Hope and Deliverance

It’s not just that I think Rebecca Drysdale is wonderful. It’s that the world is a vastly better and richer place because Rebecca Drysdale is in it. I would become a lesbian for Rebecca Drysdale.

This is why: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTQNwMxqM3E

It's her contribution to YouTube’s “It Gets Better” campaign, kicked off by Dan Savage and his partner in the fall in response to a cascade of highly publicized suicides by bullied queer teens and young adults. It’s brilliantly produced, stunningly edited music video. The lyrics are supple and brash. The choreography moves like sexy lightning.

But it’s the balance of rage, compassion, and the celebratory promise of hope that takes her video to the top of my list. An often-voiced critique of the campaign over the last months has been that too many segments–certainly not all of them, but more than a few–however well-intentioned, leave the kids who watch them in limbo, no clearer than they were before about how to survive the oppression and pain they endure daily, no clearer about how they’ll ever make it from the hell they’re living in to the safe haven they’re told awaits them. There’s no bridge from here to there, but a great gulf fixed.

What sets this video apart is that it briefly but vividly imagines individual lives and dwells on them from the inside. Rebecca doesn’t just offer herself as an example of a survivor. She stands in solidarity with the stories of half a dozen kids and presents herself as though she could be their classmate–that in some emotionally real sense, she is their classmate. The message of hope she offers doesn’t drop down out of the sky. It’s proclaimed from the midst of the virtual assembly of those who sit in something near despair and yet long for deliverance. She doesn’t just express compassion. She models it.

The rage and contempt she expresses for the perpetrators doesn’t dismiss the suffering they inflict as negligible. When she holds out survival and fulfillment down the road as the best revenge, she’s immersed in just how awful the experience kids go through can be. The solidarity implied in the anger of her lyrics is a cry for justice. And it throws out a lifeline.

No more than anyone else can she offer a roadmap to show the shortest way out of a land of darkness. But she says, pack what you need, put your shoes on your feet, and get ready to move out. Somewhere the fuck beyond this enslavement to daily misery, there’s a shore on the other side where it’s safe to sing and dance. Believe in it. Breathe it in. And along the way, remember that you’re in solidarity with a whole community of the oppressed, with whom you’ll live to celebrate together. Treat them with compassion, protect them when you need to with your righteous anger. In doing so you’ll experience compassion and protection yourself.

The Way of the Tea Garden

I had a solid professional excuse to spend five days in San Francisco last week. The weather stayed obligingly grey and wet most of the time I sat indoors glued to a computer screen side by side with my collaborator. The morning of my free day at the end of the trip, the sun rose without a wisp of fog in sight, and I made straight for the Hagiwara Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park.

For twenty-five years, no spot on earth has brought readier healing to my soul. The place is full of small, gentle gods: the spirit of this clump of rushes, growing at the edge of a broad, shallow pond where koi undulate like stoned holdovers from the Summer of Love; the god of this expanse of moss, stretching out below a grove of cedars behind the pagoda that rises above the steep hill in the northwest corner of the garden; the god of this stone basin, water brimming from its lip amidst a stand of bamboo at a turn in the path from the teahouse just before it descends again toward the entrance gate.

The bottom of the stream was strewn with drowned russet maple leaves on Monday morning; a fading yellow carpet of ginko lay sloping down over the bank.

The timelessness of the place is an illusion. Sand sifted over dunes here in the late nineteenth century. The garden was created as a permanent park after the 1894 World’s Fair by Makoto Hagiwara, who first invited the kami–these quiet, unassuming gods of small things–into the heart of his adopted city. From the 1950's, various restorations and rebuildings have transformed its design. The stone basin welling endlessly below a bamboo waterspout arrived only in 1996. The pagoda at the crest of the slope above the koi pond has begun to disintegrate, its paint peeling, the shredding edges of its staged rooflines sporting gardens of lichen among the pine boughs high above the paving stones.

The Hagiwaras tended these five acres for over forty-five years–until they were interned along with most other Japanese Americans by the U.S. government in 1942. The place was renamed the Oriental Tea Garden and left to languish. Many of the family’s original buildings were demolished, including the Shinto shrine that stood at the top of the great hill behind a torii–a temple gate–as out of place before the Buddhist pagoda that replaced the earlier building as a crucifix in a mosque. The garden is named for the Hagiwaras once again; the torii has vanished since my last visit.

Walking these paths as a queer man, I can’t but draw the line between the plight of the Hagiwaras, victims of one of American history’s more shameful injustices, and the marginalization of my own kind. The same morning as my visit, the Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was hearing arguments for and against the constitutionality of California’s Proposition Eight prohibiting same-sex marriage in the state. It’s a mere two months since the rash of suicides by bullied gay teens that spurred the It Gets Better campaign. I weep freely for the Hagiwaras this morning in part because I know what it’s like to be denied my rights and treated like a threat rather than seen for who I am. But I also sit beneath the roof of the tea house in gratitude for the family that created this place and invited these gods into it–as for those who have tended it ever since their departure. I sit here in gratitude for their example: that kindness, civility, and quiet reverence before the simple miracle of beauty can prove stronger and more enduring than bigotry and injustice.