Oh, Jon, those are harsh words for someone coming soon from such a 'tolerant' nation to visit such an intolerant one. Besides, I'm not the one being intolerant. I'm just a citizen of a country struggling with an insurmountable problem where we're very up front about it. We make no secret of the fact that we're caught between the morality of the world's sixteenth century rejects and contemporary society, nor do we hide our hideous slavery past. We can't really hide it since it greets us every morning in the world's headlines. We don't have the benefit of a semi-bridled press. Anyway, I don't have a bad attitude. Not in the way you say I do. I don't lash out, Jekyl and Hyde style, at anyone or anything - except those who attack for no reason - like the ones currently attacking the youth of our country and driving them to a horrid solution. My UK neighbors think I'm rather mild-mannered. It's my conservative mountain friends who think I'm a bit of a radical. Oh, well, as they say in Leeds, "Unless we head at a fair lick, we'll not be seein' equality while I'm out'n the grave."
You, Jon, are blessedly young and have the opportunity to see the world reverse itself. I saw man walk on the moon and Queen Elizabeth being crowned on television. You get to see, perhaps, a gay president or prime minister. Wouldn't it be wonderful if William produced a gay heir and he didn't end up like Edward II with a red hot poker up his ass or James, hiding so deeply in the closet that his translators embedded such hate for his own kind in the Bible that made his name synonymous with Christianity's attacks on us.
I guess what I'm saying, Jon, is stop saying I have bad attitude. I don't. It's getting old. Another thing that's getting old is your constant picking away at us. I read the London Times, I listen to the BBC from London daily, and I watch the news in the evening on BBCAmerica - I don't find it paints quite the negative picture of us that you do. We are all such imperfect creatures.
In the sixties the Brits did three marvelous things, they abolished the death penalty, they legalized homosexualty, and they accepted abortion. We're struggling to catch up, but we are fifty small countries still trying to find a national voice on some issues and that makes it difficult especially when some of our states have such loud and diverse populations. Great Britain is still struggling with these things because of the same problems. Phillip Hansher, that great British commentator says it best:
"Of course, tolerance is now widespread and framed in law. I very much doubt that you could now bring a defamation case against somebody who called you gay if you weren't, any more than you could if somebody wrongly referred to you as Jewish. Nevertheless, "gay" and particularly "lesbian", are still widespread insults. The repulsive Jodie Marsh, who gains much of her prominence from an irony-loving gay following and an avant-garde drag tribute act, uses "lesbian" on television as an insult. The even more repulsive Chris Moyles and Patrick Kielty use "gay" or "gayer" as insults, and are energetically defended by the public-service broadcaster.
Those are direct statements of hatred, deriving from the same feelings that inspire the National Front and the religious nutters to turn out at Gay Pride with their rubbish placards, that led David Copeland to place a bomb in the Admiral Duncan, inspired the murderers of David Morley or Jodi Dobrowski to act. If paranoia is, as Adam Phillips says, the psyche's attempt to maintain the sense of its own significance, then all these attacks - the lady columnists telling us all that nobody wants to hear from us any more, the attempt to reclaim "gay" as an insult and require us not to complain about the insult - are witness to our growing significance in British society."
Now, it's late Saturday morning and I have to go pay my taxes and fix lunch for my son and tackle a desk full of paperwork - the price I pay for living in this country. Then I'm going to pick up my son's car from the garage and pay an outrageous repair bill - the price I pay for being a parent and for not having instilled a love of careful driving in him. Then, because it's the weekend, I get to call my son and his husband in Paris and hear about their ordinary week and wish it were thirty years ago and my husband was alive and we were that age to enjoy that kind of ordinary week, too. And, to wish, above all, Jon, that you and your friend have the most wonderful, ordinary, and enjoyable trip to New York ever. Do not fail to go to the Carnegie Deli and have a bowl of matzah ball soup and a corned beef sandwich. Sometimes I recommend the whole matzah - but, for my gay friends, the 'ball ' is enough! Love and knishes.
