Unsafe in Idaho's Anti-Gay Climate, by Jeff Diteman
“the Republican Party killed Maddy Beard”
Writer and Idaho native Jeff Diteman responds to current events taking place in his home state, in a piece subtitled, Idaho's Anti-Gay Climate Made Me Feel Unsafe, and I'm Not Even Gay.
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On the day of this writing [events occurred in late March], 1000 protestors surrounded the Capitol building in Boise, Idaho. This action was part of an ongoing petition known as the “Add the Words” movement. Concerned citizens were beseeching the state legislature to take up the issue of adding the words “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the Idaho Human Rights Act. The author of the act, Republican former Governor Phil Batt, endorses the campaign. On the other side, in January, in order to strike a preemptive blow for the religious right, Republican Lynn Luker proposed two dangerous pieces of legislation to legally protect people’s right to discriminate. Thankfully, those laws were quickly withdrawn due to public outcry. Butch Otter, the current Governor of Idaho, recently had a real tiff with the Idaho Statesman, after the newspaper ran a piece indicating that the Governor believes that Idaho’s image problem is not bad for business. As far as I can tell, Governor Otter is angry with the Idaho Statesman for implying that he had acknowledged that Idaho has a problem. In fact, it is screamingly obvious that Idaho has a problem.
Let’s be honest with each other: Idaho definitely has such a reputation, because so much of Idaho is anti-gay. From what I’ve seen, most of Idaho is a pretty terrible place to be any kind of minority, whether in terms of race, sexual orientation, or religion. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it's a pretty difficult place to be anything but straight, white, and Christian. Idaho has a reputation problem because it has a lot of social problems, and conservatives' refusal to do anything about the social problems is simply going to perpetuate the reputation problem.
Full disclosure: I am a mostly straight, white male from Post Falls (near Coeur d’Alene), Idaho. In many ways, my childhood was probably a lot like Butch Otter’s. Perhaps the only difference is that I'm what some people refer to as "a little bit gay." The term "queer" is appropriate, in both the sense of "not completely straight" and the sense of "odd." I wore funny clothes in high school, because, having learned since kindergarten that no matter how hard I tried, I'd never be normal, I found it more satisfying to accept and own my weirdness. So, you know, I'd go to school in yellow slacks and a baby blue leather jacket, things like that.
I may be pretty much straight, but that has not prevented me from being the victim of anti-gay intimidation. One night, I went with some friends to Denny's in Coeur d'Alene, probably aged seventeen and avowedly out past my bedtime. I was wearing a mint green polyester tuxedo with a big stupid bow tie. Now I know that Idaho is a right-to-shut-up-and-be-normal state, but I went ahead and left the house in that crazy getup. It was the type of outfit that would garner some stares in most any square environment. There at Denny's, I found much more than stares. A couple of guys, one wearing a black Stetson cowboy hat with a big feather in it, started sending me evil vibes as soon as we walked in the door. During our wait for a table, the stares turned to scowls, very threatening looks and muttering. Soon, my friends and I were so uncomfortable that we decided to step outside. Next, the young woman accompanying the two tough dudes walked out to ask me, "Excuse me, are you gay?" to which I replied, "No, in fact this is my girlfriend's suit I'm wearing." "Oh, good," she said, as the one in the black Stetson came running out, having finally lost his restraint. "It's okay, it's okay!" she said, trying to hold him back. "He's not gay!"
The guy got up in my face. "You sure you're not gay?" he shouted.
"Yeah," I replied, completely terrified. "This is my girlfriend's suit."
He paused, deciding whether or not to whup my ass anyway. Luckily, he thought better of it and went inside.
Throughout this altercation, none of the Denny's staff sought to intervene in the very obvious conflict. I don’t know where their empathy or biases lay, but I know that the cowboy went back to his table, and I felt unwelcome.
I never went into that Denny's again. I cringe to imagine what would have happened to me that night if I had failed to convince that guy that I was straight.
Now, Governor Otter, hear me well: Your state is one big Denny's.
My brother kissed a boy on the junior high quad, and got bullied so bad that he had to quit school. I don’t think anyone in my age cohort growing up had the courage to be out. Maddy Beard, age 15, is recently dead by suicide provoked by anti-gay bullying in Pocatello. In that same city in 2011, after having suffered the traumatic stress of being beaten as an adolescent and years of being shunned by the community, Ryan Zicha killed himself at age 19. These cases are the ones that make the news; they provide the extreme example of an ongoing pattern. Any gay person who has lived in one of Idaho’s many homophobic communities will tell you that living in such places means either hiding one’s identity and living in shamed secrecy, or facing constant threats, discrimination, verbal abuse, and violence.
I don’t know what planet Michelle Bachmann lives on. When she said that the gay community has “so bullied the American people,” I almost shat myself. Seriously, Ms. Bachmann? Do you have any idea what bullying feels like? Have you ever been singled out because of who you are and threatened with physical violence? I have. A lot of people I know have. Sorry, conservatives, you just can’t play that card. It’s apples and oranges. No one is attacking you—they are attacking your ideas. Meanwhile, the violent enforcers of your ideology are attacking us in the streets.
Let me offer some advice to all of my conservative, Christian friends out there: don’t use the term “bullying” the way Bachmann did. In this context, “bullying” is a loaded term, and Bachmann’s use of it is either an exaggeration of her case, or a deflation of the word’s true meaning. You cannot compare the treatment you receive from your critics to the sort of bullying that gay people face. As though what queer people are “doing to you” in any way resembles what the culture of homophobia has done to them. As though this were a cultural conflict between two groups standing on even ground, rather than an issue of entrenched oppression grounded in religious invective and a longstanding tradition of intolerance enforced by violently hateful thugs.
Any political dispute needs to take into account a reality where gay people face more hate crimes than any other minority group in the United States. When conservative media and politicians portray Christians as victims of bigotry, this is a crass attempt to reconfigure the stakes of the conflict so that the Christians, who in places like Idaho represent a majority and very rarely face serious discrimination or violence, can feel justified in perpetuating their fear. This way, an ongoing tradition of oppression masquerades as a battle of interests. Appropriation of the term “bullying” dishonestly equates social agitation with physical violence. The tacit implication is that, if secularists are “bullying” Christians by, say, excluding religion from public schools, then retaliatory, actual violence against the whipping boys of secular morality—in this case, the queers—seems less serious as a crime.
The difference between the plight of the Christians and the plight of the gays is that no one here is torturing and killing Christians for being who they are. No one is intimidating them or shunning them to the point that they feel like committing suicide, are they? I hope not. I am not a Christian, but I would be morally opposed to anyone committing violence or discrimination against anyone for being Christian. I support the Idaho Human Rights Act’s prohibition of religious discrimination. I don’t have to agree with religious people’s morals or lifestyle to assert that.
All that queer people want is the same basic protection. They wouldn’t be asking for it if weren’t missing. In a climate of genuine bullying—not the kind Michelle Bachmann complains about, but the kind Ryan Zicha suffered—the stakes are high. People are fighting for their right to exist.
My brother and our buddy Mole used to play a game called “Your Team.” It’s kind of a mean game. When you are out in public with your friend, and you see a person who’s a real slob, you say “Your team” to your friend, and your friend is insulted. It’s just a funnier way of saying hey, check out that loser, while making a jab at your friend.
Sometimes, people play this game in political discourse. This is done by choosing an undesirable character, usually a fringe personality with a habit of saying or doing offensive or ridiculous things, and then associating that character with one’s opponent. This alignment can be very powerful, and when used unfairly it makes for serious slander. Misconstruing an opponent’s argument can take the form of an actual human being, via guilt by association.
I know it’s an awful game, but for the purposes of this argument, I’m going to indulge in it for a moment. At the risk of committing an egregious act of exaggeration, let me state my position as bluntly and clearly as possible: the Republican Party killed Maddy Beard. As long as conservatives privilege intolerant, “traditional” values over the rights of the oppressed, the blood of the innocent in on their hands, and it is a lot of blood. To the conservatives running the governments from Idaho and Arizona to Russia and Uganda: the murderers are on your team.
Some will say that this assertion is unfair. These conservatives are simply working to preserve traditional values, to make sure that their religious constituencies feel protected from gay advocates’ alleged attacks on traditional society, marriage, and morals.
In fact, the legal stakes of the “Add the Words” campaign have nothing to do with whether or not homosexuality is morally right. When conservatives use the morality of gay and transgender lifestyles as a talking point, they are distracting us from the issue at hand, which is the pursuit of justice in a context of oppression. The debate on the morality of certain lifestyles needs to be separated from the question of whether or not it is acceptable to selectively treat people with those lifestyles as second-class citizens. I don’t care a whit if Governor Otter or anyone else thinks that it’s morally wrong for me to kiss a man. The issue of traditional morality versus individual freedom should be a productive topic of debate; in the meantime, we need to agree on one thing: violence and discrimination against homosexuals is unequivocally wrong.
You can attack our values the way values are meant to be attacked, with reasoned argument. In the meantime, we are calling on you to do something to curb the climate of violence and fear that makes it so hard to be different. Advocates of traditional morality have been pushing for atrocious laws in places like Hungary, Russia, and Uganda to criminalize homosexuality, and they justify this because of the imagined threat represented by social acceptance of gays and transgender people. Why are they afraid? Are they afraid that if society tolerates the presence of gay or transgender people, conservative parents might have a harder time explaining to their children how wicked and immoral those people are? Are they afraid of losing the power to impose their standards of normalcy, to make others cringe in shame and fear?
Any moral position that needs to rely on intimidation is probably a weak one. That’s why anti-gay propaganda laws in Russia are so ludicrous. If you need to protect your society from secular morality by arresting anyone who disagrees with you and has the guts to proclaim it, you’re probably doing something wrong. The same goes for the indirect forms of oppression that we’re seeing in Idaho and Arizona. The conservative moral position is enforced by a climate of fear that makes queer people want to hide or move away. By refusing to make it officially illegal to discriminate against gay and transgender people in housing, the workplace, or medical care, Idaho lawmakers are missing an opportunity to lead their constituencies by setting an example in promoting higher standards of justice.
Back when the Aryan Nations were still located in Hayden, I had a conversation with a twenty-something Coeur d’Alene native. He said that he didn’t like the skinheads, but “At least they keep the Mexicans out.” This is called complicity. It is the iniquity of anyone who stands by and watches innocent people suffer injustice, with indifference fueled by private loathing or bigotry. This is what I mean when I say that the Republican Party killed Maddy Beard. When leaders fail to lead, by choosing to placate their intolerant constituencies rather than to protect the rights of the oppressed, they are complicit in the violence against oppressed groups. Maddy’s death should remind us all that this sort of thing is still very real.
What is at stake is nothing less than people’s ability to live without fear. Conservatives don’t want to legitimize homosexuality by offering legal protections that would be a small step toward diminishing the current climate of fear. It is much easier for people with violently bigoted ideas to persist in those ideas when they are never confronted with the “other.” These “others,” the dykes and sissies and bears and trans people, are all moving away from places like Pocatello to find a place where they feel safe. Ryan Zicha sought refuge in Washington State, and dreaded moving back home. And it’s not just the queers, it’s those of us who feel deeply connected to them, whether by association or by empathy, by the bonds of friendship or a political commitment to the oppressed. I love my hometown of Coeur d’Alene, with its gorgeous scenery and many kind citizens. But my experience there was tainted by bigotry and fear, and I still do not feel very safe there. And I’m not even gay. In fact, I’m getting married this summer to a woman, and guess what? We’re going to file our marriage in Washington State, because we refuse to do so in a state that does not offer marriage equality.
Until the social climate of Idaho becomes more inclusive and tolerant, I will be reluctant to raise my kids there—because I don't want my daughters growing up in a place where they are afraid to be tomboys, or my sons afraid to be effeminate, or where my kids will be deprived of getting to know people whose lifestyle and values are outside of the mainstream.
I know that “Your Team” is a mean game. I don’t like to play it. Unfortunately, there is a connection between a climate of fear and laws that actively discriminate against gay rights to expression, as in Russia, or passively fail to offer protections against discrimination, as in Idaho. On the bright side, there is now a golden opportunity for Idaho’s congressional leaders to distance themselves from the people who make so many feel so unwelcome. No one is deluded enough to think that adding the words will quickly remedy our social ills, suddenly making it safe for my gay friends to be themselves publicly in towns like Pocatello. But it will be a start, a principle.
So I say to the Idaho Governor and Legislature: by all means, prove me wrong. Show me that the guys who wanted to kill me at Denny’s, the people who harassed my brother, and those who drove Maddy Beard and Ryan Zicha to suicide are not, indeed, on your team. Add the words.
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For even more great writing about the culture and climate of Idaho, and how one's status as being "queer" might impact the quality of one's life, read Tom Spanbauer's essay entitled, "Being Queer in Idaho," here.
Or for another take on queer life, check out Robyn Bateman's serial comic, Failing Haus, which starts here.
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Jeff Diteman is a polyartist, translator and linguist now residing in Southern Vermont.
His online portfolio can be found here.