Accidental Activists: Mark Phariss, Vic Holmes, and Their Fight for Marriage Equality in Texas (Mayborn Literary Nonfiction, 8, Band 8) - Hardcover

Collins, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1574416928 ISBN 13: 9781574416923

Verlag: University of North Texas Press,U.S., 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Pineville, NC

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DAVID COLLINS taught English for forty years at Westminster College in Missouri. He has had unrestricted access to all materials related to the story of Mark Phariss and Vic Holmes, including legal communications and documents, and conducted extensive interviews with Mark and Vic and others involved in the case. He lives in Pineville, North Carolina.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Accidental Activists

Mark Phariss, Vic Holmes, and Their Fight for Marriage Equality in Texas

By David Collins

University of North Texas Press

Copyright © 2017 David Collins
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-57441-692-3

Contents

Foreword by Evan Wolfson and Julian Castro, 
Author's Preface, 
Introduction Reluctant Rebels ... but Rebels with a Cause, 
Chapter 1 Growing Up Absurd, 
Chapter 2 Should We? Or Shouldn't We?, 
Chapter 3 The First Blast of the Trumpet, 
Chapter 4 The Battle of New Orleans, Part I Opening Salvos: Louisiana and Mississippi, 
Chapter 5 The Battle of New Orleans, Part II Texas Engages, 
Chapter 6 Crossing the Threshold, 
Chapter 7 Justice That Arrives Like a Thunderbolt, 
Chapter 8 Backlash in Texas, 
Chapter 9 Married at Last, Deep in the Heart of Texas, 
Table of Cases, 
Endnotes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Growing Up Absurd

Go. There's a journey out there beyond what any of us know, daring and illuminating once taken, for once taken it takes you. Not so much down some path or road as from one chamber of the heart to another, one way of seeing to another, where the old definitions of "productive citizen" and "progress" mean nothing ... these are troubled times, and for some, hard times. But they are not end times. Many great problems and challenges lie ahead. It's not your job to solve them all, but it is your responsibility to be aware, to come together and take problems as best you can, and at the same time enjoy the beauty of this world, celebrate it, restore it, share it, and make it better one day at a time. You don't have to be anything you're not; instead, be everything you are.

— Kim Heacox, Rhythm of the Wild: A Life Inspired by Alaska's Denali National Park

Climbing into his car for the short drive to the home of Chris Hammet and Keith Stanford, Mark Phariss was looking forward to an evening with friends but expecting nothing out of the ordinary. Less than ten blocks, less than two miles, barely time to think two thoughts. No great adventure, just another day in the thus far uneventful spring of 1997 — and that was okay. Chris was a radiologist in the Air Force Reserve, Keith, an ophthalmologist in the Army Reserve. A couple for three years, they were throwing a birthday party for a mutual friend. Mark was pretty sure that, as was so often the case, he'd know everyone there.

As he walked up the short driveway and into the house, Mark had no idea he was minutes from meeting the love of his life, Vic Holmes. One look, one brief conversation and he was smitten, a classic case of love at first sight. The one person Mark didn't know — handsome, beautiful smile, eyes that twinkled when he laughed — was suddenly the only one who mattered.

Vic, not so much. He didn't know the hosts, had been invited to the party by chance through a medical connection: Mark Reid, a doctor he met online who just happened to be the birthday boy. Vic was dating someone at the time, had a date that night in fact, and planned to stay only a few minutes. Ironically, he had come very close to not showing up at all. Drove by several times, but kept missing the house, a bit hidden behind trees. He had very nearly driven on. Settling in at the party, Vic chatted with a few people — forty-five minutes, perhaps an hour — moving constantly from group to group as Mark followed, hoping to make an impression and trying not to be too obvious. Tired of fending off the mosquitos, having stayed long enough to be polite, Vic sought out Chris and Keith one more time, thanked them, and left.

Luckily, Mark knew nothing about Vic's personal life — knew he had a date that night, but not that he was in a relationship. Unwilling to watch as Vic walked out of his life, Mark got his phone number from a friend.

The path that brought Mark to that first meeting with Vic had not been easy. By the age of six — years before he had words to express what he felt — he knew he was attracted to other boys. But as he moved through childhood, adolescence, and eventually into young adulthood, he read the cultural signs — sometimes consciously, sometimes absorbing the message by osmosis. And every sign said "No, don't go there." Year by year, understanding more and more the heavy price to be paid for being gay, he struggled to admit the reality of his sexual orientation, even to himself. He struggled as well to keep the truth about himself from others.

Mark had barely entered elementary school when his parents and siblings first warned him that intense emotional ties between boys were taboo. Walking home from his second grade classroom the day his best friend announced that his family was moving to another side of town, Mark began to cry. When he explained the reason for his tears, his mother, his twin sister, and his older brother looked at him, Mark remembers, "as though I was nuts." From then on he understood the male code to which he was expected to subscribe. Boys don't get too close to other boys; they certainly don't cry on parting from other boys. Mark's father, born in 1921 and a George Wallace conservative, had old-fashioned ideas about masculinity: he didn't change diapers, he didn't cook, he didn't do dishes. Men were to be tough, to fight when necessary as he had done in the Second World War. Women were to be "feminine"; no woman could ever be vice-president, let alone president.

Though he grew up in Oklahoma where conservative values seep from the ground like oil, Mark caught a break early on. His mother was deeply religious — she rose before dawn to read the Bible, saw to it that Sunday school and services were a regular part of her children's lives — but by the time Mark was old enough to remember, his parents had joined St. Paul's Methodist Church, a progressive congregation whose young, educated minister, the Rev. John Reskovac, preached an enlightened version of Christianity. The fundamentalist threats of hellfire and damnation that darkened the lives of so many gays and lesbians born in the Sooner State did come into Mark's life at the annual revivals to which his mother took the children, but she was always careful to temper the fiery preachers they heard there with her own more humane vision. When at the age of twelve Mark and his twin sister, Marsha, spread the word to children in the neighborhood that they were sinners bound for hell, their mother quickly put a stop to their misguided evangelism. You'll bring more people to Christ, she told them, by the way you live your own lives and treat others than you will by threatening them with damnation. The lesson his mother taught that day Mark never forgot.

And yet, the anti-gay message found its way eventually into his head, seepage from the general culture. Mark was just a few months shy of his fourteenth birthday when in October 1973 the local paper, the Lawton Constitution, reported on a study by Eugene Leivitt and Albert Klassen on attitudes toward homosexuality — and what he read disturbed him. Two-thirds of those surveyed considered homosexuality "very obscene and vulgar"; almost 50 percent saw in homosexuality "a corruption that can cause the downfall of a civilization." Fully a third thought homosexuals should be jailed. Though the minister at St. Paul's was enlightened, Mark knew that in 1972 the larger church had added a new line to its Book of Discipline. "The practice of homosexuality," it read, "is incompatible with Christian teaching."

When...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of North Texas Press,U.S.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1574416928
• ISBN 13: 9781574416923
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 480
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar