From One Royal Wedding to Another: Kate and Wills Marry, and I Remember Charles and Diana

When I wrote yesterday about Austen Ivereigh's anti-gay heterosexist take on the Kate and Wills show, I said in a comment to TheraP that I had not intended to mention the royal wedding at all on this blog.  I chose to do so only after having read Ivereigh's comments, which, in my view, deserve attention as one in a series of male-entitled heterosexist blasts he has made against his gay brothers and sisters in recent years at America and elsewhere.  Blasts that baffle me, since I wonder what causes him to invest so much energy in issuing persistent reminders to his gay brothers and sisters that they do not count and must not expect to be included in his Catholic church.

And now, having set my foot on the path of wedding commentary, I find myself unable to get off that fateful path until I've reached its end.  Or, as our British cousins say (and changing metaphors wildly), In for a penny, in for a pound.  Or, As well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.  Or something like that.  Both seem appropriate here.

I didn't watch the royal wedding.  I find myself little interested in it except as a cultural phenomenon, as an illustration of our willingness to permit those who rule us to mount lavish spectacles designed to manipulate our consciousness and distract us from the real business of our lives.  I find the royal wedding interesting as an illustration of our never-quite-vanquished hankering for a Father who knows best and has our best interests at heart--if only we relinquish our adulthood to Him and let Him return us to perpetual childhood.  In this light, I find the fawning wedding-inspired commentary of many American conservative thinkers about monarchy and all it might do for us, if we could only find the right father figure to whom to yield ourselves, fascinating.  And repulsive, in how it misses the point about what we really need to become a humane society today.

I also find what has been taking place with the Kate and Wills show interesting because it brings back sharp, evocative memories of the wedding of Charles and Diana, which was surrounded by equal fanfare and similar fawning media adulation.  I didn't watch the Chuck and DiDi show, either, though when it was staged, I happened to be living and studying in Canada, a country linked to the Crown, many of whose citizens still preserve a certain nostalgic fondness for the monarchy--though many others find the fuss about the royals baffling, and the institution itself embarrassingly archaic (and a drain on the British economy).

Almost all of the Canadians with whom I studied in the 1970s and 1980s ignored the monarchy.  Some were actively opposed to it.  One friend would deliberately turn stamps (with the head of the Queen) upside down before she affixed them to letters.  The only ardent monarchist I ever met in my years in Canada was, as it turned out, the Polish-born friend about whom I've blogged elsewhere, who was for monarchy anywhere: he supported any king, queen, prince, or princess anywhere in the world.  Just because.  As a matter of principle.  Because that was how things were meant to be.

As a guest in another country, I didn't normally get into intra-national political discussions, unless my Canadian friends invited me to do so.  When I did so, I almost always found them jocular and mannerly, even when they were characterized by good-natured sparring between my Canadian friends and "the" Americans.  "The" Americans who were nothing like me, since I hadn't grown up in the parts of the U.S. with which my Canadian friends were familiar and which they used to form their opinion of the Yanks.  I was very surprised, indeed, to discover that I was a Yank in Canada, when I had been taught throughout my formative years that whatever in the world a Yankees might be, I was to be the precise opposite, with ever fiber of my being.

And, though my family tree is brimful of Revolutionary soldiers, a number of whom died fighting in battle to sever the ties of the American colonies to the Crown, I myself haven't ever given a great deal of thought to monarchy or its alternatives.  I don't quite understand the hankering for royalty many Americans have--not because I'm particularly opposed to monarchy, but because whatever monarchy represents seems long ago and far away to me, given the experiences that shaped me as I grew up in the U.S.  If I was shaped in any overt political direction by my parents and schooling, that direction would most likely be called Jeffersonian democracy, with strong hints of agrarianism.  I was taught to admire and try to emulate those who sought to make democratic society truly democratic, and to provide economic advantages (hence the agrarianism) to every citizen, so that all citizens might find some way to sustain their lives and communities, and become fully participating members of democratic society.

When Charles and Diana married, I was teaching a summer course at a Jesuit college in northern Ontario.  The Jesuits who ran the university were French-Canadian to a man, as were almost all of the students in their college.  The summer was good for my French, since I found myself in a sink-or-swim situation at faculty gatherings, in which I had to speak French if I wanted to communicate at all.  I ended the summer with a better grasp of spoken French than I had ever had after years of schoolroom French--though, admittedly, the French I spoke after that summer was heavily overlaid with a joual accent that would have horrified the Sorbonne-educated woman who taught me French as an undergraduate.

And the clash between the standard French I'd been taught in college and what I heard around me during that wonderfully instructive summer sometimes led to ludicrous misunderstandings, including my inability to know how to reply when I answered the phone in my office--an office assigned to a Père Pion, who was away for the summer--and thought I heard someone saying, "Papillon?"  I had no idea what to say when these calls came through, until I finally realized I was hearing people asking for Fr. Pion in a Québécois accent.  Not for a butterfly.

The French Canadian students and faculty at this Jesuit school were gloriously hospitable.  I'll never forget passing the beautifully tended little garden on which one of the Jesuit brothers lavished daily care, and having him pull out of the ground a number of radishes, hold them up to me, and say, Mais manger-en!  Ce sont médicinales.  Just as I won't forget the librarian who taught me to recognize edible wild plants of the area that her grandmother had picked for spring salads--also with medicinal qualities.  

Or the wonderful party the French students threw on one occasion--precisely what it was, I've forgotten, though it had some church significance, as well as I can recall.  It may, in fact, have been St. John's day.  The party taught me how gifted some cultures are at creating the conditions for celebration by pooling the limited resources available to individual members of the community so that, when those limited resources are gathered together and turned into the basis for a celebration, everyone benefits from them.  

A few pieces of fresh fruit here added to several slices of cheese there, along with flowers from someone's garden and a bottle of wine and loaf of bread from another person's larder: and there was the party, with more than enough for everyone.  After we had eaten and listened to music, I remember we walked outside in a kind of procession, which the students of the Anglican college on the same campus gathered to watch in silence: two cultures, with entirely different predispositions and radically different histories, on silent (and somewhat tense) display with the events of that interesting evening.  And I, caught between them, since by cultural and ethnic background, I certainly belonged with the wary, watching Anglos, but happened to be processing with the French with whom I'd affiliated myself when I became Catholic.

This was the context in which I heard news of the marriage of Charles and Diana that summer.  Needless to say, the French Canadian students and faculty among whom I was living as the royal couple married were anything but enthralled with the wedding and its fanfare.  They laughed uproariously at the news that many fellow Canadians and many Americans intended to stay up far into the night to watch the royal ceremony on television.  Why would anyone want to lose sleep to watch that man with such big ears marry? they'd ask when we gathered to discuss the news of the day.

And so it went, and so it goes as Kate and Wills marry: and I have absolutely no idea where this particular posting is going, or why I am sharing these fond memories, other than to point out that things don't seem to change--not fundamentally--over the course of years.  Not easily.  And not frequently.

People remain stuck in cultural patterns that deform them.  People remain altogether too willing to relinquish control of their adult lives to mythic figures and mythic forces that they're taught to regard as saviors, figures and forces that inevitably betray those who give the reins of their autonomy into the hands of those saviors.  Whether political, economic, or religious: mythic savior figures in each and every case.

People remain voraciously hungry for fairy tales, too--but for the easiest fairy tales of all, not for the ones that require virtue or a heroic quest of us.  The fairy tales that enthrall us on television (or in legislative halls or churches) are the ones that promise easy virtue to us, automatic reward, if we but fit the norm.  If we conform.  If we do what's expected of us.

As Mr. Ivereigh says, if we become proper boys and girls and approach the altar wearing properly matched topcoats and gowns.   If we keep the wedding cakes crowned with little men beside little women.  If we uphold the central symbols that make everyone in our society comfortable with themselves.  If we do not challenge those symbols in a way that forces people to think about what they take for granted--or about the injustice enshrined in the world we seek so desperately to reinforce by keeping those central symbols in place, the injustice we seek to keep hidden as we madly manipulate those central symbols and claim that they are readings of reality as God ordains it, and not culturally determined choices that can be changed.

And so it goes, as William marries Kate.  And I certainly wish them a happy life together.  They'll need it, on the stage they occupy.

Faith in America on Archbishop Charles Chaput: "Anti-Gay Catholic Leader Lying--And He Knows It"

This is significant: I can't remember when I've seen this forceful of a response by a group of interfaith leaders to the belligerent public homophobia of a Catholic church official in the U.S.  The group Faith in America calls the archbishop of Denver, Charles Chaput, on the carpet today for his repeated efforts to block and remove human rights of gay and lesbian citizens of the U.S.

And Faith in America also calls Chaput a liar.  A liar who tries to twist his crusade against the human rights of a vulnerable minority community into a noble crusade on behalf of human rights.  A liar who wants us to imagine that, in some bizarre alternative universe whose rules make sense only to those of the religious and political right, fighting against human rights for a marginalized minority group somehow constitutes fighting for human rights and human dignity.

Faith in America's response to Chaput re: these issues concludes,

What you and others are espousing is religion-based bigotry – and it is one of the most vile forms of bigotry because of the religious and moral stamp of rejection and condemnation it places on the lives of LGBT people, especially LGBT youth and their families.

Religion-based bigotry has been used by the church and so-called religious organizations against other minorities many times in our past. Charles, do you recall the apology the Catholic Church issued to Native Americans for using misguided religious teaching to justify treating them as morally inferior? Do you recall the Catholic Church apology in 2000 to women for using misguided religious teaching to promote the attitude that they are inferior to men?

And let’s not forget, Charles, your now cozy anti-gay friends on the Religious Right and how the Southern Baptist Convention apologized for using misguided religious teaching to justify bigotry toward African Americans and interracial couples.

Do you really expect the American public to believe that you actually believe it was those fighting the oppression of those minorities who were the ones expressing bigotry.

Chaput stands out among the American bishops for his exceptional belligerence in attacking gay and lesbian citizens and gay and lesbian fellow Catholics.  In contrast to the archdiocese of Boston, which has made a public statement accepting the enrollment of children of gay couples in Catholic schools, Chaput's Denver archdiocese belligerently refused to admit the children of a lesbian couple in a Catholic school, in a highly publicized incident a year ago.

Chaput's Catholic News Agency does all it can, day after day, to spread the Catholic anti-gay gospel, identifying homophobia with authentic Catholic teaching and attacking fellow Catholics who do not toe Chaput's homophobic line.  CNA is working hard right now to stir up the American political and Catholic right to create trouble for Mexican bishop Raul Vera Lopez and his ministry of pastoral outreach to gay Catholics in the Saltillo diocese.

Because of the prominence of the Denver archdiocese in the American Southwest, with its large Latino population, Chaput and CNA have a particular concern to keep Latino Catholics in line, to assure that the growing Hispanic population of their area--a key constituency for whose votes Democrats and Republicans are competing--remains "authentically" Catholic.  Catholic, as in opposed to gay rights.  Catholic, as in Republican-trending.

In the past two days, Chaput's CNA has published two articles in addition to the one to which I link above (and here) attacking Bishop Vera Lopez's ministry to gay Catholics and comparing this ministry unfavorably to the Catholic organization Courage, which promotes the bogus notion that one can be "converted" from homosexuality.  It is no accident that CNA is playing Courage, with its anti-gay, bogus conversion-therapy messages, against ministries that seek to include gays and lesbians in the Catholic church.  As Timothy Kincaid noted at Box Turtle Bulletin in January, the head of the U.S. Catholic Bishops' Conference, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, has appointed Oakland bishop Salvatore Cordileone chair of the USCCB's new Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Marriage.

As Kincaid also notes, both Dolan and Cordileone sit on Courage's "Body of Members," which provides oversight for the organization.  By making this appointment, Dolan is giving Courage--with its anti-gay bogus conversion-therapy message--quasi-official status as "the" U.S. Catholic organization presenting the "authentic" message of the Catholic church on gay issues. 

And when one recalls the active role that Cordileone played in removing the right of civil marriage from the gay citizens of California, one sees clearly the political stakes involved in this promotion of Courage and in attacks like CNA's recent attacks on gay-inclusive and gay-affirming ministries within the Catholic church.  Since his appointment to "defend" marriage on behalf of American Catholics, Cordileone has been busy lambasting President Obama and his administration for refusing to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, and has claimed that this refusal to defend a law that the administration regards as unconstitutional and discriminatory is an attack on democracy and an act of discrimination in and of itself (!)--discrimination against minority groups that oppose same-sex marriage.  Cordileone has boasted about the significant role he played in helping remove the civil right of marriage from gay citizens of California, and has told the media that the movement to accord rights to gay persons is inspired by the devil.

Make no mistake about it: what Chaput and the bishops with whom he is allied have been doing and continue doing in attacking the rights of gay citizens of the U.S. is overtly political.  It is more political by far than it is religious.  It is all about trying to secure Catholic votes for the single political party with whom these bishops imagine their church should be affiliated.

And it's about doing the bidding of powerful, wealthy Republican business leaders with whom Chaput is allied, and whose word counts predominantly for him as he pursues his episcopal ministry.  Faith in America is right on target to call Chaput out for his malicious lies about his brothers and sisters who happen to be gay, and to expose those lies as all about anti-Christian biogtry.

P.S. to Posting re: Nicholas Kristof on "Tussling Over Jesus": Kristof Features NCR Reporter Jamie Manson

This is a quick p.s. to my posting earlier today about Nicholas Kristof's op-ed piece in the New York Times today entitled "Tussling Over Jesus."

When I blogged about Kristof's column, I meant to note that when he discusses the case of the Phoenix hospital, St. Joseph's, from which Phoenix Catholic bishop Thomas Olmsted has removed the designation "Catholic," he's featuring a recent National Catholic Reporter article by reporter Jamie L. Manson.   As I've noted in a number of previous postings, I find Jamie Manson's work outstanding, and I take hope in the fact that NCR has given her a regular column.  Manson is a current interpreter of the Catholic tradition whose voice I find credible. 

For Jamie Manson's take on the 12-step program in the Colorado Springs Catholic diocese about which I blogged a few days ago, which seeks to "support" Catholic gay folks seeking to deal with their "addiction," see her latest article in NCR.  Manson notes that, though officials of the Colorado Springs diocese claim their program does not aim at reparative therapy, it is modeled slavishly on the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous.  And if you substitute the word "homosexuality" for the word "addiction" in AA's programmatic self-description, you end up with precisely the program Colorado Springs is offering gay Catholics who want "support."

As Manson concludes, the Colorado Springs program is all about denial--about reinforcing shame and denial in gays who happen to be Catholic; about making gay Catholics think of their God-given nature with its God-given ability to love as an "addiction" to be overcome (denied and suppressed) by prayer.  Manson notes that denial is what many Catholic pastoral leaders do very well right now:

But denial is what the hierarchy seems to model best these days: whether it's denying communion to women religious who use their consciences, denying justice for sexual abuse survivors, or denying the dignity of women called to ordained ministry. 

And it's because of insights like this that I'm glad to see Jamie Manson is now getting a national audience through Nicholas Kristof's column in the New York Times today.

Diseased Gays and American Catholic Center: A Response to Discussion of Ex-Gay Program of Colorado Catholic Diocese

In the past day or so, I've linked to a discussion at the "In All Things" blog of America magazine, which has been talking about a new "pray the gay away" program sponsored by the Catholic diocese of Colorado Springs.  As I've mentioned, after having found myself censored at this blog when I sought to counter some of the outrageous anti-gay rhetoric of bloggers at this Catholic blog site, I've stopped contributing to discussions at America.  This doesn't stop me from reading blog discussions and articles at the America site, however.

And I've been following the discussion of the Colorado Springs ex-gay program with interest.  And with concern.  In my view, some of the disinformation about gay and lesbian persons that some Catholic bloggers still feel free to circulate on Catholic blogs, while those responding to this disinformation find themselves censored by these same blogs, is dangerous.  It needs desperately to be countered.  It needs no longer to have the kind of unquestioned open-door welcome it receives on Catholic blogs of the center, at the same time those countering this disinformation find themselves censored by these blogs.

In the thread discussing the Colorado Springs ex-gay initiative, what concerns me in particular is the following: under the guise of offering healing to those who are gay, some Catholic bloggers continue to feel free to vent ideas about gay and lesbian human beings designed to reinforce ugly, hurtful prejudice against those human beings which leads to social stigmatization of a vulnerable minority group.  And which can even foster violence against that minority group.

I'm concerned, in particular, about the pseudo-caring discourse of gay infection that runs through the comments of some bloggers in the Colorado Springs discussion.  As Aaron T. Beck's Prisoners of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility, and Violence (NY: HarperCollins, 2000) notes (p. 180), leading up to the Nazi program of extermination of Jews in the mid-twentieth century was a deliberate propaganda campaign based on disinformation that sought to depict the Jewish people as diseased, and as an infectious threat to the public at large.  Beck notes that this campaign employed and built on stereotypes about the Jewish people as disease-ridden threats to Christian societies that go as far back as the Middle Ages.  

As he notes, when the Nazis gained power in Germany in the 1930s, they produced textbooks depicting the Jews and other despised minority groups as diseased, as uniquely susceptible to infection, as transmitters of illness whose loose moral lives made them uniquely prone to illness that then spread through the surrounding culture.  And this rhetoric paved the way for the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews: "This picture of the infected, poisonous bodies of the Jews not only denied them their humanity but also affirmed the necessity of their elimination."

As I noted yesterday in my posting about the film "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," acts of violence begin with thoughts of violence and words about violence.  The Holocaust--one of the most extreme examples of the dynamic I'm describing here--began with thoughts and words about the Jewish people and other minorities as dirty, disease-ridden problems to be solved in Christian communities.  The Nazis' final solution was preceded by a rhetorical stage-setting that paved the way for the mass murder of Jews and other stigmatized minority groups by associating these groups with infection and illness, in some unique way that set them apart from the rest of society.

And that is, frankly, precisely what some of my Catholic brothers and sisters continue to do with me and other gay brothers and sisters, in discussions like the one to which I have linked above.  Under the guise of concern about our salvation and our health, these brothers and sisters disseminate erroneous, hate-filled information about the unique susceptibility of gay and lesbian people to illness.  Without ever noting the fact that all marginalized minority groups struggle with medical challenges unique to those minority groups--with medical problems that often stem precisely from the stress and discrimination with which these groups live--these Catholic brothers and sisters continue to work overtime to depict their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters as carriers of illness and as uniquely prone to substance abuse.

In these discussions, no attention at all is paid to the fact that studies similar to the ones they're citing about the supposedly unique medical problems of gay and lesbian persons can also easily be found vis-a-vis almost any marginalized minority group in the U.S. Nor do the Catholic brothers and sisters citing these studies, who claim their only concern is to spread love for those who are gay and lesbian, ever seem to stop and ask why it is that so much time and energy is spent, in the social mainstream, to study the problems of marginalized minority groups.  When similar intensive focus is not given to groups within the mainstream . . . .

What might we find, for instance, if we isolated all white males earning more than $200,000 per year, and made them the focus of a study about patterns of alcohol and drug use?  Is that group ever studied as intensively as low-income Latinos, African Americans, and gays and lesbians are studied, when it comes to these issues, when it comes to studies of social problems with which we all ought to be concerned if we expect to have a healthy society?  If not, why not?

For that matter, are studies ever done to ascertain whether priests suffer from problems of alcohol or substance abuse at a level higher than the society at large? Or bishops?  If such studies aren't done, why aren't they done?

Do my Catholic brothers and sisters who want to keep the spotlight shining on me and other gay and lesbian persons, as if we alone struggle with medical challenges due to stressful lives and with attendant issues of addiction, never stop to think about what drives this disproportionate emphasis on marginalized minority communities, when these issues are studied?  Do these Catholic brothers and sisters never think at all about the prejudice that underlies the decision of the social mainstream to focus on those on the social margins as the primary cause of all social problems and all social ills?

Here's what, in my view, is going on in these discussions of the Catholic center, that continue to function as vehicles for dangerous rhetoric which can bolster outright violence against gay and lesbian human beings.  There are strong groups within the Catholic church who still do not accept even  something as taken for granted by the culture at large as the decision of the American Psychological Association to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness.  These groups believe (and they may well be right) that they have the support of the magisterium itself in seeking to continue a discourse of disease when it comes to those who are gay and lesbian--a discourse of disorder that is all about accusing gay and lesbian human beings of being mentally unbalanced, and therefore carriers of other infectious illnesses that taint the body politic.

Those Catholic brothers and sisters who buy into this discourse of infection and who believe that they are doing a holy thing in promoting it--that they are defending the magisterium as they promote this discourse--also receive strong reinforcement from the political right, which constantly disseminates disinformation about gay and lesbian human beings as diseased.  The political right constantly disseminates this disinformation because it needs to do so, to keep stigmas against those who are gay and lesbian alive in the public at large.  It was not accidental, for instance, that a leading luminary of the American Catholic political right, William F. Buckley, Jr., argued that people with HIV should be tattooed to signal to everyone else that they are carriers of illness. 

And so, in these Catholic discussions of the center--right within the discourse space of the Catholic center, at these influential blog sites of the American Catholic center--one continues to read outrageous statements channeling the hateful discourse of the anti-gay political right, about how the APA decision to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder was driven by political pressure groups, by gay activist groups within the APA.  Though the Catholic tradition of moral thinking has, at its best, always stressed the need for sound moral discourse to pay attention to reason and science, these right-wing activists who still have shelter in the Catholic center completely ignore all the carefully conducted studies on which the APA decision was based, which failed to show any correlation at all between a homosexual orientation and mental illness.

And they completely ignore the consensus of all medial professional groups in the developed areas of the world--not merely the APA--that a gay or lesbian orientation is not evidence of mental illness or any other kind of illness, but is a natural psychological phenomenon to which moral judgment ought not to be attached.

My Catholic brothers and sisters of the far right, who still have entree at the Catholic blogs of the center while those blogs censor comments by gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, are determined to keep alive, at all cost, the discourse of gay and lesbian human beings as sick.  As is the institutional church itself: why otherwise would a diocese feel free to offer a program to "cure" those who are gay?

The "pastoral" outreach of the Catholic church towards its gay and lesbian children continues to be dominated by a discourse of illness, of disorder, of mental instability and other kinds of illness.  Catholics of the political right, who are strongly allied to political groups that need to keep this discourse alive in order to energize their anti-gay political base, will, of course, defend programs designed to "cure" those who are gay, as they will defend the claim that those who are gay are sick.  They have to defend the presupposition of illness on which this "pastoral" outreach is based.  How otherwise to justify these bogus (and hateful) programs of ex-gay therapy?

And, of course, those offering and defending these programs within a Christian context also have to claim that these programs are all about love, since that is what Christians are all about.  Or supposed to be all about.  All about healing and love--that's the claim of those defending these programs.

Even as these defenders of ex-gay therapy spread dangerous lies about their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters as infectious threats to the general public and its health . . . . Never adverting to the fact, as they do this, that this is precisely how oppressive regimes that have plotted the death of targeted minorities have always historically laid a foundation for their violence against the minorities they single out . . . .

The puzzle, for me, is why those who control the conversation of the American Catholic center, who have to know better, continue permitting this dangerous toxic discourse of gay infection to roll forth at the center.  While they censor some of their gay brothers and sisters who try to counter this discourse and who call for more careful discussion of these issues . . . .

Child-Rearing by Gay Couples More Common in the South?

I'm not surprised by the recent finding that same-sex couples in the South tend to raise children more than same-sex couples do in other sections of the country.  To use the old phrase of the Scottish Enlightenment, this finding "stands to reason" for me, for all kinds of reasons:

1. Many gay people in the South come to terms with their true natures slowly, because of the constant oppressive weight on our lives of right-wing religious traditions and religious communities.  We are more likely than gay folks raised in areas where that weight is less intense to try to "cure" ourselves by doing the right thing, the expected thing, and marrying.  And so we are more likely to have children by the time we find out that faith-based talk about homosexuality as a disease to be cured is counter-factual, destructive, and downright evil, and we finally launch into living our real lives.  Often with children in tow.

2. Family and family obligations also weigh exceptionally heavily on the lives of gay folks in the South--on all lives in the South.  In my experience, even when extended families in my region have faith-based reservations about the sexual orientation of other family members, they are often not quick to repudiate or exclude gay family members--and that includes the children of those family members.  In a family-structured society, exclusion from family is the worst punishment possible.  It is exclusion from life itself.  And because this is a serious step for a family to take (and the worst cases I've seen of this involve families with means hiding their gay sons by buying apartments for them in places like New York, and then exiling them), extended families often offer networks of support for their gay family members, as those family members raise children.

3. Most of us in the South who live outside our rare large urban centers do not have access to anything resembling "a gay community" or "gay culture."  We just live our lives, because that's the only option we have.  And so to the extent that "gay culture" as it has developed in the large urban centers of the world sometimes overlooks the option of raising children or promotes choices that exclude the rearing of children, many gay couples in the South never receive the signal from a gay culture that they ought to be doing something else.

To my mind, the findings of this particular study point to the need for more intensive regional studies of gay life in the U.S.  Both in the media at large and within gay communities themselves, the understanding of what it means to be gay in the U.S. at present is dominated by the presuppositions of gay people living in large urban centers on the two coasts.

But the rest of the country is not the trackless waste that sophisticates on the coasts often imagine it to be.  However wild and however wooly, it's nonetheless inhabited.  And, as with any other place in the world, the inhabitants of that wild and wooly half-wasteland are likely to include gay and lesbian human beings.

Who carry on living our lives without the benefit of the bright lights and scintillating insights of our coastal centers of high culture.  And who may have something of value to offer those coastal centers, if the inhabitants of the important places in the world would ever choose to stop and listen to us for a tiny bit.