Culture & Reality

Andrew Sullivan is a writer born in 1963 in England, moved to the United States in 1984. He considers himself an openly gay catholic conservative. Although born and bred an Englishman, Sullivan has focused most of his writing career on American political themes.

I share a quote from him that I have saved for a while. It is very good. It deserves a serious read. Please take the time to read it now.

Andrew Sullivan wrote: (May 2012)

“... The core gay experience throughout history has been displacement, a sense of belonging and yet not belonging. Gays are born mostly into heterosexual families and discover as they grow up that, for some reason, they will never be able to have a marriage like their parents’ or their siblings’. They know this before they can tell anyone else, even their parents. This sense of subtle alienation—of loving your own family while feeling excluded from it—is something all gay children learn. They sense something inchoate, a separateness from their peers, a subtle estrangement from their families, the first sharp pangs of shame. And then, at some point, they find out what it all means. In the past, they often would retreat and withdraw, holding a secret they couldn’t even share with their parents—living as an insider outsider.

And this, in a different way, is Obama’s life story as well. He was a black kid brought up by white grandparents and a white single mother in Hawaii and Indonesia, where his color really made no difference. He discovered his otherness when reading an old issue of Life magazine, which had a feature on African-Americans who had undergone an irreversible bleaching treatment to make them look white—because they believed being white was the only way to be happy. He wrote:

‘I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page ... I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat, to show [others] what I had learned, to demand some explanation or assurance. But something held me back. As in a dream, I had no voice for my newfound fear. By the time my mother came to take me home, my face wore a smile and the magazines were back in their proper place. The room, the air, was quiet as before.’

Barack Obama had to come out of a different closet. He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family. The America he grew up in had no space for a boy like him: black yet enveloped by loving whiteness, estranged from a father he longed for (another common gay experience), hurtling between being a Barry and a Barack, needing an American racial identity as he grew older but chafing also against it and over-embracing it at times ...”

Powerful stuff whether you are gay or straight. The personal journey each of us travels. Very much alone in many regards, but still in an ocean of love and support from family and friends. Even if they don’t know our deepest secrets.

The journey informs and develops inner strength. But it is not easy.

Now, insert the ‘difference’ as a woman in a man’s world, black in a white world, protestant in a catholic world, Muslim in a Christian world, and so on.

Differences should not matter among us as negative. They should enrich and inform. They are part of our blessed uniqueness.

Where did our public discourse go so wrong on matters such as these?

Now insert the Chick-Fil-A nonsense. Doesn’t the outpouring of support for the homophobic owner of the food chain tell gay people that our nation is still a place of deep discrimination? Freedom of religion? I don’t think so. Freedom of speech? Not without consequences in my mind.

Complicated isn’t it? And yet on such drivel we make decisions on who are our leaders and legislators. They can manipulate our feelings so we vote a certain way.

Aren’t we capable of being better than that?

August 3, 2012