How it FEELS to be Othered
A real-life tale of LGBTQ exclusion
Empathy —
May I tell you a story about how it FEELS to be a member of a widely-despised minority? Why does it matter? I think a lot of people lack empathy.
I write a lot about LGBTQ issues. Sometimes thousands of people read an article I write and sometimes more than that, so I get a lot of feedback, sometimes a lot of pushback. I’m not saying I have a finger on the pulse, exactly, but I do have an ear to the ground.
The rumbles reaching my ears are often very disturbing.
Straight/cis people and even LGBTQ people push back on matters of full LGBTQ equality, insisting that things are either just fine already or that we bring on our own problems by being too out or too open.
I recently wrote an article about human rights, about how people sometimes use culture to excuse the exclusion of LGBTQ people from ordinary human pursuits — like holding down jobs or having a place to live.
Dozens of conservative Americans are arguing to me (right now) that it’s not (or should not be considered) a human rights violation for an employer to fire a person for being LGBTQ if the employer is uncomfortable with LGBTQ people. They’re dead serious about it. One of them is a self-described lesbian, several of them claim to be gay, but most of them are straight and cis.
All I can really do is shake my head and keep telling stories. I don’t know what else to do. You can’t teach people that hurting fellow human beings for being different is wrong.
All I know how to do is show. So here goes a story. I hope it helps, it’s all I’ve got.
It was when I uncovered the plate and saw a piece of dessert that I knew exactly how much of a pariah I am here.
Let me back up.
I had spent most of the previous Saturday night bleary-eyed, yawning, and sick with worry in a hospital emergency room. Not planned, obviously.
I had just gone to bed when my dad banged on my door. He pounded on it because he was having a hard time talking.
He was having intense pain in his chest; the nitroglycerin wasn’t easing it.
I threw some clothes on and bundled him into the truck. I careened 15 miles through a black rain over treacherous, back-country roads. No point calling an ambulance. It would have taken them just as long to get to us as it took me to race him to the hospital.
The doctors and nurses swarmed over him the moment we approached the desk. Within moments they had him wired up to machines. One nurse inserted an IV while a young intern took a medical history.
We left six hours later.
The doctors are almost certain that he didn’t have another heart attack. His COPD was flaring up, though, and the infection he’d been fighting for months was hanging on.
His lung condition is why I’m here. I moved to this tiny village in rural northern Michigan because things were getting so bad that he was losing the ability to properly care for himself.
So here I am, a gay man and an atheist in a land where either of those two things is all but unheard of.
My dad is very active in the village church, which is Baptist and very, very conservative.
I got a couple hours of sleep Sunday morning. I woke to a knock on the door. A church lady was standing there with two covered plates. “We know your dad was at the hospital all night. We had a potluck dinner after services, so I thought I should bring some over.”
Now this is country living!
That’s what I thought to myself. People may have differing beliefs and attitudes about things, but they look after one another.
I smiled at her warmly, took the two plates, and offered her coffee, which she declined.
I was so tired!
Not just physically but emotionally. I was pathetically grateful that I wouldn’t have to cook. I was also warmed a bit by the glow of human care and consideration.
I waited a couple hours, woke my dad, and nuked his plate. I’d already peeked at it. Turkey, stuffing, a dab of mashed potatoes, and some corn. Looked really good.
I brought it to him with a drink and a napkin.
Then I went to open my own plate, which was still covered and sealed in cling wrap.
I got it all loose, finally, and pried the cover off.
It was dessert.
For one.
Never in my life have I ever felt that unwanted.
I sank onto the kitchen chair, stunned, feeling like somebody had punched me.
That’s what it’s like, right there —
That’s the feeling. That’s the reality. That’s what it means to be a member of minority that people think it’s OK to shun. Doesn’t happen everywhere in the US, or even in most places. That’s not what I’m saying.
I’m saying that firing an elementary school teacher because she showed her students a picture of the woman she’s legally marrying is exactly the same thing.
It’s exactly hurting a person because she’s different.
And if you can’t understand that, I don’t know what else to say. You’re going to come up with all sorts of arguments and justifications. You aren’t going to change your mind.
But in the end, know something:
You’re bringing dinner for one to a household of two. Your’re being uncharitable. And you’re doing it for no real reason other than to hurt people.
On purpose.
