I thought Brokeback Mountain was excellent.

Jake Gyllenhaal is the hottest thing on the screen, and he ate that part up like it was toast and marmalade. And yes, I’ll admit, “fishing trips” have played a large part in my fantasy life since, oh, hell, as long as I can remember.

Ang Lee has an eye for beauty like few directors alive, and what between the close-ups and the sweeping majesty of the Rockies, well there’s hardly better out there for mythic West redux.

And I cried, openly, freely, at the bit with the shirt. Because I am a sentimental man, you see, and I am weak for that kind of narrative knife-twist.

But Annie Proulx, she’s a cagey one. And after seeing it I realized why the AFA, and the FRCs, and all the Christabigot hordes have not come out of the woodwork like so many roaches. They have not come out screaming and teaming about the filth up there on the screen and why? Because it’s the same old Hollywood shite all over again.

The faggot dies in the end – beaten to death with a tire iron, no less. The faggot dies, just like he always does, every goddamn time. And the converso bottles up his heresy like a good boy, and becomes ex-gay. It’s a conservative’s dream, served up as a moral lesson to us all.

A moral lesson for which I paid good money – and will no doubt pay again, because that’s the thing about myths. They speak to us like nothing else ever can. And we weep and pay, and weep again. Because that’s what’s supposed to happen, dammit.

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Below are some thoughts I put together for an invited talk before a Sunday school class at one of the big fancy liberalish mainline churches here in town…

First of all, I should like to thank Ms. X for inviting me to speak with you this morning. I should also like to thank each of you for letting me come and have this conversation with this Sunday school.

I have come to speak with you about the impact of Amendment #2; I shall speak both as a Christian and as a social scientist. I shall assume from the outset that all of you know what Amendment #2 was about, at least in outline.

Let me start with some background: My partner and I are members of First Congregational United Church of Christ. I was confirmed as a Methodist. My father was recently lay leader of First United Methodist of Sacramento. His mother (my grandmother) was the Sunday school superintendent and a founding member of Trinity United Methodist in Anderson, South Carolina; she also served as a missionary for that denomination in Monterey, Mexico. Her father (my great-grandfather, for whom I am named) was a minister in the Southwest Texas and North Georgia conferences of the United Methodist Church as well as the chaplain at Oxford College of Emory University in Georgia.

I therefore come to speak to you as a Christian. But also as someone with a long family connection to Texas – I like to say that we have “flirted” with Texas in my family for five generations. My father’s first wife was from Houston. His father went to Texas Tech, and was one of the first presidents of that school’s ex-students’ association. His father taught at Tech, having founded that school’s department of textile engineering. And his father (my great-great grandfather) married a woman named Texas, who incidentally was Sam Houston’s great-niece.

Let me start by referencing two passages from the Bible, both of which I am sure you all know well:

First, from the book of Genesis, chapter 19, verses 1-13, as translated in the Revised Standard Version:

1: The two angels came to Sodom in the evening; and Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them, and bowed himself with his face to the earth,
2: and said, “My lords, turn aside, I pray you, to your servant’s house and spend the night, and wash your feet; then you may rise up early and go on your way.” They said, “No; we will spend the night in the street.”
3: But he urged them strongly; so they turned aside to him and entered his house; and he made them a feast, and baked unleavened bread, and they ate.
4: But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house;
5: and they called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may know them.”
6: Lot went out of the door to the men, shut the door after him,
7: and said, “I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly.
8: Behold, I have two daughters who have not known man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.”
9: But they said, “Stand back!” And they said, “This fellow came to sojourn, and he would play the judge! Now we will deal worse with you than with them.” Then they pressed hard against the man Lot, and drew near to break the door.
10: But the men put forth their hands and brought Lot into the house to them, and shut the door.
11: And they struck with blindness the men who were at the door of the house, both small and great, so that they wearied themselves groping for the door.
12: Then the men said to Lot, “Have you any one else here? Sons-in-law, sons, daughters, or any one you have in the city, bring them out of the place;
13: for we are about to destroy this place, because the outcry against its people has become great before the LORD, and the LORD has sent us to destroy it.”

Secondly, from the Gospel of John, chapter 4, verses 3-15, again from the RSV:

3: he left Judea and departed again to Galilee.
4: He had to pass through Samar’ia.
5: So he came to a city of Samar’ia, called Sy’char, near the field that Jacob gave to his son Joseph.
6: Jacob’s well was there, and so Jesus, wearied as he was with his journey, sat down beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.
7: There came a woman of Samar’ia to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.”
8: For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.
9: The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samar’ia?” For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.
10: Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, `Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”
11: The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep; where do you get that living water?
12: Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, and his sons, and his cattle?”
13: Jesus said to her, “Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again,
14: but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
15: The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.”

What are these passages about? They are about hospitality and uncharitability. They are about, on the one hand, Jesus’s radical promise of inclusion to all – even Samaritan harlots. And they are about, on the other hand, the consequences of exclusion – of what happens to communities that molest the weary, the outsider, the wayfarer. They are about Jesus’s promise of good news, of grace and forgiveness for all who would ask for living water, of a way out of the Old Testament cycle of condemnation, damnation, and destruction.

With those two texts in mind, let me turn to Amendment 2.

Amendment 2 took our state Bill of Rights – a document drafted on the premise that “all free men, when they form a social compact, have equal rights” (Article 1, Section 3) and wrote into it language that forever excludes gay and lesbian couples from the institution of marriage, and forever bars their relationships from any sort of state recognition.

What was the purpose of this exercise in exclusion?

The proponents of Amendment 2 were explicit: the point was to make absolutely clear that homosexuality is a sin, that homosexual persons are categorically dishonorable and wicked (“intrinsically disordered,” to use the Catholic phrase), and that homosexual relationships are therefore unworthy and condemned. To make clear that the state will never, so long as the constitution stands as it does today, condone homosexuality, homosexual persons, or homosexual relationships. To write into the law that homosexuals are categorically excluded from admittance into a social institution nearly universally agreed to be most noble, holy, and honorable: marriage. This was not just about marriage, though. It was about homosexuality full stop; declaring publicly, loudly, and with the full force of our Constitution that gays are set apart from everyone else, set apart and declared anathema.

Now, there are additional reasons why Amendment 2 came about when it did, why Gov. Perry chose this year to bring it to the ballot, why we saw it in some dozen-odd states in the 2004 election, etc. And I would be happy to speak to those questions, if there is interest. But at the end of the day, the message of the election was clear: to quote Gov. Perry: “if there is some other state that has a more lenient view than Texas then maybe that’s a better place for them to live.”

Having amended the constitution to categorically exclude gays from the institution of marriage, and to forever bar the recognition of gay relationships, what will happen next? What, in a word, is the impact?

For gays and lesbians, on a purely emotional level, the election was hard. We knew we were going to lose when we went into it, but we did not reckon that the margin would be so high (76/24). So, there was and will for some time yet be a period of mourning and coming to terms. In other states where similar defeats have occurred, the gay and lesbian community has sometimes weathered the challenge and come out stronger (OR, CO) and sometimes turned upon itself in bitterness and recrimination (CA, ME). I suspect that the here in Texas it will be more the former than the latter (primarily b/c of alliances built during the campaign, e.g., with the Democratic Party – but also b/c most of us were relatively clear-eyed about what would happen).

But on a larger scale, this represents a significant contraction of what political sociologists call the “political opportunity structure.” Given how hostile the government in Texas is towards the claims of the gay and lesbian community, and given the slim-to-none chance that that situation will change in the near-to-medium term, the gay and lesbian community will probably undergo a significant retrenchment. To take an imperfect parallel, when African-Americans faced the legal onslaught of “Redemptionist” politics at the turn of the last century, there were (broadly speaking) three responses: one, Booker T Washington’s call for education, narrowed political horizons, and an acceptance of the reality of social segregation; two, emigration to the North; and third, the founding of the NAACP. I expect the LGB community here in Texas will probably do similarly: some portion will move to more fair-minded states, some will go back into the closet, and a remnant will continue to labor in the vineyard for another season.

For this last option, I hope that those who remain will focus on institution-building. Which is fraught, of course – not least because of people emigrating and/or going back into the closet. Institutions within the gay community historically have consisted of bars and recreational/charity groups such as the drag courts – neither of which really lend themselves easily to the advancement of political causes. In addition to those, what we need – especially in a place like this – are:

- newspapers (though the Ally shut down last year),
- neighborhoods (and their associations – but Fairmount and Meadowbrook are probably getting less gay with time, not more so)
- a community center (we lost ours 10 years ago)
- professional groups
- churches willing to host, sponsor, and incubate other groups — which so far as I know, is true of only one of the three gay churches here.
- both partisan and non-partisan political organizations: Equality Texas, Stonewall Democrats, Log Cabin Republicans, etc.

All of this, obviously, is for the long term. I do not expect the gay community will see marriage or civil union in this state in my lifetime – especially not with the current courts, state legislative and executive leadership, or the present political make-up of Washington. To agitate in these circumstance is good, but it needs must be with an eye toward making change in the next generation, not necessarily in this one. It took 50 years before the NAACP was able to bring Brown before the Supreme Court. I see no particular reason why it will take less time to undo the accumulated effects of Texas’s DOMA, Amendment 2, the national DOMA signed by Clinton in 1996, and all the state laws and amendments passed over the past dozen years.

What will be the impact on the state as a whole?

That is harder to say. I, and others, have speculated that Texas businesses – especially those engaged in “new economy”-type fields – may now find it somewhat harder to recruit and retain employees. And not just gay or lesbian employees, who will no doubt look with trepidation upon the prospect of living their lives and attempting to establish their families in a place where they can never solemnize their relationships. But also moderate-and-liberal heterosexual folks – people like my friend Margaret, who now lives in DC; or my friend Katherine, who now lives in Boston; or my friend Anthony, who now lives in New York – all of whom are from the Metroplex originally, but have told me flat out that they hope never to move back. All of this is pure conjecture, of course, and perhaps TI, or the Bombay Company, or even TCU will see no dip at all in their applicant pools for engineers, designers, and PhDs.

I would also speculate that, having succeeded in mobilizing the electorate around the demagogy of exclusion, we will continue to see versions of this in the future. Perhaps not around gay issues – though I would note that Virginia is currently considering ways of re-instituting its sodomy statute – but perhaps around other anathematized out-groups: repealing jus soli (birthright citizenship), for instance, or forming armed amateur border militias, or barring non-citizens from receiving government-funded social services, as California did back in the early 90s.

What can I/we do about this?

Well, one could quote Niemoller here, the Dachau internee who noted “first they came for the Jews, but I did not speak up because I was a Christian…” etc., but I think appealing to the fear of “maybe someday they’ll come for you” is overstated. The demagogy of exclusion will never, I trust, reach so far as to touch members of this congregation. No, I would return to Jesus’s invitation to the woman at the well, and his message of radical inclusion. Jesus shared his message, and his life, with everyone – from harlots and Samaritans to centurions and rich young rulers. And if inclusion means anything, it means more than watching Will and Grace. It means including gay people in your life, including yourself in the life of gay people, it means including gay people in the institutions to which you belong, and ultimately it means including gay people in the civic fabric of this state.

Ask someone over to dinner at your house. Next time you meet a gay couple, ask them when their anniversary is. Ask a co-worker out for coffee. Make it a point to invite partners to the office party. Etc. That kind of micro-inclusion, that basic hospitality, is fundamental to what it means to live in a decent society.

If you are willing to take that extra step, remember that the NAACP, when it was founded, was bi-racial in membership. Join PFLAG, or Equality Texas, or TROT (the gay bowling league) or some other organization. And make sure to attend the meetings– for how else are you going to find people to include in your life? At least one “gay” organization to which I belong has a membership that is in fact 20% heterosexual, and is about to elect a straight man to the executive board. If you are committed to inclusion, show it with your time and your talents.

And finally, speak up. When I moved down here to Texas, someone made a joke to me: saying “oh, you know you shouldn’t come out as gay down there. Someone might assume you’re a Democrat, and then they’d really have to shoot ya.” Which, while funny, is nonetheless instructive. I know more people who are afraid to confess themselves as tolerant, who are afraid to take on the identity of “liberal” – and who therefore, because they are afraid, comply with the reproduction of social and political exclusion. Confess the truth of your convictions and spread the good news of inclusion. Speak up – because I and others like me cannot speak to everyone, and unless you speak up, ain’t nothing ever gonna change.

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Overheard at a recent faculty party:

“What Texas needs is Navaho schools. You know, where we beat them whenever they speak Bible verses.”

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