Hopes and Resolutions for a Queer New Year

By Ed Madden From "Gays and lesbians in both Carolinas share their desires and thoughts for 2005", Q-Notes

15 January 2005

http://www.q-notes.com/features/feature02_011505.html

In September, between the hurricanes, my partner, Bert, and I spent a week with his family in Boca Raton. Hurricanes Charley and Francis and Ivan had already passed, the beachfront hotels were shuttered and shut, and all week the television weathermen were warning us about Jeanne. On Friday, the day before her arrival, I took a last walk on the beach. Far down the beach, in a little curl of shore where the surf surged and broken shells littered the sand, that's where I saw her. No one else was on the beach. Just me and a muscular woman in cut-off overalls, a red kerchief on her head, a woman wielding a pail and a trowel and a smile of contentment, shaping the wet sand into something beautiful, something remarkable. I think of her as I think about the old year and the new.

Last year was a dark year, and the elections of November still darken the horizon. My cousin in Arkansas emailed me to say that he was voting "the way God would vote." He said, God would vote for President Bush (turns out, God prefers more poor people and dead Muslims—who knew?), and God would vote for an amendment to the Arkansas constitution that not only prohibits gay marriage but also any kind of legal protections for gay and lesbian families—who live in every county in Arkansas, 35 percent of them raising children at home, 40 percent of them taking care of their elderly parents. Jim DeMint, who now represents me and South Carolina in the U.S. Senate, said that gay people and unmarried mothers should be prohibited from teaching school. (I am an openly gay teacher.) He did not say unmarried fathers shouldn't be allowed to teach. After all, Strom Thurmond, South Carolina's favorite statesman, fathered an illegitimate child on an unmarried, underage black domestic servant (fornication, miscegenation, perhaps statutory rape)—while he was a public school teacher.

S.C. Republicans, in a little legislative orgy of hatred, have pre-filed 2 constitutional amendments and 5 bills against gay people. Primary sponsors include a "confirmed bachelor" (nudge nudge wink wink), an accused rapist, and the biggest bigot in the House (documented in one offensive comment after another about blacks, Jews, and women)—a man who so vigorously believes in the sanctity of marriage and family that he's been married 3 times and taken to court for failure to pay child support.

Given those contexts, what are my resolutions? I've never been a fan of resolutions. I think of that woman on the beach. Maybe that sand castle is a little lesson in the obvious, a parable about loss and possibility. (Bert reminds me that we need to risk the obvious. Why, he asks, hasn't someone told Donald Trump that the one person he needs to fire is his hairdresser?)

So, my resolutions. To keep working. To imagine something remarkable, no matter what darkness sits on the horizon, no matter how fragile and temporary the work may seem.

What do I hope for in the coming year? I hope that more gays and lesbians in my state find the courage to come out, to imagine a world in which they don't have to hide themselves from their families or their co-workers. I get tired of folks who say they can't be out at work, they can't tell their moms. (Honey, you're 40 years old and live with another man. She already knows.) Come out. That's the only way to change this culture.

I am also looking forward to March 19. My partner, Bert, and I have decided that on the tenth anniversary of our first date, we're going to have a ceremony. It may not be legal, it may horrify my fundamentalist Arkansas family, but it represents the world I want to live in. There will be two men exchanging rings and vows in a church, some calla lilies and bells of Ireland, a little Elvis music. Something remarkable.