APRIL 18, 1997 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 23
BOOKS
gays can return from the exile in their own land
How gays
Coming Home to America
A Road Map to Gay and Lesbian Empowerment by Torie Osborn
St. Martin's Press, $21.95 hardcover
Reviewed by Kaizaad Kotwal
The word exile connotates that one is forced to dwell in a place outside or away from one's home. And if indeed home is where the heart is, then exile also suggests abandoning one's heart in that place which has become hostile to one's very existence.
History is strewn with the examples and bodies of those forced to leave home to live and rebuild in strange landscapes. Yet, what is often overlooked are the equally poignant stories of men, women and children living in exile within their own homes, their own countries and their own familiar geographies.
Gays, lesbians and bisexuals have been forced into exile within their own homes since time immemorial. And today, like never before, as America is struggling to understand the increasingly visible gay population and their needs and wants, America is redefining what home is and who can and cannot reside there.
It is also true that Hawaii's impending decision to legalize gay marriage and the scramble by other states to pass anti-marriage legislation is threatening to blow the roof off of America's collective traditional heterosexual "home." There are many other equally contentious issues still in need of attention and redefinition.
Tori Osborn, a longtime gay activist and organizer, attempts with this book to address the current and future transformations of the American social, cultural, political and economic landscapes as gays and lesbians reclaim their rightful place in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Osborn divides her treatise into five large sections, each addressing a separate process of rebuilding a home. In the first section, she lays the blueprint for the most important part of this house, coming out to ourselves. Osborn claims that the process begins with coming out, which is an act of coming home to ourselves first and foremost.
She writes that "To acknowledge who we are, it is imperative for us to come out, because we are born invisible even to ourselves. We are born with a hidden identity and then raised and nurtured by people who deny and sometimes express hostility to our very existence. In no other minority do the members have this particular and peculiar experience of invisibility within their own birth families."
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Osborn's most important lesson about coming out is that it is indeed a life-long commitment which ultimately improves not only the lives of gay and lesbian people but also of non-gay people who must live under the same roof.
In the second segment, Osborn relates the theory that coming out has a domino effect in culture, whereby the effects of one person being out has exponential benefits to the culture at large. Osborn tells us that, "There is also a clear correlation between those who know us and those more likely to favor nondiscrimination: 73 percent of those who know someone gay favor gay rights in the workplace, versus 55 percent of those who don't."
What makes this book valuable is that while it focuses on the strides made in the past three decades, Osborn resists being Pollyanna-ish and strikes a realistic chord by reminding us of all the work that is yet to be done because, "The simple fact is that 60 percent of Americans still consider homosexuality to be immoral...this is the truth of where we stand today. People do not want to us to suffer discrimination on thể job, but
they don't just don't yet fully accept us as equal."
Osborn's third strategy is to start building our own community, focusing in on affirmation and empowerment through social and political activism, as well as grass roots efforts to build from the ground up.
"For exiles from society yearning for connection with each other and for a home of their own," Osborn writes, "culture is of fundamental significance and is inextricably bound up with our self-conscious creation both of openly gay and lesbian community and of our political movement."
Torie Osborn
In the fourth and fifth segments, Osborn talks about moving beyond oppression and victimization to find individual and collective freedom. Osborn speaks of new values and new visions necessary to moving into the future with hope. It is here that issues of family within the lesbian and gay community become paramount, and where perspectives that have emerged from the holocaust of AIDS are the building blocks of a new and inclusive home.
Coming Home to America is a valuable book that is timely as gay, lesbian and bisexual issues are coming to the forefront of a national and global discourse on living in unity. Osborn attacks the demonizing claims of the right wing by presenting the thesis that gay people can engage Americans in a new process of educating them in new positive
JUDY G. ROLFE
values and visions of love, acceptance and social regeneration.
Osborn's writing resists the pedantic and preachy with the inclusion of personal testimonials and stories of many gay, lesbian and bisexual people, proving that Osborn's treatise is not mere theory, but that living proof of a new and vibrant home already exists.
While the book is realistic, the optimism is undeniable when Osborn concludes her tome by writing that, "There's the force that will win in the end: joy. Irrepressible, shining joy. Joy in the face of it all, a joy that each of us recognizes and shares as we come home at last. America, we're coming home."
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