swing of the rebels. But he couldnât in good conscience free up a single American dollar knowing there was a good chance it would go to bullets for killing innocent people. I was behind him a hundred percent.
A year later, Carter made a similarly brave moral decision after government troops in El Salvador gunned down four American nuns in the jungle, where they volunteered as teachers. Autopsies showed theyâd been raped and mutilated. Carterâs disgust was enormous. Heâd already lost his reelection bid, and in his last days he yanked all foreign aid from them, too.
When Reagan took over the following month, the White House did a complete turnaround. UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, the architect of Reaganâs foreign policy, called the nuns âpolitical activists [in support of the guerrillas],â scolding that âwe ought to be a little more clear about this than we usually are.â In a famous interview, she seemed to excuse their killers by casting them as anti-Communist vanguardists. Alexander Haig, the new secretary of state, even alleged, without presenting any evidence, that the nuns may have been killed after running a roadblock, though he never explained how that might have justified their rapes. The political extremism that crept into Washington with Ronald Reagan blinded people to human suffering and to truth.
But for me the last straw was Archbishop Romeroâs assassination in March 1980. Pro-government death squads stormed his chapel as he stood at the altar. âI do not believe in death without resurrection,â he said at Mass that day, Holy Thursday, minutes before being cut down. âIf they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people.â His death staggered the entire Catholic world. But Washington stayed its course.
During these years I changed my party affiliation and began planning my political future in earnest. It seemed the logical thing to do for a working-class kid from Carteret. I was eager to play whatever small part I could to help the Democratic Party. Perhaps Iâd be a mayor, maybe even governorâthat was my wild dream, to one day be governor of New Jersey.
Yet I knew even then that I could not be a gay governor of New Jersey. This was the mid-1970s, the start of Anita Bryantâs rise to prominence as a cheery campaigner against gay causes. I knew of no openly gay person who had ever faced voters. Now I know that there were two: Nancy Wechsler had been elected to the Ann Arbor City Council in 1972, and Elaine Noble, a lesbian activist, won a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives two years later. And that was it. In a nation where 511,000 public servants held elective office, from town sheriff to county supervisor to congressman and senator, only two were openly gay. By comparison, 3,979 African Americans had been voted into office by that time.
In 1977, Harvey Milk famously raised the bar with a colorful, high-profile campaign for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which he won by a landslide vote. His victory was celebrated by gay people around the nation. âI thank God,â a schoolteacher wrote him, âI have lived long enough to see my kind emerge from the shadows and join the human race.â What became of Milk? He was hunted down and assassinated within the yearâby a fellow supervisor.
Â
EARLY IN MY FIRST SEMESTER AT CATHOLIC, I MET A WOMAN IâLL call Laura. A girl from âback homeâ in Hillside, New Jersey, she was a graduate of Mount St. Mary Academy, the sister school to St. Joeâs, so we shared a cultural foundation. Aside from that, though, she was everything I was not: wickedly funny, gregarious, a risk taker, clever when needed (or when she could get away with it), socially fluent, always cool, and expansively curious.
She was also beautiful, with bronze skin and a thick curly head of hair. Though she had a full dating schedule and a series of boyfriends,
A year later, Carter made a similarly brave moral decision after government troops in El Salvador gunned down four American nuns in the jungle, where they volunteered as teachers. Autopsies showed theyâd been raped and mutilated. Carterâs disgust was enormous. Heâd already lost his reelection bid, and in his last days he yanked all foreign aid from them, too.
When Reagan took over the following month, the White House did a complete turnaround. UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, the architect of Reaganâs foreign policy, called the nuns âpolitical activists [in support of the guerrillas],â scolding that âwe ought to be a little more clear about this than we usually are.â In a famous interview, she seemed to excuse their killers by casting them as anti-Communist vanguardists. Alexander Haig, the new secretary of state, even alleged, without presenting any evidence, that the nuns may have been killed after running a roadblock, though he never explained how that might have justified their rapes. The political extremism that crept into Washington with Ronald Reagan blinded people to human suffering and to truth.
But for me the last straw was Archbishop Romeroâs assassination in March 1980. Pro-government death squads stormed his chapel as he stood at the altar. âI do not believe in death without resurrection,â he said at Mass that day, Holy Thursday, minutes before being cut down. âIf they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people.â His death staggered the entire Catholic world. But Washington stayed its course.
During these years I changed my party affiliation and began planning my political future in earnest. It seemed the logical thing to do for a working-class kid from Carteret. I was eager to play whatever small part I could to help the Democratic Party. Perhaps Iâd be a mayor, maybe even governorâthat was my wild dream, to one day be governor of New Jersey.
Yet I knew even then that I could not be a gay governor of New Jersey. This was the mid-1970s, the start of Anita Bryantâs rise to prominence as a cheery campaigner against gay causes. I knew of no openly gay person who had ever faced voters. Now I know that there were two: Nancy Wechsler had been elected to the Ann Arbor City Council in 1972, and Elaine Noble, a lesbian activist, won a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives two years later. And that was it. In a nation where 511,000 public servants held elective office, from town sheriff to county supervisor to congressman and senator, only two were openly gay. By comparison, 3,979 African Americans had been voted into office by that time.
In 1977, Harvey Milk famously raised the bar with a colorful, high-profile campaign for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which he won by a landslide vote. His victory was celebrated by gay people around the nation. âI thank God,â a schoolteacher wrote him, âI have lived long enough to see my kind emerge from the shadows and join the human race.â What became of Milk? He was hunted down and assassinated within the yearâby a fellow supervisor.
Â
EARLY IN MY FIRST SEMESTER AT CATHOLIC, I MET A WOMAN IâLL call Laura. A girl from âback homeâ in Hillside, New Jersey, she was a graduate of Mount St. Mary Academy, the sister school to St. Joeâs, so we shared a cultural foundation. Aside from that, though, she was everything I was not: wickedly funny, gregarious, a risk taker, clever when needed (or when she could get away with it), socially fluent, always cool, and expansively curious.
She was also beautiful, with bronze skin and a thick curly head of hair. Though she had a full dating schedule and a series of boyfriends,
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