Sexual Preference is not the issue

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

The most gentle people I know are gay. A woman who lives with her mother, and takes care of her and anyone else who needs her. A man who lives alone but is never alone because he is always helping someone out. Two men who have been with each other for 17 years. Another man, who is 49, and still hasn't told his parents, because they're old and wouldn't understand and he doesn't want to break their hearts.

The most disgusting people I've seen are gay. Two men having sex with each other in front of a crowd at Mardi Gras last year. Gays throwing condoms at priests' mothers at the priest's ordinations a year before that. Gays defiling the Eucharist at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

So what are these people really like? Are they good or are they bad? Do they flaunt their sexuality or do they conceal it? Are they passive or aggressive? Are they friend or are they foe?

The answer is, of course, all of the above.

Gays are every one of these things and none of them and a combination of both because they are exactly like everyone else. They're not clones of some learned stereotype. Their sexual preference doesn't define them, doesn't make them who they are, any more than height or hair color or handedness, or the color of their skin. People are people, a complicated mixture of good and bad, morality and immorality, kindness and meanness.

Why then is there such a brouhaha about gays marching in South Boston's St. Patrick Day parade? Don't they have a right to march? Isn't barring them an act of blatant prejudice?

I don't think so. Sexual preference may not define a person but the groups that people join do. The group fighting for the right to march in the annual St. Patrick's Day parade is the newly formed Irish American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Pride Committee of Boston. Alone, the title sounds harmless enough.

But according to the parade's chief marshal, Thomas Lyons, this group was planning on getting about 25 gays, lesbians and bisexuals to march in the parade, some of whom are members of Queer Nation and Act Up. These groups you wouldn't want anywhere near your neighborhood, never mind marching down your streets. These groups are to gays what the Ku Klux Klan is to whites: hateful, mean-spirited, outrageous embarrassments.

Still they might have gotten the OK to march if they had promised to do just that - march, with no antics. With no condom throwing, and no one dressed up like condoms, and no denigration of the Catholic Church, and no mimed sex acts.

But the group wouldn't agree to this. The group "refused to guarantee that they would behave in an orderly way," said the spokesman for the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council, John Hurley. And so Hurley, representing the organization that has planned the parade for 46 years, said no. You can't march. And who can blame him? It was the sensible thing to do.

But of course some people don't see it that way. Some people are so involved with their own agenda, so intent on politicizing everything, that they don't look at the whole picture.

"There is a general feeling among gay people in Massachusetts that we have to be visible everywhere, and that includes the places where there's been resistance in the past," said David LaFontaine, lobbying director for the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights.

LaFontaine is talking about making a political statement. Hurley's talking about running a parade.

LaFontaine sees discrimination in the denial. Hurley only seeks a peaceful parade.

In the past, both the Ku Klux Klan and ROAR, a militant anti-busing group, have been denied the right to march for the same reason the gay group is being banned: because a parade is not for disruptive behavior, it's not for divisiveness, it's not for demonstration. It's for family entertainment.

It's really as simple as that.