Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (7 page)

Instead of stooping to a comfort level of ignorance, the military should reflect the simple notion of performance as the gauge of job fitness. Besides, maybe their notion of comfort level is all wrong. Maybe there are no homophobes in foxholes.

EVAN’S TWO MOMS
February 5, 1992

Evan has two moms. This is no big thing. Evan has always had two moms—in his school file, on his emergency forms, with his friends. “Ooooh, Evan, you’re lucky,” they sometimes say. “You have two moms.” It sounds like a sitcom, but until last week it was emotional truth without legal bulwark. That was when a judge in New York approved the adoption of a six-year-old boy by his biological mother’s lesbian partner. Evan. Evan’s mom. Evan’s other mom. A kid, a psychologist, a pediatrician. A family.

The matter of Evan’s two moms is one in a series of events over the last year that lead to certain conclusions. A Minnesota appeals court granted guardianship of a woman left a quadriplegic in a car accident to her lesbian lover, the culmination of a seven-year battle in which the injured woman’s parents did everything possible to negate the partnership between the two. A lawyer in Georgia had her job offer withdrawn after the state attorney general found out that she and her lesbian lover were planning a marriage ceremony; she’s brought suit. The computer
company Lotus announced that the gay partners of employees would be eligible for the same benefits as spouses.

Add to these public events the private struggles, the couples who go from lawyer to lawyer to approximate legal protections their straight counterparts take for granted, the AIDS survivors who find themselves shut out of their partners’ dying days by biological family members and shut out of their apartments by leases with a single name on the dotted line, and one solution is obvious.

Gay marriage is a radical notion for straight people and a conservative notion for gay ones. After years of being sledgehammered by society, some gay men and lesbian women are deeply suspicious of participating in an institution that seems to have “straight world” written all over it.

But the rads of twenty years ago, straight and gay alike, have other things on their minds today. Family is one, and the linchpin of family has commonly been a loving commitment between two adults. When same-sex couples set out to make that commitment, they discover that they are at a disadvantage: No joint tax returns. No health insurance coverage for an uninsured partner. No survivor’s benefits from Social Security. None of the automatic rights, privileges, and responsibilities society attaches to a marriage contract. In Madison, Wisconsin, a couple who applied at the Y with their kids for a family membership were turned down because both were women. It’s one of those small things that can make you feel small.

Some took marriage statutes that refer to “two persons” at their word and applied for a license. The results were court decisions that quoted the Bible and embraced circular argument: marriage is by definition the union of a man and a woman because that is how we’ve defined it.

No religion should be forced to marry anyone in violation of its tenets, although ironically it is now only in religious ceremonies that gay people can marry, performed by clergy who find the blessing of two who love each other no sin. But there is no
secular reason that we should take a patchwork approach of corporate, governmental, and legal steps to guarantee what can be done simply, economically, conclusively, and inclusively with the words “I do.”

“Fran and I chose to get married for the same reasons that any two people do,” said the lawyer who was fired in Georgia. “We fell in love; we wanted to spend our lives together.” Pretty simple.

Consider the case of
Loving
v.
Virginia
, aptly named. At the time, sixteen states had laws that barred interracial marriage, relying on natural law, that amorphous grab bag for justifying prejudice. Sounding a little like God throwing Adam and Eve out of paradise, the trial judge suspended the one-year sentence of Richard Loving, who was white, and his wife, Mildred, who was black, provided they got out of the state of Virginia.

In 1967 the Supreme Court found such laws to be unconstitutional. Only twenty-five years ago and it was a crime for a black woman to marry a white man. Perhaps twenty-five years from now we will find it just as incredible that two people of the same sex were not entitled to legally commit themselves to each other. Love and commitment are rare enough; it seems absurd to thwart them in any guise.

MOVING THE FURNITURE AROUND
December 2, 1990

The man who wears an Army blanket and holds out a cardboard coffee cup in the Christopher Street subway station has a method to what some might call his madness. When he is told to leave the landing there, he goes two blocks down to the station from which trains run beneath the Hudson River to New Jersey. If that station is inhospitable, short on commuters or long on cops, he walks east to the West Fourth Street subway station. And he goes back to Christopher Street if there are problems at West Fourth.

The subway has always been a good place to collect money. It is not uncommon to sit on a train and have the narrow tube filled with fund-raisers’ speechifying: “Good afternoon, ladies and gentleman. I represent the Sons of the Lord community outreach program in Brooklyn!” It is not unheard of to sit on a train and find your life on the line: “Give me your money or I’ll cut you bad.” The definition of a captive audience is a dozen people on an express train between stations.

But the New York City Transit Authority has banned begging
on the subway, and the Supreme Court last week let stand that ban. The legal pavane included pages of discussion of whether begging is speech or begging is behavior. For my acquaintance in the Christopher Street station, begging is a container of coffee, a buttered roll, and a bottle of bad wine.

Once again, we’ve wasted time and money by dealing with the homeless backward. Too much energy has gone into deciding where we do not want them to be, and making sure that they would not be there. Benches were outfitted with dividers so that no one could lie down. Police were taught to turn people out of public buildings. And the Transit Authority rousted them off trains. The exercise is reminiscent of moving furniture in a small apartment; you can put the couch in a number of places, but you cannot make it unobtrusive. The secret is to find a place where the couch fits.

There is no doubt that some of the homeless belong in psychiatric hospitals, but the number is probably much smaller than we believe. Mary Scullion, who runs two communal homes for women in Philadelphia, took a census five years ago of habitual street dwellers in Center City, identified by name and location 115 who appeared to be mentally ill, and set out to see if they were salvageable. Today, only five of them are in long-term psychiatric care. Eight are still on the streets. The rest are living in supervised residences or with their families.

Four years ago a woman named Ellen Baxter opened a single-room-occupancy building in upper Manhattan for homeless men and women. Today she is preparing to open her fifth building, a $4 million city-financed renovation that contains seventy-five studio apartments for individuals and seven two-bedroom apartments for families. None of the people in her buildings need to be in institutions, but few of them are ready to live without the assistance of the staff Columbia University provides, to help with their medical problems and their addictions, to negotiate the social service maze and what Ms. Baxter calls “the paperwork of poverty.”

We can do much more of this, or we can continue to waste time and money moving these people around like so much furniture. One of the craziest ladies on the streets of Center City, a woman considered totally lost to normal life, lives in a group residence and works full time now, and Mary Scullion says that since that woman has been getting enough food and sleep and medical attention it’s amazing, the resemblance she bears to you or me.

Discussions about the homeless always remind me of a woman who told me that she was damned if her tax dollars were going to pay for birth control for the poor. Come to think of it, she said, she didn’t want her tax dollars paying for any social welfare programs. I wanted to say to her: If you don’t pay for birth control, you’ll have to pay for schools. If you don’t pay for schools, you’re going to pay for welfare. And if you don’t pay for any of those things, you’re going to spend a small fortune on prisons.

The question is not whether we will pay. It is what we want to pay for, and what works. The negative approach, the deciding where we want people not to be, has been a deplorable failure. There are those who believe the homeless are either criminal or crazy, that one way or another they should be locked up. It’s worth remembering that it costs far more to lock someone up than to give them, as Ms. Scullion and Ms. Baxter have, a key of their own.

ROOM AT THE INN
December 11, 1991

Ten years ago Harold Brown decided to do something that he had never done before but that he believed his Catholic faith required him to do. He began to help house the homeless. He and his wife, Virginia, and a group of volunteers from Sacred Heart Church in Queens set up a small shelter in the basement of the church in response to a call to action from the mayor, the cardinal, and the Partnership for the Homeless.

For a decade they have provided a bed each night, as well as breakfast, a bag lunch, a hot dinner, a change of underclothes, and, after the plumber hooked up extra waterlines, a shower and the use of a washer and dryer. The city housed almost seventy-five hundred people in shelters the other night; Sacred Heart housed ten. Alleluia and pass the excuses. This is an answer to people who have said they’d like to help the homeless but don’t know how.

This is an answer to all those people who find the holidays a fearsome round of eggnog and revolving charges. It doesn’t have
to be that way. Even now there are friends preparing polite ecstasies for gifts they neither want nor need. Even now there are people penciling your party into their datebooks and quietly wishing they could spend the day at home.

The important thing to remember about Christmas is not closing time at Macy’s but the story of a pregnant woman and her husband who looked for a bed for what some still think was the most transformative event in history and were told to get lost. The irony of the fact that there is no room at the inn for millions in this country is potent at this time.

Ten years ago this month the Partnership for the Homeless began the church/synagogue network with a simple premise: that with thousands of institutions in New York built on charity and compassion, surely there must be some willing to provide a bed for the night. Tonight there will be something like 1,365 homeless people sleeping in 126 churches and synagogues. At a time when homeless men and women are being rousted from public buildings, subway stations, and assorted doorways, apparently in the belief that a moving target is less offensive to community comfort levels, that is no small thing.

These small shelters, all with fewer than twenty beds, are scattered throughout the city. Their success gives the lie to dire predictions surrounding the city’s plan to build small shelters in residential areas, predictions ranging from plummeting property values to soaring crime. Mr. Brown says he was “scared to death” of opposition when the parishioners opened their little place in the community of Glendale, which is where Archie Bunker was said to have had his home. Last Sunday Mr. Brown took up a collection to pay for food for shelter guests. At the end of the day there was $1,100 in the baskets. Last month he called for more volunteers. Fifty people put their names on the list.