Return to Article's Issue Main Page | View More Past Issues
BTW
This Will Be on the Test Recent dustups in France, Denmark, and elsewhere have exposed the cultural divide between Europe’s secular democracies and their more theocratically inclined immigrant populations. This has threatened to produce an anti-immigrant backlash in some countries, which is a problem because it tends to undermine precisely the democratic values that these nations are trying to uphold. The Netherlands has come up with a novel solution: make sure prospective immigrants know just how liberal the Dutch truly are. Thus many immigrants wishing to stay in Holland will now have to view a DVD that features gay men kissing and a same-sex wedding, among other things; and later they’ll be tested about Dutch laws and attitudes toward GLBT people. Critics of the program, noting that only applicants from the Middle East and Asia will have to take the test, charged that it’s designed to discourage immigration from these regions. Defenders contend that its purpose is not so much to discourage foreigners from coming as to make sure they know what they’re in for.
Roots of a Fatal Decision A small-town police chief has been named in a federal lawsuit for preventing a would-be rescuer from administering CPR to a heart attack victim who was known to be gay. Claude Green, 43, died after being stricken just yards from City Hall in Welch, West Virginia, a town of 2,400. The American Civil Liberties Union has sued on behalf of the victim’s mother. Noting that Green was in fact HIV-negative, the ACLU’s Rose Saxe stated: “He was simply a gay man in Welch, West Virginia, and because of that we can only assume that Chief Bowman assumed he had HIV and it was unsafe to even touch him.” Or it was simple homophobia, without even the fig leaf of a medical rationale, a possibility that the ACLU should not rule out. What prompts an officer of the law to actively prevent an innocent man’s life from being saved is a decision that may well have deeper roots.
From: Associated Press, 1/21/06* “In a rare heresy trial, the local diocese has convicted and excommunicated a priest who joined a denomination that doubts papal infallibility and doesn’t follow church teachings on homosexuality, abortion, and ordination of women clergy. The Rev. Ned Reidy received a thirty-page letter last week notifying him that a three-priest tribunal of the Diocese of San Bernardino had found him guilty of heresy and schism and that his authority to conduct priestly functions was revoked.”
* It is assumed that the year in question is 2006 and not 1006, but this has not been confirmed [Editor].
Adopt This Bill! An Ohio Democrat is proposing a law that would prevent Republicans from adopting children, a move aimed at embarrassing the GOP over recent efforts to block gay adoptions. State Senator Robert Hagan (D–Youngstown) admits his bill is “tongue-in-cheek” but insists his message is no joke. His proposal is in response to a Republican-sponsored bill that would bar same-sex couples from adopting children or acting as foster parents. Taking the opportunity to skewer the Party’s values as well as its stand on adoption, Hagan claimed there was “credible research” showing that adopted children who are raised in Republican households are more likely to face “emotional problems, social stigmas, inflated egos, and alarming lack of tolerance for others they deem different than themselves and an air of overconfidence to mask their insecurities.” Both bills were headed for defeat, but only Hagan’s became national news and a joke on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. Still, even as Ohioans and NPR listeners were having a laugh, more than a half-dozen other states were seriously considering similar anti-gay adoption legislation.
Damned If You Do End of the Spear was being hailed by evangelical Christians as the next big movie to get their message out to the flocks. The drama about the 1956 murder of five American missionaries in Ecuador was poised for a zealous opening—until it was discovered that one of its actors, Chad Allen, was openly gay. All at once, what had been a must-see Christian movie was the target of a boycott (that evangelical weapon of last resort). The reaction seemed overblown even by fundy standards—could the private life of one actor really matter that much?—leading Dan Savage to quip in The New York Times that these are the same people who think they can convert your gay son to heterosexuality, yet they don’t think Chad Allen can pull off acting straight for two hours in a movie. Once again, Savage is on to something. The religious Right is always saying that being gay is a choice, a lifestyle, perhaps just a phase you’re going through. But when it comes to discriminating against GLBT people, suddenly being gay becomes a fixed condition, a lifelong stigma, a basis for permanent exclusion. Logically, they should be happy that Allen got to play straight: who knows, it just might have stuck!
Queering the Cowboy Of all the mindfucks that Brokeback Mountain inflicted on an unsuspecting public, perhaps the greatest was that Jack Twist, the unambiguously gay one, was a rodeo bronco rider, and a pretty good one at that. This led The New York Times to go out and discover that there were lots of gay rodeo riders in the U.S. and even, by golly, gay rodeos. Enthused Beth Greenfield in the Times: “The International Gay Rodeo Association has more than 4,500 active members and is made up of amateur gay rodeo clubs in 33 regions of the U.S. and Canada. That means you’ll almost always find a gay rodeo around the corner, and this spring is no exception.” Meanwhile, the success of Brokeback prompted singer Willy Nelson to release a song he wrote back in 1981, “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other.” At the Academy Awards, a film montage of American Westerns presented what must be a small fraction of the gay-inflected moments in cowboy cinema, and they were hilarious. Larry David wrote in the Times that he was avoiding Brokeback Mountain because he knew he couldn’t resist a sexy cowboy, and there goes the heterosexuality. If nothing else, America will never again be able to watch Bonanza reruns or John Wayne movies in quite the same way.
Return to Article's Issue Main Page | View More Past Issues
