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Letters to the EditorThursday Mar 20, 2008 Passport hell
My spouse Brian and I were married four years ago and he took my surname. We were planning to adopt and wanted everyone to have the same name. We encountered the passport issue early on. We were surprised that nothing has been written up about this sooner. This gentleman was lucky. After numerous calls to the State Department Brian was told that he could not get a new passport and that his old passport was no longer valid. He was told to produce the same documents the person in the story was told he needs. Essentially he was being held captive by the government that cited DOMA as the reason for the denial. The funny thing is that the government was willing to withhold his Social Security and tax him under his new name without DOMA being an issue.
Calls and e-mails to [Sen. Ted] Kennedy were never returned. [Sen. John] Kerry was our only other option, and we knew his stance at the time, so we didn’t bother going there. Thankfully the clerk of the courts office at the Worcester courthouse understood the problem and was able to fast-track a formalized name change (bypassing the court hearing and larger expense associated with it). They helped Brian get the "proper" name change document that the State Department would accept. It cost us time, cash and lost wages, but it could have been worse. Perhaps the guy in your article could use the same route.
Thanks for listening,
William Carter
Worcester, MA
P.S. I was excited to see a story about gay adoption. Too bad it didn’t have more to it. We can’t find many other couples who went through the same process. It would be nice to find support networks out there.
Arthur C. Clarke, R.I.P.
Dear Editor,
Likely the present-day world’s most famous science fiction author, Arthur Charles Clarke, died in Sri Lanka on early Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at the age of 90. Born in England in 1917, he had lived in Sri Lanka since 1956.
Among the many things Sir Arthur, who was knighted in 1998, is known for is his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (made into the classic film of the same name), and that in 1945 he was the first person to suggest the concept of communication satellites, which are a common reality today. Also in the 1940s, Clarke predicted humanity would land on the moon before the year 2000, an idea at the time that was considered absurd.
Arthur Clarke was a gay man. Though he never made a public statement, it was well known in his community - science fiction fandom - that Clarke was gay. He included gay male characters in several of his novels, including Imperial Earth and 2010, the sequel to his famous space odyssey. As commonly happens in Hollywood productions, this and the character’s love story with a same-sex crewmate were removed from the movie version of 2010. (Recently this happened in the film The Martian Boy, based on an award-winning story by science fiction author and gay father David Gerrold.)
In 1988, when I was director of the newly formed Gaylactic Network, an association of organizations for gay science fiction fans and their friends, I wrote Clarke, as I thought he would be interested in it. He was and in fact wrote me a very nice letter in reply, in which he included a news article from a Sri Lankan newspaper titled "Foreign fags arrive next week" about the importing of cigarettes. Ever the gifted writer, Sir Arthur added the handwritten note, "TOURIST DRIVE!"
In the early 1990s, I led a letter-writing campaign to Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, to have an openly gay character to appear in Star Trek: The Next Generation that received worldwide attention. I contacted Clarke about this effort and he wrote back to me that he had "dropped a line to my old friend Gene R." in support.
(This campaign resulted in a promise by Mr. Roddenberry that gay crewmembers would be seen on the starship Enterprise during the series’ fifth season. Unfortunately Mr. Roddenberry died shortly before that season began and his promise was turned into the very poor episode, "The Outcast," that failed to include even one gay character.)
One of Arthur C. Clarke’s most famous remarks, which appears in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, is, "Any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." For many readers on this Earth, we have lost some of the magic in our books.
Franklin Hummel
Boston, Massachusetts
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