posted: February 3, 2010

When Pat Robertson said the earthquake in Haiti was god's will, the intelligentsia snickered, but the beliefs of Robertson and others around the world have huge audiences. People, even in the modern, industrialized West, use religion to decipher their world and create a universe of angels and devils and heaven and hell while vocal groups throughout the world extol the virtues of a holy war that is all too real in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Why?

Barry Schiffman (my husband, who I profiled here) has written a think piece about it on his online soapbox, The Last Round. Here's a link to his article.
 

posted: February 1, 2010

Fifty years ago today, four African American college students changed the world by sitting down at an all-white Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. They became known as the Greensboro Four, and their brave and pivotal act sparked student sit-ins all across the South.

I did this piece to accompany the Op Ed piece commemorating the anniversary in today’s NY Times.

Here’s a link to the article.

And here’s a  link to February One, an in-depth feature about the Greensboro Four on the PBS site.

posted: January 26, 2010

It was on a raw and rainy Sunday that I went out to meet with Shelley and Terri and their son Dominic, where I was introduced to their sunny world and found out how they got there.

This is the fourth installment in my series, Love and Marriage, interviewing and painting long standing same-sex couples. To see the rest of the series so far, visit the Gallery I have here.

Shelley: We met at a business thing, we were on a panel together at a conference.

Terri: At first I thought she was straight. She was wearing a dress and pearls.

Shelley: We all went out for drinks after the evening program, and I said to this group of people who I didn’t know very well, but who I was pretty comfortable with -- in education you could pretty much count on people at least being open to your being gay -- I said, “I guess I can put this back on my jacket now” -- and I put on a pin that I used to wear on my jacket that said: Nobody knows I’m a lesbian. I wore it because it made people smile. But I took it off when I was working.

Terri and I were sitting across from each other, and the other six people talked amongst themselves and Terri and I talked to each other and that’s kind of how it got started.

Terri: About a month later, Clinton was elected and it was the first time I had ever voted for a presidential candidate who won. I was so excited and so emboldened that I called her.

Shelley: And I thought she had a girlfriend; I think we both thought the other one had a girlfriend because you know how sometimes people seem desperate when they don’t have a partner? Neither one of us seemed that way. So she called me up to say: there’s this thing happening on Princeton’s campus and would you like to come?

I said, “Do you have a couch I can crash on?"  because I didn’t know how late this thing was going to be. I know this sounds like a plan now, but I still didn’t know –

Terri: You still thought I had a girlfriend?

Shelley: I don’t know. I remember being surprised that there was only one toothbrush when I got to the apartment, so I really didn’t know. I was maybe starting to hope at that point, but I hadn’t gotten up the courage to say, “So what’s your deal anyway?” But the visit was great, and I came back just super excited.

Terri: And she slept on my couch.

Shelley: I did sleep on the couch, it’s true. So then I told all my friends about how great she was and she told all her friends about how great I was. You know how when you’re really falling in love, all your conversations just sort of come back to that person? And I was having a tough time impressing upon people how wonderful she was and what I remember is that when I would sort of rattle off all her fabulous attributes: she’s funny, she’s smart, she’s kind, she has this beautiful curly red hair, she has more books of poetry than I do -- that’s the thing that people were amazed at -- that she had more books of poetry than I do.

Terri: But we didn’t live together for quite a while, it was four years, driving back and forth between here and Philly, where Shelley lived.

Shelley: The decision for me to move up here was the difference between the laws in Jersey and Pennsylvania.

In Pennsylvania, at the time that we were starting to think seriously about building a life together, if you had a couple in which one of the parents was the biological parent of the child, it was not possible for the second parent to adopt. It’s important to adopt because that way both people have a strong, legal connection and there is a huge history of gay and lesbian couples losing their children because someone decides that they are unfit to parent, like grandparents and other relatives swooping in.

Terri: I don’t think it was decided we were going to have a child quite yet. It was more just feeling like –

Shelley: – we don’t want to be someplace that’s that hostile –

Terri: We didn’t want to settle down in a place where the laws weren’t supportive and I actually knew somebody who had already been through the adoption process here in Princeton before we met.

Shelley: Probably the biggest difference between the child of a gay or lesbian couple and a straight couple is that every child of gay or lesbian parents is a wanted child, every single one, by definition.

Terri: Well, it certainly isn’t going to happen by accident!

Dominic was born in 2001, and we met in ’92. So we had a lot of time to go on great long vacations and we had a big chunk of time where we could just get to know each other and enjoy our life together, but I think you reach a certain age and you realize, okay, we’ve got to make a decision here. And I was probably less sure about being a parent than Shelley was at the beginning.

Shelley: People said, “Don’t you worry about the kind of situation you’ll be putting a child in, having them be the child of lesbian parents?” And I always felt like, well, we’re going to be awesome parents, so actually, No!

Terri: After we had Dominic and we decided we were going to buy a house, we made a very conscious decision to buy in Princeton, because we were far more confident about the response we would get here than some other towns; not that New Jersey is all that conservative, but we knew that we were a lot less likely to run into trouble here. So in a way, the anticipation and fear of difficulties shaped the decisions that we made, because we’ve experienced having people drive by and scream at us in other places and we were on a camping trip in British Columbia and our tent got stoned with us in it.

Shelley: We were in a camp ground and there were a bunch of Boy Scouts, in the middle of the night they started throwing stones at our tent; they actually tore the tent with the stones they threw. They were like 14 years old.

Terri: So I think we had the good fortune to be able to make a choice to live in a town like this; not everybody can afford to live in Princeton, but I had the university's mortgage program. So we chose a much smaller house than we might have, but we don’t regret it. I mean, there are other reasons we wanted to be in town, but that really was the deciding factor.

Shelley: People who are not gay or lesbian have a difficult time imagining that sense of constraint, and they feel that it’s unwarranted, or they want very much for it to be unwarranted on your part. Because  they don’t feel it. It’s similar to the way white people respond to an African American’s story of struggle or prejudice or discrimination. A lot of times the instinctive response is, “Oh, I’m sure they didn’t mean it that way,” or “Gosh, I hope you know that that’s not really how our town really is.” People want so much for it not to be true that they immediately start to paper over it and deny its reality.

Terri: But we haven’t had any trouble – we haven’t had any problems with other kids' parents.

Shelley: There may be instances in which people are less likely to reach out to us because they’re not comfortable; there have been a few of those cases. But people in our birth class were bragging about the fact that there were lesbians in the class, it was so hip and groovy for them.

Terri: When I was in my teens and 20s, people didn’t even say the word “gay”. Shelley sometimes says, “You knew someone was gay if they were willing to say the word out loud.” Nobody wanted to. There were straight people who were really uncomfortable if you even said it in front of them.

Shelley: Things were much more secretive, and people were worried about how it would impact their jobs and some people are still living that way and there are certainly states that we’d never move to, because we would have to live that way again, but it’s gone all the way from that to now most people don’t even consciously think about it.

Terri: I think it’s very generational. I think the popular culture has opened up more space now. There are gay and lesbian characters on more than one television show.


Shelley: Back when LA Law was on the air, there was a kiss between CJ and Abbey and I guarantee you that there are many, many thousands of lesbians who, like me, have in their basement a VCR tape with that kiss on it. Because we were so hungry for any inkling, any little two minutes of reflection that our lived experience was a shared experience.

That hunger is hard to overstate. The thing that people sometimes don’t realize is that there are still huge numbers of people who are still feeling that hunger. That our ability to find community and make connections is in some ways, and to some people, still a luxury and there are still tons of people in little towns thinking, Am I the only one?

posted: January 19, 2010

I recently went up to the Upper West Side to talk with Steve and Bill, who were married in California in September, 2008, sneaking in just under the wire before Proposition 8 was passed and same sex marriage was made illegal there.

This is the third profile in my series, Love and Marriage, interviewing and painting long standing same-sex couples. To see the rest of the series so far, visit the Gallery I have here.

Bill: We met on March 2, 1996. I was living in St. Louis at the time, and was taking a vacation up here, and wanted to meet somebody to just hang out with, and so a couple of months before the trip, I went online and put an ad on a New York gay bulletin board and we started corresponding and we finally talked on the phone.

It was a snowy afternoon on the day we met and we went to what used to be a Burmese restaurant on Amsterdam, had a really, really nice time, and then a couple of months later Steve invited me up for the Fourth of July weekend and we had another great time; I spent maybe four days here and the weather was great. I tried a bunch of new cuisines that I had never had before.

Steve: Perogies and popovers.

Bill: He just made me laugh so much. He seemed emotionally stable and still does. We had a lot in common. We both like theater a lot, and adventure and we love to travel.

Steve: I was in the process of ending a long-term relationship when I met Bill. We had been together almost 10 years. And I knew it was over and we were definitely getting ready to break and then I met Bill and it was like night and day; we just we instantly clicked. With Bill, everything seemed very uncomplicated and natural and I managed to get him to New York in about a year. He lived in St. Louis his whole life, so I think he was ready, it didn’t take much to get him here.

Bill: It’s much easier to be an openly gay person in New York than probably almost anywhere. In most parts of Manhattan, Steve and I can walk in most neighborhoods holding hands and nobody even cares or stares or anything.

Steve: There are occasional comments. Like walking on the Upper West Side there was a clearly angry person, I forget what he said, do you remember? It was near Apple Bank, he just made some comment like - faggots or something, it was just – it was 7 or 8 years ago, I guess. He was really just an angry guy and seeing us holding hands pushed him over the edge.  But that’s very rare.

Things have changed over the years. We’re much more in the public face now; years ago the gay center was the West Village. I lived in Chelsea when it was mostly Spanish, and that became gay and then the East Village became gay and now we’re sort of all over the place. I hear we’re taking over Washington Heights now!

And we see more young people who are openly gay, whereas before it was harder to tell. In the past, the older gay guys, you could usually tell with them, they fit in more of a stereotype, but younger gays weren’t as comfortable appearing gay.

---

Steve: We decided to get married during the brief period that marriages were being performed in California. We were watching CNN and they said that there was a pretty good chance the marriages wouldn’t be invalidated, no matter what happened with Proposition 8 [the proposed amendment to make same-sex marriage illegal in California]. So Bill and I were sitting here and it was a pretty casual decision: Should we get married? Yeah, why don’t we? We love San Francisco, we have good friends out there, and we’d been wanting to go out for a visit, so let’s get married while we’re there. There was no big political decision that I felt we were making.

Bill: I felt the political part of it, definitely. I felt the more gay people that got married in a small window, the bigger the statement we were making. And the better chance that people would not have overturned the decision, which of course, they did anyway.

Steve: But the vote was close, almost 48 percent voted in favor of gay marriage. There had never been polling data like that, with that much support for gay marriage, even in a state like California.

Bill: When these anti-gay marriage referendums started going on the ballots back in 2004, my home state of Missouri was the first one to try it, and 71 percent voted against gay marriage. But I think even in a state like Missouri, nowadays that percentage would be smaller.

Steve: Something like two-thirds of people from ages 18 to 28 support gay marriage. That tells you where it’s at. It’s only a matter of time before we win the war. And even the most recent Gallup Poll showed that 41 percent support gay marriage, 48 opposed, but that’s an improvement of about 10 percent over five years.

But I think there are a lot of people who are against gay marriage who need to get used to the idea before they’ll change their mind.

Bill: It would help to change people’s minds about gay marriage if we could get marriage out of the church, but frankly, I’m not optimistic that’s going to happen; most people see marriage and church as inextricably linked. And most churches are adamantly opposed to gay marriage.

My mother’s a traditional Catholic, and she’s not for gay marriage, but...

Steve: She’s very Catholic. She goes to Mass every day.

Bill: When Steve and I had decided to go to San Francisco to get married, I was really struggling with what I was going to say to my mother, and anyway, I was in St. Louis and I said to her, Well, did you hear that California has legalized gay marriage? And she said, Yes I did hear that. And I said, You know, if Steve and I decided to get married out there, would you want to know about that? And her response was, Oh I don’t know, Bill, I don’t believe in it. And I just dropped it at that.

Steve: She has always been really lovely to me. I’m not sure how much she acknowledges to herself what our relationship really is, though: she called just last week and I picked up the phone and she said, Oh hi, Steve, is your roommate there? I think she was sort of joking around. I hope she knows we’re not roommates!

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