We'll have a gay old time.

In June of 1969, I was scrambling to take the last course I needed for a BA--Physics 101, ironically, which I took at Memphis State University.  The course was really dumb, and hardly got to Newtonian stuff, but it would let me finish my degree and teach in the Memphis public schools as one of three white teachers who were integrating a huge black high school.  It was a plan I thought would be better  than to go to Vietnam and napalm kids.  After a while in the Memphis public schools, I decided that napalm might be the lesser of the evils.  The Memphis public schools, for the poorest black kids, at least, were very evil.

I was in Memphis rather than in Vancouver, where I had thought I would finish my degree,  because I was fleeing from confronting my sexuality.  I had recently married, having heard informally that the love of a good woman would cure me. Well, that good woman was taking a class at Simon Fraser University and invited one of her classmates over to study.  Brian was perhaps the most beautiful creature I had ever seen.  I wish I had been able to tell my 22-year-old self to give Kathy the furniture and then  run off to Brian's ski lodge, where he had said he would teach me to ski.  Instead, having gone back in Jonesboro for what we thought would be the last Christmas with the family, I literally spent much of the time in a closet because I was so distressed.  The draft board sent a telegram to my mother's house on Christmas Eve.  (The chairman of the draft board was my brother's mother-in-law, so she knew where to find me.  She also suggested that I get a 'teaching in weird schools' deferment instead of going to Vietnam.). So I flew back to Vancouver, where Brian met me at the airport.  He helped me pack up the apartment and wait for the movers.  I enjoyed three wonderfully bittersweet days before he took me back to the airport and bought me dinner.  Years later, I went back to Vancouver to try to find him.  Silly me.

Before Brian I had had three significant 'gay' involvements.  I say 'gay' though we didn't have that term then except as it was used--ironically, perhaps in things like the Flintstones thmesong. Perhaps ironically, two of them had been with young black men.  Both had fairly significant influences on my life.  

Milton and I had met in 1965 at Memphis State.  He saw me in the student union and  said he liked my hat.  It was a huge stetson.  He was taking fencing lessons. We became friends, and had a bit of fun playing at sword fighting in the union and passing the hat.  I would win on the white side of the union, and he would win on the black side.  We would then have lunch with our collection. We became better friends, but did nothing I had to consider overtly sexual:  washing each other's backs, cuddling in cold weather.  But my landlady evicted me because 'she couldn't have that sort of thing' going on.  The next semester, Milton transferred to another school and our playtime was over.

Frederick and I met in 1966 at  a National Student summer thingy that I later found was an agent-provocateur event sponsored by the CIA.  We had been chosen as 'persons of interest', apparently.  Again, nothing happened to require me to think of our relationship as sexual.  We sunbathed on the root, wore each other's clothes, snuggled a bit.  He was a student in Lafayette, Louisiana, but spent summers with his sister's family on the south side of  Chicago, and I went to visit him there. I liked Chicago so much that I moved there to go to school.   It's I think worth noticing, because our thoughts and feelings about race are so complicated, that my father, who was firmly against forced integration, had no qualms about my visiting Frederick.  Indeed he had black friends, most noticeably a fishing buddy named Sykes.  I went with him to visit Sykes and Sykes brought his kids to visit us.  At the time I didn't think that odd, although my father took me to visit only one other of his friends.  Looking back, I realize that during that time in Jonesboro, he and Sykes couldn't just sit down together for a cup of coffee where my father usually hung out. I only realized how many black friends my father had when they turned up for his funeral.

I have been thinking a lot about those times the past two weeks as the 'peaceful protests' and 'rioting' have followed the killing of George Floyd, overlapping the 51's anniversary of the Stonewall 'Riots'.  There are a lot of complications around the current political unrest, but one thing has struck me as  hopeful, (in both the best and worst sense of hope, the last gift of the gods to Pandora), has been the difference in the way the press has covered the 'peaceful protests'.  (I use the '' around 'peaceful protests' not because I am denigrating them or considering them 'riots', but because it is really a quote of what the newsy guys are using in nearly every report.)  Anyone in the modern connected world would have to work very hard to avoid hearing about the post-George Floyd events.  In Memphis in 1969, I had no clue of the Stonewall 'riots'. And in New York, they were mostly met with contempt.  

There are of course a lot of differences between being gay and being black.  When I was in high school, two of my favourite novelists were James Baldwin and Richard Wright.  I was taught the obvious:  they were black. It was never mentioned what was possible to hide but which was probably what made them seem so interesting to me:  they were gay.  I doubt my landlady had a clue that Milton and I were sleeping together, even like puppies.  She just knew that he was black.  Had she known that we were washing each other's backs, she might have called the police. Being black is usually visible.  Being gay is not always so obvious.

Indeed there is a partially invisible man who was important in my life, a good friend of my father's whom I was only told was a 'very handsome Marine who died in the war'.  It was only after I came out to my mother, after my father had died, that I found out that Richard Dale, for whom I was named, was gay, and out, at least to my father.

Compare and contrast is a very imprecise rhetorical method. Ironically I began writing this little essay, which is quickly becoming a big essay, on the birthday of Alan Turing.

In civilized Great Britain, a country in which the BBC is now actively preferring the hiring of non-white folks to 'read the news' Turing was chemically castrated for the crime of being gay. I am not trying to play the my-victimhood-is-worse-than-your-victimhood game, because I know that in Philips County, Arkansas, for years black welfare mothers were surgically sterilized when they went to the public hospital to give birth. But it is true that for the most part, it's not illegal to be black, as it often has been to be gay.  At least in christian Europe, black folks get in trouble for being out of place, while gay folks get in trouble for being.  Things are a bit different in muslim Africa, where black folks are the norm and gay folks are illegal, and there are so far as I know now efforts to recruit white news readers.

I partially digress because I want to recognize the complexity of the times through which we are living.  The Stonewall 'riots', which didn't include nights of looting, were not widely reported nor did people take to the streets in cities around the world in 'solidarity' with gay folks.  But they have been widely credited with encouraging gay folks to become visible, to show ourselves.

Black folks are easily visible, and  for reasons that can be debated, it's easily visible that  black folks tend to be treated differently in the justice system from white folks.  (Although when I was getting a divorce in Tennessee thirty years ago, I was told by my (lesbian) lawyer that I should not contest any part of it because in Tennessee courts at that time I would probably be barred from having any contact with my children.) For all I know George Floyd was a closeted gay man.  I have had sex with men black and white who were deeply closeted and who, just as I, had children.  

So, here's a hopeful part:  police brutality sparked the Stonewall 'riots', and police brutality sparked the George Floyd 'riots'.  But the public attitude to that brutality had changed.  (Indeed this deep into this essay I realize that I might have compared the reaction to George Floyd's death to the reaction to the water hoses turned on peaceful protesters in 1963 Birmingham, because that outrage faded, too, but did lead to a call for much wider civil rights for all folks.) Police brutality against gay men and crossdressers was pretty much considered acceptable by the 'straight' community in 1969. Now police brutality is much less acceptable

But, be careful what you hope for.  'Justice for George Floyd' is itself a police and court matter.  Mobs are better at lynching than at making verdicts based on evidence.  Folks who have for years wanted the state to enforce their concepts of justice are now calling for the abolition of the police, without thinking that the police is how the state enforces justice.  Ruth Bader Ginsburg may be Superwoman, but she doesn't make house calls.

I confess that I, who am usually extremely. optimistic and dare  I say, 'hopeful', am worried. The French during their Revolution couldn't decide how to end the monarch that they had previously seen as divine without decapitating the king.  Soon the guillotine was king. Then they had a bunch of wars, which let Leo Tolstoi write a really big book.  And then they got their kings back.

Something's happening here.  What it is ain't exactly clear.