In the Life: Ep. 1309, "Social Engineering"

tonight on in the life's 12th annual pride special social engineering with political science we weren't sick we would say that and they'd say that's your sickness talking a threat to national security this moral decay weakens our resistance 25 years of quiet insurgency a coming out process for a parent is sometimes more difficult than the coming out process for a child the fall of a sacred class and of course harvey in the life is funded in part by the h penn american foundation additional support provided by the ford foundation the pride foundation the gill foundation the ted snowden foundation the collingwood foundation the otto haas charitable trust number two the reed williams foundation alan l mittelsdorf jim stepp and peter zimmer and the annual support of in the life members like you welcome to in the life i'm cherry jones on tonight's pride special america's gay and lesbian news magazine confronts social engineering over the past year america's courts have struck down sodomy laws and upheld the marriage rights of same-sex couples the president embarked on a campaign to add an anti-gay marriage amendment to the constitution and a groundswell of localities launched marriage license revolts in support of gay americans the issue of lgbt rights has made it out of the closet and firmly into the light of public debate but tonight in the life investigates the still shadowy subtext of the now 140 year old culture war over the lives of lgbt americans still obscured in a strange marriage of science and politics value judgments caught and camouflage in the language of science at work in the aftermath of colonization instead of being considered special and neither they're considered strange and different and smuggled into the pursuit of national security this is a policy that leads us to fire badly needed arabic language translators in the middle of a war on terrorism a long and clandestine legacy of social engineering lives on technically homosexuals didn't exist until the late 1800s though acts of same-sex love had been acknowledged and dubbed sins in the western lexicon the recognition of a gay identity didn't dawn until the earliest sexologists began publishing only a hundred and forty years ago starting in germany in 1864 with carl ulrichs before carl ulrich's of course homosexuality was against the law carl ulrichs was arguing that those laws should not exist because it wasn't a matter of sin it was rather because that person was born into the third sex however the sexologist's perspectives on homosexuality varied wildly but regardless of their perspective or terminology the sexologists did agree that homosexuality was innate and their work medicalized it moving same-sex love from the arenas of sin and crime into the realm of science and that budding science quickly became a battlefield many homosexuals decided that this was certainly preferable to being called a sinner or a criminal it's your fault if you're a sinner but if you're born that way you can't be accused of criminality or sin it was the beginning of a kind of politicalization for sexual inverts that is they were a group and they could begin to demand their rights it was not long after that that the german doctor magnus hirschfeld founded the scientific humanitarian committee which was guided by the motto through science to justice the early sexologists believed that homosexuality was a matter of nature freud and the freudians believed that homosexuality was a matter of nurture he said that normal people develop heterosexual interests people who become homosexuals are fixated in an earlier form of sexuality because of some trauma that has occurred but not everyone agreed unknown scientist alfred kinsey both expanded freud's notion of innate bisexuality and challenged his concepts of fixed adult orientation we came up with this kinsey scale that said that you didn't just have homosexuals and heterosexuals but you had a broad range that went from kinsey zero pure heterosexuality to kinsey six pure homosexuality with five gradations in between but kinsey's work was largely ignored by the fledgling psychiatric establishment and in 1952 homosexuality was classified a mental disorder in the american psychiatric association's inaugural diagnostic and statistical manual or dsm in fact even freud's own writings couldn't dissuade the freudians from taking the young science in a new direction he didn't believe that it was possible to make a heterosexual out of a homosexual and psychotherapists who were so influenced by freud didn't really listen to what their mentor said and they started by the 1950s a huge industry in trying to cure homosexuals the war was over the country craved normalcy and with no scientific basis homosexuals were painted as pedophiles and a danger to the sanctity of american culture what jimmy didn't know was that ralph was sick a sickness that was not visible like smallpox but no less dangerous and contagious a sickness of the mind you see ralph was a homosexual that has wanted to make homosexuals into normal heterosexuals that probably explains in in good part why the medical profession uh suddenly became political in that way the fundamental framework is forged within the family setting in 1962 dr irving bieber one of freud's most controversial followers published the book homosexuality arguing that homosexuality in men was caused by an abnormal parent-child relationship many believed his study to be flawed the authors of the study began with the belief that homosexuality is a form of psychopathology they weren't questioning whether or not homosexuality is an illness i want you to imagine that you are in a room with x in fact with the apa's new sickness branding psychiatrists developed a whole range of new treatments for homosexuality a homosexual would be shown a picture of an attractive person of the same sex and he or she would be given a shock then shown a picture of an attractive person of the opposite sex there would be no shock and it got worse from hormone injections and lobotomies to castrations hysterectomies and forced incarceration in mental institutions really insane attempts to to convert people to a different sexuality we saw ourselves as diminished creatures but our only hope for any kind of happiness would be to present ourselves uh to a therapist and undergo prolonged treatment as a result like countless others arthur martin duberman underwent nearly a decade of psychotherapy i definitely believe that if i stopped having sex and if i went to therapy five times a week uh and worked very hard at transformation yes i could become a practicing heterosexual there are lots of scars from that kind of mistreatment which is what we now know it was that never go away but others refuse to be labeled sick how do you organize people who aren't visible to do something about their problems and that was the main thing we had to work on at first then it became clear that we had to start going after the the people in the mental health professions on the sickness issue in the early 60s another pioneering voice joined activist barbara giddings in calling for change you had a whole establishment that had to be changed and reversed and in order to get them to do that you had to use political tactics frank came along with a very uh a clear vision in his mind of what we needed to do a scientist by training frank kameny scrutinized the studies that had been used to declare homosexuality a mental illness i found shabby saudi slips sleazy pseudoscience masquerading as science case in point that study by dr bieber quote or psychoanalytic theory assumes that homosexuality is psychopathological unquote nobody in the field challenged bieber's basic assumption moral cultural theological and social value judgments quote and camouflage in the language of science without any uh of the factual basis for science they would say you're sick you don't deserve to have these rights you're unstable and we would say no we're not sick we knew inside ourselves that we weren't sick we would say that and they'd say that's your sickness talking overcoming such dismissal would require a herculean effort that mixed politics and science the science that homosexuality was not an illness was much better than the science that said it was the kinsey report from a scientific perspective was probably the most important first strike at the psychiatric theory of homosexuality is illness the final nail in the coffin was evelyn hooker's study which was published in 1957 straight psychiatrist dr evelyn hooker was the first to study homosexuality in the general population as opposed to those in treatment or in prison she took the test results and she gave them to expert readers of projective tests but she did not tell the readers of the test who were the homosexual subjects and who were the heterosexual subjects and the readers could not find any difference between uh the heterosexuals and homosexuals which was really totally in opposition to everything that psychiatry in the 1950s was saying homosexuality is in fact a mental illness which has reached epidemiological proportions dr charles sacharides has long lobbied for helping homosexuals to become straight he's not considering the issue of how frequently that can happen and how often homosexuals who try to change and are unsuccessful and disappointed can be harmed in the early 70s gay rights activists began protesting the apa's annual conventions the result in 1971 the apa permitted frank cameney to organize a panel discussion on homosexuality this was the first time that the profession had ever admitted that there might be gays who were not in therapy and didn't have any need for it meaning the three gay activist groups who stormed the panel the doors burst open and all these people came in and the elderly psychiatrist proceeded to beat them over their heads with their gold medals and pushed them back out the door we took the microphone and took turns trying to say that this was not good science this was prejudice this was homophobia and we weren't going to put up with it anymore and it worked a panel discussion was planned for the apa 72 convention and it became a major turning point two of the four panelists frank and barbara kaye my partner said you know this isn't right she said you have two psychiatrists on one side and two gay people who aren't psychiatrists on the other side and what you really need is someone who is both gay and a psychiatrist and they found exactly one who was willing to talk dr h anonymous who because of the stigma would not reveal his true identity as dr john fryer until 22 years later and there he was with this fright mask and a fright wig and a voice distorting microphone he really rocked the audience telling what it was like to be a closeted gay in a profession to be unable to be honest with his own colleagues he had an enormous impact on the organization in terms of how they came to understand the implications of the diagnostic system that they were using the culminating moment would come in 1973 when the apa met to determine whether homosexuality should be removed from its diagnostic and statistical manual a very outspoken gay activist named ron gold gave a talk called stop it you're making me sick my illness at least in part was a direct result of the crimes perpetrated on me by a hostile society you have been willing accomplices in such crimes ron gold delivered his speech to an audience of 3 000 psychiatrists one of whom was dr robert spitzer an apa member who then authored the resolution to remove homosexuality from the dsm and we went to his his a hotel room and we wrote this resolution which turned out to be the thing that that changed the world on december 15 1973 the apa board accepted spitzer's proposal and finally issued this statement homosexuals should be given all protections now guaranteed other citizens this albatross that had been around our neck for decades and decades was finally lifted we were working for rights and for a full first-class citizenship in our society and we were never going to get it as long as their ideas prevailed 1973 was i think one of the most graphic examples of the way science and politics come together all the time but the controversy was not resolved for example dr sacharides has since written that the apa decision was a purely political move instigated by gays who strong-armed his profession and actually hurt homosexuals saccharides remains a proponent of what is now called conversion therapy if you're gay or lesbian and don't want to be there's hope for change many have left the lifestyle you can too well the american psychiatric association has taken a position that ethical practitioners should refrain from doing sexual conversion therapies in part because there isn't any good science about how they work zacharides believes differently as does north the organization he founded among its members richard cohen the possibility of changing from homosexual dead or sexual exists an ex-gay cohen says he's been there today he runs his own organization for treating homosexuals i think the apas have done a tremendous disservice to science and to the homosexual community by taking out the diagnosis the problem is of course is that the mental health professions psychiatry psychology social work none of them consider homosexuality to be a mental disorder so if there are doctors who are treating homosexuality as if it were a mental disorder they're all practicing outside the mainstream in the life contacted several groups within the ex-gay movement as well as other organizations who believe gays and lesbians can change groups like the traditional values coalition the family research council new hope ministries the center for reclaiming america and dr charles sacharide's most did not return our calls all refused on-camera interviews in the middle of any scientific conversation about what are facts and what are not facts are numerous gaps in our knowledge there may be no one who knows that better than dr spitzer i was the big hero of the gay movement in 1973 and i certainly didn't become the hero of the gay movement with this study three years ago spitzer published his findings from a series of telephone interviews he conducted with 200 ex-gays you could even argue that my study has hurt more people than it's helped based on the interviews he found that quote there is evidence that change in sexual orientation following some form of reparative therapy does occur in some gay men and lesbians the gay establishment and the christian right you know had different views of the study from their own political viewpoint given spitzer's history ex-gay organizations quickly picked up on the results and according to spitzer often misrepresented them i guess everybody wants to spin it their own particular way and they're more comfortable with taking extreme positions than in looking at the the actual study a few people seem to have been able to make some shift not that they change from being homosexual to being heterosexual but that they added some heterosexual capabilities in addition to their original homosexual feelings what the headlines didn't mention was that spitzer's study had several major limitations among them his interview subjects were all chosen from ex-gay ministries and north it was not a study of how often this occurs because we didn't study people who went into therapy and then followed them my own sense is that it's probably a pretty rare occurrence dr spitzer was also quote appalled at how much the media oversimplified the study with lines like a controversial u.s study suggests that gay people can become heterosexual if they really want to that's really just absurd there's nothing in the study that indicates that this is true it's just this is just made up the spitzer study has been really a central issue in the culture wars it's actually one of the most perfect examples of how science gets caught up in political battles and those battles continue as people with so-called gender identity disorder petition the apa to stop calling it an illness while the diagnosis is necessary for some who need insurance to pay for sex reassignment surgery others say it improperly categorizes them as sick at the moment they're being intransigent just as they were with uh with homosexuality the idea they know better than us and we think this is a sign of they have a disorder called gender pathophilia which is the neater desire to pathologize behave gender behavior that makes you feel uncomfortable dr drescher says the apa is not considering removing gid as a diagnosis but is looking at making the definition more specific he also points out that psychiatry is a fluid science filled with individual human interpretation there was disagreement within the gay rights movement about this tactic of bellying right up to the bar of the psychiatrist many gay people felt oh they won't listen to us we don't have the credentials we have to wait for the people with the appropriate training and expertise to do the studies that show that we are are okay and normal and then to get this information out to the unbelieving public and to persuade them to change their minds and a lot of us in the movement said no we're tired of waiting it will never happen if we wait for that or it will be beyond our lifetimes we want to do something now we cannot wait on may 14 1897 the german dr magnus hirschfeld founded the scientific humanitarian committee the group fought for homosexual civil rights by seeking to overturn paragraph 175 the german law that declared male homosexuality a criminal act today we recognize dr hirschfeld's committee as perhaps the world's first gay rights organization i'm andre de shields and you're watching in the life with colonization the western world's particular brand of social engineering spread across the globe the victorian penal code for example exported draconian sodomy laws to countries throughout the empire including india where neither hindus nor muslims had ever before criminalized homosexuality and in the aftermath of this imposed socialization a one sacred class now live their lives as pariah in tonight's reel to real the filmmakers take in the life behind the scenes of have existed in india for thousands of years ahidra is actually a hindi word for neither male nor female and that has been used to describe the eunuchs of india we met a group of hidras who said that they would work with us and tell us their stories neither of us had a background in film what we thought was going to be sort of a three-month art project and just kept becoming bigger than ourselves and we hired an indian camera crew and and took on making a documentary if you speak to people's grandparents they usually say oh yes i remember when the hedgerows used to come when there was a wedding or there was a birth and and we welcomed them and if you speak to someone's grandchild that same person would say oh i give you know i give them money just to make them go away traditionally they were believed to be closer to god because they were neither male nor female people believe that they have the power to bless or curse and so when they would invite them to weddings and the birth of children and they would give them money to sing and dance and perform and think that by doing that that their child would be safe or lead a good life and now with western ideas about gender coming into indian culture they've sort of been reduced to the materiality of their bodies so instead of being considered special and neither they're considered strange and different modern hydras they're no longer imbued with power that they used to have and yet they still have the need to be within their own communities they still gravitate toward each other they still create kinship structures outside of their their family structures they're actually these different houses within bombay with different lead hijras and then sort of these lead mothers will adopt daughters and they're accountable for their well-being and they take care of them and in return the daughters often give some of their earnings to the mother they're neither upper nor lower class or cast they're neither in many many ways they actually leave whatever the community they're from and often leave whatever religion they're from to join the hidros and it's not actually necessarily that they go down they go into another community in today's society people are believing less and less in their power to bless our curse and so the eunuchs have been pushed into begging and prostitution in order to survive traditionally hatreds were supposed to be sexually abstinent foreign it was a very intense um realization for for us how much misinformation there is about aids and hiv maintain we have a scene in the film where you know baby dancing on the train and she's just you know having the best time and everyone's clapping and it was wild i mean people just got so excited about her on the train and they started singing and and clapping and that would never happen you know a traditional indian woman is not going to get up and start you know shaking her booty you know on the train with a bunch of guys so certainly a lot of the hijras are are sexualized in that way i think what we realized through the film that ultimately this family that we worked with were transgendered people that they really identified as women they wanted to be women there is a place for a third identity and therefore they they took up that place and it makes it very difficult to say you know if you were to take these people and put them in the west they'd be this or they'd be that i think in india it's assumed that each person each individual has to live out their duty to the best of their abilities that's dharma your dharma and i think for hidras they realize that that is their dharma to be the best eunuch they can be and that if they you know if they do that then they will have perfectly fulfilled this life it's very reaffirming i think to see how these people will give up everything for this gender sexual identity and what we tried to bring to the film was just a tremendous amount of intellectual integrity in terms of what it means for us as outsiders looking into their lives and really what it means to be a person is different i'm elon harris and you're watching in the life still to come on in the life a national security violation gays and lesbians can serve honorably can serve loyally and can do so without undermining national security challenging stealth politics all we knew was what we had heard from the pulpit and in the southern baptist church that's not a very positive thing and taking on socialization within the community we cannot count on heterosexual textbooks and classrooms and parents to help our children when joseph mccarthy took on the communist menace in the 1950s he tossed in a second identifier of unamericanism homosexuality in fact the two basically became synonymous echoing in refrains like pinko kami [ __ ] the lack of logic in that equation was completely obscured by a national fervor for the eradication of anything that could be painted red simultaneously in communist regimes like cuba homosexuality was considered the sure sign of a capitalist today 50 years later the tradition of framing queerness as a threat to national security continues there's a sad theme in american history of conflating national security enemies with uh sexual deviance they constantly portray abnormal sexual behavior as being normal this moral decay weakens our resistance to the onslaught of the communist masters of deceit in world war ii gays and lesbians were fired because they were imagined to be mentally ill then in the mccarthy era gays and lesbians were fired because they were imagined to pose a security risk then in the 60s the proponents of discrimination said gays and lesbians were more prone to alcoholism now the military says that gays and lesbians pose a threat to unit cohesion and that rationale just like the other rationales is not based on evidence the reason the military keeps coming up with different rationales is because they can't admit the real rationale for the policy is homophobia it was assumed that you can't have homosexuals it would degrade military readiness and compromise the privacy of straight members the law was written that prohibited somebody from admitting that they're gay so that the people who hate them so much won't be upset retired rear admiral alan steinman is the highest-ranking military person to come out to date for those you know 25 years or so when i was on active duty i couldn't share my life with a loved one i couldn't have a family i couldn't do all those things that heterosexual americans take for granted i had to basically stay in the closet i actually went back in the closet to go into the military i understood don't ask don't tell to to mean that literally they can't ask you you don't tell and you're fine it's obviously wrong in the last two years the washington post just reported that the military has fired 37 translators many of those translators were arabic farsi and korean speakers those are the three languages identified as the axis of evil by the bush administration i was studying korean i was studying arabic i was there we did a lot better in class than i did but i was still in the in the top 15 percent of my class he was about to leave to go to his next training station we just kind of thought well you know we just have this big inspection there's not going to be any threat of anybody going through our rooms tonight you know why don't we just spend the night together and we're eight and a half months into this relationship and we've never slept the night in the same room together that night they went through it's called the uh it's barracks check so as a result i got a full room inspection which turned up a number of personal photographs that we had all of the straight couples um who were caught and the gay couples who didn't have photographs they were given the 14 days restriction 14 days extra duty as were we but we also had an open investigation and as a result as we launched into the war on terror these two translators joined the more than 110 000 gay and lesbian soldiers discharged from the us armed forces since world war ii one can theorize that how nice it would have been to have some more arabic translators out there on the front line so we could communicate with the iraqi people and perhaps stop some of the misunderstanding that resulted in some of the violence and deaths this is a policy that is not based on evidence this is a policy that undermines national security that wastes money that leads us to fire badly needed arabic language translators in the middle of a war on terrorism i really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle the aclu people for the american way all of them who tried to secularize america i point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen what he was trying to do was to start another sex panic where people would again confuse the national security threat coming from outside the country with gays and lesbians inside the country continuing in the spirit of confusing queerness with hidden enemies a 2003 department of homeland security press release alerted law enforcement to consider males dressing as females potential terrorist suspects national security is an issue after 9 11. it is important to put in laws which protect the u.s population however you know those laws have to work detention is a good example that how these policies really failed sixteen hundred plus people who were detained and none of them actually were found to be a terrorist the conditions of lgbt people in detention centers is horrifying a gay man from indonesia uh in a detention center was harassed by detention guards they called him names they asked him to perform oral sex on him and he and he was actually raped by another inmate i would say the patriot act is a big red flag but i understand where it comes from and i understand where don't ask don't tell comes from that doesn't make him right i think it's real easy for the government to gently push a mentality of intolerance to any and everyone that they're afraid of unless we have the intelligence to recognize the traitors and then if i may use a word which we use in wisconsin unless we have the guts to name them we should be taken down from those watchtowers and should not be representing the american people the fact that gay generals and admirals are willing to come out of the closet tells the american public that gays and lesbians can serve honorably can serve loyally and can do so without undermining national security in my experience gay and lesbian americans are as every bit as patriotic as uh heterosexual americans and want to and are willing to serve their country the law of course prevents us from doing so this policy is um one of the major lines in the sand in the culture war i mean people who oppose gays and lesbians in the military don't oppose lifting the ban because they're worried about unit cohesion they oppose lifting the ban because they know that once gays and lesbians are allowed to serve openly in the military that that will open the door to a range of other gay rights pflag or parents and friends of lesbians and gays celebrates its 25th anniversary this year it began as a small support group for parents whose adult children had come out now families across the country have risen up to join what has become a social and political movement some two hundred thousand strong and in the process our parents have become one of the most potent antidotes to the veiled homophobia that still surrounds their kids the group was born out of a sense of moral outrage when one mother's son was attacked and beaten because he was gay furious that the crime was being ignored by the press she went into action i sat down and wrote a letter to the new york post the next day morty called me and said mom you can't imagine all the attention your letter has gotten people keep calling me and congratulating me that my my mother would announce in the newspaper that she had a great gay son that june morty asked gene to march with him in the gay pride parade gene agreed as long as she could carry a sign telling people why she was there as i walked along people started to yell and scream and i didn't know what it was all about but they kissed me and hugged me and asked me if i would speak to parents and what i call them and someone and i just discussed it as we walked and morty said we ought to get have a groups together to talk and set these people right at the same time amy ashworth was also grappling with the news that her son was gay it's such a distinct moment in my life when i realized what right the society have to call my son a [ __ ] and all these names and i was concerned about him would he be happy would he get the job and would he find somebody in 1973 gene amy and a handful of other parents of gay children began holding monthly meetings i was so overwhelmed by the stories of gay and lesbians who spoke every other month and um that they changed my whole opinion and i realized it was so wrong what society did and it was a question of human rights and i was so impressed with parents work and we called it pog and dick said after the first meeting amy that's a good group we should go back well most of the people came crying what did i do what didn't i do what was wrong with my fault in those days the issues had very much to do with harassment assault and in some cases death for sons and daughters as members of pog traveled around the country and met other parents the organization grew by the 80s there were sometimes we had 50 people i found the parents were the bridge between the two societies so the more people you talk too slowly people change their opinion i think the biggest thing is to get society to change and i think it slowly worked in 1981 pog became parents and friends of lesbian and gays or pflag and local chapters cropped up across the country challenging the organization to meet their specific needs when i walked into a meeting i was the only african-american person there in fact i was the only person of color and it was a huge meeting there were like at least 90 people in the room in the late 80s maple flag went to a meeting to seek guidance after finding out that her daughter was a lesbian they made me as welcome as they could be they you know they gave me phone numbers please call us that kind of thing but i i wasn't about to share so what i did was i sat i listened i took the literature and i left but i did know i had some work to do and i was set about doing it on my own it would take nearly a decade but with impetus building in her detroit community maple and fellow activist imani williams helped found pflag family reunion in 1999 a coming out process for a parent is sometimes more difficult than the coming out process for a child i have to figure out how i'm going to be viewed now from my community from my church from any civic groups that i'm i belong to all of those things are large weighing measures on on parents the black community is very very quiet about things nobody kind of wants to have the one person in their family that's going to rock the boat or it's going to stand out for the parent that's coming for the very first time they are coming from that black and white world they don't understand this is a rainbow issue inside this place all they know is that when they walk in here they want to see some familiarity so that they can feel at ease so they can open up and they can communicate we are particularly proud of pflag reunion they work tirelessly to develop resources for african-american families and because of their hard work we're able to provide a template of resources for families in other communities like newark the newark chapter that's a new branch and i see that as what we would like to see as the ideal because that chapter is already integrated pflag has proven adaptable to the needs of a wide variety of cultures racial religious and regional the rock family of muskogee oklahoma for example knows all too well the challenges of finding resources in rural places didn't really know anything about being gay all we knew was what we had heard from the pulpit and in the southern baptist church i'm native american i was raised up in the 60s whenever we weren't treated as good i knew what it meant to feel like when someone you know made fun of you and basically i was more worried about what he had to go through now and how his life had to be especially in oklahoma there's many many parents and young glbt people that they are so afraid for others to know that they are gay or have a son or daughter that is gay they're afraid of what their neighbors will say what their church will say what their jobs will say the first meeting there was me and joyce and then slowly it was two four six eight and we got to the point where we had to move to another building because we got people that were the building was too small i have about four or five different mothers that i correspond with and talk to in our community that they know their child is gay but i don't know if some of them will ever tell their spouse or their families the rock's very public advocacy combined with their son's newspaper editorials have made them easy targets these columns generated a lot of controversy there in the community lots of letters to the editor and uh they knew jimmy they knew us and so this generated the calls to us i think we've been called just about everything in letters to the editor but the rocks remain steadfast in their work incorporating education into local social events one of the things we do in muskogee we they have a chili cook-off it's one of the biggest things in the spring and there's probably anywhere from 15 to 20 000 people that come through this so we we got a group in there last year and we decided well you were for last we decided okay we're going to come out to muskogee we want them to know that pflag is here and that we're a part of the community yeah i had people come up to me and they would say i've seen your article in the paper and you know and i i don't i may not necessarily agree with you but i think you as a father that you know that's the right thing to do the rock's level of education and advocacy on behalf of their child has been phenomenal and has helped persuade families and communities that the real issues have to do with fundamental fairness so as native americans know as a family that comes from a place that is not um no urban or liberal they lead by example simply by loving their child without condition while the face of pflag has changed so has its mission still ultimately a support group pflag develops programs that tailor to each community's needs and has evolved to address the issues of parents whose children are coming out younger and younger you know people have to have someone to look down to to make themselves feel better no matter whether race religion sexuality whatever it is they've got to find some scapegoat i think i don't know what the future will be but i would hope that it would come to the where there was no difference and it never needed to be mentioned i think that p flag has come a long way and i think that we're headed in the right direction it's funny the other day i thought you know history really shaped your life and for me the history for gay and lesbian rights has shaped in a way you know which direction it went and i am so grateful for that equal rights mean equal rights across the board as far as we're concerned we were appalled that job job opportunities and job security were different for the gay and lesbian community that they could be fired because they were gay or lesbian okay that's unacceptable benefits social security inheritance adoption marriage being able to be with the one you love oh it all ties into the same thing which is an environment that exists that says it's okay to deny these things to the gay community to express your uh prejudice and bigotry and that's what needs to change it's going to be a period of time before it's totally accepted and not regarded as something new but it's going to happen it has to happen this is judy shepard and you're watching in the life and finally harvey challenges the socialization of his own community in bringing up babies there's some funny stuff in there i'm getting into it that's a long way back this is not another aids piece so please don't turn me off yet although why we don't want to talk about aids anymore it's a kind of interesting subject just not the subject this month still we got to start there last year as you may remember i did a piece on the growing number of new hiv infections the piece garnered enough interest that a pair of community-minded gents decided to organize a town meeting around the subject assembling professionals aids activists and the population in general to see if we could discover the causes fueling the resurgence of zero conversions many interesting things came out of that evening at our manhattan community center a discussion of the drug companies and their advertising practices the party scene of crystal meth use and its connection to new infections a feeling of disenfranchisement by our brothers of colors all topped off by the fears of our hiv-positive family that a new attack on the disease could somehow become a renewed attack on them personally all of these are subjects worthy of discussion but the younger members of our assembled mention one subject time and again and it's their concerns i'd like to mention to you it seems that our gay lesbian bisexual and transgender youth feels out of the community loop when it comes to aids in particular they said that they don't know what we're talking about one young man put it this way we've seen movies like philadelphia but we've never seen anyone die like that aids in these young people's minds is a virus that you get and get treated for and not one of them seemed to know a person who was ill why is this so dangerous well if you don't think aids is going to kill you then aids is going to kill you if we have somehow allowed aids to be portrayed as a normal part of everyday life to our youngsters then we've done them a great disservice by lying to them just to make ourselves comfortable but there's more another young man said that he felt dismissed by older gays when trying to engage a member of the community he would either be told you're nothing but a baby or be objectified and treated as no more than a piece of meat either way these young men were telling us that they felt no part of the greater community they had no interest in our concerns since we've shown none for theirs and they demonstrated rather pointedly that when it comes to community we are severely lacking cohesion so this can't be left as is if we want to be a community we must be all-inclusive and outreaching to those not already embraced if we want to be a people with a future and a past we need to claim them both we must take responsibility for our youth no they are not for the most part are biological children but they are spiritually and sociologically no less ours if our community is to have a future our youth must be taught its past and if we want our kids to grow up strong and healthy and to stay that way we old farts are going to have to reach out and help raise them hillary clinton says it takes a village well cookies it may take the village and chelsea part of the east side the castro and all of key west as well we cannot count on heterosexual textbooks and classrooms and parents to help our children embrace their common good and set their goals and hone their political minds does this make sense to you let me ask you this who was there for you when you were first coming out were there grown-ups to show you the ropes to guide you away from the pitfalls did you have gay role models was there even anyone around to tell you that what you were feeling was normal could you have used that help and guidance would this have been a less frightening world if you did have someone to whom you could look up i'm one of the very lucky ones when i was 13 i joined a community theater group although i already knew who and what i was i barely understood what the word game meant but there in the warmth of that theater troupe i met gays and lesbians of all ages who took me under their wings and nurtured me before i knew about bars and baths i met gay couples that had been together for decades before i learned how to cruise i learned to be accepting before i figured out words like [ __ ] hag and wrinkle queen i was taught that we are as normal as apple pie and as varied as humankind can be i was one of the very lucky ones were you and more importantly are you willing to volunteer some time in finance to make this a safer world for us all my friends in your hometown there are programs where you can volunteer and work with our youth start by contacting your community center or glbt hotline or go online to the in the life website ask if you can be of help there are kids who need mentoring in school there are kids who just need a grown-up to tell them that they're not alone in the world if you have greater skills maybe you could teach a class in poetry or painting or acting or if you have no skills you can always help clean up after a class if you have no skills and no time you can still write a check to ease the work that others are doing and if for some bizarre reason you can't find a gay kid who needs help remember that a straight child who has been helped in his life by a gay person will probably grow into a straight non-homophobic adult we can always use more of those as for those moments when you might be enjoying a quiet time in your local gay bar and a kid wanders in before you even consider this youth as an object stop and consider him as your child what would you want for your own child there must be a better place for a 17 year old to make friends than in a bar step forward be proactive be a responsible part of our community so that we can take pride in how we raise our own just speaking these words i can already hear the screams of disbelief that will be filling the in the life email boxes but i still insist that you at least consider what i'm saying only we can raise proud and independent gay youth think about getting involved and as long as we're considering taking responsibility for our children let us not forget our elderly because cookies we may never again be a piece of chicken wandering into our first gay bar but we will all most likely outlive our welcome in the bar culture and then where will we be no one wants to be out in the cold when they're old and gay reach out i'm cherry jones and for all of us at in the life here at ow bar in new york thank you for watching and we'll see you next month in the life is funded in part by the h pen american foundation additional support provided by the ford foundation the pride foundation the gill foundation the ted snowden foundation the collingwood foundation the otto haas charitable trust number two the reed williams foundation alan l mittelsdorf jim stepp and peter zimmer and the annual support of in the life members like you you