I’ve made it a point to wake up at 5:30 every morning this week just so I could see the BBC news on PBS, because American news just annoys me. I don’t do soundbites and I don’t do annoying computer graphics at the bottom of the screen and I don’t do ticker tape like CNN. However, BBC News is much, much bloodier. I have seen with my own eyes the destruction that is happening while we attempt to fix our oops in Iraq.

But it has never affected me in an emotional way until today, when I heard this: the Red Cross is thinking about pulling out of Iraq altogether because they can’t be guaranteed safety. They do not want to work, and rightfully so, with hundreds of American troops standing guard. They also do not want to work with the threat of friendly fire or groups of angry Iraqis threatening to tear down their base of operations.

The concept of the Red Cross leaving innocent people, both civillian and military, both Iraqi and American, because of the mess that has been created is the lump in my throat and the stinging in my eyes.

In terms of the Iraq concept in general, I am caught in an ideological chasm. On one hand, overthrowing Saddam Hussein and then leaving the Iraqi military (such as it is) to figure things out sounds like cruel and unusual punishment. On the other, the fact that we’ve managed to fuck up their country so badly that even the Red Cross doesn’t want to do medical and social work there doesn’t mean that we will be forgiven if we try to fix the problem. I’m not sure that being forgiven is what Shrub had in mind, but still… On the world stage, there are no do-overs. You don’t get a clean slate just because you helped fix something you mangled into non-recognition in the first place. It might actually help Shrub to remember this: in the game of politics, everything is so broad and so deep that it’s always “for keepsies.”

I feel hoodwinked. As a political science major, I tend to align myself with issues I believe in rather than individual candidates. So I gave Shrub the benefit of the doubt. I thought that he would be able to do some good if he stuck to the political strategy he campaigned on… hiring the best and the brightest minds to help him because he was smart enough to know his own limitations. And now, one of two things is happening: 1) Shrub’s idea of the best and the brightest has little experience with the subject at hand 2) Groupthink has taken over at 1600, and a clusterfuck has ensued.

Perhaps it’s a combination of both.

Someone, and I will not name names, wrote me this very pissy e-mail about how since I’d started writing about politics, I’d gotten a lot more conservative.

That’s not true. I’ve gotten a lot more indifferent. As a senior political science student, I do research that leads me to believe every damn day that both parties are completely insane and neither one of them really deserves the attention that the average American gives them… because in order to fix the parties, what really needs to happen is that the average American needs to start giving the Democrats and the Republicans more attention than they know what to do with.

Because believe me when I say that constituents intent on content are like kryptonite to Congress. Say that three times fast. I’m on a roll today.

There are members of both parties that would sell their mother for Jack Abramoff to take them to Scotland… and a good bit of them are trying to sell their mothers right now because Jack Abramoff did. If you haven’t gotten a chance before now, start reading Vanity Fair. It’s a little biased to the left, but even if you’re a right-wing conservative, you’ll still have plenty to chew on. My personal favorite was the roughly five page article that started with the President denying that he’d ever met Abramoff, and five (count ‘em, five) pictures that state otherwise.

For all you yellow dog democrats out there, are you following the story of William Jefferson? I know you’d like to think that the Republicans are the axis (or “asses”) of evil, but Jefferson is a Democrat accused of orchestrating a corruption scheme- demanding cash and prizes for negotiating African business deals. Now, I’m not a lawyer, but I think they’ve got some pretty convincing evidence:

The investigation became public on Aug. 3 when FBI agents raided Jefferson’s homes in New Orleans and Northeast Washington, where they found about $90,000 in cash in his freezer, law enforcement sources have said.

In the freezer? If you’re going to claim innocence, you for damn sure don’t hide shit in the freezer. This story will get weirder before it gets better. Law enforcement officials are lucky all they found was money. There could have been a severed head.

And if the two parties weren’t causing enough trouble, let me play a lawyer on TV…

My first love is constitutional law. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the Feds have the right to enter congressional offices and loot around. It doesn’t even have a sentence from which you can extrapolate the right to fuck up their program.

I was just about to say something very naive, like “when the founding fathers were writing the Constitution, they probably never dreamed this would be an issue…” Then I realized I’d only be saying it because it sounded good, not because it’s true. Half the Constitution was written by taking the right people and getting them too sloshed to move right before they were supposed to vote.

Surely the Framers figured out that something like this was bound to happen. So what we have now is a truckload of evidence and no way to use it… a lot like the OJ case, actually… (And confidentially to the pretentious fuckwit who told me to cite more recent cases because it made me look like a rookie, THIS is going to be the next huge precedent in Fourth Amendment violations. ) The problem is not that there’s too little evidence, it was that it was obtained in an illegal search and seizure. Whether or not they had warrants, Justice does not have the right to wrestle Congress to the mat during Saturday Night Smackdown. If you remember nothing else from this web site, remember this- one branch of power does not have the authority to make any other branch his or her bitch.

In the first and badly edited section of this essay, I talked about the part that the American Revolution played in the formation of the Republican Party. Anti-federalists, as they were known then, were filled with the idea that all people should have the right to make their own choices. As Michael Palin so brilliantly says as “Dennis” in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.” Though in this case, he’s talking about the legendary/fictional coronation of King Arthur, real monarchy wasn’t so much different. Before there was such a thing as democracy, there was a concept called “divine right of kings,” which basically meant that leaders could do whatever they felt like because they were, in a sense, ordained by the Judeo-Christian God. This led to such oppression, tyranny, and violence that Thomas Jefferson advocated a coup against the government- a new revolution- every twenty years just to avoid complacency.

Nowhere was this more evident than at Shays’ Rebellion. Though it went on for a year or so, the main event was an uprising of farmers who were protesting what they felt was a financial scam in Massachusetts. Western and central parts of the state were still using a barter economy, and the east had switched to both coinage and paper money. When the people in the barter economy were monetarily taxed, they were often forced to sell their land at a third of the price it was worth, thus risking their right to vote- because at that time, voting was tied to the ownership of land. In a letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson extols the virtue of uprising against one’s government, because even if you lose, at least you’re getting some publicity to the problem:

I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Republican Party, was insistent upon the idea that the United States didn’t need a federal hand to guide it. As men and women of principle and morals, we individually are capable of being responsible for ourselves.

And that brings me to my dilemma with the Republican Party today. They’ve created a situation where you’re only fit to govern yourself if you hold the same ideals that they do… “Father Knows Best” writ large. President Bush, I know Nick at Nite. And you sir, are no Nick at Nite.

In the Republican Party, women are not respected enough to make their own decisions about whether or not to have a child. Lots of people would argue, and I agree with them, that this is a way of keeping both the glass ceiling and the general inequality of women in place, because if the debate on abortion was really for the children’s sake, the Republican Party would be lined up around the block with blankets and bottles for the children we already have.

In the Republican Party, environmental protections that took the Clinton administration years to pass have been dismantled in the name of lifting restrictions on big business, and thus, more money… though I could understand more readily if those restrictions were lifted in an effort to save the world economy from permanent ruin. But when President Bush came into office, there was a large surplus of money that no one saved- knowing full well that it was time for an economic downturn. And yes, I know that the tax cuts were supposed to reinvigorate the economy, but what do people do when they sense a downturn in the market? They save. Therefore, all those tax cuts are probably still in banks across America. I’m sure The Gap is furious.

In the Republican Party, Biblical literalists have been tasked with providing the guided hand that used to belong to the “divine right of Kings.” Now, I’m going to say this very carefully. I believe that divorce is terrible. I have been through two, both my parents’ and my own. I would not abort my child unless my life was in danger mentally or physically. I believe that single mothers often get the short end of the stick and its better not to go through being a single parent unless you have to. I fully intend to raise my child (if I have one) with a trusting and loving co-parent. But the bottom line is that those are MY CHOICES TO MAKE, and I didn’t need my political party to help me with any of them.

So, really, what makes me the angriest about the Republican Party is that the party born from the ashes of the American Revolution, the party that centered around the idea of free will and the ability to create one’s own prosperity, is now drowning in the pool of patriarchy that it struggled to leave.

Though I am not handing over my liberal credentials, I’ve been thinking since my Constitutional Law class last semester that I should write an essay on what the Republican party would look like if they were really Republicans… because the party we have now is nowhere near the way that Thomas Jefferson envisioned it (we’ll talk about why the modern day Democrats would make Alexander Hamilton purposefully lose the duel that killed him another time). The reason that I want to focus first on what the Republican party should be is that if it were that kind of party, I’d have a much harder time deciding which way I would vote.

When Thomas Jefferson was a young man, his vision for the United States was that we would all be a group of yeoman farmers, capable of governing ourselves. In order to understand why he would think that way, it helps to view those thoughts in context. The English monarchy from which he’d just escaped was, at the time, the most corrupt in the world. Whenever the American colonies expressed a slight dissatisfaction in anything concerning the British crown, they were served a new tax on something essential, like sugar, tea, postage, etc. Instead of stamping down the feeling that the colonies would be better off governing themselves, a flame broke into a wildfire.

The breaking point came in 1773 with the Boston Tea Party, which brought stiff punishment for Massachusetts called The Intolerable Acts. The port of Boston was closed. The economic lifeblood of the state was destroyed. Any chance at self-government was eliminated. The British empire wanted to make an example out of the Bostonians… to say, “see what will happen if you misbehave?” Unfortunately for them, the rest of the colonies were outraged and the idea of American Revolution began.

While most of this was going on, Thomas Jefferson was in France, trying to get us enough money to fight back against the British, because all of our operating capital actually belonged to them. The toll of living under a regime in which he did not believe, coupled with the stress of having to come up with enough resources to get out from under it, made Jefferson a firm believer in the idea of republicanism. In his America, there was only enough federal power to loosely collate us into a country. The states would even be free to make their own treaties with other countries, as well as having their own militias.

Jefferson’s idea of federalism fell apart during the Revolutionary war, because since there was no national bank and no centralized military, there was little to no hope of getting the troops the supplies that they needed. Lots of soldiers went without food. Some went without the appropriate clothes or boots. The colonists won the war based on one simple truth: the longer we drag this out, the more the British Empire will tire of it. Travel time from Britain to the US was roughly six months. Though the British had more resources than the colonists, the problem was getting them there.

Eventually, Britain conceded, and the United States was born.

It was then that the differences between Alexander Hamilton’s view of America and Thomas Jefferson’s became frighteningly apparent. Though not still loyal to the British crown, Hamilton thought that the British model for government was still the best in the world, and he strove to make the rest of the members of the Constitutional Congress understand that fact… and in my personal opinion, ignored everything that the country had just been through. Jefferson was so opposed to any kind of tyranny or injustice that he was completely set on local government. If the Republicans of that day were in power now, the highest form of government would probably be the school board.

As with most things, the truth was somewhere in the middle. George Washington knew better than anyone that we needed a federal government that was strong enough to defend the entire country, because there were several countries around the world that were just waiting for us to fall apart so they could reclaim their land… and honestly, most people do not know how close that came to happening, because the first “constitution,” the Articles of Confederation were so flimsy that every state had its own militia and its own ability to form treaties with foreign nations.

The “founding brothers” (thanks, Joseph J. Ellis) knew that the trick to making a successful country was to throw out the Articles of Confederation, and to create a constitution that married the two ideas of national government- just enough federal to unite us, and just enough local to divide us… taking away the threat of monarchy.

A few posts ago, I wrote about how, when I came back to Texas, I felt like I’d lost my church. The name was the same, but the belief system was quite different. I wrote a lot about why I was unhappy with the Episcopal/Anglican church in Texas because I felt like they were stealing my Jesus. I realized earlier that I didn’t write much about who my Jesus is, and I’d like to correct that.

My Jesus is not a shepherd who comforts me in my distress, although he does when I really need him to. My Jesus usually distresses me out of my comfort. I’ve had a lot of heartache in my life, but in the years since I’ve taken responsibility for my own faith, I’ve become increasingly aware that I am the product of a white family that is well-to-do, living in the richest country in the world. I don’t have money, but my family does, and I have never once gone without anything I’ve needed (unless I was too proud or embarrassed to ask for help). Rarely if ever have I gone without something I wanted. My Jesus doesn’t need to comfort me nearly as much as he needs to remind me that because of where I sit, it’s easy to lose sight of the rest of the world. If that doesn’t sound like a big deal, remember that cultural ignorance causes hunger, oppression, injustice, and inequality. My Jesus needs me to know that there is no such thing as “power over.” There is only power within.

Jesus reminds me that there are thousands of Iraqi civilians that have been killed in response to the approximately 5,000 we lost in New York, Washington DC, and Philadelphia. Jesus reminds me that there are poor and homeless people as close to me as one block and as far away as across the world. Jesus reminds me that the Iraqis aren’t the only people who have ever lived under a horrendous, evil dictator and that my country never did anything to help them. Jesus reminds me that when there’s a march for peace, I need to be there. Jesus reminds me to sing while I’m walking.

The conservative Christians in my city have claimed Jesus as a blue-eyed, effeminate white man that strangely enough always has shadows that fall across his face in the shape of communion and of the death instrument used to kill him. They claim him as a shepherd who feeds his flock and provides for their every need, even when they already have storage units to hold their excess of material things. But let me tell you something about my Jesus: SHEPHERDS GENERALLY AREN’T MURDERED BY THE STATE.

My Jesus was killed by a group of people who didn’t like what he had to say about the Roman government- which was that they couldn’t treat people as if they were property. My Jesus knows that we are all equal in the eyes of God, and he pretty much thinks that the people who call him the King of Kings are MISSING THE POINT ENTIRELY.

Jesus and I have a good relationship, but like most of the relationships in my life, it isn’t always easy. I struggle with Jesus, because sometimes I have to admit that I don’t believe everything that happened to him. I don’t need the miracles, and I don’t really care whether they’re real or not. Ditto with the way he was born and the way he rose from the dead. I need his message. I want to be like Jesus. I want to shake people up and move them from complacency- not as a call to arms, but a call to compassion. It is so easy in my circle of well-to-do friends for us to go years without truly seeing the homeless, the sick, the friendless, and the needy. It is when my Jesus asks me to open my eyes that I am truly blessed by and filled with the holy spirit. It is in those moments that I truly believe my Jesus did perform miracles, because he is performing them with me.

But since I can’t always believe in the miracles, I believe in the ritual. In Harville Hendrix’s book Getting the Love You Want, he described a couple that came into his office. When they arrived, they sat down on either end of the couch. They took turns telling their story to him, but they never looked at each other. It was as if they were afraid to be vulnerable with each other and had to steel themselves to interact. Yet they both expressed an interest to find love for each other that they’d once had, but weren’t sure was still there.

When Hendrix prescribed their homework for the week, he told them that they shouldn’t try so hard to make themselves feel anything, but that they should go through the motions of caring for each other. For instance, when they prepared to go out, the husband should take his wife’s coat out of the closet and hold it for her as she slips into it. He should open the car door for her to get in. In response, she might pack a lunch for him the next day with a special note inside just to show that she was thinking about him.

When the couple came back the next week, they were shocked and amazed at how much of a difference those little gestures had made in their relationship, because each loving kindness expressed made their emotions grow towards each other.

The same thing happens in my relationship with Jesus. I don’t always believe that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived. I don’t always believe that he turned water into wine. I rarely believe that Jesus died for my sins, and most of the time I seriously doubt whether he rose from the dead three days after he was killed.

But what I am fully capable of is going into the cathedral, faithfully and intentionally. I can kneel and I can recite the words that bring comfort to me and millions of others. When I take communion, it is in remembrance of the man that created my system of religious and political belief- responding to the needs of others and treating them as my equal is not only my answer to being Christ in the world, it shapes the way I want my leaders to act.

When I left the United Church of Christ to return to the Episcopal church, I heard an endless array of stories that all had the same last line: you won’t like it because it’s so strictly ritualized. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. I may not be able to believe everything that the church wants me to believe on any given day, but I can always do the ritual. When I do the ritual, I make the commitment to be present. When I make the commitment to be present physically, oftentimes my mindset changes so that I am fully present spiritually. The ritual forces me into opening up and reaching out.

More than once have I begun an Agnus Dei or a Kyrie Eleison and ended it with tears streaming down my cheeks. That’s my miracle. When I forget to reach out to my Jesus, he quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) reaches out to me.

Amen.

Has this ever happened to you?

You’re sitting in a lecture at college about republican (note the little “r”) ideals, and you bring up an article you read somewhere about national policy limiting the ability to experiment socially. That way, the nation could weed out bad policy and adopt the crème de le crème.

You use gay marriage as an example, because it’s really the only social experiment you know anything about… and as you are speaking, you look around the room and notice that people are looking knowingly at your haircut and winking to each other.

And all of the sudden, you’re not bringing up a socially relevant point. You are just a bitch with an agenda.

It’s happened to me several times lately, because with the conservative backlash of the last eight years, University of Houston is not as accepting as it once was. But the slide back towards Leviticus didn’t start at my school. It’s an epidemic across the country.

When President Bush was asked if he’d seen Brokeback Mountain, a smile came to his lips, but it was not one of pleasure. It was, “how am I going to wriggle out of this one?” because tough ranch hands are supposed to stay away from gay-themed movies. It might be catching.

My sister tells me that among her straight friends, things are even worse, because then people feel free to say the bigoted things that people say when they don’t think anyone of the group they’re targeting is in attendance.

And when I think about it, I know she is right. I am not an authority on heterosexuality, but when I look back on my experience as half of a heterosexual couple, I know that one of the things that bothered me the most was that when I held my boyfriend’s hand or kissed him in public, people felt comfortable saying those things in front of me because they didn’t know my history…

But if they had, I’m sure it wouldn’t have changed their behavior. I’ve learned from experience that if you try to tell bigots that they are being bigoted, they don’t apologize and try to learn from your experience.

They just get better at hiding their prejudice.

If it seems like I’m being bitter, I will apologize right now and invite you to come back to Clever Title on a day when I’m feeling particularly jubilant. Today is just one of those days where I’m realizing that I’m just so tired.

I’m tired of people accepting gays as long as they’re outlandishly fey and bitchy, like Sean Hayes playing Jack McFarland on Will & Grace. I’m tired of men saying it’s okay to be lesbian because that’s hot, but using “faggot” as an epithet. I’m tired of speaking in my classroom and realizing in the middle of a sentence that it might not be all right to talk about my life as it really is. I’m tired of the media’s idea of lesbian humor being limited to power tools, as if getting to act like men is the only reason to live in a household without them.

There are going to be millions of people who disagree with me on this point, but I think it is much harder to be a lesbian than it is to be a gay man. Many, many diatribes have been written on why it’s easier to be a lesbian because straight men think it’s hot and therefore lesbians experience less homophobia than their male counterparts. Why do I disagree? Because when you get right down to it, households with two men are still households with MEN. Since when has it been socially acceptable to be female in America and have any emotion but subservience? Men think lesbians are more acceptable because we are capable of arousing them, and thereby serving them. We aren’t bashed because we aren’t important enough to matter. Instead, we are continually, doggedly sexually harassed.

When I was married, my wife had a friend that I’ll call Christine. My wife and I flew to Boston for Christine’s graduation from college, and the night before we flew home, Christine’s father saw my wife kiss me in greeting and proceeded to come on to me for the rest of the evening… in front of his wife, who was sitting across from me at our table. I could feel her embarrassment and she could feel mine.

And that’s just one of the stories I’ll talk about… but they all contribute to my feeling of fatigue. I live for the day when my girlfriend/partner/wife can introduce me as such without worry… but that’s not going to happen until all women, gay and straight, have the power to stand on their own two feet (choosing between hiking boots or high heels, thanks) and continue to fight for strides in equality with men.

And so, in closing, a few words from Larry the Cable Guy:

Git’r done.

Things are going to be different around here. I will have a more relaxed publishing schedule for two reasons: 1) NOTHING about my life is Facebook and WordPress appropriate right now. It’s too personal, too close. Five or ten years from now, I might write about this time in my life, but the emotions are too high all around for any blog post to come out as what I meant to say instead of crazy person emotional vomit.

That’s the thing about holding in your feelings. They probably won’t catch up to you for the first 25 years or so, but then someone will drop a Mentos in your Diet Coke and God have mercy on your soul, then.

It tastes worse coming back up.

The light at the end of the tunnel (that’s definitely not an oncoming train) is that the sooner you really put pen to paper about the mistakes you’ve made in your life, grieving what has happened to you becomes easier. Honestly, this works with dead people as well. Acknowledging your role in their lives might give you more empathy, more grace, and more compassion when it comes to the realization that you are carrying around a lot of their bullshit. It’s not intentional. It is what it is, in the vernacular. William Shakespeare had one of the greatest ideas in the history of mankind (or herstory, depending which English class you took in college…). The play’s the thing!

THE PLAY’S THE THING!

The play is the number 42, the meaning of life, and Jack Palance’s finger in the air all rolled into one. If you can figure out your character arc, you can figure out everyone else’s. Don’t treat people like you’re both on stage; however much you feel it, giving that feeling to someone else is ill-advised. Here’s the big bang moment of reality that will make you wake up in the middle of the night: the person on the stage and the person in the dressing room aren’t the same.

We’re all players. Billy Joel’s The Stranger is one of my favorite songs in the world because it speaks to that idea so strongly. Opera singers, ballet dancers, actors (in every medium), and bloggers (don’t get me started) have more practice at the idea of separate personalities, but it’s kind of like an emotional utility. You wouldn’t live in an apartment without a refrigerator.

If you are grieving a person that has died, take heart. All the pressure is completely off that your thoughts about them are going to matter to them. When you accept this, you can allow yourself to get vulnerable enough to emotionally “go into labor.” Some people equate that image with the concept of being “born again,” and for some, it’s a sign of the resurrection. Perhaps a Phoenix has decided to come live at your house and eat all your food until the day it went POOF!

We all have our own words for this idea, but the actualization of it happens at different rates. Some of what I’m learning now is age-appropriate. Some of it is remedial math and I’m embarrassed to be stuck on the short bus because I’m ADD.

After baring my soul in every way imaginable on my web site, I have discovered that death and loss are tools to teach you who you really are. I had that realization when it occurred to me that most people don’t die young, so the reminder to think about mortality doesn’t occur very often. When it does, you have a chance to sit on the floor and look at the pictures, even the awful ones, long enough to love them.

Read Death and Loss.

Dear William,

Hi. My name is Leslie. I have auditioned for and won the role of your aunt.

Right now, you are still in your mother’s womb, waiting to arrive. You hear Mommy and Daddy and Nana and Papa all around you, in stereo. Trerio, even. You have no idea what a bale of hay has landed in your lap that of all the families in all the world, you ended up in ours. We cannot promise that you will like every minute, but we can promise that we will start a fund for your therapy. And by “we,” I mean Aunt Dana and me. We’ve grown up in this family. We know what it’s like. Plus, we’re not naive enough to think that the need for your therapy won’t come from us, anyway. Aunt Dana and I were rolling on the ground yesterday thinking about how your Mommy was never going to let us babysit and it wasn’t going to have a thing to do with us being gay.

What you’ll find is that it’s worth it. The heartache, the love, the laughter, the tears… it’s all worth it. I don’t exactly mean that our family is what’s worth waiting for, although it certainly is. I mean that you are a new person. You don’t know anything yet. Your tabula rasa doesn’t even have an eraser mark. What I’m trying to say is that you are so new, you don’t know that being born into any family anywhere is going to have that same laughter to tears ratio.

Who am I kidding? In this family, you will have trouble cutting off your laughter so that you can actually think about something seriously. Although Mommy will help you with that. She’s the practical one in the family. But even though she’s the most practical, she’s also, in my opinion, the funniest. What you don’t know about your Mommy is that you have to be really quiet around her, because her jokes are made so softly that you have to be listening close to hear it. But if your ear is attuned to find her voice in the commotion, you will laugh harder than the rest of us, because you get your Mommy on a daily basis.

William, there are very few people in this world that I love more than your dad. I’m not sure he even knows it, but I do. Your dad is a source of quiet strength to our family. He lives and loves so deeply, all without ever drawing attention to the fact he’s doing it. I hope you and your dad have long days on the back porch, just sitting there. I do that with Papa and it’s my favorite place to go- into the quiet with him where we know there is nothing wrong, we’re just glad to be together and we don’t have to use words to say it.

By now, you’re probably wondering a little about me. Believe me, William, you will know more about me than you know about anyone else in our family when you’ve figured out the verb “to Google.” But there isn’t too much on the web site about how I’ve prayed for you, carried you in my heart these last few months, just loved you even though I had no idea what you looked like or if your personality was like mine or anything else that might divide us when we’re old enough to be mad at each other.

There’s nothing on the Internet about how I’ve waited for you, that I’ve known this day was coming since I was a teenager, that day when one of my sisters was going to give birth and how that meant that I would have stock in a baby, too.

William, we are not related by blood. Your mom doesn’t have the same dad as I do. But I want you to know that I will only think that way if I have to look at your medical chart. I know that you will probably know this, anyway, just by watching our family, but we don’t use words like “step” or “in-law.” As long as you are alive, and long after you’re dead, you will always be my nephew, even if you can’t prove it with DNA. I feel the same way about your Mommy and your Auntie Caitlin.They will always be my sisters, whether you can prove it or not. I want my love for you to be bigger than the words that divide us.

Who haven’t I introduced you to yet?

The Doctor… oh, my God. It’s like I’ve just finished the seating chart and forgotten POTUS (oh, my God. We are going to have so much to talk about when you can understand TV).

The Doctor is one of the most beautiful people inside and out that I have ever met, though you won’t call her that until you’re older. But you will. Everyone does.

Want to hear my favorite joke about The Doctor, which she told me herself?

I have always wanted, in some small measure, to be an astronaut. When I was 16, I said that to The Doctor, because I had just met her then and she just seemed like one of those people you should be able to trust with that sort of information.

I told her that I thought it would be cool if she was a doctor on a space shuttle. I teased her about being a “Space Doctor.”

William, she looked at me and said indignantly, “I ALREADY AM A SPACE DOCTOR, LESLIE. I’m a ROOMATOLOGIST.

Do not engage in wordplay with The Doctor until you are ready, because you do not want to show up unprepared. It’s not that she’ll wipe the floor with you. It’s that part of the fun of wordplay is getting The Doctor to laugh. When she laughs, your insides will light up. It’s so pure that you have to hear it again, so you keep getting funnier.

I know I did.

William, I just realized that I want to stop this letter here and pick it up again in the future. You are such a new little person that writing to you feels like the best birthday present I’ve ever gotten on someone else’s birthday.

We’ll dedicate an entire letter to Lindsay.

Yours always,

Auntie Leslie

P.S. I would be thrilled if you would call me “Auntie Leslie,” because I’m a writer (you’ll come to hate that, eventually). The name I use on the web site is “The AntiLeslie.” So you see, there you go. Another play on words.

You should tell The Doctor.

It’s fun to make her laugh.

Following the social upheaval of World War II, many people in the United States felt a fervent desire to “restore the prewar social order and hold off the forces of change”, according to historian Barry Adam.

Spurred by the national emphasis on anti-communism, Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted hearings searching for communists in the U.S. government, the U.S. Army, and other government-funded agencies and institutions, leading to a national paranoia. Anarchists, communists, and other people deemed un-American and subversive were considered security risks. Homosexuals were included in this list by the U.S. State Department in 1950, on the theory that they were prone to blackmail. Under Secretary of State James E. Webb noted in a report, “It is generally believed that those who engage in overt acts of perversion lack the emotional stability of normal persons.”
——————–
“Up until the night of the police raid there was never any trouble there,” she said. “The homosexuals minded their own business and never bothered a soul. There were never any fights or hollering, or anything like that. They just wanted to be left alone. I don’t know what they did inside, but that’s their business. I was never in there myself. It was just awful when the police came. It was like a swarm of hornets attacking a bunch of butterflies.” -Shirley Evans, neighbor to Stonewall Inn.
——————–
“The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested in, nor capable of, a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. His sex life, his love life consists of a series of chance encounters in clubs and bars he inhabits.” -Mike Wallace
—————–
Homosexuality is, in fact, a mental illness which has reached epidemiological proportions- Charles Socarides
—————-
“We really did it, but we were going to pay.” -bystander to Stonewall Riots

——————————

Sometimes, pride is hard. Gathering pride hurts. Gathering pride hurts because the pieces you’re trying to quilt are small and fraying. Sometimes, it seems like pride is gone. And that is when we come to you, O God. When our pride is broken, our spirits are weak, and our bodies are weighted with fatigue.

—————–

Pause for Prayer-

God, I ask that you take our minds and think with them, take our hearts and love with them, take my lips and speak with them. O God, I ask that I reach these people today, and if I can’t, move me out of the way and speak it in spite of me.”

—————–

If you’ve been keeping up with me on Facebook, you know that last night at about 9:00 I posted a status update:

“Why did I agree to preach Gay Pride Sunday? I don’t know anything about gay people!”

Now, we all know that’s not true, but how in the world do you condense “Gay Pride” into one sermon? We’re headed for the parade as soon as church is over and this is like a three hour endeavor all by itself! As I was telling Martina last night, preaching “Gay Pride Sunday” is kind of like being asked to do a sermon on The Bible. Are there any parameters here? Can I buy a vowel? It reminds me of the associate pastor who gets up in front of the congregation for his first sermon. It’s great! They laugh, they cry, they take up offering. Preacher is on top of the world because his first sermon is such a raging success. Monday morning, the associate preacher takes his Bible to the senior pastor and says, “that was great! Got any other books?”

Gay Pride is too big for one sermon.

I also joked with everyone that I was going to come out dressed as Boy George. I said Boy George specifically because my dad is straight as an arrow, and in the 80s, he told his MYF group (Kristan, what does it stand for?) that he had booked him.

So my dad goes on for weeks and weeks about how Boy George is going to come and visit the youth group at our church.

It is at this point, ladies and gentlemen, that I began to completely fall apart laughing while I was writing this.

So, the night arrives, right? The kids are waiting. They’re out of their minds excited when BOY GEORGE starts coming down the stairs into the fellowship hall.

My mother has done exquisite makeup. Flawless. My father’s face is completely powdered white. He has black liquid eyeliner perfectly drawn and dried so there are no lumps. His mascara is perfect.

My sister used to have this puffy doll face with long, long braids made out of yarn so she’d have a place to put all her barrettes, right? So, picture this.

My dad has taken the puffy doll face and laid it flat upon his head so that the yarn braids with all the multicolored plastic kiddie barrettes are falling to his shoulders. He puts on a Boy George style hat and wears one of our family quilts whose majority color is pink draped over his shoulder.

The kids are laughing so hard they can barely breathe because this is the associate pastor of the church in drag and they’ve rarely seen him in anything but a suit and tie, or in his robes during worship.

So if you’ve ever seen the movie …But I’m a Cheerleader, congregation, That. Is. My. Root.

I love that joke. I could only make it in front of a GLBT audience and have them start rolling on the floor. Thank you, thank you for feeding my ego. As a cook, I work with people younger than some pairs of my pants. It’s important to me that, on days like this, you all are here to remind me that I’m only 10 or 15 years older than your average line cook, and for me, pride is being able to tell these jokes without you reacting as if I am Methuselah. Because I’m not. Dana is.

No, seriously. All kidding aside, my dad is one of the first people to ever teach me about pride, even though he didn’t know I was gay at the time (or did he?). Pride, he taught me, is the systematic willingness to be yourself.

I think that’s worth a second look.

Pride is the systematic willingness to be yourself.

• Pride is knowing that you have to be yourself whether the law wants you to be or not.
• Pride is knowing that your mind and your heart bring something to the world that no one else ever can or ever will.
• Pride is knowing that the Gospels of Christ are meant for you in the same way that they are meant for everyone else.
• Pride is knowing that the Gospels of Christ are still meant for you even when someone else tells you they’re not.

It is interesting that today’s Epistle to the Galatians we talk about the law in just this respect. At issue in the new church is whether Gentile Christians must keep certain Jewish practices to remain Christian. It is a bit like what the Jews and Muslims of Spain experienced during the 15th century, as Muslim Spain gave way to Catholic Spain. Those who remained often “converted” to save their lives, but didn’t give up their original faith.

Paul says this isn’t right. He is a Jew, but righteousness doesn’t come by way of keeping the Law – for Jews or Gentiles. Instead, it comes by way of the faithfulness of Jesus, who lives with us and works through us.

Before Christ freed us with his own covenant, there was no pride in spirituality. Spirituality was by the book. Spirituality was “27 8×10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence.”

(If you get that reference, you’re allowed to react like I’m Methuselah, because obviously we are professional colleagues.)

It is here that we can do a little bit of rabbinical exegesis, which is a cool phrase for “we’re going to study this in-depth for a second.”

There’s this new Internet video going around that I will absolutely not show you in church because it’s filthy called “Samesies.” The premise for the skit is that it’s an early tribe of people (most probably Biblical, but not necessarily) who have no idea what sex is or really, what it does. What they have noticed, however, is that when they do “samesies,” no people come out.

It is an hilarious demonstration of Talmudic law. The leader of the tribe decides that they will do “opposites” so that they can grow the tribe, which is what binds Gay Pride with our Scripture for this morning… as absolutely freaking unlikely as that sounds.

Talmudic law prohibits every kind of sex that does not try to further the life of the tribe. Any sex that does not lead to procreation is forbidden. However, with Seven BILLION people on the planet, our need to “further the tribe” is not as dire as it once was. It is a law that is no longer useful to us as a society, but I do not base my response on science alone.

Paul tells the Galatians that this upholding of these type laws isn’t right. He is a Jew, but righteousness doesn’t come by way of keeping the Law – for Jews or Gentiles.

Instead, it comes by way of the faithfulness of Jesus.

The faithfulness of Jesus?

What does that mean?

How are those two things different, the laws and the faith of Jesus?

When you were a baby queer (and I apologize if that word offends you- I am only trying to be absolutely inclusive), were there rules?

Come on. Stay with me. You know what I mean- you have worn that place on your skin there are rules to being gay. What are they?

You can’t be fat if you’re male

Magazines tell our men that they are not skinny enough, that the bodies they have are less than perfect even when the scale doesn’t lie and neither does the mirror. Everything is in the right place and nearly flawless but you believe the article that says you only need three or four hundred calories a day to function.

You can’t be too femme if you’re female

Well, technically, you can be as femme as you want if you’re in a relationship. I have never seen a woman successfully pull off the blonde cheerleader look with any success while single, though, because no one will actually think you’re a lesbian in that kind of outfit.

You can’t be poor

Gay culture tells us that spending money on toys, clothes, and cars is your ticket to being fabulous. Your house has to be a beautiful memory picture. You max out your credit trying to understand the rules of being up and coming, fashion forward, and whatever else the industry tells you to make raging debt look attractive.

You can’t be sober

We all know it and we cannot avoid this truth. Our culture started in bars. Going to the bars was a rule of being gay.

Lucky for us, this last one is changing as gay becomes mainstream and the need for utmost secrecy has dissipated. In very few places do we literally have to look over our shoulders for gay bashers. Never let us forget, though, that when we had no place to meet, no place to be ourselves in public, bar owners took us in and gave us shelter. Very few of them were even gay. Some of them were even run by the mafia. I don’t say this to scare you, just to impress upon you how awful a situation it must have been to be gay in the ’50s and ’60s if running to the mafia was the safest choice.

Even advancing in time, there are just so many rules. As for myself, I carried a picture of the woman I loved in my math book, and I had a very strict schedule as to how I would look at it. I think I only allowed myself 2 peeks a day, and actually felt very angry with myself if I cheated. My rules were important to me because I thought they were helping me to hide the fact that I am gay. I have always been gay and it takes hindsight to see just how ridiculous it sounds. But I had rules, and I followed them.

We give our rules away when we realize we are carrying them around for the sake of “that’s how it’s always been done” and not because they are helping us to achieve any particular goal. It’s deciding when they aren’t useful anymore and getting rid of them that’s the hard part.

As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5, the old is passed away, the new has come. It is a call for reconciliation so that Jews and Gentiles might live together as one body, both reconciled through Christ.

Ultimately, this is a call to participate in Christ’s own faithfulness, by allowing him to live in and through us. It is also an invitation to throw out the rules, and live in the love- apart from sexuality or any other constraint that takes the focus off our humanness.

As Carolynne Hitter Brown puts it:

All work toward social justice, then, is based on the principle that Christ lives in us. As we strive for reform, we do so in a manner that loves and respects others, believing all people are called to covenant with God through God’s grace.

So throw out the rules.

We’ve all heard of those churches where there’s no dancing, there’s no music, there’s no laughter… no pride. We’ve all heard of those churches where hiding your light under a bushel was the safest option at the time… even if the church itself is completely safe and it’s your own mind stirring up trouble.

When I was 12 years old, I saw someone for the first time… at my church. If you’ve ever had a romantic feeling ever in your life, you know what I mean. She was the one for whom time stood still, the only one in color in a room full of gray. She was so stunningly gorgeous that, at first, I forgot to notice that she was female. In fact, I forgot to notice she was female until I realized that I wanted my lips to touch hers… and that girls didn’t do that with other girls.

It was a trap. I knew that my lips were supposed to kiss girl lips. I also knew that since I was female, this might be considered, well, a problem. For starters, this girl was on my radar. There wasn’t a way that we wouldn’t run into each other. I had to find a way to ration out feelings, because to leak out too much was to “show.”

I didn’t want to love my girl because I thought I would “show.”

No pride that day.

When I was fourteen years old, I told a girl in my class that I liked her. She took me into a practice room in the instrumental music department and yelled at me until her voice was hoarse. Then, her friend came up to me and said that the girl I liked was now throwing up in the bathroom because I’d told her I liked her and she was straight.

No pride that day.

When I was fourteen years old, the girl I liked in the instrumental music department told everyone in my entire grade that I was gay. When the bell rang at lunch, several people with Bibles marched over to my table at lunch and started a dramatic reading of all the Scripture that would damn me to hell.

No pride that day.

When I was 18 years old, my girlfriend and I kissed in the dark, arms around each other, windows steaming… until she had to go and meet the boy her parents thought she was dating.

No pride that day.

We all have these moments. We all have these flaws and insecurities that pop up all day, every day, and we listen to them. We listen to the moments in which our minds tell us that it’s ok not to be proud of ourselves. It’s ok to treat ourselves like crap, because hey! Everybody else is doing it.

If we wait long enough, the domino reaction is that everyone’s brokenness collides. Pain meets pain and pride meets pride so that pieces of both are inextricably interrelated, scattered on the floor in no particular order…

just as are we,
gentle souls, flung to the corners of the earth, complete pictures of pride and pain walking upright on solid ground.

You are the complete picture of pride and pain, flung to the four corners of the earth. You are the reconciliation of the laws of the old testament and the loving Christ of the new. You are what God holds in God’s own hand and calls you perfect by name. Rejection of the law and acceptance of Christ to heal all the ills of the world.

And may we all say it together:

We’ve all got pride today.

Amen.

Unsafe, unsafe

I hear you, feel you

have worn that  scar

on my skin

Unsafe, unsafe

Because you gave it to me.

I had no reason not to trust you.

Not to trust the love I felt would

be returned.

Unsafe, unsafe

No reason to believe that wanting

to be in your life (wholly)

and not some undercover operation

was a problem

unsolvable

distant and close

a heartbeat

an echo

Unsafe, unsafe

I thought the arms

that carried me

wouldn’t let go.

Unsafe, unsafe

You push

I pull

We argue the same point

over and over and over and over and over and over

while Sisyphus laughs in

Schadenfreude.

Unsafe, unsafe

I lay myself bare in

supplication

Not because you have power

Because you have

fear

anxiety

insecurity

have always had

Unsafe, unsafe

I raise my voice

to be louder

than

fear

anxiety

insecurity

my heart

murmuring

to yours

Dear Leslie,

I know you said to email you requests for advice column Thursday but this was easier from my phone.

Editor’s note: Just get hold of me. I don’t care how. I don’t care if I have to check 20 e-mail accounts to try and find inspiration to write, but you have to meet me halfway and use something I check A LOT so you don’t carry resentment towards me that I haven’t answered your question when in reality, I haven’t read it.

You can publish my question if you want but I would prefer you not use my name. I have been trying to figure out how to accept and deal with an issue that continues to bother me and one I cannot get over…I am the single friend in a group. One other friend Sherri is seeing someone long distance but I don’t know if it’s exclusive as she is very private. Other friends all have spouses (with whom I’m also close) and we all hang out together. One couple has kids. All the females work together and are pretty close. We’ve managed very well to keep our work issues from affecting our friendships. I live with my parents who are in their 60s and 70s and we have a good relationship but I don’t want to hang out with them all the time. My friends don’t include me in things they do with their spouses etc. Like if it’s a holiday weekend and they do a cookout they don’t invite me. They go to a local street party and don’t invite me. They either don’t think to include me or just don’t. I don’t know which is worse….they didn’t think about me or didn’t want me around. If I say anything I get the feeling like they think I’m being petty and they say they didn’t even think about me. I tried being the one to initiate “anybody want to do anything this weekend?” Or “do you want to go to the street party?” In the past either I got no response or last minute excuse or even one time got into an argument and was told not everyone has money to go out all the time like me. It seemed if I asked no one wanted to go or could. But if someone else in the group asked then everyone wanted to. So I stopped asking and just wait for someone else to initiate. Which leaves me disapointed and feeling left out a lot. How do I get past this? Since I know I can’t change them …I can only change me. I’m pretty self confident and ok being alone but I love just spending time with my friends even if it’s at someone’s house byob style. Anyway…any advice you can give would be great!

 Sincerely,

You know my name, but they don’t.

——————————————-

Sweet reader,

Let me free you from your own head, even if it’s just for one full second. No one thinks about you at all. I do not mean this in the absolutely horrible way it sounds, only that it is a universal Truth. Especially in a Facebook-paced world, no one is going to hear you say anything unless you scream it at the top of your lungs, and I do mean this literally. You’re going to have to make phone calls, you’re going to have to move under your own power, and in the beginning, you’re going to HATE EVERY STEP OF IT.

That’s the first part. The complete first step is to acknowledge that you won’t get better by trying to change their behavior. Getting out of the house under your own power will give you the strength to make other friends, which is easier because they don’t know you enough to hate you yet. Believe it or not, I mean that in the most loving way possible. Old relationships thrive on being close enough to poke fun at each other without poking THE BEAR. That’s what I call my oldest friend’s inner personality. In fact, it’s a joke in my house… don’t poke the bear.

I will never stop poking the bear. She’s my oldest friend, like I said. However, there are a few rules you should learn before you go around poking bears. The first is that she’s going to be grumpy when she wakes up. The second thing is that once you’ve gotten her attention, you don’t need all of it. But the hard part is getting the bear’s attention, right?

Do your friends know how much you need them? Do you know how much you annoy them? I mean that in the nicest possible way because that is the balance that we all face when trying to make a friendship last over many years. How can I make enough noise to be heard without sounding like a rock concert? What is going on with me if I have to get THAT loud before people drop everything and come running? Because it is true, if your behavior is totally alienating, people will run not to spend time in your black cloud.

I don’t know your black cloud, but I know mine and It. Is. Fluffy. When I go off, I explode, and people absorb my emotions and it truly feels like Fallout. But at the same time, I also have an extremely long fuse… extremely… and I feel that I can start talking in my still, small voice and I never have to raise it as long as my friends make the pact with me to answer when I call. Because I’m so independent, I will rarely call them unless my nightgown is on fire. Want to know how rare that is? I don’t have a nightgown.

Of course your parents are not your friends or your therapists, and realistically, they don’t want to know that much about you. It is unfortunate that my life’s work is writing, because my parents are always going to know more about me than I know about them unless they want to share it. I feel like we are even. They listen to me vomit on the Internet, I listen to them during discussions about money. The emotions we share during those conversations are exactly the same, so I feel like if they’re willing to put up with my crap, I’m willing to put up with my own discomfort when it comes to talking about how to direct cash flow.

And that’s the kind of deal you will need to make with every friend you make, ever. If you want to be a good friend, you need to be able to say two things in your head all the time and have those two things not overlap, as if they occupy completely separate parts of your brain… because they do. I will say it in a serious way, and then I will joke with you to relieve the emotional javelin I’ve just thrown down.

Real Emotions

1. I love you, and you are one of the companions I choose for this life thing.
2. So help me God, there are days when I just want to murder you in your sleep.

Jokes You Make to Deal with Real Emotions

1. You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met, inside and out.
2. If you put an icepick through the front of my skull and twisted it around a little bit, I could still parallel park better than you.

Do you see what I mean?

Accept people for all of who they are- angels and morons. Accept that you’re an angel.

And a moron.

And that just has to be okay, because you’re a human, and so are all your friends. I really hope this helps you, and I encourage you to get help outside this letter. If you find that your behavior is stopping you from getting the results you want in your life, it’s probably time to talk to someone who doesn’t have a horse in the race. If you are broke, run to your pastor or to a 12 Step. I never thought I would say this, but one meeting was like group therapy and I loved it so much that I want to go back next week. I don’t feel that I need intensive therapy to deal with my old issues. I feel like I need to deal with my old issues so that I can have new issues. Life is progress.

People ask me, “why do you call yourself names so much?” I say, “my self-confidence didn’t go up until I realized that humans are morons and I am not, in fact, the exception to that rule. It gave me a way to recognize the humor in all of my quirks, because all of my stories, no matter how legal, are funny as crap because of the way I frame them. They’re framed in my head like that, too. I don’t let bad memories eat me alive anymore, and that’s what is SO freeing. The bonus part of going to Al-anon now is that the tapes I have are *so* old that I am able to listen to my own voice without flooding out emotionally. Them being old has created a layer of clinical scrutiny, as if I am the next greatest psychotherapist in the entire world because I’m so clever on the inside, dumb on the outside (there has to be a name as derogatory a term as “oreo” for that. Who’s on it? Double Stuff, baby.).

Speaking of being clever, when I watch Doctor Who, I begin to appreciate the value of “clever.” The Doctor uses it for both defense and distraction. He uses humor as deflection when you shoot an arrow at a millennium of pain.

My name is Leslie Lanagan, and whether you like it or not, I am the 12th Doctor. Just not in Wales.

I realized last week why it’s you that gets the longest letters. You were my blog before I could type. When my keyboard became an extension of my mind, e-mail sent you my first entries. My first Fanagan. The only one who got pinged for years and years and I’ll be even more pleased if you don’t know what that means and laugh to yourself that it must be something dirty. Please know that I know you are my Clio, and if I make it as a writer, really, really make it, it will all be because of those letters we wrote to each other. You have no idea how healing this writing experience has been for me because having a foundation in writing to you every. single. day. is what allowed me to go from good to great at a high rate of speed… all of those e-mails that you called “emotional bombs” were actually blog entries meant for an audience of one. I realize now that you might not have understood this; I used an equal amount of heightened language because that’s how you got my attention. Things began to get better for me when I realized that I could never be bigger or louder. I could only talk about my still, small voice and hope that in some way, one day, it would call out to yours.

Writing has allowed me to erase my shame. I have none. Literally. Because what experience is there in the world so embarrassing as the one where you take a look at the patterns you’ve built up over time that are now weaving into an exquisite noose? No one can embarrass me more than I’ve embarrassed myself. No one can shame me into better future behavior than I can. No one can weave a tighter noose than I can and then get me to use it as easily.

Writing self-reflection pieces, for me, is like volunteering to live in a house with floor to ceiling mirrors. My blog is the running commentary of trying to accept myself as I am. As I REALLY am, with tiny emotional warts and boils that I hate just as much as you hate your <insert flaw here>. In the process, it is often entertaining, but the comedy is rarely the thing. I use the comedy to get you to stay for the drama. It’s a reward.

Today is the day where I got to look in the mirror and see the real picture. What I looked like with some validation that my situation had changed. With some validation that you might have influenced my life beyond what you thought you did. It allowed me to lose a lot of the anger, bitterness, and resentment that I have toward you that I just loved and loved and loved you even though everything was so lopsided. I had the classic kid reaction to an adult they loved drinking, smoking dope, and living with an abusive spouse. I curled up in your lap and loved you and snuggled up into you even though you were just a wire monkey roller coaster, and, after a while, an idea in my head.

But because I knew how I felt every step of the way, it didn’t send up the red flags that it should’ve. I didn’t notice or care that my behavior was alienating, because I felt I’d lost all dignity long ago.

Today, I gained it.

————————————

Read Growing Up, Part 1