Photo Essays

Daddies’ little girl

Growing up under the shadow of discrimination.


Click here to enter the visual essay.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years examining how my upbringing has shaped me into the person I am today. Like most people, I know that my family and friends played an integral role in my development, but only recently did I realize, and accept, the extent that my parents influenced my core self. I can trace my relationships, my career choice, and my fundamental beliefs directly back to my mother and father and the way they lived.

I wanted to explore this personal realization further and find out how it applies to a growing social demographic in this country. Same-sex couples have been raising children for decades, but this family dynamic has been thrust to the forefront of our culture in the last few years.

When I began my relationship with the Huddlestonsmith family, it only took a few visits to conclude this family was no different from any other family I had met in Midwestern America. They welcomed me in, insisted I join them at the dinner table, and shared their home with me in every way. But as familiar as this household was to me, I often heard about the discrimination David Huddlestonsmith, his partner, Dave, and David’s 11-year-old daughter, Katie, experienced living as a same-sex family. This was something very foreign to me.

I wanted to understand what it was like to live in the shadow of discrimination. More importantly though, I wanted to find out what effect this discrimination had on Katie, a child feeling the societal response to her father and his partner’s lifestyle.  

I quickly found out Katie had adapted her life as a result of her unique upbringing.  David, Dave, and Katie had very open relationships, sharing all aspects of each other’s lives with one another. Katie, however, was much less open with people outside of her family. Aside from her teachers, a few friends, and their parents, she didn’t volunteer information about her gay father and his partner. She once said, “I know at least five boys [at school] that would tease me if they knew.”

I worked on the project, off and on, for about a month and a half. In that time, I saw the love the Huddlestonsmith family expresses. I saw the struggles David dealt with living as a gay man. And I saw Katie’s success in the classroom, and the admiration she has for her father and his partner. But I only scratched the surface. Katie’s development will evolve as our society does, and her future is dependent on our cultural willingness to accept her as a child of a same-sex couple.

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Blog

When the colors refuse to run


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June always brings many reasons for celebrations. Summer vacation. Weddings galore. The advent of summer — and the barbeques and sandal-wearing this implies.

But only in the past three decades have we found another reason to celebrate: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, and Queer (LGBTQ) Pride month.

As we celebrate LGBTQ Pride Month in this special issue of InTheFray, we share a breadth of perspectives and stories reflecting the accomplishments and struggles of sexual minorities across the United States. We begin at Michigan State University, where Lindsey K. Anderson details how this once-anti-gay campus, in spite of lingering homophobia, enabled her to come to terms with her sexuality, in The perfect couple. Meanwhile, in neighboring Chicago, Queer Latino youth dance the night away in a prom all their own. Watch for Emily Alpert‘s observations of the night, coming on June 13.

Speaking of perfect couples, ITF columnist Keely Savoie shares her recipe for an unusually subversive marriage in Finding defiance in a sparkly rock. Later this month, guest columnist S. Wright offers up her own subversive perspective, when she suggests that the battle for gay marriage may only hurt queers — particularly those of color — in the long-run.

Describing a different sort of love, Sam J. Miller recalls his infatuation with the guys in a lefty punk-rock band and the reality check — er, homophobia — he grappled with when he got a closer look at Kevin’s basement. Rebecca Beyer, meanwhile, revisits the stereotypes she faced as a female soccer player and the role that these stereotypes played in keeping her in the closet for an additional four years.

From the East Coast we journey with photographer Jeffrey W. Thompson to the home of the Huddlestonsmith family in Columbia, Missouri. There a young girl named Katie basks in being her Daddies’ little girl while struggling with the discrimination and battles of being raised by two men in the Midwest. And in Chad Gurley’s short story, The stoning of Andrew, one sixth grader must bear the double-burden of enduring the “birds and bees talk” and confronting his own sexual differences on the playground. Back in the classroom, Brian Michael Weaver will reveal later this month just how difficult it can be for a primary school teacher to use language sensitive to children with LGBTQ parents — even when that teacher is a single, gay dad himself.

And thousands of miles from an American classroom, Penny Newbury returns to Fuerte Olimpo, Paraguay — a place she discovers she still doesn’t really know or understand, even after living there for three years in Ña Manu.

But neither the celebrations nor the stories end there. As part of our LGBTQ celebration this month, InTheFray is showcasing photographs of LGBT celebrations and events happening around the United States and the world. Readers can submit original photographs to our Media Gallery, where they will be posted daily. InTheFray asks that you provide a brief caption to be published with the photograph, telling us the who, what, when, and where of your photo(s). Please also include your first name and location.

(One final note: If you haven’t done so already, please complete our 2005 Reader Survey. Your anonymous answers will help us to improve the magazine.)

Thank you for sharing your stories — and reading ours!

Laura Nathan
Editor
Brooklyn, New York

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Commentary

Finding defiance in a sparkly rock

From conflict-free diamond rings to same-sex weddings, the institution of marriage isn’t what it used to be.


My friend took one look at the blurry digital picture I sent her of my new engagement ring, and wrote back, “It sorta screams ‘I sold my sex life for this sparkly rock!’”

A couple of years ago, I would have agreed with her — there are precious few things in the world less queer, less transgressive, than an ordinary diamond engagement ring.  I had always seen the engagement ring less as a symbol of undying love than a visible token of male ownership of female sexuality, and a material manifestation of the matrimonial monogamy.  

I was never the traditional kinda girl — I never imagined the ring, dreamed of a wedding, or named my bridesmaids, not even in my head. My thoughts on commitment everlasting were always less “happily ever after” than “what a fucking disaster.” Commitment to me was not just settling down, but settling, period. It was the first step on a journey that would end, inevitably, with me as a harried housewife in the suburbs growing bored and bitter, reduced to chasing children and swapping recipes, voting Republican and worrying about Capital Gains taxes. A diamond ring symbolized the beginning of that descent.

But I have recently discovered that everything is not as it appears to be, and that wearing a diamond engagement ring is a little different when you’re a dyke. For one thing, there is no question of male ownership in a girl-on-girl relationship, and for another, monogamy is easy to take when your toy drawer rivals your sock drawer in variety of colors and styles. And after three years with my partner, the whole commitment thing didn’t seem to be so bad after all. I had begun to see the appeal of getting all of our friends and family together to celebrate what we had found.  

But beyond all those arguably schmaltzy justifications, there was a compelling political reason to want to announce our relationship to the world. For the last few years, gay relationships were coming under increasingly hostile attacks under the slash-and-burn morality of the Bush Administration. By proclaiming our commitment, by getting engaged to be married, we were not only celebrating our relationship, we were making a radical statement about our definition of marriage. And while gay marriage was once firmly in the territory of Human Rights Campaign assimilationists, it had moved into the province of radical queers at the very moment the Right denounced it as moral depravity worse than sodomy (which had just been officially sanctioned by the Supreme Court.)  

In that light, marriage started looking pretty hot. I’ve always been a sucker for subversion. I discovered the potent aphrodisiac power in defying social norms when I first came out as a lesbian. When attraction meets activism, the act of locking lips is more than simple titillation; it becomes a portal to self-liberation. I spent a few very liberating years shoring up my lesbian-activist credentials.

There was the poet from Smith with a penchant for cheap Thai food and sleazy sex.  There was the Swedish kickboxer getting her PhD in French Studies at New York University. There was the Hungarian girl whose red Doc Martens were always flawlessly shined. There was the one I called “Rock Star Girl,” who claimed any of six different professions depending on the day, and was never without her Gucci shades, a flask of rum, and a fat spliff. There was the surly butch with a Long Island accent living off unemployment in a slummy loft with her three dogs and six cats. The Army lawyer, who cried into her beer on our first date. The Singaporean stewardess whose tiny back was a sea of ocean-themed tattoos. The gym teacher whose mastiff puppy snored louder than she did. The masseuse, the vet, the ad exec.

Canadian hers-and-hers engagement rings: all the sparkle without the blood.

Given the rate at which I was going through girls, it was statistically inevitable that I would eventually meet someone I liked more than the others, someone who I would keep around for longer than it took to dig cab fare up out of the couch cushions. This one defied the reductive epithets I was given to using for the women who passed through my life, and after trying one or two, I allowed her to have a name, her name: Alex. After her name, I gave her space in my apartment. Room in my coffee cupboard for a box of tea. A carton of milk in my dairy-free fridge. Space in my underwear drawer for her boxers.

It was all downhill from there. Soon after the merging of the underwear was the merging of the apartments, the acquisition of pets, the purchasing of joint property. So after three years, four apartments, two dogs, and two cats together, we got engaged. But then there was the problem of diamonds. If I am vehemently nontraditional, Alex is the exemplar of all things tried and true. For her, there is no such thing as a diamond-less engagement.  

And this is why we are meant to be together — because compromise is the highest expression of love. And even though I had come to view marriage as a revolutionary act, I had told Alex I could still not get down with the diamond: They have long been a primary source of income for both insurgent groups and brutal dictatorships, funding genocide and civil war in diamond-rich countries like Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Congo, and Angola — and more recently, of course, they were linked to terrorism through al-Qaeda. Knowing all that, instead of presenting me with a ring as she was down on one knee, Alex handed me a plane ticket — we were going to Canada, she explained, so we could pick out some rocks that could broadcast our engagement with a PC pedigree to match their dazzle.

Canada is one of the only places in the world that offers a laser-inscribed proof-of-origin on its rocks to show that they have not come via a war-torn country where they contributed to human rights atrocities. Canadian diamonds were not dug up by the hands of children. They did not come at the cost of miles of agriculture in a famine-struck land.  They do not come at the cost of human life or dignity. But they look just like every other diamond in the world.

That’s the funny thing about this brand of activism I have come to embrace. On the surface, it looks a lot like the very institutions it seeks to reform. Fiancée sounds a lot like fiancé, Alex sounds a lot like a man’s name, and a conflict-free Canadian diamond looks just like any other rock. The defiance is in the details.

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Commentary

Ña Manu

Best of In The Fray 2005. Like a card shark, Paraguay holds its secrets close.


View of the shore
An aerial view of Fuerte Olimpo, Alto Paraguay, looking south down the Rio Paraguay. On the left is Matto Grosso do Sur (Brazil). The hills are called the “Tres Marias.”

Ohi heta secretos Rio Paraguay kupepe che aguera hatava che yvyguype.

There are many secrets along the Paraguay River I will take to my grave. And not because I don’t want to tell them.  I used to think it was only Guarani that kept me outside looking in, but it’s more than the language. People here are born knowing everything about this place; history speaks to them though the water and the stones and the dust.

I lived here three years but I’m as clueless now about how this country works as when I first arrived in 1999: a Peace Corps volunteer with two words of Spanish and a dim idea that Paraguay was somewhere hot and south and vaguely venomous. And where they sent me, to the wild northeast Chaco that is the watershed of the great swamp called the Pantanal, the secrets bubbled up from the riverbed and swirled around me. I’d reach out and each time they would float away.

It’s nine a.m. in Fuerte Olimpo when Lalo and I tiptoe up the skinny gangplank of the cargo launch Ña Manu. It’s now doing double duty as a passenger ferry since, during the years I have been away, the other boats working the northern Rio Paraguay have sunk, cracked in half, or been confiscated for unspecified, unsavory crimes.

Which makes the owner Doña Manuela very happy. This morning she is practically bursting out of her pink leotard with joy. For a three-hundred-pound woman she is surprisingly nimble and as strong as any man; she helps her rather dimwitted young stevedores stow sack after sack of rice and hard biscuits in the hold. We’re told the Ña Manu will leave Fuerte Olimpo punctually but this is Paraguay. And, though I don’t know it yet, Ña Manu has special guests.

When I lived here, I never took the Ña Manu. She is tiny by river standards, about seventy feet long, and the only places to sit are deadly caranda’y palm benches running the length of each side. There’s a bathroom — a box with a hole and a hose — and… oh, I don’t know, I always thought she was too dirty and spooky and creaky, though certainly Carmen Leticia (“the jewel of the Río Paraguay”) and the Cacique were no motor yachts. But at least they looked like they could carry more than two extra people and they weren’t wrapped in brown tarpaulin.

Ña Manu is basically a floating shanty. You don’t burn from the sun, you just braise in the brown oven bag. She has no set schedule, and she’d stiffed us on the way up to Fuerte Olimpo, leaving a day early from Isla Margarita where the distance across the river between Paraguay and Mortinho, Brazil is no more than two hundred meters. No other lanchas were due for days. But Lalo’s friend Eladio was taking his empty cattle chata past Olimpo to Bahia Negra so we hitched a ride and made it upriver that way. All this, I suppose, should be enchanting. But coming back to visit this country that still troubles me and that I still consider my true home, it only seems sad and exhausting.

When we pass through the tarp flap in the stern onto the main deck, I see far too many passengers. Five men sit lined up on one of the long benches on the starboard side. A sixth, younger than the rest and like Lalo, tall for a Paraguayan, sits on a perpendicular bench with his back to the wheelhouse. Lalo walks over and shakes hands with each of them. I’ve seen this before; I’ve learned to shake hands at parties and funerals, but doing it on a boat seems like only a guy thing.

Seems. What do I know? I decide to be a Paraguayan woman about it and give it a pass.

I sit down on the opposite bench next to a Chamococo woman with a baby that can’t be more than a week old. The six men have a look about them: they belong together somehow. The oldest is maybe fifty; the youngest twenty-five. They have small travel bags and most are dressed fairly formally: button-down shirts, belts, a gold chain here and there, boots. All are quite dark though they don’t look Guaraní or Chamococo, meaning they probably work in the sun, maybe cattle hands on estancias.

Other passengers arrive. All the men who just got on go to the bench and shake hands.  Mba’e la porte?  Upepi nde ha?  How’s it going?  Where’re you headed? They all know these guys. There’s a little jostling, a little baring of teeth for position — two old women with cigars commandeer the only two comfortable chairs. The doe-eyed crew scampers around trying to avoid Doña Manuela’s wrath. Husband and pilot Ramón has been found, dragged out of his girlfriend’s bed near the port and unceremoniously thrown into the wheelhouse, so we’re good to go.

It’s a six-hour trip downriver from Olimpo to Isla Margarita, which isn’t so bad compared to the thirteen it takes to get upriver. From Asunción the capital to Olimpo, and then up to Bahia Negra, it’s five days.  Sometimes there are buses that go halfway up the river. But this time I don’t have five days to get to Olimpo.  I don’t have, like I’d always had before, all the time in the world.  This time I’m just a tourist, and Paraguay has responded with washouts and road closures and river transport dropping like flies. So Lalo met me in Asuncion and figured out a way for us to loop through Brazil and come out at Mortinho and only have the thirteen hours up to Olimpo by boat.  And now we have to get back downTo get me home. He does this for me because he still loves me.  He treated me like shit when we lived together in Olimpo.  He is atoning.

Lalo waits for me to visit every year.  Who knows what he does in the meantime. He’s a good guy, big and sunny and friendly; everyone likes him. When we’re in Asuncion people think I’m the Paraguayan and he’s the European, so fair-skinned and healthy and well-spoken. But a little lost, like me; a few too many vices. So he is destined to live on cattle ranches and on the river, looking and calculating and waiting for the next opportunity. One of the reasons I come back to Paraguay is that Lalo no longer considers me an opportunity.  I’m just a woman he knows, who loves this part of the country as much as he does, who needs help getting to its farthest corners, because she doesn’t, after all, really belong here.

Cargo vehicles wait for the arrival of the cargo boats at Fuerte Olimpo, the main port. The rocky and steep terrain of the town above the main road makes it impossible for any vehicle other than a donkey cart to pass. (In the water are camelotes.)

An awful lot of Policia Nacional seem to be making this trip.  Lalo is staring ahead, grinning, knowing I’ve figured out that something’s up. One of the policemen I know; the other two are new to me. So much time has passed. This was my home, this inhospitable web of marsh and palm forest where nothing grows except what is meant to grow. Yet people live here and their life is hard. My life was hard. And I still miss it. Whatever it was.

I’m staring at the six men. There’s another one; he could be a crew member but I’m not sure. If he’s not, he has a future in crime with his slits for eyes and too big jaw. Even his teeth look criminal. And almost immediately after we shove off, I have to pee and must squeeze past this character to get to the bathroom, such as it is. He politely locks me in, because the door will not stay shut from the inside and I think, surely there are worse ways to die than in a shit-filled toilet on a cargo boat in the middle of the world’s largest continuous swamp. But he lets me out and shows me his teeth and I go back to my bench where there are seven other passengers now, not including the cops.

We’re all facing the five men on the opposite side, except the young one facing the stern. A cop comes over and rather roughly pushes him to one side so the cop can sit down.

Finally Lalo can’t stand it anymore. “Do you know who they are?” he asks me.

I want to punch him. Do I know who they are. Christ.

They are the cattle thieves, Lalo tells me, cuatreros who have finally been caught after two years of robbing their neighbor, Lalo’s employer, Don Miguel Arevalos, whose estancia is about thirteen kilometers outside of Olimpo’s centro. The chase and capture has been covered widely in the national press.

With the thieves, in a relatively clean, yellow oxford shirt, is the would-be buyer of the stolen cattle. The oldest man — the one with the gold chains — is the leader, but it is the youngest who looks the most worried.

He’s “lo más famoso,” says Lalo. “Because he hasn’t fallen yet. The others have all been caught before.”

But they are all, I think, a little too jolly. No one’s guffawing, but they’re joking and drinking tereré and chatting with the cops. Everyone seems to be friends here.

“You don’t get it,” says Lalo. “Everyone robs. Everyone. These guys just rob more.”

The police, while they have a boat, don’t have a budget for gas, so they use public transportation to take prisoners to Concepción, where they will be arraigned and stand trial. It seems that Big Jaw’s going down for attempted murder with a knife. He is presently roaming the decks, gabbing with the crew. None of the passengers looks particularly alarmed. “He’s sorry he didn’t kill the guy,” Lalo adds, and from the way he says it I know he’s not speculating. He knows this for a fact. And there it is again, that thread of connection that Lalo’s attached to, that all Paraguayans are attached to — a word on the street, a nod, a glance — it all moves past me and beneath me unnoticed, like the piranha and dorado passing under the boat’s hull in the brown water.

The police have brought along evidence: one saddle and two white grain bags that hold dried skins and ears, to show the brands and ear cuts. Eight cows were recovered; Lalo says Don Miguel knows of at least thirty missing. Two hours downriver, we arrive at Puerto Sastre where the buyer lives. He is let off to go home and get lunch and some clothes.  The rest are from Olimpo and have all their stuff with them. Other passengers board the boat. Motocerristas — men who cut fence posts for estancias along the river —are let on with their chainsaws and post-hole diggers, which at a shriek from Doña Manuela the hapless crew stuff into the hold. More hand-shaking. A few Chamococo come on as well, with big suruvi in grain bags. It’s illegal to fish in the river this month but no one turns in a Chamococo. They are barely alive and barely remembered.

Before, when Paraguay was all quebracho forest and swamp, they were nomads; now they’re exiled to the river’s edge with no home to get back to so they stay on the river and starve, and ride the lanchas, and are quiet. They speak a language that they know no one understands, so they simply gesture gently and smile. They smile at the cattle thieves; they could care less who took what from who. And of this whole story — of the big estancia and the thieving and the knowing and shaking hands and getting on and getting off — only I am out of place, only I am something not right.

I was living in Fuerte Olimpo when Don Miguel’s son Caludio hired a witch doctor to put spells on the corners of their land so the thieves could not enter. Neither Don Miguel nor Lalo could talk sense into him. “You have to ride out and count your herd — two, three times a week. You have to fix fences and patrol borders. Caludio wants to stay blind. He knew who was doing it; he just didn’t want to see,” Lalo tells me now. I once brought Caludio amulets from Asunción to help him with his spells. This was when I didn’t know that he already knew who the thieves were. It seems even the blind know more than me.

As we head out into the river again all the thieves open their lunches, prepared by wives or girlfriends. The cops have returned to the boat with empanadas. One of the thieves produces a cake, cut into six pieces. From the way the cake has been prepared, I can tell there was a party last night to send off the thieves and this cake is part of the leftovers. I have bananas and bread; Lalo has cheese and honey and buys a milanesa from a kid in Sastre. We drink tereré afterwards and I pray that dehydration has set in so that I don’t have to use the bathroom again.

By the time we’re well beyond Sastre, Manuela is done shrieking at the police for leaving the thieves unguarded on the boat while they bought empanadas up the road. As far as I can tell everybody finds this pretty amusing, even her.

It is about a hundred and ten degrees on the river and the lancha is galloping along at about eleven knots. My back is killing me. Camelotes crawl by, not yet in flower but trailing yards and yards of rubbery root and leaf as the upper Chaco has received about eight inches of rain this week and the river is high and fast. Twice we stop to let the crew disengage a particularly big clump from the propeller. The hum of an old diesel engine, even this one, is quiet and soothing. Above it I can hear the big green and blue parrots calling to each other in the trees. Occasionally a canoa, a small handmade fishing boat, slips out of a clump of hu negro horsetail in a small riacho, the boatmen tending some plastic bottles with hooks streaming down, baiting paku.

I can make fun of Ña Manu, I can talk about filth and discomfort, but with Paraguay on one side dark and scrubby, and Matto Grosso del Sur on the other all endless palm forest, I can’t say it’s ever been too much to bear. I have stared at this river five days at a time, over and over. I have never been bored here.

The thieves get off with the police at the second-to-last stop, Carmelo Peralta, and I have to tell Doña Manuela that they forgot the evidence. More shrieking. Much appreciative nodding by the cop who knows me. A dirty glance from the thief with the cake. I have entered the story now.

A typical cargo boat. This one is the Cacique, one of the better models. (Ña Manu is smaller.) Cacique’s route runs from Asuncion to Bahia Negra.

Ña Manu heaves herself around to Isla Margarita and anchors for the night, and Lalo and I pay a ninety-year-old man to row us across the river to Mortinho in his yellow-and-green canoa. This is the only way across. Mortinho is a bigger town and we need to catch the bus here to do the twenty-hour loop through Brazil and back down to Asunción. Brazil has roads; Paraguay has, at this moment, mud.

In Mortinho, we round a corner and sitting in front of a hotel having tereré are four men I know from Olimpo: José Belén Gonzales, a council member I worked with; his cousin Martin Suarez the veterinarian; two other guys I know but not by name. Just hanging around. In Brazil.

Lalo starts to grin. Asks a couple of polite questions that are not all that polite.

“How’d you get here?”

“Deslizadora.” Motor boat.

“Whatcha doing in town?”

“Oh … you know, heh-heh, a little business.”

“Staying long?”

“Er, no, we’re going back to Olimpo tomorrow.”

“Ya, Ya,” says Lalo, which is sort of an ‘Of course, I see,’ non-threatening, low-key, but these fellas are spooked.

José Belén looks ready to die. He can’t look at me. He never was a big help as a consejal but as far as I know he didn’t hate me. In Olimpo, I spent weeks trying to teach him and the other consejales how to read the town’s budget so they could know where the money went. On this visit trip back, Lalo informed me with a smirk that I’d done a good job and now all the consejales know how to track the money… right out of the budget.

Lalo does not do what he does best — plop down for a good long mindless chat. I have already braced myself for an hour of Guaraní. Instead he asks them in Spanish where we can find Brazilian reales since we need to pay for the bus and the banks are closed. Martin says “Oh, Vincente’s got them,” and gestures towards the corner where I see a locked door. José Belén starts to say, “But Vincente’s closed —” but Martin shoots him a look and says with clenched teeth, “No, I’m sure he’s open,” and José Belén shuts up. Lalo grabs my arm and we scram.

Lost. I am lost.

Lalo says, quietly, “Aha,” and this is what he tells me he has figured out:

José Belén owns the estancia next to Don Miguel. Each has about twelve thousand acres. The thieves are José Belén’s hired men. José Belén knows they’ve been stealing cattle from Don Miguel; there are still about twenty-five on José Belén’s property. Martin is José Belén’s cousin and knows Vincente who is a buyer. The other two are involved but who knows how. They are in Mortinho because two small chatas are berthed here and they need to ask around and hire one to take up the river, load the cows, and sell them to Vincente to make enough money to pay the thieves’ lawyer in Concepción who is on Martin’s payroll. That’s why the thieves looked unconcerned. They knew José Belén was already here, working things out for them.

“But how will a chata sneak up the Río Paraguay and load the cows?” I ask.

Lalo gives me a look that says, you know the river. You know how you can get lost in it, with its miles of riachos and twists and thickets and hidey holes. A chata can easily slip in below Olimpo without anyone noticing…unless Don Miguel and Caludio have been tipped off and know it’s coming. “Then,” says Lalo grinning, “things could get interesting.”

So we find a phone and call Miguel who is somber, then gleeful, then somber again, because Caludio will be absolutely no help, clinging to his yuyos and amuletos till he’s kicked in the teeth by a ladrón himself and left to die. But we are thanked, and defense plans are put in motion, and I will extract some small piece of satisfaction from all this. And it is that even though I knew nothing, nothing at all — I would have sat through a boat ride with felons thinking they were off to a business meeting and never been the wiser — José Belén and Martin thought I knew everything. In that one moment, all the secrets were handed to me. They thought I knew; they thought I deserved to know. And that, ultimately, is what keeps me coming back here — a nod, a recognition, a tiny opening through marsh and water, that I can slip through.

Related links:

Waterland Research Institute. Essays from a collection entitled The Pantanal: Understanding and Preserving the World’s Largest Wetland. Juan Maria Carrón provides a wonderful overview of the Paraguayan Pantanal, its people, and the dangers facing it. Also see the essay by John F. Gotlgens for a frightening look at what multinational corporations and monetary institutions are trying to do to the entire South American watershed.

International Rivers Network. For more information about Hidrovía and what the IRN and local NGO Rios Vivos are trying to do to stop this project.

Hijo del Hombre and Yo El Supremo, by Agosto Roa Bastos, Paraguay’s most influential novelist.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Commentary

Kevin’s basement

With all their progressive tendencies, punk-rockers can seem pretty cool — even sexy — to the queer eye. But their love for The Clash hardly guarantees them a homophobia-free persona.


The band engages in homoerotic male bonding for homophobes while they play at CBGB’s in New York in 2002.

Kevin’s house is small, drafty, and dirty. It sits in a poor neighborhood in upstate New York that straddles the line between rural and suburban. It’s early spring and it’s still freezing and grey: the fields, the roads, the faces. Down in Kevin’s basement, however, it’s hot as summer and warm with flesh tones.

His basement smells like body odor. The room is packed with boxes and there’s a sharp scent of mildew and kitty litter, but it’s body odor that dominates: the scent of sweaty boys working hard.

I’m sitting on an ancient brown couch, just a few feet from the amps, and close to where Greg stands at the microphone. I feel guilty taking pleasure in their smell; I fear them noticing how happy it makes me, and then never speaking to me again. It’s a big deal to me that they’ve let me sit in on their band practice. It’s my third time here, and Kevin’s basement might be my new favorite place. It’s warm, safe, and full of handsome boys sweating and spouting off radical rhetoric and contempt for the cool kids.  

“What did you say there, Greg?” says Kevin between songs. “In the next to last line of that verse? ‘Something something chicken, something something living?’”

“What the fuck is wrong with you man?” says Kevin to Greg. “Chicken?”

“So the song’s not about eating meat? I can’t understand a word you’re saying. I don’t know how you’re going to convince all these kids to become vegans when they have no idea what the fuck you’re saying,” he says as he stomps off and pretends to look through a cardboard box full of family photos.  

“Oh my fucking God! The song has nothing to do with eating meat! God! The line is, ‘I don’t want no part of the world you’re building.’” Kevin turns to me and asks, “Does anyone else in this room have any idea what the fuck Greg is saying when he sings?”

The only people in the room who aren’t in the band are Amber, Greg’s girlfriend, and me. Neither of us are objective observers. She’s in love with one of them and I’m in love with all of them. So we both say ‘yes.’ Gary, the bassist, wants no part in the conversation. His contribution to the scene involves scowling and occasionally grumbling rude remarks as he sits on the amp.

Some fans get in on the homophobic fun while watching the band at CBGB’s in New York in 2002.

Amber sits next to me on the couch and quietly flips through magazines. If she enjoys band practice as much as me, she hides it well. I say: “So what’s the word, Amber?” When she says, “Not a whole lot,” Greg yells, “Quiet in the peanut gallery.” He then winks slyly at her to cover up his chauvinistic impulses with humor.

As much as the closet Stalinists — Greg, Kevin, and Gary — mouth feminist rhetoric, they have a bad habit of telling Amber to shut up when she talks. But it’s different for me. I’m a boy; I’m allowed to have an opinion.

“Oh man, Simon, you should have seen it,” Kevin says to me between songs. His tone reveals that he cares more about retelling the story than informing me. “That kid Bolevice, the guy we always talk about? You should have seen it — he came to school the other day wearing a Metallica t-shirt! Can you believe it? I asked him what was up with that. Then I figured, hell, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he was being clever about it, and you know what he said? He said, ‘Metallica’s punk, right?’ Can you imagine?”

Actually, I can imagine because at my own school that’s me. I’m Bolevice, the corny poser loser the other boys make fun of.  

“So … he likes a band you guys don’t like and that’s a big problem?” I reply. “Why?”

“Hell yeah, man!” says Greg, who can articulate better than Kevin why mainstream culture and its followers lack independent thought. “He wants to come to shows, talk about how punk rock he is, and how he agrees with all the stuff the Dead Kennedys talk about, yet then he turns around and supports bad corporate mainstream music that kills individual creativity and independent labels.”

“Oh,” and I shut up. Of course I agree with Greg; that’s why I love Kevin’s basement so much. We see eye-to-eye: We hate big money, big business, big music. Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart , meat. Capitol Records, and Green Day. We hate sports and the jock thug misogynists on the football team. We despise the way people exert power over the weak: in sweatshops, in armies, in government, on the bus. Yet lately they have started to freak me out, not because they’re a clique — that much was obvious from the start — but because they can act just as mean as the jocks that beat me up in the locker room. They boast about fighting prejudice, but somehow faggots don’t fit into their list of oppressed peoples.  

Walking my high school halls, ducking projectiles, and headlocks, and boys yelling “faggot,” I always wanted to find people who thought like me. I used to lie alone on my bed in the dark, listening to The Sex Pistols or The Clash, and think that I’d eventually find a group of people who would accept me even if I was gay or liked commercial music. I felt happy and relieved when I finally met these three guys, even though they went to another school, but now I’m starting to feel less welcome and less valued by them.

Practice is winding down: They’ve gone through every song they know and now they’re playing around with a new riff. I’m thinking of the long drive home: the empty wasteland of dead depressed Columbia County. After we all leave, Greg and Amber will go off somewhere to fool around — although not to fuck because Greg’s practically a monk now with his new Hare Krishna/vegan/hard-line communist beliefs. He has negative views about non-reproductive sex. I’m avoiding this topic of conversation with him because I have a feeling he will say some pretty ugly things about gay sex.

I’ll begrudgingly drive 20 minutes out of my way to give Gary a ride home so as to not give him any reason to like me less. Then I’ll drive home alone, past the gray cold winter fields and the dilapidated houses. Afterwards I’ll go to my room and jerk off to memories of Kevin’s basement — the smell of boys and the guitars ringing in my ears. Kevin will stay in his basement and play Nintendo and watch television, or watch pornography — straight pornography.  

Sitting on Kevin’s filthy couch, not wanting the afternoon to end, I focus on the sight of Kevin drumming. His shirt’s off and his face shines from sweat and intensity. He bites his lower lip with the same sort of joy, concentration, and pleasure your face shows when you get a blowjob. I focus on the ecstatic look on his face and I imagine my own face buried between his legs.  

STORY INDEX

TOPICS > FEMINIST THEORY >

Information about feminist theory. Published by Kristin Switala.
URL: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/enin.html

TOPICS > CORPORATIONS >

“Is Wal-Mart Good for America?”
By Frontline. Published by WGBH Educational Foundation. November 16, 2004.
URL: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/etc/synopsis.html

Citizens Monitoring Coca-Cola
website designed to monitor the actions of The Coca-Cola Corporation. Published by Campaign for Justice at Coca-Cola.
URL: http://www.cokewatch.org

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Commentary

From tomboy to ‘that lesbian soccer player’

When sports and stereotypes collide with “coming out” on the playing field.


(Phoebe Sexton/Daily Free Press)

When I was little, I loved that people called me a tomboy. Even the name “tomboy” made me feel strong — all the privileges associated with being a boy without having to be one.

My best friend hated to be called a tomboy. In all honesty I didn’t think she qualified. She poufed her bangs and cared about having a bump-free ponytail. Sometimes she wore cute jean shorts to our softball practice. She also took dance lessons and liked it. So it angered me that people thought we were both tomboys. It brought my tomboyishness down a notch or two.

Beth Ann moved away from Kansas in sixth grade. By then she was getting too old to be caught doing pliés in right field. As first base-tomboy, it was my job not to let anything get to her. But sometimes I had to miss games for soccer, and she’d be left solo to pick up grounders or circle underneath pop flies.  

She and I ran into each other ten years later in an H&M department store in Manhattan. I was on a weekend trip to New York from Boston, where I had just finished my fourth and final season as a soccer player. She was auditioning for a Broadway chorus line. We were 22.  

Beth Ann had moved away right at that hazy time when girls who are tomboys become girls who are probably going to be lesbians. Around that same time boys who play sports become Gods. Quarterbacks. Point guards. Short stops. They are all revered.  It doesn’t matter if they can’t spell the name of the position they play. Boys become men on the playing field.

At this transitional time when I was 12, my soccer career took off. I played on two club teams that traveled around the country and on a state team whose players had the opportunity to advance to the national team. I basically lived in my uniform until I won a scholarship to play in college. Then I really lived in my practice shorts, my team sweats, and all the other gear they gave us.

I don’t look like a lesbian. That’s what all my friends and family told me when I came out to them. My dad actually said to my brother, “But she doesn’t look like a gay.” Which is to say that I did not fit the stereotype of a lesbian the same way I did the stereotype of a tomboy. I had long blond hair when I came out. I pierced my ears after my last soccer game, and I wore dangly earrings. I wore dresses, sometimes, and heels. And I liked that.  

People noticed these things, but nobody seemed to notice that I had never, except half-heartedly under extreme peer pressure, expressed any interest in boys or men. It somehow slipped by that, at college parties when girls teased about kissing other girls, I was perfectly serious. I didn’t look like a lesbian, and so I could not actually be one.

During the summer before I went away to college in 2000, I coached at a local soccer camp. On registration day I sat at the table for the youngest age group and welcomed nervous moms, dads, and their oblivious toddlers.

One woman approached, pushing her son in front of her. She had read about my college plans and soccer scholarship in the coaches’ bios in the brochure.  

She stood over me as I handed her four-year-old a size three ball and tiny t-shirt.

“Congratulations,” she beamed. And then she leaned in closer to whisper. “But aren’t you afraid that, you know, there will be a lot of lesbians on the team?”

If I had met the woman four years later, I would have told her that there weren’t any lesbians on the team, except for me, and because of her question — and the stereotyping and attitude it reflected — I spent four extra years in the closet.  

I waited until after I finished soccer to come out because I was terrified of being “the lesbian soccer player.” I let my best friends think that I was asexual and uninterested because I didn’t want them to think I was looking at them in the shower. All my life I had avoided stereotypes and stereotyping successfully. Although I was a tomboy, I wore skirts. Although I was smart, I sat at the “cool” lunch table. Nobody could quite nail me down.

I loved the competition, the pressure, the excitement, the commitment, and the skill that soccer demanded of me. But here’s a confession: I also needed soccer because people aren’t suspicious of the mysterious way a team of girls loves each other. A team of girls can touch, giggle, cry, sleep on each other’s shoulders, and kiss each other’s cheeks without arousing cries of lesbian. They can be angry and scream and shout at each other without drawing whispers of why does she care so much?  Americans love the intensity of sports — even women’s sports — and so, insignificant details like falling in love are not always noticed. I made it through undetected.

The woman at my registration table and her honestly fearful question represented my first personal experience with homophobia. In my back-and-forth struggle trying to decide when I should come out, it never occurred to me that my teammates might be afraid of me.

When my brother found out I was gay, he asked me if I was going to cut off all my hair. He thought I was going to suddenly morph into his default image of a lesbian.  

I wish I had allowed myself to be “the lesbian soccer player,” if only to prove that not all lesbian soccer players are the same. But I waited until I could avoid that very stereotype before coming out.

And when I did come out, those who knew me — including all of my former teammates — found a louder, freer, more intimate version of me.

A lesbian former soccer player, yes.  And many other things as well.

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Fiction & Poetry

The stoning of Andrew

While the Christian right attacks homosexuals and shames them as evil deviants, it fails to consider that many gays have faith in God, too.


(By Richard Tenorio)

On a cloudy spring afternoon, just after the bell rang ending lunchtime, Mrs. Shoemaker, the sixth grade school teacher at a tiny, Christian, private school in a small, rural, Southern town buckled deep within the Bible Belt, paced back and forth in front of her class with lips pursed and eyes staring blankly ahead.

She was deep in thought and full of reservations about the visitor who was to come and speak before her class in just a few moments. The children had been told to sit quietly and read their library books from which their next book reports would be written while they all waited for the day’s speaker to arrive. Aside from the occasional whisper or giggle from one student at another clowning, the only sound to be heard in the room was Mrs. Shoemaker’s tiny, low-heeled shoes clapping against the floor in a kind of staccato, military march from one side of the room to the other.

Mrs. Shoemaker’s stride had been mocked by sixth graders for years, one class passing the torch of mockery to the other, and the most famous of these legendary taunts was Mrs. Shoemaker’s “Big Bird Walk” as they called it. It was as if they thought that because her legs were short and her stride too long and wide for such limbs, she was surrounded by a huge, yellow feathered belly, carefully having to plot her course in three-toed footies attached to plushy legs of orange and red rings.

But Andrew, the strange little boy with new crooked teeth who sat on the third row, one desk away from the window, always thought that it was not only mean of the other kids to tease her, but actually inaccurate, for he had watched Big Bird on Sesame Street carefully and honestly never saw the resemblance between the two’s paces. If there was anyone Mrs. Shoemaker could be compared to, it was a reserved, absent-minded, elderly, drill sergeant, in his opinion.

Of course, Andrew, the unusually thin little boy covered with freckles that matched his reddish blonde hair, never really understood childish mockery and pranks. He was never amused when a classmate would cup his hand up under his underarm and begin cranking the other like a chicken wing in order to produce some sort of farting noise that would leave the class in stitches. And Andrew never thought it funny when another would take scissors and cut the hair of the fat girl seated in the seat in front of her without the girl ever knowing, only to get a hearty laugh from all that sat behind her. And it certainly wasn’t humorous when they would tie someone’s shoelaces together or hide someone’s glasses or whisper, laugh, and point at someone, only to create some sense of amusement for themselves by alienating him or her. Yes, Andrew was different than all of them, and he knew it, and in a way, it caused him great despair.

However, at that moment, no one was engaged in any kind of fun-poking, and the students seemed consumed by their library books while listening to Mrs. Shoemaker’s percussion melody. Andrew, on the other hand, was hardly reading, perhaps a word or two now and then, for he had become more curious about this mystery guest that seemed to leave Mrs. Shoemaker tied in knots and thoroughly distracted. The other children didn’t seem to notice that there was a difference in her manner and demeanor, but he did, and he was sure that what was about to occur was something that would make things different. It had already changed Mrs. Shoemaker.

The knock on the door caused Mrs. Shoemaker to gasp, and she pulled her hands to her cardigan, fastening the top button. As she walked towards the door, she peered over her glasses towards the classroom. “Our visitor is here. Now I want everyone to be on your best behavior,” she said somewhat nervously, and then seemed to brace herself before opening the door. In walked a petite woman, much younger than Mrs. Shoemaker, with her blonde hair pulled tightly into a ponytail. She flashed the class a virginal white grin and shook Mrs. Shoemaker’s hand. Before she could utter a greeting, Mrs. Shoemaker abruptly pushed her towards a chair she had arranged at the front of the class, nonverbally declaring that this was still her classroom, and they were still going by her rules; therefore, she should not speak until Mrs. Shoemaker allowed her to do so.

“Students, this is Miss Singleton. According to our state’s Education Department, all sixth graders must be led in a discussion of sex education.” The class erupted in giggles and laughter. The word “sex” began flying around the room in breathless, adolescent pants, and the kids looked to one another in amazement and hilarity. Andrew, however, looked shocked; his face went flush, his heart pattered, and although he knew he was unusual, he wasn’t sure why his reaction was in such contrast.

“Silence! We will have none of that,” said Mrs. Shoemaker, demanding order. “As sixth graders preparing to enter junior high school next year, I expect you to be mature about this subject, a subject that I am certain your parents have already taken the opportunity to discuss with you.”

As if prompted, all of the children began looking at one another to see if they could determine who had had that talk with their parents and who hadn’t. Mrs. Shoemaker continued, “Nevertheless, because we are required to meet state regulations, we have invited Miss Singleton here from our county’s health department to speak with you this afternoon about this matter.”

“About sex?” laughed Jim as he nudged Brandon, who sat next to him.

Mrs. Shoemaker clearly looked flustered, and now her character seemed completely changed from the always-in-control matron she normally embodied. “Yes, regarding the way babies are conceived after you are married,” she said, turning a glare upon Miss Singleton, “which I would imagine would be some time from now.”

Again the class broke into laughter, this time a more nervous kind, and Mrs. Shoemaker stomped her foot. “Now I have said that we will have none of that! You are expected to be mature!”

Mrs. Shoemaker looked around the room sternly. The class became quiet. Then she proceeded, “Now, we thought it would be best to separate the boys and girls during this talk. One group will wait on the playground while the other has their talk. The girls will have their discussion first, then the boys afterwards. So, get up boys, and follow me. And no talking, girls, until I return.”

“Which group does Andrew go in?” a voice mumbled from the back for only Andrew to hear. Andrew closed his eyes. Was this the reason the visitor was here, to uncover exactly what it was that made him so different from everyone else? Suddenly, filled with his own apprehensions, Andrew felt more alone than he ever had before.

Once outside and on the playground, which was just north of the kickball fields, the boys were ordered to sit on the perimeter of the sandbox crafted of railroad crossties and filled full of pebbles instead of sand. Clouds hung low over them and a cool, fragrant, spring breeze was forcing dandelions to let loose their seeds in flurries of white puffs while also whipping its way around and through the swing sets, pushing invisible children back and forth. Andrew was grateful for the clouds. When the sun was hidden away, he felt more comfortable in his skin, as if the shadowy gray could conceal all the imperfections that tormented him. The sandbox was deep, and one could hide his entire foot underneath the pebbles or drown her hand within its rocky puddle. The boys all sat with their feet stretched out into the box. Some looked annoyed and seemed to be moping that they were to miss the girls’ talk and miss hearing all the secrets of their female bodies.

Mrs. Shoemaker looked at them crossly, “Now please behave. There is no one available to watch you, so I’m trusting you. Just sit right here, don’t move, and I’ll be back to get you in about ten minutes. And I’m warning you, if I hear of any of you fooling around, I will immediately be calling your parents.” With that she marched back to the schoolhouse, looking back once with a very forbidding warning before entering the school door.

Andrew was uncomfortable sitting here with all of the boys in his sixth grade class. True, he called some of them his friends, and they had, on the occasion, asked him over to spend the night. But since his best friend, John, moved away a couple of years back, he had yet to find that friend with whom he was paired and could truly be himself. Andrew watched the boys watching each other as they waited for someone to lead them, and he dipped his hand into the rocks and then watched them fall between his open fingers as he raised it. He listened intently to their tapings as they fell to the sandbox below, giving his attention to anything but the group that sat around him. He was nervous, and for an unknown reason, afraid, so Andrew prayed for the ten minutes to pass quickly.

It was Guy who first shattered the silence of little boys knowing not what to do under the strict provisions of their teacher to remain within the box. “So, Andrew,” he said smirking, taking the lead, bringing to light the game that they would play, “Why are you out here? Shouldn’t you be inside with the girls?”

He laughed and prodded Scott, who sat to his right and who immediately broke into laughter as well, “Yeah, Andrew, why are you out here with us boys?” Andrew looked around the circle hoping that one of the boys might be showing some sense of apprehension about the direction in which Guy’s teasing was moving. Maybe Jason would speak up for him. Yet he was discouraged to see all the boys with slight knowing grins or giggles at the thought of it.

He could have said something at that point. He could have protested, saying with mustered conviction, “Duh, I’m a boy. Of course I’m not supposed to be inside with the girls;” however, for some reason, Andrew felt there was something almost true in Guy’s question, unlike the wrongness of the comparison of Mrs. Shoemaker to Big Bird, and it left him paralyzed in silence under the attack.

No one but God knew of the confusion that had always reigned in Andrew’s head about himself and his belonging. For so many years, every night, after Mommy had pulled the sheets over his body, kissed his cheek with a “sweet dreams,” and turned out the light over his head, Andrew had prayed and begged God to show him what made him so different from all others.

Yes, he knew he was completely abnormal, he felt it in every interaction, yet he couldn’t quite understand why. He was flesh and blood, had the same shape, the same sound, the same smell, but something was altogether different on his inside. And so his pleadings with God to show him the reason why seemed to finally be answered. Yet now, in this instance, he was frightened of the clarity that he had long been seeking suddenly coming into view.

“Andrew! Why are you out here with the boys? Didn’t you hear me?” Guy asked. He took a small pebble from the sandbox and chunked it at Andrew to get his attention. The stone hit Andrew on the chest and then fell into his lap, and Andrew looked at it, the tan little oval folded into his blue denim. He tried to mutter a laugh, perhaps trying to “laugh with them” as his dad had suggested that he do any time he was being laughed at, but Andrew could barely break a smile as he swam in deep thoughts that probed his heart over why this was happening, and it was then that the wondering as to why he was so different began to find a resolution.

All of the moments of questioning his belonging began reemerging. His memory began succinctly lining up all the episodes within his short life when the question had truly plagued him, causing him to take the look back that he had never been prompted to take before.

Like the slideshows he watched in children’s church showing right from wrong, pictures flashed within his mind. Like the time when he was four, and Santa Claus at Goldsmith’s Department Store pulled him upon his lap and asked, “So what should Santa bring this pretty little girl for Christmas?” and Andrew had to say he was a boy. The time when Andrew was six and received a severe spanking with the belt after telling Daddy he wanted their friends’ blonde-haired, tan skinned, blue-eyed son to be his ‘boyfriend,’ a very wrong request for a boy. The time when Andrew was eight, and Mommy slapped his hand down from its seeming natural limp-wrist position, which was not a proper mannerism for a boy. The time when he was nine, when the little boy next door befriended him and even after two days of playing with Andrew finally asked, “Are you a boy or a girl?” to which Andrew cried in reply, “A boy!” For the first time, those pictures, plus others, played the story that Andrew had suppressed into confusion, and now Andrew understood why he wasn’t like anyone else.

The lack of expression on Andrew’s face enraged Guy, and he tossed another pebble at him, hoping that Andrew would do something, anything, to feed this entertainment that everyone seemed to be watching with great intensity. But Andrew could do nothing, remorseful over an answer that he had found and an understanding that there was reason for Guy’s scorn. So Andrew sat with his head bowed and was hopeful that they would become bored of his target and move on to someone else less deserving.

“My dad calls him ‘squirrelly,’” Jim said, picking up a pebble from the sandbox and launching it towards Andrew. It hit his left shoulder.

“He’s a girly girl,” Jason said, tossing his own pebble at Andrew, hitting his forehead, leaving him stunned.

“Aren’t you going to do anything, you sissy?” Guy screamed, grabbing a handful of rocks. “Aren’t you at least going to say something?” He pulled back his arm and held the rocks steady there, waiting, wondering, angered that Andrew was so strange and removed that he would not even put up a fight.

“He’ll say something,” Scott said, in alliance with the leader, also grabbing a handful of pebbles, pulling them back in a threat against Andrew.

“If he knows what’s good for him,” Brandon said, gathering his ammunition, joining with the others.

Following suit, as most sixth graders do when faced with the option of rebelling against or conforming to their peers, each boy grabbed a handful of rocks and pulled them into striking positions, waiting for Andrew. What would his reaction be?

Guy laughed as Andrew lowered his hand into the pebbles and picked one up, rubbing it, feeling its texture within his fingers. All he would have to do to show that he was the same as them was fight back, even with just one pebble; pelt one laughing boy between the eyes, and perhaps it would be done. Perhaps they would laugh and say, “See, he is a boy; he’s just like us.” Or maybe they would even become scared, retreat, and worry, oh no, crazy Andrew has decided to fight, and we don’t know how far he will go. But Andrew wasn’t angry; just sadder, and he gripped the pebble within his fist tightly, trying to figure out what to do.

Another image flashed from his memory, a more recent time when he was 11 sitting on a pew in the First Baptist Church sanctuary one Sunday morning, absently listening as the preacher breathed fire from his lungs. Andrew had imagined himself flying by way of white feathered wings high up near the church’s arched ceiling, from stained glass window to stained glass window, in colored, filtered sunlight, around the heavy chandeliers, up and over the entire congregants’ heads, sprinkling everyone with love dust. This recollection inspired him, and he found a solace in this different kind of answer as to where he might belong: Simply, he did not belong on this earth at all. Instead, he was some sort of divine angel caught in between two worlds, sent here to earth only to help people with his gift of being both girl and boy. He was a Godsend.

This image and answer seduced him, and with the rock held within his grip, a familiar voice began calling inside him, giving rise to his white feathered wings, setting alight his halo, beckoning, “Love your enemies, turn the other cheek, and forgive them, for they know not what they do.” So Andrew obeyed and dropped the pebble to the ground next to the others, hearing the single tap before the stoning began.

At first, the pebbles hitting his 11-year-old frame felt like the hail that he had run through a few years back when he was entranced by the unusual precipitation falling on his grandmother’s farm on a cold twilight. Their second handfuls seemed to hurt a little, pelting his head, stinging his face, ricocheting off his chest. The dust mixed with the stones dried his eyes to red, causing water to run down his dirty cheeks. But what really drove the stake through Andrew’s throat, what really dropped his heart into burning oil, was the feeling and knowing that by not belonging at all, he was left completely and utterly alone in the world, forever destined to live emotionally homeless, to have no one that would or could understand, and to once again be back to lonely in the empty wilderness starving for belonging. That was what brought Andrew’s true tears, and suddenly, he was deaf to their chantings, calling him a baby, a mama’s boy, a sissy, and he was oblivious to the rain of stones. Alone, Andrew cried.

It was at that moment when he completely lost consciousness of them, that a single hole in the low clouds broke open, and a ray of golden sunlight streamed from the heavens upon the sandbox. The other boys, grabbing more pebbles, laughing and continuing to lay waste to Andrew, didn’t seem to notice the sudden change in the atmosphere, but Andrew noticed. No one but Andrew felt the warmth of the sun on his head and his face, a soothing calm within the fury, and he turned to look upwards; white tracks from his eyes, down his cheeks, glistening upon his dusty face. In a kind of majesty, of feeling heard, of no longer being alone, of belonging to something, he spread his arms wide, and accepted the ecstasy of the comfort in the single ray of promise which broke through the clouds to save him. He stayed like that for some time. He didn’t know how long he was there held in the sun’s embrace.

When Andrew finally opened his eyes and came into awareness, he found himself surrounded by his girl classmates sitting in a circle around the sandbox. Things had changed.

“Are you not going in with the boys?” Shelia asked Andrew.

Andrew stood, dusted himself off, and replied, “No. I don’t belong.” And he took off across the kick-ball fields towards a hole in the bushes, which led away from girls and boys.

STORY INDEX

RESOURCES >    
        

Where the Deer and the Antelope Play URL: http://groups.msn.com/wherethedeerandtheantelopeplay

The Observer
URL: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/observer/issues/2004Fall/online_exclusive/sun.html

The Epistle
URL: http://www.epistle.us/

Gay Poetry Online
URL: http://www.gaypoetry.com/design/search.asp?searchwhat=authorid&query=3060

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Blog

Brother, can you spare a dime?


The New York Times’ current series of articles on class and wealth in the United States highlights some thought-provoking new trends in wealth.  In particular, this Sunday’s “Richest are Leaving Even the Rich Behind” notes the following trends:

—The portion of the nation’s income earned by taxpayers in the top 0.1 percent has doubled since the 1970s, to a level not seen since the 1920s.

—Taxpayers within the $100,000 to $200,000 tax bracket lost a greater portion of their income to taxes than those making $10 million or more.

The rich are getting richer and leaving the rest of us far behind. Our parents grew up in a world where millionaires were a rarity and no one thought bringing a $700 piece of electronic equiptment to school was a good idea. (See May 29th’s “Where the Jones Wear Jeans”.)

We knew the gap between rich and poor in America was growing wider, but not the degree to which it had exploded. And, while the consumer market has expanded rapidly to accommodate the growing millionaire class’s whims and tastes, our society has not visibly benefited in other ways.  Charitable giving has increased the last 39 out of 40 years, and approximately 90 percent of Americans give money to charity. The examples of Bill Gates and George Soros may serve as inspiration to the men and women who can afford to buy $2.5 million homes in Nantucket, merely to preserve the view and their privacy. But ultimately, the hyper-rich’s charitable giving does not balance out the tax burden born by the rest of the American population. Their inflated income is shadowed by the memory of the 1920s crash and the subsequent Great Depression that equalized much of the nation in abject poverty.

—Laura Louison

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Political Prose

Dream on, Europe

The European Constitution is all but dead now, struck down by the one-two punch of France’s “no” vote on Sunday and the Netherlands’ (even more vehement) “no” yesterday.The bureaucrats in Brussels are scurry…


The European Constitution is all but dead now, struck down by the one-two punch of France’s “no” vote on Sunday and the Netherlands’ (even more vehement) “no” yesterday.

The bureaucrats in Brussels are scurrying for cover, as the Euro plummets in value and the political fallout continues to rain down on heads of state across the continent. The French president sacked his unpopular prime minister. The German chancellor pleaded for calm and unity, declaring that the failure to ratify the constitution must not “become a general European crisis.” Luxembourg’s prime minister lamented that “Europe is no longer the stuff of dreams.” There has even been talk of the impending demise of the Euro single currency.

The gloom-and-doom scenarios being put forth seem rather exaggerated to me. Sure, the failure of the European Constitution will mean that the process of integration will slow down. Those who are hoping for a strong European Union to balance the global scales of power will have to wait longer. But it seems only a matter of time before Europe emerges as a mature, unified political force. The younger generations across the continent are expressing an increasingly European identity. The “no” vote gained support from large segments of left because of provisions that were seen — justly or not — as too fixated on free, unfettered markets, and too neglectful of protections for workers and the public sector. Either the treaty establishing the constitution will be renegotiated to increase such protections, or those voters disenchanted with the last draft will come to the conclusion that any kind of unity is better than none. As China and India gain more of a foothold in European markets, and as the United States continues to assert an uncompromising foreign policy, the benefits of unity will undoubtedly appear more attractive to the French and Dutch, as well as other euroskeptics across the continent.

Look at it like this: Those precocious American colonists took quite a few years to move from the Articles of Confederation to the U.S. Constitution — with a whole lot of interstate bickering, Federalist/Anti-Federalist hate mail, and geez-this-is-a-stupid-idea moaning along the way. They didn’t even have a referendum. Cable news wasn’t invented yet. Shouldn’t we expect the Europeans to take some time to get “We the People” right?

In the meantime, you might as well book that next flight to Paris — the Euro is down to an eight-month low of $1.2255. Did I mention that baguettes are less than 1 euro apiece?

—Victor Tan Chen

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

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The farce in Darfur


The most recent installment of the humanitarian travesty and farce that is occurring in the western Sudanese region of Darfur happened on Monday when Paul Foreman, head of the Dutch branch of Medecins San Frontieres, which translates as “doctors without borders,” was arrested for perpetrating crimes against the state of Sudan with his report about the rapes that are occurring in the genocide-ridden region of Darfur. The pro-government Janjaweed militias in Darfur have been charged with genocide and systematic rapes, and the Sudanese government has been implicated as complicit in the acts; the Sudanese government denies such charges. And now the Sudanese government has jailed the head of a medical charity for compiling a report about the mass rapes.

The Crushing Burden of Rape: Sexual Violence in Darfur catalogues the sexual mistreatment of 500 women who received treatment from Medecins San Frontieres over four and a half months in Darfur. Medecins San Frontieres insists that its report is accurate; the Sudanese government is livid about the report that highlights the grotesque abuse occurring in the region, and when Foreman refused to present the government with the evidence which led to the report — Foreman states that to do so would violate the confidential nature of the doctor-patient relationship — the government promptly arrested him. He has since been released on bail.

The Darfur region is located in western Sudan, and the Sudanese government stands accused of providing support and arms to the Arab Janjaweed militias that are engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleaning against Sudan’s black African population. Since February of 2003, the conflict has resulted in over 70,000 deaths and two million refugees.  

The recent arrest of Paul Foreman is merely the most recent travesty related to Darfur.  Earlier this year a United Nations report claimed, in a preposterously worded report and against all evidence, that genocide was not occurring in Darfur. The United Nations report, begun in October of 2004 at the behest of the U.N. Security Council, on whether genocide is taking place in Sudan, stated that “the commission found that (Sudan’s) government forces and militias conducted indiscriminate attacks,” including “killing of civilians, enforced disappearances, destruction of villages, rape and other forms of sexual violence, pillaging and forced displacement, throughout Darfur.”  Although some individuals might have perpetrated “acts with genocidal intent,” the government of Sudan “has not pursued a policy of genocide.”

The U.N. report — which contradicts the American declaration that genocide is currently occurring in Darfur — recommends that the International Criminal Court (ICC) located in The Hague try any specific cases of genocide and war crimes that may have occurred in the Sudan. Had the U.N. report concluded that genocide is occurring in Darfur, the U.N. would have been legally obligated to intervene to help end the conflict.

—Mimi Hanaoka

  
  

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Quote of note


“I might phrase my views a little differently, but fundamentally there is no change.”

— Siegfried Kampl, a 69-year-old Austrian politician who has recently made explicit his sympathy for the Nazis, and who has condemned what he claims was the “brutal persecution” of Austrian Nazis following the Second World War. He has also denounced as “assassins of battle comrades” the Austrians who deserted their posts in Nazi Germany’s military units.

While Kampl’s pro-Nazi sympathies inspired horror among his colleges, he did, unfortunately, inspire one of his peers; several days after Kampl’s outburst, John Gudenus, a right-wing politician, asserted that the existence of gas chambers employed by the Nazis in their concentration camps “remains to be proven.”

—Mimi Hanaoka

  

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