By Troy Williams
(originally published as an op-ed in The Salt Lake Tribune, February 04, 2007)
I
am one of those radical queers that Sen. Chris Buttars and Gayle
Ruzicka have been warning you about. I am an advocate for subversive
social change. I promote a gay agenda. But this hasn’t always been the
case.
I was once a faithful Mormon, and for a short
period I was also a volunteer for Gayle Ruzicka’s Eagle Forum. That’s
right. I once helped Gayle lobby against the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and
Transgendered Community. Our society is built around confession and
redemption. This is my road to Damascus.
I met Gayle after I returned home honorably
from my church mission. I was recruited into Eagle Forum. I had dinner
at Gayle’s house. I became intimately familiar with her politics. The
Eagles provided a safe nest to sublimate my nascent sexuality.
But ultimately I felt deep anxiety in their
company. I didn’t like the person I was becoming and was uncomfortable
with their beliefs: Everyone was an enemy; atheist queer feminist
liberals were working in tandem with Satan to seduce children, abort
the unborn and leave the Constitution perilously hanging by a thread.
Gayle insists she has gay friends, which I
suppose include me. The truth is that Gayle needs queers to sustain her
political power. We are integral to mobilizing her base. I’ve read
lurid anti-gay propaganda at her house. The pamphlets describe
homosexuals as depraved sexual predators with a nefarious agenda to
seduce all youth, annihilate the nuclear family and declare Year Zero for Homo-sexual sapiens.
This rabid paranoia had one major obstacle:
reality. My actual experience with queer folk didn’t sync with Gayle’s
gross characterizations. The gay people I knew were actually kind and
loving.
Sen. Buttars is now vowing to preserve obsolete
sodomy laws. He is also determined to ban school tolerance clubs
because he imagines teens will engage in unrestrained orgies. This is
the man who passed out a graphic list of fantasy gay sex acts to every
legislator. It is curious that a man so disgusted by sodomy would
invest so much energy obsessing over it.
But Ruzicka and Buttars are fundamentalists. To
maintain power they must appeal rhetorically to an imagined golden age
of traditional values; they must conjure enemies to embolden their
followers, and any sex deviant, illegal immigrant or Islamofascist will
do. Queers and other minorities are scapegoats to legitimize their
continued power.
After a year or so, my disillusionment with
Gayle was complete. My ability for critical thinking had matured. I was
free to rocket out of the closet and joyfully embrace my sexuality.
Gayle once told me all gays are miserable. Not
true. But she was right about one thing: I would eventually become
radical. With a queer invocation of Saul, I went from persecuting my
own to passionately fighting for our rights.
And I do promote a "gay agenda." My radical
agenda is that all Americans, regardless of class, race, gender or
sexual orientation, will have unfettered access to our national
promise, that being the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness.
I believe in a universal liberty that will
protect all people. This includes fundamentalists like Gayle and Sen.
Buttars. Radical, I know.
Queers are essential contributors to Utah
culture. We are artists, philosophers, healers, lawyers, yoga
instructors and entrepreneurs. We are your children, your siblings,
your cousins and your parents. We are your friends and allies. We are
your family.
You would not want to live on this planet
without us, and we would be lost without you. We need to let go of fear
and actually trust each other. We need to work together to ensure the
liberty of all humankind. This is my radical agenda.
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