Victor J. Banis is an Author

And Queens Hereafter Shall Be Glad to Live

 

(Michael Drayton)

 

 

 

I stand on my balcony in the special San Francisco twilight. The day has been warm and summery but already a flock of white clouds gambols over the hilltops. The evening will be cool, sweater and jacket weather. Somewhere nearby someone is cooking. Chili, I think. It will be a good night for chili.

On the street below a young man hurries to meet his friends. He has an air about him, confident, unapologetic, that says more than any words how far we have come in the past thirty years.

He pauses at the corner. Something in the line of his shoulders, in that little gesture he makes with his hand, makes me think of another young man years before, strong of back and light of mind, on his way, but to where?

From the apartment behind me Hank Williams pleads with me to turn back the years…

 

We can’t turn back the years, Hank, and frankly I wouldn’t if I could. I have enjoyed my life as I lived it, good times and bad, but I am content now to let others carry that gay torch and to amuse those who care to listen with tales of a time when the torch was only a candle.

Still, as someone wiser than I has said, the flame of a single candle will pierce even the blackest night. Time has proven him right, hasn’t it, and when those who so carefully shielded their candles from the winds of hate and demagoguery began to come together and blend those little flames into one, what a wondrous light they then shed.

Did any of our efforts—those other writers, editors, photographers, publishers and brave soldiers—really count for anything in the end?

I like to think so. That young man on the street below persuades me so. Today, gays live in relative freedom; there is hardly a city in the world in which they do not have their meeting places where they argue and debate and come together and apart, and are better for it all.

It was not only gay society that was changed, either. Had the writers and publishers of the sixties not fought the fight, Danielle Steele might very well find herself today charged with writing “dirty books.”

Would Arnold Schwarzenegger or Kevin Bacon or Bruce Willis ever have shown their you-know-whats on movie screens if it hadn’t been for DSI, the Athletic Model Guilt, or Naked Men #1 and #2? I know there are many women and men who are glad for that. There was a time when they might have been, as I was, indicted for conspiracy to distribute obscenity.

Would actors like Kevin Kline, Tom Hanks, Hillary Swank, or Susan Sarandon have risked gay or lesbian scenes if our books and our magazines and our marches hadn’t brought us out of the closet? To do so in the not too distant past was sure death for an actor’s career. In the sixties, it could have landed them in prison. Nowadays, hardly anyone even blinks. Surely the world is a better place for the honest portrayal of different lives.

Say what you will, I believe it was gay men and women who put the boogie in those boogie nights at the dance clubs. Straights have always flocked to our clubs. You don’t find us in theirs.

Movies, theater, television, publishing, dance, merchandising, medicine, politics, welfare, racial interaction, education, law, police work—it’s hard to think of any aspect of our lives today that wasn’t touched by the revolution. Just between you and me, I am convinced that Julia Child filched one or two of her ideas from The C.A.M.P. Cookbook.

The publishing revolution of the sixties and the broader social revolution of the same period fed each other and are inseparable. We are all of us today the beneficiaries of those events. I have said a number of times that my contributions were minor ones, though I am proud to have made them. But I would not be able to sit and write these notes today without fear, nor could you read them, were it not for a host of writers, editors and publishers who stand at my shoulders as I type. I have been fortunate to still be around at a time when the community has begun to take note of what we did back then, but many of those others never got to hear the applause. Many are gone, and even many of those who remain, remain in obscurity.

I am happy to say that Earl Kemp’s contributions are finally being recognized, at least on the heterosexual front. Writers like Mickey Spillane and Harold Robbins have lauded him and he is an honored guest annually at the Paperback Book Show and Convention in Mission Hills. Still, I remain puzzled that Earl, who did more than anyone before or since to change the face of gay publishing, remains utterly unremarked in gay history.

 

* * * * * * *

 

While my contributions may have been minor, the revolution of which they were a part was not minor. And it had its heroes—real ones. The Stonewall demonstrators, of course, but really, the gay liberation movement started long before then and on the West Coast, though I know I will take some flak for saying so.

It could be argued that the revolution began in 1950 when William Jennings was arrested in Griffith Park in Los Angeles and charged with indecent behavior. Jennings has been called our Rosa Parks and with good reason. The usual response to one of these arrests, as I have said earlier, was for the gay victim to plead to a lesser charge and pay a large fine, but Jennings refused to roll over. He demanded a jury trial and pleaded innocent. To the surprise of many, the jury acquitted him.

Until that time no jury in California had ever acquitted an openly homosexual individual on this type of charge and it was looked upon as a slap at the police entrapment policy. To be openly homosexual in 1950 and to stand up to the police entrapment of that era took balls.

That winter Jennings and Harry Hay brought a few friends together and formed the Mattachine Society (later the Mattachine Foundation), a support and information group modeled after the naacp and the Jewish Anti-Defamation League. (One of those founders, by the way, was Wallace de Ortega Maxey, who later went to prison for publishing gay paperback novels.)

In 1951 the Foundation issued a declaration of purpose in which they held it “possible and desirable that a highly ethical homosexual culture emerge, as a consequence of its work, paralleling the emerging cultures of our fellow minorities”

It was the first time that homosexuals had linked their plight and their fortunes to those of the various racial and ethnic minorities—Blacks, Jews, Mexicans—a move that yet today remains controversial on both sides of the fence. Black activists sometimes complain that homosexuals have at least the opportunity to closet themselves and conceal their minority status, and gays complain that blacks have an advantage in a legal status that confers upon them rights still denied to homosexuals. All of which misses the point, doesn’t it? Oppression is oppression.

The Foundation’s statement was also the first public call to gays to conduct themselves in an ethical manner. Moral looseness was a charge too often laid at our feet and that charge was a weapon used repeatedly against us. Gay showed themselves eager to disprove that contention. In time, in that spirit, gays would establish their own churches, eventually their own support groups and, in the AIDS epidemic that erupted in the late seventies, prove themselves exemplars of the Christian philosophy of love and charity.

In 1953 W. Dorr Legg started another group, One, Inc., and began publishing a magazine, One, the first American gay review, in the manner of Der Kreis from Switzerland.

In 1955, in San Francisco, Phyllis Lyon, and Del Martin founded the Daughters of Bilitis, the first ever lesbian rights organization. Interestingly, the pair had never heard of the Mattachine Society or of One, Inc. and it was nothing more than coincidence, and maybe something in the San Francisco air, that led them to form a secret group who met weekly at one another’s homes.

All of these groups became objects of scrutiny and even harassment on the part of the legal authorities, in particular the fbi and, of course, our old friends, the U.S. Post Office, who refused to mail the October 1954 issue of One on the grounds of obscenity—because it discussed homosexuality in a favorable light. I have always believed that it was my subscribing to One magazine and Der Kreis that first brought me to the attention of the federal authorities. I suspect that all the subscribers were subject to scrutiny. We were certainly a threat to society, don’t you see.

A 1955 issue of the Mattachine Review mentioned homosexuals in “key positions” in the FBI hierarchy. There had long been stories about J. Edgar Hoover and his top aide, Clyde Tolson, and these two took the Mattachine’s hints personally, as fighting words. The FBI repeatedly charged that all three rights organizations were communist fronts. It was true that Hay had been a party member but there was no evidence to suggest that the groups’ members in general had any kind of communist affiliation. Reality, however, did not often rule in these matters.

In the forties gay bar owners in San Francisco routinely paid bribes to the local police, but in 1951 Sol Stouman, owner of the Black Cat Café, decided he had had enough and refused to pay. He risked the loss of his liquor license, which is to say, the loss of his business, and he suffered repeated harassment for his stance. Members of the vice squad and even uniformed officers visited the Black Cat on evening after evening, simply to intimidate the customers and frighten them from the bar. Some did leave, of course, but many refused to be cowed and stayed anyway.

José Sarria, who would later become the first Empress of San Francisco, used to entertain at the Black Cat in drag, and at the end of his show he would lead the customers in a rousing rendition of God Bless Us Nelly Queens, to the tune of God Save Our Noble Queen.

It was a courageous act of defiance and deserves to be saluted. Thanks, José, we owe you. And Sol Stouman, too, who eventually ran up something in the neighborhood of $40,000 in legal bills. To put that in perspective, in 1951 you could rent a very nice apartment for one hundred dollars or less. Top of the line cars—Caddies and Lincolns—sold for $3,000 to $4,000. $10,000 bought you a very nice house. $40,000 was a fortune, in other words.

Oh, by the way, the authorities did eventually manage to close the Black Cat, using attractive young decoys to solicit passes, which became “offenses” and led to the revoking of the club’s liquor license. What with Hoover’s fbi and most city police departments all using the same tactic, it would seem that at that time that there may have been more police officers in tight jeans cruising the gay clubs than there were in uniforms patrolling the streets. Priorities, you understand. Where, after all, was serious crime to be found if not at the Black Cat’s opera nights? We all know what Aïda can lead to.

In 1961, in part inspired by the efforts of Stouman and Sarria, a number of San Francisco bars went to court rather than continue to pay police bribes. In 1962 Bill Plath, owner of several gay bars, brought bar owners together to form the Tavern Guild, the nation’s first gay business organization; the following year, Plath helped found the Society for Individual Rights (SIR), which actively worked for gay rights through legal channels and with civil disobedience.

1964 saw the formation of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, the first organization in the nation to use the word homosexual in its name. The Council, largely the work of Donald Steward Lucas, sponsored a ball that New Year’s Eve, and the police raided the ball, arresting several ministers, gay and straight. A serious mistake. The uproar that followed the arrests was the first public demonstration for gay rights and set the stage for the Stonewall uprising five years later.

Between the Council’s New Year’s Eve Ball, however, and the Stonewall uprising, a revolution in self-perception had taken place. In the early fifties, when the Mattachine Society, One Inc. and the Daughters of Bilitis were founded, and even as late as 1964 when the Council was formed, homosexuals were still largely a secret, an underground society of outlaws and outcasts. Even when we began to organize, we were still organizing from the basement of self-esteem, burdened with unnecessary guilt and all sorts of negative hangups. We were still regarded as psychotic by the psychiatric community and as prey by police, blackmailers and homophobes; and far too often seen by ourselves as victims.

By 1969, though we had not yet found a united voice with which to stand up and demand our rights, we were no longer underground but, at least in the major cities, very much visible and already enjoying a new sense of freedom.

We had begun by then to break free of the stereotypes by which we were usually judged, not only by others but by ourselves. When the John Goodman sitcom, Normal, Ohio (like no Ohio I have ever seen, I might say) debuted on television in 2000, an astonishing number of critics carped that Goodman’s character, a beer drinking football fan given to shouting at the players on the television screen, did not accurately represent gay men.

I can only suppose that these critics have never walked through the Castro on a Sunday afternoon when the Niners are playing and gay men and women by the thousands are screaming at the TVs. They were watching the games in 1969 as well, though they may have been a bit quieter.

Already by 1969 we no longer saw ourselves as limited to hair styling and interior decorating. To be sure, there are still today plenty of gays—and straights—in both those noble professions; but by now you are just as likely to find gays working openly as policemen and firemen, as ranchers and farmers, auto mechanics, truck drivers, professional athletes, you name it. We are parents, too—natural and adoptive, single and married. And you can trace all this back to those early efforts to break free.

I believe it is clear that much of that liberated image of ourselves that we acquired in those five years between 1964 and 1969 came as a result of the revolution that had taken place in publishing. If I contributed anything of importance to our society I believe it is in leading the charge to change gay publishing. Yes, thank you, I will take a bow.

No tomatoes, please.

Still it was those others who did the real work, who took the real risk. All of us who lived through the fifties lived with the daily specter of violence, arrest, harassment. Mostly, we found ways to minimize the risks and protect ourselves.

These people, however, didn’t minimize their risks, they maximized them. Each time that they met, each newspaper or bulletin that they published, at each public demonstration and with each defiant song, they put it all on the line—their freedom, their livelihoods, even, yes, their lives. You could be killed then for being gay. You still can, of course, as the stories in the news make all too evident, but the odds were even greater then and those who suffered had little recourse under the law.

“Courage” is one of those words that the media has cheapened with repeated over and mis-use. Notwithstanding the gushing of television commentators, courage is not an ice skater throwing in a triple axel at the end of her performance nor a baseline tennis player rushing to the net to score a point. It is not even a pop singer recording a different type of song, perilous though that may be.

Courage is protecting or rescuing another at the risk of your own life or wellbeing, whether braving a burning building as many heroes did in the World Trade Center 9/11 attack or dragging a wounded comrade from the line of enemy fire, or refusing to bow to tyranny. Courage can be plodding, too, and long lasting, as my mother’s was. Courage is fighting for what is right no matter what the fight costs you. It is standing up for what you believe, in the face of hardship, ostracism, harassment, even physical danger.

It took tremendous courage and unshakable conviction to do what these gay heroes of ours did and those of us who benefited from their heroism—certainly that is all of us who are gay and in my humble opinion the majority of straight society as well—ought to be erecting monuments to them. At the very least couldn’t we set aside one day a year in their honor? Yes, I know, there is Pride day, but that’s all about parades and parties, isn’t it, and celebrating ourselves.

Which is not to suggest that there is anything wrong with celebrating ourselves but I think there should be a Heroes Day or perhaps a Founders Day, specifically for them. There’s little hope, I am sure, of a national or even a local holiday, but since when have we needed governmental approval? If we had waited for our government to recognize us or grant us equal protection under the law we would still be dancing with those chains around our ankles.

Gays love a cause. And it isn’t like the old days, after all, when we communicated in codes and whispers. The gay press now reaches across the country, even around the world. Those on the internet can communicate instantaneously. There are organizations that meet virtually every day in virtually every city, and no shortage of activist groups busy with what they insist are our best interests. What is to prevent us, the gay community, from designating a day to honor our own? It wants only someone to spread the word, to get the ball rolling.

Do I see a hand?

 

* * * * * * *

 

We have modern day heroes, too. If his Pope-ness wants to find himself a saint, he need look no further than Ruth Brinker, an older, straight woman who cared about her gay friends who were too sick with AIDS to feed themselves and began to deliver meals to them. That initial effort became Project Open Hand, which now feeds over 600,000 people each year in San Francisco—not just AIDS patients but seniors and anyone who is home bound—and inspired similar efforts in cities around the world.

What about Rita Rocket, a young straight woman who was comforting AIDS patients at San Francisco General long before it became chic to do so (and whose work also is now done by thousands of others in hospitals everywhere)?

Or for that matter maybe the entire gay community. I am a history buff and I can think of nothing—not a single page in recorded history—to compare to the response of the gay community to the AIDS crisis.

Those religious zealots who condemn homosexuals as anti-Christian ought to take another look at their Bibles. The outpouring of loving kindness and givingness that arose within the gay community at the outbreak of AIDS would have been truly miraculous if it had gone on for a single year. It is now twenty years or so and has become a way of life in gay communities throughout the world. AIDS patients—gay or straight—can count on an army of heroes and heroines to pay their rent, bring them groceries or delicious prepared meals, walk their dogs and groom their cats, clean their homes, chauffeur them around and see to every medical necessity and, when it is inevitably needed, provide a friendly shoulder to cry on.

No business could operate for long in any gay community without lending its support for the cause. Every bar—virtually every business establishment—has its Every-Penny-Counts jar waiting for patrons” loose change, to give to an army of support institutions. In San Francisco the store Under One Roof sells merchandise donated by artists and manufacturers, and every cent earned goes to AIDS charities. There are raffles and beer busts and drag contests. There are AIDS runs, AIDS bike events, AIDS marches. One would have to look long and hard to find a gay or lesbian who isn’t somehow involved.

The gay community that we set in motion in the sixties and seventies came of age with the arrival of AIDS. I will let you in on a too-little-known secret, however. It is not only AIDS patients and not only their own kind for whom gays care. Perhaps because they suffer so much pain in their own lives, gays have always been particularly sympathetic to the pain of others. Whatever the reason it is fact that gays and lesbians tend to be caring, giving people.

Some years ago at a cocktail party in Manhattan I met a young man who told me a wonderful story. It seems that he and his partner were coming home from shopping one Saturday afternoon and in the elevator met their neighbor from across the hall, an elderly lady, struggling with her own groceries. They helped her carry them to her apartment and she fixed them a cup of coffee. This began a weekly ritual of taking her shopping with them each weekend and carrying her bags for her. In between there was an occasional dinner, birthday lunches and some chicken soup when she was sick.

In time their neighbor passed on and they were astonished to discover that they were her sole heirs in her will—she had left them a couple of million dollars in blue chip stocks.

A nice ending to his story but the real point is, they had no idea she had any stocks or any money at all; they were just being kind, without any thought of reward.

Lots of gays do the same day in and day out. We help old ladies across the street, care for sick neighbors and aging relatives, give to the homeless. The next time you have been jilted by a lover, a husband or wife or have been fired or found that you are seriously ill, call your gay friends—they will almost certainly be there for you.

Isn’t that what J.C. preached so very long ago? There are those who profess to be Christians who sincerely believe that Christ condemned homosexuality. It would behoove them to take another look at their Scriptures. Christ never directly addressed the subject at all, though there are those who believe that his reference in Mathew to those who are “born eunuchs” refers to homosexuals. Jewish law condemned the eunuchs for the same fundamental reason that it condemned any practice or condition that limited procreation—it was vital, after all, for the tribe to increase.

Moreover, Genesis promises that the Messiah will come from the seed of Adam, which is to say that any male child could turn out to be the Messiah; so anything that interfered with procreation could be seen as preventing the birth of the Messiah.

But Jesus welcomed the eunuch into the fold. Indeed, if there is a common thread to be found in all of Jesus’ teachings it is that of inclusion—which makes it all the more puzzling that so many who call themselves Christians are so obsessed with exclusion.

The Biblical strictures against homosexuality come mostly from the Old Testament and many of them, as I have already indicated, had to do with failure to procreate. In just the same way masturbation—Onanism, if you will—is condemned. One wonders how many of those religious zealots who are so down on homosexuality have never spanked the monkey, so to speak. And when the Church agreed to birth control in any form, even the rhythm method, or first sanctioned wedding vows between sterile couples or those too old to have children, it really surrendered the moral high ground, didn’t it?

Granted not all of the Old Testament references are a question of procreation. In Leviticus, for instance, homosexuality is called an abomination. But that specific reference is to temple prostitution, which is a far cry from what we mean today when we speak of a homosexual life style.

The fact is there is no word in the ancient Hebrew language nor the Aramaic nor even the Greek for homosexuality as we know it today, only words for particular acts, most of those concerned with idolatry or the subjugation of slaves or losers in battle.

All right, I just know some are dusting off their Sodom and Gomorrah mantelpiece villages at this very moment. Even that tale, however, is ambiguous so far as a condemnation of homosexuality per se. If you really care to know, the first Biblical reference that clearly links the sin of Sodom to sexual activity is in the Palestinian apocrypha, in the Book of Jubilees, 16.5-6.

Yes, in Genesis, the village men did gather outside Lot’s door and insist that he send his visiting Angels out to them, so that they might “know” them. And, yes, that verb can have a sexual connotation—but that Hebrew verb is used nine hundred and forty three times in the Old Testament (you may count them yourself if you don’t trust me) and in only ten of them does it signify carnal knowledge, so one can’t be altogether certain in this instance, can one?

In any event, even assuming that to be the case, the issue then would be one of homosexual rape, wouldn’t it? Quite a different matter I should say. Rape and abuse of hospitality, hospitality which was sacred among people living in such a harsh land. Certainly it appears in Mathew 10:14-15 and Luke 10:10-12, that Jesus himself was under the impression that Sodom’s sin was abuse of hospitality.

But all of that simply begs the point. The fact is, whatever was the grave wickedness of Sodom that caused its destruction it was not this incident with the Angels in Lot’s house, though there are many who mistakenly think that to be the case. If you go back and reread the story you will see that the Angels were there to warn Lot of the impending destruction of the city. Sodom was already condemned before this incident even occurred.

There are, of course, plenty of other Biblical passages that one can examine and plenty of books that do examine them, in a far more scholarly fashion than mine; I would recommend Peter J. Gomes’ The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart (W. Morrow, 1996). Nor do I have the familiarity with the sacred books of other religions to qualify to discuss them. The point I am making is, if any congregation wishes to exclude homosexuals from their Church that is certainly their privilege. To do so on the basis of Christ’s teachings, however, is either ignorance (at best) or base hypocrisy. There is no Christian justification for condemning anyone for living his life as a homosexual, though within the framework of that life there may be plenty of other points on which an individual may be criticized—or praised.

Alas, you can never defend the rights or freedoms of gays without someone jumping up to rant about pedophiles. Yes, there are homosexually oriented—and heterosexually oriented—individuals who prey on children. And yes, of course, every sane, decent person finds repugnant those who abuse, not only children, but the elderly, the infirm, all those who are helpless and unable to protect themselves.

I have always believed that gays have a particular affinity for children; perhaps because so many were unhappy themselves as children it left them more attuned to the pain and terror of childhood.

But caring for children and molesting them are quite different things. There isn’t a single shred of evidence to show that this illness is any more common among homosexuals than heterosexuals.

Indeed, there is much to suggest the opposite. If a major movie musical showed a park with lots of young boys playing and an old queen came on screen singing, “thank Heaven, for little boys…” the religious zealots would burn down the theater, but when it is Maurice Chevalier leering and singing about little girls it’s “charming.” What is Minnelli’s Gigi about, after all? Two aging grandes horizontales wait for a young girl to get old enough to begin entertaining gentlemen. And let me tell you, if you haven’t read the book, it isn’t her eighteenth birthday they are awaiting.

I’m not trying to defend child molesters nor to impugn the reputations of Lerner and Loewe. I’m not even suggesting you can’t hate homosexuals if you choose, it’s your Karma, after all. I am saying, however, that I think there are those who use the charges of pedophilia to mask what is nothing but plain old homophobia.

I like bigots better when they are at least a little bit honest.

 

* * * * * * *

 

There are those, too, and they are particularly reprehensible, I think, who contend that AIDS is God’s punishment of the homosexual. Were that the case one would have to suppose that he particularly detests blacks, since it is the heterosexual black populations of Africa who are now suffering the worst of the AIDS epidemic (and one would suppose, too, that he is truly fond of lesbians, for whom the incidence of AIDS is practically zero).

Nature has never been reluctant to sacrifice an individual—or even an entire species—for the greater good of the whole. It is easy to look around us in the present moment and see the ills of the world; but if we take the longer view it is clear that even in the last few centuries—a mere drop in the ocean of time—we have evolved to a much higher level of civilization.

It wasn’t so very far in the past that women were not much more than chattel to men. An eighteenth- or even a nineteenth-century woman born without independent means must necessarily find a man to take care of her. For many women marriage was only a licensed form of prostitution; few women could afford the luxury of marrying for love. And aside from marriage the opportunities for legitimate employment were rare. The gothic novels of frightened governesses notwithstanding, such positions were few and far between and even those women did not usually enjoy the sort of romantic pleasantness we find in the Brontës’ novels.

Childhood is a rather modern concept. It is only in recent time that children were regarded as a separate class, protected, looked after, and entitled to spend much of their time at play. Only a few years ago they were regarded more as small adults. And routinely exploited mercilessly. They still are in many places, true, but at least much of the world condemns such practices.

It is only in modern times that debtors’ prisons were abolished and that there has come to be help for the poor and the needy and until the twentieth century decent medical care was mostly for the wealthy. And though we have certainly not eliminated wars we have come, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, to a serious understanding of the horrors and dangers of armed conflicts and the world’s major governments confer regularly in serious attempts to prevent them.

Of course, we humans take an egocentric view of life—as I am sure do all life forms—but it is really only hubris to think of our bodies in personal terms—my body, your body. For starters, it’s really only a loaner, isn’t it, and I don’t recall having any voice in choosing model or color.

Anyway, it would certainly be more correct to say “our body,” since it is really home to trillions of living things aside from your personality—bacteria, viruses, the like. At this very moment there are microscopic creatures living at the base of your eyelashes. It may well be that these other creatures are the dominant life forms and that “our” bodies are only evolutionary adaptations to provide them with congenial hosts.

Now before the Christian Right starts shrieking at me about that evolution/creation argument, let me say that I do not see that there is necessarily a conflict between the two. Why, if one believes in God, would one suppose that evolution is not itself a part of God’s plan? After all, even God could not create a perfect man and give him free will, which in itself implies the right to imperfection. And supposing anyway that he could, what would that mean? An infinity of his own clones? What would be the point in that?

It may be that we and our evolution are a necessary part of the perfect design. God could not, could he, be perfect without the fullest knowledge of all evil, all pain, all failure? But if God were a failure, if God suffered pain, or committed evil, why then, he would again not be perfect, would he?

Perhaps we are only a sort of proxy for him, experiencing through the course of many lives all of life’s goods and evils and as we learn from them and shed the necessity of experiencing each, growing ever closer to the source from which we sprang and into which in time we will return.

Like those long ago Zoroastrian magi searching for the Messiah (history tends to believe that there were only two, not three, but I can’t say; whatever you may have heard, I was not there) we are all of us hearts in exile, stumbling about in the dark as we try to find our way to an unknowable destination. Perverse as it may seem, I believe that the loneliness of the journey may be God’s greatest gift. After all, if we could find perfect happiness, perfect contentment, in any person, in any work or place, what would there then be to urge us on in our journey?

Not far from where I grew up in Ohio there are remnants of an ancient mound-building people. The largest of these mounds takes the form of a serpent swallowing an egg. What is odd is that you would never guess at this representation seeing the mound from the ground, you see only curving hillocks of earth. To see the pattern they make you must see the mounds from the air, though the people who built them could hardly have done so.

I believe that we live surrounded by God’s pattern but we aren’t high enough to see it. You can elevate yourself, of course. That is the point of education, of meditation and prayer. The more one lifts oneself up, the more of the pattern he is able to discern. Only the enlightened few have a perspective lofty enough to see the outline whole. I do not pretend that I can make out that pattern but I do believe I can discern that there is a pattern.

The Holocaust, for instance, was certainly a tragedy of incomparable proportions. Yet it is largely as a result of that nightmare—of the shame and guilt and horror that it engendered in civilized people throughout the world—that the nation of Israel now exists and the Jews, who suffered endless persecution down through the centuries, now enjoy a freedom and respect—and power—that they had not known since the Biblical dispersal.

The slavery of the blacks in the nineteenth century is another epic tragedy. Yet it was the very horror of that system that caused good people to rise up and condemn and finally outlaw the practice of slavery, a practice that had been accepted, even taken for granted, throughout man’s long history until then. You could look at that and see one of history’s darkest hours or one of civilization’s great steps forward.

I cannot pretend to wisdom or to any particular spiritual insight. But it does seem to me that when we are able to look back upon the AIDS epidemic from the perspective of history, it may well be that we will discern in that tragedy a new and wonderful chapter in the history of the gay “nation.”

The Pride that we celebrate each June isn’t just an empty word, it is a dignity that gays have earned with every penny donated, every moment given, every kind and loving word, with each soul that we have wished God speed, with every vaccine test we have signed up for, with every candlelight march we have joined in.

In the forties and fifties gays were made to feel guilty, like freaks of nature who must hide their true selves and apologize to any who realized the truth. Today no man or woman has any reason to feel ashamed or embarrassed for being gay.

If that isn’t a revolution, I don’t know what is.

The fight isn’t over, of course. The fight for freedom never is. Gays and lesbians are still bashed and killed for nothing more than being what God or nature made them. There are plenty who want us dead or at the least back in our cages. In Russia and many of her former satellite countries the laws against homosexuality mostly remain harsh. Recently in Egypt twenty-three men were sentenced to one to five years of hard labor for simply congregating in a gay club. In many Arab countries gays are put to death as a matter of course.

But it isn’t only other countries in which such ugliness remains. Here in the United States, bastion of democracy and decency, the Jesse Helms and the Phelps and the Sheldons and their minions of darkness still preach hate and evil and call it God’s work. The United States military still has a policy of gay persecution and the violence and even murders that sometimes result are indelible stains upon the souls of those in charge. The moving finger writes and, as the poet said, not all your tears nor all your piety can wash away a single word.

The persecution of gays seems to me particularly tragic because it is so often waged in the name of “normalcy.” We are commonly labeled as abnormal, unnatural, freaks, perverts, inverts—regarded, often even by those who are our friends, as somehow unnatural.

Unnatural? CNN Correspondent Jeanne Moos recently did a story on a pair of male penguins who have lived as a couple for seven years—which certainly qualifies as a long term relationship in my book.

Wendell and Cass share a penthouse burrow—I know, wouldn’t they just have the poshest digs?—at the New York Aquarium in Coney Island. They preen one another and when they are apart they vocalize to one another just like their straight neighbors (who, by the by, don’t seem to mind their relationship at all). At feeding time Cass stays home to watch the burrow—you never know when some upstart neighbor may think about moving in—and Wendell, who seems to be the butch, brings home the bacon—or in this case, the fish. And, yes, they do all the things that other penguin couples do.

Seven years. A romantic tale indeed, in my opinion. If those guys can find one another, I like to think there is still hope for me.

All right, yes, penguins are sort of funny critters to begin with. But it isn’t just penguins. Dr. William J. Sladen of Annapolis has found a solution to the proliferation of mute swans and their damage to the endangered vegetation of the Chesapeake Bay, by bringing together as cygnets pairs of male swans. These same sex couples live together for lifetimes in adoring happiness, without the problems of reproducing. So far Dr. Sladen has brokered no fewer than fifty-four of these long term relationships, a solution he considers infinitely preferable to the calls for swan slaughter that have come from others wanting to protect the bay’s environment.

Among the tropical ants Cardiocondyla Oscurior, the sexual competition is so fierce that the aggressive wingless males fight to the death for the privilege of mating with the queen. But there are winged males as well, far more docile—in a sense, the sissies of the colony. Now, one would think that these gentler fellows would almost surely get their butts kicked by their super macho hill-mates, and would have little chance for romance besides. That is not the case, however, because they secrete a chemical very much like that produced by the queen, a sort of chemical “drag,” as it were. As a result, not only do the butch wingless males not fight them, they often try to mate with them. Hmm—reminds me of that experience I told you about earlier, when I decided to dress up for Halloween.

In Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (St. Martin’s Press, 1999) Dr. Bruce Bagemihl states that homosexual or transgender behavior has been documented in no fewer than four hundred and fifty species, which seems to me to make it altogether a natural behavior. If you care, almost all bonobos or pygmy chimpanzees (our closest primate cousins) engage in homosexual acts, and only about one percent of ostriches.

Which is to say, if you are contemplating a bit of bestiality, you might want to skip the ostriches and hit on chimps instead.

Of course I just know someone is saying, but those are beasts and we are a higher form of life (at least in some opinions, although if you ask me, l’uomo è bestia, which freely translated means, men are beasts). Nevertheless, there is no country, society or culture in which we do not exist, often under the most arduous of circumstances.

A friend tells me of being taken to see a vacant lot separating the Arab and Jewish areas of Jerusalem and finding it busy with Orthodox Jews and young Arab men doing the deed together—not the first time, one must mention, that the sexual instruments have served as organs of rapprochement. I have no doubt that some will consider that scandalous but it seems to me, big silly that I am, that getting one’s rocks off is nicer for everyone than throwing rocks.

But my point is that we are everywhere, regardless of any circumstances of war or enmity, and ever have been. One need take only a cursory look at history to see that we have been around since the beginning. The writers of the Old Testament wouldn’t have had to shake their fingers and say “no, no,” if there hadn’t been guys saying “yes, yes.” We know we were represented in Rome and Greece and Egypt, and ancient Japan and China; and I haven’t the slightest doubt that one day some of those old cave squiggles will be translated to read “Peter loves James.”

What is more significant, I think, is that there isn’t a shred of evidence that either the repression of homosexuality nor the open acceptance of it has changed the numbers in any significant way. Homosexual behavior might be accordingly more discreet or flagrant, but the indication is that the overall percentage of the general population has remained more or less constant.

Which seems to me to say that we are altogether a normal part of human society, quite as natural as our heterosexual brothers and sisters and simply another facet in Nature’s grand design, which neither you nor I nor they can pretend to grasp entirely. But I am only a writer and an observer of the human condition and I am sure there are experts who will take exception with my observations and bigots who will continue to exclude us from the family circle.

Nevertheless, I have every confidence in the young men and women who will be our watchdogs and fight our fights through the next generation and the one after that.

And let it now be proclaimed herein and known by all, that, age be damned, I remain ever ready to serve as I did in our past battles, to solace and succor our brave soldiers.

And Marines, too, of course.

Oh, and sailors.