Get Used to It: Ep. 74, "Holidays"

oh [Applause] [Music] hi welcome to get used to it i'm sheila kuhl and i've been your host for about 400 years and i hope you've been watching for all of that time uh around this time of year we take a very original note and do a show about the holidays and this year will be no exception i have a group of people here who are spiritual leaders and activists in our community i'm sure you know that get used to it has concentrated over the years on issues of particular interest to the gay lesbian bisexual transgender community but we find that we have a lot of allies that watch the show as well so we're going to be a little free-ranging in our discussion today because the holidays are particularly personal everybody sort of has a different take and of course every year it's different for each of us some conflict some happiness some sadness some we don't even know why we feel what we feel some hunger for spirituality maybe some new kind of celebration maybe new family so we'll talk about all of these things today very pleased to have as my guests first the rabbi denise egger who's been on the show before she is the spiritual leader of congregation colamie here in west hollywood welcome denise glad to be here happy holidays and also my friend phil wilson who is the director of african american aids policy and training institute here in los angeles welcome phil thank you glad to have you back great and for her first appearance on the show the reverend nancy wilson who is the pastor of the metropolitan community church here in los angeles welcome nancy thank you all right glad to have you here good to be here well denise let's start with you um here we are again we've talked uh other years i think about this this holiday season and particularly for our community the gay and lesbian community whether there are any sort of differences or whether you notice any trends of i don't know hankering for you know spirituality or a new ritual but this year we have a particular um addition i think to our consideration about celebration not just as gays and lesbians and that is this this confluence of the holidays coming practically one on top of the other what what what is that experience going to be like for you well yeah it's true this year sheila that uh hanukkah christmas kwanzaa all overlap as does ramadan which started early the end of november and continues a month long so you have many of these holidays um celebrating at the same time at the same season i think for some people especially those who have families who come from many different traditions interfaith families i think it's comforting for them in many ways to be able to have celebrations together for others of us it's a more difficult season because even though we share many of the same messages about peace and kindness and love and family and celebration and spirituality i think it's often difficult when the holidays overlap because there's a sense of kind of everything kind of gets mushed together if you will in one big stew and it's sometimes hard to kind of create your own space for the holiday seeing all those windows dressed in red and green doesn't help you too much around hanukkah well no it doesn't one of my favorite one of my favorite stories is that one year i guess i was away at school and my folks sent me a hanukkah card except it was a red and green hanukkah card you know missing you across the miles kind of thing clearly whoever was the card maker didn't quite get that you know those have associations that aren't necessarily for hanukkah well it must make it more difficult i mean i thought you you said it was comforting in a way because everybody's sort of celebrating their holidays at the same time and if we're going to be jolly at one time of the year god knows we better do it right now but those interfaith couples or families uh of which we you know in addition to the fact that we may have our own gay and lesbian family within that family we may have different traditions are we torn more in terms of where and how to do this or what do we do anyway i think those are always the challenges in families that share multiple spiritual traditions together or interfaith families um that there's always a pool of how we're going to do this how are we going to decide how to do it what what feels right for our family what community are we going to be a part of are we going to be part of multiple religious communities so i think those are big questions that when families come together that they have to make some decisions about um it doesn't have to be a a painful decision but it does take some compromise between partners between sides of families it's not just between spouses that that happens but you know the larger family circle as well but at least in most families although i don't know how serious the uh sort of religious divide may be and especially uh any new immigrant community might bring more serious sort of religious divide ours is a little more polite if but probably not any less um serious i guess in in america but in addition to that you could almost always think well maybe at least the daughter-in-law will be welcome you know in the house but in our couples or do we have sort of an added sort of concern well i think i think the holidays is as fun as they can be and as joyous as they can be i think they're often difficult in our glbt queer community because it does bring up a lot of those family strife issues i mean holidays are hard anyways they bring back all those childhood memories some of all are which are not so wonderful and um in our own community for many of us who are not welcome back in those families of origin so we have to create new new families new traditions our own way of owning you know christmas hanukkah whatever the holiday but i also think that um in particular when we're partnered that sometimes we have a tendency not to see our own family as kind of the core family and so we're forced kind of to go back to that family of origin and there's always the question will my spouse be welcomed can i bring them to the christmas table can i bring them to the latka party um and how will that be received not to mention we try to create some traditions for our kids you know and create a new kind of holiday where we're all together right and then we think i mean as a family sort of grow up and the parents are then the grandparents there's this sort of tradition not always that the grandparents then start coming you know to your house that's where the kids are that's where the mess can be etc but if they won't come yeah it's really sometimes that's really difficult and really painful i like to i'd like to think that the holidays could also can be an opportunity in these particular moments for reconciliation um not just based on the distance but that somehow that perhaps the holiday might be the opportunity to say look it's christmas we don't have to make political statements let's just learn to be together and that that might be an opening for many families as opposed to a wall to keep them apart how do you help people in a congregation called me with these issues well i think that's the a lot of it is sharing with one another and talking with one another about how we handle these issues you know shiloh this year our congregation started a religious school for our kids we had so many kids and gay and lesbian families that we needed to provide for our children's religious education and one of the wonderful parts has been that on sunday mornings while the children are in their classes the parents really sit around and are able to talk about what it means to be gay parents i mean it doesn't mean our kids are gay but it means sharing what happens how we deal with school issues how we deal with just parenting general issues having nothing to do with being gay or lesbian but this has become a wonderful support network um for one another and trying to deal exactly with some of these what are you going to do this year for the holidays how are you going are you going to invite your family you're going away what are you doing and a lot of some families actually go away during the holidays to kind of avoid some of those family situations while others of us are very lucky and very blessed and don't have that painful holiday dilemma and have created new and wonderful celebrations not only with our families of choice and our children but our families of origin and and they're very much woven in apart together well i don't think it's just lucky i mean obviously if if you have parents that are not just saying that's it you're out of my life which you know about what you can do nothing um it's still it it takes work i mean i'm intrigued by the notion of the parents discussion because i often think that being part of a minority community has turned out to be a great blessing because we have the excuse to get together and talk you know we don't just talk about our oppression but we do have a different experience in life than our straight brothers and sisters and there's nowhere for them to go and talk nor do they really choose necessarily to do so so it can be very helpful i found that in my family for instance none of us ever talked about the fact that we couldn't understand why we felt so sad around the holidays it wasn't based on anything sad we were happy to be together but there's this sort of sticky sad feeling and sometimes i thought it was well maybe i'm not having a good enough time or i'm not as happy as i thought i was going to be you know those sort of basic things we didn't talk about that at all but in the community we talk about it because we think maybe it's related to being gay right and so we try to kind of flesh it out about well what's going on here why am i why am i having these feelings or it doesn't live up to the expectations that i thought it had and that's been i think a real comfort to a bunch of us who who have children and who've you know kind of struggle with just general parenting issues and i think especially dealing for those families that deal in the interfaith family realm you know how do you talk to your child when one parent's one religion and another parents another religion and and how do you how do you make that so that you're not pitting the child against the parent who doesn't share the same tradition but you know how do you help that family honor one another in a very loving spirit and i think those are kind of really important things to discuss and not just sweep under the rug right and a lot of times i think what happens especially i think this is true whether gay or straight regardless is that we don't talk about those religious differences so that when people fall in love and they want to make a family with one another they tend to see whether they have the same values in common and if they share a different religious tradition they often don't talk about them and they just kind of brush over them and then when the holidays come around like this year especially when they're all overlapped boy then you're in a situation where you better figure it out because otherwise it can bring up a lot of those feelings so that's why i always try and talk to couples gay or straight to you know you got to face these religious differences these spiritual differences they don't have to be a break for your marriage they don't have to break you up but you have to come to some kind of accommodation about what's authentic and what feels right and how are you going to go about celebrating this is a christmas tree going to be helpful are you going to what's the where's the place for the kwanzaa kenora i mean where is that going to be in the house and how that works and and so i think those are some really important issues that have to be discussed and have to be talked about in a loving manner they don't have to be world war three but i think they have to be dealt openly with very true well phil i think the first kwanzaa party i ever went to was at your house and and uh for years it was you know the kwanzaa celebration for many of us in the community when did you decide to incorporate kwanzaa into your celebration and and why was that well the kwanzaa prayer are you talking about has been going on for 16 years now so this is this will be i i think the 17th time that i've done it um i don't really know why to tell you the truth um i um you know i was interested in kwanzaa and um i've always been been interested in in figuring out how to make myself whole you know and that's what kwanzaa represented for me it represented you know just another piece of the puzzle of who i am so i started doing the kwanzaa party to kind of bring together all of the various communities that i belong to and i think that often when you're a part of you know a minority community and being a black gay man you know we you know being black and being gay and all of that kind of and then eventually you know um you know a person living with hiv all of that made me have these compartmentalized communities that of which i am a part and figuring out a way to bring them together and that's what kwanzaa represented for me you know a way to bring them bring all those pieces together and since kwanz is so much about community now and responsibility and accountability and bringing folks together it just it just really worked for me has it changed for you over the years in terms of how you celebrate or how you feel about it it certainly has changed over over the years you know i mean at this point in my life um we celebrate kwanzaa and we celebrate christmas and we celebrate hanukkah and you know and so kind of looking at it with all of the affinities that i have for people in my life at this point in my life because now i have a family and i have two children now quasi actually has become even more important now it's interesting when we before the show began that that the discussion that we're having was about children uh and i find that certainly is often a discussion that i have and um two years ago we went to israel actually for christmas and new year's and we spent christmas and new years in jerusalem and cory my youngest said really a remarkable thing after we were in jerusalem for about five days um and he says you know i wish we had not come here and uh so we stopped and we were like walking on the roofs actually they were walking on on the roofs and so i wish we had not come here and and i said well why and he said well you know before i came here i knew what i believed and now i'm not so sure you know and so he it the the kind of presence of you know ramadan and christianity and judaism you know and and even within christianity because we went to where the catholics think that christ was crucified and we went went to where the protestants think that christ was crucified and the notion of the wailing wall and the the temple on the mount you know that relationship between the two of them and and there was tension going on then that you know well as often is in that part of the world this time of year and he said you know i knew what i believed and now i don't uh and so we had an opportunity to have a discussion about what faith means and what it's about you know and uh and talking about well you know it's called faith it's not called no you know and and how you get at that place and how it's okay to analyze and how in fact it's an affirmation of your faith to not be true not not to be sure it's not actually you know it doesn't diminish your fit your faith to not be sure well you've always brought in my opinion a real spiritual quality and this these roots are too small but i've seen you speak so many times and um it's interesting to me because in times past you would have identified yourself as a gay activist and yet now i think you know we had this discussion a couple days ago that activism is a much broader issue and i was thinking about it when you were talking about faith because it's not a religious belief to be an activist right but it is there is a fervency to it there was there is a sort of an elemental passion to it that's very similar we're not worshiping our notion of our community but the the passion that we brought to it yet your work is no less passionate but it's it's broader have you do you feel that you've changed sort of this is also a sort of a summing up time of year you know well you know i think that at this point in my life i find that you know the part of me or my gayness has almost nothing to do with explicit discussions around traditional as if we can call anything gay tradition anything about the normal constructs of gayness and one of the things that you said no the last time we spoke that it actually is true i find that anything becomes gay by virtue of my presence you know and so you know to the degree that i engage in gay activism these days you know it happens by my presence you know and although very little of my time these days are in involve traditional gay politics or you know issues that that are are movement issues you know a lot of my work these days is really about being a parent and really about being a part of my community and really about my faith you know and and how that allows me to be comfortable in my skin and allows me to be to know that i belong wherever i am and so i take it with me when i'm at a school board meeting or i'm at a pta meeting or i'm you know doing any of the things that i do in my day-to-day life well it is it's sort of i see it there's a connection here to me because we were talking about how people have incorporated their own notions of spirituality partly because they couldn't be comfortable in the church or the synagogue where they grew up and so we had to figure something else out but mcc is a very different place and yet in its own way it ran the risk of being an enclave you know there's a haven and then there's a harbor and then there's an enclave and then there's a ghetto and we have sort of thought our way through and around these places mcc doesn't feel like a ghetto but it could run the risk tell tell us a little bit about how it felt to you you were you've been pastored there for 15. quite a while nancy yes um how it felt to you in terms of the reason sort of the raison debt of mcc and whether it's worked yes i think you know mcc you know certainly started as this um the place where gay and lesbian people primarily first claimed spirituality for ourselves and says said we can do this with our own hands and in our own homes and in our own institutions and we don't need to be legitimized by any other group to do this we can make spirit um ourselves and we can literally it is about saving the lives and the um i think the spirit of our community and that worked for justice and for a spiritual wholeness was always connected deeply in the heart of the community i think now mcc in it lives in a much more pluralistic environment religiously or spiritually and at one time mcc particularly los angeles was it and it helped give birth to other institutions and religious institutions and now we live in a very pluralistic wonderful uh amazing world in los angeles and in the world but i think we still have that that market if you could call it that for people who have still been are being spiritually wounded by the church i mean most of our members come from churches uh 40 are roman former roman catholics in mcc the 40 are probably from evangelical protestants or fundamentalist backgrounds or holiness churches that still continue to be very oppressive maybe 20 from no church background at all and so we we really reach out to people who've been spiritually wounded and need to work through that and heal and come to a new sense of an adult progressive religious space but also people who have no religious background whatsoever and they're not going to go to a church a traditional church or because it seems too far to go but they'll go to the church where they go to their aaa meeting or that where you know stonewall democratic club meets or where you know another where they have some other connections in the neighborhood it feels like it's connected and they know that this church has a record i think our celebration of the holidays has changed a great deal in the last 15 years and i would say two primary ways one i think at first it was survival how to survive the holidays we used to put on programs like that we used to we always had an open house christmas day it felt like an emergency surgery we were a mesh unit you know we were there we were there you know holding people's hands through the you know their lover goes off to be with their parents or they're in the closet and and there was some people were so in the closet then still it was so terrifying i think now we have this rolling holiday experience where because we have a large latino presence in our church and a spanish language service we start with a feast of lady of guadalupe for eight days and we have novenas going on in the chapel of our church um which is wonderful and that goes on and then we have christmas and we have kwanzaa celebration integrated into our church life in celebration and then the feast of the three kings and we go to a church in south central and our guys go and dress up as the three wise men and bring gifts to kids in in a in a church we have a partnership with the catholic church in south central and and it's just amazing you know we have a wonderful sort of partnership with the groups that you're just so the three wise men were gay i always thought it was a three three we three queens of orientation and uh so because i do think they were gay actually i mean i really think that's a scenario because they were away from their families at christmas they didn't bring their wives with them you don't ever picture them having wives no no i think that no i think i think they were very gay you know they were the only ones who went shopping before they went to see the baby jesus you know yes gold frankincense and myrrh you know what was it it was women it would have been diapers so so i think you know we now have this incredible i think kind of sense of variety and we participate in each other's experiences in a way that was sort of a surprise to us i think mcc became ecumenical by by not by design necessarily but by experience also became more multicultural i think we struggled with that all the time how to do that authentically and not just in a kind of a tokenistic or smorgasbord way but in a really authentic entering into each other's experiences genuinely and that's the great joy and i think there's more uh joy and less survivalism now and uh that there's maybe a greater sense of at the same time i think the challenge of the holidays is as a country particularly um you know we are um so addicted and to consumerism i mean essentially um i think spiritually that's the that's the i think the longing and the sadness partly you're talking about is that deep within many people know first of all there's this fantasy of what holidays are supposed to be emotionally spiritually and materially then there are the realities people experience people go into debt horribly around this time of year all people's addictions get triggered um drugs alcohol sex anything else because of this aching empty hole i think in people's lives that they're trying to fill and so i think that's where we experience the pain is still in those places in which people have not worked through those deep issues in our lives and where we are have still bought into so much the material [Music] philosophy of our culture and that we aren't facing that um you know what how who we are in the rest of the world um i think and how the rest of the world really views our country and what's really going on here and so we just sort of do excess and excess and excess and that's going to make us feel better but it doesn't well it's another kind of addiction as you said but it's interesting to me that commercialism has managed to extend the notion of holiday right throughout the year if omar can make one other holiday to make a car today we haven't i mean i was thinking when i take my christmas lights down which i really don't i just turn them off too much trouble um i feel kind of sorry and of course every year i leave a little longer longer longer longer and longer longer and longer because i really like the feeling of celebration and as long as my house is lit up it feels like we're also celebrating it's a welcoming environment i think oh you know it's february but let's have another party what the heck you know the lights are valentine's day is coming and so i wonder if it might be an interesting thing to try to extend our celebration because we're not making these other holidays you know so commercial others are like halloween is all about demanding gifts right now that's all it's about and forget about all hallows eve or whatever uh you know the celebration of the dead or whatever we could make from it we don't really do it or do we do we create right community around any other time of the year i mean in the religious communities i think the high holidays in our church are gay pride and pride i mean that becomes a big point that's but i mean i think there it is interesting that i mean i think there are natural rhythms whether it's in in in the seasons or in human community that you have to have up times and down times you have to have ordinary time i think sometimes for celebration to mean something i mean i think you um and sometimes we don't want to let go of that so we want to have this you know we're running at a dead heat you know throughout the year and like we need times to stop and to say gee it's just an ordinary weekend well i wonder i wonder what happens as um as as there becomes an older and older generation of out gays and lesbians i mean obviously you know gay and lesbian community has always been multi-generational but i think that that there's there's a group of folks that came out at the same time and and we are getting older over time and the the and then you inject into that no i don't know if it's a critical mass yeah but certainly there's a number of us who are now parents either biological parents or parents by other means and so the rhythms change as a result of that now when you when you're talking about you know the rhythms and celebrations and what have you you know i have to admit that that my annual calendar is hooked very much into a school rolls around that and and and for example last year a huge battle happened because the school was going to decide because my boys went to a year-round school and school was going to decide to move one of them to a different track than the other than the other one and it had been a long time since i had gotten so angry because that totally disrupted our family in really fundamental ways you know that that they didn't share vacations it's off time together it's like oh no this is not happening and so that you know the reason why i raised that because i i think that in the in the notion around around celebrations and around rhythms they become broader and that that in fact we become more our lives become more than just about us and i think that in the beginning of the movement right so much of this community was really just about us uh and fundamental to i think a number of us is a much broader spectrum and i think that's part of the healing uh psychically and spiritually of the communities when you you move into the sense of being fully empowered as citizens and as part of the citizens of the world and community is that you you have aging parents and you have you know and whatever issues you had with them you now become they become dependent on you and you be you move into different you have in-laws you have um you know extended families your friends in our community our friends are certainly family to us in ways that well i know the straight community is very happy to see us now suffering from you know the sort of same ordinary concerns and now we can talk to our brothers and sisters or they can talk to us that's right more because as you say the gay community was always in my opinion a very normal community and the only thing that made us different was that we were supposed to be ashamed of who we loved and now we finally said i'm not ashamed okay next what's next and then they said well you can't have any children because you're not you know qualified or you don't do it right or whatever and we said yeah we can have children we're going to have children now we have children so what's next what's next is the sort of ordinary life stuff that sort of gobbles up our lives but we're still in our own way dealing because our kids still have to deal at school kids still have to deal with school with you know are you going to join the cub scout troop which is the issue that my kid's dealing with that we're dealing with on our elementary school campus about what does it mean for our public school to push cub scouts in a very diverse setting where we're not the only gay family i mean those issues and as you said phil it's is being who you are 24 hours a day it's not you're a parent when you go to school but you hide your gayness it's right going to school in the fullness of who you are with your kid or at work and just being and not being able to hide in selected situations so instead of the compartmentalization that you talked about kind of kwanzaa brings together all the different communities you're part of it's really also about not compartmentalizing your identities um at different times well also think about choosing you're talking about that in terms of kwanzaa being whole i remember reading a book years ago called you can choose christmas it was at least 25 years ago and i i remember that as a very when i was you know early times of coming out and struggling with my family then that the idea that i could create celebration create holiday that i could um name my own family that i could um create traditions uh you know i know in an mcc when we do things one year the next year it's the second annual you know we create we're hungry for those kind of you know let's do it you know we did it great let's improve on it let's do it let's see you know and that there's some that that hunger for wow you know we that was great we have a rhythm to our life we have the we can count on these things in our community every year we do this or something like it or it becomes this thing that we we kind of we have our lesbian gay interfaith clergy group that you know twice a year we have a gay pride celebration we have a thanksgiving celebration and and those are so important those times where all our communities you know buddhist and christian jewish come together in different ways and celebrate are so important that we we come to count on them in in new ways of articulating our values and and expressed in our health and i think part of this issue of of rootedness if you will is really in some ways what we're talking about and how the holidays can can ground us or can be a time you know of great earth shattering but it is also in terms of the history of our kind of gay movement you know so many of us came from somewhere else to the great urban centers san francisco new york los angeles chicago you know you went you came from somewhere else and there was as that coming out time also all kinds of other disconnects in our lives and so also as the longer you're in a place yes the more roots you put down right and that's true for the movement as well the institutions that we build the rhythm of the season gay pride service thanksgiving interfaith service those same kinds of things are also about the rootedness of our institutional life and and that allows for different kind of celebration i think different kinds of transitions um in our lives and in our spiritual lives our celebratory lives as well well i feel sometimes like people are yearning for more to be to be more integrated and i was thinking nancy when you were talking about the ministers and rabbis from and everybody from different faiths how important it is and feels to get together i don't think that anyone really wishes there were simply one religion because then you wouldn't have anything to choose that's right on the other hand we do hunger to find that common ground right um just the way we talk about it in celebration you know as well i think we do it particularly well there's something about what we've probably been through in terms of our community that we don't just create a uh you know a kind of oatmeal mushy service where we do the you know the least common denominator what words can we all agree on we bring the fullness of all of our traditions into this share it and appreciate it and there's a deep sense of appreciation that is not about just sort of negotiating a bottom line but it is that's not the way it is in the world i mean it isn't that and that is precisely i think what nancy's talking about we have this other shared history together we have another bond together through our queerness if you will that allows us to say we are going to honor who you are in your fullness and you're going to sing that hymn from mcc well i read from hebrew scripture in hebrew right you know and and allow a presbyterian to read an english translation of that hebrew scripture that might not be my english translation as a rabbi and that but we have another common bond and that's what's i think so that is what's so powerful about when we do come together in our differences to allow our differences to stand and in a way we create sanctuary that does not exist now in the larger world i mean i'm struck by denise's comments about this being a time where we honor peace you know and i think about this year and there's so little of it there is so much acrimony so much discontent so much you know tension in the world um around the elections around what's going on in the middle east around what's going on in africa around what's going on you know this place and that that place and all of it is happening now and maybe it's happening for a reason and maybe it's not but one of the things that i think happens in our communities at this time of year because we understand maybe not any better than other people but certainly we do understand the need for sanctuary and so in fact we create peace and we create safety for folks and wholeness and in in our in our churches and in our traditions and in our synagogues well and i think that um the question that i've asked a lot on this show when sometimes when we do our beginning of the millennium you know kind of shows is really what we might have to teach because people think of us primarily if they don't know us as a beleaguered community and not necessarily although choosing the word gay should have been some clue to them that we were thinking about celebration here you know yes um that we really do i think have a great deal to teach but it's out of an experience of i think of oppression right and and humor united um my godson um when he was 10 years old every year at mcc when we have easter we have an easter bonnet contest after church on easter sunday which is outrageous we have group easter bonnets i mean family easter bonnets uh you know i mean the most outrageous incredible i mean men women children everybody participates my 10 year old you know godson looked at me one day and he said you know gay people have more fun in church than anybody because you know he goes to his another church you know straight church and it's like like whoa boring you know and uh but you know there's just something about this that's how can you think we'd explain this and there's he had a sense of that joy but that and it is about that joy because once you're in that sanctuary field that you talk about though that harbor is there there can be the opportunity to have that pure sense of relief of the relief of safe haven and then to really be able to tap into the depths of that overwhelming freedom because it's almost as if you can hear when you finally are in that sanctuary um the the chains of oppression breaking you can feel it and there's nothing better there's nothing more glorious than to feel that openness and that freedom at that moment and that is when we want to celebrate that joy and i in its core i do think that's what all of these holidays are about whether you're gay or not you know and and and certainly for hanukkah it is not just the festival of light but it literally was celebrating the freedom to worship in the manner in which you wanted and to break the chains of oppression of an outside group and that's the core of what that holiday is but it also gives us a challenge i'll use the word challenge even though sometimes it's a worse thing than that in terms of where to go outside the safety of that because you can't always stay there and we don't for the most part at least certainly the four of us don't stay there can you do you have some something you incorporate in your own home for instance which should be a safe place as well and then when you go further how can you be so filled with love and joy i think you can take it with you and i think that that one of the things that our institutions have done for us and for some of us the work that we have done for us is that we we we found our own okayness through our own labor and so when you find your okayness through your own effort you can take it with you everywhere you know and so the notion i i mean if i just own my own experience the notion of finding getting to some place you know and we all travel in all sorts of different places you know getting some place and to have someone to think that we don't belong because of our race or our gender our sexual orientation you know i think at some point you think and what's wrong with you i mean it it certainly gets to the point can get to the point where you at least in your core understand that it is their problem that they have to work on now and i think that that that is the gift of the sanctuary and that's the gift of the institutions but most importantly that's the gift that we give ourselves through the work we do and and i find i would go to national council of churches meetings for instance or the world council what happens is when you have that sanctuary inside yourself i think what you're saying you know within you people are attracted to that and you know so we joke about going you know these places and people tell you their whole life story and people are coming out to us or telling us about their children or their families they're telling us things they never tell each other they've known people 20 years in these institutions they cannot feel safe enough to talk to you but they feel safe enough to talk to us even if it's because they know you know how could we possibly judge them because right we're off the scale or something like that but also i just think they have a sense of that sense of you know when you have a sense of somebody has worked through and has a sense of safety or sanctuary and that they can create safe space for you and i think we kind of go and bring that that gift and it's not always welcomed as a gift but um that's up to them there's a sort of breakthrough um safe feeling that you have in yourself now maybe this is an aspect of age as well because i didn't feel safe in my 20s no matter what it wasn't even only about being gay it was about worrying about what my parents thought of me and what everybody else thought of me in my 30s i got a little bit better because i would think well maybe there's something wrong with them and not so much wrong with me but still that that need you know to be loved and we find ourselves loved in our community that's a very interesting thing and not needing and not needing approval right from someone else having it having it the wherewithal within yourself to know how you stand to know who you are and i think i think the interesting dilemma is in our gay and lesbian community when especially when there's so much emphasis especially the gay men's community on youth and still and looks that there has to be some time that we honor our elderhood or that we honor those gray hairs our maturity absolutely well you know one of the things that i think can happen is that at a certain point and maybe it has to do with the way i view mortality but at a certain point you conclude that you have more past than future yeah and and i think what happens at whatever point you conclude that is you determine well you know in balance what i've done is more than what i'm going to do and so however i'm going to be judged it's already set okay well but i also found that we once you get that sense of self you can bring it into your family whether they really totally approve of you or not right i mean in a sense you can just love the hell out of people that's right and it is so attractive i mean i went into the legislature the only open person that had ever been there right so far now of course there are four of us in california legislature but i wasn't feeling defiant necessarily like you know screw you i'm gay you know i was a little bit worried so i thought well i'll just be as funny as i can possibly be which i try to be anyway and also i just felt fine about myself right i just felt you know i'm good what can they tell me i already know i'm okay and it is so attractive to people because they wait to see do you like yourself oh yeah and if you do it's harder for them to dislike you and certainly that's true of our family absolutely and you get to share that with people regardless of their sexual orientation you get to share with them that you know you're okay right you know and it's difficult for folks to kind of reject you when you're in fact affirming no their essence now by validating your own and joy at the holidays i mean it's hard to get to sometimes i'm not trying to be you know a pollyanna i'm not exactly a grinch but i did understand his point of view it's also infectious at the holidays you know that if you can find that little bit of peace even if you go to the sanctuary to get it yes and carry it like you know carry it as a person it's an opportunity it's an opportunity really i think you know this time of year um and it's not the only opportunity we have but it's an opportunity to shift things um i think i could we could look at our holiday celebrations and chronicle them and see the shift in our lives you know and the increasing health or strength of maturity or or better choices that that people are making i see that all the time i also think that because of the prevalence of the winter holidays and that most people celebrate some kind of winter holiday if your pagan is the winter solstice you know whatever it is that more people are tuned in to these seasonal moments and that in our very fast-paced world we're not really tied to the farm anymore we're not tied to the seasons we're not tied to the earth in quite the same way and that it's very easy in these concrete jungles to have such a disconnect to the cycle the roots of the seasons the natural rhythms of nature and to these holiday celebrations that we often just kind of scoot over the rest of this year what other holidays are there the holiday season we all know what the holiday season means you know from thanksgiving to new year's you know well it gets dark early right you know that's the solstice and that's the fear and that's the sort of kind of depression and needing to think oh you know the days will get longer again let's celebrate course it used to be we thought if we did something we could make the days get longer again which is why we hung all those gifts on the pine tree i think um but the the sort of rebirth time of the year which is celebrated by some fairly major religious holidays still is not a universal celebration because again i think your point is well taken we don't have a connect to planting to you know spring as such or sort of the rebirth notion although we do try to celebrate it religiously well especially in our secularized america i mean for those of us that are people of faith religious people we we do have a rhythm we mean there's passover and easter comes along and we have those very strong connections but no gifts but no well what does america carry right exactly exactly that's and that's the point in kind of american secular civil religion you know what do we next is memorial day uh break out the barbecue and fourth of july break out the suntan lotion i mean you so you know and hang the flag out but you don't have quite the same kind of holiday rhythms and celebrations to it although it's funny when you describe it in that fashion once you get through thanksgiving christmas and new year's it really is a depressing slide you know because you get to there you go there you go you're at easter where you know the crucifixion happens and then you're at memorial day and it's like it's this kind of it's so uh it's kind of interesting i mean that's kind of you know it's kind of funny because nancy was talking a little bit earlier about you know entering high gear into this time and i always kind of laugh because i always love that thanksgiving interfaith service that we do every year because it's really the end of my high season because i've been through the hot jewish high holy days of rosh hashanah the new year and the day of atonement and the sukkot the fall harvest festival when i get to thanksgiving and i go i'm relieved and i all know that this is really the most difficult time of the year for nancy and my christian minister friends because after thanksgiving becomes advent and the four sundays and then it's christmas and i don't see or talk to them for that time and i'm everybody says oh are you you know what are you doing you must be so busy no actually i'm really loving this time because i'm done with my holiday rhythms and i know you're gearing up right exactly we sort of see each other at the end of the summer and that's right winter right but but it's also about part of that rhythm and the uniqueness of that rhythm for each of our traditions so it's interesting to me you're all talking about our children and how we have this in common now and traditions we're creating for them but in terms of the younger people in our community yes i wonder what your experience is with their with their experience of the holidays if you you know of those you know because is it different than it was for us i mean i look at we have a young group called the tribe this is young adults in our church and you know they're coming out to their parents um they're starting their first serious relationship maybe there's a little more seriousness about things like dating and that i don't remember because it was the 70s and we didn't date you know then we you know we were having sex and we were doing this and that when we were you know living in communism people i mean it was just very very different but there's a little more it's they seem a little more serious to me than than i remember to some degree or you know they're they're also dealing with if they're in west hollywood or they're dealing with the you know you know the drug and like that culture and and trying to separate you know which which path do i want to go in my life but it's the same pains or issues around boyfriends and girlfriends and coming out and you know all of this and and how do i how do i individuate from my family and when do i move out of the house and you know am i you know what am i doing career-wise and you know all of that that that you know identity issues are so strong and and how do i find a place um that can become a sanctuary for me in the middle of that and make good choices for my life but are they different in any way around this ability to celebrate are still worried because they're each person who comes out may still be rejected by their parents you know be unable to find a community right pretty much the same i think there's a great number of kids who come out yes high school early they still live at home the parents learn to be supportive rather quickly compared to others um and so they kind of have a much more natural they're going to their proms with their gay or lesbian you know day i mean that would have been unheard of right for all of us and and yet then there's this other extreme of people who are still in very just terrible disheartening situations where they fear for their lives and so i think it's a very fluid time i don't i'm not sure we're at the either or yet um because i know at my kids school there they have a a club called safe haven yeah and so clearly there's still a need for that kind of activity yeah yeah but it becomes a danger even for the straight kids that want to do that you know because clearly you wouldn't be aligned with a gay person unless you were gay yourself etc and um i know that i mean the hard thing i think for kids is this is the same thing that's difficult for us when we go home to our parents maybe not quite at our ages but a little younger than us which is you revert i mean you're right back to where you what you were like as a kid and it's hard to bring that joy that you find in your sanctuary or your safety with you because you turn into somebody you didn't particularly want to be i want to be sure that i get to thank you all this has been really wonderful and i i love the show around this time of year better than any of my others don't tell anybody well you've all been on others too um so thank you very very much denise and phil and nancy and thank you for being with us and uh if this is uh actually being run in your city around the holiday time i hope you have wonderful holidays and uh take to heart some of what was said here today whatever works for you and i hope that you'll have great joy and peace in your life and that you're actually able to get used to it [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you