In the Heartland and
Out of the Closet
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Mike Sinclair for The New York Times
HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT Cathy Jambrosic recently
married her longtime partner in Canada. |
By GINIA BELLAFANTE,
NYTimes on the Web, December 28, 2006
OVERLAND PARK, Kan. --
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.
What the increase suggests, Mr. Gates said, is not so much that gay Americans
are flocking to the state, but that the ones who live there have been galvanized
to declare themselves to their neighbors and communities.
The gay rights movement was slow to make its debut in Kansas, but during the
last two years it has developed with an intensity that has surprised even its
leaders. Kansas, which has approximately 73,000 openly gay and bisexual
adults, according to Mr. Gates’s estimates, had no statewide gay rights
organization until late 2004. It was then that a group called Kansans for
Fairness was formed to fight the marriage amendment, explained Thomas Witt, the
chairman of a newer group, the Kansas Equality Coalition, which evolved out of
the old group, with a mission of ending discrimination based on sexual
preference.
The spirited mood here evolved, leaders say, in particular reaction to the
disparaging views expressed by several well-known clerics during the campaign
over the amendment, and since. Two of them, the Rev. Joe Wright of Central
Christian Church and the Rev. Terry Fox of Immanuel Baptist Church, both in
Wichita, led the move to introduce a ballot in the state legislature that gave
rise to the popular referendum.
At the same time, the vitriol of the Rev. Fred Phelps, of the 80-member Westboro
Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., has grown more extreme in the past two years, as
he has begun to protest the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq on the grounds
that they support an army, and a nation, that tolerates homosexuality.
“Every time Fred opens his mouth, it’s good for us,” said Stacey Haynes, an
account manager for a technology company who lives in Lenexa with her partner
and their adopted daughter. “He’s creating bonds between people.”
In 2005, Ms. Haynes thought a great deal about moving to California, even though
neighbors had welcomed her family. “I felt discouraged about the political
situation and thought we needed to make a run from Kansas,” she said. But
she and her partner decided to stay put. “One of my goals for 2006 was
that I wasn’t going to look to the ground anymore,” she said.
Cyd Slayton, a resident of the affluent Kansas City suburb of Mission Hills,
said she too was energized by the heated political debate. “I think the
venom and the zealous campaigns to portray us as sinners has been a blessing, a
catalyst for many more of us to share our stories,” she said.
She had spent her adulthood, if not fully closeted, then with the door only
slightly ajar. Although she has been with a partner for a number of years,
Ms. Slayton, who is 54, did not discuss her sexual orientation with her mother,
her sisters or her colleagues at various companies where she worked making
promotional films.
Even when she began campaigning against the constitutional amendment to ban gay
marriage, she said, she was reluctant to identify herself as gay. Last
year when a local TV news reporter asked her about her own sexual identity, she
responded: why should it matter?
“I panicked and then I took a very long pause and looked deep into the lens of
the camera and said that I was gay,” she said. “It was the first time I’d
ever said it publicly, and it was quite a moment.”
Ms. Slayton found that the more she opened herself up, the more she found
solace. The day after the marriage amendment passed, her handyman, a Rush
Limbaugh fan who came to install her air conditioner, expressed his sympathies.
“He came upstairs and said ‘I’m just so sorry, Cyd, I know how hard you worked
on this,’ ” she said. “He put his arm around me and it was just about as
touching a thing that happened around this whole issue.”
Ms. Jambrosic, too, became politically active around the time of the amendment
campaign and decided to marry her partner of 22 years in Canada. “I was
kind of like a black person in the ’30s, trying to pass,” Ms. Jambrosic said.
“I never cared about getting married. I didn’t ask for the fight, but when
the religious right drew a line in the sand, I felt the need to do something.”
Ms. Jambrosic took the moment to finally tell her neighbors, who are religious
Christians and the parents of her goddaughter, that she and her partner were
gay. Several years back the couple had broached the issue but Ms.
Jambrosic and her partner, both business owners, deflected the question.
“Every once in a while they kept trying to get back to it,” Ms. Jambrosic said.
“And we flatly avoided it. We were afraid of so many things, we were
afraid of the work situation, of losing customers.” The couple ended up
serving as witnesses at Ms. Jambrosic’s wedding, and two months ago, Ms.
Jambrosic held her first party mixing gay and straight friends.
Expression of the new openness has even taken theatrical form. In October,
in Manhattan, Kan., a farming area that is home to Kansas State University,
Jason Lantz produced a play called “If Truth Be Told,” which relayed the real
stories of Kansans coming out in rural areas. Four hundred people came to
see it.
Growing up in Spearville, a town of 800 in southwestern Kansas, Mr. Lantz, 28,
knew of only one gay person, he said, a man who had been discovered and fled the
area in disgrace. In college, at Kansas State, he joined an agricultural
fraternity and allowed his friends to believe that his romantic inclinations
matched theirs. “I spent a lot of time trying to get out of being gay,”
Mr. Lantz said. But in the span of 18 months — beginning in April 2005
when Kansans voted for the gay marriage ban — he has not only revealed himself
to family and friends, but has also emerged as one of the state’s more vocal gay
activists.
The presence of an evolving gay rights movement in Kansas seems most striking in
the “Gunsmoke” territory in and around Dodge City, where a woman named Anne
Mitchell, who owns a cattle ranch with her partner, heads the southwest chapter
of the Kansas Equality Coalition. When the chapter held its first meeting
in February, she said she was shocked to see that three of the attendees, most
of whom had driven hours on roads lined with tumbleweeds, were male-to-female
transgender.
In a place where the cowboy ethos and right-wing views prevail, she said, the
southwest chapter of the coalition now has 47 members, about half of them
straight. Habits of secrecy that prevailed for what seemed an eternity in
Kansas are now beginning to erode.
Ms. Slayton, the Mission Hills resident, likes to tell the story of the elderly
lesbian aunt of a friend. When the woman died some years ago, Ms. Slayton
said, the family learned for the first time that she had been in a long-term
relationship with a woman. She came out at her funeral, through the medium
of her tombstone. She requested that it read: “I didn’t miss half
the fun you think I did.
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