I experienced a situation this weekend that I have to write about it. I’ve pondered it and ruminated on it, since it happened. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what lessons I have gleaned.
There is a beautiful old theater that was built in the 1920s in the city that I live in. It’s in the National Register of Historic Places. It has been on my bucket list to see a movie at this theater, known for it’s ornate beauty and Wurlitzer organ, for a long time, but we have never gotten around to it. My friends brought it up recently, talking about it’s amazing antique features, and so, on a whim, with nothing else going on this past Saturday night, I looked up the movie that was playing at this particular venue. (this theater typically shows indie films or old classics or the Rocky Horror Picture Show) The movie showing on Saturday night was The Shiny Shrimps, a comedic French film about a homophobic man who after using homophobic slurs, is ordered to coach a gay water polo team for The Gay Games, in order to still stay qualified as a national swimmer for France. My husband, who was curious about the theater, as well, agreed to drive the 45 minutes into town and to look around forever and ever for parking, because we really didn’t have any other plans for the night and we are always seeking out novelty (we are both adventurous fire signs).
Now, having seen Moonlight at the theaters, we both understood that there would likely be a larger than usual gay population at the theater. That doesn’t phase us. We have gay friends and gay family members and we don’t consider ourselves homophobic, whatsoever. However, as we got closer to the mob sitting outside, waiting to get into the theater, it became obvious that the crowd was 90 percent gay men and maybe 9 percent lesbians and we helped make up the possibly 1 percent or less of straight people, who were going into the theater. The theater holds 1200. We were clearly in the minority.
I immediately felt uncomfortable, not just for myself, but also for my husband, who is a good looking, charming, outgoing man. I stammered something about just exploring the theater quickly and then just leaving. I found myself wanting to get to and to sit into our seats, quickly and discreetly. I found myself trying to almost shrink into myself, as to not bring any attention to our traditional, conventional long-married, totally straight couple status. I sensed and understood my husband’s acute uncomfortableness, as well and I felt guilty for the whole situation, all the way around.
Obviously, after ending up exploring the theater and ending up staying and watching what was a fun and enjoyable movie, my husband and I discussed our experience.
“I felt like everyone was thinking, why are YOU here?” is what I said to my husband.
“I think that you have that all wrong. I don’t think that anyone cared. I don’t think that they were thinking about us at all,” my husband said.
Yes, he was probably right. It could be kind of narcissistic to think that I was any kind of focus, for the night. I compared it to an experience I had long ago when I was still in high school. One of my best friends was of Chinese descent and she invited me to an event at her Asian Cultural Center. It ended up that I was the only Caucasian person at the festival. Again, I had that same feeling of wanting to disappear, so matters got worse, when we were playing dodge ball and I got knocked in the head and my contact lens popped out. Everyone stopped the game and started searching the gym for my contact lens and I had another great, sore thumb moment. I can still make my face turn red and heat up over the moment, over thirty years later.
For me, the most important lesson, I got from my experience on Saturday night (and from the high school experience that I can still remember clearly) is empathy. It is a very strange, self conscious feeling to be “the different one.” Even if the whole population is being kind and considerate and supposedly ambivalent to your being different, you can still feel it. It is a lonely, apologetic, uncomfortable, maybe even a tad scary, defiant and defensive, yet tinged with shame feeling. I’m not saying that those feelings are the “correct” feelings to have, but to deny them would be a lie. Empathy for those who have to go through their whole lives feeling like the “different” ones, is probably the best reminder/gift that I received over the weekend. Those complicated, mixed bag, stirred up emotions would be a lot to face for anyone, on a daily basis, every single day of your life.
Recently I watched a very interesting reality show called Couples Therapy. One of the married couples, DeSean and Elaine, a black man and a Puerto Rican woman, were disagreeing over wanting to go to upscale restaurants. DeSean was trying to get across to Elaine that he didn’t enjoy spending their hard-earned money in places that made him feel “less than.” Elaine’s response to that is “Who cares?” She says that it is the other people’s problems if they are racist or bigoted or just plain snooty. While that is the truth, it is also not reasonable nor fair to discount DeSean’s internal and external experiences, and the confusing feelings that arise from those experiences of being a black man, in a predominantly white culture.
I always tell my children that we are never going to solve any of the world’s problems until we change the way people think. We cannot change how anyone thinks, until we really go about trying to understand the other person’s point of view and the feelings and experiences that have created that point of view. This is really what empathy is all about. I like that the younger generations are less focused on differences. They do a better job of “I’m okay, You’re okay.” My husband and I both agreed that our weekend’s theater experience would have most likely been much less uncomfortable (or even less of anything notable to talk about, at all) for our children, three sons, who are all young men and our daughter, a teenager. Our children have only experienced that it is okay for two people of the same sex to love one another, and for two people of different races to love one another. They know that is normal for women to be CEOs and Airforce pilots. They were children when a black man was voted President of the United States. Our children know that it is only the extreme, vicious, simple-minded and ugly-hearted people who hurt people or minimize people who have different religions, sexual preferences, political stances, or racial backgrounds than they do. They know this, not because it has been preached in esoteric theory and righteous platitudes, but because it is the experience that they have mostly lived and seen, on a daily basis, since they were young.
My experience this weekend was a very introspective, compelling lesson in empathy. I hope that someday soon in the future, we can bridge the gap of our differences and see them just as that and nothing more – differences in perspectives and points of view, spawning from vastly different lifetime experiences. Differences are not personal affronts. They are nothing to be feared or to be ashamed about. Differences are nothing to create individual, protective, inclusive clubs about, and around. Because in the end, as much variety as there is this world, at all of our own very deepest cores, under all of the hurts, and the masks, and the fears, and the bravado, and the ego creations, we are all very much the same substance – Love, Spirit, Life.
