Therefore, I, along with tens of thousands of other queers, was expected not only to be interested in but support the campaign because of my sexuality. I felt like a friend of mine who every time she ran into a well-meaning aunt of mine would have to endure questions about the latest Jewish this or that. She is Jewish after all, doesn’t that mean she CARES about all things Jewish? Of course, she may care in the global sense of Jewishness, but in a whole bunch of cases, the events my aunt prodded her about were half a world away. They were unrelated to her life on the ground. Kind of how I feel about the gay marriage thing.

But with friends and family and all the good kind liberals cheering on “marriage equality,” I didn’t really see a non-asshole path to intervene. Rather than rain on loved ones’ marriage parade, I kept my mouth shut, complained in private.

But now that this election cycle’s battle is over, I would like to say for the record that I don’t want anything to do with marriage as it is currently defined. In fact, I would like the straight people I know to come out in opposition to marriage, period.

Why?
1)  A contract is a contract 100 percent.

Marriage is a property contract. No more. No less. If you want to stand up in front of your church or synagogue or ashram and pledge your undying devotion, go for it, but that should not be considered the equivalent of agreeing to a binding a property contract. Consenting adults who want to should be allowed to create a property contract, but it should be more complicated and involve MANY more hours of conversation and negotiation than applying for a license. Imagine how the divorce rate might go down if the two people seeking “marriage” had to talk through every single detail of their contract from whether the couches are now considered joint property to who will have the right to make end-of-life decisions.

2) Just because they have it, doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.

Why do we think that because the majority has something, we need it? It is entirely possible, and in most cases likely, that the golden ticket they are holding just out of reach is a fraud, full of false promises of respect and acceptance. We only need to look to women’s fight to attain “equality” in the workplace to see that true social transformation will come when we redefine the meaning of work, not when we succeed in fitting more workers into untenable conditions.

3) I don’t think assimilation is the key to acceptance.

Remember the Mattachine society? Probably not. They were nice, professional gay men in the ’50s who were determined to erase the image of the perverted homosexual, replacing it with the good, clean-living respectability. Among other things, they wanted the more “socially conscious homosexual” to provide leadership to the whole mass of social deviates. Niiiice. I prefer the Stonewall model: Drag queens and bull daggers taking to the streets, demanding to be accepted on their own terms. Note to all: Gay and lesbian people are not “just like” straight people any more than Jewish people are “just like” Catholic people. Our lived experiences are inherently different and those differences inform who we are. Does that mean we should have different laws? Hell, no. It means we should have laws that acknowledge and allow for those differences.

So, while I support 100% the right of ALL consenting adults to enter into a property contract and the right of all consenting adults to declare an emotional or religious contract in front of their loved ones, I do not support marriage as it is currently defined. In fact, I think we would all be a lot better off if ALL current marriages were declared invalid and couples were required to negotiate all of the details of their marriage contracts.

And just so no one gets the idea that I am supporting a windfall for attorneys, I am confident that a nation that can come up with financial aid forms, income tax forms and the current array of application forms requiring inordinate amounts of detail can come up with a standard property contract.

I, at first glance, look like the person in the women’s bathroom that your mother warned you about — a man. And a man in a women’s bathroom is, by definition, a threat.

As a result, when I enter a women’s bathroom, I expect to run into problems. Experience tells me that I will come face to face with another woman who will not recognize me as such, and she will respond accordingly, as if she is in danger. To avoid both scaring other women and being challenged on my gender, I go through all sorts of gyrations when visiting a restroom in public is unavoidable.

1) Decloak

First and foremost, I remove whatever outer clothing I have on that masks my breasts — coat, sweater, scarf, sweatshirt — you name it, it’s off.  I put my curves on display. You would think that being a 42C, I would be easy to code as female when the majority of barriers to boob visibility have been removed. But, it doesn’t seem to work that way. Somehow my short hair and masculine features erase my breasts.

Once while walking back to the car after a football game, my dad and I stopped the local Elks lodge to use the bathroom. It was an unseasonably warm fall day, and (out of character) I was wearing a form-fitting tank top so no de-cloaking required. Once in the door my dad and I split up, and I asked one of the club regulars, “Where’s the restroom?” “Down the stairs to the left,” he answered, smiling. I followed his instructions only to come face to face with my father entering the men’s restroom. A repeat of the question to another club member with the gender specified — “Which way to women’s restroom, please” — offered a new set of instructions. “Back up the stairs and to your right.” Three feet from my original location.

2) Avoid
If there is a choice, I avoid crowded bathrooms. We people are pretty much sheep, following the leader to the nearest thing that meets our need. Luckily for me, that means that there is usually some second-floor, around-the-corner, down-the-hall alternative bathroom that is virtually ignored. Of course, this technique doesn’t always work because other people are looking for hidden bathrooms, too.

The last time I climbed the stairs to use the “alternative” bathroom at a small regional airport, I walked in on a young woman in the middle of changing her clothes. It is one thing to think a man has walked in while you are washing your hands. It is an entirely other issue if “he” walks in when you are stripped down to your pretty little things. I didn’t even bother to point out that I had boobs and they were a lot bigger than hers. I just put up my hand to block my eyes and backed out.

3) Survey
At busy airports, malls and movie theaters, it is often difficult if not impossible to find a low-traffic bathroom. But with careful observation, I can usually get a read on who is going in and who is coming out. And with a little bit of math, I can guestimate how crowded the bathroom is and when I will most likely be able into a stall unseen. (Getting out again, is any entirely different problem.) At any rate, the survey method is, again, not foolproof.

Recently I made my way across the lobby of a theater toward what I had determined was a fairly empty bathroom, only to have a woman chase me down from 25 feet away. Determined to stop my imminent invasion, she wildly waved her arms. “Excuse me! Excuse me!” she yelled. “EXCUSE ME! You are going in the wrong bathroom!”

I’ll admit that on this one, I wasn’t as gracious as I usually am. My parents were standing to the side watching it all. I was embarrassed. Letting my ego get the better of me, I turned toward her slowly, looked her dead in the eye and in a  low voice, snarled. “No. I am NOT.”

As is usually the case, the timbre of my voice combined with a closer look at my body eradicated her confusion, and she stood sputtering an apology. In the cosmic balance of things, her teenage daughter was completely mortified and was certainly much more affected than either my parents or I.

4) Look Down
Every once in a while, there is no getting out of it. I have to go into a crowded bathroom and wait in line for a stall. The first step is simply to lower my head and get in the line, then I wait out the first round of recoiling and gasping as the others in line absorb the evidence that I am actually supposed to be there. Unfortunately, the person who joins the line after me, more often than not, is sure that she has discovered what no one else has. THERE IS A MAN IN HERE.

I have had women tap me on the shoulder in a line of ten women in an airport bathroom, step to the head of the line and block my way to the stall in a packed concert hall bathroom, tell the other women that there is “a problem” in a football stadium bathroom.

I don’t expect this to change much. And, honestly, I consider it my responsibility to figure out how not to scare women, no matter how much of a hassle it is. The only thing I would change is the line police. I find them perplexing. Do they think all those other women are dumb? Do they think a man wouldn’t recognize that all the other people in line were not like him? Do they not know that the first thing in a men’s bathroom is a urinal. Trust me. If a man walks into a woman’s bathroom by mistake, he knows it immediately.

The Ted Haggard scandal inspires these questions.

I know that most lgbt folks twitch at the word “choice,” but that’s the line they are selling. I grew up in those churches, and as a child I attended several of these denominations—Four Square, Assembly of God, and Faith Tabernacle. I learned one thing: whether a particular sin is minor or severe, that sin is the result of giving in to the temptations of Satan: a choice. In other words, in the world of the evangelical conservatives, there are no gay people, there are only straight people who are sinning. And, don’t forget, the ministerial mission in Bible-based churches is always to shame and thus mark as needing recovery—bringing back into the fold—the one who sinned. Getting right in the eyes of God.

So, following that logic (?) the conservative Christian movement has long held that homosexuality is curable, and the leaders of the faith have directed their sexuality-questioning flock toward “restoration.” That being the case, what is a church’s basis for depriving Haggard an ongoing personal connection with the people he failed? How else can Christians truly make informed decisions about a process their leaders have directed them to?

Ah, silly me, that assumes that deeper study is the goal. The true reason a church—in this case, the New Life Church—needs to remove and banish the homosexual sinner is to circumvent the congregation’s close observation, an observation that will reveal the fiction of restoration. Basically, the theology behind restoration, which insists that Christians who question its true allegiance to the Word are fallen away, has succeeding in blocking its godly citizenship from taking measure of its effectiveness.

I guess it’s worth noting that Focus on the Family’s James Dobson acknowledged on “Larry King” that the restoration process was intended to restore Haggard from being gay to not being gay. Far from the traditional assertion that those who indulge in homosexual desire are falling to temptation from Satan, Dobson seems to be acknowledging that someone is gay, but can quit acting on it. Not exactly a cure.

Haggard wrote to his flock that for extended periods of time, he would “enjoy victory and rejoice in freedom.” At some point he would experience desires that were “contrary to everything [he] believed in” struggling with what he termed “repulsive and dark.”

People critical of the “ex-gay” movement, such as Wayne Beson, author of “Anything but Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Movement,” lay the blame for such repulsion at the feet of the very organizations that claim to want to heal by creating a culture that, overtly or not, makes people “hate themselves for being gay,” which maintains the existence of the ex-gay movement.

Here we go ’round the Mulberry bush…

Today, in the midst of more snow and cold, away from the lesbian community I knew in Eugene, Ore., long gone from the radical dyke community of San Francisco, disconnected from a sense of what LGBT “means” and trying to navigate a landscape I don’t understand, I am just me, a complicated collection of experiences and their effects, more than any single lens can take in.

Behind me, on a desk just like the one this computer sits on, against a wall of photos of Oregon rivers, are the sculptures I make when I am overwhelmed with the impact of those experiences. They are the physical shape of my emotional world: a growing chorus, always singing.

The songs they sing are gospel: the music of my childhood. “Precious Lord.” “A Closer Walk,” “Blessed Assurance.” My connection to gospel music is admittedly uncomfortable for me, a heckler of religion, and unnerving to my friends. It doesn’t fit with what their lens perceives. I understand, but I see it a different way. While I find no “salvation” in the message, there is the soothing comfort of familiarity.

I came to sculpting as a way of releasing the maelstrom of responses I have to living in a world where I feel so dislocated. And oddly, gospel and clay make that possible.

My search for solace is the bass line of my adult life — a life that has played out in a time that revealed how brutal humanity can be and how easily we turn our backs, the suffering left to suffer.

There was a time when I did not believe that my country would leave its own to suffer. And it is a testament to how cynical I have become that my faith sounds so naive. In 1987, 41,027 people in the U.S. were dead of AIDS, 71,176 were diagnosed. The president, my president of my country, after years of silence, finally used the word “AIDS” in public. He sided with Education Secretary William Bennett, saying the government should not provide sex education. All around me, my community was dying, and my president said, “… let’s be honest with ourselves. AIDS information cannot be what some call ‘value neutral.’ After all, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don’t medicine and morality teach the same lesson.” We all knew what he meant. “Let the cocksuckers die. It’s what they deserve.”

In those years, I lost friends, but perhaps more devastating, I lost my sense of belonging. It has never fully returned. Which may be why my experience of being “queer” in America weaves its way through so much more than simply my sexuality.

My body, in its contradiction to my affect, has had me needing to use, but ordered out of women’s restrooms. My experience with drugs, short-lived but intense, has me tied inexorably to a circle of poor, emotionally brutalized dykes of color, most of whom were lost or buried by the time I caught a ticket out, because I had a place to go. My cousin’s murder by a serial killer, just one year after I returned to California to exorcise my demons, obliterated the last vestiges of security, as much a result of the random violence of her death as the culture’s nauseating fascination with the vicious murder of women. My past includes too many dead too young —of suicide, of overdose, of AIDS, of breast cancer, of murder— a mountain of losses to grieve. Experiences that, in part, make me who I am; a past that no one here, and so few others, can relate to.

Out here, in the middle of the pond, my past is out of the field of view. Here, I am just a middle-aged lesbian who looks too masculine for most people’s comfort. I teach journalism. I live in a 112-year-old Victorian with my partner and her two kids. I am a good cook. I am — according to the people who are in a position to assess — blunt, witty, and, at turns, cranky — even difficult. So much more pleasant than how I feel.

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them. — Annie Dillard “Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek”

I find Dillard’s words reassuring. The idea that I can find beauty in this “splintered wreck.”

It is no wonder that sitting here in the flat, cold prairie and looking for solace, I squeeze a chorus of lament out of clay. It makes sense that the music of my childhood cuts through the political, social and spiritual complications that surround it and eases my sense of loss. If I did not know how to pull beauty out of cultural muck, I would have been finished long ago.

“There is a balm in Gilead.”

No, really.

I’m a college professor. I was teaching class on interviewing. It may be a cliché at this point, but Playboy really did have good articles. And superb interviews. I wanted a copy of the Martin Luther King interview. (It’s from 1965, but I didn’t know the month at the time.)

Because I do not have a collection of vintage Playboys and no one I know would admit to owning them and my uncle whose stash I used to snoop at all the time is dead, I needed a library. Lucky me. Universities have libraries.

Problem #1

• At the time, I was teaching a public policy research course. People in the library knew me. Combine this with the fact that I am, well, visibly queer, and you get the picture. Walking in and asking where to find the Playboys is not the typical path to maintaining a professional image.

Solution:

• I teach a public policy research course. I know how to find stuff without a librarian’s help.

Problem #2

• As I cruised casually through the stacks, I learned that the only Playboys in the bound magazine section did not include the year I needed. Strangely, the collection includes only the late ‘60s through the early ‘70s. Maybe those girls didn’t have what the average college boy likes because according to the librarian the rest of the years aren’t there because they have been ripped off or ripped up by library patrons. The campus was one of the hotbeds of ’60s radicalism so maybe guys (and the occasional gal no doubt) were just too busy changing the world to get spend time stealing pictures of girls’ boobies. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t doing me any good.

Solution:

• The year I wanted was available on microfiche. Getting the little boxes of film was no big deal though I did have an urge to casually drape my hand over the typed white label that seemed to scream PLAYBOY!!! I resisted, but it might have had something to do with my distractions with what I knew was coming.

Problem #3

• The microfiche machines sit out in front of god and everybody, which puts me and my “streaming video” of naked girls on display. Of course, this was the day, the student worker decides to “help” me get the microfiche hooked up and rolling. I try to persuade her that I have got it all figured out, but she just keeps insisting and rolling the film forward until a decidedly nude blond is filling up the screen. She says, “oh” like a teenager does when she walks in on her parents kissing. Somewhere between adult politeness and eeeeewwwwwww. I consider telling her that I am looking for an article, but it seems just too pathetic to say out loud. Instead I nod, I mumble and begin scrolling as quickly as humanly possible through a sea of boobs to find the interview.

Solution:

• Student workers usually ignore library patrons so it is unlikely I will ever see her again.

Problem #4

• The research librarian’s office is next to the microfiche machines. I teach a course in public policy research. When I am in the library and he is in the library and our paths cross, we carry on conversation. He sees me. We of course speak. I see him read the box label so I explain how many problems I had finding the necessary issues of the magazine, adding a self-deprecating, “Yeah right, I’m just looking for the articles.” He laughs.

• I keep running the microfiche. We glance occasionally at the pages rushing by. A whirring tableau of Tits and Ass.

• The librarian and I talk about how bizarre it is that people still steal pictures from the magazine. He tells me they keep the current issues behind the counter in the periodicals room. I can’t help but wonder who has the guts to go ask for it and why they need to. Wouldn’t it be less uncomfortable to fork over the cash at local 7-11? Do they not have computers?

Salvation:

• I find the article relatively quickly. The interviews are not surrounded by nudes so at least when the page is cued up for printing, I can relax.

The Conundrum

• I am not a prude. I am not closeted at all. No need to go into details, but I’ve been around the block a time or two. So why does being seen in the vicinity of Playboy embarrass me? I’d like to say it’s some kind of feminist response to the objectification of women, but it’s just not true. I am perfectly happy to objectify breasts when I want to.

I think it’s some leftover developing sexuality thing. I sneaked more than a few looks at Playboy when I was a confused teen, and I felt the same way then — like I needed to get the heck out of Dodge before someone saw what I was up to.

The number of people in the U.S. infected with HIV by the beginning of the millenium was not the millions we imagined back in 1983, but it is a heart-stopping million-plus, and climbing. Yet, there is very little public dialogue, even in an election year, about the impact of those numbers in the gay community, a number the New York Times reports is also growing.

It is not news that last fall the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene began a review of bathhouses in the city after it recorded between 2001 and 2006 a 33% increase in new HIV diagnoses among men younger than age 30 who have sex with men. A memo leaked to the Gay City News revealed that one of the methods the city might use to to deal with the clubs was to try to close them.

Joseph Couture, author of “Peek: Inside the Private World of Public Sex” by The Haworth Press, New York, 2008, argued that not only is the effort to close the sex clubs part of an effort by conservative gay America to “clean” up an image, but it’s not really a crisis after all. (Am I back in San Francisco?)

Couture makes the point “this is a case where a small numerical increase leads to a large statistical increase. There were 374 new infections in 2001 and nearly 499 in 2006. That’s only an increase of 125 cases in a city of millions.”

only

only an increase of 125

This is where my mind lurches back to 1981 and standing on the corner of Castro and Market reading a short, short New York Times article, ”Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” The statistics at avert.org tell me that  130 people died of AIDS that year. I helped scatter the ashes of one of them. My second year in San Francisco 466 people in the U.S. died of AIDS. I can remember the names of three, the faces of so many more. By the end of 1983, 1,511 people had died. It felt like I knew them all. More than 3,000 people were infected. Of all of my gay male friends, only two were negative.

Mr. Couture notes in his article that infections among men over thirty dropped 22%. That reminds me of returning to San Francisco in 1990 after a two-year absence. Infections had peaked in the late ’80s. The panic was leveling off. And, yet, there was a whole generation gone. My generation. The gay men I know now are ten years older or ten years younger than I am. Maybe the 22% percent drop from the 200 infections in 2001 is about there just not being that damn many men left to get infected.

medicalnewstoday.com covering the same Heath Department memo, writes:

Demetre Daskalakis — assistant professor at the New York University School of Medicine, who runs HIV testing programs at two bathhouses in the city — said that people who meet in such businesses to have sex “are going to have sex on their terms no matter where it is,” adding that the city should work with the businesses to offer HIV prevention and testing programs.

How are we having this same conversation? How did I get to be 25 years older and bury so many friends and neighbors and read a 2008 article that says, “Education is the key.” No fucking duh!

The discussion of AIDS in American media is non-existent. The once upon a time policy-altering rage of gay America is non-existent. So much so that someone can write “only” next to a number that represents human beings who if they have the resources now have a lifetime of drugs and drug-related side effects to deal with.

All I can think of is Larry Kramer’s 1983 letter in the New York Native: 1.112 and counting.

“I am angry and frustrated almost beyond the bound my skin and bones and body and brain can encompass. My sleep is tormented by nightmares and visions of lost friends, and my days are flooded by the tears of funerals and memorial services and seeing my sick friends. How many of us must die before all of us living fight back?”

What better way to destroy the butch dyke mythos than to start sobbing in a coffee shop.

“You should see the look on your face,” she said.

Sternly, I answered that I was pissed, and that she had been jacking me around. The “right” answer when you are 46, butch and trying to avoid the floodgates opening. If there is a choice between crying and snarling, snarl.

Certainly I understand the dangers of masking hurt with anger. The mission of my adulthood has been to develop a more diverse emotional portfolio than “fine” or “pissed,” practicing a clumsy and sometimes successful insistence that “I am not mad. I am [Fill in real feeling.] So after telling my friend I was angry, I proceeded to become a human kaleidescope of emotions. I was hurt. I was tired. I was disappointed. I was frustrated. I was lonely. I was annoyed.

Nonetheless, my Sweet Love, who, unlike my friend, has to be in a relationship with me on a daily basis, says that sincere efforts aside, most of my non-happy emotions “look” angry, and all the more so when I am trying not to cry.

Which is why peri-menopause is seriously fucking with me.

It’s just like junior high, the only other time in my life where mood swings came at a breakneck pace and involved my scowling endlessly to keep from crying, leaving my parents stunned in my wake. Except now my lover and friends are the dumbfounded observers asking, “What are you so angry about?” And my only response is basically some version of a primal scream, modulated for human ears — in other words, tears or fury.

First of all, to be fair, I have had limited experience with expressing a range of emotions (which does not mean I don’t have them), and second of all, I, by hormones or happenstance, missed out on the whole PMS emotions-out-of-whack thing. So, the upshot is, I have no training in managing the range of hormone-inspired responses I am now contending with: crying, sobbing, weeping, and the ever-fun raving lunatic hysteria.

Let’s face it, the approach of menopause does not usually signal serenity. If it did, we wouldn’t have the cultural trope of the beleaguered husband cowering in the onslaught of a wife’s emotions unleashed. “The Change” would be “The Enlightenment.” And, there would be no readership for “Your Not Crazy. It’s Your Hormones.” And for women like me, who identify not so much as female or male, but somewhere in the middle, it’s another phase of life that seems impenetrable if only in the lack of training. Starting with my period, my “femaleness” has been somewhat traumatic. The arrival of my breasts, which in a cruel twist are not small and tended to draw significant attention in my teen years, was the equivalent of a foreign invader setting up residence. And now, years after I reconciled myself to both the monthly cycle and the boobs, along comes peri-menopause and an emotional volatility I have no experience in.

The fact that I will cry at anything (Christmas commercials included) has been particularly hard to reconcile with my understanding of myself as butch. I am incapable of maintaining the slightly aloof mask that is the hallmark of a butch presentation. Instead, my bottom lip quivers — or at least it would of I released it from its thin, cold line— and my voice shakes. My barber shop haircut and swagger hardly serve as an effective disguise for tears.

Most days I delude myself by approaching this new phase like an equation: If only I could get a handle on this [where "this" is emotion] then I could stop acting this way [where "this way" is a weepy mess] and go back to being myself [where "myself" is a remarkably emotionally accessible but enticingly aloof stud.] But the tears just keep coming and my identity dissolves into a puddle around me.

“I can’t keep talking to you if your are going to keep crying,” my Sweet Love said in exasperation in a discussion turned blubber-fest last week. I angrily and somewhat confusingly argued that I endured her crying without telling her to stop, implying that my right to cry — a right heretofore previously unwritten or agreed to — was equal. Claiming equal treatment of tears is one of the weakest arguments a person can make. Give me any relationship, straight, queer or somewhere in between, and there is the person whose tears are expected and the one whose tears are unnerving.

Sweet Love will say categorically that she has no problem with my crying, a claim I believe. She is just having a hard time adjusting to suddenly being in a relationship with a blubbering idiot (my description not hers). I can relate. I have the same problem.

At a pause in the crying, she tried sympathy, asking gently what was upsetting me so much and putting her hand softly on my arm. A tactic that only got her that other predominant emotion of peri-menopause: Indignant rage.

“Don’t fucking treat me like a girl.”

The creation of the series was in some ways inevitable. Once a bar has been set, the creative goal is to meet or exceed it, and cable networks had long before crossed the threshold of the vicious-murderer-as-hero with Tony Soprano, and murder is the centerpiece of any number of programs. And, I admit, writers have done a remarkable job with brilliant dialogue, compelling story lines and frameworks that match the content.

But Dexter’s cynical approach pushes (sinks) well beyond the current limits in “ironically” juxtaposing plot and setting in a way that ups the ante: Reverential adoration of the “artistry” of blood on white backgrounds against dark and teaming social settings. ( There is an entire dissertation’s worth of examination to be done on race and ethnicity in this show, but for the moment, it’s the “serial murderer as entertainer” that it getting my attention.)

That television writers and producers, consistently under fire for adding to the levels of violence beyond the screen, would not simply consider but produce a show that smiles at serial murder speaks to a distance from understanding the real thing. In other words, they can wink at something that they only know as fantastical. And as a result, they don’t seemed concerned whether the show celebrates the deaths of Dexter’s victims, following the logic that they were bad guys who slipped through the cracks of an unreasonably rule-bound legal system. We can forgive him his desire to kill as long as he “channels it properly.”

But if the core ethos of original cable series has been gritty reality, how did Dexter make the cut? It has nothing to do with the reality of serial murder, which most definitely does not involve the murder of child molesters and rapists. Serial murder victims are overwhelmingly women, overwhelmingly poor, overwhelmingly sex workers. Though, admittedly, they too are often killed to “improve” the world, because, the logic of the serial murderer goes, the world is better off without those kinds of people. See how tricky it gets when actual sociopaths decide who “deserves” to die? Basically, real serial killers are fucking scary, and as indignant-grandma as it sounds, really shouldn’t be getting positive press.

Look, I know it’s easy to reject my argument with claims for the right of free expression or the ubiquitous, we are just giving people what they want. Those are not bad arguments. But I wonder where we will draw the line? We don’t show actual murder on television because we have deemed it unseemly. And in the past, we have made our fictional “heroes” who kill at least conflicted. And usually they are destroyed by that conflict. But Dexter is not conflicted. He likes to kill. He does it with great care. He kills bad guys not because he wants to rid the world of bad guys, but because he wants to be able to keep killing. The theory being that no one will get too worked up about dead bad guys.

Viewers are being pointed toward the bad guy and asked, “Well, is it all that horrible that the bastard got killed and was stripped naked and terrorized in the process? Didn’t he deserve it?” But it’s a bait and switch. What we should be asking is, “Should would be tapping our toe to a groovy beat and getting comfortable with the fantasy that the sociopaths out there just might have something going for them?”

Trust me, in real life, no amount of music makes it amusing.

I can recall both the one-column photo’s exact content — little more than his head and shoulders —and its exact location on the page — bottom left in the “odds and ends” news on page 2— and because, until that moment, I had not seen his face, for me, its unexpected appearance was nothing short of brutal. The photo raised, in its banality, a pervasive and, for me thus far, impenetrable question —one that I responded to angrily at the time, and that I have been attempting to come to terms with ever since.

What information is too traumatic to justify printing or showing?

The categorization of a standard news head shot as a traumatic image may seem a stretch. It is — especially in an American newspaper, which I was reading at the time, a medium that avoids graphic content and protects its family-friendly persona like a mother bear her cubs. Still, in most mid-sized newspapers, on any given day, a reader is likely to find a story reporting either the content or the outcome of a murder trial. And when that trial is news in the community the paper serves, it makes journalistic sense to run the story. But this was a trial 1,000 miles from the newspaper’s readership. So why was the verdict and his photo running?

Because, the man in the picture, who had just been convicted, is a serial killer.

A cultural obsession, each newly discovered serial murderer inspires a media frenzy. Too unusual for second thoughts about news value, too compelling to raise the “appropriate” flag, their crimes are splashed across the news. Their faces have the media advantage of being so non-monster looking that even a person disgusted by the public’s obsession with violence can forget to be disturbed by the killer’s photo appearing in the pages of a family newspaper.

Nonetheless, I am reminded of the first question I ask of my journalism students when we discuss how to handle graphic images: To what purpose? In a way, it may be easier to wrestle with the question of which if any of the photos of Fallujah to run than it is to answer hard questions about why Denis Shrader gets top billing on CNN when he makes his “confession” to the judge. Most editors would claim it is not our job to promote any one person to celebrity status. But, make no mistake, those outlets that chose to run his photo and the description of his crimes are complicit in fanning the flames of celebrity.

I had learned the name of my cousin’s killer two years before the photo appeared when the San Diego police went to Alabama to arrest him and told my family the year-long investigation into the murders six women was over. I knew he was on trial: I got an update every time I called my mother and asked, having overcome my instinct to be in the courtroom in deference to my aunt and uncle’s wishes. So the intruder was faceless for nearly two years after he arrived. His actions were too hideous, it seemed, to have human form complete with facial features and personality traits.

In the meantime, newspapers and television broadcasters in San Diego and Los Angeles kept their constituencies apprised of the information being released in each step of the case. The news stories were, in hindsight, remarkably sanitized. No description of blood spatter, minimal delving into the private lives of the victims for all to see. Pre-Internet highway and pre-Court TV, being out of state meant being out of the loop so while strangers heard the details from reporters, information came to me repackaged by lawyers and then family.

During the trial itself, our phone lines were particularly silent, the instinct to avoid the “wrong” kind of information intense. My desire to know more than anyone else was problematic. Then the verdict arrived. The defendant, now transformed into a convicted serial killer, stood in front of the courtroom, cameras rolling as the jury announced the verdict, and as he declared that he hadn’t killed the six women forever tied to his infamy. It was then that my aunt and uncle and my parents saw him for the first time. I did not seek knowledge of his face because I had been taught it was better not to look at evil. I admit that training with more shame than defiance, the force of family being what it is.

What information is too much?

My family has strong opinions on that question. The family ethos is denial, generally considered the answer to all things intolerable or “more than you want to know.” Not knowing is the centerpiece of the family system, an unbending rejection of information —any information—that may cause additional pain; and it led my aunt and uncle to what I saw as extreme levels of self-protection. Their own choices delivered a clear message to the rest of us: They did not go to San Diego to claim her body, so a good family member would not want to know the details of the crime, for instance, if there was information that may keep them awake wondering. They worked closely with police to lure the killer into view, so a good family member would certainly refrain from questioning why the police were taking so long in making an arrest because it might make us question the entire system and we needed the system on order to have hope. They spoke often and eloquently of her gentle spirit so I felt guilty about wondering what about my cousin’s upbringing may have kept her from fighting back while the first victim climbed the walls trying to get away. I would wait more than a decade to ask the lead detective why the police withheld the fact that she was raped until the trial because why in God’s name would we want that information anyway? The family system could not be questioned, and I might be chafing at the restrictions, but I was alone. There are rules. We must do our best to keep the pain at bay.

And in a situation, remember, where the coroner calls parents at one in the morning to tell them that their only child is dead, and she is the center of their world, and I am the cousin who hasn’t seen the girl in almost five years, honoring their wishes and staying home and keeping quiet seems the least I can do.

But personally, I am uncomfortable with avoiding bitter truths because I can’t persuade myself that it’s ultimately possible (if not desirable). A fundamental quality of public information, spoken or printed, includes an inevitable spreading and transferring. Secrets can get buried deep within a family’s soul and at least seem to disappear — but not public information. Inexorably, the truth will out.

But what is the limit? Persistent denial, as even my family will acknowledge, is impossible. The avoidance of information is selective. Holding closed the door, consciously or not, is temporary and ultimately exhausting. So how should we decide? Current gurus of the “self help” movement, most notably Dr. Phil and Oprah, have offered a fairly unchanging answer to the question. Their message with regard to trauma —uncover it, expose it, face it—has aligns with what is among experts considered the “right” way to come to terms with it. To my mind though, the question of appropriate dealings with adjunct traumatic information is more complex and troubling — as well as more imperative— when it is wrestled with by survivors of the victims of serial murder, those of us caught in the cult of celebrity.

We are the outer limit. We are the indicator species who experience inhumanity, or evil, at its most personal and random. The details are hideous. We humans are trained to avoid evil and, if possible, neither touch nor mention it, as if circumventing it will put it out of reach. Yet. it is the inability to look away, for each of us, that reveals not just the depths of evil but the power—healing or destructive—of unedited brutality.

For me the hardest view — and therefore I think the most traumatizing — was the face of the killer. The face of the serial murderer is not markedly different than any other I have seen. The only way of describing the face was to accept that it is human, to accept that a person who is willing to kill time and again looks no different than another person of his age, race, physique. Accepting that did not erase pain or anger or eliminate my anguish over the last moments of her life, but it did erase the exhaustion of holding it away.

The deep conflict between knowing and not knowing springs, I think, from instinct and culture. But the fear (the fear we actually express rather than the unacknowledged fear that we may not be as safe as we think we are) must be buried under a cultural obsession with serial murder because at some level we know that serial murderers are walking, unidentifiable, in our midst. They have no bright colors like a poisonous frog, no spikes like a porcupine, no rattle like a snake to warn away interlopers. Devastatingly average demeanors armed with broken psyches are just what make them frightening. And media fantasies are our protective instinct — typically emotionally antiseptic, rarely doing more than wallowing in the “reasons” for crime and, as such, permitting us to ignore the brutalized victims and their survivors. This is where the culture numbs us, masking the residue because there is not unrelenting consequence in fiction. The actual experience — those living in the wound of the aftermath know — has no narrative arc. I don’t know if it is possible to understand without having lived it.

I only know that, when I truly looked at the man in the photo, I had an overwhelming physical response, and emotional, and psychological, and I was reminded that the murder of another human is nothing short of a permanent a tear in the fabric of humanity, some of us being quite drastically harmed. I remember that I used to be someone different. I remember that we survivors are on the front lines of damage and devastation only by happenstance. I wonder how frightening I must seem to those who claim the luxury of choosing not to know that.

Fifteen years after the trial, I called the other survivors, visited their homes, tried to come to some understanding of our experience. I went to San Diego and read the trial transcript. I reviewed some of the investigation documents. A detective pulled specific pages from the wall of boxes devoted to the case, protecting me from things that “people just shouldn’t see.” I have read the reports of the discovery of her body. I have read the autopsies.

Would it be better had seen I everything?

Would it be better had I seen nothing more than that photo in the newspaper?

The question remains: What information heals wounds and what deepens them?

It is hard to think that the “this” he is referencing is not-so-rare attacks against a gay man (Hate crimes based on sexual orientation are the third most common type, behind race and religion, according to the FBI.). Maybe by “this” he meant the disturbing fact that the shooting occurred in a junior high computer lab with a precise shot to the head rather than a spray of bullets. Shootings at school are rare. Shootings involving one student specifically targeting another student are even more rare.

But, in terms of journalism and people as instruments of the narrative, Smith isn’t being quoted as “everyman.” He is the “gay” voice in the article. So maybe the point is not actually that this happened but this happened *here* — the place where perhaps Smith had come to see gay people as safe. The underlying assertion being that Oxnard, Calif., has some exclusion from homophobic violence.

Okay. I know. I am being pedantic about a simple phrase someone blurted after a tragedy. After all, he was probably shocked. It’s not nice to nit-pick. Except, I know that we, every one of us, delude ourselves about the potential for violence in our lives, and the current ease with which gay America moves across the media landscape exacerbates that delusion.

Here is the cold hard truth: Oxnard is no different than anywhere else in America. And violence against gay people is just as likely there as it is in say, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where Simmie Williams, Jr. was killed just 9 days after King. Williams was also a gay teen who dressed against gender norm. Maybe his story didn’t make the national news because he was black and walking on the streets at 12:45 a.m. in a dress. Not sitting at a computer in a school wearing high heeled boots and eye shadow.

The “gay” voice in the Sun-Sentinel story is Grant Lynn Ford, dean of Sunshine Cathedral in Fort Lauderdale, a church that ministers to gays, lesbians and their families. Ford is used to remind the reader that being black, gay and dressing in women’s clothing made Williams “a minority within a minority within a minority.”

But, minus that oblique reference, the generally unacknowledged framework surrounding these two murders is that Lawrence and Simmie were not just gay teens. These two young people lived at the flashpoint of homophobia and sexism: masculinity scorned. They rejected the male privilege (and clothing) that we are all expected to desire above all. Lawrence King chose mascara and Simmie chose a dress. They did not want what was rightfully theirs, and they paid for choosing a lower caste. And make no mistake, female is lower.

There are entire Web sites devoted to reminding us of the danger of being queer, but it might be instructive to look at a year in Washington D.C. when the intense fury directed at men who defy the gender norms exploded, if only to maintain a clear view of what it means to strain against or cross the boundaries of gender and sexuality in America.

On August 11, 2004, 19-year-old Stephanie Thomas and 18-year-old Ukea Davis, transgender teens, were shot while at a stoplight in D.C. But they were not simply shot. They were sprayed with automatic gunfire, not once, but twice. Overkill. More violence than required to kill.

One year later, with the murders still unsolved, the transgender community held a vigil for Thomas and Davis.

Four days after the vigil, transgender nightclub performer 25-year-old Bella Evangelista, was shot and killed by a man who had paid her for sex. Her murderer was charged with a hate crime.

Four nights later, after a vigil for Evangelista, police found the body of Emonie Kiera Spaulding. The 25-year-old transgendered woman had been brutally beaten, shot, and dumped nude. Overkill.

A Southern Poverty Law Center article on these and other murders of transgender citizens of D.C. quotes Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has written several books about hate crimes and murder: “The overkill is certainly an indicator that hate was present. When you see excessively brutal crimes, and you know the victim is gay or black or Latino or transgender, you have to suspect that hate was a motive. There’s a sense of outrage in these crimes that someone different is breathing or existing.”

But it is not simply outrage over difference that has a 14-year-old walking up behind a 15-year-old and shooting him in the head. The masculinity of the boy who has been confronted with a “peer” who rejects what he strives to claim is undermined by that rejection. Particularly when a boy like Lawrence King, who was bullied, harassed and housed in foster care, refused to back down. The shrine has been sullied, the sacred profaned. And that will get you killed.

It is no wonder that the focus of news stories is on King’s being gay. The average journalist not only understands sexuality only in the context of being gay or straight, but he or she is likely generally well-versed in how we are supposed to write about bias crimes. And, focusing on either boy being non-gender normative would, ironically, be seen as falling into a stereotype of gay men wanting to be women.

But if, as I teach my students, the elevation of journalism requires a unflinching examination of our assumptions, the first stop in covering lgbt issues (among others) has to be a more complex understanding of gender. It is arguably our culture’s most convoluted and unnerving terrain, and at the same time, it is the underpinning of so many of the events that make it into our newspapers.