First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
October 13, 2002

Celebrating Coming Out

Ana Figueroa, an entertainment correspondent for Newsweek, filed the following report recently:

Sunday's scheduled media event, the opening of "Flik's Fun Fair" in the new "A Bug's Land" section of Walt Disney's new California Adventure park, was designed to appeal to "young children and their families." Celebrities such as Melanie Griffith arrived on the "green carpet" with their progeny, and scurried to the five new kiddie rides, all of which were designed to give kids a "bug's eye view" of the world. The train ride put kids on top of a caterpillar as it slithered through a variety of bug-digestibles, including a watermelon rind. A balloon ride called "Flik Flyers" took kids high in the air. The spinning ladybug ride was a lot like the famous spinning tea-cups — only you were sitting in a little insect. The new rides were about the same caliber of those you'd find at a traveling circus. They were all a little, well, cheap. In fact, that's the problem with all of California Adventure. It's all a little shoddy. And I wasn't the only one who was disappointed. In short order, the celebrity kids started to whine and lose interest—and they got in for free! In my opinion, the Flik's Fun Fair will probably not save California Adventure, by most accounts a $1.4 billion disaster.

Worried that another Disney exec would lose his or her job over this bug fiasco, I looked around, trying to think of something nice to say about the new venture. But just then, something else caught my eye: a woman wearing a bright red shirt with huge black letters that proclaimed, I LOVE MY GAY SISTER. Other women in red surrounded her. Behind them was a group of men, also clad in red. My two Disney media hosts, Nick and Sandy, who had heretofore stuck to me like glue, exchanged panicked looks as they saw me scanning the oncoming crowd. Everywhere I looked, there were red shirts proclaiming, GAY DAY 2002.

Nick quickly recited a memorized Disney spiel that downplayed the embarrassing confluence of the unofficial Gay Day and young-children-and-their-families day at Bug Land. "You may have noticed some people wearing red shirts with slogans on them," he said. "Please understand that these folks aren't here for any official Disney event. It's a completely unofficial thing. The gay community just picks a day out of the year to come to the resort. It is totally extra-curricular." After trying unsuccessfully to steer me away from the red shirts, my media guides exchanged heated words under their breath. No doubt each blamed the other for letting me stray off the pre-arranged press program.

But they needn't have worried that I'd hear anti-Disney utterances. Throughout the park, groups of Gay Day attendees strolled around, enjoying themselves. Perhaps this wasn't the crowd Disney would have liked as a backdrop for its new attraction of rides for little kids. But, then again, there were numerous gay parents there with their children. I asked countless red-shirted patrons if they've been hassled by security, or made to feel in any way unwelcome. All replied in the negative. By the end of the afternoon, my anxious media host, Nick, added a caveat to his oft-repeated "Gay Day" disclaimer. "They're not here officially. But, of course, we welcome any guest willing to pay the admission price," he observed. As one thirty-ish man in red explained to me, "Gay Day started in Orlando, and we're trying to expand the concept out here. But, this is Southern California, so us being here is not that big a deal."

Dearly beloved, I am so tired! Partly this comes of beginning the Society's program year short three staff members, with all that goes into the recruiting and hiring process. Partly it is the result of dealing with my father in law's death, and mourning the role that he had come to play in Mark's and my lives. I know that these things are natural, are to be expected, are passing and will pass. But Friday morning, when the radio came on, and I heard the results of the vote in congress, giving the president authorization to make war whenever he wants in Iraq, a huge, unutterable weariness settled over me. I thought of a poem in the form of a great curse reminiscent of some of the old testament psalms by one of my spiritual resources, Edna St. Vincent Millay. In her verse "Apostrophe to Man," subtitled "on reflecting that the world is ready to go to war again," she wrote,

Detestable race, continue to expunge yourself, die out.
Breed faster, crowd, encroach, sing hymns, build bombing airplanes;
Make speeches, unveil statues, issue bonds, parade;
Convert again into explosives the bewildered ammonia and the distracted cellulose;
Convert again into putrescent matter drawing flies
The hopeful bodies of the young; exhort,
Pray, pull long faces, be earnest, be all but overcome, be photographed;
Confer, perfect your formulae, commercialize
Bacteria harmful to human tissue,
Put death on the market;
Breed, crowd, encroach, expand, expunge yourself, die out,
Homo called sapiens.

There were, of course, minor compensations; there always are. There was the splendid reality that all of my representatives, Martin Sabo from this district in the House, and both Senators Wellstone and Dayton, had voted against the resolution. I am tempted to order up a clutch of bumper stickers that proclaim, "Don't blame me; I'm from Minnesota;" I sadly expect there will come a time for them. And there was, of course, our own FUS advertisement, representing the dedication and flexibility of the social concerns committee, particularly Mary Ann Lundquist and Susan Barton, who with me took a deep breath and said that we had to speak out, even if it was no one but ourselves. Friday was an interesting day in the office, as Jean Bieries and I answered the phones. In the end there were more messages of thanks and support than there were denunciations, but it is amazing how much energy it takes to listen to someone ask you how ignorant you can possibly be. I am bone tired.

And it is, oddly, that quaint little article from Newsweek that makes me smile through my despair. "Us being here is not that big a deal." Those nonchalant words are amazing - a declaration of hope, of confidence, almost of victory. They represent the simplicity of life as it ought to be, as we imagine it in our vision of kinship and just community; as it sometimes, for a tantalizing moment or two, actually is. And so today, on this Solidarity Sunday, this national Coming Out Day, I want to consider not so much the many places and issues where the victory is not yet won - we'll come back to those presently - but rather the lessons that might be learned from such a foretaste of victory; the deeper issues that are at stake in "coming out" for all of us. Our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters have something important to teach us, something that might be the salvation of us all; something about the integrity of our pleasure, our love, and our joy.

Alice Walker points us toward this recognition in her magnificent novel The Color Purple. It is stated explicitly in the often-quoted passage that I read a moment ago, but the entire story concerns salvation from the most savage of both inner and outer oppressions through the integrity of honest pleasure. When we do not know anything else, we know what feels good and what doesn't, if we will listen to the truth that our hearts and our bodies tell. Destructive power begins with the denial of that truth, in the elemental perversion which suggests that there is satisfaction to be had from someone else's pain. From the brutal circuses of ancient Rome to the cynical staging of televised professional wrestling; from the squalor of cock fighting and bear baiting to the glamorized gore of Hollywood, from the puerile fantasy of violent computer games to the tragic reality of children with broken bones and cigarette burns, we are seduced and coerced to forget what we know about pleasure, and to find our gratification in observed cruelty and suffering and punishment. We can idealize this process, clothe it in the rhetoric of nobility and sacrifice, even call it god's will. In its most virulent form, it will drive us to the ecstasy of self-immolation, provided that we can take enough others with us. It will send jumbo jets full of aviation fuel into towers filled with unsuspecting parents and spouses and partners and children; it will plant land mines; it will send guided missiles, and napalm, and suicide bombers. But it must do something to us first - it must make us willing to embrace suffering as necessary, it must make us forget what we know about what hurts and what feels good.

In the pithier statement of a short poem, Alice Walker puts it this way:

I tell you, Chickadee

I am afraid of people

who cannot cry

Tears left unshed

turn to poison

in the ducts

Ask the next soldier you see

enjoying a massacre

if this is not so.

People who do not cry

are victims

of soul mutilation

paid for in Marlboros

and trucks.

Violence does not work

except for the man

who pays your salary

who knows

if you could still weep

you would not take the job.

Resist, she says. How do we do that? How do you stay true to what the soft animal of your body loves, in the face of that overwhelming culture of anger and violence, that wants to tell us what to feel, and not to feel, to accept what guns and bombs will do to human flesh in our name? I don't know the whole answer to that question, but I know some people who might have some expertise to share on the subject. I know some people who have gone through hell and high water to love the ones they love, who have held the ground of authentic pleasure against every rigid, life-denying, soul-destroying cruelty that the social majority could throw at them. And today I celebrate National Coming Out Day 2002, not because I want justice and freedom for my gay and lesbian fellow citizens - although I do - but rather because I have something to learn from those folks; I'm going to need them, and I'm enormously grateful that they are there.

The truth is that coming out, that quintessential act of resistance and self-affirmation, is not just about sexual preference. It is something that we all need to do, to come out as lovers and feelers, to come out for those things and people that nurture us, that give us pleasure and joy, and make us wholly ourselves. For love and joy and wholeness are realities that grow strong in the using, that develop by practice; the more we affirm them and explore them, the more real we make them in the world. And by the same token, they are fragile; they are subject to being forgotten, and the more we hide them and diminish them, the more likely the forces of cruelty and violence are to infiltrate our souls, until we no longer remember what it was that we once loved best to do in all the world.

Celie, the protagonist of The Color Purple, young and abused, poor and black and lesbian, with no scrap of privilege to protect her or ease her journey, wins through to integrity and self-ownership, to her own full humanity, by a clear-eyed distinction between suffering and pleasure, by her unwillingness to confuse the two or to relinquish the goodness she has known, whether in her sister's love, in her authentic sexuality, or in something as simple as a field of purple flowers. It is her lover, Shug, who makes the connection between this instinctive insistence and the idea of spirituality; Celie thinks that god is the old white man handed to her by the culture of oppression, but Shug knows better. "God love all them feelings," she asserts, when Celie is shocked by her use of sexuality as a metaphor for the divine. "That's some of the best stuff God did... God love everything you love, and a mess of stuff you don't," Shug promises. "You can just relax, and praise God by liking what you like."

"But, this is Southern California, so us being here is not that big a deal." Oh, but it is - it is a very big deal. It is a very big deal right here in Minneapolis, right here at the First Unitarian Society. We're not home free yet, not by quite a long sight, but we are perhaps, as Churchill once said, at the end of the beginning. Until the day that I fill out the same license for two men or two women that I filled out at yesterday's wedding, there will still be issues before us. Until every gay and lesbian couple receives the same domestic benefits from the state and from their employers as straight couples, there is still work to be done. Until high school students can explore the possibilities of their sexual identity in physical and emotional safety, we cannot rest altogether satisfied. But if gay and lesbian parents and their partners and supporters and friends by the hundreds can bring their children for a day of fun at a Disney theme park, wearing the bold proclamation of who they are across their red t-shirts, and be treated by all accounts just like anyone else, why then perhaps it is not time yet to despair. Perhaps there are those who remember what it is to stand up for love in the face of the world's hostility; perhaps there are those who know what it means to take our own pleasure seriously as a guide to what is holy in life; perhaps we might all remember, if we would only let ourselves remember, that the soft animal of your body and my body is no more vulnerable and no more precious than the bodies of the women and children and men of all the world, even of Iraq. Perhaps if we would all come out, as lovers of our own humanity, as lovers of our neighbors just as the great teachers have always urged us to be, we might at last make a world in which shared pleasure is sacred and pain is obscene, instead of the other way around.

It seems like such a simple thing, to ask for justice for our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters; it seems like such a simple thing, to ask for peace. But it never is simple, not at this juncture of history, and we are all weary and footsore and heartsick in the overwhelming events of these days. We come here, my friends - I come here - to be reminded of the small intermediate victories, to learn from those who have been there before us and all along, to remember what we love and what makes us whole. We come here to come out, over and over again, to others and to ourselves, as human beings; to break the silence of oppression, to speak for justice, to speak for freedom, to speak for peace. We need each other; we shall need each other all the more in the days now before us. Let us take courage from the example of those we honor today, and learn to speak out our own truth and live from our authentic love. Let us raise our voices together, in protest, in affirmation, in song.