CELEBRATE, DON'T STIGMATIZE, PUBLIC SEX

Public sex has a long and proud tradition and I, for one, am pleased to see that one of our Senators is engaging in it. Instead of decrying Senator Craig’s actions or speculating about his sexuality or “alleged homosexuality,” I think the more rational response is to affirm and celebrate public sex. The truth is people – all kinds of people including senators – engage public sex as a part of their sexual expression and fulfillment at different times in their lives. There’s nothing wrong with public sex; in fact, it can be a positive and healthy component of adult sexuality.

Public sex, which I’d like to define as sex between two people in a public space that offers a modicum of privacy while simultaneously carrying with it the danger of discovery, is a sexual practice of all human beings. In and of itself, public sex is neither harmful nor an anathema to civil society. When heterosexual people have or think about or fetishize public sex, we giggle and culturally reify it. Think about sex on airplanes. Erica Jong made her career writing about Fear of Flying. Most recently sex in an airline restroom was featured in the film Snakes on a Plane. More than one film about heterosexual people includes a conversation about the “kinkiest” or “most daring” place that the characters have had sex. Often the responses are descriptions of public sex. Watching these films, heterosexual people may be titillated or exchange knowing glances. Public sex is a part of human sexuality and people – straight and queer – are having it.

Yet, when public sex is heterosexual we do not call for surveillance and criminalization. Snakes on a Plane did not result in federal regulations for cameras in airline restrooms. Heterosexual teenagers caught in public parks in flagrante delicto are sent home with stern warnings or, at worst, curfew violations. The wiff of two men having sex in a public restroom, however, causes public outrage and calls for monitoring, police stings and arrests. It’s both homophobia and sexphobia.

Parents will counter that they don’t want their children in the course of using public restrooms to encounter people having sex, particularly two men having sex. I can understand that, I don’t want to unintentionally encounter two men or two women or a man and a woman having sex when I just want to urinate, but I have and it wasn’t traumatic. The fact of the matter is, while people want the possibility of getting caught while having sex, they don’t want to get caught. So when I walk into the rest room or a child does, most people have the capacity to pause for the few minutes it takes me to relieve myself, wash my hands, and move on with my life. Besides if we were to extend the argument about fear of children encountering two people having sex, wouldn’t we mandate that parents must not have sex if their children are in the house? After all, children are more likely to have their first glimpse of adult human sexuality running into their parents bedroom to tell them that visitors are here or they need breakfast or had a bad dream than running into a public bathroom to take a pee.

We need to speak out as a community about the homophobia and sexphobia that surrounds these public sex scandals. If it is truly OK to be gay, then it must be by extension OK for two people of the same-sex to have erotic encounters in semi-public spaces that carry the possibility of being caught—and being caught must not be more likely than it is for heterosexual people and the consequences of being caught must be the same for same-sex public sex partners as for opposite-sex public sex partners.

While we’re speaking out, we could also say that there is nothing particularly wrong with public sex, in fact, for some it’s a perfectly acceptable expression of sexuality. Who knows maybe in the process of speaking honestly about human sexuality we will liberate ourselves and even our heterosexual counterparts.


Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #11 dated September 18, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 677

CHANGING THE CIVIL RIGHTS PARADIGM

Sometimes there are moments of great tragedy when gay and lesbian inequality is made visible. These moments are painful and profoundly disturbing. I think of the murder of Matthew Shepherd and the murder of Sargeant Allen Schindler. Two brutal murders motivated by hatred for gay and lesbian people. There is wide-spread agreement in the United States that murdering people because they are gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender is wrong. It is a public tragedy that diminishes all of us.

By and large, however, gay and lesbian people live peaceable lives. The vast majority of us live without being targeted for discrimination, harassment, or murder. Yet, regularly, we obscure this reality. We perform a victimized status for the American public and for our legislators in an attempt to pass laws. This performance and these laws emanate from a civil rights paradigm that is a close, but not quite fit for the queer community. It’s time for a change.

We in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community—the queer community— are not going to achieve equal rights through the demonstration of hardship, or victimization, to the American people. Not because that hardship isn’t there; it is. It can be found and performed as we have just seen in the performance for the passage of the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007. We can find and tell individual stories of brutality and harassment for the benefit of Congress and the public. We can even put it together to create a pattern. The reality is, however, that the pattern of violence and abuse of gay and lesbian people in contemporary culture does not rise to the level of the reality that was experience by the African-American community during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s which lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

On one hand we could argue that nothing should ever rise to that level again. We could argue that we should learn from our past and take action earlier to smite injustice and strive for equality. In fact, I think that is the respectful framework that our queer civil rights organizations have adopted, but the time for that has now passed. It is time to reframe the debate.

For us queers to present our experiences in this country within the civil rights paradigm now and in the future is a strategic error. First, our experiences do not rise to the level of intensity or repulsion for most Americans as the experiences of African-Americans did during the 1960s. People recognize this fact; they know it. We must acknowledge it through a change in strategy. Second, a focus on violence and brutal repression has a different impact on the American people today in 2007 than it did in 1967. If we were still sensitive to violence and death, would we be in Iraq?

Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people are not going to achieve rights by asserting victimization. Our story, while compelling to us is an adequate parallel. What we should do instead of seeking to honor the civil rights movement by mimicking it, is to craft new messages. They may emerge from the history of the civil rights movement, but we must transform them to make them our own.

Our messages are not about violence, victimization, and harassment. Our messages are about the ordinary and the everyday. We will achieve equality by demonstrating the ordinariness of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender life. The banality of our lives, the everyday similarities of our lives to our heterosexual counterparts, is the message that people will understand and believe. It is the message or ordinariness and dailiness that will help us secure equality.

We need to turn up the volume and energy on these messages. Certainly, we stand on the shoulders of all who have worked for justice and equality in the past. We must honor their work, but when standing on the shoulders of greatness, we are most able to keep our balance by looking forward or looking upward than by looking downward or backward. To have a vibrant contemporary queer movement, we need to reach to the future, not the past.

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #10 dated September 4, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 694

LET'S SINK THE CENSOR SHIP: Catherine Crouch’s The Gendercator

Are ideas threatening? Are we, the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community, threatened by thoughts, images, and stories? Is censorship our response when we encounter art that challenges our contemporary ways of living?

The answers to these questions are yes, judging by the actions of Frameline in San Francisco in regard to the film, The Gendercator, by Catherine Crouch. Originally selected for the 2007 Frameline Film Festival, the screening of The Gendercator was cancelled by Frameline with the following explanation, “Given the nature of the film, the director’s comments, and the strong community reaction to both, it is clear that this film cannot be used to create a positive and meaningful dialogue within our festival.”

Hmm. I guess I don’t believe that art always needs to create a positive and meaningful dialogue. Sometimes art provokes people. Ruffles feathers. Raises questions. Postulates radical visions. Makes people anger. Clearly, that is what The Gendercator did.

The Gendercator is a fifteen-minute film with a satirical take on female body modification and gender. In a future dystopia, a young lesbian wakes up, like Rip Van Winkle, in the year 2048 after partying in 1973 to celebrate Billie Jean King’s victory over Bobbie Riggs. In The Gendecator’s vision of the future, sex roles and gender expression are rigidly binary and enforced by law and social custom. All people must choose to be either a man or a woman—no more sissy boys or butch dykes. No more androgynes. The protagonist of the film, Sally, rejects this binary based on her experiences as a 1970s feminist. Sally wants to live in the world straddling an androgynous middle between the male and female genders. This choice is not acceptable in the world in which she has awoken.

The dramatic conclusion of The Gendercator offers two possibilities in a dream-like sequence. Either Sally escapes from the rigidly gendered society of the future into a lesbian utopia replete with a rescue team of lesbians driving a VW bus or she is forced to undergo gender conversion from being female to being male. While each outcome is considered, ultimately, Sally wakes up to the party of 1973—it was all a dream.

The Gendercator is thought-provoking film. It is made with classic lesbian-feminist filmic tropes. The Gendercator raises difficult questions about the social construction of gender roles and begins to ask questions that are common in feminist communities about the costs to butch women and feminists of embracing sex reassignment surgery as opposed to working to change gender roles and eliminate patriarchy. While these questions may be challenging, they should be asked and explored, especially since there are many shared objectives of gender liberation for feminists and transgender activists.

Yes, the questions raised by The Gendercator may be uncomfortable; yes, transgender activists may be angry that they are asked and want to refute them with great alacrity. Asking the questions, however, is not wrong. Censoring the questions raises great concern. I believe our cultural institutions should embrace the opportunity to view The Gendercator. As a community, we should watch it and talk and argue about it. Censoring The Gendercator and limiting availability to the queer community does little to address the questions that it.

Hopefully, in my hometown of Washington, DC, One In Ten, DC’s International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival will show the courage that Frameline wasn’t able to demonstrate. The Gendercator should be screened in Washington, DC. Ideas should be expressed freely. We all should have an opportunity to see and evaluate The Gendercator for ourselves. We may disagree. We may find the film to be transphobic, but unless we see it for ourselves, we will never know.

As SONiA and CiNDY sing in the disappear fear song, “Let’s Sink the Censor Ship,”
Narrow minds are generally two-faced
We must sink the censorship to find
What truth is
In Washington, DC, let’s find what truth is.

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #9 dated August 21, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 648

MY GAY FATHER

If you want to know where you want to be, look at your feet. This is one of the hundreds of maxims that my gay father has given me. My gay father, like my lesbian mother, is a gay man who helped me to understand the gay and lesbian community and my role in it in profound ways.

I remember the advice, If you want to know where you want to be, look at your feet, most clearly because my gay father told it to me during one of our first long conversations involving the nature of life, love, and the city of Detroit. I left the conversation with my gay dad and bought a house in the city of Detroit. My gay dad was my realtor. I sold the house two years later, but it was absolutely the right decision at the time. I looked down at my feet, and there is where I wanted to be.

To this day, I always remember the advice of my gay father, and I look down. If I don’t like where I am, I know that I have to walk away—otherwise this is where I want to be.

My gay father is J. Michael Hickey. Like most, I just call him, Mike. Mike is a tall and hairy man. He’s a bear in every gay sense of the word. I met Mike when he was volunteering as a telephone operator for the Gay and Lesbian Helpline operated by the gay and lesbian community center where I worked. Mike came in every Monday night from 8:30 p.m. until 11 p.m. As I was leaving work during his shift, I’d stop by to say a brief hello and goodbye. These brief stops often resulted in me and Mike walking out of the community center together late at night after he had imparted some of his wisdom.

The house that I bought in Detroit was in his neighborhood, so we became stopover friends. And brunch friends. And I-need-a-special-hammer friends. And I-love-your-partner-of-now-eighteen-years-Jon friends. And I-need-you-to-approve-of-the-women-that-I-date-and-love friends.

My gay dad is knowledgeable about the ways of the world—gay and non-gay. He knows what to tell you to avoid particular trauma and what not to tell you because “everyone goes through that.” He’s an expert on depression glass and china patterns and he can repair anything in an old home.

Mike always has good advice for facing life’s challenges. Often it is a variant of if you don’t like things the way they are, get up and make a change. Often it is more direct and even blunt at times that I need a kick in the butt. Often Mike raises issues that I’m not yet ready to think about and months later I’ll remember his question. I usually call him then though I rarely tell him the reason for the call. Mike doesn’t seem to mind. I think he understands the nature of human beings and human interactions more than I ever will.

Eventually, I moved away from Detroit. Honestly, my only regret from leaving Detroit is not living a few blocks away from Mike. I only see him a few times a year now. We trade emails and I write letters occasionally. Although our physical time together has lessened my affection hasn’t.

I think we all need gay fathers and lesbian mothers—people with wisdom and experience who befriend us on our life’s journey to help us along the way. I honor my gay father Mike. He’s given me good advice throughout my life and more importantly he is one of the best friends I’ve ever had.

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #8 dated August 7, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 603

MY LESBIAN MOTHER

Often when I think about lesbian mothers I think about foremothers. Foremothers are generally women that I haven’t met and women that I admire profoundly. Women after whom I want to emulate my life. Foremothers are important to me as a lesbian, but this isn’t about foremothers. This is about my lesbian mother. That term feels a little too familiar, since I haven’t talked to my lesbian mother in years now – long enough to elicit enormous guilt in anyone let alone someone like me who me prone to guilt. Nonetheless, I still want to pay homage to my lesbian mother.

What is a lesbian mother? A lesbian mother is a lesbian who meets and befriends you early in the coming out process, often before you can even say casually and aloud, I am a lesbian. A lesbian mother is the woman who helps you understand what it means to be a lesbian beyond the pages of a book or the confines of a barroom. A lesbian mother is first and always a friend and not a love interest. A lesbian mother is the woman with the confidence of being a lesbian herself who inspires you to want to be a confident lesbian yourself. A lesbian mother is the person with whom you can practice your lesbian look. A lesbian mother will gently correct you on all matters of lesbian etiquette from hair and clothes to dating and socializing. A lesbian mother will comfort you during your first rejection and celebrate with you after your first kiss.

My lesbian mother was a woman named Lynn D’Orio. I met her in the late 1980s. She was a member of the feminist collective at the Women’s Crisis Center. I joined immediately and she schooled me in the nature of consensus decision-making, understanding empathy in a group process, and having humor in the face of the impact of patriarchy on women’s lives.

Lynn was nearly twenty years older than me. I don’t remember her exact age because it wasn’t important. What was important is that she was older and wiser and most significantly she was able to share her wisdom without judgment. Lynn lived in a large and lovely house in Ann Arbor; I know because like all good lesbian mothers she invited me to her home and treated me as a friend and family member while I was there. She had matching furniture and a well-stocked kitchen. These are things that I aspired to have in my lesbian future.

More than physical things, however, Lynn had a confidence in herself and the conviction that she would do what she wanted to do in this lifetime and live the way that she wanted to live. This may be what I admired most about her when we were friends. It is definitely what I took with me from her as my lesbian mom.

Lynn’s confidence and conviction were tested when she was my lesbian mom. She and her partner of many years broke up. That brought her great sadness, but she handled it with strength and grace. During my own break-ups, I’ve chided myself for not emulating her more. Lynn went back to college to become a lawyer and in doing so left behind her life as a saleswoman. Now, years later and about her age when she befriended me, I find myself getting a master’s degree surrounded by young men and women in their early twenties. I now realize even more the challenges she must have faced returning to law school. I admire Lynn and even though we haven spoken recently, I remember her as a source of strength in my own journey.

I don’t think that I ever adequately honored Lynn as my lesbian mother. So writing this is in many ways my honoring of her friendship in my life. Lynn was a great lesbian mom to me, and I’m sure, as it’s her way, to many others.

Thinking about my lesbian mom makes me wonder: Who was your lesbian mom? How have you honored her? To whom are you a lesbian mom? How can you honor our community by being a lesbian mom to someone who needs one?

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #7 dated July 24, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 696

TELL YOUR CHILDREN ABOUT GAY AND LESBIAN PEOPLE

A friend of mine has a four-year-old son. I have to admit, although it exposes my own internalized homophobia, that the first time we had my friend and her family for dinner, I worried. What would they tell Noah about me and my partner?

I’m used to heterosexual parents, who say they are fine with gay and lesbian people, fumbling with what to say to their children. Many times I’ve heard, “This is so-and-so and her friend,” followed by a quick subject change, or worse shushing of a child’s continued questions. I sold my friend short, however. She knew what to say.

She told Noah very clearly that this is the home of Miss Julie and Miss Kim and we were celebrating a very special event with their family, Passover. Noah, at four, didn’t need much more information. He knows that we live together, and we are a family like he and his mother and his father. He’ll get more information as he grows up.

Noah is one of the many reasons I always look forward to our Passover seder. Each year, Noah participates more in the seder; already he is asking about when he can find the afikomen. It’s these traditions, these shared, family traditions, that are going to make a difference for gay and lesbian people and our acceptance.

While our Passover table has never been as uncomfortable as the dinner table in Little Miss Sunshine, the movie demonstrates the same principle. It is fine to tell children about gay and lesbian people.

In Little Miss Sunshine, at the dinner table, over the protests of her father, Olive’s uncle explains to her his suicide attempt and that he was in love with a man. She dismisses his love for another man, but Olive’s life has been changed. She now knows gay people exist. As she grows up, she’ll learn and understand more, but for now the existence of gay people, the possibility of love between two men, exists for her. That changes her world, and it changes our world.

Sometimes heterosexual people ask me how they can support gay and lesbian rights. I’ve fumbled in the past, but now I know what to say. Tell your children, or your grandchildren, about gay and lesbian people. Make it simple and straight-forward. Do it with words they can understand. But tell them. Make the families and relationships of your gay and lesbian friends and colleagues visible to your children.

The time of believing that sexuality and sexual orientation are something in the adult world from which children must be shielded is over. Gay and lesbian people are a regular part of our everyday lives.

Whether we are partnered or not, whether we are raising children or not, whether we are your next-door neighbors, your teachers, your coaches, or your friends, we gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people are in your communities. Some of us still feel the need to render ourselves invisible; some of us still remain in the closet. More and more, however, we live openly as gay and lesbian. To continue to be open, to continue to live our lives visibly, we need the support and affirmation of our heterosexual counterparts.

You know us, and your children know us. Talk to them about gay and lesbian people. Keep it simple. Make it natural and in ways that they understand. Talking about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people to your children, no matter what their age, makes a difference.

It makes a difference for them as they grow up. Your children may be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, and knowing people who are from a young age will have a profound and positive effect on their ability to understand and accept themselves. Your children will meet other peers who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender; they can be a voice of support and compassion to other young people who may be confused or upset and who may not have parents as open as you. Your children will work with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people; they will live with them, and they will share with them throughout their lives. Talking with your children about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people now will make their lives easier in the future.

Help children to know gay and lesbian people early in their lives; help them to understand different families and different ways that people organize their personal and intimate lives. Don’t hide gay and lesbian people and their lives from your children. It makes a difference for them, and it makes a difference for us.

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #6 dated July 10, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 776

HONEY, DON’T FORGET TO EDUCATE THE STRAIGHT PEOPLE! Why We’ll Win Being Ordinary and Everyday

Let’s be honest, we’re not going to be guaranteed equal rights under the law, until we convince heterosexual people to stand beside us. While elected officials may be the key to getting our rights, more and more it becomes clear that politicians will not act without the majority of people behind them.

Some polls demonstrate that the majority of people support some forms of equal rights for gay and lesbian people, but this support crumbles under pressure. We need to stop that. We need straight people to support gay rights, unequivocally and without reserve.

In order for that to happen, the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community needs to educate, cajole, and, eventually, demand that heterosexual people support our quest for equality.

To achieve that objective, we need to refocus our social change work to speak to and persuade not only our own GLBT community but also heterosexual people. We need heterosexual people, not all of them, but a large minority, to embrace queer rights. How will we do this?

One way to begin is by telling our stories and engaging heterosexual people in our lives. Engagement is more than simply telling people that we are gay. As a community we need to move the focus away from the hyper-energized “coming out” moment.

For many of us now and for most of us in the future, being gay or lesbian is not something that we are going to hide—a fact which in itself diminishes the significance of coming out. As a result for our heterosexual counterparts, instead of reacting to this hyper-energized coming out moment, they will need to respond to openly gay and lesbian people in a wide variety of circumstances—at home, at work, and in the communities. These interactions in which gay and lesbian people do not hide their sexual orientation and in which there is no heightened moment of disclosure, heterosexual people and gay and lesbian people will be much more human and authentic than in previously constituted “coming out” moments.

Coming out is no longer enough. We must move beyond coming out to helping heterosexual people to know not only that we are gay, but what it means to be gay as well as lesbian, bisexual, and transgender. We need heterosexual people understand what our lives our like. We need them to understand that we must have the support of the institutions of our society in order to have full equality.

Fortunately, this isn’t difficult. We live and interact with heterosexual people every day.

Our greatest ally for this in the past has been popular entertainment. Intentionally or unwittingly, the presence of gay and lesbian people and our stories on television and in the movies has created a more intimate understanding of gay and lesbian people by our heterosexual counterparts. 

In spite of this success in the entertainment media, we need more visibility of gay and lesbian people in ordinary and mundane situations. People need the lived experience of knowing gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in addition to the celluloid experience of watching GLBT people on the large and small screens.

Collectively, we can create a circumstance where heterosexual people cannot “change the channel” or boycott or ignore the everyday realities of gay and lesbian people in their, or rather our, communities and neighborhoods. We do that by being open, by not focusing on particular “coming out moments,” and by living our lives honestly, openly, and authentically.

When we do that, heterosexual people will know us and, eventually, will support us. When we share more of our lives and our issues on a daily basis in comfortable, ordinary, and everyday ways, we will win meaningful and long-term support from heterosexual people.

In addition to our individual actions, we need our organizations to speak to everyone – not just the GLBT communities. The combined action of organized campaigns and individual action is how we will change the people’s hearts and minds. Ultimately, this works well to embolden lawmakers to take the actions we require.

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and activist living in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #5 dated June 26, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 669