| Houston Voice follow-up story
By ELLA TYLER
Friday, December 09, 2005
On Sept. 11, two lesbians and one large black poodle left Bellingham, Wash. near Seattle and headed east on a cross-country tour the women dubbed “Gay into Straight America”.
Dotti Berry and her female partner Robynne “Roby” Sapp plan to spend a year talking to people they encounter about marriage rights for gay couples. They stopped in Houston last week to speak at a PFLAG meeting.
The couple said their journey has been full of positive encounters.
“We’ve found that there are more people with us than against us,” Berry said. “The majority voice is for justice and equality, but there’s a shouting minority who are against us.
“They’re like a dog barking and growling behind a door, and you’re afraid to open it, but when you do, it’s just a Chihuahua”.
Berry said advocates of equality must spend their time working on what she calls the “moveable middle”, the percentage of the population willing to listen and change their views.
“We waste a lot of time and energy on the 10 percent of people who are against us and they will never be in our corner, but we can impact the middle,” she said.
The trip is not tightly scheduled so Berry and Sapp can spend a lot of time talking to people they encounter. Berry said while traveling through Arizona, everyone they met wanted to talk, so they arrived in Albuquerque a day later than planned.
“One of the men we met on that part of the trip said he’d been on the road for 10 years and he doesn’t hate anything except snow and ice,” she said.
The couple has discovered that looks can be deceiving with some of the people they’ve met.
“We also met two women at a rest stop and when we finished talking, we offered them rainbow wristbands,” Berry said. “After they took them, we found out that they are nuns from St. Mary’s College in California.
“The nuns answered my question about what they thought about the church’s current position about gays by saying ‘The Pope is out of touch’,” Berry said.
Seeing the couple’s dog and dark purple Chevrolet Suburban pulling a trailer makes for a conversations piece, Berry said. She said many conversations begin with the simple question ‘Where are you traveling?’
“When someone asks where am I travelling, I say ‘I’m with my spouse,’” Berry said. “Then, they ask ‘Where is he?” and I say she is over there. If they want to talk, then I explain the trip.”
Although Berry, who is a life coach, said she started the trip without any preconceived ideas, the positive response is not really a surprise to her.
“I’ve discovered that the more OK people are with who they are, the more positive their encounters with others are,” she said.
Berry believes it is impossible to hate someone close to you.
“When we meet people, we always ask do you know someone who is gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered and 100 percent of the people we’ve asked have said yes,” she said. “But when we ask do you talk about it, they say no.”
“We have a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy in life just like there is in the military and it’s killing us,” Berry said.
Berry said she was raised in a Christian family, but she refuses to debate scripture, saying it is like using a spiritual 2-by-4 piece of wood.
“I’ll meet someone at Camping World or someplace like that and this person will say, ‘Well I’m a Christian’ and I’ll say there are lots of great theologians who have a different opinion on this, and if you’d like me to give you some references I can,” she said.
After they leave Houston, they couple and their dog will head to Columbus, Mo. , where one of their meetings include a session with a group of ministers who are supportive of gay rights, but want to know how to engage their congregations about this issue.
“They don’t want to loose their jobs, and I understand that,” Berry said. “Too often we ask more of others than we do of ourselves. We want them to speak out, but we aren’t, so we can keep our jobs and families.”
It is not just straight people who the couple want to engage in communication. Gay, lesbians, bisexual and transgendered people also wrestle with understanding , Berry said.
Sarah Fernandez, who filmed the couple’s PFLAG talk for Indy Media, said she was impressed with the work they had done in their own neighborhood before starting the trip.
“They told a story about when their neighbors started talking about there being too many gay things happening, “ Fernandez said. “They went and visited each of them and took a rose and invited them to dinner, and then all the dissent died down.”
Fernandez said the video will be on public access television sometime after Dec. 19. For a more accurate time, check PFLAG’s website.
PFLAG’s Jim Null said he was so impressed with the couple’s talk that he has invited them back to do a half-day workshop. Currently, the workshop is not scheduled.
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