A Script for Clearing the Air

Mom and Dad, I'm calling today because Sonia came out to her parents about two and a half months ago. They had a hard time with it at first (her mother threatening suicide, her father insisting she can still get back on "the right path" and not ruin her life).

But just over two months later, I've had two dinners with them and her mother is dropping hints about babies and asking to meet you while we make kim bop.

What a natural parental instinct -- to want to meet the person that your child has chosen, then to want to meet their family.

It made me remember a tipsy phone call we had about a year after Sonia and I started dating. I was the only tipsy one, to my knowledge. I called your house needing a bit of honesty. I remember talking about my admiration for Sonia and her parents from a half a dozen different angles, trying to help you see why this relationship was the best one of my life.

That would have been a good and appropriate time for you to say you wanted to meet them. But you didn't. I did most of the talking.

Instead, Sonia and I are approaching our four-year anniversary and it seriously shocked me when her parents said they wanted to meet you. When I realized that this "meet the parents" moment was probably going to happen, my stomach sank.

Would you be willing to do it? Furthermore, do I even want you to meet them without knowing if you would support our marriage? What about kids?

I haven't put my life on hold, but I don't look forward to milestones because of the weight of navigating them with shaky parental support.

I'm thirty-six years old and I've built my own life. But the desire for parental acceptance is strong. I've held onto a candle of hope that the two of you would come around, but the flame is fanned by an absence of conversations, an avoidance of the big topics.

I won't let our marriage and any children we're lucky enough to have be tainted by your shaky support or overt judgement.

Sonia and I would like your support during these upcoming milestones, but if there is some point your religion won't let you pass, we need to know now. So we can get on with it, with all of the information.

How Death Animates Us

Perhaps this blog will become: life as animated by literature.

I couldn't fall asleep last night, as happens when I'm newly off alcohol and back to the gym, so I read this graphic novel that's been sitting on my coffee table for about a year: Unknown by author Mark Waid and illustrator Minck Oosterveer.

It's about death. Since Molly's it's become clear that every piece of art and literature is about death. I knew this at fifteen and twenty-one. Just forgot.

The main character, Cat Allingham, is a detective with a brain tumor whose last mysteries involve learning if there is or is not an afterlife. It was only the first in a series, so the jury's still out.

On Sunday, Sonia and I had lunch with my parents and they acted like themselves for the first time in her presence, teasing one another relentlessly, engaging with us and actually showing some joy. It felt good.

We met at the Cheesecake Factory in the suburbs. My parents bravely tried the thai lettuce wraps and loved them. We shared two pieces of cheesecake (all chocolate) at the end and moaned about the indulgence. We walked around the mall together afterward and went shoe shopping, where Sonia impressively saved me $30 on a pair of $105 shoes at DSW.

Who knows why people do what they do? Given time or traumatic events, my parents seem to have turned a corner. They seem more open, more accepting, lighter. I have two theories and they both have to do with death.

A few weeks ago on the phone, my dad told me about a 26-year-old boy who had gone missing from the bar a few miles from their home. It was the same bar my brother and I frequented in our twenties, the closest one to our childhood home. The boy had suffered from mental health problems and substance abuse. He'd joined my mom's church to get help with the drinking and the drugs.

Then one evening, he left the bar, threw his phone and his keys in his car and walked into the woods. It took them a few weeks to find his body, but everyone knew what had happened. My dad told me that path led to an overlook where it would be easy to jump into the river. He didn't tell me that the boy was gay.

The boy who killed himself was or was not gay. In any case, he was in working class Pennsylvania where some combination of lack of opportunity, lack of options and lack of mental health services led to him finding this way out. His options were religion or alcohol. If he was gay, a religion that despised him wouldn't cut it.

Another thing happened this winter. Driving home from the high school where he's been substitute teaching since he got laid off 12+ years ago, my dad did a 360 on an icy two-lane road and narrowly missed an 18-wheeler. Says his life flashed before his eyes. He is increasingly the kind of man who will say things like that, although it's a new look for him.

My mom texted me about the incident the night it happened. She expressed thankfulness for Sonia and my brother's girlfriend. In their shock after that near-miss, they knew what mattered. They knew that Sonia and my brother's girlfriend were the people that their children would come home to if something similar happened.

In The Unknown, death is a chalky-faced stranger with the build of Herman Munster. In my life these days, it seems to be animating a little empathy among my family from a still-safe distance. The empathy is motivating -- it feels like all I've ever wanted -- and makes me want to spend as much time with them as possible. Help them keep their monsters at bay.

Angels and Miracles for Trump

I just watched John Dickerson's Christmas interview with Stephen Colbert, and it has me thinking about the worldview I derived from my early Catholicism.

Stephen Colbert and I were both raised Catholic, and there's something in our perspectives that matches. We were taught to believe in angels and miracles, so it's possible for us to believe in things we do not understand. We were taught to question and doubt our own thoughts and desires, which allows a way in for radically different perspectives.

Angels and miracles create a space, for me, to imagine my way into my father's psyche, a man I love who thought Donald Trump was the right choice. I can imagine it even though my logical mind resists it. 

"An unquestioned belief is almost vestigial," Colbert says. "It doesn't motivate you in any way...a belief is a filter. You have to run things through it, so you know how you see the world. It's a lens, not a prop."

Trump's election is the last thing I would have wanted for our country. But it has opened an opportunity for me to question and recommit to my beliefs and choices. 

The result? I'm grateful for the meaning I find in my work. I believe more than ever that exercise keeps me sane. I love my friends. Sonia is still my favorite. 

Two things I plan to do differently in 2017: call more Congressmen. Write more everything. 

Amen. 

Jenny (Part 1): Grown-up Happy

Monday night, in a walk through West Philadelphia, Jenny called herself "grown-up happy." It's not the giddy happiness of our first relationships or the inspired happiness of a newly discovered art form. There are fewer firsts, but greater calm. Occasional satisfaction.

Jenny and I met on OKCupid in our mid-twenties. We were both new to any kind of gay community and ready to get out there. I'd already suffered my first major heartbreak with a woman but would date men again; Jenny had just broken up with her boyfriend of two years because she was gay. 

Romance was never in the cards. We both needed a like-minded friend more than we needed anything else. We hung out weekly in those early years, and the friendship blossomed into one of my closest adult friendships. Before Sonia and I moved in together, Jenny and I lived together for a year. 

She agreed to be my first blog interview. After seven years, I still had plenty to learn.

Last Friday, I arrived at Jenny's third-floor apartment and we settled at her circular, dinette table -- the one I'd left behind when I moved out. She prepared a peanut butter treat for her white pit bull mix, Snow, so the dog would leave us in peace.

We'd shared dozens of meals over the same table but this felt different, more formal. We started with religion, family and community.

Religion played a peripheral role in Jenny's experience of being a gay person in the world. Although her mother's family was secularly Jewish and her father's family Christian, Jenny said, "both parents explained it: people who believe in God are silly, and God doesn't exist."

Easy enough. Or not.

Even being religion-adjacent can be tough for LGBT people. The atheists have an easier time with it, but even atheist parents are still parents. 

Jenny explained, "My mom, who grew up atheist, her uncle came out as gay back in the 70s. She and her parents had already gone through this. But she was very adamant that she know -- 'you can't be bi, you can't be questioning' -- she needed to know, 'because I need to know what your future is going to look like.' Besides that, she was very accepting."

The Christianity on the other side of the family was a little tougher to navigate. 

My dad didn't really believe me for a while. He wanted me to go to therapy. He wouldn't let me tell his family, and that's where the religion part plays in. He thought his dad would view it as this moral dilemma -- either disown your granddaughter or accept something that you completely disagree with and hate. So he basically said, "Don't tell him until you're going to marry a woman." In his mind he was thinking [my grandfather would] be dead before that would happen. 

When I finally did tell [that side of the family], I was in my first long-term relationship with a woman and I wanted to bring her to my cousin's wedding. I told my cousin, and asked her what my grandfather would think. She [disagreed with my dad], and she was right. 

My grandfather took a few days to respond to my email and said, "this isn't what I would have wanted for you, but I still love you and accept you." Even now, if I'm single, he'll ask me if I'm going to date a man. I'm glad he'll say things like that rather than just not talk about it at all. 

I certainly felt this huge weight lifted once I was able to come out to that side of the family...I was watching my cousins get married and have babies, and to their knowledge I hadn't dated anyone in years. That was so weird and dishonest, so once that didn't have to be the case, I felt so much better.

Whatever chosen family and communities we can build up around ourselves as gay people, there is no denying the import of the love and acceptance of our family of origin.

Despite her religion-adjacent traumas with religion in her extended family, Jenny explored her own spirituality in different ways throughout her life.

"When I was a teenager, I started going to synagogue with my best friend. I connected a lot to her family's ritual around Judaism, and the community that they had around Judaism, and how it brought so much warmth to their lives." 

What if these were our standards for religious communities: warmth, inclusivity, richness and support? 

Jenny's personal spirituality matured when, in her mid- to late-twenties, she worked in hospice as a music therapist. Despite her resilient personality, I remember sitting across from her those years -- usually on someone's porch with beer or wine in-hand -- and noticing a new weight and intention in her approach to daily life. 

It's not easy to be around death all the time, even if the dying are older folks who led long and relatively healthy lives. Not all of Jenny's clients were that lucky, though. There were too many rough days without a supportive supervisor or administration. She had to find the answers for herself. 

"What I realized then was that music was my larger-than-self form of expression and form of connecting," she said. "I was very attached to music since I was five, so maybe there was always a part of me that was using music [to connect to spirituality] without even realizing it." 

I learned a few things through this first interview, and I'm so grateful I could run this experiment with one of my dearest friends. I learned that transcribing an interview takes a hell of a lot of time, and that I need to ask interviewees to trust me, rather than offer to let them read the post ahead of time. There's an urgency to blogging that will keep me engaged, and I lost it for a moment this week. 

Strangely, this interview with Jenny felt more like our first intimate conversations than it did our more recent, more comfortable friendship. The stakes were higher: to listen carefully, guide the conversation in a worthwhile direction and be true to her words. I'm grateful she's a key part of my community. 

Jenny's also been thinking a little bit about her communities lately, those she shares with her girlfriend and those they navigate separately.

"Moving to West Philly in the past year or two," she said, "I've developed a really strong queer community. I go to a party with some of these people, and the minority of people are straight couples. When I was first coming out, this was the kind of community I craved. It took years for me to find it, and now it feels so normal and so good. It helps me to interact more openly and honestly in my other communities."

From our first times dipping our toe into the pool, nodding across the bar and whispering to one another, "do you think she's gay?", to our now mostly-LGBTQ friend groups, Jenny and I ran toward queer adulthood arm-in-arm. I couldn't have asked for more thoughtful or kind partner in crime.

Perhaps because of that, there's a lot more interview to share. Stay tuned for Part 2. 

Ani DiFranco on Family, Happiness and God

Ani DiFranco's music played in my 1987 Honda hatchback on repeat until I knew every word, and then I keep singing along for another few months. This was late high school, early college. Music that I came to love in those early years (it was exactly Fleetwood Mac, Ani DiFranco & Leonard Cohen) became a part of me. 

She was my first example of a cool lesbian, but she wasn't one. 

somedays the line I walk 

turns out to be straight 

other days the line tends to 

deviate 

I've got no criteria for sex or race 

I just want to hear your voice 

I just want to see your face  

their eyes are all asking 

are you in, or are you out 

and I think, oh man,what is this about? 

tonight you can't put me 

up on any shelf 

'cause I came here alone 

I'm gonna leave by myself —from "In or Out," released on Imperfectly, 1992 

That was her testimony on her third album, and she claimed the labels "bisexual," and "queer," over the years. She wrote songs about love and sex with men and women.

I didn't subscribe to music magazines. The Internet was still infantile. I listened to Ani's albums in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She affirmed my own advocacy (I had friends who were gay), but I wasn't seriously thinking about dating women at the time. I was straight. I just loved her music. She was a poet, like me.

Not So Soft. Puddle Dive. Not a Pretty Girl. Little Plastic Castle. These albums gave me the anthems that smoothed my rough ride into becoming an adult woman. When it was safe enough and armed with Ani's strength, I practiced Hollaback from sheer rage.

So why did I feel self-righteous, in the early 2000s, when I learned that she'd married a man? It was never outside the realm of her possibility. She hadn't deceived us.

Now, she lives with a husband and two children, Petah and Dante, in New Orleans. If you're going to quiet your indignation, get a picket fence and still practice advocacy (she canceled a show in NC this year to protest their anti-LGBT law), that's the town to do it in. A town worthy of her.

Love or happiness have quieted her rage. "I have that typical songwriter’s disease," she said in an interview with Adam McKibbin in 2009, "where when I have a problem, I reach for my guitar, and when I’m happy, I’m busy being happy." 

After her daughter was born in 2007, she wrote her best love song. 

So I'm beginning to see some problems 

With the ongoing work of my mind 

And I've got myself a new mantra 

It says don't forget to have a good time 

Don't let the sellers of stuff power enough to rob you of your grace 

Love is all over the place 

There's nothing wrong with your face—from "Present/Infant", released on Red Letter Year, 2008

And where is God in all this happiness? Nowhere. In 1999, she wrote and sang, "Up up up up up up / Points the spire of the steeple / But God’s work isn’t done by God / It’s done by people."

Amen. Good deeds and aspersions alike, on this plane, are practiced by humans alone. 

My spirituality tends to be more in the vein of, if there is a God it exists within us, and the responsibility for justice is on our shoulders. What if we just looked to each other in this way? What if the steeples didn’t all point up? What if they all pointed at us, and we had to care for each other in the way that we expect God to care for us? I’m much more interested in that.” —Ani DiFranco, interview by Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive, May 2000

We do not hold humans to this expectation because humans are incredibly disappointing most of the time. Love is rare; balanced and respectful relationships are rare; altruism might not exist. We can't lift humans up with reverence and worship them, the way we can a myth. 

Ani turns to the atom.

The glory of the atom 

Begs a reverent word 

The primary design 

Of the whole universe 

Yes, let us sing its praises 

Let us bow our heads in prayer 

At the magnificent consciousness 

Incarnate there 

The smallest unit of matter 

Uniting bird and rock and tree 

And you and me  

Oh holy is the atom 

The truly intelligent design 

To which all of evolution 

Is graciously aligned —from "Atom," released on Red Letter Year, 2008

YES. The glory of nature and the universe, what we do understand that boggles the mind, contains plenty of reverence and meaning for me. 

And raising our expectations for humans, that we meet one another eye-to-eye and take greater responsibility for one another's care and just treatment, could contain plenty of holiness. 

Words Have Meaning, Unless They Don't

The second of my Happiness Project commandments, "words have meaning," began unraveling the moment I wrote it. For insight into the power and limitations of words, I turn to Stephen Dunn.

In a poem dedicated to his brother, he writes, "What is the past if not unfinished work? / Swampy, fecund, seductively revisable? / One of us has spent his life developing respect / for the weakness of words, the other for what / must be held onto; there may be a chance for us" (from "Our Parents" in Different Hours).

It is the poet, of course, who develops the reverence for the weakness of words. "Poet" was one of the first identities, at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, that I took on wholeheartedly. It felt like a spiritual calling.

IF THE POET

If the poet doesn’t yield to the priest,
as Stevens says he shouldn’t,
and if both reside in the same village,
and call on their powers to rectify
or explain the latest disaster,

does the priest become less persuasive
because his ideas are likely not his own,
and is the poet suspect for the same reason?
Would a good priest find the right words,
as the good poet would, in among the many words

passed down for centuries
on what to think, what to believe? Or would reverence
always get in the way of the true,
thus possibly giving the poet the edge?

That is, if the poet mistrusts words, as he should,
makes them pass hard tests, knows that they must
be arranged and shaped in order to convey
even a smidgen of truth, wouldn’t he,
although self-ordained, be more reliable?

But what if the villagers believed
they were saved by a prayer the priest said
on Sunday among the ruins? And all the poet
could do was elegize the ruins?
Would the real and the imagined fuse,
become something entirely new?

And what if the poet and priest were one,
each invoking the other as the crops grew
and rain was steady in rainy season, or,
just as confusing, things got worse
and prayers proved useless, and poems
merely decorated the debris where a house

once was? Would it be time for the priest
to admit he’d known but one book? For the poet
to say he’s read many, and look, it hasn’t helped?
Or has the issue from the start been a great need
that can’t be fully met, only made bearable
and sometimes served by those who try?

Stephen Dunn from Lines of Defense, W.W. Norton & Company, 2014

Religious zealots, Zen Buddhists, political activists, radio show hosts and poets all have different uses for language and different relationships to language. In this blog, I hope to expose the way language is used to silence and oppress and to highlight those occasions when it is used to celebrate and uplift.

The relationships will get dicey. The priests are everywhere, and many of them have good intentions. The poets profess to many faiths.

Still, priests and poets have different reference points for truth. I'm glad Dunn put these two in the same village. I might put them in the same room. It's time they talked face to face.

Isaac Knew Abraham's Plan

My strongest remaining tie to Catholicism is the stories. I love the resonance of Bible stories, especially the story of Abraham and Isaac. They are a part of my mythology, too.

The Abraham and Isaac story resonates with me because it is so utterly horrible and so familiar. My mother has faith like Abraham, for which she would sacrifice anything "of this plane."

In case you're not familiar, the Abraham and Isaac story goes like this. God tells Abraham to bring his eldest son, Isaac, to the top of the mountain, and kill him there like a sacrificial lamb on an altar. Abraham, without a single recorded question in any of the Biblical texts I found, proceeds to the mountain with his son. Abraham carries the knife and the fire (no matches back then), and Isaac carries the wood. You need a lot of wood to burn a recently dead anything. 

It takes the three days to get to the place where God wants Abraham to kill Isaac. Imagine that journey, with Isaac (who I picture as between eight and twelve at the time) asking questions like, "The fire and wood are here, but where is the lamb for burnt offering?"

I understand that Biblical times were different: harsher, with shorter lifespans and perhaps not as much attachment to life, but I still can't give Abraham a free pass. Isaac was his only legitimate son, born to him and Sarah late in life. There was no promise of another. 

Don't even get me started on how, for every Biblical scholar who wants to condemn homosexuality based on the line "You shall not lie with a man as with a woman," there are a dozen twisting themselves in knots to justify or gloss over the use of sex slaves by so-called men of God. Because in fact, Isaac wasn't Abraham's only son. He had a son, Ishmael, by his slave Hagar, who are only mentioned when convenient because of their status as second class citizens.  

Oh. I didn't want to get started. 

Returning to the story, Abraham gets as far as binding Isaac's limbs and laying him on top of the altar, on top of the wood. Do you think Isaac might have picked up on what was happening, offered a little struggle? Could he ever forgive a father who was willing to do that to him? 

There's a streak of masochism in Christianity that repulses me: Abraham the willing victim of God's request, Isaac lying down, mute, on the altar like the sacrificial lamb his father plans him to be. 

I have found the gay Christian blogs (bless their hearts) that work so hard to make the words say what they want. Although I respect the endeavor, for me, it's not different enough than the endeavors of the bigots, using the stale and ancient words to condemn homosexuals, women who've had abortions, or other social pariahs who don't fit with white, middle class values. 

That's what the Christianity that I know has become in America: white, middle class values and self-righteousness disguised as spirituality. In the Evangelical church, there's a little religious ecstasy mixed for a release. 

They need that release. It is a struggle, for many Christians I know, to live their lives contrary to so much actual evidence (the history of the earth, global warming, the nature of evil, you name it). Even gay Christians in progressive and accepting churches have to reconcile with the fact that several branches of their own religion would cast them out. 

Religion is one of the greatest crimes of humanity, compelling generations of victims to live in direct opposition to their own self-interest. 

The greatest victims of religion are those who believe fully, who are willing to sacrifice their children, standing right in front of them, for the promise of an afterlife they haven't seen. 

But of course, we their children are also in trouble.