"There is nothing wrong with you"

[ellenkushner]

We finally watched MILK (as in "Harvey") this weekend. Very moving and well-done. It made me want to revisit - and share with you - this long & thoughtful post by libba_bray, written back in May 2009 after California's sad & terrible vote upholding Prop. 8. Libba begins:

I was raised by a gay father. My dad came of age in the 1940’s in the Deep South. Being gay was more than just not okay then; it was downright dangerous. . . . When my father came out to our family, I was fourteen, and it was explained to me that we had to keep it a secret because my father would lose his job and might be attacked physically. The message conveyed was one of fear and shame which trickled down to all of us . . . .

Comments

[scbutler.livejournal.com]

Excellent piece. I missed it the first time around. And I was glad to follow the link and find out why Annie Liebowitz is in hock up to her eyeballs. Very weird that the reason is left out of most mainstream press articles.

[scbutler.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Except now I do more research and see in a later article that Leibowitz (spelled it right this time) claims she inherited nothing of significant value from Sontag.

Not that that diminishes the validity of inheritance problems for gay and lesbian couples.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Such a good post.

Lest people think everything is okay, I notice the sniffiness in Jane Austen circles now that the Norilana Books' James Fairfax (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1607620383/sherwoodsmith-20) is out. It was okay for hack jobs with zombies, and sea monsters, but a really subtly done thought experiment in which gay life is respectable in Regency England, via Austen's EMMA? Oh! Say it isn't so!

[ladyrelaynie.livejournal.com]

As a Jane Austen fan, I would just like to say that I would much rather read a gay story based on Emma than a zombie story crowbarred into Pride and Prejudice.

That's just my opinion, though. ;D

[elissa-carey.livejournal.com]

I can identify with that - I was raised by a gay mother, and though I'd been told from the beginning, I hadn't known what it meant until I was older. Mom didn't have the threat of violence, so far as I knew, but I also had to keep it a secret: she was in the military, where it wasn't a possibility, but a certainty, that she would lose her job. She's out of the military and we no longer have that hanging over our head, but every case of every gay person in the military fighting to stay in hits close to home.

[csecooney.livejournal.com]

Is this Libba Bray of "Strange and Terrible Beauty" Libba Bray? I'm just listening to her novels on Audiobook now. I finished the second one yesterday.

YOUR book, alas, is on back order. From the distributor our bookstore uses... But! Onward!

Haven't seen MILK. Heard a lot of things about it -- and this Libba Bray post certainly whets my curiosity more than anything else people have been saying. I'm very behind the times.

[ewein2412]

thanks so much for flagging this up to me! ♥