LGBTQ Online Safety Guide

I'd like share an important LGBTQ online safety guide which came out in early 2019. 

Did you know that 73% of LGBTQs have been harassed online due to sexual orientation or gender identity? This guide aims to empower them and give them the tools to protect themselves online.

https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/lgbtq-guide-online-safety/

I like how they give a few tips and practical suggestions for each situation.

Peace & Love, 

Gay Happiness

Thank God, All the Children Are Queer

In his manifesto, The Future of Queer, Fenton Johnson advocates that we should "teach, in the most emphatic way, our young to be queer, which as every parent and teacher knows, is through example."

I often fail to provided this example. I use the excuses of my own Catholic background and the Muslim community where I did my early teaching to keep me silenced and closeted. 

At our holiday party this year, a young person I worked with from 3rd grade to 5th grade came through with her mother, one of our organization's earliest advocates. The kid I used to teach was now fifteen and about my height. The three of us chatted with a new employee. 

"And what about your life outside work?" the mom asked. "Are you married?" 

I took a quick, stabilizing breath. I was already out to my colleague. "I have a partner," I said quickly. "We just bought a house up in Mt. Airy." 

The mom's face betrayed a flash of recognition; the teen just smiled, a little knowingly. 

Can I teach children to be queer without talking about my own love life? More importantly, over a decade into my career, have I done so? 

Once again, Johnson's definition of queer: "And so what defines queer, finally," he writes, "is not what one does in bed but one's stance toward the ancient régime, the status quo, the way things have always been done, the dominant mode, capitalism."

While I haven't shared my sexual identity with youth, I have built my teaching on queer values: recognition of individuals' strengths and skills, respect for self and neighbor and insistence upon equity. 

*****

The highest point of queer success and romance, in Johnson's view of history, has come through creative endeavor. 

To be born bent, however that manifested itself, was once to be forced to look within -- to explore and express, in Gide's words, 'what seems different in yourself.' This embrace of the gift of our essential difference was the wellspring of queer creativity -- for evidence, read or look at Walt Whitman, Henry James, Sherwood Anderson, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, Gloria Anzaldúa, Marsden Hartley, Audre Lorde, Agnes Martin, Baldwin, Baldwin, Baldwin to name only a few of the eminently civilized writers and artists who understood commitment as well as or better than any people taking marriage vows with the knowledge of no-fault divorce waiting in the wings. Their lifelong, selfless practice rooted itself in their fecund, uneasy difference: their queerness. These queer writers and artists took unbreakable vows to their art, dedicating their lives to showing us, their audience, the human condition. 

Being queer no longer forces one to look within, as LGB people and relationships become more a part of mainstream culture. Queer youth of the new generation aren't plagued with the self-doubt and double consciousness that ruined so many queers of previous generations. The brave like Carson McCullers and Audre Lorde stood out precisely because of what was stacked against them. 

Emma González, survivor of the Parkland shooting and gun control advocate, is the new queer. When she emerged on the national stage, I saw my students in her. In Philadelphia youth programs, I'd been witnessing comparable self-assuredness, clear thinking and queerness for years. 

If it is queer creatives who have shown us our past, complete with its hypocrisy and oppression and brave striving, then it will be the queer children, who have declared themselves in charge, who will light our way into an even braver future. 

Johnson has a vision of this future. "In place of our age of irony," he writes, "I imagine an age of reverence, chosen in full embrace of the knowledge of science, even as it grounds itself in the calm conviction that we live and die in mystery, that all human endeavor must begin and end in respect, for ourselves, for one another, for our fellow creatures, for our wounded, beloved Earth. Let us all become queers."

Dear Fenton Johnson, I've been talking to the children and it's already happening. With their noses buried in their phones, they've been processing the world in which they find themselves more quickly and more adeptly than any generation before them. And they don't like what they've found.

Returning to the writers and artists, Johnson writes, "Through their art they showed us that the solitude we so fear, that we will do anything to escape, even marry -- that solitude is an illusion, a scrim preventing us from seeing how we are all one, we are all in this boat together."

Generation Z, as these children who have grown up immersed in technology are called, knows we're in the boat together, and they see it sinking. 

What if they, this Generation Z, are actually the dream of the Internet, as it was promised when we first logged on: all of the information to the power of all of the people? 

What if they can develop, earlier than any generation that came before them, the ability to differentiate truth and falsehood, block out the noise and find a path to change? 

What if they do grow into an entire generation of Baldwins and Woolfs, learning from the vulnerability and wisdom of the queers who came before but empowered to rise up and create a more just world? 

Thank God, the children are all right. The children are queer. 

Now We Are Become the Suits

I just finished, for about the third time, The Future of Queer: A Manifesto by Fenton Johnson in the January 2018 edition of Harper's Magazine.

It implicates me, as a queer white woman aspiring to relative comfort. A selfish part of me bubbled up, indignant as I read the manifesto: "It took me long enough to find my love, don't I deserve to enjoy it?"

To hear Johnson tell it, I don't.

On the one hand are the far left queers, including all out trans people, who are activists and teachers who fight daily, not for the right to marry or anything so conventional, but for the right to completely deconstruct the way society thinks about family and community. And build something more beautiful in its place.

It was the kind of fantasy I certainly had as a bisexual in my twenties -- a commune-style space where relationships are communal rather than transactional and there are plenty of old folks around to care for the children that come up.

On the other hand we have, though a I am loathe to admit it, me and most of my friends. Increasingly, I know almost no single people. The lesbians and queers among us are building our comfortable lives in the image of our straight-couple friends, buying houses and marrying and having babies.

"Now to be LGB (T remains beyond the pale)," Johnson writes, "is no longer to be forced to look outside the norms, since our largely white, entirely prosperous leadership has so enthusiastically embraced the norms. Now we can forget AIDS. Now we can get married. Now we are become the suits."

It stings, but he's right. There are no lesbian or queer couples I know of who will decline the right to marry. In most cases, we point to children as the reason. If Sonia is the birth mother, I have more rights if we are married before she gets pregnant. The reason that most of us marry is to keep our children inside our chosen clan -- so they don't end up with their evangelical grandparents or a cousin in a distant city, far from the community that raised them.

For Johnson, the idea that we marry to manage these kinds of relationships under the keen eye of the state is part of the problem. It's a cop-out, and it's opposed to the early queer communities that may very well have been stronger because they had to navigate the messiness of these relationships on their own. Or maybe they just grew closer together because their children were more often taken away.

Johnson, a professor, activist and survivor of the AIDS era now teaching somewhat reluctantly at the Koch-funded University of Arizona, tells the story like this. "The assimilationists have won, with state-sanctioned marriage as the very mortar cementing the bricks of the wall of convention that separates us from ourselves, from one another, from all that is unfamiliar, strange, challenging and thus from learning and growth."

He goes on, "state-sanctioned marriage is precisely analogous to gentrification -- the creative outliers do the heavy lifting, and when a certain level of safety has been achieved, the assimilationists move in, raise prices, and force out the agents of change."

And on (he's a beautiful writer), "Because our salvation, our literal salvation in the here and now, in this nation, on this planet requires our abandoning those ancient clan divisions in favor of the understanding that we are all one. As the Buddha abandoned his family to undertake the search that led to enlightenment, so Jesus, that communitarian photo-feminist celibate bachelor Jew, rejected the ancient clan divisions in favor of a new order."

Johnson might be a gay man, but he knew how to strike an arrow right to my heart with a sexy and original description of Jesus.

I want a new order, too! I want to wander the countryside in sandals with twelve women! I want to occasionally settle, all together in a house, and plant a garden! I'm grateful to be reminded of all this, but of all of the battles that I choose in this life, I'm not sure this societal restructure will be one of them. I'm 36, I've found someone to love and I'd like to have a baby soon.

"And so what defines queer, finally," Johnson writes, "is not what one does in bed but one's stance toward the ancient régime, the status quo, the way things have always been done, the dominant mode, capitalism."

While I'm sure I'd disappoint Johnson with my comparative lack of revolutionary spirit, I will continue to define my life in small ways against capitalism: taking care of my mind and body, shopping at the co-op and abstaining from the pervasive impulse to buy and consume. Such simple steps can be incredibly difficult for those of us who were raised in a strongly mainstream and consumer culture.

Difficult on any given day, and still not enough. But I am grateful for the worthy struggle, and for Johnson's resounding wakeup call.

How Much Family Is Too Much Family?

To talk to most mothers, mine and Sonia's included, there is no such thing as too much family. In my parents' rural American culture, they look forward to every four-hour meal, every one-year-old birthday party and every high school play.

It's easy to forget from the vantage point of my coastal elitism: most of America is built this way. Or at least, the rural and suburban part of America that is lucky enough to be moderately comfortable and middle class.

This weekend, I skipped out on some family events in favor of getting my head on straight for springtime, exercising and creating some new health and writing goals. I felt more relief than guilt, a true accomplishment for a veteran of 13 years of Catholic school.

My favorite cousin, a sweet 41-year-old man with two kids, was in town from Washington state. His little brother, a self-righteous Christian who is difficult to be around, came along too. Families and girlfriends stayed at home so Thursday night, Sonia and I had dinner with the two cousins on their way to my aunt's house.

They drove their rental car our house and we walked to a nearby gastropub. I apologized for and tried to explain city life. My favorite cousin recounted a story from when we were little.

"You had this little pink mirror with a handle," he said. "I looked into it and said, 'I'm in the mirror!' and handed it to you to prove it. 'No, I'm in the mirror!' you said. You were so confused. We went on that way for a long time."

"Did you try that with your daughter when she was that age?" I asked.

"Absolutely," he said. "It's a classic. You find a classic, you stick with it."

I can't explain my love for this cousin except that we were the two oldest, so right around the time I was starting to be aware of the world, he was there, five years older than me and awesome. He's also got a way of breaking the ice.

In another moment, we were explaining the structure of high schools in Philadelphia and Sonia's school pride came out, a little more aggressively than usual. I was worried that she sounded a little racist, which she is not.

"Honey," I said. "Watch it. You're sounding a little elitist."

The favorite cousin was quick on the draw. "You would be too," he said, "If you went to Central!"

It was great to see him. Even the Christian cousin and I tolerated each other, as he engaged us in stories about his new hobby: deep-water diving.

That was Thursday night. Saturday, we were invited to may aunt's for all-day conversations and meals. Tonight, about a dozen family members are doing the same thing at my parents' house. We declined both invitations.

It's true that Sonia and I are trying to say "yes" more often than we say "no" to family, but I live in the city for a more engaging job (which I love), for a chosen family (which we are building) and for the opportunity to write about where I come from (which requires distance).

Looking back on my past few blog posts, I feel like a pendulum. My boss and Sonia have a related observation about me that drives me nuts. They both claim that I can have very passionate, completely opposing views on a topic two days in a row. They're not wrong.

At work it looks like this:

• Monday: So-and-so isn't working hard at all. We should give them a warning because they're not meeting expectations. 
• Tuesday: The same person is amazing! They really stepped up today and it's so clear that they're putting in more of an effort. 

Both of these things can be true, but few people would make such a quick shift. I think it means I'm always open to being proven wrong. I want to believe in people. 

At home it looks like this: 

• Monday: I haven't heard from the cousins who are coming to visit, so we can skip seeing them this time. 
• Tuesday: I heard from them! We have to change all of our plans so we can see them in the three-hour window they gave me for a dinner together. 

When it comes to writing, this tendency leaves me a little schizophrenic-feeling. I want to write about family and belief and happiness, but my ideas about these topics are constantly shifting and internally contradictory. 

This blog is an opportunity to build a body of memior-style vignettes, to note themes as they evolve over time and to nail down a story about family that feels fresh enough to turn into a book. To do all that, sometimes requires a break from said family. 

A Guide for Small-talking to Parents

I've had what I thought was a healthy disdain for small talk since puberty. I raged against people contentedly chatting about grocery deals or potted plants while there was so much terror and suffering in the world.

Around this time, I also began to have a double consciousness -- making out with girls and telling myself that I was just experimenting for boys, that it didn't mean anything greater about me or my life.

By scoffing at small talk and simultaneously not wanting to talk about anything of substance with family members, I was left with nothing to say to many people I'd known growing up: aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors. And of course, parents.

My family silences contrasted with the quickly intimate confidences I created throughout my late teens and twenties. The party always ended at my dorm room or apartment, with a few friends whispering about what kept them up at night and what kept them going. I sought intimacies with anyone on the margins, where I was: restaurant workers, struggling writers, anyone queer or sexually experimental.

I learned a lot, but I am in touch with almost no one from that time of my life. We were bright-burning candles that quickly extinguished, friends of a season.

For the first time in my life, I'm spending time with my elders and thinking about the next decades of our relationships and how I can make them stronger. Against all my natural resistance, it seems to come down to a question of small talk.

It all started when Sonia and I began reviewing "acceptable topics of conversation," when driving to visit to her parents or mine. We had long ago lost the ability to talk naturally with our own parents about our real lives, and this seemed the best way back in. By listing out conversation topics for one another, we gained confidence and security that we could get through the night without too many awkward silences.

Acceptable Topics: The Korean Side

• How to make Korean food (this is actually several, since you could talk about each dish in great depth)
• How to make kimchi (merits its own bullet point)
• Early days in America (their tourist stand, how they chose Philly)
• Korean traditions around marriage, 100 days (for new babies), Lunar New Year
• Business at the store
• The new micro-loan at the store, what they got with it, the sketchy contractor
• Retirement (although I learned that this quickly leads to the "when are you having a baby" conversation)
• The house in the suburbs where Sonia's brother & sister-in-law now live
• Her brother's job & sister-in-law's progress in nursing school
• Us in 2018: getting healthier, plans for the house, trips

Acceptable Topics: The White American Side

• How to make Slovack pastries
• The grandmothers (I'm still lucky enough to have two)
• Other family members (the cousin headed off to college, the cousin's child with health problems, the aunts and uncles moving south)
• House renovations and improvements, recent and planned
• Yard improvements and changes, recent and planned
• Dad's substitute teaching gigs
• Mom's halfway house project for women coming out of prison
• Upcoming trips
• My brother's work on his house & his girlfriends' parents' health
• Us in 2018: getting healthier, plans for the house, trips

Gay children with difficult family relationships have so much stacked against them. For years, we practice the art of hiding ourselves from our parents. By the time we come out, we've lost the ability to talk about even the most everyday aspects of our lives.

When we come out, we want to launch right into the big questions: the meaning of life, our dreams for the future. Yet we struggle to talk about the most everyday happenings: a movie we saw, a night out with friends. 

Even though it's still uncomfortable, Sonia and I are making plans and showing up. We are being patient with ourselves and with our parents. We are starting with the little things, and learning how to talk to them again. 

The Path of Joy Is Connection

We can walk to a gorgeous, redesigned public library from our new house, so Sonia and I recently rediscovered the magic of borrowing books. You can take 10 home, try them all on for size, and read one or none at all! 

We've been interested in mindfulness, so The Book of JOY  became my bedtime reading. It's written by Douglas Abrams and details a week when His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, two dear friends and spiritual leaders of Buddhism and Christianity respectively, spent a week together talking about the meaning of life. 

All three are listed as authors because the spiritual leaders' dialogs are recorded and sometimes quoted for several pages at a time. 

It has gems like this: "Modern society has prioritized independence to such an extent that we are left on our own to try to manage our lives that are increasingly out of control" (p. 95).

My independence is often at issue in our relationship. Sonia doesn't understand why I won't call my dad to help us hang a new light fixture or tear out the old bushes by the front sidewalk. 

I try to explain. I never saw my parents asking their parents for anything. They did everything on their own. Parents give you eighteen good years and then they should be able to reap the benefits of their hard work. It's your turn to shine.

Korean culture is more familial, so that even though it's just the four of them plus the sister-in-law in the U.S. (and, more and more, me!), the bonds seem stronger. Dinner every two weeks is non-negotiable. Parents weigh in on how much you're eating, how healthy you look, how eager they are for grandchildren. 

My parents have never in 36 years asked about grandchildren, and so I have no idea how they picture their role in that time of life. Sonia's parents bring it up every second visit and it's clear that mom wants to be involved, daily if we'll allow it. 

"Once again, the path of joy was connection and the path of sorrow was separation. When we see others as separate, they become a threat. When we see others as a part of us, as connected, as interdependent, then there is no challenge we cannot face -- together" (p. 100). 

I haven't yet put the "Script for Clearing the Air" into practice. When I wrote it, I saw my parents as a threat rather than as a part of me. It's a common feeling for those of us lucky enough to have living parents with whom our connection is still recalibrating. 

Today, after reaching out to talk to my mother this weekend about her own mother's decline (they may have to move her into 24/7 care within the week), it feels more like we're on the same team. I can almost picture my parents attending our wedding one day. 

Today the connection, which is not static but ever-changing, feels like enough. 

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.