Why Do We Need A Parade For Our Journeys?

Is Brazil one of the world's most progressive countries when it comes to attitudes about gender and gay rights?  Or is it a conservative Catholic country that's just another fuel shortage away from returning to the military dictatorship it endured for two decades?

According to an article in yesterday's New York Times, it's both.

As Taylor Barnes points out, drag shows were popular in Rio de Janiero during the 1950's and 1960's.  However, as we have seen, people's willingness to go to shows in which drug-addled men don garish clothes and layer crude makeup on their faces has little, if anything, to do with how much those same people would accept their children if they "came out" as gay, lesbian or transgender.  In fact, sometimes the same people who go to drag shows commit violence--whether or not it's physical--against people who don't fit their culture's gender norms.

Then, of course, there is Carnival, which may well  be the greatest concentration of men in drag as well as flamboyant gay men in the world.  (Interestingly, in celebrations like Carnival or the Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans, one rarely, if ever, sees women dressed as men or butch lesbians.)  And, as Barnes points out, the careers of transgender models are prospering in Brazil, perhaps more than in anywhere else in the world.

Same-sex marriage is legal in about half of Brazil's states, and laws about gender identity, while not quite as advanced as those in nearby Argentina or Uruguay, are still more in line with current knowledge about gender identity and expression than the laws in most US states.  However, those states that allow same-sex marriage are--not surprisingly--the ones that include the country's largest metropoli.  On the other hand, more rural areas still hold to their conservative beliefs (often based on the local priest's or politician's interpretation of faith) about sexuality and gender.

Now, I've never been to Brazil, so I can't tell you whether it's "better" for trans people than other places.  However, at every Transgender Day of Remembrance commemoration in which I've participated, a fair number of the victims' names we read were Brazilian.  To be fair, plenty are Americans, too.  But I can't help but to think that transgenders face as precarious a situation in Brazil as we do anywhere.

And I don't know how much things will improve if people continue to associate us with the gross misinterpretations--or perhaps unintentional parodies--of womanhood exhibited by the drag "queens" of Carnival or Mardi Gras--or, for that matter, the Pride March.  As long as we're seen that way, we are in the same situation of African Americans in the days of Sambo.

David Brooks Homophobia--And Racism And Classism

Sure, let gays get married.  Let them suffer like the rest of us.

I don't know who said it first.  But, even as a trans woman who was married (albeit briefly) as a man, I always thought it was funny.

That's more than can be said for the editorial David Brooks wrote in today's New York Times.  

Once upon a time, one could actually raise one's IQ a few points from a steady diet of the Times.  Even its most partisan editorials were usually well-reasoned and were relatively well-written.  Sometimes they envinced righteous indignation, especially if they were written by Sydney Schanberg.  Others were provocative; sometimes they were ironic or even funny, in good ways.

Then Schanberg got fired for criticizing real estate developers who were among the newspaper's biggest advertisers, and other columnists like William Safire and Russell Baker died or simply moved on.

Now we have the likes of Brooks who, it seems, is seen as a pundit because, well, he has a column in the Times and he's on all of those Sunday morning political shows.  The thing is, he writes like Dave Barry with a lobotomy and his reasoning skills make Rush Limbaugh seem like Rene Descartes.  

What I really can't stand about him, though, is his smug condescension. He's one of those people who's always going to do you the favor of telling you what's best for you because you, being you, can't possibly know.  At least he is consistent:  He has the same attitude toward anyone who's not white, heterosexual, male and a Baby Boomer still living in the 1950's.

Of course, a man like that, by definition, cannot have a sense of irony.  The problem is, he writes as if he has it, or is capable of acquiring it.  To wit:

But last week saw a setback for the forces of maximum freedom.  A representative of millions of gays and lesbians went to the Supreme Court and asked the court to help put limits on their freedom of choice.  They asked for marriage.

Now, in one way, I would agree with him:  If I were to get married again, I would be placing restrictions on myself.  I would agree to commit my life to that person and, at times, reign in certain desires for the sake of the relationship and the happiness of the person to whom I would be married. Perhaps I would have to do a few things I don't particularly care to do, and spend time with a few people I really would prefer not to know.  But I would make such choices for a larger freedom: that to pursue my own happiness.

But in a society in which no one is considered a full-fledged citizen unless he or she has the right to marry the person of his or her choice, having the right--the freedom of choice--of marriage is one of the greatest freedoms of all.  Just ask any person of my parents' age or older who wanted to marry someone of a different race or religion.  Or, for that matter, ask any African-American who was living in Virginia in 1967 or earlier.  Restrictions on marriage are inevitably aimed at people whom a society considers to be less than full citizens, which of course means people who are not of the "majority" race, culture, sexual inclination or gender expression--and who are, socially and economically, below the middle class.

Plus, the idea that gays and lesbians "asked the court to help put limits on their freedom of choice" is preposterous, not only because those who do not have freedoms don't normally ask for fewer of them, but because they were not asking for their right not to marry.  What makes that statement even more absurd--and outright insulting--is the implication that without "those limits on their freedom of choice", crystal meth-addled gays would hop from bed to bed without making any kind of serious commitments.  (His argument, if it might be called that, quickly deteriorates into a rant about black fathers who abandon their families and unemployed people who buy wide-screen TVs on credit, never mind that guys at places like Shearson-Lehman ran up balances sheets that were in the red for more than all of the wealth that ever existed in the history of the human race.)  Granted, there are LGBT people who are irresponsible and dysfunctional, but there are also plenty of straight people who are no different.   Plus, when you look at the divorce rates for straight people, do you really think gays and lesbians will do any worse?

More to the point, though, people who want to marry people of their own gender would, if allowed to do so, gain all sorts of other freedoms.  They could live openly as couples.  They could adopt kids (or have surrogates conceive or give birth to them).  They could do all of the things heterosexual couples do:  Take advantage of tax benefits, get mortgages and buy homes in both of their names, pass on their estates to each other or the kids they adopt and visit each other, unrestricted, in a hospital or nursing home.  They would be free to care for each other in the same ways heterosexuals commit themselves to caring for each other.  Heck, they can even decide which one is the "male" or "female" in the couple, or to break free of such roles altogether.

That drives people like David Brooks crazy.  And he sounds even crazier when he tries to seem logical.    The operative word, of course, is "tries":  He is no more capable of the reasoning he thinks he can mimic than he is of having babies.  What that means, of course, is that when can't pass off his resentment over other people sharing his privilege as some sort of noblesse oblige.  That might actually be his saving grace.