Undercurrents. Steve Davis

1 Reading the Water Undercurrents Powering My Journey in Practical Activism

      Life is like the sea. Its tides and currents sometimes take a man to distant shores that he never dreamed existed.

      —Jocelyn Murray, The English Pirate

I STARTED OUT as an unlikely candidate for global activism: a kid from a rural town of 4,000 people, most of them deeply conservative and proudly isolated from many of the comings and goings of the wider world. I grew up in the ranching community of Dillon, Montana, in a high mountain valley rimmed by stunning peaks running along the Continental Divide. There, the land and the water ruled supreme. So, like many boys in Dillon, by age 13 I had my first job: irrigating our fields of alfalfa and barley. This was in the early 1970s, before industrial‐grade sprinklers were widely available, so my Uncle Roy would plow the land, and then we'd walk it, surveying to determine its slope and where water might pool. Next, we'd dig a network of ditches to capture the water streaming from one of the valley's main creeks, and into these ditches I'd drop canvas dividers that worked like temporary dams, diverting the water into still more ditches and pushing it farther into our fields. The trick was getting adequate water to flow over the largest possible area without washing out and drowning our crops.

      By high school I'd become quite good at “reading the water,” as Uncle Roy used to say, so for several years I was anointed “the Irrigator.” Old farmhands sometimes used the title with reverence, but mostly it came with a knowing smirk from family members, who knew this was about the only ranch job I could handle. Still, I loved those long, hot days in the fields, analyzing water. On summer evenings, I used the same skill (less successfully) for fly fishing in the blue ribbon streams of our valley, reading the currents to determine where best to cast my line—some place that would float it into the shallows where the fish fed, but not into an eddy where it could get caught. Later, after I had left our Montana valley and was rowing crew in college, I found myself again attuned to currents and how they could hasten or hinder our quest for speed.

This instinct persisted even when I was away from water. Reading currents—whether natural, social, or economic—and channeling them has shaped my path through life. Luckily, it's also intersected with my work in activism. Among the major undercurrents powering social change during the second half of the twentieth century, four have carried me forward: first, as a young scholar and activist immersed in Chinese history, politics, and culture, just as that country was transforming itself into a world power. Then, as a gay man and human rights lawyer, benefiting from 40 years of stunning progress in consciousness around LGBTQI rights. As the Information Age dawned, I was lucky enough to be tapped to lead Bill Gates's pioneering internet firm Corbis, which leveraged digital tools to overhaul media access to art and photography; and finally, I stepped up to lead the global health and development nonprofit PATH as the world made billion‐dollar commitments to achieve the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. These four macrotrends have acted like ocean swells through my life and career, ushering me along, just as a tidal current might push a boat safely to shore.

      Though I've traveled far from my Montana roots, I treasure the foundation they provided. Even as a kid, I knew I'd won the parent lottery; my mom and dad generously shared their deep work ethic, intellectual curiosity, and unconditional love with their four children, large extended family, and community. Nevertheless, I'd already swallowed the bitter taste of outrage. I was an overweight, gay kid in a Brokeback Mountain town who hadn't yet come out. I often felt isolated and angry, convinced that I was cursed to a life of loneliness and sin. It took several painful years of living in the closet during college at Princeton University before I told my family and friends—with great awkwardness and fear—the truth of who I was. For me, the journey of coming out is never fully over, and I've spent much of my life channeling this early shame into personal, political, and community transformation, as you will see across the pages of this book.

      Running parallel to this journey, a second powerful force was similarly shaping my sense of identity. After graduating from college, unsure of what to do with my degree in religious studies, I spent a year teaching in central Taiwan and became enamored of all things Chinese. It was a complicated love since I was intimidated by the language and unnerved by the authoritarian political regime, while mesmerized by the country's complex history and culture. I learned the language, savored its cuisine, found my first boyfriend, and built lifelong bonds in Taiwan and China. Despite my disagreement with some of China's political positions, particularly around human rights, I've been a Sinophile ever since.

These two social forces—the ascendance of China and momentum around gay rights—took root then, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and became powerful undercurrents that would propel my life and career for four decades. Not that I had the prescience to predict their world‐changing power at the time. Rather, I followed those currents because they spoke to my intellectual curiosity, appetite for challenge, and determination to be true to myself. Much of the momentum came from the sheer luck of being in the right place at the right time. But I did begin to recognize that these two movements represented watershed moments in history. These undercurrents also connected me with extraordinary communities of social changemakers who further shaped my work in activism.

By late 1980, I was back home in the United States, expecting to live briefly in a friend's basement apartment in Seattle until I could return to Asia. Then I met Bob, the man I would eventually marry (when we were finally allowed to, decades later). I remember telling him about my experience in the Thai refugee camp, the dignity and determination of the teenage soccer player who'd lost his parents, the humiliation and disappointment of the Hmong man tripped up by a trick question posed by an immigration official. I could barely articulate the dimensions of my outrage and confusion. But Bob sensed them, and he suggested I channel those emotions to work helping other refugees and asylum seekers. So I decided to stay in Seattle and landed a job in refugee resettlement. For the next several years I used whatever skills I possessed, along with a lot of youthful enthusiasm and self‐righteous zeal, to help find funding, provide services, and boost community support for Southeast Asian, Cuban, and African newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. It was my first full‐time job as an activist. The pay was about $600 per month. I was far from the frontlines and removed from policy discussions in Geneva and Washington, DC. But I was learning the messy nuts and bolts of practical