Emotion, vulnerability make you human, not gay
A few Sundays ago, I wrote about my desire to see the film “Brokeback Mountain.” The prospect of watching a couple of cowboys kissing didn’t trouble me much because, well, I’d been kissing a cowboy for years.
The weekend that column appeared, I skedaddled over to Seattle’s Capitol Hill, of all places, where my husband, the former cowboy, and I visited our college-age daughter. It was, as always, a trip into an alternate universe.
We drove past a new cocktail lounge called “Purr,” we walked along store windows displaying transsexual fashions and we heard the story of a straight couple offended by a Broadway-style public display of affection.
“Oh, no you don’t,” an indignant gay resident scolded the judgmental pair. “This is Capitol Hill. You’re in our home now.”
It’s an edgy place with the power to freak out a midlife Spokane mom like me, where aspects of gay life from the risky to the fabulous are embraced.
Recently residents there have celebrated Washington Legislature’s passage of a bill banning discrimination based on sexual orientation. It was marked by the decision of a Republican lawmaker to break with his party to declare this truth:
“We don’t choose who we love,” Sen. Bill Finkbeiner was quoted as saying in the Seattle Times. “The heart chooses who we love.”
It was a dramatic, historic moment. But back in Spokane, the senator’s insight was hardly news to 22-year-old Adam Cogswell, a Whitworth College music student, who sings bass in the choir.
He’s known he was gay since he was 5.
He didn’t develop crushes on female playmates; his heart fell for other little boys.
“You always know,” he says. “You also know as a kid that that’s not OK.”
He grew up in evangelical Pentecostal churches, and for 2½ years, starting at age 12, he says, “I tried to pray those demons out.”
His choice was never whether to be gay. Finally, though, he chose to be honest.
Anti-gay activists fret that passing laws like the new one in Washington state will somehow transform the straight Heath Ledgers of the world into gay Ennis Del Mars. That hasn’t happened. Ledger filmed sexy scenes with Jake Gyllenhaal, which should be enough of a sales job itself, if you ask me, and promptly fell for the actress who played his wife in the film instead.
New anti-discrimination laws aren’t anymore going to transform Ledger into a gay man than today’s Super Bowl broadcast will turn me into a leading linebacker.
Homosexuality is similar to left-handedness, says C. David Hopkins of the Pride Foundation in Seattle, who quotes the Liberty Education Forum. You can try to write with your right hand, you can hide it, you can submit to nuns bearing rulers. But, he says, “It’s not something that’s going to change.”
When I listen to gay men speak, I find some of their experience mysterious, some of it familiar. But I have a few ideas on inborn traits of my own.
Back home in Spokane, where even the gay people seem more reserved, I hear of straight men who can’t bring themselves to see “Brokeback Mountain.”
They call it, with derision, “a chick flick.”
And in that line, I hear a small clue: Underneath their fear for all things gay lies a disdain for the personality traits we label traditionally feminine.
And that’s a sentiment I’ve heard all my life.
There are settings — certain locker rooms, workplaces, bars and golf courses — where the gay cowboys from “Brokeback Mountain” would be only slightly less welcome than the straight beauty parlor gals from “Steel Magnolias.”
There’s something about the aspect of the human personality that expresses itself with vulnerability, emotion and blond highlights that has the power to frighten. Don’t ask me why.
It showed up with my green eyes. I was born that way.