TWO MENTIONS. Yesterday, in searching Google to see if it had found this blog yet, I chanced across two mentions of me on the Internet, one that recognizes my role in gay history and one that insults me.
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The first is a one-line entry in “3,500 Rainbow Lives” (No. 2,855 in alphabetical order): “Craig Schoonmaker, American gay activist and an early advocate of outing other gay people”. The site is a list of “queer” people thru history, “each leaving their mark upon the world”. I suppose it’s an honor to be listed in such a short list on a planet of over 6 billion people, hundreds of millions of whom might be called “queer” -- tho the great majority of gay men (some 78%, according to the poll on the Mr. Gay Pride website, http://members.aol.com/MrGayPride) prefer the term “gay”. That’s a better ratio of distinction than for Who’s Who in America, where I am also shown, because about one in every 1,500 Americans is in Who’s Who.
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The source for the information about me is shown as a book, The Gay Decades: From Stonewall to the Present: The People and Events That Shaped Gay Lives by Leigh W. Rutledge, 1992, the Penguin Group. I hadn’t known I was even in that book. I know of some other mentions, from very long quotes in The Gay Crusaders by Donn Teal (1971, republished 1995), and brief quotes in Long Road to Freedom edited by Mark Thompson (1994) and the bestseller Conduct Unbecoming by the late Randy Shilts (1995), but not that one.
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A lot of people probably think that the “Founding Fathers” of the gay rights movement are all dead. Alas, many are. But some of us, of the second generation at least, are still around. My friend John Lauritsen, an outspoken AIDS Dissident (see www.virusmyth.com), is still active in countering nonsense about that drug injury reinvented into a transmissible “disease” by antisexual (and especially antihomosexual Republicans) -- but he’s not in 3,500 Queer Lives. And the list is now to be enlarged only with the addition of Canadians (it was created by a Manitoba librarian). Sorry, John.
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For those of you who don’t know, I’m the man who in 1970 proposed the term “Gay Pride” for the weekend of events designed to draw people into New York City for the first of what we hoped would become an annual march commemorating the Stonewall Riots of 1969. The original proposal had been “Gay Power Weekend”. I thought that too strident and outward-looking. I wanted something more celebratory and inward-looking, concerned with gay people’s own view of themselves, so proposed “Gay Pride Weekend” instead. Jerry Hoose (of Gay Liberation Front? -- I think he’s still alive too) seconded the motion. It was adopted instantly, without discussion. And that was that.
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Rainbow Lives also has a blog on this service, at http://rainbowlives.blogspot.com.
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I am more ambivalent about the second mention of me that I found yesterday. A Portuguese-language blog on this service, “Alto Volta” (http://altovolta.blogspot.com/), mentioned the Expansionist Party, including our logo, in a March entry, which is good, I suppose, even tho the writer was ostensibly more amused than favorably disposed. One immediately thinks of the quote usually attributed to Mae West: “I don't care what they say as long as they spell my name right.” But the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, NY warns government officials that that is NOT a good stance. Mae West offered another observation relevant here: “It's better to be looked over than overlooked.” Still, when someone calls you an “anti-Semite”, in any language, you need to correct the record. (S/he was referring to passages in a very long (c. 31,000 word) presentation I wrote to oppose the then-contemplated war against Iraq: www.geocities.com/lcraigschoonmaker/NoIraqAttack.html.)
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It is true that I am doctrinally hostile to Judaism’s “God of Wrath”. I don’t believe in God at all (tho I hold out the remote possibility that He exists), but if I were to choose a god to believe in, it would be the Christians’ God of Love. It’s hard to reconcile such a conception of God with what English terms “acts of God”, such as today’s tornado in Illinois. The very term “act of God” for “natural disaster” bespeaks the kind of primitive superstition that caused ancient tribes to sacrifice virgins to volcanoes. I don’t believe in a God that would demand that a woman be tossed into a cauldron of lava, and I don’t believe in a God that drowned the world for the sins of one species.
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I am also hostile to Zionism, a political movement that violates the fundamental basis of Jewish ethical teachings. To the extent that Judaism has any claim to being “a great religion”, it is because of the Ten Commandments. Zionism violates three of them, those against coveting your neighbor’s property, stealing it, and killing him if he tries to stop you! It is thus impossible for a pious, ethical Jew to be a Zionist.
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“Anti-Semitic” is a particularly objectionable form of name-calling. First, it terms Jews “Semites”, whereas “Semite” means “speaker of a Semitic language”, and the overwhelming preponderance of all speakers of Semitic languages are ARABS. So “anti-Semitic” more properly relates to anti-ARAB bias than anti-Jewish bias. I am certainly not anti-Semitic but pro-Arab.
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Second, it suggests that hostility to a given religious doctrine is unacceptable. Everyone has the right to reject any religious or other teaching they choose, for their own reasons, without being regarded as a bigot. It is indeed both intellectually and morally required that we make rational choices among ideas, and when we find an offensive or unacceptable teaching in any religion, we have the right not just to reject it personally but also to denounce it publicly. I reject many teachings from many religions, from antihomosexualism and animal sacrifice in the Old Testament (Jewish) book of Leviticus, to “predestination” in Calvinism (before a person is born, God chooses who will go to heaven and who to hell, and there’s nothing anyone can do to change that fate), to reincarnation (and thus the insignificance of this present life) in Buddhism, to the caste system (people choose, between lives, what caste they will belong to in the next life, and it is not for us to make life better for people in a low caste because they chose to suffer its conditions) in Hinduism.
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The difference between rejection of doctrine and religious bigotry is that the bigot (or zealot) says that because s/he rejects a given doctrine, no one should be allowed to believe it! I don’t say any such thing. If anybody wants to believe the ridiculous things I find detestable, that’s fine with me, as long as they don’t try to inflict that doctrine on me. Thus it is defensible to reject the antihomosexualism of Leviticus but indefensible to use the power of the state to suppress homosexuality because “God says so”.
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Moreover, “anti-Semite” willfully confuses flesh with doctrine, as to transfer hostility from an unacceptable dogma to the people who believe in it. This is the notorious “racial” view of Jewishness, in which one talks not of Judaism but “Jewish blood”. That, of course, is nonsense. A Jew is not a person born to Jews but a person who identifies as a Jew and/or who is an adherent of Judaism, a religion with universalist aspirations. Nazis are not alone in thinking of Jews as a “race” or “tribe”. Many Jews do, too. Zionism indeed is premised on the notion that Jews are “the Chosen People”, a tribe specially blessed by the Lord and given a “Promised Land” that they have divine right to occupy, no matter how many people they have to kill -- in violation of the ethical teachings of Judaism -- to do so. Canaan was, after all, not empty when the Jews arrived. The ancient Israelites took Canaan from the Canaanites by force, killing those who objected to having their country stolen right out from under them by people who had never lived there before. So the “Promised Land” turns out to be the twice-stolen land, and Jews who now claim a “right of return” to Palestine ignore the fact that when the Hebrews first arrived in Canaan, they weren’t “returning” to anything, because they came from Sumer: Iraq!
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Finally, “anti-Semitic” is usually not a genuine description of views at all but only a slander. It is employed not to describe ideas but to cut off discussion thru name-calling. Judaism and Zionism are not beyond discussion or criticism. Nothing is.
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(By the way, to return to the takeoff point of this blog entry, no, Google seems not to have found this blog yet.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:06 AM