“Thank You, Rep. Hodes, I Wish There Was More of You”

By on October 28, 2010 in

Tags: , ,

This is pretty amazing.  I think I’ll just get out of the way and let the letter below do the talking.  It was sent to the Hodes campaign (and reprinted here with the author’s permission) after Paul called out the Union Leader for their absurd position on prohibiting same-sex wedding announcements:

Rep. Rhodes,

I must confess that I no longer live at the address I gave. I was born and raised in Claremont my entire adolescence, but left as soon as I got old enough for NYC. The reason I left was because I’m gay, and being in NH is incredibly rough when you’re gay.

Recently I joined Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Campaign, my video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v… and in turn ended up being featured in the NY Times, which is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10…

If you have time I would be honored if you watched my video.

I’m contacting you today because of the Union Leader, my uncle’s newspaper. Yes, Joe is my uncle, technically great uncle. I saw what he published today and was absolutely disgusted. He has the freedom of the press, he can do whatever he wants, but to sit there and try to feign niceties, “not anti-gay”, repulses me on every level.

You can not sit there and preach that gay love is inherently inferior to straight love and wonder why kids are being bullied, literally, to death. Joe has helped dehumanize the gay population, and it’s people like him and the vitriol they spew that made my rearing so incredibly difficult. Grade school bullies are enabled by their parent’s opinions, and societies morality as a whole, when you silently attack the LGBT population at the ballot box you are a bully, a weak one.

I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate you speaking out on this issue. Don’t let him off the hook, keep pressing him for answers. What he’s doing is so archaic it’s hard to believe his piece was published in 2010.

If you need any help with LGBT issues I’m available, I’ve begun to speak at schools because it is an issue that means the world to me. There is nothing I care more about than equality for everyone, and fighting this kind of hate speech is such an important part of it.

Thank you Rep. Hodes, I wish there was more of you.

Mr. Calvin StowellNew

Calvin’s moving “It Gets Better” video is below the fold.
(NB – One small part NSFW)

About Dean Barker

View all posts by Dean Barker →

, ,

  • Jack Mitchell

    I just so bonded with this Calvin guy.

    As a kid, I badly wanted to grow a beard because it was a sign of ‘manliness.’ To hear that he wanted to grow a beard (1:18), “so I could convince everyone that I’m not gay.”

    Calvin, if you’re ever in Lowell, the beers are on me.

  • Beth Campbell

    It’s funny but, I’ve found that the kindest, most caring people are those who’ve been through the shit.  As a recovering alcoholic (32 years) I know that other “Friends of Bill” are always around when you need them.  So too, Calvin and his compatriots in the LGBTQ community.  I feel blessed to be a member of the former and embraced by the latter.

  • Putney Swope

    A group of gay and lesbian students at UNH formed a gay student union in the early 1970′s and tried to have a dance at the student union.

    As Ann Philbin, now Director of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, writes:

    “”When I was an undergraduate in New Hampshire in the early 1970s, a small group of us established a gay students’ organization and decided to host a dance at the student union. When right-wing governor Meldrim Thomson and his notorious cohort, Manchester Union Leader publisher William Loeb, got wind of it, they launched a campaign to kick us out of the university for spreading homosexuality–”a communicable mental disease.” They would have succeeded were it not for the ACLU, whose lawyers appeared like action heroes to defend us. They won our precedent-setting case, and we had our event–even if there were more people protesting outside than dancing inside. The ACLU propelled us into the world as activists. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G…

    Calvin’s great-uncle Joe is either uninformed of the homophobic history of his newspaper or chooses to ignore it.