Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (62 page)

The situation of gay people in most of Africa is deplorable, and the double-talk from the Ghanaian administration has done little to assuage valid concerns. In the wake of this brouhaha, I have received hundreds of letters from Ghanaians via my website and Facebook. Half are from gay people about how dire their situation is. One said, “I am tired of this humiliation and embarrassment. I don’t know whether if I am a gay I am not a living being. I have tried to pretend to be what they wanted. I need your word of advice and help. Sorry to say I feel like committing suicide. My tears are dropping so badly that I have to end my email here.”

Some others come from angry people who make harsh threats about what will happen to me if I ever return to their country: many are cruel; a handful, frightening. I am unused to being so hated. But more are from straight allies, of whom there appear to be legions. One woman complained, “Men are deceiving me too much, so I want to join your LGBT please.” Another declared, “I wish God has blessed me like you. I am not a gay but I respect and love so so much. May you live to always help mankind.” A surprising number come from priests and other clerics who announce that they believe all people are equal in the eyes of God, thank me for my advocacy, and say they will tell their congregations to accept and love instead of judging and castigating.

By curious coincidence, this whole matter arose while I was in
India promoting a book that deals in large part with how any condition may go from being perceived as an illness to being lived as an identity. It draws on my experience of such a transition for gay people in the United States. When I first visited India, some twenty years ago, the only obviously gay people were destitute and marginalized. On my second trip, in the late 1990s, I met a subculture of rather soigné gay men, but their faces flushed whenever the thing we had in common was acknowledged. At the Jaipur Literature Festival in February 2013, the “gay panel” in which I participated attracted more than a thousand people, many of whom complained of hideous prejudice in India—but who were emboldened to object publicly to the problem in a tone that anticipated its ultimate resolution. There were many, many straight allies there as well.

The articles that attacked President Mahama for knowing me referenced “the raging national debate on gay and lesbian rights” in Ghana. That there is such a debate—even if it’s a debate about whether to lynch us—is meaningful progress. That local propagandists can plausibly suggest that the president of a West African country is in the hands of gay lobbyists reflects an evolving world. I hope that President Mahama will seize this occasion to take a leadership role in the region on LGBT rights. That so many people from his country wrote to me when the scandal broke indicates that many are thinking through these issues. I hope the time is not far off when to know someone like me will be less of a liability and more of an asset.

The bizarre saga recounted in this article continues. My name appears in nearly every piece about gay rights published in Ghana and is invoked by homophobes from Accra to Zabzugu as an emblem of the evil that stalks their country. Meanwhile, heartbreaking letters continue to flood my inbox. In the summer of 2015, a rumor surfaced in the Ghanaian media suggesting that I had somehow figured in the death of former president John Mills, as part of a nefarious conspiracy to install my man John Mahama, “to pave way for the spread of lesbianism and homosexuality into the country”—this de
spite President Mahama’s continued unwillingness to show support for gay rights. Mahama has had little contact with me in the years since the original accusations were leveled.

Another recent story in the Ghanaian press described a Legon lawyer’s ecstatic vision that I would soon experience a profound religious conversion. One report held, “A Law Lecturer at the Faculty of Law at the University of Ghana, Moses Foh-Amoaning, has prophesized that renowned gay activist, Andrew Solomon, who is an alleged friend of President John Dramani Mahama, will one day become a pastor. ‘Andrew Solomon will be called Pastor Andrew Solomon one day,’ he said. The Law Lecturer told Atinka AM Drive that the gay crusader will soon get closer to God.” Another article on the topic said of Foh-Amoaning, “According to him, the forces behind the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States of America [USA] is unfortunate—he also cited renowned gay advocate, Andrew Solomon, as chief propagator—but ‘God will meet him [Andrew Solomon] at a point and hit him to change.’ ” I haven’t been hit yet, but rather look forward to the encounter when it comes.

In January 2016, another Ghanaian story said, “Citing the president’s association with the acclaimed gay rights activist Andrew Solomon to buttress his point, the Ningo Prampram parliamentary aspirant said President Mahama will do anything for money. ‘If President Mahama can collect gay money to run his campaign, then he will soon mortgage Ghana to anti-Christ to win the 2016 elections,’ he fumed.”

I wonder whether I might collect interest on the mortgage when it is realized.

New Yorker
, July 7, 2014

When this article appeared on the
New Yorker
website, it instantly attracted comments—hundreds of comments, mainly from incensed Romanians. I had gone to their country for the publication of
The Noonday Demon
there. The publisher was generous, the press was flattering, and my Romanian friends were impeccably hospitable, but I encountered prejudices that troubled me deeply. In the few years since, I’ve received many more letters about this article, and in this protracted aftermath, many Romanians have grown more accepting of its arguments. While this essay has continued to attract attention, most of my Romanian correspondents are writing in response to my books, primarily to seek advice because they suffer from depression or have a disabled child.

I
n my teens, I asked my great-aunt Rose where in Romania our family had come from. She claimed that she didn’t remember. I said, “Aunt Rose, you lived there until you were nineteen. What do you mean, you don’t remember?” She said, “It was a horrible place and we were lucky to get out of there. There’s no reason for anyone to go back.” I begged her to tell me at least the name of the place.
She gave me an uncharacteristically steely glare and said decisively, “I don’t remember.” That was the end of that.

My paternal grandfather—Aunt Rose’s older brother, a farm laborer—had preceded her to the United States when he was sixteen, fleeing pogroms and generational poverty. He was processed at Ellis Island and settled in New York City, where he brought up his family under financial duress, only just able to feed his children. He nonetheless ensured that my father got a good education, and my family has lived in relative prosperity ever since. I’ve often wondered about the life my grandfather left behind. My forebears presumably had inquiring and capacious minds much like mine, my brother’s, and my father’s, and I have pondered what it would be like if we lived in a society that provided little scope for social mobility.

My friend Leslie Hawke moved to Romania fifteen years ago and founded an NGO, OvidiuRo, to teach Roma (Gypsy) children. I joined its board of directors in part because I saw a parallel between the oppression of my Jewish ancestors and the oppression of the Roma. We had bettered our lives through access to education outside Romania; they might better theirs with access to schooling in Romania.

When a Romanian publisher bought the rights to
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
last year, it reignited my curiosity about this ancestral place, and I signed on for a promotional tour. I saw an elegant circularity in the contrast between my destitute grandfather’s departure and my return as a published author. A second cousin I had unearthed on Facebook said that she thought we hailed from Dorohoi, a small city about 250 miles north of Bucharest, near the Ukrainian border. An amateur genealogist friend offered to do further research, and she located papers confirming that the family had indeed come from Dorohoi. My grandfather and two of his brothers had sailed steerage from Hamburg in 1900, sending for their parents and siblings four years later.

My publisher had worried that Romanians might not be ready to talk openly about depression, but the zeitgeist had shifted more than they had guessed. Romania’s greatest living writer, Mircea Cărtărescu, agreed to write an introduction and to participate in the book launch. Even before I arrived in Bucharest, the book was a bestseller, and my
first two days there I was interviewed on all three major television networks, on Romanian National Radio, and in many leading newspapers. A large crowd squeezed into a capacious bookstore for the inaugural event, and
The Noonday Demon
went into a second printing the next day. Everyone treated me kindly, and I was impressed by the high level of intellectual and political discourse I encountered.

But all was not to go as smoothly as planned. Before I arrived, Leslie had been in touch with Florin Buhuceanu, who leads a Romanian gay-rights organization called ACCEPT. Leslie’s friend Genevieve Fierau had a connection to the Central University Library, a spectacular building in central Bucharest with an impressive lecture theater that was opened in 1914 by King Carol I. They agreed that this would be the ideal place for me to speak to Bucharest’s LGBT community. Genevieve arranged a meeting for Leslie and Florin with the library director, who, after what they characterized as a cordial hour-long discussion, confirmed that the hall was available, and that she would be delighted for the lecture to be held there. Florin thanked her for her courage in supporting an LGBT organization, signed and returned the contract, and posted details about the event on Facebook.

Romania had cleaned up its act on gay rights when the United States appointed an openly gay ambassador, Michael Guest, who served from 2001 to 2004, during the administration of George W. Bush. But prejudice remains deeply embedded in Romanian culture, and Putin’s homophobic shadow, which falls long in Eastern Europe, has not helped matters. In early June 2014, the Romanian Chamber of Deputies defeated a bill that would have granted legal recognition to gay couples, with 298 votes against and only 4 in favor. That same week, the library director phoned Genevieve, accused her of lying about the nature of the lecture, and said that the library would never have agreed to host an event in which gay identity was to be discussed. Thereafter, she did not return either Florin’s or Leslie’s multiple messages.

ACCEPT scrambled and found a smaller, less centrally located venue for the lecture at the National University of Theater Arts and Cinematography. After I spoke there, the question-and-answer session lasted nearly an hour. Many of the questions pertained to my family life: what it was like to have a husband and children; how it
felt to find acceptance from my father and in a wider social context, a situation as unimaginable to them as my life of relative affluence would have been to my great-grandparents. Several attendees said that they dreamed of emigrating someplace where they could find such acceptance. Too many described severe depression as a result of social oppression, and several alluded to the change of venue for my lecture as an example of such persecution. While it was hardly comparable to a pogrom, the incident helped me imagine what it might have been like for my family to belong to a group that their countrymen found repugnant.

The next day, Leslie and I drove seven hours to a horse farm in the northern Moldavian highlands, where we stayed overnight, eating rustic food and drinking homemade blackberry brandy. In the morning, we picked up one of the few remaining Jews in the region, who runs a sideline in genealogy, and proceeded to Dorohoi. It was haunting to look at the gently rolling landscape on our approach and think of my grandfather and his grandfather seeing those same hills. Life seemed to have changed little in the elapsed century. Farmers in oxcarts were going about their labor, and women in head scarves were hoeing the fields by hand. Their faces had the cracked skin that comes from brutal summers and winters in close succession. We followed a long dirt road up to Dorohoi’s Jewish cemetery, locked behind a tall metal fence. A man who lived nearby had the key, and for about $5 each he let us in, explaining enthusiastically, “I am not Jewish, but I like Jews.”

The cemetery had been profoundly neglected—like virtually everything else near Dorohoi. A lowing cow wandered among tombstones swathed in nettles. Leslie spotted the first Solomon grave. Soon we found more—many those of people born after my grandfather had emigrated. It’s impossible to know whether these belonged to my relatives, but the Jewish community was never enormous (the county has about forty-five hundred Jewish graves), so it seemed plausible that these namesakes were my relatives. I put pebbles on some of the graves, following the Jewish tradition of placing a stone instead of laying flowers. I thought about these people who could have left but didn’t. We went into the funeral chapel, which was just a small barn with a Star of David on it, where we saw an old horse-drawn hearse.

One of the graves had an inscription memorializing the Solomons who had died “at the hands of Hitler”; many of those dead had first names familiar from my own extended family. A memorial at the center of the burial ground commemorates the five thousand Jews who were taken from the area, never to return. I heard Aunt Rose saying, “We were lucky to get out of there.” I had hoped she might not be entirely right: that this wellspring of my family would be at least picturesque, that I’d have a surprising sense of identification with the place. I didn’t know how despondent it would make me to imagine being trapped in what still looked like a reduced life, with none of the intellectual excitement of Bucharest anywhere apparent. I’ve reported from war zones and deprived societies for decades, but they have always seemed profoundly other, and this felt shockingly accessible. I could have been born here and lived and died like this.

As we left, we passed five sour-cherry trees, tall at the edge of the cemetery, and we rushed over to pick their ripe fruit. The dark red juice stained my hands, and I wondered who in my family might have stood beneath these trees and relished the same taste, so sharp and so sweet. I thought of how my own children would have scarfed down those cherries if they had been with me. I suddenly understood that my forebears had been children, too, in their day—that this place had been visited not only by the old men with beards whom I’d pictured as my ancestors, but also by boys and girls who would have climbed the trees to reap the plenty of their upper branches.