Gay Rights and Baba Yaga

So, I've been doing a lot of myth reading lately. Specifically I've been reading The Maiden King by Robert Bly and Marion Woodman.  Loving this book for so many reasons.  I can tell I'm going to have it spinning in my head for years, plus it's already nudged me into new directions in my writing and sent me into new research veins.  Good times.

But mostly I have fallen in love with Baba Yaga.  Weird, I know.  But actually, no, I think it makes a lot of sense, if you look deep down.  While I'm writing this blog entry my three year old is watching a disgustingly saccharine Disney princess video, some hastily slapped together montage of badly storyboarded kid candy.  I hate it, and I hate that my daughter is watching it.  What this world needs is not Disney saccharine.  We need to start looking at the Baba Yaga.  The underworld-dwelling witch who eats the naive and the either/or disciples of the world will get us whether we believe in her or not, unless we prepare for her.  So I want to turn this show off and show my daughter the shadows so she knows they're there -- except, well, she's three.  And she's not stupid either -- in a lot of ways she already sees the shadow.  The Huns in Mulan are shadow enough to scare her pants off.  Strangers in Target greeting her are shadow.  Adults on the playground who try to engage her scare the living shit out of her.  If ever there were a child who could inspire you to believe she had come to you from a past life of heinous abuse and terror, this is the child.  So, perhaps saccharine is due. Today's saccharine for her may be tomorrow's shadow, after all.

The rest of us, though, especially we adults, need to quit looking for the adult versions of the Disney princess seires.  Baba Yaga is out there, and you won't defeat her by sending American troops to Iraq and putting a magnetic ribbon on your car, just as my HRC sticker on my Mazda and $10 a month to the same (HRC, not my Mazda) aren't solving the inequeties of human rights in the United States.   Baba Yaga wants your blood and bones for dinner, and unless you convince her you're of better use alive, she'll make good use of you in her belly.  Towing a party line of any sort isn't going to defeat her either, something I wish either a Democrat or Republican or some independent group would figure out.  Baba Yaga is gorging on this country right now, this country which is locked in bitter battle over blue or red, black and white, liberal and conservative, hawk or dove. 

But you know what I think is going to yank us out of this?  Or at least the issue that will force us to look at the third, silenced option, whatever it may be?  Gay rights.

Yeah, go ahead and laugh or roll your eyes or whatever.  But it's true -- the homosexuals will lead us over the rainbow after all.  Because that's where you can't scream, "A or B!" no matter how hard you try.  Gay or straight?  Hardly.  Oh, sure, most of us sleep with either the same sex or the opposite, not both, so there you could make a distinction.  But down deep, unless you are an angry, fearful person determined to exorcise part of yourself, you will be experiencing your own masculine and feminine within, your own personal yin and yang, every day.

I like to tease my husband that he'd make a really great gay man, if he weren't straight.  And actually, I don't know as much about lesbian culture, but I'd probably be able to hold my own, except you know, I can think other women or pretty, but it's just not my gig.  But I do have a pretty strong sense of my yang.  It's okay culturally for me to do that.  The fact that my husband would flunk most of Focus on the Family's masculinity test is less okay culturally, and I think it's actually less okay now that it ever has been.  I feel for young boys growing up now, with their clothes and toys so starkly gender defined, with everyone raking them pre-puberty for "signs" they'll be gay.  You know, I think the sign your child is gay is when they say they look at the same sex and are attracted.  Period.

In attempts to "defend marriage" and "protect children" the anti-gay camp is pushing us to a cultural choice they will inevitably lose.  Unless the choice is made on a fundamentalist Biblical interpretation, we're going to have to face the fact that there are Americans who want to protect marriage and children and want to do it while having a sexual relationship with someone of the same sex, and as soon as we stop listening to the mad ravings of people doing a fantastic job of killing Christianty by associating it with hate and exclusion, we're going to have to give homosexual couples the same legal rights the rest of us have.  And on that road we're going to discover you really can't have gaydar, you can't look at your eight year old and make a checklist to see if they're gay and send them off to a reprogramming camp.  Someday that will be considered child abuse.

Until that day, Baba Yaga is feasting.  When you face Baba Yaga she asks, "Do you come of your own free will or are you compelled?"  The answer that gets you eaten is to chose one or the other.  The answer that sets you free is to admit that it's both, and not in a nice orderly percentage of blame.  If you face Baba Yaga and you demand a black and white, you die.  If you face her and admit there isn't just gray but that you desperately need it, she might just send you away uneaten but with great gifts.

So hold hands, kids, put on your ruby slippers and head for the rainbow.  If you hear someone filing their teeth, head fast for the middle and start looking for the gray.