On gay rights and being gay

[thebratqueen]

When I was in elementary school I got into trouble one time during lunch. I don't remember what I was doing. I didn't even remember it at the time. All I knew was that I was called out, as was a girl sitting by me, and we were made to stand by the wall. The lunch lady who called us over asked what was going on. I stood there stupidly because I honestly didn't know. It was like the previous five minutes had blanked out of my mind. But the girl with me was confident. She said that she and I had been play fighting - I think - and that other kids at the table, I think they were boys, upon seeing us all over each other like that had teased us and called us lesbians.

I have no idea if she was right. To this day I couldn't tell you if she made the story up. But I do remember wondering why the other kids would call us that.

I grew up in New York. I went to high school in Connecticut but my closest friends were in the drama club. College was in Manhattan. Then New Orleans, then Denver (with my roommates, which included a lesbian couple), then back East.

I've never actually been in situations where I was personally the target of homophobia.

In Denver, once, one of my roommates and I were arm in arm while we watched the fireworks over the city on the Fourth of July. We got into a verbal altercation with someone who was mistreating a puppy and he called us lesbians. Or dykes. Something like that. He didn't mean it as a compliment. We said something nasty back and left.

In high school one of my classes did that exercise where it's the end of the world and you have to pick who gets to live in a bomb shelter and repopulate the earth out of a list of people that the teacher gave us. One of the people on the list was gay. One of my classmates said he didn't want the gay guy down in the bunker because he'd "Get AIDS and stuff"

I didn't wait to be called on to tell that classmate to stop scraping his knuckles on the floor. I think I also told him to grow the Hell up to boot.

I never had a moment of epiphany where I realized that I was bisexual. The truth is, our popular media encourages a mindset of finding women sexy and attractive. I always was that way.

As I got older and understood the terms I figured out that the label of bisexual applied to me. But I wasn't really into dating so it never seemed like an issue. When I later came out to my parents my mom asked when I knew and I think I fumbled something about figuring it out in high school or college but really that was more me figuring out that that was going to be a group that I was put into, and a label that would matter, than it was me figuring out my sexuality. I always knew I found men and women equally attractive. I just had to acknowledge that this was also going to be an issue. I guess.

I never really pushed for gay rights. I figured it was never going to happen and in the meanwhile we had this weird sort of "don't ask, don't tell" policy that really applied to the whole country. Obviously the extreme moments were unacceptable, but on the other hand I think I'm GLAADs worst nightmare - I'm a queer girl who doesn't support hate crime legislation, and I really wish they'd shut the fuck up about trying to censor people like Eminem.

See 'cause here's the thing - the first amendment isn't there to protect speech we agree with. We don't have to protect speech we agree with. That's because we agree with it. Nobody needs to pass a law that allows me to say that the president of this country is a smart man, or that we live in a great country, because those are things people want to hear. People, however, might not want to hear that I think the president is a fucktard and that this country is in a terrifying state of apathy which makes me wonder if we're actually reading and watching the same news reports, so that kind of speech has to be protected.

Ann Coulter might be a shithead, but if she lives in this country she gets to talk. Same as I do.

America, and here I think I'm stealing directly from Aaron Sorkin, but America isn't about easy. It isn't about all of us liking each other. You don't have to like me. I'm a nasty bitch sometimes. I'll give you plenty of reason to hate me if you want it, never you fear. You want to hate me or think I'm going to Hell? You go nuts. Have at it. It's your right to.

But you don't get to make hating me into law.

Laws aren't always about the things we all agree with. Laws aren't about being popular, or making everybody happy. They're about making people behave. They're about saying that if you want to live in this society, and enjoy the benefits of being around all of us and everything we can give you then you have to live by certain rules. If you want to live with us you can't kill us. You can't steal from us. You can't hurt us.

And by "us" I mean society. You want to live in society then you have to live with society.

Some laws we all like. Some we all love. But that's irrelevant. It's nice when it happens, but it's not the point. Just because a majority of people in this country might want a law doesn't mean they get to have it. It's not always a numbers game.

The majority of people did not want desegregation. The majority of people did not want to give women the vote. That's nice for them, but that's not really our society. Our society says everybody gets a voice, everybody gets the same treatment. The majority of people might not have liked it, but those were the rules they agreed to.

I think about women getting the vote a lot. When I went out to Newport I visited one of the Vanderbilt mansions and saw the "Votes for Women" china that Alva Vanderbilt had made as part of her push for the Suffragette movement. To all reports, she was apparently a dynamo who was a powerhouse in her own right, yet she still had to sit there and argue with people that just because she had ovaries it didn't mean she didn't get a say in the country she lived in.

I know I get the benefit of hindsight with the women's movement, and I'm old enough to recognize how far we've come as a culture with this that it's still remarkable to me that we now take for granted things like the women's soccer team or even TV heroines like Buffy, but it still amazes me that it ever had to be an argument that women could vote.

People died for that. Women actually had to get themselves killed to make the point that they were human beings. How does society get that stupid?

How is society that stupid now?

Do I have to die for this? I wonder that sometimes. Does somebody actually have to get themselves run over by a horse - or I guess it would be a car, these days - to make the point that gays are human beings? How do your eyes not tell you this?

How does your logic even need to be entered into this equation at all? How does it have to be explained to people that my love for somebody else doesn't affect your love for someone else? Why do I have to scream at the top of my lungs for you to give me the same rights that you have?

Why is it even your decision to give me these rights at all? How do you take my rights away from me and declare me a half-human and then get angry with me when I demand them back, and possibly even an apology?

You're an idiot but I still think you're human. I'll even let you get married too, if you want.

I don't hate people who oppose gay rights. I actually think most of them don't realize what they're doing. I think they're good-hearted people who geninuely think that, for example, they're trying to do good when they say gays shouldn't have kids because the kids will grow up as "other" and have difficulties in life. I think they just haven't realized that in situations like that what you don't do is punish the victim, but educate the bully. I think they geniunely don't understand that when gays don't have marriage rights it means they actually don't have tangible, quantifiable things and not just a word, or a ceremony.

I dare to think that if they met me, they'd realize what was wrong. Possibly even by going "Oh", and then we could all get over it.

I think some people who oppose gay rights are assholes, but I don't hate them either. I just want to battle it out with them directly. Preferably just with words, because I'm still on wishing nobody has to die for this.

I think people like Fred Phelps are sad, and I feel sorry that he's got so much hatred and unhappiness in his heart. I wish God would touch him. He sounds like he needs it.

I read the reports about what's going on in San Francisco and in Massachusetts and I sit in my chair and cry. I read about people who are so moved with hatred for me and people like me that they protest, and try to insist that I get treated like less of a human being. I want to meet these people. I want to ask them "Why?" No, really. Why me? What did I do? How am I hurting you? Why are you trying to hurt me?

I'll fight it out if I have to. I'll take to the streets and write the letters and do the protests and everything else but... Why? Why does hate speak louder? Why do I even have to defend myself in the first place? Why isn't love universally good?

I don't want to leave this country. Ironically enough, my family is here. I've got very strong ties to a word that people think I don't have a right to. I couldn't move away and leave my family behind. I just get very sad to hear that this country, apparently, doesn't want me.

I'll argue it, and I'll fight it, and I'll give it all I've got, but in the end I still want to know why I had to. All I ever did was exist. How did doing that turn me into a victim?