Accurate statistics for gays still hiding in the closet

     People like things simple, but life is not simple. Even a basic factual, mathematical question—"How many people are gay?"—runs into all sorts of complications: what's a gay person? People having sex with their own gender, of course. But what about attraction? What about bi-sexuality? Do they have to act on that attraction, or is the desire itself enough? I looked at the stats, as best I could in the space of Friday's column:

     Assumptions are tricky. They trip you.

     How things seem and how they really are can be two different matters.

     Ask an American what percentage of their fellow citizens are gay, and they often wildly exaggerate, guessing as much as 25 to 30 percent. The actual number—hard, maybe impossible, to pin down—is from 2 to 5 percent.

    Why? That’s easy: Gays are much in the news, much on people’s minds; it’s the same for Jews or illegal immigrants. We think there are a lot more than there really are.

    Demography is always a hot issue, because numbers drive politics and, in turn, are driven by politics.         

    Groups like to exaggerate their own numbers, trying to boost their significance. For years, gay advocates seized on a 10 percent figure from the 1948 Kinsey report even though it only dealt with men and seemed to include every man who ever thought Clark Gable was handsome.
     With society galloping toward recognizing gays (the preferred term is LGBT, "lesbian gay bisexual transgender," but LGBT doesn't strike me as an acronym Joe Sixpack is going to know), now might seem a time when we can finally get a fix on how much of the population is gay. But it's a complex question.
     "I'm a demographer," said Gary J. Gates, of the UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute, which tracks the nation's gay population, or tries to. "I'm talking to people who self-identify. I'm measuring visibility."
     In other words, people who admit to a pollster that they're gay. Even that is tricky.
     "In Gallup polls, among people under the age 30, more than 6 percent of adults tell pollsters they're gay," Gates said. Above 30, the number abruptly drops in half.
     "Is that really because young people are gayer?" Gates said. "I think a large piece of that is younger people are growing up in an environment where this is acceptable, so they're willing to identify themselves as gay."
     As attitudes change, once-invisible communities rise from the mist. The census doesn't ask about sexuality but does ID same-sex couples. Gates found that between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, "conservative states show the biggest amount of change." Which either means that toleration causes gays to flock to red states—doubtful—or that when it's safe to come out, gays do.
     We were talking in the wake of an intriguing article in The New York Times on Sunday by economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, "How Many American Men are Gay?"
     He used social media stats—Facebook status choices, Web searches for gay porn—to determine "at least 5 percent of American men ... are predominantly attracted to men."
     That 5 percent—or 3, or 7—is distributed around the country. The most interesting point of the Times piece is that, while we might think a place like Chicago, with its Boystown, has a much higher proportion of gay residents than, say, Phoenix, actually what they are is more visible, since gay people, like straight people, tend to stay put.
     "There's no evidence gay or lesbian people are substantially more mobile than any other group in the population," Gates said. "You don't get dramatic differences."
     The Williams Institute statistic for gay men is astonishingly low: 1.8 percent, which doubles if you include lesbians and bisexual men, though that throws the issue back into politics, since some insist that bisexuals are merely men who haven't accepted their gayness yet, while others see them as a distinct category, and experts consider sexuality more a spectrum, or continuum, than a grid of neat cubbyholes people can be tossed into.
     The whole exercise of counting gays could be seen as an echo of their repression, and just as scientists don't stay up nights categorizing straights by whether they prefer blondes or brunettes, so the acceptance of homosexuals into ordinary mainstream American life will nudge keeping track of them into less controversial scorekeeping, like how pollsters keep track of Lutherans.
     The numbers also show the stigma of being gay, while abating, is still strong. A recent Pew Research poll said that half of LGBT people with a living father aren't out to him.
     "That's still an awful lot of people," said Gates, who told me a story more evocative than a ream of numbers. He was at a wedding recently in Washington state—he lives in Seattle. The happy couple, two men "had lived their entire lives together." The vows exchanged, it came time to kiss. But they couldn't kiss, not in front of all those people.
     "They were very nervous," Gates said. "They had lived their entire lives together, cautiously." The attendees urged them that "this is OK, it's what you do at weddings."
     "An awful lot of gay people are like that," Gates said. "Even when you can get married, it doesn't undo everything you've been told."

"Drink! Drink! Drink drink drink!!!"

       Jeff Woodman, a fine actor who has read such best-selling works as "Life of Pi" and "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" for Audible.com, recorded my 2008 memoir, "Drunkard" in New York City last week.  
     Beforehand, he phoned to go over some details. I was impressed with how conscientious he was about getting the pronunciations right. We talked for a long time about the book, and when I told him how I always felt bad that the original ending was shaved off, over my objections, by my cleaver-wielding editor—the editor found the ending funny, and funny is somehow bad in a recovery memoir, I guess because it undermines the expected air of penance—Jeff graciously allowed me to return the original ending to the audio version, plus add a few other jokes that got chopped, even though it made more work for him. I was glad to get that ending back on, and I think adds an attractive bonus to the audio edition. So thanks Jeff.

      Audible.com releases the audio book of "Drunkard" next month—they work quick—but a faithful reader asked if, before then, I could share the salvaged ending. Happily—it's extra apt right now, because the scene occurred at a 2006 Lyric Opera production, "Fledermaus" which, coincidentally, debuted this week in a production new to the Lyric.  I'll certainly see it with an easier mind now than I did seven years ago. 
      As a set up to this passage,  you should bear in mind you've just read this excruciating crawl through rehab and reached what was at the time a tentative, hard-fought sobriety:

     A year after all this transpired, a friend from Gene & Georgetti invited Edie and me to the Lyric Opera, to join him and his date in fifth row center seats. The opera was Strauss’s “Die Fledermaus,” a good part of which, we discovered as we watched, is a celebration of champagne. The elegantly-attired singers, ladies in ball gowns, men in white tie and tails, gaily twirled around a sumptuous Viennese ballroom, raising glasses and enormous bottles of champagne high in the air while belting out, in German, “Drink! Drink! Drink drink drink drink!!!”
     As they did, Edie tapped me on the arm. I looked at her. She leaned in toward me.
     “You just can’t catch a break, can you?” she whispered, smiling gleefully.

                                                                                #

Photo courtesy of Lyric Opera of Chicago by Dan Rest

Divvy Diary: If you think it's cold outside, try riding a bike.

     We are chaff, blown by society’s breezes. We don’t think so; proud, we flatter ourselves that we are independent mariners, captains of our destiny, raising our sails of free will to tack in whichever direction we please. It only seems that way. Truth is, a few puffs from culture and we toss our hats in the air, quit our homes and go die in trenches at the Somme.

     Or jump onto bikes when it’s 20 degrees outside, as I did Monday. It occurred to me, striding toward the Divvy stand at the Merchandise Mart, that I have never before been tempted to ride a bike in winter, never mind done it. What changed? The job demanded I go to 11th and State, a perfect distance to try a Divvy in snowtime. The city gives us permission, making these bikes available all winter, ergo, I must go try it. That logic gets you tangled in barbed wire.

     The rack at Orleans offered, at first glance, a row of snowed-in bikes. But closer examination revealed the first truth about winter biking: As long as you aren’t biking immediately after a snowfall, someone else will have already brushed off a bike for you.      

    So I sidestepped the five snow-crusted bikes and picked a clean one, wordlessly thanking the previous cyclist. I hopped on and crossed east between the Mart and the river (going the wrong way, yes, but it isn’t technically a street and besides, it was convenient. I’ve decided not to be the only cyclist in Chicago who strictly obeys traffic laws).

     The Wells Street bridge has that new, green bike lane, and again, it helps to have societal approval, for the city to say, in essence, “You belong here, this is your path.” A kind of benediction, really, and not only did it instill confidence as I rode, but it seemed to affect the midmorning traffic flowing around me with what I perceived as a certain, “let’s not kill him” respect. Or hoped.

     The only problem was my hands ...

     Though an expert had, in this very column, urged the wearing of mittens when winter biking, and though I had read it — heck, I had written it — and found the advice sound, the drawback was it required one to actually go buy mittens, which I neglected to do. What I was wearing was a pair of thin, Under Armour-like gloves beneath ragwool fingerless gloves I had in my pockets, and though technically “layers,” they were completely inadequate.

     By Madison, the pinkies on both hands had gone numb, and I retracted them from the gloves, curling the frosty digits against my palm, a process I repeated for each finger — ring, middle, index — in turn, until I was basically riding with my balled-up fists pressed against the handlebars. Not the safest practice, but it worked. A reminder that newspaper advice is one thing, real-world experience something else entirely.

     Nothing tempers the shame of folly like seeing your madness shared, and I am not the only idiot riding Divvy bikes in the winter. Fred Wu, of Roscoe Village, owns six bikes and races on the SpiderMonkey team, but he also is a Divvy member who on Sunday rode his cyclo-cross bike to Montrose, where he left it by the team tent, checked out a Divvy and rode it in the Montrose Harbor leg of the Chicago Cyclocross Cup state championship.

     “I did it for fun,” said Wu, enthusiastically cheered by the tough cup crowd. “I thought it would be amusing.” He came in last.

     Wu was inspired by cyclists teasing each other about racing a Divvy. The blue bikes (the hue of the stripes on the Chicago flag) have become a de facto symbol of the city. Wedding parties pose with them, as they do with royal blue Citi bikes in New York, a new Gotham tradition (a shame we can’t as easily adopt New York’s custom of making serious money off the bikes; it got $43 million from CitiBank for the branding, while cash-strapped Chicago got zip — another local tradition. The city says it’s working on it).

     It took 25 minutes to bike from the Mart to Roosevelt, pausing at Polk to click my bike into a dock, thaw my hands then jump back on. There was a buffeting icy gale as I crossed Congress, but I dropped my head, stood on the pedals and persevered.

     Docking at Roosevelt and Wabash, I couldn’t help but notice the Red Line station, welcoming and warm. I did my interview and after, heading back to the office, didn’t think twice about taking the L north and grabbing a Divvy at the Thompson Center, for the much shorter, much warmer return jaunt. Blame that free will I keep hearing about — it’s smart to limit your madness — though you could argue that it is just 100,000 years of survival instinct kicking in. And the next time I rode the Divvy — on Tuesday, when it was even colder — I was wearing mittens. They help a lot.

The amazingness of life

     We read for many reasons. To be taken to different times and places, to go on adventures with unusual characters. To learn practical information and find useless pleasure. Me, I read for all those purposes, while always hoping to find what I consider "the telling detail," a little fact that stands out and conveys more than its share of emotion, reality, truth. You rarely come across a really good one. But when you do, it sticks with you.
     The telling detail I'm thinking about when the topic of telling details comes up -- or, rather, when I bring it up, since people aren't always broaching the subject — is from my pal Adam Gopnik's excellent memoir, Paris to the Moon. He writes:
    "That first year we went to a lot of circuses; in Paris there are usually six or seven in residence. We saw the Moreno-Bormann family circus,which is a true family circus. When any performer does anything slightly dangerous, the rest of the family stand around the ring calling out 'Careful!" under their breaths and averting their eyes."
     There is nothing wild or extraordinary about that moment. In fact, just the opposite, it is small, and human, and sweet, and I love it. You can see the family—in my mind's eye they are holding hands, looking alternating up at, and away from, a young man in tights, perhaps walking with a pole across a stretched wire, 10 feet off the ground. whispering, "fais attention, fais attention." "Careful, careful." 
     Another such telling moment popped out of Jack London's drinking memoir, John Barleycorn, while I was reading on the train Monday. The author of The Call of the Wild, turned to non-fiction trying to take advantage of a contract loophole (he had already sold his future fictional output; by writing a memoir, he could get paid again). London is recounting his childhood in 1880s along the coast of San Mateo County, south of San Francisco, a rough and tumble place. At age 7, he tags along with some older neighbors to a dance with immigrant workers. 
     "The young fellows drank and danced with the girls to the strains of an accordion," he writes. "To me that music was divine. The young Italian who furnished it would even get up and dance, his arms around his girl, playing the accordion behind her back. All of which was very wonderful for me, who did not dance, but who sat at a table and gazed wide-eyed at the amazingness of life." 
    Great line, "the amazingness of life." And great detail, the musician reaching around the girl, working the keys of the accordion behind her back. You can almost sense the dilemma of the accordion player — how to provide music and dance with his date at the same time? And the impromptu yet elegant solution. Reach around your date, playing and dancing. You know that Jack London saw the scene because you can't make a thing like that up. It impressed him, and he put it in his book, published exactly 100 years ago, where it delights us a full century later: the ingenious musician, his accommodating girl, faint whiffs of the smoke and the cheap wine, the echoes of their stamping feet and the wheezing accordion, reaching us today, continuing to amaze. 

Oh good, more public art...

     I've blasted public art in Chicago several times, but don't think I've ever explained what first sensitized me to it—when my wife was in law school, she wrote a paper on Irene Siegel's mural in Ravenswood's Sulzer Regional Library, a stark black fresco based on The Aeneid. Local residents and library patrons immediately hated the crude and graffiti-like artwork, protesting the work and suing to try to get rid of it. To no avail; it's still there. A reminder that you need to careful putting this stuff up because, once it's on our city streets, it can be very hard to take down. Not that art should be done by committee or put to a vote, but it was sad to have this brand new, classical and beautiful library open with one room turned over, with very little input from the people who would live with it, to this crude defacement with literary aspirations. I've searched the web for a picture of it; nothing. I'll have to head over this week and take some pictures. It's strange to have an image so controversial not be online -- none of the news articles include photos. Maybe a reader has one...

     Most art is garbage. I think we can all agree on that. You could take 99 percent of the paintings ever painted and burn them, using 99 percent of the poems ever written as kindling, and the world would be no poorer for it.

     It’s determining what constitutes the 1 percent worth keeping that sparks debate.
     I can’t decide if outdoor art is particularly bad because it’s not hidden away in museums and galleries, where at least you don’t have to look at it. Or because Chicago is uniquely cursed with particularly godawful public art, starting with Picasso’s rusty steel baboon (OK, he meant it to be a lady) in Daley Plaza, to Miro’s imbecilic brush-head doll across the street, to Dubuffet’s horrendous dirty white “Snoopy in a Blender” in front of the Thompson Center (because, you know, Helmut Jahn’s salmon and blue mounded monstrosity just isn’t ugly enough, not without a fiberglass whatsit jammed into the too-small plaza in front of it).

     Although, in defense of even the worst public art—that would be the stuff scattered around Oakton Community College, which makes my fingers itch for a blowtorch and a jackhammer—it could be argued that it is better than nothing, which must be the rationale behind the Langham Hotel's push to install Chinese artist Ju Ming's bronze tableau of 11 businessmen carrying umbrellas. A Crain's post by Abraham Tekippe reports that the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, which balked at allowing the scrum near the former IBM Building, the last American office building designed by modernist icon Mies van der Rohe, now says it'll be OK if moved by the river where, one assumes, the statue won't be so noticeable.
     The Sun-Times building used to be across the street from that plaza, so I am particularly familiar with it, and had to smile, in an ironic, rueful kind of way, to read the remarks made before the landmark committee. The plaza should "remain open," said an activist who himself lives safely across town.
     "Open." This being the same plaza where they installed posts crisscrossed with ropes in the winter, so that what few pedestrians dare navigate it have something to cling to against the canyon-fed gusts that, at times, blew out revolving doors on the building.
     The statue "does compromise the overall purity" of the plaza, another expert said.
     Well yeah, in the same way that building a house compromises the overall purity of a vacant lot. Mies' brutalist internationalism is a dead end; they were already slipping settees and coffee shops into the bare stone and glass box Mies inflicted upon Wabash Avenue. I have to see this new sculpture before judging, but if it injects a human scale into the severe, the Fueher-Will-Be-Pleased massivity of Mies' handiwork, I'm all for it.
     Art is too important to be left to artists, or their advocates. For instance, public statues should never be commissioned by grieving relatives. That's how you get ­­— sorry Pat — such oddities as the Jack Brickhouse sculpture in front of Tribune Tower, its pedestal crowded with carved achievements that would look excessive under a bust of Nebuchadnezar. As for the aborning Roger Ebert sculpture — sorry Chaz — well, let's just ask: What would Roger say about it?
     The good news is that we aren't actually stuck with public art forever; it just feels that way. Remember Jane Byrne's "Children's Fountain" in the middle of Wacker Drive? The one that Rich Daley had cut up and carted off, either as a necessary component of traffic improvement or as a big Screw-You-Jane - it isn't as if Daley will ever tell, about that or anything else.
     Art should affect people. As much as I personally dislike the Picasso, give it credit: Kids like to slide on the thing. Chicago is blessed with the most successful public sculpture since the Statue of Liberty: Anish Kapoor's 100-ton Bean (or, if you must, "Cloud Gate"). All you need do is watch how people react to the piece, how happy it makes them, the amazement it confers. That's why I liked that giant Marilyn Monroe installed, alas temporarily, next to Tribune Tower. Tourists loved it, loved posing next to it, loved looking up for a peek at Gigantic Marilyn's Gigantic Panties. It was fun, and took the edge off the Gothic horror show of Trib Tower, all flying buttresses and chunks of rubble that Col. McCormick pried out of actual landmarks across the globe.
     So welcome, bronze businessmen to the former IBM Plaza. At least soon there will be a reason to go there, once, to eyeball them. And good that the expanse of barren void will no longer be generally vacant, but always occupied by these 11 bronze guys, who can keep an eye on the cyclone-swirled trash. That's something to celebrate, maybe.

A reader notes that my mention, later in the column, of Rich Daley cutting up and carting off Jane Byrne's Children's Fountain suggests it's gone — which I thought it was. It was actually re-located to Lincoln Park in 2005. 

CTA Holiday Train wows kids, commuters

   

      ‘We’re waiting for the Santa Train,” said Sharon Moreira, of Riverside, sitting on a bench with daughter Izzy, 31/2, decked out in a pink Disney princess coat and Santa hat, on the Orange Line L platform at 4 p.m. one day last week at Midway.

     Officially, it’s the “Holiday Train,” CTA’s light-spangled, ribbon-wrapped, tinsel-draped, Santa-squiring contribution to Chicago’s Yuletide festivity, but “Santa Train” or “Christmas Train” will do just fine.

     “It’s a beautiful thing,” said Jorge Rivera, the train’s driver, who’ll keep it below 40 mph, instead of topping out at 55, in deference to Old St. Nick, braving the elements in his sleigh on an open flatbed car, posing for pictures with kids at each stop.
     But not posing for long. One aspect of the Holiday Train that might elude the causal observer is that though it is festooned with lights, staffed by CTA workers dressed as elves, handing out candy canes and Holiday Train schedules (which you can find online at transitchicago.com/holidaytrain) it is also a working L train, costing the usual fare, stopping at every stop, plying a regular route around the city from now until Dec. 23. Thus, its passengers are a mix of delighted children brought there especially by their parents to experience the Christmas magic, and regular commuters who just happened to step aboard this particular train in their journeys from points A to B.
     “It’s nice to have bright colors in the gloomy fog,” said Barbara Lamb, of Cape May, N.J., who had just arrived at Midway, along with her sister Carol Kennessy, of Denver, and the two were traveling downtown to meet other members of their family for a city reunion.
     They were surprised and pleased to find the Holiday Train waiting for them.
     “It was just here,” Lamb said. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, can we ride this?’ It’s amazing.”
     “It smells like cinnamon,” Kennessy said.
     That it does; cinnamon scent is wafted through the ventilation system (pine was tried, but riders complained it smelled like Pine-Sol) and Christmas carols burble over a PA system that also calls out station stops.
     The most unexpected aspect of the train, when you take time to examine it, is the detail. This isn’t a day’s work with crepe paper and tinsel. A complete six-car L train is pulled out of service in September, and the months of October and November are spent getting it ready. The seats are covered with reindeer and Santa material, advertising placards are replaced with ones ballyhooing the North Pole Barber Shop and, perhaps an echo of the hard times still at hand, toy-making jobs available at Santa’s workshop.
     The tradition began in 1992 with the CTA decorating an out-of-service train to deliver food baskets to community groups. The public was allowed on the train in 1996.
     The train pulled into the State/Lake station. Burl Ives singing “A Holly Jolly Christmas” was interrupted by an announcement. “This is the Holiday Train, making all stops.”
     One might think the CTA would have trouble coaxing employees into elf outfits to spend the month of December listening to carols and handing out candy canes. But the assignments are a perk, so popular CTA workers compete — in a contest of transit skills — for slots aboard the Holiday Train.
     “I like doing this, being among people,” said Sandra, a CTA employee who didn’t want to give her last name. “To see the excitement on the kids’ faces, even the adults. If you’re not in the Christmas spirit, you come on the train, listen to the music, and it puts you in the Christmas spirit.”

Visions of sugar plums danced in their heads

   

 There's not a lot of singing in "The Nutcracker." 
     Okay, there's no singing at all.  
     Which, as an opera buff, took me a while to get used to.
     Not a lot of plot development either. It's Christmas, in an well-to-do 1850s household. The boys get swords and bugles. The girls get dolls. Then a mysterious guest in a black cape arrives and dispenses more marvelous gifts, mechanical dolls that dance. An older girl, Clara, is given a nutcracker figure, which her naughty brother promptly breaks.

     As I watched the spectacle unfold Friday at the Auditorium Theater, opening night of the Joffrey Ballet's holiday favorite, which runs until Dec. 28, I idly wondered what it all was about. Not the story—that's plain enough, simplicity itself by opera standards. No mistaken identities, no jealous pharaohs or magic rings. But the subtext. What's the message here? Beauty, of course, and grace, and fantasies of young girls, and the luscious music by Tchaikovsky. "The Nutcracker" is about perfection, about heaven, achieved in our dreams at Christmas.
     In the first act, I suspected there might be some deeper, more subtle significance related to the boys, with their martial music, newspaper hats and drawn swords, swooping in and attacking the girls, on their knees, playing with their dolls. Maybe because earlier in the day I had viewed this video from Time magazine, "How Far We Haven't Come: All the Terrible Ways the Media Treated Women in 2013 in One Video." Gender politics was squirming uncomfortably in a chair at the back of my mind, waiting to have its say. 
      But "The Nutcracker" doesn't belong in Time's list. First, it's 120 years old. Nothing is more dreary than taking our supposed contemporary enlightenment and trudging off into the past to measure, judge and condemn things. It's ballet, an inherently sexist endeavor —the men lift the women, not visa versa. Chalk it up to biology, another inherently sexist endeavor, which still has a say in our world, whether we like it or not. And besides,  the Joffrey folk do the best with the material they've got -- Clara, I noticed, runs in and delivers a timely crack onto the head of the Mouse King, one of those see-we're-not-sexist moments so de rigueur in popular entertainments it is almost itself offensive. Or maybe I'm reading in too much. Maybe artistic director Ashley Wheater just needed to give Clara something to do at that point.
     Second, it's grand Russian ballet. I don't want you to think I sat there trying to extract great sociological meaning out of it. (I was trying to keep my eyes open — not to take anything from the performance, but it's been that kind of week). I just settled in my seat, occasionally pinching an earlobe, hard, with a fingernail to focus my attention, and listened to the music, watched the smooth, graceful, precise and beautiful dance, and enjoyed. As with "La Traviata" last month, I lack the technical facility or depth of knowledge to properly critique the thing -- nobody fell over, that I noticed, or dropped another dancer, or collided with any scenery a la the hippos in "Fantasia." The Sugar Plum fairy, April Daly, was a perfect specimen of dancer who seemed to do exactly what she was supposed to do with flawless precision. The children were delightful and enthusiastic. The costumes were lovely, dresses of teal and purple and rose and deep blue. The set too. I even enjoyed the audience, which was well freighted with tall, enthusiastic young girls with muffs and spangled headbands, one of whom, maybe seven, practiced her pirouettes at intermission in the lobby of the Auditorium, her hands folded over her head, spinning lightly around, a prima ballerina by the popcorn counter. That alone was worth going to see.


Photos courtesy of the Joffrey Ballet/copyright Cheryl Mann