"... Then You Have No Share With Me"

"I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

- AMOS 5:21-24

It's days like this that it's embarrassing to be a Christian.

How am I supposed to be a proud member of the institution whose ranks include a woman who compares waterboarding (a brutal form of torture), to baptism, our most sacred and widely-recognized sacrament? 

How am I supposed to seek unity or concord with a self-proclaimed archbishop in our own "civilized" country who -- when pressed -- refused to condemn the draconian new laws in Africa and Nigeria that not only make the simple condition of being gay (which is not something one chooses) a criminal offense punishable by arrest, abuse and (in some places) death, but compels the entire populace to take part in a witch hunt against the same, or face similar mob justice?  

How do I accept the leadership of the titular head of my own church, who would use very shaky evidence of a connection between mass murder in a country torn by civil war and the progress western churches have made on sexual and gender justice, as a rationale for keeping his own province in the past as the country around them moves forward, further cementing its increasing irrelevance?  

How do I explain this to the people I encounter (either LGBT themselves or just  believing in equal rights) who have a deep (and deserved) distrust of religious institutions in general and the church in particular?

The simple answer is, I can't.

I hereby declare myself "out of communion" with those who would use Christ and the Bible as a weapon against those around them. I concede that what is broken between us cannot be fixed. You can't be taken seriously when using "Biblical authority" as a rationale for endorsing continued persecution and murder.   If you don't see the defense of one vulnerable member of the human family as equally important to another, then -- frankly -- I'm not sure what Gospel you're reading, but it's not the one I know. 

Your "Christian cred" is hereby null and void here at the Church of Me if you think sinking to the level of torture is the way to make terrorism stop, and then glorify it by comparing it to the joyful initiation into the Body of Christ.  You cannot wash away another's sins while there is blood on your hands.

I cannot control what my denomination or the communion of which it is part does or says, or fails to.  Archbishop Welby claims that Christians might suffer at the hands of the intolerant if the church continues to move forward.  I fail to recall an instance where Christ promised the road of discipleship would be an easy one.  I am blessed to live in a place where we have grown so used to feeling included that we take it for granted, and a large part of the conversation is reminding those who "got theirs" that there is still work to be done.  I urge my similarly comfortable brothers and sisters to look at the world and the church outside your doors, pick up the rope and help us soldier on.

I only know that -- for me -- I can no longer be at peace with the notion that others identify me as part of an institution that is capable of what I've seen done in its name. I will continue to bore and annoy people by talking about it as long as I have a voice. I wish our leaders would put the radical inclusion that Christ preached ahead of politics and the facade of unity, an altar at which fairness and progress have been sacrificed so many times. I thank God for the opportunity to break bread with prophetic voices like the Rev. Winnie Varghese, the Rev. Canon Susan Russell, Louie Crew-Clay, and Jim Naughton, who have spoken truth to power many times when it was inconvenient or even dangerous to do so.  They are the reason I have found it possible to stay at the table when my head and my heart have told me to walk away.

We have much to be grateful for, and I know on one level that what we are seeing is the inevitable "growing paints" of progress.  But for today, I can't help but believe that the Almighty looks down at our folderol, especially at this time of year, and shakes his head, wondering, "when will they ever learn?"

Where is the Lamb for the Sacrifice?

Martin Luther King - Civil Rights Leader (1968)

I have had a volatile relationship with the See of Canterbury since I joined the Anglican fold some twelve years ago.  Those in my first congregation were no fans of Lord Carey, and thus the election of a Welsh poet to replace him filled this new adherent with enough hope to compose a Mass setting for the Sunday of his coronation.  It is probably terrible, has never been performed again, and -- as one whose "manner of life" apparently posed a challenge for His Grace -- my enthusiasm for Archbishop Williams' circuitous shepherding lasted just about as long, reaching a nadir when he appeared at our own church's convention to strong-arm us into a three-year moratorium on ordaining any further gay or lesbian bishops.  Thankfully, three years later, we remembered we don't actually have a Pope, and went about our business, electing Mary Glasspool.

Thus I greeted the Current Occupant, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, with no particular relish, especially given his corporate background and evangelical ties.  I watched his installation anyway (pleased that he eschewed the term "coronation") and learned a new hymn in the process.

While the Church of England struggles to come to grips with concepts we in the Episcopal Church have (for the most part) put to rest, society in the Kingdom is moving along without them.  Last week, civil marriage equality became the law of the land in England and Wales.  Even Her Majesty has gotten in on the fun, and the church -- somewhat grudgingly, I suspect -- issued a statement dropping resistance to the inevitable.

So I was somewhat knocked over today when I learned from the President of Integrity (the LGBT ministry of the Episcopal Church, of which I am a board member)  that his Grace, in the midst of a radio interview, basically said the CofE can't move ahead on LGBT issues because -- if they did -- African Christians would die.

"Scapegoat at Holy Trinity: Southport"

PHOTO CREDIT:  Julia (flickr.com/loscuadernosdejulia)
Used under Creative Commons License

In response to a listener's question about the Church of England's reluctance to allow its clergy to exercise their consciences on blessing same-sex relationships, the Archbishop cited the impact on the church's decisions on Christians in other parts of the world. He went on to describe standing at a mass grave in South Sudan earlier this year and being told that the victims were killed "because of something that happened in America."

While the Archbishop did not elaborate, in the context of the conversation it is difficult to imagine that "something" as anything besides the progress that American churches, and ours in particular, have made in the inclusion of LGBT people and recognizing their relationships.

In the absence of any clear evidence of a direct connection, it strikes me as irresponsible at best and dangerous at worst for a religious leader to link this tragedy and the actions of a relatively small church on the far side of the globe, amid a civil war, sectarian violence and other local perils, and use it as precedent to deny the church's blessing to the faithful same-gender couples who seek it. 

My particular mission is to minister to and protect the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, both those within the church and those who need its care. Thus I feel compelled to remind the Archbishop and the church that – even if this vague correlation is based on fact – anti-LGBT violence directed at non-LGBT people is still anti-LGBT violence, and it is still wrong. If we capitulate to it by denying rights to LGBT people in other places, the violence will not go away. Instead, we send the message to the church and the world that if you bully us, we will back down, thus inviting more of the same.

This whole event comes shortly after two African countries in which the Anglicsn church has a strong presence (Nigeria and Uganda) passed draconian new laws  which criminalize those known or suspected to be gay, as well as those who fail to turn them in.  The Archbishop's alarmist statement today comes in the wake of a far more muted one when his peers in those countries expressed enthusiastic support of the new laws, despite reports that LGBT people were already being subjected to violence. 

I remembered -- guiltily -- well past cocktail time that today is the feast of Dr. King (we observe our "saints" principally on the anniversaries of their deaths).  If I know one thing about his work, it is this: When you take a stand against the status quo, someone -- generally the person who is benefiting from the status quo -- is going to make noise.  They may threaten, they may even harm.  But that risk cannot be enough to make us fail to stand up for what we believe in.

Dr. Welby would apparently have the LGBT members of his own church give up their own full participation therein at the altar of a great and unproven "what if." I learned there was only one sacrificial lamb in our theology, and that part has been spoken for.

In the 150 egg-faced  years since we -- by and large -- sat shamefully by and watched emancipation happen around us, it seems my church has learned a few things about justice and equality. I wish I could say the same for our friends across the pond.

Find the Cost of Freedom

ASH WEDNESDAY

“Hey, are you Polish?”

The question, though incongruous from a stranger as my two friends descended a busy staircase into the West 4th Street subway station, seemed innocent enough, and -- in fact -- one of them is.

The next question was even more out of place, although the intent was not immediately clear: “Are you faggots?”

My friends report that at first they thought the stranger was kidding around; an inside joke on the gayest corner of the gayest city east of Mrs. Madrigal. There has been much debate in the “community” over whether we should neutralize the venom of that word by playfully throwing it around, much as another two-syllable word has been co-opted by some of those against whom it was used. We know people who do that, with that word. The stranger had an accent, and sometimes people from other places use words differently than we do, and they were a little buzzed (they were, after all, celebrating their tenth anniversary). In a city they know well, and -- a mere block from Stonewall on a Saturday night -- they had no reason to be particularly wary.

So they said yes.

What followed happened so quickly that they struggled to recall it in detail… to the doctors, to the cops, and then to me. In a nutshell, the stranger did not like that answer, and he made that brutally and physically clear, while a station platform full of people fixed their eyes back on their phones and did nothing, said nothing. The birds are angry. Can you blame them?

Eighteen hours later, my friends finally made it home, having been up almost all night retracing their steps, paging through mugshots. One of them required stitches near his eye and may need surgery for facial fractures. They are both stunned, angry and sad. The city whose welcome we have come to take for granted now feels like a house that had been robbed.

Protest in Greenwich Village after Mark Carson's murder

PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Fleshman
Used under Creative Commons License

Even as crime drops precipitously in the city and marriage equality comes to a new state seemingly every other week, two groups of people have increasingly found themselves the targets of violence and rage: gay men and transgender women. We are not just being called names or getting black eyes. In May of last year, a young man named Mark Carson was shot dead just blocks from where my friends were attacked. In August, an aspiring fashion designer named Islan Nettles was beaten on a Harlem street, right across from a police station, later dying from her injuries. Although multiple people identified her attacker, the charges were later dropped. Another man was attacked in an East Village subway station just three weeks ago. In all these cases, the perpetrator hurled homophobic and transphobic remarks at his victim.

My friends know they are lucky that what happened to them wasn’t worse. They are home eating soft foods because it hurts to chew, but they are alive. The police and doctors took their report seriously and told them they had done nothing wrong. We can be grateful: this would not have been the case thirty years ago.

As I write this, an invitation to a male couple’s wedding, which will be valid in the eyes of the church and the state, sits on top of today’s mail. My straight friends treat my partner and me like members of their families, and their kids say “uncle and uncle” without even puzzling at that idea. I think they would find a rotary phone more confusing.

It is clear, however, that some around us remain so threatened by the evolution of our rights and the normalizing of our place in the culture that the only way they can reassure themselves of their power is by lashing out: with words, with fists, with bullets. The rash of Jim Crow-evoking legislation that popped up around the country in recent weeks, was -- while failing to become law -- still successful at reinforcing the us-and-them mentality that drives such paranoia in some quarters. We can celebrate how far we’ve come, but if we let ourselves believe for a minute that the struggle is over, it is at our peril.

“It's unfair to be called a faggot your entire life; however, the slur becomes most dangerous when you let it no longer faze you.”

- PAUL FLORES

Saving the iGays

"For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed."

 - PSALM 139: 13-16

 FEAST OF THE HOLY NAME OF JESUS

I have been fussing at my better half for the past week that we do not have exciting New Years' plans.  We will be ringing it in at his brother's house, on the couch with Ryan Seacrest while our nephew shows off his Christmas loot.

There is nothing wrong with this, of course.  We are generally not "partiers" these days, and New Years in a bar (or -- as my friend Tony called it -- "amateur night") is frequently overpriced and generally populated by people who are trying too hard to convince themselves and those around them they're having an amazing time.

However, my observation from astride a bigger elephant in a smaller room, which is that -- for a certain wedge of the gay male culture pie -- every Saturday night is New Years' Eve. I get weekly email invites from every DJ and promoter I ever met, trying to convince me that their venue is the place to be.  There are people whose job it is to go around and photograph people at these weekly parties and post them online and in Time Out and free bar magazines like Next.  You are of course supposed to be sought out to pose for these photographs (what my friend John, who records/performs club music as Jipsta, calls "giving red carpet") and there are men who scan these pictures eagerly over brunch the next day to see if they or their friends made the cut.

Wentworth Miller gives red carpet

I was never more than at the fringes of this world. You only have to look at the images that it produces to know that there is a pecking order, and that you need to look a certain way to be taken seriously.  I learned the truth at seventeen: You can gym up, wear the "right" clothes of the moment, and raise your stature a little bit, but if your physical dimensions and the shape and placement of your facial features are not within a few millimeters of the airbrushed "ideals" set by the likes of Wentworth Miller, there is an inner circle of fabulosity that will forever remain out of reach. In the event that you mistakenly cross the class boundaries, this world is populated with enough young men who fancy themselves as an extra from Mean Girls, who will helpfully direct you back to your rightful place. Further, the mandatory retirement age is distressingly young, although I know men who have resorted to Botox, hormone therapy and other means to stay "in the game" a bit longer. 

This is, of course, not new: the Village Voice personals in the 1980s could be pretty specific. In his 1983 novel I've A Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore, author Ethan Mordden creates a character named Harvey Jonas, whose raucous public persona is -- he reveals -- a mask behind which he hides a deep loneliness, brought about by a keen understanding of the looks hierarchy.

"Everybody talks about power, but everyone wants beauty.  It's sad, because you can acquire power, but you can't acquire beauty. Do you know why everybody wants beauty?  Because beauty is the only thing in the world that isn't a lie."

What is new, and somewhat disturbing, is the way that technology has impacted the gay male social scene, and it is enough to make me glad to be out of the dating game.  Traditional matchmaking strategies, and -- to a certain extent -- even the bar scene have been largely supplanted by smart phone applications which enable men to -- by means of GPS -- locate potential mates in their immediate proximity, with only a photo and a handful of characteristics and preferences to differentiate themselves.

“We are an un-community. We have become a consumer product. We are the iGays. We have lost our souls. And we don’t even know it.” - ANONYMOUS

What was once at least a perfunctory opportunity to get acquainted has now been reduced to a quick scan of acronyms and statistics.   One quickly learns you need to be "VGL" (very good looking) and "Masc." (figure it out) and be able to prove it to even get a reply to your hello. Exacting standards of age, ethnicity, body dimensions, quantity and placement of body hair all help weed out undesirables.  Intimacy becomes a transaction from which you can be excluded simply for not filling out the paperwork properly.

We do like convenience, however, and the popularity of these applications is evident by their prominence in media and culture.  A recent meningitis scare in New York was cited to be largely spread by contact with others met via smart phone "hookup".  They have also played a factor in the decline in the number and quality of places for gay men to meet in person and actually socialize.  And what men are still going out do so with phones in hand, in case Mr.-Right-Now isn't in this bar, but the one next door.

Not everybody is happy about it. An Australian man who blogs anonymously writes:

"I came out in 1993, in Sydney, to a gay scene that was vibrant, colourful, out and proud. Here I sit not twenty years later, and the community has been decimated by the Internet. Completely, utterly decimated. As a whole, gays everywhere have become a sick group of animals who have completely lost their ability to interact on any authentic level, who have fearfully squashed themselves into simplified categories of drop-down boxes, and who banish entire groups of their own kind based purely on unwanted physical characteristics that do not fit the Gay-For-Pay Porn Model Image. We demand equal rights, but treat each other like sub-human animals, and worship the Straight Man as God-King."

For those of us mere mortals who don't get chased through the mall by modeling school reps, the odds are not good. Any endearing personal characteristics one might have -- a charming laugh, graceful conversation skills, a subtle or biting wit -- never get the chance to be experienced because the unseen panel of judges has already dismissed you on a technicality like the "wrong" eye color or the five extra pounds that came from binge-watching Orange is the New Black the same week that Starbucks brought back the pumpkin spice latte.  And even if you do actually get to meet in person, don't count on a second date.  "NSA" (no strings attached) is generally the intent.

The psychological effects on an already fragile population are not surprising. Our blogger laments:

"I have never felt more ugly, unworthy, and disgusting as I feel now. I have become so acutely self-conscious and lacking in esteem that if I actually venture out (despite this having become a pointless expedition of being ignored and judged, and watching small groups of gay males ignoring other small groups of gay males), I’m too uncomfortable to even dance anymore. I have no joy left in my life, because I have lost hope that I will ever share my life with another person."

He is, as it happens, an atheist.  From his biography, I suspect that any suggestion that he is loveable and beautiful in the eyes of God will be met with a dismissive eyeroll emoticon, and a chiding about invisible-man-in-the-sky fantasies to which we're already accustomed.  Which is a shame, because he is part of a population that desperately needs to hear they are in fact worthy of love.  Our tradition is full of flawed, neurotic men with questionable style and grooming habits who somehow managed to find companionship, fight injustice... even save nations.  Surely we have room for a few more! Our congregations can and should be communities where LGBT men (and women, although this looks-above-all nihilism appears to be a principally male trait) of all descriptions can be reassured of their worth in a world that frequently tells them otherwise, and where the opportunity is there for healthy, mutually-sustaining relationships of substance to form.

The church saved me in this way.  It was through seeing LGBT people, few of them actual supermodels, being uplifted by their parishes at a time when few others in society were doing so, that I knew it was possible that I was home, and I subsequently met my partner through the church. Ten years in, our extended "family" has seen us through joy and loss, and I was recently privileged to stand up for the wedding of another couple who have become dear friends. 

For the most part I have left the party world behind, and that is okay. Yes, I may have groused about not going out on New Years' Eve, but I love what my life has become, and I want that same feeling of belonging for my brothers out there in the dark, staring at their phones.

Seacrest out.

Walking on Water

So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

MATT. 14:29-33

We spend most of our Florida vacation within site of the Gulf of Mexico, but -- with the exception of our eight-year-old traveling companion -- most us us limit our actual immersion to splashing around right in the fairly miniscule waves.  

Last winter, the proprietors of a surf shop a few blocks from our rented house caught my attention with a strange contraption that looked like a cross between a surfboard and a kayak.  You stand on it like a surfboard, but -- rather than skimming on the crest of a wave, you paddle it like a boat.  Though I am about as graceful as a drunken giraffe during an earthquake, it looked like fun, and I wanted to try it. By the time I got the nerve to talk to them about it towards the end of our stay, the wind and currents had picked up and made conditions unsafe for a beginner.

That's me!

Since then, I found out this "has been a thing" since 2005 when it came over from Hawaii, but really took off in the past year or so.  Several friends have used them on northern New Jersey's lakes. People's little kids were doing it. A senior citizen with an enviable torso glided past us on one right near the water's edge during one of our daily walks. I was not going to miss the opportunity again this year!

So midway through our trip, I marched myself over to the languid youth guarding the pile of  equipment on the beach.  He has a cake job at this time of year, before the snowbirds and college kids arrive, we shared the beach with only a few other people so he mostly has to sit there and hope someone wants to rent something.

There were no lessons... after about a five-minute description of what to do, he dragged one of the boards into the water and guided it past the breaking waves.  I flopped onto it, managing not to go off the other side, and followed his advice to start out kneeling until I got more confident with my balance.  After five or ten minutes, I tentatively got to my feet and lasted a few minutes before flying off into the drink.

Unperturbed and glad I had not yet made it to where my friend Linda was waiting with a camera, I scrabbled back onto the board and tried again.  Before long, I was standing more than kneeling, and getting used to the sensation of trying to balance on top of a giant pan of Jell-O.  I am proud to say I didn't fall again, and made my way slowly up and down the beach, hoping the wake from a passing speedboat wouldn't send me flying right when I was in range of my intrepid news photographer.

By the time my rental hour was over, my quads were like rubber bands, but I was hooked.  I can understand how this is the Outdoor Industry Association's reported #1 new sports activity for 2013.  I also think it will help me in the gym, since it requires constant engagement of your core muscles and awareness of how you are distributing your weight.

Speaking of weight, I cringed when I saw the photos. I hate pictures of myself to begin with, let alone shirtless ones, and studying for the Project Management Professional exam plus some medical issues meant it was not a very outdoorsy summer for me! Hopefully I can find more chances to "SUP" next summer which will help counteract too much computer time.

"I feel pretty, o so pretty"

At the end of our week on the beach, we headed to Busch Gardens in Tampa for a day before flying home.  I was kind of amazed how in-your-face Christian the Christmas (clearly not Happy Holidays here!) decorations and music were.  But my point (yes, there was one!) of mentioning our visit there was that we saw a hippopotamus swimming underwater.  This huge animal, which lumbered slowly around its enclosure on land, was positively as graceful as a dancer as it moved through the tiny fish and plants that surrounded it.  Similarly, as uncomfortable as I was with the sight of my pale, flabby self, there was none of that while I was actually cruising, albeit slowly, on top of the waves.

Maybe it's a Cloudbust

Ignatius of Antioch - Bishop & Martyr (107)

Last week -- after a very long wait -- we screened Cloudburst, a 2011 film of which Netflix apparently has one copy.

In my book, this film had three things going for it: Olympia Dukakis (playing gay, no less), Nova Scotia (playing itself), and a hot guy (Ryan Doucette).  How can you go wrong?

(from left) Olympia Dukakis, Ryan Doucette, Brenda Fricker

I wanted to see it at the Montclair Film Festival (especially because Dukakis was present for the screening) and wasn't able to get a ticket (probably because Dukakis was present at the screening).  She is a heroine in the town where she once lived and operated the Blooming Grove Theater Company.

The premise is as follows:  Stella (Dukakis) and her partner Dot (Brenda Fricker) have lived together for decades, but are being separated by Dot's granddaughter Molly (Kristin Booth) who is convinced that Dot's failing eyesight means Stella is incapable of caring for her, and she resorts to trickery and the fact that her husband is a cop (maybe the only cop in their small town) to get Dot away from Stella and into the rural Maine version of Shady Pines.

Emboldened by tequila, Stella hatches a plan to spring Dot, and they head off to Canada, with the idea of getting married.  Along the way, they pick up a hitch-hiker with the unlikely name of Prentice (Doucette).  Prentice is, inexplicably, almost always half-naked.  I have been to Maine and Nova Scotia:  It is not that hot, even in the summer. 

Prentice's story is that he left his dancing (modern, not exotic!) gig in NYC when he heard his mother was dying.  He's hitching his way back to Lower Economy (not be confused with Upper Economy) to see her.  He's a little nervous about exposing his parents to a lesbian couple, particularly since Stella has no filters and is regularly mistaken for a man.

When they arrive, Stella is sequestered in the truck, but Dot needs the rest room. Prentice gets her in the door and then apparently forgets about her as he sits eating cereal and talking to his mother (who -- other than a hacking cough -- seems well enough, and offers no explanation as to why Prentice was summoned home).  They quickly agree that he can't stay there (apparently they just had extra Cheerios they needed to finish). Dot gets herself into a bit of trouble I will not describe, which hastens their departure and leads to possibly the strangest scene in the movie.  Sufficient to say, we see more of the native twigs and berries than was really necessary.

Having given up his job to see his mother for ten minutes, Prentice seems remarkably calm about being homeless, unemployed, and having no plan for the future.  He agrees to accompany Dot and Stella into Canada and witness their wedding, perhaps in part for lack of anything better to do, but (I like to think) also out of a genuine desire to help them. He reveals a level of intelligence and complexity behind his initial trashy opportunism over the course of the film, as the couple's situation sparks some innate compassion and perhaps a sense of belonging he hasn't felt at home in a long time.

Of course things do not go entirely as planned.  They make it across the border with Prentice's dignity being about the only casualty, but cold feet lead to the seemingly counterproductive summoning of Molly, who tries once again to assert her will to keep the women apart.  The skirmish that follows leads to Dot finally getting to the root of what is driving Molly's behavior.  I will not spoil the ending, but it's not exactly happily-ever-after.

This quirky film kept me engaged, but the characters' seemingly self-defeating behavior both endeared them to me and made me want to understand their motives better than the film allowed.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

William Temple - Archbishop of Canterbury (1944)

I admitted on Facebook last week, not without some trepidation, that I am not, nor have I ever been, a Halloween person.  Don't get me wrong; I like candy as much as the next person, and don't mind a clever, cute or sexy costume (my co-worker and her husband outdo themselves each year with a punny. costume-for-two (think "the fork in the road" or "deer in the headlights") that is an institution in their lake community.  It's the creepy-crawly-undead stuff I can do without.  I know I am squarely in the minority in this, considering that Americans reportedly spent $6.9 billion on candy, costumes and giant inflatable spiders this year.

It's part of a pattern: I don't like horror movies, I follow a proud family tradition of steering clear of the biology lab on dissection day (well, except for mom, who earned a nursing degree!), and I try to avoid "dressing up as" anything that involves makeup or a wig.  Hell, my "dressed up" look tends to skip right to the end of the wedding, with collar open and tie askew, but that's a shortcoming for another day.

I struck gold with the Archwarden in this regard, because every year he amasses a lot of candy and then no kids come to the door, which may be because he has all the lights off and the shutters closed, but we're not sure.  He's even less inclined to make a spectacle of himself than I am, so I don't have to worry about him asking me to fill out the back half of a horse costume anytime soon.

Yeah, not gonna happen.

This year was typical in our non-observance: I uncharacteristically declined an invitation to spend a beautiful Saturday on the Asbury Park boardwalk, mostly because I would have been sharing it with 9,252 zombies.  They were able to break the Guinness Book record for such events without my assistance, thank you very much.  I went to the beach the next day instead when all the ghoulies were cleaned up and attending brunch.

I did, however, take advantage of the fact that the Most Rev. Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, was the celebrant and preacher for All Saints Sunday at the beautiful and historic Church of St. Luke in the Fields in New York's West Village. In her sermon, which you can read here, she touches on the origins of Halloween, which was once called All Hallows' (saints') Eve.  All Saints' Day is officially November 1st (the next day) and she explained how the two events fit together:

"Lots of people have forgotten, or maybe never knew, that All Hallows Eve, the night before the Feast of All Saints, is a deeply Christian observance.  It’s not only about celebrating all the saints and [All Souls] those who’ve died in the last year, but it’s about what we do with scary things, including the bad dreams that wake us in the middle of the night or the reality that confronts us outside our front doors.  That what the ancient prayer is about, 'and from ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties, and things that go bump in the night, good Lord, deliver us.'"

I suppose that -- by making light of death, decay and all things possessed -- we could be coping with our anxieties about the things that keep us up at night.  For me, I don't need such additional stimuli: the real world and the stuff I churn up in my head is plenty. 

Add to this that I have not been able to lift weights, my normal means of tiring myself out enough to sleep soundly, since prior to my recent surgery.  That restriction was lifted Monday, to my great relief, and I was in the gym when I head the news of the latest gun-related incident to dominate the national news, and this one was right nearby.  A lone (or was it two? or five? the eyewitness reports varied widely) gunman walked into the Garden State Plaza, New Jersey's largest shopping mall, and fired several shots before disappearing somewhere inside (or outside... it was hours before anybody knew).

So much for sleeping! The mall is about 20 minutes from us and someone we know lives right on its perimeter in a ground floor apartment. Did she have her windows open?  We recently got a security system, but of course I could still speculate about how someone could defeat it and get in our house... and so it goes.

The mayhem that followed continued long into the night.  Police escorted terrified shoppers and employees outside while searching the giant facility room-by-room.  Some people were trapped in stockrooms and kitchens until early the next morning.

“Your fears they grew into a mountain Where you're freezing alone at the top Still I'll wait everyday at the bottom Just to catch you the second you drop” AM TAXI - "Tanner Boyle vs. the Seventh Grade"

It was 3:30 a.m. before the shooter was found dead by his own hand in a darkened storage area. As it turned out, he was not an Al-Qaeda wannabe or disgruntled ex-Abercrombie greeter dismissed because his waist size went up.  Instead, he was a 20-year-old pizza driver and aspiring model from a nearby town named Richard Shoop, who left no clear indication why he chose to take his own life, or why he chose to do it in such a dramatic way.  The gun belonged to his brother Kevin, who looked for it after discovering a note from Richard entitled "my will" and hearing reports of a shooting on the news.  When he confirmed the gun was missing, Kevin connected the dots and headed to the mall to warn police.

After the initial relief that we were not, in fact, under some kind of siege, my meant went back to Richard who - although I quite possibly bought a slice from him at some point in the past - would have probably never crossed my radar had he not seized the headlines. Despite being no stranger to post-adolescent angst, I could not help but wonder what inner demons would have driven him to such a desperate act.  As his friends gathered with candles and photos last night on Cedar Lane (Teaneck's Main Street) to remember him, I recalled Sunday's reading from Daniel and what the Presiding Bishop said about the monsters that inhabited his world, and ours:

"When Jesus says, “blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God,” he’s talking about that kind of home.  That irrevocable condition, that God-given birthright, is open to all, but we only find it by embracing and yearning for it.  Daniel’s demanding and destroying monsters aren’t likely to find it.  All the blessings Jesus spells out are about the road that takes us homeward, and the woes are about choosing paths that lead only to isolation and self-exclusion, and cutting ourselves off from that blessing.  Those blessings and woes are the story of the prodigal, who leaves home and discovers only mere existence."

May God rest Richard's troubled soul and bring comfort to those affected by his actions: his family and friends, the people caught in the mall, and all the public safety officials who walked unflinchingly into a very unclear situation to assist them.

An Unlikely Angel

I have been wrestling with this topic for a while.  I think today is the day to post.

ALL SAINTS' DAY

Fifteen years ago this week, the world watched as a grisly story unfolded in southeastern Wyoming.  A gay college student, Matthew Aaron Shephard, was found -- beaten and left tied to a remote fencepost -- by a bicyclist who initially mistook him for a scarecrow.  Shepard died October 12th in a Colorado hospital.

Two young men, with whom Shepard had last been seen the night of October 6th at a Laramie bar, were charged and subsequently convicted of the crime.  One, Russell Henderson, pled guilty and testified against the other (Aaron McKinney) in exchange for avoiding the death penalty. McKinney's life was spared by Shepard's parents, who agreed to two life sentences with no chance of parole.

“But there was something about Matt that caused the giant, callous machine that is America to take its foot off the gas, if only for a relative moment, and maybe, just maybe, start to think it was possible that gay men were not all sick predators. Maybe we were actual people, who could and did feel pain.”

As we mark a decade and a half since Shepard's death, he is again in the virtual limelight.  A new film, entitled Matthew Shepard is a Friend of Mine, premiered on both coasts last weekend. One venue was the Cathedral Church of St. Peter & St. Paul in Washington D.C.  The Very Rev. Gary Hall, Dean of the Cathedral, used his sermon this past Sunday to remember Matthew and Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi, who committed suicide in 2010 after learning his time alone with a male friend had been secretly recorded and broadcast on the Internet by his roommate.  The mothers of both young men participated in a forum after the service.  You can read and watch videos of both the sermon and the forum using the links above.

Though I was not yet an Episcopalian (and in fact in a state of cold war with the church, more on that another day!) in 1998, I found myself with 1,000 others at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York, attending a memorial for a person I knew nothing about, other than that he was gay like me, and that he was brutally, gruesomely dead.  I didn't know it at the time, but this struck a particular chord within the Episcopal Church, perhaps because Matt was one of us, a member of St. Mark's: Casper and an acolyte.

Even before Shepard died, there was something about this attack, amongst all the others against LGBT people that occurred before and since, that was different. I don't know if it was because he was a slightly-built guy with youthful features, who looked in the photos that were everywhere in those days to be incapable of hurting a fly.  I don't know if it was the way he was found hanging pitifully from that fence, which for Christians could conjure up one image and one image only.  But there was something about Matt that caused the giant, callous machine that is America to take its foot off the gas, if only for a relative moment, and maybe, just maybe start to think it was possible that gay men were not all sick predators.  Maybe we were actual people, who could and did feel pain.

As a result, it felt natural to accept that the murder was an anti-gay hate crime.  After all, the perpetrators initially claimed as much, saying Shepard had been targeted because of his sexuality, and that they pretended to be sexually interested in him to gain his trust, so as to get him alone and rob him.  What they didn't explain is why they couldn't just rob him as planned, instead of beating him to a pulp.

But the murder had set wheels into motion.  Misanthropic quasi-Christians aside, the general consensus was that this was going to be -- like Lawrence vs. Kansas -- a case that changed everything.  It took over a decade, but the names of Shepard and James Byrd, an African-American man who was savagely killed the same year by white supremacists, grace the bill -- passed in 2009 -- that added sexual orientation and gender identity (real or perceived) to the nation's hate crimes law and expanded it past federally-protected activities like voting or attending school.

The narrative around Shepard's story is not homogenous, however, and it does not arouse compassionate impulses in everyone.  A recent University of Mississippi production of Moises Kaufman's The Laramie Project (a re-enactment of Shepard's murder and the events that followed based on interviews with townspeople who were involved) was disrupted by homophobic jeers from the audience.  Students, including approximately 20 members of the Ole Miss Rebels football team, had been compelled by the administration to attend the play.  In the absence of anyone taking responsibility, the school announced since that all students who were present will be required to participate in a discussion about the incident.

Separately, a gay freelance journalist named Stephen Jimenez has just written a book which stands the public understanding of the case on its ear.  Quoting sources who claimed friendship with them both, The Book of Matt posits that Shepard not only knew his attackers, but that he and Henderson had been sexually intimate in the past. McKinney, Jimenez claims, worked as a prostitute and enjoyed sex with gay men.  He claims that all three men used and sold crystal meth, and that it was more likely that the attack was a drug deal gone bad than an anti-gay hate crime.

In an award-winning 1999 essay for Harper's, JoAnn Wypijewski unpacked the intricacies of the world the three men inhabited, in an attempt to understand how the pieces that led to the murder fell into place.  By her account, Henderson and McKinney were both on a week long meth binge, and bore no more hatred of the gay Shepard than the other men, ostensibly straight, that they beat up later that night.  Of the media's reaction after, she wrote, "Press crews who had never before and have not since lingered over gruesome murders of homosexuals came out in force, reporting their brush with a bigotry so poisonous it could scarcely be imagined."  In her opinion, it was decided that Shepard was to be the poster child of the hate crime lobby, and any attempt to derail that was squashed.  My initial reaction was that she must be the new Anne Coulter, 'til I dug a bit and discovered she worked for a decade at Mother Jones.  Socially progressive generally, she doesn't agree with the idea of hate crime laws, arguing that putting people in different categories implies one person's murder is worse than another's. 

Wypijewski wrote about the case again in 2004 after a 20/20 piece (which Jimenez also helped produce) exploring the drug angle drew outrage by LGBT groups and Shepard's family.  She called the way the story had been framed in the public consciousness the "second tragedy" to occur at Laramie.  The third, a year after Shepard died, was the death of Russell Henderson's mother Cindy Dixon, who had been raped, beaten, and left to die in the snow. There were no hate crime laws to protect her, Wypijewski asserts.  Her well-known problems “with the drinking, and the men” led locals to write off her death as practically inevitable, and the perpetrator of a crime similar to that against Shepard got off with a manslaughter charge and is already out of jail. 

A piece by Aaron Hicklin in the Advocate suggests that -- even if there is truth to Jimenez's view of the story -- it doesn't make Shepard's death any less awful or undeserved.  He argues that there is a time and place for different versions of narrative. "There are valuable reasons for telling certain stories in a certain way at pivotal times, but that doesn’t mean we have to hold on to them once they’ve outlived their usefulness," Hicklin writes.  He goes back to the Lawrence vs. Texas case, which unraveled sodomy laws nationwide after (we were told) two men were arrested for having consensual sex in their own house.  Except that -- if you actually read the details -- they weren't a couple, and they weren't even having sex. 

Those of us who are LGBT must reconcile the fact that we collectively benefited from the public's response to this story as it was told them.  If any of Jimenez's version is true -- and we may never know if it is -- it messes with the imagery we have collectively built around the diminutive figure whose death galvanized a movement. Reports that Shepard was depressed and possibly engaging in harmful behavior are not new, but they were never the focus of the narrative.  Unsurprisingly, conservative voices are playing this up as evidence of why hate crime laws are bad, and progressives are pushing back, pointing out holes in Jimenez' story, most importantly the unreliability of his star witness (Henderson) and Jimenez's own connections with the defense attorney in the case. 

I found the whole controversy unsettling, but I also grew up among journalists, and -- in the process of writing this -- found myself digging deeper, wanting to understand the situation and thus make peace with it, even in a place of continued uncertainty.  I have dear friends who are furious at the idea that anyone is trying to change the public's perception of who Shepard was, especially if it appears to be for some personal motive.  Maybe Kaufman's portayal is closer to the truth, maybe Jimenez's is, but I'm not sure it matters.  Nobody deserves to suffer as Shepard did, and many LGBT people do, ever year.

Within the Episcopal church, we  seek to be inspired by those whose lives and deaths touch us is reflected in our calendar of  "saints" as documented in the book Holy Women, Holy Men.  We expect no miracles of our saints, and in fact some of them were known to struggle with deep flaws.  In the case of Matthew Shepard (who is not in the aforementioned book), I think it's important to remember that he never signed up to become an icon for LGBT rights, nor the public scrutiny that goes with it.  His death made many people think about gay people (and -- sorry -- gay men in particular) differently, but it was one death in many.  LGBT people continue to be killed, even in enlightened places like Seattle and New York, their names sadly unknown to but a handful. If the randomness of Shepard's genetics or the horrible, crucifixion-like manner in which he died meant enough hearts were changed that we could spur the progress we have made since, is that miracle enough?

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