Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

How to Be a Great Ally

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
June 17, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

 

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.
                      — Alexander Solzhenitsyn

 

Reading from Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America, by Michael Nava and Robert Dawidoff

Coming out is more than an acknowledgment, acceptance, or even announcement of one’s sexual identity. It represents a continuing process founded on an act of compassion toward oneself. That act is the acceptance of one's fundamental worth, including and not despite one’s homosexuality, in the face of social condemnation and likely persecution. Coming out is the process by which one arrives at one’s values the hard way: testing them against what one knows to be true about oneself. Gay men and lesbians must think about family, morality, nature, choice, freedom, and responsibility in ways most people never have to. Truly to come out, a … person must become one of those human beings who “want to be true to themselves.” Once they have their own authentic self, they will not want to lose it.

 

In Billings, Montana, in 1993, a young boy put his family’s Hanukah menorah in his bedroom window to be visible to those outside, as tradition dictates. The Ku Klux Klan was trying to become active in the town at the time, and someone responded to his symbol by hurling a brick through his window, shattering glass upon his floor and shattering the peace of his family and his community. Threatening phone calls followed.

The police advised the family to take down their menorah and any other symbols of their religion. But a wiser and a braver voice came from a woman named Margaret McDonald, who urged her church and the town of Billings to stand with the handful of Jews who lived there. They printed hundreds of paper menorahs and taped them to their windows, as beacon of freedom and courage to tell bigots that they would not be intimidated and that the Jews did not stand alone.

The singer and songwriter Fred Small, now a Unitarian Universalist minister, chronicled the town’s response in his song, “Not in Our Town.” Of the little boy’s mother, he sings,

Through the drifting snow, Tammy drove her children round
To see all the menorahs in the windows of the town.
"Are all those people Jewish, Mama?" asked Isaac as they went.
"No," his mother answered, "they are our friends." ¹

June is Pride Month. “Why pride?” some ask. If being transgender, gay, bisexual, or lesbian isn’t cause for shame, why is it cause for pride? And it’s true, pride is not about what you are but who you make of yourself by your actions. There is nothing to be proud of in being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT, as I’ll say from here on), any more than a cause for shame, but there is cause for pride in being open about it: in insisting upon integrity. Pride has to do with how we respond when someone tries to make we ashamed or afraid.

Another songwriter, Ruth Huber of our area Rainbow Women’s Chorus, put it another way, in a song that was inspired by and dedicated to Gwen Araujo, a Bay Area teenager who was murdered for being transgender. Ruth calls it simply “courage to be who you are.” In a world that tells you that who you are is a reason for shame, being who you are does take courage and is reason to be proud.

Those who make themselves allies of LGBT people also have good reason to be proud. They, too, have the courage to be who they are, to speak up when they hear unkindness and take action when they witness injustice. They also are people who have chosen “to come out,” in the words of our reading, to be people who are “true to themselves”: who have their authentic self and do not want to lose it. Allies are those who are heterosexual and cisgender (cisgender is the opposite of transgender or transsexual), who could choose to separate themselves from something that, due to the quirk of fate that determined their orientation and gender identity, “isn’t their problem” — but who don’t see it that way. Like the people of Billings, Montana, who said with their words and their actions that the fate of the one hundred Jews in their midst was their fate as well.

Last week Reverend Darcey Laine left us with these words of blessing: “Remember who you are.” That is what we are all called to do, whether bisexual, transgender, lesbian, gay, or a heterosexual and cisgender ally. To remember who we are. To speak the words that say who we are and what we believe, and to act to bring into being the kind of world that we want to live in. That is integrity, and living with integrity is reason to be proud.

In Palo Alto in 2007, as in Billings in 1993, we have a troubling series of events that call for us to respond with pride and principle. No brick has been hurled through a window, I am happy to say. But attempts have been made to intimidate people who are LGBT, to force them to either hide themselves or leave. I share some of these stories so that we can all be informed and take action against an attempt at intimidation.

Jeff Keuscher started coming to UUCPA a couple of years ago. After coming to the “New UU” class and talking to me about the congregation, he decided that he had found the spiritual home he was looking for. He became active in Forum, attending regularly and soon leading sessions. He was invited to teach in our Children’s Religious Education program, first as a guest for the 3rd–5th graders taking Our Whole Lives sexuality education, then as a regular teacher of this year’s Purple Class, where Jeff’s partnership with Susan Owicki was a great success for them and their students. He was elected to the Planning Council and added his thoughtful, articulate guidance to the long-range planning of our church. In short, like all dedicated and principled members of our community, Jeff has been as valuable to UUCPA as the congregation has been to him.

He no longer feels safe or welcome here. When Jeff was adding items to the bulletin board of Peninsula Interweave, our group for LGBT people and their allies, he was twice accosted by people walking by (possibly members of the congregation, possibly a parent from Thacher, the school that meets here.) One accused the “gays and lesbians” of trying to dominate UUCPA priorities. Presumably, that was a church member. Another asked him why “the queers” should be able to “advertise” in a location where children were in regular attendance. “They ought to get all you fags out of here,” she said.

Twice, Jeff came out of an evening meeting at UUCPA to discover that his car had been vandalized. Once the person had written homophobic slogans in the dust on his windows. These same slogans appeared on his car windows a few days later while his car was parked at his home 15 miles away. And a few nights after that, someone threw eggs at his house.

Now, most people here did not know about these and other related incidents; I didn’t learn about them until about a week ago myself; but Jeff has now shared them and given me permission to share them with you, in the hopes that it would help us to respond.

He was encouraged to learn that [the Reverend] Alicia [McNary Forsey, our Consulting Minister] had urged the creation of a task force to revitalize our Welcoming Congregation work — the work by which we remind ourselves and educate ourselves about our commitment to LGBT folks — and that the Board was taking the action of creating this task force even without knowing about any of these incidents that were aimed at him. He thinks that that will help people whose hearts are in the right place to understand the issues better. ”But, tell me,” he wrote to me, “how will a Welcoming Congregation task force change the [harassment]? It’s my belief that neither you nor any other LGBT person can effectively stop this kind of dangerous nonsense and intolerance. That’s the kind of action that straight allies have to provide.”

He is right. No small group can bring about change alone. No targeted group, however brave or vocal, can turn things around alone. It needs allies from the larger community. And it is you, the ones who wish to be supportive, who I am addressing this morning, you in particular. Now, you can be an ally in many many ways. Maybe you aren’t sure what you think or feel about this whole topic. Maybe you aren’t comfortable, yourself, seeing two men holding hands, or you’re worried that a church that flies a rainbow flag announces that it is “LGBT-only” space (I know there are a few members among us with those concerns). The Welcoming Congregation program is a safe place for you to explore those concerns honestly, as well. But I am speaking to you because you want to be fair and you don’t want anyone to be frightened away because of who he is or whom she loves. So I am speaking to you this morning to give you some ways to live out these good principles, how to give your support and be an ally. And I am talking also to those of you who are bisexual, transgender, lesbian, or gay, to remind you that your allies need your support as well, and to suggest a few ways you can give it.

I said that these were attempts to intimidate and silence people, not just one person, because that is what they do. One only needs to scrawl hatred on one person’s car for everyone else who hears the story to get the message. The attack in Billings was not on one child, it was not on one family. It was not only on those who displayed their religious convictions. It was meant for everyone who was Jewish or who stood up for Jews. An attack made on a bisexual man because he is bisexual tells all LGBT folks that they are unwelcome. That is its intent and, if we do not respond, that is its effect.

And I said that a minority cannot gain equality and justice without the support of allies in the majority. It is also true that a minority of bigoted people cannot hold sway unless they have allies. And the great allies of prejudice are silence, and ignorance, and inaction. As the famous saying goes, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [people] to do nothing.”²

So: how to be an ally. How to be a great ally! There are many things you can do to support people, and I can make a list available — a professor at Foothill College, for example, has compiled such a list. But they can all be summed up in three sentences: Speak up. Listen and learn. Stand together.

Speaking up means that when you hear someone say something that doesn’t strike you quite right, you say so, aloud: to them, to everyone else who heard it. When you hear someone say that parents don’t want to bring children to a place where they might see two people of the same sex holding hands, and you think, “I do — I want to bring my children to a place like that,” don’t keep it inside your head. Say it aloud. (I’m grateful to Kay Pauling for having shown the courage to do just that in such a situation.) When someone says “The gays and lesbians are trying to take over,” and you think to yourself, “No, most of them just want to feel safe and welcome here,” say so.

Now, this is not easy.

We have a handyman who comes when we call our landlord to say something in the house needs doing. Tom comes to the house, he’s a friendly guy, cracks really old, bad jokes — I always enjoy it when he comes. But one time he told me a joke that just stunned me, stunned me, I’m sorry to say, into silence. He said, “You know, you are what you eat. So don’t eat any nuts, vegetables, or fruits.” I just sat there. I just sat there — I didn’t know what to say. I made some feeble comment, finally, like “Mm, too late for me.” It took writing this sermon to strengthen my backbone enough to finally write him a note telling him what I thought. Telling him, “You know who I am. You know I’m one of these people you call a ‘fruit,’ and even if you didn’t, that’s really an offensive joke.” So simple! I thought I was all prepared to speak out when I heard something like that, and then it came and it went right by me. It was just so hard to speak up.

It’s even harder to speak up if the comment is made in public — and it’s more important. It’s hard because we’re trained to be polite; we’re told not to stir up conflict; and contradicting someone in public feels like it’s against all those social rules. So if that happens, consider this: someone else may be sitting there who is gay. You don’t know he’s gay, and he doesn’t know that you’re appalled by what you just heard. Unless you say so, he looks around at the faces and thinks, “Do they all agree?” He hears the silence, and thinks, “They do! This person has just spoken for all of them with his tasteless joke,” or Гwith his ignorant comment.” Or maybe he thinks, “Well, they disagree but they aren’t speaking up. I’m on my own.” Do you suppose he’ll come back? Do you suppose he’ll feel safe?

Our silence speaks loudly. So we need to make sure that what we are saying, with our words or our lack of words, is what we want people to hear. So speak up!

The second thing allies can do is listen and learn. Even if your best friend is gay, even if your daughter is a lesbian, even if the best man at your wedding is now a woman, there is undoubtedly more for you to learn. Reverend Alicia and Barbara Schonborn have started planning to offer the Welcoming Congregation curriculum again. People who took it when it was first offered here some 15 years ago talk about how it transformed their lives and taught them so much, and that it made friendships that have never ebbed. It is not forced re-education or an attempt to shame you into changing your mind. It is an opportunity to sit in a safe circle, listen to many experiences, and share your own.

So I hope you’ll take this opportunity. None of us knows exactly what it’s like to walk in someone else’s skin, and one of the reasons that we have programs like the Welcoming Congregation is not on behalf of LGBT people, but on behalf of everyone, because of how much our lives are enriched when we get that opportunity to learn what it feels like to be someone else in this society — and to share with them how it feels to be us. This is how we teach one another, and this is how we build a community of justice, fairness, and compassion.

And the third and most important thing that you can do to be a great ally is to stand together with LGBT folks: to take action when something happens that makes them feel unwanted or afraid. And here too, I have a personal story — I’m happy to say, of people who found the right words and right actions in a way that I did not when Tom told that joke. This was when I was in college about twenty years ago. I don’t remember the exact incident, but in a fraternity house on campus there was some kind of very hurtful anti-gay incident. And someone, I don’t remember who, organized a response. (This was before Billings — maybe the people of Billings were inspired by my university.) Someone organized the response of cutting out little pink triangles, handing them out, and encouraging people to put them in their windows. And they showed up! You would walk by a dorm and see thirty of them in the windows. You knew that most of those people were not lesbian, or gay, or bisexual, or transgender. They were standing in support. You would see the triangles in classrooms, in professor’s offices, in the windows of fraternity houses, in dorms and shared houses. It was so empowering to know that all those allies were there. It meant so much. And it turned an incident that could have made the whole university feel ashamed — ashamed of who they were, ashamed of their name and what had happened there — it turned it into an occasion for pride and integrity.

And that is exactly the opposite of what the people who had committed the first act of intimidation wanted to happen.

I’ve had that experience coming to UU churches as well: just meeting people and not knowing who any of them were, but seeing on their nametag or their lapel, a little pin — a pink triangle, or a rainbow chalice, or a sticker that said ALLY. And knowing, “If something happened here that made me uncomfortable, these people would be standing with me. These people are standing together for the principles that are important to all Unitarian Universalists.”

Now, I also have some advice, as I said, for LGBT people on how to be allies to your allies, in the form of a quick list of dos and don’ts.

• When someone finally gets on board the train, don’t say “what took you so long?” It’s tempting, I know, but we are aiming for transformation, and it is very hard to change if your change will be met with a scornful, “It’s about time!”

• Do say thank you when someone speaks up, listens, or stands with you. It takes courage to be an ally and sometimes the only thanks an ally gets is rejection by other straight and cisgender people. So make sure that isn’t the case.

• Don’t take your anger and fear from bigots out on those who are trying to be allies. You really don’t want your allies to get hit from both sides.

• Do tell would-be allies what they’re doing right, and when you have to tell them what they’re doing wrong, try to do it gently. They are trying to learn, and very few of us learn best when the teacher only tells us the answers we got wrong and not the answers we got right.

• And do be an ally to them. Everyone is in need of support in some aspect of their life. Maybe that straight white middle-class man needs you to speak up when someone makes a slur against people his age. Maybe that Latina woman is wondering is she’s welcome in a mostly-Anglo church. Maybe that family is going through a time of sadness and worry, and just needs to know that you’re a loving member of their community. We all need to know that someone has our back. Be an ally to your allies.

Now, I want to close with a concern that a few people brought up when I said I was going to be speaking about this topic — people who are strong allies, and want this conversation to go in a way that will help. They raised the concern that by talking about this — by sharing the incidents that happened to Jeff, by sharing this concern — I would be magnifying the events. That I would be signaling, in fact, to LGBT people, that they are not welcome here, despite my best intentions. Those of us who hear the story of harrassment may share the feelings of being intimidated, it’s true. So why then am I spreading the story? What if we do just magnify the event, spread the word, and scare people away?

The answer is, the way to make sure that we are not magnifying the problem, but shining a helpful light on it, is to respond the way our principles tell us to respond. If we raise our voices in support, if we stand up and say, “This is not what we do here. This is not something that we will tolerate in this community,” then we, like the people at my college, will have turned around a shameful incident into an occasion for pride. We will have turned an act of intimidation into an act of transformation. And people know that.

And remember, it is no secret to LGBT people that bigotry exists. We know already. We encounter it every day, even in a place as safe and enlightened as the Bay Area. We hope it won’t happen at a Unitarian Universalist church, but we know that no community can guarantee that everyone will always act with respect. It is okay to acknowledge that people say the wrong thing, that people are hurtful.

What LGBT people need to know is that when someone makes a slur; someone tells them they’re not wanted here; worries aloud that they’re “taking over” when they’re less than 5% of the community’s population; tells them that they shouldn’t hold hands with their sweetheart, although straight people can; doesn’t want them to be too many of the Worship Associates; insinuates that they are dangerous to children: that when these things happen, others will speak out and stand up. That this is a community that remembers who it is. That we have the courage to be who we are. That is all that people need to know.

So we as a community have a choice. We can accept the definition that a few people would impose upon us by their actions; we can accept fear and shame; or we can reject it, out loud, and in doing so, stake our claim to the community we love and want to be. We can allow others to define us or we can remember who we are. We can be ashamed or we can turn shameful incidents from a few, which will always be a fact of life, into reasons to be proud. We do it through our words, our actions, and our healing love.

I look forward to hearing from everyone your thoughts — what can we do next? — and to joining the leadership in taking the steps to make this the community we know and want it to be.

Let us sing together the great anthem of solidarity, hymn number 169, “We Shall Overcome.”

 

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