Big Gay Sunday

Rev. Marisol Caballero
August 21, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

August 20 is the Austin Pride Festival and Parade, and the party will continue on Sunday at First UU! Join us for a celebration of love, justice, and perseverance.

Call to Worship

Gratitude to My Ancestors
by Rev. Marta Valentin

With honor and respect, these eyes see for you
all manner of life you could have not imagined.
My lips move with the rhythm of your words
flowing through me,
my tongue caressing each morsel of wisdom
I am graced to pass on.
Your DNA rides my veins
and with every breath I take,
your cautious steps from the past
toward a fuller life become
bold moves I make toward my destiny.
Together, we wrap arms
around a new generation,
here to become who were born to be,
to cast their magic as we once did
and bless each day for their ability to do so.

For you, dear ancestors, we live this day.

Reading

“A Litany for Survival”
by Audre Lorde

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours;

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full
we are afraid of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty
we are afraid we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak
we are afraid our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

Sermon

Two years ago, I preached the Sunday before Austin Pride and called the service Big Gay Sunday- partly because this title was vague enough to give me plenty of wiggle room for the direction of my sermon while meeting our newsletter deadline, and partly because, let’s be honest, putting the words “Big Gay” in front of any event makes it sound like it’ll be ten times more fun! “Big Gay Lunch Buffet.” “Big Gay Grocery Run.” “Big Gay Tax Audit.” See? It works! And that service was so much fun. The Intergenerational choir sang Lady Gaga’s, “Born This Way” and wore feather boas, dangled a disco ball, and got us dancing in the aisle.

Last year, I wasn’t the one scheduled to preach on the Sunday before Pride, and I’m not sure if I would have called the service “Big Gay Sunday” again, but no fewer than five different people have asked me in the past year, “Why don’t we do Big Gay Sunday anymore? Is there a reason we stopped doing it?” Once. We had done it once before, but in the memory of at least several, Big Gay Sunday was a beloved annual church tradition that had inexplicably disappeared.

So, back by popular demand, is ye old tradition of yore, Big Gay Sunday, The Sequel: Bigger, Gayer, and Sunday-er than ever before! A pep rally, of sorts, to get us good and hyped for First UU’s participation in next Saturday’s Pride festival and parade.

Today also happens to be my Sunday swan song, as it’s my last Sunday with you all as one of your ministers. My last day on the job here is August 31st, and you will see me at Pride, but I won’t be at church next Sunday, so I feel a special responsibility to go out with a bang and give this service a real party feel.

Pride is an annual celebration of survival by people who, due to cultural saturation of both homophobia and violence, was never meant to survive. Yet here we are, together with our many allies, speaking, singing, dancing, advocating, simply living in ways that our ancestors never imagined. We are their eyes, their breath, their tongues, their arms, their help them bless the generations coming up.

In Spanish, the word for ancestors, antepasados, directly translates to “those who have passed before.” Circumstance has left my family many unanswered questions about our genetic relations, so I find this definition of ancestors appealing & quite useful. In this way, my ancestors; our ancestors, need not be blood relation, but rather those who have gone before, leaving us behind to continue their legacies.

I’d like to introduce you to one of our ancestors. Her picture is on your orders of service. Her name was Marsha P. Johnson. She was born Malcolm Michaels Jr. in 1944 New Jersey and lived as a transgender woman in lower Manhattan. Of course, back then, the terms she used to describe herself were, “transvestite,” “transsexual,” and “queen.” She spent much of her adult life experiencing homelessness. Sometimes Marsha slept at the home of friends, in Times Square movie theatres, or anywhere else she could find to lay her head. In the documentary about her online, “Pay It No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson,” a friend recalls once seeing her asleep under a table in the Flower District. She was known for wearing elaborate crowns of fresh flowers on her head and was often given colorful varieties by the wholesalers she made friends with. Her friend recalls asking the vendor, “Why do you let her sleep under your table like that?” and the man answered, “Because she’s holy.”

It’s true. “Saint Marsha,” as she was called by folks in Greenwich Village, though poor, had no attachment to material things and would literally give the shirt off her back, or food, or money, to total strangers in need. Often harassed and brutalized, she somehow kept a genuinely cheerful disposition. She said that the P. in Marsha P. Johnson stood for “pay it no mind.”

She was spending the night of her birthday, June 27th, 1969 at the local dive bar in her neighborhood. Calling it a “dive” was correct, but calling it a “bar” was a stretch. It was illegal to operate a gay bar in New York City then. In fact, it was illegal to serve a customer if they revealed that they identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans*. Because of this, a few mafia-run establishments popped up along Christopher Street that catered to “the fairies,” without liquor licenses and the police were paid to look the other way. The gay men in most of these bars did not take too kindly to the presence of “queens,” so the Stonewall Inn became the place with a clientele made up mostly of young, gender variant and poor people of color. The Stonewall bar became a refuge and often makeshift LGBT homeless youth shelter. Kids who had to run away or were kicked out because of who they were could panhandle during the day to get the $3 entrance fee and spend the whole night inside and out of the cold. In a place with no running water, just a tub behind the bar to rinse and reuse glasses, no one monitored whether everyone inside was a paying customer.

No one who was there remembers exactly how it all started, but that night, the police raided the Stonewall Inn in the wee hours of the morning of June 28th, arresting 13 people for being caught either with three or more items of clothing that did not match their assigned gender or dancing with someone of the same gender. Everyone who was there agreed that Marsha and her friend and fellow queen, Silvia Rivera, were among the first to fight back. Someone threw something. Some say it was Marsha who through a shot glass and yelled, “I got my human rights, too!” at the police. Within minutes, the Stonewall Inn was fighting back in a full riot and the LGBT Rights Movement was born.

The riot went on for six days. At one point, a can-can line of queens formed and confronted the police with a song as they kicked their legs, Rockettes style, “We are the Stonewall Girls, we wear our hair in curls… ” It was this courage and daring by people who had very little to lose, like Marsha and Sylvia, that inspired such resistance. The amazing this about these riots is that yes, there was violence as these people fought back against years of subhuman treatment, but they also used camp humor, sarcasm, song, and dance. They didn’t lose themselves in the violence, but rather used the very essence of their community as an act of resistance. It reminds me of one of my favorite lines from the musical Rent, “the opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation!”

A year after the riots, New York’s queer community gathered for an anniversary march from the Stonewall Inn to Central Park. The organizers remember that they were so terrified or being attacked or arrested (or both) that first year, that it was more of a run than a march. But, when they arrived at Central Park and looked back at the crowd, it had grown to hundreds. This is how Pride marches and parades were born.

Today, Pride celebrations still employ the use of creative resistance. There are queer cable networks, well-recognized & well-funded LGBTQ rights advocacy organizations, there are LGBTQ Chambers of Commerce, softball leagues, legal firms, youth centers, you name it. When I was growing up, I did not know of one single out and successful celebrity. These days, it’s not completely without occasional serious professional consequences (remember Michael Sam’s NFL career), but it’s no longer shocking news when a major celebrity comes out of the closet. In fact, if a celebrity chooses to keep their personal lives private, as Jodie Foster did for so many years, they are negatively judged by the public as self-loathing and cowardly.

Of course, there are legal battles that have been won through our efforts, as well. We now enjoy the right to marry in all 50 states. We can adopt children. We can openly serve in the military. Our queer culture has saturated the arts so thoroughly that those among us who identify as straight no longer bat an eye to see a queer character on their favorite primetime TV shows.

Pride is about being celebratory, yet cognizant of the footsteps we travel in. A way has certainly been paved, by Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and many other forgotten heroes of the Stonewall Rebellion. Hollywood depictions of the event emphasize white male characters, even though veterans of the event all agree that the LGBTQ rights movement was begun by trans women of color. Our predecessors laid their lives on the line, yet there is still so much work yet to do. Marriage equality did not do anything to ensure proper healthcare for LGBTQ people, or protection from employment and housing discrimination, and many other rights still denied us.

Our greater community, including our straight allies, is still shocked with grief over the Pulse nightclub shooting, which left 50 dead, the majority of which were queer people of color. I include in these numbers the shooter, who himself was a casualty of homophobic, hyper-masculinity that has arisen as a result of our LGBTQ community’s recent gains. As much as we would like to attribute 100% of the assassin’s actions to affiliation with a terrorist organization across the sea, such violence against queer people is historically as American as apple pie.

As society swings left on acceptance, there are those whose bigotry has not been given time to accept these new standards, though it has been almost fifty years since the Stonewall Rebellion. Such hatred has seen an increase in recent years, and trans women of color have borne the brunt of it. Last I checked, a few days ago, the death toll for trans women killed in 2016 had climbed up to 19. Almost all of them were trans women of color.

The majority of violence against the most vulnerable in our community goes unreported and/or unprosecuted. In fact, Marsha P. Johnson’s death by drowning in 1992 was quickly ruled a suicide, though her friends suspect foul play to this day.

To exist, and especially to exist joyfully, as a queer person, continues to be a radical act of defiance in a world and in a time that still tells us that we are not meant to survive. This Saturday, we will participate in the Pride Festival and Parade, as we have done the past several years. As a community of faith, we are unique positioned to demonstrate that celebration of life (ours and those of the dead) can coexist alongside the grief that we continue to hold. Our float is themed, “In Memoriam,” and will be a moving tribute to our gratitude to those who dared to live life as fully and authentically as possible and are no longer with us. We will be dancing, celebrating their fierceness, as well as carrying candles and signs that read the names of the victims of the Orlando shooting. Please consider showing up in great number, making a sign of your own, or carrying one that our middle schoolers are working on, and creating this important space for our community to hold the reality of the pain of grief and the joy of love.

It’s fitting that this will be my last act with this church community & such a holy act at that to march alongside you in this way. If UUs held “sacraments,” I’d like to think that this would be among them. Our participation in Pride is an act of humility around how little of this struggle we can attribute to ourselves, alone, as well as a commitment and show of our resolve to continue in the struggle that did not begin and will not end with us. It has been my honor to minister to you and beside you, and a blessing that I will complete my service here next Saturday on the revolution’s parade route. It is a deeply religious act to realize that we were not meant to survive, and yet here we stand.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 16 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.