Gumption (18 page)

Thus, I realized that my woodshop is my garden. It is there that I am a member of a fellowship; our dusty gang of studious woodworkers work together and separately to achieve a robust harvest year in and year out. Even there I am more than half absentee, but I remain in correspondence as though they were my lifeline, because they are. Answering a question about glue choice or spline placement from
afar can feed me for days. I actively pursue a continuous fidelity with my woodworkers because together we make a life of craft, in which we take raw wood and transform it into beautiful and useful implements. Chairs, ukuleles, baseball bats, canoes. I feel like what gets done at Offerman Woodshop can be considered a type of good work. I also plant my flowers in my writing and in my work as an actor, and I love to see those efforts blossom. Although, I must confess that I will always nurture a fantasy of setting up shop on a little farm one day and raising the finest bacon in the county, with a healthy crop of garlic, just like my dad’s.

Mr. Berry has written a great many poems, some of which call us to action with lines like “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts,” and some of which call to mind the beauty of a riverbank with its attendant leaves and birds and insects and sky and breeze, but the one I will share with you is not of that stripe. It is Wendell Berry telling the magnificent truth as only he can:

A WARNING TO MY READERS

Do not think me gentle

because I speak in praise

of gentleness, or elegant

because I honor the grace

that keeps this world. I am

a man crude as any,

gross of speech, intolerant,

stubborn, angry, full

of fits and furies. That I

may have spoken well

at times, is not natural.

A wonder is what it is.

He is eloquent, he is beautiful, and he is funny as shit. I have left out so much. There is a cornucopia of beauty and joy and mirth and tragedy and romance and charm and nature and humanity to be found in his writing. There is a bumper crop of common sense. Perhaps his greatest talent is to be found in his proclivity for telling it like it is.

As our conversation waned around the Berrys’ kitchen table, Mr. Berry said, “Well, you wanna see my barn? I’ll show you my barn.”

I replied, “Boy, I won’t turn down that invitation. But then get me out of your hair. I don’t want to overstay my welcome.”

He said, “All right. Well, when we get back in, you can leave.”

Then we giggled.

BARNEY FRANK

I
love you. You love me. We’re a happy family.” Would that these words were describing the slogan of our nation’s population. Despite my infrequent indulgence in television, not to mention my adult age, these are the words that come to mind when I hear the name Barney, as they are the theme song from a children’s television show that was so ubiquitous in the 1990s that it jumps to the fore of any associations. I also think of Barney Fife and Barney Rubble, two characters who brought me a great deal of enjoyment in my younger years, with their supporting sidekick hijinks on
The Andy Griffith Show
and
The Flintstones
, respectively.

As my adult attention, however, has been drawn (slightly) away from cartoons and ever increasingly toward the real world in which we live, a new Barney has emerged to capture my notice with his actions of a decidedly more protagonist nature. Barney Frank, an American Democrat from Massachusetts’s fourth district who served in the US House of Representatives for thirty-two years (1981–2013), is considered to be our country’s most prominent gay politician. As a
reputation, “most famous gay politician” could be seen as a substantial bit of gossipy click-bait; really quite an attention grabber, but the charismatic thing about this redoubtable fellow is that his accomplishments speak much more loudly than his sexual orientation.

His record shows that he has been a legislator in the truest sense of the word. From the moment he arrived on the political scene in Boston in the early 1970s, he has been advocating for those positions he deemed in need of his attentions, not to mention his bulldog-like tenacity and his well-sharpened wit. Although he remained closeted about his own sexuality until 1987, Mr. Frank introduced Massachusetts’s first two gay rights bills in 1973.

In May of 1980, Barney Frank won his first congressional election, gaining the seat abandoned by Father Robert Drinan when Pope John Paul II issued an order for all priests to step down from political office. Said Barney Frank, “The irony was pretty clear. I think I said at the time that apparently [papal] infallibility doesn’t extend to picking members of Congress. And I’ve since asked people who know something about me to name the unlikeliest person in the whole world who would have wanted to make me a congressman, and very few of them get it.”

Although he was still years away from coming out publicly, Mr. Frank was asked by a local LGBT rights organization if he would support a bill for gay rights, to which he said yes. Little did he suspect that he would be the solitary signee, and so he became, in one fell swoop, the instant leader of the movement for gay rights in Massachusetts and then the nation. Thank you, Holy Father.

Since then, he has remained one of the nation’s leading proponents
of LGBT rights. In case you are not familiar with that initialism, it stands for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender
.
”

Please allow me to begin this particular conversation with a warning; not to you, but to myself: I would like to caution myself against becoming too emotional in my writing about discrimination against homosexuals. Something I discussed with Mr. Frank was the increasing ineffectuality of impassioned partisanship, or more simply put: shouting. In past writing, I have expressed some opinions in an emotional fashion that, while honest, I now feel to be less than the ideal volume at which to communicate if I wish the reader to remain fully open to my ideas. I have been warned. To you, dear reader, I would issue only an entreaty: Regardless of your politics, your religion, or your shoe size, please consider these following thoughts with an open mind.

Let’s take a moment to examine the trait of homosexuality. I think “trait” is acceptable? A condition born of nature, like hair color or height? There’s a lot of well-earned prickliness around the terminology of gay culture, since it has become such a hotly contested topic. For example, “sexual preference” is a serious no-no, since one of the ignorant claims made by the ignorant is that homosexuality is a choice rather than a natural-born state of being. It is this misconception that causes Christian organizations to suggest that homosexuals should be able to “pray the gay away,” as though it was as impermanent and superficial a condition as dandruff or a sunburn, or at worst an addiction or sickness, like alcoholism. In truth, they might just as well encourage their congregants to pray away their blood types or perhaps their eye color. The cruelty of this attempted brainwashing,
especially in children, is yet another factor of this conversation that makes my blood boil. Again, these groups of vicious people who profess to follow the teachings of Christ, who embarrass themselves in the arena of mercy by afflicting their followers with guilt and denial rather than embracing them, are shameful and abhorrent.

“Gay-free” churches may be the biggest asswipes under the banner of heaven (oops, there I go), but at least they are not engaging in the far more brutal discriminations that have plagued homosexuals throughout history.

It’s no wonder that Barney Frank remained in the closet as he rose to prominence in his career. The America in which he lived instructed him to do just that if he hoped to advance without being unfairly persecuted because of the flavor of person he desired to kiss. For Hollywood actors and actresses, politicians, and, to some extent, professional athletes—all performers of different stripes who depend upon the approbation, adulation, or at least approval of the masses to retain any semblance of job security—the specter of open homosexuality and its concomitant disapproval presents far too great a risk.

As Mr. Frank said to me of discriminatory behavior, “I think that there are some people who genuinely don’t realize that it’s offensive. There are some who are just bigots who want to offend, but . . . there are some people who have been brought up this way, and they have not fully thought about the fact that it’s very, very insulting.” Here’s the thing, team: No matter what you have been raised to believe about anyone with a sexual orientation other than heterosexual, the simple fact is that being gay is as inbred to the human being as is his or her back hair.

The only folks who seem to disagree with that statement are some sects of Christianity, who are basing their opinions upon a few Bible verses that reference sodomy. Islam also considers homosexuality a crime against Allah, but I feel like the vitriol toward same-sex marriage in this country is rather monopolized by self-professed Christians. I’m unaware of a prominent Amercian politician who is Muslim making anywhere near as much illogical noise as the likes of outspoken Republican and Tea Party politicians Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, and Tom DeLay, who said in a 2014 interview, “I think we got off the track when we allowed our government to become a secular government. When we stopped realizing that God created this nation, that he wrote the Constitution, that it’s based on biblical principles.”

Now, you see, if I hadn’t given myself that careful warning earlier, it’s language like what Mr. DeLay said right there that would cause me to become very emotional. Even now, I can feel my knickers threatening to get themselves into a twist, but instead, I will endeavor to emulate that great practitioner of common sense, Wendell Berry. In his essay “Caught in the Middle,” he describes the way in which all creatures can be considered of a kind, or kin; all members of one family, as we surely are. He tells us, “Much happiness, much joy, can come to us from our membership in a kindness so comprehensive and original. It is a shame, as I know from long acquaintance with myself, to be divided from it by the autoerotic pleasure of despising other members.”

This is a very important human truth to recognize: It feels good to despise those who are different from us. It is precisely this aspect of human nature that I am trying to arrest in myself so that I may look past our differences in such policies to focus upon what it is we all
share
as Americans. Sentiments like that of Mr. DeLay, and those in agreement with his ilk when it comes to opposing same-sex marriage in our country, are flatly dehumanizing to any citizens who wish to live within a marriage and who happen to be other than heterosexual.

The sad thing is, at their core, religious writings like the Bible are founded upon beautiful wisdom and guidance for how we might live in kindness, but when such verses are appropriated by humans like DeLay to support more petty and hateful means, the original intent is not only lost, it’s completely desecrated.

Mr. Frank said this to me, of religious texts: “It’s very lovely what they’re talking about. Sadly, an awful lot of people think [they’re] a great stick to hit other people with and use as a weapon rather than a way to embrace people.” He makes my point, and Mr. Berry’s point, beautifully. Aren’t Christians supposed to embrace people? “Love thy neighbor as thyself”? I have never witnessed as much vitriol and seething hatred in public politicking as that issuing forth from these particular Christians in regard to such issues with their “neighbors.”

When Mr. DeLay, a prominent former congressperson from Texas, made that statement, he urinated on both the Bible and the Constitution. Our nation is the greatest nation on earth for exactly the opposite reason of his speech. The Constitution
protects
us from such a silly idea, so that wherever you come down on the subject of the Bible or any other religion, you will be treated with an equal amount of fairness as the next citizen. His statement is patently anti-American, as well as patently unholy. The last time I checked, the Bible was not concerned with limiting its benevolence with respect to the borders of
any
nation, including ours. This sort of absurd rhetoric
strikes me as having strong similarities to the communist paranoia of McCarthyism, and the hysteria of the Salem witch trials. His stance would be laughable, if it weren’t for the fact that people like him are being elected to political offices of the highest importance, where they can encourage the perseverance of discrimination.

Back to the good guy. Besides his triumphs in equal rights and financial reform (from 2007 to 2011, he also served as chairman to the House Committee on Financial Services, where he was instrumental in cosponsoring the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010), Barney Frank has also been a great champion of civil rights throughout his sixteen terms in Congress. His ability to garner deals that cross party lines has been admirable, considering the virulent bipartisanship ruling our current White House. He said that the members of Congress can be openly duplicitous depending upon when the timing of any proposed initiative relates to the timing of their primaries.

I had one moderate Republican; I asked him to support us on the question of protecting transgendered people against discrimination, and he said to me, “Well, if it comes up after my primary, I can probably vote with you, but if it comes up before that, I have to vote against you.”

This sense of being seen by one’s constituents as strictly Democrat or Republican is an issue that has really begun to stick in my own craw. As Barney Frank tells it, “Twenty years ago, people had a common set of facts that they read. . . . They got their information generally from newspapers and broadcasts. Now the activists, left and right, live in parallel universes, which are both separate, and echo chambers for each.”

This juxtaposition has occurred to me in recent years, as I have begun to feel like our politics are yet another area in which we are being trained to blindly consume the messaging that we’re being fed, either by the “liberal” channels of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, MSNBC and
The Huffington Post
, or conversely by the Fox News/Rush Limbaugh side of any debate. Regardless of our red- or blue-team membership, we all rather lazily follow along with what we are told to hate about the policies of the opposing side. This leaves no middle ground, which, it seems to me, is where most of life actually resides.

Because of the black-or-white commodification of our votes, candidates are no longer allowed to say, “Hey, let’s stop and examine this issue” from any perspective but the far left or right. I am a great fan of the humorous news programs like John Oliver’s and Colbert’s, but Barney Frank makes a good point when he notices that their messaging is almost exclusively negative. Funny, yes; poignant, yes; true, yes; but is it helping us toward any progress?

There is a difference in kindness, certainly, a most substantial difference, between your John Oliver and your Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh: The difference is that Oliver has it. When Oliver gets loud, he does so to condemn a person’s or organization’s
actions.
Also, his is a comedy show, including self-deprecation, lending the silly presentation a softening quality from the get-go, which I think makes a big distinction from the right wingers who are flatly mean and vicious without humor. They are so severe about “saving our country” that their rants remind one of nothing so much as an angry child throwing a tantrum, which is often hilarious to the grown-ups around them, although we must contain our mirth lest we exacerbate their tiny
tempests. Bill O’Reilly proves with ever-increasing desperation that when you take yourself that seriously, you are perceived as a joke.