Are You Guys Brothers?

Last night, our former paratrooper, secret service, body guard, private eye, twice-married father of six, tour guide cab driver who earlier had declared that negative attitudes about homosexuality would never change in Singapore, asked if he could take us to a gay bar in town after we had dinner together in Chinatown.

The bar, located on the third floor of a mall was called Cafe Romeo and to my eye was loaded with gorgeous, seductive, heterosexual hookers, one of whom seemed determined to make my acquaintance. We soon learned that rather than hookers, they were gay cross dressers and transsexuals from Thailand.

"They're very pretty," we explained to our driver as we headed back to the hotel, "but are there any bars in town where the gay men are dressed as men?"

"Oh," he exclaimed with delight. "Yes, yes, I know a place, but no one would know that they're gay!"

When we parted company, he looked at us long and hard, smiled broadly, and enthusiastically shook our hands. "Tell me your names again," he asked. We had made a new friend.

We had very similar experiences with our tour guides all year. The Peruvian guide explained that the porters liked us very much but wanted him to explain homosexuality. The Cambodian driver who told us there were no homosexuals in Cambodia declared when he learned that we were gay that he personally felt that gay people should be allowed to marry. The closeted Australian 26-year-old who quietly sat at our dinner table the night before my talk in Sydney to Merrill Lynch confided at the end of the meal, "I want what you and Ray have in your relationship," and then came out to a colleague at the end of my presentation the next day.

In the past 13 months, Ray and I have been fortunate enough to travel the globe and have gladly presented ourselves as a gay married couple to desk clerks, porters, housecleaners, meal servers, taxi drivers and tour guides, flight attendants, business people, U.S. Senators, shop keepers and all others in England, Portugal, Equador, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Charlestown, Venice, New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore. Before the end of the year, we may also be doing so in Japan and India.

It hasn't always felt safe celebrating our relationship with others, and it hasn't always been easy, but we have never shied away from affirming who and what we are, and the effect has been universally positive. Attitudes and behaviors have change in some people, others have felt permission to ask questions, to tell us about themselves or their gay friends, and all of them undoubtedly have relayed the close encounter with a gay couple from America to all of their family members.

So, stories about the very happy, funny, likeable and generous gay men who have been together for 32 years and who were married in Canada, are being repeated in some of the poorest and most remote parts of the world. The probable impact is that more than a few gay children in those homes or neighborhoods are now aware that they are not alone and that there is hope that one day they too might find love with a same sex person. It's also likely that the Peruvian porter who is explaining to his wife where he got the brand new sleeping bag will react less fearfully if he discovers that his son or daughter is gay.

There is a seismic global cultural climate change on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues. You can see it and feel it even in countries such as Singapore that prohibit homosexual sex. The marketplace is making such rapid change possible, but it is the coming out process that is ensuring that attitudes and behaviors toward gay people improve.

All gay, lesbian, and bisexual people are messengers of same sex intimacy. We all put faces on the issue for others. If we hide who we are, the face is one of shame. If we gently but firmly celebrate who we are, the face is one of dignified love.
    
When Ray and I got back to our hotel tonight after a celebratory dinner with my Merrill Lynch hosts during which we toasted the success of my presentations on gay issues, the concierge informed us that a package had been dropped off for us. It was a gift from our former secret service cab driver. There was no note inside, just the address on the outside to "Mr. McNaught and Buddy."

Our underwear is still getting washed out in the sink, but it's a small inconvenience as we stand in our "Paradise" bedroom and smile at a rainbow over Lake Wakatipu and a mountain range near where Frodo saved Sam from drowning.  

Air New Zealand lost three of our four bags somewhere between Los Angeles and Aukland, but the one we did get had in it the dark chocolate from Kilwin's, so I'm happy.

Ray and I are the only same-sex couple staying at the Blanket Bay lodge outside of Queenstown, but it was built and is owned by Tom Tusher, the former President and COO of Levi Strauss, a pioneering company on gay workplace issues, so we feel at home. Nevertheless, the Indian massage therapist from the UK who worked on my shoulder knots this morning commented,  "Your friend told me that he'll be waiting in the spa. Are you guys brothers?"

"No," I replied, "he's my partner," to which she answered, "You look so much alike. " We don't, but the question allows people to explain the intimacy between us that they see. (My soon-to-be-published book by the same name explores this phenomenon further.)

I used to feel very lonely on vacations and work-related trips such as this, but not so much anymore. I used to think that Ray and I were the "odd men out," but the reality is that we're actually more "in" than anyone else. We're the only ones who engage other travelers and are engaged by them in conversation. It's not a matter of "gay vs straight" in the dining room today, but rather shy vs. outgoing, or frightened vs. confident. Unless they're rabid social conservatives, (who fortunately aren't often encountered among other tourists), most heterosexuals we meet are eager to talk because they pick up that we're fun, friendly, happy people to know who might be more interesting than the sullen straight couple two tables over.

After lunch today, we're going for a hike. Tomorrow, hopefully in clean and different clothes, we're taking a helicopter ride through the spectacular Milford section of the country where much of "The Lord of the Rings" was filmed. We'll hike again tomorrow afternoon, and the next day kayak for four hours down a fast-moving river. We fly on Thursday to an isolated eco-lodge in Abel Tasman National Park in the northern section of the southern island in which we will kayak and swim with the seals.

The New Zealand segment of our trip is an early celebration of my 60th birthday. We then fly to Melbourne, Sydney, and Singapore where I'm giving a series of talks on gay and transgender issues to the senior leadership of Merrill Lynch, the latter being the first such presentations of the kind for any such audience.

Those are all fun and interesting things to talk about. So, if you were straight and sitting next to us at breakfast in any one of these places and you suspected that Ray and I were gay, you might break the ice by asking "Are you guys brothers?" but after learning the wonderful truth, wouldn't you really rather talk to us about our lives than to the straight couple nearby who are bickering, whining, and who plan to spend their day retrieving e-mails?

One of my regrets with my folks and Ray's folks was that they only grew to accommodate us being gay rather than celebrating it. If they were with us in the dining room on this trip and heard us asked, "Are you guys brothers?" they might have secretly wished that we would simply say "Yes," so as to avoid feelings of discomfort. They never learned to have real fun with us being gay and with the very interesting and rewarding lives we have.

Fortunately, today the world has changed enough that there is no reason to assume as a gay person that you have to endure loneliness on a vacation or business trip when you're surrounded by heterosexuals. Because gay people throughout the world are coming out and putting such wonderful faces on the issue, and because we are growing in our confidence that we have something valuable to share, we're less likely to feel accommodated than celebrated at the breakfast table as people communicate their awe of the rainbow, and learn that you're wearing the same, though washed, underwear that you had on yesterday.

Ray and I are having a ball in the beautiful land of Frodo, and we're doing so as self-affirming and valued members of the fellowship.

Many years ago, when I was in Burlington, Vermont to speak, I met a married man who confided in me that he was gay. We walked and talked at length, I met his wife and young children, and we stayed in touch for several years as he and his family worked through the recognition of his homosexuality. A few days ago, he sent me a DVD recording of an interview he did on local television with Sharon Underwood, the mother whose deeply moving letter to the editor about her gay son was circulated around the world and generated an enormous international response of affirmation.

Prior to viewing the interview, Ray and I re-read the powerful piece that appeared in her local newspaper at the time when Vermonters were debating, often angrily and cruelly, the issue of civil unions for same-sex couples. We were so glad that we did so. It had been a few years since Sharon had captured our hearts with her “roar” against those who would further victimize her beloved child with their hateful words. How we both had wished at the time that our own mothers or fathers had written the same letter. My guess is that gay people throughout the world felt the exact same thing when they read her epistle. More so than us, whose parents eventually grew time to support us, what must have the gay children of Vice President Cheney, and rabid American social conservatives such as Tony Perkins, Phylis Shaffley, and Alan Keyes felt when they saw a parent so vigorously defend her gay child without compromise?

Sharon Underwood wrote:

Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I've taken enough from you good people.

I'm tired of your foolish rhetoric about the "homosexual agenda" and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny. My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay. He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called "fag" incessantly, starting when he was 6.

In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17-year-old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn't bear to continue living any longer, that he didn't want to be gay and that he couldn't face a life without dignity.

You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair. I don't know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn't put him, and millions like him, on this Earth to give you someone to abuse. God gave you brains so that you could think, and it's about time you started doing that.

At the core of all your misguided beliefs is the belief that this could never happen to you, that there is some kind of subculture out there that people have chosen to join. The fact is that if it can happen to my family, it can happen to yours, and you won't get to choose. Whether it is genetic or whether something occurs during a critical time of fetal development, I don't know. I can only tell you with an absolute certainty that it is inborn.

If you want to tout your own morality, you'd best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you. If you disagree, I would be interested in hearing your story, because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I received with no effort whatsoever on my part. It is so woven into the very soul of me that nothing could ever change it. For those of you who reduce sexual orientation to a simple choice, a character issue, a bad habit or something that can be changed by a 10-step program, I'm puzzled. Are you saying that your own sexual orientation is nothing more than something you have chosen, that you could change it at will? If that's not the case, then why would you suggest that someone else can?

A popular theme in your letters is that Vermont has been infiltrated by outsiders. Both sides of my family have lived in Vermont for generations. I am heart and soul a Vermonter, so I'll thank you to stop saying that you are speaking for "true Vermonters."

You invoke the memory of the brave people who have fought on the battlefield for this great country, saying that they didn't give their lives so that the "homosexual agenda" could tear down the principles they died defending. My 83-year-old father fought in some of the most horrific battles of World War II, was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart.

He shakes his head in sadness at the life his grandson has had to live. He says he fought alongside homosexuals in those battles, that they did their part and bothered no one. One of his best friends in the service was gay, and he never knew it until the end, and when he did find out, it mattered not at all. That wasn't the measure of the man.

You religious folk just can't bear the thought that as my son emerges from the hell that was his childhood he might like to find a lifelong companion and have a measure of happiness. It offends your sensibilities that he should request the right to visit that companion in the hospital, to make medical decisions for him or to benefit from tax laws governing inheritance. How dare he? you say. These outrageous requests would threaten the very existence of your family, would undermine the sanctity of marriage.

You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people who find your attitudes repugnant. God is not for the privileged majority, and God knows my son has committed no sin. The deep-thinking author of a letter to the April 12 Valley News who lectures about homosexual sin and tells us about "those of us who have been blessed with the benefits of a religious upbringing" asks: "What ever happened to the idea of striving . . . to be better human beings than we are?"

Indeed, sir, what ever happened to that?

My friend's television interview with Sharon Underwood was a wonderful tribute not only to her but also to the power of her witness to a mother’s love. She didn’t singlehandedly calm the turbulent religious and political waters in Vermont at the time of the debate but her words opened many, many minds, and healed many, many wounds not only there but across the globe.

Ray and I felt very personally connected to her, to her letter, and to her interview in two significant ways. The first is that we went to Vermont on our 25^th anniversary as a couple and had our civil union recognized by the state. It was an extraordinarily affirming experience for us, never to be forgotten. Secondly, at the end of the program, the friend who came out to me in whispers many years ago, looked into the camera, smiled, and proudly shared with Sharon and with his audience that he too was gay, something he had not yet stated so publicly. It was a powerful moment for him, for Sharon, and for us.

Please share Sharon’s letter with any gay person or parent of a gay person you know, no matter where in the world you are reading this. You will never know what an incredible source of support it will provide them. Also, please get in touch with me if you have any comments, questions, or stories of your own to share, at www.brian-mcnaught.com.