Richard Rodriguez

Why is gay-bashing almost always a male story? Why does one almost never hear about women murdering women over sexual winks? A friend, beautiful, in her 30s, heterosexual, tells me with a throaty laugh that she gets propositioned by women all the time in San Francisco. My friend declines, but says she is flattered.

In the case of the Wyoming murder, one wonders about the two girlfriends, now charged as accessories to the crime.

Typically, a sympathy exists between gay males and heterosexual females. Very early, the gay little boy learns to keep his eyes to himself when he is with other boys. Often, he finds ease and comfort in the company of girls — the first of a lifetime of ironies.

It’s no coincidence, I think, that calls today for a return to “family values” have come from men far more than women. Male Republicans (Trent Lott, Dick Armey) and self-styled religious leaders (Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell) have recently mocked homosexuals and portrayed homosexuality as a key measure of what’s wrong in America — our lack of family values.

In truth, America, perhaps more than any other nation of the world, is not a country of family values. We treasure the individual’s right to create her own identity. Most of us left families behind in the “old country.” Most American parents raise their kids to leave home.

Lately, America’s anti-family attitudes have spread to mom — the last holdout. Whereas once mom was the one who tried to hold an unruly family together, now she wants out. Mom wants a career; mom wants an abortion; and mom doesn’t want to be saddled with her husband’s surname.

So the “family values” crowd is mad at mom, and meanwhile, homosexuals are becoming more defiant in our public lives. We are “out,” no longer content to be cast as sissies or pansies.

Institutional America is struggling now with homosexuality because gays are proclaiming our utter normalcy. For example: I want to be a Marine and openly gay, or: I want to have my relationship with another person of my own sex sanctified by my church, just like you.

According to media reports, Matthew Shepard, a University of Wyoming student, was trilingual. He had just returned form Europe. Clearly, he was a young man unafraid of the world.

Typically, the sexual left — in its cultural war with the religious right — likes to portray gays as victims in heterosexual America. But as two Supreme Court justices complained in recent decisions, homosexuals in America have assumed great power, both economic and cultural.

As a gay man, I do not expect other Americans — male or female — to approve of my sexuality. But I demand the right to be. And I refuse to be saddled with responsibility for what is wrong with male-female relations.

The men who murdered Matthew Shepard are not, I think, typical of most heterosexuals in America. But their anger against him is, I think, telling. They hated Matthew Shepard not because he was a loser in America, but because he was winning.

And who knows? Maybe that’s what they desperately needed to disprove to their girlfriends.

 While it had been widely expected that the president would appoint a woman to replace retiring Justice David Souter, Federal Appeals Judge Sotomayor was immediately described in the press and celebrated by Latino political leaders as the nation’s “first Hispanic Supreme Court justice.”

 More pointedly, if the Senate confirms the appointment, she will be the first unmarried (and divorced) woman on the Supreme Court.

 In 2008 California passed Proposition 8, in no small part due to the defense of traditional marriage by the California Conference of Catholic Bishops and the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It is an irony worth remarking that both Roman Catholicism and the Mormon Church are governed by elderly men, and both religions have known more than their share of male sexual scandal.

 Indeed, the Catholic clergy in Europe and the United States has been shamed of late by revelations of clerical misbehavior, often involving unwilling boys. Last week, for example, the Irish government released a nine-year study of sexual abuse and sadism committed by Catholic priests and religious orders of brothers over more than 60 years in state reformatories and orphanages. The misbehavior required the acquiescence of civic as well as church officials.

 American bishops have been anxious to change the subject. And what better strategy — in an era of sexual scandal — than a crusade to “preserve” marriage by precluding any but a heterosexual and sacramental definition of marriage?

 To fight the legalization of gay marriage by the California court, San Francisco’s Catholic Archbishop George Niederauer enlisted the help of Mormon officials in Utah (where Niederauer, for a time, served as bishop).

 The Church of Latter-Day Saints is the fastest-growing religion in America. But, despite its adherence to Republican “family values,” the Mormon Church is haunted by a cowboy polygamy (that often entailed marrying underage girls to overage men).

 It would require a comic talent as large as Mark Twain’s to do justice to the hypocrisy that joined California’s Catholic bishops with Mormon male elders in their campaign for Proposition 8.

 Hypocrisy won the day. Conservative church leaders successfully blurred any distinction between sacramental and civil marriage. The justices of the California Supreme Court refused to challenge the right of the majority to deny gays a marital right the justices had, only months earlier, deemed constitutional.

 The rest of us continue to live in an America where more than half the population of adult women is living without a male partner. Last week, we also learned that 40 percent of American mothers are unwed, many by choice rather than because of an errant male.

 As Barack Obama stood alongside Sonia Sotomayor in the East Room of the White House, it occurred to me that we are living in the America of Ann Dunham. Dunham, the president’s mother, was twice married, twice divorced. She was a scholar who traveled far from the university library, to several continents.

 In an interview with Time magazine, Barack Obama called his mother “reckless.” But surely Ann Dunham gave both her remarkable daughter and son a measure of confidence and daring. Because of his mother, Barack Obama is comfortable with the fact that there are women in this world who have much to give the world, whether or not they find a male to accompany them throughout their journey.

 Sonia Sotomayor and her brother were raised by a single mother in public housing in the Bronx. (Sotomayor’s father had died when Sonia was just 9 years old.) Working two jobs, her mother sent both children to Catholic elementary and high school.

 Sonia Sotomayor attended Princeton University and Yale Law School. She married when she was in school. And then, most biographies published in the wake of her appointment note, without mentioning her ex-husband’s name, she was divorced.

 The fact that she is unmarried will give her that much in common with those of us who are homosexual in California. 

It becomes oddly pertinent to observe that, as the country faces an economic calamity unequaled since the Great Depression, the employees of the failed brokerage houses and banks in New York are not clustered on the ledges of skyscrapers above Wall Street. (I am afraid if they were, the cry from below would be “Jump! Jump!”) The pope of Ponzi, Bernard Madoff, is required by a federal judge to wear an ankle bracelet not because he is a danger to himself, but because the judge fears that Madoff will skip town.

Politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, have learned in these last weeks that Americans are not a people listless with dejection. Quite the reverse. Americans are angry at corporate incompetence that is rewarded. Americans are angry at having to bail out the institutions that so efficiently foreclosed on their mortgages. Americans are angry that rich people — rich, smart, educated people who know all there is to know — seem not to know how to pay their taxes.

Despite the fury of public opinion, the press has been intent on diagnosing a national economic depression in terms of psychological depression. The New York Times, on its front page last Sunday, headlined: “Florida’s Crossroads of Foreclosure and Despair.”

In October a Southern Californian murdered his wife, his mother-in-law, and his three sons, before killing himself. The Los Angeles Times diagnosed the killer as “despondent over financial losses.”

We do not know yet the precise impact that the recession is having on American suicide rates, but crisis lines have reported increased numbers of callers. The national suicide rate did climb in America during the first five years of the Great Depression. But it crested by 1935, which was also the year when Americans laughed at “A Night at the Opera” — wherein the Marx Brothers happily embedded themselves within the pretensions of the rich. It was also in 1935 that Fred Astaire romanced the nation; dressed in white tie and tails, he danced with Ginger Rogers in “Top Hat.”

The Depression years were the golden years of Hollywood. Americans went to the movies as the economy melted. In some small towns, where people were unable to buy tickets, merchants projected movies onto the side of a building to attract shoppers to Main Street.

You will say, perhaps, that Americans wanted to forget their troubles in the dark. But maybe Americans needed to have their vision restored by the scale of the big screen. And maybe people needed the civic assurance of being in a large audience — not alone with their worries — as the crowd of strangers laughed and cried as one.

From Europe have come two recent stories of suicides among the very rich. Adolf Merckle, a German billionaire, threw himself in front a train, after losing a vast portion — but nowhere near all — of his wealth in bad investments. In France, Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, a money manager, committed suicide after learning that his clients’ investments — Bernard Madoff, again — had disappeared. Both suicides were Japan-esque in their sense of shame, and quite unlike the recent scenarios from Wall Street.

Dick Fuld, who oversaw the collapse of Lehman Brothers, continues to live in his Greenwich, Conn., mansion. (Kudos, Dick!) John Thain, who managed to sell off Merrill Lynch as it was accumulating billions in debt, was recently fired from Bank of America. He promised to repay the million dollars of bank money he used to redecorate his office. But he exited the building with million-dollar bills stuffed in his briefcase. Robert Rubin (once proclaimed “the best secretary of the treasury since Alexander Hamilton” by Bill Clinton) resigned from Citibank after receiving millions of dollars for services that have never been adequately described to shareholders. Rubin plans some sort of return to “public service” in the future.

A friend of mine who teaches philosophy at Harvard tells me that for the past 10 years or so — years of the Wall Street boom — his best students, the most subtle thinkers, the elegant stylists, were bedazzled by the earning power of fund traders. The hedge-fund billionaires seemed to belong to some new global civilization, and philosophy students were by no means immune to the lure. “Now, it is unclear if my bright students will want to emulate them,” my friend says.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin described fascism as “capitalism in decay.” Though Lenin died five years before Wall Street crashed, his epithet anticipated the rise of fascism and Nazism across Europe. Anarchists and Marxists and socialists also seized the bullhorn and swayed crowds.

With the 1930s as our guide, we should not be surprised today by the riots and demonstrations in Chinese factory towns and along the boulevards of Paris, and at the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago. Economic depression gives rise to political unrest that makes “depression” a misnomer when applied to human emotion or behavior.

But all was not street riots and the rise of tyrants in the 1930s. John Updike, the great American writer who died last month, remembered in an interview the fears of his childhood — life savings lost, people thrown out of work. Updike was born in 1932; he remembered also strangers’ kindnesses to one another: “It was considered correct form to give a dollar to bums when they came to the back door, and when they did, we did.”

The social cohesion attributed to the ’30s (I, too, have heard such stories) and the war years and 9/11 might be mythical. I don’t know. But a novel like John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” was written for middle-class readers during the Depression. Steinbeck summoned compassion for the poor during years when the middle class of California’s Central Valley was so cruelly organized against the “invasion” of Okies and Arkies.

As grandparents and great-grandparents who lived through the Depression will tell you, families were often strengthened in adversity, not splintered. And there was, in the constriction of family budgets, a sense of the essential. Today’s economic downturn is the result of an unbridled credit economy — the expectation of ever-increasing earning power. In the past year, Americans have learned caution; we are saving money, not spending. Economists tell us we will extend the recession if we keep saving. But the question is whether Americans are going to find a sense of well-being by living modestly rather than by shopping.

Finally, I would speak of the bravery of Americans. All over the country, people are uneasy, worried, yes. But they are getting out of bed to join job lines and job fairs. In Washington, there is much debate about the appropriate girth of a “stimulus bill.” But responsibility is the stimulus that gets people out of bed and dressed and out of the house.

You see them in hotel lobby job fairs — men and women of every age, their résumés in their hands. At Great America in Silicon Valley, a call for seasonal hiring gathered hundreds of applicants, 20-year-olds alongside 50- and 60-year-olds. In Miami last week more than a thousand people showed up for 35 fire department openings. The crowd formed before dawn. Everyone in line looked solemn. Not expectant. But resolute.

We are more than the sum of our dollars. In adversity, this is what America is learning. The national mood is more complicated than an economist has the ability to graph.

I remind you: The ’30s were a time of bread lines and tent cities, a time of humiliation and want; they were also the years of the big bands — Ellington, Goodman. Americans wanted to sing and to dance. Busby Berkeley made dozens of loony musicals with hundreds of Americans, in swimming suits, tuxedos, sequined gowns, dancing. At ground level the movement was as confusing as a nightmare. But from a bird’s-eye view, a skyscraper view, the movement of lives seemed like a vast machine, ready to work.

The immediate conclusion drawn by political analysts from Super Tuesday’s big headline, “Hillary Clinton Wins Latino Votes,” was that Hispanics refused to support an African-American candidate, and that all is not well among “people of color” (another cheap term from the multicultural dictionary).

In fact, people of color do not walk in lock step, are not necessarily united in their goals by their tincture or free from competition with each other. In fact, Hispanics, particularly immigrants — legally or illegally here — often find themselves, as newcomers, in fierce competition with working-class blacks and whites at the meat plant hiring office.

The cynic will say that Hillary Clinton has detected tension in the brown-black relationship and exploited it, at a time when her rival is an African-American with vast support from black America. More accurately, I think Clinton has punctured the easy generality of a term like people of color.

Bill Clinton was famously anointed our “first African-American president” by Toni Morrison. But after his recent demeaning comments about the African-American vote for Barack Obama, I think it more likely that Hillary could end up as our first Latina president.

Our first Latina in chief, for more reasons than one: Hillary Clinton is reaping the benefits of a widespread Hispanic defection from a xenophobic Republican Party, the result of the GOP’s inability to distinguish the kid crossing the border to pick apples from a terrorist.

But remember also that Clinton won two-thirds of the Hispanic women’s, or Latinas’, vote. So the question her opponent should ponder is whether Latinas were voting as women, rather than as Hispanics ambivalent toward blacks?

Or, to put the matter more bluntly: Can a person in one demographic box also belong within another? Yes, Latina women, for example, may also vote for Hillary out of feminist allegiance. And Latino men may support her, too, although perhaps for slightly different reasons.

In the end, Hillary Clinton did only slightly less well among Latinos than Latinas. The stereotype of Latino men is that, like bright, feathered birds, they are apt to shy away from strong women. But my own stereotypical view is that Latino culture is matriarchal and machismo is less a confident strut than a reflection of male insecurity. Which Latino voter had not met her type before — the strong mother, the persevering wife, particularly the wife who withstands the humiliations of a sexually immature husband?

What, then, to say about Barack Obama — the son of a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya?

His biography is a case study in the ways that diversity can exist within diversity. To his credit, Obama has taken from his childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii, has learned from his experience of his father’s Muslim faith and his mother’s Christianity, has the wisdom of being able to unite disparate populations and cultures in a single life.

But whites (as early as Obama’s adolescence in Hawaii) tended to see him as black. Whereas blacks, whether at Harvard or in Chicago, tended to see him as not “black enough.”

Obama has been anxious to prove to African-Americans that he is one of them. And white liberals are content to see him as nothing more or less than that — “America’s first serious black candidate for president.”

Most Hispanics in the United States are mestizos — a racial mix of European, African and New World Indian. Most Hispanics would understand Barack Obama if he came to us, not as an African-American but, like us, as a person of confused bloodlines.

For the moment, Hillary Clinton’s advantage is that she promises mothers and wives universal healthcare and improved educational opportunities. What she shrewdly sees is that Hispanics are more than an ethnicity, they are also a gender.

That family tie is the lesson of these parades. In Houston and Boston, in Phoenix and in San Jose, Calif., what we saw were not exactly “protests,” nor were they political demonstrations, primarily. We were seeing huge family gatherings, celebrations of the clan.

In Los Angeles, I saw a veritable platoon of young women with baby strollers, the babies asleep or not, the women chatting, as though they were headed to the grocery store. I saw carnival balloons and comic oversize sombreros. I saw the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe floating on somebody’s shoulders. I saw the flags of several nations, often, of course, Mexico’s. On one Mexican flag, an old man with an Indian face had taped the photographs of his sons, serving in Iraq.

In generations past, for example during the Depression, once America had done with the eager hands of Mexico, there were mass deportations. Send the Messicans back!

But now, how do you deport so many millions who belong to even more millions?

After the early parades, some Americans (who never complain about Irish flags on St. Patrick’s day) complained to Sean Hannity about all those damn Mexican flags. (If they love Mexico so much, why’n't they go back?) In Dallas on Sunday, some mad-as-hell Texans decided to burn the Mexican flag.

Yesterday, it was clear that the crowds had heard the complaints. On extravagant display were yards and yards of red, white, blue. And thus the irony was deepened: The happy parade of outsiders was waving American flags.

For years, the wisdom in political circles was that Mexicans do not vote, are apathetic, too busy or lazy. Mexicans, after all, are not Cubans; they lack the political savvy or will.

The giant was sleeping in Phoenix and Chicago and throughout North Carolina. And the Democrats were just as happy to leave the snoring undisturbed, because of the unhappiness of trade unionists and of the complaints of African-Americans against illegal migrant workers who undercharge America for their labor, then work with third-world fury.

Some Republicans, including the president, saw signs of the giant stirring. George Bush is the first American president to speak Spanish and to run a reelection ad in which he is pictured waving a Mexican flag. His is that portion of the Republican Party that understands big business has a lot to gain from cheap labor.

But then there is the Republican Party of Pat Buchanan and Tom Tancredo — a party that now mixes hysteria with patriotism and wars against any notion that America exists within the Americas.

Buchanan likes to portray the brown (suspiciously Indian-looking) Mexicans crossing our Southwestern border as “foreigners.” Pat Buchanan, with his rifle butt, may end up responsible for stirring the giant awake.

In the end, however, the gatherings all over America these last days were not most importantly political events.

Their scale has been epic, but their meaning is intimate. No coincidence is it that they were not organized by politicians, but were the result of grass-roots passions — the encouragements of local radio DJs, nuns and neighbors.

Before these mass gatherings began, two weeks ago, I would have told you that I feared that the increasingly virulent rhetoric against illegal immigrants would end up causing the “Arab-ization” of millions of Hispanic children — an alienation on a scale comparable to that suffered by Islamic youths in Paris or Amsterdam.

No other children in America hear what the children of illegal immigrants now regularly hear on angry-white-guy talk radio or from the likes of Lou Dobbs on CNN or Bill O’Reilly on Fox.

From the Congress came daily calls for a vast new Wall of China, mass deportations. And a litany of complaints: Illegal immigrants take, take, take from America. They pose a burden, a drag on the country; they are welfare cheats, criminals, drug dealers, thieves.

No one in public mentioned to their children what their parents and grandparents have done for America for over a century — and at what a cheap price.

What, I wondered, would the children think about their parents?

I got my answer in the huge family gatherings.

Puritans, who do not trust the value of the theatrical, scorned the pop vulgarity of some of the trappings of his papacy — the “pope-mobile,” for example. It didn’t matter. The pope-mobile served him, as did the pop music, the lights, the robes, the staging — religious convocations modeled upon rock concerts. Indeed, the other night, Peter Jennings said of him, “He is not only the pope, he is a rock star.” Jennings, of course, meant superstar — the concept formulated by the pope’s fellow Slavic genius, Andy Warhola.

The pope was famous everywhere. John Paul was a much better pope to the world at large than he was to his church. He was such a vast contradiction, this fiercely conservative pope (within his own church) who was also a liberal regarding the affairs of the world.

We knew John Paul was critical of Jesuits in Latin America (we saw him wag his finger at an offending priest on camera) for confusing the mission of the church with politics. We must set that example alongside John Paul’s own astonishing role in undermining the Soviet Union’s grip on Eastern Europe.

The anti-totalitarian pope worked within the Vatican to centralize his own power. He silenced dissident voices within the clergy as efficiently as any dictator.

The church flourished under his patrimony, especially in Africa and Asia. The church suffered and repined under his paternalistic rule, especially in Western Europe and North America. Indeed, he was a more effective pope to the Third World than to the materialistic and secular West; much more at ease in his televised meeting with Castro (a man who smelled like a man, in a country that smelled like a country), than he was with Clinton or Bush.

Like the shrewdest of modern celebrities, he fully comprehended the uses of the curtain. He did not grant interviews. He never responded to questions from journalists. He spoke when he wanted to speak. When he spoke, there was silence.

He understood better than any of his pop rivals — better than Jagger or Bono — that the young are in pain for lack of hope. He addressed young people seriously, never pandered. But neither did he spook them; they drew near.

During his reign, as more and more churches in Europe emptied and slipped into museum status, Pope John Paul II looked to the South to find the future. He brooded over the advance of Islam into Europe and the spread of evangelical Protestantism in Latin America.

He defended the world’s poor at the conferences of international foundations, and from first-world leaders who imagined birth control to be the answer to the poor’s ills. He defended the sanctity of work, of every sort of work. He criticized capitalism.

He enchanted stadiums full of believers and nonbelievers. He disappointed more nuns and priests and Vatican II Catholics than the secular press ever reported or understood.

He could not reverse the declining numbers of men entering the priesthood — even in Ireland, the seminaries emptied. A priest friend of mine believes John Paul would sooner have watched the church fall down around him than ordain women.

He criticized the West. He spoke out against abortion and birth control and homosexuality. And yet, when sexual scandal in the rectory was exposed in Europe and North America, this pope was silent. The theologically conservative bishops he had appointed proved themselves incompetent and worse, moving molesting priests from parish to parish, then covering up their mistakes, then selling off parish properties to meet court settlements.

And after 40 years of Vatican II blather — You are the church, this is your church — the contraption of the church slammed shut in our faces. The bishops would take no advisement on the matter. When former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, the chairman of a national investigative committee on clergy sex abuse, accused the hierarchy of obfuscating, he was replaced.

And yet: The cameras watched as John Paul II entered the synagogue of Rome to pray; watched him approach the Wailing Wall. The cameras watched when the pope was shot in St. Peter’s Square. The cameras watched when, months later, the pope visited the cell of his would-be assassin.

As pope to the world, John Paul II spoke words of apology: to Jews for the church’s anti-Semitism; to the Islamic world for the excesses of the Crusades. He apologized for the persecutions of Martin Luther and Galileo and the forced conversions of Indians in the Americas.

In her last decade, when her famous legs failed her, and her famous beauty was all unstrung, Marlene Dietrich hid herself from the sight of the world in her Paris apartment. She foolishly attempted to protect her role from her humanity.

Pope John Paul II was a cannier theatrical. He was willing to portray himself even in suffering, to the bitterest end. He showed the world what it means to be old and dying. Ecce homo. Even when he was dragged in on a wagon, drooling, he found the spotlight. The only comparable public suffering I can think of was that of another anointed superstar, Princess Diana.

The pope’s last stage was his bedroom window, a perfect proscenium: The curtain opens. The old man is wheeled into the light of the open window to utter a benediction — his arm flailing uncontrollably, clutching his forehead in a simian gesture, his mouth opening and closing in tortured silence. The microphone is quickly withdrawn. The curtain begins to close as the figure recedes.

Here was Lear; here was Olivier; here was Samuel Beckett; here was life as theater, here was something more real than anything we see on a public stage — real suffering. When word of his death was broadcast, the crowds gathered in St. Peter’s Square, at first hesitated in silence and then began to applaud — that ancient Roman gesture under that mild Roman sky. The applause continued for more than 10 minutes.

Even those of us who harbored misgivings and bitterness in our souls concerning the state of our church could, in the face of his extraordinary understanding of his role, claim this old actor, and join the prayer: Bravo.