One Way To Commemorate This Day

Today, on Martin Luther King Day, I thought it would make sense to share something I learned just recently:  He actually gave his "I Have A Dream" speech--albeit in a slightly different form-- for the first time in Detroit, some two months before the whole world heard him deliver it from Washington.

It's interesting that such a fact has been all but lost to history, especially when one considers how much sense it makes.  After all, he made his speech in Detroit right around the time it became a majority-black city.  Also, King had, by that time, realized that the struggles of the labor movement were part of an overall struggle for justice, and no city has ever been more emblematic of the American labor movement than Detroit.

It's thus fitting that there's a "Tour  de Troit" taking place today. If today's weather in the Motor City is anything like what it normally has at this time of year, I give "props" to whoever rides it.  

The name of the ride is kind of funny.  The name of the city itself means "strait" in French; Francophone settlers who came by way of Quebec named the then-settlement for "le detroit du lac Erie", which separates it from what is now Windsor, Ontario.

(If you are under-age, or of delicate sensibilities, please skip over everything else in this parenthetical element.  The second syllable--"troit"--means "narrow" and is pronounced the way Anglophones pronounce a vulgar term for a part of the female anatomy.  In fact, it's believed that British soldiers in World War I introduced the term in to the English-speaking world.)

Anyway, congratulations to everyone who is riding today. And thank you for everything, Dr. King!

Why Are Gay Families In Salt Lake City?

According to a recent study, the US city in which the highest percentage of itsr gay couples is raising children is in a state that I wouldn't expect to legalize same-sex marriage in my lifetime.  In fact, two of the next three cities with metropolitan areas  of a milion or more are in such states.

The winner in that category is Salt Lake City.   Next is Virginia Beach, followed by Detroitand  Memphis. Jacksonville, FL is another place where more than one in four gay couples is raising children..  Of those cities, only Detroit is in a state in which there seems to be any chance of legalizing same-sex unions any time soon.

Mind you, New York, San Francisco and Boston have larger overall numbers of gay couples raising kids. But the percentage of such couples is actually much smaller than the cities I've mentioned--or the California communities of Visalia and Porterville.

The researchers who conducted the study say that the main reason for this phenomena is that members of gay couples in Salt Lake City and the other seemingly-unlikely hubs were in heterosexual marriages before coming out as gay.  They had kids in those unions and brought them into their new domestic arrangements.

The terrible irony of this is that in such places, gay people often feel more external or internal pressures to get married and have children--whether to mollify members of their families or churches, or in an attempt to silence their own inner voices.  A young person who's grown up in Park Slope or Chelsea or Castro or the Back Bay is less likely to feel such pressures and thus more likely to come out earlier--and less likely to enter into a heterosexual marriage.  On the other hand, I can only imagine how it feels to grow up gay or trans in a place where the center of life is a fundamentalist church.

Now, I don't want to depict all of those places where gay people are raising kids as backward or imprisoning.  Rather, I want to point out that the very same social milieu that causes people to avoid living as themselves--or simply not to be aware of their true natures--is also, in many ways, more conducive to raising families than what we find in larger and more cosmopolitan cities.

One, of course, is economics.  One almost has to be very wealthy to raise kids in New York, where I live, or in San Francisco, Boston or Washington.  At least, one has to be wealthy if one wants his or her kids to be safe, attend good schools and get good health care--and find kid- and family-friendly facilities.  What that means, of course, is that one has to have independent wealth or the sort of career that both pays well and has policies that allow parents to take time off to care for kids and such without losing a day's pay--or risking his or her job.  Contrary to popular perception, not all LGBT people are in such careers.

Also, while there is more than likely plenty of homo- and trans-phobia in the smaller cities and towns, those kinds of hatred are not absent in the Big Apple, the Hub or the City by the Bay.  In fact, gay, lesbian and transgender people from other places have expressed, to me, their surprise at how much homo- or trans-phobia they found here.  One reason for that, I think, is that New York is a much more segregated city than most people realize.  Many people live in neighborhoods populated mainly by people who come from their country or culture, or share their religion.  And, in another contrast to public perception, there's religious fundamentalism in this city.  We may not have snake-handlers and such here, but there are people who belong to various fundamentalist churches.  And, of course, there are ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic Jews who, although they barely communicate with anyone else in this city, have a disproportionate influence on public policy.

(To my own surprise, in my early transition, I didn't encounter prejudice from religious Muslims or Catholics, even those who come from "macho" cultures.  The latter may have to do with my own Catholic upbringing and the fact that I speak Spanish.)

So, really, I'm not surprised that so many gay couples by the Great Salt Lake or along the Virginia coast or across the river from Windsor are raising kids.   To me, it means that simply legalizing same-sex marriage or adding protections for LGBT people to civil-rights laws--as important as those things are--aren't enough to ensure that any kid with gay parents (or, for that matter, LGBT kids) will have the same access to the benefits of a good family and community that their peers (some of them, anyway) have.  

Kudos to all of the people in those places--and in my hometown and the other gay "capitals"--who are doing what they can to understand (and, hopefully, accept and support) same-sex parents and their kids.  If they are doing so out of their concern for children, as I suspect they are, that is as good a starting point as any.  

Coko Williams, Murdered In Detroit

"Her throat was slashed and she was shot."

A friend of mine read that sentence to me during our phone conversation.  "If that sentence had appeared all by itself," this friend said, "I would have guessed that a transgender woman had been murdered."

This time it was in Detroit.  Coko Williams' body was found during the early hours of Tuesday morning, in an area of the city known for sex traffic.  However, authorities say they're not certain as to whether Ms. Williams was involved in any sex work.  According to those who knew her, she was never involved in prostitution or any other kind of work that would have sexually exploited her.

From what I've been hearing and reading, there's been an epidemic of violence against LGBT people--the T's in particular--in the Motor City.  If that's true, then it's evidence that something I've feared, even before I undertook my transition, may be coming to pass.  

Detroit is a desperate city.  Many people have already left--It now has fewer people than it had in 1900--and many of those who have remained are unemployed and will never again have jobs, or have never had jobs in the first place.  The anger and frustration of such people is reason enough to fear:  While most won't turn it outward and against other people, some will.  And the ones who get the brunt of their anger are almost invariably those who have even less power than they have.  

The situation there makes people in nearby areas fearful.  They are afraid that the violence and other problems--of which they have little to no understanding--will spill over into their communities if it isn't checked.  Right-wing politicians knead and stretch this fear, and stir some brand or another of religious fundamentalism into the fold, making for a volatile mix.  


Ronald Reagan based his political career on doing exactly what I've described.  His "moment of opportunity" came with the riots in the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles.  The following year, he was elected Governor of California.  In the ensuing years, violence against blacks and Chicanos increased.


Now we have politicians like Rick Santorum, and their followers, who are convinced that marginalized people are nothing but sponges for their tax dollars, and that any violence against, or disease contracted by, LGBT people is "God's retribution" or some such thing.   People who are afraid of losing their communities and countries to "others" are receptive to the messages of folks like Santorum, who may actually beat Mitt Romey--whose father was a Governor of Michigan--in the State's Republican Presidential primary.

Such an atmosphere cannot make things safer for any member of a "minority" group, especially trans people.  The irony is that the people who are convinced, or can convince others, that we are some Levitical "abomination" that will destroy the fabric of this society also see us as expendable and will attack us rather than others who are more numerous and have more resources.  


I really hope that neither Detroit nor any other city will experience another murder so brutal and senseless as that of Coko Williams.  Hey, I hope not to be the next Coko Williams!  And I hope the authorities in Detroit take the investigation of her murder more seriously than their counterparts in other places have taken the brutal, grisly killings of too many of our sisters.