This Christmas message from British knitter and Olympic diver, Tom Daley, brought tears to my eyes. I hope you'll take the time to listen and to read the article that follows it.
My Gay Retort to All the Grimness
Contributing Opinion Writer
The world is on fire. That’s no exaggeration, as The Times Opinion section’s recent canvass of the effects of climate change around the globe demonstrated. We are speeding — or should I say sizzling? — toward disaster. That prospect has instilled a kind of existential dread in the globe’s younger denizens, and understandably so.
There’s a fierce and terrifying attack on democracy underway in the United States, in which ideological differences grow ever sharper, tribal rivalries get ever uglier and a pandemic that should have brought us together drives us farther and farther apart. Our political leaders seem either lost or at a loss. We lurch from one crisis to the next.
There is, in other words, a glut of grim. So why don’t I feel entirely glum? Why don’t the feelings within me precisely match the chatter around me, which is that everything is getting worse?
One reason is the course I taught during the just-concluded fall semester, my first at Duke University, and another is the thematically related book that I finally had time to start reading after the course’s end. Both remind me of darker days — and of how far, at least in some respects, we’ve progressed toward the light.
The course was called The Media and L.G.B.T.Q.+ Americans. It mingled an analysis of journalism with gay history, so the students and I looked at the Lavender Scare, which was contemporaneous with the Red Scare and led to the firing or forced resignation of thousands of gay and lesbian people from government jobs in the late 1940s and the 1950s. We looked at the prelude to the Stonewall rioting in 1969, which, no matter its immediate trigger, reflected profound anger at prolonged oppression and marked a turning point. We looked at the AIDS epidemic, the first chapter of which cast gay men as degenerates to be gasped at, lepers to be feared.
To revisit all of that was to be schooled anew in the advances since. And that education is being amplified by the book I referred to: “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington,” by James Kirchick, an advance copy of which I’ve been slowly and raptly making my way through. (It’s scheduled to be published in May.) “Secret City” is a remarkable, hugely impressive accomplishment — exhaustively researched, skillfully told, erudite, heartfelt — that speaks not only to the impact of double lives on our nation’s life but also to the individual toll of veiling your soul. It makes me sad. But more than that, it makes me grateful, for all that has changed since those days of lies and whispers.
Part of the dedication written by Kirchick, who is gay, says it all. He thanks “all those who unburdened themselves of their secret, so that I did not have to live with mine.” Amen.
When I graduated from high school in 1982 and then college in 1986, I wouldn’t have guessed that I’d be living now in a country where gay and lesbian couples can be legally married coast to coast. I didn’t foresee this many gay dads, this many lesbian moms. I didn’t expect a career in which I would never minimize my sexual orientation and never feel penalized for my forthrightness.
There are still instances and pockets of cruel discrimination, even violence, especially toward transgender Americans. There’s no guarantee that the arc of the past 75 years will continue to bend toward justice. And it’s a jagged arc. The past five years made that clear.
But most Americans are conscious of inequities in a way that we weren’t before, and that’s true when it comes not only to gay Americans but also to other marginalized groups. We’re attuned to details that once escaped us, and while we disagree bitterly about how to address them, we have the discussion — and having the discussion matters. It doesn’t get us where we need to go; it doesn’t excuse how short of that mark we are.
But it gets us closer. And to examine certain aspects of our past is to feel significantly more hopeful about certain aspects of our future.
