Lavender Graduation

Tuesday night, I attended Lavender Graduation at Millsaps College.  You probably don't know that that is.  I didn't either until about three weeks ago.  I'll explain more about what it is later.

Once upon a time, I took an oath.  It went something like this "I swear, my life long to (among other things) defend the weak."  That sounds like overly-dramatic, false masculinity smoke and mirrors.  For me, it's not--at least, I try to make sure that it's not.  We're born into a world where there is an immoral imbalance of power.  An oath like this seeks to mend that by making the strong the vassal of the weak.  Not everybody takes it seriously, but I do.

I hesitate to call homosexuals "weak."  It might offend them.  It would offend me.  Individually, they are generally better educated, healthier, and wealthier than the rest of us.  The problem is that, as a group, they suffer from a political weakness because their numbers are fewer than other demographic groups.  That means they are politically vulnerable, and right now, there are people, particularly in the South, who are bullying gay people for their own political gain.  It's a sad fact that in our democracy, demagoguery can win elections.  Anyone who can convince two people that a third is their enemy is halfway to being king.  Mississippi doesn't lead the way in this, Florida does, but Mississippi is doing its best to catch up.  

When you look at what's been happening in the Florida legislature, Tennessee, Lousiana, Mississippi, and more, it's quite clear that there are people seeking to turn back whatever gains have been made in gay rights, just as they turned back whatever gains have been made in Women's reproductive rights, and they're using the same mechanisms to do it.  When you pair that with what's going on currently with the United Methodist Church, the sponsors of Millsaps Collge, it's not hard to get the feeling that homosexuality is under siege in this country.  

There are those who say the United Methodist Church is on the cusp of changing its policy and allowing the church to sanction gay marriages.  I don't know if that's true, but I do know there are thousands of people who are so worried that they might that they are leaving the United Methodist Church.  I know scores of people who are in gay marriages.  There's not one of them I could say to them, "I do not accept your bond."  The man sitting next to me, Tuesday, is married to a boy I knew from his days at Millsaps.  I would fight for them.  

There are a number of reasons why I would side with homosexuals in this political battle.  For one thing, they're often very good, if not the best, at things I consider very important.  That's not the real reason, though.  The real reason is that I find it immoral to hurt someone who hasn't hurt you, and it's doubly immoral to hurt an entire group of people who never hurt anybody.  I find it immoral to attack or to seek to contain people just because they are different, so this is where I draw my sword.  This is the weak I will defend.   I'm old.  If this is the hill I die on, I'm satisfied.

Lavender Graduation is a ceremony celebrated by over two hundred colleges and universities that acknowledge and celebrate LGBTQ Plus students.  It was created by a woman who wasn't allowed to attend the graduation of her own children because she was a lesbian married to another lesbian not quite thirty years ago.  Now that I've seen thirty years go by twice, I can tell you that 1995 was not very long ago.

When I attended Millsaps, there were very few openly gay students or faculty.  Last night, the event in the Christian Center event space was so full they had to call out for more chairs to hold everybody.  When I attended Millsaps, there were several people who were either closeted or "quietly open," which is a phrase I learned meant that they told a few people but didn't mention it very often.  There was one person who told me they were gay way back in 1985 but still have not told their parents.  I hope they'll read this.  

Before I attended Millsaps, there were at least two incidents where people called either my dad or Dr. Harmon with proof that a professor was gay in hopes that they would lose their job.  It happened once more while I attended Millsaps, and probably more than that because Dr. Harmon and my dad never really told me everything, just those things they thought might affect me because I knew the professor in question.  To my knowledge, no one was ever fired at Millsaps for being gay.  Daddy's response in situations like this was usually that his hands were tied because of tenure and "thank you for calling."  His thought was that engaging these people gave them the confrontation they wanted, so he kept it brief.   Mind you, this happened with straight professors too.  Jilted lovers or angry wives would call about Doctor So-and-So running around with a student.  In one case, he was openly cavorting with a lawyer downtown that I also cavorted with, and shouldn't we fire him for cheating on his wife.   He didn't get fired, either. 

There were three professors at Millsaps--I don't have permission to say their names.  I  feel pretty strongly that the individual chooses if they are out or not.  There were three professors who were very dear to me and very influential in my life and who spent most of their lives working at Millsaps and were never able to say publically what they were.  One of them pulled me aside one day,

"Boyd, you will hear things about me."

"I know."

"These things are true, but I need you to understand that I am very discrete and careful about these things."

"I know.  I need you to know something, man to man.  What you've told me changes nothing.  My feelings for you, my respect for you doesn't change.  Your life, outside of this room, is your life.  Not mine."

I don't know how many other students he told.  That was thirty-five years ago.  I don't know how many colleagues he told.  I do know that he died, not ever feeling comfortable saying who he loved, while I cavorted with every co-ed I could find without any repercussions.  While we both attended Millsaps, I was able to take whoever I wanted to formal dances, but he could not.  That's not fair.  That's not right.  He died, not ever knowing that would change.  I hope that there's some way he could look down from heaven and see Lavender Graduation and see that things have changed.

One of the most remarkable things the theater program at Millsaps ever produced was Sam Sparks.  As a student, he was the go-to kid.  The go-to kid is the one with the confidence and knowledge, and responsibility that you can go to with serious jobs.  One summer, Brent had to be away all summer, so he gave Sam and Erin keys to the theater.  Tens of thousands of dollars in lighting equipment, power tools like you wouldn't believe, dangerous ladders, and catwalks were all in the hands of these two young people with the keys to the kingdom.  It strained the relationship between Sam and Erin because it was so much responsibility and sometimes so much of a pain, but they made it through, and Wednesday Night, I had dinner with them both to celebrate Sam's first year as the Director of Theater at Millsaps College.

Besides being only one of two responsible kids in the whole department, Sam was also an incredible artist.  Very young, he returned as a guest artist to direct Equus.  If you know this play, it's a remarkably difficult hill to climb that requires so much out of the actors and the director, but he made it through, and it was beautiful.

Sam sent out a notice that Monty had asked him to deliver the address at Lavender Graduation.  Monty is our everything kid.  The everything kid is an awful lot like the go-to kid, except they're everywhere.  Everything I go to at Millsaps or at Galloway, Monty is there.  There may be clones of him.

I knew that Sam was interested in Millsaps Pride because we talked about it, and I was really interested in what was happening with Millsaps Pride, mainly because it didn't exist when I was a student. 

If you like to read, take the time to read Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums and then read Diary of a Misfit by Casey Parks.  There's something like seventeen years between when Kevin was at Millsaps and when Casey was at Millsaps; while the school didn't change that much, the life of gay students was so very different that I doubt they would recognize one another.  Having known both of them as students, one older than I and one younger, that progression and the progression from when Casey was at Millsaps until today pleases me very much.

I had no conception of what a Lavender Graduation might be when I said, "I'm in."  They could have had strippers and snake handlers and dancing elephants, and I would still have sat there to take it all in.  I've seen dancing elephants before.  

It embarrasses me and always has, but I'm aware of what my name means to Millsaps.  I'm also aware that, if I had any other name, I've still devoted enough of my life to Millsaps that sometimes, just showing up matters, so that's what I did.  I showed up.  

I arrived early because I'm annoying like that.  One student was setting up.  He had a table with twenty rainbow pattern lanyard chords laid out.  I recognized immediately what this was.  Chords representing some aspect of the student's life are worn around the neck and shoulders during Commencement Ceremonies.  Sometimes, it's a fraternity; sometimes, it's a sport; in this case, at least twenty of the 2023 graduates would be wearing Millsaps Pride chords when they walked.  Monty, the everything kid, among them.  

I was far too early, so I went outside to wait.  I don't smoke anymore, but I still slip outside and sit on the stoop of a building to clear my mind.  Sometimes it's hard not to smoke when I do that.  The stoop of the Christian Center, if you're a certain kind of student from a certain period of time, is hallowed ground.  From there, I pulled out my little folding keyboard and wrote a short piece about my dad and Andy Griffith, and Atticus Finch.  I can't go to Millsaps without seeing the ghosts of my dad and Dr. Harmon, and Lance and Jack Woodward, and Lucy Millsaps and Rowan Taylor and Robert Wingate, and even Dick Wilson, even though he went to Ole Miss.  My brother is a ghost at Millsaps now.  One day I will be too.

After pressing "post" on my essay, I went back to the event space room and met Sam on the way.  Soon Shawn Barrick and Catherine Freis, Liz Egan and Anne MacMaster, showed, and I knew I was in the right place.  Our kids, the theater kids, were dramatically gathered at a table together laterally from us.  Theater kids are either always performing or always hiding--divided between actors and technicians.  Even at dinner, it's easy to tell which is which.  It's fun to watch them as a group.

Assistant Dean Ryan Upshaw spoke first.  Ryan invoked James Baldwin.  I honestly don't know how much the students know about Baldwin.  He's a name that's really from before my generation and far before theirs.  He was born in Harlem, both black and gay.  A rough hand to play in the twentieth century.  For a twenty-year-old Millsaps student, who was gay, of color or not, I think I would recommend Giovanni's Room by Baldwin.  They may not ever have to live through the struggles that Baldwin did--but I can't promise that.  One of the reasons I was there was that I can't promise things won't get bad again.  There are people who want very much for the life of homosexuals to go back to the way it was when I was a boy and before.  I specifically wanted to be there last night to say "NO" with my presence--and now, with my words. 

Sam's remarks were beautiful.  He's a fine writer.  Having been a student of Catherine and Anne and Brent, I don't know that he had much choice.  Every time I see Sam, I think, "he can do all the things Lance dreamed of but never could."  That's how much things have changed between when Lance taught at Millsaps and today when Sam teaches at Millsaps.  Lance did Equus; it shocked the world.  Sam did Equus; the world was more ready to receive it.  I think those bookends in time say a lot.  Sam spoke of many things, but he ended with the final speech of Angels in America Perestroika.  Although Angels in America is technically an "aids" play, it encompasses everything there is to know about being a gay man in America before the current century.  I'm hoping his speech will motivate at least one student to pick it up over the summer, either to read or watch the HBO production.

At the end of the ceremony, I turned to Sam and said, "You know... if you could cast it, there's nothing to hold us back from..."  

"It's SIX HOURS LONG," Sam said.  

"You can do it in parts, maybe a project over two semesters; not all the roles have to be students..." I said, and Sam, for a moment, starts thinking of people who could fill some roles who aren't students before he said again, 

"It's six hours."  Needless to say, I don't think we're gonna do Angels in America any time soon, as much as it would please some of us, but the point is, he could.  

Sam could do Boys in The Band.  He balked at doing Corpus Christi, but I think he could get away with it.  Lance put on Equus with a fair share of ferocity about what the world thought about it.  He did that play, but he couldn't have done any of those.  We talked about Boys in the Band.  Toward the end of his life, we talked about Love! Valor! Compassion!  In the days I knew Lance, we talked about maybe a thousand plays, most of which he had done at Millsaps.  That sounds like an exaggeration, but it's not.  He put on all those plays, but he never felt like he could put on these, even though he had high regard for them.   The point is Lance could be a bulldog for theatre, but for these plays, for these subjects, he believed he couldn't.  Sam can.  Sam can.  He can, and he would receive accolades from not only the students and his peers in theater but also from his colleagues at Millsaps and the administration.  Much has changed.

In 2023, with Ron Desantis passing bills that say "don't say gay," the Methodist church rending itself in half over whether to sanction gay marriage, and two remarkable pastors in Mississippi facing a church trial for marrying two of their students in love,  and suddenly the whole world really mad about transgenderism--twenty Millsaps students will walk at graduation with rainbow chords hanging on their shoulders.  

So, the question becomes: "Who's the old guy next to the theater professor?" and the answer is, "It's an old guy who believes more in your capacity for greatness than he believes in the people who would hold you back.  He's somebody who never thought in 2023 there would be people who wanted to hold you back, but there are.  He's somebody who doesn't know you but loves you enough to be counted with you." There's no color on the rainbow for old guys who just want the people he loves to be happy and complete and safe and able to reach the full limit of whatever gifts God gave them.

That's ok.  I'm still there.

You Are Safe With Me Lapel Pin - Amazon

If I had a muse

 They say that every writer has his muse.  They've said this for quite a long time.  Still, I'm not entirely sure what it means.  

A muse, I suppose, is a memory of someone or something that pushes you to create.  Sometimes it's a beauty that inspires, but more often, it's a wound that won't heal or a memory that can't resolve itself.

Williams' muse, they say, was probably his mother.  Her name was Edwina, but on stage, she was Amanda, Cat, Blanche, and more.  Memories of his mother and her efforts to deal with the declivity in her life inform nearly all of his work.  It's not a loving memory, either.  A muse doesn't have to be a pleasant force.    

Shakespeare had his "Dark Lady."  Nobody really knows who she was, although there are some interesting theories.  It's very likely that she was no Anne Hathaway, his wife.  

Wilde's muse was a beautiful young man that sent him to prison and kicked off the Victorian effort to eliminate homosexuality.   Queensbury was very clearly the inspiration for Dorian Gray.  Known for his chamber comedies, his most revealing work is a gothic horror about a murderous young man with a mirror that kept him beautiful--very much a description of his experience with Queensbury.

If I have a muse, it's an imaginary dog a man on the radio talked about when I was a very little boy.  There are certain memories of smokey-eyed beauties that sometimes motivates my work, but feist-dog is the summation of my life from my flickering waking into sentience through my life until the day my father died.  Feist-dog is a well of all the souls that moved in the firmament above me when I was young, including Jim Neal, who invented him--although I'm sure even he would admit that Feist-Dog really came from Faulkner, and Faulkner would most likely say, Feist-Dog came from the fecund dark loam of Mississippi.  

One of the reasons there are so many great writers from Mississippi is that being from Mississippi is a very complicated thing, and living here is still complicated, even if you're not from here.  I include Memphis in my definition of Mississippi because it's more delta than it is mountain.  The northernmost point of Mississippi is the fountain in the Peabody Hotel.  

What makes Mississippi complicated is we'll kill you for acting up.  We'll kill you for being different, but then we'll invite you into our home to watch over our infant children.  We send our children to cotillion so they'll have proper manners, and we'll have debutante balls so our daughters can lead the next generation into polite society.  

If a muse is a thing that pushes you to write and gives you things to write about, then my muse is an imaginary dog that holds Mississippi inside of him.  

In Absalom, Absalom! Quinten Compson is asked why he hates the South; he famously says, "I don’t, I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!”  That's very likely a reflection of Faulkner's complicated feelings about his homeland.  Faulkner died in Oxford.  He had the money to go anywhere, but he died in Oxford.  He may have hated the South, but he never left it.  

Faulkner nursed large quantities of bourbon while his muse bubbled over in his brain.  Miss Eudora did, too, but in much lesser quantities.  Twelve years younger than Faulkner, they will always be the bookends of Mississippi writers in my mind.  Everyone else fits between them.  

Ultimately, I don't know what makes anyone write.  Whatever it is, sometimes it won't let me alone.  On nights like tonight, when I just can't stop writing, it's not hard to imagine a little dog fiercely tugging my pants leg, trying to force me to do something; I don't know what.  

Andy Griffith and Atticus Finch.

Before he got old and started putting on weight and losing his hair, My daddy bore a strong resemblance to Andy Griffith in terms of dress and speech, and mannerisms.  There was a time, in the seventies, when he wore sideburns down his cheek toward his chin, but Billy Nevill told him that looked silly, and that was the end of that.  My mother had told him the same thing, but there are things a fella just needs to hear from another man.

Among Southern men of my dad's generation, Griffith was a pretty good model for behavior.  Being white and male and from Mississippi was reviving criticism all over the world, so I can imagine many men seeking a way of saying, “I’m not one of those types of men.”

Another role model for men of his generation was Atticus Finch.  Most lawyers I knew (and a fair portion of doctors) did their best to take on the airs of Gregory Peck.  Peck’s portrayal of Finch was not only not offensive, he was positively heroic, and for men born in the twenties and thirties in Mississippi who had been through World War II and Korea, being heroic was just about all they wanted to do.  

These men were in their thirties when the Civil Rights movement broke out in Mississippi.  They were still too young and hadn’t ascended to their full adult potential economically, politically, or socially, but they would be judged their entire lives by what happened in those years.

For men who never ventured outside of Mississippi, it wasn’t so bad, but for men whose business took them to different latitudes and different longitudes, being from Mississippi could be used against you.

Daddy taught me to turn my accent on and off.  Some people found it charming, while some people found it offensive, so I learned.  My sister is better at it than me, but she’s also more charming than I am.  

When I went to Los Angeles or Chicago for business, I had o be conscious of this.  In Hollywood, once, a gentleman in his cups approached me and said, “I’m a Jew!”  

Taken aback but also a bit in my own cups, I said, “Hello, I’m a Methodist.”  Then he said, “If they had their way, people like you would kill people like me, wouldn’t you?”

He must have been an Irish Jew because he clearly wanted to have a bar fight.  His accusation of me hurt me more than his knowledge that Mississippi was sometimes cruel to Jews hurt him, but not by much.  We were at a stalemate.  

I wasn’t going to fight this man.  When you’re my size, you learn to either not fight or be thought of as less than fully human and certainly not a gentleman your whole life.  I was already having a problem with that this night.   

Even though I’d been raised with the Andy Griffith model of Southern manhood, that night, I switched to Atticus Finch and explained to this man the history of Jews in Mississippi, including the bombing of Beth Israel.  I told him about Emmitt TIll and Medgar Evers.  My plan was that if I owned up to what happened and showed that I fully understood the gravity of what happened, I could convince this man that I, Boyd Campbell, had no desire to kill any Jews, least of all the ones drinking with me on Hollywood boulevard while I try to imagine myself back in the thirties when some of the movies I love the most were being shot over on Gower Street.

I don’t know who young Southern men model themselves after now.  I don’t know how many of them have even seen Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch or read the book.  I suspect the prejudice against us still exists, though.  It’s gonna take a lot for that to wear off.

“Buddy, you need to know that your accent can work for you, or it can work against you.  You need to learn to control it and figure out what’s right for the situation you’re in.”  Daddy and Andy Griffith are both gone now, but I figure that’s still pretty good advice

W. B. Selah Clarion Ledger

The following is a printed statement from Dr. Selah, after the Galloway Board enacted rules that would bar Freedom Riders from entering Galloway for service.  I was six months old.

Clarion Ledger
Jan 7, 1963 Monday 

Selah States Stand On Race Integration

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 

The pastor of the largest Methodist congregation in Mississippi said Sunday he believes forced segregation is wrong and advocates voluntary desegregation of all public facilities.

Dr. W. B. Selah of Galloway Memorial Methodist Church in Jackson stated his beliefs in answer to an Associated Press query about his position concerning a statement last week by 28 young Methodist ministers endorsing an official "no discrimination" church position.

Since the “born of conviction” statement was published last Wednesday in the Mississippi Methodist Advocate, the movement has slowly added numbers and age to its list of supporters.

However, the bishop of the Mississippi and North Mississippi Conferences, Dr. Marvin A. Franklin, said Wednesday he would not like to be quoted concerning the statement and has maintained silence since.

Thursday, Dr. J. P. Stafford, lay leader of the Mississippi Conference, praised the statement as "very worthwhile." He said "it is hard for many of us to go along with the great Methodist Church and changing times, in matters of race, but this is an adjustment Christians can make." 

As lay leader, his position in the conference is roughly the lay equivalent of that held by Bishop Franklin among the clergy. Dr. Stafford's remarks will appear Wednesday in his column in the Advocate.

Francis B. Stevens, a Jackson attorney, an associate lay leader of the Mississippi Methodist Conference, said Saturday he endorsed the statement of the 2 young ministers. He said that a climate of "fear and hatred, created by pressure groups, had kept many Mississippians silent on the race issue.

Also last Thursday, 23 ministers along with Dist. Supt. W. I Robinson of Tupelo voted "enthusiastically" to endorse the original statement of the 28, which did not ask desegregation and made few specific references outside of a denunciation of communism, but stressed the freedom of the pulpit.

Dr. Selah's statement, however, tackled racial questions direct and answered them directly. The church's own obligations in racial matters was the central theme of Dr. Selah's statement Preference for segregated worship is not sinful, he said, but sin is committed when a church erects a color bar.

"I've been saying it-announcing those principles (in his statement) lots of times," Dr. Sela said. His 17 years at Galloway mark the longest tenure in a Mississippi Methodist church.

He said most of his statements Sunday came from a sermon delivered at Galloway on Nov. 19, 1961. He has had it, entitled it "Brotherhood," put into print. His statement Sunday bore no title

Dr. Selah's statement is as follows:

"Jesus said, 'One is you Father and you are all brothers’ The doctrine of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of man is fundamental in Christ’s teaching. For seventeen years I have preached the law of Christian love from the pulpit of Galloway Methodist Church. This law means that we must seek for all men, black and white, the same justice, the same rights, and the same opportunities that we seek for ourselves. Nothing less than this is Christian love. To discriminate against a because of his color or his creed is contrary to the will of God. Forced segregation is wrong. We should voluntarily desegregate all public facilities. We should treat men not on the basis of color but on the basis of conduct.

"In the light of Christian principle, there can be no color bar in a Christian church. It is not sinful for white people to prefer to worship with white people or for colored people to prefer to worship with colored people. The sin comes when a church seeks to erect a color bar before the Cross of Christ. As Christians, we cannot say to anyone, 'You cannot come into the house of God.' No Conference, no preacher, no official board can put up a color bar in the church. That matter is determined by the nature of Christianity which is an inclusive fellowship of those who seek the Lord. The house of God is a house of prayer for all people. black and white.

"When a person seeks membership in the church he is not asked about the color of his skin. He is asked about his faith in God as revealed in Christ. Salvation is not by color but by faith. There can be no color bar in a Christian institution.

"Race prejudice is a denial of Christian brotherhood. Any kind of prejudice racial or religious weakens the nation by dividing it into hostile groups. It sets race against race, church against church. This plays into the hands of the Communists and makes it easier for them to do their diabolical work.

"Every American citizen, black or white, is entitled to the best educational opportunity the state affords. In our struggle with Communism we need to offer all our people the best possible training; for in the long run the fight for freedom will be won by that nation which produces the finest brains and the best character. The public schools must be kept open.

"No doubt there are some places where laymen expect the preacher to echo their opinions. The freedom of the pulpit must be maintained. The preacher must get his message not from the community but from Christ. He must state his convictions and allow others to disagree. I'm sure that many of my people disagree with things I say. But they want me to declare my convictions. "Think and let think' is the genius of the Methodist Church. Thoughtful laymen will demand a free pulpit. Only a free pulpit inspires people to think.

"All these things I have stated to my people many times before."