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| ARCHIVES: April, 2004 |
The Agenda:Testing the Premise: Are Gays a Threat to Our Children? What the "Dutch Study" Really Says About Gay Couples Federal Hate Crime Statistics: Why The Numbers Don't Add Up Favorites:
Photo Essays:The Anasazi Ruins of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico Now Showing / Reflection on Hayden, Arizona
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The Aperture of Memory
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I’m juggling a large number of personal projects, any one of which could be a full-time job if it were possible to get someone to pay me for it. The most personally rewarding project has been the digital archiving of all of the family photographs. I’ve been working on this project off and on for more than five years, and probably have a few more years to go before I can claim victory. While I’ve been working on this project, I have come to understand that the role that pictures play in 21st century living cannot be underestimated. Pictures have a power for evoking memory. And not just an individual’s memory, but a collective one as well. Even where pictures are absent, the image that can be evoked is typically more powerful than any picture that could take its place. That’s what makes the narrative in books and on radio so compelling. |
 © LookingForSam |
 Photographer Unknown |
I’ve found in talking to my relatives that pictures are central not just to what we remember, but how. The power of pictures to evoke memory in turn informs which images we remember. Our collective memory is in pictures. We remember Jackie in her pink suit and pillbox hat. She made that outfit famous when she wore it in Dallas. We saw it in the pictures, and we remember the pictures when we talk about what happened. |
Today’s technology has made pictures amazingly democratic. Eastman’s box camera at the turn of the last century gave ordinary people the means to produce excellent quality images on a mass-production scale. Over time, the box camera has given way to Instamatics and Polaroids, which in turn have yielded to digital cameras and video recorders. And now cell phones, which people are already in the habit of carrying with them wherever they go, often include cameras in their tiny little bodies, promising more spontaneous photographs than ever before. The proliferation of the picture in everyday life has given rise to some of the most compelling images in human history. It was ordinary people carrying their descendents of the portable box camera who captured the Kennedy assassination and the attack on the World Trade Center, not artists or professionals. |
 © LookingForSam |
 © LookingForSam |
We cherish pictures like no other possessions. When wildfires threaten communities and people are asked to evacuate their homes, they reach for their family albums like refugees in wartime. They protect their photos as they protect their own children, and there is a tremendous honor paid to those images in that act of protection. Everything else can be replaced, but the loss of the family pictures is associated with the loss of memory, and with it, the loss of stories that can be passed down from one generation to the next. In preserving the pictures, they honor the memory of their loved ones who are no longer with them. |
 © LookingForSam |
I suppose that’s why I’ve come to regard old photographs in antique stores as an unspeakable loss. These photos are separated from their families like orphans in a flood. The people in them are strangers to me, but somewhere, somebody is related to them. But as they are separated from those photos, they are also separated from their family’s story. The men and women staring out of the photos in the antique shops are no longer honored, and their descendants have lost their memory. |
 © LookingForSam |
Most of my family’s stories can be tagged to a photograph. When an older relative looks at an unremarkable photograph, that picture may be suddenly transformed by a wonderful retelling of a story which led to that picture. Inevitably, the conversation will turn to someone who has been long gone. But through those pictures and stories, these lost relatives are alive once more, at least temporarily. They are alive in the memory and the retelling of the stories prompted by the photos that we share. When we preserve photographs, we honor those whom we wish to remember. |
So
it strikes me as being perversely un-American that the Bush Administration
has worked very hard to suppress images of the Iraq War dead as they return
home. We are forbidden from seeing their flag-draped coffins. This misguided
policy has disturbing implications beyond the mere official suppression of
information in a free society. Sure, that is disturbing enough but if that
were all there was to it, it wouldn't be so bad. After all, official
suppression of information is mainly a political problem. But by banning
those photographs, President Bush has inflicted a far greater damage to our
culture that goes beyond the banalities of mere politics. |
 Memoryhole.com |
That damage comes from this: we instinctively avert our eyes from those things which shame us, and build monuments to that which stirs our souls. We destroy photographs of people who anger us, or people we wish to forget. An aggrieved wife burns pictures of her cheating husband; a child throws away pictures of her hated mother. We hide pictures we are ashamed of, like hiding pornography from our parents. So, what does it say to the families of those who die on the battlefield that our government will suppress the pictures of their returning to our soil? What possesses our leaders to sneak our friends and relatives back home under the cover of an official blackout? As we preserve images, we remember and honor. As we destroy or hide images, we deny and hold in contempt those whose image we attempt to banish. |
 Memoryhole.com |
This is not how honorable people act. Cowards act in darkness; criminals act in shame and humiliation. Historically, it was the insane and the infirm who were kept hidden, but we now are better at treating them with the compassion and respect that they deserve. The men and women who volunteered to serve in our armed forces deserve no less. As Arizona’s Senator John McCain said, “Perhaps those pictures need to be shown of the coffins returning. I think it’s a way we honor them, and understand their service and sacrifice." |
The soldiers who gave their lives in Iraq are being humiliated again by their own Pentagon and President. And that shames us all. Fortunately, a very aptly named website, The Memory Hole, has been able to obtain 361 of these photos and has made some of them available on the internet. In bringing these pictures to our attention, webmaster Russ Kick is doing supremely honorable work. Shame on President Bush for fighting to keep our soldiers’ honorable heritage from their families and children. Shame on him for denying us our moment of remembering, and for denying our soldiers their moment of national honor |
 Memoryhole.com |
Did you know “Happy Birthday To You” is copyrighted? It’s true. That’s why they can’t sing it in restaurants, and we’re stuck with the wait-staff standing around clapping and singing an advertising jingle instead. We can’t join in because we don’t know the words, and we can’t quite make out the words even if we wanted to, and we’d loathe singing the song if we did know the words, which we don’t.
Thanks, Sonny Bono, wherever you are.
But since this is not a for-profit web site, I probably could get away with copying “Happy Birthday To You” on every web page without incurring the wrath of the commissars from Time Warner’s Intellectual Property Rights Directorate. Maybe I should. Conglomerates deserve to be tweaked now and then for retaining ownership rights to our culture. But instead, I’ll just boycott the whole thing.
In Mexico, they sing “Las Mañanitas”, an old traditional song (traditional = “public domain”, where it should be) for birthdays, patron saint’s day, anniversaries, Mother’s Day, or any other special day for the guest of honor. There are many different versions of this song, but here’s the one I learned:
Las Mañanitas |
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Estas son las mañanitas que cantaba el Rey David. A los muchachos bonitos se los cantamos aquí:
Despierta, mi bién, despierta, mira que ya amaneció. Ya los pajarillos cantan; la luna ya se metió. |
These are the mañanitas (daybreaks) that King David sang. To the beautiful boys we are singing them here:
Wake up, my dear, wake up, look at what has already awoke. Even now, the little birds are singing; the moon has just set. |
Happy Birthday, Christopher.
She was born on Easter Sunday in 1898, and what a momentous day that was! That's why her parents named her Easter. Her birthday fell on Easter Sunday when she was born, and it only happened three more times in her lifetime – 1955, 1966 and 1977. Today is the 106th anniversary of her birth.
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© LookingForSam |
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Easter's Birthday, Easter Sunday 1966. Easter is at left, her husband Cecil at right. That's me in the middle. |
My great-grandmother was an amazing woman. Her strong force of will made her the matriarch of the family, and everything revolved around her. She was the sun in a center of planets; she was the force to which immovable objects yielded, the action demanding an equal and opposite reaction.
She was decades ahead of her time, but I don't think she ever understood that. She was a working woman even though her husband worked, and an entrepreneur in the days when women simply didn't do that. She mostly worked retail, in several department stores and shoe stores around town. She sold "Stanley" cleaning products at "Stanley parties". She dabbled in real estate, buying houses, fixing them up, and either renting them out or reselling them for a profit. She often had to get her husband's signature to complete transactions, but that was no obstacle to her. Cecil would do just about anything she asked because, well, frankly he had no choice. She had a way of making people miserable when she didn't get her way.
Whenever I describe her, people say with great admiration that she must have been quite an early feminist. But to say that would be to suggest that she cared about politics or social theory or equal justice. She cared for none of it. Her only concern was what she wanted to do, what roadblocks were in her way, and how she was going to go around, over, or through those roadblocks.
I loved Easter. I always called her by her first name, which is a long story in itself. I would go to their house and sit for hours while she told me stories about "the olden days", before electricity, telephone and radio. She taught me to play cards, and as we played she told me stories like those about her father, a grocer and postmaster in the rural Kentucky hills. She said their store had the first phonograph in Lewis County. You'd put a penny in the machine, turn the crank, hold some rubber tubes to your ears, and listen to a recording of Turkey In The Straw. She said people would come from miles around to hear the talking machine. I don't know today if that was really the first phonograph in Lewis County, but I certainly believed it then. I believed everything Easter told me.
One thing I remember more than anything was that nobody could tell her what she couldn't do. If they did, she'd take it as a personal challenge. She built her own grocery store in the early fifties. The man from the city said that she couldn't build it as close to the street as she wanted, and made the construction crew move the stakes back further from the street to the legal setback. After the man left, she went back to the construction site that night and moved the stakes back where she wanted them. That's where the store ended up being built. That store, with its soda fountain, was her pride and joy, and a gathering spot for the neighborhood.
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One of her customers aspired to be a writer, but was griping that he would probably never get published. Easter lost her patience with him and said that with an attitude like that, he was probably right. He responded, "If you think its so easy, let's see you do it.". She did exactly that: she got a short story published in one of the True Confession-style magazines. I wish I had a copy.
 Painting by Easter. © LookingForSam |
Writing wasn't her main creative outlet though. And while gardening was a great passion (her rosebushes were legendary), she got her greatest enjoyment from painting in her spare time. To this day, whenever I walk into a painter's studio and smell the oils, I am instantly transported back to a summer day in the late 1960's, with the windows open, the hot stifling air resisting a stir from the oscillating fan that always scared me because its grill was wide enough to drive a Mack truck or a finger through, and the smell of her oils on the card table she would set up in the living room. I often wondered how different her life might have been if she had pursued art seriously, and perhaps lived in a different place or time. I used to imagine the glamorous and fascinating life she would have lived if she had been in New York or Taos, instead of out-of-the-way Portsmouth, Ohio. But I don't think she would have expressed any regrets like that. Her life was plenty fascinating exactly where she was. She used to tell me often how grateful she was to have lived in her own time and place. She'd say that in the span of her lifetime, she saw everything from the horse and buggy to man's landing on the moon, and that nobody would every be privileged to witness a more astounding leap of progress than that.
She was right, and I am privileged to have had the honor of sitting on her lap.
Happy birthday, Easter.
“Facts are ventriloquists’ dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.” – Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), in Time Must Have a Stop (1944).
“Facts are stupid things.” – Ronald Reagan (1911– )
Chris and I chided him, saying “You’re only as good as your last blog”. But he gets away with it because just about everything he posts is entertaining. And he gets away with it too because just about everything he posts makes me pause and say “huh!” But this guy, well, he needs to work it some more.
I’ve been rather preoccupied lately. I mentioned the research that I’ve been doing, and it’s coming along nicely. The pace at work has also picked up a little (it’s about time!) and since the weather’s turned warmer, there’s so much to do that is incompatible with a computer keyboard, no matter how portable it may be.
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I’ve been holed up in the medical library, gathering data to counter some really bad “scientific research” that continues to circulate in many homophobic circles. I’ve concluded that I probably won’t change any minds. I just hope I can strip away a little of the false “data” that is being used as weapons against us. If it is stripped away, then nothing is left except opinions and faith. That's when the arguments will become much more honest.
(By the way, one gay counselor I know hates the word homophobia. He says he’s never actually seen anyone shaking or screaming in a phobia-induced hysteria in the presence of a gay person. He’s seen real phobias first-hand, and homophobia is not like acrophobia or arachnophobia. He prefers the term homo-averse. Anyway, back to the story…)
This research I’ve been doing has made me confront the age old questions of motivations in the service of truth – or more precisely, facts in the service of motivations. Facts are facts, you may imagine, but I find that facts are no longer facts when they are ripped from their homes. They become wailing orphans, easily exploited by any number of strangers. Some of these strangers are well-meaning, others more sinister. But regardless of the strangers’ motivations, these orphans get passed around from one foster home to another, all the while loosing their identity and becoming more and more separated from their original birth family, Truth.
Facts may appear hard, in and of themselves. Their impermeable shells make them seem immutable. Ten percent is always ten percent, no matter how many times it gets passed around. So are two-thirds, each and every one, and seven in ten. Twelve respondents are always the same twelve respondents, but those twelve aren’t the same as the 96 patients, or the 103 delinquents or the 107 family members, or the 979 residents. Each of them has a story to tell, and they tell these stories in more than just numbers.
Facts aren’t stories. And it’s the stories that place facts in context. Suddenly, the seeming strength of the hard, cold facts is warmed and softened by the light of the stories. Of course, the stories of the 96 patients are very different from the 107 family members. How could they not be? Suddenly the 57% of the 96 patents, while still 57%, means something very different. And no wonder seven of ten family members are worried. It suddenly makes sense. But don’t worry too much, because 57% of the 96 patients aren’t the same as 57% of the 979 residents. They are two completely different things.
It’s ironic, but I can now confirm that Ronald Reagan was very prescient in his observation that “facts are stupid things.” One fact says that the average gay man dies at the age of forty-three. That’s the fact according to one study, and that fact is absolutely correct when viewed within the parameters of that study. I’ve seen it myself and I know that this fact is correct. Of the obituaries that Paul Cameron looked at in a small handful of gay newspapers, the average age was forty-three. It’s a cold, hard, indisputable fact. But is it true? Don’t worry Mom, the short answer is no, and there are other far more reliable facts from far more reliable sources that prove it. The summation of facts does not always equal Truth, especially when some of those facts are orphans. Orphans ripped from their birth families almost always have very serious bonding issues with their foster families.
There’s a reason Christian scriptures don’t say, “the facts will set you free.”
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A wise nun once told me, “You can judge a man’s actions, but you can’t judge a man by his actions. You can never know with certainty what is in his heart.” After a very long, hard struggle, I’ve come to believe it. That dictum has become one of my more important principles in the past five years. Fear, hate, and ignorance are three completely different motivations, but they can lead to the exact same set of actions. And so can other motivations that I can’t even think of. So, which is it that drives a particular person and how can anybody possible be able to tell with certainty?
Is it fear or sadness? Is there a deep, dark secret that causes facts to be trotted out from the orphanage, to be held up and shown to a sympathetic world, with the earnestness of a Sally Struthers or Bono? Is there a fear of some impending sense of tragedy, or a sadness of something that is seen as being lost? Where did this perception come from?
Is it ignorance? Is he blind to what the rest of us see around us, or read in the same journals he reads? A blind orphan is a particularly sad sight, worthy of a tremendous pity. Maybe not pity – maybe empathy? Yes, empathy, for at some level we all have our moments of ignorance. Ignorance can be a fault, but then even Catholic theology, famous for assigning fault, holds blameless the one who is blinded by invincible ignorance, one whose cultural surroundings or personal experiences prevent him from seeing what is really there.
Is it hatred? Blind hatred? A searing hatred that lashes out at the world around him, grabbing orphans right and left, shouting this will happen to you if you don’t watch out! But all hatred has a source, and that source usually shelters a tremendous pain. Hitler and Stalin were abused children. Or maybe it is a righteous anger gone horribly wrong, like Osama bin Laden. But then, you see? I just now pretended to know what was in their hearts. See how difficult it is to avoid doing it?
Or is it something else? Is it self-aggrandizement? The opportunity to see his name published, to appear on talk shows and to grab headlines? To see people talking about him? Is it love? – terribly misguided though it may be? Following the dictum, if I can just change one life it will all be worth it? How many times have we heard that from some truly well-meaning people who aren’t misguided? Misguided love is still love nevertheless. Shouldn’t we be grateful for love? Didn’t someone just tell us “all you need is love?"
The heart is a secretive place. It could be any one of these things that motivates a particular act, it could be a combination of many of these things, or it could be something else entirely different. We can never know. The best we can do is guess; the worst we can do is project. And maybe this is my own projection at work, but I believe that it is a characteristic of human nature that our guesses are typically little more than projections. Sure, we may believe that we are relying on observed patterns from past experiences, but isn’t that just a clever definition of projection? The Zen masters would certainly have our hide for it.
In this dream, I'm a schoolteacher. Yes, a schoolteacher. I teach a class of children who look to be about seven years old, and I am having the time of my life. The kids are laughing, they make me laugh, and I am able to keep their imaginations engaged and their television-addled attention spans focused on the material.
In this dream, most of the parents like me too. They all think I'm a fantastic teacher, except for a couple. These few don't like me because I'm gay. They complain and protest in front of the school. I'm afraid to pat their kid's on the head, afraid that I'll be accused of being a child molester. But I'm not backing down. I'm a good teacher, damn it!
In this dream, I'm pulling into a parking lot. The only space left for my tiny little car is a crowded one between a huge pick-up truck and a huge SUV. I just know my poor little car's gonna get smashed.
In this dream, I'm laying on a couch in the bookstore. People glance in my direction as they pass, but they don't stay. There's a singer/guitar player singing and playing in the next room. I think I may go and listen to him, except I can hear him just fine.
In this dream, where I'm laying on the couch in the bookstore, I look down, and I'm naked. Aw hell! I hate when that happens. Again. I'm not really embarrassed, just annoyed. You'd think someday I'd learn to check before leaving the house.
In this dream, I hear someone laughing, but he's not laughing at me. Or, wait. No, he's crying. No... what is it. It's a strange, convulsive noise. What is it? What's the matter.
I wake up and I still hear that noise. It's Chris. He's crying. No. He's laughing? No. He's having trouble breathing? What's the matter?
I find him at the computer, laughing uncontrollably at this.
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