All things being relative, it’s probably fair to say that life isn’t really “easy” for anyone.  It’s true that grass always seems to be greener from a distance, but up close there are weeds, without fail.  Even a king can get cancer or be overthrown; the most pampered, bonbon-eating bimbo knows pain.  We wouldn’t be human without the experience of adversity.

So it’s easy for us gay people of a certain age to look at the generations coming along behind us and wonder at the “ease” with which they are allowed to live their lives.  They’ve never experienced the social opprobrium, backed up by officially-sanctioned violence, that inspired the Stonewall riots.  The twenty-somethings among them only know a world in which gay people serve openly on state and national legislatures and where gay and lesbian cultural icons are welcomed by mainstream society with open arms.  People my age, on the other hand,  have one foot each in vastly different worlds.  We embrace today’s more accepting atmosphere with gratitude (we fought for it, after all!), but have strong, life-changing  memories of when it was not OK to “just be yourself.”

So while I may envy the clear path my younger gay and lesbian colleagues may see before them as long as they stay within the liberal societies of the West, I tremble for them when they decide to do something like joining the Peace Corps.

The standard Peace Corps recruiting interview is one of the most intrusive imaginable.  Potential recruits are asked and encouraged to be frank about very private issues in their lives: recent divorce or loss, for example, or where they stand on the spectrum of sexual orientation.  They’re encouraged to talk about these things so that recruiters can then counsel them about the realities PCV life in regard to these issues.  How wonderful that these questions are even asked!  They certainly weren’t when I applied to the Peace Corps, back when homosexuality was still regarded as a mental illness and was grounds for immediate separation from service.  But of course, back then, our radar was extremely fine-tuned to safe or unsafe situations, and most gay people knew when to slip, chameleon-like, into ersatz “hetero” personas.  It became almost  instinctive; when we first discovered the need for this dissimulation there must have been some psychic cost, but it was so habitual by the time we reached our twenties it was as natural and reflexive as breathing.  Because of all this prior social conditioning, then, a lot of Peace Corps counseling wasn’t really necessary.  Official–and non-prejudicial–recognition of our existence would have been nice, but we were used to keeping our own counsel.

How must it be, then, for young gays and lesbians, out to the world, perhaps even active in gay politics, to be told that they may have to “go back into the closet” when they get to their sites as Peace Corps volunteers?  Even that choice of words is probably inappropriate, since many of them have no closets to return to–they’ve never known a time when total self-expression wasn’t acceptable.  They get plenty of counseling on their way to staging, from a country-specific mentoring service of the LGBRPCV organization, a gay/lesbian email list-serv, and countless other sources, so intellectually they can prepare themselves.  But the reality of living in a Senegalese mud-hut village must be brutal for them.  Their world is suddenly attenuated, unimaginably.  They are so completely accustomed to just being who they are.  How can they possibly make close host-country friends if they must hide such a huge part of themselves?

In response to this discovery, I can only say (and I mean no irony here):  “welcome to the world.”  Gay and lesbian Peace Corps volunteers are unique in having to decide, early on, which is more important:  their overall impact as  volunteers and the entire experience of living in that world, or their own self-expression?  At their sites, the choice is literally that stark.  It may be unfair, tragic even, but it’s true.  If you insist on coming out, you may be disruptive, you may never gain anybody’s trust; by extension you could damage the entire program in your country.  That’s quite a chunk of reality to absorb, and it’s all about simply expressing who you are.  It’s a wonder any gay PCVs decide to stick it out, and a testament to the deep, personal meaning of the overall Peace Corps experience that they do.

Whatever else they may accomplish, all Peace Corps volunteers learn one central lesson and bring it home to enlighten the rest of their countrymen.  The lesson is that  most of the rest of the world lives far differently from what we are accustomed to here in the dear old, fix-it-or-forget-it USA.  Gay and lesbian volunteers are no different; indeed, for them this lesson is deeply personal.  Their host-country gay and lesbian brothers and sisters may live literally in fear of their lives.  Peace Corps volunteers may be in no position to change that sad fact, but the memory of it will inform their own lives forever.  In the end, all of us, straight or gay, come home better people for what we have learned through the lives we’ve touched. Our diverse backgrounds and expectations going in are squeezed through the Peace Corps sausage grinder and we come out citizens of the world; then our diversity takes over again and we spread that hard-earned wisdom where we may.  Not a bad, bargain for our country, I’d say, and I’m proud that gay and lesbian volunteers are still such an important part of it.

The discovery of Cat Stevens in late 1970 was a signal event in the lives of fhe Peace Corps volunteers who lived in the vicinity of Kumasi, Ghana.  My friend Michele taught at Kumasi Girls Secondary School, and I taught at Kumasi High School, a boys’ school.  We were the two people out of our group of 75 who were lucky enough to be posted to Kumasi, Ghana’s second city.  We had lots of PCV visitors from nearby smaller towns, in for a little urban R&R, and since Michele was closer to city center, the inevitable parties always ended up at her place.

Michele had inherited a state-of-the-art Sony reel-to-reel tape deck from departing (non-Peace Corps) colleagues, who then proceeded to keep her supplied with the latest US music via occasional shipments of tapes.  It happened that a group of us had gathered at her apartment just after the arrival of a new haul, which played mostly as background music until this oddly scratchy voice started singing a fantastic, never-before-heard song  called “Wild World.”  We all stopped talking and listened spellbound to “Tea For The Tillerman” in its entirety.

That unforgettable episode is a perfect metaphor for the cultural isolation Peace Corps volunteers felt almost universally as they navigated their way on the separate planet that was “the developing world” in the early years of the program.  We had no idea who this Cat Stevens was:  Man?  Woman?  Black? White?  We just knew the music was wonderful.  We lived and died by the international editions of Time and Newsweek and jabbered endlessly about current events (luxuriating in our English fluency after weeks of speaking “special English” with our Ghanaian co-workers) whenever we got together.  When we got off the planes that had delivered us to our various destinations, we entered a world that was virtually closed off from our nearest points of reference back home.  Parents and friends would have to be satisfied with the vagaries of international mail–and our inclinations or lack thereof to write long, newsy letters–to hear from us.  A phone call to the States was a major event, requiring, in my case, the reservation of a phone in the Kumasi Post Office two weeks in advance and a good portion of that month’s living allowance.  Connections, once made, were tenuous and could be cut off.  (For that matter, a mere cross-town phone call in Kumasi was like a long-distance call in the U.S. of the 1920s.  Half the time the connection was never made, and the whole ordeal was so time-consuming and frustrating that Michele and I ended up writing letters just to meet up in town for the occasional dinner.)

In short, young people who joined the Peace Corps in those pre-Internent days were free to a degree unfathomable to our wired, parent-hovered counterparts today.  There was no email.  There were no cell phones.  You were expected to write regular letters so that the Office of Special Services wouldn’t have to send posses out to look for you so they could tell your worried parents you were OK.  You were in a neverland, between cultures, cut from the moorings of family and life-long friends and yet never really an integral part of the culture by which you found yourself surrounded.  Your closest touchstones were fellow volunteers, who were experiencing the same sensations of isolation- cum-freedom as you.  You were cradled in a new culture, the unbelievably nurturing ways of the Peace Corps overseas, which told you you were OK because it had accepted you for this challenge, and then worked to help you succeed.  You were free to try on new identities to see if something might fit better than the one you left behind.  If you were on the fence in your sexual identity, you could try a new one (despite the strictures against homosexuality at the time).  If you were a woman after a man, you could pursue with abandon.  Previous wallflowers became social butterflies, bookworms became chatterboxes.  If you’d never danced before, you danced.   It’s no accident that the Peace Corps discourages newly married couples from jumping into the experience right after marriage: the frailty of these forming relationships can cause them to fail as partners discover their new selves.

It’s reassuring to know that people joining today have the same trepidations and questions as we did 40 years ago.  The observations, the expressions of awe, written by current volunteers are almost identical to the things we wrote.  Still, I wonder how different it would be for me to become a Peace Corps volunteer now, getting on a plane with a laptop that would give me instantaneous contact with the rest of the world.  I’d feel protected and I’d probably be happy that I could stay in touch.  I could twitter a funny thing a student did and my whole world would know about it in virtually the same instant.  Who wouldn’t like that?

Still, that old sense of utter abandon would be gone.  I’d be tied by the deceptively gentle wires of technology.  You kids don’t know what you’re missing, God bless you.  I’m glad my time came in the dark old days.

My last post may have left the impression that I’m not on the  bandwagon for gay marriage.  Well, I’m not, at least not in the black-or-white version of matrimony to which it is being reduced by most media, and which so many of my fellows seem to be pursuing.  Actually, I’m all for good marriages between people of any persuasion.  Both my partner Steve and I are products of solid families headed by two people who were clearly in it for the long haul.  All wasn’t always bliss; we saw how long-term relationships work on a daily basis warts and all, and separately, long before we met, we apparently came to the same conclusion:  the warts are worth the trouble.

I’m not sure why–basic temperament or because I’m gay–but the idea of “being married” was never part of the adult picture I conjured of myself when I was growing up.  Although I was a serial monogamist and never a field-player while I was in the dating matrix, I found both states, being single and being part of a couple, had their individual charms. Switching between one and the other as I progressed through the maze towards maturity required adjustments.  At my core, I was happy either way and was actually surprised when a strong nesting instinct started taking over in my early 30s.

As the idea of a permanent relationship settled into my mind, it was colored by one attitude I can definitely attribute to being gay:  I was an outlaw.  I was perfectly happy with the way I loved and how I expressed it–for me, it was all nothing more than doing what came naturally–but society made it clear that it had other ideas.  I knew from the outset that whatever kind of family I may create for myself, it would never conform to the Ozzie and Harriet model, and I was actually fine with that.  Ozzie and Ozzie it would be, and if some other Ozzie and I should one day fall in love and decide to build a home together, we were free to make our own rules.  We would play by those that our parents had modeled for us unless they didn’t work, then, we’d improvise.  In the late 1970s, Steve and I were pioneers.  Yes, there had been gay couples, known and unknown, throughout history.  But we were among the first of the  “post-Stonewall” generation to set out on the path, to present ourselves to the world at large as a gay couple with no pretenses suggesting otherwise.  If we couldn’t have the legal protections that automatically accrue to heterosexual married couples, we’d use society’s rules and laws to create our own protections.  Steve and I had both had entire lifetimes to examine marriage as outsiders and decide whether or not some version of it was for us.  At ages 30 and 33, we were formed as adults.  We knew ourselves.

And so now I wonder exactly what it is my younger confrères are after when they pursue “gay marriage.”  The only reality they’ve ever known is a society that accepts gay couples at high school proms and venerates cultural icons like kd lang and Rufus Wainwright, two gay artists who contribute substantially to the mainstream culture, not just the gay byways.  Yes, this larger acceptance has created its own backlash, the loud cultural conservatives who keep harping about “traditional family values,” but these groups no longer own the microphone, and the louder they rant, the more irrelevant they become.  Young gay people are free to make their ways into the world to a degree simply unimagined when I was their age.

And what does that freedom mean?  Does this very acceptance remove the need my generation felt to ask important questions?  Is marriage now viewed the same by everybody, essentially as a less serious proposition than it really is?  (Look at some of the current examples!)  Steve and I were lucky.  We came from solid families and we were tempered by the challenges of blazing our own trail.  And we came to our life together relatively late.  Will a gay couple marrying in their early 20s today have as good a chance of making this complicated and hard “marriage” thing work as we did?  I hope so.

America, you’re talking about me again, and as usual the subject is what you will and will not allow me to do as I go about arranging my own life.  This time it’s because 15 brave people in Massachusetts–6 same-sex married couples and three 3 men–have mounted a legal challenge to DOMA.

DOMA is the Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law in 1996 by that great friend of the gays Bill Clinton, his broad “triangulation strategy” at its worst.  It denies federal recognition of same-sex marriages and gives each state the right to refuse recognition of same-sex marriage licenses issued by other states. While it doesn’t prohibit states from allowing gay marriages, it also doesn’t obligate other states to recognize those marriages.

Here’s what all this means to me in my real life:  I am a retired federal employee with the famously excellent health insurance that is part of the federal retirement package.  My partner Steve is not a fed.  He is 59 years old and will be finding himself in forced retirement in June, when the contract his company has with the government runs out.  He will lose his health insurance.  Because of federal law, I can’t put him on my policy as family.  We aren’t “married.”

The gay marriage issue was forced into the nation’s consciousness by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the pre-eminent gay rights lobby group.   There were other ways to navigate this minefield, but HRC chose this one, and in my opinion it was colossally wrong-headed.  Insistence on “marriage rights” tossed that red-meat M-word into the ring to be ravished by the religious right.  At the time, the cultural right was in the ascendancy from the White House on down, they owned the pulpit (word choice intentional), and they had and continue to have a field day rousing the Bible-toting rabble with our supposed attack on the holy sacrament of marriage. Like that other completely private matter, abortion, how I choose to conduct my life with the person I love has become one of those polarizing public topics that just won’t go away. It didn’t have to be that way. Civil unions could have been quietly recognized, state by state, until, before you knew it, you had a defacto national consensus. The federal government would have been forced to follow suit. “Marriage” as co-opted by the HRC would have had nothing to do with it.

Most gay couples are already able to cobble together legal protections equivalent to those automatically conveyed by what’s conventionally called marriage. Steve and I own everything together, from our house (right of survivorship) to our joint bank account. We have given each other legal and medical powers of attorney. Our end-of-life documents make it clear that we consider everything in our life equally and jointly owned. In short, in a legal sense, we are already “married.”

(Here is an illustrative sidebar to the matter of health care. I discovered a few years ago during a medical emergency that despite the scary bugaboo about hospitals having the option to ignore medical powers of attorney on moral grounds if they disagree with our living arrangement, HIPAA and standard medical practice make the nature of our relationship legally irrelevant. First, HIPAA forms simply ask, “whom should be contacted in the event of an emergency?” “Relationship” is not part of the question. And second, in order for treatment and follow-up care to continue after hospitalization, doctors need to know who will be the primary caregiver. I was accepted in that role as a matter of course, no questions asked. If the hospital had insisted on Steve’s unavailable blood next-of-kin, it was clear that I could have sued for malpractice and won.)

So we are as well-protected as we can be within the present legal framework. But there is a behemoth in the room: no federal acknowledgement of our relationship. Steve can’t legally name me as a survivor for his Social Security benefits, nor can he receive any share of my federal retirement pension after my death.  And I can’t put him on my health insurance policy.

As much as I admire the bravery and evident financial wherewithal of the Massachusetts 15 to pursue this case, I fear it may backfire for the same reasons all other such efforts that bring the word “marriage” into the conversation, and worse, doom other approaches because of the way it removes oxygen from them.  Before this legal challenge, there was already a glimmer of light, a move in Congress to work around DOMA. Last September, there was actually a hearing of the Government Affairs and Homeland Security Committee, chaired by Senators Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Susan Collins of Maine. It was poorly publicized and held in the basement, but it was well-attended, and it set in motion a search for ways to implement equal benefits for same-sex couples in the federal work force. The issue was cast in terms of civil rights and homeland security, the rationale for the latter being that the government has to be at least as competitive as the private-sector institutions that already have these equality protections on their books. The Feds face a serious brain drain as Boomers retire, and the best minds are needed to protect the country. Many owners of those good minds happen to be in love with people of the same sex.

My actual preference would be to let DOMA remain as a fig leaf and give the Bible-thumpers their cover.  Essentially, Lieberman and Collins are saying, “we don’t care what you call it. Keep your ‘marriage.’ For the security of the nation, these people need equal protection and we’re working to see that they get it.”

So call it marriage, call it civil union, call it a romp in the woods. It’s all the same to me, and as far as the government is concerned, the “civil” part is the essence of marriage, anyway. In a church wedding, the clergy pronounces the happy couple husband and wife “by the powers vested” in him/her by the state. The pronouncement may be part of a ceremony with religious trappings, but as far as the government is concerned, God has nothing to do with it. Go ask any Justice of the Peace: marriage is a universally recognized  legal contract.  Deep down, I think that’s what all any of us want.

When John Coyne asked me to do this column I was both flattered and a bit nonplussed: flattered to be in the company of John and the other contributors, and nonplussed because I was told I could write about whatever I wanted, from the gay perspective. I guess the Peace Corps also ought to figure in fairly regularly somewhere, since this is a publication meant to serve the Peace Corps community.

What I had to think about was how “gay” I could be since, while that is a big part of my identity, it’s by no means the only part, nor even the most important one in my attribute self-inventory. And gay Peace Corps? Well, that’s a great topic and one I spent a lot of time on during my 27 years working at the agency. But I’ve been away from the day-to-day business of the Peace Corps for five years now, and am not current on what the atmosphere is like inside those halls today. As for the Volunteers, I’m so far removed from the experience of the young gay people among those now populating Volunteer ranks that I can barely imagine what world-view they bring to their Peace Corps experiences. When I was their age, the only big gay cultural icon on the horizon was Liberace. If you were gay but not the sequins-and-makeup type, you pretty much forged your own lonely way with no models except the best and most humane people you could find within the straight world. Contrast that solitary pioneer experience with today’s cultural landscape and we might as well be on another planet. Gay people coming of age today have never known a world without the Human Rights Campaign, their own Capitol Hill lobbying group, for heaven’s sakes. And there are gay performers such as Melissa Etheridge, kd lang, Elton John and Rufus Wainwright whose love lives inform their work deeply and who are downright venerated by the general audience because of it. No mere cult performers, they; but examples of gay people of substantial accomplishment and acceptance that were unthinkable to my cohort. (Music lover that I am, I did have my gay cultural heroes: Tchaikovsky, Benjamin Britten, Cole Porter — but they were either simply tolerated, regarded as talented but odd ducks, or were properly tragic — Tchaikovsky was even compliant enough to commit suicide. Care to identify with that?) No, I don’t feel qualified to talk to young gay people coming into Peace Corps’ ranks today.

But I can speak to history, and by way of introduction, that’s what I’ll tell you about now. My working relationship with the Peace Corps spanned 34 years, from the time I swore in as a PCV in Ghana in 1969 to my retirement from the Africa Region in 2003. Those of us of a certain age, gay or not, know that attitudes towards homosexuality changed drastically over that time period. I bear personal witness to those changes. In 1969 we were still very much in the days of “the love that dare not speak its name.” I nearly early-terminated, ready to face either the draft or coming out to my parents (both ghastly prospects) because of an unrequited emotional affair with an African neighbor that I couldn’t shake and was afraid to tell anyone about. From that experience I ricocheted to a 1993 reception for agency Director Mark Gearan, a White House appointee, given by the gay and lesbian employee group at headquarters. He thanked us for our service. It was my privilege to illustrate the changes in attitude with my own life. I told him publicly that I had gone from fear of being kicked out of the agency simply because of who I was, to being honored by the highest reaches of government, again, simply because of who I was.

Life is crazy. I’m not complaining.

I can’t promise stories of such heady triumph every month. And since I’m a guy, I guarantee that whatever I have to say is going to be weighted more towards men’s experience than women’s. I try to be inclusive in everything I do, but some things are still biologically impossible. I hope you’ll understand, and come along for the ride.

— Ralph Cherry