Stonewall Triptych

“[Wilfred]’s death was an unhealed wound, & the ache of it has been with me ever since. I wanted him back—not his poems.” 

The man who writes these words is Siegfried Sassoon, and he is writing about Wilfred Owen. They loved one another. They met in the fall of 1917, and Owen died in the trenches in France in November 1918. Owen wrote to Sassoon in November 1917, “I love you, dispassionately, so much, so very much, dear Fellow, that blasting little smile you wear on reading this can’t hurt me in the least….You have fixed my life—however short. You did not light me. I was always made a comet, but you have fixed me. I spun around you a satellite for a month, but I shall swing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze.”

Three or four weeks ago, I wrote of Wilfred Owen and of his love for Siegfried Sassoon, the two of them being the two great war poets of the Great War.  Here are three by Sassoon to go with the two from Owen a couple of weeks ago:

“In the Pink.”

So Davies wrote: “This leaves me in the pink.”

Then scrawled his name: “Your loving sweetheart, Willie.”

With crosses for a hug. He’d had a drink

Of rum and tea; and though the barn was chilly,

For once his blood ran warm; he had pay to spend.

Winter was passing; soon the year would mend.

He couldn’t sleep that night. Stiff in the dark

He groaned and thought of Sundays at the farm,

When he’s go out as cheerful as a lark

In his best suit to wander arm-in-arm

With brown-eyed Gwen, and whisper in her ear

The simple, silly things she liked to hear.

And then he thought: to-morrow night we trudge

Up to the trenches, and my boots are rotten.

Five miles of stodgy clay and freezing sludge,

And everything but wretchedness forgotten.

To-night he’s in the pink: but soon he’ll die. 

And still the war goes on: he don’t know why.

“They”

The Bishop tells us: “When the boys come back

“They will not be the same; for they’ll have fought

“In a just cause: they lead the last attack

“On Anti-Christ; their comrade’s blood has bought

“New right to breed an honourable race.

“We’re none of us the same!” the boys reply.

“For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind;

“Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die;

“And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not find

“A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change.”

And the Bishop said: “The ways of God are strange!”

“The Kiss”

To these I turn, in these I trust;

Brother Lead and Sister Steel.

To his blind power I make appeal;

I guard her beauty clean from rust.

He pins and burns and loves the air,

And splits a skull to win my praise;

But up the nobly marching days

She glitters naked, cold and fair.

Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this:

That in good fury he may feel

The body where he sets his heel

Quail from your downward darting kiss.

This week the web is full of news of the latest movie about Alan Turing, The Imitation Game, presenting recent analyses about the life of one of the inventors of the computer and who defeated the German Enigma Code during World War II, who was gay. In a century when LGBTQ were subject, for seventeen years, to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” queers almost lost our history. The poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen puts us, intimately, back in touch.

NOTE:  The two poems are from War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon, Dover Publications, 2004. 

On November 18, 2003 the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts released its decision in the case Goodridge v Department of Public Health, which brought marriage equality to the United States. Mary Bonauto had assembled this case and argued it before the court. She was GLAD’s first civil rights lawyer and knew what happens to a gay couple when one of them dies, and their shared home is stripped by blood relatives who are “next of kin” and therefore “heirs.” Bonauto knew why marriage was important to gay people. She had been working on civil rights cases for the gay community for ten years. One of the most powerful descriptions from this period is of Bonauto reading the court decision on November 18. There is also a photograph—a snapshot—of her reading that she—and we—had won.

This information and the picture are drawn from a new book, Winning Marriage: The Inside Story of How Same-Sex couples Took on the Politicians and Pundits—And Won, by Marc Solomon, ForeEdge, 2014, There is a Foreword by Deval Patrick, which is interesting in its own right. The print book is $20.93 and is available everywhere and the Kindle edition is $10.99. No editions in ePub for Ipads. Marc Solomon has been tilling these fields almost as long as Mary Bonauto. Governor Patrick says that “Marc led the effort to save marriage equality in the wake of the court’s decision and efforts to undo it.” Anybody who was in Boston during that time will appreciate what a central and critical role Marc Solomon played in this struggle.

I bought Solomon’s book yesterday, and when it arrived on my Kindle, I started reading it immediately. My husband, C, said a couple of hours later, when he got home from work, “I don’t know. You must be reading an interesting book. You haven’t put that thing down since I got home.” I told him what it was. I didn’t stop reading until I had finished Chapter 6, and all of the “Massachusetts” pages. It was riveting.

Winning Marriage is divided into several sections—Massachusetts, New York, California, Barack Obama, and then a final section “Courting Justice,” on the Supreme Court—so it’s clear that this book is not the whole story of marriage equality, but it does seem to be the story of the most significant bits. This book introduces us to the main characters—Mary Bonauto, Evan Wolfson are the ones Solomon dedicates the book to—and to the main events, and, most importantly, it introduces us to the way it was done. When I hear people speak of the how it was done, I think of all the people in this book, who were very very good at what they did, and who were energetic and determined and who never gave up. In other words, they fought hard. I have read only “Massachusetts” before I had to stop to pack for the weekend. But this story in Winning Marriage is inspiring and hugely informative. No where else have I been given an idea of how hard these people fought to bring us marriage equality.

When I was eighteen, in 1957, attending the school in Tennessee, and, of course, not dealing well with my sexuality. I took a course in poetry that included poems that have stayed with me during the fifty years since. One, called “Greater Love,” began, Red lips are not so red, as the stained stones kissed by the English dead. It was by an English poet, Wilfred Owen, and was written in 1917, during the Great War. Kindness of wooed and wooer seems shame to their love pure. Oh love, your eyes lose lure, when I behold eyes blinded in my stead…..Owens proceeds through four stanzas, investigating the love he feels for his love, comparing it directly to the love expressed by men who are now dead in the trenches in France. 

Your slender attitude 

Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed, 

Rolling and rolling there 

Where God seems not to care; 

Till the fierce Love they bear 

Cramps them in death's extreme decrepitude. 

Your voice sings not so soft, -- 

Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft, -- 

Your dear voice is not dear, 

Gentle, and evening clear, 

As theirs whom none now hear 

Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed. 

Wilfred Owen loved Siegfried Sassoon, who was the other great war poet from the First World War. The other great war poet. 

Heart, you were never hot, 

Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot; 

And though your hand be pale, 

Paler are all which trail 

Your cross through flame and hail: 

Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not. 

The article is by Liam Hoare. It is a review of a novel, Rejuvenation, by Pat Barker, about the soldier’s rehabilitation hospital in which Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were examined by doctors treating soldiers shell-shocked from their experience in the trenches in France. Wilfred Owen died in France in 1918, one week before the Armistice was signed. Siegfried Sassoon lived until the late nineteen-sixties.  

Also by Wilfred Owen is “Dulce et Decorum Est.”

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Both poems are from this edition: Complete Poems by Wilfred Owen, with an Introduction by Siegfried Sassoon, Blackthorn Press,

It is Thursday night, at 10:24, and I am watching Lawrence O’Donnell. He and his guests are discovering the one responsible for the disaster on Tuesday night. It was, he says, the Democrats!, and specifically the Democratic leadership,  who set the strategy for the party in the Congress. Simply put, the Democrats ran from Obama, and that meant, they ran from all the successes of the last six years, and so a voter, looking for a reason to choose between this Democratic candidate and that Republican candidate, couldn’t think of a reason to make his choice but speeches by the candidate! I wonder if they can be serious, here. Make your choice of where to vote on the basis of political speeches?

I don’t think I have ever listened to a political speech in my entire life and then made up my mind to vote for that person on the basis of that speech. 

I read. I watch TV. I know the histories of the two political parties. By the time I actually am close enough to see and hear a candidate, I am months past the time when hearing him was going to affect my choice of candidate. 

But then I realize I am different from a lot of people. Before a single candidate has been chosen, I already know the parties’ philosophies on most issues. I don’t need to hear a candidate to think, “Hmmm. This one might be good.” I already know that if this one is a Republican, then his economic proposals are going to be a disaster for the country. And i know that the Democratic candidate is going to have a better plan for immigration. I also know that this country was built on immigration—all of us, except Native Americans, are immigrants—and so any proposal to seriously reduce immigration is a serious proposal to reject out nation’s history. What we are. So I don’t have to do much when the candidates begin to sort themselves out. He’s a Democrat—check. He accepts or pushes issues from the Democratic playbook—check. He speaks well—that’s a plus. Well, you see how this is going. 

Now, if a voter tries to make up his mind in the last weeks of the campaign on the basis of what the candidate is saying, he is very very likely to get it wrong. 

You have to educate yourself. You have to read books. You have to watch intelligent TV. You have to learn who lies to you and who doesn’t. You have to educate yourself on the policies of the two parties. Which ones are successful when adopted and which ones are dismal failures. And if, in 2014, you make the mistake of thinking that the Republicans are going to be better for the country than the Democrats, you are responsible for that mistake. 

Our voters, who didn’t educate themselves in recent weeks, screwed up on Tuesday. 

On May 8, 2012, Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to affirm his support of marriage equality. After that time, the Department of Justice announced it would no longer defend the DOMA before the Supreme Court, and, in 2013, the Supreme Court overturned the central parts of DOMA, removing the federal government from defining marriages, and now 32 states have marriage equality. It is not certain that Obama caused this series of events, but it is undeniable that he facilitated them—he and his Attorney General Eric Holder.

At a time when the appeals courts are still working on the effects of the Supreme Court’s having declined, on October 6, 2014, to hear appeals from the 4th, 7th, and 10th Circuit Courts, it begins to seem as if the marriage fight has been won and that the next fight is less over the question, “Shall same-sex couples be allowed to marry?” than over the larger question, “Is there any right of citizenship that can be constitutionally denied to gay people?” 

We are six days from the mid-term elections of President Obama’s second term, and it is appropriate to look at how we got here. Getting here was the work of thousands upon thousands of gay people, working alone and with others, by the various civil rights organizations, the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of Bilitis, the Committee for Homosexual Freedom, The Gay Liberation Front, Gay Activist Alliance, the Human Rights Campaign, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, and Lavender Menace, to name just the early ones. The movement to obtain legal marriage started out being a bizarre attempt by people who didn’t seem to need (or want) marriage, but in the twenty years since 1993, when the Hawaii Supreme Court almost gave us legal marriage, legal marriage went from the fringe to the very center of our movement for liberty. It turns out that legal marriage brings with it a legal status indistinguishable from freedom. 

The single person most prominent in recent years in the movement for legal marriage has been the President of the United States, Barack Obama. And now, any listing of the achievements of his administration would have to include, prominently, his leadership in bringing marriage to all citizens without regard to gender. It’s not just that the courts have come around to a new reading of the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses, including more people in their expansive reading of the Constitution, it is also that the president has been a leader in bringing the whole of the United States with him in his acceptance of it. In his second inaugural address, he said, “We the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Senaca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall….” And Stonewall. And at great moments since then, he has made it a point to bring into the legendary history of this republic, men and women who love their own gender. In Soweto, at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service, he said, “Around the world today, men and women are still imprisoned for their political beliefs; and are still persecuted for what they look like, or how they worship, or who they love.” So he included us when there was no political benefit to doing so, teaching the citizens of the world where our place is. I am profoundly grateful to Obama. Eventually, we might have ended up here, without him, but it has happened more quickly with him. He was the true leader, bringing his people—the people of the United States—along with him.

President Obama’s financial policies are successful. He has created healthcare reform. He is working on serious environment action, and he opened up American society and government to minorities, and women. He is transforming the federal judiciary.

In the election next Tuesday, he and his party deserve our support. Vote. Vote for Democrats.

The recent synod of the church is receiving mixed reviews. Barbie Latza Nadeau, writing in The Daily Beast, says the synod is a victory for Pope Francis, and that all is going to come out well after a year’s discussions and in the conclusion of the synod. Or it may be that young people are going to settle all of this.  Carol Kuruvilla, in the Huffington Post, says that, “Close to 85% of self-identified Catholics between the ages of 18 and 29 believe gays and lesbians should be accepted by society, according to a 2014 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.” The same survey says that the same age group, 18-29, is in favor of gay marriage by 75%. These numbers may make the painful struggles in the synod irrelevant.

Another factor that may contribute to its irrelevancy is that many people have simply turned away. Paul Raushenbush, writing in the Huffington Post, observes the internecine squabbles of the church and responds, as a gay man, “The idea that some random people are debating my life and my love now seems strange and insulting.” He is, as he says, “over it.” There are many gay men and women who are simply over the struggles of the church. I think my own response to reading about the synod is, “Let them have whatever painful churning discussions they wish. None of it has anything to do with me or with my husband.” I don’t think members of those organizations understand how many hundreds of thousands of gay men and women were driven away by the spectacle of Christians arguing in public over the question of whether gay men and women deserve the love of the church. Those organizations who fought over this question during the last twenty or thirty years, are smaller and less vibrant because of their own careless indifference to their own principles.

We’re gone now. Even if Pope Francis’s Synod on the Family by chance discovers the Christian way to respond to gay families, it will find that it is promulgating its new discoveries to pews emptied of gay people. For myself, I can’t imagine ever going back.

Yesterday was National Coming Out Day, and I would join in the fun but I’m out and everybody I know (who’s in that situation) is out, and the coming out is now for other people. Cheers for them, it’s a big moment.

But a comment. Every time coming out comes up—and it comes up all the time because there are so many gay folk, and most of us understand that a person doesn’t just come out once, he or she comes out again and again and again as their lives progress—then we have to talk about coming out again and demonstrate that our culture hasn’t really gotten a good grip on what it is, or why it is what it is, and what it means. What we do is simplify a complicated situation. We act as if it’s a public event when really it’s deeply private, the most important parts of which are shielded from the public eye. 

Coming Out Day is an annual event celebrated since 1988 "to promote a safe world for LGBT individuals to live truthfully and openly.”  This quotation, from Bill in Portland, on Daily Kos Friday, a Democratic, leftist blog I read all the time and have linked to occasionally, gets at the heart of our societal confusion about coming out. The essential problem with what Bill in Portland has said is that he assumes that in some way the person who has not come out yet is not living truthfully. The way this is usually put is that the person who has not come out is not being honest with himself. That is absolutely not true. In almost every case, the person who has not come out knows that he or she is gay. That person is not coming out for any of several reasons, the most frequent being that the world is unsafe and the person is protecting himself. And that’s OK.

Coming out has several parts. There is my consciousness of myself (“I am a fifteen year old boy”), my consciousness of my sexual desires (“I think I want the boy in the locker room who is two years older than I am”), my awareness of my culture (“Will they beat me up?”), my ignorance of what these desires mean to me (“Am I a bad person?”). I do not need to be told, in the midst of all this, that gay people think I am being dishonest. I know exactly who I am and what my desires are. 

What the gay community is really doing when it starts laying this on the fifteen-year-old kid, is this: The community wants the fifteen-year-old to be open to the community. For its own political reasons, it wants the fifteen-year-old to be public so as to increase the power of the community. 

Now, to be clear. No kid owes me anything. Let me say that again. No kid owes me anything. If the gay person who has not come out finds his situation tolerable, then he should not be hounded by us with charges of dishonesty.  A person’s sexuality is that person’s alone. He does not owe information about that sexuality to any other soul on this planet. This is what freedom means. 

Publishers are businesses and so need to make money. Nobody disagrees with this. As Dan D’Addario said in Salon  last year,  “Publishing is not a charitable endeavor.” Publishers choose book manuscripts to publish and market to a public that it hopes will buy, so the publisher can make a profit. But this is difficult. How can you be sure that you know what the public will buy? 

In 1912, Marcel Proust submitted the first volume of In Search of Lost Time to the Parisian publisher Eugene Fasquelle, who turned it down, saying “he didn’t want to risk publishing something ‘so different from what the public is used to reading.’” (Lydia Davis, “Introduction,” Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust, ebook, Penguin Books, 2002). Fasquelle’s fears neatly encapsulate the whole process of publishing.

We have the writer, the book, the publisher, and the reader. Here, the publisher is afraid of not giving the reader what he wants, which is admirable. But it is not clear that the publisher knows what the reader wants. A best seller? Something new and utterly different? Something major? In the 100 years since In Search of Lost Time was first turned down by a fearful publisher, it has been all of these things, sometimes at the same time. What is clear is that if the publisher asks that the manuscript be a “best seller,” then small minorities like LGBTQ are not going to be able to make it be a “best seller” without significant help from other minorities or the dominant culture. The point here is that all LGBTQ books that get published are going to have to be, to some extent, cross-over books. 

This is where we are now, and it is a terrible place for us to be. Our LGBTQ writers cannot write for us without also writing for a certain percentage of straight people. The financial demands put on each book by the publisher make it impossible to publish a gay novel. What if what the writer wants to say amounts, in effect, to a severe criticism of the straight community? Or, what if what the writer wants is to write a book for us alone. 

Dan D’Addario summarized what the publishers want in a manuscript: nothing controversial. Controversy reduces sales, apparently. They want cross-over books. And they don’t want gay characters who are angry. Reading that, I thought, Ah ha! So that’s why no publisher bought any of my books in the last twenty-five years. Since I believe that many gay people are angry—and have deep reason to be angry—that’s what I write about. And here is the reason that New York agent said, “This is a wonderful book. But no publisher in New York will publish it.”

Holy shit. What’s to do? Ebooks. It may happen, in this current surge of support for the LGBTQ community, that eventually other communities aside from our own will come to understand our anger and therefore give us access to American publishing. Until that happens, we can do it ourselves. Ebooks. And we can learn how to explore our own lives and to discover that our lives are more than merely coming-out stories, more than merely adolescent fictions, more than merely beach reading.

As I said two days ago in my last post,

"We  are serious people. We confronted AIDS. We survived Reagan and Bush (1) and Bush (2), we have learned to work the political system, we have gotten gay marriage in some places, and we have fought against DADT and are fighting against DOMA. We are transforming what marriage means in this country and what this country considers a family. As gay people, we have fought in the great battles of our time. We have been heroic and successful. We have been fighters. We have preserved those aspects of ourselves which were unique. But our literature doesn’t reflect those things."

Ari Ezra Waldman has put up a post on Towleroad discussing what’s happening at the Supreme Court right now (3:35 pm, September 29, 2014). They’re meeting for the first time since June to consider petitions for certiorari. Seven of these petitions concern marriage equality from various states. Waldman’s post is informative and something to keep track of while we wait to find out what SCOTUS decision is, apparently sometime next week.

Here is the link.

Coming out is a big subject, it’s important to just about all of us, it means many different things to different ones of us, and it’s changing all the time.
I had a friend in college—we never talked about our sexuality back in 1957—and at first we took the same path after graduation. He went to graduate school and I did, and then I got married to a woman and went into teaching in the midwest. I had children. He came out during graduate school, started a small business, and had a group of people he worked with who were gay or gay friendly and who knew he was gay. He made a success of his business and is still there now. I left teaching, divorced my wife, and came out. I started writing. Occasionally I exchange letters with my friend from college. We write about being gay and coming out and our lives now.
Now, even though we are the same age (75 years old) and both out, the quality of our being out is very different. I think that probably it has been hard for each one of us. Being gay was hard in our generation. But it’s been hard in different ways for the two of us. He was out far longer than I was, and I think it must have been hard for him being gay in the South. It may be that he had to develop protective measures in his business and in his social life. Today he is an admired, successful business person, working largely within the system. When I divorced my wife and came out, I began to become a rebel, very publicly violating closely held values in the community I lived in at the time. My birth family were  deeply offended by my coming out, and for a long time I lost my place in that family. (I must say I managed—because all three of us wanted it—to maintain a close, loving relationship with my two children, which I still have.) It may be that once one becomes a rebel, it is difficult to stop being one. At least, I have not found a way to make that difficult transition. The only way I could come out was to get to a point where I no longer cared very much what other people of my generation thought about gay people. I’ve have been out for thirty years now, and I can’t imagine going back to a place where I cared very much what people think about me. I am not a part of the community of straight white people that I used to be a part of. I had to fight to get where I am, and some of that residual anger still hangs around me, like the odor of tobacco hangs around a person who has recently smoked a cigarette. It is my rebelliousness that fueled my drive to write my novels. My friend from college and I differ, at least in part, because of the way we came out, and when we did it, and where we did it, and, of course, why we did it.


None of us are given entire freedom to choose the moment or the conditions under which we come out. It is apparent that Matthew Shepard did not choose that moment—tied to a rail fence on the prairie above Laramie—to come out, and Jason Collins and Michael Sam were careful even while they were courageous. It is true for gay people, as for every other person in the world, that we have to play the hand we’re dealt. That’s what makes my coming out so very different from yours and is a major part of what makes me different from you. 

I have just finished reading Sodom and Gomorrah, the fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time, in the Penguin edition. It is a novel whose major theme is Time—we age, all of us, and lose our youth, we lose our memories of our past, we forget the people who mattered to us, and we lose our memories of our lives. The principal subject of In Search of Lost Time could be said to be homosexuality. The Baron de Charlus is one of the great literary creations of any century as he goes out into the night, decked out in his rouge and heavy powder, in search of rough trade. By the time the novel ends, after seven volumes, just about everybody is seen to be homosexual. It is a novel that I—being me and my age—would predictably find fascinating. Decay—the decay of youth into age, the decay of Parisian society, the decay of beauty into ugliness—is one aspect of the theme. Rejuvenation is another aspect—the revivifying qualities of beauty, the kindness of the narrator’s mother and grandmother and of Charles Swann, and, it ought to be said, the immense amounts of money various characters inherit unexpectedly, almost as many as are killed at the front in the Great War. Most of Proust’s themes come together at the end in a large reception given by the Princesse de Guermantes, and what the reader notices first is that the people at the party are not the ones he expected to see there. Even the Princesse de Guermantes is not the same person we have known. There are beautiful young people at the reception, so beautiful nobody much cares who their parents were or how they got invited. A man who has reached advanced age speaks easily to a man a third his age because he forgets for a moment how radically things have changed since he was the age of the young man he’s talking to. Time is destructive, but it’s also the source of rejuvenation. A younger generation is on the way in just as the older generation is on the way out. So finely balanced is this book that it is impossible to tell whether it is a comedy or a tragedy.

Proust suggests that the past can be recovered by art, by the novel he will write, which will become In Search of Lost Time. Marcel Proust is gay, and In Search of Lost Time is an important gay novel of the early twentieth century. Probably the most important gay novel ever. For that reason, it ought to be read. The gay community has other, more important reasons for reading In Search of Lost Time. It sheds light on a culture aside from our own that has undergone radical change, and it speaks to a people whose losses have been immense and profound and suggests a way of recovering the past that has been lost. Finally, it suggests the shape of the future. It’s the paradox of art. Even as In Search of Lost Time draws to a close at the Princesse de Guermantes’s reception, as Proust closes his harsh comic exposure of Parisian society as social climbers, prostitutes, and fornicators and liars, driven by money, clothed in their ancient titles and rich clothes, the reader knows that Proust’s great novel was written in the same social world that the novel judges so harshly. If there are liars and fornicators and snobs in turn-of-the-century Paris, there are also writers of genius. That genius was one of us, and that fact should be celebrated.

We had a moment this past week when we were shown exactly how far we have to go before we reach freedom. 

Anna Paquin, she says, is bisexual, married to the actor Stephen Moyer, and Larry King found out about it, and the result, for several days, has been all over the web, two examples of which are here and here. King wanted to know how you could be bisexual and married at the same time. People focus on how clueless King is about bisexuality, but it seems to me that almost everybody is pretty clueless about all these matters.

Remember how exercised people got three years ago when John Travolta wouldn’t come out (here and here) just because, people said, he had been caught having sex with some male body? I think what the raft of marriage equality states have done is to make it OK for people who will say “I’m gay.” Then there are the people who say, “I’m straight.” All those folks are OK, and we can treat them with respect and dignity. That leaves all the rest of humanity out there, neither gay nor straight, and they’re the weirdos. This is what we’ve been doing for the last several years, setting up a system where we have, instead of one approved sexuality, with everyone else a weirdo, now we have two sexualities, and everybody else who is not in those two is a weirdo. We’ve set up this system so that to get respect and dignity—in Justice Kennedy’s phrases—we have to come out and call ourselves either gay or straight. 

Now we have bisexuality, which so confused Larry King. This means we can choose among three options. That’s better than being confined to two, I guess.

Choosing from among a limited number of options is still a mechanism of control that people who are approved impose on people who are still out there. 

I had it several years ago, when a man I used to know said to me, “Well, if you were married, you must have been bisexual.” I said, “No. I was always gay.” He looked at me, worried, his arm in the air, looking for something to point to that would resolve his discomfort. It was as if his world was divided into two—those who were married, and those who were bisexual, and everything would be OK if everybody got in one or the other of those two groups. Here I was claiming to be a member of both of them, at the same time, and that made him uncomfortable. This is so because, once we define ourselves by coming out and saying, “I’m gay,” or “I’m straight,” we have to act like the other members of that group. Men who claim to be gay can’t marry women. Men who say they are straight can’t suck cock. But of course, they do it all the time. And people who act like gay people refuse to take on the label.

Well, it’s not the people who get it wrong, it’s our words, the way we think about all these things. It may be that  “gay” and “straight” have about lived out their usefulness. We’ve reached a point where we do not need words that describe one kind of person and one pattern of behavior. And we have certainly lived beyond the point where we can attach a word to people, and then judge them by whether they match the supposed requirements of the word. People may be too various for that. It may be that we should assume that all sexual states are temporary and that no sexual states are exclusive—unless we choose to make it so. You can’t know anything about my sexuality unless I tell you personally, and then you’ll have to ask again next time.  

In these ways, it may be that the word gay has been bleached of all meaning and that the term gay activist likewise has no meaning left. What we can fight for, because it does have meaning, is the right of all of us to live our own lives, free of those who think they have a right to know and a right to impose their thoughts on the rest of us. 

This guy, who wrote a comment on Gawker dealing with whether or not James Franco was gay, has it right:

On July 7, 1984, forty years ago, in Bangor, Maine, Charles Howard was murdered by violent, homophobic boys. After his death, people who knew him found themselves rootless, without a clear way to move forward or a clear rationale for living, and without knowing who their friends were and who their enemies, in a world that was profoundly unsafe. I wrote Ceremonies, a novel inspired by what a community of gay people of Bangor, Maine, did during the summer of 1984, after our friend Charles Howard was murdered. It is composed of first-person accounts, and the book has the effect of a very intense conversation among people in crisis, who know themselves and each other well and don’t demand definitive resolution of the crisis they are in.

In Race Point Light a man who was born before World War II looked for a way he could feel himself to be one of us. From his childhood, he knew that he didn’t belong in his family or with his classmates, and all through his growing up, he looked for a way to live in which he could think well of himself. He refused to be a rebel, and always searched for a way to be that would allow him to be queer and also respected. He learned that his culture was never going to respect a gay person and that it was always going to demand acquiescence to its sexual rules. He rebelled. He divorced his wife, left a tenured position in the University, and moved to Boston, where he explored what it meant to come out and be in rebellion against his culture and what that said about his culture. Race Point Light is the story of one man’s coming to rebellion. Along the way way, it is a story that touches on most of the major events that happened in the US between 1939 and 2003. It is an intimate, epical story of one man’s reluctant and triumphant rebellion.

Adam in the Morning tells the story of one man’s perception of the Stonewall Riots in Sheridan Square, in late June 1969, the most important event in the last sixty-five years of the history of gay liberation. In the beginning, before anything was decided, three men and a woman gather around Bo Ravich, beginning an hour after Lt Pine started his raid on the Stonewall Inn. These people hated the cops who came into Sheridan Square with billyclubs and arrested everybody they could get into the paddywagons and bloodied everybody they couldn’t get into the wagons. Mitzi, a street kid, fifteen years old, who hasn’t had a home the three years they’ve known her is one of Bo’s gang, too, and they are concerned that her courage will take her too far, and she will be killed by the cops. None of these people have any difficulty being gay, but they know that they are in rebellion—and they hope that the Revolution, the thing that all radical leftists in the late sixties hoped for and tried to make happen, is beginning now. They ask themselves the questions they need answers to now—What is a gay man? What does a gay man do? Who do we fight along side? What does it mean, to fall in love? They read Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and they know that the oppressed man “finds his freedom in and through violence.” They talk, they have sex, they fight the cops, and they go home and have breakfast when it is all over for the day, and bind up their wounds, and talk and have sex again, and go to sleep. The book moves fast—intense conversations, battles in Sheridan Square against New York’s finest—and exhaustion is what they feel most, and at the end, they find that what they’ve done is good.

Today—July 7, 2014—is the fortieth anniversary of the death of Charles Howard in Bangor, Maine. I have asked myself the question in these forty years, if there is a simple plain statement that describes what I have been doing in my writing in these forty years. One simple plain statement is this one:  All of my books are about gay people fighting back. And, as you will know, we’ve been incredibly successful, too. We did fight back, and we are successful today, in 2014, because we fought back in the nineteen-fifties and sixties and seventies and eighties and nineties. We fought, we weren’t nice. 

Hillary and Bill Clinton, headed into the 2016 election, have to deal with what they did in the nineties. Many people have this problem. Senator McCain regularly acts as if he didn’t do what we know he did. 

Hillary was asked this past week about her views on marriage equality—she was famously against it during the election in 2008—and whether it could be said that she changed or the American public changed. In her interview with Terri Gross, Hillary says, “I did not grow up even imagining gay marriage and I don't think you probably did either. This was an incredibly new and important idea that people on the front lines of the gay rights movement began to talk about and slowly but surely convinced others of the rightness of that position.” 

The trouble with this—none of us even thought about it until a few people led the way—is that it leaves out the moral consequences of a person’s failure. Everybody has seen pictures of the couples who are finally allowed to get married, couples who have been together twenty or thirty years, and have been legally prevented from federal marriage rights in the eighteen years since DOMA was passed and signed by Bill Clinton. Children have grown up to adulthood without ever having married parents. Gay families—parents and children—have been denied all financial benefits that the federal government makes them entitled to.  After DOMA was enacted, states had the right to enact what Justice Bader Ginsberg called “marriage lite” but the presence of DOMA made it extremely unlikely that any state would pass legislation that opened up marriage to full equality. DOMA was very seriously injurious to every single GLBTQ person. It was a stigma which GLBTQ people carried. Even if you want to get married, you can’t.

Hillary Clinton was implicated in all this, and consequently she has an obligation to acknowledge it. If a person doesn’t do the right thing, it is incumbent upon that person to acknowledge that her failure has serious consequences no matter how good her excuses. Doing the right thing now is insufficient if she doesn’t also acknowledge her past. 

The public  consensus on marriage equality is changing fast, and many people are caught in the situation Hillary is caught in. As a kindness to everybody else in her predicament, Hillary ought to show us all how to do it. She should say this: “I was wrong in the nineties about marriage equality and about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and about DOMA. That hurt many people seriously. My thinking has evolved since then, led largely by the leaders of the GLBTQ movement.” 

I can vote for Hillary Clinton. But I do want her to get her thinking straight about this. The lives of many Americans have been seriously damaged because of what she and her husband did in the nineties, and that ought to be acknowledged. We ought to hear her say, “Yes, I did that. That hurt people. That was wrong.”

Having said that, she would then be completely free to say, “I can now say, I am completely committed to marriage equality.” And I would be free to vote for her.