All posts tagged: gay people

I Was a Heretic at The New York Times

I Was a Heretic at The New York Times

Published by Sam

On one of my first days at The New York Times, I went to an orientation with more than a dozen other new hires. We had to do an icebreaker: Pick a Starburst out of a jar and then answer a question. My Starburst was pink, I believe, and so I had to answer the pink prompt, which had me respond with my favorite sandwich. Russ & Daughters’ Super Heebster came to mind, but I figured mentioning a $19 sandwich wasn’t a great way to win new friends. So I blurted out, “The spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A,” and considered the ice broken. The HR representative leading the orientation chided me: “We don’t do that here. They hate gay people.” People started snapping their fingers in acclamation. I hadn’t been thinking about the fact that Chick-fil-A was transgressive in liberal circles for its chairman’s opposition to gay marriage. “Not the politics, the chicken,” I quickly said, but it was too late. I sat down, ashamed. As far back as I can remember, my parents have …

America’s Long Campaign to Erase Gay People Is Itself Being Forgotten

America’s Long Campaign to Erase Gay People Is Itself Being Forgotten

Published by skeptic

In the summer of 1984, after he finished his first U.S. Foreign Service assignment, in Yugoslavia, Jan Krc flew to Washington, D.C., for what he thought would be a couple of weeks’ training en route to his next post, in South Africa. He thought nothing of it when he was called in for a security debriefing early one morning at the U.S. Information Agency headquarters. There, in a nondescript conference room, he was met by two middle-aged men in suits. The session began with half an hour of preliminaries, but then swerved sharply. Have you engaged in homosexual relations since age 18? Oh, shit, he thought. Krc, who was 27, hesitated. He said he should get a lawyer. The questioners told him representation wasn’t needed; if he answered truthfully, he would soon be on his way to Cape Town. Believing them, he disclosed having had flings with two foreign nationals (not a violation of fraternization rules, as neither was from a hostile country). The interrogators drilled for details. They wanted the names of other Americans …

The Social-Justice Rebellion at the Satanic Temple

The Social-Justice Rebellion at the Satanic Temple

Published by skeptic

The last time Lucien Greaves got into this much trouble over a photograph, he had his genitals out. In July 2013, Greaves gained nationwide media attention for resting his scrotum on the gravestone of the Reverend Fred Phelps’s mother—a stunt designed to protest the homophobia of the Westboro Baptist Church, an ultra-conservative group that was then regularly featured on the news. Greaves was trading offense for offense. Phelps’s church had a habit of protesting soldiers’ funerals with placards telling gay people that they were going to hell. So Greaves claimed to have performed a “Pink Mass” that turned the mother of Westboro’s patriarch gay in the afterlife. The stunt was typical of Greaves and of the Satanic Temple, or TST, the group that he had co-founded months earlier. The Temple uses Greaves’s talent for the profane and the outrageous, along with strategic lawsuits, to target Christianity’s special status in American public life. Think of it as the ACLU with pentagrams. Greaves himself is a striking figure, charismatic and droll, pale and slender, usually dressed in …