“CH-CH-CH-CH-Changes!”
Woman on Miami Beach in 1980s condemning “immodest” clothes of beach-goers.
If “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens…,” (Ecclesiastes 3:1) David Bowe (1971) was right: We’re living in a world of “ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!”
What will cause the world to come to a fiery end (according to “christian” fundamentalists, evangelicals and other “people of faith” so convinced of their “righteousness” and others’ “evil”)?
To paraphrase Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Let us count the ways…” [That was a gratuitous reference thrown in just for the laughs.]
Will & Grace, featuring a gay lawyer and his female, straight interior designer roommate, ran on NBC from 1998 to 2006, retuning in 2017 and permanently ending in 2020. From 2001 to 2005, it was the highest rated sitcom among adults 18 – 49. That was before the power of cable and streaming TV, but it didn’t change the percentage of gay lawyers by a decimal point.
M*A*S*H, with its ensemble cast featuring Alan Alda and Wayne Rogers as surgeons Benjamin “Hawkeye” Pierce and “Trapper” John McIntyre and Loretta Swit as head nurse Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan, gave America 256 episodes between 1972 and 1983. With few exceptions, the characters were concerned about two things: healing soldiers wounded in the Korean War and having as much – free-and-easy and often out-of-marriage – sex as possible. Oh well! Has war ever been different? Tonight let’s “just do it” cause tomorrow the North Koreans and Chinese might overrun our hospital unit and kill all of us.
Despite its theme of a sexual relationship between two male sheepherders and their intermittent encounters through the years, the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain grossed $178 worldwide against a $14 million budget and earned bucketsful of awards and nominations. And the world continued to spin on its axes.
The release of each of the seven Harry Potter had kids (and their parents) staying up all night, first lined-up to purchase the newest novel and then to sit on the floor of local bookstores and read straight through the night. Amazingly, there are no scientifically (or even police) validated cases of any of those kids turning into witches and warlocks or going to schools specializing in all kinds of black magic.
The best thing about The Real Housewives fantasy “reality” television franchise that launched in 2006 (“of Orange County”) and continues to metastasize – eleven different productions in the U.S and 21 international adaptations – is that Fathers Tobin and Flynn don’t watch it. Nonetheless, it makes mockeries of excessive alcohol abuse and leaves folks wondering “Do these women know the meaning of fidelity, marriage, good manners, and a day without alcohol? Who the hell drinks that much so constantly?” (The second question was rhetorical.) Not our brand of television but it does portray sloppy drunks and maybe that’s a public service.
Commercial television is filled with stuff “christian” censors would prohibit us from seeing. For example: Wednesday – “Chicago Night” on NBC. “Chicago Fire” has firefighters and EMTs, both gay and straight, male and female, getting it on or trying to set-up others for their next tryst. “Chicago Med” doctors and nurses are “doing it” even more than the heroes of M*A*S*H. And “Chicago P.D.” is just too confusing to even begin to figure out who’s ironing sheets with whom. The francize series premiered in 2012 and continues to enjoy primetime viewer ratings. And, despite Chicken Little, the sky has not yet fallen.
There’s still a generation of Americans that knows the secretiveness with which we attempted to purchase condoms: Going to a pharmacy far from home; whispering what we wanted (because they were kept behind the counter); praying to God Almighty that the pharmacist didn’t say something that would embarrass us and that there was no one within hearing distance who would spread the news that we were seen buying Trojans. Those days are gone; major pharmacies display rows and rows of condoms on open shelves and, because of self-check-out, no one knows what you’ve just tossed in your bag.
The first condom commercial was broadcast on barely a handful of commercial television stations in 1975; as a young couple ran barefoot along the beach, a male voice repeated the text of Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 with the tag line “The makers of Trojan condoms believe there is a time for children - the right time, when they are wanted. And Trojans have helped people for over half a century practice responsible parenthood.” The Federal Communications Commission received only 100 recorded complaints. The ad aired the same year that Loretta Lynn’s “The Pill” was banned by more than 80 radio stations from Boston to the Bible belt.
Today airways, print and social media abound with commercials for PrEP (Pre-exposure prophylaxis), a class of medications that can help prevent HIV infection in people who are HIV negative but at high risks of exposure. Without drawing attention to the gender identity or partner preferences of the characters, the ads appear to feature gay and straight men and women at parties, socializing or preparing for a night out. While the “the world is ending” angst of would-be censors is almost palpable, the medication and the ads are actually saving lives. Perhaps, just possibly, that might be God’s will.
Television presents women as lead FBI officers in Hawaii, Europe and New York and they manage to thwart crime and nab the bad guys. Over the course of a week of prime-time commercial television, virtually every ethnic group will appear in some kind of hero/boss/problem solver/authority role. What’s the world coming to?
Major League Baseball opened the 2024 with eleven Japanese players featured on the squads of seven clubs. [Hold onto your hats, white “christian nationalists.”] On March 29, 2024 – Opening Day – 27.8% (264) of MLB’s total rosters and inactive lists of players were from 19 countries and territories outside the United States – the fourth highest number of Opening Day international players, behind 2021 (291), 2022 (275), and 2023 (279). And baseballs just keep getting hit out of the parks. Wow!
George Poage
Appropriately, the first modern Olympic Games opened in Athens in 1896. With a University of Wisconsin degree in History and already the first Black athlete to win a race in the Big Ten Conference track championships, George Poage captured bronze medals in the 200-meter hurdles and 400-meter hurdles of the 1904 St. Louis Games, becoming the first Black American Olympic medalist.
John Baxter Taylor, far left, 1908 London Summer Olympics
Brand new University of Pennsylvania alum and veterinarian Dr. John Baxter Taylor became the first African American to win an Olympic gold medal as part of the 1600-meter relay team in the 1908 London Games. Unfortunately, London’s cold climate sparked a case of typhoid-pneumonia so severe that it claimed his life months later.
Born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1878, Margaret Ives Abbott and her family moved to Chicago in 1884. In 1900, the amateur golfer and her mother travelled to Paris, where they signed-up for and she won a women’s golf tournament – without realizing she was competing in the Second Olympic Games of the Modern Era.
Margaret Ives Abbott
Beginning with the Atlanta Games of 1996, Team USA has dominated Summer Olympic medal counts; U.S. women won 58 per cent of Americas Medals in Tokyo (2021, delayed a year due to COVID-19) – the third straight Olympics in which women won more than half of Team USA’s medals.
American women out-medaling the men! What is this world coming to? And yet, except for the most ignorant and bigoted, Americans will spend hours watching this summer’s Olympics. What is the word coming to?
Originally produced at London’s National Theatre in 1973, Equus opened on Broadway the following year, garnering Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Direction and nominations for Best Performance by a Leading Man and Best Performance by Featured Actress. The production focused on psychiatrist Martin Dysart and his 17-year-old patient Alan Strang, who struggles with erotic and religious fixations on horses before using a steel spike to blind six horses he believes have “seen” his soul. After a failed attempt at intercourse in Act 2, Alan appears nude through much of the remainder of the production. (The film adaptation, starring Richard Burton in the psychiatrist’s role, premiered in 1977.)
Originally based on a 1973 French play of the same name and set in Saint-Tropez, the musical La Cage aux Folles opened on Broadway in 1983 and presented a normalized - except for the personal idiosyncrasies of the principals – long-term homosexual relationship between a nightclub owner and his drag-performing partner. The plot revolved around the return of their adult son, coming home to present his fiancé and her conservative parents. The original production ran for more than four years, garnering six Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Score, and Best Book.
Robin Williams and Nathan Lane in The Bird Cage
Revived in 1996 – at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, with Robn Williams and Nathan Lane as the primary characters and set in a South Beach nightclub, The Bird Cage [La Cage] served as a counterpoint to the then tragic and negative theater and movie depictions of gay men. The box office success – grossing $185.3 million on a $31 million budget - was one of the first major studio productions to feature LGBT characters, earned the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by Cast and received a nomination for Best Art Direction at the 69th Academy Awards.
Despite the outrage of some cultural/religious/political conservatives, the movie left folks feeling good and laughing as they left the theater. And the world continued to spin on its axes.
Before same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide by the 2015 Baker v. Nelson decision, La Cage normalized committed gay relationships; before gay couples rearing mentally healthy and sable kids was recognized as not pathological and destructive, Bird Cage showed the way. And the Republic continues.
Yup! Things have changed and they’re “ch-ch-ch-ch-changin!”
Jackie Robinson
And we don’t want to go back! Not to the 1930s and ‘40s – before Jackie Robinson broke racial barriers - when American professional sports were “white sports.” Not to the 1950s when minorities and immigrants knew “their places.” Not to Latin Masses in which few knew what they were “praying” or “plastic Jesuses” rode on dashboards. Not to the ‘60’s, ‘70s and ‘80s attitudes that made buying condoms a cause for shame and fear or when LGBTQ kids and adults were forced to live “in the closet.” Not even to a year or two ago when politicians and Moms Who Want To Take Away Freedom began censoring books, deciding what elements of History were acceptable for teaching in grade and high schools, and removing Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl from school libraries. Not to a nation in which a theologically/historically just-plain-wrong version of the Ten Commandments has been mandated for display in the nation’s schools.
We don’t want to go back!
Yup! We’re living in a world of “ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!”
And men and women of Courage and Faith don’t “go back.”
Yup! We’re living in a world of “ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!”
Men and women of Courage and Faith won’t to go back!
We’re living in a world of “ch-ch-ch-ch-changes” and men and women of faith move forward.