Considering Andrew Sullivan On His 48th Birthday

Andrew Sullivan’s story is undeniably unimaginable. He is an HIV-positive gay Catholic conservative who grew up in a poor, nearly illiterate Irish family in the tiny English village of East Grinstead who went on to become as one of the most powerful writers in America.

Sullivan is really quite dadddylicious... I think I would do him.

I disagree with Sullivan on so very many issues, yet he is one Conservative who not only makes sense a great deal of the time, he also is eloquent, informative, well researched & not locked into any single ideology. He represents so much of the character that the Right Wing Conservatives rail on about: intellectualism, discussion, & truth. Hmmm… maybe he is actually liberal in a bear costume.


Sullivan is the author of 5 books, including The Conservative Soul, which argues that the American right has strayed from "true" conservative thinking. His writing has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, The Economist, & New Republic. Sullivan has appeared on political talk shows: Face the Nation, Nightline, Meet the Press, & he is a regular on my much loved- Real Time with the Bill Maher. I am a daily reader of Sullivan's political blog- Daily Dish, which moved from the Atlantic website to Newsweek this spring. Daily Dish is in the top 10 of the most read blogs on the Internet.


Born in Britain, Sullivan moved to the United States in 1984 after studying at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. After earning masters degree in public administration in 1986, Sullivan went on to write for The New Republic & then became editor in 1990. During his tenure at The New Republic, the magazine won 3 National Magazine Awards for General Excellence, Reporting & Public Interest. After resigning in 1996, Sullivan became a contributing writer & columnist for the New York Times Magazine, a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review & a weekly columnist for the Sunday Times of London. In the summer of 2000, Sullivan became one of the first mainstream journalists to experiment with blogging, & grew a large following with andrewsullivan.com's Daily Dish. He has blogged independently & for Time.com, & in 2007 Sullivan moved his blog to The Atlantic Online, before the switch to Tina Brown’s site for Newsweek, where he now writes several posts every daily.


As a boy, Sullivan slowly realised that he was gay, yet he had no vocabulary to understand it. He says he didn’t hear the word “gay” while at school. Sullivan: “It’s hard for people to understand now, but there was a total silence about homosexuality. It was unmentioned & unmentionable. When I was 8 years old, I asked his mother if it was true that God really knew everything about you. She said yes. Then I answered: ‘ there’s no hope for me, Mum’”


After years of trying to suppress his sexuality that Sullivan claims: “ I had emotional blockage that really warped my personality”, he allowed himself to fall in love & have sex. On a visit home he finally told his parents he was gay. His mother said: “Oh my god. I’d better make a cup of tea.” His father wept. Sullivan had never seen his father cry before. Sullivan said: “What’s wrong? I’m fine.” His father replied: “No, you don’t understand. I’m crying because of everything you must have been through, & I did nothing to support you.” Sullivan: “It was the most honest expression of love I have ever heard.”


Sullivan’s sideswipes with the liberal gay establishment is easy for me to understand. The gay rights debate has been reshaped in the past 2 decades, much because of Sullivan’s writing. He penned the first major article in America calling for gay people to be given the right to marry, & he was brought to task by other gay people for it. He was shunned by gay rights groups & in gay bars he was reviled & dubbed a “collaborator” & physically attacked. The case was made that he was asking gays to assimilate, act less “gay” & model themselves on straight marriage. Sullivan was opting into the very system gay people wanted to destroy.


Sullivan suggested a radical change for the gay rights movement, from an argument that we are different to the insistence that we are the same as straights. Sullivan published Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality. The book took the homophobic right & the gay left to task & made the case for absorbing gay people into existing social institutions, especially marriage. Sullivan sees this position as fundamentally conservative & I have to agree with him. I never have understood while the Conservative Right Wing rails against gay people as promiscuous & reckless, & stressing that we can not be married & have families. It has occurred to me that by their very own standards, they should be rejoicing that we want to marry.


When it was discovered that Sullivan was advertising for unprotected sex on a bareback website, his detractors went full tilt with the revelation & spotlighted it as a scandal. Sullivan made it absolutely clear he was HIV positive & only sought other positive sex partners. Sullivan: “It was vile. It was published everywhere, & they sent it to my mother & my bosses. They wanted to destroy me.” His critics claimed that this proved Sullivan’s argument for gay monogamy was a fraud. Sullivan: “I was never a hypocrite. Never… No gay man writing at that time was more open about their sex life than I was.”


Sullivan has taken position that is disarmingly honest: “One side has excoriated promiscuity; the other side has glorified it. & both have, in the process, erased the human being in the middle. I felt, & often still feel, unable to live up to the ideals I really hold.” He even admitted to having unprotected sex with another HIV-positive man. When quarries if there is a part of him that subconsciously wanted to get caught? Sullivan: “No. I wanted to get laid!”


Sullivan intends the next battle is to “turn Christianity against the fundamentalists”. For him, “their certainty is the real blasphemy; their desire to control the lives of others the real heresy; their simple depiction of the Godhead proof positive they do not really understand him. In the Gospels, the men who set themselves up as arbiters of moral correctness are often the furthest from God, he says, while Jesus urges people to see beyond fetishising rules & commandments to their own conscience.”

5 years ago Sullivan met Aaron Tone, a younger actor & artist, & fell in love. In 2007 they were married in Provincetown, at a small ceremony for family & friends. It was where, 15 years before, when gay marriage seemed an impossible dream, Sullivan had composed his tome-Virtually Normal. They live together with their 2 beagles in an apartment in Washington DC.

If you follow my little spot on the Internet, you can surmise by my writing & my age, I am daunted by the prospect, that with the inevitability of Marriage Equality for all people in the USA & as the walls come tumbling down around the argument that gays are the product of the devil & that their unions will be the ruin of civilization, gay people will assimilate to the point of loosing their gayness. This concerns me, as I have grabbed hold of being an outsider as my badge of honor. Even though I am married & live in a city without a gay ghetto (gays are everywhere in Portland), in my heart I want us to still be queer. Ours is a rich & rare history. Even when I find Andrew Sullivan to be wrong, the fieriness of his arguments strengthens & stirs me on to be defiant & different.

 

Was George Bernard Shaw An Early Gay Rights Advocate?

The very heterosexual- George Bernard Shaw is one of my favorite figures in history. He was a man of the theatre & films, a Socialist & a rabble rouser. My 1st realization of Shaw as an important person was from my parent's original cast album of My Fair Lady, a Lerner & Lowe musical based on Shaw's play Pygmalion. The cover featured a drawing of Shaw as God the puppeteer, pulling the strings of Julie Andrews & Rex Harrison as marionettes. I still picture God as Shavian.

G.B. Shaw was born on this day in 1856, in Dublin & moved to London when he was 20 years old. He found great success as a music & literary critic, but he is most famous for writing drama. He wrote 60+ plays, & he continued to write until his death at 94. He was fiercely proud of being a free thinking humanist, dedicated to presenting the cause of human rights for all.

Shaw became a vegetarian while he was 25. As a strict vegetarian, he was a firm anti-vivisectionist & was antagonistic to cruel sports for the remainder of his life.The belief in the immorality of eating animals is frequently a topic in his plays & prefaces. Shaw: "A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses."

But who knew that he was a gay rights activist? In 1889, Shaw recognized the harassment, arrests, & punishments given to homosexuals as a violation of basic human rights & wrote to the editor of a newspaper:

"I am sorry to have to ask you to allow me to mention what everybody declares unmentionable. My justification shall be that we may presently be saddled with the moral responsibility for monstrously severe punishments inflicted not only on persons who have corrupted children, but on others whose conduct, however nasty & ridiculous, has been perfectly within their admitted rights as individuals. To a fully occupied person in normal health, with due opportunities for a healthy social enjoyment, the mere idea of the subject of the threatened prosecutions is so expressively disagreeable as to appear unnatural. But everybody does not find it so. There are among us highly respected citizens who have been expelled from public schools for giving effect to the contrary opinion; & there are hundreds of others who might have been expelled on the same ground had they been found out. Greek philosophers, otherwise of unquestioned virtue, have differed with us on the point. So have soldiers, sailors, convicts, & in fact members of all communities deprived of intercourse with women. A whole series of Balzac's novels turns upon attachments formed by galley slaves for one another - attachments which are represented as redeeming them from utter savagery. Women, from Sappho onwards, have shown that this appetite is not confined to one sex. Now, I do not believe myself to be the only man in England acquainted with these facts. I strongly protest against any journalist writing, as nine out of ten are at this moment dipping their pens to write, as if he had never heard of such things except as vague & sinister rumors concerning the most corrupt phases in the decadence of Babylon, Greece & Rome. I appeal now to the champions of individual rights to join me in a protest against a law by which two adult men can be sentenced to twenty years penal servitude for a private act, freely consented to & desired by both, which concerns themselves alone. There is absolutely no justification for the law except the old theological one of making the secular arm the instrument of God's vengeance. It is a survival from that discarded system with its stonings & burnings; & it survives because it is so unpleasant that men are loath to meddle with it even with the object of getting rid of it, lest they should be suspected of acting in their personal interest. We are now free to face with the evil of our relic of Inquisition law, & of the moral cowardice, which prevents our getting rid of it. For my own part, I protest against the principle of the law under which the warrants have been issued; & I hope that no attempt will be made to enforce its outrageous penalties in the case of adult men."

Born On This Day- February 4th... Crusader Evan Wolfson

Evan Wolfson is Executive Director of Freedom to Marry, the leading campaign to win marriage equality nationwide. His national leadership on marriage equality & his appearance before the U.S. Supreme Court in Boy Scouts of America v. James Dale, prompted the National Law Journal to named Evan one of "the 100 most influential lawyers in America." In 2004, Time magazine named Evan one of "the 100 most influential people in the world."

 

In 2004, he published a book,- Why Marriage Matters, in an attempt to create dialogue with straight Americans who don’t realize that civil unions are a parallel alternative, & not on an equal footing with marriage.


Wolfson: “Gay marriage is not what we’re looking for. We’re looking for the legal right for gays to marry. You don’t ask for half a loaf. We don’t need two lines at the clerk’s office when there’s already an institution that works in this country, & it’s called marriage. One of the main protections that come with marriage is inherent in the word: certainly in times of crisis any other word than marriage would not bring the same clarity or impart the same dignity.”


His passion for Marriage Equality does not mean Wolfson wants to get hitched. No one has put a ring on it, he is not even engaged. Wolfson: “Why get engaged, if you aren’t allowed to get married?”


Before attending Harvard, he spent 2 years with the Peace Corps in Togo in West Africa, where he had his first gay relationship. After law school, he was recruited by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.


Wolfson worked as a prosecutor from 1983 to 1988 , writing amicus briefs arguing for a ban on racial discrimination in jury selection & the abolition of the marital rape exemption. He did pro bono work for Lambda from 1984 to 1988. Which meant he had to “come out” professionally.


With Lambda, he represented James Dale, the ousted Eagle Scout, against the Boy Scouts of America, & participated in Baker v. State, which led to civil unions in Vermont.


Jewish, portly, short, & bald, Wolfson is just my type. He is a Blogger. He turns 53 today.


Wolfson & his significant other for the last 6 years, Cheng He, a Canadian whose field is molecular biology, are not married- “but we would love the opportunity to have that choice.”

Born On This Day... Michelangelo Signorile

Considering the striking news of the vote to repeal DADT, I can't help but reflect that when I came out to myself at 15 years old, I held back the anquish by reminding myself: "Hey, you won't have to be drafted & go to Vietnam, or get married & have children." Then the world changed around me.


Michelangelo Signorile became embroiled in a controversy when he published a story outing the former Assistant Defense Secretary Pete Williams. The scandal brought even more discourse about the hipocricy of the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding gays serving in the military.

Signorele is one of the most notable gay activists of our time. A journalist, radio talk show host & an author, Michelangelo Signorile helped pave the way for gay people to come out more easily. There may be a bit of controversy attached to his name from his actions, but his work helped change the way gay people can freely live their lives today, including the right to serve in the military.

Signorile was born on this day in Brooklyn. His childhood was spent in Brooklyn & Staten Island. He recognized his sexual preference at an early age, but he chose to keep it a secret from his family & friends, because of his Roman Catholic upbringing.



During the 1970s & the 1980s, Michelangelo Signorile studied journalism at Syracuse University. After graduation, he landed a job at public relations firm in NYC, & his job involved getting his clients into the city's gossip columns. Later on, he ended up working as a gossip columnist himself.

"Outing" was a word coined by Time magazine. The term itself is controversial, even to this time, because the definition is to cause a closeted homosexual to admit his or her sexual orientation publicly by force. In the early 1990s, Michelangelo Signorile found himself at the center of that controversy.



For OutWeek magazine, Michelangelo Signorile watched the gossip columns of other publications. It became the goal of his work in OutWeek to challenge what he perceived as the media's double-standard when it comes to being silent on reporting on homosexual celebrities while glamorizing heterosexual couples.

Among the celebrities that Michelangelo Signorile was credited for outing are film & record producer David Geffen & gossip queen Liz Smith.



Perhaps the most controversial outing that Michelangelo Signorile was responsible for was the publishing tycoon, & frequent Elizabeth Taylor date Malcolm Forbes, publisher of Forbes magazine. Within weeks of Forbes' death in 1990, Signorile published a story about Forbes being a closeted gay. It is a fact that was known in the social circles of New York but was never publicly declared.

The Forbes story became the subject of scandal at the time & many other mainstream media refused to report on Malcolm Forbes' sexuality until months later.

Signorile was once arrested for disrupting a speech made by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger at St. Peter's Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1988. Cardinal Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI, wrote many of the policies of the Catholic Church against homosexuality & the use of condoms at the time. Signorile attended the speech only as a spectator, but hearing Cardinal Ratzinger talk, Signorile said that his childhood experiences of homophobia came back to him & filled him with rage. This rage prompted Signorile to jump up the platform, point to Cardinal Ratzinger & declare the cardinal as the devil.

I am so shallow; I need to admit that I started reading him because I found him to be so hot. He grew to be one of my favorite writers on the subject of gay rights.

Born On This Day- November 19th... Gay Rights Pioneer Morris Kight

40+ years ago, Christopher Street West, which oversees the L.A. Gay Pride Parade, was co-founded by gay rights pioneer- Morris Kight, who also started up the Gay Liberation Front in Los Angeles in 1969 & the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center in 1971, when it was known as the Gay Community Services Center.

Born in 1919 in Comanche County, Texas, Kight arrived in Los Angeles in 1958 when he was almost 40. He had been working for social justice causes since the early 1940s, & suddenly he found himself, dealing with the brutal ways that the L.A. Police Department chose to treat gay people.


He often cited Eleanor Roosevelt as an influence on his values & his activism. He came to prominence with the Dow Action Committee, protesting weapons manufacturing during the Vietnam War. In 1969, he & a small group of others launched the Gay Liberation Front, one of the first such efforts.He focused his work on GLBT people, but he was a dedicated civil rights proponent & had long, deep ties with the Peace & Non-violence movements. Kight followed a Gandhian pacifism. He had taken a personal oath of poverty, & lived on very little money. He truly wanted people "to live an open & free life without fear of persecution."


Kight was a relentless organizer & protested & won all sorts of battles. His proudest achievement was the founding of the Gay Community Services Center, later to be known as the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, in 1971, a time when gays & lesbians still needed to be extremely cautious about living openly gay lives.


The Center was initially housed in 2, & eventually 3, ramshackle Queen Ann buildings on Wilshire Boulevard. Right after the opening, Kight was standing on the rickety front porch of the main building under the home made-looking sign: Gay Community Services Center. One man said, "Morris, you are going to get us all killed with that sign." Kight: "Well, dear, then don't stand under the sign."


One of the most important & effective gay rights figures in the history of the United States, Kight spent his final days at Carl Bean House in Los Angeles, a guest of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, one of the many agencies he nurtured & supported. He passed away in 2003 at 83.


Rarely satisfied with all he had achieved, Kight also created some of the movement's most visible efforts, including: The L.A. gay pride march (Christopher Street West Parade); The Morris Kight Collection, which archives 1000s of artifacts chronicling the beginning of gay, lesbian, bisexual & transgender civil rights & contains both fine art by gay men & lesbians & memorabilia including posters & photographs documenting the struggle for glbtq rights.; & the Stonewall Democratic Club in California politics.


Kight: “I'm sure we are going to get our freedom. I see it everywhere: In the marketplace, in the stores, in the homes, in dealing with families, in the kind of attention we get from radio, television and the newspapers. Still, I realize we're not home yet. We have a long way to go. There are 1,750 arrests in L.A. each month. I weep for each of them. Everyone who's denied a job, I weep for. Everyone who is driven from their homes by a misunderstanding family, I have to offer my love to."

A portrait of Morris Kight by Stathis Orphanos,

 & a sign from a West Hollywood restaurant that inspired a protest led by  Kight.