News Stories of the Year

By Advocate.com Editors

From marriage celebrations in D.C. to beleaguered youths taking drastic action to a prominent activist succumbing to pressure, 2010 was as dramatic as they come. But the good news outweighed the bad, with happy endings for people like Constance McMillen, Dan Choi, and the students in Arkansas's Midland School District. Here's our list of the most riveting news events of the year.
 
 Annise Parker Takes Office
Somewhere Harvey Milk smiled on January 2: Lesbian Annise Parker began her first day as mayor of Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city. Even though her city is on relatively stable financial ground, Parker still had to deal with an economy that has yet to fully recover. City council members showed how much faith they have in Parker’s leadership that they voted unanimously in December to give her the ability to order mandatory furloughs.


HIV Travel Ban Lifted
The teens started off with some good news — on January 4, the 22-year-old ban on HIV-positive visitors to the U.S. was finally ended. A gay man from the Netherlands became the first HIV-positive tourist to freely enter the country when he landed at New York’s JFK airport. With the travel ban ended, the U.S. is now planning on hosting a biannual global HIV/AIDS summit in 2012.


D.C. Marriage Kicks Off
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal was the year’s big gay achievement, but marriage equality also advanced in 2010. Washington, D.C., opened the doors to same-sex marriage, with the first ceremonies being held March 9. Media reports of the first marriages showed a racially diverse mix of couples — a big change from gay marriages showcased in states like Vermont and Iowa.


First Lesbian Episcopal Bishop Named
Too bad her surname wasn’t Glassceiling — Mary Glasspool certainly broke a barrier when she was consecrated on May 15 as the first openly lesbian bishop in the Episcopal Church. The partnered Glasspool is now a bishop suffragan in the church's Los Angeles diocese. In an interview with The Advocate, the pioneer shared her favorite Bible verse: For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38-39).

 ACLU Investigates Fake Prom
When 18-year-old Constance McMillen invited another young woman at her prom at Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Miss., she had no idea the nation would be riveted by her actions. Last spring, school officials told McMillen she couldn’t bring a same-sex date to the prom, then canceled the event altogether when she resisted their decision. The ACLU sued the district on McMillen’s behalf, and then a group of parents set up an outside prom — and sent McMillen and her date to a sparsely attended fake prom. The school district later settled with McMillen for $35,000, paid her attorneys’ fees, and enacted a nondiscrimination policy.
 

Target Controversy
As opposed to a retailer like Wal-Mart, Target has enjoyed a positive reputation among many gay and lesbian shoppers. But that all changed this summer when news broke of a $150,000 corporate donation from Target to a group supporting antigay Republican Tom Emmer, who ran unsuccessfully for governor of Minnesota, where Target is based. Boycotts followed, then an apology from Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel, and then the news in December that Target continued to contribute to antigay causes — months after Steinhafel’s “sorry.”

 Youth Suicides
Tyler Clementi, Raymond Chase, Seth Walsh — these are just some of the names of the young people who took their lives this year after enduring bullying for being gay, or being perceived as such. But these young people didn’t die in vain; their stories brought attention to an epidemic that has endured for decades, if not centuries. Celebrities and politicians, from Kim Kardashian to President Obama, filmed “It Gets Better” videos, while states and cities enacted or considered antibullying legislation.



Arkansas School Board Member Thinks "Fags Should Die"

While teachers and students across the nation wore purple this fall to highlight the epidemic of antigay bullying, the vice-president of the Midland School District board in Arkansas went in another direction. Posting on Facebook, Clint McCance took umbrage with people dressing in purple, and then, responding to comments on his page, said he hoped gay people would kill themselves, dropped the f word repeatedly, and said he relished "the fact that [gay people] give each other AIDS and die." After The Advocate broke the story, reaction was swift: A Facebook page called for his firing, and national media ran with the story. McCance offered a pseudo-apology and resigned from his post in late October.


Lesbian Students Prevented from Graduating
Girlfriends Kelsey Hicks (pictured) and Melissa McKenzie, both 18, were told by administrators at Del City High School in Oklahoma that maybe they should finish out their education at another school. Hicks put it this way while talking to a local TV station in November: “The principal will say 'Well, you're gay. You're not going to do anything with your life. You might as well just drop out now.' It's stuff to put you down that makes you want to drop out.” A statement from school officials said they don’t discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, disability, or age — sexual orientation was notably absent from their list.

Dan Choi's Breakdown
In mid December, the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” looked like it slipped through Congress’s fingers (thankfully, lawmakers would get it together before Christmas). Dan Choi, a lieutenant in the Army facing discharge for coming out, had been one of the most public gay personalities in the battle to end DADT — he came out on The Rachel Maddow Show, chained himself to the White House wall, endured hunger strikes, and traveled the country to tell his story at rallies and protests. The assumed defeat of the repeal hit Choi hard, and he was hospitalized at a mental facility following the news. But the resilient activist wasn’t down for long — he attended the signing ceremony for DADT’s repeal December 22. At the event, Senate majority leader Harry Reid returned a West Point ring belonging to Choi, which he had given to Reid five months earlier with the request to have it back when the law was repealed.

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White House Staff: It Gets Better

It Gets Better?

By Stephanie Faryington


As is well known by now, a few months ago, six teens, who were repeatedly ridiculed and taunted by their peers for being (or being perceived as) gay, took their lives, all within a six week span. The suicides of Asher Brown, 13; Seth Walsh, 13; Justin Aaberg, 15; Billy Lucas, 15; Tyler Clementi, 18; and Raymond Chase, 19 prompted a national conversation on bullying and galvanized gay celebrities and their straight allies to speak out against gay hate. Dan Savage, the popular sex and relationship columnist, launched It Gets Better, a suicide prevention project for gay teens. Savage’s campaign includes a series of Web videos of queer and straight adults touting the message that life after middle and high school gets, well, better.

These are all noble and necessary efforts, but they aren't enough. Few queer youths on the brink of suicide are going to be soothed by the notion that at some unforeseeable time in the distant future their lives will improve. While we can’t immediately eradicate social contempt for homosexuality, we can and should help queer kids feel the power and pleasure in their otherness — right now.

Growing up gay in a small suburb of Los Angeles and, later, San Diego, I too grappled with the kind of self-loathing that could send some kids over the edge. My sense of inadequacy sat like a sack of rocks on my shoulders, weighing down my self-esteem. The way I dealt with my budding lesbianism was to completely desexualize myself. I wore men's maroon wing tips, dark polyester slacks, big boxy shirts and sweaters to completely erase all traces of the fact that I was woman — a woman who desired and could be desired. While my classmates were participating in all the heterosexualizing rituals of high school — dances, dates, parties, and putting out — I was fighting to deaden my most primal needs and desires. While I wasn't driven to suicide, neutering myself into a state of numb half-aliveness was no way to live. I didn't come out of this zombie-like funk until I moved to Berkeley — far away from the stifling homogeneity of conservative San Diego.

At UC Berkeley, where one of the first LGBT programs in the country was launched, I encountered a subversive cadre of queer academics who took devilish delight in their otherness. Happy to be the queer disruptions that upended the social order, they exposed the ways dominant ideologies and institutions create unfair hierarchies that stigmatize and undermine certain groups of people, practices, and beliefs. They empowered me with the knowledge that language was the God of all our societal beliefs; and that since language was constantly changing, so too could the destructive ideas that debase same-sex love. In the meantime they taught me to celebrate my queerness and its power to challenge the status quo. For a girl crippled by an overwhelming sense of inadequacy, this was potent stuff. It fortified my self-esteem by helping me see my perceived weaknesses as strengths and believe in a future where society, not just my individual life, could get better. I only wish I'd had this education earlier so I’d never have felt the need to anesthetize so much of myself for so long.

Similarly, we need a campaign that doesn't kowtow to the tastes of conservative straight America — with softball solutions for our suicidal teens — and offer a message far more compelling and persuasive and self-affirming than "it gets better." Much like the Black Is Beautiful movement from the '60s, which encouraged African-Americans to resist the self-hating temptation to assimilate by straightening their hair and whitening their skin, I'd like to propose a different sort of campaign — one that understands that the only viable lifeline for queer kids saddled with self-loathing and suicidal tendencies is to teach them to delight in the ways they don’t fit in.

We need to show our queer youth that their marginalized perspective is a vital asset to society; that the sensitivities of queer misfits are often the revelations in the world's best literature and art; that a life that doesn't conform to the status quo is often the measure of a great life; that they are part of a long lineage of brilliant artists and thinkers, whose queerness, undoubtedly, informed the qualities that set them apart from — and even above — the masses; that their queerness is part of their greatness.

Such a campaign concept would be akin to Santa Claus recognizing that Rudolph’s ridiculed red nose is actually his social asset and power. It would fundamentally change the way same-sex desire is seen, which, of course, would be met with bitter opposition with some fearing that a message that endorses homosexuality would spread same-sex desire like a disease to otherwise "healthy" heterosexual teens — an insulting and absurd concern. After all, we’re all gay despite the overwhelming pressure to be straight. Others might be skeptical of a campaign that accentuates difference, concerned that it will pit gays against straights; but carefully executed, the point will be healthy self-affirmation, not antagonistic separatism.

The Stonewall ethos undergirding the project I propose will raise the question of why it’s still useful, given the tremendous strides we’ve already made toward greater equality and acceptance, to exalt our differences as our strengths. Here’s why: Unlike African-Americans or Hispanics or women (other marginalized groups) who can keep populating the world and thereby change demographics and become a force in numbers, gay people will always be a minority (we can't be sure to reproduce gay offspring!), so the quest for complete normalcy and assimilation will ultimately fail. We'll always be abnormal, so it would serve our communities well to honor and celebrate that fact.

The truth is, things have gotten better ... but they still suck. The teen bullying that pushed these kids to their deaths manifests itself in the adult lives of all LGBT people. Queer people often experience harassment on the streets when seen holding hands or kissing or hugging (even in New York City) or from family members who don't allow significant others to attend familial festivities such as weddings and holidays or refuse to acknowledge a same-sex partner's child as a legitimate family member, never mind the institutional forms of bullying like excluding gays from marriage and (until this Saturday), the military’s "don’t ask, don’t tell policy." Can we really condemn the bullying of queer youths when we support such policies and practices?

Sure, American society accepts gay entertainers and will grudgingly engage a national conversation on same-sex marriage and even repeal DADT, but our culture continues to view homosexuality as an unfortunate biological affliction rather than a beautiful, if less prevalent, variation of human sexuality. If we want to change attitudes toward homosexuality at a cellular level and thereby give gay kids and teens a healthier sense of themselves, we need to offer a message that affirms the very nature of their desires. Such a measure won't prevent bullies from bullying, but it’ll give our youths the wherewithal to endure social alienation and scorn without succumbing to tragic and premature ends.

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