A while back, Jack of Erie Media-Go-Round had floated the idea of sometime getting a guest blog from me about local media coverage of GLBT or Pagan issues. So, I wrote a little something for that, and he had a teaser yesterday. Some of the anonymous commenters apparently assumed that it was going to be some kind of shrill whine, I guess.
The guest blog entry ran today and here it is. I genuinely feel that local media does a fairly good job on covering both communities to which I happen to belong. There have only been a few rough spots over the past 15 years, which I think is a very good track record indeed. I try to save getting angry at others for the big stuff. I am also a very big believer that you can't complain about something unless you are prepared to do something about it. I sort of get that from how my mom raised us kids.
One of the reasons that I wanted to write about both the GLBT and Pagan communities is to point out what I see as the internal differences in how the local versions deal with being open. It is just weird to me that although Pagans tend to be much more likely to be not well understood, I tend not to see the same degree of neurotic hiding. (But obviously, there are all kinds of folks at all kinds of comfort levels in both groups.)
Of course, my being in one group has nothing at all to do with being in the other. I do think that Pagans as a rule tend to be much more comfortable and welcoming to GLBT folks than many other faiths, but I also don't think that we choose our religious orientation any more than we choose our sexual orientation. We might choose how we deal with it, but whom we love and are attracted to and how we connect with the Divine is not something that we control.
I remember being on a panel once with my friend Jeremy, who also happens to be Pagan. There were also 2 women on the panel who were very actively Christian and also lesbians. (So it was the Pagan guys and the Christian women - I seem to recall that they were Methodists, and one of them had gone to Divinity school to be a minister.) I very much respected the 2 women. Being active spiritually is NOT about conking anyone over the head and getting them to "be on your side." They were equally respectful of us.
One of the advantages to being out as a gay man is getting to see that people from many different faith traditions can be quite accepting and genuinely decent. I had a wonderful conversation years ago with an area woman who had converted to Islam. Because she had faced hostility because of her faith, she was able to understand differences in others. She dressed in the traditional garb of her faith. At one point after 9/11, some jerk screamed at her that she should "just go back where she came from!" The funny part is that she was a red-haired, blue eyed German-American from Lancaster PA. So, going back where she came from would not even need to involve crossing state lines, let alone going to another part of the world. We both noted that people don't get that nationality/ethnicity does not perfectly line up with faith traditions.
Thanks Michael for writing the post for my blog. I think you proved a very valid point and your personal media experiences were enlightening.