Can We Forgive You? Meditations on an anti-LGBTQ+ nation’s past & present

Though I have contemplated writing this for many years, I have continually put it off because it represents thoughts and feelings I never really wanted to make visible. I believed that if I relegated them to the recesses of my consciousness, over time they would simply evaporate, sparing me the task of putting pen to paper (or more appropriately, keystrokes to computer screen).

But no matter how hard I have tried to let go of the pain and hurt, these thoughts and feelings nonetheless resurface. Maybe now if I write them down, I can let go.

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It began for me back in 1987 when I first learned that one of my favorite writers and personalities had died in France at the relatively young age of 63. James Baldwin, essayist, novelist, poet, playwright, activist, hero to many including myself, expatriated to France where he lived much of his later life.

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He was attracted to the cultural and political progressivism of the Left Bank, where he could escape the pressures of Jim Crow racism and the enormity of heterosexism in the United States, and where his creative energy could soar. His numerous works directly tackled issues of race, sexuality, and socioeconomic class with unflinching and inescapable honesty, and with a clear indictment of the corrupt systems of power that dominated his native land.

Reading and listening to multiple obituaries on the day Baldwin died, I distinctly remember a particular reporter recounting an anecdote in Baldwin’s life that has stayed with me and has given me permission to feel my own similar feelings ever since.

Sometime in Baldwin’s life, a white news reporter apparently asked him the question, “What do Negros want from white people?”

Without hesitation, Baldwin responded, “You ask the wrong question, which should not be what we want from you, but rather, the question should be, ‘Can we forgive you?’”

I clearly understand that the ways people of color experience racism are very different from the ways queer people experience heterosexism and cissexism. Nonetheless, Baldwin’s rejoinder to the white reporter hit me like a pitcher of ice water in the face, waking me and releasing the anger I had attempted to stuff inside when I was growing up during the late 1940s through 1960s as a differently-gendered young person residing in a hostile country.

So many questions gushed forth from me, all inspired by Baldwin, questions in which the term “you” refers to systems of power, domination, and privilege.

Can we forgive you, the psychiatric profession, for the atrocities, the colonization, the “professional” malpractice, the defining, the so-called theories of causation, the biological and psychological pathologizing of sexual and gender transgressive people, and the attempts to change us that you have perpetrated over the preceding centuries in the name of “science”?

Can we forgive you for the so-called “Eugenics Movement” of the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth, and still continuing today in some circles within the medical and psychological professions, proposing and addressing, in starkly medical terms, our alleged “deficiencies,” “deviancies,” “abnormalities,” and “mental disorders”?

Can we forgive you for the mid-last century involuntary hospitalizations, the electroshock therapy “treatments,” and, yes, the lobotomies?

Can we forgive you, the religious institutions, for defining us as “inherently disordered,” as “contrary to God’s will,” as “sinners,” as “perverts,” as “heretics,” as “Godless,” as “deceived” and “depraved,” as a “corrupting force on civilization and on the family,” as “contrary to the laws of nature,” and for saying that our relationships “will tear down the very fabric of society”?

Can we forgive you for your abusive “religious counseling” and “conversion therapies” to remove us from the so-called “evil gay lifestyle”? Can we forgive you for your bogus and dangerous “reparative therapy”? Can we forgive you for the defrocking, ex-communications, purging, and banishments? Can we forgive you for turning our loved ones against us and for making us internalize your lies?

Can we forgive you for firing us from government service, from the private sector workforce, from the teaching professions, from preventing us from serving as foster and adoptive parents and from having contact with young people over your stereotyped fears of our alleged “predatory nature” and “agendas” to “recruit” young people into our “deviant lifestyles”?

Can we forgive you, law enforcement, for tapping our phones, for the entrapment, surveillance, incarceration, the ruined careers and reputations, and the social rejection?

Can we forgive you for refusing to rent or sell us housing in your neighborhoods or for evicting us once your “suspicions” were raised over who we are, often resulting in our ghettoization and segregation?

Can we forgive you for denying us service in your businesses, for restricting our access to loved ones in hospitals and nursing homes, for stopping us from attending funerals and receiving inheritances from our life partners, basically for limiting us from all the benefits and responsibilities our heterosexual counterparts have been routinely accorded?

Can we forgive you for denying us our history, our literature, our historical personalities, our voices, our subjectivity and our agency in the schools and in larger society, for keeping our collective past from us and making us believe that we have been and continue to be alone?

Can we forgive you for the school bullying and harassment, the threats, the intimidation, the social isolation, the violence, the injuries and mutilations, the many many murders, the suicides caused by our internalizing your negative representations of us, the family rejections and abandonment, and the qualified, conditional, circumscribed, and withheld love?

Can we forgive you, nations throughout the world, for your utter neglect and lack of compassion at the outbreak of the HIV/AIDS pandemic due to your misguided insinuation that “it was just a bunch of f****ts” affected? Can we forgive you for the grief we experienced attending so many funerals in part caused by your inaction?

Can we forgive you for quarantining us to second-class citizenship status by banning us from serving in the military because of your superstitions of our supposed “predatory nature in bunks and showers,” your concerns that we will “crumble under the pressure of combat,” and your apprehensions over whether we will place ourselves in compromising situations where we will be forced to divulge critical defense secrets to foreign governments?

Can we forgive you, the political operatives, who used and continue to use our bodies as stepping stones for your ascension to power by scapegoating us as the cause of the problems that plague our nation?

Can we forgive you for accusing us of “playing the victim” whenever we challenged the ways you treated us, as some may be doing right now?

I will tell you directly that I am playing at nothing and that I am no victim. I am resilient. I am one of the survivors who has spent a lifetime working to relegate your treatment of us to the trash heaps of history and to turn your denial into conscious action.

I realize that since 2015, the Supreme Court has “allowed” same-sex couples to marry. I realize that a number of religious organizations have at least begun to “accept” us into their congregations, and some are performing ceremonies for same-sex couples.

I realize that the U.S. government has reversed its ban on gay, lesbian, and bisexual people openly entering the military (though trans service members are still often banned), and now provides some of the rights granted to heterosexual couples to same-sex couples as well. I also realize that our media and larger social visibility has increased and that many good people have come to our aid and have provided continued and welcomed support.

But for many others, how dare you “tolerate” or even “accept” us? “Acceptance” implies there is something to accept, as if a superior being deigned to regard an inferior being. This feels extremely condescending and patronizing. It seems very nobless oblige.  

I understand that we as a society have come a long way even from the time I was a young person, and we still have far to travel. What can never be forgotten, however, is that as racism is white people’s (my) problem and obligation to eliminate, heterosexism is a heterosexual problem, and cissexism is a cisgender problem.

The dominant group has the responsibility to dismantle the forms of oppression that bestow upon itself the multiple arrays of unearned privileges not accorded to those outside, who are often viewed as the “other.”

The poignant words of U.S. professional basketball coach, Doc Rivers, also recently came to mind. After the killing of a Black man, Jacob Blake, by Kenosha, Wisconsin police officers on August 23, 2020, Rivers gave an emotional press conference.

He teared up and said, “We keep loving this country and this country doesn’t love us back.”

I too keep loving this country. One day, maybe, I can truly and fully forgive you, but I can never forget.