Ranting, etc.

I was talking to Vanessa yesterday, and she was telling me about a conversation she had with someone about Prop 8 and how they believe that gay people should have the right to marry, just not a legalized institution known as marriage. Which seems pretty contradictory, but apparently it made sense to them...anyways, so I was laughing about it with her and I referred to the gay community as 'we'. 

And she asked me, does the whole Prop 8/gay rights thing bother me more now that I've come out?

It was a weird feeling. Because I mean, of course it's just as outrageous to many straight people when gay couples are discriminated against, and of course you don't have to be a member of the gay community to sympathize with gay rights. In fact, given that gay people make up a relatively small percentage of the overall American population, it's a really really good thing that there are many straight allies willing to stand up and fight for our rights. 

But then at the same time, it kind of hit me how intensely personal all this is. They're trying to take rights away from me. They're trying to keep me from seeing my wife in the hospital, they're trying to prevent me from being legally recognized as someone in a long term, societally acceptable romantic partnership. My state, my community, my neighbors don't consider me to be an equal citizen. It was something I'd never really considered; I've been involved with gay rights activism for so long but I'd gotten used to referring to the gay community as 'they'. And now I'm referring to it as 'we'. And therefore I have to take on all the negative repercussions of that, all of the prejudice, all of the hate, all of the people who look at me differently or consider me to be a lost cause. It sort of knocked the wind out of me for a bit. 

And it made me sad. And it makes me sad. Because I realized that by coming out, I put myself within the confines of a group that will always be on the fringes of society. I labeled myself with something that is incredibly controversial, I put myself out there as a member of a community that is hated by millions of Americans. The idea of being hated, by people who don't know me, who have never met me, who don't know anything about me other than my sexuality- it's mind boggling. And I don't even know how to deal with it. And I don't want to deal with it. I want to live in a place where that is not an issue. I mean, for god's sake, I live in California, historically one of the most gay-friendly places in the nation, and even here in Irvine, where we have literally hundreds of different nationalities and races and a very mixed school population- even here there's a ton of discrimination. And I'm proud of who I am. I'm proud to say that I have a girlfriend, and she's amazing, and I'm attracted to women, and yes, I've dated guys but I have to say there's no comparison. I don't want to come off as whining about all the difficulties of being gay, because at least for me the positives far outweigh the negatives.

I just want to live somewhere where I don't have to wear my pride as a shield. I want to be someplace where being gay really is just a facet of personality, like eye color or hair color, not something that garners more attention simply by way of being controversial- even if all the attention is positive. My point is that being gay should not have to be such a big deal for anyone. I think it's great that a lot of members of the gay community are really out and open about their sexuality, and I think it's great that a lot of members prefer to keep it relatively quiet. It's their choice. But it shouldn't. have. to. matter. Gay people shouldn't have to be so flamboyantly gay that they force others into accepting them by forcing them to deal with it on an everyday basis, and they shouldn't be ashamed of it because of how they know they'd be perceived. 

I don't know how all of this is going to turn out, I don't know what the world will be like 30 years from  now. And this is just my take on things. Because right now I do believe that everyone who is gay has a responsibility to be as active and as open as they can be, if only because I think it's the only way to show everyone that gay people are functioning perfectly well in every level of society. But I also believe that every person's sexuality is their business and theirs alone, and nobody has the right to even ask them to clarify, let alone label themselves. It's a huge mess of contradictions, and I hope that by being open and active now we can eventually retire to the point where it really will not matter.