But no matter how many times I watch the four police officers beat up Rodney King, it still looks indefensible to me, and to the eight-year-old, too. Three times he watched the videotape and three times he brought his arms over his head in a double arch, as though to ward off baton blows. And finally he said, “Are they really allowed to do that?” It broke my heart, but it could have been worse. I pictured a mother and an eight-year-old watching the same clip, both of them black, the son asking the same question the mother forced to reply, “Yes, baby, they are.” The lawyers told the jurors that they had to pay attention to what happened before the videotape started rolling. Here’s what came before: Ronald Reagan, Willie Horton, rotten schools, no jobs, falling plaster, broken boilers, David Duke. Years and years of rage and racism, measured now in angry words and broken glass.
Everyone wants to attack the jurors. Let’s be honest, white folks: They walked into that room with the baggage most of us carry, the baggage of stereotypes and ignorance and pure estrangement from African-Americans. They walked in from a world that thinks the cops are the DMZ between us and them. And the defense made the most of it.
It makes you wonder whether the jury system, that bedrock of our society, can truly work when there is a fissure in our foundation so deep that sense disappears into it. It makes you wonder how many others could say, as one of the King jurors did the other night on television, that it didn’t seem particularly significant that, just before the beating, one of the cops in the case said he’d had a call to a black household that was “right out of Gorillas in the Mist.” In some of our kids’ schools they do this sensitivity exercise in which the blue-eyed kids treat the browneyed kids like garbage for the day. But at the end of the day lots of the brown-eyed kids go back to being just white kids with brown eyes. They move back across a deep divide. We wore ribbons to show our support for the hostages; we wear ribbons to show our concern for AIDS. I wondered about ribbons to repulse racism and then thought about how naive I was, on my side of the divide, as I watched Los Angeles burn.
It’s as naive as thinking that because African-Americans go to Harvard and sit in the next booth at Burger King, it cancels out the neon sign that blinks NIGGER in white minds. It was rich with irony, that the fires raged as the last episode of Cosby was aired, the sitcom that let white America believe that being black was as easy as being brown-eyed, that their lives were just like ours except that their sweaters were better.
Somebody’s daughter was on the news from Howard University, and she said that we had lied to her, that her parents and all the rest of us had given the impression that while racism still existed, it was no longer legal. But the Rodney King verdict taught her different. So smart. So sad. Even George Bush was wondering how to explain to his grandchildren.
I take solace in the fact that the outrage seems felt by both whites and blacks. Some white empathy may have dissipated with the violence; that same juror seemed to take considerable satisfaction in saying that what they were doing was much worse than what those cops had done. One black woman stood watching looters, tears rolling down her face, and said she couldn’t understand how they could bring their children to steal. “I’m ashamed of my own people,” she said.
I know that feeling. So why does it seem so impossible for her and me and millions like us to have a meeting of the minds until finally the met minds take precedence over the closed ones?
In 1968 the Kerner Commission released a report that talked of two Americas, one black, one white, separate and unequal. And I looked at my eight-year-old and thought that maybe in 2018, he would write the fiftieth-anniversary piece saying that nothing much had changed. I wondered if he would remember how he felt this last terrible week, or whether he would just be another brown-eyed child. I’ve tried to teach him that prejudice is intolerable, but watching the videotape he learned a different lesson. I wanted better for him. For all of them.
ERIN GO BRAWL
March 14, 1992
I never felt entirely at home at St. Patrick’s Day parades. As constituted by the Ancient Order of Hibernians—emphasis on the Ancient—they reminded me until recently of two perceptions of the Irish: as silver-haired civil servants redolent of Old Spice, and as intoxicated teenagers throwing up into the hedges of Central Park.
Neither of those is me, and I am Irish and proud of it. But then, both of those stereotypes have their limits. A woman was grand marshal of the parade not long ago, and the ranks are now filled with black and Latino children who attend the city’s parochial schools. The parade has changed.
But not enough.
Ethnic stereotypes are misshapen pearls, sometimes with a sandy grain of truth at their center. It is true that my forebears were the folks for whom the paddy wagon was named, because of the number of them taken away drunk and disorderly on long-ago Saturday nights. The words Tammany Hall speak for themselves. We are storytellers, accomplished mourners, devout Catholics.
And we are none of these. Because all of them are stereotypes.
And now we are stereotyped as antediluvian bigots, because the Ancient Order of Hibernians—still Ancient—decided to deny the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization permission to march in the parade. First the organization was told there was no room, which is a familiar line to anyone who has read the Christmas story.
Then, after the mayor said that room could be made, the addition to the parade was judged “impractical,” which is familiar to anyone who has dealt with a bureaucracy and is a fancy way of saying “we don’t want to.”
Finally, the gay group was told that its members could march if they melted into other groups and did not carry their banner, which is a familiar request to all who have ever been forced to deny what they are, closeted by the will of the majority.
Ethnic stereotypes are sometimes based on observed behavior, but they ignore complexity, change, and individuality. My earliest perception of my countrymen was of people shaped by blighted potatoes and empty stomachs, people who held fast to what they had and so sometimes had a closed fist. Like many immigrant groups, they found contempt and hatred everywhere, and so they drew together, in neighborhoods, churches, fraternal organizations.
Some characteristics of the Irish I know and love have always seemed to me contradictory. Hail fellows well met, without being met at all. The unknowable extroverts. It is no accident that some have taken to professions that give the illusion of being among the people while remaining essentially separate. Newspapermen, who are of events but outside them. Politicos, who always stand apart in the crowd. Priests.
Stereotypes, of course. If you see it differently, I understand.
But understand that the stereotypes about gay people grow not from small knowledge inflated but from ignorance writ large. “No queers in the parade,” people on Staten Island shouted at the mayor. These are the cries of those who don’t know any gay people—or, more accurately, don’t know they know any—and so create the bogeyman. Pederasts, drag queens, instead of the reality: the man at the next desk, the girl you went to high school with. Ordinary people who are gay. And Irish. And proud.
I can’t imagine why those people want to march after what has happened. The A.O.H. has made a mess of this. When it barred gay people, there was the suspicion that it was reflecting the faith of its fathers, which considers homosexual acts sinful. But when it also barred a group of kids in wheelchairs—kids! in wheelchairs!—it appeared that it had forgotten that faith entirely. Hope those guys never get a chance to run Lourdes.
This is a parade that should belong to everyone. But they turned it into something that belongs to none of us, or at least none of us who have been stung by stereotype, none of us who were raised on the memory of the signs that said NO IRISH because all employers were sure the Irish were lazy and unreliable.
The members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians should remember those signs. They tried to hang a variation on Fifth Avenue this year. And in doing so they tarnished not the gay community but their own. Eve
rything they’ve done stinks of stereotype, of the small-minded Irishman. For all of us who know that stereotypes exist to reduce understanding, not to enlarge it, I say they should be ashamed of themselves.
NO CLOSET SPACE
May 27, 1992
It was twenty years ago next month that an elementary school teacher named Jeanne Manford made history. She walked down a street in New York City carrying the sort of poster paper her students sometimes used for projects, except that printed on it were these words: PARENTS of gays UNITE in SUPPORT for our CHILDREN
At her side during the Gay Pride march was her son, Morty, her golden boy, the one the teacher once told her would be a senator someday. When he was in high school he said he wanted to see a psychologist, and the psychologist called the Manfords in and told them that the golden boy was gay. But it never changed his mother’s mind about his glow.
Morty’s story, and his mother’s, too, are contained in a new oral history of the gay struggle, Making History, by Eric Marcus. The cheering thing about the book is how far we have come since the days when newspaper editors felt free to use “homo” in headlines. The distressing thing is how far we have to go, not in the world alone, where homophobia remains one of the last acceptable bigotries, but in our homes, where our children learn that the world is composed exclusively of love and sex between men and women. Even when Mom and Dad have gay friends and raised consciousness, there is too often a silence that surrounds other ways of life and love. And silence begets distance.
Distance between parent and child is one of the saddest things discussed in Making History: the parents who try to commit their gay children to mental hospitals, the ones who erect a gravestone and send an obituary to the paper when they discover their daughter is a lesbian, or the ones who were told nothing because their children considered the truth untellable.
Greg Brock, a newspaperman, describes how he came out to his parents the day before he was to appear on the Oprah Winfrey show. Thirty-five years old and the man had never spoken to his mother and father of his central reality. “I was about to destroy my dad’s life,” he recalled.
Is this really what we want, to obsess about ear infections and reading readiness and then discover many years too late that we were either unaware or unaccepting of who our children were? To keen “What will I tell my friends?” when our kids try to talk about their lives?
In the same borough in which Morty Manford grew up and his mother taught, a Queens school board has rejected a curriculum that encourages respect for all families, including those headed by gay and lesbian parents. Consider that decision, not in terms of gay rights, but in terms of the children.
Given statistical estimates, the board is telling one out of ten kids that the life they will eventually lead is not part of the human program. Among their students are surely boys and girls who will discover they are gay and who, from their earliest years, will have learned that there is something wrong with them. Learned it from classmates, from teachers. Worst of all, from their own mothers and fathers.
Actually, it’s probably the mothers and fathers who need that curriculum most. All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.
All parents should know that when they consider this subject unspeakable, they may be forever alienating their own child and causing enormous pain. Paulette Goodman, president of the Federation of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, likens it to her experience as a Jew in occupied Paris. “I know what it’s like to be in the closet,” she recalled. “I know all too well.”
Jeanne Manford didn’t want a closet. Her Morty was the same golden boy after she found out he was gay as he was before. She was with him at the Gay Pride march and with him in the gay rights movement.
And she was with him when he died a little more than a week ago of AIDS, almost twenty years to the day after she wrote her unconditional love on poster paper for all the world to see. She does not reproach herself. She loved and accepted her child the way he was. In a perfect world, this would be the definition of “parent” in the dictionary. The point is not what you’ll tell your friends at the bridge table. It is what you’ll tell yourself at the end.
WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE
June 24, 1992
The story of Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer had a certain déjà-vu-all-over-again quality. It might as easily have been the story of Sergeant Leonard Matlovich or Sergeant Miriam Ben Shalom or one of several other soldiers whose job histories included decorations, promotions, excellent evaluations.
For Colonel Cammermeyer, the honors included a Bronze Star for her work as a nurse in Vietnam and recognition as the Veterans Administration Nurse of the Year. None of it made any difference when she was dismissed from the Washington State National Guard, one of thousands of Americans whose exemplary service has paled beside the military’s determination to boot gay soldiers.
Many in the service will tell you that this is a difficult issue, as is the question of women in combat and other adjustments the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines have been asked to make to the twentieth century.
It is not difficult at all. It comes down to this: Will we continue to support one of America’s largest and best-known institutions as it, not simply by custom but by regulation, engages in the rankest forms of discrimination?
The question is particularly apt as the Navy finds itself embroiled in a sickening sexual-harassment scandal. If you were wondering where your defense dollars go, almost $200,000 of them were spent to fly naval aviators to a military frat party in Las Vegas last year at which Navy women were passed down a gauntlet of their male colleagues, grabbed and mauled in a form of hand-to-hand combat not taught in basic training. An aide to an admiral had to resort to biting one flyboy who pushed his hand inside her bra during this group grope, which apparently had become something of a Navy tradition.
There is wailing and gnashing of teeth about this by the brass, a search for blame and underlying cause. It seems never to have occurred to them that if you treat women like second-class citizens by denying them promotion to combat positions, your male personnel will get the idea that they can treat them like second-class citizens in other ways, too. And that if you make homosexuality the modern equivalent of godless Communism, then hetero conduct in even its most abusive forms may seem sanctioned, even blessed.
The Vegas incident renders almost comical the fear of allowing gay people into the military. Same-sex propositions seem sedate compared with being pushed down a long hallway of guys with nuclear hands and Cro-Magnon mores.
But that is not the underlying cause of this ban. It is the perceived comfort level of straight male soldiers. The term of art is “cohesiveness,” what we civilians might call male bonding. In other words, they may have to fight or serve beside those with whom they lack proper kinship.
This is the argument once used to keep black soldiers in segregated units, a bit of military history that seems unthinkable today. And it has also been used to oppose allowing women in combat. (There’s also the argument of the pedestal, the idea that male soldiers will spend all their time protecting their female counter-parts. I imagine the admiral’s aide would have some choice words about that.) It’s funny to read about a new Navy training program that, for the first time in history, features sexually integrated boot camp. After all the arguments about fatal distractions, they’ve discovered that putting men and women together actually improves training and fosters the much-vaunted cohesion. “It’s more cooperative and there’s more teamwork,” said one instructor. Armed forces, meet real life.
According to the General Accounting Office, the prohibition on gay people in the military costs us at least $27 million a year, given the fact that a thousand men and women are dismissed and replaced. That’s an absurd waste of time and money.
But more important is the fact that the military continues to piously justify retaining regulations that are no more than codified prejudice. Of
ficials sometimes say this is the will of the people; if they are keeping track, seven in ten think women should be permitted to occupy combat positions and 50 percent see no reason to keep gay people out of the military.
Instead of stooping to a comfort level of ignorance, the military should reflect the simple notion of performance as the gauge of job fitness. Besides, maybe their notion of comfort level is all wrong. Maybe there are no homophobes in foxholes.
EVAN’S TWO MOMS
February 5, 1992
Evan has two moms. This is no big thing. Evan has always had two moms—in his school file, on his emergency forms, with his friends. “Ooooh, Evan, you’re lucky,” they sometimes say. “You have two moms.” It sounds like a sitcom, but until last week it was emotional truth without legal bulwark. That was when a judge in New York approved the adoption of a six-year-old boy by his biological mother’s lesbian partner. Evan. Evan’s mom. Evan’s other mom. A kid, a psychologist, a pediatrician. A family.
The matter of Evan’s two moms is one in a series of events over the last year that lead to certain conclusions. A Minnesota appeals court granted guardianship of a woman left a quadriplegic in a car accident to her lesbian lover, the culmination of a seven-year battle in which the injured woman’s parents did everything possible to negate the partnership between the two. A lawyer in Georgia had her job offer withdrawn after the state attorney general found out that she and her lesbian lover were planning a marriage ceremony; she’s brought suit. The computer company Lotus announced that the gay partners of employees would be eligible for the same benefits as spouses.
Add to these public events the private struggles, the couples who go from lawyer to lawyer to approximate legal protections their straight counterparts take for granted, the AIDS survivors who find themselves shut out of their partners’ dying days by biological family members and shut out of their apartments by leases with a single name on the dotted line, and one solution is obvious.
Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private Page 4