Pride Month: Remembering Ellen Degeneres' Coming Out on National T.V. Twenty Years Ago

Pride month is a good time to point you to the commemoration Ellen Degeneres did on 28 April of her historic coming-out episode twenty years ago. It's on my mind today because I save episodes of Ellen's show to watch as I slog on my treadmill daily, and have just gotten to that episode in my queue of saved shows. Steve and I just finished watching it.

Ellen Degeneres, the Catholic Bishops, and Losing Control of the Conversation about Spirituality

I feel pretty sure I've mentioned to readers more than once that part of my normal daily routine is to slog, slog away at a treadmill (on days when the weather or our schedule doesn't permit us a long walk) while I watch the Ellen Degeneres show on t.v.

Good Gays, Bad Gays: Gay Love and the Play Book of Churches of Main Street USA

These days, people are afraid of Ellen. And her love.

Let me back up. People are afraid of Ellen. Ellen Degeneres.

Yes, that Ellen. The one with the talk show, who laughs at anything with uproarious delight, raises money for victims of Hurricane Katrina. America’s gal pal. The BFF we all wish we had had in high school, particularly us gay men. The one without a mean-girl bone in her body, whose humor is never at anybody else’s expense, who makes a place for everybody at her table.

That Ellen. And her love.

It’s the love thing that’s the problem. First of all, she talks about it, not in a showy or combative way, but as if it’s just there, a fact, as solid as the table she limbos over every afternoon on her show. What’s talked about might exist, and that’s an intolerable thought to those who don’t want gay love to exist.

It’s the love. Not Ellen. It’s Ellen, America’s gal pal, claiming that her love counts, that it’s love just like George’s love for Martha or Laura and Rob Petrie’s love for each other.

Love is the problem. It’s the problem the love police handle constantly these days. The religious right, people who profess a religion centered on the claim that love is what it’s all about, the path to heaven, the very nature of God: they seem to be spending an amazing amount of time these days fighting love.

The love of others, that is to say, their own being divinely sanctioned and stamped with ecclesial approval. The love of others they want—need—to keep in subordinate positions. One wonders how they find the time to love, these love police of the religious right—to love as their religion enjoins them to do. How can those fixated on 24-7 policing of others’ love have time left over to keep love alive in their own relationships?

The problem with love, the kind of love Ellen has for Portia, is that it trumps the rabid need of right-wing movements in church and society to reduce being gay to sex—to reduce gay human beings to something instrumental and sordid, something useful in games over which those being used have no control, games played for political goals that go far beyond controlling sexual morality.

As long as we can get a majority of people to think sex (in all the lurid manifestations we plant in people’s minds) when they think of gay and lesbian human beings, we can continue playing those games with impunity, no matter how many people are hurt by them. But when people begin to think love, to see faces of people they love (BFFs, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters) when the words “gay” or “lesbian” pop up, the game is over.

When people think love as they see a gay or lesbian person, they will also inevitably end up thinking hate when they see the faces of many key players of right-wing politics in church and society. And they’ll wonder how those committed to increasing love in the world and its families could, for so long now, have sought to effect precisely the opposite in so many human lives and the lives of so many families.

When I think of playing games with other people’s lives, I can’t help thinking of the churches. Throughout these blog postings, I keep (broken record, one-song repertoire) calling the churches to accountability.

I keep calling on church members to take responsibility for the manifold ways in which hate dresses as love in church rhetoric, to examine not the words but the effects of the words. It’s there that we find whether love or hate is at work, in the effect our statements and creeds and books of discipline have.

Do the words churches speak engender respect for LGBT persons? Do they foster a desire on the part of church members to get to know LGBT persons? Do they lead to a commitment by congregations to hear real-life stories of real-life LGBT human beings?

Do they lead to an attempt on the part of churches to understand the love manifest in gay lives, even when that love differs from the kind of love we take for granted as normative?

If what the churches say (and do) doesn’t lead to these embodiments of love, then perhaps the churches need to ask themselves if they are, in fact, involved in something other than love, when it comes to the gay community today. In particular, perhaps the churches need to examine whether they are involved in the same noxious game-playing with gay lives that is now being exposed as hate masquerading as love in many political circles.

Readers of my blog may have concluded that I think the churches of Main Street USA don’t include many gay members. I don’t think that this is the case, at all. In fact, I think the churches of the radical middle are full of gay members.

But those gay members are bound by both spoken and unspoken rules in many churches to keep their presence hidden, to disguise themselves, to become different people than who they are the rest of the week, once they walk through the church door. The price they pay for “inclusion” in the Christian community and its institutions is to comport themselves on church premises as good gays, rather than bad gays.

If my previous postings have given the impression that I think churches don’t want gay members, let me correct that impression. Many churches of Main Street USA would stop functioning immediately if they expelled their LGBT members. Gays are everywhere in the church: singing in the choir and directing it; teaching Sunday School; ushering and organizing hospitality ministries and ministry to the sick and shut-in; playing the organ. Gays are everywhere in the churches: standing in the pulpit preaching on Sunday, and at the altar celebrating the eucharist.

It’s not gays the churches of the radical middle don’t want—not precisely. It’s bad gays that they want to keep at bay. The good gays, the ones that are everywhere, but silent, hidden, apologetic, meek and mild: these the churches want, need, can’t do without.

I’ve learned this lesson the hard way, working in church institutions. I’ve learned it teaching and doing academic administrative work in church-affiliated colleges and universities.

Before I set forth on my vocational path, I had never dreamt of myself as a bad gay. I was quite decidedly good. My whole self-image depended on being the good small-town Sunday-School boy of Main Street USA whom I was raised to be. Heck (I couldn't say "hell"), I wasn't even sure I was gay. It was probably just a phase I was going through. I'd outgrow it when I met the right woman, sat down to a table spread with tea and sympathy.

I was deferential, mild-mannered, intent on pleasing others, constantly fearful of hurting the feelings of others. I was also closeted, tormented by self-doubt and guilt about the inclination of a love that I really could not deny in my heart of hearts. I lived in a state of constant debilitating panic about being exposed.

I was a good gay. I was the kind of gay churches of Main Street USA, and their institutions, want and need.

As I’ve noted in previous postings, a number of pivotal life experiences, beginning with my brother’s death in 1991, catapulted me into a different universe altogether, right as I was offered tenure by the Catholic university at which I had taught for seven years in New Orleans when my brother died.

After this life-changing event, I was still willing to play the game church institutions dictated that I play—the don’t ask, don’t tell game. I was still willing to be the good gay, but with one crucial new proviso: I would not lie, dissimulate, live in fear, give signals that I was not equal to my colleagues. This decision, a resolute one, one that I believed to be inspired by the Spirit who calls us to live in love and truth, was one I carried into my first disastrous job experience as a bad gay, when I turned down the offer of tenure and took a job at another institution.

This experience happened at a Catholic college in North Carolina. I won’t slog through all the sordid details of my reception there in this posting. I’ve written about them elsewhere.

What I want to home in on here is the written-unwritten game book governing gay lives in church institutions in Main Street USA. At the Catholic college in North Carolina, after I had received a one-year terminal contract on the heels of a glowing evaluation, and had not been given any reason for the termination (or any written copy of the evaluation), I resigned. I did so rather than allow myself to be humiliated any further.

When this happened, a recent graduate of the college whom I had taught, a theology major with a sharp intellect and a distinguished career in the college (he has subsequently come out as a gay man), came for a visit. We did not discuss the issue of sexual orientation and the key role it played in what had happened to me at the college. Don’t ask, don’t tell required that we, well, not ask and not tell, either one of us.

Even so, my former student said something extremely illuminating, which I have thought about constantly over the years as I have sought to dissect and deal with the good-gay, bad-gay play rules in church institutions. My student told me, “You know, when you arrived here, the good old boys were out to do you in from the moment you set foot on the campus. Without saying a word, you gave a signal that you wouldn’t take any b.s. from them. You did your job, you excelled, you stood on your merits. And they hated that, and hated you for it.”

I had become a bad gay. And I didn’t even see it happening. All I did was insist on my right to be respected for the work I did, for who I was, for my integrity, for my excellence in teaching, scholarship, community service, and service to the college.

That was too much for the good old boys’ network in this Catholic-affiliated college of Main Street USA to handle. It was too much for the leaders of the United Methodist university in Florida who fired me last year (without providing any evaluation of my work at all) to handle. When gay people insist on being equal, when we insist on making sexual orientation irrelevant to our right to be at the table, we become (I have learned through painful experience) threats to those who absolutely have to see us differently, in order to use us in political games they need to play with our lives to benefit themselves.

Good gays are non-assertive, hidden, willing to let ourselves be used as doormats. I know. I have lived in that posture. It’s not a happy place to live.

Bad gays can be assertive without even trying to be. We can be tagged as assertive when we insist on what everyone else takes for granted in the church-related workplace—the simple right to be who we are, unapologetically, within all rubrics of professional decorum governing our particular vocations. When we are public about our identity, when we claim our lives and insist that they are lives and not lifestyles, we become extreme threats to the churches and church institutions of Main Street USA. We become uncontrollable.

And that is something the churches of the radical middle will not permit. They and their institutions cannot permit this, because the next step in the process of our emergence from oppression is to claim that our love counts, that it is equal to the love of heterosexual persons.

The next step is to claim that it is love, period, our gay love.

And this is, in the rule books of the churches of the radical middle (and in the institutions these churches sponsor), an intolerable step for gay people to take. It is so for all kinds of reasons, about which I plan to write in further postings on this theme.

But it is so for one central, critical reason I want to note here, a reason that has everything to do with the credibility of churches today: when gay people’s love is accepted as love, period, then what the churches do and say to gay brothers and sisters today in the name of love will eventually be revealed to be hate. Hate masquerading as love.

The churches cannot have this hate unmasked. That is, they can’t do so, and continue doing business as usual.

This is the serious, key, intolerable threat that the mere presence of gay people—bad gays who are bad simply because we refuse to apologize and hide—poses to the churches of Main Street USA today. This is why we must be driven from the table.

Week in Review: Equality Is a Moral Imperative

Another Friday. And wow. When I gathered material last night for my weekly Friday news round-up, little did I know how much the news sites and blogs would be popping this morning with fresh items worth mentioning.

Above all, the open letter Barack Obama issued yesterday to the LGBT community (and to all Americans, since we all suffer when any of us are oppressed) deserves attention. The full text may be found at today’s Bilerico Project Blog at http://www.bilerico.com/.

This statement is significant. It centers on one simple, stark claim: Equality is a moral imperative. The beloved community that constitutes America at its best is a community, rather than a collection of disparate individuals with competing interests, precisely because it regards equality as a moral imperative. The vision of American democracy at its best centers on the astonishing moral claim that all human beings are made equal by the hand of God and have an equal claim on the right to pursue their destiny without being fettered by the prejudice of others.

It’s interesting to me how this moral imperative seems to fall on deaf ears not merely among Americans to the right of the political spectrum, but also among Americans who identify as liberal. That is, it falls on deaf ears among liberals when the moral imperative involves LGBT Americans. It is still difficult for many liberals to hear the moral imperative to accord full human rights to gay human beings. It is still hard for many liberals to understand that standing in solidarity with LGBT Americans and working with us to eradicate the many barriers we experience to equality is a moral imperative involving all of us—not just gay people.

A case in point: the lively blog at my statewide “liberal” weekly newspaper the Arkansas Times. Yesterday, the paper’s editor Max Brantley excerpted Mr. Obama’s statement in a posting entitled “Today I Am an Obamaist": see www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog. The responses of bloggers to Obama’s statement have been astonishing. They’ve been deeply saddening.

There are, of course, the predictable wing-nut rantings and ravings: if you think Katrina was a disaster, just wait for what God will do to the nation when we let the mire and cess of queers rise to the top. What’s shocking to read, though, are not these predictable comments: what's shocking are the postings of self-professed liberals who say they had planned to vote Democratic in the coming election, no matter which candidate is chosen.

One poster says he will now change his vote to McCain. Many others chide Obama for having miscalculated politically. Some of these say that making this statement—that is, enunciating the clear moral imperative that binds us together as a beloved community—will drive centrist voters into the Republican fold.

The subtext of these comments is worrisome to me. For these "liberals," gay human beings are obviously still the Other. We who are gay are not the children, the brothers, the sisters of those who are content to see us still denied full human rights. We are clearly the poor unfortunates who should stand beside the table while they sit to feast, and be grateful when a crumb is dropped into our outstretched hands.

These “liberals” just haven’t yet gotten the message. They haven’t yet heard the moral imperative. The concerns—the lives—of gay human beings are somehow at a remove from their lives. Whereas they have no difficulty at all hearing the imperative for women or African Americans to be given a chance at a full human life, they have yet to hear that moral imperative when it comes to LGBT people.

And this in a state in which, a half century ago, most white people responded to the moral imperative to treat black citizens as fully human with the same timid truculence they now apply to that moral imperative in the case of their gay children, brothers, and sisters. Fifty years ago, it was politically unpopular—politically disastrous—to stand up and speak forthrightly about the full humanity of African Americans in Arkansas.

Today, we celebrate and admire those who had the courage to speak out. Those who vacillated, who sat on the fence, who calculated the political odds and did the expedient thing: their names are all but forgotten. They did not make the choice that moved our society closer to the vision of a beloved community. They deserve not to be remembered, frankly, because they obstructed rather than participated in history in the making, in the realization of the vision of the beloved community.

Speaking of remembering, a theme I have stressed repeatedly regarding gay youth like Lawrence King or Simmie Williams, whose lives were recently tragically cut short by hate crimes, this week’s Arkansas Times carries a story that has touched the depths of my soul. Leslie Newell Peacock’s “Stirring the Ashes” at www.arktimes.com discusses a horrendous event that occurred just outside Little Rock on 5 March 1959.

On that day, 21 African-American youth aged 13 to 16 died at a fire at the Negro Boys Industrial School. These teens were sleeping in a dormitory whose doors were padlocked on the outside. When a fire broke out in the adjacent chapel, they burned to death. Fourteen of the young men were so badly burnt that their bodies could not be recognized. They are buried together in an unmarked grave at a cemetery in Little Rock.

A number of these young men were placed in the Industrial School—a correctional institution for wayward black youth—on outrageously slim charges: e.g., for soaping windows at Halloween time, or for riding the bike of a white friend (with the friend’s permission). This story is a reminder of where we have come from in places such as Little Rock, when it comes to the rights of African Americans.

Just as we should not forget the names and lives of Lawrence King or Matthew Shepard or Simmie Williams, we must challenge ourselves to remember the names of Lindsey Cross, Charles L. Thomas, William Loyd Piggee, and the other young men who died in this horrible fire in 1959. The Arkansas Times article prints those names, and I, for one, will do my best to keep them in memory, as a reminder that the life of every human being counts, that the life of no one who dies tragically young due to prejudice deserves to fall into the darkness of forgetting: Equality is a moral imperative.

As I read this article side by side with the Arkansas Times blog regarding Mr. Obama’s statement yesterday—with the Cassandra-like moanings of liberals because Mr. Obama has chosen to do what is right if not politically expedient—I call to mind the Pete Seeger commemorative that Steve and I watched this past week on PBS. Since that special aired, we’ve been playing Pete Seeger’s protest songs over and over.

In a Carnegie Hall performance of that stirring anthem of the Civil Rights movement, “We Shall Overcome,” Seeger noted how much the youth of the Civil Rights struggle taught their elders. He notes that the verse, “We are not afraid,” was inspired by youths’ willingness to demonstrate fearlessly for equal rights, when their elders, both white and black, cautioned prudence and political calculation.

PBS’s choice to air this special now strikes me as fortuitous. We are at a similar turning point in our history today, with regard to the fundamental direction our nation will take. We are at a crossroads at which we must either choose to accord fundamental rights to LGBT Americans, or frankly admit that we have given up on the vision of a beloved community.

What I wish desperately to say to my “liberal” fellow citizens who are now wringing their hands about the unwisdom of Mr. Obama’s statement yesterday is, Equality is a moral imperative. I want to tell these fellow citizens that another death of any gay youth—the killing of a single other gay youth because he or she is gay—is unacceptable. We must make this a nation in which such deaths are no longer thinkable. These youth are not just the children of the biological parents who gave birth to them: they are all of our children; they are the children of you liberals who still hear the call to equality for LGBT citizens with deaf ears.

Today’s Towleroad blog contains a posting entitled “Ellen Degeneres on Lawrence King: We Must Change Our Country”: see http://www.towleroad.com/. This posting notes that on her show today, Ellen will issue an appeal for us to remember Lawrence King and to make what happened to this youth unthinkable in our nation in the future. Ellen will appeal to us to vote in the coming elections with this moral imperative in mind. The posting links to a clip of that segment of today’s “Ellen.”

And finally, I want to leave readers with a thought-provoking quote from today’s Christian Science Monitor. The Monitor carries an editorial today entitled, “What Is ‘Good Theology?’ ” The editorial excerpts a statement from Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase, in which Armstrong defines what constitutes authentic theology in the religious traditions of the world. Armstrong states:

The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology.

The one and only test of a valid religious idea . . . is that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If only all of us could hear that moral imperative today. And, in particular, would it not be inspiring if the churches examined themselves on this point, and asked whether their proclamations about LGBT human beings lead directly to practical compassion. If they lead in some other direction—if, for instance, they foster ignorance or distortion of the real lives of gay persons, or if they fuel violence in any form towards LGBT persons—it seems the conclusion is inescapable: the churches are misrepresenting the authentic Christian tradition, when they use it to support callous or destructive attitudes towards gay human beings.