“The Joy and Delight of Being Alive and Different”

Binghamton NY, People of Blessing
Rev. Miller Hoffman

June 13, 2018

All week and all month Binghamton has been celebrating Pride and what it means for us as a diverse community, straight and LGBQ, cis and trans and genderqueer, women, men, and nonbinary folks, monogamous, nonmonogamous, serial, hooking up, in all the ways we are bi and pan and poly, in all the ways we are different. Pride is peculiar and unsettling and odd in our bent- and fluid- and fabulous-ness. We celebrate our strangers and our strangeness, all of us connecting with and celebrating one another during this month of heightened awareness of our differences and what they mean for hope and justice.

Pride is fun and celebrative and sometimes silly. There’s a but coming, but let’s just sit with that for another few seconds, because we need it these days. Pride is fun and celebrative and sometimes silly. It is in some ways redemptive in its silliness, in some ways its foolishness is salvific. But, Pride is also more than a parade, also more than the floats that usually get air play on the local news, more than the salacious and provocative dancers on those floats. I say “more than” the salacious and provocative only because there is more of us than that, not because in any way it is shameful or scandalous. The salacious and provocative, in fact, is critical to who we are as a people and where we come from. The salacious and provocative is another way of reclaiming and proclaiming our identities and our life “styles” from those who would call us pervert, threat, danger. From those who have called us illegal, immoral, insane. Rather than being a danger to our children, children can in fact benefit by learning the liberative and nourishing lessons of our salacious and provocative history. Two weeks ago we honored Harvey Milk’s birthday; his response to this sort of accusation was to embrace and invert it, and he would begin speeches by saying, “My name is Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you.”

These salacious and provocative edges are important because we need to be honest about where our line is and that we have one. We must acknowledge who it is that we struggle to celebrate, who we wouldn’t bake a cake for. Maybe those folks are bi or poly. Maybe they are BDSM and kink and fetish folks. Or like Alok Vaid-Menon, a tall, hairy, brownskinned femme genderqueer wearing bright, low cut, above the knee, flouncy pastel hot pink and three-inch easy pumps. It goes for all of us. Allies and LGBTQ folks alike who think Alok and the queens and the body stocking wearing body painted naked go go-boys in hot pants and little else and leather men in leather chaps and little else who are ruining “it” for the rest of us. “It” being however we determine value or respectability or proper or just the right amount of weird-strange-odd-freakish and no more, not like “them” who are ruining our children’s innocence, and proving the haters right, and crossing the line that “we” had moved just enough to get ourselves in.

Being able to support and celebrate that level of difference is critical to our communities, because we are a mash-up of L and G and B and T and Q, and any one of those initials has its own incredible breadth and depth of difference. It’s critical to our own wholeness. Thich Nhat Hahn calls the connection between all things interbeing; and he asserts that, no matter how incredibly different we are, or how much we disagree about morals and mores and politics and promiscuity, no matter how much we may even really confuse our dislike for each other’s ideologies with dislike for each other, Thich Nhat Hahn says we are congenitally part of each other. We are existentially connected. There is no part of you that is not part of me. The flower cannot exist without the soil, wind, sun, rain, cloud, ant, bee. We cannot exist without each other, we are each other.

Harvey Milk’s anniversary is a reminder that, more than the parade and the floats and the titillating that makes for good news, Pride critically is still a movement, also a march, still a protest. If we doubted it, if we thought we had reached some kind of post-gay utopia of marriage and adoption and military service and hospital visitation, some kind of “why can’t you people just be happy with how much you have?,” all we need to do is turn on the television or open a newspaper and realize how much we are losing what we had, how much many of us didn’t receive in the first place, how many of us are still in peril.

Between Orlando and the dozens of dozens of trans women of color murdered in the United States alone in the last few years, between the 31 states with no laws protecting from discrimination in employment or housing and the introduction of state and federal policies actively hostile to queer and trans servicemembers, students, parents, patients, partners, and pee-ers, many of us are still in honest-to-God peril. Yesterday was the 51st anniversary of the Supreme Court Loving decision that eliminated race-based marriage discrimination, and it was the second anniversary of the Pulse shooting, when 49 mostly Latinx LGB, trans, and queer people were murdered.

We’ve known the danger for maybe always. So many people across all sexualities and genders have been working so hard for so long to address the danger. Our history and timeline is a greatest hits of action and protest, from Mattachine to Daughters of Bilitis, to Bayard Rustin and Langston Hughes, to Barbara Gittings and amendments to the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel, to all the queer and straight women who nursed gay men throughout the AIDS crisis, to Marsha P. Johnson and STAR, to ACT UP and GMHC and the Lesbian Avengers and the Lavender Menace, to Harvey Milk and Barney Frank, to Troy Perry and Gene Robinson, to Lambda Legal and the Sylvia Rivera Law project and GLAD and GLAAD, and Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, to allies like PFLAG and Judith Light and Elizabeth Taylor and Cyndie Lauper, and, as always, that’s just off the top of my head. Imagine what list we could come up with if we sat down with Google and caffeine?

It’s important to talk about what queer and gender queer folks have done for ourselves – because folks need to know that we’re fierce and resilient and empowered and powerful and strategic and smart – and it’s critical to discuss how our straight and non-trans allies and advocates have pitched in and carried the torch and taken the baton – because it’s important, during Pride and during all the times, to understand how much we have to offer one another, to really understand how much we all need each other. How much we are one another.

Homophobia and transphobia hurts every one of us. Some of those folks killed and wounded in Pulse were queer and trans, and some were friends and family. Brenda Lee Marquez McCool was killed protecting her son, Isaiah. She raised 12 children and beat cancer twice. Lisa Lambert and Phillip Levine were killed alongside Brandon, back in 1993, because he was their friend and they were in the house together. Lisa was a straight, cis single mother who didn’t have an enemy in the world. In 2001, Willie Houston was guiding a blind friend and holding his girlfriend’s purse when he was called gay slurs and shot. Michael Hunt and Private First Class Barry Winchell were murdered for loving trans women. The Sucuzhanay men were attacked and Jose was killed because they were thought to be gay, two brothers walking home arm in arm after a church party.

And homophobia and transphobia hurt us as well, all of us, because they assume narrow definitions of “real manhood” and “real femininity.” They paint everyone with a single brush, and they paint everyone into a gender corner, and if you don’t conform to the rigid expectations, if you dare to do masculinity softly and gently, or dare to be a woman with hard tips or sharp corners, then homophobia and transphobia try you, convict you, dehumanize you, place you in peril. Or they force you to conform. Or they force you to reject your queer and trans and gender nonconforming loved ones. Or they try to make you doubt yourself and hate yourself and wear you down and take all the joy and all the delight away from being alive and different.

I’m thinking of that scene in The Birdcage, when Nathan Lane has already been shamed and forced to conform, and he comes down the stairs in the right clothes and the right hair and the right walk, and he sits down and reveals just the one thing he kept for himself, pink socks, and they clearly give him such immense joy. And everything in the room closes in with more shame and more judgment and disappointment, and his face falls and you can see his spirit crushed.

I know something happened in the movie after that, I think it even had a happy ending, but I never saw it. I walked out of the theater because crushing his spirit broke my heart.

It’s not just about gay guys who like pink and swish. It’s about all of us, being told who can and can’t play with trucks or dolls, who can and can’t be hairy and wear skirts or makeup and be swarthy and femme or should or must and shan’t and what color and which emotions and what jobs in what uniforms…

It hurts all of us who beg to differ, and it hurts everyone who fits in but will never be allowed to stray, and it is embedded in the culture. It’s in the air. It’s in the water. And it will take all of us to change it. It takes the whole culture to change the culture. All of us will need to contribute, to pitch in and carry the torch and pass the baton. We all need to care and be invested and believe that it is our concern. Which it is.

Basically, we all kind of need to be Elisha.

So, this is the People of Blessing service, so I feel compelled to bring in a tinge of scripture and a dab of religious philosophy and a scooge of faith. I’m going to talk about some Hebrew bible, and full disclosure I’m even less Jewish than I am Buddhist, and I’m as much atheist as Christian, so if you think anything I say on this front is bogus, fair enough. Also, get in line.

This is what I think is true of Elisha: he was determined. When Elijah called him to be a disciple and a junior prophet, he slaughtered his oxen and bade farewell to his parents, destroyed his livelihood and his family ties, burned every bridge behind him and went all in. And knowing intimately and firsthand what Elijah had been through, Elisha in the end wanted only to carry on that work. Elijah was hunted, banished, starved, he prayed for death, he felt persecuted and alone, he was in a near-constant state of crisis. And three times at the end, Elijah tells Elisha to quit, to stay behind, to go back home, maybe have a family, maybe take up golf and cigars, maybe play dominoes with the other retirees on park benches on a shady street. And three times Elisha says, No way, like a latter-day Ruth. “Do not ask me to leave you. Where you go I will go, where you lodge I will lodge. As long as God is alive, and as long as you are, I’m staying.” That’s a paraphrase.

This feels exactly so much like the history of Pride and what its legacy of activism is about. The passion of one being handed down to the next. The generations that follow taking up the mantle and carrying on the passion for setting things right and making things even. Mattachine and Daughters of Bilitis laying the groundwork so that Stonewall could happen. Oscar Wilde laying groundwork for Langston Hughes laying groundwork for Allen Ginsberg laying groundwork for Richard Blanco. Christine Jorgensen breaking the sod for Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. and Kate Bornstein breaking the sod for Laverne Cox and Janet Mock and Chas Bono and Alok. Without Elaine Nobel and Harvey Milk, maybe we wouldn’t have Tammy Baldwin and Barney Frank.

The trailblazers are rock stars – if you read these stories closely, Elijah is like an Avenger or a Marvel superhero or something. Elijah built an altar with 12 boulders and slaughtered a bull single-handed in one day. He outran the king’s chariot for 17 miles from Mt. Carmel to Jezreel. He lived for forty days and nights on a single meal. Elijah doesn’t get a seat at every seder table for nothing.

But as important as the folks who who break the ground are the folks who pick up the mantle. For every Elijah, there must be an Elisha. Because if the work dies with the trail blazers, the work dies, unfulfilled, unfinished. We know that now as much as ever. We can’t stop at marriage equality when we don’t get to celebrate it with cake. We can’t stop at marriage equality when so many still lack basic housing and employment protections. We can’t stop at federal marriage equality when there is a religious exemptions movement to eliminate federal marriage equality. And that’s not all. There’s now a national monument at the Stonewall Inn, which is a lovely thing, and “Stonewall was an uprising against police brutality by QTPOC” (Annalise Ophelian), and we still need accountability for police brutality. We need accountability for mass incarceration. We need reparations for the federally-created racial wealth gap. Flint still needs clean water. Parts of Puerto Rico still doesn’t have power. And we need safe places to pee. And I am bone-weary of us having to die in brutal massacres and in horrifying numbers before anyone notices or cares.

We can’t quit pushing and advocating just because our group got a little of what it needs. When it comes to LGBTQ and allied communities and history and activism, our people sit at all the intersections of race, class, body size, gender, gender identity, sexuality. We are one another. Black Lives Matter is our issue. Trans justice is our issue. Immigration is our issue. Deportation at the highest rates of any administration is our issue, and that was under Obama. No one is free until we are all free. There is no equality until we all have a seat at the table.

It’s a good thing that Elisha got a double portion of Elijah’s spirit. We’re going to need a double share of the spirit of our fierce ancestors and forebears. We’re going to need it for the work still ahead. Celebrating each other is hard work. Take up your mantle folks. Gird up your loins while you’re at it. Roll up your sleeves. Or as Emily Saliers writes, “You take your prospects and your pickaxe and you trudge down to the stream, and you bloody your hands digging for your dream.” We have work to carry on, with all its blessing and all its agony. We have work to do for one another, for our edges, for ourselves.

Happy Pride. Peace.