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LGBTQ Icons and Everyday Heroes
- Kathleen Archambeau
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Welcome to Healing From Within I am your host Sheryl Glick author of my new book A New Life Awaits Spirit Guided Insights to Share Global Awakening which allows readers a new way to view the many changes happening worldwide now in 2020 as a means to better understand life death and human evolution so we may heal personally and collectively. I am delighted to welcome Kathleen Archambeau author of Pride and Joy who will share stories that comprise the best of LGBTQ history and many who are living fulfilling successful lives. For those who may not have questioned their sexual orientation or gender identity to learn more about people in that community this show will offer an opportunity to learn more about the topic. Life is about learning accepting allowing loving and ultimately finding peace no matter what spiritual journey one has chosen to live.
As listeners of “Healing From Within” are well aware my esteemed and very knowledgeable guests share intimate stories as we explore the metaphysical and physical aspect of human development and remember that as spiritual beings having a physical life the choices we make to explore this wondrous world of nature and human relationships is distinctly of our own making. We have choices of course, but many of the events or challenges we face were partially created by our own thoughts and actions as part of our soul journey.
In today’s episode of Healing From within we will discuss many interesting life journeys sharing the fight for justice that motivated Kate Kendell for the National Center for Lesbian Rights and many other members of the LGBTQ community who have helped express the values and love of this group and also often their difficulties in facing those who may not accept their lifestyle. Award winning writer and longtime LGBTQ activist Kathleen Archambeau tells the untold stories from diverse LGBT community voices around the world. Not like depressing sinister shadowy stories of the past, this book highlights queer people living open happy successful lives.
When Kathleen is asked to think back to her childhood and remember a person place event that may have signaled to them the interest work lifestyle they would choose as an adult for Sheryl knows that we are born with a soul destiny or life plan that ultimately moves us to refine our energy and remember the values of soul life Kathleen tells us of her mother who always gave quotes from Shakespeare and other noted writers and who loved language and using it prolifically. Her love of writing began in childhood.
Sheryl who would never use the term “queer” asks what it means to people in the LGBT community? Those not familiar with the LGBT community often have little awareness of their issues dreams aspirations and hopes. Kathleen shares that older people thought it derogatory and judgmental but millennials seem to embrace it and see it as an attribute of modern times.
Sheryl was enchanted with Dustin Lance Black Academy Award Winner for Best Original Screenplay, Milk, in 2009 who tells us in the foreword of this book Pride and Joy the following:
“My dream has come true. But even with marriage equality won in the US, our larger, global dreams of LGBTQ equality for all are still far from realized For too long our stories have been robbed from us, buried in fear and shame. Until recently, we would have been labeled mentally ill or criminal for even claiming our stories as our own. In many countries that is still the case. So diving back into an excavation of our long buried LGBTQ history with ABC’s miniseries, When We Rise, I gathered a group of diverse artists to help tell more of our stories in an even more inclusive fashion. But even this effort only scratches the surface. Far more light must be shed on who we are and where we come from. It is our combined histories, efforts, and stories that help define us as a people, pull us out of isolation, bring us together in community, and inspire us to rise up by reminding us that we have risen before, fought back before, faced backlash before, and won. Sharing our stories and our histories is not an exercise in nostalgia. Our history laid manifest is the foundation of our power.”
This book, Pride & Joy: LGBTQ Artists, Icons and Every day Heroes, by longtime LGBTQ activist Kathleen Archambeau, empowers queer youth to do more than survive, but to thrive, whatever the challenges, whatever the losses, whatever the risks, wherever you find yourself.
We go on to discuss why Tony Kushner quit cello and how Colm Toibin found his voice?
Kushner’s collaboration on a number of award-winning films, including Munich, starring Eric Bana and Daniel Craig, and Lincoln, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field. He penned the adaptation of August Wilson’s Fences, starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis.
Tony Kushner, for all his achievements as an American playwright and screenwriter, remains not only modest, but assiduous in pursuit of his art and tells us: “In every profession, there is gender bias, misogyny and sexism. It actually does grotesque things to humans. I fully believe if women were in positions of power in the Church, the pedophile scandal wouldn’t have happened. I think if women were dominant in the US Congress things would actually get done.
Tony Kushner was a young reluctant cellist in his father’s Governor’s Program for Gifted Children’s orchestra. We find out while walking to his lesson at his father’s college the box housing the cello dropped and everything broke. Might have been divine intervention for his path was to write and not be a musician like his father and mother.
Kushner is even more adamant about the basic role of the artist: “The only thing an artist has to do is try and tell the truth.” The forces against telling the truth come from without and from within. Those from within, in Kushner’s experience, are more devious and treacherous and harder to recognize. “There’s the voice inside that says you’re garbage and nobody should ever really listen to you. There’s the voice that says you should copy someone successful. Then, you lie because you think it’s a popular point of view. You warp your version of the truth about life because you think you’ll get more Twitter followers,” he explained. Kushner doesn’t Tweet and doesn’t read the critics. His husband filters the reviews and shares the positive ones with him. He has a thin skin and can get really upset if people say nasty things to him
Colm Toibin an award winning Irish writer tells us how his own world came crashing down when he was eight years old and his father, only one of three students from County Wexford to win university scholarship and a teacher in the Christian Brothers’ school in Enniscorthy for thirty years, took ill. Colm was shipped off to an aunt’s house and never saw his mother once during his months-long exile. When Colm’s father died, he was twelve and began to both stammer and write. He was so far down in his classes that there were frequent discussions of his working in a drapery shop—the loftiest ambition those around him could see for him. That all changed at St. Peter’s Boarding School, where Colm discovered reading. He devoured books and went on to graduate in English from University College Dublin. It’s ironic that words saved him when he grew up after his father’s death, in a world of silence in his widowed mother’s home.
One of his quotes is quite introspective , “We walk among them sometimes, the ones who have left us. They are filled with something none of us knows. It is a mystery.”
Sheryl says that as a medium who deals with downloading spiritual energy and messages that thought by Toibin has great truth in it for “Consciousness survives physical death,” and whenever we think of a loved one or mention their name they are indeed around us. So many have seen their loved ones either in dreams or in their mind’s eye.
Toibin writes a lot about exile and home. His story of Henry James in nineteenth-century England, The Master, won the International Impac Dublin Literary Award, the world’s most valuable literary prize ($150,000) for a single work of fiction, chosen from nominations by public librarians worldwide.
Let us go on to be inspired by the audacity to fight for justice that motivated National Center for Lesbian Rights Executive Director Kate Kendell a Mormon who grew up in Utah.
Kate Kendell grew up Mormon in Ogden, Utah, where the church considers being lesbian a grievous sin. Its immoral behavior is to be abjured. Before coming out to herself, Kendell was active and held many leadership positions—to the extent that girls were allowed to hold leadership positions—in the Mormon Church. She loved the social aspect of the church. All her friends went to church because that’s what happens in Mormon communities, where 90 percent of your neighbors and classmates are Mormon. She never had what the church called “testimony.” She never quite “bought the story that being a faithful woman was the only way to salvation.” She came to consciousness as a feminist first, and then as a lesbian in her late teens. So when she left, she didn’t have the same traumatic identity or faith crisis her LGBT friends did. When she finally told her mother she was gay, her mother reacted, “The most important thing to me is that you’re happy.” Kendell’s mother saying that made everything possible. It gave Kendell permission to embrace who she was as a lesbian. She had a very close relationship with her mother, so her mother’s opinion mattered most. Kendell’s father died when she was three, and her mother had married Kate’s stepfather who was both racist and given to rages, so she didn’t care much what he thought. Her mother’s status as a Mormon widow with two small children and no college education, no doubt, influenced her choice of husband. Kate’s mother died following a series of strokes, but despite cognitive difficulties, often told friends and neighbors, “Kate’s making the world a better place for LGBT people everywhere.”
Utah has a very, very dominant white culture. “And to be who I wanted to be with Sandy her African American wife, she was forced to really unpack white privilege, to understand how deep white supremacy goes, how you’re either part of dismantling it or complicit in upholding it. To really understand race and Racism I feel is one of the most important lessons of my life, ”said Kate.
In her twenty years as Executive Director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, recent headlines would be among the highlights of Kendell’s legal career. The 2015 SCOTUS landmark decision Obergefell v. Hodges ruled that same-sex couples enjoyed the same freedom to marry as all couples. NCLR was co-counsel in the case from Tennessee, one of four cases that led to the Obergefell decision. There have been extreme highs and lows in Kate Kendell’s efforts to secure justice for LGBTQ individuals. “The audacity to fight for justice. Kendell spoke before the Supreme Court on three separate occasions when many attorneys never get there one time.
Sheryl says that she often has synchronicity with her guests and their stories. Sheryl’s daughters name is Stacey Kendall and as a child actress made a movie when she was fifteen and spent almost three months in Ogden Utah where she learned a great deal about the Mormon community. Later on Stacey had her own children and a young woman from that area in Utah came to help her with the children and became a member of the family. She was very independent and though her love for God was strong she did not embrace the Mormon life style. She was extremely independent.
I believe nothing is random in our life as our soul seeks to refine its energy and create opportunities to grow in greater compassion and love and learn that our life journey may take us in a different direction than our original social or religious belief systems encouraged. The mind and soul can mature and leave behind limiting patterns that alter our personal growth.
We are aware that in many Muslim nations LGBT members are physically harmed even murdered. How will we begin to approach changing ignorance and false religious beliefs which Kathleen says is a huge question and hard to achieve goal where religious indoctrination is so firmly implanted. But there are facts we can observe to show how unfair treatment of the LGBTQ community has been.
In the UK, 66 percent of LGBT individuals have experienced a hate crime and reported it to no one (www.independent.co.uk, 2014). Only 6.3 percent of Chinese workers are completely out at work for sexual reasons. (Beijing Today, 5/24/13) . In some of the most populous countries—China, India and Russia—propaganda laws limit freedom of expression and can result in political imprisonment. African and Middle Eastern countries generally have some of the most severe penalties for being gay, up to life imprisonment and, in severe cases of human rights abuses, the death penalty. On the global stage, seventy-six countries still imprison LGBTQ citizens for the crime of being queer, and thirteen states can impose the death penalty. In December 2011, Hillary Clinton famously declared “LGBT rights are human rights and human rights are LGBT rights” in a speech to the US Mission to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Support of LGBT rights in a declaration to the UN Human Rights Council has been signed by ninety-six member-states of the United Nations (2011). Fortunately, seventy-six countries offer non-discrimination protections for their LGBTQ citizens, forty-seven countries recognize same-sex unions, and twenty- seven countries allow joint adoption (The International
Sheryl tells Kathleen that when she was a child she had a Special Needs cousin. At that time it was referred to as a retarded child. One day in the Catskill Mountains at a resort while walking with him a family of adults and children started to laugh. Sheryl was confused…he was just my younger cousin and he was to be loved, no matter how different or unique he was. Sheryl was tremendously hurt to see how cruel people could be. We may not be comfortable when we encounter something that is new or unfamiliar but open- minded heart based people try to learn and appreciate difference without judgment.
So Kathleen tells us of a time she was hurt or disappointed by people who simply were insensitive While working in a corporate role she heard one of the heads of a department actually say A death penalty for pedophiles murderers adulterers and gays was a necessary punishment. That is quite an ignorant and harsh comment but to be said in public. At the time Kathleen was not out in the business world but still the wound from that statement was intense. Kathleen writes.” I don’t want LGBTQ young professionals to experience what I did as a closeted lesbian in a corporation where it was literally dangerous to come out in the early 1980s. In one of my Persuasive Speaking classes at a Silicon Valley high-technology company, one of my students, an educated male American engineer, delivered a speech justifying murder for only five crimes, one of which was homosexuality.
At another tech company, I was outed by a former friend and colleague and subsequently fired by a “cracker” CEO. A labor lawyer advised that I had no recourse since I was not out and couldn’t prove that this was a targeted “layoff.”
Some problems Legalized same-sex marriage is linked to fewer youth suicide attempts, a striking finding since suicide, after fatal injuries and homicides, is the most frequent cause of death for US citizens between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. LGBTQ youth attempt suicide at four times the rate of heterosexual teens. The data in this same-sex marriage study reflected thirty-two states that legalized same-sex marriage between 2004 and 2015 and fifteen that did not. The study concluded that legalizing same-sex marriage was related to a drop in suicide attempts, most likely related to a reduction in social stigma. This Harvard-Johns Hopkins Schools of Public Health study has the validity of self-reported data from 750,000 students over the course of more than a decade, 1999-2015
So while the world is growing more tolerant of LGBTQ artists, icons, and everyday heroes, LGBTQ youth around the world are hungry for positive, successful, life-affirming, openly queer role models. A full 42 percent do not feel accepted in the communities where they live in America, and 92 percent hear negative messages about being LGBT at school, on the Internet, and from peers (“Growing Up LGBT in America,” based on 10,000+ survey participants, ages 13-17, HRC, 2014 ).
It is also true that you must keep yourself safe wherever you are; it may mean remaining circumspect or even closeted. Sometimes it means moving to another city or creating a family of choice if your family of origin rejects you. It sometimes even means leaving your home country.
In observations of how response to the LGBT community has changed in the last twenty years and how it needs to change in all areas of life Sheryl shares a passage from her new book.
In Sheryl’ book A New Life Awaits Spirit Guided Insights to Global Awakening she share how we are moving forward through the most challenging times to a higher version of human awareness and writes, “As spiritual beings having a human life experience, readers will also take away with them a greater awareness of human life in these tumultuous, changing modern times as we are encouraged to develop a more heightened and astute social consciousness in order to bring about worldwide cooperation when dealing with health, educational, medical, and political concerns affecting all of life: evolution in all our communities, spiritually and physically offering much needed new ways to go about eliminating injustice, the proliferation of crime, conquering disease, reinventing social graces and finding ways to integrate higher Universal Laws for wellbeing and success into our human daily lives. If we are being watched from above by those who live in gentler conditions than here on Earth and who, with love and hope for our advancement as a human species, expect us to expand and create more loving interactions and conquer warring impulses, the choice to do this is non-negotiable. “…………
“The American people are ardently demanding changes to present corrupt, political, elitist, ruling-class practices that do not allow simple, kind, good values to be honored. As we question what we want in life and what is truly a just criteria for success, we are discovering that people embroiled in only a materialistic approach to life—either forgetting or never having considered their equally important spiritual needs for love, for compassion, to be of service to others, and to be free from greed— have become disconnected and dissatisfied. I have observed people who are not only happy and fulfilled, but often courageous and dynamic and bold leaders much needed in today’s world of conflict and confusion. Their general mindset reflects virtues including empathy, the acceptance of others with genuine regard for their differences, and respect for what we all can contribute to the world.”
Kathleen might like readers to take away with them after reading Pride and Joy some facts possibly to remember are…The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) found that 53 percent of Americans are still closeted at work (“The Cost of the Closet and The Rewards of Inclusion,” HRC, 5/7/14). Within the US, twenty states still have no legal protections against employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, and four other states have no legal protections except for state employees. Only twenty states offer full employment protection based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Since the Human Rights Campaign has assessed corporations through its Corporate Equality Index (CEI), 92 percent of the Fortune 500 prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and 199 scored 100 percent, while 327 of the Fortune 500 scored 91 percent or higher on the CEI Index (CEI Index, 2017).
Some of the most populous countries—China, India and Russia—propaganda laws limit freedom of expression and can result in political imprisonment. African and Middle Eastern countries generally have some of the most severe penalties for being gay, up to life imprisonment and, in severe cases of human rights abuses, the death penalty. On the global stage, seventy-six countries still imprison LGBTQ citizens for the crime of being queer, and thirteen states can impose the death penalty. Fortunately, seventy-six countries offer non-discrimination protections for their LGBTQ citizens, forty-seven countries recognize same-sex unions, and twenty- seven countries allow joint adoption
Sheryl thanks Kathleen Archambeau author of Pride and Joy for sharing insights into the spirit of the LGBT community which for a good portion of the nation and world still remains elusive. In learning that we are all connected by the energy of life and soul it becomes easier to appreciate all living beings as unique and guided by a Higher Hand for their own unique journey.
In summarizing today’s episode of “Healing From Within” we have explored the most creative and courageous journeys of many members of the LGBTQ community as we move forward to the best of human evolution accepting people in all their uniqueness and know that many march to the feelings and awareness of needs that have not traditionally been honored often by religious misconceptions or limitations and through the fears of those who would keep society stagnant and adhere to old time understanding of how they believe men and women should function in a competitive society. When one begins to understand soul needs, past lives, and the Universal Laws of Energy we come to know our dual nature as spiritual beings having a physical life for the purpose of feeling greater love and compassion, and the challenges of our innate life plan or destiny that helps us to make choices that resonate with our Higher Self and teach us how to live boldly and brilliantly sharing our many talents with the world. And to the best of our ability, stand up to corruption hate fear and lack of human understanding to make people love us, just as we are and not try to fit into a socialized program of similarity for all for that is not a possibility for many of us.
As a medium and energy healer I accept allow and surrender to all things as I know our lives ,sexuality, health issues, relationships and interests, are part of an eternal journey of gathering experiences and understanding the immense “personal power” we have to create lives that are happy joyful purposeful and productive. “It is A Wonderful Life” the movie also shows us how we often are not aware of how our presence in the world affects so many and when we are serving others with the best within ourselves, goodness humility honor and courage, the world and universe reverberate with a forceful energy of love.
Kathleen and I would have you invite into your life all people most especially people you may have not understood in the past and have feared for whatever reason, and open to seeing beyond their physical exterior to the inner being of soul life, which actually gives them the ideal life path they are following. Allow accept and surrender to all things and ultimately you will find peace!
