Registering to vote (photo credit Christopher Enzi)
Even before I realized I was gay, I loved James Baldwin’s book Giovanni’s Room. It wouldn’t be until several years later that I learned the book was required reading for every gay man. Last week I was connected again to Baldwin’s writing, on the occasion of my citizenship.
In the opening essay of Nobody Knows my Name he describes his discovery of what it means to be an American. Oddly enough, Baldwin, like me, understands being an American from the perspective of Europe.
James Baldwin spent several years in Paris as a writer, before he sat down in a café with white Americans to realize that white and black Americans knew more about each other than any European ever would.
This catalytic experience gave him insights into being American that were kept from him when he lived in the US. There his experience defined him as, in the word of the time, “a Negro.” In Paris Baldwin became what we know him to be today, an American writer.
What then does Baldwin discover about America? What was hidden from him before?
Europe has what do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a new sense of life’s possibilities.
How I have drunk that promise of life’s possibilities. I came to the US to be with my husband, Gil. I wanted to be together with him and since he lived in Chicago, well, that is where I had to be. What a choice it was.
I can no longer imagine what my life would have looked like, had I stayed in Holland. Would I have earned my Ph.D. in Anthropology, conducted fieldwork in Mali for a year, taught sexuality studies, joined my church, City or Refuge—there is no City of Refuge in Holland. I can’t help but reflect on the choice to follow the love of my life to this country, which I once considered the root of evil in the world.
I do indeed feel full of a sense of life’s possibilities.
I received my citizenship certificate on Thursday the 28th. When the attendant handed me the paper I looked down on it with eagerness. Then I saw this line:
Gil and I and my certificate. (photo credit Christopher Enzi)
Marital Status: Single.
Still not quite 100% citizen I thought. Something is being withheld. With all the exhortation to bring my whole self to the US and contribute what I can to this country, my 19 year long relationship cannot be recognized.
During my first visit to Chicago, back in 1991, I visited the Historical Society and saw a replica of the Declaration of Independence. I had learned about it in school of course, but it wasn’t until that day that I was struck by the incredible foresight of that document.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Who else in human history had declared that all are equal and that we have the right to pursue our happiness? Nobody to my mind.
But it was an unfulfilled promise. America has defaulted on this promissory note, in the words of Dr. King. But I believe it is making good. Slowly but surely.
A great Civil War was fought over slavery. General Grant himself, while in admiration for his opponent, commented that rarely a war was fought for worse reasons.
Women gained the right to vote, segregation was ended, and homosexuality is no longer regarded as an illness.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” Dr. King declared on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol. And I agree with our president—did you get that, our president, mine as well.
On April 4, 2008, Senator Barack Obama, speaking on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, declared:
Dr. King once said that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. It bends towards justice, but here is the thing: it does not bend on its own. It bends because each of us in our own ways put our hand on that arc and we bend it in the direction of justice….
And so I see the day before me, quite soon, when others gay men and lesbian women will receive that same certificate of citizenship that will bring their whole person into the United States, and acknowledge the long lasting relationships they have. I am a citizen now. My arms are on that arc. I can feel it bending.
That is what is different for me today, that is what citizenship gave me. I don’t just observe, I pull on the arc. And I can feel the strain as well as the direction in which it is moving. We have never lost a civil rights struggle—that is right, we! And we are not losing this one. There will be others, you can be sure.
The struggle for marriage equality does not stand on its own, and the reason to fight for it is not just to establish equality for gays and lesbians in this arena. Marriage equality is today’s episode in America’s fulfillment of its promise, that all are created equal and all are endowed with certain inalienable rights.
Baldwin saw his duty as a writer to combine Europe’s sense of tragedy with America’s sense of life’s new possibilities. I believe that America still has the possibility to be the one prophetic country in the world that declares human dignity above anything. And it shows how to achieve it: through a long hard struggle. It is that struggle that forms the bridge between tragedy and new life.
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