Dancing Queen

Dancing Jesus icon.

Okay, I can’t get it out of my head. Dancing Queen. This past week, Wade and I watched some escapist fare to overcome the world’s angst over the pandemic, the murders of black people, and who is in the White House. We watched both versions of Mamma Mia! on two consecutive nights. And I listened to my CD of Abba as I did my blog business last Wednesday.

That day’s post quoted my spiritual mentor Henri Nouwen about the U.S. Civil Rights Movement: “It seemed as if nobody could party better than these oppressed people.” That’s true of LGBTIQ people as well. Henri had a taste of that when I once took him to a popular West Hollywood disco, Studio One.

In the middle of marchers dancing during an apartheid protest in South Africa, Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu was asked by a news reporter why dancing was so important. Tutu continued his dancing, gave the reporter a puzzled expression, pleading, “We’ve just got to dance.”

Wade and I watched the fa-bu-lous Global Pride 2020 24-hour marathon this past Saturday that often moved me to tears of joy and gratitude, as well as grief and pain for those who never lived to see it. (An aside I can’t resist: a gay friend of mine had to keep re-taping a McDonald’s commercial because he kept putting too much emphasis on the word “fa-bu-lous”!)

I still remember when I thought I was the only one.

And I remember an early Pride festival in my home city of Los Angeles. Friday night, at the entrance, fundamentalist Christians had positioned themselves with damning signs, including “TURN OR BURN!” which the band just inside the festival fence mocked by playing “Burn, Baby, Burn!” from Saturday Night Fever.

Another aside from “the old days”: MCC founder and Pride activist Rev. Troy Perry liked to explain that fundamentalism was an ideological “ism” that included nothing “mental” and nothing “fun.”

It was the Saturday of a subsequent Pride festival that a friend and church member brought his ten-year-old son along. When I arrived, I noticed the dance tent was crowded with a circle of attendees watching a couple dance in the middle of the tent, clapping their approval to the beat of the music. As I approached, I realized it was my friend’s very white little boy dancing extraordinarily well with a very tall black man. I kidded my friend, “Your son has fulfilled your fantasy of having the eyes of everyone on the dance floor riveted by your dancing skills!” When the father died of AIDS years later, I probably told that story in his eulogy.

I have often taken my emotions into my dancing, whether expressing joy or grief. That’s true of many of us in the Queer movement. My first long-term boyfriend and I used to dance till we were sweaty and shirtless.

A friend who died of AIDS a few years after graduation from Columbia Theological Seminary here in the Atlanta area had a rather traditional Presbyterian memorial service. But at the end, to our delight, he had requested the postlude, “Dancing Queen.” We left with a smile on our lips.

Thanks be to God for all the dancing queens of our lives!

I will be leading a virtual, at-home retreat open to the public for Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program September 17-19, 2020 entitled An Open Receptive Place: Henri Nouwen’s Spirituality. You are invited!

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Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite.

My Birthday Wish

Children in Soweto.

Several readers of last week’s post responded that they too had visited Soweto. One mentioned that he had been taken to a children’s cemetery there. I wrote back that one thought nagged me when visiting: how can a kid born and reared in the shacks of Soweto rise above the mentality/culture instilled by such an upbringing?

I immediately recognize the paternalism inherent in my thinking. Poverty and poor housing do not automatically “mark” someone for life. At the same time, they can limit one’s hopes and dreams. I know my own hopes and dreams were limited in scope by a working-class upbringing. As I listened to the Senate hearings of Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh last week, I caught a glimpse of a privileged, preppy, country club world that surely gave them both a boost in their own careers, though it also propelled them toward the incident that Dr. Ford convincingly described and Judge Kavanaugh unconvincingly denied.

I mentioned last week that Dennis, the guide who took us to Soweto, had grown up there and had never seen a skyscraper until he was 22 years old. The government had built an earthen ridge so Soweto’s residents could not see the skyline of Johannesburg, lest they aspired to a life apartheid denied them.

Now there is better housing and schools in Soweto, with more to come. Satellite dishes on even some of the smallest homes suggest access to a larger world. And that two of South Africa’s national heroes had residences there, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, surely must elevate the hopes and dreams of even the most destitute.

But the contrast between Soweto and Sandton—the upscale financial district of Johannesburg where we were staying—indicates an income inequality that could breed discontent if not revolution.

Me and Wade in Nelson Mandela Square,

a huge, upscale shopping mall in Sandton.

Dennis told us that he had lost relatives as a result of apartheid. But he credited Mandela with his family’s ability to cope, even as they heard from those responsible for their deaths during the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a process that offered amnesty to those who would come forward and honestly admit what they had done. Dennis told us of later running into one of those men who confessed, and both were able to greet one another civilly. He said honestly that if it had not been for Mandela’s example he might have killed the man. Mandela averted a blood bath, he explained.

But then I wondered about the children living in poverty in Soweto who are growing up without a Mandela at the helm of the South African government.

As I write this, it occurs to me that we in the United States could benefit from a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that could help us talk about sexual assault, racial violence, LGBT bashing, and other ills. We too suffer from income inequality that breeds discontent if not revolution.

We could use both a Nelson Mandela and a Desmond Tutu.

Today is my birthday. Most of my birthday wishes throughout my life have been for peace on earth, sometimes for a particular region, sometimes for the whole world. And I’ve meant a full-bodied peace—that is, peace with justice but not revenge.

Today I wish for peacemakers.

Yours truly. 

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Text and photos copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser and Wade T. Jones. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Silencing while Assaulting

Dennis, our guide to Soweto.

Not saying I know it to be true, but the image of a potential Supreme Court justice as a youth muzzling a woman while sexually assaulting her serves as a powerful metaphor for how men have too often treated women. That men do the same when legislating and adjudicating women’s reproductive choices cannot be denied.

I would not want to be judged by my own careless acts as a youth, but by what I have become since. So the question for me is if this nominee has sufficiently matured to keep his hands off a woman’s uterus when it comes to her choice to bear or not bear a child. I am not pro-abortion, I am pro-choice.

Last week I attended a book launch for Connie Tuttle’s fa-bu-lous memoir, A Gracious Heresy: The Queer Calling of an Unlikely Prophet. In a blurb for the book, I described it as a book full of “extraordinary stories extraordinarily well told.” One of those stories, and one she read for the launch, is about her attending a presbytery meeting that was to vote on the ordination of lesbians and gay men and thus, the possibility of her own ordination. To be silenced, to be disallowed from speaking in her own defense because she was neither an ordained elder or minister, was and is what countless LGBT Christians endured and still endure in too many religious communities.

Three weeks ago Wade and I visited Soweto, where I learned that one of the breaking points of apartheid was when the South African government in the mid-1970s insisted all citizens of color had to learn and speak Afrikaans, a language only spoken in South Africa. It was to silence protest and prevent their mobility to other countries. Non-violent student protests to this led to massacres of innocent children and youth. The world took notice and imposed sanctions.

I was describing Soweto to a young person when I realized she had never heard of “townships.” I grew up reading about them in my high school current events publications, and I was horrified to think that blacks and other nonwhites lived in what the government called “townships,” and could only leave them when going to and from work, expected by authorities to show their passes on demand.

Soweto is short for “southwest township.” Our guide, Dennis, grew up in Soweto, and he referred to townships as “concentration camps.” He picked us up at our Hilton (!!—Wade had points to cover the hotel) in Sandton, the very upscale financial district of Johannesburg, for a personal tour and history lesson. On the drive to Soweto, he taught us more about South African history then I ever learned in any history class.

As we got close to Soweto, he pointed out huge earth ridges that had been constructed long ago to prevent its residents from seeing the skyline of Johannesburg in the distance. He said he was 22 years old before he ever saw a skyscraper!

Shacks in Soweto.

What surprised Wade and me was the contrast between shanty town homes (that the government is gradually replacing with better housing) and plainly middle- and upper-class homes, usually reflecting the architecture of the countries from which their residents came. Dennis explained that as apartheid came to an end and Nelson Mandela was released from prison and eventually came to power, many nonwhite South Africans returned and built homes that reflected the education, businesses and professions they had been able to pursue elsewhere.

Middle class Soweto homes.

Dennis told us that, upon hearing the plight of those in the townships, who were not allowed education, Scandinavian churches had built churches and schools, smuggling promising students out of the country for higher education. It was in front of one of those schools that a massacre of students occurred. There is a museum nearby named for the first child who fell, caught in a photograph that incensed the world:

Soweto boasts the only street in the world whose residents included two Nobel Peace Prize laureates: Nelson Mandela, whose modest brick house is now a museum, and Bishop Desmond Tutu, an occasional and modest residence for the Anglican churchman who chaired South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The street where Mandela and Tutu resided.

From prison in 1977, Nelson Mandela wrote to his wife, Winnie Madikizela Mandela, these words, which are now on a plaque at the museum:

In judging our progress as individuals, we tend to concentrate on external factors such as one’s social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education…but internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one’s development as a human being: humility, purity, generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve your fellow men—qualities within the reach of every human soul.

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Text and photos copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.