Learning from our children

Fifteen years ago today, the Sacramento Bee and San Francisco Chronicle simultaneously published an essay I wrote about an issue that was both complex and bracingly simple. I was a young father with a wife and three kids who adored their adopted godfather, my best friend. And he had just come out.

I was happy that my friend had opened up this part of his life to me and my wife. But it was also upsetting to me, because I knew I was living in a world -- an insular suburban heterosexual moms-and-dads-and-2.5-kids world -- which might have trouble accepting my friend for who he was (and is). I knew most of them were good people who would want reflexively to do the right thing; they might just need a little push to understand what the right thing was. So, I wrote.

The California Supreme Court's recent decision upholding gay marriage gives this little flare-up of personal nostalgia extra resonance this week. One of the things that made the Court's decision possible is the changing attitudes of a new generation. Today's generation is asking the same kinds of clear-eyed, fearless questions about sexual identity that the Boomer generation asked about race when they were young, i.e. why should we treat those other people differently?

In 1993, the Bee titled my essay "Learning from our children." We still are.

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Learning From Our Children

by Jason Warburg

On a warm spring evening I sat, wedged into a metal folding chair, in a grade-school auditorium that could have been in any town in America. I sat, watching a roomful of parents and children and trying to figure out who was teaching whom.

It was opening night of that elementary school staple, the spring show. A crowd of adoring parents giggled and cheered as a hundred and fifty alternately terrified and mugging second through-sixth graders flooded the modest hall with a torrent of off-key songs. Video cameras, dotting the audience like ants on a sweet roll, recorded the event for posterity from ten or more vantage points.

My wife and I brought two of our three small children in hopes they would enjoy the show, or at least take a break from the ongoing process of leveling our house one chunk of plaster at a time. Our three-year-old Sarah was indeed mildly amused by the vast noisy spectacle, until she reached her maximum sitting-still time -- about forty-five minutes if it's a really good show -- and commenced one of her fidgeting frenzies.

Minutes -- and a bruised parental shin or two -- later, Sarah was suddenly still, frozen in time except for a widening smile, as a familiar melody rang out. She had been transfixed by the five indelible notes that begin the theme to Disney's animated Beauty and the Beast..

The story of Beauty and the Beast has long captured the imagination of a wide, youthful audience. As told by Disney, it is filled with echoing images of longing and awkwardness, jealousy and compassion, vanity and selfless heroism. This jumble of familiar adolescent emotions is crowned by a collection of unabashedly catchy songs, three of which were nominated for Academy Awards, with the main theme winning.

As we smiled at Sarah's excited recognition of one of her favorites, it struck me that similar scenes of grade-school musical drama must be playing in auditoriums across the nation -- and that this is only the beginning. Over the next thirty years, a thousand Belles and a thousand Beasts will conduct their shy, delicate dances across ballrooms fashioned of painted cardboard scenery and worn stage floors. Millions of parents -- a near-perfect cross-section of America -- will look on, beaming, filling rooms with pride so pure and thick you can taste it.

Few of the players in these scenes will know whom to thank for the warm feelings that envelop them. The name of Howard Ashman, lyricist for not only Beauty and the Beast but also The Little Mermaid and much of Aladdin, is not well-known, yet his life's work has touched the hearts of people of all ages and walks of life. As executive producer as well as lyricist for Beauty and the Beast, he more than any other individual is responsible for its vitality and resonance.

As I considered all of this, a sudden irony overwhelmed me. These young parents, many of whom have a difficult time even speaking the word "homosexual," particularly in any connection with the lives of their children, were joined in chorus with their sons and daughters, jauntily singing lyrics written by a gay man.

As this sunk in, I thought also of our youngest son, at home that night running and playing his two-year-old heart out under the loving care of his godfather, our best friend -- a man I hope each of our children will adopt as a role model, and one who, after foregoing shaving on weekends, occasionally resembles the Beast himself. If our children do emulate this man, they will grow up to be bright, thoughtful, exceptionally witty and gentle human beings. And I expect it will be completely irrelevant to them, as it is to the millions of children so well entertained by Beauty and the Beast, that the giver of this wonderful gift is predisposed to fall in love with another man.

Howard Ashman's legacy is tremendous. We live in a world filled with fears, both rational and irrational. To be a fully functioning human being is to recognize and respond appropriately to the rational, while eliminating the irrational as thoroughly as possible. In producing Beauty and the Beast, Ashman launched a vehicle for teaching an entire generation of movie-goers to banish their irrational fears -- to look beyond outward appearances, even prejudgments foisted on us by others' intolerance, and see to the heart of a person. Ashman died of AIDS in 1991, but his offspring is at work every day now reminding us that the only real beasts are the ones we create when we allow fear to prevent us from recognizing and appreciating the essential human sameness we all share.

At the close of the show, watching a hundred and fifty young faces sway to the music of A Chorus Line, I couldn't help wondering about the five, or ten, or fifteen or more of them who are gay. Will their friends and family be able to accept them for who they are? If so, perhaps it will occur to one or two of them to silently thank Howard Ashman for teaching millions of people that the Beast is ignorance and fear, and the Beauty is inside every one of us.

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(c) Copyright 1993 Jason Warburg