Sympathy for gays
GAY BASHING
. Before we set aside the recent controversy over gay lifestyles in DuPage, let me add a personal perspective.
. I once worked the graveyard shift at the U.S. Postal Service in downtown Chicago, sorting people’s mail far into the night. In those days, I would put my work aside at three a.m. and catch a subway train, which carried me to 51st and Prairie. There I might wait for a bus, or on summer nights, I might walk along the border of deserted Washington Park to my home about a mile east.
. At the train station one warm night, I met a man and his woman who humbly asked for money. Against all the survival lore of the streets, I stopped and spoke to them.
. There was little of the standard urban toughness about them. They seemed almost innocent, as my parents must have been when they’d come here from the rural South. They were hungry, homeless, without a cent. An old story. I gave them a little cash which would have gone to waste had I been carrying it ten minutes later, and I turned toward home.
. I’d spent the train ride home in a dour Presbyterian mood of spiritual dissatisfaction–my soul is seldom rested. The encounter with the two innocents depressed me almost to despair. It was such a tiny bit of suffering I’d seen, yet it set me to questioning the goodness of God. It seems absurd to me now, but I recall praying, “If life must contain this sort of misery, I’d rather die.”
. I was so disturbed that I forgot my surroundings, ignored my city instincts. Only later did I notice that I was not alone.
. “Hey, man! Got a match?”
. On the other side of the street, four or five or six teenage boys eyed me. Even then, I did not think.
. “No,” I replied. “I don’t smoke.”
. And here is the part of the story I don’t know how to tell. How do I explain to you about my manner, cold and aloof even in prayer? How can I convey to you the high-pitched voice and precise diction which makes me sound imperious and arrogant even to my family?
. Most difficult of all, how do I tell you about the culture of black urban males, for whom every act, every gesture serves as an assertion of intense, virulent masculinity? Unless you have lived in this world, you can’t know.
. In retrospect, I knew what they heard in my voice that night. I’d seen it in men’s eyes before, a moment after speaking. I saw it now, and heard it, and realized that I’d just made a horrible mistake.
. They came to me then, at a run, brandishing broken broomsticks that I hadn’t noticed before. How many? Four? Five? Six? Before I could count, I was down, my clothes half torn from me, my head quaking from the blows. I screamed for help, and they screamed too.
. “Kill the fag! Drag him into the park and kill him!”
. They might have done it, too, had not a yellow cab pulled up and stopped. The driver did not get out; he didn’t have to. The lads wanted no witnesses.
. The beating stopped. They helped me up, dusted me off with elaborate courtesy, removed a buck from my wallet and handed it back. They warned me of the bad things that could happen to faggots traveling at night alone. Then they vanished into the park. My glasses were shattered; I was blind. For all I knew, they’d merely ducked behind trees in the park, waiting to spring out again.
. I staggered into the middle of 51st Street, flagged down a police car, collapsed against its side. The driver aimed a blurred face at me as I whined at him through bruised lips. Then he drove away.
. Alone I staggered toward the bright lights of Cottage Grove Avenue. And of course I made it. Later, in a hospital emergency room, I remembered that just before the attack, I’d been praying about the advantages of death. But God is merciful, and smart enough to know a stupid prayer when he hears one.
. This is a coming-out story, though not the kind you may have supposed. I am not gay. But I have been mistaken for a homosexual by a fair number of people. And I’m the only heterosexual I know who has been the victim of a gay-bashing.
. As this story reveals, I am a bad Christian, but a believer nonetheless. I’m quite an old-fashioned one too, as any Wheaton College alumnus should be. For example, I hold to the traditional Christian belief that homosexual acts are sinful.
. But two of the best friends I made at Wheaton College are gay. They’re my friends still. They’re bright, witty and make wonderful drinking companions, even if you don’t drink. And neither of them deserve the savage and lunatic hostility that they face daily, any more than I deserved to be beaten with sticks.
. Having a gang of youths go upside your head can be a wonderful aid to clear thinking. I almost wish I could prescribe a similar treatment for some of the people who’ve been phoning and writing us here at The Journal.
. Many of our critics mean well; they sincerely worry about the promotion of a lifestyle they consider immoral. But underneath the sincerity is the smugness of straight, well-off American white people, people who are convinced that everyone in the world is either like them, or desperately wants to be like them.
. None of their messages showed any hint of sympathy for gays. There was no word of regret for the outrageous abuses these people suffer. Nor was there a realization that what these people chiefly want from straight society is the right to be let alone.
. These sincere, good people would never bash a faggot’s head in, but they’d treat him like dirt in any of a dozen other ways, without even realizing they were doing it. With all kindness, I would no more leave the civil rights of homosexuals in the hands of these people than I would have left my civil rights in the hands of Bull Connor.
. This is one born-again Christian who has a very personal reason for supporting gay-rights legislation. And the more I hear from straight people, the more I favor it.