Below is a link to an essay I wrote that was published in the Middle Kingdom Newsletter, “The Pale”.  I wrote it to try and get some ideas out to others holding the same position in other groups.

Web Ministering for Your Local Group

Explanation

A year or two ago, there was a request for comments made by the Board of Directors of the SCA regarding the proposed change of the wording in Corpora regarding qualifications for Crown Lists from:

“Each competitor in a Royal Lists must be fighting for a prospective consort of the opposite gender.”

to:

“Each competitor in a Royal List must be fighting for a prospective consort of the opposite sex unless the Crown has elected to permit a competitor to fight for a prospective consort of the same sex.”

Below is what I forwarded on to the email address they provided for comments.

Comments, As Sent to the BoD

I apologize if this comment is strongly worded – I have attempted to ensure it is civil, but I also feel the need to express how strongly I disagree with the wording as proposed and why.

While I think that the proposed language is an improvement in that it could lead to opportunities for same-sex royal couples (which the current language does not allow), I feel that the revised wording fails to solve the problem sufficiently.

“Each competitor in a Royal List must be fighting for a prospective consort of the opposite sex unless the Crown has elected to permit a competitor to fight for a prospective consort of the same sex.”

All this does is pushes the discrimination away from the Society level and pushes it down to the Crown level. It then is up to the Crown whether to grant same-sex couples the ability to fight in Crown, based solely on their sexual orientation. I honestly find this extremely offensive. I am well aware that the Crown can decide to allow or disallow individual couples based on their own criteria – but those criteria should relate to specific society-related things, like combat prowess, progress in the Arts and Sciences, etc. Not things that the individuals are identified as.

To see how offensive this is, try the following wording on for size:
“Each competitor in a Royal List must be fighting for a prospective consort who is of Caucasian descent unless the Crown has elected to permit a competitor to fight for a prospective consort of Black descent.”

Obviously the SCA would never back such a proposal. I suggest to you that there is little difference between the above and the proposed wording. People would be equally upset if there were maximum age restrictions, or a requirement that people don’t have disabilities, or if we didn’t allow Catholics to fight in crown, or disallowed veterans from fighting in crown. The wording proposed suggests that the SCA is perfectly ok with allowing discrimination against homosexuals based on nothing other than their sexual orientation. The main difference seems to be that for these other classes of individuals, it is codified in law that we should not discriminate against them based on their status – it’s not yet universally accepted in this country that people should not be treated differently due to their sexual orientation.

As a group, we are usually extremely friendly to people with alternative lifestyles – the SCA is by and large very friendly to the gay community. I know many homosexuals within my local group – they are well liked for who they are as people, not who they sleep with. Indeed, my kingdom has had at least one major officer who happens to be homosexual. We induct them into our highest orders of the Pelican, Laurel, and Knights. We do not prevent gay people from serving the society in other ways and I see no logical reason to prevent them from serving as our crown.

Furthermore, many large corporations have a very strong non-discrimination policy that includes sexual orientation and gender identity. They are not required by law to do so, so why bother? The answer is that in addition to being the right thing to do (and let’s be honest here, that’s not going to get most companies to do it), it’s good for business. I would very much like to see the SCA be ahead of the curve on this issue. We try to recreate the best of the middle ages, and toss the negative parts. Why not toss discrimination?

Here’s the wording I’d like to see:
“Each competitor in a Royal List must be fighting for a prospective consort.”

Short, simple, and nondiscriminatory. Dictionary.com includes several different definitions of the word consort, but the two that matter for this discussion are: “a husband or wife; spouse, especially of a reigning monarch.” and “a companion, associate, or partner”. Neither of those definitions actually specify that the consort must be the opposite gender.

Personally, I’d like to see the board of directors take this a step further, as well. In the document “THE CORPORATE POLICIES OF THE SOCIETY FOR CREATIVE ANACHRONISM, INC.”, available online at http://heraldry.sca.org/laurel/precedents/wilhelm/atoc.html, section XII, I’d like to see the current text:

“The SCA, Inc. will not discriminate against any member or participant on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, age or disability. The SCA, Inc. will comply with all laws of the nation in which the meeting or event is held. For any meeting or event held in the United States, the SCA, Inc. will comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The SCA, Inc. will provide reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities to enable all participants to fully enjoy the events whenever it is possible to do so. The SCA, Inc. will at all times attempt to provide reasonable accommodations, while preserving the fundamental nature of the SCA event.”

amended to:

“The SCA, Inc. will not discriminate against any member or participant on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, age or disability. The SCA, Inc. will comply with all laws of the nation in which the meeting or event is held. For any meeting or event held in the United States, the SCA, Inc. will comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The SCA, Inc. will provide reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities to enable all participants to fully enjoy the events whenever it is possible to do so. The SCA, Inc. will at all times attempt to provide reasonable accommodations, while preserving the fundamental nature of the SCA event.”

Although we are not legally required to do this yet, current events suggest that it’s only a matter of time before sexual orientation is added to the list of protected classes. We would do well to be proactive on this issue.

Thank you for taking the time to read and consider my thoughts on this issue. I’m more than happy to discuss further, and can be contacted via email at antonio at danscomputing dot com, mail at 502 S Jefferson St., Brownsburg, IN 46112, or phone at 317-985-3178.

Antonio Bellini (mka Daniel T. McGillen)
SCA Member for 4 years, residing in the Barony of Sternfeld, Constellation, Middle Kingdom, Knowne World

My name is Antonio Bellini.  Well, not really.  My name is Dan McGillen, but I am known to some as Antonio Bellini.  Sometimes people include the title Lord in front of that, but I don’t get bothered one way or another about it.  I’ve been active in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), a medieval reenactment/history group for about five years now.  Six years ago this past spring, I started going to the Barony of Sternfeld’s dance practice, which was being led by my then girlfriend, Alice/Colette the Seamstress (who I’ve since married).  I went to my first event (Baronial Border War) in Ionia, Michigan, back in Early Summer 2008.   When I first started, I didn’t totally understand what the group was about or what we were trying to accomplish – and what little understanding I did have was full of inaccuracies and misunderstandings – but I did at least think that people were doing interesting and novel things and I wanted to see more.

Going back a bit further, I’d first heard of the SCA about ten years ago, but the person who told me about it originally scared me away from even considering attending or participating before I ever set foot near an SCA activity.  This is someone who was part of the group who thought I might be interested.

This is an important point that bears highlighting, I think.  People need to consider how they describe our hobby to people who are not involved – it turns out the SCA has a lot of things going on that I’m interested in but I would never have given it a chance because I was given a false sense of what it was about.  Indeed, had I not met Colette, I probably would not have ever gotten involved.  She has been part of the SCA since approximately the year 2000.

Other than dance practice and going to an occasional event, I didn’t do much the first year I was around the SCA.  By the end of that first year, Colette had moved in with me and had decided to put in a bid to be the Autocrat for Grand Pageant, a dance event Sternfeld used to hold annually.  Knowing that I would be helping her out with a lot of the elements of planning the event (it’s hard not to when you live with someone), we put in a bid together as co-autocrats.  Because of that, we needed to attend the Baronial Business Meeting each month and also started attending Fighter Practice.  The event happened in Fall 2009, and after it was over our involvement could have very easily stopped.  Dance Practice was starting to be very poorly attended, and without that or an upcoming event to plan for, we might have disappeared completely.  Except two things happened that year – the first thing was that we went to my first Pennsic War.  Colette had been several times before, and I’d heard good things about it, so was excited to go.  It ended up being an amazing experience – nothing else I’ve done has been quite like it.  That probably wouldn’t have been enough to cement my involvement however – I probably would have kept going to Pennsic annually and not given a fig about the SCA.  The second, and arguably more important thing was that we started to get to know people in our local group.  We made a lot of acquaintances and started coming around more often.  We also made closer connections with a handful of people and started spending time with some of them, even in some non-SCA contexts.  And that, as they say, is that.

Which actually leads to my second point – attracting new members and keeping them is really hard.  So much of what we do in the SCA is social activity – if new people don’t make new friends and connections quickly, they will stop coming.  It’s our job as ambassadors of our hobby (and like it or not, we all have to be, or our hobby dies eventually) to get to know new people personally, make them feel welcomed, and connect them with people they will have commonalities with.

In SCA terms, I’m still a relative newbie – I’ve only been around six years, and only really been active for five of them.  Compared to some of the people I know that have been in for 30 or more years, it doesn’t even compare really.  But I have been involved.  I’ve been the Web Minister for the Barony of Sternfeld since May/June 2010, and picked up the role of Chronicler for Sternfeld this spring.  I’ve worked at most of our events over the past few years, often as a department head.  I’ve been to Pennsic five times in a row.  In short, I’ve been a lot of places and heard a lot of things.  I have heard opinions ranging far and wide about what the SCA is and is not and what we should be doing.

I’ve been seeking out opinions and ideas, and listening more carefully to what people have to say – and it was starting to get me down.  I’ve recently heard a peer suggest that creating the Order of the Pelican (however many years ago) was a mistake.  Someone else questioned whether we actually needed to recruit new members or encourage new people to come around.  I’ve seen complaints that people don’t strive for 100% period perfection in everything they do in the SCA, and conversely, I’ve seen people complain about people being a stickler for authenticity.  There’s been a lot of negativity about newbies in general.  A lot of people seem to think that there’s only one way to play this game – their way – and all other ways are wrong.  And that’s not the attitude I want people to see from our hobby.  As a member of the SCA, I would prefer our group be seen as fun, interesting, welcoming, encouraging, diverse and worth the time, effort, and money.  I’d like to see our local group grow and for the region, Kingdom, and Society to grow and become healthier.  I’d like to see less administrative overhead and more focus on doing fun medieval things!

And that’s ultimately why I’m starting this blog.  I’ve got opinions, and I want to share them.  I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the SCA and what it means to me as an organization.  Where is it going?  How is it going to get there?  What are we doing wrong?  What are we doing right?  All these thoughts are useful to me to decide how to comport myself and how to guide my own actions and activities, but I also want to encourage others to think about these same topics and even make a difference, no matter how small.  I also hope to do my part to make playing in the SCA more fun for me and others – it’s our shared hobby, and if people aren’t having fun, what’s the point?

Before I dive in to what I’ve been thinking about lately, I’m going to repost two previous things I wrote about SCA topics.  First up will be a reprinting of a letter I sent to the Board of Directors regarding same sex couples fighting in Crown Tournaments.  There was a request a year or two ago for comments and it was a hot-button issue for me.  Secondly is an article about Webministering for a local SCA Branch, which was also published in the Middle Kingdom’s Newsletter, “The Pale”.  With those two things posted, I plan to move on to new topics…

I have turned off comments completely on this blog – past experience with WordPress blogs tells me I would be buried in spam comments quickly.  So instead, I encourage you to email me at danmcgillen@gmail.com if you wish to communicate with me directly about my postings.

Lastly, I assume this goes without saying, but I’m going to go ahead and say it:  any opinions expressed on this blog are mine and are not the opinions of the SCA, it’s Kingdoms, or it’s Branches.  These are my opinions as a person involved in the hobby – this blog is hosted on my own personal web domain, and has no “official” qualities whatsoever.  I hope that others who play in the SCA are able to read it, enjoy it, and take away ideas that can help improve the game for others.