Book lets gays speak for themselves> ‘Much More Than Sexuality’ tackles societal intolerance born of ignorance

MUCH MORE THAN SEXUALITY: Listening to 70 Gay People Talk About Their Lives, compiled and edited by Liz and John Sherblom, Audenreed Press, 324 pages, $13.

A few weeks ago, a young man verbally attacked me for displaying a “Maine Won’t Discriminate” bumper sticker on the back of our family car. Apparently, screaming obscenities and flipping the bird at a woman and two young children was his way of defending family values. For me, it was an unpleasant but isolated event. Imagine being gay and living with the daily expectation of such behavior, and worse. (Remember Charlie Howard?) And all it took to trigger it was a bumper sticker.

Co-editors Liz and John Sherblom take on intolerance born of ignorance in their new book, “Much More Than Sexuality: Listening to 70 Gay People Talk About Their Lives.”

In the introduction, Liz Sherblom writes, “Our intention in putting this book together is to facilitate a small step in the direction of re-examining people as fellow human beings, rather than as part of a group defined and stereotyped on the basis of one or another innate characteristic.”

In 1993, she spent several months interviewing homosexuals and lesbians throughout the northeastern United States. “Much More Than Sexuality” is the distillation of these interviews. Unburdened by philosophical or scientific analyses, the stories are given in the person’s own words. The result is a collection of first-person narratives as direct and unvarnished as conversations over coffee. The Sherbloms offer no annotation, the gay and lesbian people speak for themselves, and readers are allowed to form their own conclusions.

The idea of being judged on a single characteristic is echoed repeatedly. “My thought when I meet a straight person is not `What do they do in bed?”‘ a woman named Kate says in Part Three. “My thought is, `What do they do? What’s their thing? …’ We’ve met with a fair amount of headache in the process of coming out as a couple, but in a small town like this, if you hide things, I think it encourages people to think it’s bad, so we both agreed not to hide.”

Kate is, among other things, a mother, a life partner, and an assistant leader for her daughter’s Brownie troop.

A broad range of social, educational and economic backgrounds emerges, suggesting that there is no particular environment that “produces” homosexuality. While most of the people interviewed have little more in common than their sexual orientation, some common themes do emerge, one of the foremost being that homosexuality is not a choice, but an innate characteristic. Nearly every person interviewed stated in the most emphatic terms frustration with this societal misconception.

“Yeah, like I would choose a lifestyle in which I could get beaten up, I could get discriminated against for housing and a job, that people are calling me sick,” a pharmacist identified as Wayne says in Part Two. “Yeah, I really want to choose that over being heterosexual, which is just the norm. It holds no water.”

In fact, just the reverse seems to be the case. The majority of subjects either denied their own sexuality or kept it closeted for many years, often marrying in an attempt to have a “normal” life. Such methods were universally unsuccessful. Other myths addressed are the frequent allegations that straight men or women are “turned gay” by predatory homosexuals, or that all homosexuals are also pedophiles.

The Sherbloms have dedicated “Much More Than Sexuality” to the memories of several gay friends and relatives, including David Sherblom, John Sherblom’s brother whose AIDS-related death inspired the collection, and poet Gordon Barker, whose poetry prefaces each of the book’s six sections.

This division is somewhat confusing. Barker’s poems express a succession of emotions, such as unity, loneliness, the memory of lost love, and hope, yet the interviews that follow do not seem to be strongly grouped around any particular theme. Nonetheless, “Much More Than Sexuality” provides an invaluable window into the lives of a segment of the gay population largely overlooked by our sensation-oriented media — ordinary people, teachers, factory workers, secretaries and parents struggling to lead ordinary lives in a society that persists in perceiving them as drag queens, biker dykes and hairdressers.

Liz Sherblom is an artist and market researcher. Her husband and co-editor, John, is an associate professor of communication and journalism at the University of Maine. Ten percent of the proceeds from “Much More Than Sexuality” is being donated to social justice causes.