Keeping Mixed Company
This is an excerpt from an interesting article about same-sex couples in Kansas — largely suburban Kansas City, Kansas, in fact, where I was born and raised. The article profiles several couples who were energized to come out by a referendum on the Kansas ballot to ban "gay marriage".
Ms. Jambrosic is part of a dramatic shift that has taken hold lately among gay and bisexual Kansans, many of them well into midlife and ensconced in long-term relationships. An energized culture of coming out has emerged, apparently in reaction to what many see as the anti-gay climate that led to the marriage ban.
Nowhere is this change more obvious than in a new analysis of census data by Gary J. Gates, a demographer at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy, a think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles. He found a 68 percent jump in Kansas households headed by same-sex partners between 2000 and 2005. In 2005, 11 out of every 1,000 couples living together in Kansas reported themselves as same-sex, according to Mr. Gates’s review of the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey data, a figure closer than one might expect to those recorded in New Jersey and New York, where 12 and 14 out of every 1,000 couples, respectively, are same-sex.
What the increase suggests, Mr. Gates said, is not so much that gay Americans are flocking to the state, but that the ones who live there have been galvanized to declare themselves to their neighbors and communities.
[…]
Ms. Jambrosic, too, became politically active around the time of the amendment campaign and decided to marry her partner of 22 years in Canada. “I was kind of like a black person in the ’30s, trying to pass,” Ms. Jambrosic said. “I never cared about getting married. I didn’t ask for the fight, but when the religious right drew a line in the sand, I felt the need to do something.”[excerpts from Ginia Bellafante, "In the Heartland and Out of the Closet", New York Times, 28 December 2006.]
As the story reports, the result of their coming out has made them and most of their friends feel much more comfortable.
The article mentions that Ms. Jambrosic has recently thrown her first party mixing gay and straight friends. As we know from experience, that can be a fun and worthwhile thing to do.
Our first mixed party, as it turns out, was a surprise birthday party that Isaac gave to me for my 40th birthday, in 1996.* He invited most of our friends, which largely consisted of two groups: gay male friends and friends, predominantly female, from his church. I was a bit apprehensive — but only a bit, really — when I saw them all together in the same room. However, they got along famously, I suspect because so many shared an interest in cats.
Anyway, that group became the core of the group of people who come annually to our Open House / Pot Luck party in early December, and they still get along famously, many claiming to look forward to it for months because it's the only place they get to see the people that they see only at this event. Next year will be our 10th anniversary for this party; I suppose I should start planning something special now.
Is it just me, or does it strike one as odd that this story in the NYTimes was in the "Home & Garden" section?
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*I'll leave it to Isaac to explain in detail sometime about how surprised I actually was despite all the clues inadvertently dropped in the week prior to the party, the fact that we were having dinner inexplicably at some casual friends' house, that I noticed lots of cars parked near their house and figured someone in the neighborhood must be having a party, etc. Even then I was a pretty absent-minded scientist.
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I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Friday, 29 December 2006 at 02.02
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Doesn't surprise me that people who were OK with cats turned out to get on well with one another. Cats are nothing if not discerning.
Really, there's no good reason why straight people should have any problem socializing with gay people. There is a bad reason: blind prejudice.
Even a moment's thought should cause a thinking straight person to realize that if sexual practices are going to be the yardstick by which he or she measures others' worthiness, there's going to be practical problems coming to terms with any other people. That's because straight people could engage in activities the prejudiced straight person deems unnatural. In fact, going by survey results, a whole lot of straight people engage in a whole lot of sexual activities the straightlaced are sure to find objectionable.
But as a practical matter, how is a prejudiced straight person going to figure out who does what with whom? Now, there's a conundrum.
The only sane thing to do is figure that what people do for intimate activities is their business. And so, if that's the only practical way to relate to other straight people, why shouldn't it make just as much sense with gay people?
One other thing about the prejudiced that gets off with me: they have to assume too much. Since there are heterosexual couples in longterm relationships who don't engage in sexual activities, it stands to reason there are gay and lesbian couples whose relationships are nonsexual as well. Again, how to tell? In fact, unless someone reveals all, there's no way to tell.
They don't call it blind prejudice for nothing.