Tuesday, 4 a.m.
The alarm on my cell phone wakes me with that annoying ring. Not the most pleasant way to start the day; I keep forgetting to change it. But I was wide awake. After a quick shower and throwing on clothes while playing “don’t wake the boyfriend,” I was out on the road driving toward Santa Monica. My day of volunteering at the polls for No on Proposition 8 had begun.
We all met shortly after 6 a.m. to get our polling place assignments and to be matched up with fellow volunteers. Having agreed to be a team captain, I was questioning my leadership ability in light of my sometimes pathological shyness. That is, until I saw my friend Melissa Fitzgerald. Besides being a wonderful actress, she is also fiercely political, smart as a whip, and a natural-born leader. She had just flown in to work on this campaign (she was working for Obama until she saw how close this race was), and by coincidence, we showed up at the same place. We joined up with a guy named Nathan and we were off to our first polling location.
Nathan also turned out to be a political phenom, and thankfully they both led by example. We introduced ourselves to the polling supervisor and informed them we would respect the required 100 feet distance from the polling place. We then held our signs high and passed out our palm cards. The three of us, two straight, one gay, working together to help inform people about protecting civil rights.
And that is what we did, we volunteers, all day. I had two more shifts at two more polling locations. We worked until the polls closed at 8 p.m. What will remain most in my memory from those hours are the extreme reactions from both sides.
The man who screamed “Homos and lesbians!” as he drove by, the older man who shouted at me to go back to West Hollywood (I live in Los Feliz), the woman who called us “abominations,” the man who spat on the palm card we had handed him. There was a man who attacked a young female volunteer of ours at a nearby polling place at a Catholic church, shoving and pushing her and ripping up her palm cards. Every single supporter of Prop. 8 was so filled with anger and bile as they voiced their "support" to us, with the exception of one older gentleman, who engaged us in a very civil conversation.
One person in over 13 hours.
All of that was countered by the many straight families who were very vocal in their support of No on 8. The young man who joined us while on break from work (holding a sign he had downloaded from his computer), another guy who brought us cookies and juice in the morning, the husband and wife who brought us cappuccinos at nightfall, the drivers who honked in support (when others weren’t flippin’ us the bird), and the woman who hollered from her car, “Thank you for fighting for our family.”
As we packed up for the evening the news came in. It looked as though Obama would be our next president. As my boyfriend and I drove home (he had joined us, even though he was sick as a dog), we listened to McCain concede the race. We made it to the television set just in time to witness the beautiful, truly awesome sight of the first family making their appearance on that Chicago stage. We heard a president-elect mention gay people in his acceptance speech. A night of many firsts.
But then the news of Proposition 8.
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