didn’t know it. I didn’t understand it. My entire understanding and concept of myself was set through a religious filter, and my religion made no room for my identity. My religion condemned my identity. And so I couldn’t see it.

I won’t link to the Nashville Statement. Perhaps it’s an empty gesture, but this little slice of digital whatever is my space, and I do not invite those words nor the people who wrote them and/or saw fit to affirm them into my space. You can search it, if you’d like. But I read every word, and in the briefest of summaries let me tell you that if you were to search it, you would find a “proclamation” in several parts stating that God – as defined by Christianity – accepts as valid and good only heterosexual cisgender identities.

That’s the kindest possible bit of paraphrasing.

I don’t have a theological argument here. I won’t be drawing on my extensive religious education to offer examples rooted in text and ideology as to why this is wrong. Unlike the authors of this statement, I don’t presume to speak for the Christian God nor any other.

I speak from and for myself.

Queer people of faith exist. Transgender people of faith exist. And they do not exist to spite their religious communities, they exist because they believe. They believe so powerfully in something beyond themselves that they continue to practice and persevere at great personal risk – a risk that is both physical and psychological.

To point to a group of people and deny their humanity and existence is hateful. To claim divine right in doing so is shameful.

The Nashville Statement is the latest in a long line of hateful, shameful declarations that in the eyes of authors and supporters are a hammer of strength, but that drip with weakness and fear.

It’s the weak and the fearful who close their doors.

And their eyes.

And their minds.

The strongest communities open, and listen, and build, and try to understand. They disagree, and they are unkind, and they fail, and they try to do better. They don’t celebrate themselves – they celebrate each other.

I remain a person of faith, though I do not remain a Catholic. I don’t have a word for what I consider myself – agnostic, I suppose, is the closest. But I feel neither compelled nor inclined to name it. I’m happy in that. Secure in it. I stumble, and I doubt, and I question. I miss some things. I get wildly angry about others.

But I see myself.

Within a religion, or without, we have the power to self-determine without expectation of punishment or reward.

We have the power to see each other, to build with each other, to open. Or we have the power to close – to point to our neighbors and say, “You are not me, and so you are not allowed.” That’s a choice. It’s not on God, not any god.

Any power that would endorse, “Me, not you,” over, “Me and you,” is not worthy.

A power that excludes not on action but on existence is not a power at all.

Every identity – queer, transgender, beyond – rejected by the Nashville Statement, rejected by congregations and organizations of all degrees and denominations big and small across this country, exists. They – we – have always existed.

To ask us to be other than who we are is to ask us to be less than who we are. Worse, it’s to ask us to be that which we are not.

And when people answer, because it’s not as easy as just walking away for so many, you stop knowing them. If you ever really did.
   

Thursday, January 12, 2017

On Teaching and Learning.

I was a teacher for about seven years, running the drama/acting sections of after school and summer musical theatre programs for kids for a non-profit. It was hard work, and it was good work, and it - as well as the company itself and the really wonderful people I worked with - is something I am very proud of.

There is, I think, a unique pressure that comes with being an educator and mentor, whether you run a full classroom all day in and day out or spend just a few hours a week with a group of students as I did during the school year, as well as three weeks each summer. As I grew into the role and it became my, "real job," I started to feel eyes and ears on me in a new way.

I was being watched as both an instructor and a person. What I said, how I said it, the tone in which I answered questions, the way I chose to handle frustration and discipline, even the way I dressed. It made an impact.

Sometimes I rose to the occasion - maybe even more often than not. But there was one day - not even a day, a moment - where I messed up. Badly.

I was running a rehearsal at an after school program. The script was one of mine - the first show I'd written on my own for the company, and the one I still feel is the best. It's my love letter to musical theatre, and highlights some of the genre's familiar themes, including romance.

Due to the ratio of girls to boys who had auditioned, an eighth grade girl had been cast as one of the male leads. I gave her the option of playing the character as a boy or a girl, and she opted for the latter.

However, it was a Catholic school, and this was one of the characters involved in the "love" act. Before scripts were printed and distributed to the students, I adjusted the language so that the two talked about unseen crushes rather than each other. It didn't feel good.

I had been out for a year and had just literally scrubbed myself out of my own work.

My only comfort was that the students would never know. But I had missed one reference, and during this rehearsal, the eighth grader raised her hand, "Were these two in love?"

It caught me off guard, and the words came out (as it were) before I could even stop to think about them: "When it was still a boy and a girl, yes. When we cast two girls, we had to change it."

Fuck.

I told the truth, but I couldn't explain it - couldn't say that because of the rules, this was what we had to do. Couldn't say that relationships - hell, the world for that matter - didn't need to be defined by, "boy," and, "girl." Couldn't say that I was gay.

The best I could backpedal was a lame, "Not that there's anything wrong with that."

Fortunately, this kid was one of the best. She paused, then nodded. "I believe that."

I would have been devastated at her age.

I stopped teaching in Catholic schools after that.

It wasn't just this incident - it was the same year the archbishop notoriously proposed adding what amounted to a "morality clause" into the contracts/handbooks for four schools in the archdiocese, and I'd stopped feeling safe. It didn't directly affect where I worked, and I wasn't technically a school employee anyway. In complete fairness to them, I'd always been welcomed and treated warmly by the staff members I worked with. But the rules - written and unwritten - weren't something I could abide by anymore.

What we say matters. What we do matters. There is a responsibility, and I did not meet it. I won't ever be able to let that go entirely.

But I did scrape one bit of positivity from it: I learned.

I started including sensitivity to and inclusivity of orientation and gender expression when I led our drama staff training for summer. The first year went okay. The second went better. I think it will continue to improve.

I also chose the same show for my last summer camp before leaving to pursue new things, and we had an identical casting scenario. However, this time we were operating as our own program, not a school's, and I was fully in control of the conversation.

I took the two students aside and presented them with their options: George could remain male and they could play the scene as written, George could be a female character and they could play the scene as written, or the text could be adjusted so the characters could be talking about people we never see. There was no right answer - it was about their comfort.

They were two of the best kids - mature and sensitive and a beautiful example of what the next generation has the power to be. And we had a conversation and reached a conclusion together.

It was easy. And while it didn't undo the sting of the first time, it was progress.

My mistake did not mean I could give myself permission to stop trying.

My improvement does not mean I get to stop working at being better.

Though I may not be a teacher in the came capacity right now, I hope I still have eyes and ears on me in the same way while I share - and, hopefully, live - that particular lesson.

Thursday, January 5, 2017

On History.

I came out on a Friday in a written post in this very space, and a wave of sweet support started rolling over me almost immediately. My journey along the emotional spectrum of the moment also started pretty immediately: euphoria and elation and liberation, back to dry-mouthed fear as I had to tell a few people in person, forward into anger at myself and the world and the person I'd never gotten the opportunity to be for the first 27 years of my life, over to anxiety that I'd never be accepted by people who had figured themselves out sooner and been brave enough to live authentically in less welcoming places, back to elation, over to...

By the following Monday, I was overwhelmed. I couldn't settle enough to start thinking about what it now meant to be me. My Out Self and I had only just met, and I wasn't even close to being able to see her clearly yet.

I got on the bus with every intention of going to my office in the Sunset and instead found myself walking down to 575 Castro Street, once the home of Harvey Milk's Castro Camera and now the central storefront and action center for the Human Rights Campaign.

It was quieter than I have ever seen it since, but I suppose it was before noon on a Monday in March. Still, there were a couple of people occupying the lone cashier's time, and I walked through the small store, taking in the rainbows on every wall and feeling an immediate punch in the heart because those rainbows were now...not mine, that wasn't the right word for it. Me. They were me.

In the back, a memorial placard for disco queen and activist Sylvester marked the beginning of the Rainbow Walk - a "Walk of Fame" of LGBT+ icons that was just recently completed. I picked up a pamphlet about the project, happy that it was happening and a little ashamed that I didn't already know about it.

When I finally made my way to the register, I was the only one left in the store, save for one other man lingering near the front. The cashier was an older gentleman, kind and soft-spoken, and when he asked me if I wanted to become a member, I said yes. As he took my information, he told me to choose a baseball cap or a water bottle as a gift. I made a joke about my head being too big for most caps and opted for the water bottle. We laughed. And then, very suddenly, I told him I had just come out.

Without hesitation, he stopped, looked me in the eye with a big smile, and said, "Well, welcome to the club!" The other man in the store came over and offered his congratulations, and my new cashier friend let me know that it was his husband.

"Where are you from?"

I hesitated at the question. As I've mentioned, an early fear of mine - one that I may never get over entirely - was that I would be judged for being a San Francisco native and still deeply closeted. But I answered, and the man told me we were from the same neighborhood. More than that, we'd gone to the same grade school, albeit many years apart.

We continued to chat, and as I took my bag, the cashier asked if he could give me a hug.

"Your official welcome," he said, "And your head's not that big. It's just got to hold your big brain."

I left, a little dazed, but also a little more centered. It was the first time I had stood as myself with complete strangers, stood to be counted with members of my community, and it had felt so correct. I still had a lot of work to put in, just in terms of figuring out what owning my identity meant to me (honestly, I don't know that I'll ever be done with that work), but I had started.

As it turns out, the HRC shop had given me an extra gift that would help me immeasurably with that work. At the bottom of each receipt is a coupon for a few dollars off admission at the nearby GLBT History Museum - a museum I, again, am embarrassed to admit I did not know existed. As important as it was to me to be a good ally, I clearly was maintaining some distance. Denial is powerful like that.

Yet that same sense of having been an ally, and a lifelong San Franciscan on top of that, convinced me before my first visit that the museum would not be all that enlightening. I was up to date on current affairs, and I knew my city's history. I knew about the activism of the 70's, about Harvey Milk's life and murder. I'd grown up during the height of the AIDS crisis, confused and desperately trying to understand why it was a word we only whispered, and why so many people were so angry and sad and afraid and moving away to "climates that were better for their roommates' health," in a very Catholic world that did not want to answer my questions.

So yeah. I knew a few things, or whatever (oh, my sweet summer child...).

What I did not know was just how unprepared I was for the impact of the little museum space on 18th  Street.

I don't know that I can properly describe what it is to stand in front of pieces of your history and really recognize and feel them as yours for the very first time, especially when so much of that history is so recent that it feels as though you could just reach out and touch it. In this city, even with everything that has changed, you still can in some instances.

And I don't have to describe that to a lot of people. Ending segregation and securing more rights for women and...how many things that we'd believe to be so far away really just happened? How many actual years had to pass before we started telling ourselves that we did it, we ended racism and sexism and all the other -isms so it's cool, we don't have to pay attention or try anymore? 10? 20? When does history start to feel so far in the past?

I've gone back to the space on 18th Street many times, and I never fail to feel the pull and weight and life of what lies within, no matter what the exhibit. That's part of it, I think - life. The museum isn't a monument to the past - that's part of it, but there's also so much dedicated to the present and the future. Our history - the community's history, my history - is alive. The names and the faces of those who fought and risked and often lost everything to be themselves and make things even a little bit easier for those who would come after them are so young and so close, and so many of them would and should still be here were it not for violence and criminally ignored disease.

Coming out, and stepping in, and stepping up meant letting that in. It meant making that mine, to the degree that it can be mine, and feeling and facing the good, the bad, the ugly, and the hopeful.

Never was that made more clear than on the visit in which I stood in front of the clothes Harvey Milk was wearing the day he was murdered in City Hall.

It was a simple and respectful display, a dark box whose contents were illuminated only when the viewer stepped close enough to clearly intend to actively engage with the exhibit. Soft lighting brought the suit into focus - the damage and the stains neither hidden nor glorified - while a piece of the (in)famous recording Milk made in recognition of the strong possibility of his assassination played.

The good, the bad, the ugly. And the hopeful. I stood there for a good long while, overcome, because a person I had never and would never know had stood up, years before I was even born, and taken action - at the risk and eventual cost of his own life - that had made my life better. He was aware of and accepted that risk and did what he felt he could and should do.

You don't do that without believing, firmly and unshakably, in the possibility of more. Of better. If not for you, than the next folks. And the next.

That feeling is not quiet, and it is not complacent, and it does not erase or justify what should not be. But it is one way forward.

History and hope. It was then, and it's now, and we will make sure that it will be.