For many the
passing of Prop. 8 is the first time anything of
significance has gone so wrong for gays and
lesbians -- we've had no other choice but to
stand up and fight. This weekend 12,000 people-plus
descended on Los Angeles's Silver Lake district, proving
that when faced with discrimination, if the
gays have to choose between equal rights and a
rum and diet Coke, they may fill up a flask -- but
they’ll march.
Maybe it was the
sign of a half dozen patients at Los Angeles’s
Children’s Hospital banging on the windows, flashing
the peace sign, and waving at the crowd. Maybe it was
the hundreds of gay people who sat down in the middle
of Sunset Boulevard on Saturday night to demand that
police officers stand down and allow the march to move west
into Hollywood’s heavily trafficked nightlife
district. Maybe it was simply that I’d never
seen 12,000-plus gay people stand so strongly behind the
fight for civil rights before.
Maybe it was a
combination of all three. I’m not really sure what it
was. I just know that Saturday at 7:32 p.m., four days
after California voters passed Proposition 8, I broke
down.
I’m used
to friends who choose a trip to the bar over the opening of
an art exhibit. People my age who consider Eating
Out and Mean Girls classic gay cinema while
Longtime Companion and Gods & Monsters
are relegated to "boring art-house flick" status. I
hear too often from people my age and younger that
AIDS is a thing of the past -- at least in terms of fighting
for funding and visibility -- and that while the desire to
get married is admirable, civil unions will do just
fine in a pinch.
I guess
I’ve just become accustomed to people not caring --
or caring peripherally. You write a check, attend a
function, and you move on, as if "don’t ask,
don’t tell"
or the gay homeless crisis or
the subject of marriage could be magically solved over
cocktail hour. Not until the shit hits the fan (and I mean
really hits the fan) does anyone wake up.
On Saturday some
12,000 people descended on Silver Lake -- old, young,
black, white, Latino, Asian, gay, straight…the list
goes on. There were speeches; news crews flooded the
streets. Sunset Junction was virtually locked down for
hours while we stood there, united, telling California
that constitutionally denying a class of people their civil
rights is unacceptable, and that no matter how long it
takes -- no matter how many times we need to fight --
we aren’t going to take it.
It finally hit
me.
Prop. 8 had
passed. The energy we needed before the campaign came after
it, and while mainstream media will try to pit us against
each other by blaming certain demographics whose votes
leaned conservative while urging us to blame the
Mormon Church, we did this to ourselves, in some ways. We
didn’t fight hard enough, we didn’t fight
smart enough, and while some of us were off to battle,
more of us stayed home.
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