This is an exciting time for gay people. There is a change in how we are viewed in the world. After being forced into punishing shadows in most of the world for too long, we now are being seen, recognized and appreciated. We are demanding our full civil rights and they are being granted—at least in enlightened nations. Even in places still ruled by ugly traditions of bigotry, overdue awareness is dawning. Since gay marriage is becoming normal, a woman may speak of her wife and a man may speak of his husband without anticipating an ignorant, rude response.

Being a gay man, woman, girl or boy is not common or ordinary but, like having blue eyes, blond hair, great artistic talent or being left-handed, it is absolutely natural. Gay people have been present on this planet, in all times, in all places, throughout all of human history. Sometimes gay men and lesbians are more visible and sometimes less so. It depends upon the extent to which we are welcomed and appreciated.

A friend met a man on an airplane who said that he had made the mistake of assuming that very few people are gay “and if they are you can tell.” He had also assumed that any woman with a wedding ring has a husband and any man wearing one has a wife. He learned a lesson at his international business meeting. It was there that a Norwegian woman mentioned her wife.

“Then I found out the guy from Boston has a husband, the California guy got married in San Francisco and is retiring and moving to Belgium with his husband, the gal from Barcelona is engaged and getting married to a woman from Canada and my Amsterdam tour guide and his husband are planning to have kids with a pair of married lesbians who are their friends.”

He felt ashamed for having believed marriage could only be between a man and a woman, he said. “I’m sure I sounded like a little parrot saying just what my senators and preacher said. Dumb as wood. I just woke up. The world has enough misery without going out of our way to make trouble for people who want to get on with their lives like anyone else.”

A good cautionary tale. Truth unbalances the presumed reality of people who have failed to question assumptions that rest on prejudice. Anyone who looks will find that gay people are many and varied. Some of us are cowardly, some heroic but most of us are ordinary individuals, sometimes forced into extraordinary behavior in order to maintain our integrity. Most of us do not call attention to ourselves.

Anyone who is aware of lesbians and gay men in the world will notice that we are most visible in those places where civic leaders and lawmakers show that they appreciate individual differences in the population and are sufficiently enlightened to understand that only progressive areas which celebrate diversity reap the rewards that diverse cultures contribute. Where top-down, authoritarian governments and religions demand conformity, we are less visible. Where these repressive regimes decree that we do not exist and promise punishments of expulsion, imprisonment, torture or death to anyone who proves them wrong, we must be assured of discretion and consideration of our safety before we reveal ourselves and become visible.

In the more progressive nations of Europe as well as in South Africa and the more forward looking states of the United States, gay couples may choose to marry and secure equality of civil rights. In some nations and those U. S. states not yet free of habitual authoritarian political/religious bigotry, the word married is reserved for heterosexual unions (as if thereby recognizing some sort of superiority). In the spirit of segregation’s separate but equal doctrine, “domestic partnership” or “civil union” may be offered to gay couples who formalize their union and obtain an approximation of equal civil rights.

Top-down, authoritarian rulers and religious leaders fear us, with good reason. We are not conformists. We break rules in order to express our love. They cannot see us. They do not understand us. They do not appreciate our worth in society. When they threaten us, our protective caring for one another easily can cross whatever boundaries they choose to draw on their maps.

Letters have come to me from such places, thanking me for my work. These letters, sometimes smuggled across borders before being mailed, were written as a response to books that were smuggled across those same borders. These are acts of quiet courage that I have been unable to applaud appropriately because any direct communication might put the correspondent at risk.

Repressive political and religious rulers need to reinforce their self-serving delusions. They use stereotypes and prejudice to vilify any group which might lack loyalty and therefore prove a threat. Propagandists advertise the presumed faults and evils of the groups to be despised, making them seem to be responsible for any ill endured by the public. Poverty, war, food shortages, new ideas among the young, bad weather or epidemics routinely are blamed on the unfavored people.

Answering questions after a speech at Columbia University in New York City, the president of Iran stated that there were no homosexual people in Iran (causing a burst of incredulous laughter in response.) Before the collapse of the Soviet Union and its network of client states, the official party line was that gay people did not exist—and any who did appear were shipped away to labor camps or mental hospitals in order to “protect” the public. Yet soon after the Berlin Wall fell, announcing the beginning of the end for Russian-style communism in Europe, a Polish edition of Loving Someone Gay (Clark, Don. Lesbijki I Geje: Jak ich kochac, Przelozyl Jerzy Jaworski; Wydawnictwo Da Capo, Warszawa, 1995) appeared. People there were ready to translate, edit, publish and distribute such a book and others were ready to purchase and read it because, of course, gay people had been there all along.

We have been called many names in many languages, most of them are meant to be unflattering or shameful. Faggot and dyke continue to be favored by bigots in English speaking parts of the world where words such as nigger and kike are also used. French speaking people may use an abbreviation that sounds like payday in English and means pederast. Spanish speakers sometimes use mariposa which means butterfly and might bring up positive associations if one were to think of all that a butterfly represents. The sixteenth century English word faggot actually refers to a bundle of sticks used as kindling to fuel the fires that burned people alive at the stake, people killed because they were different. Their “different-ness” was assumed to be a supernatural gift or curse, endowing them with powers that could be used to do great harm. Today, as in centuries past, people who are different frighten people trained to narrow minded conformity. Panic, hysteria, vandalism, mob violence and murder result from the discomfort of such people.

Gay is the name for us that has taken root in most places around the world. It has origins in the nineteenth century and referred to people who deviated from the straight and narrow, first theatrical people and then prostitutes who were said to be in the gay life.

I once had the honor of introducing the gifted writer Christopher Isherwood to an audience. Picking his English-American words as carefully as one might expect, he looked out at the mostly gay assemblage and said he wanted to make it clear that “… while I can not always say truthfully that I am gay, I am certain at all times that I am queer.”

Politically active gays sometimes prefer to call themselves queer, thereby being clear in their language and robbing potential tormentors of a tool. More conservative gays sometimes simply refer to themselves as homosexuals which, again, points to the simple facet of their lives that makes narrow-minded people so uncomfortable.

As more of us claim our identity publicly and are recognized, mystery and misunderstanding disappear. A gay person is simply a man who is fully attracted to men more often than he is to women, or a woman who is fully attracted to women more often than she is to men. As a gay man I have the ability to experience and express that attraction in all ways, including sexually. It does not mean that I am indiscriminate or uncontrolled in my attractions, nor does it mean that I am never attracted in any way to women. It definitely does not mean that I hate women. Being gay is ability, not a disability.

Many lesbians and gay men have heterosexual experience. In fact many of us have been, or are at present, in heterosexual marriages and many of us have children. We are a varied population and can blend into the scenery. More of us today choose to stand up or come out, so as to make ourselves whole and fully known.

Unquestioned fears and prejudice in some places continue to drive us out of our communities and away from our families unfortunately. Those of us who survive this exile find role models and mentors among others of our kind. I wonder still what happened to the young American I met while I was a student passing through Paris in 1957. He and I, both caught in a sudden summer downpour, dashed from different directions for cover under the same blue awning. We waited while the thunder and lightning flashed around us with the dozen or so other people sharing the small but relatively dry space. We discovered that neither of us spoke French well but that we spoke English.

Later, he told me how he had been set adrift by his wealthy family when he told them who he was. He could go to Europe, Africa, Asia, New Zealand or Australia but he was not to return to North America. Checks arrived each month. The cover story at home was that he was attending college in France. As time went on, the story would change to an import business operating from wherever he happened to be living or traveling at the time. The hard fist of ostracism was no less cruel for being clothed in the glove of financial generosity.

Other young people are punished more directly. Boys and girls may be sent to unethical psychotherapists who claim that they can ”cure” homosexuality. Others are prayed over, exorcised, excommunicated or shunned according to the dictates of the family’s religion. Too many are hounded into misery and suicide, especially during adolescence. Humans are social animals and do not thrive when we are excluded.

Homophobia is a word that was first used by psychologist George Weinberg in his 1972 book, Society and the Healthy Homosexual. It suggests a phobic, irrational fear of people who are gay or primarily homosexual in orientation and, indeed, of anything having to do with homosexuality. Homophobia, like any phobia, can be subtle or blatant in its manifestation. People who are phobic about snakes may be made extremely uncomfortable when they come across a picture of a snake, though the picture clearly can do them no harm. When confronted by a live snake, they are apt to conceptualize the meeting as a “kill or be killed” encounter. They are unable to entertain the possibility that they are of little or no interest to the snake. Such people are covering some other fear or anxiety that is very personal and too unacceptable for them to face.

Homophobia may cover a person’s fear of his or her own homoerotic feelings. If those feelings are damned by family, friends and community, the last thing in the world that the individual wants is to admit such feelings into conscious awareness. It is easier to stay away from such awareness with a socially acceptable distraction. Of course, the perfect distraction is to join the crusade to punish overt queers. It is not logical and it is not rational. It is an irrational, illogical pathology driven by fear and the awesome power of buried anxiety.

Humans are peculiarly vulnerable to this sort of pathology because of our social nature and the consequent urge to stay in the good graces of our community. Such pathology makes it possible for a consensus to evolve that requires everyone to agree that the naked Emperor is indeed wearing fine garments, that the madness of ethnic cleansing is somehow justifiable, that Hitler’s Nazis were simply social reformers, that Jews are responsible for the world’s evils and that there was no Holocaust.

Scapegoating is an ancient, simple-minded trick of superstition, sometimes used by manipulative politicians, but also used by others in hurried desperation to quell fear, escape guilt or buy favor from presumed supernatural powers. A goat or a person can be sacrificed to appease an imagined angry god. When an as yet undetected and unnamed virus began its spread among gay men in the early 1980s, the first name given to the resulting symptoms was gay cancer, then GRID for Gay Related Immune Deficiency. Though the virus had been at work, unpublicized and unnamed, building in strength and number in other populations for uncounted years, many people, including those in positions of power, quickly and peculiarly assumed that the deadly disorder could only affect gay men and that it might be God’s punishment for their sins. Therefore, gay men could be sacrificed and investigative research into the problem could proceed at a leisurely inexpensive pace.

Blinded by bigotry, world health leaders failed to see, or chose not to see, that the disease would not follow the lines of their own social prejudice. It was not until the infection had savagely torn through the lives of thousands of gay men and their loved ones and proved its presence in all segments of the general population that governments began to spend more money on research, treatment and social aid—too little and too late for the countless thousands of people already suffering or dead, however.

If the virus had made headlines having to do with legislators of a powerful nation and been named Legislators’ Immune Deficiency or LID rather than GRID, the response would have been far swifter, the suffering and loss of life dramatically reduced. Instead, the ever-ready temptation to assign blame and to assuage fear by scapegoating permitted the virus to get a tenacious foothold around the world, creating a worldwide epidemic.

During the first decade of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S., there were influential people who, motivated by fear, hysteria, hatred, ignorance and prejudice, wanted all gay men to be forced to submit to an HIV test. Those who tested positive for the antibodies to the virus (indicating that they had been exposed to it) would be marked by a tattoo, quarantined and/or segregated in detention centers isolated far from the general population, thereby stripping them of property and civil rights. It did not happen in the United States but it was a seriously considered possibility. A similar isolation plan was instituted in nearby Cuba, however.

Today, rapid advances in the mapping of human genes and the reality of genetic engineering lurk as threats in a world where medical ethics shift with the prevailing political currents and prejudice based on difference remains the world’s most costly social disease. Gay people will continue to be born and to find one another, no matter how unwelcome. However, the nightmarish prospect of a deliberate attempt to abort gay people in utero is chilling and not entirely far-fetched. It could happen in a world that is so blinded to its need for differences that if flails and claws its way mindlessly toward its mediocrity and its own extinction.

Each new generation chooses its favored ingredients from the rich variety of human differences. These choices fashion new styles of adaptation that will identify theirs as distinctly different from all other previous generations. Sometimes, these newly incorporated differences are used to redress old wrongs, and thusly do human beings adapt to change as an evolving species, living on an evolving planet, in an evolving cosmology.

Riding from JFK Airport into Manhattan one day, I discovered that my driver was from Kenya. When I told her that I had gone to college with a young man from Kenya, she nearly drove us off the road when she heard his name. My former college acquaintance had become a very important person in that country. She was homesick for her village and her family, she told me, but glad that she had been able to relocate, first to France and then to the United States. She lived with her lover, a Greek woman, whom she had met in France.

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Loving Someone Gay

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Table of Contents

Being Gay