Daniel
12-28-2006, 10:46 AM
For a paper that, at one time, refused to use the word 'gay', the NYtimes often makes me smile with their stories about us. (To see how far the Times has come, one has only to read the 'Marriage and Commitment' pages, where our folk are included, heads pressed together above- at times- witty copy.)
This article makes my heart glad- from the 'Home and Garden' section.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/garden/28kansas.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
In the Heartland and Out of the Closet
KANSANS, as they will tell you, are not generally ones for trading in personal biography with neighbors and cubicle mates. The Midwestern consciousness has long placed a premium on reserve. Even as American society grew easier discussing gay and lesbian issues during the past decade, Kansas lagged behind, a place where the closet was well populated and the planet of “Will and Grace” seemed to spin very far away.
So it was with Cathy Jambrosic, a native Kansan, who divorced her husband in the late 1970s because she was gay (as was he, it turned out). Even as she built and moved into a house with a woman she planned to spend her life with, Ms. Jambrosic never discussed her orientation with her family or friends.
Then, in the walkup to Kansans’ overwhelming vote in April 2005 to amend their constitution to ban gay marriage, something changed. Ms. Jambrosic, who at 57 had lived for years on a quiet street in this conservative exurb of Kansas City, was moved to come out, about her sexuality and her relationship, for the first time.
Ms. Jambrosic is part of a dramatic shift that has taken hold lately among gay and bisexual Kansans, many of them well into midlife and ensconced in long-term relationships. An energized culture of coming out has emerged, apparently in reaction to what many see as the anti-gay climate that led to the marriage ban.
Nowhere is this change more obvious than in a new analysis of census data by Gary J. Gates, a demographer at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy, a think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles. He found a 68 percent jump in Kansas households headed by same-sex partners between 2000 and 2005. In 2005, 11 out of every 1,000 couples living together in Kansas reported themselves as same-sex, according to Mr. Gates’s review of the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey data, a figure closer than one might expect to those recorded in New Jersey and New York, where 12 and 14 out of every 1,000 couples, respectively, are same-sex.
The caption to the photo:
GALVANIED Cyd Slayton and her mother, Carolyn Weeks. “The zealous campaigns to portray us as sinners,” said Ms. Slayton, a lesbian from Mission Hills, Kan., have been “a blessing.”
This article makes my heart glad- from the 'Home and Garden' section.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/garden/28kansas.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
In the Heartland and Out of the Closet
KANSANS, as they will tell you, are not generally ones for trading in personal biography with neighbors and cubicle mates. The Midwestern consciousness has long placed a premium on reserve. Even as American society grew easier discussing gay and lesbian issues during the past decade, Kansas lagged behind, a place where the closet was well populated and the planet of “Will and Grace” seemed to spin very far away.
So it was with Cathy Jambrosic, a native Kansan, who divorced her husband in the late 1970s because she was gay (as was he, it turned out). Even as she built and moved into a house with a woman she planned to spend her life with, Ms. Jambrosic never discussed her orientation with her family or friends.
Then, in the walkup to Kansans’ overwhelming vote in April 2005 to amend their constitution to ban gay marriage, something changed. Ms. Jambrosic, who at 57 had lived for years on a quiet street in this conservative exurb of Kansas City, was moved to come out, about her sexuality and her relationship, for the first time.
Ms. Jambrosic is part of a dramatic shift that has taken hold lately among gay and bisexual Kansans, many of them well into midlife and ensconced in long-term relationships. An energized culture of coming out has emerged, apparently in reaction to what many see as the anti-gay climate that led to the marriage ban.
Nowhere is this change more obvious than in a new analysis of census data by Gary J. Gates, a demographer at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy, a think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles. He found a 68 percent jump in Kansas households headed by same-sex partners between 2000 and 2005. In 2005, 11 out of every 1,000 couples living together in Kansas reported themselves as same-sex, according to Mr. Gates’s review of the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey data, a figure closer than one might expect to those recorded in New Jersey and New York, where 12 and 14 out of every 1,000 couples, respectively, are same-sex.
The caption to the photo:
GALVANIED Cyd Slayton and her mother, Carolyn Weeks. “The zealous campaigns to portray us as sinners,” said Ms. Slayton, a lesbian from Mission Hills, Kan., have been “a blessing.”