GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

A Book Review/Essay on Gay Marriage from GPW’s Files

by

As I was looking through my files in preparation for my presentation tomorrow, I chanced across a book review I wrote nearly eight years ago. As it remains timely, reflecting some of the ideas on gay marriage I have expressed on this blog while it summarizes what I believed needed be said then — and still needs to be said now — in the marriage debate, I share it with you (in slightly revised form).

In the debate on gay marriage, I often fault many of my friends and associates for spending too much time in pursuing the legal “right” to marry, that is, using the courts or legislatures to gain state recognition for gay and lesbian unions. I have countered that marriage is primarily a social institution and that we must first establish marriage as a gay social norm. After all, the traditional concept of marriage, one man to one woman, evolved as a social and religious institution long before it was recognized by the state.

As I struggled in my teens and twenties with my own longings for affection and intimacy, I read whatever I could discover in the mainstream press on homosexuality and, when I could muster the courage, bought gay books and periodicals. Whatever I read, I found few images which corresponded to the love I felt deep in my own heart: for a tender and intimate monogamous relationship with another man that, to paraphrase the great Oscar Hammerstein, would last everyday of my life for as long as I live.

Since coming out, I have discovered that the gay norm is far closer to my own expectations than what I had been reading. But, even today, there still seems to be a dichotomy between gay culture as it actually exists and gay culture as it is portrayed in the media, both in the articles written about us and in the articles, essays, stories and novels that we write about ourselves. If we really want gay marriage, then we must present our lives as they are lived: of men and women seeking same-gender intimate, long-term relationships.

With his book, Together Forever: Gay and Lesbian Marriage, Eric Marcus has taken a necessary step in the right direction. He interviewed forty “self-described happy couples who have been together for at least nine years,” twenty male and twenty female. Some couples have been together for as long as fifty years and they hail from fourteen states, ranging in age from thirty-one to eighty-six. He noted that when he began the project some of his gay and lesbian contemporaries cynically suggested that it would be a short book.

[Read more…]

A Jungian Helps Explain Bush-Hatred

by

In our class this week, “Archetypes in Cinema,” the professor assigned an article to help us understand the father archetype in films. But, as I read Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig’s, “Sinister Fathers–Healthy Children” (from his book, From the Wrong Side: A Paradoxical Approach to Pscychology), I occasionally felt I was reading about Bush-hatred. Here he seems to describe many afflicted with Bush Derangement Syndrome (B.D.S):

I have met many people who experienced only the loving father in the outer world. They were, therefore, never forced to grapple with the murderous side of the archetype in their environment or in themselves. These young people subsequently projected the destructive portion of the father archetype onto the world around them, using the smallest of hooks on which to hang their projections. Every mildly authoritarian or domineering male figure became a murderous inhuman father. Because they had not learned to deal with the destructive side of the father, they became existentially insecure when they met anything that even resembled it.

It would be interesting to study those evidencing symptoms of Bush-hatred to see if, as children, they experienced only positive images of the father for it is clear that many are projecting onto the president images of the destructive father. We see him depicted as a monster whose fangs drip with blood and akin to Adolf Hitler, the worst human monsters of the last century. His alienated adversaries describe him as a man who delights in destruction and who cheerily countenances cruelty while his policies mandate murder.

Such descriptions say little, if anything, about the president, but say a lot about those offering them — and about the demons which lurk in their imaginations.

UPDATE: Just corrected a sentence. In the original, a clause had read: “those evidencing symbols of Bush-hatred,” I had meant symptoms not symbols and have since corrected the text above.

Tom Malin, Media Culture & Redemption

by

After a pretty intense three weeks of blogging, I found myself slowing down a bit this week. It seems I’ve been more in a thinking than a writing mood, some thoughts for future posts, others related to ideas for my dissertation (ideas which I have finally been putting down on paper) and yet others for screenplays and this fantasy epic that has been kicking around in my head.

And some stories in the news (and on this blog) have given me pause.

As I follow the news about vile terrorists blowing up a shrine sacred to one sect of Islam, I see some similarity between the sectarian violence those terrorists hope to foment and that which took place Great Britain for the better part of two centuries (the 16th and 17th).

When I read that Senate Majority Bill Frist has scheduled a vote on the “Marriage Protection Amendment” for June 5, 2006 (as part of his already-doomed bid for the White House in 2008), I wonder if advocates of gay marriage would use this an occasion to have a serious debate on the topic or return to the juvenile rhetoric which has dominated the debate in the past. (The initial signs are not good.) But, there’s more than three months until the vote.

Let us hope that gay leaders come to their senses and make arguments for gay marriage like Jonathan Rauch (especially in the chapter “What is Marriage for” in his book Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America) and Dale Carpenter (in his columns) have made. Instead of having angry adolescents, ever eager to repeat mantras from Poli Sci 101, dominate the debate, it would be nice if such grownups would lead the way, encouraging all gay marriage advocates to engage their opponents with serious arguments rather than ideological attacks. (Yes, I have been accused of being a “cockeyed optimist.”)

One subject which has occupied my attention has been the case of Tom Malin, not so much because I particularly care whether or not this man wins a seat in the Texas legislature but because of what his case says about gay culture and American politics today. First, it shows the hypocrisy of many gay left bloggers, eager to expose the hustling past of a Republican journalist, yet indifferent to a Democratic candidate’s similar past. (And it seems those very bloggers believe “hypocrisy is quite possibly the greatest crime one can ever possibly commit.“)

[Read more…]

Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man, A Must-Read Book on the Absence of Intimacy in Men’s Lives (Among Other Things)

by

When Glenn Reynolds first blogged about Norah Vincent’s new book Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey into Manhood and Back, I knew I had to read the book not only because I have enjoyed this iconoclastic lesbian’s columns, but also because, like me, Norah is a graduate of America’s finest small college. Despite its hype, the book did not disappoint. Indeed, I would call it one of the most important books published in the past decade, particularly important for gay people as it deals with the difficult subject of gender difference.

I ***highly recommend*** this book and regret that I will not be able to address all of the many points Norah raises. I underlined so frequently that were I just to type up the passages that struck me, I would spend all weekend on this post.

After spending one evening in drag in Greenwich Village, then watching a TV reality show where two men and two women “set out to transform themselves into the opposite sex,” Norah realized that the show’s producers “didn’t have much interest in the deeper sociological implications of passing as the opposite sex.” So, she decided to do her own experiment and live for a few months disguised as a man named Ned so she could “survey some of the unexplored territory that the show had left out.” Over the course of eighteen months, she would join a bowling league, frequent a strip club, date a number of women, live in a monastery, work as a door-to-door salesman and join a men’s group.

Of the many things she learned in her life as a man, what struck me the most (perhaps because it relates to the Ph.D. dissertation I hope to write on the role of the goddess Athena in men’s lives) is her growing awareness of women’s role as “communicators, the interlocutors between men and themselves, men and their children and even men and each other.” She found that one of the downsides of life at the abbey was that the “nurturing influence that women could provide, the communicative skills they could lend and foster were lost to these men, and much to their emotional detriment.”

We gay men are as in need of that nurturing influence as those monks in the abbey. The monks “took refuge in machismo because they feared inappropriate intimacies between men.” They feared being seen as weak — or gay. And yet, we gay men, comfortable defining ourselves as such, seem often to take refuge in a similar machismo, boasting about our sexual conquests and making catty remarks about having sex with our buddies, not so much out of sexual desire, but because we too fear intimacy. It’s far easier to boast about sex or hook up with another man than it is to forge an emotional connection with him.

[Read more…]

Celebrating George Eliot’s birthday in Germany — and at home

by

Germans are celebrating George Eliot’s birthday by electing a pro-British (and pro-American for that matter) woman as Chancellor. Today, Angela Merkel became the “first ever elected female head of government” of the Federal Republic. Perennial Bush-basher and Chirac chum Gerhard Schröder seems to have permanently sidelined.

It is fitting that a strong woman would come to power on George Eliot’s birthday as that great lady was fluent in German, traveled there frequently and translated Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity and Strauss’ Life of Jesus from German into English.

On such a day honoring strong European women, I am delighted that Penguin also recognizes a strong American one as they are releasing my Athena‘s latest — John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father.

So, continue the celebration of George Eliot’s birthday by cheering Chancellor Merkel’s election and buying Peggy’s book!

Happy Birthday, George Eliot!

by

There are holidays we all celebrate. In a couple of days, most Americans will join their families for a festive Thanksgiving meal. And there are some holidays sacred to our religions — or our region. And then there are the personal days, the anniversary of a wedding, the day we first met our beloved, the birthday of a friend, special relative or favorite writer. Today, November 22 is one of those days for me. Not only does it mark the anniversary of the birth of a very dear great Aunt, my Aunt Ruth, who would have been 109 today, it is also the 186th anniversary of birth of the greatest English novelist, George Eliot. Last year, I honored her with this post.

Born Mary Ann Evans in South Arbury, England on November 22, 1819, she was particularly close to her brother Isaac as a child. She describes that sweet relationship in her novel The Mill on the Floss. In her early adulthood, she wrote countless essays and translated several works German into English. She, however, did not become the great novelist we know today until after she met George Henry Lewes in 1851. Like her, he wasn’t particularly physically attractive, but like her was charming in person. When people met Miss Evans, they soon forget her looks, more entranced were they by her conversation, her intelligence and her insight, her wisdom.

Even though Lewes never divorced his wife, he and Evans lived together as husband and wife until his death in 1878. While their love produced no children, it did help her “give birth” to many great ideas which she turned into some of the greatest novels, including the greatest novel, in the English language. She did not publish her novels under her own name, taking the name George from Lewes, the great love of her life.

Her greatest books include the aforementioned Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede, Felix Holt, Romola, the touching Silas Marner and Middlemarch the greatest novel in the English language. There is much, so much, I could say about this great woman such that I would take up our blog’s entire home page. She had a keen sense of values, understood human psychology, could peer into the human heart and show the positive sides of her villains. Indeed, none of her characters were completely evil and none purely good. Yet, they all performed acts of kindness, cruelty and/or stupidity.

The selfish Bulstrode in the end shows some kindness to his nephew Fred Vincy. And that well-meaning Fred had previously gambled away a loan that Caleb Garth, the father of Mary, his one true love, had guaranteed for him, draining that good man’s family of money they had saved to pay for their son’s education.

She spoke of compassion, of the importance of finding that one person who could “be all” to her heroines. She had lived so long alone, well understand the value and promise of romance and how true love sustains those of us who recognize its power and are willing to work hard to keep it alive. And she exhorted us to understand our fellow man and showing sensitivity to his difficulties: “More helpful,” she wrote in The Mill on the Floss, “than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.” “Fellow-feeling” was one of her treasured experessions.

To honor her birthday, I offer a few more quotes from the writings of this great lady so that you will may celebrate her life with nuggets of her wisdom. Then, as Glenn Reynolds might say, go read the “whole thing” — her collected works! Happy Birthday, Mary Ann Evans, George Eliot. And thank you, thank you for the compassionate, the insightful, the profound, the wise work you left behind.

-Dan (AKA GayPatriotWest): GayPatriotWest@aol.com

The quotations are all below: [Read more…]