fear

weekly reflection, updates & good stuff 5.18.2021

Friends, 

1990. It was a magical year, wasn’t it? Paris is Burning was released, but “Vogue” dominated. Janet donned a zoot suit for “Alright.” and the Pet Shop Boys asked, “Tell me why don’t we try not to break our hearts and make it so hard for ourselves?” Vanilla Ice told us to stop, collaborate, and listen, and Jesus Jones prophesied that the world was waking up from history. On May 17, the World Health Organization declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder, and two-and-a-half weeks later, I graduated from the eighth grade. 

Yesterday was the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. Why May 17? See above. On Sunday evening, I started to see more hashtags and memes promoting the observance, and by morning social media was filled with hopeful and creative messages, but I couldn’t help but wonder (#carriebradshaw)...there’s an International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia? It’s not the pithiest of names, and the calendar of queer holidays has gotten rather crowded in recent years, so perhaps I missed a memo. I’m glad for it - I’m happy there’s an international movement to celebrate and protect queer folx - but it bothers me for three reasons.

First...um, one day? One, stinking day in May, an already crowded corner of the calendar? Queer people are queer 365 days of the year. And 366 in leap years. Leap Day William does not make everyone heteronormative for a day while he trades children’s tears for candy. Until homophobia, transphobia, and biphobia are eradicated, every day should be IDAHOTB (even the World Bank initialized it like that).

Second...1990? By the time the WHO made the change, Madonna was already choreographing her Louis XVI reinterpretation of “Vogue” for the VMAs. In some ways the US was ahead of the curve (the American Psychological Association removed homosexuality from its list of disorders in 1973), but (and it’s a big but) it wasn’t until June 2020 that the US Supreme Court opined that an “employer who fires an individual for merely being gay or transgender violates Title VII” (unless, of course, that employer invokes the “ministerial exception,” a loophole that enables religious organizations to keep on discriminating). So if there’s a parallel time-lag between changing the classification and achieving legal parity, that means that legal recognition and protection might become the norm in (let’s see...1973 to 2020 is...grr, math...47…), we might reasonably expect equality (for LGBTQ folx) to sweep the globe by...2037. In case 47 years doesn’t seem that long, consider it generationally: a generation lasts 20-30 years, which means the lag from declassification to legal parity took two generations. 47 years, two generations. And who knows how many loopholes hatred can poke by then?

Third...the name. Oh, God, the name. Munroe Bergdorf posted a pithy, succinct, and stunningly precise explanation. In case you don’t want to toggle over to Insta to see it: the first of a series of images and videos reflecting diversity in sexual identities is a black field with the updated Pride flag under four, all-caps phrases: 

I HATE THE WORD HOMOPHOBIA. 
IT’S NOT A PHOBIA. YOU’RE NOT SCARED.
YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE.

Of course, it’s not the first time that Munroe Bergdorf has spoken the truth. In 2017, she lost her gig as the first transgender model in the UK for L’Oreal when The Daily Mail quoted her saying “most of y’all don’t even realise or refuse to acknowledge that your existence, privilege and success as a race is built on the backs, blood and death of people of colour.” A trans person of color was fired for holding a mirror up to the world, making me all the more grateful that the wrangling with L’Oreal didn’t silence and derail Bergdorf. Here, she excavates the truth under the word “homophobia.” 

Etymologically, it’s a silly word. What should probably have been coined as homosexualphobia contracted to homophobia, which literally translates to same-afraid, or ‘afraid of the same,’ which is not, (I hope we all recognize) its meaning. But that’s not the worst of this disaster of nomenclature: as Lucy and the DSM tell us, “phobia” is a clinical diagnosis rooted in irrational fears of specific situations, experiences, and objects. Invoking “homophobia,” or a “fear of homosexuals,” implies that there’s something to be feared, and dignifying it with the suffix -phobia confines its expression to a disorder over which the person experiencing it (the “homophobe”) has limited control. Therefore, behind the shield of clinically detached language, the “homophobe” bears no responsibility for homophobic actions. 

But I can tell you: every “homophobic” interaction I’ve ever had was the result of someone’s choice. Every word, every microaggression, every insulting name hurled, every intimidating or mocking glare, every threat, every trajectory of spit, every beer bottle thrown - every one was a choice. Ask someone who’s been bashed, who’s been fired, who’s been denied healthcare or access to a partner who is suffering, who’s been publicly and unexpectedly outed, who’s been kicked out of a home or a family. Ask the ones left behind when someone’s been murdered for being queer - given and chosen families, lovers, spouses, children. They can tell you that the death of each of these people, the people they loved, was the result of someone’s choice, the product of someone’s agency and free will - a choice to transform hatred into violence in the form of words, microaggressions, insults, glares, threats, bashing, workplace and healthcare discrimination, isolation, and murder. 

So, instead of hiding behind clinical terminology, let’s call it what it is: hatred in the form of violence. Hatred against people who are different, hatred that mocks, attacks, isolates, and excludes. The antidote to hatred against queer people isn’t treatment or therapy, as a “phobia” might suggest, but a different choice: a choice to love, a choice to be kind, a choice to belong.

UPCOMING

• Guided Meditations | Mondays, 4:00pm PST & Thursdays, 9am PST (starting April 8!) via Zoom

• Good Stuff V | 4-week symposium on Wednesdays at 5:00pm PST begins on June 2. Sign up here!

UPDATES

Guided meditations via Zoom continue on Mondays at 4:00pm PST and on Thursdays at 9:00am PST! These morning (on the West Coast)/mid-day (on the East Coast)/evening (wherever else you might be) sessions will be just like the Monday session - our aim is to practice being present and finding a little peace and quiet. If you or someone you know could use a 20-30 minute dose of peace and quiet on Mondays or Thursdays, visit the meditation page on my site to sign up! 

Summer planning is underway! Why not add some meaningful conversation along the way? Symposia bring people together to explore a topic from different angles. Check out my website for more information and to sign up. Symposia are limited to 10 participants and need 4 to run. Upcoming Symposia:  

• Good Stuff: talking about listening, seeing, feeling, and other ings. Good Stuff V (Wednesdays June 2, 9, 16 & 23); Good Stuff VI (Wednesdays: July 14, 21, 28 & August 4); Good Stuff VII (Wednesdays, August 11, 18, 25 & September 1; Good Stuff VIII (Wednesdays: August 8, 15, 22 & 29)

• Rituals, ceremonies, traditions: starting points for understanding, engaging, and constructing ritual life (Thursdays: July 15, July 22, July 29, August 5) 

• Madonna: a case study in religion & pop culture (Thursdays: August 12, 19, 26 & September 2)

• Miss Jean Brodie is past her prime: teachers in film (Thursdays: September 9, 16, 23 & 30)

GOOD STUFF

Watch
My introduction to Nina Paley was through her feature-length Sita Sings the Blues, an animated retelling of the Ramayana that splices in the artist’s own life. I stumbled into her rendering of “This Land Is Mine” while developing a unit in my world religions course on the conflict between Palestine and Israel. The song itself was composed for the film Exodus, based on a novel about the founding of the State of Israel, but Paley uses Andy Williams (who can never really escape the cheesy tinge of Branson in his recordings) as an ironic backdrop for an accelerated depiction of the last 7,000 years of groups displacing each other for control of the Levant. The Canaanites slaughtered the “cave men,” the Egyptians slaughtered the Canaanites, the Assyrians slaughtered the Egyptians...as Williams croons heartfelt patriotic pride, we see the invasions and falls of groups and empires and the rise of the biggest winner of all, the Angel of Death. Paley doesn’t provide much (or any) nuance, but she puts the conflict that we see today, the conflict that has raged since the displacement of the Palestinian people and the establishment of the modern State of Israel, in a broader, if gruesome, context. Yes, gruesome. It’s not an easy thing to watch, but it does inspire a question that don’t get asked enough: why has control of this land been worth more than the people who lived in it?

Listen 
I got onto a Gogol Bordello kick in the mid-2000s. Most of their songs are upbeat and raucous, blending the best of punk and Romani music, but “Illumination” stands out from the rest of the Gypsy Punks album (and the rest of their music, really) as a meditation on difference and resilience. “Of course there is no us and them/But them, they do not think the same,” Eugene sings, laying out the problem that each of us has probably faced at the intersection of compassion and self-interest. He continues with an anthem for resilience with a bit of uplifting if awfully daunting truth:

You are the only light there is
For yourself my friend

If you stream music on Spotify, I’ve started a playlist called “Bill’s Good Stuff,” including music I’ve loved for a long time as well as things I’ve come across more recently. Feel free to add the playlist to your favorites! Bill’s Good Stuff Spotify Playlist

Read
For this week’s meditation, I used a poem by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. 

“In Jerusalem”
Mahmoud Darwish

In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls,
I walk from one epoch to another without a memory
to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing
the history of the holy ... ascending to heaven
and returning less discouraged and melancholy, because love
and peace are holy and are coming to town.
I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: How
do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone?
Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?
I walk in my sleep. I stare in my sleep. I see
no one behind me. I see no one ahead of me.
All this light is for me. I walk. I become lighter. I fly
then I become another. Transfigured. Words
sprout like grass from Isaiah’s messenger
mouth: “If you don’t believe you won’t be safe.”
I walk as if I were another. And my wound a white
biblical rose. And my hands like two doves
on the cross hovering and carrying the earth.
I don’t walk, I fly, I become another,
transfigured. No place and no time. So who am I?
I am no I in ascension’s presence. But I
think to myself: Alone, the prophet Muhammad
spoke classical Arabic. “And then what?”
Then what? A woman soldier shouted:
Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you?
I said: You killed me ... and I forgot, like you, to die.