Wrapped in the Flag (42 page)

Even though I’d lived through her rants against Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter, I was unprepared for her obsession with the Clintons. She ranted about Vincent Foster and Hillarycare.
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At one point, she started calling the First Couple “the liar and the lesbian.”
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I knew, from the way Mother said “lesbian”—with a snarl—that it was
intended as the ultimate insult. Hillary was not a real woman, Mother thought; she was a pervert. Her view came directly out of the Catholic catechism, in which homosexual acts were described as “depraved” and “intrinsically disordered.”
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Proving that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, I had believed the very same things about gay people—years before I had any idea about any kind of sex. As a teenager, I heard whispers about “queers” and “limp wrists,” and started to figure out that men were doing things together that were dirty. In my Psych 101 class, I learned that domineering mothers turned their sons into men who loved other men.
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It took me a long time, but by the time I was forty, I’d changed. I discarded Freud in favor of genetics as the determinant of sexual orientation. And surprise, I discovered that I had gay friends.

Then, while Mother was telling anyone who’d listen that Hillary Clinton was a lesbian, my third child came out.

“I’m gay,” Brian told me. “I wanted you to know.”

I needed to say the right thing. I wanted to offer comfort and understanding, but I wasn’t sure how to say what was in my heart without somehow diminishing what was in his.

I know
seemed arrogant and thoughtless.
I love you
seemed like a closing statement. I decided to wait. If Brian had more to say, I would let him say it.

“I’ve known I was different for a long time,” Brian continued. “Since I was six or seven, I think. But I didn’t know how I was different or what it meant. When I figured it out, I was too terrified to tell anyone.”

“Look at you now, Bri,” I said. “You are strong and honest and good. I’m proud of you, and I’m proud to be your mother.”

And I was proud. That dear boy of mine had tried for years to figure out who he was and where he was going. His dad and I had suspected for some time that his sexual orientation was the reason. As parents, we so wanted to take away his pain, but we both knew that this struggle was his. All we could do was love him and trust that he’d find his way.

That day on the phone when my twenty-five-year-old son revealed his secret, he pushed open the closet door for himself and for his dad and me too. From that moment on, gay had a face.

When I told friends and family, many of them were surprised that Bri came out over the phone. They miss the point, I think. The circumstances of “coming out” are unimportant. What is important is that my son stood tall for who he is, and in that process, he became a man.

Less than a year after Brian came out, another young gay man—Matthew Shepard—was
pistol-whipped, tortured, and tied to a fence post outside Laramie, Wyoming. Eighteen hours later, two bicyclists noticed the body. They assumed, at first, that they were looking at a scarecrow.
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Matthew Shepard died five days later without ever regaining consciousness.

At his funeral, a group of protestors from the Westboro Baptist Church, based in Topeka, Kansas, appeared carrying signs declaring “No Tears for Queers” and “Fag Matt in Hell.”
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After Matthew Shepard’s murder, I began to pay attention to who was leading the hate-the-gay parade. I discovered, not surprisingly, that the right wing, the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church, and evangelical Christians were up to their eyeballs in homophobic nastiness.
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Author Michelle Goldberg examined the right wing’s anti-gay politics and concluded, “For the right, gays are living signifiers of decadence and corruption. They’re seen as both repulsive and tempting, their mere existence sparking some deep primordial panic among much of straight America. A great many of the anxieties stalking the country—fears about social dysfunction, family breakdown, cultural decay, and decreasing status—have been projected onto homosexuals and their ostensible ‘agenda.’?”
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The John Birch Society, which had been in the anti-gay business since its fight against AIDS education in the mid-1980s, took great exception to President Clinton’s move to lift the ban on gays in the military. JBS president John McManus wrote that senior military men had told him that a “serious undermining of morale, discipline and good order” would result if the homosexual ban were lifted.
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Clinton, who had taken “unusual pains to avoid serving” in Vietnam, could not understand that attitude, McManus contended. He went on to insist that since “half of our nation’s cases of venereal diseases are found among homosexuals, the likelihood that military personnel would become incapacitated with syphilis and related diseases would raise significantly. Then there’s the problem of AIDS.” McManus finished with a brash flourish of moralism: “Is there to be any moral code for this nation? If homosexuality received an official acceptance, won’t it and all its consequences spread?”

Jerry Falwell, who’d made his mark as the head of the Moral Majority, used the Clinton administration to revitalize his brand. In one of his fund-raising letters, he wrote, “Has American lost its vision of being . . . ONE NATION UNDER GOD? Are we about to become a hedonistic nation of unrestrained homosexuality, abortion, immorality and lawlessness?” and, “We are only days away from seeing the U.S. military infiltrated with gay men and lesbians.”
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He even hinted that “churches would be forced to hire a quota of homosexuals.”

My parents agreed with the JBS and Jerry Falwell. They were like so many in the right wing, folks described by Jean Hardisty in her book
Mobilizing Resentment
who believed that homosexuality “should be met with alarm and loathing and that the gains made by the gay rights movement were a threat to ‘family values.’”
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If I hadn’t already renounced all ties with the Right, the crusade to keep my son from enjoying basic civil rights would have done it. As it was, their views pushed me further and further left.

By 1997, Mother was convinced that the Clinton White House was about to surrender the United States to either Red China or the United Nations.
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The scheme, a pet project of the New World Order conspiracy, was so close to completion that only one remedy was available to save the country: impeachment.

I guessed that Mother’s new political crusade was a John Birch Society operation, orchestrated from the new national headquarters in Appleton, Wisconsin. A quick peek at the materials on her kitchen table confirmed my suspicion: the Birch Society had its own National Impeach Clinton Action Committee, selling “Impeachment Packets” and twelve-by-twenty-five-foot billboards reading “Impeach Clinton Now!” for $125.
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If Mother had been healthier, I’m sure she would have made the trip to Marietta, Georgia, in March of 1998 for the National Town Hall Meeting on Impeachment, organized by some previously unknown grassroots group called Citizens for Honest Government and their Birch Society allies.
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One reporter described the Georgia rally as “a multifaceted far-right strategy to hobble the Clinton presidency.”
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Among the speakers who took up the impeachment banner that day were Catherine McDonald, widow of Congressman Larry McDonald—the John Birch Society president who’d been killed in the Korean Air disaster fifteen years earlier—and John McManus, the current JBS leader.
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Republican Bob Barr of Georgia, who had been elected to the congressional seat previously held by McDonald, claimed that Clinton had committed treason by soliciting campaign money from China “in exchange for transferring military and computer technologies. The congressman cited “classified information” that he had seen but could not discuss as proof of his charges.
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The prospect of impeaching the president was a big shot in the arm for the Birch Society, a welcome respite from the irrelevance it had suffered
through the Reagan administration. No one had needed a far-right, populist insurgency when the president himself was a far-right populist. A Democrat in the White House, however, offered new opportunities to recruit a new generation of Birchers and Birch wannabes.
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The society reinvigorated its summer youth camps, where kids were treated to a week of conspiracy classes and flag waving as an “antidote to left wing disinformation from public schools.”
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One fun activity was the so-called Night Patrol, in which a roving band of camp counselors wearing swords and headgear stormed into campers’ cabins. According to the director of the Los Angeles camp, the patrol was intended to instill resentment against excessive police power.
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Young patriots could also buy T-shirts, which included one that read: “I hate what Clinton and his gang of anti-gunner, gays and liberals are doing to America.”

That slogan summed up the Birch view of the president. Whether they were Birch campers or Birch leaders, William Jefferson Clinton was public enemy number one.

That summer of 1996, a thousand kids also learned about the powerful “Insiders” working to create a totalitarian, atheistic world government and the Marxists who planned to send millions of Mexicans across the border—each one charged with killing ten Americans.
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That same summer, my mother had become a one-woman anti-Clinton committee. Every day she pounded out letters to newspapers, members of Congress, and a raft of folks she called her contacts castigating the president for anything and everything. And the harder she worked, the better she felt. I swear, the process of getting Clinton impeached added years to her life.

On December 11, 1998, when the House Judiciary Committee approved Articles of Impeachment against the president, Mother was as giddy as a schoolgirl.
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“We did it,” she said to me. “It’s a grand day.”

Several days later, the
Washington Post
acknowledged that the John Birch Society, along with Robert L. Barley of the
Wall Street Journal
and Congressman Bob Barr, had created the groundswell of support among Republicans for impeachment. “Together, their success is a demonstration of how a determined and ideologically committed group can change the course of history,” Thomas Edsall wrote.
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After Clinton’s acquittal by the Senate, the Birchers insisted that Republicans had blocked the crucial material needed to find the president guilty. It was another proof that the conspiracy pulled the strings: clearly the GOP and the Democrats were one and the same. David Shippers, investigative counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, said as much in
American Opinion
, the
Birch Society magazine. The Senate Republicans, he wrote, had not just tried to rig the case but had “rigged it. It was rigged to make it impossible for us to win.”
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According to Shippers, one senator was completely clear about the situation: “I don’t care if you have proof that [Clinton] raped a woman, stood up and shot her dead, you are not going to get 67 votes.”
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Before the impeachment trial in January of 1999, Mother was euphoric about the new power of the right wing. Afterward, she was depressed, almost despondent. “That’s it,” she told me. “Any day the conspiracy will take over, and no one will lift a finger to stop them.”

At first, I thought she’d break out of her funk and jump into a new cause. But as the months dragged on, she remained detached and depressed. I wondered if something else was happening. One day, after the bank called me about errors in her accounts, I spent an afternoon untangling the money messes and trying to make sense of her check register and bills.

Mother argued with everything I suggested until I lost my temper. “Don’t call me anymore,” I said. “Take care of this mess yourself.”