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Some of My Best Friends Are Gayle A Gay Returned Missionary Reflects on His Involvement with the Eagle Forum by Troy Williams February 2007 Troy Williams produces the talk shows “RadioActive” and “NQT” on KRCL radio. This is from a letter he sent to the Salt Lake Tribune. I am one of those radical queers that Senator 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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