Last Sunday, NASA’s Mars Polar Lander lifted off for an 11-month voyage to the Red Planet, searching for signs of life in its polar icecaps. Robotic missions to Mars are nothing new — they date back to the Mariner 4 fly-by in 1964. But ever since the Apollo moon missions ended a quarter century ago, the notion of manned exploration of our celestial neighbors has seemed beyond our reach — more like science fiction than reality.
Today, most of us discount the prospect of a human mission to Mars as far-fetched. I did too — until a phone call from an old friend four months ago. But over the last several months, through an avid and serious Internet community of Mars devotees, I’ve learned that their dream, what I’d call “extreme pioneering” — the exploration and settlement of Mars — is easily within our technological grasp.
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“I’ve been through the solar movement and the environmental movement, but I have never experienced such passion,” Bruce Anderson’s voice quaked. “It was palpable.”
The late night call had shrilled through my cottage. After a while, I began to comprehend that, no, my friend had not been to a workshop on tantric sex. Anderson had flown to Boulder, Colo., on Aug. 13, 1998, to join more than 700 people at the founding convention of the Mars Society.
As director of industrial liaisons for MIT, Anderson enjoys a prime view of the technological horizon; he’s an aficionado of reality, not science fiction. Moreover, with a long history of environmental activism, he’s not inclined to undervalue our present planetary accommodations. So when Bruce revealed the Mars Society’s mission — to establish a human settlement on Mars within 10 years — my pulse accelerated.
The next day, I opened an investigative file. My first step was to dig out the story of the society’s roots in a loose-knit confederation of Mars enthusiasts who called themselves the Mars Underground. Long ago — about 20 years — a group of precocious graduate students at the University of Colorado, including Chris McKay and Carol Stoker in astrogeophysics (both now at NASA Ames Research Center and on the Mars Society’s steering committee), started a seminar on terraforming Mars — transforming the planet into a more Earth-like habitat. That led, in April 1981, to the first Mars conference at which enthusiasts bonded as the Mars Underground, sketching plans for human exploration of Mars. The conferences continued every three years; by the third Boulder conference in 1987, there were more than 1,000 attendees. Carl Sagan keynoted.
Members of the Mars Underground thought their efforts had paid off when in 1989 President Bush called for manned missions back to the moon and on to Mars in the 21st century. Responding to the president’s bugle, NASA proposed a buffed-up space station, already a pet project of many scientists. At the station, a Galactica-sized spaceship would be constructed for a voyage to Mars “flag and footprints”-style (we came, we saw, we conquered). The estimated cost: $450 billion.
It was a lousy plan with a Neiman Marcus price tag. Splat went the Mars movement.
But NASA’s wasn’t the only plan around: Robert Zubrin had one, too. Zubrin, a science teacher, attended the second Boulder conference in 1984. The event rekindled his childhood excitement over Sputnik and Kennedy’s classic 1961 mission statement: to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade. By 1989 Zubrin, who’d moved on to become a senior engineer at Martin Marietta, had developed his own strategy for getting to Mars and staying there a while. Pitching his “Mars Direct” plan to NASA and the Mars Underground, Zubrin kept fine-tuning his ideas, eventually writing and publishing the book “The Case for Mars” in 1996.
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The book details a plan that takes about five years to execute, at a base cost of $20 billion plus $2 billion per mission. It works this way: 1) Send an Earth return vehicle (ERV) to Mars. 2) On Mars, using off-the-shelf technology, ERV components convert carbon dioxide from Mars’ atmosphere plus hydrogen to produce methane and oxygen — the fuel and propellant needed for the return trip. 3) After a six-month outbound trip, a spacecraft with a crew of four lands on Mars and establishes a base. 4) For 18 months, the crew explores Mars, looking for water, mineral deposits and evidence of microbial life. 5) As the first crew returns to Earth, a second crew arrives, establishing a new base and, perhaps, beginning greenhouse agriculture. 7) The process of launches, new bases, exploration, settlement and eventual transformation of Mars into an Earth-life planet continues.
By 1996, the engineers and scientists of the Mars Underground had dwindled to a small, grim group. But a popular tide was rising. Science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson published “Red Mars” in 1993 and its sequels “Green Mars” in 1994 and “Blue Mars” in 1997 — adding characters and plot to a story line that Zubrin had already demonstrated was technically and financially feasible. When Pathfinder landed on Mars in July 1997, about 2,000 enthusiasts, including Bruce Anderson, watched the first pictures of Mars flicker on a 26-foot screen at the Pasadena (Calif.) Civic Center. Over the next 30 days, NASA’s Pathfinder Web site took 566 million hits.
“I got 4,000 letters from people that read my book, all basically asking, how do we make this happen?” says Zubrin.
That ground swell convinced the Mars Underground to convene the Mars Society Founding Convention in Boulder last August. The epic conference covered a wide swath of territory, including biomedical issues, advanced propulsion and the need for a legal system on Mars. The conference organizers wanted to break out of the confines of the space-industrial complex and build a populist movement — and they got the diversity they sought. For example, Kathleen Bohne, a 12-year-old home-schooled Colorado girl, gave a brilliant presentation, describing how the prospect of exploring Mars had inspired her. And a plenary session on the ethics of terraforming Mars unleashed a ruckus of dissent.
Six of seven panelists spoke fondly of extending the concept of “Manifest Destiny” into space — including Zubrin and, most ardently, science-fiction writer and astrophysicist Gregory Benford. Most panelists had no problem with annihilating indigenous Martian life, as long as doing so advanced human interests. No one gave a damn about the fate of subterranean microbes on Earth, so it didn’t occur to the engineers that people might care about them on Mars.
But when the panelists invited questions, the conversation heated up. It was, essentially, an outer-space version of the abortion debate: When does life begin to have value? To many in the audience, whatever meager life Mars had managed to harbor had the same ethical value as Earth’s biota (the sum of all living organisms). Afterwards, several people from the audience climbed onstage to continue the discussion for another two hours. One of those was a corporate attorney from Los Angeles named John McKnight.
“Dr. Zubrin listened, really listened,” says McKnight, “and understood we weren’t Luddites or anti-Mars or anti-terraforming. For the most part the interchange was exhilarating. I think it did spook some of the Mars Underground to suddenly be challenged by all those people whose values were so different from that of the old steely-eyed missile men.” The docking between lay public and expert engineers wasn’t the smoothest, according to McKnight, but it was a respectful engagement nonetheless. “I think it was the birth of Mars as a grass-roots cause, the real birth of the Mars Society,” concludes McKnight.
Like Zubrin, McKnight had been a space-crazed kid who lost his way. He rediscovered Mars in the mid-’90s with Robinson’s trilogy. The Pathfinder photos of the Martian surface made him feel like he was 10 years old again, living in a world full of possibility. He read everything he could get his hands on about Mars and penned one of the 4,000 letters Zubrin received. On the final night of the convention, McKnight offered to create a worldwide task group to address the legal and ethical aspects of Mars settlement. Riding such enthusiasm, the society took off.
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My case file was already bulging. But I wanted to better understand the object, half the size of Earth and one-10th its mass, that had inspired so much passion. So I attended a lecture at the University of Arkansas by Mars geology expert Harry McSween.
McSween described the ’97 Mars Pathfinder mission. First, the Pathfinder’s rover located andesite, an indication of a possible continental crust system like Earth’s. Second, unlike Earth, where soils vary locally, all Martian soils seem to have roughly the same composition — as though homogenized by dust and wind storms. Third, much of the purported evidence of life on early Mars comes from the study of one Mars meteorite. Embedded in the meteorite are tiny objects that some people think are fossils, but McSween believes are magnetite grains.
On the other hand, McSween noted that water is probably present at both Martian poles and underground elsewhere. Erosion and flood deposits indicate massive, long-term water flow — like “pulling the plug on the Great Lakes.” What’s more, hydrogen isotopes in Mars meteorites imply that water cycles from the atmosphere into rocks. Why all the recent fuss about water on Mars, ice crystals on Earth’s moon, water vapor in the atmosphere of Titan (a moon of Saturn), and indications of a hidden sea on Europa (a moon of Jupiter)? Because everything we know today suggests that wherever there is water — no matter how cold, hot, dark, light, pressurized or laced with chemicals or radiation — there is microbial life.
At a reception across campus in the University Museum, McSween stroked a large asteroid on display. “She’s worth a lot of money,” he said. I asked McSween about the Mars Society, but he hadn’t heard of the organization yet, so I explained the society’s goal of beginning settlement no later than 2008 — as compared to NASA’s revised plans today, which vaguely call for human exploration in 2014 or so. “Oh, I think we have to go in steps,” McSween said. “NASA needs to prove it can carry out a large project on time, in budget. They did it once with the Apollo program, but their recent history with the International Space Station isn’t great.”
That ho hum approach — on time, in budget, no risk — has become NASA’s mantra. The collective rush we got from Sputnik’s launch in ’57 and from the glide of human feet upon the moon in 1969 has been supplanted with the tedium of watching objects circle and circle and circle Earth. The Mars Society could restore boldness to space exploration, with its spanking new motto — “Public if possible, private if necessary, but on to Mars!”
Already the Mars Society has 70 chapters in 20 countries, 10 task forces, 900 dues-paying members and a mailing list of 6,000. Relying on the Internet, the Society has become both a global forum and bazaar. Task forces coordinate through discussion and work groups. At the hub is the Web site, providing chapter contacts, news, a library, bookstore, archives and message boards.
The membership has toned its political muscles by rescuing the Marie Curie rover on the Mars 2001 mission from budget trimming. To date, the organization has operated online only — but bricks and mortar, file cabinets and a phone will soon materialize in Lakewood, Colo., at Pioneer Astronautics, a space R&D firm founded by Zubrin. Just before Christmas, the steering committee hired an executive director — John McKnight.
McKnight went to the Founding Convention hoping to engage in one good conversation and “got a lot bigger piece of the action than I ever imagined.” Some of the forthcoming action will be mundane — the start-up challenges of purchasing office equipment, writing procedure manuals, ordering business cards and fund-raising. Another project is the construction of a $1.5 million Arctic base, with money raised from private sources. To be located in the Martian-like Haughton Crater region of Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, the base will be a prototype of the Mars habitat for researchers and astronauts.
Still another formidable task before McKnight is to finish chiseling a profile of the Mars Society. How, for example, will the Mars Society relate to NASA, one institution to another? Several NASA officials sit on the society’s steering committee, and a large portion of the Mars Underground work for NASA as employees, contractors or subcontractors. Today NASA’s Reference Mission, its blueprint for manned exploration, has evolved away from the $450 billion monster of a decade ago; now it’s essentially “Mars Semi-Direct” — Zubrin’s plan plus two more crew members and one more launch per mission at a cost of about $55 billion. But aside from tiny budget allocations through the Johnson Manned Space Flight Center in Houston for Mars research and astronaut training, what little money Congress is allocating to Mars is all for robotic missions. The shuttle and the International Space Station gobble up NASA’s entire “manned” budget.
McKnight doesn’t fault NASA for its robotic-skewed priorities. NASA can’t lead, says McKnight. “As a government agency, its job is to follow where the president points and Congress pays.” The Mars Society joins existing groups like the Planetary Society and National Space Society on the nonprofit side of the space industrial complex. However, unlike these “newsletter groups,” as Zubrin describes them, the society is an activist entity: It aims to influence where the president points and Congress pays. McKnight elaborates: “We’re doing political action, looking to meet with potential presidential candidates to encourage them to make Mars a priority in the next administration.” In short, the Mars Society wants to see the first U.S. president of the third millennium walk to the podium for his or her inaugural speech and, echoing Kennedy’s promise three decades ago, announce that the United States will lead a global consortium to establish the first colony on Mars by the end of the decade.
“If that doesn’t happen,” says McKnight, “we can act as NASA’s competition by pursuing a private space program. That way, we’ve got a space race again, between us and NASA, and that can only speed the way to Mars.” In such a race, the society has a couple of advantages. “We’re global, with access to a much bigger talent pool, ” says McKnight. “And we have more fronts on which we can progress. We’ll explore the possibility of sending out a hitchhiker payload on a European or Japanese mission. We’re eager to build our presence in Russia. As we grow, we’ll be looking less and less like an American group with an American agenda. But as the big kid on the block, NASA will always figure prominently in our attentions and efforts.”
The Mars Society chose the timing of its debut carefully: It has time to influence the November 2000 election. The just-launched Mars Polar Lander destined for the planet’s south pole, along with the December-launched Mars Climate Orbiter, will begin returning new data on Mars in late 1999: analyses of rock and soil samples, views of the south pole, sound recordings, subsurface temperatures and observations about the movement of water and dust in the Martian atmosphere. That should help stir public interest in Mars. So, too, may a TV miniseries: Variety reported in November that Fox plans to air a miniseries based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s books, produced by “Titanic” director James Cameron and to be shown in the first quarter of 2000.
Underground for two decades, the Mars movement now pushes at the landscape of possibility — a pioneering spirit prepared to erupt into our lives through TV, educational initiatives, new products, symposia and, if the Mars Society achieves its goal, an international commitment to colonizing Mars. As the pitch of Mars fever increases, people will wonder: Is this a good thing?
Those of us who experienced the ’60s, either the big waves or the ripples of its wake, shared a sense of taking part in something more important than ourselves. Previous generations have found such passion in other historical moments. For young people like Kathleen Bohne, the rising tide of the Mars movement may be a rare opportunity to participate in the next defining moment in human history.
And what exactly is that? Today humanity sits on a threshold. Soon life will vault from Earth to Mars, the moon, asteroids and other planets. Some people will argue that the urge to leave our problem-ridden Earth is merely another expression of a disposable society. Others will contend that we should, instead, invest the time and energy in bettering conditions here.
But surely a global conversation about how we’ll seed Earth-originated life on another planet could reward us with a heightened perspective on problems at home. Such a conversation, and its outcome, might improve conditions on Earth via a simple mechanism — elongating the axes of time, distance and scale in which our species thinks and acts.
The Mars Society is a forum for the emerging philosophy of planetary exploration. Here, the lay public can collaborate in setting a course for the settlement and governance of Mars. Will we generate a prime directive (` la “Star Trek”) for noninterference in the evolution of other species, including microbes? What might a legal system for Mars look like? Can we devise less exploitative templates for relationships among human beings, between humans and other species, between humans and their habitat on Mars?
Such off-planet questions, while they may seem at the margins of relevance
today, will only grow more common, and more urgent, in the future. Answering them well could benefit not only the pioneers of Mars but the rest of us back
home.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
–T.S. Eliot
On election eve in Fayetteville, Ark., nearly 50 people gathered at the Campaign for Human Dignity headquarters. “How many think we’re going to win tomorrow?” asked Campaign Manager Anne Shelley. Arms surged in buoyant optimism.
A day later, at the election watch party, the mood had plummeted. Final results tallied 7,800 votes against a resolution that would have extended the city’s equal employment policy to homosexuals. Only 5,700 voted for the resolution, while progressive city council candidates who had backed the measure collected 9,300 votes.
What happened in Fayetteville mirrored a national trend. Democrats and swing moderates put their foot in the door of the Republicans’ party, but gay civil rights ballot measures fared miserably. In Fort Collins, Colo., where Matthew Shepard died in a hospital after a vicious beating in Wyoming, voters trounced a measure that would have prohibited discrimination against gays in housing, employment and public accommodations. Statewide efforts to restrict gay marriages won by landslides in Alaska and in Hawaii. The single gain was South Portland, Maine, where citizens passed a broad nondiscrimination ordinance. While many commentators are calling election results a rebuke to moralizers, the rap on the knuckles of gay rights activists was equally severe.
Why did Fayetteville’s resolution go down? We could point a finger at our opponents’ reckless and hateful rhetoric about “special privileges” and the “homosexual agenda.” Or we can take a moment and think about the broader meaning of the election results. I joined the Fayetteville campaign reluctantly, knowing the vulnerability and pain I would feel on election night if, after serving up part of my identity for outside affirmation, we lost. But even before the numbers came in, I’d been watching the toll our opponents’ rhetoric was taking on volunteers. I’d begun to wonder: Is affirmation by ballot box an effective keystone strategy for the gay rights movement?
Initially I attributed our uphill battle in Fayetteville to the other side’s ignorance. But after three months of campaigning — morbidly punctuated by Shepard’s death, mourned by most of the country but gloried in by the Dickensian Rev. Fred Phelps and his supporters — I realized I had no idea where the ultra right was coming from. I thought about a speech made by Arkansas campaign consultant Betsey Wright — President Clinton’s former campaign whiz — about the drive in politics today to draw a line and simply declare those on the other side evil. Was I doing that? Maybe I was the ignorant one. If so, my ignorance — my simplistic view of the good vs. the bad, the enlightened vs. the unenlightened — appears to be reflected throughout the gay rights vanguard of the civil rights movement.
The writing of conservative gay authors has helped me understand where the ultra right is coming from. Andrew Sullivan, in his provocative New York Times Magazine essay “Going Down Screaming,” describes the ultra right as a new blend of conservatism and Puritanism, motivated by a fear of a post-1960s liberalism that no longer exists. The nation has reformed welfare, reduced teen pregnancy and promiscuity; even divorce rates are down. Gays are asking for the right to be married, Sullivan observes, not threatening the institution. But the right wing, thrilling to persecution and ideological battle, continues to see liberalism everywhere, like the Japanese soldiers who didn’t know World War II was over, who needed the war as an affirmation of their identity. So abortion and homosexuality become obsessions, symptoms of the country’s moral decline.
Peter Gomes, Harvard minister and author of the bestseller “The Good Book,” detailed the religious context behind the right’s political positions. Since the first compilation of early writings that became the Bible, some have used it as a map to regain a lost moral society. Others have used the Bible to reach toward an ideal society never attained. Today, says Gomes, we are engaged in a struggle to reform our national character “as complex, ambitious, and destabilizing as any of those reformations that traumatized sixteenth-century Germany and seventeenth-century England.”
I’m no virgin to politics, but my focus has been environmental causes. Still, while my vision has been peripheral, outsiders sometimes see things that insiders don’t. I remember the ACT-UP activists I watched from the door of the Clinton headquarters, then joined, marching through Manchester during the ’92 New Hampshire primary, chanting: “Suck my dick! Lick my clit!” Our naughty adolescent behavior had a psychological label: oppositional defiance. Since then, I’ve watched the gay rights movement gain sophistication, but it still lacks reach; it lacks the generosity of spirit that results from understanding the other side. We need to understand the anxiety of those who see gay rights as another crusade to undermine family and community as they have known it.
Matthew Shepard’s death generated public sympathy and moral capital for gay rights. It was a historic turning point, a pivot, but instead of compounding the moral advantage and using this as a platform for peace talks, gay and lesbian leaders shoved forward national hate crimes legislation, another victim-centered oppositional strategy. We’re stuck in a reactive, enemy-centered mode, defending our rights, insisting on outside acceptance.
The election provides another opportunity to reset our bearings. But I see little evidence that’s happening. The Human Rights Campaign, which had invested heavily in the Hawaii ballot measure, immediately announced its intent to muscle forward with “every ounce of energy, commitment and vigor.” And when I asked Kerry Lobel, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, how she felt about election results, she mostly defended the movement’s strategy. “We’ve built infrastructure where we never had it before, engaged people who were never engaged before. This is how the movement has grown — by taking risks and fighting.” Lobel’s words echoed those of PFLAG (Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) regional coordinator Carolyn Wagner, who initiated Fayetteville’s resolution. “We have such a statewide database now,” said Wagner, “and we’ve educated a bunch of newspapers that two years ago wouldn’t print a PFLAG ad.”
I asked Lobel how she explained the political undertow that took down gay ballot measures even while progressives did well in Fayetteville and nationwide. Her answer: “We have a long way to go before we completely make our case to progressives that the fight around women’s and other civil rights issues are connected to gay rights.” I waited for some pause, a reflection on the message of the ’98 election, an indication that what she calls GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered) leaders will be evaluating their keystone strategy of affirmation by local ballot box. Despite the significance of election losses and increasing resistance to legislated tolerance, Lobel appeared to be steering NGLTF full speed ahead.
What about reaching out to dialogue? I asked. “That’s not in the leadership’s interest,” Lobel noted, then added with barely a skip, “the conservative leadership, I mean. They have no interest in seeing me as anything but a figure they can demonize in order to generate funds and consolidate their base. Our tactic is building coalitions. Theirs is stripping down to one idea and building a base. I have everything to gain and nothing to lose by reaching out. If tomorrow Gary Bauer [president of the Family Research Council] decided to have a conversation with me, he would lose his job.”
But the first step in mediating differences is to understand the underlying interests of each party. That requires conversation. How do we converse across an ideological chasm when the ultra right is increasingly inflexible, irrational and intolerant but winning the ballot game? One way is to opt out of the game, at least for a while, since we are so out of sync with the national mood. Moreover, it’s in our own interest to move along developmentally toward cooperation and interdependence and to cultivate new strategies that sustain the spirit of those on the front line.
Maybe America’s ’98 election message to both queers and sneers is “grow up.” Maybe it’s time to get past notions of the oppressor and the oppressed, instead lining up actions behind values in resolute self-affirmation. Growing up, unfettering our collective gay spirit, requires reflection and sincere self-evaluation. We need to ask tough, painful questions. Does the gay rights movement evince the same besieged Japanese soldier mentality as the conservative movement? Are GBLT leaders unconsciously casting each issue as a crisis to generate funds and perpetuate their organizations? Once liberated from its electoral mind-set, in touch with its natural generosity, humor and tolerance, the gay rights movement may find the ideological chasm less onerous. It may be easier to reach out to those who fear they will never regain their lost moral utopia.
A path in this direction has already been cut into the political landscape by Oregon-based Love Makes A Family (LMAF), a gay nonprofit that engages in dialogues with conservatives to discover common values and bridge differences. LMAF Executive Director Bonnie Tinker says there is a small but growing reconciliation community within the gay rights movement. Tinker is best known for her four-year talk radio show about lesbians, gays and family values hosted by a right-wing station.
Among Tinker’s many stories of change, her favorite is Natale, an elderly Italian man who frequently called to argue, “You weren’t born this way. You can change.” Using nonviolent Gandhian speech and political techniques, Tinker has been successful in wedging open room for disagreement so that Christians who believe homosexuality is wrong can also confirm that gays deserve civil rights. Natale called in during the bitter 1994 campaign over Oregon’s failed anti-gay Ballot Measure 13 to say, “I don’t think this is what Jesus would want us to do.”
Ballot measures fit into a tool kit of strategies, such as direct action, judicial recourse, election of friendly legislators and education. The increasing reliance on city and county ballot measures to fight discrimination is “a product of not getting the work done at the state and federal level,” says Kerry Lobel. Many of the 160 resolutions and ordinances passed in the United States that extended civil rights to homosexuals were passed in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But since the early ’90s, such ballot measures have been subject to increasing heat and opposition.
There are times when conflict, direct action and oppositional strategies are appropriate and effective in catalyzing change. But today such techniques seem stale, both to those of us working inside the gay rights movement and to the general public. Is this, then, the political foot we want to continue putting forward, the image we want to continue projecting?
Lobel was familiar with Tinker and Love Makes A Family. Her voice warmed reminiscing about a youth program she did for Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock. “I think we’re afraid to have these discussions,” said Lobel. “I was.” Such difficult but generous efforts to reach out — not just to our opponents but also to the higher expression of our collective spirit — are, like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliaton Commission, what it may take to inspire change today.
Shortly before the election, citizens gathered for the dedication of the J. William Fulbright Peace Fountain on the University of Arkansas campus. Speaker after speaker rekindled the memory of Sen. Fulbright, who hailed from Fayetteville, holding aloft his torch of wisdom: The way to peace among different cultures is through education. The towering Fay Jones sculpture of interlocking, interdependent parts at the center of the fountain will forever symbolize two things for me. First, that the cultural divisions in this country can be as dangerous as those between nations. Second, that reaching out to others, seeking first to understand, remains the most effective bridge across the chasm.
Editor’s Note: The death early Monday morning of a young gay man, Matthew Shepherd, from a vicious beating in Wyoming underscores the tragic toll homophobia and hate crimes continue to take across the United States. This November, there are initiatives on the ballot in various places that will affect the overall progress of gay rights in America. Today’s Newsreal examines one of those initiatives.
After returning home to Fayetteville, Ark., this summer from Gay Games V in Amsterdam, I made my customary Saturday visit to the Farmer’s Market. Dazed by the late-summer sun — bright and hot compared to the diffuse sun of Amsterdam — I ignored the gluttony of flowers that festoon our fair square and stumbled toward the outstretched tailgate of a farmer’s pick-up. The tailgate was laden with the day’s last overripe tomatoes, sun-spotted peppers and grande zucchini.
I was mulling my choices when a man strode up, excited about the Campaign for Human Dignity’s ballot initiative to extend Fayetteville’s fair employment policy to homosexuals. My ears pricked to the conversation between activist and farmer. Before I left for Amsterdam, I had managed to ignore the whispers of my conscience: “Get involved, get involved.” I’d watched the entire spectacle unfold from the sidelines.
It began in December 1996. Sixteen-year-old Willy Wagner was walking down the street on lunch break from Fayetteville High when a throng of teenage boys pummeled him with fists and the epithet “faggot.” They picked the wrong person. Wagner’s mother, Carolyn Wagner, was an activist waiting to happen. “I have no words to explain the anger that was and still is inside me,” says Wagner. “I have always felt close to the Holy Mother. Now I understand what it’s like to have a son treated like an outcast. I take time to reflect upon how Mary responded to the mistreatment of Jesus, and I try not to hate the haters. I have to work on it every day.”
At first, she battled the local school board, but it took a threat from the U.S. Department of Education to wrest an amended sexual harassment policy from the addled board. When Wagner realized a token statement was as far as the board would go, she decided to take her cause to the City Council. She collected 160 non-discrimination ordinances and resolutions from other U.S. communities and went to see Councilman Randy Zurcher. In a community starved for, but not necessarily appreciative of, bold leaders, the fresh-faced 28-year-old Zurcher fills the gap. A graduate of nearby John Brown University, a bastion of Christian education, Zurcher knows his Bible. More importantly, he isn’t afraid to stick his neck out, an unusual quality in our community, which like so many others suffers from what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the appalling silence of the good people.”
Before meeting with Wagner, Zurcher had been drawing a line between Willy Wagner, the subsequent hate-murder of a local gay man, David Alan Walker, and the homosexuals among his own friends and family. Zurcher and Wagner formed an alliance, built coalitions and introduced the Human Dignity Resolution to the Fayetteville City Council on April 21, 1998. Going into the meeting, Zurcher had only two sure votes. Then the hate began. During the public comment period, “The people who got up to talk were open bigots.” Zurcher frowns. “It was ugly.” Later, several councilmembers confided to Zurcher that the hostility woke them up: The vote was 6-2 in favor. On April 26, Mayor Fred Hanna dusted off his rarely used “veto” stamp and whacked it against the resolution on the grounds that it was divisive.
On May 5, City Hall was again center stage. The stalwart six held flanks, overriding the mayor’s, veto 6-2. Fayetteville inhaled for a collective sigh of relief, but before the community could exhale, an organization called Citizens Aware was organizing in several Baptist churches and collecting signatures to put the resolution on November’s ballot. It quickly succeeded. Citizens Aware has no central office or phone number; its spokesman lives two cities away in Rogers. Printed campaign materials focus on “the homosexual agenda” in the same dark tones Sen. Joe McCarthy used against communism.
That Saturday morning at the Farmer’s Market, I struggled with an impulse to go home and shut my door. But I was still bedewed by an epiphany I’d experienced in Amsterdam Arena, where I sat on Aug. 1 among 45,000 global citizens gathered for the opening ceremony of the Gay Games. The ceremony had revealed a geographic breadth and historic depth to civilization’s march toward tolerance that dwarfed America’s ultra-right and its hostility toward different people and ideas. The clock on Old Main at the University of Arkansas chimed in the distance. I knew that turning my back on what was at stake in Fayetteville would be pure hypocrisy.
The next day I was sitting in one of a dozen metal folding chairs circled for the monthly meeting of PFLAG (Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). Dan Hawes of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington put the local campaign in its national context: In June, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had likened homosexuals to addicts and kleptomaniacs. In mid-July, the ultra-right bought full-page advertisements in the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today for a “Truth in Love” campaign overtly aimed at converting queers. In addition to Fayetteville, Nov. 3 features three other showdowns on gay civil rights. Fort Collins, Colo., faces a similar nondiscrimination vote. Alaskans will choose whether to outlaw gay marriage. In Hawaii, anticipating that the Hawaii Supreme Court may legitimize same-gender marriage, the ultra-right orchestrated a preemptive referendum that, if passed, will authorize the Legislature to ban the marriages.
Nov. 3 will resolve two things for Fayetteville: first, whether homosexuals get fair employment opportunities; second, whether the city actually is the progressive, university town it has built its reputation around. Several things make Fayetteville’s vote worth watching. Fayetteville is a small town in a region nearly devoid of expansive civil rights legislation. The resolution originated from the “straight” community. This is the first time a chapter of PFLAG has championed a ballot issue. The two-sentence resolution focuses on one eloquent point: the inherent worth and dignity of each individual.
The outcome is hard to predict. Our Baptist contingent is huge, and they truly seem to believe that what Jesus would do today is condemn queers. On the other hand, a coalition of 10 non-fundamentalist religious leaders held a “love-thy-neighbor” press conference. Prominent queers and a swath of the good people have been silent. Fayetteville is skilled at using fear to keep people in line — Councilman Cyrus Young’s boss tried to strong-arm him into upholding Hanna’s veto. One of the stalwart six, Young asserts, “If the resolution goes down the tubes, Fayetteville will stagnate. The University of Arkansas won’t be able to recruit quality students and faculty.” No high tech-firm, no major businesses, he adds, will want Fayetteville’s stain to rub off on them.
Another segment of Fayetteville is angry about the disturbance to the city’s aura of tranquillity. At one point I, too, wondered if the fight was worth it. Such referendums raise a community’s intelligence quotient about homosexuality but they can also increase hate crimes. But sometimes we overvalue tranquillity. King knew that. He argued that constructive, nonviolent tension is necessary for growth. Without it, he said, a society is unlikely to rise from the depths of prejudice and racism to the heights of brotherhood.
I helped move the Campaign for Human Dignity into an empty 18-by-18-foot office in late August. A month later, the accretion of office equipment, sodas, stacks of paper and boxes is astounding. It’s a typical campaign with phone banking, door-to-door canvassing, plotting and strategizing. Carolyn Wagner is a blur of activity. She counsels suicidal teens, tries to ignore threats, weaves people together, consults with advisors. Mostly, she pleads for money. Dashing out the door to testify at a special hearing before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in Little Rock, Fayetteville’s Patron Saint of the Dispossessed is emphatic: “Fayetteville is no way the end. Arkansas is my home state. I want a non-discrimination law on the books for the entire state.”
When you’re 30 and haven’t been to Europe, insecurity may gnaw but only as your friends circle, wine glasses atwirl, to reminisce about hiking the Pyrenees. When you’ve reached 40, still without a pilgrimage to the cultural capitals of the West, and when you hail from the hinterlands of the U.S., another type of insecurity sets in: that of being an American clodhopper in Europe. That was my state of mind as I set out three weeks ago for Amsterdam to attend Gay Games V.
I knew that I wasn’t completely hopeless. Friends had tipped me about how to avoid sticking out like a sore American thumb — leave the Nikes behind. Plus, I wasn’t beginning the trip from ground zero, someplace like Springdale. The Utne Reader had awarded my departure point, Fayetteville, the title of Most Enlightened City in Arkansas. Still, it was fortunate that I had designed into the excursion a side trip. When I arrived at La Guardia airport, my friend David Kramer, rogue professor of English, whisked me off to Ithaca, N.Y. Crowned the Most Enlightened City in the entire U.S., Ithaca, I realized, would be the perfect gateway to that blossom of Western civilization, Amsterdam. During our five-hour drive to the Finger Lakes region, I confessed my insecurity.
“My dear Rebecca,” came David’s gallant response, “the Dutch have seen everything from the super rich looking for complicated sex to the super poor looking for complicated highs. They won’t think anything of an Arkansas lesbian in tennis shoes.”
Several days later, adrift in air currents over the Atlantic, I began to ponder why I was going to the Gay Games. I don’t sport a rainbow sticker on my car. I don’t belong to gay and lesbian organizations. When a friend gave me a book about lesbians at midlife, I yawned and tucked it away in a bookcase. But for this trip, I had actually conducted research. I knew that Dr. Tom Waddell, an Army physician, had founded the Games more than a decade after his own experience as a decathlete in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Disillusioned by the intense nationalism and by the obsessive focus on winning, Waddell had based his alternative venue for gay and lesbian athletes upon the principles of inclusion, participation and personal best. Waddell also had a more subversive objective. By parading gay and lesbian athletes aglow with sweat and esprit de corps before the world, he hoped these wholesome images would outmuscle drag queens and bull dykes for space in the collective psyche.
Waddell named the 1982 San Francisco event — where 1,400 athletes competed in 11 sports — the Gay Olympic Games. In a snit, the U.S. Olympic Committee obtained a restraining order, barring use of the word “Olympic,” despite their previous indifference toward such happenings as the Dog Olympics and the Beer Olympics. Waddell officiated at Gay Games II, again in San Francisco, before dying of AIDS. In 1990, Vancouver, B.C., hosted the Games. In 1994, 11,000 athletes from 45 countries traveled to New York City, which estimated the economic impact at $400 million.
Sixteen hours after take-off, I am sitting at a table in Leidseplein Square, ordering a beer. Gay Games banners and posters showing the outline of a red tulip hooked to a pink triangle plaster the city. Two groups of marauding musicians pass through the crowded plaza, already musical with the twining cadence of many languages. Soon a throng surrounds a new arrival — a street performer sitting atop a 10-foot-high unicycle. The performer lures a bespectacled, becamerad Pakistani away from his wife’s side and persuades the man to light and hold aloft a torch. Against the background of the neo-Renaissance Stadsschauwburg Theatre, the performer bows, stretching a hand toward the Pakistani, “An advertisement for the Gay Games.” The setting sun flirts with Amsterdam, embossing the narrow cobble and brick streets with gold. Who needs Nikes, I wonder, when the city itself fits like a pair of old shoes?
In the days preceding the Opening Ceremony, Amsterdam, which has been under the sleeping spell of summer vacation, begins to waken and send gezellig — a Dutch vibe that conducts good times — rippling through the Gay Games. At the same time, the Gay Games, centered at the expansive opera house (now renamed Friendship Village), begin to coalesce into the kinetic, creative energy that is unique to queer culture, and it ripples out into Amsterdam — where the two forces meet in the magic of authentic revelry that puts Disney in its third-rate place. For once, we see what it would be like to live in a queer world. Gay men would make sure that everyone had fun, and lesbians, doing most of the work, would handle politics and practical matters.
At Hotel de Paris, where I am staying, I meet Adrian Kalil, a swimmer from Portland, Ore., who has arrived early to practice in the pool where he will race in six events. Adrian is a veteran of the New York and Vancouver Games. He tells me that he has trained intensively for two years and resents the sexual overtones in advertisements and in the officially sanctioned Mr. Cockring Contest. I understand his point, but upon later viewing the Olympic Gods exhibit at the Rijksmuseum, I recall that the original Greek Olympics were a celebration of male beauty. The Federation of Gay Games, which selects sites and contracts with local hosts, attempts to balance that tradition with sensitivity toward the goals of Dr. Waddell, for the Games have become the largest multi-sport event in the world, an event that has recently acquired strong corporate sponsorship from the likes of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Levi Strauss & Co, Speedo, Kodak International and many others. Sensuality vs. athleticism is just one of the contradictions that organizers and participants alike struggle to contain.
Local residents notice another irony. The savvy Dutch realized that the homosexual market was much more profitable than that of college backpackers on summer vacation, plus it fit well with Amsterdam’s anarchistic image, so they courted the federation with money, volunteer time and free use of dozens of sporting facilities. The new Purple Coalition government, catching the spirit, has even promised to introduce legislation that will legalize same-gender marriage. While government officials and media have primed citizens for an onslaught of 20,000-30,000 homosexuals, many Dutch remain confused about the concept behind a “Gay” Games. As I eat rijstaffels, a rice platter with a medley of Indonesian dishes, with Adrian and his local friend Eveline de Winter, she asks, “Is it not inclusion that gays want?”
I hear one answer the next day from Carina Benninga at the opening for a photography exhibit, “Sjalhomo,” at the Jewish Historical Museum. Benninga is Jewish, a two-time Olympic field hockey medalist who carried the Dutch flag in Barcelona, and a lesbian. She melts me with her dark beauty as she explains, “I had a different history, being Jewish, and that made me insecure. So did being gay. Sports showed that I was worthwhile and that people liked me for who I was.”
“But a separate Gay Games?” I query.
She stresses that the Games are an opportunity for homosexuals from many parts of the world to be themselves for one week. She then asks, “If there are Asian Games, Jewish Games and Commonwealth Games, why not Gay Games?”
Each day more people wearing the plastic identification badge and logo of Gay Games V swell the pedestrian- and bicycle-clogged streets of Amsterdam. On Saturday, Aug. 1, we begin to mass along Prinsengracht canal. To the rear we are flanked by a row of narrow, four-story brick buildings with decorated cornices and articulated gables. An old lady from down the street comes early to sit on the bench behind me. Locals wedge kayaks, paddle boats and motorboats between the houseboats that permanently festoon the canal. When the beat of disco music begins to reach our ears and an airplane ferries the banner “Have a Gay Time!” across the sky, we know that the canal parade has begun. One after another the floats pass. There are men in cowboy regalia and Stetsons line dancing and women jittering and glittering on a Roaring Twenties float. Sailors in white uniforms crowd the Love Boat, followed by boxers on the Fight for Aids float. I sit only 100 feet from the Anne Frank house, and when the Israeli flag sweeps by, my throat tightens.
That’s the appetizer. That same evening thousands convene at Amsterdam Arena for the Opening Ceremony. In honor of its role as original host of the Gay Games, the San Francisco contingent enters first. I count representation from 61 countries, including India, Trinidad, Cuba and Romania, where homosexuals can be dealt with harshly. The single participants from Iran and Zimbabwe win the crowds’ roars of approval. So do the Scots when they lift their kilts, and the mixed South African team, which sashays to drumming. The North Hampton, Mass., team carries the banner “Lesbianville, USA.” It takes nearly two hours for 14,500 participants to dance through the arena and take seats. Now there are 45,000 in the stands.
As Mayor Patjin addresses the crowd, I realize for sure that I’m not in Amsterdam to make a fashion statement. (If that were the case, I would have ditched my fanny pack too.) We rise and then sit, waving the arena with an ecstatic rainbow of colors. Now I know why I came. The Dutch gained their tolerance through travel and exchange with many cultures. By the same means, a larger perspective eclipses an old worldview. In my country, a judge ruled that a murderer was more fit to parent than a lesbian. The righteous right attempts to dispense or withhold liberty in exchange for conformity to its incongruent values. Here, neither the United States nor the righteous right loom so important, so big. The world is moving on, and the momentum, it seems, is toward those inalienable rights of liberty and freedom.
Dana International, an Israeli transsexual who just won the Eurovision song contest, is onstage. A Finnish man on my left whispers that the song contest is roughly analogous to the Miss America contest. Israeli rabbis are dismayed, he says, because the country that wins must host the next contest. Dana takes the mike. “Are you free?” she bellows.
“Yes!” we scream.
The Games begin under two clouds: the firing of Director Mark Janssens for financial mismanagement and the threat of the International Skating Union (ISU) to bar any athlete or referee who participates in figure skating. The City of Amsterdam and sponsors quickly ante up additional funds to cover potential budgetary shortfalls. Except for skaters, for whom the ISU decision is a bitter blow because it translates into cancellation of their event, few who have come to compete, to spectate and to party are sidetracked by these matters.
I spend the next several days cruising sporting events. I walk into a neighborhood sport hall where shuttlecocks are flying. Roughly 500 athletes, nearly half of them German, will participate. Another contradiction manifests: On adjacent courts are a clumsy Level C men’s singles match and a mixed doubles practice session among players of international caliber who can clear a backhand from baseline to baseline. The Games try to embrace both the beginner, who is as likely to be motivated by fun as by challenge, and the professional. Olympic swimmer Bruce Hayes once said, “Winning a gold medal at the 1984 Olympics was everything I always hoped it would be. But participating in the Gay Games was, in many ways, the most satisfying and gratifying experience of my athletic career.”
At a University of Amsterdam sport hall, I sit by a chunky woman who looks like she might be from Eastern Europe but turns out to speak English fluently. Ardel Thomas explains the rules of powerlifting, a medley event where contestants must do squats, bench press and dead lift. A panel of three judges sits at a table, evaluating the form of each lift; if a lift does not conform to International Powerlifting Federation standards, it doesn’t count. I pigeonhole Ardel as something of a Neanderthal when she tells me that she won a gold medal in the 90-kilo class. Then she goes on to say, “This is really something for me to get a gold medal and my Ph.D. the same summer. I can’t believe it.”
“Ph.D.?” I ask.
“Yes, in modern thought and literature from Stanford. My dissertation saved my powerlifting, and my powerlifting saved my dissertation.”
Another day I show up at the Bavaria Pool and Snooker Center. By now my own dormant athleticism is aroused, and I am beginning to consider what events I might compete in when Sydney hosts the 2002 Games. It’s a smoky room. The tables have ornate, wood-carved legs. Tension sits thick around each match. I watch a Japanese woman who won bronze in New York in a tight match with a European woman, maybe Swiss, maybe Belgian. They cut and bank smooth as butter. These matches can last hours. First they play nine ball (best of nine games), then they play eight ball (best of seven games). If then tied, the clincher is straight pool — the first to sink 40 balls. A beautiful young Dutch woman stands by me and we talk and the Japanese woman wins and I am walking out with the Dutch woman, who gets on a bike, inviting me, I think — the accent is difficult — to meet her later at a bar.
On the fourth day of the Games, I stand on a tram, torn between volleyball and soccer. Enter a group of German women. They are Team Berlin soccer and soon persuade me that, since the sun is out, I should follow them to the soccer complex. I wander from field to field taking in games, looking for the elusive team from Austin, where I used to play. Time gets tight late in the afternoon. I’m supposed to meet friends at 5, but I don’t want to leave because Berlin is playing. When a Berlin halfback sets up a remarkable cross and a striker scores, I rush off to the volunteer desk and ask directions. One of the volunteers is getting off duty and offers to walk me to the subway station, which she says is faster than the tram.
As we leave, I notice a pace problem. I am late and must hurry, but she is slow, one leg dragging. First she takes me in the wrong direction, apologizes, and turns in the opposite direction. Minou is curious about what I find unusual about the Netherlands. I tell her it is all unusual but in a good way. Several times I am tempted to thank her and rush on, but something holds me back. Finally, we board a train and sit. Minou tells me that she’s a writer. I say that I’ve written a children’s story called “Moonbeam.” She wants to know what it’s about, and I tell her that it’s about an unusual girl who wants a friend more than anything in the world.
“I have written a story that is nearly the same,” she says, “but it’s about a turtle. The turtle is very slow, so slow that no one will be its friend. The turtle is sad. One day the turtle meets a snail, and the turtle wants to make fun of the snail because it is very, very slow. But then the turtle decides that this is not a good idea and makes a friend of the snail.”
Startled by this gift of intimacy and self-revelation, my heart widens, and I place a hand on her leg. The motif of Gay Games V is Friendship Through Culture and Sports. This Arkansas lesbian in tennis shoes will never be the same.
