I need to explain myself, a little

I had a column that ran in Hearst newspapers yesterday that needs just...a...little...more

When I write a newspaper column, I usually start typing with no real destination in mind. I mean, I have a topic, but I’m not necessarily sure where I’ll end up.

This week, I wrote (not for the first time) about a time I was a participant in a hate crime, though we wouldn’t have called it that at the time. Though I grew up fundamentalist, I swear on a stack of all things holy that the hot topics of abortion and homosexuality never came up in church conversations or Bible lessons — not once. Given the corporate silence, I assumed (silly me) that I was allowed to make my own decisions on those topics. Abortion wasn’t a difficult decision for me, but I operated as an agnostic when it came to equal rights for members of the LGBTQ community (which is not what we called them then). I mean, I didn’t hate them. I just didn’t think about them.

And then one Saturday night in high school, a group of us jumped into a car and in the process of dragging Main St. in Joplin, we pulled up in front of what someone had told us was a gay bar, and we yelled mean things out the window. And then we laughed at our wit, and sped off. I know we did it at least once. We may have returned on different evenings.

No one at my hard-shell church had ever condoned — ever — being hateful, so you could say I came up with this on my own.

Yeah.

I know.

It was just good, clean fun in my hometown, where we yelled at members of a marginalized group and then laughed about it. Of course at the time, I didn’t think of it that way. I didn’t think I knew any gays (In fact, I knew plenty — some quite close to me — but if you knew I catcalled gay people, would you come out to me?) and so I could participate and never look back. All I knew was what the media and my folks told me, which is a kind of intellectual laziness of which I am not proud. I can’t say I was entirely comfortable in that car, but really, not once did I say — or even think -- “Let’s not do this.”

And then a few years later, a man was pushed off a cliff into Shoal Creek because, the man who was convicted of his murder said, the first man was gay. The murdered man, a concert pianist, had a son who was a college classmate of mine. I read all the stories, and when I next saw my classmate, I told him I was sorry for his loss. The details of his father’s death were horrible but all I could think about was this classmate lost his dad in a horrible and public way and he didn’t need reminding of that. The loss of his dad outweighed the breathless coverage of was-he-or-wasn’t-he, as far as I was concerned.

Years later, after I met gay people and sometimes heard how their families turned their backs on them, I stopped thinking of gays/lesbians/all of ‘em as “other.” I found myself writing newspaper columns about their challenges, first in support of fair housing, then fair adoption laws, and then marriage equality in Connecticut. I mean, I wrote about that a lot.

I’m not gay. I’m not trans, but I know unfairness when I see it. I mean, I was even a practitioner of rank unfairness, for crying out loud. Still, it was years before it hit me — in the middle of one night, the weight of what I’d done on Main Street. I mean, my God.

I like to think of myself as a good person. Who doesn’t? But it haunts me that I never spoke up because, well…there’s no good reason, is there? I want to think we all have things like this that keep us humble, but I don’t know about you. I do know about me. My own idiocy doesn’t make me more compassionate about people who continue these ranks acts against members of this community. It makes me understand that they can change, and that they very much need to.