In honor of this week, the culminating week of Gay Pride Month, I present, from my archives, tributes to two men who greatly affected me during my coming-out process.

Here’s the story of Kirk.

Here’s the the story of “Scott.”

I’ve been thinking about my prior post. Sometimes I wish I could write simply and forcefully about my views on gay marriage and anti-gay Christians, but I have conflicting thoughts and feelings on those subjects. To explain, I’ll have to describe things in personal terms.

I am, by nature, a conciliator. I don’t like conflict. I like to concede some ground in order to have some peace. It can make me feel magnanimous, mature, and good. I like to be liked. I’m also afraid of my enemies and of what they can do to me if I push too hard. They might attack me or kill me. (I’m sure there are parental- or other upbringing-related reasons for all of this.)

At the same, I often doubt whether concession and compromise are really the way to go. The fact is, none of us know what the consequences of our actions will be. Therefore, do you try to act out of pragmatism, or out of principle? Or do you act from a mix of pragmatism and idealism – be pragmatic, but do it because you think that’s the best way to eventually achieve your goal? I tend to take that last view.

But I know that my actions and views on gay marriage tend to be unconsciously motivated more by fear than by principle; that is, into the basket of calculations, I throw an assessment of how other people will react. And I’m sure I do it in areas beyond gay marriage; it’s just the way I tend to be.

Another thing about me is that I’m very interested in what makes other people tick. I tend to be empathic – which means, of course, not that I agree with another person’s views, but that I try to understand why that person has those views. I used to consider becoming a psychotherapist because I can find it interesting to try and understand other people’s motivations.

But you can’t put yourself completely into another person’s body. I’ve never actually sat down and had a one-on-one conversation with a conservative Christian. The most I’ve done is participate in online debates on message boards and the comment sections of some people’s blog posts. But those never last because people stop commenting. I’ve never completely delved into the mind of a conservative Christian, like some of the commenters on the previous post have. So I don’t know if my empathy and understanding and psychotherapeutic impulses can change a thing in other people. Since I haven’t experienced such a conversation with a conservative Christian, I have to concede that I’m speaking from idealism and naivete. To put it crudely, I’m speaking out of my ass. What the hell do I know?

I don’t know nuthin’, to be honest.

This article from today’s NY Times Magazine, looking at the Christian-centered anti-gay-marriage movement, depresses me.

For [anti-gay-marriage Christians], the issue isn’t one of civil rights, because the term implies something inherent in the individual — being black, say, or a woman — and they deny that homosexuality is inherent. It can’t be, because that would mean God had created some people who are damned from birth, morally blackened. This really is the inescapable root of the whole issue, the key to understanding those working against gay marriage as well as the engine driving their vehicle in the larger culture war: the commitment, on the part of a growing number of people, to a variety of religious belief that is so thoroughgoing it permeates every facet of life and thought, that rejects the secular, pluralistic grounding of society and that answers all questions internally.

How do you communicate with people who have such a completely different world view from your own?

”My concern is the health issue,” said Evalena Gray, an activist in southern Maryland. ”I want to get these people away from AIDS, out of that unhealthy lifestyle.”

Then wouldn’t you want to support gay marriage? Monogamous marriage, particularly? Even most gay people weren’t thinking about gay marriage in the 1970s, and that’s when HIV first started to spread. How is keeping the status quo going to change the number of people seroconverting? And haven’t you heard of protected sex? I get so angered and frustrated by people who don’t know how to think.

When I met [Lisa] Polyak [a lesbian who is raising two children in a committed relationship], she told me how, when she first testified before a legislative committee, an anti-gay-marriage activist, a woman, confronted her with bitter language, asking her why she was ”doing this” to the woman’s children and grandchildren. Polyak said the encounter left her shaken. A few days later, as I sat in Evalena Gray’s Christmas-lighted basement office, she told me a story of how during the same testimony she approached a blond lesbian and talked to her about the effect that gay marriage would have on her grandchildren. ”Then I hugged her neck,” she said, ”and I said, ‘We love you.’ I was kind of consoling her to some extent, out of compassion.”

I realized I was hearing about the same encounter from both sides. What was expressed as love was received as something close to hate. That’s a hard gap to bridge.

How do we bridge this gap? I used to think that conversation was the way to do it – that if I could sit down one-on-one with someone like Evalena Gray, and have a calm conversation in which she and I explained our views to each other, that my appeals to logic and compassion couldn’t help but win her over. Actually, I still think it can help. It requires not a lecture, but communication based on empathy – putting yourself in another’s shoes and “understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing” that person’s “feelings, thoughts, and experience.” People don’t like being lectured to, so in order to change people’s minds, you have to communicate with them on their own terms. And even if they don’t admit to agreeing with you, your words can leave some impression on them.

Barring that, though, sometimes I think the best move is to focus our energy on the moderates, those who are more open-minded and more amenable to rethinking their position on this. And I also sometimes think it’s best to focus on civil unions, if calling it a different name will garner more support. After all, calling it “marriage” isn’t going to give it any more legitimacy in some people’s eyes than calling it a civil union; if the goal of calling it “marriage” is to give us social legitimacy, then sorry, that’s not going to do it. People who oppose us and think we’re evil will continue to do so. Why waste our time trying to make people like us when we’d be better off focusing on the pragmatic goal of getting solid rights, whatever we wind up calling them?