Our city’s tolerance can have surprising limits
When the Episcopal Church decided to appoint an openly gay bishop, I didn’t expect more than a ripple here. In churches elsewhere, perhaps, but not in Los Angeles, where “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” is on billboards all over town and even Disneyland had an entry in the gay pride parade. Over the years, an image of this city has grown in my head, and if it isn’t the perfect city, it is a daily miracle of tolerance that other parts of the world only dream about. We’ve got more of every type of people here than almost anywhere else, and while there is plenty of hate crime and prejudice to go around, we manage not to burst into flame every other day or even every other year. Amazing.
So my husband and I decided last Sunday to visit our local Episcopal church, in support of the decision and in hopes of finding a new spiritual home. Over the years, I, like many Catholics, have found it increasingly difficult to accept the way my church sees women, birth control, abortion and homosexuality. As my children have reached ages where religious instruction seems appropriate, the problem has become more pointed. While I have struggled to maintain an uneasy cafeteria-style Catholicism -- I’ll accept that, but not that -- I couldn’t imagine having to explain to my 5-year-old why he should listen to Father when he speaks of helping the poor but stop listening when he speaks of the abomination of gay marriage.
I prayed for divine instruction, or at least a good recommendation; when the Rev. Canon V. Gene Robinson was voted in, I thought I had received an answer. They had women priests! Socially responsible sermons! A service structure I recognized! And since this was my city, of course congregants would greet the decision with, if not joy, then at least acceptance.
In the words of the poet: “Ha.”
It doesn’t matter which church it was; suffice it to say it turned out to be one of the many local churches that are publicly opposing the appointment. Which would have been disappointing enough, but along with announcing this position, the priest felt obligated to spend 15 minutes on the six passages in the Bible that condemn homosexuality, exhorting Christians to love the sinner and hate the sin and summing up with the obligatory rejection of gay marriage.
When he was done, many people applauded.
Other than that it was a perfectly lovely place, and the people seemed very nice. Afterward my husband and I sat on a bench outside watching our children play and felt as alone in this city as we have in a very long time. This city, which fearlessly leans into change, which continually moves forward, where something as odd and exasperating as the recall race is endurable because it proves that we live in a place where people would rather experiment wildly than sit in judgment.
An antidote to immorality
I couldn’t understand how, in a city like this, we could still be having conversations about “the immorality of gay marriage.” How can anyone who just wants to get married be immoral? Isn’t marriage supposed to be the antidote to and protection from immorality in the first place?
Sidling beside the “immorality of gay marriage” is inevitably the “sanctity of heterosexual marriage.” Now, any place that has offered the world “The Bachelor,” “Joe Millionaire,” “The Newlywed Game” and Elizabeth Taylor should probably go easy with this particular phrase. Marriage seems to be as sacred as the participants choose to make it.
Significant swaths of the L.A. area have been brought to life by the gay and lesbian community -- Hollywood, West Hollywood, Silver Lake -- and it’s impossible to calculate the influence gay culture has had on the entertainment industry. So it’s OK for “them” to improve our property values but not OK for them to marry our daughters. Is this Birmingham circa 1964?
Was the city that lives in my head just a myth?
No, says James Elias, director of the Center for Sex Research at Cal State Northridge. But the price Angelenos pay for diversity is, well, diversity. “We have a more diverse population here,” he says, “so we have a more heterogeneous population. We could drive down toward Orange County and find people still trying to convert gays to straight, and then we could stop at UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine, [proof that] the gay community supports the city and the city supports the gay community.”
Los Angeles, he says, is less a city than “a thousand communities held together by streets. So there are liberal Episcopal churches and conservative.”
This wide diversity is exactly what allows the L.A. brand of tolerance to thrive. “If you have a homogeneous community, any opposition, anything strange is going to cause a tidal wave,” Elias says. “Here it doesn’t. Here we just move on.”
Politically and socially, California is traditionally more liberal than other states, with the coastal cities and college centers outvoting the more conservative inland towns. So Elias believes that legalized gay marriage will probably find more support here than in other parts of the country. Los Angeles, he says, has, from the creation of the Mattachine Society in the ‘50s, long been at the forefront of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights. “The first high school program [for gay and lesbian youth] was at Fairfax High,” he says. But that doesn’t mean every community is going to be accepting or even tolerant.
“We are probably the only major city that has no majority population,” he says. “So we have no one dominant culture.
“But here,” he says, “you can always find a place.”
Maybe it’s geography that allows us to live and let live -- there is a lot more elbowroom here than in other major cities. Or maybe it’s history -- people came here for a reason, and it often had to do with getting away from the rules and tyrannies of other places. Non-Angelenos keep trying to tell us what we aren’t -- centralized, easy to define, cohesive. They can’t seem to understand that this is the whole point. The city is unpredictable because people are unpredictable.
It’s easy to champion diversity in a sort of general way, harder when it means accepting a very real divergence. But it’s one thing to not approve and another to not allow -- disapproval is a popular hobby even here and is not at all the same thing as intolerance. I have faith that soon enough gay marriage will be a fact rather than just a divisive topic. Those who still don’t like the idea can comfort themselves with the knowledge that they will probably never be invited to a gay wedding.
If they are, they can just neglect to RSVP. Because this is Los Angeles, and that’s what we do.
