Autism is not a parenting problem. Autism is part of a person.

I had an extraordinary conversation with the mother of an autistic child on Saturday. She was one of the clique of parents who objected strenuously to the original version of this post. I don't want to use her name because I know it would really bother her, so I'm going to call her June. I have been in contact with another member of that clique, who has been very helpful, interested in dialogue, and patient with the anger I feel toward her friends. I don't want to use her name so I'm going to call her Rose. June had posted something nasty on the thAutcast Facebook page, and I had complained about it to Rose. Rose told June about my complaints, and June contacted me angrily.

I had previously written this post specifically for June, because she had told me that she could not possibly be bigoted against autistic people because her child is autistic. In it, I try to draw parallels between my experience as a gay man and my experience as an autistic person, citing the fact that even my domestic partner Max did not understand the importance of full rights for gay people until he heard the testimony in the Proposition 8 trial:

Max is older than I am. He has been openly gay for about as long as I have been alive. He has fought courageously and successfully for our rights. He was one of the first who got top security clearance when President Clinton reversed the ban on gay people having it in the 1990s. And he still carries bias against gay people

I disagreed when people went to court to try to get Proposition 8 overturned after it made same-sex marriage illegal in our state. I like elections, and I think ultimately minority groups win by making elections stronger, not by trying to undo them when we don't like the way they go. But what happened in the trial was that gay people laid out the difference that having full access to marriage made in their lives, in their status, in the eyes of their families.

Max is my domestic partner. It is not yet legal for him to be my husband. And he needed that trial to understand that separate but equal is not okay. He needed legal testimony to lose that piece of his bias against people like himself, after decades of fighting for our rights.

This is how June interpreted my post, when I sent it to her:

she thought that a gay man was writing about his own gay life in order to attack her.

She's done some advocacy for gay issues, so she thought I was writing about Max and I in order to hurt her feelings. She thought that I would only write about the person I love most in the world in order to poke at her.

That's how firmly convinced she is that she--  a neurotypical, straight advocate for autistic and gay people-- is the subject of every sentence a gay or autistic person says.

And the thing is, the reason I am writing about this, is this happens all the time.

June's friend Rose, who really has been great to me, has done exactly the same thing with my friend, who I'll call Louise. Louise has made some critical statements about things that Rose has written. Rose is unable to see that Louise has made these comments, not because she is mean, but because she really believes, as I do, that some of things Rose writes hurt autistic people. Rose cannot see that she is not the center of Louise's world, just as June cannot see that she is not the center of mine. Rose has accused Louise, publicly, of being willing to hurt children out of spite-- because she linked to something offensive Rose had written and said it was offensive.

Rose is a good person, but she has decided Louise is a bad person who only writes about the rights of autistic people in order to poke at her and other parents who have other points of view.

Other people do this, other good people. One of my friends assumed I participated in this documentary, in which I talk about my whole life, only to attack Autism Speaks. Another of my friends reacted with fury to this interview-- because it does not reflect his life, raising a very difficult autistic child.

People really do think of autism as mostly something that affects children and their parents.  This is the real epidemic-- parents who insist every discussion of autism be centered around themselves and their understanding of their children.

A group of parents really are insisting that we fight for our own rights only because we want to hurt them.

June cannot understand why I would write about my own experiences as a gay man-- I and those experiences are not real enough to her for her to see that they are more than an attack on her.

That's the real failure of theory of mind.

In the piece I wrote that June thought was attacking her, I included this:

My domestic partner Max is my favorite person. He's smart, funny, handsome, sweet. He's also been in great pain for much of the past week, with an infection that required him to spend one night in the emergency room and may require additional hospitalization. As we fight these things, I think how fortunate both Max and I are that we do not have AIDS, that we are still alive.

With Max in the emergency room-- she thought I would only write about him in order to hurt her.

That's how accustomed the autism parent community has gotten to seeing hostility where it does not exist.

I spent the day in the emergency room with Max again, yesterday, and came home to a message from Rose. She was upset that I had blocked her on Facebook, then told me again how she thought everyone was acting equally badly.

And that was why I had blocked her.

I cannot spend the day with Max in the emergency room and then be told that I am the equal of someone who assumes that I would write about Max being in the emergency room-- not because I love him and I'm scared-- but to hurt her.

I did not write this initially to hurt one person, or a group of people. I wrote it because it is wrong to invite autistic people into a group, then use their communicative challenges against them. And I see that happening literally every week. Usually not to me.

I am fighting to help create a world in which the children of Rose and June will not be treated in the way that their parents treat autistic adults today. They are our kids, too.

And some of their parents really do think I fight only to make their mommies cry.

Where is there to go with people so determined to make everything about themselves?

I want to write a little bit about The New Normal, before the season finale tomorrow night. As is always the case for me with producer Ryan Murphy’s work, I love some things about the series and hate others. I love seeing a gay couple at the heart of a television show, but I wish they did not remind me so much of other couples in previous Murphy series, mostly the doctors in Nip/Tuck, who weren’t literally a gay couple (but totally were) and the nasty gay ghosts in last season’s American Horror Story, who were a prescient parody of the sweetsy-poo dads-to-be in The New Normal. And this is silly, but I wish Murphy would break his habit of casting his gay couples with one gay actor, who plays the sort of feminine one, and a more attractive straight actor, who plays the sort of masculine one.

I don’t know who this show is for. It seems to be for children, with its after school special lessons, simplistic plots, and aggressively lovable cast of characters. But then it gets so raunchy (like that reference to that real picture of a real actor’s genitals) that I would not let young kids watch it. I guess its for middle school kids who are super sophisticated in terms of their understanding of sexuality (or unusually clueless about it).

And the Sue Sylvester, nasty older blonde lady is so played out. I like Ellen Barkin, but it would be the best thing for her and the show if she were not on it next year.

I have appreciated some of the messages the show has sent, especially when it included disabled people and their kids in a montage about everyone’s right to have a family and find love.

Last week’s episode caught me by surprise by illuminating one aspect of the difficulty some people might have with autistic adults as role models.

Click here to read more and watch the episode.

Click here to watch on NBC.

Since I decided to go with the incendiary headline, let's get a few things out of the way first.

1) I am not one of those atheists who believes that everyone who is not an atheist is stupid or bigoted. I believe in religious freedom, not universal atheism. I like and respect religious people. I believe that religions do both good and bad things. I don't think all religions are equal but I try to treat them all with equal respect since I don't share any of them.

2) Lots of autistic people are atheists, but lots are also religious. There is some research indicating that we might be less disposed toward belief than others. I am skeptical of this research-- I think maybe the way autism has been defined by some scientists (extreme male brain) may skew it. I know many intensely, and beautifully, religious autistic people.

3) My autism does not prevent my from being able to believe. I have been a Christian. I have been a Buddhist. I have benefited from being part of both of those traditions. I'm not an atheist because the faithy part of my brain is missing or damaged. I have the capacity for belief, and I believe that the vast majority of other autistic people do, too.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan talked to ABC's George Stephanopoulos for Easter. Early this morning, I read what Dolan said about gay people feeling unwelcome in the Catholic church:

“Well, the first thing I’d say to them is, ‘I love you, too.  And God loves you.  And you are made in God’s image and likeness.  And – and we – we want your happiness.  But – and you’re entitled to friendship.’  But we also know that God has told us that the way to happiness, that – especially when it comes to sexual love – that is intended only for a man and woman in marriage, where children can come about naturally,” Dolan said. “We got to be – we got to do better to see that our defense of marriage is not reduced to an attack on gay people.  And I admit, we haven’t been too good at that.  We try our darndest to make sure we’re not an anti-anybody.”

And I thought, I want to see him say that. So I watched when the interview was on this morning.

Click here to watch and keep reading.

Oh, Slate.

Oh, Slate, Slate, Slate, Slate, Slate.

How I love to hate you.

Today, Slate answers the question "What if the media treated LGBT people the way they treat autistic people?" by publishing a post from Quora(!) and titling it "What Is It Like to Have an LGBT Child?"

The title is part of the problem. Although this piece of writing emerged from a general discussion about parenting LGBT people, it is about one parent's experience of raising a gay son. Just like raising a boy who is diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome in middle school is not very much like raising a non-speaking autistic girl with intellectual challenges, raising a gay son is not very much like raising a transgender girl. This mother probably does not mean to present her experience as anything more than just that-- her experience-- but the way it is framed suggests that it is more universal.

Her attitude is basically great. She loves her son and has no trouble accepting him for who he is:

David was very definitely born gay. One of his favorite words was "pretty," which he would chant over and over while stroking my clothing. He liked to do waaaay too many things most folks consider "little girl" activities, and he didn't care for many "little boy" activities, at all.

Well, we didn't care. Dave's Dave—cute, funny, scarily intelligent, curious, and could put ideas together in a way that got him in more trouble than not. In junior high, he told us about a girlfriend, and went to a few dances, but we didn't do any sigh of relief or anything because we really didn't care one way or the other. His two brothers didn't care, either, and they were 17 months older and younger; it just wasn't something we made any kind of deal out of.

I would love for all gay kids to have parents who are this accepting, and I think getting narratives like this out to the public is still important.

I would not bother to complain about the problems with this piece for a gay audience-- they don't matter very much because this is not typical of how gay people are seen in the media. Reporters are more likely to speak to gay adults about gay rights issues than to ask our moms about them. There are gay people with TV shows who can talk to their audiences about LGBT issues. The HRC has a bigger budget than PFLAG.

These things are not true for autistic people. Reporters are much, much more likely to talk to our parents than to us. Policy about autism is set by organizations dominated by parents that give autistic people no more than a token presence. They would never think about holding a government hearing on autism and inviting parents of autistic people as an afterthought.

We are not equal.

Gay people and straight people are not equal, either, and that matters more to gay people than to straight people.

Even to our loving and accepting parents:

Apparently, now that his state has passed gay marriage laws, Dave and Rob will be getting married soon. That's nice, I'm glad they get a chance to be like everyone else. But to me, it doesn't matter—that's Dave, and that's Rob, and that's fine with me.

Benign indifference to marriage equality is not a pro-gay position. And Dave and Rob will not be like "everyone else" because they get to be married in their state-- the Defense of Marriage Act still means that they will not have federal marriage rights, and those are the important ones. Just because Dave has the same status as her other children to her, that does not mean he has equal status in the world.

And this "that's nice, dear" attitude would never get marriage laws changed if people who held it made all the decisions about policy.

To this mom, her son's gayness is not important, and she has a hard time respecting the idea that it might be important to him:

So, I think for us it worked well because no one really cared—except Dave, and he never thought he was hiding some big secret, he just hung around with folks who told him how traumatic or life-affirming or soul-cleansing coming out would be, so he wanted to try it. I always get a slight cringe when I think that I ruined that for him—but forevermore! Why would he think we cared? We always supported him because he was Dave, not because he was gay

That's the same voice that says, "My son is not autistic. He has autism, but it does not have him."

It's the voice of someone who has accepted their child despite a difference.

It is not a voice that can or really wants to advocate for making people with that difference equal.

And, again, not a big deal for gay people, because our voices are seen as being more important than our parents when it comes to making decisions about policy.

A VERY big deal for autistic people, who are still usually seen as either being not competent enough or too competent to have valid things to say about autism.

I can pretty much tell that I'm wasting my time talking to a parent if he or she says something like, "I have a child with autism. I love him with all my heart. I could never, possibly be bigoted against people with autism. It's very cruel and hurtful for you to say that!"

Because here's the thing. I'm autistic. I can be bigoted against autistic people. I'm gay. I can be bigoted against gay people. When I was visiting my parents, and volunteers from a gay rights group came to the door, my dad rolled his eyes,  in front of his openly gay son, and said, "I don't think we need to listen to that." When my mom told my aunt recently about my autism, my aunt immediately started talking to me about how violent autistic people are. You may think your family is better than mine, but I think these things just run deep in society, and we're part of it.

My domestic partner Max is my favorite person. He's smart, funny, handsome, sweet. He's also been in great pain for much of the past week, with an infection that required him to spend one night in the emergency room and may require additional hospitalization. As we fight these things, I think how fortunate both Max and I are that we do not have AIDS, that we are still alive.

People want to forget how many of us died.

They want to forget the murderous silence of our governments.

They want to believe that the gay men who died of AIDS in the 1980s were so promiscuous and irresponsible that they more or less deserved it.

I am reminded by the comments on this Towleroad piece on the recent death of New York City mayor Ed Koch that there are many gay men who want to believe that their brothers who died, who are still dying of the plague, were totally alien from themselves. I'm guessing that lots of those guys would respond like those parents who drive me crazy do: "I can't possibly be bigoted against gay men. I'm gay. But those guys died because they were irresponsible."

My friend Dean, who died when I was 25, was infected by his first boyfriend when he was sixteen. Not in a bathhouse. Not with drugs. Young love. And he died. He was a good guy, so much nicer than me, would have made the world so much brighter. 

He was not garbage.

He did not deserve to die.

And no one deserved to die as David France describes gay men dying by the thousands in New York City:

We regularly received phone calls from St. Vincent patients complaining that staff members fearing the disease was airborne refused to bring them food, instead piling their trays outside their doors, or that terrified nurses wouldn’t bandage their wounds or change their soiled linens. It was like something out of a Saramago novel. I personally brought this information to Koch myself, as the first journalist with gay-media credentials to address him in a Blue Room press conference. He responded explosively. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he told me.

Those were the early days. As the epidemic mushroomed, the city’s hospitals simply ran out of space for all of the patients, and again he was silent. Deathly ill people were routinely turned away. At some hospitals, patients were lined up on gurneys along the emergency room hallways for days on end awaiting medical care that never came. When things went south, we all knew there was only one funeral home in the city — the gentle people at Redden’s on 14th Street — where we could bring our friends’ remains.

I do not recall Koch ever acknowledging these medieval conditions. He surely never took action, nor did he spare an ounce of sympathy for us in the trenches, not in public at least.

What does this have to do with autism?

Charli Devnet's piece about "The Dark Side of Aspergers" is what it looks like when members of a marginalized group have absorbed the biases of the majority:

If Adam Lanza had only destroyed himself, no one would have noticed. He would have silently departed this world, leaving “few footprints in life,” as the New York Times put it. If he had only killed his mother, well-meaning people would have shaken their heads and said exactly what they said about my neighbor, that here was another troubled young man who “snapped.” It is because Lanza exploded in such an unusual, deliberate and almost apocalyptic way, that we are so shaken. If we allow that Lanza might have been on the autistic spectrum it might help us take a candid look at the dark side of living on the spectrum.

Aspies are prey animals, said Tony Attwood at an Asperger’s conference in 2012. We are much more likely to be victims than villains. Wounded prey may, however, grow desperate and strike back. A lifetime of being bullied, rejected, and relegated to the periphery of life can give rise to anger and bitter fantasies of revenge, especially perhaps among lonely young autistics that have grown up in a culture where violence is glamorized and who may turn to perfecting their skills at violent video games in lieu of a social life.

"Self-hatred" is most common term for this, I think, but that seems wrong to me.

Autistic people and gay people, etcetera, are part of a world which is biased against us.

There is no good reason to think we should be immune from that bias, and we don't have to hate ourselves to experience it.

Max is older than I am. He has been openly gay for about as long as I have been alive. He has fought courageously and successfully for our rights. He was one of the first who got top security clearance when President Clinton reversed the ban on gay people having it in the 1990s. And he still carries bias against gay people

I disagreed when people went to court to try to get Proposition 8 overturned after it made same-sex marriage illegal in our state. I like elections, and I think ultimately minority groups win by making elections stronger, not by trying to undo them when we don't like the way they go. But what happened in the trial was that gay people laid out the difference that having full access to marriage made in their lives, in their status, in the eyes of their families.

Max is my domestic partner. It is not yet legal for him to be my husband. And he needed that trial to understand that separate but equal is not okay. He needed legal testimony to lose that piece of his bias against people like himself, after decades of fighting for our rights.

Think about that.

And don't tell yourself that you can't be biased against autistic people because you are one, or because you are related to one.