a work of fiction by Robin Reardon
FOREWORD
On April 29, 2008, my second novel will be released. Thinking Straight is about a gay teen whose parents send him to a summer camp designed to straighten him out. You can read more about the book, including an excerpt from Chapter One, on my Web site. What's important to note here is that the story is positive and inclusive. Not only does it respect religious belief, but also it takes a step toward creating a safe place for people of all sexual orientations within the religion called Christianity.
Starting with this blog entry, I’m introducing a series of monthly installments that present the rationale behind Thinking Straight. The series is written from the point of view of a gay man—which I am not—so I'm labeling it as a fictional open letter to humanity, addressed to anyone who will read it and consider its points. My hope is that it will further understanding and acceptance.
The installments will be presented in logical order, and I encourage readers to start at the beginning and proceed through. The series will be highlighted each month on DREAMWalkergroup.com in the DREAMScene newsletter.
The Installments
I. From Me to You
Expecting Acceptance
The Faggot-bag
The only thing wrong with being gay…
II. The Cards: Intro and Card One (Unnatural)
This is a systematic deconstruction of some major assumptions used by the ignorant and/or malicious to support the fallacious conclusion that “Gay equals bad.”
III. Cards Two and Three: Abnormal and Promiscuous
IV. Card Four: Pedophile
V. Card Five: "There's no need to think; I feel instinctively this is wrong."
VI. The I-beam Strategy
This is an extremely high-level business model, underpinning all accepted project management methodologies. Think it sounds boring? Wait until you see how I apply it.
VII. The Biggest Card: Intro and Objective
While there are many assumptions used by the ignorant and/or malicious to condemn homosexuality, this section addresses the one that is most resistant to logic, to rational examination. Can you guess what it is?
VIII. The Biggest Card, continued: Situation
IX. The Biggest Card, continued: Tactics
X. Acceptance: A few suggestions...
On Marriage
On Civil Rights
On Choice
Conclusion: The only thing wrong with being gay is how some people treat you when they find out.
FROM ME TO YOU
I am a gay man. I am not a therapist or a scientist or a religious counselor, although I will draw on those and other disciplines and resources to prove my point, which is that the only thing wrong with being gay is how some people treat you when they find out. Presenting this conclusion is, in fact, the objective of this letter. And because my belief in this conclusion is so strong, I try to live my life expecting acceptance. I don’t always get it, and I don’t always have the energy to try. And I’ll take tolerance over hatred when I can get that, but who wants to be tolerated?
What does it mean to expect acceptance? For a gay person, it means having a tremendous amount of intestinal fortitude and a determination that would put a Pit Bull to shame. Here’s an example.
Say I’m in a conference room at the company where I work, sitting at a long table with maybe five other people. It’s a few minutes before our meeting is due to start, and there’s general chit-chat going on while we wait. The fellow directly across from me, who doesn’t know me, addresses the table in general.
He says, “My wife has talked me into taking our vacation in Hawai’i this year, but I can’t tell one of those islands from another. Has anyone here been there, and do you have any advice?”
So this guy has put his question squarely on a personal platform, and he’s mentioned his life partner. He says he’s confused about something very specific, and he asks for help.
So I say, “Actually, yes. My partner and I were there a couple of years ago. He and I went to three islands. I can tell you what we discovered about each of them. What do you and your wife like to do?”
He blinks at me. “Your partner? I thought you worked here.”
“Oh,” I say, “yes, I do. He’s my domestic partner, not my business partner. So, what kind of tourists are you? Do you enjoy hiking, shopping, beachcombing…”
Now, if anyone at the table has a big enough problem with my being gay that they create any kind of disturbance, they’ll need to be willing to look like an intolerant bigot. But if they’re willing to do that, I’ll have to have a very thick skin to get through it without some nasty comeback. In fact, I’ll need a thick skin just to smile at some of the faces around me, even if no one says anything. It takes guts to expect acceptance.
The hardest situations might be those in which no one says anything directly to me. I’ve had some heteros ask me why it is that gay men are so sarcastic, as though it’s something that comes with the territory, the way female secretaries are supposed to be genetically predisposed to working copying machines. While I would never agree that “gay men are sarcastic” any more than I would agree that “heterosexuals are blind and stupid,” I do have a personal theory for why sarcasm becomes the weapon of choice for many gays. If someone in my hearing, perhaps even very near me, says something about me that they consider to be uncomplimentary, but they never say it to me, that’s an indirect assault. This is perhaps preferable to being hit about the head and kidneys with a baseball bat, but it’s still very nasty treatment. It inspires either a total withdrawal or a response that can’t be any more direct than the assault. I mean, how can you respond directly when all you hear is someone saying to someone else, “Yeah, you were right. He is one of them, isn’t he? [snigger]”
Since “indirect” is part of the definition of sarcasm, it’s the nearest weapon. It takes guts to use it, but it takes perhaps even more guts to say, “I’m sorry, what was that you said?” and then wait patiently in apparent innocence. Especially since I'm never quite sure what will happen next.
Did I say this took guts? But back to expecting acceptance.
The first step is eliminating cards—those nasty, virtual flash cards that homophobic bigots will flip up at gays to prove how disgusting we are. You know the ones. You know a lot of them. I’m going to show you how I destroy them by deconstructing five of them, and then you can use the same process to destroy all the rest of them that you’re carrying around in your faggot-bag.
What’s a faggot-bag? Oh, come on; everyone has one. Every one of us grew up hearing insult after insult, smear after smear about how dreadful it is to be gay. I have one. And all the time I was growing up, all of the nineteen years before I realized I was gay, I would hear those nasty things and shrug; they didn’t apply to me, after all, or so I wanted to believe. But what was I supposed to do with them? Well, they went into my faggot-bag.
When I could no longer pretend I wasn’t gay, I knew I had to open that filthy, disgusting thing and dig around in there, review each slur and see what it was, really, because I sure as hell didn’t want to think all those pieces of crap applied to me. And I knew how nasty they were, because I’d put them in there myself. So I sidled up to it, glancing around cautiously to make sure no one saw me taking ownership of that yucky thing. Carefully, avoiding as much of the crap rubbed into the bag as possible, I opened it, looked around me once more, and reached into the slime until I could grab something and pull it out. Gritting my teeth, I shook the thing until enough muck came off it so that I could recognize it. And do you know what it was? Pedophile. It was a card that said Pedophile.
Well, this certainly didn’t apply to me! I’m gay, I said quietly to myself; I want a man, not a boy. So I threw the thing aside thinking maybe this process wouldn’t be quite as painful as I’d feared. That one wasn’t so bad; it was easy to get rid of. Feeling encouraged, I forgot to look around and see if anyone was watching as I dug in for the next bit of crap. This homophobic bigot saw me, saw the faggot-bag and recognized it, saw that I’d discarded Pedophile, walked over and picked it up and threw it in my face, sneering, “Here, faggot. This is you.”
This has happened to me many times, these nasty cards getting flung at me when I knew they weren’t who I was. And if I hadn’t taken steps to make sure I knew—I mean, really, really knew—that these things don’t apply to me, I might have bought into the idea that there was something wrong with being gay.
If there’s something wrong with me—and there might be, because I’m hardly perfect—it has nothing to do with being gay. And I’m going to show you how I know that.
Some people who read this letter will find fault with my logic. I expect that, because just as I’m no scientist, I’ve never studied logic as a discipline. But what I want to do here isn’t to write a treatise on logic; what I want to do is demonstrate that it’s perfectly possible for human beings of normal intelligence and education to use their brains in logical ways on a topic most people aren’t used to thinking about at all. In other words, I want them to think. So if you have a problem with some of my leaps of logic, fine; but I’d be willing to bet that infallible logic would reach the same conclusion I have: the only thing wrong with being gay is how some people treat you when they find out.
