Charles Reich in his San Francisco home

Four decades before the Occupy Wall Street message spread across America, the New Yorker published on September 26, 1970, a nearly 70-page article, “Reflections: The Greening of America,” by Yale Law School professor Charles Reich that spread a message about a student-generation counterculture that sought “a more human community.”

Reich’s zeitgeist article generated more letters to the New Yorker than any other article in the magazine’s history. Among non-New Yorker readers, the article also provoked excitement. Even my 5,700-circulation, mill-town Southbridge (Mass.) Evening News, which published the article along with local pro-and-con reactions, generated a barrage of brickbats and bravos. Random House soon published The Greening of America as a book that went into its fifth printing in less than two weeks, topped bestseller lists and eventually sold more than two million copies.

Reich, the former editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal and the admired scholar of property and civil liberties law, suddenly became an instant celebrity, portrayed in the “Doonesbury” comic strip and sought daily by the media for sound bites. He said the media were “trying to turn me into a fifth Beatle.” The Washington Post’s Don Oldenburg wrote that “so desperate were the media for a piece of Charles Reich that when he turned down its offer, the ‘Today Show’ scheduled Yale’s chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, as a friend of Reich’s.”

Reich depicted as a character in the comic "Doonesbury"

Despite the popularity of The Greening of America, or possibly because of it, many academic and media critics savaged the book. Newsweek’s Stewart Alsop called it “scary mush.” Harvard Law School’s Charles Fried dismissed Reich as a naïve, “pop-fadist cult” romantic and The Greening of America as a “bad book,” slipshod, incoherent and silly.

“The Greening of America did me in as far as academe was concerned,” Reich says today. “I would never be the same after that.” He resigned from the Yale Law School faculty and in 1974 moved to San Francisco. “It was with the goal of being as far away as I possibly could be still in the United States—as far away from New York, where I grew up, New Haven, Washington, D.C.—to get some distance from my former life.”

How does he feel about today’s counterculture movement, Occupy Wall Street? “They’ll never get anywhere with what they’re doing now because they’re appealing to someone else to do something,” whether it be Congress, President Obama or the business community, Reich says. “My message is: ‘You’re going to have to do it yourself.’”

Reich sees plenty to do. He worries about the two million inmates in U.S. prisons, the spread of nuclear weapons (“I’m not sure we won’t blow ourselves up completely in the next few years”), the role of the U.S. military, at a cost of $1 million per soldier a year, in Japan and other countries, and the “scandal and disgrace” of the U.S. economy, with millions of jobs sent overseas, sometimes with tax support.

Our economy “is much worse than the Democrats are willing to say,” Reich continues. “If you’re over 50 and you lose your job you’re not going to get another one. You’re going to live to be 80 and how are you going to support yourself for 30 years?”

Contrasting his attitude during the 1960s, when he taught law, believed in reform and felt he was “doing some good,” he sees himself today as “a dissenter in my own country.” He says: “I don’t like what is going on. I don’t think this is a good future.” He echoes a concern he expressed in The Greening of America about the United States having become a corporate state “taken over by a small minority of powerful interests. I don’t think we’re a democracy anymore.”

But Reich, 84, sees greater tolerance today among Americans than in the past. He recalls growing up in New York where “black people were not allowed to come in the front door” of his apartment building and had to use the service elevator. The progressive private schools he attended—City and Country School and Lincoln School—were not so progressive. They had no African-American students.

He began his law career in 1952, at a time of discrimination against Jews and women as well as blacks and people of other races and ethnicities. At Cravath, Swaine and Moore in New York, where all the lawyers and stenographers were male, Reich says his boss, Donald C. Swatland, told him, “Women are frivolous, women belong at home, women are not designed for business.”

Reich, who is gay, fails to see “how anybody can object to expanding marriage to include any two people—two grownups—who want to live together.” But he downplays his gay identity. “I represent a different group—an unknown minority, probably 40 million or more—people who live alone. I’m a person who can’t live with another person and that trumps sexual orientation completely. My sexual orientation now has almost no relevance to my life.”

As we leave Reich’s San Francisco apartment, the floors of every room and hallway stacked high with books, he reiterates that he is a dissenter, but a dissenter with hope. I recall his earlier comment about his life as an older person who walks with a cane. When he climbs on a bus, people rush to give him a seat. “You get the best of human nature….I get the feeling that people are very nice.”

Loren

After Matthew Shepard’s bloodied and frozen body was found tied to a buck fence on October 7, 1998, the city of Laramie, Wyo., changed the names of the streets.

On a wintry day, at the intersection of Pilot Peak and Snowy View Roads, the sky and the snow-covered ground appeared to have no boundary in the Equality State. The desolation of the place 13 years after the murder could be felt despite the houses in the distance.

At 21, Matthew Shepard, 5’2” and 102 lbs, met two Laramie men who were pretending to be gay at a local bar. Planning to rob Shepard, Aaron McKinney, 22, and Russell Henderson, 21, held their victim at gunpoint and took his wallet containing $20. After driving Shepard away from Laramie and tying him to a fence in an isolated area, the two men continued to beat him and finally left him to die.

18 hours later, a cyclist found Shepard’s body. The police officer who responded to the 911 call testified, “Though his face was caked in blood, his face was clean where streaks of tears had washed the blood away.”

Due to the efforts of resistant residents, there is no marker or memorial in Laramie to commemorate Shepard’s murder.

Her journalism career began when, as a welfare mother of two, she attended the Borough of Manhattan Community College to become a secretary. She soon became interested in journalism and, sometimes accompanied by one of her children, started covering community news events.

“I didn’t know I was [four-year] college material,” she recalls. “I didn’t know I had a voice.” Nevertheless, she won a full scholarship to New York University and, following graduation, began reporting for the Bridgeport (Conn.) Post. The only Latina in the newsroom, she says, “I fell in love with Bridgeport and the issues.”

She also became active in the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, which led eventually to her election as president of Unity: Journalists of Color. Her two-year term, for 2011 and 2012, probably qualifies as the most time-consuming and tough in the organization’s history.

The National Association of Black Journalists recently left Unity, with the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association taking NABJ’s place. Hernandez hopes to encourage NABJ to rejoin Unity.

She also focuses on a new strategic plan for Unity that she expects will reflect an agenda involving sexual orientation and gender identity as well as race and ethnicity. In addition, the difficult economic times, especially for news media, have diminished companies’ focus on diversity. It is important to diversify “so that the stories that are important get told,” she says. “I see us going backwards.”

At home, as Dan Tham’s video makes clear, she faces other challenges, including her son’s questioning of her notion of ethnic identity.

Loren Ghiglione

We met Trevor Thomas in a futuristic office on Massachusetts Avenue. Blue neon lights cast a ghastly hue on the employees at Media Matters, a Web-based progressive research and information center. The employees’ eyes were focused on the television and computer screens at their desks. “We monitor television, radio, blogs and newspapers to be able to push back on what we perceive as misinformation,” Thomas, director of external affairs, explained. I noticed most of the screens were turned to FOX News.

Thomas is a gay man from Marne, Mich., a small, unincorporated town. He was recently the director of communications for Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, an organization that worked to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

At Media Matters, Thomas has noticed an “uptick in misinformation” when it comes to reporting on lesbian, gay and transgender issues, particularly around bullying and homosexuality as a choice. He understands that especially in small towns like Marne where he grew up, the media play an important role in shaping the opinions of “everyday Americans in their living rooms.”

“If there’s bad facts out there, we do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t become mainstream media,” Thomas said. In this video clip, Thomas talks about how his small-town roots help him stay grounded.

Dan Q. Tham

Gunner Scott

At first, transgender political activist Gunner Scott hesitated to give us an interview. The media so often bungle trans coverage that it’s not hard to understand why.

Take Rita Hester’s case, for example, which continues to resonate with Scott more than a decade later. Hester—a transgender woman—was stabbed to death in Allston, Mass., in 1998. Her murder is still unsolved.

The media identified her as male, even though Hester had been living as a woman for 10 years.

“I still hold her in my heart,” said Scott, the executive director of Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, which, for the past 10 years, has aimed to use political channels to end discrimination against the transgender population. Every year, he calls the police and asks for updates.

“Her case did not get the same attention as other people’s did,” he said.

Other ways traditional media outlets mess up: Asking privacy-invading, personal medical questions (i.e. “Have you had surgery?”) and publishing addresses of transgender crime victims (which can lead to additional violence). Scott said it’s important to be attentive to these nuances within the transgender community; he can disagree with an article but still find it respectful if it’s reported with tact.

And while the transgender population has historically been lumped in the LGBT group, there can be differences in their needs. For one, the larger public has more difficulty understanding the transgender community. Being transgender has to do with a person’s gender identity and not with sexual orientation; sexual orientation is about who a person is attracted to.

Part of Scott’s job is to be an advocate, but even he has reservations about his image appearing in mainstream media outlets.

“I do the next day worry about getting on the train and being in my neighborhood.”

Scott, who has been threatened before, has “passing privilege,” which means he resembles a man. This makes it easier for him than, say, a 6-foot tall transgender woman.

“Being trans is a process,” he said. “For some of us, we struggle our whole lives. It isn’t just a lifestyle choice. It’s a struggle.” Scott has come out twice; the first time he went back in the closet and didn’t come out again until his 30s. One of the biggest misconceptions is that “people just wake up one day and decide they’re transgender and they transition within a week, or the next day,” he said.

Another is that transgender people want to cause trouble. “We for the most part want to put our heads down,” Scott said.

Alyssa

Loren's mother, Rita

What makes a woman The Other? Race? Ethnicity? Sexual orientation? Skin color? Wanting a family, not a career, first? Or does a woman become The Other by just being a woman, not a man?

I’m asking those questions after interviewing five female graduate students at Yale’s School of Drama who identified themselves as The Other (watch our video here) and after thinking about my mother, a graduate student of drama at Yale almost four generations earlier. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in theater production in 1935.

Today’s students call themselves The Other for strikingly different reasons. Delilah Dominguez, 24, a native of Bastrop, Texas, identifies herself as small-town, “queer and a minority woman”—the first member of her family to attend college. A student of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism, she feels uncomfortable in the privileged world of theater at Yale and bristles at the “socio-economic disparities” she observes. Having volunteered at a Branford hospice, she plans to switch careers and enter social work.

Keri Klick, a 22-year-old student of sound design who is also the first college graduate in her family, defines herself as The Other “because I have excelled quickly in a male-dominated industry—but with the sole intention of preparing myself to have a career in theater production eventually.” She talks of getting married and starting a family young. To ensure a life focused on her family, perhaps she will earn a Ph.D. and teach. “I’m going to make it work somehow,” she says.

First-year acting student Michelle McGregor, 24, of Wilmington, N.C., considers herself The Other for three reasons. She recalls her first day of classes at Yale. She felt uneasy, as a private person who viewed theater as scripts to be analyzed, “rolling around on the floor, acting like children, being goofy”—being pushed immediately to open up to people and to analyze herself. Though “school is great” now, she remains sensitive to her life within the seemingly safe, “strange bubble” that is Yale, when gunshots at night and people on the street asking for help remind her of the harder-edged reality that is much of New Haven. And, while working in New York City before arriving at Yale, she became increasingly aware of women needing to “care very much about their appearance,” while men “can get away with being disheveled.”

Prema Cruz and Carmen Zilles, acting students, are conscious of their ethnic heritage. Zilles, a 24-year-old Mexican-American, says she is the only Hispanic member of her second-year class. At the drama school, which accepts only one acting student for every 80 who apply, she wonders sometimes whether “that has to do with why I got in here.”

Carmen Zilles

As a scholarship student at Sarah Lawrence College, where “most people had a lot of money, I felt like a huge Other,” she says, turning philosophical. “I sometimes have the feeling everyone is an Other.” When she visits her family in Mexico she says she feels “very Other.” “Sometimes,” she adds, “I feel very American.”

Yale’s drama school, with its free tuition, “feels very equal,” she says. But ethnicity remains an issue. “It’s interesting that people don’t talk about it,” she says, “but it’s definitely there.” She worries that she will be limited to Hispanic acting roles after Yale.

“There’s not a whole lot of plays about the Latin American experience in this country,” she says. She has already been cast in a Yale play as a Cuban. “I’m not Cuban,” she says. “I don’t necessarily walk around feeling like a Hispanic person. I just kind of walk around feeling like a person.”

Born in the Bronx, N.Y., Cruz, a 26-year-old, first-year acting student, grew up in Sacramento, Calif., with her African-American mother. Only recently has she begun spending much time with her Dominican-born, Spanish-speaking father in New York.

They visited the Dominican Republic together. Cruz, who considers herself “a black woman” and is much darker than her father, found herself faced with a wrenching moment of decision in a culture with “very blatant racism.” She needed to board a flat-bed truck that served as a bus, with dark-skinned women sitting in the back and light-skinned locals sitting inside the truck’s cab.

Her father knew to sit inside the cab, Cruz recalls, her eyes tearing. “I didn’t know what to do. Do I sit in the back or the front with my father? I’ll never forget that moment.”

Prema Cruz

Cruz, who was “never raised to think about color,” has not dated African-American or Dominican men, only white men. Whomever she marries, her children “must know who they are and where them came from”—the stories and roots of their parents and grandparents. She says, “It’s important to know what those roots dig into, what they are soaking up.”

My mother, Rita, was the daughter of Loren Haskin and Hettie Fletcher, white, Methodist, farm-family Kansans who moved west to Pomona, Calif., at the beginning of the twentieth century and never attended college. Rita graduated in 1932 from Scripps, a new women’s college in Claremont, Calif., where she was known for being, in the words of Groucho Marx, “well over four feet” and nicknamed “Birdie.”

Childhood polio had required annual surgery, recalled Marion Jones, a cousin, “to lengthen and keep her spine as even as possible. She must have suffered great pain and I thought she was very brave.” Virginia Willis, a Scripps classmate and childhood friend, said, “She had so much illness but in all the years I never heard her complain.”

Many of her classmates regarded Scripps as a finishing school preparing them for marriage and a family, not graduate school and a career. But Rita pursued her interest in theater production at Scripps and beyond (for a summer 1931 course in play production at Claremont Colleges she earned an A).

She applied to Yale. Isabel F. Smith, dean of Scripps, recommended her as “quick and humorous; diligent, conscientious and ambitious.” Smith concluded: “I have seen her take part most admirably in several plays, but she has a slightly noticeable spinal curvature and it may be that her decision to go into production has been influenced by a realization of this handicap.”

Yale accepted Rita. My grandparents scraped together Yale’s annual tuition of $350 and in 1932 my mother started the three-year production course of Yale’s department of drama where, according to department rules, “only one third may be women.”

Loren Ghiglione

Craig Hotchkiss is the Education Program Manager at the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Conn. In this video, Hotchkiss addresses some of the topics we’ve been dealing with, including race and sexual orientation, as it relates to Mark Twain.

Video by Dan

You’ve probably noticed that this video is six minutes long. So far, I’ve been making an effort to keep the videos I upload brief, sometimes (read: most times) under a minute. That’s, of course, a response to the ever-diminishing attention spans of the American public. But I had a lot of trouble keeping this one short. The stories of Delilah Dominguez, Carmen Zilles and Prema Cruz are incredibly moving and worth every second. Find out for yourself as these three women from the Yale School of Drama reflect on what makes them feel different.

Video by Dan

Quinnipiac University journalism professor Ed Alwood

The Saturday morning we went to see journalism professor Ed Alwood at Quinnipiac University, it happened to be parents’ weekend and the campus was abuzz with activity—music playing, lots of hand-drawn cardboard signs, mothers and fathers walking around with their kids.

We pulled up to the gate and rolled the window down to speak to the security guard. Loren managed a few words before the security guard held up a piece of white paper with, bizarrely, Loren’s headshot on it. She compared the image to the real thing, and then waved us through. A hundred feet later, another security guard stopped us. She held up the same photo, grinned, and pointed to the face on the piece of paper. We were VIPs.

Ed Alwood, like every good journalist, had done his homework on us.

Before entering academia, Alwood had a long career in journalism and public relations, including working as a CNN correspondent in Washington, D.C. He published Straight News: Gays, Lesbians, and the News Media—the first book to describe the experiences of gays and lesbians in mainstream media—which is why we went to see him.

Alwood, who is gay, has had a prime view of the gay rights movement, from the pre-1974 era when homosexuality was classified as a mental disease, to the first gay march in Washington D.C., to the current movement, which he questions.

Alwood finished college in 1972, when “gays were still mental cases.” he said. “I wasn’t out at work, whatever out is,” Alwood said. “How are you out at work? Bring in a banner? Oh, I didn’t have any boyfriends’ pictures at my desk.”

Being gay sometimes left Alwood feeling vulnerable on the job, but it also helped him find and air stories he otherwise wouldn’t.

It was sometime in the early ‘80s in Washington D.C. “I’d never been to the gay porno movie theater, but I knew where it was,” Alwood said. “In that day, the gay movie theater would advertise the movie it was showing in the Washington Post.” Alwood was riding in the van with his crew when he heard chatter on the police scanner about a three-alarm fire.

“I heard the address and I looked at the Washington Post, and I thought, ‘That’s the gay movie theater!’” he said. “Then I thought, ‘Well how do I handle this?’” Alwood laughed at the memory.

“So I made up this convenient story, and I got on the walkie talkie, two-way radio, and I said, ‘Listen we were riding along here and I heard this police thing and I just happened to be reading the Washington Post and just happened to notice that the address of the fire is this gay movie theater.’ And they went, ‘Oh really?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I think we need to go there.’”

Several people died in the fire, and it turned out to be a big story.

At that time Alwood’s social network, and that of his gay peers, revolved around bars. “The bar became the gay people’s church,” he said. At bars, they “could meet with a fair amount of anonymity,” he said. “Except if you were on television every night.”

Alwood, who easily reminisced about being a gay man in the less tolerant ‘70s, visibly bristled when asked about coming out to his family. He grew up in Albany, Georgia. “I’ve got a fair amount of family who are fundamentalists,” he said. It wasn’t discussed.

“I don’t sit with them and talk about their sexuality,” he said. “I don’t see any reason to sit with them and talk about my sexuality.”

Alwood doesn’t describe himself as a “political person” but he did participate in the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979, the first of its kind. But the movement he identified with then is not the same anymore, he said. His statement reminded us of Larry Mass, whom we interviewed in New York. Mass said similar things; gays and lesbians don’t have to fight for equality as much as they once did, and it changes their culture.

Alwood wasn’t shy about his disapproval.

“The whole tenor of that type of political movement has changed so that it’s almost embarrassing,” he said.

For one, Alwood said the movement has gone corporate. At a recent convention, people at booths were hawking services and products “like the state fair,” he said.

“We come across as clowns,” Alwood said. “We come across as weird, very weird people.”

He hasn’t embraced the word “queer” either.

“We have people who seem to revel in these stereotypes rather than knock them down…In all of the celebration of gay pride, I just feel like there has been a decline in the pride part,” he said.

Alwood hasn’t forgotten a piece of advice given to him and his peers: If the movement wanted to be taken seriously, its participants had to present themselves seriously. That meant men wore ties and women wore dresses. Nothing over-the-top.

Alwood acknowledged that the needs of the movement have changed. He has stopped going to National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association meetings. These days they’re more about finding jobs than improving coverage of gays and lesbians in the news, although he said he’s still supportive of the organization.

“Sometimes movements outlive their necessity,” he said.

Alyssa

Larry Mass invited us to his Manhattan apartment to discuss the sense of wistfulness that the gay community feels as it becomes more and more assimilated in society. Mass, co-founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, is a writer and physician who wrote the first press reports on the troubling and enigmatic epidemic that later turned out to be AIDS. In this video, Mass compares the sense of loss the gay community is experiencing to that which the black community experienced after the Black Power movement.

Video by Dan

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Occupy Wall Street

The tour buses show up

Mark Twain is also occupying Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street

If it looks like everyone is sleeping, it’s because they were

Occupy Wall Street: For the young and the old (and the formerly oppressed shop mannequins)

Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street

The 99%

Occupy Wall Street

Wait, homeless camp?

Class War

Occupy Wall Street

Fighting against the rats

Protesters gather

Occupy Wall Street

One thing about the Occupy Wall Street protest in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park: Don’t visit too early. Like, before 2 p.m.

We made that mistake last week and arrived around 11 a.m. Everyone was still sleeping, literally curled up in their sleeping bags, and in one case, underneath a tarp. Dan and I were kind of disappointed in the vibe of the whole thing; I had expected to be so taken with the movement that I would throw my sleeping bag down there with everyone else. After all, this is my issue! I have a $40,000 debt and no job! Most of my friends don’t have healthcare! One of them only goes to the dentist when she has a Groupon in her hand!

But those who were awake couldn’t quite articulate why they were there, other than that they were angry and wanted change—which I absolutely agree with—but it was disheartening when one person we talked with told us he doesn’t vote. Most people here don’t vote either, he said. The logistics of the protest are well-organized; the manifesto of the movement is not.

In any case, Occupy Wall Street is truly all-American. The park is little, but it’s a cross-section of the country. We saw retirees protesting, business-types taking pictures with their iPhones, hippies beating drums, tourists gawking, police patrolling, vendors selling food…basically enough variety to rewrite modern, angsty lyrics for the Twelve Days of Christmas song.

A succession of double-decker tour buses rolled in to see the spectacle. It’s been tough for us to remember which city we’re in because of our ping-ponging around the country, but after that we knew we couldn’t be anywhere but New York City.

Alyssa

New York State Senator Mark J. Grisanti, a Catholic, agonized about his vote on legalizing same-sex marriage in the state. In the end, as the video indicates, he decided the denial of rights to same-sex partners took priority. He was one of four Senate Republicans who provided the votes necessary to legalize same-sex marriage in New York. Grisanti represents New York’s 60th Senate District, which includes Buffalo, Grand Island and Niagara Falls.

Video by Dan

Doug Moore, president of the Missouri Chapter of National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association

“In a city like New York, they have happy hour every week,” joked Doug Moore, the Missouri Chapter President of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association. With only ten members in the Missouri branch of NLGJA, which includes journalists from as far away as Nebraska and Iowa, Moore explained that weekly gatherings of gay and lesbian journalists in St. Louis for cocktails would be virtually impossible.

Moore, 48, was born in Neosho, Mo., a town of 10,000 in southwest Missouri, and raised Southern Baptist. “Every Sunday we were told these people are sinners and are going to hell,” Moore recalled. “You always romanticize your childhood. But my life was threatened and I was called ‘fag.’” Moore didn’t come out until his mid-30s.

Moore currently serves as diversity and demographics reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He came out in a big way in 2004, by helping found the Missouri chapter of NLGJA to prevent newsrooms from “bungling gay coverage.” Having served as president for the past four years, Moore believes that every newsroom needs an advocate for LGBT issues.

He gave us the example of a reporter covering a woman horse trainer at Rainbow Ranch. The reporter didn’t know and didn’t ask about the woman’s partner, even with the “rainbow flag flying above the sign for Rainbow Ranch,” Moore recalled with a chuckle. For instances like these, Moore feels a responsibility to educate fellow journalists.

“There is a hesitancy. They don’t want to make that person [being interviewed] uncomfortable,” and they don’t want to be uncomfortable themselves.

Moore is thankful that his paper is supportive of him. He strongly encourages other gay journalists to come out. “If you just have straight white guys running the newsrooms, you would have very narrow coverage. I think I’ve added a lot more stories that wouldn’t have been in the paper.”

Dan

"I've been allowed to be me," said Michael Gaines, president of the Hannibal Arts Council.

What’s it like to be gay in Hannibal, Missouri, a town of 17,606 that bills itself as America’s hometown?

Mary Lou Montgomery, editor of the Hannibal Courier-Post, says sexual orientation is not discussed: “It’s pretty quiet—not secretly hidden, not talked about in polite society.”

Attorney Terrell Dempsey suggests that sexual orientation is like race in Hannibal, “You just don’t talk about things.” Gays are tolerated. “Most gay folks will move to Quincy,” a nearby Illinois city, he adds. “It’s still outwardly hostile here.”

Michael Gaines, 43, the gay executive director of the Hannibal Arts Council, refuses to be melodramatic about what gays face in Hannibal. He says, “It’s not like they’re dumping people in the river.” He cites a gay worker at the local General Mills plant who “has worked there forever” and is open about his relationship with his partner.

But some gay men, Gaines says, “are giving up on who they are.” They do what they feel the community expects of them. They marry women and have families.

Gaines says he came late to addressing his sexual orientation. “That wasn’t the community’s fault,” he says, “That was me.” He had pursued a workaholic lifestyle: “I was about what I did.” He had taken no time for personal life.

He also had lived in fear, “which was really unfounded,” he says. He had grown up on a farm near Bethel, Missouri, a town of 121 people with a history as a religious community. His father was a deacon. Gaines says he had to address the “religious baggage I carried my whole life.”

After time in New York City, Austria, Italy and at the University of Missouri (where he obtained a degree in tourism development in 1990), he took a development job in Bethel and, a year-and-a-half later, his current position in Hannibal.

He also chose in Hannibal to be open about his sexual orientation. “I haven’t put an ad in the paper,” he jokes, “but I still just go about life.” He attends community events with his partner.

“I’ve been allowed to be me,” he says. His parents, he says, “proved they loved unconditionally.” He no longer faces “wanting to die everyday.”

“When I came to love myself,” he says, “I was okay.”

Loren Ghiglione

Twain was willing to compare Americans—however arrogant or ignorant—to smug, cultured Europeans and to declare Americans a superior class of being. An Englishman, Twain noted, “does things because they have been done before.” An American, he continued, “does things because they haven’t been done before.” The Germans infect their language with a “parenthesis disease” that allows a “sort of luminous intellectual fog” to substitute for a clarity that might be associated with the straightforward American language; German is a language in which a person can “travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.”

Despite Twain’s declaration that he was the American, some might argue otherwise. For much of his life he was privileged, not poor.  His descendants were “Virginia Clemens,” and he married into money. Perhaps the representative American is an American Indian or an African American or the descendant of an immigrant from Ireland, India or Italy. Many Americans arrived involuntarily on slave ships. Others, like my great-grandfather Angelo Francesco Ghiglione, risked death voluntarily in steerage as indentured workers.

The identity of Americans remains a controversial, high-profile issue. President Obama, who describes himself as the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, chooses to celebrate multicultural America. His story, he says, “is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts—that out of many, we are truly one.”

But race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and immigration status remain ways for Americans to define some among us The Other. Many Americans, for example, feel threatened by the size of today’s U.S. immigrant population—30 million, the largest in the nation’s history. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates the United States will be a minority-majority nation by 2042, largely because of immigrants and their birth rate. Some Americans see immigrants, especially Muslims and Mexicans, as the enemy.

What better time, with Mark Twain looking over our shoulder, to crisscross the country to interview Americans about their identity and their nation’s identity. An important message that comes from reading Mark Twain is that humor remains “the one really effective weapon” in the decimating of discrimination over race and other differences.

A second, significant message is that we can change. Twain was on the cutting edge of technological change, early on installing a telephone in his Hartford house, using a typewriter to write and investing in an innovative typecasting machine. Twain also urged us to embrace change of a different kind. He invited us to be better global citizens—more self-aware, more understanding and more compassionate: “”What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth….We change—and must change, constantly, and keep on changing as long as we live.”

Loren Ghiglione