I was driving back into the city after being away in New Jersey all day and flipped on the radio. It was a ‘greatest hits’ kind of station that I don’t usually listen to but they have traffic and weather reports. It’s always a good idea to check and see if the bridge or tunnel you take is jammed in advance as it can save you alot of time, also tonight they were saying it might rain/sleet/snow and I wanted to be prepared.
While waiting for the next report to start the DJ took to the microphone to take a request. A young man was on the line and the DJ asked him his name. “Sean”, he replied. The DJ asked him what song he wanted to hear and who he wanted to dedicate it to. He said he wanted to hear The Door’s “Light My Fire” and he wanted to dedicate it to his boyfriend Josh. The DJ said “no problem Sean, and where are you and Josh tonight?”. Josh replied “Hamilton” and the DJ then said “You guys have a good night” and with that the song began to play.
There I was driving on the Garden State Parkway with tears welling up in my eyes. It’s hard to explain to someone what it’s like to hear a young kid be so comfortable calling up and making that request and equally to hear a DJ, after decades of hearing homophobic comments on radio, be nonchalant and treat him like any other love bird on a Saturday night. It felt like a milestone, one of those moments where you find yourself at a marker along a very long road. All those years marching, writing letters, voting, living out loud in an effort to raise consciousness and boom, there it is, raised. On top of that was the sweetness of the whole thing, just being moved by fact that this will now be ordinary. It’s what so many of us have fought so hard for.
There are still tons of battles to be fought but you have to savor those moments when you feel something has been accomplished and tonight was one of those for me, and it feels so damned good.
I’m Catholic, so I’m not supposed to like this kind of thing, but for what it’s worth I thought that was beautifully written. I’m really tired of hearing from people who claim that God is angry. That’s not my own experience of God.
Six years of Catholic school here.
I think that those who need an angry God feel unworthy of a loving one. They superimpose their own issues onto God which is misguided.
Reading about it makes me feel as you did, I think, and thank you especially for the simple but sound and panfaithic theology of your comment.
It makes me feel good in kind of the same way the story of Sean’s perfectly ordinary moment did, except I have this urge to suggest that you consider going into religious studies if you are not already thus occupied, and disposed to the notion…
I feel life is pretty much an ongoing course in religious studies. I left the Catholic Church decades ago although I still attend a few times a year in family gatherings/weddings/first holy communions etc., too much indoctrination and not enough of Jesus’ teachings and their attitude toward gays is deplorable.
I’m attracted mostly to Buddhism and I very much like the Christian writings of Rev. John Spong. I read his autobiography recently and found him inspiring and I subscribe to his weekly column.
Any suggestions in particular Ducktape?
Mohmammed Ali said it best, in a poem that I can’t remember exactly, it was something like, lakes, rivers, oceans, all are different, but all are water.
But all this seems to be stuff you have already figured out, if you have figured out that the best theological school is life, and just looking at a rose will teach you more than a thousand books. 🙂
I have it on the Highest Authority that God IS angry.
All them morons trying to make Her into their political supporter, their enforcer, their personal idea — in short, the Fundies of all stripes — She’s a bit tired of that, and rather pissed that She’s being completely misrepresented for reasons having nothing to do with Her…
Bad idea.
Yeah, she’s mad.
But She says Hi to everyone here and sends Her best… and She’s been a bit busy lately, as always, but will be around to see each and every every day, though it may be late afternoon sometimes.
— the faux faithful, that is — often attribute emotions to “their” god: anger, love, etc. Little do they realize that in so doing they proscribe their personal deity from being omnipotent. Can’t have one with the other. Ridiculous!
what else can they do? God(s) is/are merely human creations, reflections of the universe already in us, projected outward because we’re too frightened to take responsibility for what we do.
. . .well, duuh!
Let me get this straight. You are responding to my note above. You seem to be saying: (1) that I am “faux faithful,” and that (2) in “attributing emotions” such as anger, love, etc. to “my” God I am “proscribing” my personal deity from being omnipotent. Please.
This is silly.
First, as a logical matter, possession of an emotional attitude is not inconsistent with omnipotence. You may need a basic vocabulary lesson, or a few hours of Philosophy 101. Perhaps you meant to use some other fifty cent word.
Second, I’m sorry that you don’t understand what I’m talking about. But you may get your chance!
What can I say…rock on. It’s stories like this that keep me from permanently residing in “mad at the world” territory.
Thanks James. Moments like that make it all worthwhile.
Thank you for this, Wildred. I had a simliar moment when I was listening to my 20 something grandaughter, (who has found her true love,) speaking of getting married some day with the same kind of natural ease once reserved only for heterosexual couples. She’s been fortunate to have been raised in family full of gays, in a gay friendly urban setting.
I also have had the joy of seeing my new granddaughter, who has two Moms, born early and welcomed by a hospital staff who was completely accepting and able to celebrete her birth like any other. I never dreamed I’d see days like this, and I so wish it was like this everywhere.
Wonderful to hear about your granddaughter, Scribe. She is growing up in a time when she can actually be herself from an early age. I’m the first generation of that as I came of age just after Stonewall and came out to my family while in college in the late 70’s.
I used to argue about gay marriage in 1980 (after attending the first gay march ever in DC in 1979) and even my gay friends would look at me and shake their heads and say ‘never in our lifetime’! They thought it was too radical and too much to hope for.
When you came out, I was still a few years away from making the mind-blowing discovery, at age 41, that I really wasn’t a frigid, abnormal sinner-woman headed for hell after all, I was just…gay!
Thanks for sharing this. We need all the bright spots we can get!!
I’m quite sure this will be the most lovely story I read today and will hope for the day when it won’t even have to be a ‘story’…it just is.
thanks, chocolate ink.
what a beautiful thing to say.
Thanks for this diary, wilfred.
This “quiet milestone” stuff is important, even if not too many people realize that it is. These kinds of changes often seem insignificant (or merely sentimental) to people who do not really understand the magnitude of the problem, or understand what it is like to live out decade after decade of your life and see only negative and inaccurate representations of your identity category in the popular culture. The effect that this can have on the psyche is staggering, so these kinds of changes are, on a basic level, essential to the psychological/emotional health of not just minorities in a culture, but also non-minorities whose consciousness is also shaped and refined by experience.
Plus, it’s often the quiet milestones like these that serve as a barometer of sorts to track the progress toward the milestones around which there’s always so much yelling, such as enough public support for this particular minority group to finally make some headway regarding equality under the law.
Yes, Willard, I so understand your heart in this.
Thinking about your experience it triggered a memory of 1972. Myself and 4 or 5 other glbt folks were actively involved in bringing MCC (Metropolitan Community Church) to Salt Lake City. Yes, that Salt Lake City.
In 1972, my gosh it seems now astonishing, there was a radio talk show that was interviewing us about this event and what this would mean to Utah’s glbt community and the community at large. It was a call in show and the comments were all over the board. . .I was surprised and encouraged by the many supportive comments, just as I was discouraged and but expectant of the hateful comments. One elderly woman called to tell us the program was making her physically ill, so ill that she had to lie down on the couch. . .she went on from there in her misguided and derogatory thoughts.
All I could think to respond to her was if it was so devastating to her person, couldn’t she find the strength to turn the radio off?
There have been milestones and there will continue to be. Sometimes we become so engaged in the battles and the vigilance that we miss some of the sweetness of those milestones. Thanks for sharing this one with us.
Beautiful writing, Willard.
Hugs,
Shirl
Okay so I am LMAO. . .and how classy of you not to have mentioned it. . .apparently I am having senior moments today. I know your name is Wifred and even if I didn’t, I could easily have looked at it listed as author……
No way to explain it, and as I so often do, I see what I intended to say, not what is actually there when I proof.
Sorry Wil, you know I love you. Just laugh with me and we will pretend it was a joke on purpose.
Ha!
oh shirl, you can do no wrong with me.
and i have absolutely no ego about such things!
Thank you so much, Wilfred. I avoid the radio because it seems to be dominated by the extremely maniacal. I’m thrilled to know that it is permissable to be a normal human on the airwaves.
I hope that eventually these sweet moments will be the norm in our public discourse.