Andrew, Reading your 'Gay in the Heartland' post this morning was interesting. I have had much the same experience in my own heartland of VA, where most of my extended family safely falls into the 'southern redneck' category. They're not about to lobby for gay marriage, but they have always shown me love and respect, and I've never tried to hide who I am from them. I moved to New York and assumed that life here as a gay man would be more comfortable, and for the most part that is true. But riding the subway last night from downtown to Times Square, I sat across from a nondescript, average looking black woman. 30 seconds into our trip she started gesticulating wildly towards me, flipping her hand in an exagerrated limp wrist, snapping her fingers at me and yelling, whooping, and generally making a very loud ass of herself. I had my iPod on, and initially thought the best thing to do would be to completely ignore her, but after several minutes of the constant commotion and obvious gaybaiting I stood up and moved to the other end of the car, where she proceeded to yell and flail her hands for another minute or so in my direction. The woman was obviously a misguided Jesus freak (she loudly referred to the Bible as a justification for her absurd behavior), with a strong possibility of mental illness. But the rest of the blue-state crowd in the car just looked uncomfortably away from us and part of me suspected that several of them tacitly agreed with the poor wretch. New Yorkers are notoriously reticent to break out of their personal space for much of anything, so it didn't surprise me, but reading that letter from the heartland on your site made me think. If some crazy person was verbally assaulting me back home, and my family or anyone in my community saw it happening, you can bet there would be hell to pay, and she would have been whisked away from me, or worse. Much like the straight people who wished to defend your reader at the club. I don't know if there's a lesson in this or not, but it just goes to show that you can't make rock-solid assumptions about who will be there for you, politically or otherwise, merely based on party affiliation or geography. Addendum Some rather provocative and not unexpected comments call for a bit of further explanation. Why did I not confront this woman who was harrassing me? And why the need to mention her race? I find it best to engage the mentally ill as little as possible. She was so lost in her own strange delusional world that to confront her would be to deal with her on her terms, and I refused to do that. Also, it was painfully apparent that she was itching for me to respond to her and pay her some mind. I merely smiled at her and refused to engage her, which of course made her even more incensed and ridiculous. Often, in the name of 'defending themselves' people are merely exercising their vanity and satiating their enemies' desire for attention. For better or worse, I am an extremely non-confrontational sort, and that policy has worked very well for me for the past several decades. I make friends far more often than enemies, and have managed to avoid physical altercations altogether. This must seem awfully lame to a brave former Marine like Scott, but each man must find his own path in this world. I am an extremely quick and efficient judge of character, and have engaged quite a few anti-gay minds in the past if I felt that there were some chance of connecting with them (successfully, more often than not.) But she was beyond hope, and quite obviously so. I found myself pitying her, and pity is the foulest thing you can feel toward a person. The fact that she was black was a descriptive qualifier, and nothing more. I think white people can be just as irrational and hateful as anyone else. I commonly refer to "this white guy did such and such" or "a hispanic girl told me" and so on. I have no malice in my heart toward people based on their physical appearance. But often, I find people's behavior slightly ironic considering their skin color and enjoy highlighting the irony. In this case, an average-looking black woman in her 40's completely surprised me by suddenly turning into a raving homophobe based on religious quackery. That is stereotypically the province of religious white men or aggressive young straight boys. I felt that the racial detail was therefore intriguing.
As I sat there ignoring the creature, these thoughts swirled through my mind, trust me, and the temptation to yell at her or somehow make her stop was very strong. But I held my ground because I honestly felt that no productive good could come of such an emotional response. Maybe I was wrong, but it felt right at the time. After the fact, of course, as is common, I thought of the perfect way to respond to her if I had wanted to, by playing on her simple religious fears and proclaiming myself the harbinger of gayness and evil, out to destroy her and her kind. This may have backfired in a big way, but ideally it would have frightened the crap out of her, because in a real way she is a dying breed and she knows it. But I still think the wise course was to not engage her at all.
Would love to hear further thoughts from others about this. Am I just a big pussy, rationalizing away my fear?
Perhaps your fellow subway riders saw you yourself weren't coming to your own defense, so thought why should they?
Posted by: Foxy | Thursday, November 17, 2005 at 12:58 PM
Foxy has a good point Aatom.
Posted by: scott | Thursday, November 17, 2005 at 01:59 PM
Is there a point in your mentioning her blackness? If she had been white would you have mentioned it? And yeah, take off the headphones and give it back to her.
Posted by: | Thursday, November 17, 2005 at 03:54 PM
So what if he mentions her blackness. Her 'blackness' was the one that came out of her face in the first place.
Posted by: | Friday, November 18, 2005 at 10:09 AM
I'm right there with you, Aatom. Getting in a fight with her would have been letting her upset you - and that means she wins.
Posted by: Fagat | Friday, November 18, 2005 at 11:33 AM
Stop apologizing. I live in New York and when confronted with a nut the only thing to do is go "passive face" and walk away. And, frankly, you didn't even have to tell us she was black.
Posted by: | Sunday, November 20, 2005 at 02:05 PM
You did something I would of done in not acknowledging her presence. I would of, though, done one thing different, walk away.
Posted by: V.J. | Wednesday, November 23, 2005 at 08:24 PM
As far as I can tell, your point here is that people who know you would have come to your defense more readily than strangers did. The situations are not comparable, so the attempted comparison doesn't cast any light on the differences between NYC and Virginia specifically, or on blue and red states generally.
Posted by: anapestic | Thursday, December 08, 2005 at 03:19 PM
that was kind of my point, anapestic. i was just highlighting one instance where being surrounded by city-folk didn't make me feel any safer than being surrounded by rednecks. there is no tried or true formula for predicting how people will react to you or to a threatening situation you find yourself in. it's just an anecdote, i'm not trying to champion the red states or anything.
and i did walk away, VJ, right after I couldn't take any more of her idiocy.
Posted by: Aatom | Thursday, December 08, 2005 at 05:44 PM
Were you wearing one of those 'nobody knows I'm gay' t-shirts? How could she tell?
Posted by: olivier | Friday, December 09, 2005 at 03:35 PM
that's the part that really annoyed me, olivier. I was very much in personal space, nyc camo mode. I'm no rugby player, but it's not as if I pranced onto the train with a purse dangling from my arm (not that there's anything wrong with that.) it was just bizarre.
Posted by: Aatom | Friday, December 09, 2005 at 05:08 PM
Haha! The image made me giggle. And I think you did the right thing. Pick your battles. I'd like to quote something said by the Buddha about 'the middle path' and general avoidance of violence but ...er ...I guess I'm not that well read.
Posted by: olivier | Friday, December 09, 2005 at 05:26 PM