GAZETTE Tampa Bay Gay and Lesbian News

By Hilton Kean Jones
Does your mother know?
Terrifying words when you're in the 3rd grade, usually spoken by some Sunday School teacher or neighborhood disciplinarian. They implied that we'd done--or were about to do--something very bad, and that our mother did not know, but when she did...there'd be hell to pay!
We're not in 3rd grade any more, but the fear those words instilled is still with us enough to provide the humorous punch to the Castro district (San Francisco) card shop of the same name. Unfortunately, the terror also lingers in our fear of letting our mothers know we're gay. Sadly, those fears are all too often justified, but the proposition of this article is that those fears must be overcome: even if no one else knows, our mothers need to, because mothers, collectively, are the most powerful and protective force on earth. When enough of them know their daughters and sons are gay--even if, at first, they are resistant to that knowledge--there will be no stopping their demand for justice and equity for their children.
If you don't believe this argument, take a look at a few historical and literary examples. Consider first Aristophanes' Lysistrata. the women of Athens, tired of losing their sons in the war, withhold sex from their husbands until they make peace with Sparta. Guess who won that contest of wills? This drama still has impact today in the Lysistrata Project, in which Bush's Iraq war is protested with 1,029 readings of Lysistrata in fifty-nine countries to over 300,000 people. Lysistrata was fiction, but in a real event in 415 B.C.E. Athens (probably Aristophanes' inspiration), the women of the city, in a magical gesture to protest their husbands' war against Sicily, hacked off the penises of all the city's hermes (phallic pillars with the head of the god Hermes on top that protected crossroads).
A more recent real-life demonstration of the power of mothers is told in the 1985 Argentinian film The Official Story. The context of the film concerns "the disappeared" (dissenters who are taken away at night by the military junta, never to be heard from again). Daily, the "abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo" (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo) silently processed around the town center plaza, demanding happened to their children. Although the answer to that question for many of "the disappeared" will never be known, the Grandmothers became an international story that exposed these horrors.
As hate crimes have increased in our country, there is a tragic growth in the number of mothers of the victims. A number of those mothers have gone on to demand justice for their murdered children, to salvage some positive effect from their sacrifice. To name but a few, those mothers include the mothers of Matthew Shepard, Allen Schindler, Barry Winchell, Brandon Teena, Danny Overstreet, JR Warren, Billy Jack Gaither, Bill Clayton, and Tyra Hunter. For their story and the stories of others, click here.
In current drama, Sharon Gless's portrayal of Debbie Novotny, PFLAG mom of Michael (Hal Sparks) on Queer as Folk we see the power and support we could tap into when we open up to our mothers. Probably, there is not a single nuclear family that does not have at least one gay member. Once the mothers of all those millions of families work their way through to their own acceptance and understanding of us, the mothers will demand that their children be treated as equals. But first...we have to tell them.
We have to let our mothers know.

COMMUNITY CALENDAR presented by the Tampa Bay Business Guild

LINKS

Are You Registered to Vote? It's easy! Click Here!

AIDS Memorial Bells

Tampa Bay Business Guild

Metropolitan Charities/Metro Center

gaystpete.com

Tampa Bay Lesbians

Equality Florida

National Center for Lesbian Rights

Winter Pride Tampa Bay

St. Pete Pride

queertampa.com

King of Peace MCC

First United Church of Tampa

Gypsy Productions

Team Tampa Bay

Una Voce